shannon_a: (Default)
The last day and a half, I've been down in the Mountain View / Los Altos area, to support Chris (and our co-hosts and experts, Angus and Bryan) with a workshop on cryptocurrency custody. This is something that's actually been a long-time coming, as Christopher and I started writing the material a year and a half or more ago.

We went down there midday on Monday to get all of the equipment running and the space setup. And had a nice dinner afterward with Angus, one of our other experts.

Then, Chris was staying out a bit more, but I decided to walk back to our AirBnB. It was about an hour walk, about two and a half miles, but what I hilariously learned is that most of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills is pitch black at night. I first saw this as I walked back into neighborhoods, past El Camino Real, but then even moreso on the Los Altos Palo Alto Bike Path, a nice path running alongside park then cemetery, and just a little spooky in the dark at night. I actually liked it, but after two bikes swooshed past me (with lights on), I reluctantly lit up my iPhone for safety. (It was on most of the trip back and I ended up with a 34% battery by the end.) I walked some other dark walking path, just set back a bit from the road, and I now see it continued on into hiking trails. (Alas!) And from there I went into dark neighborhoods, often without sidewalks, and eventually found my AirBnB down a pitch-black street and a mostly dark driveway.

The AirBnB was quite nice. Super tall ceilings, nice rooms. It was a guest house in someone's super fancy Los Altos Hills house, but curiously did have a connecting door.



So today was the actual workshop. Chris and I drove through the actual Los Altos downtown to get there, and it was much nicer than the corner of Mountain View I walked through on my way to our BnB last night. Much more small-town feeling. We got bagels, muffins, scones, and coffee for our attendees.

We'd mapped out the workshop to discuss custody, adversaries, and risk-modeling as our three main sections, and successfully worked our way through it with help from Angus and Bryan. We were the most unsure about the risk modeling, because we knew it would be challenging to teach because it's a lot of work to do the procedure, but despite our shakiness it was the best-received part of the course. And now we know even better how to teach it next time. (I actually did some teaching throughout all of this, which isn't something I tend to do, but I did explain issues with using various metal devices to protect your cryptocurrency keys, and I taught increasing parts of the risk modeling with Chris as we went on, until he left me to finish it up.)

And hopefully people will get even more useful info when they get home, as we distributed a 135-page booklet that contains most of our writing on custody, adversaries, and risk modeling.

After the event was over, and our space cleaned up for our kind hosts, I would usually have zoomed out as soon as I could, but it would have taken 2+ hours to get home in bumper-to-bumper traffic. So I joined folks for dinner one more time, and caught a Lyft around 8pm, which got me home just before 9.

Totally exhausted now. Though it was just a day and a half, it feels like it was a major trip.
shannon_a: (Default)
Tuesday & Wednesday, I had a very unique experience: I was one of two TAs for Jimmy Song's Programming Blockchain course.



First up, the course was great. I was obviously quite familiar with some of the course material, thanks to my two-and-half years of working on blockchain papers, docs, and specs for Rebooting the Web of Trust and for Blockstream. But even when we were doing things like creating transactions, which I teach in the Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line course that Christopher Allen and I are putting together, it was great to get more hands-on experience, in a different format, to be viscerally reminded of how all these puzzle pieces go together.

And that "hands-on" element was what made the course really great. Jimmy teaches the course in python, but it's more than just dry recitations of code. He has an extensive set of exercises laid out in a Jupyter Notebook, which allows you to write and run python code from your web browser. So the course is constantly skipping back and forth between Jimmy spending at most 5-10 minutes explaining something, and then the students being dumped into an exercise where they write and test code for the concept that was just explained.

I was also impressed by the breadth of Jimmy's course (in just two days!). He covered the ECC basics of Bitcoin and after transactions went on to other stuff like block structure. This was stuff that I had an intellectual knowledge of, but it was sparser, and the hands-on work helped me come to a truer understanding of it.



TAing the course was challenging.

As of Saturday afternoon, I didn't know python. So I read about half-a-book on the language. I'm certainly not comfortable with it at this point, but that mainly means that I haven't yet come to a visceral understanding of its programming patterns. Its iterators in particular are something that I have to look up every time. But I learned enough to take (and TA) the class, and I could certainly start programming in it now, if I wanted, and I'd pick up those patterns and usages with practice. (Overall, python is an attractive, forgiving language. I liked it.)

The other challenge was the course material itself. I do have a solid knowledge of blockchain after so much technical writing and editing on the topic. I can talk about its structure, its advantages, and its disadvantages off the cuff. Work on the Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line course also taught me a lot of the internals. But my knowledge of the internals isn't off the cuff yet, and Jimmy also dived deeper. So that's why I spent much of my weekend (and Monday night and Tuesday night) making sure that I'd done all of the exercises in advance. And that also stood me in good stead.

Overall, I felt like the TAing went well. My proudest moment was during the very tricky transaction-creation exercise, when I helped three different people finalize their transactions and get them out to a Testnet server. But I was generally able to provide people with some help throughout. Sometimes, my answers were a bit vaguer that I'd like, because blockchains aren't quite something I deal with every day, but I felt like I earned my keep, and I'd be a lot more comfortable if asked to do it again.



I was also in San Francisco on Monday, for a meeting with another blockchain company and a demo of their software. So, three days in the Citythis week, and this all reminded me of how much I despise the horrible state that BART has descended too. Oh, it was working well enough (this time!), with only one delay on my six trips, and that only 5 minutes or so. But, the crowding just gets worse and worse.

Five of my six trips were standing room only. One of them, the one where I boarded a train at almost exactly five, was jammed together like sardines, to the point where people couldn't get on at Montgomery or Embarcadero. Last time I was in the City for a few days during rush hour, you could still get seats if you walked out to the CIvic Center, but that no longer seems to be the case either.

And of course every fifth person on BART was coughing, sneezing, and sniffing. Literally, every where I turned there was another sickly person.

So, our main form of public transit for medium-haul in the area has become a disgusting and over-crowded petri dish.



I think TAing the course was a good experience, and it was good to meet some more folks in the blockchain community. I increasingly think that's where I'll be spending my time in the coming years, based on my solid experience there. But, oh, it was exhausting. I had days of working with people constantly, and then having almost no time to despaz at home.

I did stop by Endgame on my way home on Wednesday, but I was barely coherent. (And then I delightfully got another standing-room train only when I headed back from Oakland to Berkeley at 8.30. WTF???)

And it turns out that I'm still semi-coherent tonight.

But after 11 straight days of work, I'm taking tomorrow off. In fact, it should be a pretty low-key three-day weekend with the newest musical at the threatre the only thing on our must-do-list
shannon_a: (Default)
It was a busy weekend.



Saturday was gaming. Although I decided to end my frequently futile attempts to run my Burning Wheel campaign, Donald, Mary, Kevin, maybe Dave S., and I have decided to try out a campaign-style board game. I put out some options, Mary added Time Stories, and then we voted:

1. SEAFALL, 14
2. Time Stories, 13
2. Pandemic Legacy Season 1, 13
4. PACG: Rise of the Runelords, 12
4. Charterstone, 12
6. PACG: Rise of the Runelords, 11

All pretty close, but we decided to try out SeaFall on Saturday. It's a 4X Legacy game by Rob Daviau with plenty of American influences (which seems to be one of the things that put eurogamers off, the other being poor development).

I was certainly leery the first time I went to rip a card up, when I didn't know if this would be a successful, continuing game, but I verified with everyone that they were having fun and enjoying the campaign and then rip I did.

Overall, we had fun. There was some great exploration, which is particularly fun because you get to mark up what you find on the map, some fun dice chucking (with one horrible result for me: blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, success — which sank my ship, and which was very unlikely given there are two blanks on each six-sided die), and some interesting storytelling.

From the one play of the beginning set rules, I don't think SeaFall is a great game, but it's a good game that gains weight through its Legacy elements, and I'm looking forward to how that plays out.

This was just the prologue, with changes to the map, but no long-term success or failure for us as players. It was looking like six weeks until our second game, but we managed to slot in a special game on May 5th, just before K. and I go on our family vacation. So, we should get to reinforce our knowledge of the rules pretty quickly.



Sunday was visiting. My mom, Bob, and Rob came up to see us and celebrate K. and my's birthday. For some reason the south campus area was jammed on Sunday (I think there was something going on at the stadium), so we headed out immediately for an early dinner at Chevy's.

There was much enjoyable talking and eating, some margaritas, and then we came home for cake.

It was great seeing everyone.



I did minor walking on the weekend. Nothing big, but I wanted to get out and move both days, rather than just staying home while people came to me.

So I walked Strawberry Creek a bit before gaming, then up in the hills afterward, then I walked in the hills again after lunch on Sunday.



However my other main activity of the weekend (and one that consumed both evenings, plus Sunday before folks showed up) was studying. I'm auditing a Bitcoin programming course on Tuesday and Wednesday, as part of Chris' and my continued attempt to collect blockchain knowledge that we can disseminate, but then I was asked if I could help TA it too.

I was happy to, as I've got two or three years of Bitcoin knowledge and tech writing under my belt at this point, but it turned out to be more challenging than I expected.

First up, it's taught in Python, which is a programming language I don't know.

Second, that meant that I should really be familiar with as much of the course's exercises as possible.

So my studying consisted of flipping back and forth between a book on Python and working on the exercises. As of this moment, on Monday evening, I'm 7 chapters into the book (out of 16, but I probably won't finish it) and 6 exercises sets into the course (out of 8, and that I hope to finish before the second day of the course).

Whew. Exhausting; I'm tired out even before getting up early enough to be in the city by 8.30 on Tuesday.

And we'll see if my studying was good enough to actually offer meaningful help to others tomorrow.



Two more days of busyness to come.

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