Thanks man!

Day to day it’s a lot of reading and writing code. Splicing is a bit of A doozy. It affects so many other parts of code base I often find myself jumping around having to understand more and more of all that’s going on compared to a more insular feature.

Compared to previous work it’s definitely a lot lot harder. There’s two main reasons for that a think:

1. Lightning is just complex. There’s a saying I like, “lightning is all the parts of bitcoin you didn’t understand plus a whole bunch of new things you didn’t understand.”
2. It’s all being written for the first time. A common technique for other coding projects is to search stack overflow for a problem you run into and finding premade solutions. There are also lots of tools out there to help with common coding problems. With lightning problems that come up neither exist so you’re just on your own. It’s very frontier work feeling.

I got started by… just getting started I guess lol. I spent a few months just reading the code base and trying to fix little things here and there as I went. @niftynei was very generous and continually helped me work through parts that were complex to understand. As a lightning dev veteran she has a lot of deep knowledge on it all.

In the end they’re all open source projects and anyone can contribute. And how cool is it to work on Lightning? I think it’s pretty great to be able to anyway 🤣.