Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Massachusetts Residents Can Sue Online Merchants for Spam

Last week, I saw an interesting article on the /r/legaladvice subreddit. An e-commerce business owner was complaining that a customer was suing because the merchant had been sending the customer promotional emails for years that the customer never agreed to. The author deleted the post a few days later, but I found a copy of the text.

The merchant was indignant and felt like it was a shakedown, but I was 100% on the customer’s side. The merchant is in the wrong for spamming their customers with promotional emails they never requested, and so the merchant should suffer financial repercussions.

Paternity Leave: Month 2

Highlights

  • I’m finding it surprisingly difficult not to work.
  • Sleep is getting a little better.
  • I used Nix to create a slick and reusable fuzz testing workflow.

Goal grades

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

Enjoy family time

  • Result: Spent lots of time with my wife and our newborn son and had frequent visits with friends and family.
  • Grade: A

I’ll be okay if I don’t work for a bit

I never thought of myself as someone who needs to work all the time, but I’m finding it difficult to take time off.

Paternity Leave: Month 1

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.

I'm Still Confused About Base

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.

Noah Bragg's First Stoke Fire Livestream

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.”