#109 Tabbing
Conferentially.
Three weeks no update? Unbelievable! Here we go. Main reason is that I travelled to Atlanta for TABConf. And it was a great time. The conference is excellent in that it is completely builder-focused and brings together many brilliant minds in a pretty casual atmosphere. Everyone is excited about being there, chatting about what they are tinkering with and proud to present their work and ideas.
And so were we with Saving Satoshi. After two years of (for most contributors) remote collaboration, we organized a 2-hour workshop where attendees tried their hands at the game. They got swag as a reward for reaching certain chapters (shout-out to Stacie for her awesome work with the swag). Team members walked around and answered questions, and I observed how people navigated the UI to see whether it was intuitive or not. It was a great first workshop and the plan is to do many more in 2025, now that the initial scope of Saving Satoshi (10 chapters) is mostly complete.
Was also nice to meet Johnny, one of the devs of the Bitcoin Core App, Conor and various people from the Spiral gang, connect again with Stephen and see the Atlanta BitLab that he runs, chat with Easy about his design work for SeedSigner, have various conversations with others who run foundations and funding entities, and so many more nice people. I saw almost no talks because of constant conversations and helping at the Saving Satoshi booth. Time just flew by.
On the foundation side, we had our first board meeting! There’s a little more detail in the quarterly foundation report here. Super nice to have those three smart people on board. Running this foundation is a lot of work, we have big ambitions, and we can only do it together.
The Bitshala design fellowship is also coming together. The basic operational things are clear, we have a timeline and now it’s time to tighten up various loose ends and make it happen.
This week I also did a bunch of PR reviews on the guide. Another page of the inheritance wallet (cosigner onboarding) is now live and the remaining ones are in good shape. The silent payments PR is also coming together nicely. All good stuff. I threw out the question of whether we should add tracking to the guide, to see what content is the most visited (and infer usefulness from that potentially). Will be interesting to see how that pans out.
And three PRs for the Open Design Guide went live, updating chapters 2, 3, and 4. Weekly calls are continuing (latest recording). We’re now halfway through the content and have a pretty good feel for where it’s at and what’s missing. I really think the guide fills a big gap and will help designers find their way into open-source more easily. I’ll try to present it at FOSS Backstage and FOSDEM to get the broader open-source ecosystem involved.
There’s also a whole bunch of review stuff that I did not get around to, mostly for the Bitcoin Core App.
Speaking of calls, we also had a design review of Saving Satoshi. Check it out.
I am also thinking quite a bit about goals and plans for 2025. We really need to make a major difference in the quality of execution of bitcoin wallets next year. If the UX is not good, people will not trust the tech, no matter how fascinating it may be. I love getting hands-on with this, but in my role as community organizer and foundation admin I need to think about this more broadly. Big goals. But should I feasible if we break things down into smaller bits and pieces and start pushing and massaging the right places. I still need to do more planning there, but then I’d really like to share my ideas and discuss and come up with some to-dos that everyone is on board with.
So that’s that. Have a good weekend.
Also, go Kamala Harris. Hope she wins and there won’t be four years of insanity and drama going on across the ocean.
Oh, make sure to also read Mo’s updates.
✌️