I've been working on FOSS for about 5y now. I was on the shitcoin world until recently, but now I'm a grantee with Spiral and my experience towards a grant consisted of several factors:

These items above helped me get context on the team activity. It is important not only to be willing to help, but also to understand what kind of help is needed, and what are the current priorities.

Eventually I saw SteveLee/moneyball mention on SV2 Discord that the SRI team needed experienced Rust devs to join the team and Spiral was willing to give out more grants. So I reached out to him and started talking. Some key points of our interaction were me sharing my CV and him telling me to join some calls with @pavlenex and @Fi3 to agree on what the project's roadmap needed more hands and how I could commit myself to helping it.