lynnux
☁️ customer engineer at google
🏂 snowboarder
🍞 carb addict
🏘 real estate investor
💃🏻 dancer
✈️ traveler
📖 learner
👾 ex-gamer with semi-annual relapses
☕️ fueled by caffeine
Journal
04 Nov 2021
TIL
I spent this morning’s deep work session studying more on blockchain technology. I learned so many things:
1. Wallets
- wallets don’t store coins but store one or more private keys which prove ownership of an address
- coinbase != coinbase wallet; coinbase stores your private key, coinbase wallet has the customer store their private key
- a wallet can be a piece of paper, software, or hardware
2. Ethereum 2.0
- along with migration to proof of stake and sharding (which I learned in yesterday’s journal entry), I learned about 2 other solutions for Ethereum scalability:
- state channels: group transactions together off-chain and add together on-chain
- plasma: child and grandchild blockchains on top that are vertical specific
3. Gas
- fuel that powers ethereum network
- ex: you pay for gas when you create a transaction on the Ethereum network using Ether and it gets paid to miners
- you can use your own private blockchain network or use public test networks if you don’t want to pay for gas
4. Software
- FileCoin: airbnb for extra computer storage
- MetaMask Browser Extension: access dApps, manage identity, sign off on transactions
5. Preethi Kasireddy
- my role model
- total badass
- intelligent, minority ethnicity, engineer, mentor, business woman & owner
- knows a lot about blockchain technology
- writes super informative and interesting blog posts
- I learned more about The Architecture of a Web 3.0 application in one of her recent posts
6. Upgradeable Smart Contracts
- separate proxy and logic contracts
- backdoor way of updating decentralized applications
- dApps are immutable so there normally isn’t an iterative development process; once a dApp is deployed, there’s no going back to fix a bug or add a new feature
General
Every week day morning, I wake up at 4:45am. This gives me dedicated time to prepare for my day, have a nice deep work session, and go for a walk before I need to start my 8-5. I love walking because it’s extremely good for you and I get to learn new things through a podcast, audio book, or youtube video. I also really enjoy listening to nothing during my walks which is what I did today. By listening to nothing, I’m not bombarding my brain with new information. It allows me to digest the information I’ve been taking in, form my own thoughts and ideas, and allows me to think creatively.
After all the blockchain content I’ve been reading and listening to, I finally had the time to try and understand the concepts, think about the implications of the technology, and figure out what I wanted to do with this new knowledge. I had come to the realization that blockchain technology and decentralized applications have the power to make my current role as a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer obsolete. That’s far off in the future and not something I really need to worry about, but just the thought is crazy. Cloud engineer roles are currently highly desirable. To think that there is a future where they’re no longer needed is absolutely wild! Why would you need to pay Google or Amazon for leased compute power and storage when you can use the world computer and IPFS?
Brainstorming benefits cloud providers like AWS and GCP provide if web 3.0 becomes mainstream:
- Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
- requires lots of computing power from gpu/tpu’s
- how will the advertising industry be affected by web 3?
- can you combine the computing power of all the nodes in the blockchain network to run machine learning workflows?
- Serverless Functions
- developers that do not want to learn how to deploy and connect their apps to the blockchain network
- DevOps
- you still have developers and you still have operations
- blockchain automates a lot of things but you still need additional CICD
- Microservices?
- Do we still need Kubernetes and service meshes?
- I still need to learn and think about this more
In the scenario that this future arrives much earlier than expected, it’s great that I’m learning this now. Fortunately, while blockchain and the cloud are competitors and have opposite goals; they still have many similarities which allow me to learn something new without starting completely from scratch. This is the end of my first week learning about Blockchain and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface! I’m looking forward to adding some hands-on development content on this site soon!