The Magicians Who Merge Architecture and Beauty Into the Tangible
Large projects often require massive effort undertaken by many individuals and sometimes certain groups get overlooked when we step back to appreciate and critique the final product. I try hard to acknowledge hard work and milestones that we accomplish, but sometimes I take for granted the efforts of individuals and teams who put their head down and go to work, delivering quality effort day in and day out.
The team at OB1 is a rather flat organization with no bosses or managers (other than me 😉), but we do have fluid teams centered around different responsibility areas like our back-end developers, UI and UX design, mobile, desktop, etc. These labels help us determine who needs to be involved when it comes to meetings and decision making and not bother people whose time is better served elsewhere. This story is about one of those particular groups that we often don’t discuss publicly and that’s the front-end development team. This group currently only consists of three OB1 employees (Josh Jeffryes, Rob Misiorowski, and Jason Hotelling) with the help of minor open source contributions here and there. They are the glue that melds the amazing work Mike Wolf has dreamed up over the last few years and the complex work done on the server side that Chris Pacia has led and spoken about at conferences. I often forget how challenging it can be to cross-communicate between two groups and execute a common understanding through a product.
Josh Jeffryes joined OB1 and OpenBazaar in August of 2015 as a contractor at a time when OB1 was only a few months old and shortly after we hired our first employee Mike Wolf, a designer, who was brought on immediately to clean up the mess I had made of the UI. Hard to believe but at that time I was the main developer and designer for the project.
Once we had hired an actually talented designer we began to realize that transforming beautiful new design revisions into reality was going to require additional manpower. There was some interesting kismet that lead to us adding Josh to the team, but we were then able to quickly start rebuilding OpenBazaar into what we really envisioned it could be. He single handedly took control of managing and building the desktop application according to Mike’s designs and freed me up to start focusing on being a startup CEO rather than a coder.
The challenge presented to Josh was not an easy one. We had decided to completely rewrite and re-architect the application with the help of Chris Pacia whom Washington Sanchez demanded we hire immediately to build the back-end. This meant scrapping the entirety 1,645 lines of code in DarkMarket and whatever we added to make it OpenBazaar into an actually scalable and functional marketplace. We immediately got started redesigning the entire OpenBazaar protocol and API. Josh worked with Chris to ensure that the server would be able to serve up the content necessary to implement all of the features and interfaces we needed to make a completely decentralized marketplace. In addition to that we moved away from a web browser hosted app to a native desktop application using Electron, complete with an easy installer. All of this constituted ambitious work for a small group of coders.
It wasn’t until January of the following year that we brought on Rob Misiorowski as additional developer support and boy did we need it. Together they cranked out more than 4,100 git commits and 40,000 lines of html/js to deliver OpenBazaar v1, which we just recently deprecated after nearly two years and to put that work in perspective with OpenBazaar 2.0, we have already pushed over 4,700 git commits and over 80,000 lines of html/js code.
I will caveat these statements by saying that lines of code is an extremely poor judge of code and product quality, but it does give a slight indication to the amount of actual code these guys had to generate to build the product.
OpenBazaar is a deceptively complex application that has taken a lot of blood, sweat and tears to make. I recently searched the phrase “not working” in our Slack and I almost fell out of my chair.
We had nearly 600 pages of people saying something was “not working”. That’s a lot of struggle and frustration designing, engineering, debating and building. It’s working with early adopters to troubleshoot their installs and configurations. It’s struggling to figure out how to build a reliable network on top of IPFS, which is an alpha quality software project (their characterization not mine). It’s having our software flagged as malware because we use a common auto-updater package. It’s finding yourselves on the wrong side of a scaling debate, landing in a place where people actively troll your project to rub your face in your decisions. But you know who didn’t let that shit bother them and continued to work hard? These guys.
[Insert photo of these guys, but we’re privacy minded folks so you’ll have to imagine some really handsome guys here]
Our whole team is amazing and I definitely appreciate each and every person who contributed to OpenBazaar over the last four years, but right now let’s pour one out for the front-end homies who are in the trenches turning ideas into tools that people in over 240 countries worldwide use to profess their financial freedom.
Thanks guys!
