Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Nine years ago, when I was a PhD student, I attended the Oregon Programming Language Summer School in Eugene. I had a great time and learned a lot.

Learning some of the things I learned there, and meeting some of the people I met there, also led to me graduating, which led to me becoming a PostDoc at UPenn, which led to me later joining DFINITY to implement the Motoko programming language and help design and specify the public interface of their “Internet Computer”, including the response certification (video).

So when the ICDevs non-profit offered a development bounty for a Motoko library implementing the merkle trees involved in certification, this sounded like a fun little coding task, so I completed it; likely with less effort than it would have taken someone who first had to get into these topics.

The bounty was quite generous, at US$ 10k, and I was too vain to “just” have it donated to some large charity, as I recently with a few coding and consulting gigs, and looked for more personal. So, the ICDevs guys and I agreed to donate the money to this year’s OPLSS, where I heard it can cover the cost of about 8 students, and hopefully helps the PL cause.

(You will not find us listed as sponsors because for some reason, a “donation” instead of “sponsorship” comes with less strings attached to the organizers.)