I was watching another Palmer Luckey interview recently (Side note: I’m such a fanboy! His vision and enthusiasm is super contagious!). He mentioned he was able to counter Zuck’s unimaginably huge offers to acquire OculusVR in March 2014 because he was already independently rich hodling bitcoin (price was around $200-500 then). Dang! Had I known about it back then, I was sure to smash buy some just because it had Palmer intrigued. It wouldn’t have been life changing money, but I was quite young and super frugal then, so I would’ve put in a whole month’s pay cheque without thinking.

Around this time, Melbourne’s tech scene had folks whispering about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but my personal social circle was just using it as an medium of exchange for Silk Road. No one of authority and experience, who I personally viewed as a pioneer, was publicly sharing their long term vision around crypto back then. So, I was, and remained to be for quite a while, in analysis paralysis around cryptocurrencies.

It’s always nice to follow in the footsteps of pioneers when your compass isn’t providing a clear direction. With the rapid advent of LLMs, now is another one of those times for me. I don’t know what the future of software engineering looks like, even a few years down the road. However, I’m better tuned into what the pioneers are doing and trying to follow in their footsteps.

As of yesterday, I read that Andrew Wilkinson is playing around with AI coding agents to whip up micro-SaaS tools that he himself wants and then opening them up to his audience with a freemium model. I’m gonna be following his progress very keenly, as it closely aligns with the what I’m doing right now. I’m sure Andrew doesn’t need the money and his time is super valuable – so if he is spending time on such experiments, there might be a RoI that is beyond the obvious.