Today I had a great conversation with Blake, the Product Ops team founder and my former manager at Stripe, a lover of digital art and, most importantly, a great guy. When I mentioned I wanted to start a regular update about Jamroom, he recommended looking at the Prince of Persia book recently republished by Stripe. I did not know it was basically the journal of the creator of the game, I thought it was more of a technical analysis. I should have the book somewhere in my storage but I just moved to a new house so I’ll get there during my weekend boxes cleanup hopefully.

But the idea of a journal sounds great. I want to do a candid narration of my lows and my highs, my struggles, and my exciting moments. And why not do it on the blockchain, in public? Not sure if the book Blake mentioned is exactly like this, but this is how I want to do it. So let’s go.

This is day 0 and it is not really day 0. In the past two or three months, I have been playing around with my vision to build a platform where people create any kind of content together. The composability of the blockchain and the generative power of the AI open up new territories. Basically, for the first time in human history, we can have lawyers enjoy creating art with their favorite artist using just a prompt describing their thoughts and a ledger automatically recording their piece of contribution to the collaboration. To me, this is pretty insane and my brain cannot stop thinking about all of the ways we can build a product that allows that.

Anyway, I finally had to stop the thinking. I now have a product I am building that I am extremely excited about, an artist committed to launching the first collaboration, and a network of people I love and respect that seems to be excited about bringing this project to light.

This journal will be a diary of my progress but also a report of the thoughts that come up in my brain while I move through this path. Today, it’s just about the progress:

• Launch date: Second part of January 2023 (between January 15 and 31)

• Today’s work:

  • Product: I have finished the CSS design of the web pages of jamroom.xyz. I am not using Tailwind although it is clearly the most polished option; I love CSS and I feel like I never got to use it on a real project so I want to get my hands dirty with it for once. I am sure this will make me appreciate even more Tailwind in the future. Anyway, the entire flow is basically mapped and it works pretty well on mobile too. I have tested it on an iPhone SE (the simulator) and on my iPhone 13 Pro and the UI is almost fully responsive. I will clean it up once the full app is working but I am happy with this milestone. It took me 2 full days of coding; it took me 1 full day to design the low-fidelity mockups in Balsamiq and the high-fidelity ones in Figma.

  • Launch: I spent some time thinking about how to launch and re-organizing a big spreadsheet with all the names of people I’ve met during the past months.

• Tomorrow’s work:

  • Product: Tomorrow I start writing my Next.js app. I am planning to actually spend one day reviewing some concepts I have not been looking at for a while, like some React basics, hooks, and redux. I hope one or two days to be enough to refresh my memory. I will also have to do some chores at home, we have a date night and a movie night. So basically, it is very possible that I will end up using Friday and the weekend to just review and practice my React skills and then build the app next week. Yes, that sounds like a good plan. For what concerns the smart contract, I have already written one that I need to review, but I have decided that the decentralized part of the tech stack is going to be the last one I develop. By Wednesday, November 23 I should have my app ready; then there’s Thanksgiving. After that, the priority goes to the smart contract and wallet interaction, which will be ready by Sunday, November 27.

  • Launch: I do not plan to spend time on the GTM part of things tomorrow.

I feel pretty happy. I am tired, slept only 5 hours and I have been quite nervous during the day, but I’m feeling good. This journaling is definitely helping. I had lunch at Google Boulder with Flavio and with talked about how he can help.

Goodnight