Weekly Update #4
Happy New Year!
It's been 2 weeks since my last update. I had a great time doings lots of cooking and hanging out with people over the Omicron-disrupted Christmas/New Year break. Pictured below is Attempt #2 at authentic buckwheat crepes: turned out really well!
A quick recap from last time:
🟢 Wrote up an article on querying information on the Solana blockchain. This information is severely lacking on the Internet so hopefully this is helpful for someone. Every code snippet on that article is actually runnable in the browser. That took some doing. Runkit wouldn't work for me because importing the Solana npm packages errored out on Runkit. So, I forked remy/jsconsole which hasn't been updated in 2 years and made many significant changes to get a nice embeddable, live code editor in the browser. Maybe I’ll release it one day but for most people, Runkit should suffice. Between work on the jsconsole and actually writing the blogpost, this project ended up taking 30 hours total over the last 2 weeks. But I'm very happy with the end of result and hope this helps Solana newcomers.
🟢 Got a new personal website up and running. Along the way, explored a few different options with the goals being (1) easy to deploy, (2) easy to write on and (3) easy to customize and maintain. Overall, I'm pretty happy with tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog on all three fronts. MDX - Markdown with support for JSX components - makes it possible to write interactive blogposts like the Solana tutorial. next.js hosted on Vercel is really easy to deploy, just have to push onto the master branch and it auto-deploys. I still find next.js's magic annoying: ran into a hard-to-debug issue that happened with production builds but not with development builds. Gatsby continues to be popular in this space but I don't think it's easy to customize and maintain. Overall, next.js is alright but I still think this whole ecosystem of static websites is way too complicated.
I didn't have any time to mess with GANs, but that'll be on the docket for this week.
Zooming out, December was about unencumbered exploration. I'd still like more of that in January but I also want to add some focus towards income-generating ideas.
With that said, here are the goals for this week:
Generative NFTs: Generate 10 images by deploying this notebook to a production environment. Understand how fast the generation can be and also, play with how diverse the generated content can be, given different inputs. Research other NFTs of generative art where the art is generated during minting rather than being pre-generated. I think this is an exciting way for someone who has never owned an NFT to get into the space.
Write up 2 commercially viable ideas for API services that wrap around the OpenAI API to do something more specific and useful.
Write 1 blogpost