Adam Jonas

Leverage for Discovery

For the past 7 years, I’ve been stuck on a question: how do you build systems that nobody controls but everybody benefits from?

As we start to tell the story of Qala more publicly, I’m reminded of the relationship between prominent learning and exclusivity. A shortcut to fame is designing the admissions process to yield as ratio as low as possible. This taps into the innately human pursuit of coveting and valuing that which is scarce. The mechanism is effective at creating an external perception of a good education. It’s a playbook I’ve relied on for the residency, Summer of Bitcoin, and Qala. It works. It’s also a false signal. Rejecting a lot of students has nothing to do with the quality of the program. It made no difference how many people applied to any of these programs. We were looking for a specific profile, and we made up the program on the fly.

Why teaching doesn’t pay… but should

Qala is kicking off a trend of new programs that will train bitcoin and lightning developers. But before we can do that, we need to find the teachers to inspire, motivate and unblock the new generation willing to endure the pain of learning. If bitcoin is going to be a paradigm shift, we need to start with who we are putting in the front of the room. Teaching is about as high-leverage an activity as there is, so we need to elevate the teacher’s role in our ecosystem and start with incentivizing teachers properly.

The gaps in open-source funding

A few people reached out about my post on my Guide for Grant Seekers with some critical feedback about promoting work-for-free culture. To clarify, this guide was not meant to be an ideal vision for the future, it was meant to reflect the present and help grant seekers achieve their goals.

A guide for open-source grant seekers

Over the past few years, the bar for funding has been a moving target. Prior to 2019, finding full-time funding for open-source bitcoin development was quite hard. That summer, we gathered a few brave souls in New York and went as far as hosting a demo day in the hopes of finding them financial support for their open-source work. It took months for many of them to find support. That was three short years ago and it was a totally different funding climate back then. Blockstream, MIT DCI and Chaincode were the only games in town. Xapo had one and Coinbase had one employee that worked on open-source. That was about it.

Managing Yourself in Open Source

Corporate performance reviews are anathema to open-source contributors, especially in Bitcoin. For many who have suffered from corporate constraints, being your own boss is a goal in itself. But I’ve observed this freedom can bring all sorts of unanticipated effects as well.

Study Groups and Educational Experiments

I’ve fielded a lot of questions about our plans for the Chaincode residency. While an in-person program isn’t a great fit for the times, we have no plans to move it online because we felt we’d lose too many essential components that made the program special.

Starting a 501(c)(3)

This post outlines research to create an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to help fund deserving Bitcoin contributors.

Funding Open Source Development

I’m grateful that Chaincode doesn’t have an open grant process. It’s an enormous time investment to do well. After convincing the higher-ups that grants are a good idea, the real heroes dig in to read all those applications and talk with dozens of candidates. Over this couple of years, it’s been a thrill to see an uptick in dev funding. I’ve witnessed life-changing grants that allow developers and researchers to turn 100% of their attention to Bitcoin development. That trend seems to be accelerating with more individuals and bitcoin businesses recognizing the importance of supporting the devs that secure our Bitcoin future. In fact, when I first wrote this in the fall of 2020, finding funding for all the qualified devs was an issue. Now (November 2023), there is an excess of money without enough quality devs.

Working to Make Myself Obsolete

When I told my mother, an executive of 30 years, about my goal to make myself obsolete she flipped.

New Technology and Developer Happiness

What is the price worth paying to introduce a new technology into the stack? For our heavily junior team of 13 the price feels high. Our JS weapon of choice has been backbone and marionette. This toolset wasn’t determined by me. It was molded and implemented by a talented dev who might be a little short on leadership experience but has talent and intuition in spades. We’ve made some mistakes along the way, but the architectural choices he has made have served us well. Still about 8 months since its we push our first major feature set with marionette, the entire team has yet to be completely onboarded. We may be getting to the size where we can split our squad into front-end and back-end specialists, but to date that has never been discussed as a group. The fact that we all haven’t got there is a problem. It means that some of us aren’t capable to work on parts of the stack, which affects feature assignments and pairing.

Goal Setting for Devs

I heard you, goals are important. I get it. I’ve watched the Ted talks and read the zillionth article on the importance of goals. I understand the psychology and the physiology. I’ve got a dirty secret though. I haven’t been able to set goals for developers. We’ve tried KPIs and they don’t seem to filter down to the individual contributor level. When I ran our apprenticeship program two years ago I tried weekly goals, bi-weekly goals, monthly goals and quarterly goals. The problem was, the constants, the areas the goals could be clearly defined were mostly areas of personal development – writing blog posts, learning keyboard shortcuts, giving a lunch and learn, etc. I had a much harder time defining goals for them to improve in their core job function, namely contributing well built features and pushing good code.

Quarterlies

Weekly 1 on 1s are not enough. Maybe if I did them better they would be, but mine are all on Fridays and often I’m not able to tease out anything more than the day to day updates and feelings of the past week. That’s not to say that I’m going to stop, 1 on 1s keep me connected to my reports and even if 1 out of every 5 is a breakthrough session then it is time very well spent.

When I Didn’t See It in the Interview

Raw intellect isn’t enough. Just like product market fit we need to see person-job fit. How can we test it? Good people with drive and patience for change and a healthy sense of duty seem to be able to adjust to nearly any job for a short period. We can all do any job for six months and knock it out of the park.

Transparency

Transparency begets trust and trust begets transparency. It isn’t easy and it feels unsafe to bare your process and sometimes soul. Talking about the thing you least want to talk about has been something that has helped our team address the weirdness that exists between our people and processes. But it wasn’t always like this. We used to ignore or only privately address what needed to be discussed the most.

Peer Mentorship

Next week I’m going to introduce a new 1 on 1 system on our team. I currently have 8 reports and the other manager on our team has 5. The load of weekly 1 on 1s is quite large if we are truly doing a legitimate check-in. And so, I’d like to try out a system of peer mentorship where peers conduct one on ones with each other for a week to 2 weeks a month. This means we will need to spend time training the team on how to conduct 1 on 1s which I will assume will force us to consider how we currently conduct our 1 on 1s and how they could be better.

My Take on Maker Versus Manager

I toed the line for months trying to code a little and be the manager I wanted to be. When the team was at 8 I could find time to block off a morning without meetings or distractions. I could be a hybrid. As we grew to 12 it became untenable. The code I contributed was copy and CSS changes. Barely anything that was worthwhile from a contribution perspective. Letting go was the healthiest thing I could do. I’m not a coder anymore and I admitted that to my team in a frank conversation about imposter syndrome a few weeks ago. I’m a conductor. My job is to make sure the symphony continues to play in harmony. To draw out the sounds and rhythms of my individuals through 1 on 1s, quarterlies and conversations in the hallways.

Onboarding

I’ve read a lot of articles about onboarding, but I’m not sure I come away with anything that actually changes my process. We all know that onboarding is important. Given how many juniors are on our team, it is essential for them to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible so that they have a chance at being productive.

Passion Without Anger

I am fiery. That’s euphemistic for being a little man with a short fuse. I’ve never been the type that can fall asleep in the middle of a movie. If I’m into it then I’m into it. I’m intense. And boy, do I love what I do. I like being a multiplier. My coding skills are middling at best. I wouldn’t hire me for my team. Not enough raw talent. I like that I can impact the lives of the people on my team on a daily basis. That I can keep them motivated, engaged, fulfilled and happy. I feel like a mechanic that tunes highly customized and specialized machines. I once interviewed with the Yankees as a sports psychologist. Years later I feel like I have a similar, but better job. All that is to say, I take my responsibility to my people very seriously.

What Working in Professional Baseball Taught Me About Web Development

Before I was a web developer, I spent my time on baseball fields helping teenagers realize their ultimate dream of playing in the Major Leagues. All of them had talent. Somewhere, someone had seen glimpses of it. Cultivating that talent and turning their potential into performance was the primary purpose of my job. In the vast majority of cases we failed. Now, a few years removed from the game, most of the players I worked with are out of professional baseball. Those who did succeed, found a way to endure the grind and adjusted to the game’s mental and emotional demands.