What is FOSS Friday?

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FOSS Friday is our bi-weekly innovation day at Voltage! On these days, our team dives into the exciting world of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Why, you may ask? Well, Bitcoin and the Lightning network, the very core of our work, are open source technology.

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As a bitcoin infrastructure company, we don't just use open source; we actively contribute to it. This is a symbiotic relationship for us: by contributing to these projects, we can do our part to bolster the bitcoin ecosystem while also uncovering fresh, innovative ideas.

What did we do?

Across four Fridays, the Voltage team contributed to a wide range of projects. Some are useful, some are fun, and the best are both. Some of them won hackathons, while some of them merely won our hearts. Let’s take a closer look.

Create Voltage App

Austin shipped more updates to our CLI tool for spinning up web apps connected to your Voltage node. Actually, this was mostly about untangling a spaghetti of conflicts across various branches. Like a true master of spaghetti, he ate that conflict one noodle at a time until every branch was merged.

Nostr Dog

tee8z plowed ahead with his and w3irdrobot’s Nostr Dog project. He fixed the data pipeline, set up a droplet, hand-crafted a deploy script, and added some pretty graphs. What’s the goal of all this? Well, you know that annoying uncle that always likes to start polarizing conversations about Nostr NIP adoption at the Thanksgiving table? Well, now you can speak to that uncle armed with facts about actual NIP usage straight from the relays, thanks to Nostr Dog.

TwelveCash

TwelveCash had v1.0.1-beta release. Stephen pretended to be a real-life open source maintainer, performing actions like merging PRs from first-time contributors @GlenCooper and @paulosacramento, frontend-ifying @chdwlch’s paid usernames feature, and even cobbling together release notes. All these performative actions really add up to something that feels like a great cosplay of a legitimate open-source project.

PlebDevs

We’re super proud of Austin for shipping his PlebDevs platform. This is an educational resource where you can learn to code for the web, Lightning, and Nostr. Some of the videos are free content, where others require a Lightning payment. The PlebDevs platform itself is actually built with 100% naturally-sourced, cruelty-free Nostrich feathers.

Payjoin Presentation

Wow, Brandon has been a contributor to the Payjoin website for a bit now. This October he was given the task of communicating this project to TABConf 6. He used FOSS Friday time to work on his presentation for the conference. Of course, that was just the opening scene. Next came a black-and-white montage of him at a typewriter in a dimly-lit room, hammering the keys incessantly through the night. There were several close-up shots of all the privacy-focused sheets being balled up and thrown into the trash can. As the vivid beams of sunrise pierced through the blinds, he pulled the final sheets from the typewriter and held them up triumphantly. This presentation would focus on Payjoin benefits like transaction cut-through and efficient use of blockspace by large exchanges. Cut to TABConf where he nailed it!

Doppler

Balance was restored: this October, tee8z worked on a FOSS Friday project with a weather-related name, which means the laws of the universe are functioning as we expect them to (knock on wood). He built a visualizer that shows you the Lightning network that Doppler has orchestrated for you and got it compiled to a binary, just in time for his presentation at TABConf 6.

Web5

W3irdrobot got a PR merged on the Web5 SDK. We don’t know exactly what the PR did. Something about creating a presentation definition via the command line? Honestly, we’re not sure if he knew what the PR did either. We think w3irdrobot just wanted to win some sweet hacktoberfest rewards that he could flex on the streets.

FROSTR

Austin helped out on the FROSTR project, which uses FROST threshold signatures for Nostr keys. Basically, it’s like a multi-sig for your Nostr. This project took first prize at the TABConf 6 Hackathon!

Bitcoin TLDR

Stephen consulted with the Bitcoin TLDR project on their upcoming site design updates. We’re already living in a sci-fi future where you can have all the bitcoin development chatter summarized for you by AIs, and we’re about to live in a future where that feels delightful.