About Me

From Web Dev to
core Ethereum and distributed systems

I'm Poulav Bhowmick, a 22-year-old engineer who loves to work on distributed systems, rust, and to core Ethereum dev!

Till now

I started programming back in 7th grade, learning Visual Basic for the 1st time. Since then, I was always curious about how it works, and loved writing basic programs on my computer. In 9th and 10th grade, we were taught Java, which I found pretty interesting.

But things started in a different way once I reached university in 2022. Like many other self-taught programmers, I started writing C++ and going through Data structures. But it was pretty boring and I saw some of my seniors, and began learning full-stack development. Since then, till December 2024, I did 2 internships at different startups, and won 4 hackathons, also securing grants from Solana and Starknet.

Then came Ethereum. I was initially a smart contract dev while also doing hackathons and stuff, with my friends. But I always wondered how things work under the hood, how are transactions processed, what goes on once the tx is submitted. So I used to look into all these. A friend of mine, Rahul has been in this ecosystem for quite some time, and he introduced me to Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, a pathway for aspiring devs and researchers to work with client teams and work on the development of the protocol. For that, I started to study from EPF study group, organised by Mario and Josh (the goats). I was initially not selected, but kept doing permissionlessly, and got selected as a Fellow eventually! After that, in Jan 2026, I got into Nethermind as an intern.

I wrote Rust for the first time in Aug 2024 as a part of a Solana hackathon, and I found it very cool, especially after 2 years of JavaScript. After that, I was not doing much, but once I started contributing to Reth (huge shoutout to Matthias Seitz, what a legend!), I started to learn more about how things work, learnt Rust from the Rust book, and also making tons of open source contributions, and eventually working on some of my own projects.

Other than that, I can play chess, I love doing photography/videography and editing as well. I once took Adobe yearly subscription just to learn AfterEffects and immediately cancelled it 1 month later :D I love FC Barcelona 💙❤️. I love going on walks in unknown/new places

Professional Experience

Blockchain Engineer

Nethermind

Jan 2026 — Present

Working on Catalyst, the preconfer sidecar that enables based preconfirmations on Taiko Alethia—Ethereum's first based rollup aiming for ~2s transaction finality.

My focus areas: validator registration, lookahead dispute mechanisms, L2 block construction from the mempool, and the P2P networking layer for preconfirmations.

Protocol Fellow

Ethereum Foundation Ă— Lighthouse

Jun — Nov 2025

The project that defined my transition from contributor to core developer. I (almost) implemented a memory-aware caching system for Lighthouse that replaced the existing count-based LRU cache. Almost because the project had to be discontinued due to several overhead issues in BeaconState memory calculation.

The problem: During non-finality periods, consensus clients would run out of memory and crash. My solution tracked actual byte sizes instead of item counts, enabling graceful degradation under memory pressure.

OnlyDust Fellow

Open Source Program

Jun 2024 — Aug 2025

Selected as 1 of 40 from 500 applicants. Built Rust backends using Actix and SQLx, wrote integration tests, and set up Docker-based deployment pipelines. This is where I learned to write production Rust, not just hobby code.

Grant Recipient

Starknet Foundation & Solana

2024

Received grants for StarkFinder (Starknet Foundation + Argent Telegram Accelerator) and MidoFinance (Solana Ă— CoinDCX via Superteam). These projects taught me how to ship under constraints and iterate based on user feedback.

Technical Depth

Languages

  • Rust: primary language
  • Previously: Typescript, JavaScript, Cairo

Protocol Knowledge

  • Currently exploring PBS, block building, MEV domain
  • Based rollups, L1/L2 preconfirmations

Infrastructure

  • Docker & Kubernetes
  • PostgreSQL & Redis
  • AWS deployment
  • CI/CD pipelines

Beyond Code

When I'm not reading protocol specs or debugging consensus issues, I'm probably exploring Kolkata with my camera, trying to capture the chaos and beauty of this city.

I believe in learning in public—writing about what I discover, sharing my mistakes as much as my successes. You can find my technical deep-dives on my blog and my half-baked thoughts on X.

I'm always open to conversations about Ethereum, Rust, distributed systems, or why based rollups are the future. Feel free to reach out.