#7 - The Summer of Bitcoin Experience
A developer's journey as a Bitcoin Core contributor, chat with SOB 2022 intern Pavan Joshi, and best bitcoin jobs for freshers!
Hello Summer of Bitcoiner!
A Bitcoin Core developer’s journey can be challenging yet rewarding. It is essential for any aspiring beginner developer to keep a track of their progress through checkpoints along their development journey. Bitcoin Core dev, Andreas Kouloumos shares his 13-month journey as 4 major milestones:
Obstacles
Accountability
Navigating through the foothills
Arriving at Base Camp
“Adjust priorities, do the work, gather context, be accountable, repeat.”
- Andreas Kouloumos
Andreas’s painful but ultimately rewarding journey on contributing to bitcoin is a must read! Drop everything and read it here now!
Are you starting out in bitcoin today and want to learn how to build apps on the bitcoin blockchain?
Build On L2 (BOL2) is a community-led effort by contributors and companies building on Core Lightning and the Liquid Network. It's a space to connect with bitcoin builders, product managers, designers and developers through events and mentorship programs and learn from experts building the future of bitcoin.
Completely free and accessible, each layer-2 protocol has a respective community platform that will host activities including:
Localized hackathons
Virtual networking events
Project bounties and other incentive programs
International builder tournaments
Career development programs
Mentorship and coaching
AMAs with leading developers
Visit buildonl2.com to join the community and learn how to build killer apps on bitcoin.
Interview with Pavan Joshi
We spoke with Pavan Joshi, a 22-year old university student of Government College of Engineering, Yavatmal, India and a Summer of Bitcoin intern who contributed to Alby. Pavan goes deep into the history of bitcoin, why he’s excited about the Lightning Network and shares advice on getting started with bitcoin open-source development.
Listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.
You can also watch a video of the conversation here.
Read the full transcript:
Shankara: Hey Pavan, welcome to the Summer of Bitcoin Experience. Let's start with a little bit of your introduction. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Joshi: Good evening. Firstly, thanks to Adi for having me here. My name is Pavan Joshi. I'm an undergraduate engineering student and an aspiring computer engineer from Maharashtra. I'm a professional web, android, and game developer. I have also participated in numerous open source, competitive and international events such as Google summer of Code and Summer of Bitcoin. I have also been mentoring Google Summer of Code in their 2022 season.
At bitcoin internship I was intern of the week as well as top performer of the year. And most importantly, I got opportunity to speak at Asia's largest Bitcoin only conference that happened in India, that is in Goa. That was pretty much an awesome experience. That's the biggest thing I got from the Summer of Bitcoin internship program.
Currently I'm working on the data driven smart transactions, that is making Bitcoin a visible option over the internet or bringing more, better monetization policy over the internet using Bitcoin's blockchain.
Shankara: Awesome. Let's start from the beginning. When was the first time you came across Bitcoin? And how did you stumble down that rabbit hole?
Joshi: So basically, I was interested in blockchain based things. I came to know about summer of Bitcoin and tried to learn more about blockchain. Summer of Bitcoin gave me the opportunity to learn everything from scratch, including money, including Bitcoin.
Rabbit hole is basically an analogy that says entry into the unknown or entry into the new world full of adventures where you question almost everything that you learn from the start, including economics, politics, world, everything.
So stumbling down in the Bitcoin rabbit hole was really at first scary, I can say! Because everything was new for me. Blockchain, Bitcoin, how it works. So, it basically starts from the history. In 1980, there were many efforts that were made to build digital currencies. But no one was capable to build that particular currency without establishing any central server. That was the problem. Money can't be copied over the internet. This is known as double spending problem. So this is particularly a 40-year longstanding problem and in 2008 a guy named Satoshi, they came with a nine-page PDF known as Bitcoin whitepaper. And that solves the double spending problem without establishing a central server or without trusting anybody as a third party such as a bank. So, this was my first orange pill moment. Someone is coming with a nine-page PDF and telling me, hey, I have solved this particular double spending problem in a decentralized way or in a decentralized network without establishing any central server or without, depending on bank, that's really fascinating.
They also came with the implementation of code we know as bitcoin. So, if you learn about blockchain you must start with history of blockchain. And there you will by default or naturally land on the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Beauty of Bitcoin is that you don't have to trust anyone. No one can manipulate your money. No one can control your money.
Shankara: Absolutely. So let's switch gears to summer of Bitcoin. How did you hear about it and, what made you apply?
Joshi: As I said, I was searching for opportunity. I was hearing everywhere, blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. There is something happening in the blockchain industry. People are making careers, people are getting profit. Many startups are evolving on the top of blockchain. and there was summer of Bitcoin. So I just wanted to explore what is happening.
Shankara: Awesome. So let's talk about the organization that you chose to work with.
Joshi: So basically I worked with getAlby. It is a lightning browser extension.
So it is an Chrome extension. It can work on Opera or of course, other Chromium based browsers as well. So they are bringing new specifications, they're bringing new features, and they're providing monetary policies over the internet using bitcoin's Using Bitcoin's blockchain or a Bitcoin as a finance system, you can attach payment flow at every interaction over the internet. And most importantly, it is free. You don't have to spend thousands of bucks on any developer who can integrate any financial service or you don't have to pay thousands of bucks to any third party service, such as PayPal. So as a developer, that's really hectic to create your, or keep a particular budget aside to just integrate payment gateway.
Shankara: So let's talk about your specific project idea, what exactly did you work on during your summer of Bitcoin internship?
Joshi: So we developed a particular specification named as smart transaction.
They are smart. You can program a particular behavior with that transaction. What benefit it brings, it brings best possible monetization for your site. Like if you are selling a song, you can send your marketing banners in that you can allow users to play that particular song live in your confirmation window. You don't have to let users visit any particular URL link to see the content .
So you can pass everything, almost everything in that particular transaction, and that is attached to the transaction. So it is much more insightful and user can interact with it.
Shankara: Yeah, very interesting. And I think this is only possible by lightning and you cannot do the same things with traditional fiat payment gateways. Like you have to build something very custom and it will obviously cost a lot of money and will have a lot of friction because banks and the traditional digital finance does not allow for such interactivity.
So at summer of Bitcoin, you worked closely with a mentor who is guiding you on your project. Can you tell us about your experience working with your mentor?
Joshi: So his name is Michael Bumann. He's a very experienced guy in blockchain and bitcoin community. So the best thing I got from him is that particular spark, a visionary spark of doing things. Sometimes if you are a student, you just apply to the internship program, you try to complete that particular project and just leave. You get your stipend, you get your certificates, and that's it. But whenever I was discussing with Michael what this means and how this can change the current situations, what specific feature brings specific functionality to the bitcoin's blockchain or how we can do wider mass adoption of people to the bitcoin's blockchain using the smart transactions.
So, every feature or everything we were contributing to Alby or while building this specification was purposeful. And he kept that spark throughout the process. Like we are building a different monetary system, which is completely free and much more better than fiat currency. Why not put effort on our own, not just for the internship. So he's that guy who always brings that particular excitement and that particular spark while developing things around him.
Shankara: So what are you up to now? Are you working on any Bitcoin project right now?
Are you continuing your work from summer of Bitcoin?
Joshi: Currently I'm bringing smart transactions, specification of smart transaction much more forward. We are improving documentations, we are building websites to post that particular thing in different way.
We are doing marketing videos. We are contacting different specification sites such as WebLN and LN URL to inform that we have developed this. What do you think about this? What can be the improvement? Alternately, I'm working on LN URL Auth specification.
LNURL is basically a specification built on Lightning network, which allows us to do payments right from your browser. So there is a LNURL Auth - how about you visit or use any service over the internet - you get authenticated. You create account using LNURL Auth, but you still remain anonymous. You don't have to share your email address. You don't have to share your personal details such as phone number, date of birth, to any third party service such as Gmail.
So you are surfing the internet or using services over the internet by getting authenticated. But still you are on anonymous over the internet. That's the beauty of Bitcoin blockchain or LNURL auth specification. So currently I'm building different projects on LNURL auth specification and continuing my work for this awesome initiative named Bitcoin.
Shankara: Okay. So towards the end, let's hear from you - if you have any advice for beginner developers who want to contribute to open source bitcoin projects.
Joshi: Yeah, so definitely, at first I was scared as well. I had doubts if I were able to make it or not. It doesn't matter how much coding background I had, if you start something new, it is always tough.
But don't hesitate to start. Just get started. If you don't know about blockchain, read about that. If you don't know about money, read about that. There are many resources to read about economics, money, how things were developed, and more specifically, consider Bitcoin as a global currency or a money, not any investment opportunity.
Biggest misconception is if there is a money, it is a government creation. But if you know the history about money, about economics and about the history, how things were changed, what is fiat money - we don't call it money at all in Bitcoin community.
Just get started with the things. If you know open source, you know you have to use GitHub, you have to use git or version control. That's the basic requirement. And the third thing is ability to learn and work in real time. You must learn and implement things. Focus on small portions. Learn in real time, implement in real time and keep moving forward. And there are many projects in Bitcoin, not just bitcoin core. You can work on Lightning Network. Lightning Network is a great initiative that scales Bitcoin from seven transactions per second to millions of transactions per second.
So you have lightning projects, you have different specification projects such as LNURL, WebLN. You can work on wallets as well. There are wallets that are running in the browser. So many things are happening in Bitcoin world.
You can visit SOB website. You can see list of organizations present there. See what idea fascinates you the most. Just get started with it. You can't prepare everything prior to exploring things on your own. So you just have to get started, explore things, learn in real time, and work.
Shankara: Thank you so much Pavan for sharing your experience with Summer of Bitcoin and also talking about your work with Alby and in the Lightning Network.
Joshi: Yeah, thank you so much Adi.
JOBS IN BITCOIN
If you are a fresher straight out of college, here are a few exciting job postings we recommend:
Engineering:
Senior Front-End Developer | Wavlake | Chicago, IL, USA - Remote | Apply
Rust and Node.js engineer | Mercury Wallet | Remote | Apply
Senior Front-End Engineer | Coinbits | Remote | Apply
Senior Back-End / Full-Stack Engineer | Coinbits | Remote | Apply
Full Stack Engineer | Lucent Labs | Austin, TX, USA Remote | Apply
Software Engineer | Mash | Remote | Apply
Lead Open-Source Developer | Saving Satoshi | Remote | Apply
iOS engineer (Lightning, Nostr) | bookmark.org | Remote | Apply
Backend Engineer (protocol and API development, Lightning, Nostr) | bookmark.org | Remote | Apply
Vue.js developer | LNS | Remote | Apply
Software Engineer Intern | Riot Platforms, Inc. | Austin, TX, USA | Apply
React Native Developer | Synonym | Remote | Apply
Full Stack Linux Software Engineer | NCR (LibertyX / LibertyPay) | Remote | Apply