Last update for this momentous year of 2023. How was it for you? Was definitely a bit exhausting at times for me, but it’s been a really good one overall.
I did lots of planning and scheming this week and I think 2024 will also be very busy. Foundation (which Bitcoin Magazine wrote about) efforts will really ramp up, and getting all that right is one of my primary goals. Should be fun, I’m excited for it. I should share more about this, but I write these weekly update posts intentionally very quickly. Maybe it can be a separate post…
Now back to practical bits, Legends of Lightning Vol 2 is wrapped up. As a judge, I reviewed 21 of the 86 participating projects and there was a lot of really good work there. As Johns said on one of the calls, the projects have gotten lots more sophisticated since the initial Bolt.Fun hackathons. Really a great sign. Winners are listed here. For Saving Satoshi, we submitted but did not want to be eligible for prizes (because me being a judge). Here’s our submission.
Speaking of projects, the HRF and OpenSats announced their latest grantees, also lots of good initiatives there across so many different categories.
What I also heard is that projects have a hard time finding designers. I think we can help a lot with that in the community and I hope we can be more involved next year in this matchmaking and supporting design work.
Also, both HRF and OpenSats are funding Bitcoin Core App development. Jarol did some awesome work in arranging that. Now we have some real momentum in 2024 to speed up development, which has been very slow. I hope we can then also onboard (and possibly fund) some other contributors (design, research) that can be dedicated to this complex project in some capacity.
The image below shows a quick layout mock from this week to make the block clock adjust to very small sizes. The most likely reason this might occur is for split-screen interactions on Android, or some type of widget usage. Not common, but I think it’s great when products allow for flexible use and support fringe cases well.
I updated the Bitcoin UI Kit website slightly to represent the new color and theming system. The new section below lets you try out different color, mode and type combinations directly on the site itself.
This made me think that it might be good to create more formal code UI libraries for the kit. It’s a way of productizing the project further. Just like the Bitcoin Icons can be easily imported via a NPM module, maybe we should make the same possible for the UI Kit. It would then allow both designers and developers to have the same base to build on. Something to look into, to see if people would actually use it. Before that, education and awareness is first priority for the project. Hopefully with a new co-maintainer that I am hoping to onboard in January.
We also just merged two PR right before the break. Michael’s page about time-based recovery using miniscript was a really complex one (simple for the user, complex for the designer) and took many rounds of review. It’s great to get this one live. Because it’s complex, I think we should do some calls around it in January to discuss and help others wrap their heads around it. Generally, I think we should do this type of reading/learning call every other week or so moving forward. There’s so much good content in the guide. Anyhow, the second PR was for a new header image to the wallet page, a first contribution by Jeff.
And a bit of a random thought at the end. Having reviewed ~40 of projects in the last two weeks, from the hackathon and the grant rounds, I wish we could get a bit more expressive and fun with bitcoin applications (beyond “clean”). I understand that many are focused on getting the functionality to work well, which is absolutely essential. I also think that there are several layers on top of that, that make for great products that resonate differently. Some are perfectly happy by being in full control of the node they personally set up and monitoring network traffic and tweaking settings along the way. Many others have no interest in that and require additional layers of abstraction. These layers also require a lot of thinking and work, of a very different nature. I hope we get to see more of that. I also think that this becomes more of a focus as the tech commoditizes, when it’s not so hard anymore to build something that just barely works well enough. That makes it easier to focus on other aspects of a product.
I wrote my first weekly update on Jan 4, 2022, so I’m almost at two years of doing this now. I still enjoy it as a way to reflect and keep me accountable to myself. I really like how btchoneybadger put it here. Also shout-out to Mo for also doing weekly updates.
Huge thanks to all the great people I got to meet, interact and work with this year. You’re the best. Let’s keep rolling, do good work and have a good time.
✌️