When I lead the dev team we had a clear pipeline and delivered weekly - it was the initial stages but the mandate was to write all our own code starting from scratch - to make things work I pulled in a few frameworks to bootstrap ourselves into existence — ActvitiyPub for one was something that wasn’t a thing until me and my connect all the things and integrate with everyone mentality won out. It was very much UI first, front end heavy at the start so making it work and plumbing the skin was the fun to come.
After I left I did watch with interest the first network tests and the early demos - but when I left there wasn’t much more than a hello world in a blockchain test and some network messages in testing.
Things seemed to have slowed down after they got funded - but during the startup daze it was epic to have crypto architectural discussions with the likes of Bill Binney and we had a humming dev team with some great talent. Shoutout to those that left before me and those that got paid for their time — I’m still hanging out for the promise that it is. Someone has to make it better than a twitter clone.
For my sins I was one of the original co-founders of PanQuake - involved in the initial architectural design and scoping. “technical director and development team lead” I lasted barely two weeks as a paid “employee” before being replaced after a falling out. I maintain hope that the promises of open source transparency will be fulfilled. I did have some of those slides (and the napkin sketches) before the IP was wrapped up in Cook Islands Corporations and more tightly controlled. Those were the days.
https://youtu.be/7n06ElYp_8A?t=115m0s (1h55m or so)