Utah, US
This week I spent most of my time on IPFS and Ethereum related products for my HackFS project – bigannouncement.eth.
The organizers arranged several online workshops: HackFS YouTube. Each showcased live coding, and attendees asked questions frequently. Speakers made mistakes sometimes, and they were pretty comfortable with that. They debugged and fixed mistakes confidently.
I especially like Austin’s workshop, Connecting ETH to IPFS. He brought his optimistic attitude and experience about building on Ethereum. As he said, just be patient and be comfortable with errors and failures – it’s normal. Just try one more time. That inspired all the attendees in the Zoom session.
I started writing JavaScript for our project. We deployed our project website to IPFS and linked it to blockchain domains: bigannouncement.eth and bigannouncement.crypto. I learned a bunch of IPFS-related products and tools from hackathon sponsors. IPFS is cool!
We open-sourced our project from the beginning, with a mostly-daily-updated hacklog. We shared it with other HackFS attendees, which encouraged more project showcases. Happy to see that.
I have enjoyed my HackFS journey so far.
The ETHGlobal team has been incredibly supportive, responding quickly and politely to everybody’s needs.
For example, they created the #showcase channel for us.
Rust in Blockchain newsletters are consistently getting more upvotes from r/rust. I am glad to see this-week-in-rust started to include the RiB newsletter. Moreover, HackFS brings new subscriptions to RiB as well.
I am delighted by the musical Hamilton. It’s so touching that I can’t help but thinking of it every day. I watched it again and again, and we listened to its songs when we were cooking. It is real art. WSJ wrote an interesting article about its lyrics: How WSJ Used an Algorithm to Analyze ‘Hamilton’ the Musical.
It was an exciting week. I learned new stuff every day.
Built and things learned
- Deployed Bigannouncement on IPFS with go-ipfs, ipfs CLI and Fleek
- Created notes (working in progress) for HackFS:
- Updated rustinblockchain.org website
- Added the Awesome-rib menu
- Added the awesome GitHub link to the page so that contributors can click into the awesome repo directly
- Updated impl.dev website
- Learned new way to write CSS
- Updated the purple color to a brighter one
- HackMD is a convenient doc tool. It’s fast, it supports markdown, it can sync to cloud services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub repo. Also, it’s an excellent replacement for Google Docs for team collaboration and public sharing. Very cool product. But if you push a HackMD doc to GitHub, GitHub considers those commits come from HackMD_hub but not your GitHub account.
Reading/Highlighted Notes
- A Short History Of The Bear Market
- How To Understand Things
- Matt Ridley: How Innovation Works, Part 1 with text. Naval recommended several books from Matt.
- Dan Guido: Trail of Bits – The Evolution of Smart Contract Security #346. This is a podcast of the Trail of Bit interview. Dan Guido provided knowledgeable insight in software security, and he shared his opinions on how to write better software. I listened to it twice.
Just like all software, smart contracts on the blockchain are subject to serious security vulnerabilities and coding errors. The fact however that smart contracts are often directly in charge of assets and cannot be changed once they are on the blockchain, makes secure development and running essential. Some smart contract platforms have their own languages, for example Solidity in Ethereum. Bugs and vulnerabilities in the source code, and errors in the virtual machines used by the network, are the main reasons behind security issues in smart contracts.
Projects using blockchain applications should expect constant changes in the security landscape. New bugs, security risks, and best practices will continue to emerge over time. Dan Guido explains all things software security in a really detailed and technical, yet easy to digest way.
Fun
- Reloaded our kitchen with new beers, wine and Scotch.
- Went to the lake, which is part of the Lake Utah.
- Planned new ventures for the coming months.
- A lovely movie: Palm Springs