I knew I wanted to work on/with bdk and ldk so I wrote up a proposal that outlined roughly a years worth of work and submitted it to Spiral. There was a little back-and-forth where they explained the process and expectations a little more clearly and could get a better understanding of what I wanted to work on.

They were pretty flexible as my plans did end up changing quite a lot compared to what I originally proposed. Initially my plan was to focus primarily on DLCs but building out a lightning node (sensei) with bdk+ldk ended up being the core of my work.

I hope that as companies realize how important bitcoin is for the world (and their company) that they will prioritize funding the ecosystem as a core part of their business as Block (and a few others) have.