Start with #web3

In the past two years, I’ve been fascinated by the rise of web3.

As Albert (from union square venture) wrote:

“It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is. We went from not being able to do something at all to having a first working version. Again to be clear, I am not saying this will solve all problems. Of course it won’t. And it will even create new problems of its own. Still, permissionless data was a crucial missing piece – its absence resulted in a vast power concentration. As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide a meaningful shift in power back to individuals and communities.“
Albert WengeR – USV

So let’s start with the first step. Get your wallet. You can think on the crypto wallet as a ‘browser’ to the world of distributed applications that lives in the #web3 world. I would suggest you to try a few wallets as we are still very early in this new frontier.

🎁 WALLETS

Hardware: I got the Ledger Nano X but another good option is Trezor.
Desktop: I like Exodus and (of course) you need Metamask in your browser. Btw, Brave got a wallet as well but with Metamask it will be ‘easier’ to start ‘trying’ the NFT world as well.
Mobile: Exodus , Jaxx and/or Trust Wallet

🚨 Do NOT buy any hardware wallet from third-party resellers such as Amazon or eBay.
Only buy units from the OEM to ensure that you are getting a clean device.

Next, you wish to buy some tokens (e.g. BTC, ETH, SOL etc’) – You can do it in one of the exchanges below.

EXCHANGES

Coinbase – The easy way to get into the crypto world.
Gemini
Binance.US – large number of supported coins. But sort of centralized solution.
Kraken – Decent staking options

Now, let’s create ourselves a ‘portfolio’ and watch the market:

💽 MARKET DATA, PRICE INFO, NEWS AGGREGATORS, MARKET ANALYSIS, ONCHAIN METRICS

Messari.io – onchain metrics and market data. They got one of the best UX/UI.
CoinMarketCap – a market data and news aggregator.
CoinGecko – market data and news aggregator.

🎤 CRYPTO PODCASTS

proof.xyz – All about NFTs: Artists, Developers and everything else.
modern.finance – New crypto projects and some interesting conversations.
Bankless – A great analysis and discussions of ETH markets

🎨 NFTs marketplaces

🥅 DEFI RESOURCES

DefiRate – Mostly info on Ethereum Defi.
Defi Llama – Defi yield info aggregator and has nice metrics on TVL and potential airdrops.
The Defiant (Defi 101)

Sport

Weekend Ride

Gravel is the new thing.

But ignore all the ‘buzz’ – as Lauf coined: ‘just ride’.

“Pick three hobbies: One that makes you money, one that makes you fit, and one that keeps you creative”. With cycling, you can have the last two.

Have fun and be strong!

Business, life

Priorities And How To Be More Productive

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Winston Churchill

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life

Games You Should Play

Some of the best games out there are free and could be used with friends and family over FB Rooms (or Zoom).

If you have other suggestions – please let me know.

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Chrome

How To Interview A Product Manager?

“A great product manager is both trusting and trustworthy.
She knows the difference between trust and blind faith, and invests in building a working environment where people have each others’ backs.
She sets an example with her own behavior and works from the assumption that people have good intentions. She listens and always strives to understand others’ context, point of view and perspective.”
— Lawrence Ripsher

An interview – like yoga on the water – is a tricky thing.

An interview is always a challenge.

It’s far from a perfect solution but in many cases, it’s the only option you have in order to decide if a person will be a good fit to your needs.

In some roles you will need more technical skills and in some it will be more about the leadership and strategic thinking.

The main aspects you wish to have in a product manager for a technology company:

Intellectual ability
Great Communication skills
Leadership
Culture Fit
Deep understanding of what users want
Strategic thinking
Analytical capabilities
Technical knowledge
Entrepreneur at heart

Below are some ideas for questions that will help you identify if the person have some of these aspects. It’s still “work in progress” so if you find something ‘funny’ please let me know.

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life, Sport

Favorites Books And (Virtual) Ironman 2020

It’s been a challenging year.
A year that caused lots of misery and the long term implications are still going to be discovered in the future. Nevertheless, I’m trying to focus on the hope we see just around the corner.

As for books and running/biking and swimming, it was all ‘virtual’ events. The Ironman race I was registered to do at Santa Rosa was first ‘pushed’ to ‘later this year’ and a after few months it was canceled.
As we learned during this year, it’s best to have patience (and endurance). Looking backward, there were quite a lot of new events that we managed to do. Both Strava and Zwift saw their platform taking an uplift. The new (or old) way to do a group ride: Zwift and Discord is quite cool. It won’t replace the real thing, but with the ‘new norm’, it’s quite a nice option.

Virtual Races

This year moved ‘everything’ into ‘virtual’. Sports events are just one example.
Since all the official races were canceled I did some virtual ones.

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life

Reading Recommendations From @naval

A list from @naval talks/podcasts and tweets.
It’s mainly for my personal usage when I’m buy new books (or ordering some from the library).

Poor Charlie’s Almanac: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. This one is the biggest book (for real) you will have in your library. Find a special and strong shelf for it.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I wrote about here in the past.
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle (@EckhartTolle)
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson
Incerto Series by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb): All 5 books are great but not an easy read. I had to re-read some parts in the books again and again and I’m still not sure I got to the bottom of the idea(s).

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life

Are You Doing COVID-19 Research?

“World War II was the defining moment of our parents’ generation. In a similar way, the COVID-19 pandemic—the first modern pandemic—will define this era.” – Bill Gates said it in his last post yesterday.

One of the interesting aspects of his observations is the need to collaborate our efforts on treatments, vaccines, testing and contact tracing.
We all want to help fight Covid-19. At JFrog we are helping developers be more productive with their work by harnessing the power of DevOps best practices (and tools).
Are you working on IoT to medical devices?
Here is one example on how to improve your process to ship better code in a faster way.

There are many more examples like that but bottom line, we want to help any organization that is fighting Covid-19.
You can apply here: https://jfrog.com/covid19/

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cloud, JavaScript

Integrate JFrog Xray with Slack

The need to protect your software and to be updated about vulnerabilities is getting stronger. JFrog Xray is unique in its capabilities to perform analysis of all the binaries you are consuming in your project. It works with Artifactory to perform a deep analysis of binary components at any stage of the application lifecycle. Xray provides great visibility into issues lurking in components anywhere in your organization and there are many cases where you wish to get notified on a security violation (or a license breach) directly to Slack.

Getting Started

We will use Xray’s Webhooks to define our server’s and base on the policies/rules our Webhook will be notified with the alerts about violations (security or licenses).

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Business

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (and the current one) – Quick Review

After the last few weeks, it clear we are in the biggest financial crisis in our generation. I read “Stress Test” a few months ago and there are several perspectives that are good to be remembered. Especially during these crazy days where the market shows ‘no bottom’.

“The fundamental causes of this crisis were familiar and straightforward,” Geithner writes. “It began with a mania — the widespread belief that devastating financial crises were a thing of the past, that future recessions would be mild, that gravity-defying home prices would never crash to earth.”

The causes of the crisis, in other words, were the same old-fashioned madness of crowds and extraordinary popular delusions responsible for every panic dating back to the Dutch mania for tulip bulbs. The entire society — including all the big banks and some nonbank financial firms, like the insurance company A.I.G. — simply ignored risk.

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Ido Green

Thoughts To Remember