My favourite toy were legos. They were “standardized” creative blocks then lend themselves to any imagination. While I enjoyed the pre-defined builds that came with set boxes, it was a lot more fun to build something without formula. Why buy another Hot Wheels car, when you can create

More than 2 decades down the road, that “creator spirit” is still part of me. I’ve found serendipity baking in the kitchen, making coffee with aeropress/v60/espresso machine, making ice cream, and the rare occasion being on the pottery wheel.

But I’ve never really built anything serious in digital bits.

There were a couple of lessons on C++ back in high school, where we created shapes with for loops and nested ifs. It got a bit more serious with VBA in university to help build financial models and simulations, but nothing too crazy. When work life began, coding took a backseat, except for a few courses on Udemy and Coursera:

• The Complete JavaScript Course
• Front-End Web Development with React
• Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4
• Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB

With all these tutorials, it was usually following the steps, tackling some assignments, which is great for getting some foundational knowledge, but nothing like actually building something on your own. A few ideas came along e.g. a coffee tracker app, or a closed-group social app, but they’ve never gone beyond the idea board.

Until recently, with the whole NFT craze brought me back to the days when my childhood friend and I imagined D&D like games on paper textbooks. I wanted to create a complex “swords” collection, but thought I start with something simple first – ManiaTulips!

I started with YouTube videos (e.g. Patrick Collins, HashLips) and a Udemy course on Solidity. I was overly-ambitious to aim for verifiable randomness and persistent metadata on IPFS. With limited coding experience, I couldn’t figure out easily to integrate random function from Chainlink with canvas to draw from a selection of source files, upload to ipfs instantly and get a CID which I can embed in the tokenURI. I also attempted to integrate the minting site with a multi-component React App with router and the works. More details to come in the future, but essentially after hours of trying, I decided to simplify for my first “MVP”.

And ta-da! I finally launched ManiaTulips on ethereum mainnet. 10,000 randomly generated NFT Tulips, a play on the narrative of tulipmania of the 21st century. Could be something for the NFT community to HODL onto to prove the world wrong, or if the world is right then this would be a nifty souvenir to mark this historical event 😉

Hope you can help support by joining ManiaTulip’s Discord server here, and message me your eth address to get a free NFTtulip!