Honey badgers

2022 has been the year of conferences! Couple months ago I attended Baltic Honey Badger in Riga, Latvia. Then was a Bitcoin Design meetup in Barcelona, Now I'm sitting in a cafe with @zapp_ed in El Zonte, El Salvador. This one was special because I was able to meet some friends IRL for the first time, and reconnect with some old ones. For example, I was finally able to meet Christoph Ono from the bitcoin design community! We have been collaborating and working together for two years but this was the first time we had met in person.

Another highlight was realising BOLT.FUN has quite some fans. Shout out to everyone who showed love! There was a moment when the only maker I knew about was Ben Arc who works on LNBits and a bunch of hardware projects. Community is super important for this project to succeed though and there is only so much one person can do. We also need to make the process of building more transparent.

I had a conversation with Ben, we were discussing this platform and he made me realise the scope of what we're trying to do with these stories.

We need to make [information] about bitcoins building journey more permanent, because having [information] saved in bitcoin talk type forums is very useful for research, debugged, etc.

— Ben Arc

In the Telegram groups, Slack channels, and Discord servers awesome insights get lost. They become hidden from the rest of the internet. Someone looking for content on how to create a music player app with bitcoin payments, or how to debug some LNURL code is not so accessible when they all live in a single thread of chat messages.

Engagement by makers has been limited to the period of time we put on our events. We've been so busy building the platform that it’s easy to forget that we also have to engage the community. Sounds obvious but there's so much to put into the foundation. Not the best example of a lean process of "Build, Measure, Learn" for sure. We also need to keep makers engaged over a long period of time not only when we're putting on an event.

We need to prepare some tutorial videos to better explain the process of creating profiles, and posting stories on BOLT.FUN.

We would also need to define what stories are for example makers can; they can write an introduction of themselves, while building their project they could write daily reports about their progress to get feedback, ask questions to the community of other makers.

For the long term, we discussed some ideas around making it easier to post project updates to the platform from Telegram or Discord.

While this has been a scattered rant, shout out to @GBKS from the @bitcoin_design community, he’s been doing a weekly newsletter summary of his work and thoughts.

Happy Sunday!