08/29/24

Rating: 9/10, Sleep: 6 hours

summary

Emotions

• productive
• happy
• inspired
• creative
• limitless
• focused
• strong

What I Learned

• tailwind
• astro
• codeWithAntonio

Exercise

• leoMoves
• trackRun

Food

• grilledChicken
• fruit
• cereal

Slog

• freeCrap(s)

Legacy predispositions

August 14: Spent most of my time trudging through the ThreeJS Lessons today. It was a bit of a slog, but just started Lesson 23 - Blender Intro and this is quite exciting. I’ve had Cinema4d for 6 months now but never knew how to use it. I have a dream of being a designer and coder who can be a bit like the conductor of an orchestra. It’s something I think about a lot these days, in terms of what is the right balance between theory and practice? Should I spend all my time trying to create things, or learning the foundations? I feel like the right answer is something like 80% theory, 20% practice, with a focus on managing the practice bits into sufficiently digestible components. For all the buzz about AI, if you tell it to go produce a killer craps game styled like Zynga Poker, it’ll produce something so far from what you were looking for that sometimes it feels like there’s no hope. But if you use it more to autotune a planned direction, I think that’s much more promising. This is the direction Pietro Schirano recently took with Claude Engineer (AutoPilot) into Omni Engineer (peer coder). I think the latter approach is going to be much more productive. Right now I feel like my ability to read code has significantly improved, but to properly plan things from scratch it’s still quite difficult. So tomorrow I plan on starting the first Core CS class from the OSSU Curriculum to start that two year (hopefully one year) journey, and also to start my Math Academy curriculum as well. There’s a lot ahead, but that’s what keeps me motivated. In the evenings it does start to feel lonely but that’s what I have A for, it’s comforting knowing she’s always there on the other side and hopefully one day soon we can see each other again.

August 17: Spent most of the day learning React Three Fiber. What an amazing library. The fact that I spent so much time learning ThreeJS made me appreciate it that much more. I suppose the same can be said more broadly for learning, and how much time you spend on the “practice” versus “theory”. Right now I’m bouncing between React Three Fiber using threejs-journey, Typescript on UI.dev, Code with Antonio, and Systematic Program Design, and figuring out how I balance all these things with the need to learn practical things fast. It’s a constant push-pull. I also wish there were better learning resources on Solidity, the ones that are out there I don’t love. Maybe just reading the official docs is the best way.

One thing I’ve been pondering today is whether one can go to market with a traditional mobile F2P game with “funny money” as the currency, and then have token rewards for daily competitions be an extra incentive for folks to play (where they can use the token in a separate “fully on-chain” version of the game not owned by the developer). Seems like a potentially promising model to avoid the friction of going fully on-chain day one.

Feeling focused. Trying to get to the point where I feel I’m riding a solar-powered bike, and making progress every day on the journey.

August 18: I’ve hit that point in my learning journey (Typescript + React) where things are becoming a bit of a slog.

Zooming out a bit, to build an onchain casino game, Claude tells me this is what I need. While it’s energizing to face the challenge of learning so many things, it’s also unnerving when I realize how little I know. Especially compared to the teenagers who have been doing things while their brains are still plastic. Like this guy and this guy. Even with all the “appkits” like Onchainkit or Scaffoldeth-2 it’s still really, really hard to ship something without knowing like 10 different things. And even the things that are supposed to make it easy like v0.dev basically suck. If you want to do anything right, you have to do it from scratch. I’m getting slowly better at all of them, but I still feel I need another 100-200 hours before I can ship something basic. Someone should do a “Code with Antonio” equivalent of building onchain apps. I’d pay to watch that, as there is a dearth of explanatory content in the space. The learning curve is crazy, and AI is a helpful companion but definitely no substitute.

All that being said, I know I’m progressing, so going to keep my head up. More Typescript and React tomorrow.

August 19: Spent all day learning React Deep Dive, then the last 3 hours diving into the TON ecosystem. Figuring out how to ship a Mini App (and create some Jettons on the TON blockchain is going to be an interesting challenge). It’s exciting seeing some of the work accumulate, although I have a long way to go still. Excited because the opportunity still feels underexplored and potentially solves a lot of user acquisition issues, especially if we can find a way to offer Jettons as a reward for a daily competition but not necessarily have all logic/state of the game be fully on chain.