This is a picture of the book Red Mars, the first volume in the Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It too is about terraforming (among other things). Its a fun book, I recommend it.

But today, I am going to talk about the other terraforming involving dev ops – and that is Terraform by Hashi Corp.  Terraform is a framework for making and executing automated script based deployments. I have seen this story before with ansible, salt stack, chef, puppet there are probably more.  I have always revered back to bash scripts because I am old school and these tools were not 10x. But then I started playing around with ILP nodes and used their fantastic terraform scripts.  (ILP is a technology that provides cross blockchain interoperability).  Basically the scrips spun up so many aws services in such an elegant design, that, if I would have done it by hand, it would have taken me forever and would probably look a bit gnarly  (since I would just want to get it over with and would not take time to make in beautiful).

Fellow recurser Akiva gave a lovely terraform tutorial, which really demystified everything. We talked a tiny bit about providers. Providers, in terraform, are definitions for, or extensions of, services that you are integrating with e.g., AWS, GCS, Digital Ocean, Heroku, etc. I would like to write a terraform provider, but I am not sure what environment needs one.  If someone comes up with one let me know.

I missed the consciousness reading group, because terraform ran over and I just wanted to get back to my rust cryptopals.  I am really enjoying programming in Rust, feel like I am getting a hang of the language.  I sort of just want to lie on a couch and program in Rust reverie.

Ben and I continued our ad hoc contract reading group and looked at ERC721 in openzepplin  – Non Fungible Tokens (ie cryptokitties).  There was a bunch of weird magic involving hex referring to function stubs. Not quite sure why we need that.  We are considering submitting a sample contract for ERC721 to github- which would be exciting.

I also did the first chapter of cryptozombies, a fun website that walks you through recreating cryptokitties but with zombies.  I was fast, fun and reinforced my cryptocurrency knowledge – also I think it was a well made app, but the compiler does not recognize blank lines and spaces – where can I send a git pull. I kinda want to create cryptosucculents now.  The day is not over yet and I hope by the end of the day to have deployed my UnpaidLaborCoin app via heroku. This would satisfy my tech proof of concept for the prayer blockchain and remove the unknown unknowns (for the most part). I also hope to finish the first two lessons in fast.ai.  If I can get this done – then maybe I can write up a tutorial tomorrow on creating a blockchain app with truffle and react and revisit the Haskell music prayer wheel.

There was this random url in my browser.  Its cool so I am including it hear. I am not sure where I got it from but who does not love Tan Lin?