#71 Back to busy
Onwards.
It’s been a month since my last update due to being off (at least trying to) for vacation. Last week I was fully back, although the previous 1-2 weeks did require attention to the UI Kit project due to the HRF bounty.
Let’s summarize this bounty real quick. The HRF did a surprise announcement of a very generous series of bounties end of July. One of them was for porting the UI Kit to Penpot, for which I am the lead maintainer (and therefore take responsibility for how things are going). The bounty resulted in a frenzy of activity with a bit of a messy result. Some people were excited to join in the collaborative group effort we had going in the Discord channel. Others worked in private as quickly as possible to claim the bounty. Submissions were made and one group (who acted privately) received the reward maybe 3 weeks after the bounty was posted. The incentives were clearly set for speed.
On the positive side, I think it’s amazing that the project is deemed worthy of such a bounty, and it brought a good amount of attention. On the other hand, this was an external effort without any consultation of the project maintainer or contributors. I wish the bounty had been formulated to encourage open collaboration and longer-term thinking and contribution (feedback I forwarded to the HRF)). Now that the bounty is done, the Discord channel has gone quiet again and it’s not clear if/how the submissions will be maintained. Penpot is evolving quickly, so we need to have an iterative mindset right now. It’s not all set and done though, I hope we can keep some of the newcomers around and get momentum going again. Ideally, Penpot will become our go-to design tool in the future. There’s a long way to go, but it’s going to be a fun and interesting one.
This experience has also made the need for a Bitcoin Design Foundation more clear and urgent. We are close to being set up now with Open Collective and should be up and running very soon. There are a lot of discussions being had behind the scenes to figure out various aspects of how an entity like this should be set up and run. From governance to donor-relationships and expense policies, it’s quite a lot. I’m excited to get it going, and I’m sure we’ll also mess up a few things along the way. As long as we quickly correct, it’s all good. Lots of good and important work happens around bitcoin design, it will be great to support contributors better.
Aside from that, much of last week was about catching up, and a few other things:
Giving feedback to some small LDK site design updates
Checking in with Wallet Scrutiny and hearing about new design needs
Catching up with Bitcoin Core App design work (milestones 1.2 and 1.3 are in progress)
QA on chapter 3 of Saving Satoshi
Testing accessibility improvements for Zeus
Realizing we missed sending the newsletter this week 😬
Lots of really nice chats and conversations with various people in the community about their projects, upcoming events, etc
It’s Monday morning, so let’s get to it.
🧑🌾