New Site Structure

I'm in the lull between political bureaucracy processing at the moment. It's that place where I've put in my work and just have to twiddle my thumbs with both the SEC and the SDF until they make a call. I've taken that time to execute some cutbacks on this repository.

Since it's not apparent at all what I've done from the public deployment, I'm going to lay it all out here. I'm also going to talk about the self-discovery process I went through these last six months to get to these changes. It's been a really interesting journey rediscovering parts of myself since the exam's pressure.

Segmenting Ponyfication

For anyone who's been following my X these last 10 months, you'd notice that almost all my posts relate to the fandom. That's because the immense pressure of our first exam forced me to find rejuvenation in the only side of my life that's always been there to help emotionally. You can see the earliest moments of this bleeding in on the Dash internal framing of war economies in the Plain Bagel reference.

But really all this started around Nov–Dec 2024. After I made all these intense political efforts to introduce interleaving, the scope of my role expanded far beyond what I thought was a simple anchor execution on the network. I can't believe it, but I really had no clue about the CAP-37 and -38 differences until the background material prompted me to update the docs.

I have Bri and Anuhya to thank for that. The former championed an internal concept to put out documentation mountains, and the latter told me about it during our community interview at Consensus.

For the longest time, I thought it was fine to just ignore the Foundation's efforts since the protocol is great. But in discussing the interleaving change with prominent community members, I learned that the new structure put in place after Jed left created a political bureaucracy. And there's nothing wrong with that—bureaucracy is a great wrapper for mature systems, giving them the predictability they need for scaled deployment.

And it's not an insult in any way either. Developing something of that scale with those internal controls takes significant effort and clarity. But it is an accurate representation of the state of affairs, which brought the SDF just a little bit closer to how the SEC operates.

This was exemplified by the lack of interleaving development after Protocol 18, despite significant and vocal community advocacy. The SDF in my mind growing up was supposed to listen to what the users of the network wanted, following their development ideas. But when you put a hierarchical structure around a hundred engineers, you create command-and-control dynamics that isolate workers from the market, tying them instead to the decrees of the highest up.

I don't think there's anything morally wrong with this. It helps consistency and has helped the Foundation pioneer privacy work on the network, to say nothing of single-handedly producing Soroban. But it is a meaningfully different structure than the original network topology.

I work best in pure markets, without the institutional lethargy innate in cross-departmental reporting and work sequencing. The SEC has been a fun foil to that over the years because they have clear accountability to Congress and naturally cannot operate at all like how I'd like.

I've long accepted that reality and scoped my life around their constraints for many years because of it.¹ But when I realized that I'd need to incorporate some of these skills into my ongoing Stellar work, it forced me to expand past the existing stressors and contextual needs of DRS.

I needed more energy and motivation to take on that increased role. There is only so much bandwidth I can naturally allocate toward all these working relationships. I rediscovered that spark in the fandom I'd long since dropped after the show ended and college transformed into the startup.²

And so it was much earlier into 2025 that I started experimenting with the level of political permissibility I could maintain. My first foray was setting my Discord status to a little Rainbow Dash emoji (you know the cool glasses one) for a few months. After receiving no observational remarks whatsoever despite active forum participation, I used an outright image of her doing the salute on an American flag. This was in response to WhatCan's advocacy efforts, and it was in #general, so I know it received a lot of attention.

Again, no response or retribution over the coming weeks. At that point I felt safe enough to expand the identity exploration and chat more with new fandom friends. I'm really happy to report that they have become a safe second social circle that supports my life without being the draining relationships tied to active work I have in other good friends who I do still appreciate.

It's just different with friends who you purely associate with for joy, which I never really did after high school because of my intense focus on the mission and markets. These two were able to absorb my full capacity for many years, so I never made time for happiness. But once I did so much so that it wasn't entirely in my hands anymore (like this stalling time now), I decided to start back toward happiness again. And I found it.

So yeah, it's been nice settling back into the community. At first I thought it all had to be under my personal brand, mostly for disclosure and transparency reasons. I also didn't like the idea of splitting my identity between two places, as I presumed I'd need to maintain twice as many masks.

That fear faltered when I continued developing into smaller, less judgmental pony communities. Even the big Discords have the same politics you'd expect from breaking into a new developer group. Thankfully I found my specialization in art, being the small and quickly growing niche.³

Once I had a solid base of friends, I was able to drop the masks I've held for probably 13 or 14 years. I could just be myself without all the social lies and proprietary framing. It feels so nice to have that acceptance without professional consequences, a place where I just don't have to think about the deep consequences of my natural train of thought.

In an effort to facilitate that, I created a new identity and completely separated it from my working brand. That has lately meant the silent deprecation of X pony replies on the main brand. I will say also that I appreciate how even members of the Stellar community have actively accepted my being a brony, which has given me the confidence to leave the OC profile pictures up that remind me of what true freedom feels like.

Private Repositories

And this is for the first time in what I can ever remember: I created new and intentionally private GitHub repositories. I remember hearing so many interviews from the founding team about how they only made public repos free before the Microsoft acquisitions.

I agreed with that so much back then. I thought wholly that there was no excuse for proprietary code and, by extension, the secrets withheld in the confidentiality of central institutions. And I still hold that view for my own work in that there are no internal separations for Syndicate operations and communications aside from basic email right now.

But man, is it so relieving to finally have things I can just create that don't need the mental processing of public reference. Oh my god, one of the biggest moments for me was writing a physical sticky note not again and then not transcribing it into a public repository. I can't tell you how long it's been since I was able to consciously do that happily.

I guess in getting everything perfect for the Commission, I lost a fair bit of what made my trading so good, because the rules require some conformity to the needed standards or status quo. While we still have that, I now also have, for the first time, my own self outside of their purview and strictly for internal satisfaction, which I had previously unstably outsourced.

And once I moved my sticky notes, group post drafting, macros/reflection days, office configuration, and a few other things into a new private org account, it felt amazing! I've been able to put things out there so much faster because I can iterate without the public scrutiny risks for minuscule implementation details.

That, and I've been able to defer masking on critical decisions. I noticed the need for this when I was drafting Response 6 in the exam. I asked for help from the Stellar community, received none, and rewrote the document privately rather than keep the publication link up during drafting.

By leaving the draft private, I could experiment around with ideas I wouldn't be fully comfortable making known to just anyone. A parallel example that exemplifies this point came up in a pre-meeting chat with Chives. Since the DUNA recording hadn't started yet, I had the comfort to call an external non-member actor a pessimist on the basis of their work, which everyone (being just us two) vehemently agreed on.

It helps to move things along faster when you have the freedom to be raw without the ruthless public record that should accompany final decisions. So it's been nice to be able to draft the intended paths I need to take for the goal without worrying about filtering basic ideas. Thank you, private GitHub expansion, even if it means all my work feeds the AI overlords!

Final Blog State

And hence we arrive here with just what was the migration, although you can't really tell that from publications anymore. It means I will stick to my style of no deep hyperlinks, speeding up drafting significantly. It also keeps my head out of the explainer/teacher mode that I spent so very much of college immersed in.

Don't get me wrong, I loved spelling things out because technical explanation mattered and still matters a lot. It was a significant pillar that I wanted to and did achieve while I was young. But the absolute lack of reception with centralized algorithms and relative brand obscurity means it just isn't the path in the long term for me.

I've always known this because of the clear application of blockchain to securities I saw standing the mission back in high school. I thought college would give me the tools to start that infrastructure development, while I rounded off the education front with enthusiastic videos. Instead it just gave me immense disdain for central organizations and a confused start to a very long path.

But that's over! And I'm here! I wouldn't trade the journey for anything because it's gotten me right where I need to be now.

I hope you like the new site. I am so so happy to finally have something I can see update with my writings. And uhm yeah it's on a normal domain because I refuse to pay the costs of IPFS implementations solely for political clout.