I've hosted this website on Drupal since 2010. That's almost a decade. Which is like a century in web time scales. But now it is time for a change.
Using Drupal taught me a ton that I will always value including:
* What a content management system is and why they are nice
* What server-side rendering is
* That I don't really like sysadmin-ing very much
* PHP
* How to participate in an open source community
In December 2018 I went to South Korea with Isaac DeFrain (friend, neighbor, CTY colleague, former RChain colleague) to teach a workshop about blockchain and decentralization through the lens of the RChain project. It was quite an experience. I was pretty nervous going into it, but Isaac had the right mindset. He said it would be as cool as we made it. And we made it pretty cool.
The concept of a bitcoin transaction is pretty clear. It is a financial payment from one party to another. While there are some nuances when it comes to things like multi-signature wallets, or P2PK vs P2PKH, bitcoin transactions don't generally vary by orders of magnitude in complexity. That being the case, it is natural to discuss the performance of the bitcoin network in terms of how many transactions it can handle per second (TPS).
With a split forming in the RChain community in the last few days, and developers suddenly in high demand, several people have asked me what I might like to work on with them. Rather than making them guess at what offer I might like or explaining it privately multiple times, I figured I'd just write it up and maybe boost community morale at the same time.
Even though I jsut went to Europe for the first time, I had a chance to go back already. This time I went to Berlin for RCon3. It was my first conference presentation. I also had a little bit of time to see Berlin stuff. Hopefully I'll get out and about more next time.
This year I spent third session travelling in Europe with Julie. I had never been there and was glad to have her showing me around. And just to spend some time together.
Julie had already been travelling for weeks and her adventures are chronicled much more carefully than my own.
I've been programming rholang for about 5 months now and in general I love it and am super happy I learned. If you want to join in that journey, checkout out my tutorial. In those five months, though, I've also noticed a few pain points where I think syntactic changes would go a long ways. I've opened issues or started discussions about some of these already. But I'll write them down here too.
The past few years I've grown more and more concerned about the use of services like docusign. My complaints are partly because of the horrible user experience which often involves creating an account and agreeing to a long consent written entirely in legalese. But more importantly I'm concerned that they market themselves as a company that facilitates secure communication, when in reality they are just a trusted third party who could easily be compromised by the pressures of a government, or simply hacked.
This update is long overdue. Thanks for all of your patience. The past few weeks have been significantly different than I had planned. I don't mean to imply that they were worse. Only time will tell, but I suspect this surprise turn of events may prove to be better.
Today did not go well. Things started normally enough when I got up around 8:15, had breakfast with Sharon and Bob, packed up, and hit the road around 9:30. I did a test ride before leaving and my knee was feeling normal enough. I had two potential stopping points in Mary Esther FL, and in Pensacola FL depending on how far I made it with the outrageous headwind.
