Well I’ve made it to the end of phase 1 of the Boss Challenge. Thinking back to two months ago, I had never heard of the Boss Challenge or even thought about learning Rust or becoming a Bitcoin developer. Here I am one month into the challenge, with three completed challenges under my belt. This has not been easy, but I’ve learned a ton!

Challenge 3 centered around spending coins efficiently to minimize transaction fees. The challenge was maybe not as technically difficult as the previous two, but it required a lot of tricky logical thinking and deep understanding of transaction fees and address weights. This one is graded on a scale and compared against my peers, so I’ll see how I did! It was intimidating to compare myself to other devs, many of whom are moving more quickly through the exercises, but I just had to focus on my own solution and optimize it as well as possible. I’m happy with my effort!

I did get a start on challenge 4 which involved setting up a Lightning Node locally and making a couple transactions. Unfortunately I missed the cutoff by just a couple hours to submit my solution and access challenge 5! The program has been very ambiguous on deadlines and evaluation metrics. I respect this, but I might have shifted things around if I had known the deadline was so soon. I think the instructors just want us to focus on learning and not on external evaluation. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the instructors think about me, what matters is I develop the skills to make real contributions to open source projects. And I’m making a lot of progress in that regard.

My Rust skills have a long way to go, but one month ago I had never written a single line. This added a lot of time to my solutions, but will pay off. And I feel much more confident about learning technical Bitcoin details. I feel I gained an especially deep understanding of Taproot.

In typical fashion, program organizers have been ambiguous about phase 2 details. I’m looking forward to more and will be reporting back!