Recently in an article about the joys of JavaScript Maps, I wrote about the ordering of property keys during their traversal. Expecting keys to be in the same order they were added was a long-time bad assumption to make in JavaScript before ES6. ES6 ES6 introduced property key order, putting into the specification an expectation of how keys will be ordered. Keys are essentially sorted by , however, keys still may not always be ordered as you may expect. JavaScript I will suggest, that ES6 introduction of this standard may not be a reason to start writing code that is dependent on an expected order. In ES6, of course, maps can be used instead, as a data structure for this purpose. _JavaScript ES6 introduces a new data structure, called maps. Maps are designed as an alternative to using Object…_hackernoon.com What You Should Know About ES6 Maps Basically, this is the problem. You can do this: x = {zzz:1}// Object {zzz: 1} x.a = 2// Object {zzz: 1, a: 2} x[window] = 3// Object {zzz: 1, a: 2, [object Window]: 3} x['0'] = 4// Object {0: 4, zzz: 1, a: 2, [object Window]: 3} Object.keys(x)// ["0", "zzz", "a", "[object Window]"] You may not encounter this example in the real world, but you also cannot depend on the keys being listed in the same order they were added, or on a consistent ordering of the keys by the system. According to the specification, . The mechanics and order of enumerating the properties is not specified _THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE ECMA INTERNATIONAL "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT…_www.ecma-international.org ECMAScript 2015 Language Specification - ECMA-262 6th Edition Of course, you can spend time examining the spec, and the different implications of different types of enumeration, or just continue as you may have done in the past, to not create code that depends on the ordering of keys. It’s not difficult to make some mistakes. Here, we see that we don’t get the order that the keys are entered, the system orders them. Integers, then normal alpha sort, then symbols. o = {a:0, 2:1, 1:2, b:2, ['zz']:4, window:5}// Object {1: 2, 2: 1, a: 0, b: 2, zz: 4, window: 5} Object.keys(o)// ["1", "2", "a", "b", "zz", "window"] This is in Chrome 56. As expected the property ordering in ES6, however, these keys are all strings, even though ES6 calls for non-string key types. The keys are strings, ordered — but not — in alpha order. There is a little bit going on here. So, an option will be to just not make a lot of assumptions about key ordering in Plain old JS objects, and instead, just continue to write code that does not depend on it, or use Maps in ES6, which is nicely suited for this purpose. Like these articles? Please Recommend Below. Thanks.

Different

Out Of Order Keys in ES6 Objects

Today, for the first time publicly, I’m very excited to announce that Starsky Robotics has been working to make driverless trucks a reality since September 2015. On February 3, 2017 one of our trucks hauled a 5000-lb load 140 miles, and drove itself for 120 of those miles. It’s telling that the only autonomous company truly in market isn’t using LIDAR. While LIDAR’s promise is great, we think that waiting for its development is a moral hazard. Our highway autonomy relies on computer vision, radar and software. These are technologies that are well understood and allow us to quickly start saving lives on the road. From an integration perspective, we aren’t compromising trucks’ existing systems by hacking into them. Instead, we’ve built a retrofit kit to actuate the physical controls of the truck but don’t hinder the capacity of our safety drivers to take control. Our system physically pushes the pedals, turns the steering wheel, and changes gear. Our focus on long-haul driving gives our system almost the same functionality as a driver with way greater availability. Which is important because the core problem in North American logistics is rather straightforward. It’s really, really hard to get a human being to spend a month at a time in a truck. That’s why truck and . Any technology that requires a human physically get into a truck doesn’t solve the problem. driver turnover is over 100%/yr there’s a shortage of 50,000 drivers We are solving this problem and moving freight on the highway this month was the first step. We’ll begin regular service in the next few months, and we plan to remove safety drivers from certain vehicles by the end of the year. We’re on to something big and are starting regular service We think we’re on to something big, are starting regular service in the coming months and have been able to put together a great team. We’ve raised $3.75m from Y-Combinator, Sam Altman, Trucks VC, Data Collective and many others; have a network trucking, regulatory, startup, and technical experts advising us; and now have 11 people on our team. But building driverless trucks is non-trivial, and we need help. We’re going to change a which . Check out for areas we particularly need help in, and send us an email if none are a perfect fit. $700b industry contributes 15% to the cost of everything our website Keepin’ on Truckin’ -Stefan & Kartik

Starsky Robotics: Driverless Trucks that Don’t Leave Drivers in the Dust

Well, it started more than a year back when I joined a Bangalore based . startup For more than a year I worked for them day and night. Starting work at 9 a.m. and returning home late to still continue work till 3 am. I was loving the new work, I had ownership and was doing something interesting. But it did not last long. A colleague of mine started getting ridiculed for not working long hours or for not working on weekends. I remember an instance when he had to go home to West Bengal and a day before in the night the manager told him to change certain aspects of the product. He changed the code and it got messed up a little. However when he got back from his trip he was openly ridiculed by our CTO in front of everyone. The above continued till he finally quit because of the toxic environment. Following which I wrote an article on medium about “How not to run your startup” ( ) which became one of the discussion points in the organization. However, when I quit later I was never confronted directly by any of the members of the upper management regarding the article. https://medium.com/@vinikatyal/how-to-not-run-your-company-49b831d22098#.7h2gydako Two of my friends got fired the following month for not being a Cultural Fit after working at the startup for 6 months. In the meanwhile every month a person was fired for the same very reason. In Jan of 2016, I was promoted at the very startup from a Software Dev to a Senior Dev and that is when all Saturday’s became working days because according to top management working extra led to higher productivity which sadly didn’t happen with most people. The constant nagging of the higher management continued. Every employee had to work late and but then they got fired under pretext of Cultural fitness (I frankly don’t understand what this word means anymore). It was enough for me and I quit and requested my manager to let me go within 1 month as my notice period was 2 months. They agreed after few weeks and I got a farewell. This is when the deceit started. I got selected at Citrus payments and Citrus in my reference check called up the CTO who said I was not a Cultural Fit. He said I left before the notice period which came as a shocker for me as I had left with the consent of management. I worked my ass off for more than a year, got promoted but the management said i was not a cultural fit. I asked them when I left before my notice period and they agreed to it. I just have one thing to say stop abusing your employees for work, respect them, talk to them, not behind their back. One of my friend’s brought this treatment up with the CTO when he quit. He mentioned that I was not technically sound. The management took one year and a promotion to figure it out !! Employees have certain basic expectations from their . Maltreatment is the last thing an employee would expect. management This experience screwed my head big time and compelled me to write this. On the upside I got an incredible work atmosphere and colleagues at Citrus Payments who understood this and hired me. My faith in Startups is still intact because of them Would encourage everyone to fight for what you feel is right and share your experiences as much as possible. If you have any feedback please do leave it :) Thanks and for publishing my first story here. Hackernoon David Smooke 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

Facebook

How working at a Startup in Bangalore screwed me emotionally

Ever wondered how to render a hearthstone card using React and SVG? What are you saying? That question is too specific? Well … even if you’ve never asked yourself how to render a hearthstone card using and , now you have the opportunity to learn about how to mix and mingle Hearthstone, SVG and React. Let’s get right into it! React SVG We’ll start from a couple of spare card assets, mix that styled text and end up with a beautiful SVG and React powered mech-goblin card. Layout card elements The first task we have to do is to turn all the separate card elements like cost, frame and title into something that looks like a card. How do we do that? Well we have several options to layout elements and we have to choose one of them. We could arrange them using , we could use flexbox to compose those elements together or we could arrange them using SVG. position: relative CSS has some great tools to layout elements, like or flexbox, but I think that SVG is just better suited to laying out the separate elements that make up our card. SVG has a wide array of editors that let us arrange stuff visually instead of playing with raw pixels or playing with flexbox properties. Also SVG markup can be easily embedded into React components. position: relative; Composing together the elements and exporting the result we can achieve a neat card frame like the following: And here is the created React component: Round the card image We have a card frame that looks almost exactly as a Hearthstone frame, except for the ugly square border around the card image. How can we remove that? Easy! Using SVG’s . To clip an SVG element based on another, we can add it a clipPath attribute referencing another element. So we'll add to our Piloted Shredder image. <clipPath /> clipPath="url(#image-clip-path)" See the diff . here Thank god that border is gone! Show variable text This card frame only needs some card text and it will look exactly like a real card! Fortunately it’s very easy to add text to it, we just add some svg tags and interpolate its value with JSX. text See the diff . here The sky’s the limit now that we’ve introduced variable text onto the card! Styling the text Sure, the card has some text now. But it looks nothing like the real hearthstone text. It needs some spice and style, so we’ll go ahead and add it. Turns out the magic sauce that makes hearthstone text look like hearthstone text is the Belwe font! We’ll set the text to use this font family, give it a white fill and a thick black border and that’s it! As always, is the diff. here That’s some good looking hearthstone looking text! Making the title flow through Now those are some really good looking cost, health and strength values! But that title looks too stiff, it doesn’t look quite right, it shouldn’t be drawn in a straight line; so we’ll make it flow by following an imaginary squiggly line. Again SVG gives us the right tool for the job, this time in the form of , who can make text be rendered along the shape of a . So I created in my SVG editor a with and referenced it in the title using . textPath <path> <path fill="none" textPath See the diff here Title’s got some sick flow now! Wrapping up the text We’ve been trying to ignore the fact that the card’s body text has html tags and does not wrap around the card edges. That’s the last detail that we need to make our bag of images and text look exactly like a hearthstone card. Using HTML this would be as simple as putting the card text inside a div, but there is not a simple way to make automatically wrapped text in SVG. Even though this cannot be easily done in SVG, we can effortlesly embed an HTML snippet in our SVG markup using . <foreignObject /> Another thing we have to do is transform our HTML string into a react element. Fortunately this can be easily and safely done using . html-to-react This is how we parse the card text string into a component and embed it using . <foreignObject /> Check out this diff It’s a wrap! We went from a few spare parts to a beautifully rendered Hearthstone card and learned some SVG and React tricks in the process. We learned that SVG is great at generating visual content, that React is great at giving dynamism to SVG and also saw that rendering a hearthstone card using both tools is really simple. Check out the if you want to see the final result! You can also see it live in . source code https://render-hearthstone-card-react-svg.now.sh/

Flow

Your Partner in FinTech Development

Read My Stories

Render a hearthstone card using React and SVG.

Alphabet

BUNCH

Disney

Discovery

Naked

Super

YouTube

Why I don’t want to grow up

This is the beginning of a 4-post series, taking you through a website refactoring process using , a functional CSS toolkit that is guaranteed to trigger very strong opinions [insert Dave Rupert’s soundboard effect]. tachyons hot drama The website in question is , an Australian marketplace lending company where I work as the front-end lead. SocietyOne Welcome to the first chapter! On the menu Why re-write in the first place? (you are here) What even is functional CSS? The refactoring process, step by step The aftermaths: key learnings and recommendations Let’s begin! Chapter 1: Why re-write in the first place? The marketplace lending industry is fairly new and things are moving fast. We’re a very small team. We designed and developed our “new” website about two years ago, and have been maintaining and evolving the in a very iterative process. codebase We planned things carefully. Adopted the BEM methodology to organise our styles. Things were working great for us. We were writing beautiful, clean modules. We had a good understanding of our codebase. Up to a certain point. I love BEM. I think it’s a great way to organise your and does a good job at keeping specificity relatively low. What BEM (and most other CSS architecture methodologies) doesn’t really help with is dealing with . CSS accumulating technical debt Our growing company went through a lot of churn. New people, new opinions, new strategies. This generates a lot of minor — and major — change requests. This phenomenon, commonly known as BAU (business as usual), is one of the biggest drivers of technical debt in a codebase. The Start of the End BAU requests often coming with a “can we have it done today” deadline, as a developer you run a high risk of reaching out for questionable techniques at some point. It might be an extra class at the bottom of a stylesheet, or a copy/paste of a module with a few tweaks here and there instead of carefully crafted “BEM modifiers”. Before you know it, you’re considering introducing a file in your repo. Dare I say, you may even reach for an . 😱 shame.css inline-style hack And then, things get out of hands. It doesn’t take many hotfix hacks to throw a huge spanner in your beautiful CSS wheel. And as real-life BAU requests continue, you can only witness your handle on the codebase slip away further and further. 😓 When things reach a tipping point In the weeks leading up to Christmas 2016, I felt like things were reaching a tipping point. Tech debt was becoming a serious problem, and there was no sign of BAU slowing down. Quite the opposite, actually. I was losing a lot of sleep over this increasingly worrying situation. I remember being close to the edge of the “burnout cliff”. Dangerously close. What now? Something needed to happen. thing. Some One day, totally out of the blue, my colleague showed me that intriguing thing he stumbled upon, called tachyons. Looking back, this very moment may have played a huge role in preserving my mental health. I had never heard of tachyons before. I had a look. My initial thought was: “Meh, look at all these classes in the HTML. Ugh”. I moved on. A lot of people — if not everyone — have the exact same initial thought. And they . move on A couple of days later, I read (the creator of tachyons). That article resonated with me so much that I decided to give that tachyons thing a second look. this spectacular blog post by Adam Morse The more I thought about this functional CSS approach, the more it made sense. My head started to buzz with excitement and hope. In the , I’ll show you why! next chapter 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!3 latest tech stories trending tech stories

Full re-write in 10 days with tachyons and functional CSS: A case study (Part 1)

Thanks for stopping by! You might also want to check this follow-up Medium article about deploying Laravel on AWS or even download the book using the form below! My consulting clients often ask whether it is worth porting their web application to Amazon Web Services. They are expecting better performance and reliability because sounds more professional, but they’ve also heard stories of horrifying AWS bills, even though they’re not sure why. AWS The short answer is that by architecting your the right way, you will be able to first deploy on a cheaper hosting option, while ensuring a smooth migration to AWS down the road, zero refactoring guaranteed. web platform The long answer is the below, an extensive checklist that will guarantee your web platform to be portable, and making the most of AWS. 1. Configuration as environment variables The first thing I would check in an audit is whether the app configuration is retrieved from the environment variables. The environment is wherever your app could be running. It could be your developers local machines, your testing servers, your staging servers or your production servers. An application configuration is anything that might change between environments. Resource handles to backing services (URIs to database, cache engine, search engine etc) Any credentials to external services (passwords, SSH keys, SSL certificates) Retrieve your configuration from predefined files… … and the config files should be initialized from environment variables. In PHP Laravel, this is achieved by creating files into the folder, and initialising the config files with environment variables, using the helper . config env() And initialise your config files from the environment The environment-specific configuration should not be in the source code, but rather stored in the environment.On your test, staging and production servers, the environment is set by your deployment scripts. On the developers local machines, and for the Laravel framework, it is stored as a .env file at the root of the project, that should never be committed to the source code repository (add it to your file). .gitignore Configuration for your test pipelines can be stored in the file. .env.testing Smell test Any code that tests the environment is a red flag ( production / staging ). When local and production and staging are using different drivers (for example dev machines are storing files locally, whereas production server use a file storage service), then an abstraction layer should be used, but it should not be mixed in the code with your application business logic.Laravel offers services facades for , , , etc ; their role is to make abstraction of how file storage, cache, background jobs queuing, etc are achieved so the logic is independent to the environment, and so your code should be. ifs then … if then Storage Cache Queue Doing so, the same code will use a local Redis server to store the web sessions, and a managed service ElastiCache on AWS.There will be no last minute switch when deploying your code to production, and no last minute mistake. 2. Stateless code A stateless app is an application program that does not record data generated in one session — such as information about user settings and events that occurred — for use in the next session with that user. Of course your application won’t be stateless! If you build a web platform, you will usually want your users to generate as much data as possible on your service.But its should be stateless, in the sense that redeploying or crashing or load balancing a user to different servers should not affect the userThis is achieved by centralising storage only in backend services, not on the application servers. By storing your sessions in a managed Redis service (like AWS ElastiCache), your user files on a file storage service (like AWS S3) and running your database on a managed AWS RDS instance, you ensure that redeploying on one application server will not interrupt your users sessions. processes It also means that you can load balance your traffic on multiple application servers, and your users will always find their files. They will find them even after a deployment failed and loosing a server. Smell-test: code using local files, local memory A PHP application storing files on the local server it’s running on is another red flag. If you were to loose that server on the next redeployment, you’d loose user data. Such an application will not be ready for scaling and will need refactoring too. JWT For user sessions and API OAuth tokens, you could even handle user session data without a centralised key-value store or using the database. By using Json Web Tokens instead of random OAuth tokens, an application would rely on the client (browser) to store and send back across all this information. The data is encrypted server-side to avoid tampering, and could be stored in a cookie. In that case, the servers are storing nothing (or just the black-list for revocation), and the application processes do not have to share anything or call a backend service. 3. Allow concurrency Now that your app is stateless, an immediate benefit is that you could run multiple versions of it, on different servers. This is known as horizontal scaling, as opposite to vertical scaling which would mean keeping running your application on one single server, and to upgrade it to a more powerful one when needed. Not all software can be horizontally scaled (for example it is a complex problem for databases or search engines), but PHP apps can be immediately horizontally scaled just by following the 6 points in this guide. Once your application is stateless, the next step is to separate the front-end code to the background tasks. On the first hand, web processes are processes responding immediately to your users’ browsers requests. You might also have background jobs (like sending reports, generating invoices, crunching data, send email/push notifications). They should be executed outside of your web processes, even if they are written in PHP as well. These jobs are to be executed by worker processes, so to not block web requests. In the Laravel framework, use the Queue facade and a message queue server like Redis, to dispatch these blocking tasks to a separate pool of servers. When you migrate to AWS, you can use the managed message queue service SQS. Warning: if you’re using AWS SQS to schedule critical tasks, you need to be aware of the edge case as described by Buffer.com . duplicate message in this post 4. Logs as streams, not files Just like user generated files should not be stored locally on your app server, logs should not be stored locally either. They should be centralised as well, and streamed to a backend service, where you’ll find all logs from all your application servers in one place (even from the servers you lost or took down). Laravel’s Log facade only stores logs in files by default, so you would need a to stream them to PHP’s standard error output instead. If you’re running your PHP application inside Docker, you can then make use of the AWS CloudWatch driver and stream your logs to one centralised place. custom configuration Smell test Any log written into a local file on a production server. 5. Horizontal scaling, without refactoring If you’ve followed the above points, congratulations! Your web application is ready for scaling, no refactoring required. By separating the configuration from the code, the application becomes portable from a cheaper hosting provider to AWS.Dispatching the blocking tasks to background workers processes allows us to offload the front-end and scale it independently to the workers processes.By running our application as stateless processes, we can load-balance our users traffic to different servers, and store the data in backend-services. These are the pre-requisites to horizontal scaling. It is already cost-efficient since you can scale with smaller less expensive servers. The next step is to host your backend services in a cost-efficient way too. 6. Leverage AWS Managed Services We’ve been only talking about the application servers (where your HTTP servers respond to web requests by executing your PHP code) so far, so what about the backend services, the database, the search engine and so on? That’s where you can make the most of AWS. All these backend services exist as on AWS, ie a pay-as-you-go billing and no server for you to maintain.You want to use these services as much as possible, for the database (AWS RDS, DocumentDB), file storage (S3), session storage (ElastiCache), logs aggregation (CloudWatch), cache engine, search engine (AWS Managed ElasticSearch) and load-balancing. managed services Conclusion So what’s with the cost-efficiency?Managed services cost much less in practice than running your own servers. There are more secure and scale in a few clicks. Storing your user files on AWS S3 costs about $0.02 per GB per month after 15GB transfer per month, and is before that.Hosting your search engine on AWS ElasticSearch managed service is for the smaller instance.And so on and so forth. free free More importantly they will take much less time to setup, virtually zero time for maintenance and get you to sleep better at night. Lionel is Chief Technology Officer of London-based startup Wi5 and author of the Future-Proof Engineering Culture course . You can reach out to him on https://getlionel.com

Amazon

Initialized

6 must-do before hosting your Laravel web platform on AWS

Dive into the options of chart.js to create stunning charts. Interactive charts can provide a cool way to visualize your data.However most out of the box solutions are not as beautiful as they could be, with default options. I will show you how to customize your chart.js options to make some cool charts! ⚡ Quick Start What we will use: Vue.js vue-chart.js vue-cli We use to create a basic structure. So I hope you got it installed already. And we use as a wrapper for chart.js. vue-cli vue-chart.js vue init webpack awesome-charts Then we go into our project folder and install our dependencies. cd awesome-charts && yarn install And we add : vue-chartjs yarn add vue-chartjs chart.js Our first chart So, let’s create our first line chart. touch src/components/LineChart.js && subl . Now we need to import the Line BaseChart from and create our component. vue-chartjs In the function we need to call the method with our data and options. mount() renderChart() LineChart.js We pass in a basic chart.js data object with some sample data and in the option parameter, we pass So the chart will grow brased on our outer container. responsive: true. ☝ We can call the method because we extended the BaseChart, were this method and some props are defined renderChart() Mount & Test it Now we delete the Hello.vue component from our App.vue and import our chart. App.vue And after we run the dev script in our terminal, we should see our chart. yarn run dev 💄 Make me beautiful Okay, now it is time for some beautification 💅. There are a few cool tricks in chart.js. We can pass a color hex value to But we can also pass a rgba() value. So we can make our color transparent. And as chart.js is using html canvas to draw, we can utilize backgroundColor; createLinearGradient() This is where the fun starts. 🎢 But to use it we need the canvas object. But this is not a big deal, as holds a reference to it. We can access it over vue-chartjs this.$refs.canvas So in our LineChart.js we create two variables to store a gradient. Because we have to datasets. Then we create two gradients: this.gradient = this.$refs.canvas.getContext(‘2d’).createLinearGradient(0, 0, 0, 450) this.gradient2 = this.$refs.canvas.getContext(‘2d’).createLinearGradient(0, 0, 0, 450) There is another cool function we can use: addColorStop() We create three colorStops for each gradient. For 0%, 50% and 100%. this.gradient.addColorStop(0, ‘rgba(255, 0,0, 0.5)’)this.gradient.addColorStop(0.5, ‘rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.25)’);this.gradient.addColorStop(1, ‘rgba(255, 0, 0, 0)’); this.gradient2.addColorStop(0, ‘rgba(0, 231, 255, 0.9)’)this.gradient2.addColorStop(0.5, ‘rgba(0, 231, 255, 0.25)’);this.gradient2.addColorStop(1, ‘rgba(0, 231, 255, 0)’); Now we can pass to . And we have a very nice gradient. To get a nicer effect we also set the borderColor to the individual color with an alpha of 1. (or we use the hex value) And set the borderWidth to 1 and last but not least the pointColor. this.gradient backgroundColor borderColor: ‘#FC2525’,pointBackgroundColor: ‘white’,borderWidth: 1,pointBorderColor: ‘white’, Presentation Last step is to add some styling to the container in our App.vue 👏 Final Result Happy coding!

Mozilla

Creating stunning charts with Vue.js and Chart.js

Are you interested in exploring ways of how to reach out to a younger audience? Have you ever thought of using in your business? As has become increasingly popular in recent years, communication via tech devices has elevated to a completely new level. This is where walks in! Snapchat visual messaging Snapchat is, as you may have heard, one of the currently most popular social (messaging) platforms which enables a quick and efficient communication around the world. Many of us, especially the middle age generation, would shrug their shoulders to this and say “Meh!”.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Snapchat However, the influence of Snapchat can easily be understood by looking into its achievement happened within only three years. Becoming the , Snapchat has been successfully increasing the number of its users on a monthly basis. In September 2016, for example, the number of Snapchat users grew to , with . Imagine that! Even Facebook saw Snapchat as the potential money booster which resulted in a offer unfortunately (or fortunately) refused by the Snapchat founders. mainstream messaging platform in 2016 150 million active users 9.000 snaps shared per second $3 billion How Snapchat Works The first thing to keep in mind about Snapchat is the limited duration of the posts. A posted video or a photo will be visible to others only for a few seconds. Users can choose the duration from 1 to 10 seconds, but bear in mind that it will disappear forever after its duration finishes. This is also a challenge for marketers — how to gain attention in only 10 seconds? Furthermore, Snapchat filters are the most popular feature at the moment (even Facebook is now copying/pasting this), and the three editing tools enable users to design fun posts and grab some quick attention. Filters include geographical location, time, speed, temperature, colours and interesting face changers. There is also a pencil with a variety of colours that help users create an interesting piece of art. Of course, what type of posts would there be if there wasn’t an option for writing something on top of it? Therefore, personalising a message with the tool “Type” is another interesting tool to use. Messaging has never been so much fun so far, and this is why users can find an option to chat with friends without sending photos or videos. This, just like everything else on Snapchat, has a limited duration, too. Once a user leaves the chat the message disasters unless saved. So, how to start using Snapchat for your digital activities? Snap Your Event Up One of the best ways to use Snapchat is to create and trigger audience’s interest. Streaming a live events gives an opportunity for others, who are not there, to be a part of the happenings from their living rooms. This is especially interesting if you’re planning an event, or if your business is all about events. Imagine posting interesting peaks into a live event that others can’t see — not even the people who are there. Doesn’t that sound like a special treat for those who follow you on Snapchat? It certainly does. live events Take , for example. When , sharing live videos and photos from the red carpet, they counted 12 million views! What did MTV do? It offered an exclusive view on the favourite celebrities during the popular event. Not only did this help them promote their event, but also helped them to be five steps ahead of all other media which would eventually inform about the event’s happenings a few minutes or hours later (via social media and news). MTV 2015 VMA awards MTV ran Live Story on Snapchat Promote Yourself Live (and Smart!) Snapchat is currently one of the most efficient ways to sell a business online. Forget about those ineffective ads, irritating bragging and repulsive ways of showing off. Snapchat gives a unique opportunity to actually say and turn this into a personalised advertising for a business. Hey, let’s play! One of the latest examples I’ve found is the promotion of . Users were given a Terminator filter to lay it over their pictures or videos and make themselves look like the movie hero. Of course, the greatest impact on s_napchatters_ was made by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, who used the filter on his own picture and promoted it all over social media. The idea of a live promotion through a fun and day-to-day communication with your customers indeed gives a food for thought, wouldn’t you agree? Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator: Genisys movie Convince and Convert the Right Talent Looking for a young and fresh talent to join your company? Well, maybe Snapchat can help you with the recruitment process. One of the latest example with smart and fun Snapchat recruitment is done by the American multinational mass media corporation . Promoting diversity and searching for a talent while, AOL focused on recruiting more millennial women in the corporation. So they thought of . The first promoted was , a program that invests in startups run by women. The other one was a footage of AOL employees who were interviewed live for the Snapchat campaign. AOL launching two 10-second videos and Live Stories #BuiltbyGirls While the overall campaign also activated on Twitter and Instagram, because Snapchat reaches over 40 percent of the millennial audience globally, we felt that this was the best avenue for talking to millennials in a meaningful way and showcase to them what it’s like to work here at AOL. — Monica Cepak, AOL Senior Manager Marketing The campaign increased the number of application by 18 percent, increased in brand awareness for 4%, reached . 8 million users and generated 17 million views Snapchat on WordPress Of course, we want you to and reach out to your followers via blogs. All you have to do is use Snapcodes. connect your Snapchat with your WordPress Log into your Snapchat account and download the zip file, extract it on your computer and upload two QR codes, and to your WordPress media library. Add the Snapcode in a sidebar, an image widget in the footer or choose other paces of your WordPress website. snapcode.svg snapcode.png You can do the other way, by using a plugin . Activate it and create a widget. Snapchat Snapcode Widget So, now that we are aware Snapchat is the most successful app on the market at the moment and that the real-time communication has changed the way we communicate, it’s a good thing to start thinking about how to implement Snapchat into your digital strategy. The so called has changed the way we see our devices. They have now become more personal to us, so why not use all this to create a fun Snapchat activity for your business triumph? post-PC era This article was originally published at Avalon blog .

Instagram

Twitter

Targeting Millennials? Snapchat is Your Marketing Strategy!

Solana

The Graph

Apache

Community Is

Trace

Getting to know Tarantool 1.6

I have always been fascinated with new things, often being the first in my circle of friends to go ahead and plop down good money for the latest innovation in town. Of course, this is usually a recipe for disaster. Like the other day, my ₹2000 ($30) Mi fitness band’s Android app announced that I could now see the caller ID on the band. I was thrilled no end, and clicked ‘update’ casually. The shiny new reincarnation of the app appeared, and quixotically informed me that it couldn’t connect to my band. Seems the band was connected to some other phone. It went on to politely mention I could fix things by unpairing the band from the other phone. There was just one problem. My band wasn’t paired to any other phone. I spent the next hour frantically browsing through Mi Band online forums. Others seemed to have the same issue. Some seemed to have solved it but sadly their solutions didn’t work for me. One of the members consoled me by saying I could always send it back to the dealer as it was within the warranty period. But that meant living without a fitness band for a while, and the nerd in me strongly objected. I was on my own unless you count the nerd as a second person. On second thoughts, why not? So I decided to let the nerd have a go. He quietly analysed the issue, and came up with an idea. The app believes I’m paired with another phone so why not humour it by doing exactly that. Worth a shot. I tried connecting the band to my iPhone. The thing connected at the first try. Really! I went on into the iPhone app’s setting and unpaired it. I then tried once more to connect it to my Android phone. No success. In desperation, I tried again and again, until I began to nod off. Suddenly I jerked awake as I felt my wrist buzzing. After nearly three hours, the thing had finally paired. My fitness history was completely wiped out. But the blinking caller ID was working. The nerd who is a lefty, and I who am a righty, do a high five, for a perfect clap demo (maybe I should've recorded it for Nicole Kidman). After which, the nerd disappeared and I staggered over to my bed and collapsed, too tired to savour my triumph. You would think such experiences would cure me of early adopteritis. But it seems to have the opposite effect. All those misfiring innovations do by misfiring, is create a situation where I go from hero to zero. If I’m lucky, I go back to hero, which makes me appreciate the distance from zero even better, and bond with the innovation. Does that make sense? Probably not. Never mind. Once an early adopter, always an early adopter! Like that Android band itself was a gamble. It’s the Mi Band 2, from the Chinese upstart Xiaomi. I was thrilled at the idea of getting a fitness band that was sleek looking, sort of waterproof, and came with a dial, pulse detector and a battery that lasts a month. All for this for just $30 so I jumped at it. So far, so good, but it could have easily gone the other way. This leads me to think that most early adopters live and die by the motto, ‘The valiant never die but once.’ Take my car. I recently upgraded it as the latest model came with the new AMT technology. In India, nearly all cars have stick shifts or manual transmission. Automatic transmissions are a lot more expensive as the entire manual transmission system has to be replaced with the expensive automatic one. It’s also less fuel efficient and that's a big no-no for an ordinary Indian. The AMT is a totally different creature. It uses the existing manual transmission box and clutch, and just automates the gear changing process. So it’s a lot less expensive than the automatic transmission. It’s also more fuel efficient as it changes gears to conserve fuel, and that’s something guaranteed to get the attention of most Indians. As usual, I jumped in with my eyes shut. It was only when I took the test drive that I discovered the negative side of AMTs. What do you expect from your car when you floor the pedal? An instant surge of power, and quick acceleration, right? Well, not if it’s an AMT. The moment you floor the pedal, it goes into a sort of ‘Let me think it over’ mode. It cuts off the gas while it figures out what gear to switch to or whatever. It’s like camera lag, happening with the gas pedal. Now this can be scary on India’s roads which are mostly two way. That means driving into oncoming traffic who may often be executing the same overtaking manoeuvre, making the whole adventure a bit suicidal. To survive, you need to complete overtaking real quick, which the AMT won’t. But that nerdy early adopter is a tough breed who doesn’t give up so easily. He figured out the car has a manual mode. With some judicious planning, it was still possible to execute a swift overtake. So he convinced me to buy the car though I’m still not sure how he did that. It was probably the sports and manual modes that helped him con me that this was the real thing. It’s two months now, and I’m still figuring out that manual mode. I’m just managing to stop myself from cursing every time the car lags when I expect it to accelerate. One thing is clear. My days as the fastest car in town are gone forever. “Speeding is dangerous,” mutters the early adopter. I give him a dirty look. But maybe he has a point. The roads are definitely safer. For the rest of the world. My early adopter enthusiasm also affects the people around me. Negatively. There’s the touchscreen laptop I got for my kid a couple of years ago, when the first ones were just coming out. The idea of a touchscreen windows laptop for my touchscreen generation kid was hard to resist. A couple of months later, I snapped the lid shut, like I would with a normal laptop. Big mistake. The touchscreen cracked and was no longer touchy. I had to fork out nearly 30% of the cost of the laptop to get it replaced. Win some, lose some. This was lose some. However, the wins when they come, are sweet. My first one especially. It was back in my university days when my bicycle was my preferred mode of travel for obvious reasons. Indian roads are notoriously potholed, and bicycles have to be tough to survive them. But I had spotted an internal gear system (Shimano) that helped the bike go faster. Unlike a regular geared bike, it was compact, hidden and inexpensive. I hadn’t seen anyone else using it but that didn’t stop me. So I got myself the sportiest looking bike with a racing handlebar, another first in my hometown. The dealer delivered the bike with the gear system fitted. In no time, I was dashing madly over the potholed roads of India, the unofficial King of the Road. Six months later, the bicycle broke! The iron frame literally fell apart, which I have never seen happen to a bike. Indian bicycle makers design bikes for the slow speeds that Indian roads permit. They are just not meant to be ridden at the speeds I was doing. Naturally, I got some pushback from the manufacturer. They refused to replace the frame as they insisted it was my fault. I went atomic on them, and sent them a dramatic photo of my broken bike, along with the sale receipt showing the bike was just six months old. The manufacturer backed off, probably because it was a good story, which may have been picked up by even the newspapers. They replaced the broken frame with a new one, which the dealer refitted to make my bike as good as new. I rode that bike hard for few more years till I was done with university. It survived. This means the new frame was either reinforced, or the old one was a lemon. Like I said, victory was sweet. From push bikes, I leapt into electric bikes which surfaced some years later in India. The technology was new, and sort of experimental. Basically, a full charge (six hours) gets you a measly 40–50km, which means a serious case of ‘range anxiety.’ India is a oil importer so the government promotes electric bikes by subsidising them. Besides you don’t need to register it, or have a driving licence to ride it. The only rider is the government has severely limited the speed limits, and the best I can get is around 30km/hr. Batteries are also expensive at ₹11000 ($165) and need to be replaced every year, or 18 months with low usage. The bikes are not as complicated as petrol bikes as they just have an electric motor and very few other moving parts. But this makes them feel flimsy unlike the heavier regular bikes. All put together, these bikes have almost no resale value and come with a big ‘Don’t Buy’ recommendation from experts. Naturally, I jumped on the electric vehicle bandwagon. After four years, I’m still not sure if this was a good move or not, though I would add it’s viable only for those who make a lot of short runs. My latest adventure is going to be solar. India has serious shortage of electricity and depends a lot on hydroelectric power. So when rains get delayed in summer, power cuts are often imposed on us. Surprisingly, alternative sources of energy like wind and solar are just not taking off. But most homes have battery packs called UPS (uninterrupted power supply). Last week, my UPS died and I started looking around for a replacement. It costs around ₹16000. That’s when a friend informed me that around half the cost of the solar power home system is the battery. The system costs around ₹40000 per house, and lasts for 15–20 years. The negatives with solar are there are no big brands as of now, and it can’t take equipment that needs huge power surges like water pumps and ACs. But I felt it was worth experimenting as we can expect huge power cuts in the coming years with the climate change causing shortfalls in rainfall that powers our grids. The major expense for solar after you buy it, is the battery replacement cost at ₹16000 every 5–6 years. If current electricity expenses are ₹500/month, then expense on electricity for five years is ₹30000. So we are still ahead by ₹14000 (or more if electricity bill is higher). Thing is we are anyway spending ₹16000 on the UPS battery every 5–6 years. In short, since I already have this battery replacement expense for my UPS, it reduces the running cost of solar to a nominal amount for me. Moreover, since I am due to replace my UPS, the cost of installing a solar system is also halved for me. All in all, it looks like the time has come for me to finally jump into solar. As I clamber aboard the rollercoaster, I see the nerd has a huge grin on his silly face. I wonder if this will be another one on the ‘lose some’ side. The funny thing is I hate roller coasters so what am I doing… hang on!

Uninterrupted

My rollercoaster life as an Early Adopter

Machine learning meets microgravity genomics Source: NASA Apollo Programme Photo Archive Whenever I start writing a research paper, the famous aphorism by Steve Jobs comes to my mind. ‘Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.‘— Steve Jobs As much as I dislike embedding aphorisms in my research work, that simple quote pretty much summarizes for me how will tackle the most of the existing problems in protein biotechnology. machine learning I don’t bet my money on bizarrely complex deep learning. I put it completely on the experimental data, along with a deep and profound understanding of their type and nature. Why? Because numerical machines built to predict and explain natural phenomena are as good as your input data are. You may wonder now, how is my little machine learning digression related to space poop in the first place? NASA have organized their bizarrely awesome . Beyond the obvious arguments, Allow me to explain why. Space Poop Challenge space poop-related research can have an invaluable impact on the modern biotechnology via machine learning. But first. Why pooping in outer space is a bad idea? 1. It’s cold outside. The current black body temperature of the background radiation is about: 3K = −270°C = −454 °F Bad for your bottom. On the other hand, awesome for quantum effects enthusiasts, who would love to experiment with superconducting and superfluidity. 2. It’s dark. With an , one can safely conclude outer space is quite dark. Moreover, if our expansion models are correct, it is about to get even darker and colder. average distance between starts of 4.2 light years 3.It smells funny. As , interestingly explains, space does smell funny. Don Pettit It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as “tastes like chicken.” The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space. 4. You may get hit by something nasty. Don’t take my word for it. Simply check . Our dearly beloved Earth is exposed not only to abundant space debris. There are all sorts of celestial objects, which require constant monitoring and completely unorthodox detection methods. NASA Frontier Development Lab _Edit description_www.frontierdevelopmentlab.org NASA Frontier Development Lab 5. Exo- and astrobiologists will hate you forever. You may want to note this one down. A gut of an healthy individual can host on average , which means you carry with you 390000000000000 bacterial cells almost an equal amount of bacteria as the number of the cells that build your body! A human contains on average stool from 540000000000 to 720000000000 bacterial cells per a gram of dry weight! Interestingly enough, common bacteria are known to display bewildering resistance to cosmic radiation, oxygen shortage and even stringent sterilization. Let me quote an abstract of one of the . seminal studies of bacterial survival rate in space On board of the NASA Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), spores of Bacillus subtilis in monolayers (10⁶/sample) or multilayers (10⁸/sample) were exposed to the space environment for nearly six years and their survival was analyzed after retrieval. The response to space parameters, such as vacuum (10^(-6) Pa), solar electromagnetic radiation up to the highly energetic vacuum-ultraviolet range (10⁹ J/m2) and/or cosmic radiation (4.8 Gy), was studied and compared to the results of a simultaneously running ground control experiment. If shielded against solar ultraviolet (UV)-radiation, up to 80 % of spores in multilayers survive in space. Solar UV-radiation, being the most deleterious parameter of space, reduces survival by 4 orders of magnitude or more. However, up to 10⁴ viable spores were still recovered, even in completely unprotected samples. Substances, such as glucose or buffer salts serve as chemical protectants. With this 6 year study in space, experimental data are provided to the discussion on the likelihood of “Panspermia”. Dumping human feces into the lower orbit of earth could create a microbiologically contaminated zone with decremental and unpredictable consequences for all sorts of extracelestial life search missions. Imagine the headlines of s and news outlets: ‘Extracelestial life found!’, ‘We are not alone’, and finally the rectifications — ‘We are alone! We have found space poop’. cience There is nothing worse in science than false positive results! 6. WYPInWYG — What You Poop Is not What You Get! This is my final point. It makes me truly giggle with, both excitement, and angst. Common bacteria mutate in microgravity and outer space environment at least order of magnitude faster than on earth. Why should anyone care about this? First of all, it appears microgravity, cosmic radiation, and a whole range of simply fast-forward evolutionary-like mechanisms on the molecular level. unreproducible (on earth) conditions specific to outer space Having an information about what a certain pathogen could become in the near future, is of central interest in industrial and medical biotechnology. We are given a unique chance to prepare an adequate response, should the mutagenesis and epigenetics scenarios observed in microgravity take place on earth. The experimental data from the ‘fast-forward’ molecular evolution and selection experiments not only enrich our current knowledge about systems microbiology, but can be of fundamental role in the understanding how life evolves on a molecular level under conditions very different from the habitat we have on earth. Thus, we should be able to refine our methods aimed at finding extracelestial life. I will refer you here to an excellent article written by , who in very intelligible way enlists and explains the nature of the biggest practical issues which hamper current biotechnology research. Finally, at Peptone — The Protein Intelligence Company , we are actively looking for a synthesis of data from systems microbiology, high throughput genomics and proteomics analyses, to aid our academic collaborators and industrial clients at designing better proteins. Matthew Heberling _Protein Science Deserves More from Big Data_blog.peptone.io Fame and Fundamentals Complicate Protein Biotech , The key is the data, and the way we ingest them in the context of systems biology. As I have postulated in my previous article machine learning alone will absolutely NOT solve all the problems we have in protein biotechnology. pooping in space may have absolutely unforeseen consequences, which cannot be modeled nor predicted by , , , and any other **(**generate your own bizarre and catchy name using this regex). To sum up: GANs Deep Nets Convnets Inception nets **/.*net[s]/g** . If you decide to poop in space, please package it and send it back to earth for further analysis! Finally Useful post? If so, make my day by clicking the heart below! About the Author is the founder and the architect of . You can connect with him on , , , and . Kamil Tamiola Peptone — The Protein Intelligence Company AngelList LinkedIn Twitter Researchgate

Why Pooping in Outer Space is a Bad Idea

When I worked at Trilogy, one of my fellow managers seemed to have a brutal case of absenteeism. He was never at his desk. Even more concerning, when I did see him he seemed to be doing random things — talking to one person, going for coffee with another, or maybe just standing around and looking at people. Yet his teams performed excellently. I wondered if luck bestowed him with a pack of A-players, enabling him get by doing nothing as a manager. I thought he was hopeless, but then I discovered something powerful: he spent all his time helping people. Those ostensibly random activities were his way of unblocking his team and paving their way to success. I changed my own behaviour. I started to work for my team and carried that practice throughout my career. Whether I manage five (as I did at first) or 300 (as I did at Xtreme Labs), I help people do their jobs. I volunteer for the unpopular jobs. When my people are blocked, I work as hard as I can to unblock them. To an outsider, it might look like I’m doing nothing. But the value accruing to the company is tremendous. There are four main reasons: Your people need a threshold level of responsibility to get creative Your people need missions and authority to reach peak productivity You are in the best position to unblock people This is how your people learn — and how you learn 1) Your people need a threshold level of responsibility to get creative “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut In order for someone to do her best work, she needs to feel and understand the problem. She’ll never grow wings if she’s never forced to fly. The conflict and struggle of fixing one’s own problems is the key to creativity. This is why people should work for themselves and ask for help from managers when they need it. This is the opposite of what most people think (people work for managers and ask for help from below when they need it). As a manager, your job is to unblock people by getting your hands dirty, showing them who to ask for help, or asking for help a level up — from your own manager. This way, the company benefits by having far more people working on creative solutions to problems. Command-and-control works for organizations like the army, but not for knowledge workers. You need each of your people to spread their wings. 2) Your people need missions and authority to reach peak productivity “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” — Toni Morrison Your people have to shed their chains to do good work. A typical manager might give her subordinate a task and micromanage until it . I prefer to ask my people to build something that . looks like they want solves the pain For example, I asked one of our Helpful product designers, Novia, to help solve a pain: some users want to use the app but they won’t use their phones. The mission was to build web functionality for everything in our app. Her output looked nothing like I expected, but it was fantastic. Roger Martin calls this the “Choice Cascade” — choices cascade down the org chart and fall to the people that actually do the work. Missions alone, however, are not enough. Your people need to have the authority to accomplish their missions. Even if you think the output should look different, they need to be able to say “no.” Saying “no” is a skill, and like all other skills, it has to be nurtured. I encourage and reward people who defend their points of view. For example, I gave Shawn, another Helpful product designer, a specific feature suggestions. When I didn’t see it in the app, I repeated it five more times. Eventually, I asked, “Why isn’t that in the product?” He replied, “I know you’ve told me many times, but I don’t agree with you.” He has the final say. I am just one voice. 3) You are in the best position to unblock people “In most cases you will have more context than I will about a [technical] decision, but come to me when you’re blocked and I’ll unblock you. That’s my job.” As a manager, you understand who knows what, who’s done what, and who owns what. By virtue of that alone, you know how to get help for your people. At Xtreme, I spent a lot of my time learning about people. This way, I could help people quickly. My team called me “air traffic control.” My task as air traffic control was to unblock people (making sure there were no crashes), but not micromanaging (how to fly the plane). 4) This is how your people learn — and how you learn “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” — Richard Branson As a manager, your job is not to prevent people from making mistakes. Don’t worry about mistakes. In reality, there are extremely few catastrophic mistakes that people can make. Your job is to set a tone that making mistakes is okay — as long as people learn from them. Make your own mistakes. Bring a mindset of learning to everything. Explicitly call it out: “I thought that X was right, but turns out I was wrong and Y is better.” I learned that you have to be explicitly and emphatically advertise your own mistakes. At Pivotal, I once called someone by the wrong name and a colleague said, “Woah, you make mistakes!” I was floored, ”Do you think I never make mistakes?” My mistake was to not showcase my mistakes. This helps people get rid of their fear — again unleashing autonomy and creativity. Two Cautions 1. You can very sparingly say “no” Success for a manager sometimes requires saying “no.” Some of your creative people will sometimes create output that just won’t jive (with other departments, with the company vision, or with other team members). Your duty to the company may require you to put a bullet in such projects. Do it quickly and without remorse. As a manager, you have to be decisive — your team will appreciate it. Just use your bullets wisely — saying “no” should never become a habit. For example, I will not budge in my stance pair programming. I believe so strongly in the benefits of pairing that I simply will not allow engineers to code alone. I often say that, if you don’t like pair programming, you don’t have to work at Helpful. 2. Don’t create a leaning monolith When you have large numbers of people all working to advance their mission, you increase the risk of colossal failure. They might build a huge monolith only to have it fail in an unexpected way. To mitigate this risk, be agile (ship, test, iterate). At Helpful, everyone (not just our engineers) demos every Friday. This means nobody can work on something for more than a few days without another person seeing their output. Friday demos also force people to think in terms of short-term output. It’s okay to demo something that’s broken, as long as it’s moving in the right direction each week. Be hard on the process, not the people. Another way to avoid creating a monolith is to time box activities. For example, one of our Helpers wanted to create a new analytics report. I know that analytics can take a lot of time, so I said, “Sure, but don’t spend more than one day on it.” This forced him to hone in on the few most valuable metrics, create a lightweight report, and move on. Your org chart is upside-down. Flip it. Conclusion:

Your team doesn’t work for you. You work for them.

A familiar sentiment for anyone starting out with Git No doubt you have heard of Git or GitHub for source control, but what is source control? This is a basic overview of source code control and the advantages of using it within a team environment or using it on your own, if you do a Google search for you can read how Wikipedia defines Source control, as: source code control “Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.” Cool story br0! In other words: Source control allows distributed work in teams of any size, at different locations, while avoiding conflicts in source code changes. Really!? Thanks for clearing that up! Lets look at it this way… In its simplest term it’s like a . You want the new file without getting rid of the changes on the old one. It’s an everyday situation, except on a software project there is the potential for a lot of changes. “Save As” Concepts There are some basic concepts about version control I’ll quickly go over here, these terms used in many SCM systems some relevant to Git and GitHub some to other systems. Repository/repo: The database storing the files. Branch: Create a separate copy of a repo for use on your computer. Revert/rollback: Go back to a previously saved version of the codebase/repo. Push: Push is an access level on the repo, if you have no push access you will need to make a pull request. Pull: If you have no Push access you can make a pull request which will notify the repo owner you want to merge your changes into their code. If you are just starting out then your most used commands will probably be : git add .git commit -m 'some informative message'git push origin master Those commands have served me well in my early days of learning how to get my code back up to GitHub. Git and GitHub are two separate things, Git is a free and open source version control system whilst GitHub uses Git technology to host your repositories on the servers. Git and GitHub GitHub.com Git and GitHub were a bit confusing for me when I first started out with them, I was familiar with VCS before but that was in the shape of Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe and Team Foundation Server where you have a nice GUI to guide you through the check-in and check-out process, for those the process was: make a copy of the repository you wanted to make changes to on your machine, once you have made your change then, Check-in your changes. Check-out: add your changes back to the repository with an accompanying message detailing the change you have made. Check-in: With Git it’s a bit less fancy, all via the command line, but pretty much the same as with VSS and TFS. Clone the repository: Make a copy of the repo on your machine. Make changes. Once the changes are made then add them back with accompanying commit messages. Push the changes back to the repo on Github. The documentation on GitHub is fantastic for anything you want to achieve and in this post I have referenced some the documentation. It can get a bit overwhelming though, especially if you get out of sync, i.e. forget to pull a change made on the remote then try to check your changes in before pulling the changes into your local version. I’m by no means confident if things go a bit wrong but I have developed a approach so if you do break something you din’t lose too much of you valuable time trying to work out what went wrong where. “Commit Often Perfect Later” If you take a look at a repo you have cloned from GitHub you will see there is a file called this is like a little database of all the changes you have made on your machine and it contains all the information it needs to connect to GitHub and make the changes it needs to make to the master repo [or whatever branch you’re pushing the changes to]. .git I made a cheat sheet which I used every time I went near Git, it has now turned into a of other cheat sheets I still use on a daily basis. Gist repo In it I cover these situations: Make a new project on your machine that you want to add to GitHub? Look . here Cloning a repo from someone else’s GitHub and pushing it to a repo on my GitHub, or “I didn’t make a fork, what do I do now!” You have before making any changes. a fork which you need to update Workflow will be different for differing situations, for me as a noob developer I have tried to document anything I have come across with Git so I can reference back to it for that one time I need it but can’t remember what I did at 21:45 on a Wednesday just to get the code checked into GitHub. There are many GUIs that integrate with Git for use with GitHub the official GitHub one is pretty nice but I quickly got into situations that the GUI couldn’t get me out of so I have stuck with the terminal since, well there is VSCode though which has a beautiful Git UI that I use daily, but there are some things that I still use the terminal for: git statusgit checkout <branch-name>git [push] tags All pretty handy, there is probably extensions out there to help with these but for now I’m pretty comfortable doing it via the command line. Any tips or tricks you use in Git you’d like to share? Please feel free to leave a comment or better still add to the . repo via a pull request If any of this has helped you in any way feel free to like the article and share it on social media. Many thanks.

Google

Microsoft

Just starting out with Git and GitHub? It gets easier, honest!

I hope if you reached this story you’re already interested in Vue, so that I don’t need to tell you my about it. “Point of Vue” As usual, I just want to make sure you are aware of the awesome stuff out there you might be missing, hoping to serve you a great Brunch with an awesome Vue. As much as I consider Vue one of the best, if not THE best UI framework out there for developing web applications, I also believe today’s web development tasks need a solid build system that does the job well, and does not require us to do a lot of work for it to actually perform. When using Vue for a whole app, you need building… and even when not… if you want your code to be optimal, you need building. When I was getting into the work of building modern web applications I stumbled upon this problem, and found some interesting solutions like , some more complete stuff like and I said… ok, this works for everyone, let’s go with it. But no matter how much I read about it, how much I used the pre-built examples for almost anything, it just felt weird the whole time. GULP Webpack Enter Brunch Out of nowhere, the name of appeared and I can’t even remember how, or what was I searching for. What I can tell you for sure is the sky cleared up for me that day. Brunch Brunch defines itself as an “Ultra-fast HTML5 Build ”, and while that is true, it does not make justice to its power. With just a small config, you can basically satisfy any of your needs, since there are plugins for most commonly used stuff such as Babel, UglifyJS, Pug, HTML Templates, Handlebars, JS, CSS, Images and what-not… It’s so that you can even use it for Node applications as well as client side apps. Tool automation Brunch’s presentation video — Taken from Brunch’s website Brunch is easy to learn, you can get it working without almost any work on your end for most plugins, it delivers its promise of being ultra-fast… It makes you wonder why so many people still uses webpack, Gulp or even worse, Grunt. Vue and Brunch? Why not? Nathaniel Blackburn built a simple, yet awesome plugin that lets you build VueJS-based applications with brunch, so easily you would be amazed. It’s called and it works just fine! vue-brunch Vue’s Cli tool is great, but it uses webpack and is quite slower than Brunch, has a ton of config files (obviously not meant for editing unless absolutely necessary and while the rails sensation is fine for me… I feel it comes at a high price. That’s why I thought I’d give it a shot with Brunch and Vue-Brunch Brunch with Vuety Yeah… word games again… I know, but bear with me for a while. I wanted to create an updated Brunch Skeleton that would use the Vue2 stack (including the new router and Vuex), and did so in an opinionated way so that users don’t need to think too hard to get started. I took inspiration on Nathaniel Blackburn’s Skeleton and did a few updates and tweaks, and so was born. brunch-with-vue brunch-with-vuety _brunch-with-vuety - An opinionated Brunch skeleton for using Vue2, Vuex and VueRouter. Comes packed with axios and…_github.com GitHub - srodriki/brunch-with-vuety: An opinionated Brunch skeleton for using Vue2, Vuex and… Take a look at it, it’s simple to use and understand and can get you up and running with something similar as the vue-cli does, but using Brunch instead of webpack. For me, it’s the marriage between two pieces of technology that actually deserve way more attention that they have had so far: and are excellent. VueJS Brunch Honestly speaking… take a look at Vue-cli’s Webpack build scripts and take a look at brunch-with-vuety’s one: module.exports = {files: {javascripts: {joinTo: {'vendor.js': /^(?!app)/, // Files that are not in `app` dir.'app.js': /^app/}},templates: {joinTo: 'app.js'}},plugins: {babel: {presets: ['latest', 'stage-3']},vue: {extractCSS: true}}} That’s the difference between Brunch’s Convention model and Webpack’s. Much simpler, isn’t it? I will be creating more skeletons and templates as time passes, and hope to deliver a few more complete ones. If you have any suggestions, please don’t hesitate to open an issue or comment here.

A Vuetiful Brunch for Everyone

Six months ago, I joined NNIT and embarked on my journey as a Graduate. So far the journey has been incredible and I’m just about to start my second module in a new department. Being a graduate is rather different from joining a company in a specific position. The three separate modules in the program allow us to explore areas we wouldn’t otherwise be able to. This comes with multiple advantages both for NNIT and for us as graduates. However, because we are given the opportunity to explore these previously unknown areas, we might lack the specific skills at the beginning of each module to perform some of the tasks. This often entails a very steep learning curve in the respective field. I will in this article provide my view on 3 additional things a employee always will be able to contribute with to add value to their department, regardless of their experience with specific operational skills. junior Knowledge Sharing sharing is defined as the sharing of knowledge between individuals. This can be any kind of knowledge and it is not limited to sharing information in an organization. However, it is and should be a big part of a professional organization. Any given department will always benefit from having a well-defined structure for sharing knowledge. Similar to the diverse nature of information sharing, the actual structure can encompass a multitude of knowledge processes. One way would be to simply initiate a weekly sharing of interesting links within the department’s field of interest. Then you could incorporate a small comment regarding any new links in a weekly department meeting. Knowledge What skills do you demonstrate? The very notion of knowledge sharing is a direct indicator of passion. Being responsible for coordinating and locating new articles or publications in a given field will show your employer that you are eager to follow the movements in the industry. It will also provide a great foundation for discussing future strategic initiatives in the department. Documentation Documentation is famous for being a love/hate relationship in organizations. If it isn’t up to date, valuable knowledge may be lost when employees are changing departments or companies. However, too thorough documentation will only slow down the high pace of a department eager to move forward with new solutions. A good starting point for documentation is the key areas of a department. Try to review key processes and see if the necessary documentation is in place for other new employees to replicate these processes. Some areas will of course always be difficult to document if they are highly technical. However, creating documentation and writing about subjects is definitely one of the best ways to understand and remember the subjects. What skills do you demonstrate? In the right setting, documentation will show that you possess the ability to determine the truly vital processes in a department. Apart from this, you get the chance to demonstrate a clear understanding of certain subjects related to processes in the department. A Fresh Pair of Eyes This point touches upon one of the general clichés concerning new young employees. We have all had the talk with someone emphasizing the significance of having a fresh pair of eyes look upon the processes in a given department. While it has become a widespread catchphrase, it definitely is true. With the pace of change today, every department needs to keep up. This involves optimizing all processes as much as possible in order to release time for other valuable activities. After some time in a department, you will get a solid understanding of how time is distributed between certain operational activities. Once you have established this overview, take a step back and break these activities down to smaller tasks. Chances are that some of these tasks could be candidates for either automation or optimization. Try to initiate actions on these small tasks and remember that even tiny optimizations will save time in the long run. Time you will be able to leverage to keep your department as efficient as possible. What skills do you demonstrate? Suggesting improvements to processes is essential to keep departments efficient. The moment a department becomes stale, it will fail to remain competitive in today’s IT industry. The ability to take a step back and assess your work in a larger perspective is highly valued in any organization. This is often the foundation for internal optimization projects and will demonstrate a clear understanding of core lean principles. This concludes my write up with actionable suggestions for junior employees in any department. This list obviously only constitutes a tiny fraction of the things you can contribute to as a junior employee. However, it is my experience that it’s basically always possible to change something within these three areas. I will always continue to do all three and I suggest you add them to your list of things to keep in mind when starting out in any department. This goes for both junior employees and senior employees. Feel free to drop me a message with suggestions regarding other relevant areas.

Keep

Mind

Junior Developers Bring Knowledge, Documentation, and a Fresh Pair of Eyes

Today I released a simple React-Native game on the App Store with the aim of providing some tips on how to handle small React-Native projects like this one. The game is, of course, completely open-source, you can find the repository on and in the . GitHub App Store Protip: You can find this same Medium article in the and on . They might be easier on the eyes given the fact that there's some code ahead. GitHub's README.md my personal website Tap The Number! is a simple React-Native game where you have to tap the tiles that appear on the screen in a specific order. Even if developing this game didn’t take too much time (I should have put in it ~20 hours I guess) it has been a fun ride and I’d like to share some tips and some info on the complexities I found during its development. The stack and the dependencies React-Native Tap The Number is built entirely with , which has been an obvious choice for me given the fact that I love React/React-Native and I use it on a daily basis at my current workplace. React-Native comes with , a test framework that shines when coupled with React.Related dependencies: React-Native Jest State management: MobX I started this project using for handling the state management, but after a while I noticed that, being a simple project, it was slowing me down, so I seized the opportunity and implemented . , but this time I tried using its and à la Redux, and I really liked it!Related dependencies: Redux MobX This is not the first time I used MobX provider inject Static type checking: Flowtype is a static type checker. I’ve been using it for a while now and it saved me A LOT of time. I can’t praise it enough. Flowtype I strongly suggest you to give it a try, or better still stick with it for some days for seeing its real benefits. Related dependencies: Linting: ESlint and Prettier I wasted way too much time in the past tweaking my ESlint configuration.Now I’m super happy with and with , which takes care of all the code styling of my application.Related dependencies: a minimal ESlint config Prettier Importing from absolute path: babel-plugin-module-resolver I use for importing files from the path. Related dependencies: babel-plugin-module-resolver src Playing audio files: react-native-sound If you need to play an audio file in a React-Native application you must use some kind of external library at the moment because it is not (yet) implement in React-Native out of the box.To me is the most complete library at the moment and it worked fine on this application. react-native-sound P.S.: I’m pulling the library directly from its Github Master branch because the latest version available on NPM does not support React-Native 0.40 yet. Related dependencies: Simple animations: react-native-animatable For simple animations is the de-facto standard on React-Native.Related dependencies: react-native-animatable Project structure Enough with the dependencies! Let's see the project structure: The project structure I used may seem over-engineered at first, but this setup paid off almost instantly (continue below). A bit of history I started working on this game with a totally different idea in my mind: I wanted to play a bit with , and you’ll see that at some point I even implemented an when tapping Tile.Unfortunately I had to drop the idea because React-Native suffers from small lags when you run multiple animations (in my case when tapping on tiles rapidly), but it seems that something is changing thanks to . React-Native ART if you take a closer look at the commit history animation similar to the Twitter’s heart one Native Driver At the time, I had already created the game engine and some components, so, instead of throwing away the project, I decided to turn it into this game. Interesting stuff Config files are your friends I tried to gather all the variables that describe the app behaviour in the directory. The for example exposes all the application dimensions: config config/metrics.js This setup, coupled with hot-reloading, came in super handy even for a simple game like this, because I’ve been able to concentrate most of the variables I needed to change in a single directory. Relative dimensions React-Native is not a game-development framework and one of the things you’ll miss a lot, if you’ll ever try to build a game with it, is a proper way to handle the camera/viewport.Tap The Number is a simple game though, so using relative dimensions is more than enough for its use case.Using relative dimensions means that instead of defining the dimensions of the views using the logical pixel units (which is the default unit of React-Native) you should define the dimensions relative to the device size (or to their parents).Following this approach will make your game resize automatically on bigger/smaller devices (even on tablets!) but it also has many drawbacks in my opinion: The more the app grows, the more dimensions you’ll have to define and keep track of; Handling screen rotation might become difficult (Tap The Game works only in portrait mode) ; If you’re using some native components you’ll might not be able to resize them ; Speaking about dimensions, In Tap The Number I did something that I’m bit ashamed of: I tied the game engine to the device size, as you can see in of : getRandomTilePosition utils/boardUtils.js When the app initializes the game board the above function searches for available tiles positions using a while-loop. I’m aware that this function , and that it can break if the device has a weird width / height ratio, but considering that: can be optimized in many different ways I’m targeting only iOS (>= iPhone 5); The maximum number of tiles on the board is 6; The tile size is 28% of the device width; …I decided to opt for this solution for the sake of simplicity (and for keeping the code readable, but feel free to correct me if it seems too unreasonable). One last thing: keep in mind that the React-Native component does not scale the text based on the device size.This is one of the reasons I always use a custom wrapper over the built-in component, so that I can change its default behaviour/font/color easily.To get the scaled font size you should do the following: <Text /> <Text /> MobX (and src/utils) tips Let’s be honest here: I love Redux and I use it daily, but for simple applications like this, MobX is more then enough. In fact, if you’re not interested in middlewares or in having a centralized pattern for dispatching actions, in my opinion MobX might be a better choice than Redux. One thing I just recently started using with MobX is the + combo, which provides a nice abstraction on connecting components to the store (in a similar way to the Redux's ). provider inject mapStateToProps Another thing I’ve found really useful has been using abusing the and folders: from my experience the MobX actions tend to get cluttered, so I prefer to keep them easy to read by minimizing the verbosity of the code. Talking about my utils functions... I'm a bit sad because they are not super pure -- they use the files internally -- but if your application is bigger than mine I'd advise you to make them accepts those configs as parameters to make them testable. src/utils src/services src/config P.S.: use values whenever possible if you need to compute an observable value (just like Redux's selectors). @computed Animations, part 1: The animations library I used In Tap The Number I animated the components in three different ways: React-Native-Animatable is a wrapper of React-Native Animated API which exposes many simple animations and allows you to use them both programmatically and in a declarative way, embracing React's philosophy. If you don't need complex animations, interpolations or timings, is a solid choice. react-native-animatable react-native-animatable React-Native Animated API I used the Animated API for the TimeBar animation in : I wanted to achieve an effect that required some manual tweaking, and the Animated API is the most flexible one of the lot. Specifically, I wanted to animate the TimeBar width and the TimeBar color from grey to red. src/containers/Playground/TimeBar LayoutAnimation is a powerful way to animate the transitions between layout changes without the need to specify the animation behaviour. You just call or before calling and React-Native will animate the component that has been subjected to a layout change. You can see an example of it in , where I animated the tile depth by calling just before . The drawback of LayoutAnimation is, as you may have already guessed, that it provides much less control than the other animation alternatives. React-Native LayoutAnimation LayoutAnimation.spring() one of the other available configurations setState src/components/Tile.js LayoutAnimation.spring() this.setState({ isTouched: true }); Otherwise you’ll have to keep track of the animations state in your component’s state (e.g: which adds a nice amount of unneeded complexity to your component's lifecycle. this.setState({ isContainerFadingOut: true }) Animations, part 2: React and animations I’ll go straight to the point here: In my opinion animations don’t get along nicely with React (and React-Native), and they never will. I know that it might be a controversial opinion, but having tried many different libraries both on React-Native (and on React, for example React-Motion), I still think that animations move against the declarative React pattern. Don’t get me wrong here, you can still achieve a clean code while using small animations, but when you’ll start linking animations one after another you’ll end up doing it programmatically: Otherwise you’ll have to keep track of the animations state in your component’s state (e.g: which adds a nice amount of unneeded complexity to your component’s lifecycle. this.setState({ isContainerFadingOut: true }) …And last opinion: I don’t think that the clashing of the imperative nature of animations with the React's "declarativeness" can be solved easily (I’ll be super happy to be proved wrong though): after all, animating hard. IS Android support I was planning to release this game on too at first, but I had some issue that I’ve not been able to solve easily. The most annoying one was my inability to use custom fonts on Android: I tried linking the assets folder using (which works perfectly on iOS) and adding the fonts manually, but it seems that , while other works perfectly even when using the first method.The other issue I faced was a sluggish responsiveness in the animations (specifically when using LayoutAnimation), but I guess that I could have easily fixed them by investigating the issue a bit more. Android react-native link some fonts don't link correctly at all Thanks to… I’m not a creative guy at all: every single thing I used in this application is just a re-iteration of stuff I had already seen before.So, without further ado, here are all the sources I can think of that I used to build this simple game: for the iOS assets; Asset Catalog Creator that I’ve found on Images (sorry, I don’t know who the author is); The game background image Google for the sound effects; freesound.org that inspired the design of the tiles; This Slack image Mostaza, the startup where I work, for all the support (and for the App Store account too!) All the libraries I already linked and talked about in this post; Forks, comments and critics are warmly welcomed, I just hope that this app example might be helpful to someone sooner or later!

Apple

Instantly

Slack

How I built a super-simple game using React-Native

LightCyber was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. This is my version of the story. Ten years ago, I had a conversation with a mentor of mine, who was at that time Israel’s top . It was a cold day in September, the 2nd Lebanon war had recently ended and I had just returned from a long reserve duty and was looking for career advice. The seasoned investor who’s seen it all, told me about “growth-stage investment”, a term I knew little about at the time (and have been dealing with ever since). He was bullish about the tech segment in Israel and had two clear messages: venture capitalist growth 1. Unlike early stage VC investments — growth investing is about numbers, not people. 2. Don’t sell quickly. You invest to build a mammoth! (they didn’t call them unicorns back then…), we want an Israeli Nokia! (we all know how that went). He gave me his third and last piece of advice, when I already had one foot out the door: “most importantly!” he said, “don’t pay too much attention to other people’s advice… go with your gut!” Ten years have passed and over the past weeks I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot, in the context of LightCyber’s acquisition by Palo Alto Networks. My relation to the deal is that I led LightCyber ‘s last financing round in the summer of 2016 and served on its board since. It is common knowledge that early-stage investments are “all about the people”. You meet a couple of wide-eyed entrepreneurs with a PowerPoint presentation and you need to make a decision. Growth investments require a much more data driven decision process, as the target companies already have substantial metrics, historical revenues, P&L profile and a sizeable team in place. But once in a while, even in later stage investments, you come across an investment decision which is largely driven by “the people” element. For me, the investment in LightCyber was exactly that. Yesterday Yesterday, Palo Alto Networks announced it has acquired LightCyber. Palo Alto is one of the world’s leading cyber security companies. It was a successful deal for the founders, employees and investors. And it is just the beginning, because now LightCyber’s team has even better chances to make the world a safer place, protecting companies and organizations from malicious hackers. 20 years ago… What most people don’t know is that the LightCyber story began over 20 years ago, at Boyar high-school in Jerusalem. Giora Engel, Michael Mumcuoglu and I met in 10th grade for the first time. Being much smarter than me (and to this day two of the brightest people I know), they both majored in Physics (I — in Geography). Despite being much smarter, they were still nice to me — and the three of us, together with a group of kids from our high school class actually founded our first company at the age of 15. Our company (creatively named Boyar Inc.) didn’t go public or get bought, but we won some prizes and came out with roughly $100 USD profit each, roughly 500X our capital invested, which is (still) my best investment ROI to date. Years passed and Michael & Giora (M&G) started another company together (MeterLive — audience measurement for outdoor advertising). They didn’t invite me to join them that time, but were kind enough to come and talk to me about it every now and then. I even introduced them to one of the best VCs I knew — Battery Ventures (BV). BV didn’t invest in MeterLive, but a couple of years later, BV became the largest shareholder in M&G’s newest venture — LightCyber… and BV’s Itzik Parnafes joined its board of directors. The call When it was time for another investment round at LightCyber, Itzik called me. By coincidence, when that call came, I had just walked out of a meeting with Israel’s “Mister Cyber”, CheckPoint’s co-founder Shlomo Kramer. At that time, Kramer had just recently joined LightCyber’s board of directors and told me about his long relationship with Gonen Fink, LightCyber’s CEO. Gonen was one of the first employees at CheckPoint and spent years as a part of their senior management team. He was recruited by M&G and Glilot (LightCyber’s first VC investor) as a professional CEO to take the company to its next phase. I had met Gonen several times before and highly appreciated his leadership style and his strategic thinking. And so, even before the due diligence started I had already made my decision regarding LightCyber. During the DD phase, my colleague Tomer Babai and I analyzed the market, competitive and strategic landscape. We consulted with subject matter experts and spoke to almost every player in the space. We met and spoke to many LightCyber’s customers who explained to us how superior the product was compared with any other network-based detection tool they had tested, specifically LightCyber’s ability to provide real threat detection with minimal amounts of false positives. The company already had real revenues and customers and we had a clear thesis on why it will be a good investment — but even with all that, at the end, the decision was based on the quality of people, whom I knew for many years. The night is dark and full of horrors Every Startup’s journey, even at growth stage, is a struggle. It is a rough trip through the snow desert north of the Westerose Wall and not a carefree tour of Disneyland. While the trip behind the wall can be difficult, dark and full of horrors, I knew that with Michael & Giora, Itzik & Shlomo and Gonen at the helm, it would be exciting to go for the scary & challenging journey, and I was willing to join them — frankly, anytime. So we (ClalTech) led the company’s last investment round and as an added bonus, I was joined by one of my favorite investors — Vertex’s Aviad Ariel. It has been an intense but short journey… Claltech led LightCyber’s last investment round in July 2016, and today, roughly seven months later, we are parting ways. Sale or Scale? This brings me back to my old mentor’s second piece of advice — not to invest with an eye to a quick exit but rather with the aim to build a large company. That was indeed our intention when we invested, though we always knew that one of the leading security vendors could proactively approach the company in the near term with the intent to buy it for its great product and people. Before investing — we all knew that the area north of the wall is dangerous. It is full of wildlings and giants and if you are not careful you can run into White-Walkers. But neither the competition nor the need to educate the market scared us. We were more than willing to continue to trudge through the snow and to fight and support the company through the next steps of its journey. But then came Palo Alto Networks- the mother of dragons… and we quickly realized it was the leader we wanted to align with, the true heir to the Iron Throne… Palo Alto Networks, led by the Israeli Nir Zuk, is a $14B market cap emerging leader in the cyber security world; with technology, vision and growth that are second to none. Under Palo Alto’s dragon wings the amazing LightCyber team will be able to move onwards and upwards faster and stronger than before, fighting harder to make the world safer against cyber villains. To avoid any misunderstanding, my old mentor was right: when you invest in more mature companies the metrics become critical. He was also right in saying that you should never invest in a company just looking for a quick exit. But sometimes a unique opportunity comes, which is fantastic for all parties — providing a promising future for the company’s employees and vision, a great outcome for all stakeholders. When that happens, my rule is to follow the entrepreneurs and join them in whichever direction they choose. At the end of the day — the keys to the company’s future are in their hands. When a great company wants you to join forces with it — it’s a badge of honor and a reason to be proud, and by no means is it a thing to apologize for. Should we build multi-billion companies in Israel? YES, of course. But it is NOT the only way to go. Once the founders and management communicated their view to the board — we gave them our full support and rolled up our sleeves to execute the best deal we could. The North remembers… A big thank you to my old friends for including me in this journey north of the wall. Good luck, and always looking forward to joining you again for another adventure. — — — — — — — — — — — — - is a common greeting in Braavos, meaning “all men must serve” in High Valyrian. It is the common response to the greeting (“all men must die”) — meant in the sense of “all men must (eventually) die,” sooner or later, somewhat like the Latin saying “memento mori”. This has absolutely nothing to do with my story, but I always wanted to use it as a headline, because I think it’s cool. Valar Dohaeris Valar Morghulis

Target

Valar Dohaeris*

Why do I feel so rewarded? I've been an avid user of from their early beginning. I registered and actively used every social media that has been popular in the latest ten years: social media Myspace Netlog MSN Messenger Facebook Instagram Reddit Twitter Snapchat You name it, I'm registered, I’ve been active, I tried it, and eventually gave it up. Lately I started thinking why using them is so rewarding and I had some conclusions. I think that social media— especially Facebook, since it's the most sophisticate and biggest and most successful social media ever created — are exploiting a loophole in our brain. (probably not so new) But let’s start with an old fashioned addiction: . Nobody is talking much about television anymore, we got used to it. But I noticed a parallel between the television and the feed scrolling, which is the main engine of the loophole I mentioned before: . the television zapping Scrolling social media feeds is like zapping from channel to channel Why are we zapping? Think about: zapping is a weird activity. Jumping from channel to channel while looking at pictures and sounds. You have no control on what’s going on, except you can jump to the next channel. It’s Tinder for content. Somehow our brain likes that. I guess it’s the sensation of choice, of entertainment and the high hopes of finding an interesting content — which could be the next one. Somehow our brain releases a reward for this activity even if it’s not an useful activity at all. Zapping is the loophole. I’m sure you see the parallelism now. Your brain is wired to enjoy that kind of interaction, and since Facebook tailors those content exactly for you the hook is even more powerful. What is Facebook now? It’s a video after another video after another photo, with pictures and sounds. I’d love to see real-time dopamine levels in order to understand the behaviour of our brain when it interacts with social media feeds. Facebook is the new television.

Does scrolling release dopamine?

By now most technically minded people have heard of neural networks. This is a technology that is widely adopted while still being very active in research. It is an exciting time to do research in CS. However, this article does not expect the reader to know much about theoretical or applied method in AI. All that is required is for the reader to imagine a Neural Network as layers of connections of neurons that send signals (synapses) to one another. First, let look at depth and breadth, to find our first issue. Hardware, at least the kind that you would need to model the human brain, is inaccessible. No one has that sort of computing power yet, though there are plans to build towards that, but that is another story. The first issue is simply that when building neural networks with many layers (deep) and many pathways (breadth) you run out of space. This is why we need to downsize or the networks regularly. prune Second, our philosophy of mind is prepubescent. We have no rigorous theory of how computation and simulated brains map onto real human minds. We don’t even know what we don’t know. This manifests as a hit-or-miss research schedule that almost abandoned deep learning until we realized that it was actually amazing. When taken together, we have giant networks of essentially banana mush, that are driving cars and running the financial system. If this sounds ridiculous to you, its because it is. Everyone knows it is crazy, but it is still state-of-the-art, and nothing but nuclear war will stop this sort of bandwagoning momentum. This is where pruning comes in. Everyone knows that there is inefficiency in the models and duplication in the code, but we don’t know where. So we can start looking. So we start with the socratic method. Let’s let the machines ask themselves questions and prune the models to be most verily correct, yet compressed in application. First question: If the input and output of two subnets of a network are equivalent in outcome, can we remove one and replace it with a connection to the other? The answer to this is context sensitive. Second question: Can we enumerate all possible networks and refer to them by ordinal values? The answer to this is yes (See Church-Turing theses). Third question: Can we order all previous networks such that the most prevalent networks have the lowest, and thus most compact, ordinal. The answer to this is yes (same proof by Church). So in three questions, if you accept all of the assumptions, we have found an algorithm to create perfectly compact neural networks from any input. In practice, nothing is this simple. The search for our neural continues. platonic solids 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

Pruning neurons with the Socratic Method

Intro First of all, a short disclaimer: I’m not an expert in machine at all. In fact I’m in a rather early stage of the learning process, have basic knowledge and this project is kind of my first practical hands-on ML. I’ve done the by at University of Washington, by Udacity and and the , all of which I can really recommend. After having gathered all that theoretical knowledge, I wanted to try something practical on my own. I decided to learn a simple classifier for chat messages from my messenger history. I wanted to learn a program that can, given a chat message, tell who the sender of that message is. I further got inspired after having read the papers related to Facebook’s text classification algorithm. In their examples they classify Wikipedia abstracts / descriptions to classes or news article headlines to their respective news categories, only based on plain, natural words. Basically these problems are very similar to mine, so I decided to give it a try. Since I found that many text classifiers are learned using the Naive Bayes algorithm (especially popular in spam detection and part of ) and it’s really easy to understand, I decided to go for that one, too. Inspired by , where the sentiment of tweets is analyzed, I chose to also use the for Python. Another option would have been , but NLTK also provided some useful utilities beyond the pure ML scope. learning machine learning course Pedro Domingos Intro to Machine Learning Google Machine Learning 1 lecture at Karlsruhe Institute Of Technology Telegram fastText DBPedia SpamAssassin this article natural language toolkit sklearn All of my . code is available on GitHub Basic Steps The very first step was to download the data, namely the chat messages. Luckily, Telegram has an open API. However it’s not a classical REST API, but instead they’re using the protocol. I found as a cool C++-written commandline client on GitHub as well as as a Ruby script to automate the history download for a set of users / chat partners. I told the script (ran in a Docker container, since I didn’t want to install Ruby) to fetch at max 40,000 messages for my top three chat partners (let’s call them , and ). The outcome were three files. MTProto vysheng/tg tvdstaaij/telegram-history-dump M P J JSON Lines To pre-process these files as needed for my learning algorithm, I wrote a Python script that extracted only message text and sender from all incoming messages and dumped these data to a JSON file. Additionally I also extracted the same information for all outgoing messages, i.e. all messages where the sender was me. Consequently, there are four classes: C = { , , , } M P J F Another data-preprocessing step was to convert the JSON objects with class names as keys for message-arrays to one large list of tuples of the form , where is the name of the message’s sender and is the respective message text. In this step I also discarded words with a length of less than 2 characters and converted everything to lower case. (text, label) label text Next step was to extract the features. In text classification, there is often one binary ( / ) feature for every possible word. So if all messages in total comprise X different words, there will be a X-dimensional feature vector. contains contains not Last step before actually training the classifier is to compute the feature vector for every messages. For examples if the total feature set is , the resultung feature vector for a message would be . ['in', 'case', 'of', 'fire', 'coffee', 'we', 'trust'] "in coffee we trust" ('in'=True, 'case'=False, 'of'=False, 'fire'=False, 'coffee'=True, 'we'=True, 'trust'=True) One more minor thing: shuffle the feature set so that the order of messages and message senders is random. Also divide the feature set into training- and test data, where test data contains about 10 % of the number of messages in the train data. Train classifier. This is really just one line of code. nltk.NaiveBayesClassifier Use the returned classifier to predict classes for the test messages, validate them and compute the accuracy. Using that basic initial setup on a set of , (7931 from M, 9795 from P, 9314 from F and 10217 from J), I ended up with an . There seemed to be room for optimization. 37257 messages accuracy of 0.58 Optimizations Inspired by , I decided to include n-grams. This seemed resonable to me, because intuitively I’d say that single words a way less characteristic for a person’s writing style than certain phrases. I extended the feature list from step 4 by all possible , which are easy to compute with NLTK. Actually I’m not taking ALL bi- and tri-grams and I’m not even take all single words as features. Reason for that is that there were approx. 35k different words in the dataset. Plus the n-grams this would make an extremely multi-dimensional feature vector and as it turned out, it was way to complex for my 16 GB MacBook Pro to compute. Consequently, I only took the , ranked descending by their overall frequency. fastText bi- and tri-grams top 5000 single words, bigrams and trigrams Since NLTK already provides a corpus of (like “in”, “and”, “of”, etc.), which are obviously not characteristic for a person’s style of chatting, I decided to remove them (the German ones) from the message set in step 2. stopwords With these optimizations, I ended up with an after a training time of 348 seconds (I didn’t log testing time at that point). accuracy of 0.61 Conclusion Certainly 61 % accuracy isn’t really a good classifier, but at least significantly better than random guessing (chance of 1/4 in this case). However, I trained a classifier on my data as a comparison baseline and it even only reached (but with a much better ). My intuitive explanation for these rather bad results is the complexity of the problem itself. Given only a set of words without any context and semantics, it’s not only hard for a machine to predict the message’s sender but also for a human. Moreover, given more training data (I’d need a longer message history) and more computing power to handle larger feature sets, the accuracy might further improve slightly. Actually, the practical relevance of this project isn’t quit high anyway, but it was a good practice for me to get into the basics of ML and it’s really fun! fastText 60 % accuracy training time of only 0.66 seconds Please leave me feedback if you like to. Originally published at ferdinand-muetsch.de . 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

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive February 28th, 2017

@jsborkedJust Chris

@stefan_66577Stefan Seltz-Axmacher

@vinikatyalVini

@juliJulia Paduszyńska

@michelleku12Michelle Ku

@simonswissSimon Vrachliotis

@getlionels

@aperturelessJakub Juszczak

@avalonhostDamir Mujic

@Vadim.PopovVadim Popov

@babulousbabulous

@KamilTamiolaKamil Tamiola

@fnthawarFarhan Thawar

@spences10Scott Spence

@srodrikiRodrigo Juliani

@kristoffer_andreasenKristoffer Andreasen

@mmazzaroloMatteo Mazzarolo

@danielshinarDaniel Shinar

@giuliomichelonGiulio Michelon

@andrew_luckerAndrew Lucker

@n1tryFerdinand Mütsch

@jsborked
Just Chris

@stefan_66577
Stefan Seltz-Axmacher

@vinikatyal
Vini

@juli
Julia Paduszyńska

@michelleku12
Michelle Ku

@simonswiss
Simon Vrachliotis

@getlionel
s

@apertureless
Jakub Juszczak

@avalonhost
Damir Mujic

@Vadim.Popov
Vadim Popov

@babulous
babulous

@KamilTamiola
Kamil Tamiola

@fnthawar
Farhan Thawar

@spences10
Scott Spence

@srodriki
Rodrigo Juliani

@kristoffer_andreasen
Kristoffer Andreasen

@mmazzarolo
Matteo Mazzarolo

@danielshinar
Daniel Shinar

@giuliomichelon
Giulio Michelon

@andrew_lucker
Andrew Lucker

@n1try
Ferdinand Mütsch