I was going through my inbox when I saw the mail from an organization called summer of bitcoin. I opened the mail, there was a link to the website and quick info about the project. I opened the link that was given on the website that headed me towards the homepage of the summer of bitcoin. I read all the details about the programs and concluded that this program is quite similar to google summer of code.
What is the Summer of bitcoin?
A global program that matches students with open source, free software, and technology-related organizations working on bitcoin to write code and become part of these communities while making some BTC along the way! The organizations provide mentors who act as guides through the entire process, from learning about the community to contributing code. Students get involved in and become familiar with the bitcoin open source community and put their summer break to good use.
Application Process
Majorly there is 2 selection round, each round is an eliminator round in nature. To know more about the application process head over to the official website.
- Student Application Period
- Screening Round
- Proposal Round
- Accepted Students Announced!!
After the selection process
Once the results were announced for the 2022 batch, we were asked to contact our respective mentors to complete the selection process. Once that was done we were then given a question and a reading text like a pdf that contains descriptions of various topics related to bitcoin. Each week we were given a particular reading material that we have to read and find a suitable answer to the given question. Every Thursday we would have a Summer of bitcoin meeting in which the given topic will be discussed.
We were divided into teams of 5 members each week the team would change so is the topics and the question. Once we join the meeting with our team, we were allocated a breakout room that we have to join. The team lead will start the conversation and ask each one of us to introduce ourselves. After this, we would discuss the answer to each of the given questions. This way we will learn the topic of bitcoin and discuss questions related to it. In total, I had 5 weekly meetings with 5 different teams. I read about 11–12 different bitcoin concepts in great depth. Each breakout room was given 90 mins for the discussion then we had to join the main room. Each week a working professional would explain some bitcoin concepts to us, and we were given the flexibility to ask questions to the speaker. So overall it was a great learning Experience. Chaincode provided all reading material for bitcoin topics.
Work
I worked on adding the web ln functionality to the Quick-Pay browser extension. Quick-Pay is a plugin to make payments on the lightning network. It uses REST API and RLT's c-lightning setup to make the calls. WebLn is a standing library to make lightning payments. WebLn library added to the Quick-Pay browser extension. With the help of this, all the WebLn features will be implemented inside the content.js file and a new webln script will be created. It provides a programmatic, permissioned interface for letting applications ask users to send payments, generates invoices to receive payments, and much more. This documentation covers both how to use WebLN in your Lightning-driven applications, but also how to implement a provider.
More on this - sanjay22rajpoot.medium.com/what-is-webln-7f..