#53 Holocat

A two-week special.

This update will be for the last two weeks. Last Friday I was in London at Advancing Bitcoin, so I did not post. That week was pretty much taken up by the conference and my preparations for it, meaning finalizing a new version of the UI Kit and my workshop.

The UI Kit is getting a big overhaul. The type of overhaul that users may not instantly notice, but will make their use of the UI Kit way more pleasant. The website has now a 1-hour workshop video and 3 case study summaries. All the icons in the Figma file were synced with the Bitcoin Icon set (oh it sounds so simple, but man this is a fickle and time-consuming process), hundreds or thousands of auto-layout and component adjustments, revision of lots of component structures and properties, etc. Still plenty to do, best is probably to spend 30-60 minutes per day to keep momentum going. It’s unfortunately a lot of manual detail work that can only partially automated with Figma plug-ins and custom scripts. But the value of a UI Kit is that this basic stuff is executed flawlessly. The tools are still way better than just a few years ago, we’ll get there (maybe even with Penpot). On that note, Stephen is organizing a “Learning bitcoin and design” call around design systems.

Anyhow, I think the workshop went well, always a bit hard to tell. Big thanks to all who joined. My plan was to build a PayJoin design flow together based on the ongoing case study work by Dan Gould and Yashraj. A nice concise flow requiring only adjustments of existing UI Kit screens, with a practical technical background. We did not get through the whole thing, maybe 1/3 of what I had planned, and ended up discussing all kinds of topics around design systems, design/dev collaboration, tooling, etc for 2 hours. There were lots of questions, I take that as a good sign.

https://twitter.com/JoeNakamoto/status/1631350233903841281?s=20

The rest of Advancing Bitcoin was also great (huge thanks to the organizers). So many whip-smart and friendly people. Met a few people I had worked with for 1+ years, but never met, or never even known what they look like or what their real name is (still don’t know for some). Shout-out to Johns for representing Bitcoin Design.

We also had a nice review call with Keeper. These types of reviews should be really helpful for designers coming into the space, or working on similar products. A few more are in planning, for Torq and JAM.

This week started with catching up with lots of emails and notifications. Still a bunch of things I had to put on the back burner for now, because I had to prioritize Saving Satoshi and the Bitcoin Core App.

Saving Satoshi is targeting a demo release on March 14, so plenty of stuff to wrap up there. Everyone in the team has a bit of a different focus. I wanted to ensure that story, lesson content, generated images, and the UX come together in just the right way, so put lots of time into ensuring we have a design spec in Figma, creating and reviewing issues/PRs, etc. Also took a bunch of time to generate story images for chapter 1. It’s coming together really nicely, props to the whole team, and I am excited to hear what the first users/learners will say.

The trial-and-error of image generation.

With the Core App, it’s a matter of a few final PRs right now, a bit of design documentation, and properly launching this thing. It will not be some type of official announcement, more of a soft “Milestone 1 achieved” launch. But any time something is declared ready to go, it’s a big step. And first impressions matter a lot, so it’s important to get it right.

Plenty of other stuff happening, big and small. Just one more thing I want to point out is the Nostr hackathon, which started today. I don’t have a ton of time for it, but will be participating with Nosta to support and maybe make a little bit of progress.

✌️