Solana CHI HackerHouse

February 9, 2022

A few weeks ago, I went to the Solana HackerHouse in Chicago at the Jump Trading building. This was my first experience at a crypto event irl and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Going into it, I was under the impression that it was going to be more of a bootcamp with speakers and things of that nature – it was more of a co-working space for developers buidl-ing on Solana.

Now, I am fairly new to the Solana development world. I have just started learning Rust/Anchor and the Solana programming model about 2 months ago. I’ve gone through a ton of tutorials online and have built a couple of very small and basic projects on my own, but nothing I’ve built comes even close to what was being built by the developers at the HackerHouse that week. Just about everyone there was a part of a group or start up it seemed like and it showed me that I still have quite a ways to go before I can call myself a Solana dev. But it was very eye opening and I met some very cool people there, it also motivated me to continue the course and pursue this skillset even more.

I would recommend anyone interested in Solana/crypto (even if not a developer) sign up for one of the many HackerHouses that are now global and attend at least a day or two just to meet people in the ecosystem and get a boots on the ground idea of what’s being built. I will say attending this made me even more bullish on Solana than I was before. So, all in all the Chicago HackerHouse was a great experience. They fed us everyday, there was unlimited coffee, and we got free merch (plus the NFT gallery and the after hours events that I was not able to attend bc of work :/). I would like to attend the Miami HackerHouse coming up this spring, but I would also prefer to attend these with a team and specific project/goal in mind.

Thank you Nasdaq

November 19, 2021

Tonight, I stumbled across a bunch of articles written by the Chief Economist at Nasdaq, Phil Mackintosh, on LinkedIn that were published on the Nasdaq official site and fell down the rabbit hole a bit. These articles were aimed at incoming interns at Nasdaq and even though I work in the industry at a Market Maker I learned quite a bit from these and they were a very fun read - you can actually sign up to receive these blog posts that he publishes weekly every thursday in your email. I used evernote to create some notes on what I learned from the readings and think I will continue to do so going forward (there are a lot of diff articles I want to read here). Here is a link to the notebook.

In other news, I also somehow came across this pseudonymous developer in crypto on Twitter and really liked this blog post of theirs about the comparions of money printing and inflation in the US today to Weimar Germany in the 1920s They make a good argument that they are not really comparable and provide another example from history that is less well known.

Best content of the last week

October 6, 2021

This past weekend, I had about a 5 hour drive from Louislville back to Chicago and I normally spend drives like this catching up on some of my favorite podcasts. This time I listened to a few episodes of Deribit's Deep in the Money podcast. This podcast is solely about Crypto Options and the host interviews various different players in the industry. Given that I work at a TradFi Options Market Maker, this is an area that interests me greatly. With all that said, I was blown away at the latest episode with Greg Magadini from Genesis Volatility. Please go check this out if crypto options are of interest to you, there were a lot of interesting topics discussed in a manner that is easy to understand. I will be giving this episode another listen sometime this week.

Life decisions!

September 27, 2021

Anthony Pompliano, otherwise known simply as Pomp, is someone I've discovered within the last year when I firsrt got into the crypto world and he has been one of my favorite follows since! Pomp always has some interesting and thought provoking things to say and he definitely knows his stuff when it comes to Bitcoin and investing. Here is a thread he tweeted the other day about the most important decisions a person makes in their lifetime that I really enjoyed reading, definitely some good advice here.

also I really enjoyed this tweet I saw the other day from @0xc1a8

iPhone prices in ETH at their launch:

iPhone 6s: 690.41 ETH
iPhone 7: 52.17 ETH
iPhone 8: 2.49 ETH
iPhone 10: 3.37 ETH
iPhone 11: 3.70 ETH
iPhone 12: 1.96 ETH
iPhone 13: 0.24 ETH

— Cal (in NYC) (@0xc1a8) September 15, 2021

In the beginning

September 27, 2021

This page was inspired by the wip on Sean Halpon's personal website I really enjoyed the idea of an informal personal timeline to keep track of your life. Part of what made this so attractive to me is the fact that the updates I post here don't need to be full fledged blog posts and aren't really something I would want to tweet out. I will just use this space to air my thoughts out and post updates on projects and/or ideas I'm working on at the time.