Q2 2022 Review

So, it's the 10th of July and I'm once again checking in to see how I'm measuring up vs the goals I set myself for the year.

Portfolio wise, I am pretty badly wrecked. Though I was somewhere between neutral and bearish the LUNA ecosystem, my market making bots on ZigZag ended up holding the bag on some luna and ust. I guess more significantly than that, DPX/rDPX are down massive from their ATH, which sucks till you consider they're still up vs the token sale price. In crypto as with poker, it all depends on how you frame what's going on mentally. There's no point whining about what could have been.

All told I'm down about 22% in ETH terms since the start of the year. So it's unlikely I'll hit my goal of +20% my ETH stack. But, I've survived and I've learned so I'm not feeling too bad about it.

Building wise, things have been going much better. Since Q1, I've built out what I believe to be the best pool 2 calculator on the internet, defiyieldcalculator.com. I couldn't quite believe it when I couldn't find a pool 2 calculator that took staking rewards into account (isn't that why anyone invests in pool 2s!?), so I re-created the best one I could find and added staking rewards.

Though you might not be able to tell, I also took an introduction to UX course over at frontendmasters.com. I have gone from 0 to 1 in terms of taking UX considerations into account when putting together websites, and I've (finally) realised this is an essential part of creating compelling websites that I shouldn't just ignore.

I also had some excitement with zkscanalyzer.com - the ZigZag team announced their IDO plans, which led to a massive spike in users for a short while. Not much of the traffic has stuck, but it did inspire me to give the site a facelift using my new UX expertise and make a few other improvements.

While defiyieldcalculator.com is another front-end only app, I did also manage to deploy a full stack website to the web for the first time this quarter. DopexStats.com was going to be modelled on gmxstats.com, and after several days of trying I did manage to piece together all the component parts of a MERN stack app. I will circle back to this when the opportunity arises.

But right now, I'm back to work for ZigZag. I got a challenge from the founder to build a tool to track token balances across mainnet, zksync, arbitrum and polygon. In doing this I had to completely re-learn javascript promises, but after a week I had a decent prototype.

I've now set my sights on zigzagstats.com, which will track trading volume, fees and users over time. This represents a substantial step up in terms of difficulty, as it will be a full-stack app that also tracks data in real time. I'm expecting this project to take at least a month, and to keep me on the steepest learning curve possible.

Overall I'd say my building skills are up another solid 3x this quarter.

At times during the market crash I felt like I'd made a mistake essentially going all-in on this crypto builder path. When significant sums of $ are evaporating before your eyes, it's easy to feel discouraged.

But with the right framing, it's clear to me that it's actually going quite well.

• It took me 12 months to get my first paycheque for writing code, and just 3 months to get the second.
• The apps I'm building are starting to attract more traffic, and certainly the code is of better quality.
• I'm learning, and I'm providing more and more value to more and more people.

Personally I'm in a good routine, exercising a little more discipline in order to ensure I am consistently putting myself in the best position to put another brick in the wall every day.

Just gotta keep building.

GL out there!