Aaro Altonen
Software Engineer at Subzero Labs
Estonia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAaro Altonen is a software engineer with seven years of experience specializing in Rust and peer-to-peer networking for blockchain systems. He has led networking work at Parity Technologies and contributed modular refactors to flagship projects like Polkadot and Substrate—extracting and hardening the Bitswap protocol into its own crate to improve testability and maintainability. Aaro has built networking subsystems for parachain frameworks and UTXO-based smart contract platforms, and helped design core protocol and end-to-end testing infrastructure for NovaNet. Currently based in Estonia and working at Subzero Labs, he combines systems-level rigor with practical product delivery across research and production code. Notably, his contributions emphasize reducing dependencies, clarifying protocol boundaries, and raising code quality through tests and lint fixes—traits that make complex distributed systems easier to evolve.
7 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Information Technology, Master of Science - MS Information Technology at Tampere University
Github Skills (28)
substrate10
wp-api10
testing10
c1110
winapi10
networking10
c1710
polkadot-js10
network-protocol10
blockchain10
cumulus10
nodejs10
protocols10
rust10
para10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
paritytech/polkadot-sdk
Aug 2023 - Apr 2024
The Parity Polkadot Blockchain SDK
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:157 reviews, 17 PRs, 185 pushes in 7 months
Contributions summary:Aaro primarily refactored and moved the Bitswap protocol out of the `sc-network` crate into its own dedicated crate, `sc-network-bitswap`. This involved introducing the new crate, improving test coverage, and updating documentation. The user also addressed clippy warnings, removed a dependency, and bumped the `prost` version. These changes focused on improving the modularity and maintainability of the codebase.
blockchainpolkadotcumulussubstrate
paritytech/substrate
Sep 2022 - Dec 2022
Substrate: The platform for blockchain innovators
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:266 reviews, 83 commits, 41 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Aaro primarily focused on refactoring and improving the Bitswap protocol within the Substrate blockchain platform. They moved the Bitswap protocol into its own crate, improved test coverage, and fixed documentation and clippy issues. The user also included the Bitswap protocol into request response protocols and moved transaction protocol to its own crate.
blockchainsubstrateparitypolkadotnode
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