*A regular reviewer must have left >= 5 comments
The questionnaire consisted of 13 questions, which included:
25 contributors completed the survey. A word cloud from their comments is posted as a banner at the top.
When asked to rate how happy they were with the project in 2023 (on a scale of 1-5), the mean increased to 4.00 (3.70 in 2022, 3.71 in 2021, 3.77 in 2020, 4 in 2019), and the median remained at 4 (4 in 2022, 4 in 2021, 4 in 2020, 4 in 2019).
When asked to rate how happy the respondents were with their personal 2023 contribution (on a scale of 1-5), the mean rose slightly to 3.64 (3.59 in 2022, 3.54 in 2021, 3.41 in 2020, 3.55 in 2019), and the median remained at 4 (4 in 2022, 4 in 2021, 4 in 2020, 4 in 2019).
When asked whether they would be willing to mentor:
There were a number of topics that contributors would like to learn more about, including:
19 of the 25 respondents made specific references to priority projects:
There were some outstanding questions about priority projects as well:
Project satisfaction numbers rose to their highest numbers since the survey. However, contribution numbers are down across the board.
Priority projects were frequently mentioned as having helped improve the enjoyment of working on the project, however, Bitcoin Core is not attracting new members to replace long-time contributors who have stepped away.
Consistent with past surveys, review was a central theme but there was less mention in this survey than in past surveys. Maybe this is because a lot of that discussion shifted to talking about the project priorities.
This year’s survey also had a couple of specific requests for the maintainers:
Thank you to the contributors who took the time to respond to this survey. I look forward to reporting on a similar survey in early 2025.
]]>*A regular reviewer must have left >= 5 comments
The questionnaire consisted of 13 questions, which included:
28 contributors completed the survey. A word cloud from their comments is posted as a banner at the top.
When asked to rate how happy they were with the project in 2022 (on a scale of 1-5), the mean remained the roughly same 3.70 (3.71 in 2021, 3.77 in 2020, 4 in 2019), and the median remained at 4 (4 in 2021, 4 in 2020, 4 in 2019).
When asked to rate how happy the respondents were with their personal 2022 contribution (on a scale of 1-5), the mean rose slightly to 3.59 (3.54 in 2021, 3.41 in 2020, 3.55 in 2019), and the median remained at 4 (4 in 2021, 4 in 2020, 4 in 2019).
When asked whether they would be willing to mentor:
There were a number of topics that contributors would like to learn more about, including:
Review (again) was the most repeated word in the survey closely followed by project and core respectively.
Many respondents acknowledged they should be doing more review (+4).
Besides just wanting more review, there was some specific themes this year when it came to comments about review headlined with the volume of PRs that address superficial issues and refactors:
There were also calls for more coordination and prioritization of review:
The pace of merging large projects was a recurring theme.
This year’s survey also had some specific requests for the maintainers:
Thank you to the contributors that took the time to respond to this survey. I look forward to reporting on a similar survey in early 2024.
]]>I’m disappointed that I’ve fallen into the trap of celebrating admissions standards more selective than {insert famous college}. The goal of these programs is to make bitcoin development more accessible, not teach the top 1%. For the 99% who didn’t get in, we’ve sent them an unambiguous signal that they don’t have what it takes. There is no way this excluded group doesn’t have a significant fraction of people worth further investment. This reflects the American high-ed model solely motivated by the U.S. News and World Report rankings to pump up absolute application numbers so that their relative ratios can appear more exclusive. This method is ubiquitous. It’s in pre-schools, sports programs, and theater. And without much consideration, it’s in the things I do too.
The promise of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) was to allow anyone in the world to access the best material. This was going to change everything. But it didn’t because MOOCs don’t produce signal. There are no consequences for not finishing. There is no way to tell if a learner got what they needed from the first 10% of the course and withdrew or whether the student just quit.
Bitcoin needs a massive signal machine that can call attention to the people that are falling down the rabbit hole. Time spent on the platform, number of actions per day, and number of comments posted are useful platform metrics to measure the relationship between a user and a platform, but they don’t measure time spent on quiet reading or digesting the intricate play of the connection of power dynamics, decentralization and money in the mind.
The journey through bitcoin is different for all of us, yet you can tell by the crazed look in their eye and the rapid pattern of their speech that the bug has bitten someone. This is happening all over the world amongst talented and motivated people. And we are failing to grease the wheels on their next steps.
We are losing the talent war. We can scoff at their naivete, but it’s not their fault. It’s ours. We are losing the battle because we are losing the information war. No one can say what Web3 is, and yet, it travels better than any bitcoin meme I’ve encountered. Bitcoin’s job opportunities are dwarfed by the Web3 ecosystem. The long tale of derivative projects and copies of copies creates plenty of room for newcomers. Their tooling and tutorials are better too. But the biggest difference and why I think Web3 is winning is because the message is that Web3 is for everyone. The core message is inclusivity. It’s hard enough as it is to recruit, being branded as toxic certainly doesn’t help.
I don’t know how to make this, but I want it. The best education is meeting the learner where they are at the moment they need it. That can be motivation in the form of a pep talk or the social pressure of showing up for others. That could be showing up with curated content for the exact subject that has commandeered their mind. The trick, however is to be able to derive signal from people willing to endure the pain of learning. I don’t know of a better screen for success than watching learners overcome struggle, nor do I know how to capture it en masse. (Maybe there is a better way with games, contests, or something else?)
The title of this blog is that bitcoin is for all of us, yet I’m part of the problem by broadcasting that thousands of learners don’t have what it takes to participate. Because of time and energy constraints, it’s reasonable that we increase our investment in learners as they demonstrate skills and passion. But to discard so many without providing paths that to indicate that they warrant further attention is unforgivable.
]]>The education industrial complex has trained us to underpay teachers. Bitcoin must not follow suit. We must recruit and train our best to transmit our values, culture, and hard-earned lessons. My best teachers had nearly unlimited optionality. Temba Maqubela, Karl Scheibe, and Avi Flombaum didn’t have to spend their precious careers teaching. This wasn’t a fallback for failed dreams. They chose to be there. They did the exhausting and irreplaceable work of using all of their gifts to help me learn. And yet, despite the benefits reaped by the greater society due to the leverage of their instructional abilities, they were awarded a lower salary than doing something else. And so, maybe it’s not just a coincidence that while all my favorite teachers are still alive, none continue to teach.
When fundraising for Qala, I was repeatedly asked what the instructors earned and how those salary numbers were calculated. While I was comfortable with the due diligence, I was less pleased when asked if their earnings were “calibrated to the market?” What market? Is there some pool of bitcoin instructors out there that I don’t know about? Without picking a fight with people I was soliciting money from, my guess was what they wanted to ask was, “this is what we’d pay a developer for a grant. Is this too much for a teacher?”
The industrialization machine has done what it does best and created a race to the bottom for how little a teacher could be paid. This does make some sense. Now that content is free, the role of a teacher has changed. Gone are the days of the teacher being the source of knowledge in the front of the room. Accessing the best lecture on any subject or downloading a battle-tested lesson plan is trivial. What we can’t do is digitize passion. What’s the term that describes the cycle of falling wages forcing out talent? Whatever that’s called, it is what happened to teaching. While I think the general educational system is broken, I’m disappointed this perception has seeped into bitcoin. Scale requires fungibility of the parts, meaning that both teachers and students are expected to be replaceable. Meet Will, Stéphan, and Duncan and then tell me how easy they are to replace. Meet Eni, Vladimir and Raphael and tell me how easy they are to find.
The model for code boot camps is to grow your own. Teach a batch of students and keep a few for yourself. These students turned into teachers who know the program and add immediate value without much training. They are lower risk because you already know them. Some choose this path because they are genuinely interested in teaching, and some choose this to avoid the tension of looking for a job. From what I’ve seen, this is a path for the better students but rarely for the very best. Because this isn’t forever, little is invested in upping their pedological skills. Over time, some figure things out on their own and grow into front of the room material. They know the exercises inside and out, can think on their feet, and can enforce the organizational culture. This path leaves money on the table because jobs have a limit for what they will pay for a dev without production experience.
The university industry is incredible at growing its own. Reinforce the nobility of the profession and the prestige of the association with academia. Create demand by linking education to learning to employment. Raise prices.
Alternatively, devs who are done taking abuse in Startup Land or Dull Corp create a narrative about the utopia of teaching. They want to have more impact than optimizing ad delivery systems and rediscover their passion for the craft. As a señor dev, they do some research and discover they will have to take a significant pay cut. Now they have a choice. Do something meaningful and take the pay cut or interview at Droneville and get a dog. Woof.
This might have been true for biology or gym class. I don’t think I ever had a biology class with a bonafide biologist, and I’m positive that not all of my gym classes were run by top-notch athletes. But it’s tough to do this for software. Those teaching people to code should know a little something about how to write it themselves. That means that the instructors will have professional options. There are lots of great teachers out there, but as a society, we punish them for their professional choices because there is an assumed lack of optionality. And so the ones not willing to take a vow of poverty leave. It’s shameful.
I made up an easy-to-remember acronym to help you recall the importance of unique teachers – I call them Non-Fungible Teachers, or NFTs for short. (Does anyone know any good SEO folks?) Our best bitcoin teachers aren’t fungible. They are tasked with passing down cultural values and philosophy. They aren’t there to know every technical detail (we’ve got Sipa and Murch for that), but they are there to inspire. It’s challenging work. It’s important work. It takes talent and a varied skill set. It’s time we start incentivizing the work properly by paying them what they deserve.
Seth Godin influenced much of my recent views on teaching. It’s hard to say which of these ideas are his and which are mine. To find out, read Stop Stealing Dreams.
]]>At the end of the post, I mentioned that this doesn’t serve a lot of different groups. In fact, I think it serves a limited population which is why we see such geographic density of bitcoin FOSS devs. Those who cannot do work for free over a long period aren’t going to be able to make significant progress on becoming a FOSS dev quickly. Working on an all-consuming start-up, raising a family, or living in a place with limited electricity/internet will put grant seekers at a significant disadvantage. Because the proof of work is lower for other projects, this also means that, by default, they are more inclusive. I am biased because free work is such a useful screen. It’s almost unforgeable proof of intrinsic motivation.
The big gap I see that isn’t currently filled in the funding landscape is for people who can’t quit their job or can only afford to work nights and weekends because of other commitments. Sure we see part-time grants, but building up one’s credibility to get to that point takes investment. Funders aren’t really taking a chance on people. The residency filled this gap for some in the past. It was an almost-guarantee of finding FOSS funding. The residencies were never meant to scale, and they are in hibernation anyways. Instead, we need a pot of cash to fund prospects. Let’s call them bridge grants.
Bridge grants are short-term grants, somewhere between 3 and 6 months, to wean a prospect off their job and give them a runway to show what they can do. They won’t get rich from this funding, but it will be enough to avoid starvation and should inspire them to spend their time wisely establishing a track record that will attract a full-fledged grant.
No strings attached funding provides the freedom to do meaningful work. In an industrialist society that no longer offers much respect to the individual worker, it reflects the trust of the grantee to choose the work that needs to be done. It’s a thing of beauty.
But, without strings, grantees don’t go through the same growth of learning how to be professional – AKA, how to show up when they don’t feel like it. The kind of pain that comes with showing up to a crappy job day after day because you made a promise to be there. No strings attached open-source funding doesn’t help develop young people to be critical of management or understand when they need to quit a job. When a manager isn’t parceling out tasks or providing (even poorly done) performance reviews, I believe it is harder for a green dev to get the feedback they need to grow as a developer and generally be consistently productive. Because FOSS doesn’t signal whether you are performing well, I’ve seen people become demotivated and discouraged without a feedback structure that works (see wildly successful talent recruitment and retention of large tech companies).
Bitcoin open-source development isn’t yet a career. Even in the US, where taking the road less traveled is culturally celebrated, health care is tied to employment. There is motivational value in career progression. While I don’t believe in titles (see my current “descriptive” title - Head of Special Projects), demonstrating career progression is helpful to mitigate the criticisms of friends and family who are already skeptical of the open-source path.
Something is missing from the funding landscape. There now exist a variety of grant programs for established contributors, but we don’t have any with enough margin of error and structure to help bridge the gap to a lot of valuable prospects. We need something that provides both financial safety and modeling – a prospect league of sorts. We have some footholds with programs like Summer of Bitcoin and Qala, but they are still small scale. FOSS development can be hard, so we can either say that single devs with social/economic safety nets and 5+ years of industry jobs are the only people who should attempt it, or we go out and create better scaffolding and structure for those who can’t make the jump on their own.
Thanks to @jarolrod for the review
]]>Then Square Crypto showed up. Not only did they poach BlueMatt from us to lead an internal team, but they also launched a massive grant program. OKCoin and BitMEX spun up their programs soon after. Peter McCormack pressured Coinbase and Gemini into the mix. Brink started their grant program. By 2022, giving was normalized and now we find ourselves in the position where there much more funding available. I have personally shifted more of my effort towards projects focused on enticing novices to join the ranks of bitcoin devs (see Summer of Bitcoin and Qala) because our recruiting pipeline is quite poor.
Disclaimer: Chaincode doesn’t give grants. It’s a challenging process and my gratitude goes out to all the grant programs that are doing their best to get this right. I wrote more about the giving side of things here.
Bitcoin funding is different from other open-source and other cryptocurrency projects. Getting a grant in bitcoin is pretty straightforward. You either need someone to vouch for you, or you need to do work – ideally both. While grant programs often have open applications, the secret to getting funding isn’t much of a secret. Start doing the job for free. It establishes you as a contributor and proves your motivation to do the work. It shows that you are a good investment. Applicants will have much more success if they do the work and then apply. For most jobs, the applicant is trying to convince the employer that they are capable of doing the job. But the job-seeker has no idea what the work or environment is actually like. In open-source, one doesn’t have to guess. Do the work. Demonstrate capability. Then ask for support.
Doing the work also means demonstrating your work. Not all work in open-source work is as visible as writing code. The less visible work isn’t less valuable, but it’s in your best interest to create artifacts of your effort. Transparency is your friend. If you learn something, it’s helpful to codify it by writing a blog post or keeping a running log. I’ve seen some write a bi-weekly summary email tracking their progress. Code reviews used to be hard to track, but now GitHub does a better job crediting a green square. Taking long walks to reflect on how to approach a problem is necessary, but writing up your conclusions in a public place is valuable collateral that can forever serve as evidence of your progress.
The round number people tend to use is $100,000. This simplifies the process for grantors, so they don’t have to make judgment calls on your standard of living or life circumstances. Some programs will adjust their grants based on need. $100,000 in San Francisco is very different than $100,000 in San Salvador. This requires more effort from both the grantor and the grantee to find the number that makes sense. It is also standard for most programs to allow you to take grants from other sources, but some require exclusivity. This is to prevent situations where people have stacked grants to the point they are making a higher than industry salary, which can appear greedy. I think you are usually fine if you are as transparent as possible with your needs and where you expect to source money.
The goal of these grant programs is not to make you rich. If you are looking for financial upside, going the grant program route isn’t for you. The list remains short of full-time roles for bitcoin open-source work, but they do exist. Grants are typically 12-month terms, but it is fair to ask about grant length and the renewal process. The majority of the grant turnover I see is not driven from the grantor side – usually, either the grantee quits to do something else, or they move to another sponsor because of better terms or to associate with a grant program with a better reputation.
If you live in a part of the world like the US, where health care or other benefits are tied to full-time employment, you need to take that into account. Many of these benefits can be purchased, just like any self-employed freelancer might do, but they can be a significant expense.
Depending on your jurisdiction, it might be advantageous to receive the grant through an entity like an LLC or corporation rather than as an individual. This approach may increase your privacy and reduce your tax burden, but it is very much based on your country. If you have questions, you should talk to an accountant.
Grantors usually will want credit for their gifts. Some grant programs are actually managed by, or work closely with, marketing departments. You should expect that they will publicize your grant with a blog post or tweet. Some will also require that you will write a blog post or two during the term of your grant. If you are giving public talks, it’s also customary that you might thank them for their financial support on an opening or closing slide.
There is some level of prestige among the different programs. Most of this is based on the sponsor’s standing in the community. Jonas Schnelli got some flak for taking money from Marathon Mining when their company policy was to censor transactions. For me, there are two ways to look at this: 1) By taking money from a source, it could be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of their business and role in the community or 2) taking money from a less-than-ideal source could be seen as reparations or their attempt at gaining goodwill with the community with money. In other words, taking tainted money and turning it into good. Obviously, it’s not so black and white, but if you are foregoing financial upside to work on open-source, you probably want to think about where you fall here.
Grantors need to ensure their money isn’t going to a supervillain to protect themselves from legal and reputation risks. As of writing, Spiral leads the way regarding policies surrounding open-source grants for pseudonymous contributors. Other sponsors also offer support for pseudonyms, but I don’t know the details of what level of personal identifying info they may require.
Some programs offer grants either dominated in fiat, bitcoin, or both. This can go very wrong. We are all here because we believe in bitcoin and have high hopes for its future, but bitcoin hasn’t yet arrived. If you can’t cover your bills because of a market price crash, now you are back to worrying about funding. Please don’t be irresponsible with philanthropic money given to you to create public good.
If you have a family, doing work for free is difficult. If you are from a culture where open-source devs aren’t celebrated, this is a hard road to justify to friends and family. Part-time contribution takes a long time. But all of these paths are possible. I’ve seen them done.
If you want to work on open-source bitcoin, I’m happy to talk.
Thanks for Josie and Jarol for the review and feedback
]]>*A regular reviewer must have left >= 5 comments
The questionnaire consisted of 13 questions, which included:
24 contributors completed the survey. A word cloud from their comments is posted as a banner at the top.
When asked to rate how happy they were with the project in 2021 (on a scale of 1-5), the mean declined slightly to 3.71 (3.77 in 2020, 4 in 2019), and the median remained at 4 (4 in 2020, 4 in 2019).
When asked to rate how happy the respondents’ were with their personal 2020 contribution (on a scale of 1-5), the mean rose slightly to 3.54 (3.41 in 2020, 3.55 in 2019), and the median remained at 4 (4 in 2020, 4 in 2019).
When asked whether they would be willing to mentor:
There were a number of topics that contributors would like to learn more about, including:
Review (again) was a common theme found in the answers. The word ‘review’ was the most popular topic appearing even more times than the word ‘bitcoin.’
There were a few different flavors of problems, starting with a general dissatisfaction with the management of review:
There was also an acknowledgment of the impact of not getting review:
Others noted they wished that they had done more review:
While there was frequent mention of celebrating the activation of taproot, frustration around the taproot activation process was also apparent.
Thank you to the contributors that took the time to write up their responses. My hope is that this can be a useful reference for prioritization and process improvements, and I look forward to reporting on a similar survey in early 2023.
]]>*A regular reviewer must have left >= 5 comments
The questionnaire consisted of 12 questions, which included:
27 contributors (-4 from 2019) completed the survey. A word cloud from their comments is posted as a banner at the top.
When asked to rate how happy they were with the project in 2020 (on a scale of 1-5), the mean declined slightly to 3.77 (-0.23 from 2019), and the median remained at 4 (+0.0).
When asked to rate how happy the respondents’ were with their personal 2020 contribution (on a scale of 1-5), the mean dropped slightly to 3.41 (-0.14 from 2019), and the median remained at 4 (+0.0).
Mentorship is one way to accelerate the acculturation and technical onboarding of new devs, who multiple respondents identifited as bottleneck of the project.
When asked whether they would be willing to mentor:
There were a number of topics that contributors would like to learn more about, including:
If/when there are face-to-face meetings again, respondents would like to discuss:
Review (again) was the most common theme found in the answers. The word ‘review’ was mentioned 62 times across the 27 responses. Below are some bucketed themes.
Lacking deep review, not having a deep bench of reviewers:
Review prioritization:
Communicating individual priorities:
PR Status:
NACKing:
Status influencing interactions on GitHub:
A thread of contributor isolation ran through many of the responses. Missing the Core Dev meetups appeared in multiple answers, and it is clear that the weekly IRC meetings are not a suitable substitute for meeting face-to-face.
Thank you to the contributors that took the time to offer their candid responses. Hopefully, this can be a useful artifact to refer to when prioritizing work suggesting process improvements. I look forward to reflecting on these answers throughout the year and reporting on a similar survey in early 2022.
]]>Open-source provides little feedback – positive or negative. In Bitcoin Core, for example, after hashing out concept approval and code review, authors still need to manage rebasing their branch against other changes along with keeping up motivation from reviewers to keep coming back. All of this can feel Sisyphean when someone swoops in with a late-inning critique. It can be a slog. After all that struggle, when your game-changing patch is merged you might get an acknowledgment from someone you respect – but probably not.
Corporations invest in professional development because it’s a cheap way to retain employees. Without feeling like we are progressing, we tend to start looking to change our situation. For those who are trained by the educational system and corporate world to feel the pressure of deadlines, the lumpy and unpredictable flow of open-source pull-request merges can be frustrating. And while frustration at our old hierarchical corpo jobs could have been attributed, or at least directed at poor management or lack of leadership/strategy/etc., a common outlet for this kind of resentment becomes the project itself.
Code is definitionally the center of how a decentralized open-source coding project is organized, and therefore, it is prioritized over its contributors. This makes sense. Code is logical (well, it’s supposed to be), people are not. I believe this leads to losing contributors over time with the natural waning of motivation to work on something that doesn’t love you back. Without a strong tie to the people, the code is all we have. I have two motivating factors that have served as a barometer of my professional happiness. Connection to the project (Is this useful to the world? Is it still interesting? etc.) and connection to the people I’m working with. The people part is why Chaincode is a good fit for me, but not everyone has that luxury.
Under normal circumstances, open-source can feel lonely. Couple that with the effects of prolonged social isolation, and you get a group feeling really disconnected. If you work in Bitcoin open-source and are looking for structure, I’m happy to hop on a call. I’ve done this for a handful of contributors on a quarterly basis to visit longer arching themes like career goals, work fulfillment, productivity, etc., with regularity. Here is part of the survey I use to set up the conversation:
It’s not formulaic. Answers to the questions above serve as fodder to explore how to make things better. When I managed a team, this was, by far, the single best thing I did.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people in Bitcoin feeling disconnected. You aren’t alone. Let me know if you want some help.
]]>The 2019 residency’s goals were to prove that we could quickly bootstrap new contributors enough to secure them funding to continue to work in open-source. On the whole, we accomplished that, but it was expensive both financially and in terms of the time invested in mentorship and organization.
The 2020 residency was planned to be shorter in duration but with similar goals. That meant that we needed to rely more on online pre-work and rapport building so that attendees were up to speed before they arrived in NYC. To that end, we invested in cleaning up and formalizing the pre-work we had done with the 2019 cohort.
I think the study group material is pretty good. However, good material isn’t all that much of a value add. If you are looking for an exhaustive list of resources, there are others that had already done this better than we could. Our curriculum is different because a) it’s focused specifically on protocol development, and b) it’s designed to be a group activity.
For most people, studying with others is better. It creates accountability. Provides a tribe to connect with. It creates social pressure to slog through the hard parts. So we thought about designing these materials to be used as a book club. Read for 2-4 hours a week as your schedule allows. In the meantime, you have a lobby to chat with others and bounce ideas off of until the scheduled time when you come together to discuss it synchronously.
We created this curriculum for the 2019 residency, and it worked pretty well. It wasn’t flawless, but the residents engaged in the material and engaged with each other.
With the residency canceled, we ran three pilots this fall but couldn’t replicate the results. Ultimately, this was a good lesson that this only works if participants do the work. That might seem obvious, but there were many instances of people showing up to the meeting without preparing. I found that confusing. Why come if you haven’t done the work? There are no grades for attendance. The result was that these turned into lectures rather than discussions. Not ideal.
I still believe there is a lot of upside in making these work. We are starting another cohort next week. Caralie has done an excellent job pulling together a high powered group and creating an active lobby. We’ve added a Bitcoin fizz-buzz-esque exercise for candidates to demonstrate their commitment. The material has been ported to Canvas. We’ve also added discussion preparation meetings where participants are paired off with assigned discussion questions and meeting out-of-band before the weekly group meeting.
Online Bitcoin education has great potential, and eventually, I’d like to see these study groups arise organically like any book club. We haven’t nailed the mechanics of how to do this right, but when we do, I’d like to try an experiment for the masses, ala the taproot review.
I believe the 2019 residency demonstrably proved the program’s efficacy, which is what we sent out to do. However, that meant that it had to be exclusive because we were focused on the results and trying not to break the bank (pun!). We can do better and offer this to more people. We just need to figure out how to do this right first. If you are interested in participating in something like this or have ideas on improving it, please reach out.
]]>