My name is Yash Karthik, I’m a programmer and writer. Many things capture my interest; I write about them here.

Building Tiviem [0]

May 6, 2023

From Yul to building EVM from scratch. On issues I faced while implementing opcodes and the gaps in my theoretical knowledge. And the sheer amount of new stuff I learnt while working on this project.

Scroll →


Weekly reflections and updates on my projects, goals and learnings.

Week 8

Sun, Feb 26, 2023

Week 7

Sun, Feb 19, 2023



How to pour water, without making a mess.

Jan 10, 2023

Understanding the science behind pouring water without it dribbling down the sides of the container. Overcoming adhesion between water and container, using gravity and momentum.


2023

Jan 2, 2023

Well-defined learning goals help me focus my efforts and make progress measurable. Here I talk about my goals for 2023 and how I plan on achieving them.


How Skimmr Works

Dec 27, 2022

A technical overview of Skimmr. Implementing a Ratelimiter, on working with LLMs and the convoluted nature of browser extensions.


Projects

Web apps, smart contracts, CTFs and a scattering of personal workflow software.

Tiviem

(/ti:vi:em/) A rudimentary implementation of EVM in Typescript. Currently work-in-progress, I'm building this to learn how Ethereum works under the hood.

Scroll →

Firechat

A proof of concept for using smart contract storage as a database. It's a chat app that stores messages on Ethereum (inside the smart contract). Learnt a lot while building this, currenty working on encryption.

Casterscan

A collaboration between me and dylansteck.com. It's a sort of block explorer for Farcaster. Recently: integration with nf.td.

Scribble

MS Paint + Stable Diffusion => art. An AI-powered whiteboard where you can draw rough sketches and use Stable Diffusion to generate art out of them. Built with Next.js, embeds Excalidraw.com for whiteboard, and Stable Diffusion ControlNet for guiding the image output. (800+ generations in 5 days)

Enscan

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is an on-chain Linktree. But almost none of that data can be queried with complex conditions, like in SQL. Enscan is an indexer that crawls the ENS contracts and indexes the data into a database, enabling developers to interact with the data using SQL. (v1 out, building v2)

Farcaster Directory

A directory of Farcaster accounts and their respective Twitter accounts, making it easier to find your Twitter friends on Farcaster.

pg-scraper

A simple program that generates a scraped RSS feed of Paul Graham's essays. My first app in Go; it was the perfect project to explore Go's concurrency model. It's deployed as a serverless function that generates the feed everytime a new request comes in.

Damn Vulnerable DeFi

Solutions to the Damn Vulnerable DeFi CTF challenge.

Skimmr

A Chrome extension that uses OpenAI's GPT-3 to summarize and explain articles, helping you read articles faster.

Ethernaut CTF

Solutions to the Ethernaut CTF challenge.

Breathe

A web app that sends you alerts when the pollution in your city reaches dangerous level.s

Screenshot Essays

A Farcaster "client" to read the best screenshot essays posted there.

Simple NFT

A beginner NFT project built using Solidity and the Brownie framework.

Friendcaster

A web app to visualize your Farcaster interaction circle.

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about.

It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. [...]

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn’t paying any attention; he wasn’t supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly—while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you’ve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease—the delight in being able to see how much you can do.

Richard Feynman