Rest of World has a piece on the fastest-growing countries for software development featuring GitHub’s Innovation graph. I got a peek at this last year at the GitHub booth at the IGF2023 in Kyoto. One of my favs is Economy collaborators which represents international collaboration on projects. It is the sum of git pushes sent from one country to another. This is some real CIA Factbook or Atlas of Economic Complexity-like stuff but for software development.
Had a call with a friend I knew from Kyoto. We went to China together in 2004. I saw him once in Oakland in 2013. We occasionally have catchup calls, but have not met in person in a long time. I have a few friends like this. They are all great and I am lucky to have them. 🥰
Big day today: the keys 🔑 have been handed over! We moved to Osaka in October and put our Kyoto apartment up for sale. Sold in December, and the new people took possession today. An 18 year long chapter is now over.
Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons, We have a long-time group doing the Strahd campaign… the DM commissioned cute voodoo dolls of our characters!! 😍😍😍 Amazing! #DnD
A wide-ranging and thought-provoking ep about crypto, AI, VCs, ZKs, quadratic funding, democracy, anarchism… Audrey drops the inspiring line “bridging polarity to plurality” 🎯
Of course a couple days after writing my post consolidating thoughts of decentralization I found a piece by Nathan Schneider in my Omnivore called: What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work
This further makes the point that the centralization-decentralization debate is nuanced, and Schneider quotes another scholar saying we must go “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.”
Schneider discusses entrepreneurship, co-ops, blockchain, and more, introducing three characteristics of applying the decentralization principle:
“Live in a small apartment rather than a big, drafty house… Fly rarely… Work less… exercise … Tax the rich… basic income… capital toward home care and nursing homes, not arms…neighborhoods dense and walkable…” etc
Just an hour left in the last day of January, so sent out my monthly personal note with a little advice that might make you feel a bit better… it’s working for me! buttondown.email/chadkoh/a…
I really appreciated Mark Nottingham’s memo RFC 9518 on Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards. In it he provides a wide-ranging and balanced introduction to the topic in quite a short article. I have been collecting bits of arguments for decentralization (in a centralized location of course 😉) for the past couple of years, with the intention to write something round-up, but have struggled. I am so glad Mark did it, and so much better than I could!
Spoke at Osaka Web Designer and Developer Meetup about my journey in tech. Talked about the never-ending technologies I had to learn, and the socio-economic context around each career shift. We then discussed future trends.
Watched this vid yesterday arguing that El-P is the most influential white rapper. So catching up on his non-RTJ stuff while doing laundry and chores around the house (like installing a new daughterboard on my keyboard)
