4+1: episode 6

Today was my first day at the office. OK, a desk in the corner of an office space of another startup, who’ve offered to give us some space to work from. Cheers to humble beginnings!

1. I came across one of the most interesting projects in the recently-hot crypto space, this one being closer to home for me, as it involves storage. FileCoin from Protocol Labs essentially pays you to be a storage hosting node on the network, while offering very competitive pricing for users that need storage. Kinda like being paid to be a BitTorrent seeder. These guys recently did the biggest ICO to date, although it wasn’t without completely kosher it turns out. Nevertheless, the guys at Protocol Labs have done other cool things, like IPFS (a decentralized, content-addressable file system), which they used to make Wikipedia available to Turkey residents, after its government decided to block access to it earlier this year.
2. Still on the topic of crypto and blockchain, BAT is another great example of how this technology has the potential to impact entire industries (ad tech in this case). Instead of paying a centralized ad broker (read: Facebook), the advertiser may now directly reward the user for viewing an ad (AKA an impression), while users may chose to browse ad-free if they so choose (and receive zero tokens). While BAT is more of a thread to Facebook, another company is doing something similar, this time more of a threat to Google’s model.
3. It’s been a while (too long, actually), but recently I started writing proper code. It’s a scary but thrilling experience to start a new project entirely from scratch. But it’s never been a better time to be doing software development, with the quality of tools and infrastructure available. I want to point out a fantastic such example, the Serverless Framework. I came across it via another amazing tutorial on how to build a proper React app on AWS, specifically leveraging the AWS Lambda serverless compute platform. I can’t tell you how happy I am not having to think about managing VMs or EC2 instances. Write code → test → deploy. That’s it.
4. Catching up with a good friend recently, I learned about a new network protocol that Google has been working on. QUIC, as this protocol is called, comes roughly as a replacement for TCP, one of the building blocks of the Internet. Despite TCP’s many drawbacks, it’s been really hard to practically switch to something new, since the code that implements TCP is pretty much everywhere. But with Google being Google, they may have a chance in adoption of this new protocol. Not everyone welcomes QUIC though. You see, another feature of this protocol is true end-to-end encryption. This means that companies, governments, etc, can’t snoop on your web traffic. A good feature, if you ask me.
5. On a lighter note — although you can’t really beat the unique sound of an air-cooled vintage Porsche 911, this guy stripped the engine off a really great example of one and converted it to fully electric. It even comes with a manual gearbox and a ~200mi range. Pretty damn cool.