Setting up | 2022 Dec 11-17

During this winter break and spring semester, I’m going to try to become a regular contributor to Lightning Dev Kit—an open-source lightning implementation written in Rust used to create and integrate custom lightning nodes.

I’d like to document my efforts somehow, and also to remember more concrete things I learn. This blog post is a part of one of three efforts:

Write down 3 concrete things I learn each day. For the days where I’m actively working on lightning stuff, I want to record a bit of my learning. I’m hoping this can be low effort enough that I might actually keep up with it.
- I’ve been doing this for just the past 3 days and have found it to be pretty rewarding. It seems like it’s a pretty good reflection of my actual process of figuring all this stuff out which will be cool to reflect on and share at the end. Also I’ve noticed I’m already subconsciously perceiving my consumption differently. I’m realizing just how little I actually takeaway from watching or reading something, even if it’s dense with quality information.
Organize my questions. All the time while learning I have questions come up that I can’t always answer at that moment. I’ve written them down in all sorts of different places and I never come back to them. I think making it easier to actually get around to these questions would be another good way to help me learn more effectively. Also if I have a busy day and I don’t get to a lot of lightning stuff, it could be a good way to keep my mind coming back to it by just picking up a question and researching it.
Weekly update blog posts. This is less of concrete learning and more for me to just briefly reflect and document my thoughts on this process on some sort of regular basis. Hoping to make this very low stakes, just writing my thoughts, putting something on paper.

I am excited yet intimidated to start contributing, but that’s how it always is when starting something new. Nevertheless, I’m really happy that I’m actually giving this whole thing a shot.

Hopefully will be taking on an issue on the ldk-sample-node repository tomorrow. Wish me luck!