Following the ideas presented by Bytemaster in Beyond-bitcoin last year, I created a bitcoin/ bitshares cross-chain exchange node, allowing users to bounce Bitcoin into the Bitshares network and back again via a UIA - GATEBTC.
This required reading the Bitshares codebase and reimplementing key bts functions in the development language, and a moderately sophisticated bitcoin coin-management system. A basic website was developed, showing a projection of the transactions between the two chains in the style of blockchain.info.
In addition,
- I paid for two medium vps-servers,
- took extended annual leave from my real job to develop, and did support on these forums on christmas and new years day
- reported bugs in technical forums, contributed c++ pull-requests to the Bitshares source base, and provided advice to Paul and Metaexchange in private mail.
I also created/reserved /r/bitusd and similar subs on reddit, participated in nullstreet reddit and hacker-news discussions and maintained a non-diluting delegate for a while.