#107 Oh the humanity

Taking a peek.

Alright, so what happened this week. This is where I review my weekly note that has a sub-header per day and a list of stuff I got done (or not) for each one.

Monday and Tuesday I spent most of my time catching up with the guide. Many hours of PR reviews between Yashraj’s silent payments PR, Erik’s ecash PR, and Michael’s multiple inheritance wallet PRs. Some really good coming together there. It always takes several people to whip these things into their final shape to go live. For the authors, it can feel like a drag. They spent so much time researching and thinking and putting everything carefully together, and then they get dozens of comments and have to revisit and refine. But that’s where you feel the polish appear.

I also put together a PR with a checklist for authors to go through before requesting feedback. Having reviewed a ton of them, patterns have emerged about things that keep coming up regularly. Hopefully the checklist can help everyone catch those early and help keep reviews efficient.

We also had another reading club session for the Open Design Guide, about the role of the designer in open-source. Three sessions in, I think we now see some patterns with the AI-generated content as to its strengths and weaknesses. It tends to be a bit too wordy and generic. AI just doesn’t really know about the human stories and experienced behind open source, but that’s what we all want to see more of in this material. Might be time to pause the reading club for 1-2 weeks and revise the content, if we don’t want to end up with the same feedback in every session. Will have to think about that a bit next week.

I just finished up testing Saving Satoshi chapters 1-9. Took screenshots of every step and annotated issues I came along. Man, this lesson material gets really hard towards the later chapters. While I know some coding, that stuff is way beyond me. Overall, I think we have really great experience here, and I am excited to see how people react to it.

We hard our 100th design call for the Bitcoin Core App. Here are some Midjourney renders for call covers (a fun playground for me when I need a quick break from more serious tasks).

I am very happy that we have a good design and research team and a good design process in place. Our first design call was almost exactly three years ago, so it has been quite the process. But it’s a worthwhile endeavor, we’re keeping on keeping on and going to make this happen.

Had a session with Michael today to spec and plan the send screen with all its features and variations. Next goal will be to fully flesh that out in design. The dev gang is quite active, so I’ll also need to be in those PRs and help test and review next week.

Mo and I put together another edition of the world’s best newsletter about bitcoin design. Check it out.

And then there are various organizational things around the foundation, the community, the Bitshala design fellowship and various other things.

Have a good weekend.

✌️