BitcoinDevelopment

LN Lighthouse – Lightning network visualiser

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Hi Plebs,

Myself and Saravanan worked on a primitive Lightning network explorer in the month of Feb and here is a detailed post into it.

I always felt guilty about the barebone UI that I built for it. But couldn’t find time to revamp the UI. It’s July 2022 and the time has come.

We spent countless hours debating to find what kind of LN visualizer will prove to be useful to the node runners. Our node running experience is very limited and most useful data like channel balances, etc., are private information. So after a point, we decided we will make the best visualization tool, that does its job properly. A node can have either 4 peers or 4000 peers, we should make the UI usable and clean.

After sketching out various designs, we decided to go with clustering by node capacity.

Design

Though I could think UX, I am bad with colors and visuals. So I pulled in my dear friend, Sakthi and he made a brilliant Figma design by stretching over 3-4 nights.

Yes. The theme is inspired by amboss.space

Then 2-3 weeks of late-night coding (after office hours) and weekend stretching, the work is almost done. Thanks to my friends Hemath, Raghav, Beulah, Aadarsh, Thina for testing the tool and giving useful feedback.

With all the testing, we launched it on Aug 19, 2022. Here is the launch tweet

The launch received a very good reception on Bitcoin Twitter.

The unexpected milestones

2 legendary plebs (my personal favorites) liked the tweet

  • Fiatjaf reshared
  • Starkness (Elizabeth Stark) liked the tweet

And earned some sats by posting it in stacker.news @ https://stacker.news/items/68195

Inspired by the community feedback, we got another half a dozen ideas that we like to execute. But my top priority at the moment is to find a job in a bitcoin company and join the greater mission.

Thanks to my partner Saravanan mani and of course to Andreas Antonopolous for orange-pilling us.

– Hail Satoshi –

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