On a random Thursday evening I got a notification from harkirat about Summer of Bitcoin and how

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got into JAM and I was instantly hooked (also the $3000 BTC stipend doesn’t hurt). I started researching about SoB and JAM and they used the same tech stack as I did (mind you, this was a year ago and I barely knew React). Plus the mentors were very active; I decided that if I was applying to SoB then it’d be with them. So I looked at some issues, git clone‘d the project and made my first contribution. It was a pretty small change, but tbk (my SoB mentor) was super helpful. I slowly made a few more PRs and finally it was the day to apply for SoB ’25. I submitted my resume and got through the initial screening (just basic checks) and the 4-week bootcamp began!

Bootcamp (4 weeks)
We got 4 problems in total to solve and we needed to finish at least 1 per week (you can solve and submit them early as well) I tried my best to finish it as soon as possible so that I wouldn’t feel pressured by the deadline. I finished the first two relatively quickly within a week and in this period the SoB discord server was extremely active and I saw a few people who had already solved all 4 problems.

Texting my friends that I’d not make it.

To be honest I felt that I would probably not make it in (especially since most of the people who I interacted with were from IITs and had pretty good experience already) I eventually solved all the tasks and could finally participate in the proposal round.

I saw the orgs that came and I also contributed to a few of them (You can send up to 3 proposals to increase your chances of getting selected) but I didn’t even start with the proposals until there were just 3 days left for the deadline!!!! I quickly drafted a half-baked proposal (even though I had planned to write 3 proposals) and the deadline was 5:30 PM but I finished at 5:32 PM and was sweating trying to submit.
Thankfully adi didn’t close the portal and after submitting, I realized I hadn’t added the competency test (each org gives a competency test just to filter out the majority) I quickly added them and submitted again. I was relieved that at least one proposal was in; but when I checked again I saw that there were still a few errors and typos which I hadn’t noticed.

Pasted the same link twice!

I thought I’m definitely not making it through. JAM was one of the last orgs to join SoB and also one of the last ones to reveal who they selected, but a few days later I got this in my inbox

I was pretty thrilled and I waited for a week but I didn’t know where I’m supposed to communicate with my mentor, so I asked

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and he told me that we communicate on Matrix, so when I checked there, I realized he had already texted me! (This was after I’d already been selected btw)

My task is to create a new JAM V2 UI from the ground up. The proposal for V2 was to use Tanstack Query and integrate Storybook and to build every single component and every page using new technologies. The V1 used Create React App and vanilla CSS with Bootstrap. My first task was to run a bitcoin node locally and to check out Lightning Network for which tbk sent me 3000 sats just for me to check it out which I thought was very cool and completely changed my perspective about BTC being slow!
It’s been about a month now and I’ve managed to make some pretty good progress on my project and the mentors are so chill that it doesn’t even feel like an internship! (tbk is the best).
Hope this was a good read and I’ll update the blog gradually as I hit more checkpoints and milestones!