Mid August in Saigon

weekly update: August 12th to 18th, 2023

Table of Contents

1. Migrating my portfolio website

2. ‘Nights and Weekends’ Week # 2 assignment: build a toy app

3. Dungeon Master adding Smart Escrow

4. Blue Beetle Film

5. Closing

Migrating my portfolio website

This week I decided to improve my website. It had not changed much for a couple years. I migrated the front end to a Create React App. Then I added it to be rendered from the Django backend. After spending many hours reading about the different strategies to do this and the trade offs, I implemented to hybrid approach. This means that Django serves the template html page, which then loads the react app, and the react app then makes API requests to the back end. This proved to be very difficult to run on the Digital Ocean server in production. I ended up scrapping the idea and implementing it in NextJS with a Supabase backend. Now it is live with hosting on Vercel. I am feeling that this will increase my velocity and it will make more creativity possible leveraging the rich React package ecosystem. View it here: https://KonradGnat.com !

‘Nights and Weekends’ Week # 2 assignment: build a toy app

For the second week of this course to build a startup, the assignment was to build a toy version of the app. I launched a landing page that describes the product and has a blog post section, it is live on textlife.store. I used a Wordpress template for this. Wordpress has very good SEO, really good Blog and out of the box packages like e-commerce and other plugins. This is the reason why I chose it. I want to be able to reach a wide audience and build really fast with this tool set.

A second part of the the toy app was a demo version that is built on top of an open source project called quiver dot app. View it here: textlife.xyz! This is a nearly fully featured app, with user login and creating chat sessions with uploaded files using openAi. I deployed the Docker container on my server. This as a very difficult task as the server has only 1GB of RAM and only 15GB of disk space. I had to overcome many challenges to make it compile and run with these restrictions. I customized the front end styles to my taste and recorded a demo video. See it here:

https://twitter.com/konrad_gnat/status/1692861084397625391

Dungeon Master adding Smart Escrow

My major task this week was to complete the implementation of a web3 invoicing app inside a tool called Dungeon Master that is used within the agency DAO called RaidGuild.

Blue Beetle Film

This weekend I was invited to view the film super hero film by DC called Blue Beetle. It was a very well done film, with a good story line and made you feel like you were part of the world of the characters. The film inspired many contemplations for me. First about the theme of living with good and bad relationships, those that are symbiotic and parasitic.

The blue beetle is an ancient Alien creature that binds to it’s host and becomes inseparable from it. It chooses the host and gives them super human powers. This theme explored within this film and many other superhero films. I see the superhero genera as a beautiful one, as a new revitalization of the modern world with ancient motifs of the Western Tradition. That of Ancient Greek heroes that are part human and part God. How fantastic is it that this concept reemerges in the 20th century metropolis.

Walking back from the film, I engaged in conversations about this theme with my companion. This idea merits deeper exploration and expansion. I observed there are several manifestation of this theme, of symbiotic and parasitic relationships. First, most obviously in the Blue Beetle. Second in the form of the jobs that the main character Jaime Reyes had to take as a menial laborer at a resort hotel. We may have this relationship with work, where we give up our time and energy, in exchange for money, and at the same time the labor limits our development. It can be something that we do for some time, while we manage to make savings, and acquire some experience and skills that can allow us to move past that stage of menial labor, in to a more fulfilling and creative type of work.

Another relationship that can be classified as parasitic is that of the Kord industries Corporation, which manufactures weapons. This corporation sustains and grows itself by the destruction of human beings. On the other hand a symbiotic relationship can be seen in the relationship between people and machines like computers. This was written about first by J.C.R. Licklider. In 1960 he published a paper called “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” This was a brilliant paper envisioning the world that we live in today in the 2020’s. Where the internet enables global collaboration, creation of new applications that increase human kind’s productivity. At the same time there is the potential for a turn to a parasitic relationship with these tools. If they are used to wage war or if a new form of life in the form of Artificial General Intelligence takes over as the primary life form on Earth.

Closing

This was a shorter post. I was very busy this week with coding, at the same time I felt I was productive. This was the last full week in Saigon. I will leave this beautiful neighborhood called Japantown and fly back to Chicago next Tuesday. I mostly worked from my hotel room this week. It was very comfortable and conducive to deep work. I mostly stayed up late until 3 or 4 am and slept in until 11 or 12. This was my routine. I attended Muay Thai Kickboxing training, met up with friends, went to some developer meet ups. Overall it has been an active and balanced week here. I find the neighborhood very beautiful and it has everything very close so I am very content living here. I will return to the same hotel when I return on September 20th.