Beyond partisan politics in distributed systems

Devcon4 was a blast- at least, the bits I was well enough to attend. I've been fighting a pretty serious illness for some months (ticks are the worst), but my housemate has a diagnosis now so hopefully the end is in sight for me. It was less about attending the conference and more about catching up and swapping notes with people, anyway. I stayed with the Circles UBI team (who are all amazing) and managed to bump in to Frankie from MetaMask & the Scuttleverse again, and meet some members of the 'Dark Crystal' team (which is a super exciting project- stay tuned!)

I also managed to catch up with Vinay Gupta in the corridor after Stewart Brand's talk and had a nice little chat with him. It was really quite delightful and it seemed like we both got a lot out of it. Turns out we're all a lot more reasonable in real life... who knew? :p (more)

Building success on public blockchains: a strategic guide

With development of blockchain applications now booming there are many interesting things happening and a lot of reasons to be excited for 2018. Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic too. Many are approaching application development in the same ways they always have, which in an open global system runs at odds with the design and ethos of the very ground they're walking on.

Creating an open-source platform designed to work as part of a globally integrated system is a very different process than building a product or enterprise platform to be monetized through licensing and sales. In this article, I'll attempt to explain why this is the case and give some tangible rules to guide you on your journey to creating the next killer blockchain app. I'll focus on Ethereum, but the same ideas apply to any public global system. (more)