For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained control over memory and control flow. To motivate myself, I’ve been benchmarking my Ethereum implementation against the official Go implementation.

Goal grades

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

Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company.

For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.

Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely. The product quickly caught on, and it’s been my main focus ever since.

I found it eye-opening in terms of understanding how municipal governments work in practice and how perverse incentives lead to poor community outcomes. It had a huge impact on the way that I think about where to live and what policies I support in local government.

This book complements Happy City in that both books explore what characteristics of a city make it attractive for residents to live there but also how legislation often yields the opposite results.

Have you ever used archive.org’s Internet Wayback Machine? It’s a free tool that’s been archiving the web since 1996. So, if you want to see what Google looked like in 1999, they’ve got it.

ArchiveBox is like your own, personal Internet Wayback Machine. It’s free and open-source, and you can use it to archive most websites.