2023 August
As I build out LA more and more, I realise just how much time I wasted on not only pointless things but also on not automating some core things deeply. YouTube especially is a huge time sink. Even if you rationalise watching it picture in picture.
Doing things with purpose more and more.
In August I went to Artem's birthday which was great fun. Loved meeting the people there, discussing Georgia, working on Safari at Apple, Booking A/B testing and lots more things. Amsterdam is pretty as always too.
LA
The other part of the month I spent building out LA. It's so so close now.
Is the topic page design made by Leo, first official designer of LA.
Is landing page.
Is current Figma state. It's nice to work with people who know their domain.
I had a vague idea for how the topic page should look but after discussing it with Leo, things suddenly started to be more clear and in some ways obvious.
Building it out now.
Solana Hacker House Berlin
Visited my first Solana hacker house in Berlin.
I came to the hacker house with an idea. I wanted to build an idea platform + have ability to buy digital goods with not just FIAT through Stripe (losing minimum 3/4% on each transaction) but with Solana (essentially free).
I came alone not knowing anyone there. But during it, met the 4 people I worked with for 3 days to finish the demo. Of which I gave a talk in the end.
Video recording here. Slides here. Some more photos here.
I also met many incredible people in Solana space. I talked with probably 100+ people, mostly trying to understand how to build this:
For demo we did build essentially a version of Solana Pay but with an option of platform having custody of the SOL for smoother UX.
I talked with many people on how to make the custody of SOL be done in a way where the platform has no way to drain the funds and it's not trivial. But I will dedicate my entire time after LA launches and has essential UX/features covered to make it work.
The dream app I want to make is an app where you can do interactions that have financial action under the hood without forcing user to sign each transaction. It's seamless. Like how users like a post. Imagine doing a superlike where a superlike sends 5 cents to creator. Seamlessly. For that you need to have the custody of the SOL addresses. As you don't want to have the wallet popping up every time you do a simple action like that.
I want Web3 in Web2 without all the baggage of Web3. And it's not impossible.
I need to read up on the programming model of Solana more but there is a way where for each user on platform, a smart contract gets created where topping up the account with funds, would require a private key. But further usage of it within the platform in some restricted ways (so no attack vectors from anyone including platform) should be possible.
One thing for sure though, the above case of putting money in escrow until an idea/task gets built is all possible with existing tech.
I have many Telegram contacts now in case I get stuck in building any of it. So very grateful for how the event went. It's a nice little community. The best part with the way the crypto market is now, the kind of people you meet at these events now and especially hacker houses are of so high signal.
Another thing I started doing is stream myself coding. It's actually great focus boost.
I do stream without sound as currently I try to not spend time on explaining things to viewers and mostly stream as if I was working on the thing already, just with stream on. The no sound part is due to the fact that I listen to music that is copyrighted on Spotify and can't actually have that playing in streams.
I do plan to build my own streaming platform where in the least, you could connect your own Spotify and listen to music as the streamer is listening it.
Photos
Listened
Plans
Release LA. No fucking around.