Week of 10/24 Roundup

AI uses in the wild, Solidity Developer Alpha, & Web3 Social Media

Here’s the best of what I wrote, recorded, and found on the internet last week.

Lex Fridman & Andrej Karpathy

This was a gem. I especially liked Andrej’s thoughts on ‘advice for young people.’ Don’t worry about the how so much. Just put in the hours. This clip on how he approaches his work is excellent as well.

Youtube Shorts & Code

Vs code is killing it on shorts. Code demos seem to do really well in shorts. This sort of thing is worth exploring if you’re selling/promoting a developer facing product.

AI is Getting Used By Everyone

One of the coolest parts about open source software is that it allows more people to use it for novel tasks. AI in particular is getting exciting now because people are figuring out how to use it to solve real problems in their own lives. Dwarkesh has a pretty cool example here:

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

I read a lot of books for my podcast & blog. But often I can't finding the particular passage I'm looking for. Ctrl-F doesn't work unless you know the exact phrase. So I built search for ebooks using OpenAI's embeddings API. Link below to use. Works surprisingly well!

And here’s another one. GPT3 prompts in Google Sheets 🤯

Shubhro Saha @shubroski

This weekend I built =GPT3(), a way to run GPT-3 prompts in Google Sheets. It's incredible how tasks that are hard or impossible to do w/ regular formulas become trivial. For example: sanitize data, write thank you cards, summarize product reviews, categorize feedback...

Solidity Developer Alpha

Paul Razvan Berg with an excellent thread here about templates he uses when learning a language. What’s most interesting about Paul’s templates isn’t just the templates themselves, but that they’re a window into how someone like Paul learns.

What’s your process for learning a new language? If you don’t have an answer to that question, maybe you should..

Paul Razvan Berg @PaulRBerg

I write code primarily in Solidity, TypeScript, and Rust, and for each language I built a template that I use every time I create a repo from scratch. This is a mini thread in which I aggregate all of my templates, in case you will find any one of them useful. 1/5

NFT Development and W1nt3r

If you’re not following @w1nt3r on twitter, you should be. We’re interviewing them on Devs Do Something this week, and the research process has been a gold mine of insights. Check out this thread of threads from w1nt3r on solidity development, NFTs, and learning in public:

WINTΞR 💙💛 @w1nt3r_eth

I'm building web3 projects in the open. This is a meta-thread of all the interesting things I've learned ↓

Relationship Management

This thread from Joshua Steinman on how he stays in touch with many people via a kind of personal CRM in Airtable was excellent

joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @JoshuaSteinman

Open ended thread on relational database building in @airtable at the request of fellow founder @jsohere: the question was, how do actually **do** the relating. Let’s dive in: 1/?

Web3 Social Media

I wrote a piece on web3 social media last week. If you’re interested in what’s happening in the world of Lens, Farcaster, & more. You should check it out:

Next Gen Social Media

Devs Do Something

This episode with Cami was recorded live in Bogota, and it was a memorable one. Cami had a moment in the beginning where she got emotional at the fact that she’s been able to have as much success as she’s had so far after the sacrifices her parents made to immigrate to the US from Colombia. She’s also just a really excellent speaker & DevRel engineer.

If you’re interested in Fuel, DevX, and crypto in LatAm, I highly recommend it:

The Balmanack

I found the Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan the other day, and started going through some of the recommended reading. What I found fascinating is that Balaji recommends a ton of technical books - something not common when people give out book recommendations. I actually hadn’t heard of Schaum’s outlines, but recently bought the Linear Algebra edition as I’m working on shoring up my math skills as I dive deeper into ML. I recommend checking out the Balmanack & much of the reading here if you want to level up:

https://www.balmanack.com/balajis-recommended-reading

That’s all for last week, expect another one of these roundups this weekend (:

Have a great week.

-Sam