I used to have a tough time reading long-form articles on the internet. Part of my job at Medium is to encourage writers to publish long-form articles on the internet, so this was hard to admit. If you recommended an article to me, I’ll bookmark it into a folder called to_read and then keep working. If it’s urgent, I’ll block out some calendar time to read it. While I’m reading, I may get a Slack or a text. I may pause in the middle for an errand. Over the course of hours or days, I’ll eventually finish it. …

Over the last year I got back into various little programming projects. Most of it was fixes and tending to projects, from updating little apps to migrating my server, and some of it was trying out new tools. Most recently, it was some data manipulation in python, which I hadn’t really done since I was a researcher.

Usually, it begins with some task I need to do. Some feature I’d like to have or some error that I want to fix. I’ll google for that feature or I’ll copy/paste the error that shows up in the console into a google…

A few weeks ago I partner with Noman to come up with an idea for NFThack. It’s mid-March 2021 and the obsession with NFTs is growing. We want a project that’s unique, creative, a bit out of the box. There’s so many financial things. It limits the imagination. We want to break out of that and show what else is possible. Noman introduced me to dfeatures, and I’m smitten by the idea of media dfeatures. That are interactive. What’s that mean? Nothing yet, let’s find out.

TLDR; We make an interactive art trading card

It’s called Confetti Vortex. You can play with the prototype. It’s fun. It works…

I had sort of an opposite approach happen in the last year. Rather than beginning with writing and then finding a way to connect outside of it, I moved connections from outside of writing towards my writing. I was running recurring virtual events, and soon the event invitations expanded to newsletter posts. I started publishing these on Medium and used the events to support my writing. The events were virtual drawing parties where we'd gather on Zoom and I'd share a few writing prompts and everyone would draw. At the end we'd share our drawings. It was a ton of fun. Each week I'd pick a different theme and set of prompts. Through the weeks a general theme emerged around using creativity to further understand ourselves and express ourselves. This became a theme I could explore through writing.

Apple has won a patent that takes point cloud data in the environment and creates 3D reconstructions. Basically whatever the device is, there’s sensors that will be able to get spacial point data, and then a method to turn that into virtual objects for applications. From the patent abstract:

A voxel feature learning network receives a raw point cloud and converts the point cloud into a sparse 4D tensor comprising three-dimensional coordinates (e.g. X, Y, and Z) for each voxel of a plurality of voxels and a fourth voxel feature dimension for each non-empty voxel. In some embodiments, convolutional mid…

Hub Talk

As we explore growth, a recurring theme that comes up is building relationships — both with your readers and with other writers. Writing sparks new connections and strengthens existing ones. “Connecting with your audience after you publish a story is as important as the story itself,” writes Jenna N. Chambers, before diving into several ways to connect with your audience through responses, roundups, prompts, and reading their stories too.

What’s worked for you to connect with your readers? This includes ideas both on and off Medium, activities outside of writing, events, one-to-one’s, and more. Let us know in the responses! Just like our other discussions, I’ll share what I’ve found helpful too, and publish a roundup of highlights soon after.

At the beginning of last year I was like I’m going to figure out my finances stuff. Like forreal. I’ve always tried to and avoid it because the whole thing overwhelms me. All of the decisions for savings and investing and what if I pick the wrong thing. I’m getting older, I can’t keep putting this off.

So over the year not gonna lie I was super tempted to download Robinhood and start trading because everyone’s talking about it. But then also the markets are ??? I just felt like I’d get burned. What I was seeing around me during…

I like checking out google trends of different things to get a feel for interest or relevance of that thing. In this case I keep seeing NFTs more and more, everywhere, and wonder what’s the interest look like over time? It’s fascinating to me because the interest kind of skyrocketed as more and more wealth poured into them, like some sort of supercharged viral meme. Then I wonder, the faster it grows, might it be the faster it falls?

It’s still too early to tell in terms of future search interest going up or down.