#startups

Thanks to artists like Beeple and projects like CryptoPunks, NFTs have been the main character of crypto news in 2021. This has led to an avalanche of NFT sales by artists and celebrities all over the world. Despite the heavy focus on people with clout cashing in on their social capital, I think NFTs will have an even bigger impact on artists emerging today.

A common anti-pattern in the world of software development is the over-operationalisation of the research and development process. In moving away from traditional ways of working, companies will spin up long-lived teams, working to sprint cycles, but still find a way to cram an inordinate amount of upfront planning into the system, causing a significant amount of waste. This can feel like a big step in the right direction but often comes with very little benefits compared to the old way of working, as the way the team works doesn’t change.

The world of work is rapidly migrating from physical space to the internet and this newly dominant medium for work is going to significantly change how we structure society. This may sound dramatic, but it is inevitable that industrial-revolution era systems, legislations and structures will eventually be superseded. I think, in the crypto community, we’re already seeing the structures of the future emerge.

A playbook I’ve used to describe the responsibilities of a software engineer for hiring and professional development purposes.

In much of the world, industrialisation has led to the abundance of calories, often in very unhealthy forms — a novel state for a creature that is accustomed to subsistence. This has posed serious challenges for society (e.g., how do we provide large populations of people with healthy food?) and individuals (i.e., how do I eat healthy food in reasonable amounts when millions of years of evolution has instilled a nature of scarcity into me, that drives me to consume all I can find?). Growing up in the 1990s, the golden age of the fad workout plan and diet, the public debate regarding the dangers of junk food was prominent. The parents of many kids in my generation changed their attitudes towards sustenance significantly throughout our childhoods. Abundance, while positive in so many ways, comes with challenges.

On August 25th, Identify and Disrupt passed both houses of the Australian parliament with support from both major parties, just one day after it was first debated. Officially dubbed Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021, the bill empowers the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) with three new and egregious powers when investigating federal crimes, or state crimes with a “federal aspect”.