Hey there! I’m a computer scientist with 10+ years of open-source experience across industries, and a University of Oxford alumni researching space-efficient data transfer and JSON Schema. You might have come across other of my work if you ever used my popular open-source USB flashing tool called Etcher (https://github.com/balena-io/etcher).

For the past 2 years, I have been researching and prototyping a novel space-efficient data interchange format based on JSON and JSON Schema called JSON BinPack. The goal of JSON BinPack is to enable cost-effective and network-performant data transfer through high-latency, high-interference and metered network connections. While this problem space is common in the context of the Internet of Things, I believe it will be even more important in this era of space exploration. How much do you think it will cost us to send tons of data back and forth across planets in some decades?

I produced various outcomes so far:

• The JSON BinPack dissertation: https://www.jviotti.com/assets/dissertation.pdf
• A leading paper surveying existing JSON-compatible binary serialization technologies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02089
• A leading paper benchmarking existing JSON-compatible binary serialization technologies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03051
• A formal taxonomy to classify JSON documents according to characteristics relevant to data serialization: https://github.com/sourcemeta/json-taxonomy
• A leading tool to upgrade JSON Schema definitions across specification versions: https://github.com/sourcemeta/alterschema
• A JavaScript-based proof-of-concept implementation of JSON BinPack: https://github.com/jviotti/jsonbinpack-poc

I'm currently heads down working on a production ready C++ JSON BinPack implementation https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsonbinpack.

Sponsoring me would allow me to spend more time on exploring and solving this problem and pay for the growing amount of operational expenses to keep these projects running!