Free Computer Science Courses!! And This Week’s Top 15 Tech Stories

Dear Curious Hacker Noon reader,

Education is never ending a battle. It’s not a text book or a classroom. It’s creating a better way of thinking than you had yesterday. Innovation in tech comes down to ways of thinking, ways of making, and ways of testing. Here’s this week’s shortlist of trending tech stories divided by IoT EXPLOSION, Hacker Life, Crypto Columns — A SaaSy Story — and Software Development Trends.

IoT EXPLOSION

Internet of Everything: The IoT Market Is Projected to Expand 12x from 2017–2023 by Sr. Product Designer at Ten-X Justin Baker. The proliferation and ‘smartening’ of IoT-driven devices is projected to reach a market cap exceeding $195 billion in 2023, according to analysts at ReportsnReports. From a market of $16 billion in 2016, this growth is mainly fueled by the increasingly ubiquitous manufacturing of smarter in-home, mobile, and transportation devices — and the need to capture that data and enhance communication infrastructure.

Hacker Life

Taking a Think Week by SkillShare CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn. It’s definitely not a vacation. The days are long from 5am to 9pm. I spend the days reading, writing, and thinking. Here are some topics I think through: reflecting on my personal goals and resetting them, reading through hundreds of articles searching for trends, and using those insights to come up with ideas to solve some of our biggest challenges.

How your country’s world class athletes can help your startup by Entrepreneur & Adventurer Denis Petrovcic. Only your mind can put boundaries on where you can go. Not your passport.

From pork bellies to product management by Lattice Product Manager Ming Lu. Aside from the great learning experience and amazing friends that I got from my first job after college, I also get to tell people that in a past life, I was a commodities trader (agriculture futures to be exact, e.g. corn, soy, hogs, cattle). It always causes raised eyebrows, being a somewhat untraditional starting point for someone who’s now a product manager at a SaaS company building HR software.

Are you built to be an employee? by TabbDrink Technical Co-founder Joey Clover. I had the opportunity to have a brilliant, well-paid career and found myself still wanting more. I didn’t want the money, I wanted the control. If something happens to the business, at least it’s down to me. As one of my favourite songs said: I still hate my boss sometimes, but at least it’s me. (note: I don’t hate all bosses)

Surviving CryptoFever 🦁. Single player Hackathon: 6 projects in 6 days. by CryptoHacker Alexander Isora 🦁. Being an aspiring developer, I simply could not let the world-wide party pass by and decided to hop on the train. Fortunately, I still had 6 unused vacation days, so I decided to have some fun and set myself a goal: develop 6 cryptocurrency & blockchain related web projects in 6 days.

FEATURED FREE COURSES FOR HACKER NOON COMMUNITY (from our weekly sponsor, edX):

1. Blockchain for Business from The Linux Foundation
2. JavaScript Introduction from W3C
3. Cybersecurity from RIT

Crypto Columns

Cryptocurrency Trading Bible Two: The Seven Deadly Sins of Technical Analysis by author, engineer and serial entrepreneur Daniel Jeffries. Figure out moving averages, stochastic RSI, trend lines and the basics of candlesticks, upwards and downwards channels, bull flags, breakouts and wedges. Forget everything else for now. Just forget it. Most of it doesn’t work or is too rare or is too hard to read.

Is Tezos ICO Dead? by early stage VC Ouriel Ohayon. Tezos is under the spotlights because of an internal fight between the founding team and its governing foundation (well in particular with its head, Johann Gevers, allegedly accused of fraud) that could threaten the future of the project (already affecting Tezos “future” IOUs). This is newsworthy because Tezos is one of the highest profile ICOs on the market with close to $400m (technically $232m but with the ETH value helping now more since they have not yet converted the funds to fiat money…) raised before launch. Many already consider the project dead. I would not be so sure.

Forget Church and State: The Coming Separation of Money & Banks by Founder Collective’s Noah Jessop. The many Bitcoin derivatives, Altcoins, and other token-based protocols have created a thriving, if wild, marketplace. To understand our manic monetary moment, examining the history of classical monetary policy can be helpful. Through most of history, central banks or other regulatory agencies determined how much money would be issued and how fast, which in turn determined how much interest could be earned.

How A Smart Contract replaced An Escrow Company in a $60k deal by Propy, Founder and CEO Natalia Karayaneva. One of the goals of the first transactions within the current legislation in Ukraine and other countries is to identify recommendations for the government to improve the process from legislative and technical perspectives. This brings innovation to the countries as well as allows Propy to attract more foreign property investment to each country. A whole new class of property investors is emerging out of crypto millionaires.

A SaaSy Story

Understanding Customer Experience in SaaS by Entrepreneur Myk Pono. Customer experience (CX) is a perception a customer has about a company based on all touchpoints, interactions, and engagements with the company, its brand, and its product. Naturally, the question surfaces: What do you mean by touchpoints, interactions, and engagement?

Software Development Trends

My impressions about React Conf BR by FullStack Web Developer Vinicius Dacal Lopes. The conference was opened by Fernando Daciuk talking about TDD and Jest. Daciuk is an experienced developer and his didactic is excellent. More than just showing what we are used to see about TDD, he talked about the importance of tests to document our code and our functionalities and he also guided us through a baby step test case using Jest.

Understanding Git — Explain it Like I’m Five (part 1) by React Developer Kevin Cooper. First of all, GitHub is not git. Many people understandably confuse the two. GitHub is a website for hosting projects that use git. Git is a type of version control system (VCS) that makes it easier to track changes to files.

How Kotlin’s “@Deprecated” Relieves Pain of Colossal Refactoring? by Kotlin Developer Oleksii Fedorov. We were migrating our code base from Java to Kotlin. When somebody needed to touch an existing Java file, we would auto-convert it to Kotlin. And only then introduce change. Otherwise, all new code was written in Kotlin. We were using _mockito_ library in our unit tests. And as you might know, mockito heavily relies on _Mockito.when_ method. _when_ is a reserved keyword in Kotlin. So we had to fence it with backticks. To be honest, it looked quite ugly, and was awkward to type…

McSoftware by Brian Yahn. Mama always told me, shoot for the moon, because even if you miss you’ll still be among the stars. So when I went to college, studied engineering, and excelled — I never thought flipping burgers at McDonald’s would be in my future. Maybe I wouldn’t start the next Facebook, I admitted to myself, but I’d at least be a somebody at IBM or somewhere.

Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted.

Kind Regards,

David Smooke, @AMI