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About a year ago, I took a free MOOC course called “Learning How to Learn.” I’m not bad at learning–in fact, I’ve had a successful academic career; I double majored in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science and graduated top of my class with awards to show for it. I took this course because I had thought, perhaps, I wasn’t actually good at learning but rather good at “playing the game.” The game, mentioned in this essay by Paul Graham, is one where students try and guess potential exam questions for classes and study for them. If you were good at the game, you would study for the right questions and do well. Surely enough, I was quite proficient at this game during my time in school. ...

As of writing this post, Ethereum is trading at ~$450 USD. After soaring to $1000 back in 2018, it’s dropped as low as $83–and has now recently rallied a great amount. As news articles and a new wave of FOMO inevitably deludes the market, I thought it might be a good time to reflect and see what Ethereum might look like in an ideal world. _Note: I won’t be talking about POS/POW. Instead, I’ll focus on the technology of Ethereum. ...

In the world of engineering today, everything seems to have become an API. If you’re a front-end engineer, you’re likely going to be working with frameworks–which are abstractions (that are invoked like an API). Even if you’re working in pure html/css/js, you’re still interacting with the standard APIs that the browser exposes. If you’re a back-end engineer, you’re likely going to be working with servers like Tomcat, working with tools like AWS, and interacting with the CPU and memory through libraries. ...

This was originally posted May 30th 2019. Edited February 8th 2020. As I drove home listening to a podcast about cryptocurrencies (one that’s often quite optimistic), I couldn’t help but critique some of the comments they were making; here are some of those thoughts jotted down. Instead of technical critiques, I want to focus on behavioral challenges and implications. One of the ideas I heard get echoed over and over again was the idea of “a unified gaming platform.” Why the hosts of the show thought it was a good idea is explained below: ...