I am Daniel the solo dev behind Bountycaster

Ask me anything

Engineering
Startup life
Solo dev

Will take my time and answer everyone

Happy new year 🎊

Hi! My name is Daniel. I am building bountycaster.xyz

Ex Phantom, 0x Project engineer.

From Italy originally, currently live in NYC

- Django for backend
- NextJS for frontend

Best choice ever made
- Django is the best 0-1 framework for CRUD apps that do not have low latency requirement. Django has Admin panel, scaffolding, routing, test framework, tons of resources
- NextJS is lovely to work with, good caching system

Both frameworks have ton of documentation, resources, support, which is something I care for a lot.

I'm also an early contributor of Django so I know some internals relatively well.

building /cortex, hacking /farhack, yapping /dylan | dylansteck.com

Best: speed, from idea to product is days to max a few weeks. There is no context switching and no meetings and PRs reviewed by AI, so i can be very productive

Toughest: being social, it sometimes feels meaningless not collaborating or supporting other engineers.

happy new year daniel! curious, what have been some of the best and toughest parts of being a solo dev on a project like bountycaster?

/ted | exploring the onchain frontier | surfing @ venice, ca | eating @ gjusta / gjelina

- Videogames (Cyberpunk, Final Fantasy)
- Running, gym
- Taking the dog out
- Cooking

founder @explorelabs

prev @neynar, @hypeshot

don't take my casts seriously please (most of them at least)

We don’t exist in a vacuum. No matter how hard you work, external forces come into play, and pushing yourself to the brink for a single outcome leads to burnout

It’s more effective to keep driving forward while respecting your energy limits and using external realities to your advantage

what is the number one thing you have learned about yourself since you started working on bountycaster?

agentmonger @ ai16z, 

raider @raidguild | hot take mode on

From June 2023 to September 2024, I relied on my own savings

I don't have big exits and am pretty bad at memecoins so most of the funds used to survive are from saving every month when I worked at Phantom. I'm lucky to also have a wife that works in tech that also supports me.

Starting in September, I began receiving a small salary to cover expenses, and things are looking up now

I initially thought that a prompt market would have happened at some point. Example: "build me a ChatGPT prompt that does X" which the author can then fine-tune

what bounty have you not seen that you really want to see?

Co-founder @bountycaster (bountycaster.xyz). Co-producer @ethereumfilm. Previously co-founder of Scalar Capital and product at Coinbase

she does a ton of things for me, here are some of the most impactful:

- she's phenomenal at helping me prioritize, so I can dive into deep work. My focus is basically goldfish-level, and she keeps me on track with what matters most 

- she takes on copy changes, CSS tweaks, keeping FAQs and docs up to date, this avoids context switching.

- she has a better pulse on the ecosystem, bugs, and customer needs than I do. She flags the most important items that need my attention

hey daniel. happy new year 🥂 

i remember a while ago @linda posted something about being grateful to you for creating cool tools that she uses to make her work easier as the non-technical co-founder?

what's one one thing that comes to mind that she's done for you that's made your job way easier as the technical co-founder?

Farcaster Product Studio @ https://dTech.vision 💜 in love with tech 🤓decentralization, fitness and oldschool rap 😎

Please walk me through the multi agent setup of the concierge 🙌

Full time, this is all (99.999%) Bountycaster's commits

Building /moxito 🍃for fitness, @tipothehat for funding bangers, @rumour for fun ~ Full-stack mobile dev, parent, musician 🎹

Hi Daniel,

Do you do this full time or as a side project?

𝓵𝓲𝓿𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓼𝓾𝓶𝓶𝓮𝓻 • building @buoy 🛟 • pfista.com

Are you referring to the engineering side? or something else?

How do you "learn"? What is the process like? How intentional (or not) are you about it?

Building Higher apparel at High Line 🧢 
Host at /clickcast /cpg || Husband to @shiwen

@linda recommended it to me in 2021 (or 2022, cannot recall) but I only took it seriously when we were looking for startup ideas


Geophysicist || web3 || UI/UX || art || FCB ❤️ 

Interested in social infrastructure (URL & IRL) | slowly building /firstdraft, curating /concretejungle | markfishman.xyz

I love working with Linda in person, we do it 1-2 times a week from a cafe in the city. We pair it with a nice meal some place nice.

Prior to her moving to NYC, I'd travel to see her in SF or other places for a few days so we can get some in person time

How often do you and Linda work together in person?

In 2016 at Money2020 in Vegas, someone gave me $10 in BTC. I was amazed that a "BTC account" is just a random number from 1 to (2^256)−1. That blew my mind and started my journey towards learning more.

I started working in the space in 2019:
- Worked at 0x Project in 2019 (aka Matcha)
- Worked at Phantom in 2022

Happy New Year to you Daniel, thank you for the opportunity to learn something about you. Could you tell us a little about your beginnings in the crypto world?

Render.com + Poetry

The Django guide on Render docs is pretty good

What's your infra for deploying the Django backend?

data science @ coinbase                                


t0ny.base.eth

I love AI tools.

I use Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT all the time. Bountycaster would take a lot more to build without these tools

Are you using cursor? Another LLM or none at all? What are your general thoughts on the dev AI tools these days

Embracing the Decentralized Revolution 🪙 | OG of the Crypto ’19 Crew & Heir to the ultimate meme stash.

The biggest win has been seeing users connect and start collaborating together. People have connected for the work, and that work then evolved into a relationship

Reminds me of a Guido Van Rossum (Python creator) quote: Come for the language, and stay for the community

happy new year, daniel! managing everything solo must be a challenge. what’s been your biggest win with bountycaster so far?

As a solo dev, how do you track tasks / issues to work on?