35: Drinking from the Firehose w/ SEC-08
35-drinking-from-the-firehose-w-sec-08
No Solutions
No solutions, only trade-offs. Walking towards a better internet since 882,690. Inspired by #SovEng
3 min read
"I have found my people, and that is the craziest discovery for me."
The SEC-08 crew & Gigi pass the mic around on a pirate boat.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
This one is not a single guest walk so much as a moving snapshot of the final days of Sovereign Engineering SEC-08: tired builders, unfinished follow-ups, jokes over the water, and a quick tour through what actually stuck after six weeks in Madeira.
The recurring answer is that the cohort felt wider and deeper than expected. People came in for Bitcoin, Nostr, Lightning, or AI-adjacent hacking, and ended up talking about rebuilding pieces of the internet from first principles. FIPS comes up again and again, not as a neat demo category but as a substrate people can finally build on. Totem, Napplets, NIPlets, Hypergate, Marmot, Quake III over FIPS, mapping tiles on Blossom, agent email, and a pile of half-ridiculous demos all point in the same direction: the parts are starting to connect.
There is also a softer engineering lesson running through the boat noise. Zaza gets shouted out for turning sad little nerd UIs into something people might actually want to touch. Walks keep showing up as infrastructure for thought. The Nostr Office becomes a place to keep building after hours. Pairing, one-minute demos, and forced constraints change the shape of collaboration. By the end, the phrase that keeps returning is less about a project and more about belonging: I found my people.
In this dialogue:
- why SEC-08 felt like SEC-01 again: less polished, more exploratory, and full of first-principles internet rebuilding
- how FIPS moved from missing piece to common substrate for demos, games, agents, and networking experiments
- why Totem, Napplets, NIPlets, Hypergate, Marmot, and Quake III over FIPS kept surfacing as cohort highlights
- how Zaza's protocol UX work changed the first impression of projects across the cohort
- why walking still works as an idea generator, even when the explanation sounds like left-foot-right-foot bro science
- how Blossom-backed map tiles hinted at better mapping UX through content-addressed infrastructure
- why Thomas's email-over-FIPS idea sounded small at first but opened a bigger agent communication door
- what changed when Johnathan paired people up and made collaboration an explicit week of work
- why one-minute demos made the follow-up conversations sharper
- how the Nostr Office became a place for after-hours building, LAN parties over FIPS, and cohort spillover
- why several people described the experience as exhausting, painful, joyful, and direction-setting at the same time
- how the final answer kept circling back to friendship, music, barbecues, and finding the people you want to build with
- why future cohorts might pull more from local-first software, mesh networking, and broader hacker communities
Related dialogues:
- #22: Sovereign Engineering w/ Yo
- #24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan
- #30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
- #33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
- #34: Female Engineering w/ Sherry
People mentioned:
- Zaza
- Julien
- HZRD
- Johnathan Corgan
- Thomas
- Breno
- Balazs
- Rahul
Projects & tech mentioned:
Recorded at 964,157.
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