Sometimes, an answer to a hard problem is so simple and elegant that you're surprised it wasn't obvious earlier. Two Screens for Teachers is one of those answers.

Even though vaccines are on the way, many students and teachers will be interacting remotely at least through the rest of this school year.

Adding a second screen is, in fact, a game changer when you spend your life on Zoom. Makes it so you can see people and content at the same time. For teachers, this is even more important, both from a classroom management and emotional perspective.

Two Screens for Teachers is being organized by my old friend Matt Lerner, the former CTO of WalkScore.

It's a beautiful project and I'm donating now, and I'd encourage you to do the same if you can.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/490033774

Two Screens for Teachers from Matt Lerner on Vimeo.

This summer, we moved into a new house. Moving is a lot of work. As part of moving out of our old house, we got rid of a lot of junk that we had accumulated over the years. We ended up working with the amazing Dave O'Rourke of Spaceback. As Dave and I were loading a huge junk pile into his truck, he said something that really stuck with me -- he said: "in this business, you can't waste any footsteps". Meaning, there's a lot to do, lots of things to lift and move, and you need to be smart and efficient with your energy.

As I am now moving items around our house, and carting empty moving boxes and miscellaneous trash out, Dave's words have been sticking with me. If I'm going to the basement, grab a box to take to the trash. If I'm going up to the second floor, grab a bag or a box or an item that needs to go there. Going back to the first floor? Grab something that needs to go there. No wasted footsteps.

This is good advice for moving a bunch of stuff around, but it's also good advice in general. And it's been on my mind, as of course moving to a new house means that you tend to fall behind on other things (like work and email). So the same approach of no wasted foosteps could (and should) be applied to digital life. Get the thing done that you need to get done right then and there, don't waste any footsteps walking around empty handed. The folks that I work with that seem to be most productive and efficient seem to take this approach, and I'm going to try to keep it front and center myself.

I've written before about how re-structuring identity is one of the most interesting opportunities on the web today. Today's identity ecosystem is account-based (accounts with Google, Facebook, Apple, etc), which perpetuates data silos and prevents interoperability & innovation.

As web3 and crypto become more widespread, there's an opportunity to shift to an identity model that's more about cryptographic signatures, which can be done directly by an individual without an account at any one company. The problem is, the user experience around this is still rough, and worse, there are some pretty extreme risks (lose your private key, lose everything, with no recourse).

So the big question is how to address the the opportunity and also solve for these hard challenges. It feels to me like an important approach is leveraging the concepts of multi-sig and hardware-based key-signing.

On hardware-based keys: the most powerful one out there today is the iPhone. ApplePay and sign-in with Apple are all about the hardware you hold (the phone) and using it to authenticate. It's secure and easy (amazingly so) -- no need to remember passwords, limited phishing vectors, etc. Problem is, it's totally locked up in Apple land.

Luckily there's a lot going on in the identity hardware space.

I use a

Sometimes, an answer to a hard problem is so simple and elegant that you're surprised it wasn't obvious earlier. Two Screens for Teachers is one of those answers.

Even though vaccines are on the way, many students and teachers will be interacting remotely at least through the rest of this school year.

Adding a second screen is, in fact, a game changer when you spend your life on Zoom. Makes it so you can see people and content at the same time. For teachers, this is even more important, both from a classroom management and emotional perspective.

Two Screens for Teachers is being organized by my old friend Matt Lerner, the former CTO of WalkScore.

It's a beautiful project and I'm donating now, and I'd encourage you to do the same if you can.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/490033774

Two Screens for Teachers from Matt Lerner on Vimeo.

This summer, we moved into a new house. Moving is a lot of work. As part of moving out of our old house, we got rid of a lot of junk that we had accumulated over the years. We ended up working with the amazing Dave O'Rourke of Spaceback. As Dave and I were loading a huge junk pile into his truck, he said something that really stuck with me -- he said: "in this business, you can't waste any footsteps". Meaning, there's a lot to do, lots of things to lift and move, and you need to be smart and efficient with your energy.

As I am now moving items around our house, and carting empty moving boxes and miscellaneous trash out, Dave's words have been sticking with me. If I'm going to the basement, grab a box to take to the trash. If I'm going up to the second floor, grab a bag or a box or an item that needs to go there. Going back to the first floor? Grab something that needs to go there. No wasted footsteps.

This is good advice for moving a bunch of stuff around, but it's also good advice in general. And it's been on my mind, as of course moving to a new house means that you tend to fall behind on other things (like work and email). So the same approach of no wasted foosteps could (and should) be applied to digital life. Get the thing done that you need to get done right then and there, don't waste any footsteps walking around empty handed. The folks that I work with that seem to be most productive and efficient seem to take this approach, and I'm going to try to keep it front and center myself.

I've written before about how re-structuring identity is one of the most interesting opportunities on the web today. Today's identity ecosystem is account-based (accounts with Google, Facebook, Apple, etc), which perpetuates data silos and prevents interoperability & innovation.

As web3 and crypto become more widespread, there's an opportunity to shift to an identity model that's more about cryptographic signatures, which can be done directly by an individual without an account at any one company. The problem is, the user experience around this is still rough, and worse, there are some pretty extreme risks (lose your private key, lose everything, with no recourse).

So the big question is how to address the the opportunity and also solve for these hard challenges. It feels to me like an important approach is leveraging the concepts of multi-sig and hardware-based key-signing.

On hardware-based keys: the most powerful one out there today is the iPhone. ApplePay and sign-in with Apple are all about the hardware you hold (the phone) and using it to authenticate. It's secure and easy (amazingly so) -- no need to remember passwords, limited phishing vectors, etc. Problem is, it's totally locked up in Apple land.

Luckily there's a lot going on in the identity hardware space.

I use a