It can be achieved with a zero-knowledge proof - there are many schemes, but in essence, they all allow you to prove something (e.g. your birthdate, validated by a government agency), without revealing who you are. You can prove to a third party "the government authenticated that I was born on 1970-01-01" without exposing who "I" is.
Some worthwhile reading on the topic if you're interested:
> And you will never know code as well as a reader and you would have as the author for anything larger than a very small project.
This feels very true - but also consider how much code exists for which many of the current maintainers were not involved in the original writing.
There are many anecdotal rules out there about how much time is spent reading code vs writing. If you consider the industry as a whole, it seems to me that the introduction of generative code-writing tools is actually not moving the needle as far as people are claiming.
We _already_ live in a world where most of us spend much of our time reading and trying to comprehend code written by others from the past.
What's the difference between a messy codebase created by a genAI, and a messy codebase where all the original authors of the code have moved on and aren't available to ask questions?
My company is in a similar situation - have large teams in several eastern European cities (primarily Minsk), and a few long-term remote teammates in Ukraine. A couple have fled (from Kyiv) with children, others are worried about being conscripted. It makes me want to vomit just thinking about it. I'm amazed many of them are still on Slack and making PRs.
We're fortunate some of our leadership has quite close ties to the area, so our company's response so far has been extremely understanding.
Some worthwhile reading on the topic if you're interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
It should even possible to construct a protocol where you can prove that you're over 18 without revealing your birthdate.
Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/430
"Zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a secret value lies in a given interval."