Dan Connolly is a seasoned software engineer and long-time open web advocate with 31 years of professional experience spanning research labs, standards work at W3C, biomedical informatics, and modern smart-contract platforms. Currently at Agoric, he contributes full-stack features to a JavaScript-based smart contract SDK while also maintaining independent work in web history and open-source projects through MadMode. His open-source contributions date back to 1993 and include deep backend work on the RChain Rholang compiler and pragmatic improvements to Agoric’s cosmic-swingset and smart-wallet components. Dan blends protocol and tooling expertise—blockchain compiler internals and distributed system concerns—with practical CI/test and packaging improvements that make developer workflows smoother. Based in Kansas City, he pairs academic rigor from UT Austin and MIT-era research experience with decades of production engineering. Despite recent account recovery challenges, he remains an active contributor to significant projects in the decentralized web space.
monorepo for the Agoric Javascript smart contract platform
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:11 releases, 3358 reviews, 13 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Dan primarily contributed to the Agoric Javascript smart contract platform. Their work involved testing and refactoring the `cosmic-swingset` module, which included modifications to the Makefile, shared state, and constants. They also addressed issues in the `agoric-cli`, specifically related to passing command-line options. Furthermore, the user fixed a typo in the `smart-wallet` documentation, implemented lazy purse creation, and refactored the `smart-wallet` to create purses lazily. Finally, they added the ability to subscribe to bank assets without waiting for the creation of the first wallet and enhanced the codebase to utilize existing vbank assets for smart-wallet initialization.
Blockchain (smart contract) platform using CBC-Casper proof of stake + Rholang for concurrent execution.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:8 reviews, 166 commits, 56 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Dan focused on enhancing the Rholang compiler, a key component of the RChain blockchain platform. They implemented features to compile .rho files to .rbl files, including error handling and specifying the main class for packaging. Further work involved building a standalone .jar application for the compiler using the sbt-assembly plugin, and adjusting tests to support CI integration. The user also addressed bugs, and optimized various aspects of the compiler's operation.
rholangsmart-contractstakeethereumproof-of-stake
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