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My blog posts have slowed down quite a bit over the past few years. I’m probably going to be ramping back up on posting, and covering some new topics. So I thought a quick update on what’s been happening with me would be in order.
Twins
In 2021, we welcomed two wonderful babies into the world, and just celebrated their third birthday. This by far accounts for most of my radio silence over the past few years. Between a difficult high-risk pregnancy followed by the difficulty of juggling two babies (on top of our other kids), Miriam and my lives have been pretty thoroughly dominated for the past 3.5 years.
Things have certainly gotten easier in the past year, and time spent at school has always given us a bit of breather. Though that hasn’t exactly been consistent…
War
My family moved to a small town in Northern Israel in 2009. We live 10 kilometers from the Lebanese border. For the past year, we’ve been in the line of fire from Hezbollah rocket attacks. We didn’t live through the previous war in 2006. When we moved here, we met lots of people who told us war stories of living for months on end in bomb shelters.
I consider us to be relatively lucky. Iron Dome has brought life much closer to normalcy. But we’re still living through regular rocket attacks, artillery responses, air raid sirens, and overall tension. At this point, everyone in the family jumps if we hear a car door close too loudly. Our children haven’t had a regular year of school for five years running (between COVID and now entering our second year of war). Our three year old daughter is terrified any time the sirens go off or the explosions shake the house.
Lots of friends and family have been worried about us. We’ve set up a Telegram broadcast channel to send updates, especially after large attacks on Northern Israel. (I morbidly call it the “proof of life” channel.) I don’t feel comfortable sharing that link publicly, but if you have my contact info and would like an invite, just send me a private message.
Additionally, since we’ve gotten the question a lot: at this time, we do not have plans to leave Israel. But we’re open to changing our mind on that as the situation develops.
Illness
Perhaps a result of the above two stressors, or perhaps completely unrelated, I was fairly sick for the past 2.5 years. I had something called Silent Sinus Syndrome, a perpetual infection in my left maxillary sinus that created negative pressure and resulted in weeks-long bouts of fever, especially after physical exertion. I eventually had to give up weight lifting as the disease progressed.
I was scheduled to have surgery last October, but when the war broke out, all elective surgeries were canceled. Miriam was ultimately able to get the surgery set up through a private hospital in March, and after a few months I began to feel much better. Today, I feel healthier than I have in at least five years. I’m back to weight lifting, dieting properly again, and overall simply relieved to be free of a chronic illness.
Blockchain space
For the past three years, I’ve more or less been working full time in the blockchain space. This has still been work done through FP Complete for our customers, and has touched on GameFi, DeFi, and a few other areas.
I’ve been working off-and-on in the space for the past eight years or so. When I first got into the space, I wasn’t particularly excited or impressed by what I found. Like many others, I saw a world of scams and poorly implemented technology, of get-rich-quick schemes that could generously be called Ponzis.
I’ve definitely changed my perspective a bit, and I think the industry itself has reached a new level of maturity. “Crypto” is still young, and it’s still evolving rapidly, but it seems to me like we’re past the initial few phases of the hype curve, and we’re beginning to find what blockchain is actually a good technology for.
Many of you know that my formal education was not in software, but in actuarial science. Getting to leverage the math, finance, and statistics muscles again has been a huge perk of moving deeper into the blockchain space, and I’m looking forward to more of that.
Rust
Most of the blockchain work I’ve done has been in the Cosmos ecosystem, focused on CosmWasm smart contracts. That’s necessitated a lot more work with Rust than I had done previously. The necessity of Rust in smart contracts has really been a forcing function for me to use Rust in even more places. At this point, our preferred tech stack for Cosmos projects is heavily Rust, leveraging our FP Complete cosmos-rs library for backend services, CosmWasm in contracts, Rust for off-chain data analytics, and occasionally even using Leptos for putting together frontends.
In addition to Rust, I also picked up quite a bit more experience with TypeScript and React over the past few years, which may explain why I like Leptos so much.
Haskell hasn’t had much of my attention over the last few years.
I haven’t spent much time blogging about Rust like I used to with Haskell. Part of that has simply been a time issue. Part of it has been a desire issue. I’m not quite as interested in churning out technical blog posts as I used to be. The topics still interest me, and if I come across an interesting topic or receive a blog topic request, I’ll likely still do a write-up. But a lot of my extra brain cycles have moved over to other topics to ponder.
Blogs
While I intend to continue blogging on technical topics, I’m planning on expanding my focus on this blog. I already started adding in some health/diet/exercise posts in the past. I’m planning on expanding this a bit further to economics. My work in the blockchain space has really woken up those old muscles. And the times we’re living through, with wars, COVID stimulus, general money printing, and overall chaos, are all leading to very interesting changes in the world. I plan on putting on my amateur economist hat.
I really enjoy writing on topics I’m passionate about. I find it cathartic. So don’t be surprised to see upticks in blog posts during the worst of the war in Israel. Nothing better than sitting in a safe room with my wife and six kids typing up a blog post :).
Conferences
Between COVID, the twins, and the war, I’ve done very little traveling over the past five years. I’m starting to change that up, air travel permitting. I’m attending Cosmoverse in Dubai later this month. If anyone’s going to be attending, let me know, I’m looking to meeting people in real life again!
Most of my conference attendance will likely be in the blockchain space, but if timing allows, I’ll probably try to make it to some Rust and functional programming conferences too.