My journey to discovering Nostr seems like a fairly typical one. I first heard about Nostr during the Twitter chaos when it was pitched as one of the many decentralized alternatives. After downloading Damus and exploring it a bit, I was intrigued but ultimately churned, as the “censorship resistance” selling point wasn’t enough to offset the gap in content compared to centralized alternatives. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I revisited the protocol with a new perspective and became obsessed. Understanding the fundamental difference between Nostr as a single app and a new way to interact through the internet was the key to unlocking my interest. We are on the cusp of an era in how the web is used, and we don’t even need a bunch of scam tokens to do it.
For some background on me, I am 23 years old and have been developing for three years. I majored in Biochemistry in college, but by the time I graduated, there was nothing else I wanted to do but write code. I had been working on side projects during my free time, a mix of personal websites for celebrities I admired (https://www.fuelbar15.com/, https://andrewschulz.netlify.app/), and a few for Ethereum projects that I was passionate about 🙄 (https://mev.army/, https://www.skulltracker.app/). My most significant project at the time was a virtual tutoring platform I built for my high school to help students earn community service credit for college by offering free tutoring during the pandemic (https://www.blastofftutoring.com/). With these side projects and my somewhat atypical resume for a Software Engineer, I landed a job as a Full Stack engineer at a Y Combinator startup.
Fast forward to February of this year, a friend from Twitter reached out to commission me to build a website for this new thing popping up in Bitcoin. The thing was Ordinals, and while I understand this may be a sensitive subject in some Bitcoin circles, I assure you, I’m no fan of the BRC-20 shitcoin stuff either. Anyway, back to the point. After a few weeks of hacking things out on nights and weekends, I put together a pretty slick Ordinals explorer, especially compared to the sparse ecosystem around such a nascent space. Long story short, we started gaining traction like nothing I had ever seen before, and by May, I had decided to quit my job and start working on things full-time. It was during this journey into Bitcoin that I revisited Nostr with a new perspective. It seemed like Ordinals and Nostr were the two areas in the Bitcoin ecosystem where there was excitement among developers and plenty of code being shipped. The main reason I began my crypto journey on the Ethereum side of things is because that’s where the developer activity was. As a self-taught engineer just starting to get my feet wet, there wasn’t much to contribute on the Bitcoin side of things, whereas Ethereum offered a myriad of random side projects to spin up. Now that we’re seeing a new spark of excitement on the Bitcoin side of things, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be spending my time.