At Flovatar [1] we've been using SVG and SMIL animations as a way to achieve true composability and interactivity for our NFTs while also being able to store all the illustrations fully on-chain.
I just fell in love with SVG and highly encourage everyone to dig more into the potentials of it. You can even have fun and create epic pranks [2] with it :)
I recently became a web3 developer and created Flovatar (flovatar.com) and I totally agree with all the issues outlined in this article, but I think they are mostly limited to the Ethereum ecosystem and because most projects are not thinking outside the box and using IPFS to store the images.
In my case I decided to build it on the Flow blockchain (flow.com) and to use SVG illustrations and I couldn’t be happier about both choices.
Flow provides a JS library to interact with the blockchain without the need to use browser plugins like Metamask and also allows to store data on-chain with really affordable costs.
Having the SVG stored in the NFT guarantees that all the issues outlined in the article won’t apply in my case and will be guaranteed to exist as long as the blockchain will live (unlike IPFS where someone actually has to keep paying for the servers to store the images).
I could go on by saying that I managed to build a Marketplace that handles 500k$/month transactions with a single and relatively simple smart contract. Doing that in a web2 way would have been much much harder to both implement and maintain.
So from my perspective all the problems outlined in the article are super valid, but if you look a bit outside the current “standards” of the Ethereum world there is definitely hope and lots of solutions available.
I turned 42 recently and I went through a similar situation.
Good job, well paid and still interesting enough, but becoming more and more boring every month.
At some point I felt that I had just two options on my table:
- Stay in the company as technical director to continue growing but with limited expansion possibilities. Write less code and make more boring meetings basically.
- Continue doing more coding as senior developer and be happier with my life without all the meetings, but that would mean even more limited growth possibilities.
So like in most things in life, in the end I found out that there are not just 2 options, but thousands.
In my case the best solution I found was keep working with my daily job to have the stability that makes me feel "safe" when I go to sleep, and at the same time spend most of my free time in doing what I like the most: coding on some project that is 100% mine and where I have total control over.
I tried this approach a few times with some SaaS projects and even if they didn't became unicorns and some generated barely 30-50k$/year, they were totally worth the effort in creating them, because on top of the money, the most valuable thing you get in return is to learn how to create a project from start to finish, with all the non-technical components like marketing included.
Over time I found out that you'll need to be lucky enough to find someone good enough like you on the design and marketing side of it as well, but if you finally find the right team, then it will become 100x better than working on any company. Both financially and in terms of happiness.
Of course it's not a recipe that will work for everyone because you really need to be passionate about something to spend most of your free time on it, and you will risk of getting burned out, but from my experience is definitely worth the effort!
And the most important part of this, is that you will have the ability to jump into any technology you want!
In my case I felt like the web2.0 was getting pretty boring and repetitive for me after doing all the SaaS projects, but now I'm about to launch a web3 project that I built within 5-6 months without any prior knowledge of smart contract in any way.
You can't find a job that will give you the opportunity to make such drastic changes in your career and will allow you that level of freedom.
Do you think Apple would argue that they can’t put USB-C on a phone? Or have they already? I haven’t seen it and it wouldn’t make much sense.
The only consumer oriented argument, which IMO isn’t bad, is that a lot of people have Lightning peripherals for their phones that they’d have to replace. It’s really the only explanation that can explain why they’d change to USB-C on iPads but not iPhones. With laptops and iPads using adapters with most peripherals you’d use there is not a problem. People don’t tend to use something like a FLIR camera with iPad, and such a camera would be extremely flimsy to use on an iPhone with a USB-C to Lightning adapter.
I’m not arguing that Apple shouldn’t switch to USB-C, but I think this is a decent argument why delaying it has been good for a certain subset of customers.
I think they were hoping that they could go all-wireless for consumer iPhone and USB-C on Pro iPhones. They didn’t want to switch before that because they don’t want to send the signal that peripheral makers can rely on USB-C for all iPhones. But wireless charging tech hasn’t progressed as fast they hoped.
The other argument against the EU directive isn't about now, it's about what happens in 5, 10 years, when our technology has progressed, but the directive still specifies USB-C.
Any technological developments in wired charging can be reflected in a timely adjustment of technical requirements/ specific standards under the Radio Equipment Directive. This would ensure that the technology used is not outdated.
At the same time, the implementation of any new standards in further revisions of Radio Equipment Directive would need to be developed in a harmonised manner, respecting the objectives of full interoperability. Industry is therefore expected to continue the work already undertaken on the standardised interface, led by the USB-IF organisation, in view of developing new interoperable, open and non-controversial solutions.
These are exactly the pain points that Taylor Otwell (creator of Laravel, a PHP framework) tried to solve with Spark (https://spark.laravel.com/).
It was actually just updated to v6.0 yesterday so it's definitely a good time for considering it.
I personally used it for a couple of projects and I'm really happy about it. It probably saved me a few weeks or a couple of months of tedious work!
I've been using PHP for many years now and I was very close to switch to NodeJS or Go a couple years ago until I discovered Laravel. That changed my view of PHP completely and it improved my code quality and potential by a 10x factor at least.
I think that what Taylor Otwell has done in the last years with Laravel and with its ecosystem has been really underestimated. Not just for Laravel that is an excellent framework in my opinion, but especially with all the other products and libraries that he built along the way.
It covers all the needs I had in building my last few SaaS products and it made my life soooo much easier.
A few examples:
Forge and Envoyer: setup and manage your VPS in a breeze and deploy your code with zero downtime.
Spark: create a SaaS product in literally a matter of minutes without having to care about all the boilerplates
Echo: real time notification across multiple channels (mail, Pusher, Slack, etc.)
Passport: OAuth2 API server as easy as it can be
Scout: Redis/Algolia search with just a couple of lines of code
Dusk: test your app easily both for unit and browser testing
Cashier: payments with Stripe and Braintree in a breeze (both for one time payment and recurring ones)
Socialite: OAuth for all kind of services (Facebook, Twitter, Google, ...)
And beside all this, there is the excellent Laracasts by Jeffrey Way that made me learn not just Laravel but PHP and JS in general in a really great way.
And I could go on talking with the great and simple queueing system, the perfect integration with VueJS that I love as well, ...
As you can see I'm a big big fan of Laravel in general and I hope that it will become popular in HN especially over time.
The guy from "Pair" in the first episode of "Planet of the Apps" [https://www.planetoftheapps.com/en-us] tried to make a similar SDK his main business model but eventually failed to get the fundings from the VC.
I hope in the end he decided to stick his focus on the app (which is quite amazing), otherwise he's in big trouble now!
I really think that a lot of new apps will come out in this space, now that the technology is much more approachable.
The 21st of March one my server stopped working without any apparent reason, and it could no longer reach the DNS server to lookup domains, so all the API calls made by my app started failing.
After excluding networking issues (pinging from console was working fine), and after a lot of digging I found out that the source of the error was actually a security patch just released by Canonical that caused NSS ABI to break after a few hours of running. This would result in being unable to reach any external domain, and the only solution would be to restart the server.
Thankfully they just released a patch of the patch so hopefully everything should be fine now.
I just find it amazing how something like that could have happened and how installing critical and recommended patches now has become something more like a roulette than a sense of relief.
What about using Forge instead (http://forge.laravel.com)? I know it's not free but for 10$/month you can get Let's Encrypt cert in 20 seconds and tons of more features (server provisioning with really good security setup and all the tools you need).
https://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...
At Flovatar [1] we've been using SVG and SMIL animations as a way to achieve true composability and interactivity for our NFTs while also being able to store all the illustrations fully on-chain.
I just fell in love with SVG and highly encourage everyone to dig more into the potentials of it. You can even have fun and create epic pranks [2] with it :)
[1] https://flovatar.com
[2] https://twitter.com/flovatar/status/1520509399466483716