2017
We are on the edge of the future - seeing the emergence of technology that we dreamed of years ago; AI powered bots, Holographic GUIs, autonomous vehicles, decentralized application networks. It's happening fast. There is new form of distributed world consciousness of truth in the internet, it enables people to come to distributed consensus about certain things. Sometimes it is tough to tell which are certain, cryptographic proof of providence of content will become a standard. Ratings and reputation currency creating the convergence of identity. Proliferation of meta-physics in numbers. More ICOs, tokenized application networks, appcoin protocols, zero-proof currency spinoffs, enterprise crypto consortium, and crypto hedge-funds.
This past year I learned:
How to build Hololens AR applications with Unity and C# How to build Bots with NLP How to write and deploy a Solidity Smart Contract to the EVM
This is going into the 5th year I have written on my blog. I am at just over 45,000 views all time.
Hit 11,424 this year in total views; not bad, though a slight decrease from 2015.
2013: A Year in Review
2014
2015
2016:
These were some my goals from 2016:
Learn AngularJS and ReactJS Learn Microsoft CRM Programming C# .NET Earn Blockchain Technology Patent for Smart Contract Management Build the Dreamforce Story and Demos – (Alphabet type HUGE Conglemerate) Build Salesforce Lightning Components for the Relaunch Learn how to push GIT, anywhere in the world to anyone in the world Build 21.co applications to earn Bitcoin Learn Chinese and Portuguese Build a program with the Tessel.io Start MicroSaas with the BizSpark program at Microsoft Trade Cryptocurrency daily, more ICOs, Finish the Art of War Write a blog post on the state of cryptocurrency More water every day Eat Healthy: Chicken, Vegetables, Almonds, Salmon, Brown Rice, Eggs, Protein Powder, Oatmeal Run and Lift at 6AM at Koret out by 6:45 to get to work by 8
Some of the highlights from 2016:
Traveled to London for work and visited Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, and Ibiza) with my Dad for his 60th. Flew to New York for the second time for the Consensus 2016 Hackathon and won the prize for best App on Azure by Microsoft. MicroSaas - Enterprise Smart Contract Platform and Exchange (BizSpark grant). Made it into an article in TechCrunch for Bots and VR at Apttus Started investing in ICOs
Focus in 2017
Build Dapps Build with Babel, ReactJS, Redux, GraphQL, and Node Keep building Bots and a VR/AR interface library in Unity Learn about Containers, Docker, Kubernetes Learn how to write python scripts with Tensorflow, Theano and Keras libraries Write 21.co computer python scripts Write 1000 Ethereum Smart Contract Clauses Read Applied Cryptography cover to cover with annotations Keep a written Daily Journal and Physical Calendar Say my autosuggestion every morning Drink more water, run, and read everyday (52 books, 365 miles) Get 100K views on the site
Crypto -
Cryptocurrencies, cryptographic application networks, applied cryptography protocols, application coins, decentralized application networks. Dapps.
Bitcoin is first and last OR Bitcoin is first of many. The price of bitcoin is next to $1000 and the overall market capitalization has hit an all time high:
Do we only need one cryptographic state machine for the world similar to one internet to the world? Does segwit, payment channels, teechans and the like round out the Bitcoin network or do Turing complete scripting decentralized state networks aka Ethereum bring us into the next generation of decentralized applications. There is room for both, and the price of both tokens Year over Year seems to think so as well. Despite the Dao hack dropping the price from a high of 19$, down to around $7.50 now, Ethereum is moving fast.
Companies such as Truffle are making Smart Contract development for the Ethereum network much easier. Zeppelin is creating a library for secure and effetive smart contracts, BlockApps is creating the bridge for Enterprise Blockchain deployments and apps, and MetaMask is making your browser Ethereum network compatible via the web3 api.
ZCash - zkSnarks - Zero Knowledge Proofs has a ton of upside; 21 million notes that come with an encrypted memo field, a key that enabled selective disclosure, and ofcourse the blockchain immutable, petrified effect.
Brave and Blockstack are reimagining the internet browser experience.
The finserv platforms players have launched R3 Corda and also Chain has launched its platform and smart contract language Ivy.
Enterprise is off the races with Microsoft leading the pack; and IBM not far behind banking on hyperledger on blue mix, and AWS with Monax.
consulting firms are just starting on POCs such as Delotties Rubik;
I think this is a fundamental shift in the enterprise back office from on-premise, to cloud, to dapps.
Dapps for the enterprise; or a new UI over decentralized application networks like bitcoin or ethereum.
That is next.
One last thing on ICOs and blockchain tokens; a paper was released on the difference between securities and blockchain tokens which I found interesting. Ideally if doing an ICO or any cryptocurrency the following is something to keep in mind:
the token is sold once there is an operational network using the token, or immediately before the token goes live, it its more likely to be purchased with the intention of use rather than profit It is built with all of the technical permissions necessary to actions the networks functions; it is for use and able to be used by an individual buying the token A token which has a specific function that is only available to token holders is more likely to be purchased in order to access that function and less likely to be purchased with an expectation of profit.
The buy in is based on the premise of the usefulness of the underlying function that the token enables on the decentralized network. The value of the token is based on the supply and demand of the underlying function.
AR -
Built AR Hololens CPQ Applications
Jet and Bike configuration inside of Hololens -
Learned how to create a Holo-App
Learned C# classes and Visual Studio
Learned Unity how to build GameObjects, import GameObjects from Blender. Applying scripts to different game objects and manager objects. How to call methods that looked into the children of certain gameobjects and in doing so was able to create animations and implement visual rendering based on user interaction via voice and gesture taps.
Unity is a very powerful platform to learn, it is very remarkable to essentially anchor an image from a computer into a digital layer in the space around you.
I think Unity and the platform is amazing. You are able to download a 3D model import it into a scene, apply a script, and deploy it the 3D world to interact with.
This learning curve to accomplish this is not too bad. You can start designing and deploying 3D models in a holographic interface. The other cool thing is that they stayed anchored; in that when i put a hologram in my living room, and come back two weeks later my hologram is still there.
It's thethered to the real world in space; theres context to what you build.
I enjoy working on VR.
I think that setting up the VR and learning how to deploy holograms was one of the hardest but coolest projects I have ever worked on.
Bots -
Build Bots using Howdy.Ai for Slack, wrote the OAuth 2 script
Built bots using Microsoft Botbuilder and attended BotDay
Built out Max... bots on Azure
Integrated LUIS NLP model into the Bot code hosted on bitbucket continuous deployment to Azure web app.
Conversationalist are no doubt a new way to interact with applications, but they also inherently change the way we build software.
Bots are never really a finished piece, there is always something to optimize, tweak, add in; to make the bot more human like to create a better experience for the user.
There is so much friction that is removed in conversational interfaces. The advancements with lingustics and computers is astonishing. I remember creating my first SVG trees using prolog to parse english and japanese sentences. I didn't realize it then but ultimately that recursive programming was an excellent base line for my understanding of how to create bots that leverage NLP.
The other important thing about getting a bot up and running is that is is being hosted, you have the app id, secret, you have continuous deployment from a bitbucket repo, you have the right size application node, your webservice are leverage keys that do not expire causing latency issues, you are testing locally with an emualtor before pushing changes to the live bot, that you are taking into a fact security, querying the data intelligently, that the bot sounds conversational and you have removed console log statements from the dialect, that you are able to talk to the bot randomly and achieve some outcome, that the bot is available in multiple channels and dynamically can alter the response based on the context, that the bot learns, and you learn, what it is that can make it more efficient, effective, and execute what it is it is being told to do.
Also,
that you have a pricing model for the bot, and you know exactly how much this bot is going to cost you and earn your platform provider in the form of consumption, that it is ultimately going to have to be managed through a lifecycle of improvements, and that during these lifecycles people who need to access the bot are going to come and go and you will need a way to manage what users have access, in addition to if you want to update at a certain time for certain users, how that can be accomplished, and ultimately if you can run some different advanced algothritms through all of the data you are collecting because you are essentially creating a platform, in essence you will need a way to bake in some form of deep nueral net; my guess would be to stay ahead of the market.
I am truly excited to begin the next step in my career. I'll be working on the technology that is fundamentally going to change the way that enterprise companies around the world do business. There is the combination of having a decentralized blockchain network facilitate certain business functions between trustless parties. The decentralized trustless yet collaborative industry. Decentralized Applications that enable certain functions and state on a world computer, a distributed consensus protocol, from an internet browser. There is the concept of having an intelligent agent calling and deploying to these decentralized networks...
Happy New Year,
Live the dream.
-Dom