Minnesota, US
We moved to a new Airbnb yesterday and of course we filled in our refrigerator with exciting beers, which calls for more tasting tasks – a lot more to come!
It is almost the end of November and the end of 2020 as well. Families in Rochester are starting to decorate their houses, and we are thinking of doing ours too. There is already a Christmas tree standing in our living room. How lovely!
What I Saw This Week
More covid-19 confirmed cases in Rochester, and 900 doctors got infected. It’s scary. New infections showed up in China too. Rust China Conf has to move from Shanghai, where is was initially scheduled, to Shenzhen, a Southern city. The geographic changes caused extra work for the organizer team and new costs because of the venue changes. Fortunately, there are more sponsors this year, compared to RustCon Asia in 2019, so hopefully they can cover the expenses.
Crypto projects that issued their own cryptocurrencies are loud as long as there is enough money for hype. By contrast, development activities and dev community discussions are less noticeable. Focusing on Rust projects, I can see limited projects, such as the Ethereum client Lighthouse, Substrate/Polkadot, and NEAR, demonstrate marked dev improvement and regular activities. You can find it out from their GitHub repos or simply check the “Most Active” section in RiB each month.
Dev tutorials and documentation are the primary evidence of a project’s attitude to the dev community: how the entries are set up for developers with different programming requirements; how well (or bad) explained the step-by-step tutorials; the last updated date of each page, and so on.
Hacks, Writes, and Thoughts
More hacks these days! I mainly hacked on Walnuts and Substrate ink, and I made progress with them. Things learned are error handling, the cargo-expand tool, and other concepts in Rust programming. I became more excited about programming in blockchain, along with the growing knowledge I have learned.
I have been considering PGP messages for a while and finally updated my PGP public key with the help of Protonmail. I am quite into Protonmail now, and I moved the rib.rs official email to it, too, with the MX protocol settings.
Along the way, I wrote a bit more about “how to pretend to be a hacker”, adding some command lines to it. It might be too detailed, but I hope it’s useful for someone who doesn’t know how to use a terminal properly, like me in 2019. Meanwhile, I updated Study notes. I changed its CSS, moved some sub .org files to one single .org file, and generated several .md files.
Learning
- Paper: Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language. Started reading.
- Book: In Light of Yesterday: The Backstory of the Global Economy. Finished reading. Quickly learned macroeconomics from stories in different countries.
- Blog post:
- The Rust Performance Book. A short book.
- On Blockchain Voting. There are more reading resources in it.
- Sunzi’s《Methods of War》- Introduction. I have read this book before and happy to reread someday.
- The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
Status
- Pushed Walnuts source code and updated the hacklog. Learned error handling and structopt
- Played with Substrate ink and updated the inknote
- Wrote more draft: how to pretend to be a hacker
- Updated my PGP public key and verified the website with Keybase
- Updated stylesheet for Study, light blue link’s color & code block’s style
- Other updates in the Study notes
- Rust smart contract
- Rust computer science
- Error handling
- Rust China
- Philosophy and minds
- Blockchain voting
- Moved to another Airbnb and filled in our refrigerator with beers. More beer tasting
- Chats and connecting
- w/ Boson project
- w/ Rust China community
- w/ The ten-year coffee friend/client
- w/ Previous colleagues
The Porter Moon drawing is inspired by the sky colors and the cute moon in the evening when we bought porter.
