Summer Fun Edition
Where I share some of the things I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Vacation
Earlier this month I spent 17 days away from home, traveling in Asia, with my husband, our 3 kids, and my sister. We hit 8 cities in 4 countries - Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. It was hectic but we did it through a tour which made it easier than it sounds. Some photos:
Side Projects
3 months ago, I wrote about applying DevOps principles to side projects because I was feeling overwhelmed with the number of side gigs and passion projects I had going on. I’ve been quietly making progress and am pleased to share a few projects have gone live recently.
Writing a short story for Philosophical Foxes. I was originally drawn to the NFT project for its vision, and I stayed around for its strong community values as well as creator
’s broader vision around the future of content being multi player and endless. Several NFT holders have been contributing our own short stories to further build out the world that was conceptualized by Mario. My contribution is a short story written from the point of view of my fox, Hannibal, about how she - a logical, and rational being - came to discover religion during a scary night when her world no longer made sense. You can read it here —> https://mirror.xyz/0x643D06108d4694605B266DFd85B1816BacCFb55D/cKSKv32f-3Q5myqxanOvetd5cyX_C6m7XJkVfDzRhwo . I would love to hear what you think, and if you want to read more Fox stories, they are all published on the main Fox mirror page.Launching a podcast with 3 of my college girlfriends. I became interested in learning the technical mechanics of podcasting and luckily had some good friends who are just crazy enough to experiment with me. I started exploring the idea in January and happy to share episode 1 is live. Check out our website or search Four Old College Friends on Apple or Spotify. I also wrote a blog documenting the tech stack I ended up going with.
With these 2 projects live, I’ll be shifting my focus towards the children book I’m working on with my sister. Hope to have some meaningful updates before the end of the year.
Around the Web
Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains by Josh Stark - An excellent essay that captures, more eloquently than I ever could, some of my convictions about crypto. Josh introduces the concept of hardness, defined as “the capacity of a system to make something very likely to be true in the future”, and presents a model for thinking about the different ways humans have tried to make the future more predictable in the past through atoms and institutions, and how blockchains are the first “new source of hardness that humans have invented in thousands of years.”
Speaking of hardness and certainty, did you know humans will trade pain for useless information?
“Most of the worlds contracts live in PDFs” - I found Simon Taylor’s rant about institutions vs. crypto insightful.
Podcast: Tyler Cowen interviews Paul Graham. Challenge: count how many times Paul says “I don’t know”
Book: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve read two of his other books - Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go - so I expected this to have a tech or sci-fi angle, but it takes place long ago in a post Arthurian England. It was a delight to read, and it makes you think. 10/10 - highly recommend!
Asker or guesser - There may be some scenarios where I ask, but I tend to be much more of a guesser. Which are you?
A note to my subscribers:
I started this substack nine months ago as an experiment to see if developing a writing a habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide any other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post here.
I plan to continue to write about twice a month and will be sharing musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here, or find me on twitter and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️
Nice, Adrienne! The trip sounds amazing. The photos are beautiful and inspire travel.
The foxes project sounds really cool. I will dive into that.