This is the last week of the Summer of Bitcoin (SoB) 2022 internship and what a journey it has been. When I was job hunting after being released from serving National Service in Singapore, I never thought that I would be taking on one that focused on Bitcoin. Most of my friends and peers had negative impressions of Bitcoin and crypto in general, and I don't blame them, with all the shady business going on. Personally though, I am neither for nor against Bitcoin. I feel that in time bitcoin will fill out its niche, regardless whether its taking over the finance industry or not.
I applied to numerous software engineer intern positions, though I never found SoB through my job hunting. It was only after one of my friends sent me the link to SoB semi-jokingly and I thought it was pretty interesting. A fully remote intern position where I can do basically whatever I want? I thought this once a nice opportunity to learn something completely new to me, and to earn a nice chunk of change for myself too, so I signed up and got in almost immediately.
Padawan Wallet
In the SoB internship you were either a developer or a designer, and every intern will have to pick a project and get the respective mentor to choose them over every other intern vying for that project.
It is a simple system, whoever catches the mentor's eyes the most will get the opportunity to work for them, and it encourages the interns to put in effort.
Since my programming background is mostly focused on Android, with web development being on the weak side and no knowledge on other up and coming languages like Rust, I went about to try and find some Android / Java projects to work on.
Luckily for me there just so happens to be 1 project that fits the bill, Padawan Wallet
The Padawan Wallet project started as a passion project by @thunderbiscuit to play around with the newly created BDK-Kotlin library.
He envisioned a small android app that users can use to learn about bitcoin wallets.
Users will download the wallet, go through its tutorials and delete the app with full confidence that they can navigate other bitcoin wallets on the market.
With the power of android, BDK-Kotlin and the bitcoin testnet network he created the first version of the Padawan Wallet as an open-source project.
After Summer of Bitcoin came around thunderbiscuit signed up as a mentor and brought in students to not only learn about bitcoin but to contribute to the project.
The reason why this blog post exists is also because I worked on the project as part of my Summer of Bitcoin internship too.
I brought the project from using fragments to Jetpack compose alongside the help many designers.
How to contribute
As of writing this post the current Padawan Wallet project is undergoing a major shift to using the Summer of bitcoin
If you do want to help out or just check out the project codebase feel free to join the discord server where we all are!
You can drop thunderbiscuit or me and message on any questions you have about the codebase and we will be more than happy to reply.
The project uses Jetpack Compose to create the UI, and you can take a look at the design wireframe on our discord. There are many open issues on the github, most of which are outdated and will be cleared once the project is moved to the Compose framework.
Of course, you can also use the project as inspiration on how to use the BDK-Kotlin library.
The library is written in Rust, so do take a look if you are interested, it is also an open-source project!
Lastly, I just want to thank thunderbiscuit for teaching me about the bitcoin network and how to navigate the project codebase throughout the 3 months.
