Saturday 9th July, 2022 - Mindblowing Crypto
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
I listened to a lot of podcasts this week, and there was a distinct cluster of crypto related shows that together form a basket that I think paint an enlightening picture of the entire landscape.
From very technical developer focussed, to an angle for the mainstream, to the view from the journalism crowd, and finally the mind blowing things futurologists envisage. I’ve decided to javascript-style hoist those episodes up here so you can get a moon view of the whole landscape. It’s Bonkers.
Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), web5 and lightning privacy with Tony Ep #69 (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - Quite a lot of this went over my head, it gets very technical in an area I’m not that familiar with, but it’s interesting nonetheless to get a good sense of where these technologies are at, it’s clearly very early days - Tony also sounds like a young Jerrod Santo from Changelog https://anchor.fm/citadeldispatch/episodes/CD69-decentralized-identifiers-DIDs--web5--and-lightning-privacy-with-tony-e1ktg84
What problems does crypto solve? (Freakonomics Radio Podcast) - A sort of palatable and sensible exploration of crypto for the mainstream https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-problems-does-crypto-solve-anyway
The Future Of: Crypto Criticism; Substack and ABC News (Recode Media Podcast) - Journalists poking wholes in crypto things https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vcmVjb2RlbWVkaWE/episode/NzM0NWQ0ODQtNTIyMS0xMWVjLWFlMzEtZmZmOWNjODE0Y2M4?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjg4JnLpen4AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
The Network State and How To Start a New Country (Tim Ferris Podcast) - Discussion with Balaji Srinivasan covering many topics from his very interesting book about the future of crypto and humanity, really far out, he is a firehose that will redraw the inside of your head on the crypto future https://tim.blog/2022/07/04/balaji-srinivasan-network-state/
Aside from all the crypto podcasts, I made a fair amount of progress on my ssg this week. Quite a lot of things came together and annoying wrinkles got ironed out. I found a way to write a plugin that combines many components into a single component. It’s a little bit difficult to explain, but essentially it drastically simplifies things, and works super well with the file based routing that you define your website with.
For example, the archives plugin, which adds functionality to generate a set of archives pages from a data collection, previously you had to create separate templates for years/year-months/month/days. But now all that is combined under the hood, so to speak, so you just need to create a single template that contains a single Archives component, and the entire archives tree get generated in that location. Pretty cool.
Yesterday I also found a way to generalise the archives plugin so that it can work for many different data sets. So for instance in my test site I create archives for a linkblog, and I’m very close to getting it working for a regular blog. What’s more it should work for different data types. The linkblog is stored as JSON files whereas the blog is stored as Markdown.
I’m still putting the finishing touches to that, but hopefully, by next week, adding a linkblog or blog to a website will be trivial. Just npm install a plugin and add a small template into your file based routing, and an entire application of static pages will get built at runtime. And there’s no reason why other applications couldn’t be made into plugins in the same way. It’s all quite exiting.
Okay, enough about that, and onto this week’s slightly eclectic mix of podcasts and links…
Podcasts
Blake Lemoine (Duncan Trussel Podcast) - Engineer who believes Google has created a sentient AI, and bizarrely a voice doppelgänger/twin of Tod Maffin the host of the Today in Digital Marketing podcast https://audioboom.com/posts/8113989
American Civil War: Aftermath and Civil War (The Rest is History Podcast) - I was a bit down on some of this series in last week’s issue, but the final episode in the series is really really good, the past meets the present in this episode and some superb analysis and observations about the confederacy and the union and how it affects the present moment https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/203-american-civil-war-aftermath-legacy
Après Spotify w/Anchor Founder @mignano (Techmeme Ride Home Experience Podcast) - A look back at the early days of the podcast scene, how things changed and the current situation of creators and democratised audio on the web, and how progressive enhancement is the best approach to evolving standards, the passion in the music industry, working with big teams of people, and the future of podcasting and web3 and encryption - Sounds like a young Adam Curry https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwLzNtektoMWZqcnRmcmZlODlzTFFnc2c3ZEMyM1pscUdBX20tQlVXd0lDRkk?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjg4JnLpen4AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQFA
Jon Ronson, writer and broadcaster - I really like the way he describes some of his disc selections https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00180zy
What is Money? w/ Lyn Adlen TIP Ep #462 (We Study Billionaire Podcast) - It’s how I buy food and water, please remember that, feels like the entire world has forgotten this at the minute https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/episodes/what-is-money-w-lyn-alden/
Gone With the Wind (The Rest is History Podcast) - An addition to the series on the US civil war, eye opening analysis of the civil war and abolition of slavery aftermath, via the medium of film https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/204-gone-with-the-wind
The Europe Question (TMBA Podcast) - Will more americans start moving to Europe? http://www.tropicalmba.com/europe-question
Jay Hoffman and the History of the Web (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - Lots of fun discussions about RSS and web2.0, sounds like a young Jerrod Santo from Changelog https://shoptalkshow.com/522/
Joe Rogan: Comedy, Controversy, Aliens, UFOs, Putin, CIA and Freedom (Lex Fridman Podcast)- Quite special to listen to these two podcast heavy weights talking, it’s awesome when rivals can be friends like these two https://lexfridman.com/joe-rogan-2
The Last Days of Boris Johnson (The Rest is History Podcast) - The latest very exciting developments in British politics all expertly packaged up by two more podcasters that seem like good pals and are a pleasure to listen to https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/205-the-last-days-of-boris-johnson
Links
hackclub/some-assembly-required - An approachable introduction to assembly - Pleasant read and easy to follow, especially because the higher level language examples that are mapped to assembly are written in javascript, imagine all the clutter you’d have to process if there was a type system getting in the way https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required
The Right Space Around Headings in Web Typography https://pimpmytype.com/hugo-md
This blog is decentralised - I’m curious about trying to get my website on the blockchain https://hugo.md/post/this-blog-is-decentralised
What Comes After Git https://matt-rickard.com/what-comes-after-git
Indie Microblogging (The book) https://book.micro.blog
This Page is Designed to Last - A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last
Writing Better CSS https://sprucecss.com/blog/writing-better-css?utm_source=Web-Design-Weekly.com&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=421
edoardottt/awesome-hacker-search-engines - A list of search engines useful during Penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, red team operations, bug bounty and more https://github.com/edoardottt/awesome-hacker-search-engines
My Wonderful HTML Email Workflow - Quite complicated but enables writing in markdown, and you can include React components, good to read to get sone ideas, uses MJML to create the email HTML https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/wonderful-emails-with-mjml-and-mdx
Average Software Engineering Salaries by Country in 2022 https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-country
Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/07/elon-musk-twitter-jeopardy/
JustinBeckwith/linkinator: 🐿 Scurry around your site and find all those broken links https://github.com/JustinBeckwith/linkinator
Node.js Import Aliases https://abhijithota.me/posts/node-import-aliases/
Related Content by Day of Year in Eleventy https://www.raymondcamden.com/2022/06/23/related-content-by-day-of-year-in-eleventy
The Network State - Balaji’s incredibly and somewhat unbelievably late days book that I am currently reading, free pdf download available - I’m finding it difficult to reconcile how advanced and thought out the ideas in this book are compared with the apparent reality from on the ground crypto currency software developers
https://thenetworkstate.com
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
Consider becoming a patreon, any support would be very much appreciated
Thanks for reading!
If you liked this newsletter you might like my blog, daily linkblog or experimental podcast :)
I’m a freelance web developer, consultant and automation engineer, consider hiring me!
Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!