The new decentralized web hasn't reached that level of growth yet but we are in the cusp of sparking the flames that will get us there.

Farcaster has shown that it's possible to build compelling (sufficiently) decentralized consumer experiences leveraging blockchains, pragmatically.

Building on Farcaster, or new protocols inspired by its approach, is a great way to get us to the growth that convinced Jeff Bezos to start Amazon.

You don't have to wait until then though. Start building now and help spark the flames that will take us all there.

Props to the Merkle team for keeping at it for years and willing to continue doing so, as evidenced by their latest round.

Note: bare with me since I don't plan on doing much editing or rewriting. I will split it into different topics so feel free to skip around.

Let me know on Farcaster (@gabrielayuso.eth) if you'd like me to expand more on a particular topic on future posts.

Topics

• Farcaster and Me

• FarCon

• Farcaster user/bot growth

• Farcaster the protocol, Warpcast and the ecosystem

• Why this all matters

I joined Farcaster when there were less than 1K registered users, I've been active ever since.

I joined because I was looking for the signal amongst all the noise during the last crypto bull market. I was looking for glimpses of the future of the decentralized web enabled by blockchains, beyond the casino.

The two projects I found that point towards the future of the web as I hope it'll be are Nouns and Farcaster.

The Merkle team is building the protocol and the first client, Warpcast, in a very pragmatic and disciplined way. The idea of it being a sufficiently decentralized protocol that leverages blockchains for identity and registries, with its own p2p network tailor-made to the protocol's content and usage patterns resonate with my engineering sensibilities.

The care that was put into making a good quality product with a good quality network from the start resonate with my product sensibilities. It attracted and retained users with similar sensibilities early on, that's why the community's bond is strong.

Last week I attended FarCon '24, a community organized conference, in Venice Beach.

This wasn't my first FarCon. In 2023 I flew to Boston for the first FarCon which was an order of magnitude smaller than this year's conference. Farcaster itself now has an order of magnitude (or two) more active accounts than it did then.

A year ago, the protocol wasn't in mainnet (production), signups weren't permissionless, the idea of channels had just been introduced, frames weren't a thing and there was no memecoin tipping. FarCon attendees were mostly just users since few were building on top of the protocol then. There was no hackathon, no big funding announcements and no VCs.

Props to everyone involved in making the conference happen since it was a huge success, despite it expanding drastically only a few months before it took place.

I preferred the size of FarCon '23. It was more intimate, conducive to deeper group conversations and participation in the talks. This year I missed most of the talks and had just a few deep conversations since there was so much going on and so many people to say hi to.

I was overwhelmed, but everyone's mileage in these social situations is different.

I'm not sure if I'll attend FarCon '25. I'm more likely to attend smaller meetups instead.

The protocol has grown considerably this year, with both humans and bots.

There have been several discussions on Farcaster and Twitter about the DAU number, its relationship to memecoin tipping, bots that aim to extract value from tipping, etc.

On the web, there will always be bots, there will always be spam, there will always be scams, etc. Companies like Meta and Alphabet have large teams and infrastructure dedicated to keep bots and their content away from users as much as possible, yet they don't always succeed. Google Search's web results are less useful in large part because the open web has turned into garbage full of low quality, clickbait-y, filler content. Twitter is full of garbage replies from bots. Even ads are scammy, I helped take down many phishing crypto ads on Google Search. It'll always be a cat and mouse game, companies trying to filter out bot's content while bots get better at mimicking human behavior, now with the aid of LLMs.

Bots and spam can drastically reduce the quality of a social network so it's critical for clients to address this. One benefit that comes with the need to filter content is that it forces the discussion on decentralization and the need for diverse clients and data providers to give users more choice and control of their feeds.

Dan and Varun (Merkle's cofounders) stated in the opening talk at FarCon that they plan to grow Farcaster with crypto. There are both good things and bad things about this.

The good thing is that by embracing crypto trends, such as memecoins, it's more likely that folks on crypto Twitter will move to Farcaster, growing the protocol's network and that people coming to crypto will join Farcaster directly without even passing through crypto Twitter first.

The bad thing is that by embracing crypto trends and focusing on crypto natives, the carefully curated community which was more focused on crypto the computer could shift more towards crypto the casino. It can also deviate from building a product that explores UX for general consumer beyond crypto natives.

I'm not too worried about this since crypto the casino and the amount of crypto natives is small, and crypto will remain small unless it can move beyond the casino and can appeal to the general consumer space.

The way to do it is by building compelling product experiences that show the benefits of participating in the new decentralized web powered by blockchains without making crypto and the ease with which it enables speculation the main thing.

If you want to know the technical underpinnings of Farcaster the protocol read Varun's Sufficiently Decentralization for Social Networks and The Goldilocks consensus problem essays.

The way I see it, Farcaster provides:

1. User Owned Social Identity and Auth

2. Open Social/Engagement Graph

3. Permissionless Content Feeds

4. Frames (extension of #1)

Every Farcaster user has a globally unique FID which can be associated with a username (fname, ENS), a social profile (pfp, bio), multiple authorized signers and verified wallets. Signers are what give Farcaster profiles the power to become a trusted auth system across apps and frames. It's like a crypto version of Google SSO.

The Farcaster account system can be used as an identity and auth layer without using the social graph and content feeds. For example, if someone signs in with Farcaster, then you immediately know that that user owns all the tokens associated with all the verified wallets associated with the account without having to ask them to sign a message with a wallet.

Since Farcaster is a social networking protocol, it has a social graph baked into it (users can follow/unfollow other users). More importantly, the protocol also keeps track of an account's content engagement via likes, replies and recasts. These engagements form a different type of graph between accounts.

It's well known that one of the biggest challenges for any new product is overcoming the cold start problem. By integrating with Farcaster, products can build on top of a pre-existing network of users.

I don't remember the specifics but Instagram built their social network by essentially letting users import their graphs from Twitter and Facebook before they closed down those APIs. This way, you could start following people from Twitter and Facebook on Instagram as soon as they created an account.

Apps can use Farcaster's graph to either find others from Farcaster that are using the app and bootstrap their own follow graph, or by fully integrating with Farcaster's follow graph without the need of a separate one. Also, apps can use Farcaster's engagement graph to recommend accounts that you've engaged with on Farcaster.

Farcaster was born as a sufficiently decentralized social network protocol in the likes of Twitter but if you think about the underlying data layer and not about the main product that has been built on top of it, Farcaster is a content feeds protocol.

Since the system that stores the content is a p2p network with global state, there are tight constraints on the data that can be pushed to the network. A small amount of text and embeds (links to other content) is all that the protocol lets you store. Each entry (cast) is associated with the author's FID.

Like Twitter, the protocol supports replying to a cast, which means that casts can be parented to other casts. This parent-child relationship is what makes replies and threads possible. The feeds are actually trees not just lists.

One simple tweak let the protocol go beyond its Twitter roots to enable what Warpcast calls channels. Casts can be parented to any URL, not just other casts. All casts parented to the same URL can form a new feed. For example, all casts in the Nouns channel are parented to a URL that corresponds to the Nouns token contract.

By leveraging the ability to parent to any URL, Farcaster can be used to build many different content feeds.

By leveraging the ability to embed URLs in casts, Farcaster can be used to build feeds with many different types of content.

The feature that brought the most attention to Farcaster earlier this year was the introduction of Frames. Frames are interactive embedded URL previews.

Social networks use HTML meta tags pulled from websites to present links in a nicer way (such as with an image, title and description) than just the plain URL. Merkle expanded on this to let websites tell clients to render interactive components such as buttons and which HTTP endpoints to call when each button is pressed. This allows developers to build "mini apps" that can be embedded into casts in a feed.

The most powerful aspect of frames is that the client sends Farcaster auth data to the frame server when a user interacts with it. This means that the server has proof that a specific user interacted with a frame and also has proof that the user owns the wallets associated with the user's Farcaster account. Since both Farcaster and wallet data is open, the frame server has a lot to play with.

Apps have opportunities to integrate Farcaster in different ways, as described above. This enables a rich ecosystem of apps and tools that leverage (1) the Farcaster auth system, (2) the social/engagement graph or (3) the content in one way or another. For example, events.xyz uses the Farcaster auth system to let users RSVP to events including directly on a feed via a Frame.

Apps that integrate the protocol fully are considered clients. The main client developed by Merkle, in tandem with the protocol, is Warpcast, which is a Twitter-like client. There are other clients such as Supercast and Nook. Clients don't necessarily need to have a Twitter-like feel but they usually do.

There have recently been discussions about Warpcast's dominance. Dan answered my question during FarCon about growing the ecosystem by stating that there isn't much economic incentive to build other clients at the current size of the user base (~40K DAUs) and that there will be more room for other clients once the protocol hits ~10M DAUs.

Despite that, there are now at least two other VC funded clients, Nook and Kiosk. I'm particularly curious (and surprised) about Kiosk since it seems to be very well funded yet there is little info about it other than an announcement teaser video that makes it look memecoin channel centric with cast minting and native tipping.

At this size, it's fine to have Warpcast as the main Twitter-like client with a few smaller boutique ones.

What interests me is leveraging the protocol to provide other types of experiences beyond the Twitter/Reddit-like clients. Experiences that could expand the protocol and the ecosystem beyond what Warpcast is doing.

Imagine if the web had stayed as Tim Berners-Lee envisioned it without Marc Andreessen and other's pushing it beyond the academic use cases.

Building tools and clients that just address "opportunities for a another client" won't move the needle and will eventually shutdown due to low usage or be sherlocked.

We should explore beyond Twitter/Reddit-like clients. We should also build with the protocol and extend to it as opposed to just using it as a bootstrapping and GTM conduit.

Remember Farcaster is: Auth, Graphs, Feeds, Frames

The second priority Dan and Varun mentioned at FarCon was focusing on enabling cozy corners to form in the protocol. Cozy corners are subnetworks within the larger Farcaster network, such as channels and communities.

Dan also mentioned that he believes there are more opportunities for channel centric clients to succeed. Such as turning a channel into a fully formed app.

I tend to agree completely with Dan and Varun. Going deeper into communities can unlock more use cases yet unexplored. I'm biased since I'm building in exactly this space, starting with Nouns (prototype: 498.wtf) but aiming to scale beyond.

Finally, Dan and Varun mentioned that another goal is to build more legos. Initially by incorporating direct casts (DCs) and channel registries into the protocol.

A big reason why building beyond the Twitter/Reddit-like client paradigm is important is to increase the amount of legos we can come up with.

I'm particularly excited about legos that let us move beyond the client paradigm. Legos that allow for much more composability at the application layer, that take us forward in the new world of computing and data.

Ok cool, but why would one care about all this? Why would one care enough to dedicate time and money to help grow Farcaster's user base and ecosystem?

Because the open web is dead.

Websites are full of garbage content and obtrusive, useless ads. Social media walled gardens have complete control over creator content and monetize it for themselves. Data is trapped behind their control so what they say goes. We live in a monarchy of data, the lords control it and do with it as they please not letting free cities and free economies to flourish, stifling innovation.

Decentralized protocols like Farcaster are large part of the solution. Inversion of control and power, from the self appointed monarches to the citizens.

Long live the open web.

I wrote a last minute proposal so, unlike everyone else that submitted, I had no clue what I was going to build. That's what I've been figuring out since the win.

I've been eager to explore user experiences leveraging the composable and open nature of decentralized protocols. I did that a bit for the quick prototype I built for the proposal by combining prop house, Nouns onchain ownership and Farcaster data. I'm going to go much further.

Nouns is a community full of talented builders and creators that publish content across the decentralized space. There's always many things going on: daily auctions at noun o'clock, proposals, prop house rounds, nounish mints, IRL events across the globe, podcasts, articles, discussions about memes, culture, governance, ideas, etc. It's hard to keep up, even without including all the other nounish communities out there such as lilnouns, verbs, yellow collective, builder DAO, purple DAO, etc.

Given all this, I decided that step one had to be to make all this great nounish content accessible in one place and highlight the top content to be able to get a feel of what is going on in Nouns at a glance. There's much (much!) more to it than that, of course, but this is step one, we'll get to the other steps later.

The image below is an annotated snapshot of the v0 prototype providing some details as to what it's all about.

You can try the less-than-half-baked prototype at: https://498.wtf/prototypes/nouns/

I want to make the feeds fast and useful but also explore personalization and customization. The feeds in the prototype were chosen quick and easy just to put it all together.

I'll lean on the community to learn what the initial sections and feeds will be. I'll also explore ways to make it much easier to jump to each section without having to scroll.

As a nouner and fan of everything nounish I'll make this the first place I go to get my daily doze of Nouns since, honestly, I don't even know where to start today (the trending feed of the Nouns Warpcast channel ain't it).

There will also be more than one of these sites (when we get there). Individual projects, creators, sub-communities and others will be able to have their own site and... I'm getting ahead of myself, I'll leave it at that. 😁

Please reach out to me (@gabrielayuso.eth) on Farcaster with thoughts, ideas, requests, criticisms, etc.

I'm going to keep on building, sharing more and requesting feedback as I go.

I'm grateful to all the people that have congratulated me on my first big step, and that have reached out to offer a job opportunity or potentially invest in what I might be building.

I'm ready to share more.

Many companies are doing great work building infrastructure that will power the decentralized future and many more are popping up in the decentralized AI space building infra for decentralized training, data provenance and inference.

I, however, plan on tackling things from the top down. Focusing on addressing user needs with experiences made possible by the infrastructure we have today and help shape the infrastructure that others are building.

This is how Google was built, after all. First they addressed the user need with the PageRank powered search engine with a clean and fast UI, and then they build infrastructure to scale their offerings such as GFS, SSTables, BigTable, MapReduce, Borg, Spanner amongst many others whose open source counterparts have helped scale the entire web.

I knew that, to start, I'd be building on Farcaster and Nouns because Farcaster is pragmatically building on the consumer decentralized web, without focusing on speculation, and Nouns is leading the way on mobilizing builders and creators across the globe to create an open, decentralized brand.

Open tech and culture. Gotta love it.

As a happy coincidence, Nouns had a prop.house round to fund Nouns x Farcaster clients. I submitted a proposal as a last minute thing and won!!

To be clear, I won because of the goodwill and trust I've gained by being an active participant in Farcaster and Nouns for years, not because of a master plan, since I didn't share one at the time (my technical background helped).

What am I building?

Subscribe, follow me on Farcaster and you'll find out! 😁

To be honest, I have a grand vision but the first step is to build a web platform to improve discoverability and monetization for communities and creators participating on the decentralized stack, on Farcaster and beyond (starting with Nouns!).

Communities, creators and builders are this industry's lifeline. Their creations are scattered, buried in a see of spam and not easy to find. Unlike in web2, the content is open, we should be able to do something about it, together.

I'm building a consumer product, but that's only the beginning. That's why I'm building a company whose mission is to reimagine the web, blurring the lines between creator, user, and developer, empowering them with ownership and control.

If you're a creator, builder or investor passionate about this problem space, whether you're operating on it or not, don't hesitate to reach out!

I'm starting to put together a pre-seed round and looking for first hires (job descriptions).

Reach out form: https://forms.gle/Kuz2zDyxj3o462b9A

⌐◨-◨

After 10 years at Google, it’s time for me to say goodbye. Today, March 26th 2024, is my last day as a Googler – scary and exciting!

I learned a lot from all the great people I worked with throughout the years.

Seeing how such a beast works from within was amazing, the sheer scale of it all. I’m fortunate that I got to learn the inner workings of one of the biggest tech marvels in existence, where a lot of the foundational infrastructure that has scaled the web was invented.

In early 2021, I got hooked by the crypto space starting with ArtBlocks. Seeing what blockchains and smart contracts could do for builders and creators was inspiring, even if the tech was in its infancy. It felt like the beginning of the web I experienced as a kid.

Google was born in those days, the days of the original decentralized web.

However, the web has changed a lot since then. Especially with platforms such as Facebook and X that just want to keep you and your data in there.

Google itself had to evolve as well since, in many cases, users just want an answer and don’t want to go hunting for it within many websites. The introduction of knowledge panels, web answers, oneboxes and other such features made Search more useful at the expense of sending traffic to other sites. I joined Google right around the time of this transition and worked with teams trying to figure out how to measure quality for these new features.

Providing answers instead of just linking to other sites has its pros and cons since it’s a better user experience but then folks that put content online get less traffic. The problem is getting worse with LLMs since tools like ChatGPT generate information based on the web’s content without pointing back at the source, some, like Perplexity, do cite sources but I suspect few people visit them.

This will cause havoc to the fabric of the web. Although, to be honest, the web was already really broken by sites trying to game SEO and maximize ad impressions.

AI can simplify the user experience but it won’t fix the fabric of the web, it can actually make it worse and make walled gardens even stronger since they can now package user generated content and sell it to the highest bidder (e.g. Reddit) or keep it all for themselves (e.g. X).

I truly believe that the solution lies in the decentralized stack (crypto, blockchains) that has been built in the past few years.

There’s still a long way to go, but the building blocks are starting to come together so we can set a new foundation with built-in provenance and incentives where all participants can be rewarded by their contributions to the system as a whole.

This might’ve been naive of me but I truly thought that Google could be persuaded to return to its roots of supporting the decentralized web since that’s where it was born. In late 2021 I looked for other Googlers that were interested in crypto/web3 and I built an internal community with over a thousand of them.

This led me to have discussions with leadership across many parts of Google. A new team was put together to explore the decentralized tech and several other parts of Google started exploring it as well; YouTube, Cloud and Search being the only ones with public announcements/launches.

Unfortunately due to the FTX drama, the bear market and the rise of ChatGPT, most of the work in the decentralized space was deprioritized. The only thing I worked on that saw the light of day was the feature that lets you check crypto balances for a given Ethereum wallet on Google.com.

In the summer of 2023 I was transferred to work on AI related projects in Google Labs. I had mixed feelings about it but I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the AI space. However, the work we were doing was not for me, and my heart was still in the decentralized space.

So here I am, taking the plunge.

Those golden handcuffs were freakin’ strong… but I have taken them off… It's exciting!

The web is changing, there is no doubt about it. Companies like The Browser Company, Perplexity, Humane, Rabbit and others are starting to experiment on new ways to interact with computers and the web.

This is an area I’m deeply excited to explore but, unlike others that are just thinking about AI, I aim to reshape the fabric of the web powered by decentralized protocols. We can truly reimagine the web, blurring the lines between creator, user, and developer, empowering them with ownership and control.

The future of the web will be bright, it won’t be easy but we’ll make it happen.

I’m planning on playing a big role in it so stay tuned! I’ll be sharing more about my thoughts and my journey on programmista.com and Farcaster.

It’ll be a big undertaking and I can’t do it alone. 

⌐◨-◨

P.S. I shared the following brief goodbye post within Google, thought I’d share it here as well.

Powered by DNS, TCP/IP, web servers and what not, the URI is used to find the document and it serves it to you. There is no one controlling any of this, you can just put up a document, set up your DNS, point it to a server and there you go. Anyone with a URI will be able to find your content. This is something that has been lost, don’t get me wrong, this still exists, but it has been lost in the sense that running your own server, buying your own domain, and managing all of it is not super hard but it's not easy either. It's just much much easier to create an account on X or Meta or whatnot…

It's so easy to join and put content on these platforms… they're optimized for that. They're optimized to make it much easier for you to start posting and keep coming back. Because there's a financial motive behind it. There's nothing wrong with making money, you need to make money in order to keep things progressing, Someone has to pay for it, right? But, we've lost control… we've moved to a centralized world. All this content lives behind the walled gardens. You don't really own your account, you don't really own your username, you don't own any of it…

Ownership means the freedom to exit, the right to go somewhere else, and the ability to take your stuff with you. When you rent an apartment and fill it with your belongings, those belongings don’t stop being yours. Even if you’re renting, you don’t have to leave everything behind when you move out. But the web doesn’t work that way. You put all your stuff in one place, but when you want to move to a different platform, you can’t take it with you. Even if the platform allows you to export some of your data, it’s not always easy to import it into a new service. It’s possible to do it, but it’s not always straightforward, and it’s not always supported.

When you move to another network, you mostly start over from zero… no followers, no nothing… You have to rebuild your content and your graph. It's ridiculous… The fact that you can barely make any money on these platforms is ridiculous… That's one of the reasons why I care about decentralization and I care about blockchains and crypto and peer-to-peer and web3.

Honestly, I think tokens have a place but tokens have been one of the things that have caused the space to be completely misunderstood, Because tokens and the ease in which they can be traded made the space too focused on speculation… “wen token! wen token!”... Honestly, it's just not appealing… It’s cool that they’re a form of utility that we have, they’re a form of exchange native to the medium, which can be used to incentivize certain behaviors, so that's great… But they’re just one piece of the puzzle… a piece that a lot of people are put off by.

We need to move beyond that, if we want to grow the decentralized web. I want to take it back… We're getting there… We're going to get there. I've seen recently more and more people saying that we need to move away from a lot of speculation, we need to focus more on real value to the users. We need to start thinking more on higher levels of abstraction. Finally, we have the notion of embedded wallets! Even though we don't like what web2 did to the web. There's still a lot of value there. There's a reason why it's worked so well, right? Optimizing the user experience makes it so easy, so trivial… you don't worry about anything technical… you just use your product… We can do the same. The technology still has to mature but we can start doing it already.

We can start taking the steps. I'm glad that people are now doing these embedded wallets which live within the app itself to a certain extent and you don't have to necessarily worry about an external wallet, which honestly has been one of the worst user experiences… Folks have been trying to make wallets nicer and better, props to them, but they shouldn't exist… At least not the way they are today. We really need to make the decentralized web useful. Show its value… that's another reason why I'm starting all this…

After I got hooked on web 3, crypto, NFTs, DAOs, etc. I really tried to push building in web3 within Google… I really did… I was excited because it really seemed that it was being taken seriously, to a certain extent. It was great… The plan looked awesome. I was excited, but it stopped. Understandably… What OpenAI has shown with ChatGPT and so on, it shifted the industry. It really bumped me that we didn't continue and we didn't execute on these plans. That would have been pretty cool…

I haven't pivoted.

Sure. I might be somewhat working on AI now but I haven't pivoted. I'm still in crypto, I'm still in decentralization. That's what's still in my mind 24/7.

I started d11d.tools – d11d stands for decentralized – I started all this to start getting back into space a little bit more, building a bit more, working towards something that I've been thinking about for more than a year now.

It’s gradually getting more and more into focus in my mind. I want to share… talk about it. But I don't think it's still at the point where I can fully share it since it’s still developing… but I’ll do so in the upcoming posts.

d11d.tools are these little experiments I'm starting to run, just pieces to a puzzle. I’m starting to navigate the space, send some signals and see what comes back. To iterate and find different use cases, different opportunities, different strategies to inform a layer that will help bring the decentralized web back. Because that's what I want. It's what we all want… Building infrastructure is easy (comparably). Also building little applications on top of like next.js and things like that is easy. It’s fun and they have value, for sure but they’re tiny tools. They’re not something that will bring value, engagement and hook people, something that makes you think, “this is how things should be”. Something familiar yet. refreshing and exciting… revolutionary… Something that it's not more of the same. I find that interesting, and that's exciting.

That's why I'm going to continue thinking about this space and build in it. I'm starting to take the steps towards that. I hope you all can follow along in this journey.

I can't do this alone. I can't.

I'm going to continue sharing through programmista and Farcaster.

I want your questions, I want your thoughts. I want your ideas… because I cannot do this alone. This is for everyone. This is by everyone.

I always start involving people more as I progress. I definitely will.

More on this soon, but I'm a firm believer in the power of decentralization. Therefore, I didn't want to create a podcast with Spotify, as podcasts are becoming increasingly centralized, despite their origins in RSS.

I care about decentralized media so I decided to mint the audio companion as NFTs. This ensures they have a presence onchain, allowing the episodes to be collected and the content stored in decentralized storage. This is similar to programmista's text version on Paragraph, where posts are stored on Arweave, and each post can be collected as an NFT.

To achieve this, I started a collection on Zora and leveraged the data onchain to build the podcast feed.

As I continue to build more in the decentralized space, this Thanksgiving break, I developed a tool I’m calling tpod. It can create an RSS feed and a simple webpage for a given token URI.

Since my aim is to create more tools and compile ones created by others, I included a tool named man, inspired by the UNIX manual tool. It provides information on how to use each tool.

Here is the man page for tpod: https://d11d.tools/$/man/tpod

Keep in mind, this is a very early alpha version that hasn't been thoroughly tested. Here are a few links to podcast pages from some audio collections on Zora:

- Zero Rights Reserved Podcast: https://d11d.tools/$/tpod/chain://eip155:7777777/erc1155:0x20035fEa4dd659553233FE5ea3CA207E6427B5Eb

- UFO Podcast: https://d11d.tools/$/tpod/chain:/eip155:7777777/erc1155:0x4174f78b7769650c1b205a2e1ac69cd0e47bbe02

- programmista audio companion: https://d11d.tools/$/tpod/chain:/eip155:7777777/erc1155:0xd5E04c47bBF5686dfA55027d9ca8b7c46eC05Fc5

How tpod was built

Since programmista aims to be somewhat technical, I'll share a bit about how tpod was built. I have a Go server that calls the reservoir.tools Tokens API to pull data for a given NFT contract on a specific chain. I chose Reservoir because they have indexed many chains, allowing me to pull data from Zora, Base, Optimism, Ethereum, etc.

The server generates the RSS feed following iTunes podcast standards and generates webpages using preact for client side rendering. The site is being served by Railway.app and the domain is managed by Cloudflare.

I’ll share more later, but I'm building d11d.tools in a way that allows multiple tools to be registered with a descriptor. The server calls the registered tool logic passing in the subcommand and arguments (if any). The man tool reads the tool descriptors to generate the pages.

Closing

Give it a try! If you have any suggestions or encounter any issues, please fill out this form.

If you haven't already, check out the welcome post for programmista. Leave any questions you'd like me to answer in the call to action cast.

Gabriel Ayuso — web/acc on Warpcast

TL;DR; Doing an async AMA. Will answer in long form post. I'm reviving an old blog of mine, programmista.com. I'm trying to write more and will use an async AMA format as an initial forcing function to write. I go more into detail on the post linked below. Any topic is fine. https://programmista.com/welcome

Audio

Subscribe to programmista's audio companion by pasting the following RSS feed URL to your favorite podcast player (only tested with PocketCast so far 😅). https://d11d.tools/$/tpod/chain:/eip155:7777777/erc1155:0xd5E04c47bBF5686dfA55027d9ca8b7c46eC05Fc5.rss

Lately, I've started writing more, through tweets and casts, but long threads or screenshot essays are rare for me.

I haven't given myself the time due to other commitments. I'd like to share my experiences and thoughts, assuming others find them useful. I prefer asynchronous communication, which is why Farcaster appeals to me more than group chats. So, I'm looking to experiment with an asynchronous AMA , of sorts, and see if that works for me and others. Kind of an interview podcast/newsletter where I’m the interviewee. This could lead to stand-alone posts that grow from those “conversations”.

Initially, I'll prompt for questions with a cast, select some, and answer them in a podcast/newsletter in the following week.

Since I prefer podcasts, I'll offer that format alongside text—no live spaces, just audio responses to questions.

There's no set schedule... I might aim for weekly releases, possibly dividing questions into separate posts if there's enough interest.

I’ll start by doing a very brief intro for now… I can expand on it based on people’s questions or I might just feel like telling a longer story myself at some point…

A little about me

I was born and raised in a touristy beach town in the pacific of Mexico. I got into movies, games and computers at an early age. Although I didn’t really learn to code until college, in Mexico. Before then I mostly played around with photoshop and Flash so technically ActionScript was my first language. I considered majoring in Graphic Design or Physics but I chose Computer Science instead because it combined the technical and the creative.

After college I moved to Germany since I had never been to Europe and wanted to experience living there. While living there I worked at Nero which was a Windows software company but I was part of the Online Services building things such as online storage, photo printing, payments, etc. After four years I quit my job and moved to Mexico for a bit before searching for jobs in the US. While I was there I built a Tumblr MacOS client but, soon after I put it in the Mac App Store, Nero offered me a job in their LA office, so I took it to get my foot in the US. 

I helped build a photo synching service for a new mobile app Nero was building but after a bit over a year there a Google recruiter reached out so I went through the job interview process and got the job so I moved to SF. That was a little over 9 years ago.

At Google I’ve mostly worked in Search, in the data engineering side of things supporting experimentation, strategic analysis, growth, quality/ranking, etc. When I moved back to LA, I switched to work on YouTube Ads for a couple of years where I worked on the ad formats on Android and iOS, before going back to Search.

A couple of years ago I got hooked on the idea of a new decentralized web (web3) powered by blockchains, p2p networks, etc. I joined crypto twitter and Discord servers where I met many people working in the space. Unlike many others, I stayed at Google since, as a true believer of Google Search’s mission, I saw the new decentralized web as a return to the origins of Google, a great fit.

I managed to build an internal community of Googlers that were excited about “web3” and I was even one of the first Googlers to work on “web3” explorations full-time, even assisting GV with crypto deals. However, after the bear market hit and ChatGPT’s wake up call to Google, I switched from working on web3 to AI related data and quality stuff. However, I’m still a true believer of the new decentralized web so I try to stay active and engaged in the community mainly through Farcaster.

Participate

Follow me on Farcaster or X, I'll post the AMA call-to-actions there (I'll also link them from http://gabrielayuso.com/programmista/cta). Reply to the post with your question and I might answer it on the next post.

Audio

Since many of us consume more audio than text these days, like myself, I'll include an audio version of each post and will provide a link to a feed (coming soon).

I'm experimenting using ElevenLabs to generate the audio version using AI to make it sound more like me. So you know, in case it sounds odd.