Crunchy time
The past two weeks went by super fast with Bitcoin Amsterdam and the Designathon. Both kicked off on the 12th, which made for an intense few days. It was really great to meet a few online friends/collaborators in person, kick off both events, and see some interesting talks (Bitcoin is Borderless was very impactful).
The Designathon will wrap up this Sunday with a presentation call at 16:00 UTC. 18 projects are registered, but I have no clear idea yet what to expect across the board. Some projects work more in public and others more in private and only sometimes peek their heads out. But that's also part of the point of the hackathon format. You provide people an opportunity to go at it, support them as you can, and in many ways it's up to them, and what comes out at the end is unknown ahead of time. As is common with the creative process.
We had a few workshops, also in collaboration with Legends of Lightning. Below is the one I did for the Bitcoin UI Kit. Sounds like it was useful to a few people already.
My primary participation for the event was in the Saving Satoshi project, an effort to build a site with interactive bitcoin coding challenges, wrapped in a sci-fi story around time travel based on the history of bitcoin. Really fun. Below is a video of a 1-hour video call the group had.
There wasn't a huge amount of activity and coordination overall, but several contributors in different areas across putting the lessons together, investigating code setups, etc, so we did make some good progress. It's a potentially massive project, so the idea is not to flesh the whole thing out and build it, but more so capture a vision for it and see if it can be built, and built on, afterwards.
Here's a 8-minute video with the latest design update. As you can tell, I also went a bit wild with AI generated images, which all the illustrations are (using DiffusionBee).
Would be super cool to see this one come to live, especially if it helps bring more developers into bitcoin.
There were also a few Taro-related workshops (one, two), organized by bolt.fun, and a Taro exploration project. I did not do much other than attending the calls, but put together this video to reflect on my understanding (it's only half-baked, as I totally ignored the onchain aspect in it - it's a learning experience).
I definitely got a much better feel for the specific design attributes of Taro and the limitations and trade-offs involved. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, and I hope we can come up with some good UX guidance around Taro assets (for the design guide), so this new tech will be used responsibly for worthwhile things. Another mini-project to get going.
Make sure to check out the other projects in the event in the latest Bitcoin Design newsletter.
So now let's see what the weekend brings. Prizes will be awarded on Wednesday at 16:00 UTC in a separate call. And then I think I need to take a couple of days off. Planning and running this event was quite exhausting, and the weeks after will be quite busy again with a short vaca, a design conference, and a Bitcoin Design core group meetup in Barcelona coming super fast.
Lot's going on, and it's all pretty cool stuff. Hope all is good with you.
✊🏼🍺