I'm supposed to be doing a presentation/demonstration of Bija at Nostrica on Sunday and the truth is that I'm not only pretty uncomfortable to have to stand in front of a crowd and present something but I also feel unqualified to do so in many respects :/

Bija started as a fun project for me in early November, I'd barely written any code for years and building a client seemed like something interesting to dig my teeth in to reintroduce myself to it. There was only a few accounts, mostly devs, active at that time but 2 weeks later Nostr exploded and it wasn't long before half of Bitcoin Twitter was there! 4 months later and this fun project has consumed most of my time over that period!

Anyway, feeling like I need to write my thoughts down as I've been having sleepless nights over it. Torn between feeling unworthy to be presenting and not wanting to let people down when I've said I'll do it. Again, this started as a fun project for me, I certainly never wanted any notoriety, success, money, or anything else from it. If it would maybe add some value to this amazing ecosystem that would be amazing - decentralised and censorship resistant social media that actually works is something I've wanted for a long time.

I probably shouldn't be stressing myself so much over it, everyone in the space is so nice and welcoming, I'm just acutely aware of how much dev talent there is around here whereas I was a lowly web dev without any formal training until around a decade ago, that walked away from it, and has just recently thrown himself back in at the deep end. Whilst I do have a functioning client which has a fairly unique approach, the fact is that I've learnt most of the technologies used along the way, during the process of building Bija, and there's many areas where I'm not sure, or qualified to know, if I've really made the best design choices, etc. - I'd only used Python a little before and never used Flask, SqlAlchemy, websockets and various other things in my life before. Hell, when I walked away from web dev HTML5 and CSS3 weren't even in use yet, they were on the cards but you couldn't actually use them because no browsers supported them, not to mention that javascript was still only being used for basic front end stuff! It still boggles my mind that we have full stack js now 🤣

I don't know what will become of Bija, it doesn't have a particularly large user base, I certainly enjoy using it myself though, as do a few others. Fundamentally I care way more about the success of the protocol as a whole than of Bija, and more than that the success of a new, more open, decentralised, and censorship resistant Internet, whether that means Nostr or anything else that achieves those goals.

Peace out. Thanks for reading. Feels better out than in!