Milestone .01 🗿 #buildinpublic

Last week we announced a new feature on BOLT🔩FUN - Stories ✍️. Within this post, we outlined the key objectives of this feature, and what we hope to see makers use it for in the months ahead. As time rolls on, BOLT🔩FUN is approaching its longer-term aim of becoming a platform for makers to discuss, showcase, and launch their lightning projects and ideas to the rest of the bitcoin community.

However, to realise this goal we first have to abide by our own objective to #buildinpublic, by being completely transparent with BOLT🔩FUN’s product design, development and management.

In this article, I will outline our processes of product management, design sprints, and development cycles, as well as provide you with an update on what we’ve been up to over the last couple of weeks.

Our current process ⚙️

BOLT🔩FUN’s core team uses the following outlined processes to manage the product roadmap, design, development, and decision making.

Communication & Decision Making 👾

All communications of BOLT🔩FUN’s platform and feature development, design, and roadmap currently take place in Discord. There we have a weekly Platform WIP call where anyone can discuss their plans, progress, and problems from the current sprint cycle.

Design sprints 🎨

When we need new designs, or when we have to solve major challenges, we use the Peak Shift design sprint model to contextualise our platform issues, ideate solutions, and design workable/testable prototypes that can be later developed within an Issue or Milestone.

Issues & Milestones 🪧

Using GitHub, our team creates issues surrounding QA work, new features, improvements, user testing, and more. We then organise these issues into 2 week sprints (each with a particular theme or feature upgrade in mind), known as Milestones.

Milestone .01 🗿

So, what have we been working on recently? Well, here’s a rundown of our development progress throughout the last 2 week sprint cycle - Seamless Story Creation & Engagement.

Sprint focus ⚡️

Whilst we are on a headstrong mission to become the go-to social developer platform for bitcoin designers and developers by providing an array of platform features, we primarily aim to develop high-quality work showcased through beautiful UI & UX patterns.

Milestone #1 heavily focused (no surprises) on improving the work we had done to implement our new Stories ✍️ feature. This included minor UI/UX updates, work on our Nostr commenting system, the introductions of Drafts, Tags, and Preview states, plus upgrades to our markdown editor.

Progress 🔋

100% complete

🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩

Issues 🎯

Closed ✅

A few big updates

Introducing Story drafts 💾

Every great blogging platform allows writers to save drafts of their articles so that they can revisit and edit a post, or publish it at a later stage. BOLT🔩FUN's new stories ✍️ feature now allows makers can now save and access their story drafts, giving them full control over their creative process.

Nostr comments are here 💬

One of the main upgrades we've been working on during this sprint has been adding comments to our stories ✍️ feature, so we can generate more community engagement, feedback, and sharing. This feature will use Nostr relays to store comments and replies directly to a network of federated servers rather than our own. Exciting, right? If you want to learn more about how this feature works, you can read this story from our unicorn dev MTG.

What’s next?

On Wednesday 27th July, we reviewed our final pending issues and planned out our next sprint cycle, Milestone #2. This will focus on a few more minor upgrades to our Stories ✍️ feature, as well as a full implementation of Nostr powered comments.

⚡️ Lightning Sprint: Tournaments ⚔️

Looking ahead, we will be diving into a design sprint for BOLT🔩FUN Tournaments ⚔️, a longer-version hackathon of our current Shock The Web events. This feature looks to gamify the process of hacking on lightning, whilst leveraging our platform to run these events using maker profiles, stories, and products.

The design sprint will kickoff on Wednesday 3rd August @ 15:00 PM, UTC on Jitsi. Anyone is welcome to join!

📽 https://meet.jit.si/bolt-fun-sprint 🔗

Join our Discord

If you would like to get more involved in the design and development of BOLT🔩FUN, please join our Discord and introduce yourself to the maker community👇

https://discord.gg/HFqtxavb7x