Five Links Friday #1

Matt Spear

Matt Spear: 15th April 2022

3 min read

Startups, Screenshots, Web3 and Awe

Hey 👋

My name is Matt – I’m a recovering link hoarder / tab collector… never wanting to loose the cool things I find and new topics I want to explore.

Each week I’ll throw together 5 links I’ve found from around the web, so hopefully they’ll be something for everyone who reads it.

Loosely I’ll cover the things I love: startups, coding, learning, education, augmented reality, machine learning, productivity, you name it and we’ll find some links for it.

Thanks for subscribing and giving this a go!

1. Startups

Slidebean

I found this channel through a YouTube video about the dark side of Digital Nomads, expecting to find a travel vlogger channel, it turned out to be mostly about Entrepreneurship / Startups.

The quality of the channel is high with a mix of case studies (How Boosted Board failed) to startups 101 (How to write a pitch deck).

Plus I’ve also finally got my head around how startup funding works (seed vs Series A vs B vs C)!

2. NFTs and Art

You're Wrong About NFTs

A nice explainer by Andrew (Blender Guru) about what art, digital ownership and fairer payments for artists means.

For more from Andrew check out his infamous Blender Donut Tutorial to try your hand at 3D rendering.

3. Tool for beautiful screenshots

Pika – Create screenshots and browser mockups quickly

I recently used the Pika app to create a tweet image to show off my new site Progress. I think the tool make screenshots look more polished / visually appealing.

If you are a developer there is a similar tool for code called Carbon, to show off all your fancy functions!

4. Web3 Learnings

This week I ventured further down the web3 rabbit hole writing my own Solidity / Ethereum contract and deploying it to Rinkeby testnet following this Egghead tutorial:

Build a Practical NFT Ticketing Service with Solidity and React | egghead.io

A few connected resources I found were Scaffold-ETH, Speed Run Ethereum and ETH.build which give me a clear direction on learning more and some further experimentation.

I’m far from convinced about web3 but enjoying the conceptual idea of contracts / blockchain based interactions… so watch this space!

5. Jason Silva

Hat tip to Julian Shapiro, who mentioned Jason Silva in a recent Newsletter and I couldn’t help but re-share this video.

It snapped me out of my own busy-ness and got me out away from the screen, in nature, seeking adventure and present. Love this guys energy / passion!

HOW I FIND HAPPINESS

Fin.

You made it through – I hope at least one of the links this week was interesting, It’s early days for this newsletter and I’m certain it will take a few weeks (or months) to hone my curation / commentary / style.

Thanks for coming along on the ride!

Matt