Scatter is open-source and free because that is how we think the world should work.
Open-source technology is helping me find my path forward. If you’ve always wanted to be part of an open-source project, read on. It may be your path forward, too.
I have been a fan and follower of open-source and free (as in beer) software since 1998, when I first learned about Linux, the GPL, and free thinkers like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds.
Once in a while I’d be exposed to using Linux, and subjected myself to a year of it in the early 2000s when it was very rough around the edges. Lately, I’ve been running an Ubuntu Linux laptop for general home use for about three years now and there have been no complaints from the natives. That’s pretty incredible. The fact that people from around the world get together to build free software is beautiful and amazing. We should take a moment to appreciate that for what it is: utopian.
But, aside from some server setups, some basic home use, and some interest in the field, I had never actually contributed in any tangible way to open-source software. I never felt ready. But, man, it felt hypocritical to believe in something so earnestly, and not fulfill my duty.
I always thought that “Someone’s got to pay the bills, so if I’m going to work then it better be for money. It doesn’t matter that you like making software, it only matters that you get paid for it”, but that always left me feeling empty.
My career trajectory over the past two decades has been from lowly design grunt to helping conceptualize and implement working, beautiful software releases. There were a lot of shitty jobs along the way, and some genuinely enjoyable experiences. I felt like the things that were so hard became so easy, and that the things which I thought didn’t mean anything (marketing, I’m looking at you) were actually more important than the work that I did.
A couple of years back, I felt like I had peaked and my trajectory was nose-diving. I wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t doing anything. I was just getting a paycheck and it sucked.
I have spent tens of thousands of hours becoming who I am today as a designer, a manager, and a small business owner. I like making software, and I like trying to up the ante from release-to-release to push the outer boundary of what I’m building conceptually is.
If you’ve ever heard someone say that making software is a creative, expressive thing, well, this is that. I’m pretty sure that my brother Nathan feels the same way and it is part of why we work so well together.
Scatter
About 18 months ago I slipped into the deep-end of the pool and decided that what I wanted to do was create free software, make it open-source, and try to make a living from it. I joined Scatter, my brother’s nascent startup, as the first employee. We were going to build a business around the best damned cryptocurrency wallet that we could build. I think that we have done a decent enough job, made some waves, and most importantly made a solid, trusted reputation for ourselves in an ecosystem known mostly for its scammers and financial disasters.
I’ve done a lot of stuff while at Scatter including UX and UI work. Mostly I’ve been trying to put out fires and make order on the business side. I’ve really enjoyed connecting with a larger community of other like-minded folks from around the world.
We’ve spec’ed out five whole versions of Scatter and now have a pretty deep understanding of what a wallet is, and maybe what it could be going into the future. It’s exhilarating working on the cutting edge and we don’t think many people in the world have our specific domain of knowledge accessible. We are super-duper niche and that is valuable to a very small but very wealthy class of people.
My day job at Scatter could be called “Product Ownership”. It basically means that I sit and think a lot about how things work and maybe how to do them differently or better. I’ll go and make wireframes, flows, designs, prototypes and build a kind of skin for a UI that I think others will find easy to use. It’s a lot of guess work, and I get a lot of stuff wrong. It keeps me up at night.
It is also long stretches of quiet followed by intense bursts of creative output that is nothing less than exhausting and emaciating.
I love it, and I think it is time that we start sharing that feeling with others in the ecosystem. We want to create a group of core developers who believe in Scatter and decentralization. People who can help us conceptualize, develop, evolve, and build the Scatter of the future.
This is a call to open-source developers who:
- Are interested in blockchain technologies or have a background developing on systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Want to learn a codebase that has a medium sized userbase (around 250K users) and contribute to its future.
- Believe in free and open-source software, but have not actively contributed. This is your chance
The different projects we have that might interest you
Our open-source cryptocurrency wallet is really a bunch of pieces, with these being the core pieces that make it all work.
- ScatterJS — a wrapper library with plugins which allows your mobile or web application to talk to the wallets that have implemented our protocols (some 20 wallets at this point).
- ScatterDesktop — what used to be the full repository is now just a shell for pulling in our new library:
- ScatterEmbed, which is the “wallet” you’re thinking of when you look at the screen.
There are literally dozens of other libraries and projects which you can find by poking around our Github repos.
What we’d like to achieve going forward
We’d like to move Scatter, the product, from something which just Nathan and I build to something that a community builds for itself. We want to stay on as guiding hands, but we think that for Scatter to become what it must become, it will take more, smarter, cleverer hands than just ours.
Come join us in the Telegram chat or head over to our repositories above. Star and follow us on Github and we’ll try to make some issues that we think would be good to get started with. We’ll need to develop some sort of group governance mechanism together that works for everybody. Let’s talk about that next.
You can always help support us by voting for our BP candidate “vote4scatter” on the EOS Mainnet and on the Telos Mainnet.
— Rami James | Telegram: https://t.me/Scatter | Website: https://get-scatter.com
Scatter is a blockchain application signature provider. We provide high quality tools for developers and users.
