Spend any time around Web3, and you’ll find a lot of true believers. Lots of deeply interesting but deeply complicated decentralization schemes and products that can’t help but have sharp edges for users to bump into. Then you have the TopShots and Sorares of the world that use the blockchains but simplify things enough for users to just… use them.
Reads #
- Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks: How much blockchain is too much blockchain? I like this outline. I’ll just point out, once again, this piece is largely about user identity as a compelling use case.
- Sorare Community Update: Sorare’s product update barely mentions the underlying blockchain tech, but clearly still carries forward the community-focused ethos of Web3.
- ‘Lost Ark,’ a years-old South Korean video game, is 2022’s surprise big hit: Found this story as I was researching ARPG games this week. Good overview of gameplay and audience dynamics at play with this genre.
- Big Ten Blame: A contrarian take on who’s to blame for the weird consolidations in college sports. I love Ben Thompson diagrams.
- An Interview with Barry Jenkins: Bias creeps in where you may not think of it. A good reminder… Apple and Google both were working to fix these sorts of biases in their image processing for iOS and Android.
Code & Tools #
- JavaScript just got way faster: Thought this was a nice quick overview of Bun, the project I linked to last week. If the web page was too dry for you, this is a good overview.
- Instagram Q&A: Friend and extraordinarily talented designer Aaron Weyenberg has been teaching himself 3D design with Blender for a few years now, posting amazing work on his Instagram. If you’ve ever thought about learning Blender, a good set of resources here.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joPca0-fl00: I’ve always been surprised at how much tooling Unreal doesn’t have yet. No cloud build service, for example. Am about halfway through this video. Some good ideas here. Design through play is a good philosophy.
- 10 Best Practices to containerize Node.js web applications with Docker: Guess what I was doing last week. I liked this list.
Maker & Home Automation #
- Building a Lego-powered Submarine 4.0: This is a really clever build. The whole series is worth watching. Such a great little design.