BTCPay Server is growing!

…keep coding

I started BTCPay Server in August 2017. BTCPay grew organically with merchants gradually coming to the project.

Halong Mining and Coincards were among the first very high volume users, and brought me tons of bug and feature requests as I was trying to fill the gap between Bitpay and BTCPay, while Rockstardev was initially helping bridging my gaps in CSS/HTML/JS. (along with major contributions like LND support)

BTCPay would not have gone far without them and other early merchants. Not being a merchant myself, it is more difficult to taste my own food as I do with NBXplorer or NBitcoin.

BTCPay is a side project, and the amount of support and encouragement received by the community means I needed to spend more and more time I spend on Support and other stuff than coding.

This is coupled with the obligations of the companies I work for (Metaco and DG Lab), who thankfully give me enough breathing room for doing some Open Source work as long as I fulfill my obligations… Obligations which are cool enough and always related to Bitcoin. (If not the case, I get grumpy and they get scared)

I created the slack to have a place for the community to help each other, so newbies could receive help from other merchants for easy to answer problems. I am always on the slack, as it is the best I can get to eat my dog food. Some questions are often an indication that the User Experience is not clear and need to be improved. This system, while messy from the outside, is the best support a product can get. Kukks, Vortex and Bitcoinshirts are coming soon with even more doc and support vectors. No FAQ and no support call center can beat the continuous flow of articles and resources produced by a dedicated community. Just imagine if Javascript was a company and that instead of stackoverflow, you would have to open a support ticket.

Recently, even more people came as a result of the community word of mouth and specifically thanks to bitcoinshirt who created awesome tutorials to hand hold new users.

As BTCPay grows, I need to keep focusing on what I do the best:

Coding in C# for Bitcoin. Integrating tooling made by the Bitcoin community with a coherent user experience inside BTCPay. (LND, C-Lightning, Zap, soon Spark) Documenting for helping other devs and refactoring to support stuff which are not my personal priority. (like Monero, Ethereum support)

This is why I am sharing now BTCPay Server social media accounts with rockstardev and bitcoinshirt. So I can spend less time on twitter and growing the community myself, and more time coding. Rockstardev also has commit access to BTCPay Server.

BTCPay is a not my side project anymore, this became a community project and as more people contribute, I need to make sure I am not the bottleneck, my road as a maintainer has just began and I will do all I can to spend my time where it is the best fit.