So I started out 2018 with a goal to start this blog and write some cool posts, but the truth is I failed miserably. I wrote a couple of posts thinking I would write specifically on bugs that I found but that tends to be pretty difficult since you don’t necessarily notice bugs all of the time.
Where did 2018 go?
I’ve been interested in cryptocurrencies for a long time and last year took the advantage to expand my understanding of the ecosystem out there. Initially I setup a site that would pull in pricing from all of the different exchanges. It was a great learning experience but honestly, I just didn’t have the time to maintain it. There is a lot of shady things that go on with small cap coins to try to get attention.
There are all types of things you have to check for before including the price as part of the average. The amount of time it took to try to maintain it was too much for me to handle in just a few minutes a day of available time. In the best interest of the community I brought the site down until I could get more time to work on it. When I finally had spare time, the ecosystem for this type of site had matured a great deal. Competition had improved the quality of the sites that provided this information. I no longer feel like it’s a good use of my time to pursue that.
What’s next?
Well I changed jobs this year and went to a new company. Right now I am loving the culture and environment that I’m a part of. We’ve got a ton of work to do and I’ve been trying to fully immerse myself. It’s a new domain which has provided some challenges but it is nice to work in something new. It’s an exciting time to work at the company due to growth but the people I work with are fantastic. They are phenomenal people both professionally and on a personal level
New Projects
My next small project I’ve been working on is simply working the the Lightning Network for Bitcoin and Litecoin payments. Over the holiday break I was able to get a Lightning Node setup and connected. I put a very small amount of funds on while testing just in-case I got the setup wrong. I’ve been working on integrating a “social network” allows you to pay to post using the Lightning Network.
I don’t think this is a mass adoption project but there are some people in crypto that would enjoy the tech. I think it can serve as an example of what could be done with lightning. Privacy advocates could also pay small amounts to use a service instead of the service collecting information on them. If a service relies on micro payments and not advertising it can survive like this. I don’t expect this to be anything other than an experimental project but it has been fun so far.
How does it work?
The challenge of the project has been to communicate with the lightning network from PHP. I’m most comfortable using PHP as a back end so I chose Laravel for the social media portion. I’m using NodeJS and VueJS as a bridge to the Lightning Network and front end respectively. This should be a fun project and I hope to find a few hours a week to work on it. I intend to make some posts on how it works as I build. Being off the last 2 weeks was nice but now there’s a ton of work to do!
So that’s pretty much 2018, what’s my goals for 2019? Well do some work on my side project, lose some weight, spend more time with family. I know this sounds like the standard new years goals, and they are, but I hope to accomplish them. In addition, I really want to make a better effort to write more on here. I’ll be adding some posts on some things I’ve been working with going forward and hopefully it can bring some value to someone!