Today felt like the first real workday for the 2026 ₿OSS Challenge, a program designed to train the next wave of bitcoin open source developers. I started working on the first challenge that requires writing code.

I am choosing to write the solution using the Rust programming language, which I have no experience with. I spent the last week working through the The Bitcoiner’s Intro to Rust which is definitely a crash course in the language. Many of the concepts are new to me as a former Magento 2 developer who worked mostly with PHP, where declaring a variable is much easier for the developer. With Rust, I am learning you need to declare whether variables are mutable or not, and understand where the values are stored in memory and how to access them in various parts of the program. But the tradeoff is much better performance for the program.

This is important for something like bitcoin that could one day underpin the entire world’s financial system. As someone without a computer science degree, it’s intimidating to read about concepts like stack and heap memory. Imposter syndrome was mentioned during the kickoff call, and I sometimes doubt my ability to work on a complex and important project like bitcoin. But I achieved a very high level of proficiency in Magento which is notoriously difficult to learn. So I know I’m capable if I put in the work.

Getting back to the challenge, I am eager to work on the solution but found myself working through simple Rust tutorials. You have to crawl before you can walk, and completing the simple program and understanding each component has given me some confidence as a fledgling Rust developer. I am focused on learning bitcoin the right way and not rushing through any foundational steps. If it takes a few days to work through major concepts in the book, that effort will likely pay dividends later.

For better or worse, there are no hard deadlines in the program. So I hope I will not fall behind despite spending many hours learning foundational Rust concepts. Fortunately, I have a lot of time to spend on this.

I am so grateful for all of the free learning resources available to me. The website learn me a bitcoin made it so easy to learn about extended private keys, which are relevant to this challenge. Almost all of these concepts are new to me and intimidating at first, but the bitcoin community is very generous with sharing knowledge. I feel set up for success as long as I put in the effort.

The ₿OSS Challenge is a new and exciting advendure for me. With the Magento job market very quiet, I was looking for a change and am so grateful I saw the challenge application on bitcoinerjobs.com about 10 days before the submission deadline. The program offers the possibility of getting paid to do something I love for a cause I believe in, which would be a dream scenario. There’s no guarantee of success, but I intend to give this opportunity my very best effort. Worst case, I learn a lot. Thank you to everyone who put in the time and effort to make this program happen, and I’ll talk to you next time.