Last week I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum, which was already a chance I never expected to get, and it reminded me why I decided to focus on open source and, more than anything, on Bitcoin.

If you’re a software developer, you know the work isn’t always fun. Sometimes (almost always) it’s repetitive, and other times you’re stuck on projects you don’t like or that feel pointless, a well-paid waste of time. Or at least that’s how it was for me. I wasn’t enjoying it, and in the long run I always ended up burned out.

My solution was to focus on projects I actually liked and that were useful. I started saying “no” to projects I knew wouldn’t go anywhere and didn’t solve anything, and that’s how I ended up in bitcoin and open source. At first it was just to learn, but later, once I understood I could genuinely be working on something useful, I decided that yes, this was what I wanted to focus on.

The Oslo Freedom Forum brings together a lot of activists from many countries, many of them living under dictatorships like mine. Hearing the different stories of people who have been through things you only ever read a little about in the news is completely incredible. You leave wanting to make a change.

Something that never stops amazing me is how bitcoin is used in so many parts of the world. Someone in Europe or the US, at home with a relatively stable currency, maybe doesn’t see much point to it, unless they think about no longer having a third party managing their money. But for countries under dictatorships, Bitcoin is a way to fund activists and people who are there to help the victims of those dictatorships.

In countries where the banking system simply doesn’t work or isn’t accessible to everyone, Bitcoin is a way to use money without anything holding you back. Knowing that bitcoin is useful in so many contexts motivates me to work more, to build more tools and more things that can help. I guess that’s what the Japanese call ikigai.

If you want to watch the talks, they’re all on YouTube. A lot of them are a reminder that the world isn’t okay, that there’s a lot going on and there are people who want and need to be heard, but they’re also motivation to use our skills to build things that help, and that’s what a lot of open source tools are.