Harry Bairstow

17.

Conference Speaker.

Elixir & Rust enthusiast.

Harry Bairstow

Systems Engineer

Published on 31/12/2022

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6 min read

2022 Recap

My 2022 has been an eventful year, from finishing my GCSEs and starting A-Levels to getting a job at WalletConnect. I thought I would make this blog post to recap the year and reflect on my plans for next year.

GCSEs

For the half of this year my focus was passing my GCSEs and moving on from high school; surprisingly I managed to achieve grades comparable to my target grades, resulting in:

  • English Lit: 6 (B)
  • English Lang: 5 (C)
  • Science: 6-7 (B-A)
  • Maths: 7 (A)
  • Comp Sci: 9 (A**)
  • Product Design: 7 (A)
  • Geography: 6 (B)
  • Creative iMedia: L2D (A)

This allowed me to move onto the next stage of education within the UK, but first I had what was supposed to be one of the best summer holidays ever from the end of June to the start of September. Instead of doing nothing I decided I would ask around for an internship at some of the companies I had worked with in the past and/or had good relations with.

Summer Internship

After asking a few companies I decided to join WalletConnect as a Cloud Engineer over the summer. Working on their Cloud App, open-source and more.

While there I got to know the amazing people on the team there and expand my work to other parts of the company getting to work on projects that interested me and power over 20,000 messages per second.

EthCC

In the middle of July I traveled to EthCC[5] where I got to meet everyone in person and explore Paris. Working with the team that I had gotten to know over Slack/Discord in-person was an amazing experience that I will remember forever.

After watching Pedro's talk at EthCC we had the WalletConnect Boat Party where I got to meet people from many other companies such as: ENS, 1kx, and more.

The End of my Internship

As my internship came to an end I had moved towards writing more Rust and working with the team who build out the relay and accompanying infrastructure. Knowing that I had to go back to school was sad but luckily I was offered a part-time job to stay on with the team and continue the work I started on the Push API.

A-Levels

In September I moved to study my A-Levels at Sir John Dean's, I chose: Computer Science, Maths, and Electronics, all subjects that I enjoy and was excited to study over the next 2 years. Starting at a new school that was much larger than any I had go to before was hard but I have made an amazing group of friends so that ever day there is fun and I'm excited to see how the next 18 months there are.

Distributed Systems Engineer

I started as a Rust Distributed Systems Engineer at WalletConnect to continue the work I started on the Push API. For this blog post I did a bit of number crunching to figure out how much I had done up-to this point (152 Days) I have the following stats:

  • ➕ Lines Added: 62955
  • ➖ Lines Removed: 21562
  • 📦 Repositories Work On: 19
  • 🧩 Features Launched: 4

EthLisbon

For the 28th-30th of October I was in Lisbon with WalletConnect where I helped at the Booth and spoke to hackers there trying to integrate our newly released Web3Modal v2 as part of our bounties. I also got to explore the city and make some new friends who I continue to talk too. <img src="/assets/blog/img/wc_ethlisbon.jpg" alt="WalletConnect Booth at EthLisbon" class="h-96 w-auto" />

Ongoing Open Source

This year I made 1,773 contributions across server open-source projects. Some highlights were:

Next Year

I thought I'd take some time to share some events going on next year and some goals I have...

FOSDEM'23

I have been invited to speak at FOSDEM'23 and will be doing an introduction to Gleam on the Sunday (5th February 2023). It will be available as a video later and I plan on writing a follow-up blog post summarize my talk as well as talk about what I had to do for my first talk.

Contributing to Gleam

This year I discovered Gleam and I'd love to continue contributing next year as well as finally finish Shimmer and the Packages Website that I started this year.

To summarize the contributions I made this year:

  • ➕ Lines Added: 1720
  • ➖ Lines Removed: 6630
  • 🧩 Features Launched: 1
  • 🧑🏻‍💻 Pull Requests: 13
  • 🚨 Issues Opened: 4

Launching the Push API

Continuing the work I have done at WalletConnect this year I'm excited to get the first alpha of the Push API out to wallets and dApps so we can get some feedback and have people running Echo Server to support their notifications.

Supporting

If you want to support me I'm planning to set-up Github Sponsors, https://github.com/sponsors/harryet, where you can support me and my open-source. A follow on Twitter or GitHub is equally appreciated and you can watch what happens in 2023!