#100 Not special
Just round.
This is the 100th edition of this “weekly” update. I started the first one in January 2022, with the goal of being super public about my open-source activities. Let’s keep going…
Some small stuff from the last two weeks:
Published another Bitcoin Design newsletter (with Mo) and a Q2 report for the Bitcoin Design Foundation.
Also updated the foundation website with a list of grants and info on how to donate bitcoin. Board planning and fundraising is ongoing as well.
Had a call (with Mo) with My First Bitcoin around some design needs they have. If you want to help, take a look here.
Had a super nice call with the Open Design workgroup by Canonical (creators of Ubuntu). More about their initiative here.
Had a Summer of Bitcoin mid-program evaluation call with Deeksha, MTC and Aditya for the Border Wallets project. All looking good there.
Attended 4 webinars by HRF (last one is later today) around how non-profits can use bitcoin. I’m trying to learn how these things are presented to newcomers, what questions they have, common problems with software, etc.
Chipped in on a design for satsto.me.
Tried to support the ongoing design work for payment requests (receive) for the Bitcoin Core App.
I posted an issue in the Phoenix repo to suggest updates to the receive screen. I’ll post the image with my critique here, check the issue for my proposed changes.
Related to this topic, I created an issue to discuss the editorial policy around newer bitcoin proposals. My PR for the page about human-readable addresses is on pause until this is resolved (which is totally fine and normal).
Continuing the new image generation for Saving Satoshi chapters 9 & 10, I’m digging deeper into the new capabilities. Here for example is a character sheet. First I generated an image that has just the head of the character. From that, I created a full frontal view, and from that I can create character sheets with different angles, poses, and expressions. I can then use those for rendering the character in specific scenes. All thanks to the new character reference feature in Midjourney.
With the release of chapter 10, the initially planned content for Saving Satoshi is complete, so we need to shift gears a bit and focus on getting the word out, getting users & feedback, iterating, etc. With the story and visual material we have, we should be able to come up with some really cool ways of doing that.
Created a plugin called “Day & Night” for Penpot. I got invited to the beta program for their new plugin system and wanted to test it and give feedback. It was surprisingly easy to get going, also because I have already built plugins for Figma and Penpot works pretty much the same.
I keep pushing on the open design education curriculum to bring momentum into this initiative. If you’d like to chip, check the #education channel in Discord. Goal is that this effort helps us bring more designers into the bitcoin space and get them quickly to the point where they can navigate projects well and be productive (and happy) contributors. I really like the simplicity and clarity of opensource.guide, but also find it a bit bland. Maybe we can lean on that site as reference, but beef things up visually a bit more (quick sketch below).
Pretty thinly spread. I’m hoping I can create some free time this summer to make some dents on the guide and direct contributions to wallets (like the Phoenix issue I mentioned). That work requires lots of focus, so it needs planning ahead.
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