Conferences & re-orgs

Offscript was a blast. The conference Twitter account has captured some good impressions. Really refreshing on a personal level to get a bit of time in the sun and surrounded by lots of interesting, creative people after Covid winter. Also super interesting in terms of design, bitcoin, and the broader crypto (aka web3?) ecosystem. Hope my presentation recordion gets shared publicly, which I believe it will.

We wrapped up major parts of the re-org I talked about in the May 18 update, right in time for the Bitcoin Miami conference. It was a ton of detail work to get through this, but it turned out great. Shoutout to everyone involved. Still got some minor things to pick up, as usual, but the bulk is done, and I think the guide structure and experience got a big upgrade.

Took Thursday and Friday to pick up some smaller tasks, some had been lingering on my list for a while.

Two conversations that stuck out this week. One was about labelling. People love to discuss general terms like “wallet” and what exactly they imply. My opinion is that they don’t mean much because they are abstract words representing a whole category of things. Abstractions are abstract. If you want precision, use more precise language (or visuals, or both). A mouse can be a rodent or a handheld hardware input device that controls a cursor in a GUI. An Apple Magic Mouse has one button, and a gaming mouse has 6+. The image below is from Understanding Comics and shows how text and visuals have a continuum of abstraction. “Wallet” is like the smiley face, which can represent billions of people, no matter their gender, skin color, etc. Conversations around labels should be precise and take these things (and other things like cultural context) into consideration. Maybe we need a framework as a basis to have good discussions about this?

The second conversation was about community resources like the UI Kit, icons, guide, etc. To sum it up real quick, it’s good to focus on the practical work, and let community resources emerge and evolve as by-products. That way they stay relevant and practical.

Lots of things to get into next week, but I first need to review and prioritize everything that’s going on across the community and projects I am directly involved with (6 projects at the moment). That’s typically my Sunday evening task. The better I do this planning, the smoother the week usually turns out and the more balanced my efforts are across everything over the longer term.

Have a good weekend.