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Building Personal Infrastructure

· 5 min read

To enjoy a life of building software, media, and community as a ==hobby (all things here are NOT related to my job) / for pure pleasure== - why build personal infrastructure? And what are the strategies and executions to grow hobby projects? What is my current progress?

Everything starts from playing

Primary school

Playing Chinese copy of Tamiya mini 4WD

And play computer games on DOS.

Introduction to programming with Macromedia Authorware

Middle School

  • Built a website with Microsoft FrontPage to track Iraq War 2003
  • Built a text-based game with QBasic on Digital Dictionary

And then you can play in the classroom behind piles of textbooks :)

High School

  • Built with Lego Mindstorm RCX for FIRST Lego League Challenge
Lego RobotsChallenge

College & Grad School

  • used SQL injection to add 20 CNY credits to our school's meal card for my roommates. However, two days later, they were called by the cashier... LOL.

  • sniffed an audiobook app and then, based on its API, built my own Android App to get free audios.

Why is programming fun?

… the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning.

— The Mythical Man-month

  • Builders build for themselves anyway. Why not share them with others?
  • Builders build things anyway. Why not make them big?

Meanwhile, I came across some mind-blowing articles.

I conclude:

  • Amazon's flywheel is built for business with high fixed costs and optimizing returns to scale.
  • My life is with high fixed costs (limited time and energy), and scale economy is worth pursuing in this case.
  • I can achieve more than I think with a powerful personal infrastructure that gains progressive advantages over time.

Plus, some take-away from my previous pre-PMF startup experience

  1. Seek retention-first, data-driven growth. Sean Ellis: "Focusing on customer acquisition over 'awareness' takes discipline… At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. However, for the first year or two it's a total waste of money."
  2. Table stakes are table stakes. You don't need VC to build initial product. Ideas are just ideas. Build your team, build your product, and collaborate with people.

Developing Personal Infra Strategy

Execution

Here is the architecture of my hobby projects.

Tech Stack

Technologies: React, React Native Expo, GraphQL, KOA, TypeScript, AVA, Webpack, Airflow, MongoDB, Python Pandas and Flask, svelte, Metabase, Golang, etc.

Servers and APIs: Heroku, DigitalOcean, Azure, AWS, Github Pages, BunnyCDN.

Being an early majority to adopt proven new tech

System Architecture

Focus on building, not wasting time on SRE

Example 1

Example 2

"This architecture is not future-proof! / does not scale!"

Well...

  • Services are mostly stateless and horizontal scalable
  • Service collocation is a problem but you have to segregate them anyway when collaborating with various people and achieving Personal IaaS (individually-sellable).
  • Can always evolve to kubernetes.

Personal Root Metrics

Living a balanced life and keep everything on track, measured by data

The key metrics for a "retention-first growth" is cohort analysis.

Benchmarks for reference:

IndustryDay 1Day 7Day 30
2C402010
E-commerce35155
Gaming3015<5
EdTech25105
  • Values in unit of %

Results

Products

  • Beancount.io: Double-entry bookkeeping made easy for living your best financial life
  • touchbase.ai: Personal CRM: Smartly engage more in meaningful relationships
  • coderoma.com: One coding challenge per day

Framework

  • onefx.js.org: Building web & mobile apps with speed & quality

Helped my friends' projects to start from scratch

  • CocuSocial: Discover a different food and drink experience
  • helped my day job at IoTeX to build staking portal, blockchain explorer, desktop wallet, etc.
  • not to mention some other failed projects...

Media:

Community:

  • github.com/puncsky/system-design-and-architecture

Can I use your projects or join your community?

👍 Definitely and welcome! They are mostly open sourced or open for registration. Thank you for becoming our valued customer or community member!

👏 Feedback is highly appreciated!

❤️ Like it? Check this article at https://tianpan.co and follow me on https://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Ftianpan.co%2F&region=follow_link&screen_name=tianpan10x :)

Blockchain Technology Review

· 6 min read

What is blockchain?

A blockchain is an incorruptible distributed ledger that is…

  1. Hosted by multiple parties
  2. Secured by crypto algorithms
  3. Append-only/immutable and thus verifiable in data storage

How does it work?

how does blockchain work

Categorization: Public vs. Private vs. Hybrid Blockchains

  • Public: It is permission-less to join the network.
  • Private: The permission to join is centrally controlled.
  • Hybrid: Multi-parties control the permission to join.

Do you need a blockchain?

Do you need a blockchain?

Architecture

Hardware

Hardware

Basic Utils

Basic Utils

Ledger

Ledger

Concensus

Concensus

Smart Contract

Smart Contract

APIs

APIs

dApps

dApps

Dev


Ops


[Not supported by viewer]

  1. Hardware: computer resources = computing + networking + storage

  2. Basic Utils: P2P network + crypto + data storage w/ db or filesystem

  3. Ledger: chain of data blocks + domain-specific data models

  4. Consensus: write first consensus later (PoW/PoS/DPoS) / consensus first write later (PBFT)

  5. Smart Contract: limited program running on the blockchain

  6. API: RPC + SDK

  7. dApps: 1) transfer of values 2) data certification 3) data access control

  8. DevOps: deployment, operations, metrics, logs

Industries

  1. Financial Services

    • crypto exchange: binance, coinbase, etc.
    • international payments: ripple, stellar, etc.
    • Know Your Customer (KYC) / anti-money laundry (AML): civic
  2. Health care

    • sharing data across providers, insurers, vendors, auditors, etc
  3. Public sector

    • asset tokenization
    • transparent voting in public election
  4. Energy and resources

    • trading
    • sharing data across suppliers, shippers, contractors, and authorities
  5. Technology, media, and telecom

    • DRM and incentivizing content creator
    • securing operations and data storage of IoT devices
  6. Consumer and industrial products

    • loyalty points programs in traveling
    • document signing
    • supply-chain management

Case Study: Ripple for Cross-border Payments

  • Partnering with 200+ banks
  • 47 trillion dollar cross-border payments market
  • Huge hassles and costs. A large number of businesses cannot afford the high transaction fee of traditional cross-border payments.
    • Without ripple, it may take days to fulfill the transaction in some African countries
      1. Quote the exchange rate
      2. Find the path in those hops
      3. Lock the quote
      4. Validate, KYC, AML, etc…
    • With ripple, users in country A buys ripple tokens, pay with ripple, and then users in another country just withdraw. It just takes a few minutes and during which the token price will not fluctuate much.

Killer Apps

  • Graphite Docs: Similar to Google Docs but everything is encrypted when data leaves your computer.
  • Textile Photos: Phone App like a private Instagram. Photos are encrypted and stored on IPFS, a decentralized storage network running by the community.
  • Augur: Web App where people can bet on predictions on many things.
  • Blockstack: Tools for developers to build DApps.
  • D.Tube: Video streaming service that is add-free but content creators are rewarded by tokens. Similarly ThetaNetwork for e-sports videos.
  • OpenBazaar: Online marketplace with no platform fees, powered by cryptocurrency.

Challenges

  • Network Effects. It is hard to convince users leaving existing well-established centralized services.
  • Privacy vs. Free Services. Would people like to buy services with crypto? Or would people like to sacrifice privacy for free services?
  • Efficiency in decentralized systems. Complex and decentralizes systems vs. simple and centralized systems.