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440 sats \ 3 replies \ @m3anm4chine 1 Jun 2022 \ on: New Lightning Explorer… and asking for any feature requests that would be helpful bitcoin
how long have you been working on this, it looks pretty great and polished! well done
Thank you! I've been working on this for about 6 weeks now, and excited to keep building anything that will help the community
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6 weeks? That's amazing! What is your stack? What were the technical challenges that came up? Have you considered open sourcing your project? Would be very interesting to see how the whole thing works!
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Thank you! I'm an application dev (primarily C#/.NET), so I went with what I know.
I use Voltage for Lightning Node infrastructure, a .NET and Azure hosted webjob for syncing network data, MongoDB for persistence, Azure Blob Storage for graph storage, and Azure webapp (C#/.NET) for hosting the main explorer.
The Lightning Lab team has made some great gRPC APIs available for pulling data from a lightning node.
The biggest challenge for me is understanding all of the network data - what do things like HTLCs or Parts per Million all mean in both a technical and business context. I'm still ramping up here, and posting at a '101' level as I learn more and run examples on my own lightning nodes (which is great with Voltage): https://docs.exponentiallayers.com/lightning-network-concepts/lightning-network-overview
And I'll get some links up soon of various resources and threads that have been helpful.
As for open source, I hope to carve out pieces to make publicly available in the future. In all honesty though, my hope is to start charging for new features shortly so that I can cover all of my hosting costs (Azure, Mongo, Voltage, WebFlow, etc - it adds up fast) and cover some level of my basic living expenses. I left my full time job to explore Bitcoin and the space in general because it is so interesting, so I need some way to cover my expenses to be able to do this indefinitely. So expect to see some paid features soon!
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