Had a productive first full week of experimentation.
Finished the Mastering Bitcoin book. Very informative, wrote my very rough notes/summary here. Cryptography really is such cool technology. And the design of Bitcoin - except for the scripting language - is quite beautiful. Sidenote: I’m going deeper into Solana and Solana’s design is just straight up ugly compared to Bitcoin.
Jumped into a super fun rust/wasm rabbithole for the early part of the week. Got me more excited about building practical AI applications. Built a face detector using a Rust library (rustface) that compiles down to wasm and runs in the browser. Took about 15 hours total, including learning some wasm and Rust. The rust+wasm toolchain is surprisingly well developed and fun to work with.
Started building a simple Solana NFT not-quite-a-showcase. All it lets you do is Connect your Phantom wallet and see a cool view of all the NFTs you own. I’m almost done with this, but currently in the deep wormhole of how to query the Solana blockchain for the data. Solana docs are not super helpful at all, but I’m stitching together the solution slowly.
Failed with the goal of writing 2 blogposts womp womp
And in other non-work accomplishments, I put in my application to become a US citizen! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I’m also starting some freelance work this week to fund these adventures. Speaking of freelance work, I wish there was a platform to do on-demand work. Like, a list of projects that will last 2-3 days, maybe even a week. Whenever I want to work for a few days, I can work. And if I don’t want to, I don’t have to. I really do feel like programming for me happens in bursts but all the freelance contracts I’ve done are longer term commitments (like 10-20 hours a week or build v1 of this app in 2 months). Having been on other side, that of hiring for help, startups constantly need super quick projects accomplished by experts to meet their short-term deadlines. Someone needs to build this. Uber for code.
So, goals for this week:
Deeper into Crypto: Wrap up Solana not-quite-an-NFT-showcase. Build a basic smart contract on Solana. Understand how proof of stake works.
Apply to the OnDeck Founders program (next cohort starts January 8)
Write 2 blogposts
See you next week!