Happy New Year!! Goals for 2023 ;)

I hope your new year is off to a great start.. Some how I managed to stay clear from the laptop over the holidays 🤷 and let it gather some dust in the office.. Even with my mind racing through ideas and wanting to experiment more with Stable diffusion and finalise and release a few more fun components to github.

Unfortunately my ChatGPT OCM component has been on pause; it looks as if the OpenAI servers are being hammered with every developer experimenting and creating cool things to the point it's  slow and constantly returning errors.. I'll return to this but even now checking their environment I'm getting messages notifying me that the servers are under heavy load.

With that said I'm jumping right back into design and code - this time experimenting with the Twitter APIs and creating my own mini simplified UI client. And I hate to say this.. I'm so.. so disappointed; I can't believe the state of the Twitter APIs - Trust me if you plan to do any development stick with V1; -V2 was created back in 2020 and even through it's iterations and enhancements over the last 3 years - it's just lacking key functional features and trying to get in contact with twitter or their dev relationship team to enhance  the APIs is currently impossible with the mass layoffs and upset employees who've jumped to mastodon.

Anyway FYI - For those interested in Twitter APIs There is a good overview video here of how Twitter uses graphQL to generate their public APIs and use it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rueKLwoQJV8 Unfortunately... you can't officially use GraphQL as it's against their terms.

Here is a quick preview of my customisable Twitter Client - I'm planning on porting this UI over to support OCM and enable the ability to create employee feeds, huddles, interactive Fishbowls.. but more to come on that later ;)  

What cool things did I get to work on last year?

I was pulled back into the Blockchain ecosystem at the start of the year entering a few global hackathons - expanding out and using what I had learnt from creating a Public NFT Marketplace to building a true Enterprise NFT Marketplace on the Oracle Cloud stack - this involved working closely with Oracle PM teams to figure out how to roll out and use the Ethereum Virtual Machine on OBP and how to connect with web3 creating my own suite of tools similar to remix to work across web3 and REST APIs. This led to the creation of a CloudWorld Blockchain app which unfortunately didn't make the cut this year - maybe this is the year!...

What else.. I had some fun and built my own mini Gameboy game, flashed it onto a cartridge. Setup this blog, created a suite of open source sample components and tutorials on some of the Oracle Cloud stack; Published over 50 blog posts in 3 Months.. and also partnered with Consensys to build cool Ethereum and Polygon Tech (playing with Metamask Flask and Snaps ATM)..

After 3 years of lockdowns and zero travel I finally went abroad to Oracle Cloud World Vegas and partied with the Fishbowl Solutions Team - A month of Detox was much needed after this...

4x Hackathons

Grabbing a Silver Medal from OpenSea.io team was amazing from a 4 day EthGlobal hackathon with my solo entry and competing with over 1000 other teams. (No Sleep and a lot of redbull)

NFT Drop & Private Marketplace

Creating a successful 5,000 NFT drop and building out my own private market place from the ground up built on top of Ethereum for TipToePunks was a great learning experience and I have to say - I hated IPFS and the challenges of dropping 10,000 assets on infura.

Creating my own Classic Gameboy Game!

That's right last year I went down the rabbit hole of Gameboy Development, hacking, flashing cards, bootlegging and building my own game!..  

Enterprise NFT Marketplace Designed for CloudWorld

The idea was  to create a CloudWorld app that anyone could use to collect OBP NFTs from partner booths, sessions and events. Alongside these NFTs  users would get Fungible Tokens aka ORA Tokens that they could use to redeem at the end of the event at a booth for Oracle Merchandise and any tokens they wanted could be exchanged for Soul Bound Tokens on Ethereum and held within their own wallet as a momento/Badge for attending OCW.

It also provided partners with additional analytics and stats on their user base, who visited and collected tokens and how they experienced and interacted with the show without the need to scan badges - collecting an NFT would auto add the collectors info into the partner dashboard.

Launched the BitmapBytes Blog

Covid is now finally behind us and with that - I'm working to get back my Oracle ACE status - releasing code snippets, blogging on Content, Blockchain, Digital Assistants, Process.. And working closely with the Oracle PM Teams with a few new campaigns planned this year!

Flew to the US for CloudWorld 2022!

UK to Minneapolis to Vegas! What a blast!.. Finally out of lockdown and planning lots of travel for 2023..

Custom Twitter NFT Card

Created an integration with Twitter that allows users to list and purchase NFTs directly within the Twitter Web Client as a quick POC - I thought this was cool! I don't know why no ones released something like this - I'm guessing because it only works with the web client.

Plans for 2023

I need to get up to speed with Rust and start moving my projects over to typescript - it's one area I've felt that I'm falling behind in tech and need to get back into pushing myself to learn more and get better at coding.

Somehow I've never needed typescript but I know this is the way forwards.

On the Rust side I've recently come across this course - https://rustforjs.dev/ Rust for JS Developers - so I think I'm going to jump on board and start rolling with this to start learning Rust and seeing how I can bundle to WASM and create new things..

That's all folks - here's to 2023 and the new adventures ahead!