2025 H1 Retrospect
I'm heading to Paris, Bonjour! I will stay about three weeks at Paris and Cannes to participate some important Ethereum events (EthCC, Beam Day, EPF Day). Meanwhile, I am looking forward to visit Paris' renowned museums. As a big fan of art, I can't wait the upcoming days in France.
It's time to write some retrospects as we are at the end of June. I was employed as an software engineer for the last two year so I usually listed what tasks that I did. However, as I came back as a student, this retrospect might be slightly different from those in the past. Retrospect is always a cumbersome task but I strongly believe these articles help me a lot.
My Second Return-to-school
After two years of break, I finally came back to school again. There were plenty of reasons for this decision, but the primary one is I want to study more! Though I learned a lot while working, I think the curriculum of the university is innegligible. Everybody can acquire knowledges from YouTube or Udemy nowadays, but I realized that engaging in deep critical thinking—particularly when preparing for assignments and exams—has a profoundly strong learning effect. Also studying was super interesting since I now grasp about what I don't know. This deepened understanding ultimately led to my achieving the highest GPA of my academic career last semester. What a fantastic semester.
For more detailed comments on my last semester, I wrote some memos on my Github so feel free to check it out.
EPF (Ethereum Protocol Fellowship)
I will participate as an fellow of Ethereum Protocol Fellowship which is held by Ethereum Foundation. For five months, all fellows are responsible to work on their dedicated projects actively and eagerly, with the great Ethereum core developers. Anyone can participate this program as permissionless way, but there was a process to select a few fellows for sponsorship. Fortunately, I was chosen as a selected fellow among 18 participants.
I am taking a glimpse on the projects suggested by Prysm team because I had contributed few times on Prysm in the past. There are two projects that draw my attention: Generalization of merkle proof for Beacon state and Migrating E2E to Kurtosis. The main reason I'm heading to France is to propose about my project that I will be dedicated for next months. I'm going to prepare a PoC (and also write up) of my first project for the proposal.
I definitely believe that EPF is a great opportunity for me. I have been interested in open-source contributions, so I expect what I can make things happen in the upcoming days.
Ream Contributor
Since last December, I've been actively involved as a contributor to the Ream team, which is dedicated to Beam Chain – one of Ethereum's massive future endeavors. In January, I even had the opportunity to present on the topic of Beam Chain at Orakle, a blockchain society at KAIST where I was once an active member. It felt quite surreal to attend as a speaker after having been a society member!
Before the spring semester kicked off, I was able to dedicate a bit of time to contributing to the Ream team, primarily focusing on tasks related to zkVM and cryptography (like BLS and Merkle Proofs). Unfortunately, once the semester began, the deluge of assignments meant I barely had any time to contribute. However, I'm aiming to contribute much more this summer break and during the fall semester (which I plan to take a lighter course load).
In conclusion...
It looks like I might be able to graduate as early as next summer. With graduation rapidly approaching, my thoughts about the future are naturally deepening. Still, after sorting things out in Seoul and heading down to Daejeon, I feel I've gained some clarity on what kind of work I want to do and how I want to do it. For now, my immediate focus is on successfully wrapping up the projects I've already set in motion.