Over the last year I’ve gotten many questions to the tune of “so what do you do exactly?” I’m finally here to answer them!

“No lessons were learned and I did not grow as a person” 

a very good friend, Chris Welch, after traveling the length of the Connecticut River by canoe

Hello world 👋 I’m currently 39 weeks pregnant and baby #2 could come any day now! I’ve been spending a lot of the last few weeks in the bittersweet process that is wrapping up an incredible year in open-source Bitcoin. Maternity leave has just begun for me and my attention is shifting from Bitcoin to babies, from development to diapers, and from coding to cradling.

As some know, I left my position at Casa in June 2022 where I had spent 3.5 years working on the backend systems for their flagship k-of-n multisignature offering. Prior to that, my experience was primarily in the enterprise blockchain and ad tech industries. Making the move to a company like Casa where I could work on a Bitcoin product I truly believe in was a dream come true. Leaving was a very difficult decision but I knew it was time for me to go deeper into Bitcoin as well as open source. They say the magic happens outside your comfort zone right? My formal education is in computer science, but GitHub wasn’t really a thing when I was in school, and open source has always intimidated me.

Fast forward to 11 months later and I can’t believe how far I’ve come. Of course this wasn’t without help. On the home front, my family has been fortunate enough to receive weekly part time childcare for my toddler from both sets of grandparents. I know this is a luxury that is not afforded to everyone and we’re deeply grateful for it. None of what is in this post would have been possible without it. 

I also have the community to thank for helping guide and support me in ways I didn’t even know were possible. At the very start of my journey I was able to secure funding to work on open source Bitcoin from an amazing funder that (chooses to remain anonymous, but is responsible for so much good in open-source bitcoin) was understanding of my need to take a few days each week to watch my toddler. That flexibility alone was tremendously meaningful. As a new-ish parent, it’s really hard to decide if you are going to continue working or not. Having this balance, one where I could continue working on my professional goals while still spending quality time with my child was better than anything I could have hoped for. It allowed me to balance my new role as a mom without completely abandoning a career I had spent so many years dedicating myself to.

Below is a list of things I did with my precious year in open source Bitcoin, a list of things I can proudly look back on and say “hey I really did that!”

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Project #1 – The Seminars

My attempts to fit as much information into my head as possible

At the beginning, my goal was to poke around Bitcoin Core and see if it was a good fit. I started by completing the (free) Bitcoin Protocol Development (BPD) seminar with Chaincode Labs, a six week online program that I highly recommend to anyone hungry to learn more about the protocol. 

This particular seminar exposed me to a plethora of resources across a variety of topics like SegWit, mining, and Script. It gave me the confidence to go further in my own learning. Examples include reading the bitcoin-dev mailing list, participating in discussion at my local BitDevs, compiling Bitcoin Core on my own, and starting to take a look at the actual code.

After that ended I also participated in Chaincode’s Onboarding to Bitcoin Core (OBC) cohort, a five week walkthrough of the fantastic https://bitcoincore.wtf guide written by willcla-rk (GitHub). This helped me gain a better understanding of how Bitcoin Core is architected, revealed a gigantic toolbox of core dev tips and tricks, and answered a bunch of questions about abstract concepts that would otherwise be hard to find information on. 

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Project #2 – Try Bitcoin + Saving Satoshi

Taking a break from learning to create

In between the BPD seminar and the OBC cohort I took a break from learning to do some creating. Jonas from Chaincode has this big, awesome idea of creating a Bitcoin computer game. It excited me and I wanted to help, but didn’t have the front end skills to make a full fledged game. Instead, I made a little proof of concept, a technical Bitcoin tutorial called Try Bitcoin (forked from Try Regex, which itself is inspired by popular Try Ruby and Try Haskell tutorials).

It was my first FOSS project and it was a hit! I couldn’t believe people actually liked it. Since release, it’s been translated into three (!) languages. PRs welcome for anyone else that wants to contribute a translation 😀

After the success of Try Bitcoin, the idea of a Bitcoin computer game found a new home as one of the projects for the Bitcoin Design Community’sDesign-a-thon. I initially joined to lightly help with the technical accuracy of the game, as well as some storyline work, but as you will read it became something much bigger than that! 

After the Design-a-thon ended, the project’s lead designer, Christoph (who, by the way, really is Germany’s best kept secret) proposed we keep the momentum going and roll the project into the Bolt.fun Legends of Lightning Hackathon. After weeks of hashing out the concept, refining  content and design, and laying the groundwork for the code base, our pitch was ready. 

Not too long after we found out we were selected as finalists! The next step was to do a live pitch. I shared silly (but effective) vocal exercises with the team (I think know Jonas briefly doubted my sanity for a moment here) and we went to work figuring out how we wanted to split the presentation. 

I think I did too many vocal exercises because I lost my voice after this, but it was worth it because we won the Global Adoption award for Design! This was no doubt thanks to the stellar work Christoph put in. I think I speak for the rest of the team when I say we were thrilled to support his vision for the design, and appreciative of how his work brought the project to life.

Today, Saving Satoshi lives on! You can find more information about the game at https://savingsatoshi.com/ It’s still under development but has come a long way over the last six months, with contributions from people in a variety of fields including engineering, product management, story writing, and design.

While I still participate, my involvement has scaled back to accommodate some of the other projects you’ll read about in this post. But it’s been a lot of fun to do technical research for lesson content, particularly with extremely low level, deep dives into topics like elliptic curve cryptography, key and address derivation, BIP-32 HD wallets, as well as the “Satoshi style” of message signing and verification. These adventures help inform the content for game challenges and ensure the technical accuracy of what we are teaching. Working code samples can be found over on repl.it.

The Saving Satoshi team meets every Tuesday to discuss issues, milestones, and to generally work on moving things forward. While I’m sad to have to take a step back, I know the project is in good hands (new contributors are always welcome!) and I’m excited to cheer it on from the sidelines.

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Project #3 – Getting into Bitcoin Core (getnetmsgstats RPC)

Gaining a new appreciation for Bitcoin Core contributors and maintainers

After the OBC cohort I connected with Bitcoin Core contributor Amiti Uttarwar who kindly offered to share her wealth of knowledge and mentor me in Bitcoin Core. We quickly found an issue I could work on and I started carving out my little corner of the code, learning a lot about P2P and RPC design along the way.

This turned into a full fledged project that gave me the gift of seeing (almost) the entire lifecycle of a new feature in Bitcoin Core, with Amiti helping me at just about every step along the way. As the discussion in the issue shows, I also received loads of additional help from vasild and ajtowns. I am proud to say that six months later, I made my first “real” PR to Bitcoin Core. It really does take a village!

From concept ACKs and social consensus, to feature design, to C++ and git, I could dedicate an entirely separate post to the things I learned from this experience. The only one I ever got around to documenting was my notes on git, which can be found here. 

Suffice it to say I learned a lot. Going through this process has leveled up how I approach coding and transformed the way I view open-source development.

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Project #4 – Meatspace things

My self promotion to Junior Operations Associate for Boston BitDevs

Back in September, a few folks in the Boston area decided it was time to revive the once  thriving Boston BitDevs meetup to its pre-pandemic glory days. I jumped along for the ride and ended up taking the lead on many of the operations and logistical tasks for the last seven monthly meetups (as well as attending – shoutout to my husband for being the seltzer mule more times than I’d like to admit, especially as each month pregnancy made me less useful). In March we even had the honor of hosting BitDevs founder Jay and NYC co-host Murch! 

Over the months we’ve been able to secure a truly wonderful set of sponsors (c=, Fidelity, Foundation, the MIT Bitcoin Club, and Coin Metrics) that care deeply about Bitcoin and the technical foundation that underpins it. These sponsorships have allowed us to rotate locations around the city, which maximizes our exposure. They have also allowed us to feed our attendees, a small thank you we can extend to these people for coming out and caring about Bitcoin.

Special shoutout to my co-organizers and the community that has come out to support us in this. It blows my mind that we have regulars! It means so much to know that people find enough value in what they are learning and sharing at these events to keep coming back. 

Running things like this is no small task and I can’t look at event organizers the same way again. On top of all the obvious stuff like finding space, sponsorship, and preparing content, there’s always a long list of things that could easily be forgotten like:

• Do people have directions to the room? Do we need a sign?
• How should we promote this?
• Does security need a list of attendees ahead of time?
• Are there any parking recommendations we can make?
• How much food should we get so we have enough, but not too much leftover?
• Are there any requests for special dietary restrictions?
• Where can we recommend folks go after so we can end the event in a timely manner?

Next time you go to a conference or a meetup that you really enjoy, give the organizers a hug.

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Project #5 – Bitcoin Bytes

Putting the fun in Bitcoin fundamentals

I’ve always enjoyed creating educational Bitcoin material, especially with the goal of making things that are simple, colorful, and fun. However I lacked the motivation and could never get myself past initial one offs and prototypes. All that changed when Amiti, who found herself in a similar position, approached me with a nebulous idea, or rather a calling to make something larger and more impactful than just a few pieces of content here and there.

We thought long and hard about underserved audiences in the Bitcoin community and the best ways we could attract newcomers, especially to the technical corner of Bitcoin. We thought about why we cared about Bitcoin at all, about why we chose to devote our careers to it, and about the kinds of resources we wish we had when starting out. We thought about what was missing, and what we were passionate about. After many phone calls that spanned over weeks, if not months, and several ideas that we decided against (no, we will not be doing a podcast) we honed in on what we wanted to build.

The next step was to recruit a killer team. We brought two kickass founding team members on board: Quay to own marketing and Autumn to flex her design chops and help with marketing. As an experiment, I made a physical zine (short for magazine – it’s pronounced “zeen”, it’s silly and I still have to say “magazine” in my head every time I say the word) about BIPs, and had copies distributed at Boston BitDevs, NYC BitDevs (thanks Murch and Jay for handing these out!), as well as virtually.

The process of creating the zine was incredibly fun and challenging. I made a font using my own handwriting with two variations for each letter in the alphabet. I researched how to create a physical booklet that could be mass produced from a single sheet of paper, and I learned to use a sewing machine to make the bindings (totally not necessary but it is impossible for me to half-ass something). 

But perhaps the largest challenge of all was making the content concise enough to fit on a single sheet of paper, front and back. It’s really hard to boil things down to first principles, to remove all unnecessary jargon, and write for an audience that may not have enough experience to read the raw source material. You also need to have a complete understanding of the big picture, otherwise you risk leaving out important concepts.

I started by researching BIPs (reading actual BIPs, listening to podcasts, and reviewing articles) and created a gigantic list of notes. Then I broke the information out into different sections and highlighted exactly what I wanted to include in the zine. After that was done I took a piece of paper, folded it into quarters and started writing the content out by hand. This gave me a very good feel for how much I could fit into a single page. 

Now it was time to make a digital version. I used the Procreate drawing app on my iPad for this, though there are many other apps for actual book making. Then I printed it out and began a never ending cycle of ruthless editing. I think I went through four or five revisions, physical print outs of the zine that I sat down with and read like a book to make sure everything was explained to the best of my ability. And that wasn’t the end! Only after the content was finalized did I move onto jazzing everything up with decorations and formatting.

I also created a landing page with additional resources and a link to a digital version of the zine so anyone could make their own. It’s important to Bitcoin Bytes that this material is easily accessible and leads to a digital presence so readers can continue going down the rabbit hole.

The point of the BIPs zine experiment was to see if:

1. You could create meaningful, educational material with single sheet of paper
2. There was a desire for technical bitcoin content that was somewhere in between an ELI5 and a full fledged deep dive
3. People liked learning from physical material (I can hear some of you saying “dead trees” as you read this…)

As it turns out, the BIPs zine ended up being a wonderful success and gave us some pretty clear answers to the questions above! People were sharing images of their copies and some even started printing their own to distribute at local meetups. One person went as far as translating it to Thai!

The BIPs Zine taught me so much about the content creation process and as a team we were now ready to tackle something bigger. I got to work making a second zine, this time about Taproot. Amiti prepared us for an official launch at Bitcoin 2023, which included securing the website domain, setting up a structure for project management, preparing a special reveal at the end of her keynote, and working out the logistics to get physical copies of the zine to the conference. Quay began to lay out all the internal frameworks we needed for a successful marketing campaign (easier said than done, especially after getting deplatformed several times by newsletter services for being associated with the crypto industry), and brainstormed larger questions like what our brand voice is and the values that we want to communicate. Autumn sprinkled magic fairy dust on a number of fronts, including making us a gorgeous logo, establishing our social media presence, and assembling 200 zines at the conference!

At the end of Amiti’s keynote talk at the Bitcoin 2023 conference, she unveiled our new initiative, Bitcoin Bytes along with the new Taproot zine. It was such a good feeling to finally have the project live!

We’re still small and in the process of bootstrapping, but I invite everyone to check it out and let us know what you think. You can find a copy of the BIPs zine here, and a copy of the Taproot zine here. This is a true labor of love and one of the few projects I am going to try and revisit if I am able to during leave.

Accomplishment #6 – Assorted firsts

Baby’s first hackathon and podcast

The funny thing about my first time experiences is they are also baby’s! This year I hit two personal milestones and stepped outside my comfort zone to 1. Record my first podcast appearance, and 2. Participate in my first hackathon. 

In late March I joined Nik Bhatia on his podcast The Bitcoin Layer to chat about open source Bitcoin and some technical developments in the space. I spent a lot of time doing homework for this, researching the topics we planned to discuss, and sketching out discussion points for myself. A cool bonus is this ended up feeding into and shaping the direction of a lot of the Bitcoin Bytes stuff I did. My podcast notes became the launch point for the content in both the BIPs and Taproot zines.

Despite my careful note taking and prep, I still made at least one mistake (I said there were 5 Bitcoin Core maintainers instead of 4). That’s when I realized you can never be 100% prepared for anything, and what matters is trying your best. Later, I’ll get into more life lessons that have come out of this year, but this was one moment I distinctly remember where I was kinder to myself than I would have been in the past. It also helped that Nik and Joe made going on the podcast and chatting such an enjoyable and comfortable experience.

The second big milestone for me was participating in my first hackathon at this year’s MIT Bitcoin Expo. I suppose the Legends of Lighting hackathon mentioned earlier is technically my first, but that one was over an extended period of time and I didn’t do any real coding for it. With the MIT one I was actually writing code, debugging, and could really feel the pressure of the 30 hour time limit!

My other teammates were two Casa engineers and former colleagues of mine, Armin and Ron. Unsurprisingly these are two people I was over the moon to work with again, even if it was for just a short amount of time. It felt like we were getting the band back together! We leveraged our experiences working in self custody and our excitement for Taproot and Nostr to create Munstr, a MuSig coordinator that uses Nostr as the communication protocol.

We had so much fun building and the hackathon was a great way to kick the tires on an idea that we were all passionate about. It probably goes without saying that the hardest part was getting the cryptography code for MuSig right. Massive thank you to the libraries and examples from the Bitcoin Optech Schnorr Taproot workshop. But the second most difficult thing was keeping the scope contained! By the end there were so many other things we wanted to add and improve but simply not enough time. Armin and I never even made it down to the venue. We had planned to meet up at MIT in the afternoon but the amount of time it would have taken to travel there was too great to sacrifice. Our team ended up working 100% remotely, just like at Casa.

As the night went on we started to wrap things up and put final touches on the pitch. We submitted what we had, closed our laptops and finally got some rest. My husband had taken our toddler to visit my in-laws that day, but I managed to sneak in a little hackathon break and hang out with them around dinner time. It was rewarding to finally be done, even if we didn’t know the results yet.

The following morning I was out with the family running our weekend errands when we got the good news that we were finalists! I really leaned on my teammates for this phase. It wasn’t guaranteed that I was going to be able to get to my computer in time for the live pitch, so I’m especially grateful for their willingness to take the responsibility of presenting. I made it home just in time to pop in for the last bit of the live pitch and help answer one question, and then it was back to waiting again.

If we won, we’d have the opportunity to present at the closing ceremonies for the Expo. Once again, I had to rely on my awesome teammates for this part. That afternoon I had a 3 hour Hypnobirthing class (which, BTW Hypnobirthing is amazing and I highly recommend it, I almost love it as much as Bitcoin) and there was no guarantee I’d be back at my computer in time to help present.

Much of Hypnobirthing is training your mind and body to go instantly into a state of deep relaxation so I took my anxious self to class, nervous about how we stacked up against the competition, and left feeling calm, relaxed, and happy to accept whatever the outcome of the hackathon was. My state of zen was quickly replaced by excitement after class as I checked my messages and saw we won the grand prize!! The grand prize for the entire hackathon! We thought we had a reasonable chance for the Bitcoin-Taproot track and were thrilled to hear we exceeded our big goal!

Over the following month Munstr received way more attention than we anticipated. It was featured in a few digital publications (including one in German!), and got a mention at the Miami PlebFi during Jameson Lopp’s presentation. I may or may not have framed both our Bitcoin Optech and Matt Odell shoutouts.

It’s hard to say what the future of Munstr is right now but this is another project I really hope to have the time to return to. There are just so many things about it that I am personally invested in and that we as a team want to see through. Keep an eye on it, and hopefully it can grow into something more than just a weekend hackathon project!

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Takeaways

As I reflect on this year, I can’t help but notice how transformative it was for me on both a career and a personal level. I got to explore so many paths that I don’t think I ever had the courage to, paths that I previously never gave myself permission to even consider. I want to take a moment to talk about lessons that were especially important for me to learn. These won’t apply to everyone, but the point I want to make is that open-source development can be a vehicle for enormous personal growth.  

For me, the real work was when I realized I was completely responsible for my own destiny. Participating in open-source forced me to examine where I found satisfaction and feelings of accomplishment. I saw where I was giving my power away to others, and learned to stand strong on my own.

Overcoming shippers’ high and learning to think for myself

One of the first things I noticed about open-source, especially open-source bitcoin, is the lack of a reliable shippers’ high, if any at all. I’m talking about that awesome dopamine hit you get when you release a new feature or fix a bug for the company you are working for. It rarely mattered what the feature or the bug was, as long as I was helping a teammate or a user, I felt good. 

Shippers high isn’t necessarily bad. It’s an important way to keep momentum going and an opportunity to give your colleagues the recognition they deserve. The problem is when you become too reliant on it. When you need it, when you become addicted. When you stop thinking for yourself and you start chasing whatever will bring the next shippers’ high. You can probably tell from a mile away that I was a good student in school and I LOVED rules. I thrived in that kind of environment. The report cards, the titles, the assessments – the more structure, the better. I had no problem rolling into industry after graduation and continuing what I was best at, doing the things that other people told me to do.

When I got to open-source I was overwhelmed by the choices available to me. There was so much freedom and responsibility! Knowing that there was never a guaranteed shippers’ high, at least the kind I was familiar with, was scary and made me question if my decisions were the best use of my time. I’m really happy I started with the two structured learning opportunities with Chaincode (the Bitcoin Protocol Design seminar and the Onboarding to Bitcoin Core cohort mentioned earlier). It was a gentle way to ease into the world of open-source. I got exposure to a variety of paths I could take, but also had a program to follow to make sure I didn’t spend too much time spinning tires.

Reframing how I viewed accomplishment was the key to overcoming shippers’ high. I realized that approval from others should not be what drives you. When I look back at my work I can actually observe this in action. As the months progressed, I took more ownership of my work and started really pursuing ideas and projects that I wasn’t totally sure others would approve of, but ones that I had a gut feeling were the right decisions for me. Your time is your most valuable resource and it doesn’t make sense to spend it doing only what others want you to do. There will be circumstances where this is required, but if you do it all the time, you’ve given your power away.

I realize there is some irony to this blog post that is riddled with screenshots of accomplishments and positive feedback from others. The difference between pre-open source Stacie and now is I am no longer reliant on those screenshots. I know that I can feel just as happy and satisfied with my work regardless of if or how it’s recognized by others. And while it feels too obvious to state, I’ll say it: constructive feedback is always welcome and taken seriously.

A bonus to all this is I allowed myself to acknowledge the following: work that involves longer time horizons is usually more meaningful than the small things. When talking about this with my husband he gave me an interesting perspective. He actually feels guilty doing the little tasks because he knows that time could have been put towards something much greater.

You actually can’t rely on others for approval

Learning to separate your self worth from the approval of others is great, but in open source you actually have to. I’m going to repeat that. You must stop chasing approval from others because the reality is you will never make everyone happy. If you try to do that you’ll be stuck in a cycle of thrashing back and forth and never reach any kind of stable state. You must learn to think for yourself, defend your choices, and stand your ground. Of course you want to do this in a way that is respectful of the people and projects you work alongside, but it’s possible to be both polite and firm at the same time. Do your homework, come to your own conclusions, and go with what makes the most sense to you.

Scratch your own itch!

We’ve all heard it before: the best way to contribute to open source is by scratching your own itch. Use the software, find something you don’t like, or something you want to see added, and go do it! This is in complete alignment with learning to stand on your own. When you do work you really believe in, it doesn’t matter how it turns out. Got an idea for a fun project? Did you make a PR for a feature you think is really useful? If it ends up not getting a lot of reception, who cares. You did it for you, and you get to take those learnings onto your next big thing. Everyone has something unique to offer. Lean into that.

Reward behavior you want to see

There seem to be a lot of unwritten social rules around open-source contributions. I think most boil down to “don’t be a jerk”, but if you really want to move things along, be sure to show appreciation and thank others when they help you in your journey. 

Full disclaimer, I am behind on addressing some PR feedback, and wish I could give back more to Bitcoin Core in terms of review and contributions. I’m very aware of this. The point I want to make is at the end of the day, you are not entitled to anyone’s time. No one has to review your mailing list post, your PR, or whatever other thing you throw out there. So when you do get eyes on your work, be sure to acknowledge that and return the favor if you can.

In that same vein, don’t reward behavior that isn’t productive! This mainly applies to trolls but it also can be helpful to remember this when you look at your daily workload. Are there meetings or tasks that consume a lot of your energy with little return? Are you in a position where you have some freedom to push back on them or make changes so they take up less of your time? Identify what those are and stop feeding into them. They will NEVER go away if you don’t consciously scale back the attention you give them. Put your effort into meaningful things that energize you.

Stay the course

Everything I’ve mentioned is kind of easier said than done, at least for someone like me that is trying to shift a way of thinking that has been 30+ years in the making. This stuff is not easy. It’s the real work, and it often goes unnoticed. 

The important thing is to keep going, to power through, and ask for help when you need it. I experienced a number of setbacks and frustrations this year that I’ve chosen not to get into because 1. It would probably exponentially increase this already long post, and 2. I don’t think it’s productive, or I at least haven’t found a way to share that is.

Build your support system. Surround yourself with people that want to see you succeed and tap into that network when you need it.

A note on motivation: Obviously there are times when you are required to do things you don’t want to do. The good thing about that is you usually have some kind of external motivation to help you along. This can come in the form of a company, family member, or friend that is relying on you to do the task at hand. 

However, if you are having motivation problems for things that you have chosen for yourself, as is often the case in open-source, you may want to reconsider your “why”. Why did you choose to do this? Does it align with your interests and values? Is it a small piece of something bigger, something that is meaningful to you? When you have the precious freedom to carve your own path, make sure you are thoughtful about it. If you have made decisions based on what is right for you and not others, then motivation doesn’t become an issue.

See you later!

My entire strategy for deciding what to work on and how to spend my time changed when I found out I was pregnant. It forced me to double down and focus. I had to take a long look at what was most important. For me, this was impact. How could I maximize that? In a situation where I felt like I didn’t have nearly the same amount of hours as everyone else, what opportunities did I have to work smarter instead of harder? 

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I am very sad to be taking a step back right now, but happy I get to leave on a high note and excited for our family’s new addition. This time I’m taking a longer maternity leave than I did with my first and can’t say for certain in what capacity I’ll be returning to work, or when. I spent a long time thinking about this and as difficult as it is, I know it’s the right decision.

Once again, I have to acknowledge that none of this would have been possible for me without family stepping in for part time childcare (specifically my mom and my mother in law), the generous funding I was able to secure, and the support of the Bitcoin developer community. 

I’m going to go raise a fam now. I’m not totally going away, but my involvement in Bitcoin will be drastically scaled back. Hit me up on nostr: npub1fhmmgwe6fk6tn83ahttt6ruyyfnjdm7k8tn7qflert9ajx6dhfyqf3nzcu

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Jonas from Chaincode for helping me realize open source Bitcoin is something I really can and should contribute to and for the unwavering support (and often enthusiasm!) as I fell down all kinds of strange Bitcoin rabbit holes.

Thank you to Amiti for not only her mentorship in Bitcoin Core and inspiration in projects like Bitcoin Bytes, but also for helping me work through all the personal growth that comes with this journey. This doesn’t go unseen.