This week’s list is a bit of a link dump of some of the technical things going on behind the scenes at Proof Of Learn, the startup I joined in late May.
Our first product is a game called Metacrafters, “a learn-and-earn game that teaches players, or Crafters, how to write smart contracts and build on-chain. We want to onboard the next 1 million blockchain developers to web3.” We’re building a game using Unreal with lore and challenges that together will teach you about different blockchain technologies while picking up practical skills. This is married to a learning platform that will offer courses to really go deep on programming skills. This ends up being a lot of game dev, the platform services backing the game, the learning platform, and integration with a blockchain which, in our case, is Solana (see below).
We’ve got a lot more information coming later this week and regularly coming out every few weeks. If you’re interested in any of the topics below, please reach out! I’m happy to nerd out on any of this. We’re also hiring across the engineering team. Come join us in this adventure.
Related Links #
- Consensus 2022 | Sheila Lirio Marcelo - Proof of Learn: Sheila Marcelo, our CEO, spoke at Consensus 2022, explaining the origin of Proof of Learn and our mission. She also announced a few significant partnerships.
- Metacrafters: There’s a trailer available here on the game. I can’t wait to share more about this soon.
- Why Metacrafters is Bullish on Solana: This is a really high level overview of the Solana blockchain and why we feel this fits with our goals. A more technical post will be up soon.
- More information on our Genesis NFT drop: This isn’t just a beautiful NFT, but the way for you to be a part of shaping our final gameplay and course material through early access and a shortened feedback loop. We’re minting on Solana, which is a low-transaction-cost, high throughput blockchain built on Rust. (more on that in a minute)
- ok so what the f*** is the deal with Solana: The official Solana site links to this, and I think it is both informative and will give you an overview of the general feel of working in the lower levels of Web3. 😉 (Obviously, from the title, it contains strong language and is quite… irreverent. Consider yourself warned - this may be NSFW depending on your workplace.)
Reads #
- SoFi Stadium’s converged network saw 53 petabytes of traffic for Super Bowl 56: This is amazing. The vast majority of the data seems to be the video streams to power all the screens in the stadium, which means that this total is likely close in rough magnitude to what a normal game would see every season. The network topology is the point of this article, which is also fascinating (and a bit of an infomercial).
- $6 Billion for Cricket?! Jiminy! Why?: This was shocking news from my perspective. When I was working in India on ESPN.in and the Sony ESPN network partnership, Star & Hotstar seemed like an unstoppable force for cricket rights. Sports rights are going to be an interesting battleground between traditional media and Apple/Amazon/Everyone else. (Worth also noting the NESN News)
- Disney Offers Global Travel Package To All 12 Of Its Parks For $110,000: I have to admit, this itinerary seems pretty cool. Sadly, I don’t have a few hundred grand lying around to take this trip. 🙃
- What would RBG (probably) say?: A weird experiment built using analysis of RBG’s writing and media appearances. The Post wrote up a decent article about some of the questions this work raises.
Code & Tools #
- The Rust Book: Solana is built on Rust, and my day job therefore uses Rust a lot. I’m coming to really like it. This is the best place to get started.
- actix-web: I have a love/hate relationship using Node.js for API stacks. The fact that we’re using a fair amount of Rust already has led me to experiment with using Rust for a few API services. This framework seems mature, and has decent performance in benchmarks.
- Diesel.rs: There are a couple of ways to interact with a DB, but I do like having an ORM if it’s not too heavy. Mixed feelings about this so far. I’m also looking at something like SQLx or one of the ORMs built on top of it. If you have experience with any of these let me know!
- Web Framework Benchmarks: Thought this was an interesting list of benchmark results. The associated github repo is a pretty good source for configurations and setup code, too.
Maker & Home Automation #
- LEGO sculpture of two planes flying: This is so clever and very cool.