Marco Falke Bitcoin Network – Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin News, Articles, Charts and Guides

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Last week, Bitcoin Developer Marco Falke recorded its 1752nd commitment to the Bitcoin Core codebase, overtaking WJ van der Laan to become the most prolific Core Dev in terms of the number of individual changes submitted to the project.

As a full-time maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repository since 2016, Falke himself is the first to point out that many of his commits represent minor changes that are merged relatively easily into the codebase, and that this step in and of itself does not make him Bitcoin. largest or most enterprising contributor. But, after all, Bitcoin is code, and the work Falke does as maintainer of that code every day – reviewing the contributions to make sure they improve the protocol, maintain continuity on the network, and organize the code in a way that is easy for developers to work with – is essential.

“As far as my contributions go, I think the majority are smaller enhancements, each of which is exciting for their own reasons,” Falke said. Bitcoin Magazine. “I mostly continued to improve testing and spend time on quality assurance and review.”

Probably Falke’s most substantial development work on Bitcoin has been his contributions around his testing infrastructure, something he identified early on as an ineffectiveness in the project he was passionate about improving. Bitcoin’s test environment is used to examine potential changes to the code base, allowing developers to examine the work of others and identify potential issues. Falke has spent much of his career improving this testing environment to make this process more efficient.

“When I saw how critical Bitcoin Core was, that’s when I realized that the testing infrastructure for Bitcoin Core was by no means sufficient, and I was motivated to improve it, “said Falke, who began to” prowl “. on the Bitcoin project in 2014 and started contribute to the code the following year. “For example, functional testing back then was mostly superficial or even completely broken – unable to spot any glitches. I started by fixing obvious bugs in testing and rewrote the testing framework to use modern Python 3, instead of Python 2, which was obsolete at the time.

Until last year, Falke was based in New York City, working full time for Bitcoin research and development company Chaincode Labs. But now he’s working remotely from an undisclosed location thanks to an open source developer grant from the OKCoin cryptocurrency exchange, a source of income he says makes it much easier for developers to work on projects. open source like Bitcoin Core.

“Outside of my job, I like to sleep (mostly) regularly and sufficiently, because my brain will refuse to function when I sleep less than eight hours for a few days,” Falke added. “Also, I try to exercise at least every other day to give my brain more time to recover and also to stimulate the rest of my body through exercise.”

It should come as no surprise that Bitcoin’s most active maintainer, who is also one of its QA leaders, sees the project’s notorious resistance to change as one of its notable qualities.

“One major difference is the level of scrutiny,” Falke said of Bitcoin Core as a software project. “Every change to Bitcoin Core has to go through a code review. Changes which affect critical areas (consensus or network code, for example) or which are deemed to be more risky, must go through a code review by several people … Which is a good thing for Bitcoin, because Bitcoin users would not want not that the rules of consensus change willingly. stupid.

As arguably the world’s largest open source software project, Bitcoin is a pioneer in several ways. From Falke’s point of view, another of the most critical things that sets the Bitcoin project apart is the ability for users to check for new versions of code (delivered as “compiled version binaries” or as compiled versions of the application for computers to read and implement) and protect against malware injection. To help users authenticate new releases, Core Devs provides “reproducible builds,” software builds that serve as instructions for verifying new code – something that Falke says should be a standard way to ship files. versions in the world of open source software, but is not yet.

Finally, Falke also highlighted Bitcoin’s extensive fuzz testing, a quality assurance technique that uncovers code errors that could otherwise lead to security breaches or other malfunctions.

“Bitcoin Core is also extensively fuzz tested, which is not yet the norm for the average open source project,” he said. “I’m already happy with the overall state of our test infrastructure, but I think an area of ​​improvement still within reach is in fuzz testing.”

Falke also sees education as a major need in the Bitcoin Dev community, something he helps in whatever way he can.

As someone whose job it is to feed Bitcoin Core daily, now leading their story in terms of the number of successful code changes, Falke is clearly happy to keep the network going and make it work for the rest of us.


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