How we turn developers into Bitcoin open-source contributors - and how your community can too.
Written by Code Orange Dev School in Canggu, Bali, from what we do in our own community. Contributions by our community members are tracked, with links, on our PR dashboard.
License: CC0. Fork it, translate it, run it in your city. If it helps, tell us - we love seeing this spread.
Three rules make everything else work:
- Contribution-first. Every session ends with a concrete next step in a real repo. Never teach theory without a "do this before next week."
- Nobody leaves empty-handed. Every first-timer walks out with something running - a node, a signet wallet, a merged typo fix. The first session decides whether there's a second.
- Sell the career, not the curriculum. The honest pitch to a developer: your GitHub becomes your CV, your CV becomes your income. Open-source contributions lead to fellowships and grants that pay globally - that's a life-changing offer in most of the world, and it's true.
Hey {name}, welcome to Code Orange 🟠
Three steps to get started:
- Say hi in #introductions - who you are, what you code (or want to code)
- Pick your entry point: • New to Bitcoin → Bitcoin Basics (next: {date}) • Can code, new to Bitcoin dev → Bitcoin Dojo (next cohort: {date}) • Ready for advanced → Privacy Track (bi-weekly, drop in any session)
- Full calendar: {link}
Everything is free. The goal: your first node → your first merged PR.
🟠 START HERE Code Orange takes developers from first Bitcoin node → first merged PR → first grant. Free, open-source, contribution-first. This week: {sessions} The path: Basics → Dojo → rawBit → Decoding Bitcoin → Privacy Track → Fellowship Proof: {your PR dashboard link} Questions → #general. See you at a session 👇 {calendar}
Within two days of every workshop, send attendees one message: what was covered (2 lines), one specific action for the week (a good-first-issue link, not "keep learning"), and the next session date. It helps people come back. Template:
Thanks for joining {workshop}! 🟠 What we covered: {2 lines} Your one action this week: {specific link} Next session: {date, topic} Stuck? Post in #help - someone always answers.
A public, time-boxed challenge: open your first PR to a Bitcoin open-source project within 90 days. Developers don't sign up for "education pipelines" - they sign up for challenges with deadlines, prizes, and witnesses.
Structure:
- Weeks 1–2: environment + first node + pick a target repo from a curated menu (docs, tests, and good-first-issues in BDK, rust-payjoin, Floresta, peer-observer, bitcointranscripts)
- Weeks 3–6: attend 4+ community sessions; file a first issue or review someone's PR
- Weeks 7–10: build the contribution, with mentor office hours
- Weeks 11–13: PR opened, reviewed, iterated
Milestones & rewards (adapt amounts to your budget):
| Milestone | Reward |
|---|---|
| First issue filed or PR reviewed | 5,000 sats |
| PR opened | 21,000 sats |
| PR merged within 90 days | 50,000 sats + fellowship fast-track + name on the public dashboard |
Rules that keep it honest: upstream repos only (no PRs to your own forks) · maintainer merge = merged · AI-assisted is fine, but you walk a mentor through your diff · one entry per person.
Public leaderboard: a pinned message or simple page fed from your PR dashboard, updated weekly. The leaderboard is the marketing.
Split the room. Blue Team are merchants/activists transacting on signet, trying to preserve privacy. Red Team plays the chain-analysis firm trying to deanonymize them with mempool.space and clustering heuristics. Then swap.
- 0:00–0:15 Briefing. The stakes: one real story of a donation address doxxing someone. Blue mission cards: "pay 3 parties, receive from 2, consolidate once - leak nothing."
- 0:15–0:30 Setup. Pre-funded signet wallets for Blue; Red gets a shared sheet for cluster hypotheses; facilitator holds the ground-truth ledger.
- 0:30–1:05 Round 1 - naive. Blue uses default wallet behavior. Red hunts: address reuse, round amounts, change detection, timing. Score: +10 per correct link (Red), +10 per unlinked tx (Blue).
- 1:05–1:15 Teach break. Name exactly which heuristics burned Blue. This is the entire privacy curriculum, taught by defeat.
- 1:15–1:50 Round 2 - armed. Same missions with coin control, no reuse, a Payjoin between pairs, batching. The score flip is the lesson.
- 1:50–2:00 Debrief. Map every technique to a repo: "the labeling UX that saved you → BDK issue; the Payjoin that broke clustering → rust-payjoin good-first-issues." Winners get sats. Photo. Post.
Facilitator prep (once): 10 pre-funded signet wallets, 6 printed mission cards, ground-truth sheet. Infinitely rerunnable.
Sats locked in real (small) UTXOs that only the solver can sweep - the prize claims itself.
- Brainwallet graveyard - sweep a wallet whose seed is a famous quote (why brainwallets die)
- Script kiddie - redeem a P2SH whose script is
OP_ADD 8 OP_EQUAL(Script fundamentals) - Leaky change - given 3 txids, identify payment vs change outputs (privacy heuristics)
- Nonce sense - two signatures share a nonce; recover the key, sweep the coin (ECDSA foot-guns)
- Time lock vault - a CLTV output that unlocks mid-session (timelocks, guaranteed drama)
- Metadata trail - a social post + a tx + a screenshot together reveal an address (opsec)
Practice rounds on signet; finals on mainnet dust. Hints cost points. Publish the solutions repo afterwards - it recruits.
Take the session to a real local merchant who's agreed to accept Bitcoin. Participants deploy the payment setup (BTCPay / a static QR solution / a Lightning wallet) with the owner, print the QR stand, and stay for the first real customer payment. Back at base: debrief, and file an upstream issue for every rough edge you hit in the field - real-world pain converted into legitimate OSS contributions. The merchant keeps every sat. This format is almost impossible for anyone to copy without a real local Bitcoin economy - if you have one, weaponize it.
Round 1: dice-and-whiteboard mining simulation - hash attempts are dice rolls, difficulty adjusts live, the room feels proof-of-work. Round 2: plug in real open-source miners (BitAxe) and lottery-mine on signet. One hour, zero prerequisites, photographs beautifully.
A real maintainer from a target repo reviews participants' open PRs live on a call. Participants prepare harder for this than anything else, and maintainers get cleaner PRs from your community forever after. Ask the maintainers whose repos your members already contribute to - most say yes to communities that bring them good contributors.
The dev-journey story (one per month, thread or 60–90s video): Before (who they were, honestly) → turning point (first session, one real struggle) → the work (what they built, PR links on screen) → now (where the code runs, what's next) → CTA ("They started where you are. Next session: {date}").
Rules: the subject approves before posting; tag the repo's maintainers when it goes live; link the PRs - verifiable stories beat polished ones.
The proof-of-work habit: every session announcement gets a follow-up comment with a screenshot of the actual call/room and what was covered. Receipts, always.
- Referral bounty: bring a developer friend → you both earn sats after their second session (the second visit filters tourists). Cap 5 per member per cohort.
- Guest workshops in non-Bitcoin dev communities: your biggest untapped pool is developers who've never touched Bitcoin. Pitch GDGs, language meetups, and university CS clubs a free 90-minute "First Commit" session: 15 min why Bitcoin is the most interesting codebase they'll touch → 40 min hands-on (node + build a transaction) → 20 min pick a good-first-issue → 15 min the career path + community QR. Every attendee leaves with something running.
- Partner-community slide: one slide in allied meetups' decks - "Can you code? {Your community} turns Bitcoiners into Bitcoin builders - free." Plus a one-line forwardable message for organizers' group chats.
- Capstone pipeline: offer CS departments free mentorship for final-year projects that contribute to Bitcoin OSS. They get supervision; you get pre-vetted cohort members.
Joins → intro posts → first-session attendance → second-session return (the one that matters) → PRs on the dashboard. If second-session return doesn't move within two months, change the formats, not the effort.
For the reusable 60-minute developer call, one canonical weekly scorecard, and the operator rhythm for the 90-Day First PR Challenge, see Weekly Operating Rhythm.
Made with 🧡 by Code Orange Dev School. CC0: copy anything, ask nothing. If you run this playbook in your city, we'd love to hear about it: {contact}.