good-idea

Lucrative app idea generator

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Remote: Open to in-house or remote (experienced with both)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React, Redux, Typescript, GraphQL, Node, Python.

Functional programming & TDD

Résumé/CV: https://www.notion.so/goodidea/Joseph-Thomas-Resume-a9aef186... Github: https://www.github.com/good-idea

LA-based full-stack developer. I've worked as a contractor for 7 years with a variety of projects & clients. Open to contract work or a full-time position. I'd like to work on an exciting project with an experienced team. I want to build tools that help others to lead happier, healthier, and more empowered lives. I'm not interested in crypto, optimizing ad click-through rates, or harvesting user data.

I feel that people aren't talking about the environment enough when it comes to bitcoin (and many other topics). More in-depth research and knowledge on the matter (like this article, thank you for sharing) might be better known among those who spend more time reading about crypto, but most of the time environmental concerns are left out of the conversation.

Problematic topics are usually omitted from discussions when they are complex or not obvious and in the forefront. The conversation goes elsewhere, and we turn our heads to follow it.

From this article:

> As with many dubious claims, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that much of it is underpinned by a single, leisurely researched source: Digiconomist.

> In fact you’d be hard pressed to find many articles in the press pushing the environmentalist, anti-PoW narrative that do not link back to that one source. But hey, can you really blame them in today’s sound bite media environment? Research is hard and time consuming.

The author's POV is a little different in that he is addressing anti-bitcoin alarmists - but, underlying this is the argument that research and shared knowledge on the topic is scarce. This is the kind of content I want to see more of.

I'm happy this comment sparked some discussion here.

yes, definitely, and that's why I'm excited about it. What I was writing about when I posted that comment was more about how the environmental impact is often just left out of the conversation - and I was surprised that the original article didn't even give it a mention.

I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those)

But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems above). This is something that literally affects every human being.

Of the 203 comments (at the time I am posting this), there are only two uses of the word "environment". One of these is about the "regulatory environment".

Let's say Bitcoin, Ethereum, or another coin achieves an economic value & level of efficiency that makes mining an accessible investment for low-income people. Instead of server farms in Iceland, mining would be done by millions of people around the world. Some of the energy used for this would be renewable - but plenty of this is going to be coming from coal. In that sense, the coin would create an economic incentive to pollute (there are plenty of these already), and there's no way to regulate that kind of decentralized network. (That's the whole point)

My favorite summary of crypto is something along the lines of: leaving your car running while it solves sudoku puzzles in exchange for drugs. The drugs part isn't as relevant anymore, but the rest is.

I'm not here with an answer. There are many problems that I think crypto can solve and I'm glad it is something on the horizon.

But we need to talk about the environment.

Does anyone have a TL;DR?

There's a lot more to be said about a schema-based API. On the server (which this project covers), maybe it's not as important, but it is tremendously helpful on the front end, especially when your data has a lot of relationships (Of course, you can do this without GraphQL). I think this is a big factor in how libraries like Apollo were able to grow so quickly.

It's also nice that it's more standardized than a REST API - I know that if I need to work with a GraphQL api, I can look at the schema and immediately know how all the pieces fit together and how to get what I need.

I have used Dgraph on a couple of projects and enjoyed it. It seems a little more natural to me to think about all of the relationships between my data. It also can be queried using a GraphQL(ish) request.

But, it hasn't been around for long and doesn't have any options for hosting, and the JS client library is pretty basic - so you need to do a lot to have something a little more abstracted like Mongoose.

I enjoyed learning something new and will use it again - but unless I need queries that traverse many relationships, I'll probably use Postgres.

If you're just looking for a tool that you can use to define (and play with) a state machine, take a look at https://sketch.systems - it's not a 'drawing' tool but you could export an XState object and put that in another tool

Here are a few remote-focused job board websites that include non-dev roles:

https://remotive.io/ https://weworkremotely.com/ https://remoteok.io/