There are many more games apart from the Flexbox and Grid ones from this creator[1].
CryptoZombies[2] is often the recommended start for anyone wanting to learn Ethereum's Solidity and associated front-end library. It's not as gamified though.
I've found that interactive tutorials/courses, like those that KataCoda seems to offer are a pretty interesting approach: https://www.katacoda.com/ (someone once linked one of their Kubernetes courses, it was pretty nice; seems to be locked behind a signup now)
On a slightly unrelated note, i think that it's also important to figure out what to learn in the first place. Therefore, i think that this site is pretty useful for seeing some of the common technologies or practices: https://roadmap.sh/
I got thrown into an existing application. The best way to learn React was really just to work inside an existing code base so you can see existing patterns.
I was a developer, now in IT security, I started a business and haven’t looked back since then. If you’re highly technical and can stand the work, right now is absolutely the time to kick off IT security stuff
So if I want a new Macbook purely for software development and building mobile apps, what should I pick between the $2499 14" and the $3499 16"? Doesn't look like there's any difference in Xcode build times from their website
14" + M1 Max (24 GPU cores) with 32 Gb Ram is the sweet spot imho. It costs a bit more but you get twice the memory bandwidth and double the ram, which will always prove handy.
I develop iOS apps and I think this is the sweet spot. I am not sure what impact the extra bandwidth of the M1 Max will have though. We will have to wait to see. For video editing is clear. For Xcode not so sure.
14 or 16 inches is up to personal preference. I just value more the smaller package and the reduced weight. Performance is about the same.
Read about Level 2 solutions like zk snarks. It's really fascinating stuff. I enjoy the podcast called "Zero Knowledge." The last one with Professor Alessandro Chiesa is really great, but that's not the best one for beginners for sure.
Alogrand has some pretty nice tech. It feels like a v2 - instead of being held together with tape and fencing wire it's a well engineered properly thought out solution.
Things like their on-chain language not being Turing complete so they can scale it better than the Ethereum disaster.
Most of the new blockchains constantly being spun up are little more than schemes to make the founders rich. Even if the stacks are technically cleaner and nicer to work with, it's really hard to imagine any new blockchain bringing anything significant enough to the table to overcome network effects of established leaders. Specifically be wary of coins like Solana, Cardano, and maybe even Ethereum, which Gary Gensler of the SEC has indicated are probably all unregistered securities and he looks to be gearing up to come after them.
I'm in the bitcoin only, simple, rock solid foundation with complexity built in higher layers camp, so I'll mention a couple of interesting things going on.
The lightning network is starting to get some real momentum after years of development. People are using it in unexpected ways, like building an e2e encrypted chat network (https://sphinx.chat/) that piggybacks on the network, or the LNURL-auth protocol (https://xn--57h.bigsun.xyz/lnurl-auth.html) that allows websites to provide persistent user accounts that are authenticated with a user's lightning wallet and require no other personal information. There's recently been some proposals (e.g. https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf) to do some magic to stuff a truly massive amount of scaling within the limited bitcoin blocksize.
Protocol changes needed for trustless drivechains/sidechains seems to be gaining traction, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0300.mediawi.... The Rootstock sidechain will potentially bring the ethereum virtual machine to bitcoin as a sidechain.
I know Ethereum also has some interesting layer 2 work, but I'm not as familiar with what's happening since I don't personally buy into the fat, complex base layer approach, the much more centralized nature of the network and development, nor the planned transition to proof of stake.
One question though (and this is a question I've had for a while with all these ed-tech startups) - how do you ensure the quality of the courses outside of plain ratings? What's the guarantee that the course creator has explained things in a way that will help someone learn effectively?
Could you spill the beans a little? I’m really curious about happened in the 90s with Microsoft that antagonized them so much (was born in 99, so I’ve only seen the Bill Gates who’s saving lives in Africa)
Microsoft as led by Bill Gates was an aggressive, anti-competitive entity.
They crushed competitors with the motto "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", where they'd start to embrace an open standard, extend it with their own customizations, and use that to crush the competition.
They tried to do it with Java, but Sun prevailed in a lawsuit against them.
Before that they crushed word processor rival WordPerfect (though arguably, WP did not handle the migration to GUI properly), and spreadsheet rival Lotus 1-2-3 this way. They leveraged their control of the Platform (Windows) to control any software market they wanted, such as internet browsers, crushing Netscape, leading to an anti-trust lawsuit [1] that almost caused Microsoft to have to split up (arguably saved by Bush Jr. being elected to office).
There was also the SCO lawsuit against Linux, but that was after Bill Gates stepped down from CEO, so it's at Steve Ballmer's feet.
Needless to say, he (& Microsoft) accumulated so much ill will that it basically required a generation turnover (as you've demonstrated ;) ) to forget.
I already have a decent amount of experience with Linux internals, but my next project is far less ambitious in scope: simply reverse-engineering the Android-based firmware on a Huawei router and creating a drop-in replacement.
There is a lot of foundational hacking to be done around the Oculus standalone headsets. I don't believe the headsets have yet been cracked to unlock the bootloader to launch unsigned firmware.
It's probably worth moving discussion over to a forum and Wiki dedicated to such reverse engineering efforts (such as XDA developers) [1]
I do think that now is the time for such a project, and that crowdfunding has changed the economics to make this possible in a way that it never has been before.
