Hardbound.co The team behind Hardbound launched their mobile app last week. They reached #1 on Product Hunt and captured the ever-fleeting attention of tech Twitter. A few founders asked me why I invested so I thought it would be valuable to share my perspective more broadly. I had heard Nathan Bashaw’s name (Founder/CEO) surface in conversation a few times recently. We share many mutual friends. Each spoke highly of him and said he was “working on something interesting.” Not only is Nathan intelligent, creative and ambitious, but he had previously seen success at Product Hunt, Olark and General Assembly. One of the most impressive things about Nathan is his conviction in the inevitability of Hardbound’s success. He constantly talked about product roadmap milestones revolving around the acquisition of millions of users during our first conversation. This wasn’t some bullshit fundraising ploy, but rather a deep, authentic belief in what he’s building. As democratization of information accelerates, platforms are competing for the finite resource of human’s time and attention. Certain products defy logic by easily capturing attention. These products usually possess something I call “weird magic.” It’s hard to articulate exactly what weird magic is, but you know it when you see it. It’s one part weird, one part magic. It’s the perfect combination of awkwardness and entertainment. At first glance, you’re overwhelmed with beauty, functionality and the need to calibrate yourself to the software. It’s the purest form of engagement. Most people focus on content, rather than the platform, when talking about entertainment. But instead of focusing only on the content, what if you built a platform that was entertaining regardless of the content? This is what excites me about Hardbound’s vision. I believe that habitual products are built by blending entertainment into structural pipes that make users forget there was an intentionality behind the software — or in other words, habitual products are a combination of core, novel features. Hardbound does this with it’s “tap to read more” functionality. I quickly realized I was experiencing the next story-telling format after reading the first story. Each tap of the screen unlocked more content. Not only was I compelled to see what was waiting on the next screen, but I was quickly addicted. Dopamine is one powerful drug. With such thoughtfulness and novelty built into Hardbound’s app, it’s easy to lose sight of this team or the macro trends that make the timing right for the next great story-telling format. It’s encouraging to see so many people passionately supporting Hardbound — this is only the beginning. I’m excited to see the product evolve over time and feel fortunate that Nathan felt Full Tilt Capital was the right partner. Stay tuned! — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — If you enjoyed this post, please recommend it by clicking the “heart” in the bottom left corner. You can always tweet me your thoughts as well. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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A few months ago I decided to try my hand at web development. Angular 2 was new and shiny at the moment, so I decided to download it and start building a website. Now, as someone who is primarily a , this was an altogether new and very interesting experience. I followed the alleged “5 Minute Quick Start Guide” and after an hour and a half of wrangling with Angular 2 and its plethora of dependencies, I was able to get something up and running. Java developer Next, I started to build a real app. I decided to build a personal blog platform from scratch, mostly for the , and partially because I’ve been meaning to start a blog for ages. The desire to have a blog would be the carrot keeping me motivated to learn new technologies and keep building my project. learning Over the months, I’ve been keeping up with the Angular 2 releases and, each weekend, I’ve been chugging along on the blog. Oh, did I say chugging? I meant banging my head vigorously against the wall over and over and over again trying to understand and deal with the freaking ecosystem. Javascript Maybe I’m just used to the slow paced, sturdy, battle tested libraries of the Java world. Maybe web development starting with Angular 2 is like trying to learn a new video game and starting on hard core mode. I don’t know. learning All I know is that the Angular 2 release was, from my perspective as a Java engineer, a freaking disaster. Every single minor release made lots of breaking changes. Every single time I checked back on the accursed “5 Minute Quick Start”, huge swaths of it had completely changed. Don’t even get me started on the whole Angular 2 router business. That was truly a fiasco, and agonizing to deal with as a user, particular one who is less familiar with the Javascript world. I find myself writing this post in a moment of passion, fuming over the latest Angular release which was announced a few days ago. Angular 2, for rulz this time, has been released and you can upgrade to it and not have to deal with breaking changes for a whopping 6 months! Well then, I naively thought to myself, I should upgrade my blog from @angular 2.0.0-rc.4 to @angular 2.0.0. This was the journey that I just underwent: Upgrade to @angular 2.0.0 Remove all ‘directives’ fields from my Components. Apparently Angular2 has decided that Modules are the way to go. Get rid of all imports anywhere that end with _DIRECTIVES. Upgrade @angular/forms from 0.3.0 to 2.0.0. For some reason, @angular/forms was super behind the rest of the versioning for angular. Until this release. Upgrade angular-material to 2.0.0-alpha.8–2 (can we just pause for a second and appreciate the ridiculousness of a version called 2.0.0-alpha.8–2??). Upgrade to typescript 2.o, which, as I was unpleasantly surprised by, is currently in beta. Having finally reached a version of relative stability in Angular, it was dismaying to realize that angular-material, a key tool in my stack, has unstable dependencies that are ahead of Angular 2’s dependencies. By this point, `npm start` was working. This is where the hard part began, because now I had to deal with tremendously cryptic error messages that have been plaguing me ever since I started learning Angular 2. Such as this one: After some troubleshooting (by now I’ve gotten okay at debugging System JS’s useless error messages), the issue was caused by this errant line in my systemjs.config.js file: // No umd for router yetpackages['@angular/router'] = { main: 'index.js', defaultExtension: 'js' }; I guess @anguler/router has a umd now. Whatever a umd is……… The next issue I encountered after that was this: Great, a freaking syntax error from a random file in angular-material. There is no helpful error message, no line numbers. There is precious little to help me figure out what to do next. I don’t know whether to upgrade dependencies, downgrade dependencies, install new dependencies, change the syntax of my tsconfig.js file (which undoubtedly changed when I upgraded to typescript 2.0). I’m lost in a sea of confusion and frustration. Now, those of you who are seasoned web developers can probably troubleshoot an issue like this fairly easily. That’s not what I’m getting at. It’s not about the particular issue I just faced. It’s that the Javascript ecosystem is utter chaos. Every new version of every new library comes with a slew of breaking changes. New libraries will be released before their APIs are nailed down. Libraries in beta are now old news because only alpha libraries are new and interesting. Stackoverflow posts that are older than 6 weeks old are no longer relevant and probably deal with an issue from an old version that I’m no longer using. The Java engineer in me is screaming with the frustration of this ecosystem. What sort of madness has web development devolved into? What the f**cking f**ck is going on with Javascript these days??? Okay, I think it’s time to take a step back and say that I actually love Angular 2. When I get to a point where all the dependencies have been upgraded, and everything is working, when Intellij is underlining the correct things and my typescript compiler is hooked up right, Angular 2 is awesome. To be fair, I have been using versions of the library that have thus far not been officially released. Maybe, you say, it’s my fault for trying to download and use a version of the library that is still in alpha/beta/release candidate and expecting it to work and be relatively easy to use. Perhaps you are right. But, considering the fact that we should ask ourselves the question: is it responsible to release libraries that are still very much a work in progress? Does it make sense to announce a release candidate and then make tons and tons of breaking changes over the course of evolving from rc.1 to rc.6? How many hundreds of thousands of human hours were wasted dealing with the pain of upgrading a version of Angular 2 and all of its related dependencies? And, as most engineers will attest to, developer hours are a precious commodity in today’s job market. How many developers have been utterly burned by the experience of trying to use Angular 2 and have sworn off Angular forevermore in favor of React? How many other Javascript libraries are out there that have also caused such frustration and undue anguish for their users? hundreds of thousands of developers are already using Angular 2, Perhaps the Javascript ecosystem is just experiencing growing pains. Maybe developers are quickly understanding the errors in their initial designs and brazenly correcting them as they blaze on in iterating through better and better versions of their libraries. Maybe the Javascript world is where the vast majority of software engineers will live soon, since the tools there will have evolved rapidly and effectively. Perhaps people will accomplish more in Javascript and the tools written in Javascript will be easier to use than the tools in any other software engineering landscape. Or, maybe, just maybe, the Javascript world will always be sort of a joke, a place where engineering hipsters go to waste time and feel like they’re on the cutting edge of innovation when really, they are living in a world of madness and chaos, throwing hours of productivity down the drain so that they can use the latest and ‘greatest’ tools out there. intense But I am just a humble Java engineer. What I’m most interested in is: what do you think? is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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Hey guys, This is an English translation of a post by Leonid Yuriev, originally published on Facebook here: . https://www.facebook.com/leo.yuriev/posts/553318381522430?pnref=story The post is about Leonid’s experience of using both Tarantool and Redis. This is only the beginning. More articles are on the way. So let’s start :-) As a part of my work, I have compared Tarantool and Redis from Redis Labs. Here are some intermediate results. Dev team availability Kostja Osipov and the guys from Tarantool’s team are always available. 2. Support of Lua To make the long story short, Tarantool is a real Lua application server, whilst Redis can just run Lua functions only with local variables. In detail: Tarantool Tarantool has a full-feature Lua engine with JIT, which is integrated with the and has embedded fiber support. database For the majority of blocking libc functions, Tarantool’s Lua implementation has counterparts that switch fibers. You can write and run a full-feature service that can use any Lua libraries, use , get and process internal requests, connect to external services. network Stored procedures and triggers just exist and work as they should,including the fact that you can write them in C and load them as shared libraries. You can easily update/reload all Lua functions without even having to restart the server. Redis Lua interpreter lives aside in a sandbox and is good only for simple scripting (only pure functions and only local variables). You can complete a script by EVAL or load and start it later by EVALSHA. Redis itself is available from a script only via a local connector. In last versions of Redis you can write modules/plugins on C. 3. Persistency Redis is focused on in-memory processing with a possibility to back up data periodically or on stop. On the other hand, Tarantool can continuously persist data on disk. Tarantool: besides snapshots, it has a full-scale WAL (write ahead log). So it can secure data persistency after each transaction out-of-the-box. Redis: in fact, it has snapshots only. Technically, you have AOF (append-only file, where all the operations are written), but it requires manual control over it, including manual restore after reboot. Simply put, with Redis you need to manually suspend the server now and then, make snapshots and archive AOF. 4. Latency and throughput In Tarantool, you have dedicated threads to handle networking and writing to disk. That’s why you have better latency in real-life cases. But in synthetic tests, Redis should have better throughput because there is no CPU usage on context switching and thread synchronization. 5. Indexes Tarantool has secondary indexes, including Geospatial Indexes (R-TREE). Redis does not have secondary indexes, but you can simulate them with several operations or by Lua scripts. Sometimes it looks gross. See details here: http://redis.io/topics/indexes 6. External API Redis has simple interfaces for basic data structures like lists, sets, hash tables. Those interface methods are based on the concept of accessing an object/structure via network, which is intuitive for most people. Tarantool has a more general interface for data manipulation, which supports all the functionality above. 7. Clusterization and replication Redis has ready-to-use Sentinel with replication and failover. Tarantool has replication, including master-master, but there is no intrinsic orchestration of a cluster or native failover (Tarantool developers say that this is in progress). 8. Database size Tarantool has a brand-new storage engine named “vinyl” (it is not officially released, but you can already try it). It allows you to store and process data which does not fit in your RAM. Redis only has an in-memory engine and nothing more in plans by now. 9. SQL Tarantool: SQL support is coming soon (based on a fork of sqlite), including ODBC/JDBC. Select operations have already been implemented. You can try them. Redis: No SQL support at the moment and not even in plans. P.S. If you aspire for absolute objectivism, then you should know that the comparison above contains some inaccuracies.However, attempts to eliminate them will require a huge number of details that cannot be objectively compared. Thank you for reading. If you want to add something on top of what’s been said above or clarify it, feel free to leave a comment.

Tarantool vs Redis

Every time I upgrade my project’s dependencies using and it cannot find a change log I create an issue titled “Add changelog”. Most of them were ignored, sometimes maintainers answer something that means “fuck off”, very rarely they listen. npm-upgrade A good change log answers these questions for the project’s user: What’s the new value for my project in the new version? What are the breaking changes? How can I migrate my codebase to the new version? Were my issues fixed? A change log is a tool that helps you decide to upgrade or not and to evaluate the benefits and the cost of the upgrade. A good change log is: Written for humans, not computers. Understandable by users, not just contributors. Not a Git commit log. Written by a project maintainer — don’t ask for a pull request. You should read this and add a change log to your open source project today. awesome guide

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By Pauli Rautakorpi (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 ( )], via Wikimedia Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 This is Part 3 in a series of articles about building — a 16-bit Windows 3 . If you haven’t done so already I recommend where I explain my (ir)rationale for starting this project. Win3mu emulator starting at the beginning This post covers the design of the CPU. At the center of any emulator is an accurate emulation of the CPU and it’s usually the first thing to tackle. Win3mu’s CPU is implemented in a separate project called “Sharp86”. Instruction Set Initially I was planning on implementing just the 8086 instruction set and running Windows in real-mode. It didn’t take long to realize however that that protected mode solves a whole class of memory management issues (which I’ll explain in a later article) so Sharp86 implements the 80186 instruction set and a mechanism to implement protected mode features externally to the processor. Since all the new instructions introduced between the 186 and 286 are related to protected mode, from the 16-bit program’s point of view the CPU might as well be a 286 – because it shouldn’t be using any protected mode instructions anyway. The ALU Class The Arithmetic Logic Unit, aka the ALU, is the part of the processor that performs math and logic operations. It accepts one or two input values, performs an operation, provides the result and sets the flags register according to the results. Sharp86's ALU is implemented as a base class to the main processor and includes methods for all the required operations — most in 8 and 16-bit forms: API to the ALU is essential a set of flags and a set of operations It also implements the flags register and as a slight performance tweak it delays resolving some flags until required. eg: very rarely is the parity flag used so it doesn’t calculate it unless it’s read. The CPU Class The CPU class derives from the ALU class and implements most of the processor logic. It’s responsible for maintaining the rest of the registers, instruction decoding, memory and I/O port access and raising interrupts. It communicates with the outside world via an IBus interface which is analogous to the system bus on a physical processor. For simplicity, it’s a an 8-bit data bus (unlike a real 286 which is 16-bit). The CPU class consists of a few key parts: A huge switch statement that reads one instruction opcode, decodes it and performs the appropriate operation — often by prodding the ALU to do something. Handling of the 8086 addressing modes. Mod Reg R/M Interrupt and exception handling – see below. Besides IBus and a set of properties to access the registers, the API to the processor really only consists of a single method “Step()” which executes one instruction and returns. By calling Step repeatedly in a loop you have a running processor: Interrupts and Exceptions x86 processors have three ways that interrupts are raised. In Sharp86 these all end up at the CPU’s RaiseInterrupt method Hardware Interrupts – a hardware interrupt can be emulated by calling the RaiseInterrupt method from outside the processor between calls to Step(). Win3mu doesn’t use hardware interrupts at all. Software Interrupts – Sharp86 automatically calls RaiseInterrupt when an “int” instruction is executed Exception Interrupts – these are raised when the processor detects an exception. Sharp86 catches any C# exception of type CPUException thrown during a call to Step() and calls RaiseInterrupt. eg: if the emulator’s IBus implementation throws a GeneralProtectionFaultException in its WriteByte method then this would cause interrupt 13 to be raised. The default RaiseInterrupt method does the same as a real processor – it looks up the interrupt descriptor table for the address of the handler function, pushes the Flags registers and performs a far call to the handler. Note that RaiseInterrupt doesn’t actually run the interrupt handler — it just sets up the processor so that next time Step() is called it will be. CPU Bugs Are Nasty! I’m a little paranoid about bugs in a processor. Here’s why… When I was working on FPGABee I hit a problem where the operating system was hanging part way through boot. Since the FPGA board I was using had very limited debugging support I didn’t have much visibility into what was happening — I couldn’t even step through the code. In the end I configured the circuit to show the current instruction pointer on the LED readout, slowed the clock speed right down, videoed it with my iPhone and then played it in slow motion while stepping through a disassembly listing. I spent a lot of time tracking down what turned out to be a bug in the processor core— it wasn’t incrementing a register during a string operation. Never had to video a bug to catch it before! If there’s one thing I learned from this its that you need to be able to trust the processor — CPU bugs can be super nasty to chase down. I don’t expect to be doing video camera debugging with this project but a subtle processor bug popping up in the middle of a program would probably be very difficult to track down. Time for a whole pile of unit tests… Unit Testing Testing a processor is tricky. It’s nearly impossible to get full coverage so I broke it down into a few key areas: The ALU — tests for every operations and important flags after each The Mod Reg R/M Decoding — tests one instruction with all the different addressing modes. Instruction Decoding — at least one unit test for each instruction. For the instruction decoding tests I wanted to make sure I had the right opcode mapped to the right instruction so I used a real assembler (YASM) to generate one instruction which then gets tested. Each of these unit tests follows this pattern: Set the CPU’s registers through it’s public properties and/or write values to to emulated memory Invoke YASM to assemble one instruction and load the generated code into emulated memory Step the CPU Check the results A typical instruction unit test case — emit calls YASM, run calls step() All up, there are over 470 test cases and so far I’ve only noticed one bug that’s slipped through — a far call instruction that was incorrectly doing a near call. Ignore the times — most of that’s from spawning YASM. First Signs of Life For the processor’s first test run I needed a really simple executable. Since you can’t get much simpler than a DOS “.com” file I decided to: Write a simple C# console program that uses Sharp86 and implements just one DOS Int 21h function— 09h output string. It then loads and runs a .com file. Wrote a simple .com program and compiled it with YASM. Ran it on DOSBox and under Sharp86 and checked for the same output. First Signs of Life from the CPU I ran a few more adhoc tests after which I was fairly confident I had a working processor. Cycle Accurate Often you’ll hear the term “Cycle Accurate” when talking about CPU emulations. Sharp86 is not cycle accurate since it doesn’t need to be but I thought I quickly describe what this means. For a hardware based emulation such as a an FPGA based processor, cycle accurate really means cycle accurate — it means the timing and order of CPU’s control lines, address and data bus and the speed of instructions all match the original processor. For a software based CPU emulation it’s a little different and more about trying to accurately match the execution speed of the original processor. This is normally done by calculating the number of clock cycles each instruction took on the original processor and maintaining a running count of which clock cycle number the emulated processor is up to. The number of clock cycles per instruction is usually variable — and can even depend on the results of an operation. eg: conditional jump instructions often take a different number of clock cycles depending whether the branch was taken or not. Once you have that running cycle count it’s pretty easy to throttle the processor to match the speed of the original: Use the current system time to calculate the expected current cycle number Process instructions until the current cycle number catches up to the calculated expectation Yield, or go do something else for a while (eg: update the screen). Repeat from 1 As mentioned, this project doesn’t need this and simply executes as fast as possible. Programs running under the emulator will be scheduled by Windows just like any other program. Pseudo-Protected Mode I’ve mentioned pseudo-protected mode a couple of times now but this article is long enough so I’ll leave it and cover it in the . next post Progress! As you may have realized, I’m writing these articles retrospectively and the implementation is a fair way ahead of this post. Win3mu can now run large parts of “Clink II” — a Tetris style game I wrote in the 90s: Hi, I’m Brad Robinson — an independent software developer living in Sydney Australia. I write software for musicians and as an indie developer I rely on word of mouth. If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it by hitting the “recommend heart” below or by sharing on Facebook/Twitter. It’s a small gesture but makes a real difference. Also, if your feed is lacking in hex dumps, disassembly listings and screen shots of old Windows 3 games you might like to follow me on . Twitter Continue reading — ! Part 4 — Protected Mode

Win3mu Part 3 – The CPU

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The world of email design and development moves notoriously slow… or at least it did before this month. In just about 30 days, three huge announcements by some of the biggest players in the space have completely changed the game and for the better: The Microsoft Outlook team is no longer annoying the #emailgeek community. Litmus will now act as a liason to ensure bugs get high priority and will offer new Microsoft Outlook clients in their testing suite. The goal? Make email better. Litmus and Microsoft Outlook have announced a partnership **You can now use Foundation for Emails and create ready-to-send emails right in your browser**We’ve developed a new tool called that uses the power of Foundation for Emails combined with the slick features of CodePen so you can create beautiful, responsive emails with no downloads or build environment to set up. Slinky **Gmail will soon support responsive email**The team at Google announced on a developer blog that Gmail will soon support styling and media queries. This could spell the end for inlining and opens up a ton of new possibilities. We’re thrilled about how each of these announcements is going to push email forward! Get all of the details as well as links to resources in the latest issue of the Inky Insider: http://zurb.us/2d5ZXTm

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3 Announcements Have Changed Email Design and Development Forever

Deal Flow It’s almost a buzz word, but deal flow is the life blood of accelerators, angels and venture investors everywhere. Without deal flow your ability to make investments dwindles significantly. However, there’s a strange fallacy with deal flow that everyone is aware of, but no one really talks about or if we’re being blunt, doesn’t want to think about. It’s a mentality that doesn’t help early stage investors in the least and ultimately ends up leaving the scraps for the folks who rely solely on deal flow. The whole notion of incoming deal flow is nice… for marketing purposes. But let’s get realistic for a moment. Name a single business that thrives by sitting back and waiting for opportunity to smack them upside the head? It doesn’t happen. Forget what the media wants you to believe. No business is successful by sitting back and waiting. Building a business is a fight, a battle and a war. The only teams that survive are the teams that are willing to get out there and make shit happen. Your accelerator is no different. It’s time to take the red pill and see reality for what it is. Deal flow is not all it’s cracked up to be. Sure you’re connected to this source or that source for deals, but . If you’re accepting applications via the application sites you’re meeting with the companies focused on smiling and dialing. Will you find some good companies that way? Yes, you will. But good companies are not what accelerators need. Good companies don’t return the fund. Really, good companies suck. You need great companies with great teams. Speaking frankly, those that are great are not applying to your accelerator, unless Sam Altman or PG happen to be reading this. if you’re not proactively seeking out the best companies you’re getting left with the scraps Since we’re being brutally honest here let’s just go ahead and say what everyone has been thinking for the past three years. Accelerator applications suck. The whole process sucks. First you have to weed through the crap applications which represent roughly 90%. Then you have to figure out if the remaining 10% is crap dipped in chocolate. Once you determine that 5% of your total pool has potential you then have to go about hoping they really want to participate in your accelerator. Inevitably, some of the teams you’re most excited about have found better options or more funding and no longer need you. The teams who finally do accept are good, but not great and you find that you’re left with the scraps. With enough hard work and fortitude they can become great, but the potential really isn’t there. Now, it’s important to note that there is incoming and outgoing deal flow. Incoming is relatively easy. You place applications on the usual suspects and wait for companies to fill them out. Outgoing is an entirely different animal and it’s far more expensive; or is it? You must spend your time traveling, attending events, finding interesting teams and getting rejected a lot. Further you must beef up your program to give them incentive to want to join you. Pitch practice, demo day and mentors are about the last things on these teams collective minds. The best teams want to accelerate their business by adding customers and/or strategic partners. They want to achieve real traction, not media induced hype giving investors temporary FOMO. Simply put they want to grow their true business, not get better at public speaking. They would join Toastmasters and not lose equity if they were really interested in the later. As you can see adhering to this notion of outgoing deal flow fundamentally changes the operating procedures of the modern accelerator. What’s interesting is that you may have noticed many accelerators have been changing their model over the last 12–24 months. Why? In order to grow and improve as a business they need to increase the quality of companies signing their term sheets. They can’t do this with the old model. They’ve realized that all forms of applications suck, warm intros are nice and relatively helpful, but the thing that really moves the needle for them is proactively finding the best companies and coherently presenting their value proposition in a way that entices those teams to join their program. This is why the accelerator model is changing and morphing to look more like micro or program VC style firms. Want to learn more about outgoing deal flow, how you can increase it with minimal effort and how can help you in this area specifically? Hit me up sam [at] outset dot vc. Outset is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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If you haven’t noticed, there’s a brand new Search section on SaaStr.com right below the header: This new search, powered by Forbes Cloud 100 leader , is about 1000x better than what we had before. Algolia SaaStr.com has 2000+ pieces of content, and finding a lot of it has been almost impossible before. We added the SaaStr Academy to categorize a lot of the key content, and there was an old WordPress-based search. But most stuff was unfindable, for all intents and purposes, especially longer-tail content. We love it. Try it. _____ And Also … New At SaaStr … The CoSelling Space … Click to Learn More : ____ Want more SaaStr? or, better yet, join us in person at in February. Subscribe SaaStr Annual

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(Spoiler alert: We didn’t even win) Awesomeness. We had the honor and privilege of launching Rex at this year’s Battlefield at . Since then, we’ve gotten a bunch of questions as to what the process was like and whether it was worth it. Startup TC Disrupt Other than the obvious takeaways from becoming a Battlefield alum (a TC article, free tickets to Disrupt, VIP parties, in-bound interest from potential investors, etc.), there’s a LOT that I don’t think has been covered or mentioned anywhere, so I will cover the two things that really helped out my company: Access to The TechCrunch Staff — (shoutouts to: Sam O’Keefe and Lora Kolodny especially) Sam is amazing. We have a really technical product and she was able to help us distill our message to a lay audience in the course of a month. She was able to help hone the message not just for us, but for 22 other companies as well! As a startup founder, you know your company inside-out, and because of that, sometimes the message of your value proposition can be somewhat lost in translation. With an outside perspective, she’s able to help you simplify your message to something clear and concise that you can bring to a general tech audience. This is something that will help us moving forward whether it’s with customers or investors moving forward. Not to be outdone, our writer, Lora was equally amazing. She had a clear enthusiasm for our product and industry to where the article that was released the day of Battlefield was sooooooo good. Not only did she write an awesome article, but she made valuable connections the day of! A Network of Bad@$$ Founders Startup Battlefield brings in top companies. Only 2% of companies get a chance to present, and so the other companies you’re surrounded with during tech rehearsal and at the Startup Battlefield section of Disrupt are very impressive. Yes, you are competing each other. But there’s something to be said about being surrounded by super ambitious and ridiculously smart founders. That should be enough to energize you to work/try even harder with your company; I know it inspired me. You’re also going through similar stresses. The moments leading up to your session is pretty nerve wracking. Having other founders who can not only empathize with you, but are literally living through what you’re going through as well builds a sort of support network amongst your group. For us, we immediately bonded with our fellow biotech founders (Amaryllis Nucleics and mFluidx) and our fellow Techstars founders (Pundit and BlazingDB) because there was almost in-built connection already. However, everyone else is super supportive and cheering you on, even though they’re competition. Because of that, your network builds and there’s a #givefirst mentality where you wanna help your fellow entrepreneur succeed (and because of that your LinkedIn and Facebook invites explode). This isn’t limited to your competitors, but you also get to meet Battlefield alum companies who provide helpful advice as well during Disrupt. — — So there you have it. These are two major value adds of competing in Startup Battlefield. If you’re on the fence about applying, just DO IT! If you’re a founder and have more questions, feel free to reach out via Twitter (@ainakosiboyie) is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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