🌱 Garden

It’s been about a year since I started integrating AI tools seriously into my development workflow. I resisted for longer than I should have — partly scepticism, partly the classic developer ego thing of “I should be able to figure this out myself”. Eventually I caved, and I have thoughts. What Actually Helps Boilerplate and scaffolding. Asking an AI to generate a basic ERC-721 contract or a standard API handler is genuinely useful.

I have been writing Go professionally for over a year now, mainly for the backend of Web3 products. Before that I was mostly JavaScript and Python. I want to write down why Go has become my default choice for anything backend in the Web3 space, because I wish someone had told me this earlier. The Concurrency Thing is Real When you’re building something that listens to blockchain events — indexing transactions, watching contract events, syncing state — you need concurrency that doesn’t make you want to cry.

The crypto market is down bad right now 📉. But honestly? The bear market is my favourite time to learn. No FOMO, no Twitter noise. Just me, my laptop, and a very long reading list. I have been talking about zero-knowledge proofs for a while now (see my earlier posts on the STARK prover). This time I actually wrote one from scratch instead of just reading about it. Why Circom?

There are so much going on this October. I have two Bootcamps going on at the same time, a two-week-long project, the ETHOnline hackathon and a new start in my career! I am also trying to sell my iPad Pro and a brunch of scammers approached me… gave me a headache. Btw, let’s get into today’s topic. The half-finished hackathon solo project that I had recently submitted lol! The original project idea is to build a casual personality test and map some NFTs to the personality results.

Karl and Vitalik talked about retroactive public goods funding on the recent EthOnline click-off ceremony. This idea was raised as we learnt there are lot of coin voting failures, such as the one with EOS and the Hive fork. The idea of retroactive public goods funding is fund only goes to the public good that showing to have an actual impact. Instead of funding public goods ahead of time, and hope that it’s going to do some good over time.

From my observation, Rust is a really popular language in not only blockchain but also areas such as gaming where high performance is required. Many of my favourite projects are written in Rust, and it is frustrating when I can’t understand the language… 🥲 This is also my main driving force to study Rust. I came across few resources on the Rust official site. Making sure that I subscribe to official updates and newsletters.

Starkware is one of the projects that are always on my watch list. Today, I finally have some spare time to go over one of their stark 101 tutorials to write a stark prover from scratch. The tutorial is a great material to understand the proving mechanism, in which the verifier is succinct logarithmically using a small amount of computation and the prover is proving in a quasi-linear to achieve efficiency on both sides.

I have been brainstorming ideas lately for the Consensys’ Bootcamp final project. This final project is an individual project where students are required to build their own Dapp (decentralised application). NFT is such a hot topic lately that many of my classmates are planning to build NFTs related applications. I am personally interested in the topic of privacy, however, it requires mature zero-knowledge infrastructure and study research papers. It doesn’t sound too realistic that a newbie can achieve it at this point in time.