markjgsmith

2024/05/20 #

• The world is on the war path again. This time it's an old classic. Red items are being left everywhere I go. For example bit of red ribbon tied around a post next to where I sit and lay my head. I little red box thing that has the shape of a roll of quarters left for me to discover as I woke up this morning. Past experience has shown that these will likely get turned into escallations in one way or another. #

• cat << EOF > Documenting code while blogging

  Running a blog while developing code is a great idea. It's a fantastic way to hone your thoughts as you go, and a place to host the stories and activities that led to the software you are building.

  Future you will be able to easily look back and remember the thought processes that resulted in taking a particular approach. Another perhaps less talked about reason to run a blog, especially as a solo developer, is as a relatively frictionless way to write basic documentation for the software you are building.

  Solo developers don't have much time to spare and often find it difficult to write and keep product documentation up to date. One quick and easy solution to this is to write a blog post introducing major new features, describing general functionality. If you use tags or categories, something most blogging software support, then you have a super easy way to group these documentation posts together.

  In this way you'll be able to ensure you have basic documentation available as you go. These posts aren't really supposed to replace full on detailed product documentation, but they might serve as a starting point for writting such a thing if you later need to. They will definitely be useful for early users.

  It's also a great way to provide product data to ChatGPT style bots. These have been gaining a lot of popularity recently, and could be a good way for users of your software to get information about the software you are developing.

  EOF

• cat << EOF > Bitcoin is great for learning about money

  One of the most over-looked positive things about Bitcoin, and perhaps crypto in general, is how they promote learning about money in general. There’s nothing quite like getting actual physical hands on experience with something, and that's something that's totally possible with crypto currencies. Anyone can participate as an investor, as a person executing transactions, but also as a developer.

  There are so many ways to get stuck in. Being able to easily set yourself up to receive and send is huge. From simple transactions to creating your own blockchain, you can relatively easily get hands on experience. This is in stark contrast to the existing financial and monetary system, which is opaque and difficult to learn about, since you really can only learn from books or by getting a job with an organisation in the industry.

  Once you start exchanging then you inevitably get interested in all other aspects of money, in both existing traditional finance, but also of course in bitcoin and crypto industries. I think it's likely that in the future many traditional education institutions will start to run crypto courses as part of traditional finance degrees. It's an exiting time to be interested in finance, with so many places to learn, what has been until recently quite an unnaproacheable subject.

  EOF

• Kevin Rose made a surprise appearance on a recent Twit episode. I initially missed it when it came out. Lots of great tech discussion on all sorts of topics including TikTok & China, gaming platform algorithms, AI chat bots and algorithmic manipulation, VR and Apple Vision, Moonbirds, crypto, Bitcoin, Etherium, Solana, NFTs & speculation, raising VC money, selling to yuga labs, hype cycles, only buying what you can afford to lose, sticking to your allocation goals, portfolio rebalancing, intel, chips and foundries, and rich people buying media companies. Overall a good listen. #

Today’s links:

• OpenAI strikes deal to bring Reddit content to ChatGPT - No mention of the amount the deal is worth, but it follows a similar deal with Alphabet worth $60 million per year. Reddit stock is up by 12% on this latest news. www.reuters.com #

• The carcinization of web frameworks - Front end frameworks appear to be converging on a similar set of features, and these might end up becoming part of the web platform. Immutabiliy, single-directional flow of data, signals, server-side rendering, resumability and web components are all patterns that are appearing across frameworks. toddle.dev #

• Five Basic Things About JavaScript That Will Help Non JavaScript-Focused Web Designers - I thought this was a pretty good list. Basically if you are more of a CSS / designer person, these are the top javascript things you should get familiar with to make your job easier: selecting things, updating classes, listening for events, changing HTML, getting data from forms. Great examples and explanations of each, plus a few bonuses like web components. frontendmasters.com #

• New Post: Documenting code while blogging markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Bitcoin is great for learning about money markjgsmith.com #