Highlights

• My wife and I became parents.
• I realized that caring for a newborn takes more time than I expected.
• I’m unsure what to do with my partially-finished Hacker News course.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Finish recording my course

• Result: Baby arrived early, and I only recorded 20% of the material.
• Grade: N/A

Recording the course took longer than I thought, and the baby arrived a few weeks earlier than we expected, so I didn’t get to all the material.

A year ago, I listened to an interview with Jesse Pollak on an episode of Into the Bytecode.

Jesse works for Coinbase, and he noticed that lots of developers building apps on top of Ethereum were solving the same problems over and over again. He started a project at Coinbase to create a layer on top of Etherum called Base. Base would get Ethereum developers up and running faster because they could use shared solutions to these common problems.

I’ve been interested in Ethereum the past year, especially the Base ecosystem. The problem is that after hours of reading about Base, I still don’t get what Base is.

Every few months, I check back in on the Base website’s developer section to see if there’s a path to building on Base for a beginner, and the path seems to be “here are some disparate tutorials for very specific things, and if you have questions, come ask us on Discord.”

Highlights

• I learned a few techniques that make it easier for me to record videos for my course.
• I’ve decided I don’t need to use a Merchant of Record service.
• I’ve integrated htmx into my standard toolkit for making web applications.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Record publishable versions of four lessons from the course

• Result: Recorded most of one lesson
• Grade: D

I forgot how long it takes to record videos! And I underestimated the amount of work I had outside of recording. Most weeks, I didn’t have time to record at all, but now I’m in the swing of recording.

Last week, I was listening to the CoRecursive podcast interview with PowerShell’s lead architect, Jeffrey Snover.

One moment in that interview has been stuck in my head the whole week is when Snover argues that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are inherently “antisocial”:

I realized that — you know, that the mouse is antisocial. The GUI is antisocial. So what’s that mean? You have a problem to solve, and you solve it with the GUI. What do you have? A problem solved.