When I got into RC this morning it was time for a group communal learning activity. It was lead by one of the members of the W1 batch who had 7 weeks under her belt. It was interesting to see on a blackboard what people wanted to learn or teach.  I grabbed a coffee and chatted with my fellow recurser, Patrick, about his work as a political activist and we made tentative plans to visit an activist bookstore in queens that runs a mesh network allowing users to download ebooks or chat with one another BUT only while they are local (ie able to connect to the local network).

I spent most of the day working on the web app for my test NFT – unpaid labor coin. I am building it in react and I used create react app to generate the scaffolding.  Most of my work came in the form of reading documentation about the latest web3.js library.  I also did a deep dive into which node package manager I should use yarn or npm.  I also spent a little time connecting my ganache local blockchain to metamask – so I test the entire web app.

At about 5 pm I was done with my blockchain work for the day and I headed to the 4th floor, the social floor, to work on the first cryptopals project. Liz and I puzzled through converting hex to base64 without a library. I learned a bunch of things behind code I have written for years like what UTF-7 or UTF-8 really means (Hint: it is the way that the ascii characters are mapped to the decimal representations of each 6 bit chunk of data).

I wrote the conversion code in Rust, which is a very pleasurable language to program in, and I am excited to be learning it. I also aliased vi to nvim in my .bashrc because  my muscle memory is too strong and I cannot stop typing vi whenever I want to edit something.

To end the day, I bookmarked a few rust open source projects that are interesting and that  I would like to contribute to one of them: either a web framework called tower, or a web assembly library, which is heavily used by  parity  (a company building a suite of crypto tools, wallets and cross chain protocols).  I would have liked to have gotten in a bit of Haskell, but tomorrow is another day.

A bunch of folks  then headed into chinatown for noodles.  I went home and put the kids to bed and went to bed early. We made a perhaps unwise decision this weekend to allow the kids to watch the movie Beetlejuice, and although they have discovered calypso music, they now are afraid of ghosts.