OpenSats 180 day update

[gsovereignty]

Period: January through March 2024
Commits: ~150

During this period I attended Sovereign Engineering Cohort 01.

My primary focus was on introducing cohort members to the Nostrocket problem tracker and observing usage patterns, as well as seeking advice on how to improve it.

I restructured the Kind 1971 Problem tracker event so that it doesn't require any upstream consensus from Nostrocket participants.

Most of the changes however were UX improvements. I cycled through 5 major iterations of the UX based on feedback from others in the cohort.

The problem tracker is now quite nice and is able to be used independently of Nostrocket itself.

The current status of the problem tracker is that it is complete enough for now, and I can use it internally to track the progress of Nostrocket itself instead of using Git issues.

I've decided not to spend time pushing for further adoption however and instead just use it myself until I'm comfortable that nothing will go wrong (if people use it and something goes wrong it will cause damage to their project(s), I want to make sure this is very unlikely before really pushing it).

G-Hole

During this period myself and two others from the cohort also experimented in creating a Git bare repo service, originally named GitRocket but changed to G-Hole under to peer pressure.

Technically this is somewhat successful in terms of being able to deploy a bare git repo which could be permissioned by nostr pubkeys, but it requires a lot more work to make it into something reliable, and even more work to market it.

Next Steps

Nostrocket currently uses a high degree of consensus over the core state, which makes it difficult to interoperate with other clients and also requires fetching a large number of events without much tolerance for missing events.

After discussing with others in the cohort I have a notebook full of ideas on how to deal with this which I'll spend the next month or so working through (in terms of experimentation), and I'll hopefully be able to implement something more robust before the Prague dev hack day which I'm going to be speaking at.

In addition to this, a significant amount of work needs to be done on G-Hole as the first example use case of Nostrocket.

Use of money

During this period, the funding was mostly used for living expenses, with some minor amounts being used to pay for a relay and to hire people to solve specific problems outside my domain of competence.