Stories That Matter in Tech This Week

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

History, Waves and Winters in AI by dudeperf3ct. Data in the age of AI has been described in any number of ways: the new gold,the new oil, the new currency and even the new bacon.

I spent 20 minutes trying to predict the stock market with AI — these are my results by Machine Box CEO Aaron Edell. I decided to make it a two-class problem; given some input, the market either goes up or down. And I limited the market to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

BITCOIN DETAILS

An In-Depth Overview of Bitcoin ETFs by Hodlbot Founder Anthony Xie. These days, Bitcoin ETFs are the talk of the town. The market is in dire need of a rally, and investors believe institutional money flowing in from ETFs will do just that.

How I Got Over $11,000 in Free Bitcoin by Writer Mina Down. This story is about how I managed to get free Bitcoin online, and while I can’t claim there was no effort involved, I can say it didn’t cost me any money.

BLOCKCHAIN

Beginner’s Guide to Blockchain — Explaining it to a 5 Year Old by CS Grad Sidharth Malhotra. An Simple Guide to Understand Blockchain with a Real World Analogy.

The Future of Blockchain — Bridging the Sharing Economy — a TEDx Talk by Writer Chelsea Rustrum. I wrote a book on sharing, the sharing economy, but within a few weeks of the release of It’s a Shareable Life, I felt like I had to abandon everything I’d been working for. The sharing economy had changed.

BOARD GAMES

9 fascinating things I learned while coding up the rules of a board game by Software Engineer Graham Lea. I recently decided I was going to take the rules of the board game Forbidden Island and write them up as code. I guess that sounds like a weird thing to just decide to do, doesn’t it?

CODE BETTER

Be a Better Programmer with these 45 Mathematics Courses by Back-End Developer Dibakar Sutra Dhar. The Ultimate Course and Book list to be an expert in Mathematics and Programming.

Checklist for Writing Highly Reusable Components in React and Vue by Michael Thiessen. There are so many best practices and advanced patterns — the problem is keeping track of them and keeping them in mind as you develop new components.

Code Review Review is the Manager’s Job by Hecate App Founder John Barton. The code review, usually performed using GitHub pull requests or the like, is now the highest leverage point for improving an engineering team’s output.

Containerizing a Node.js API & Using Docker with Kubernetes and Minikube by Stream Developer Evangelism Nick Parsons. Docker and Kubernetes are a powerhouse that makes it infinitely easier to develop fast, immutable applications capable of running on multiple operating systems, without all the hassle of handling all the requirements of package management.

PostgreSQL vs MongoDB v2 by Full Stack Developer Vladimir Kovpak. Benchmarking read performance of PostgreSQL and MongoDB on same data sets.

Surviving And Thriving In Your First Year As a Junior Developer by Kainos Software Engineer Peter Lappin. I’ve been working as an apprentice developer for a year now, and I thought it time to share my experience with any people thinking about joining or who have recently joined the industry.

CRYPTO

Cryptocurrency Yield Opportunities by Phil Glazer, Research at Bitwise Invest. This piece provides an overview of the opportunities to generate investment yield within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Unf*ck the Crypto Markets by Samsa.ai Lead Analyst Brian Quinlivan. The crypto markets are currently f*cked. Between the consistent manipulation they face, as well as specific issues per individual major exchanges like Coinbase Pro, Binance, and Bittrex, there is a lot to be concerned about when making even the simplest of token swaps and transfers.

Why is the Cryptocurrency Market Crashing? Another Long Term Perspective by Data Solution Architect Brian Schuster. Because the actual rate of adoption couldn’t possibly keep up with the high valuation expectation being set by speculators (because the value was rising too fast and the use cases too sparse), many of these speculators soon became mass _sellers_in the market. No one asset or organization caused this crash, it was simply the inevitable flow of the market out.

DAPPS

DApp Infrastructure Design (Part I): Reliable Ethereum Event Tracking with Kubernetes, Docker, and Parity by CoinAlpha Co-Founder Carlo Las Marias. Learning Solidity and writing a smart contract is relatively easy, but we’ve found that the harder technical challenge is designing a DApp backend infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and snappy.

DESIGN

Why disrupting design will accelerate humanity’s progress. by Atomico Venture Capitalist Ben Blume. Over the past eighteen months, I have begun to notice a trend across a number of startup teams, taking the design process and applying new computational techniques and algorithmic developments.

ETH

Getting Deep Into EVM: How Ethereum Works Backstage by TowardsBlockchain Founder vasa. An Ultimate, In-depth Explanation of What EVM is and How EVM Works.

ESPORTS

A Case for Interscholastic Esports by Cuy Sheffield, Partnerships at Visa. I strongly believe that within the next decade, millions of people across the world will earn a living from jobs related to video games and esports making it one of the fastest growing new industries.

Design for Rewards of the Tribe by Hooked Author Nir Eyal. Communication technology in particular has given rise to a long history of companies that have provided better ways of delivering what I call, “rewards of the tribe.”

GOOGLE CHROME EXTENSIONS

Creating a Chrome extension in 2018: The good, the bad and the meh by Tim Nolet 👨🏻‍🚀. It turns out Chrome extension development is almost like real web development, but with a weird dash of quasi embedded development mixed in.

MARKETING

Slack’s Kelly Watkins on the Importance of Setting Team Tone Early + More by FirstMark. Being human and vulnerable, on the other hand, is invitational and helps people feel like they can contribute to the direction in which you want things to go. “There’s nothing more powerful than saying to someone, ‘I don’t know the answer, but let’s work together to find it.’”

5 Free Tools to Make Your SaaS Landing Page Convert More by Designer & Consultant Pedro Cortés. Let’s be honest, converting visitors into customers isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have the expertise to be able to target them properly.

OPEN SOURCE

KickOff To Open Source! by Madhav Bahl, a cadet who codes. Generally people have a mindset that they need to be very expert in every (or any one) domain to start open source contributions. This is WRONG! Even if you are a beginner and you have a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub, you can start contributing.

Need for better documentation by Software Engineer Vaidik Kapoor. Even though we all agree about the importance of good documentation, there seems to be a widespread failure on our part to act on this belief and pay attention to how we document our software. Why does this happen?

PRODUCT MANAGER TIPS

The Patient Change Agent by Product Development Nut John Cutler. The optimistic change-agent believes there is always a way forward: a communication issue to unravel, low hanging fruit to tackle, and more opportunities to establish psychological safety. But it also gets people (me included) into trouble.

The Hard Skills of a Product Manager by Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven. With training from coaches, role models, and senior PMs at Google, we learned what skills you need to develop to become a product leader.

STARTUP LIFE

What We’ve Learned in The First 30 Days of Startupbootcamp by Writer Michael Thompson. Don’t Look for a Big Idea, Focus on Identifying a Big Problem.

TECH GIANTS

Entering God Mode — The Kernel Space Mirroring Attack by Alibaba Tech. How Alibaba are researching using the hardware features of ARM MMU to enable God Mode in Android 8 terminals

Just give me a sharp knife Google! * by Danny Preussler. With what we’ve seen in the last two years, Google giving hints and tools for how to architecture an app, many of us were curious about the code.

TOKENOMICS

The Security Token 2.0 Stack by Invector Labs Managing Partner Jesus Rodriguez. The current generation of security tokens platforms is focused on two main areas: Toke Issuance & Security Token Exchanges. Let’s keep things in perspective, the entire security token space is about one year old and, regardless of how fast its evolving, remains very immature technologically.

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

Kind Regards,

David Smooke

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