Going into an established library, I thought that everything was already implemented and that there wasn't anything to do until I went through the existing issues and organized all the tasks and decided on an order. Sean DuBois (https://github.com/Sean-Der), one of the co-creators and current maintainers of Pion, an open-source pure Go implementation of WebRTC (which uses SCTP), introduced me to a dissertation that was written about improving SCTP from 2021 (https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/d...). To my surprise, the features in it weren't actually implemented yet, and generally went unused even though it depicted pretty big improvements. This came as a bit of a shock to me considering the countless companies and services that actively use Pion with millions of users on a daily basis.

This led to two things: 1) implement the feature (done by me) and 2) measure the performance (done by Jo Turk https://github.com/joturk). If you're interested in reading more, please check out the blog post where we go over what SCTP is used for, how I improved it, and the effort that went into making such a large improvement possible.

This also marks a huge milestone for other companies and services that use SCTP as they can refer to the implementation in Pion for their own SCTP libraries including any real-time streaming platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Discord screen share, Twitch guest star, and many more!

For my personal background, please take a look at a comment below about what it was like for me to get started with open-source and my career related journeys. Thanks for reading!