Frequent questions I get on AWS are: “How do I keep up with all the changes happening in AWS ?” “Do I have to know all these new things to pass the certification exam?” “AWS changed the way a service works. What is the right way to handle questions about this in certification exams?” To give some examples: Previously we could attach an IAM role to an EC2 instance only at launch time. Now, EC2 service allows you to attach an IAM role to an existing instance. VPC Peering used to be supported only within region. With a new release, AWS now supports VPC peering across regions. My 2 Cents on this For the first two, it is a chicken and egg problem. Focus on core services that are widely used and has gained credibility among users. Certification exams tend to emphasize on these services. As services gain acceptance among user community, you can expect few questions about these to show-up. Not all services are super successful and some are gradually phased out as well. The third question is tricky. With these kind of “knowledge-breaking” changes, more than one answer may be correct when you are expected to pick a single correct answer. General advice: pick an answer based on your best knowledge. I suspect that for these kind of changes, exam may give you credit for both old and new knowledge answers. Core Services VPC, Route 53, EC2, IAM, ELB, Auto Scaling, S3, EBS, Glacier Concepts, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS, Serverless compute, RDS, RDS-Aurora, DynamoDB, ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, Kinesis, Opsworks Core Concepts Cloud Computing Benefits, Cloud Security / Shared Responsibility Model, Global Infrastructure, Pricing Concepts, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery WhitePapers AWS Well Architected Framework, , Reliability, Cost Optimization, Performance Efficiency, Operational Excellence, Architecting for the cloud: AWS Best Practices Security Preparation Guided preparation can save you a lot of time and keep you focused: , Practice Test AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Part 1: AWS Certified Associate (SA,CD,SO) Guide & Questions

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There’s a lot of background and story in these first sections. If you’re a developer picking up Solidity and just skimming, you can get the most out of this article by scrolling down to the gotchas sections below. I found this while googling for “Solidity” and with usage rights. Cryptos and Ethereum are hot topics right now, and within tech circles, ethereum dapps (decentralized apps) development is just beginning to take off (in part due to the popularity/virality of CryptoKitties in December 2017). Resources to learn about developing on the Ethereum blockchain is still all over the place. There’s tons of one-off articles (like this one) everywhere, about certain specific topics, but very few articles about the very beginning steps of getting started. I started playing around with it a few weeks ago. My only regret is not writing down all of my learnings in real time as I go, because there has been so much to learn, and things that already seem like second nature to me now, were still extremely foreign to me a few weeks ago. I’m starting now, and will also try to go back as far back as I can remember, to make note of all the gotchas I’ve had along the way. Getting started Like many others, I started with the . It’s a Node.js framework for developing Ethereum dapps. The other popular framework is , which is in Python. I don’t know much about it, so I won’t talk about it here. Truffle Framework populus The first question that comes up is what role does a “framework” play in Eth dev? I thought Eth dapps are written in their own language called Solidity ( ), why is involved? docs here Javascript The first thing to understand then, is that Solidity code is compiled into binary code, in order to be executed on the Ethereum blockchain. The compiler is . Having the Truffle framework mainly helps with two things: 1) Compiling and eventually migrating (deploying) your compiled smart contracts onto live networks (mainnet or a testnet like Ropsten/Rinkeby), 2) Writing and executing both unit tests and integration tests (written in Javascript, calling into your smart contract functions via web3 just like real world apps would). solc The first tutorial Truffle comes with which are sets of templates you can start new dapps off from. Truffle Boxes I chose to start with the , which also comes with a . I must stress that this tutorial is . If you have absolutely no idea where to start — don’t go and read all the other articles others have written, like how to code your own CryptoKitties and so on. Read and follow this Pet Shop tutorial. (If you need help getting started with Node.js at all because you haven’t worked with it, I recommend my .) Pet Shop full tutorial article *excellent* getting started with Node.js tutorial The nice thing about this tutorial is it assumes almost no knowledge. It doesn’t assume knowledge of React. Only jQuery, which pretty much everyone knows at this point. And some minimal knowledge of Node.js. Consider the rest of this article a “follow-up” to end of that tutorial — an attempt to rescue you when you feel lost after finishing that tutorial! Life after the Pet Shop tutorial You will have a few things under your belt by this time. You have Ganache installed and running, which allows you to do local testing, both units/integration tests as well as end-to-end tests from the browser to the smart contract. You have your browser with MetaMask plugin for testing this on live networks (mainnet or testnet). You have your code editor (VS Code for myself), and terminal running truffle commands. All seems good. Now you start exploring and making your first changes to the smart contract solidity code, and see how it all works out. You may immediately realize that even though the syntax of Solidity looks simple and looks like Javascript, it’s actually incredibly restrictive, because of memory and resources concerns. Your experience might soon turn out to be the . Like the author of that article, I learn best by doing, instead of reading documentation. Also like the author, I ran into most of the same things mentioned on that article, and some more. Pet Shop of Horror Gotcha #1: Sending in ETH to the contract as a user: Solidity side code One of the first things I tried to do was trying to make my dapp take payment (in ETH, of course). After all, the purpose of most dapps is to involve an ETH payment somewhere in the functionality, right? (at least if you’re trying to make any revenue doing one.) I was not able to find a single article or documentation page anywhere explaining how exactly you write your smart contract code AND Javascript code in order to take a payment from the user. (The Pet Shop tutorial doesn’t include it, neither does the Solidity documentation linked above At the end, I only figured this out because I looked the source of another smart contract, that is simple enough (and has nearly no other functionality other than sending in ETH payments) to read and understand. Below is an example Solidity smart contract that takes in payment: pragma solidity ^0.4.19; contract MySmartContract {// If this smart contract's purpose were to keep track of how// much ETH a user (an address) has sent inmapping(address => uint) public balances; function MySmartContract() public payable {// constructor needs `payable` keyword.} function() public payable {// fallback `payable` function is needed for a contract to// accept ETH payments.} function sendEth(bytes32 message) payable public returns (bool) {// Here, the ETH value being sent is available as `msg.value`.balances[msg.sender] = balances[msg.sender] + msg.value;// This function also takes in a message that is 32 chars max.// Also returns a bool as an example.return true;}} This is somewhat of a minimal working smart contract in Solidity that can take in an ETH payment (and do nothing to it other than keeping the money itself!). There are already several sub-gotchas just from this code: Taking in payment is a special “metadata” type of thing in Solidity. It doesn’t come in as a parameter of a function call. When searching or looking in documentation, you may quickly find the call. Trying to call will run into errors because what it does is send ETH money of yourself (the contract) to others. transfer transfer out What should happen is that you need to make your function (and contract) , then on the Javascript side we will look at how to trigger the call that has a ETH payment attached to it. payable On the Solidity side, the amount that the user is sending, comes in as the variable. (the variable contains the public address of the user.) msg.value msg.sender The smart contract itself has a public address on the ETH network and has a wallet just like any user, and can own ETH. When you send ETH into the smart contract, the contract now owns that money. This is another subtlety you may not realize when you first start. If your assumption is that the smart contract is a computer program, and your users are users, you may not realize that the smart contract is also like a user on the Ethereum network, in that it can own an ETH balance (store money). When a user sends an ETH value into your smart contract function, your smart contract now owns that ETH. If you want that ETH to eventually go into your wallet, you will need to expose a function, callable by only a certain person/address (yourself), which transfers everything the contract owns, onto yourself. Contract variables are automatically “ “ type, and are permanent data stores. storage You may have learned that there are variables and variables. Variables initialized at the contract level are automatically type. (Variables initialized at the function level are type by default, but can be defined as a type explicitly if needed.) storage memory storage memory storage If you’re learning by examples, this has another implication, and you probably guessed it by now: This is how you store data on a smart contract. Yes, there’s no fancy magic behind it. No database calls. If you develop a decentralized app, and you need to store some data on the blockchain, throw it onto a variable on the contract level. The data types that will probably be most handy are s and s of s and s and es. array mapping uint bytes32 address Mappings are hash maps. If you’re from the Javascript world, and you’re used to using literal objects as hash maps — the equivalent data type in Solidity is s. mapping Similar to languages like C++ and Java where you have generics, you have to define the data types for both keys and values of your mappings. By far the most common data types you’ll use are (for storing ETH values or any numeric values), for storing characters/strings, and for storing user addresses (think of them like user IDs). There is also an actual data type, which is really a dynamic array of , which has limitations you’ll find out soon. uint bytes32 address string bytes Gotcha #2: Sending in ETH to the contract as a user: Javascript side code Now that you have the Solidity side of the code, let’s look at how you would make calls to it properly from the Javascript side, from your UI. var message = 'Hello World!';var amountInWei = 1000000000000000000; // This is 1 ETH mySmartContractInstance.sendEth(web3.fromAscii(message), {from: account, value: amountInWei, gas: 3000000}); For now, we assume the code before this is all set up with a instance, and it’s hooked up with your deployed contract’s ABI file (a json file generated at the time of compiling/migrating to the live network). I’ll cover more details on that in a section. web3.js future Let’s look at the sub-gotchas just from this piece of Javascript code. The Javascript function call takes in your Solidity function’s parameters, plus a metadata object as the last parameter. This is something I wish there was an article telling me about; and I only figured it out after looking at an existing simple open source project. The Javascript interface of the function always takes in the same parameters as you declared on Solidity side, but with an additional metadata object at the end which contains the “from” address (can’t be faked as far as I can tell), and the ETH value you’re sending in along with the call. Armed with this, you can programmatically derive the value from whatever your app’s business logic is, and pass it into this call; and the user’s MetaMask instance will prompt them if they approve sending in that amount of ETH. You have to specify a gas amount, for a function call that modifies data or take in payment. This won’t always be the gas amount the user actually has to spend. Most likely it’ll be little, if your smart contract doesn’t do a lot of looping and things that are costly in cpu resources. But you still have to specify a gas amount here nonetheless, or else it wouldn’t work. The user has the option to adjust it on their MetaMask prompt. ETH amount is in wei. You may know by now that ETH has a word/term for different denominations of its currency. The smallest denomination is called a wei. You can find the full list . The commonly used denominations seem to be wei (default for all code interactions), Ether, and Finney (0.001 Ether, or a milli-ether). I am guessing the idea is that when Ether is worth $1000 USD, a Finney is about $1 USD. here A string has to go through the fromAscii function to be converted to valid bytes32 data. Strings are just not easy with Solidity. Strings themselves being dynamically-sized arrays make it not easy to pass back and forth between JS and Solidity, and between Solidity contracts themselves. When possible, using is more reliable as it works across everything. But it does mean you have to use a converter function to convert a regular string into the right format, and back when you retrieve it from Solidity. bytes32 Enough lessons for this article As you can tell so far already, even with just a smart contract as small as simply taking in an ETH payment and doing nothing with it, there’s already lots of gotchas if you’re coming from other languages, and don’t have good official sources of documentations/tutorials/examples to learn the conventions of doing these simple things. I had to learn pretty much all of above through trial and error. I’m hoping this article can help others on the same path along the way, when they get to these parts. There is certainly a lot more gotchas on the path of setting up a simple end-to-end working Ethereum dapp. In the next article I’ll write about the set up / structure code with your client JS, and more interaction intricacies between Javascript and your Solidity code. web3.js

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The Gotchas on the Path of Learning Ethereum Smart Contracts and Solidity

Let’s get into the topic fast. I know, you don’t have time. You have to learn other topics too. Okay! I hear you :) CONTINUOUS VARIABLE A continuous variable can take any values. Think of it like this: If that number in the variable can keep counting, then its a continuous variable. Ex: Weight of a person: 152.232 Kg, you’re probably thinking, “where am I counting?”. Yes, you are! The weight of the person is actually 152.232211223342211223332112244778899399947777889999888888377747666678788992336677……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Kg Obviously, those dots aren’t ending anytime soon. Matter of fact, they’re not ending! Now you see how specifically that variable can “keep counting”? When I say “counting”, I’m referring to those counts after the decimal. That is an example for continuous variable. Can you think of another example? Did you say Age? “You’re awesome!”. That’s correct! because age keeps counting. Don’t believe me? Install . this and see for yourself Okay, other examples are time to train a deep neural network, income, cost of electricity, processing power of your brain (what!!??), your energy during night in J, just a quick remainder : J is the S.I unit of Energy. I mean you know other examples now. ML context : Continuous Variables are used for Regression. https://www.slideshare.net/cdhnmj/introduction-to-biostasstics DISCRETE/CATEGORIZED VARIABLE A Discrete variable can take only a specific value amongst the set of all possible values or in other words, if you don’t keep counting that value, then it is a discrete variable aka categorized variable. Example: Number of students in a university. Think about Number of students in a university. Say a university has 75,123 students enrolled. Is that variable continuous? You might say “yes” because, you’re intelligent. You’d suggest 75,123 is 75,123.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000………………………………………………………………………………right? Man! I too had the same thought, but let me tell you this: 75,123.00….=75,123, because, 0 after a decimal point doesn’t come into consideration at all. Haha. Statisticians are very intelligent! :) The point is, if the number is an integer (and obviously an integer doesn’t have decimals) then it is discrete. Other examples: The number of deep learning libraries in the market. The number of GPU’s your regular computer has. How good is your ML model: Say it only had 2 options {good, bad}. Then it’s a discrete variable. Level of Agreement {Full, Partial, Not at all} ML context : Discrete Variables are used for Classification. To end this article let me ask you a question: If a variable A can take only values {22.3,225.69,122.23}, what kind of variable is it? why? Continuous or Discrete? Don’t tell me “both”! If you liked this article, then clap it up! :) Maybe a follow? My social plug: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rakshith-vasudev/ _Rakshith Vasudev. Learn Artificial Intelligence with me as we progress to make this world a better place. Tensorflow…_www.facebook.com Rakshith Vasudev _Read writing from Rakshith Vasudev on Medium. Software Engineering student catching up with Data Science…_medium.com Rakshith Vasudev - Medium _Getting started with Datascience, best programming practices. Topics include Machine Learning and others._www.youtube.com Rakshith Vasudev

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Lollipops, ice creams and marshmallows! We are not talking about desserts and sweets here, but rather the newest version of Android. Yes, that’s right. The next version of Android, is tentatively called Android P or Android 9.0 because the real name is not yet disclosed. But considering , we can expect a ‘sweet’ name. The rumors are that the name could be Android Pie, Android Pecan Pie, Android Pumpkin Pie, or even Android Pineapple and Android Pistachio Ice Cream, but it is something yet to be seen. the other versions of Android Here are the main features that you will find in the Android P operating system. 3X the Privacy With the new operating system, the security of the phone will be stepped up at least 3 times. The biggest problem users now face is that the app searches for information from the sensors, cameras and microphones even when it is idle. With the new OS, these apps will not be able to extract anything when it is in the idle mode. This is because the systems will not be reporting to the app when it is idle, which is a good thing. After all, why should the apps be requesting information from your systems when it is idle? Image Credit: Android Developers And there is more good news, the apps themselves will have better fingerprint system access in the new operating system. There are other features like encryption for backups with per-network randomization of MAC addresses, but we will be aware of them only during the Android P review later. Multi-Camera Support How about the cameras on your user’s phone working simultaneously? Phones with dual cameras at the back, and trio cameras with two at the back and one in the front are entering the market. The new OS allows for all the cameras to work at the same time. And in addition to this, Google allows for image stabilization at the developer level, complete with in-display flash feature. Examples are the latest Vivo and Oppo phones. Improved Notifications Now developers can move their conversations from their favorite messenger into notifications. Image Credit: Android Developers Now the dreaded “the person has sent an attachment” message can be replaced with image attachments and stickers. At-a-glance messaging service can be greatly improved with this, but the hitch is that it could take up physical space in your notification dropdown. Image Credit: Android Developers The improved notification feature would also give developers the option to add quick replies, which is almost like Google Allo and Google’s Reply app. The extent of control is not yet revealed, so that is something we’ll have to wait and see. A Fresh Look The text is sharper, and the menu has a lovely color, with livelier and smoother animations and seamless transition. Some of the elements in the interface have been moved about, but on the whole, the software build looks enticing and fresh. Image Credit: The Verge For example, the time display is now on the top left corner rather than on the top right corner of the screen. And the pixel launcher has a rounded off screen and it matches the notification window. Also, the battery percentage is at the screen’s bottom all the time so you don’t have to wake your phone to see whether you need to charge it. Your users would love this. You can Create a User-Customizable Channel With Android O, you introduced notification channels to your users. This was helping you to create a user-customizable channel for each of the notifications. You can simplify the notification channel settings, by doing the following: A) Your users can block entire channel groups for a particular app. isBlocked() method is used when a group is blocked, and the user will not be able to send notifications for channels in that particular group B) NotificationManager.Policy has two new policy constants: PRIORITY_CATEGORY_ALARMS (alarms are prioritized) and PRIORITY_CATEGORY_MEDIA_SYSTEM_OTHER (media, system, and game sounds are prioritized). Trying Out Different Notch Styles Shrunken bezels and front facing sensors could leave a notch on the display. With Android P, you can have APIs that would help around that notch. So, with full-screen apps having buttons on the sides, you can easily avoid those notches, a great thing for developers. create user interfaces Image Credit: Android Developers If you are developer starting out on your job, you can try out the different notch styles that the operating system comes with. So, you can test these things on the Android phone simulator, without trying it out on a real phone. Support for Wi-Fi Direct Printing, better integration for Android Things, Bluetooth Hearing Aids are all other attractions for Android 9. Conclusion The news is that Android 9.0 will be released in August 2018. Some rumors say that the OS will be coming out sometime in mid-May 2018. And new phones will be arriving with Android P at the September IFA 2018 show. If you haunt the Twitter page of Google Developers, you can see them dropping little hints on what’s in store for the next version. Phones with vanilla interfaces will have the Android P updates on their 2017 phones, and Nokia is one of the first companies to roll it out, followed by Sony, LG, HTC and Samsung. So, that’s something to look out for! Interested to know more about ? We’ll be happy to assist you… Android app development Contact Us Today

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Photo by on rawpixel.com Unsplash Real-time data is data that is presented as it is acquired. It is often used in tracking or monitoring systems like traffic GPS system, auction/bidding applications and stock trading applications. Charts help with a graphical representation of this data and help the viewer make a decision easily. In this post, I’ll show you how to make real-time chart in JavaScript. We’ll be building a basic voting web application with a page for voting, and another page with a real-time chart showing the voting result as it happens. Here’s a peek at what we’ll be building I’ll be using and to build it. Chart.js is a simple JavaScript charting library. Hamoni Sync is a real-time state synchronisation service which enables you to synchronise your application state in real-time. The vote result is the state we want show users in real-time. Hamoni Sync makes this easier by allowing you to define state for your application, while you avoid designing complex state logic around publish/subscribe systems. Chart.js Hamoni Sync Setup the code We will be using a project template which already has the HTML pages and node app to serve the static files. Follow the instruction below to set it up Clone the repo from GitHub by running in the command line. If you’re not using git, you can download it . git clone https://github.com/pmbanugo/realtime-chartjs-hamoni-starter.git here Switch to the project directory cd realtime-chartjs-hamoni-starter Install the dependencies by running . This will install and Hamoni Sync node modules. # Backend npm install express The file contains code to server HTML pages in the folder. Lines 9–14 defines a default state for the voting application. It contains 4 candidates with their vote count as 0. server.js public let voteData = [      { candidate: "Peter Mbanugo", vote: 0 },      { candidate: "Angela Daniels", vote: 0 },      { candidate: "Rose Philly", vote: 0 },      { candidate: "James Crump", vote: 0 }    ]; It also defines a REST endpoint for voting defined from lines 18 to 30. When a vote comes in, we may want to save that data to a database and then update the chart with an up-to-date result of the vote. The chart state will be communicated in real-time using Hamoni Sync. On line 40 I have declared a statement to initialise Hamoni but we need an account ID and app ID. Create Hamoni Account and App Login to the Hamoni (or Signup if you don’t already have an account). When logged in you can click the button to see your account ID. We need a Hamoni App ID, hence we need to create an app from the dashboard. An app is a container that can hold application state. You’d typically want to have a separate Hamoni app for each of your application. dashboard Show Account ID Under the “Create Application” header, enter an application name and click the create button. Within a few seconds, you should see it created and displayed in the application list section. Copy the app and account ID and replace them with the string value on line 40 in server.js Create application state in Hamoni Now we need to create state in Hamoni Sync. To do that we need to use a sync primitive. Sync primitives are what you use to define and manipulate state. They’re basically a way to categorise or differentiate kinds of data to be stored. There are 3 sync primitives: This kind of state holds simple information represented with datatypes like string, boolean or numbers. It is best suited for cases such as unread message count, toggles, etc. Value Primitive: Object state represents states that can be modelled as a JavaScript object. An example usage could be storing the score of a game. Object Primitive: This holds a list of state objects. A state object is a JavaScript object. You can update an item based on its index in the list. List Primitive: I’ll be using an object primitive for this post. Add the following function in server.js function createState() {      hamoni        .createObject("election", voteData)        .then(statePrimitive => {          console.log("election state created");          state = statePrimitive;        })        .catch(console.log);    } This creates a state with the name of * hamoni.connect() createState()` *election* and state value using the variable `*voteData *.* Then we need to connect to the Hamoni Sync server. We do this by calling . Add the following code below the function hamoni.connect().then(() => createState()).catch(console.log); If it connects successfully to the server, we call the function to create the state for our chart. createState() Update application state We want to update the state when a new vote comes in. The object primitive which holds our state has an method which can be used to update the state. We will update the state when the user calls endpoint of our API. Below lines 27, add the following code to update the state update() election /vote app.post("/vote", function(req, res) {      ....      state.update(voteData);      ....    }); This will update the state and broadcast the update to connected clients. Frontend Our backend is ready to accept votes and update the state. Now we need to build the frontend to send in votes and display realtime chart. The starter template we cloned at the beginning has the files and These files already contain code to display a form in the web page and javascript to post to the server. I skipped writing that code here because it’s a basic HTML form and JavaScript to send form data to the server. Do leave a comment if anything there is confusing. public/vote.html public/js/vote.js. The chart will be displayed in inside the public folder. already contains script tags for Chart.js and Hamoni Sync (see lines 17 and 18) index.html index.html <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/Chart.js/2.7.2/Chart.min.js"></script>    <script src="https://unpkg.com/hamoni-sync@0.2.0/hamoni.dev.js"></script> Render the chart Open the file Add the function below to render a chart in the web page. public/index.js. function renderChart(state) {      var ctx = document.getElementById("myChart").getContext("2d");      var chart = new Chart(ctx, {        // The type of chart we want to create        type: "bar",        // The data for our dataset        data: {          labels: state.map(s => s.candidate),          datasets: [            {              label: "Elections 2018",              backgroundColor: "rgb(255, 99, 132)",              borderColor: "rgb(255, 99, 132)",              data: state.map(s => s.vote)            }          ]        },        // Configuration options go here        options: {          scales: {            xAxes: [              {                time: {                  unit: "Vote"                },                gridLines: {                  display: false                },                ticks: {                  maxTicksLimit: 6                }              }            ],            yAxes: [              {                ticks: {                  min: 0,                  max: 30,                  maxTicksLimit: 10                },                gridLines: {                  display: true                }              }            ]          },          legend: {            display: true          }        }      });    } This function takes a parameter that represents our chart state. The type options specify the type of chart we want to render, in this case, a bar chart. The data option defines properties used to display data for the chart. There are two important properties that I want to bring to your attention. First is the label property on line 8, labels: state.map(*s* *=>*` `s.candidate)`   It gets its value from the state. The chart state is an array of each electoral candidate and their vote. With that code, we’re setting the candidate’s name as labels for the chart. The second is `data: state.map(``*s*` _=>_s.vote)` on line 14. It sets the data for the chart. Now we need to retrieve chart state and render the chart. Get state and state updates To retrieve the chart state, we need to connect to Hamoni Sync. Add the following code to get state and state updates, then render the chart based on that: let hamoni = new Hamoni("Account_ID", "APP_ID");hamoni  .connect()  .then(response => {    hamoni      .get("election")      .then(statePrimitive => {        renderChart(statePrimitive.get());

        statePrimitive.onUpdated(state => renderChart(state));      })      .catch(console.log);  })  .catch(error => console.log(error)); If the client successfully connects to Hamoni Sync, we call to get our election state. If it succeeds, we call with the value for the state. hamoni.get("election") renderCharts() To be notified of state updates, we call on the state primitive with a callback that should be executed each time there’s an update. onUpdated() Now we can test our code to see it working. Open the command line and run , then open your browser and navigate to . npm start localhost:5000 Voila!! 🚀 Real-time chart state made with less hassle. Chart.js is easy to use. Hamoni Sync reduces the development time and effort in designing complex state logic around publish/subscribe systems because it embraces the concept of state. You can get the finished source code on . GitHub Links Hamoni Sync Chart.js Express Also shared on Dev.to

Real-time Chart in JavaScript with ChartJS and Hamoni Sync

‘The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.’ — Charles Baudelaire Electronic dance music has always been a playground for old patterns in new guises: repetitive rhythms with various shifting musical layers. Yet, the various expressions of repetitive rhythmic patterning are not new developments confined to music technology. African tribal music, South American shamanic music, loop-based analogue tech music all share the same etiology: familiar rhythmic geometry, layered with intoxicating sonic expressions. And blending these patterns with cutting edge music technology is the paradigm that keeps genres like techno at the forefront of electronic music culture. But what is it about the human condition that gives this simple combination its hedonistic appeal? “As the old causality dilemma asks: Which came first, the music or the drugs?” The obvious answer — and the first fallacy — is drugs. As the old causality dilemma asks: Which came first, the music or the drugs? Or was it about poultry? Either way, experiments with intoxicants in the rave scene (and any music scene for that matter) have been known for a long time, from psy-trance and acid-jazz, to breaks and drum and bass — all host to a plethora of aptly named artists like Infected Mushroom, M.A.N.D.Y, Cut Chemist and Chemical Brothers to name a few. Is there an eponymous theme going on here? Undoubtedly… but academics are now discovering that our enjoyment of repetitive music is a lot more than merely chemical-induced shenanigans. ‘Undoubtedly, the most primitive musical percept is that of pulse, recognized perhaps first in our own rhythmic pulse, heart beat” Scholarly research linking sound design with emotional appeal is still nascent and answers are not immediately forthcoming. However, a few researchers have started to tie together some interesting links between evolution and repetitive sound patterning. As Philip Ball states in his book , ‘we know of societies without writing, and even without visual art — but none, it seems, lack some form of music’. And the most ubiquitous form of music? The kind driven by a consistent, steady pulse, a.k.a the 4x4 beat known to many cultures all over the world. From the clubs of Berlin to Bwiti music in West Africa, whether layered with polyrhythms or synthesized melody, the fundamental features remain the same. In his essay , Bill Hammel expands on the links between steady rhythm and biology: ‘Undoubtedly, the most primitive musical percept is that of pulse, recognized perhaps first in our own rhythmic pulse, heart beat. Imagine an Australopithicus, on his day off, picking some object up and banging it against another; the satisfaction obtained by simply ‘beating out time’, in a steady repeating unit of time.’ The Music Instinct [i] Patterns in Musical Composition, Transformation, Mathematical Groups and the Nature of Mathematical Substance [ii] Whether it’s ‘beating out time’, or something more abstract like learning new words or recognizing a loved one’s face in the clouds, we are all hardwired to see organization within seemingly random situations. And it’s this ability to see and impose patterns within the natural world that is possibly one of the great fundamentals of human musical empowerment. Mathematics is primarily concerned with quantity, and therefore all the parameters of mathematics are readily quantifiable — the same is true of music. Even though we may not understand the theoretical aspects of what we listen to, our brain is organizing the sounds into a pleasing structure. So when we nod our head in rhythm to Justin Beiber’s odious bile, we are using very similar mental processes to spotting someone we recognize in a crowd. Unfortunately, herein lies another caveat. We may have figured out why we understand and recognize music, but the manipulative power of music over our emotions is left unchecked. As the great 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, ‘Without music, life would be a mistake’. No matter where you are or your cultural background, music will always hold a transcendent emotional power regardless of prior intellectual training or knowledge. Considering only 4% of the population has amusia — otherwise known as tone deafness — 96% subconsciously ‘make sense’ of music. Though still to this day, attempts to understand why a simple line of melody can augment or depress one’s mood haven’t been particularly fruitful. [iii] “When music is designed for immediate effect (dancing) ‘more primal and automatic neural processes take over, […] bypassing the intellect to create a pure and optimal experience’” Dr. Stefan M. Oertl has been researching the emotional fluctuations that occur when listening to steady kick drums and simple bass loops. The repetition of these simple patterns creates what Oertl dubs a ‘functional trance state’ (not in reference to the music genre). He states ‘this type of trance, directly induced and disrupted by compositional structure and sonic design [is] a “functional trance” because music serves as a rather precise control element for the quality of such an induced altered state.’ The simplicity of the pattern allows the listener to respond in a ‘neurally (“hardwired”) subconscious way’ instead of using more analytical thought processes. When music is designed for immediate effect (dancing) ‘more primal and automatic neural processes take over, […] bypassing the intellect to create a pure and optimal experience’. This isn’t to denigrate electronic music as simple and animalistic, it is to highlight that the mind and body process the sound differently. It also illustrates why the slight changes have the biggest impact in dance music; it brings us out of the ‘functional trance’ briefly allowing analytical appreciation, before quickly putting us straight back into the trance. So when, as is common in genres like progressive techno, one hears polyrhythms churning and disrupting a straight four beat, the listener is dealing with a blend of trance-inducing elements as well as some analytical processing — the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mind and the body, flow and disruption. We enjoy successfully predicting the next four bars of a song, but we also occasionally enjoy when those predictions are wrong and the music catches us off-guard. [iv] Hidden amongst these hypotheses is a strong argument as to why the marriage between substances and music has existed for so long. Psychotropic drugs work on a similar level; they tend to make the ordinary extraordinary. We use them to add a new layer to what is already familiar; we trick our sensory perception; we warp our surroundings; we heighten what would otherwise be ‘normality’. Scholarly research is proving that music is a drug like any other, stimulating our reward-response mechanisms, altering our chemical balances, playing with our perception of the present. There are no easy scientific answers to explaining the beauty of music, but there are ways we can appreciate it more fully.

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Why We Love Repetitive Electronic Music

Having a job where it is possible to work occasionally from a remote location is an amazing privilege. Call it ‘remote work’ or ‘workation/workcation’, it is a great way to get away from daily chores, break routines, get inspired and an opportunity to focus. But it demands a lot from you — working remotely only work if you do. Here are a few recommendations, based on experience from working remotely at — a marketing tech company based in Stockholm, Los Angeles, New York and London (oh, ). Relatable we’re hiring! Is it a good idea? Before everything else, set yourself up for success. Have the right mindset. The trip should be about you doing the work you usually do but at a new place. With an attitude of “a little vacation and a little work” you are better off putting in those hours at the office, and then take days off to actually do a proper vacation. Working remotely is about putting in solid, productive hours in an environment that requires you to be more disciplined than ever. It is not a substitute for a vacation, or even worse, a family trip. Bringing work along on a planned vacation is a sure way to get stressed out. You will be stressed about not spending time with your family and at the same time being stressed about not able to focus on work. Going with friends who want you to join them on late party nights is another recipe for disaster. Doing a successful workation requires discipline, being responsible and professional to a much greater extent than working in the office. First, prepare to succeed. Prepare your workation Plan what to do, prepare and set goals Consider which type of tasks where you are most effective in the environment of your workation. Typically it’s not tasks requiring a lot of collaboration, or dependencies on others. Start by identifying the goals to accomplish during the workation, and then ask yourself how you can prepare for them. Don’t underestimate all the practicalities that will require your attention when being remote that you may not consider at home. Getting food, access to power and wifi, not to mention taking in a potentially different culture — all that will demand your attention. The better prepared, well researched and the more clear and concise the task is the easier it will be to get started and find a productive flow, instead of being distracted. Set the expectations Make sure to talk to your team and those who you interact with about your plans. You will avoid frustration by clearly setting the expectations of when you will be available, how you can be reached, what you will work on and what they can expect from you during your workation. For example, due to time zones you may not have the same overlapping office hours, or you choose to structure your day to do an afternoon excursion and then continue to work later. Being clear about this to your colleagues is critical. Talk to your manager Make sure your manager (and other stakeholders, internal or customers, where it makes sense) are fully aware of your plans, and that they approve based on their perspective as a leader (who also must consider the , team collaboration needs, and many other things). team dynamic Communicate your goals and how you plan to work — removing any uncertainties and ensuring you understand the manager’s expectations and vice versa. You don’t want to be away and at the same time have a nagging feeling that your manager doubts that you will pull it off. Research the location Once at your destination you want to get started as soon as possible instead of spending all your time on finding a place where to work. Consider what you need — power and wifi are a given. Do you expect to take phone calls? Then a co-location space may be better than a public café. Research as much as possible ahead of time, so you’ve got a plan and a backup plan. A café that once was there might be gone, that great wifi-spot you got told about may have a port blocked that you need to use a particular , and so on. tool Make sure that you can work from where you live — it is great to have a home-base to start from, especially if all else fail. Get your kit in order What happens if your laptop or phone get stolen? Take precautionary actions to reduce the damage done and make it easier to recover. Verify hard disk encryption is on ( on macOS). FileVault Have two-factor authentication enabled where available (e.g., your or ). Google account Apple ID Have any passwords securely stored in a password manager and know how to recover them (e.g., ). 1Password Enable to be able to remotely locate, lock and/or erase your laptop and phone. Find My Mac Always have a minimum of two credit cards and never keep them in the same place. During Your Workation Time management Be disciplined about your times and establish your routine. Don’t sleep in, get up at the same, work first, structure your day. Sure, this is an opportunity to be more flexible and split up your day in both work and recreational segments, but be true to yourself and make it easy to pull off. Don’t plan to work in the evening if you know that dinner usually drags out and may involve a beer or two. Plan tasks where you are the most effective. Are you most focused in the morning? Then do programming, writing, or what other focus-demanding work you have at that point, to get into the flow. Do you have routine chores that needs to be checked off? Pick a time for them when you know it is harder to focus. Don’t forget; it is about balance —make sure you also plan time off work. Have fun, plan small excursions, get inspired! Communication Communication while being remote is critical, especially when coming from an environment where you usually are physically at the same office as your colleagues. If your usual day-to-day communication relies on informal talks in the office and impromptu meetings, the requirement on your communication while remote is even greater. Do daily check-ins on Slack, outlining how you structure your day, when you will be available and address any other dependencies colleagues may have on you. If you know someone relies on you, let the team know that you will be away for a few hours. Rather over-compensate than doing too little communication. Share your progress. Be your best Being away remote is invigorating, but without the comfort of your regular life at home, it does demand more of you. Make sure you get the sleep you need and don’t skip any meals. Take a walk, or even go jogging if that’s what you usually do. Make your health a priority. Stay professional. Be a grown-up; this is not the time to party. Make sure to be your best at all times. Network It would be a missed opportunity to not tap into the local entrepreneurial spirit of your location. Attend local , business hubs, co-location spaces and reach out to companies and people. Most are happy to invite you to an after work or meet you up for a coffee to tap into your knowledge and experiences. Extend your and get inspired. meetups network Are there any clients nearby, or even potential clients? Make sure to pay them attention — even if you’re not in sales, buying a coffee is appreciated and an easy way to become top of mind. Back home When back, talk to your team and colleagues about your workation. It is an excellent way for you to share your remote working learnings and experiences, as well as getting feedback about what worked and what could be improved. Also, it builds confidence in the team by opening up to address any questions that may have occurred. Do follow up and talk to your manager and revisit the goals shared before the workation and how everything worked out. How was the experience, what worked and what didn’t — not only does this build confidence, it is also learnings that may be shared to help others to work remotely as successful as you. Relatable is a marketing technology agency specialized in creating large scale word of mouth marketing with the most creative and influential people around the world. Check out our current job openings to join us on this journey.

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How to successfully work remotely

If it’s for business, the short answer would be an absolute yes! If you are doing so for the promotion of a product, or of your skills, it is absolutely great if you spare some money to buy followers. As we humans are highly biased when it comes to popularity, buying a threshold number of followers would result in a lesser effort on marketing than starting from the absolute bottom. But, if you want to buy them to boost your , then it would create a effect ruining your life with rest of it being accompanied by and . ego domino anxiety depression 100 thousand followers could set a notion in the mind of a visitor of you being a celebrity (maybe that’s an exaggeration) or an important person. The truth is that everyone loves big numbers and the probability of a person opening your profile to see posts increases by 500% if you have anywhere over a 200 thousand follower count. The increase in organic follower’s conversion, however, isn’t much affected by buying fake followers, you have to maintain composure in your posts to get another 100k after buying the first 100k’s. The probability of a person following you upon seeing a 100k likes merely increases by a 50% if you got ‘bad’ recent posts, but you can skyrocket those numbers to an 800% increase if you work upon posts displayed on the top of your page. The science behind the need to buy followers comes from a simple interpretation of how populated the scene of social media actually is. It’s absolutely worth if you can skip 95% of your competition by buying 100k followers for 400–500$. Before buying followers you must realize a few things: 1. It’s a investment.The number of followers you buy will decrease over-time, apart from that, fake followers wouldn’t actually engage with your posts, so you need elaborate new followers and can’t overly depend on your fake numbers. As discussed before you would need actually great posts to create a true fan following. debt 2. If you aren’t good at it, nothing can truly help you before you work on Buying followers is great for someone who knows what they are doing and can manage posts accordingly. If someone who has no idea how to do these things and buys a million followers it will eventually end up leading to an of both and . self-improvement. absolute waste time money 3. There are loads of selling fake followers.There are a lot of people promising of millions of fake followers in a day’s time, think and you can easily spot the fake ones. When dealing in bigger numbers the advance and after delivery payments with installments resonating with the number of followers rose. frauds split 4. There are types of fake followers offered.You must complete your research before heading into buying fake followers, it is almost certain that a number of fake followers are going to unfollow/unlike your page. Now, most websites offer two types of packages, one with 10–30days follower refill guarantee, second with a lifetime refill guarantee. Both packages differ a lot in , choose wisely. two prices 5. The fake followers market is .It’s only about time that social media websites put up new algorithms for defense against fake followers, don’t bet too big to handle in these types of schemes as it always involves a lot of unknown risks. Also, most companies offering fake followers after a short span of time, give this a thought while buying packages offering a lifetime refill guarantee. uncertain shuts down

Is it really worth ‘buying’ followers?

TL; DR. This post will get you started with the Keras deep learning framework without installation hassles. I will show you how easy it is to run your code on the cloud for free. I know there are lots of tutorials out there to get you up and running with deep learning in Keras. They normally go with an image classifier for the MNIST handwritten digits or cat/dog classification. Here I wanted to take a different but maybe a more interesting approach by showing you how to build a model that can recommend a place you might be interested in given a source image you like. Let’s get started! Run on the cloud, no installation needed If you come from a background of programming in general, you might have once be suffered from the pain when you were first starting something new. Installing an IDE, library dependencies, hardware driver support… And they might have cost you a lot of time before the first successful run of “Hello World!”. Deep learning is the same, it depends on lots of things to make the model working. For example, in order to have a deep learning model to train and run faster, you need a graphics card. Which could easily take several hours for beginners to setup, let alone that you would have to choose and purchase the graphics card itself which can be quite costly. Today you can eliminate the initial learning curve of deep learning. It is now possible to run your code entirely in the cloud with all necessary dependencies pre-installed for you. More importantly, you can run your model faster on a graphics card for free. At this point, I’d like to introduce since I found it very useful to share my deep learning code with others where they can reproduce the result in a matter of seconds. Google Colab All you need is a Gmail account and an internet connection. The heavy lifting computation will be handled by Google Colab servers. You will need to get comfortable with Jupyter notebook environment on Colab. Which is quite easy, you tap the play button at the left side of a cell to run the code inside. You can run a cell multiple times if you want. Let’s supercharge the running speed of a deep learning model by activating the GPU on colab. Click on the “ ” menu button, then “ ”, choose GPU in the “ ” dropdown list. Runtime Change runtime type Hardware accelerator We are ready for the journey! Now buckle up since we are going to enter the wild west of the deep learning world. A Deep learning model that classifies places The model we are introducing can tell which places an image contains. Or described more formally, the input of the model is the image data and the output will be a list of places with different probabilities. The higher the probability, the more likely the image contains the corresponding scene/place. The model can classify 365 different places, including coffee shop, museum, outdoor etc. Here is Colab notebook for this tutorial, you can experiment with it while reading this article. Keras_travel_place_recommendation-part1.ipynb The most important building block of our model is the which will play the role of extracting image features. From more general low-level features like edges/corners to more domain specific high-level features like patterns and parts. convolutional network The model will have several blocks of convolutional networks stacked one over another. The deeper the convolutional layer, the more abstract and higher level features it extracts. Here are an images showing the idea. Now enough with the intuition of convolutional network. Let’s get our hands dirty by building a model to make it happen. It is really easy to build a custom deep learning model with framework. Keras is designed for human beings, not machines. It is also an official high-level API for the most popular deep learning library — TensorFlow. If you just get started and look for a deep learning framework. Keras is the right choice. Keras Building the model Don’t panic if it is your first time seeing a Keras model code below. Actually, it is quite simple to understand. The model has several blocks of convolutional layers. Each block as we explained earlier extract different levels of image features. For example “Block 1” being at the input level, it extracts entry-level features like edges and corners. The deeper it goes, the more abstract features each block extracts. You also noticed the final classification block formed by two fully connected layers, they are responsible for making a final prediction. Dense Predicting labels for an image Let’s have the model predict labels for an image. The model expects a fixed shape of image input which is 244 x 244 pixels with three color channels(RGB). But what if we have another image with different resolution? Keras has some helper functions come in handy. The code below turns an image into the data array, followed by some data value normalization before feeding to the model. Then we feed the processed array of shape (3, 244, 244) to the model, the ‘ ’ variable is a list of 365 floating point numbers corresponding to 365 places/scenes. preds Take the top 5 predictions and map their indexes to the actual names of places/scenes. And here is the result. ['beach', 'lagoon', 'coast', 'ocean', 'islet'] Feel free to try with other images. Summary and further reading We have learned how easy it is to get a deep learning model that predicts places/scenes up and running quickly with Google Colab. Read of the tutorial, I am going to show you how to extract raw features from images and use that to build a travel recommendation engine. the second part At the meanwhile check out some resources that might be helpful. Keras documentation , especially the part. https://keras.io/ sequential model API If you want to upload your custom images to Colab, read the section “ ” in one of my previous posts. Predict with Custom Images Originally published at www.dlology.com .

Gentle guide to setup Keras deep learning framework and build a travel recommendation engine (Part…

Let’s continue our journey to build a travel recommendation engine. You can find the on my blog. After reading this post, you will know how to turn a model trained for classification into one that extracts image feature vectors. Then we’ll walk through how to compute the similarity between two images with their feature vectors. Finally, we will generate the travel recommendation with the most similar image. part 1 of the series For the best learning experience, I suggest opening the while reading this tutorial. Colab Notebook The engine we are going to build is a content-based recommendation engine. If a user likes a destination photo, then the system will show him/her a similar travel destination image. From classifier to feature extractor In our previous post, the model was built to classify an input image as one of the 365 place/scene names. We are going to remove the last 4 layers responsible for place logits generation and only keep the “feature extractor” part of the network. In Keras we can pop out the last 4 layers like this. The last line above saves the model weight to a file for later use. Next time we just need to define the model without the 4 classifier layers and initialize the network with the saved weights. If you run the again, you will notice that the output is no longer a vector of 365 floating point numbers. Instead, it is now a vector of 4096 floating point numbers. This is the feature vector, an abstract representation for the input image. mode.predict Recommend similar images Our recommending engine takes a query image liked by a user and recommends a similar place. The similarity between two images is computed by measuring the distance between the two feature vectors. You can imagine measuring the distance between two feature vectors in a 4096-dimensional space. The smaller the distance, the more similar two images to each other. Precompute image features We can compute all known images feature vectors at runtime and compare with the queried image’s feature vector. But this will be ineffective since we are basically computing those values again and again. An alternatively faster approach is to pre-compute those feature vectors and store them in memory. During the run-time, we only need to compute the query image’s feature vector if it has not been computed before, that saves a lot of time especially when you have lots of images to compare with. Here is the function to compute an image’s feature vector by calling the feature extractor model’s predict function. And we have another function to pre-compute all known images feature vectors and store them into the memory, this only needs to be done once. Get the most similar image Here is the function we execute during runtime to search and display the most similar image to a new query image. Let’s give it a try by running the following line. get_similar_photo("images/canyon2.jpg")[0].name And here is the result, our model recommends a similar photo to our queried image. Further improvements If you play with the recommending engine, you may notice it generates wrong recommendations once a while. There are two reasons, 1. The model was trained for classification and the image feature extractor part of the network was optimized for classifying images to 356 classes, not for distinguishing similar images. 2. The model was trained on image datasets distributed among 365 classes of places. The training set might not have enough images for a particular type of beaches or one place at different seasons. One solution to the first problem is to use a , which is popular in face verification task. The model will be trained to identify if two images are from the same place. You can check out the on Coursera about this concept, I find it very helpful. siamese network with triplet-loss video introduction The solution to the second problem is to apply to our model by “freezing” some earlier convolutional layers and train the rest of the model parameters with our custom image datasets. Transfer learning is a great way to leverage the general features learned from large image datasets when training a new image model. transfer learning Conclusion Now, you got a taste and likely impressed by the unlimited potential of deep learning as well as getting hands-on building and running a Keras model. The journey to master any technology is not easy, deep learning is no exception. And that is what initially motivates me to create this blog site by sharing and teaching what I have learned along the way to become better at applying deep learning to real-life problems. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me personally if you are looking for a solution or simply saying hello. , , , or . Find me on GitHub LinkedIn WeChat Twitter Facebook Originally published at www.dlology.com .

Behind every great website or application stands a great development team. Unfortunately, the laurels and applause are so often directed at just one-half of such teams — the developers behind the customer-facing front-end. But like a car without an engine or a painting without a canvas, a solution can’t be delivered to a client without everything being perfect on the interior. And on what some might see as the less glamorous ( ) side of the development equation sits the humble back-end developer. although traditionally better paid Back-end developer basics Back-end developers control the parts of a website that a normal user will never see. They look after the ‘server side’ of the equation, leaving the ‘client side’ — the bit that the user actually experiences — to the front-end developers. The key role of a back-end developer, as defined by , is ‘to ensure that the data or services requested by the front-end system or software are delivered through programmatic means.’ Techopedia To reach this goal a back-end developer must obviously demonstrate a high level of technical expertise, with proficiency in back-end programming languages and framework being non-negotiable. But the role is a far more dynamic and varied one than many might imagine, and the leading back-end professionals display a similarly dynamic and varied set of skills; skills which allow both they and their entire dev teams to work with incredible efficiency and effectiveness. So how does a back-end developer develop themselves? What skills should they learn if they hope to truly succeed in the role, and bring success to their team? To find out we spoke to , Technical Lead of Digital Platforms at , and , Head of Back-End Development at , to see how they keep at the very forefront of the back-end. Jowel Bondoc Kalido Adam Woods hipages The hard skills… 1. Front-end technologies While having a deep understanding of server-side programming languages (Ruby, SQL, etc.) is what defines back-end development, a great developer will display a knowledge base that is far broader. An understanding of front-end languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript will allow a back-end developer to easily communicate with their front-end counterparts, resulting in far more efficient and effective collaboration. 2. Data science A major part of Bondoc’s role at Kalido, behind building and maintaining back-end technologies, is to “develop and maintain scalable components for storing information in a server.” It’s a task that most back-end developers will face, which is why developing his knowledge of data science fundamentals has been incredibly helpful. Knowing how the experts use databases will allow you to develop and maintain the type of database that they’ll want to use. Woods of hipages confirms this — “In the next 12 months I’m going to need a deeper understanding of data science,” he admits. 3. Artificial intelligence Bondoc describes AI, and in particular Intelligent Automation, as “the next revolutionary wave that will be coming through back-end development.” Simply the combination of Artificial Intelligence and automation, back-end developers must begin to develop their skills in the area if they don’t want to be left behind. Building a website that can essentially think for itself and automate previously manual tasks will make for a totally new — but incredible — user experience. 4. AR/VR Augmented and virtual realities might already seem like they’re (how long ago did Pokémon Go come out?) but the reality is the potential of these technologies has barely been scratched. old hat “I believe the demand for [AR and VR] will increase in the next couple of years,” says Bondoc. He expects this trend to be particularly prevalent in the consumer market, as device manufacturers continue to up their AR and VR game. An understanding of this tech could prove to be crucial for back-end developers into the future. … and the soft skills 1. Communication Despite how popular culture might portray developers, those know that back-end development is an inherently collaborative task; one that can be made very difficult if there isn’t clear and concise communication within a dev team. Being a master communicator goes hand in hand with being a master developer. in the biz “A back-end developer can be considered as the interpreter between humans and machines,” says Bondoc. “They need to understand what a client requires, and be able to write codes so that a server will perform the required function.” 2. Curiosity “I believe a healthy amount of curiosity is important; the industry landscape is constantly changing so it’s vital that you keep learning and exploring,” Woods explains. “I am always looking for new ways to be a better architect and developer.” Can you learn to be curious? Perhaps not. But can you put an effort into learning and exploring the world of back-end development in your own time? Definitely. Both Woods and Bondoc actively develop themselves, listing the following resources as particularly useful: Stack Overflow Code School Lynda (by LinkedIn) Meetups, conferences and summits 3. Problem solving/critical thinking A back-end developer’s job is to solve problems. Some problems are more difficult than others, and creative, lateral and critical thinking will be required of a developer if they are to crack the more difficult nuts. “You will spend the vast majority of your time solving problems and coming up with creative solutions, so it is very important to possess an appetite for problem-solving and critical thinking,” notes Woods. And as instructs, there are real and tangible ways that you can improve these skills. this terrific piece from College Info Geek 4. Adaptability The back-end development sphere is as changeable and unpredictable as any in tech. The dynamic nature of back-end technologies can mean that a developer may never find a real ‘comfort zone’ at any point in their careers. Rather they need to achieve comfort in discomfort, as they find themselves in an ever-changing landscape that requires pragmatism and adaptability to get by. Bondoc points out that back-end developers not only need to find a way to be adaptable in this state of flux — they also need to know the tools and new technologies that are being introduced, and demonstrate an ability to identify when to use those tools and technologies to deliver a solution. Sure, back-end developers may not get the recognition that front-end developers do. But then that’s not really why these professionals have chosen this particular path. The engine of the car might not get photographed as much as the body, but no one questions what it brings to the table. To be the best back-end developer you can be will require discipline, motivation and effort. But a back-end developer who continually develops him or herself is one of the most valuable assets any tech company could hope to have. Keep up to date with the latest insights from Australia’s top companies in the tech space 👉 The Martec

Keep

These Skills Separate the Best Back-End Developers from the Rest

Internet service providers would like you to think there’s broad agreement on net neutrality because everyone agrees cable companies shouldn’t block or slow access to websites and online services. But mention the words “paid prioritization” and you’ll get a much different reaction. The issue is sure to divide the House Energy and Commerce Committee during its . hearing on the topic next week Paid prioritization refers to an ISP charging a website or online service for better and quicker access to users, effectively creating internet “fast lanes.” Since studies show that even small changes in web page loading times can have significant impacts on user behavior, a company that can pay to connect to their users faster will be at a huge advantage. Paid prioritization is especially harmful to startups, which are often competing against deep-pocketed incumbents. A startup with just tens of thousands of dollars in funding can’t outspend market giants for faster access to users. Small companies with less funding will be at a serious disadvantage as larger firms use paid prioritization for anti-competitive reasons. This problem will be most acutely felt by the startups who dare to compete with services owned or affiliated with ISPs, like a video streaming service that could replace cable TV. ISPs and their allies often try to gloss over this problem. They extol the virtues of charging for better, faster access to users. Don’t be surprised if during next week’s hearing there’s pearl-clutching about vital latency-sensitive services that rely on high speed connections to users. You wouldn’t want telemedicine services or an autonomous vehicle to experience lags or buffering, would you? But no one is arguing that prioritization can never be pro-consumer. The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules created a waiver system so an ISP could offer prioritized access if it showed it would not degrade consumer choice, competition, or expression. That critical telehealth service or autonomous vehicle data net neutrality critics are fretting about? As long as prioritizing that traffic wouldn’t distort markets, it would almost certainly have been just fine under the 2015 rules. But ISPs prefer to talk about those specialized services rather than the blatantly anti-consumer and anti-competitive paid prioritization schemes that are much more likely to be quietly implemented. In the wake of the 2015 rules, ISPs claimed that the rules could cost them tens of billions of dollars in lost incentives. Now that those rules are gone, where will those tens of billions of dollars come from? The obvious answer is paid prioritization schemes that would allow ISPs to charge websites and online services for better access to users. Big Internet companies may be able to afford to pay tens of billions of dollars to ISPs for fast-lanes, but startups cannot. Faced with this unlevel playing field, startups will have trouble reaching users, gaining traction, and justifying the higher costs to investors. See more: https://hackernoon.com/five-reasons-chairman-pai-says-gutting-net-neutrality-helps-startups-and-why-theyre-all-nonsense-19412e391a2b

Funding

Paid Prioritization: Leaving Startups in the Slow Lane

1. ‘UAE Blockchain Strategy 2021’ Is Launched The that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, has launched a project called ‘UAE Blockchain Strategy 2021’. The project is part of their ‘Future Industry’ development plan, aimed at putting them at the forefront of innovative technology adoption. The government hopes to conduct 50% of federal transactions through blockchain technology by 2021. It is hoped that the new technology will save time and and cut costs. The change could help reducing the AED11 billion which currently being spent every year on document transactions and documents. Furthermore, the government will also launch an initiative to educate its citizens on blockchain. Dubai Media Office has reported 2. Bank of America Wants To Improve Its Data Sharing System With Blockchain Bank of America has with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a blockchain-based data sharing system. The document was published by the agency on April 12th, but initially filed by the bank back in October 2016. . Cryptographic keys would be used on a private blockchain, and this would help to tackle the problems with data tracking and sharing. In the document, it was also discussed how the current data sharing system carries risks which would disappear with a blockchain-backed system. The news comes following , and the release of a Proof-of-Concept paper. filed a patent The new system would assist with data validation, as well as ensuring a secure data sharing process Bank of England’s partnership with startup Chain 3. Bermuda Goes On With Crypto-friendly Regulation Plans We previously on Bermudan Premier and Minister of Finance David Burt’s plan to create a regulatory framework which is crypto friendly, and can ensure the industry will flourish. The Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) has now discussing a potential anti-money laundering (AML) act. The financial regulator hopes to create regulations broad enough to cover the varied activities in the crypto industry. According to the proposal, firms involved with token sales and initial coin offerings would be required to gather and maintain consumers data. Companies launching ICOs would not be impacted by this act, as a separate one would be created afterwards. Bermuda’s Minister of National Security Wayne Caines even for the industry to grow. Lastly, a sandbox-like licensing scheme is also currently under investigation. reported published a consultation paper stated that regulations are necessary 4. Yahoo Japan Set To Purchase 40% of Crypto Exchange Shares Yahoo Japan is going to . The acquisition will be made through Z Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary. BitARG Exchange Tokyo also . The exchange said that the acquisition will give them access to greater resources, especially in terms of tech and knowledge. Official figures have not been released yet. However, according to a source familiar with the acquisition, Yahoo Japan might fork out 2–3 billion yen ($18.5–27.8 million). Yahoo Japan’s announcement comes one week after brokerage firm to buy all of Coincheck’s shares for 3.6 billion yen (33.4 million dollars). purchase a 40% stake in local crypto exchange BitARG released the news on its website Monex’s decision This news roundup was brought to you by . BlockEx To receive our daily news roundup in your mailbox, sign up here: http://bit.ly/BlockExNewsRoundup-Updates

Chain

Bank of America

13/04/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere

by Joseph Flaherty In 2007, Groupon took in the of what would ultimately be $1.4B of venture capital, raised with ambitions of reshaping shopping. For a while, it looked like group buying, social commerce, daily deals, or whatever you call the practice of time-limited sales paired with social pressure was really going to change buying behaviors in a big way. In the space of four years the category exploded: first million dollars Groupon became the fastest startup in history to reach a . billion-dollar valuation Founder Andrew Mason appeared on the covers of and . Forbes Wired even though it had no clear connection to any aspect of the search giant’s business. Google offered $6B to buy Groupon Not to be outdone by Google, . Amazon invested heavily in LivingSocial Shockingly, Facebook as well. copied the idea A slick business about Groupon, and the phenomena it generated, was published and blurbed by the likes of Andrew Ross Sorkin and Tony Hsieh. book Hundreds of VC-backed daily deal sites sprung up focusing on every geography, vertical, and buying gimmick you could imagine. So many startups were founded in this space that ! multiple daily deal aggregators got VC funding Poorly conceived were aired. SuperBowl commercials Groupon went public and at its peak commanded a . $16B market cap “Social shopping” wasn’t a platform in the way mobile is, but everyone in tech started thinking about how it would transform their market. The business model just didn’t work very well. under the stress of baking beignets at bargain basement prices. Daily deals turned out to be a great ad platform for indoor skydiving facilities and escape rooms, but that’s not the kind of business that changes commerce — It’s the kind that trades for 2X profits. Brunch spots broke There was a flash sale on GRPN stock that saw its value drop by 85%. . The clowder of copycats screeched their last. LivingSocial died a lonely death It wasn’t a total washout. Zulilly IPO’d and was . quickly acquired by QVC Wish has adapted the model and currently holds an . $8.5B valuation Coupang, the Korean alternative to Amazon, , though they thrived after pivoting into a full-stack ecommerce model. commands a $5B valuation Even after all the drama, Groupon is still around and has a $2.4B market cap. Many of these companies were and are successes. They may have fallen short of outrageously high expectations, but the model worked in some specific contexts. It just wasn’t a generally applicable approach and a lot of startups paid the price for chasing a trend that didn’t materialize. The real loss is the years of effort wasted by entrepreneurs blindly chasing after the “next big thing.” The media’s incentives are different than startups’ Why did Groupon get overhyped? The media has to drive an exciting narrative every day. The problem is, truly disruptive innovations don’t come along often. Interesting but ultimately marginal developments are oversold. For instance, in 2015, following in the wake of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, declared that “ ” Three years later, we’re still pawing at glass like morlocks. And when VR does arrive, there’s a good chance it’ll primarily be a video game accessory rather than a general purpose computing platform to rival smartphones. Time Magazine Virtual reality was about to change the world. . . . These were all proclaimed as the “Next Big Thing” by major news outlets. Good businesses can be built in any of these areas, but in retrospect, they did not become broadly lucrative trends. Personal Robots Gamification Wearables Today, “ ” is touted as a disruptive platform, but at present, it looks more like a new UI layer for Apple and Amazon services than a technology that will launch a hundred startups. voice These reporters aren’t purposefully misleading people. They’ll make bad predictions in much the same way VCs will make bad investments. It’s the job of founders to look at these trends critically and to remember that may be deadly to reporters, they can be fabulously lucrative to founders. boring ideas Startup who chase after these trends often find themselves stumped by “ ” The Platform Paradox. For the record, VCs also have a role in this, hyping your startups is part of the gig, but they also pay a heavy financial penalty when their companies go belly up. The solution? Embrace the use case The same year Groupon got started, Peter Gassner raised to fund , a vertically-focused (and very boring) CRM-style SaaS solution for life science companies. Its launch was little noted by the tech press. The product’s ability to streamline communication between pharma companies and clinical research organizations didn’t herald the arrival of any new tech paradigms. Incubators didn’t create special purpose funds to spawn imitators. $3M dollars Veeva However, many life sciences professionals thought it was the best startup in the space since Emil Erlenmeyer got into the flask making business and were willing to pay accordingly. Veeva went public a couple years after Groupon and today it’s worth over $10B. Considering Veeva only raised $7M in total venture capital, it is easily one of the most successful tech IPOs of the last half decade. Groupon was sold as a paradigm shift in ecommerce that would ripple through the broader economy. Veeva was “just” a well-conceived B2B product for a niche market. It turns out niches hold riches. Don’t believe the hype As wrote, “By the time there is a special purpose VC fund devoted to a trend, it is probably too late to build a meaningful company in that space.” David Frankel _One of the questions a VC gets most often is “what are you interested in?” Many investors have developed “themes” that…_hackernoon.com Why today’s tech themes are poor predictors of tomorrow’s hot startups Keep an eye on macro trends, but employ them in the service of a specific use case for a specific kind of customer. Technological fads come and go, but human use cases are durable and can be exceedingly valuable.

Startups, Beware the Next Big Thing

Futurestan is my point of view on future products. I study huge problems and try to find simple but effective solutions. Here is a first short story on a pretty huge problem — “How AI-connected home might become a healthcare-oriented system”. A photo from “ ” by Andrew Hoyle/CNET How to prevent the Apple HomePod from staining your furniture solutions have become something customary for families. These products have been effectively integrated into a habitual order of things now. They are fair, cheap, and rich enough in a sense of a user experience (UX). That is why seed and scaling stages are changed by a blitz-scaling using really big distribution channels like is. It hasn’t been the first case ever. Everybody knows and deals. Smart home Amazon Google x Nest Labs Samsung x SmartThings Petcube Play, Interactive Wi-Fi Pet Camera by Petcube This concept is rapidly growing with the new use cases. While , , , continue to focus on security and alarming, some products like , , and pursue a smart care. As wrote, “It also seems super useful if you have an elderly parent or grandparent who lives alone and you’d like the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can get alerts if the camera doesn’t seem movement”. Care solutions are growing fast. It’s cute — they’ve verified on pets. Nest August BuddyGuard SmartThings Petcube CherryHome Lighthouse The Verge Here is a huge niche on the market. There is a well-known fact that an unhealthy lifestyle is the main cause of diseases at least in 60–70 percent of cases, . It is a scourge of modern times. Only 5–10% of all cancer cases can be attributed to genetic defects, whereas the remaining 90–95% have their roots in the environment and lifestyle. Something similar is observed in a scope of the eyes diseases, like a near-sightedness (myopia). according to the WHO Weed need a deep shift from a smart control to a smart care in consumer IoT paradigm, a photo by BusinessWire Of the 7.3 billion people in the world today, 63 percent are considered to be in need of a vision correction. The lifestyle factors cigarette smoking, diet (fried foods, red meat), alcohol, sun exposure, environmental pollutants, infections, stress, obesity, and physical inactivity. , approximately 15 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed. — nearly 30 percent of the global population — are overweight. include By 2020 More than 2.1 billion people Oh yeah, we need something just like this. Something like a smart camera with a design of HomePod, analysing a people’s lifestyle at home are responsible for 1.1 trillion dollars in lost productivity in the United States. So the idea is very simple. We need home AI interfaces that care about people having superfluous uninterrupted binge-watching (to prevent eyes and spine diseases). The guard who supervises the unhealthy habits and notifies of dangerous consequences. It’s time to give our children a chance to prevent scoliosis, diabetes et cetera. Cancer, diabetes, and heart disease healthcare

The Verge

Uninterrupted

Products I’m Waiting For in Futurestan i1

Image Credit: Pawel Kucynsky Last month was a strange one. We saw mainstream media questioning and Cambridge Analytica practices after recent concerns over the US election. sums it up in one frightening sentence: Facebook The Guardian They had manipulated the voters of democracies across the globe, notably in the US, with unsourced propaganda that was not necessarily true; and boasting of sting operations and honey traps Cambridge Analytica took part in the yes for the campaign, the election of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz’s campaign, and in (44 apparently in 2014, just for the US). They are now a massive Brexit dozens of local election political force, engaged all across the globe with a strong preference for conservative candidates. While Cambridge Analytica was already , they weren’t very secretive about their intent; here’s what they boast about in their promotional videos: advertising its services on Youtube since August 2015 On the American market, they claim to have “up to 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans” “We go beyond big data, we add an extra layer of personality data to get down to an individual level” The activity of Cambridge Analytica and its impact over elections have been well covered, or the . Now, even Google will tell you: such as in The Guardian’s Cambridge Analytica files NY Times What’s less discussed is how could we even get to this point? Considering the company’s goals and practices, abuses should have been expected and prevented. Let’s broaden the discussion and address the tradeoff made with “free” services instead and the consequences of this data theft: a loss of political and personal power. THE ADVERTISING MODEL: THE NECESSARY PAIN? It’s actually a quote from Mark Zuckerberg that got me started on this article. In the when asked about the , he didn’t exactly answer the question yet provided a fascinating response: Ezra Klein Show limits of Facebook’s current business model You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the . only rational model that can support building this service to reach people He presents the advertising-supported model . I would argue instead . Essentially, advertising allows generating revenue out of each/most users of the service. Because of the monetary incentive tied to ads, the provider tends to focus on collecting more data and increasing the user base even further instead of actual development of the service. It can’t be sustainable. as the only rational one able to bring free services to the world it’s only the easiest way As they restlessly harness data, . Facebook is now the kingmaker, or is it already the king? If Facebook is king, it’s a sneaky one: he’s being secretive about its regal nature. They didn’t come public about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they waited for the public to notice and patiently prepared. online services gain actual power and influence on individuals and societies , he develops a grandiose and frightening vision for the social network, as What we’re seeing today is only stage 1. In a manifesto written in 2017 about the future of Facebook “the social infrastructure for the global community”. Yet, Facebook isn’t a lone wolf. There is a whole industry built on similar concepts: online advertising. While Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are probably at fault, many other companies such as Google, Yahoo, or Baidu have similar practices. A whole industry is at fault. A CROOKED INDUSTRY The advertising industry has always been ripe for abuse and scams, but . Abuses are common, both for advertisers and other actors. digital advertising brought it to another level Taking a closer look at the industry, you uncover several battles being lead all at once. First, . On the advertiser side, botting and click-fraud are massive. To top this all up, users, annoyed by the evermore intrusive ads, are now fighting back. shady practices are rampant in the industry ABUSES AND SHADY PRACTICES Abuses and misleading tactics are spread all around the industry on all kind of ads and devices. On mobile, apps and games may have , requiring unnecessary permissions (contacts, pictures, files…), which allow them to collect unnecessary data. Unsurprisingly, the Facebook app is among one of the most demanding in terms of permissions. aggressive data collection practices On desktop, there are intrusive banner ads and pop-ups all around deteriorating the browsing experience on the web. Worst, there are also much more intrusive practices such as (your beloved grandma’s toolbar) . spywares bundled with free softwares A glimpse in toolbars’ hell If scammy tactics are common for advertisers, brands pay the price for it as automated clicks are hard to distinguish for real ones. PRACTICALLY IN A CIVIL WAR Bots or automated activity is indeed massive in the online advertising world. It’s hard for brands to recognize these practices, and it allows the ad seller to increase their profits. AKA, why are they so many bots on Twitter? About 20% of all accounts are bots (fully automated), and . So, if Twitter was to take actual measure against automated activity, it would risk losing up to 40% of the impressions it sells to advertisers. at least 20% others use automated methods The industry itself is well aware of the issue, the estimates that . The total loss is estimated at $50bn a year, roughly a third of the current online advertising industry yearly revenues. World Federation of Advertiser between 10 to 30% of the slots are never seen by consumers because of fraud USERS ARE FIGHTING BACK TOO On top of the click fraud, you must add another stream of lost revenues for advertisers: users using an ad blocker. To protect themselves, surfers took matters in their own hand and developed Ad-Blockers extension, such as or . NanoBlock uBlock origin Considering how intrusive and annoying ads have become, it was bound to happen. Because less users now see the ads they host, media advertising revenues dwindle putting their very subsistence at risk. While adblockers minimize annoyance on the user side, it doesn’t solve the problem at all at the industry level. Image Credits On one side, installing a Firefox/Chrome extension come easy for some, many don’t know about them or even about ad blockers. Only the most tech-savvy users tend to use ad blockers. However, , some websites are now blocking access to users with an ad blocker enabled. Luckily, blockers currently have the final world with anti-ad blocker defusers like . It’s an ongoing back and forth. the ad industry is fighting back Nano Defender The advertising industry is mined by vicious circles of abuse that lead users to fight back. Since it lowers their revenues, media and advertisers are pushed towards even more intrusive advertising and data collection practices to try to break even. The whole advertising model is unsustainable. The actual consequences of the development of free services spread all the way down to the individual level. The tributes we pay is already massive. These include the abuses within the industry, the ongoing war with the users but most importantly the political clout claimed by online service which now makes them able to coerce public opinion. It’s not only about Cambridge Analytica, it’s much bigger than this. I share on Zuckberg’s hearing: Max Evans views “Words will be said, apologies noted, laws passed, but the problems will grow. Companies will not moderate their behaviour totally because they only have to accede to individual nations”. If the state is unfit to deal with this, we have but one option left: do something about it. The advertising model is not only tendentious but perverse. Is it really the only option Zuck, or just the one that happened to be proposed first and quietly established as a standard? Other models that allow a fairer distribution of the values between all the actors of the ecosystem exist. Let me know if you liked this article and you can keep pressing 👏up to 50 claps. check out my wiki for more content like this. Don’t forget to clap it to help it spread:

Analytica

Facebook X Cambridge Analytica : the hidden cost of free services

As a reader of this article, you may already know that the English version of Primas DApp is currently recruiting users for the first round of beta testing. If you happen to have an iPhone and you feel enthusiastic about earning revenue out of creating and sharing quality content . If you are still wondering what Primas DApp is, or confused what DApps are in general, then continue reading as we will be looking deeper into the Primas DApp and two other interesting DApps currently in beta or development phase. this is the place to go What’s DApp? Let’s take a quick recap to the basics. DApp means a which essentially is an application that runs on a decentralized network. This as opposed to more general applications that are running on a centralized system, where the central entity is controlling the operations and individuals in the network depend on that central entity to send and receive information. In short, your regular apps are talking to a server (a computer) that then send them information back, when DApp will be communicating and recording transactions to multiple different nodes (computers). This makes them more: decentralized application, a) Robust — as even if one node fails the network is still operational b) Tamper proof — the information is stored into multiple places, making it pretty damn hard to change or censor information after it has been published This means that application where robustness and trust is essential, are benefiting of the use of the decentralized structure. Let’s take a couple of examples of what those apps could be 1. Primas DAPP Primas DAPP provides an open content publishing, referral and exchange system. That means that you can use Primas DApp to write articles and share them with likeminded people. What makes it interesting is that by using the Primas DApp the content published will be written on a blockchain including the authors details, which gives you some extra benefits compared to say, me writing this article on Medium. As the content is documented on blockchain with timestamp and author’s details, it is easy to identify original piece from a plagiarized one, and reward those who have created original content while punishing those who go and steal other peoples stuff. You will directly earn revenue by writing quality pieces. If the audience likes to read and share your content you will be rewarded with Primas cryptocurrency PST. No middle man taking away your earnings or defining what is valuable content — audience makes the choice. You will earn revenue by endorsing quality pieces. Liking and sharing content is rewarded as well. If you share a piece of content you will be getting a share of the PSTs it is generating The centralized applications for distributing content have been hard on new radical views and easily tampered throught the history (from book burnings to Facebook and Twitter algorithms). If you feel like a central-entity shouldn’t dictate what is published and how the revenues are distributed, come and join the Primas community. The English version of Primas DApp is currently recruiting beta users for the first round closed beta testing. If you happen to have an iOS device and you feel like trying out how the content ecosystem of the future feels, go ahead and . apply here 2. Ethlance The Internet has greatly improved the ability for employers to find employees. Especially the freelancer scene has benefitted of platforms, like Upwork, that bring together freelancer looking for a gig and companies that have short term projects that need taking care of. The only friction left in this open job market has been the fees that the centralized platforms cut from payments of the freelancers. But not anymore. Thanks to decentralized apps on blockchain there is no longer a need for a middle man as smart contracts take care of the trust issues when dealing directly with individuals. is one of the most interesting DApps that is functioning in this field. On Ethlance you can find freelancing gigs or post jobs and search freelancers. All of this with 0% cut on the services fees. Ethlance 3. uPort Have you realized that your identity is currently quite a centralized application? The basic records of who are you, where you live are held in the safekeeping of thecCountry you are citizen of. This basically means that the if the central records are tampered or destroyed, your official identity could be lost. Ouch. The guys at are trying to prevent this kind of a nightmare by providing a DApp that gives the user a unique digital identity. Future applications could be in the lines of a digital passport and tamper-free online voting. Pretty cool. uPort DApps are a great way to handle use cases where the application needs to be robust and tamper-free and without a middlman. Check out these three DApps mention in this article for a nice overview on how decentralized apps can improve our future. Also let us know what are your favorite DApps at the moment, we’d love to hear more from you!

Three Trending Decentralized Apps You Should Be Trying Right Now

Why not buy a car with the money you save on transfers? In a world that’s becoming rapidly more globalised, living abroad is becoming increasingly common with the popularisation of migration. Moving abroad will likely be an intimidating process for anyone, but knowing how to do it cost effectively can save you hundreds, even thousands; making the process a little less stressful. So, what should you consider before moving abroad? How can you save money on your move? There are a significant number of additional costs which you’ll incur when moving; some can be avoided, some can be reduced. Firstly, let’s look at the costs which you can cut completely. By doing research into the process of moving overseas, you’ll be able to save a great deal as you won’t need a financial advisor. The internet has countless resources to inform you about the financial aspect of the moving process. While using a real estate agency can save you a lot of time and stress, it will also add to the cost of the property due to commissions. There are a number of websites online dedicated to matching property sellers with buyers. If you choose to do this, you should be very cautious. Ensure the person advertising the property is the rightful owner. You will also want to visit the house beforehand to ensure it is as advertised (not a bad excuse for a weekend away). You’ll also want to ensure that the property’s deeds haven’t been offered as collateral for any loans. While there are some costs which you’ll incur regardless of how you approach purchasing a house abroad, there are steps you can take to lessen costs in other areas. Firstly, you’ll want to keep an eye on the different property markets as they can vary hugely; even in neighbouring countries. This is something worth doing early on when you decide to move as it will likely factor into where you choose to live. So, moving to the right place can save you a lot of money. What about moving at the right time? Exchange rates are definitely something you’ll want to keep an eye on. When transferring large sums of money, the amount you receive post-transfer can vary hugely depending on that days exchange rates. Using apps like Find.Exchange you can set alerts to notify you when the exchange rate is most favourable. Another area where you can save a lot of money is on the actual transfer. With so many companies offering so many different rates for the same transfer, on the same route, finding the most competitive can take hours. What’s more, you’ll also want to factor in how long the transfer will take. With big banks charging huge fees on international money transfers, you’ll want to look at some of the smaller, dedicated providers. While the fees will be lower, there will still be a huge selection to choose from. I suggest getting back on the Find.Exchange app and comparing the providers that can transfer on your chosen route. You’ll be able to see how much you’ll get in the foreign currency, how long the transfer will take and the providers user rating. Using this app will save you money; and depending on the amount you transfer, it could be a significant saving. By using price alerts and transfer comparison, you’ll be able to rest assured that you’re getting the most for your money. By taking these factors into account, doing research and comparing transfer providers and exchange rates, you’ll be able to get a good idea of just how much money you’ll save. You might just find that the budget for your house has gone up. Saving money when moving abroad may not make it any less daunting, but when you arrive at your new Greek villa, knowing that the car you just bought was paid for with money you saved, I guarantee it will put a smile on your face. To see how much you can save on your money transfer, head to : https://find.exchange/search/transfers Find.Exchange

Abroad

Buying a House Abroad?

a dynamic, general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is programming Clojure is functional programming, all is function you can see the basic pattren : (fn param-1..param-n)(fn (fn-1 (fn-2 param-2–1) param-1–1)) Stop pulling your hair out while understanding existing Clojure project, here four tips that I can share with you while right now I also still suffering understanding Clojure code Reading function by function starts from the last child function to the first parent so value from will be collected by and store to :data , than protobuf will build user-batch, then from protobuf value get-user-profile for publish-topic this technique will be pain less then read from the first parent then go to the last child 2. Reading nested hash map also start from the last child of key How to get follower of his k account: faceboo Java Object.getData().getProfile().getSocialMedia().get(0).getFollower() Clojure (:follower (first (:social-media (:profile (:data object))))) 3. Use lein repl if you stuck something you may know debuging clojure on itellijIDEA is worst, not fully make you happier, for example 1 (let [atc-products2      (for [cart carts] (get-product (:product-id cart)))]3 5   (println "HERE PRODUCTS" atc-products)) 4   (response **atc-products** ) console>> HERE PRODUCTS ({:product-id 123 :product-name "Sepatu"} {:product-id 456 :product-name "Sandal"}) Let say i put a breakpoint at , you will be wondering in debugger panel atc-products will be shown as null, but you will see some values of atc-products in the console after println. line 4 with lein repl you can execute parentheses by parentheses, or even function by function if you got an error you can fix instantly and then just add :reload (require #[namespace :as alias] :reload) 4. Use rainbow parentheses plugin help your eye catch ton of parentheses in clojure with atom https://github.com/johngeorgewright/atom-rainbow apm install johngeorgewright/atom-rainbow Thanks!

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4 tips to help you understand clojure

I’m here to serve you. Whatever you want or need, feel free to ask, and if I can help I will. Over the years I’ve built up a vast, eclectic mix of knowledge which’s spans a huge number of different industries. With that has come a distributed network of experts whom I have grown to rely on and call my friends. I have connected with and learned from some of the most exciting minds in the world about the things they have become on experts in themselves. For me, this has been the most efficient mechanism to learn and succeed. When I have wanted to progress in a certain area, and acquire an expertise on a subject, my first port of call is usually to the person I have deemed to be the best source of that knowledge. My next step is to provide a short reason why I have reached out to them, typically explaining what they have done or produced — being really specific — that has inspired my interest. I may then ask for the books they have read which has endowed them with the skills they possess or about what mistaked they made which, with hindsight, they would have avoided and been able to progress far more efficiently. If you’re working on something interesting and likely to be seeking funding in the next 18 months I know the people you should be talking to right now. That might start with government/public bodies who can assist during the startup process, lawyers who can advise or assist with the protection of your IP or institutional investors who could invest large sums of capital in your business. If you are exploring options to start a business and don’t know what to do next I’m happy to share my journey so far. If you have already started a business and feel like you don’t know what you are doing, or that you are treading water and not going anywhere fast, understand we have all been there and that the quickest route to recovery is usually a conversation with an experienced entrepreneur who can elucidate their early struggles. Nothing is ever indefinitely up and to the right. The early struggles and lack of clarity what to do next are typically signs that you are going in the right direction. If you have been building your business for a long time and are having trouble now with horizontal expansion, strategy, growth or anything else, I would be more than happy to share the playbook’s I have used to help startup companies and large corporate multi-nationals grow, evolve and innovate in the last few years. If you are interested in anything we are building at and have any ideas about how we could make it more compelling let me know. Nexves If you’re experiencing any struggles and don’t know what to do next, chances are that I or someone in my network has experienced the same thing and would be more than willing to share their solution. That might be in relation to changing careers, struggling to progress in your current role, or simply wanting a little help with knowing what you should focus on achieving. The majority of the opportunities that have come my way in the last 3 years have been as the result of luck. Sending an email at the right time, asking a question of the appropriate person who was willing to reply or posting content that somebody has seen which has grown into a massive opportunity. The only thing that wasn’t luck was that I was willing to take the chance to reach out and connect with people who could of rejected my advances. They didn’t. They took their time to help me and as a result I have been incredibly fortunate to experience significant personal growth that I have. I want to help you achieve the same things. Just ask. If I’ve helped you in the past, feel free to share how in the recommendations. If I couldn’t feels free to share that as well. Applause for this post to share it with as wide an audience as possible would be greatly appreciated

Why I Exist to Serve and Empower you

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2019 - Contributing Writer of the Year

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Move over Next.js and Webpack 🤯

What I’d say to my younger self when learning development “ I just can’t learn JS :-( ” by on Louis Blythe Unsplash A friend on mine, who is learning JS, showed me proudly a clock on an html page. He told me that after 7 hours he finally got it to update every minute! I smiled at him and said: “I think you are ready to learn a JS framework.” That same person previously had the hardest time trying to make sense of JS, — he hadn’t called it — why in the world would I need a function? Why is my function not working, I already wrote it? Why do I need an array for? I can just have a couple of variables… In a similar fashion I have meet many people that shy away from coding because it is , or or they can do everything they want with HTML/CSS and JQuery. “hard” “you have to be a genius to get it,” Back when I was learning JS I remember thinking, while reading for the third time, Eloquent JavaScript “Why in the world would people care about inheritance or _this_ or arrays? Why not just use a variable and be done with it? Why are they just complicating things by putting them in an object?” The experience was very similar when I was teaching Algebra at a middle school. I’d say with the blank eyes of my frustrated students staring back at me. It was puzzling to me how they couldn’t understand something “ And then, the insight! There was an activity we needed to organize but we couldn’t find a number because we weren’t sure about something that could change And with a new interest we took a look into those weird equations and formulas that Mr. B (that’s me) was teaching them and… they finally made sense! They were actually useful! The students were elated and so was I! Math had an answer for questions they formulated. Before that math was just giving them answers for questions they formulated. “ _a - b = a + -b_ ” so logical.” (vary? as in variables… WOT?). (You mean that math can be used for more than just knowing how many watermelons little Johnny has?) had hadn’t Learning Math is NOT about learning things about numbers (well, it is a little bit 😃). Learning math is mostly about how to use different methods and tools, to solve problems, may they be for science, cooking, personal finances, space exploration or how many apples little Laura has left. I believe the same thing happens when learning JS, or any other language or skill for that matter. Out of context, a book or online course or university course is giving answers to questions the student hasn’t asked. Learning JS is NOT about learning (memorizing) JS, it’s about learning a tool in order to solve problems. I recently read an excellent on how to be a better developer by learning the meta skill of problem solving. While I agree strongly with that article, I believe that in order to even make sense of development you need to be a little exposed to the problems you are trying to solve. article Working as a CTO for a startup I had the opportunity to deal with a couple of CS interns and it was kind of a disappointing experience. It seemed like those students had learned a lot of theory, memorized how to write a or a , but had no clue what those were actually used for. for switch This happens even more when the person is self-taught and decides to pick up a book or enroll in an online course for, say, JS. It can be very frustrating and confusing because the book or course is providing answers to questions the person hasn’t yet formulated and the brain has a hard time figuring out where to store that information and how to process it. I spent the longest time trying to explain to somebody why they would like to learn what a function is and how it works. Their question was, It was frustrating to say the least. But as soon as that person tried to do something a little more complicated than a cli calculator, it was just beautiful to behold her insight about functions and how useful they actually were! “Why would I need a function if I can just have my whole little calculator app in one file?” So, what can you do to learn JS better? First, don’t panic! don’t panic! With many courses you are told to practice, practice, and practice… but practice ? ANYTHING! Try to make something that is a little over your head, use your current knowledge, fire up Adobe Muse or Dreamweaver, if that’s what you know and try to build something (a is a good place to start). Don’t look at anybody else’s code, and don’t copy/paste from StackOverflow just yet… find where the limits are of the current tools that you know and knowledge you have and then, and only then, you’ll be ready to acquire and understand new knowledge! what todo app Many courses give you challenges and exercises… don’t skip them because you feel like you get the content (I used to do that all the time 😁), they are actually designed to challenge you, stretch you a little bit, get you to the point in which you realize that you don’t know. Then you realize that you don’t get frustrated because you don’t know! NO, quite the contrary, when you know that you don’t know, that is when you are ready to learn what you don’t know! Let me just say that again, when you find a mountain in your way, that’s the moment you’re ready to learn a way to climb it! It’d be very hard to understand why you would even need a rappelling rope if you have never seen a mountain. And above all, don’t stop learning! When you are doing something that feels a little too complicated or hard, usually, I have found, I’m doing it wrong, and there’s a tool or skill to accomplish that in an easier and more efficient way. An example is a coworker that was uploading a file to a web server every morning at 5:00AM for the past 5 years… wow! But there’s . In another occasion a friend was trying to erase a couple thousand files but keep some other thousand, thus the apparent solution was to select all the files-to-be-erased on finder and erase them. After a weekend of frustration we wondered, _what if there’s a BASH script was can write to fix this? A_nd there was! Five minutes later the task was over! cron Or just try building a todo app only with JQuery… You’ll see what I mean. So, keep being awesome and learning and building cool stuff!

Laura

You are learning JS wrong

By Eric Ly, founder and CEO of Hub Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm made prominent through its work for the 2016 Trump campaign, have found themselves in deepening trouble over the past few weeks. and concluded that the firm had harvested data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles in its bid to develop techniques to predict the behavior of individual American voters. After all, Facebook’s business model depends heavily on the effectiveness of advertisements shown to users and thus, on the quality of data collected. Just a quick look at one’s settings shows the extent to which the social network collects personal information. Not only does Facebook store your personal messages, likes, and friends — anything from your favorite music and films to a list of your family contacts, personal emails, and conversations with your loved ones is saved as well. Such centralization often leads to breaches of data, as seen in the recent Equifax and Yahoo hacks. Once a quiz app built by a university researcher in 2014 is able to leak the Facebook data of millions of people to a political consulting firm, it is clear that changes need to be made. The New York Times The Observer of London Unfortunately, fixing this problem under Facebook’s current model will certainly be difficult if not impossible. In an interview with CNN, Mark Zuckerberg remarked that “this was a major breach of trust, and [that he is] really sorry that this happened.” This led to the removal of full-page ads from , , and and a promise to review the data policies of thousands of apps. However, the sheer size of Facebook’s structure and operations makes monitoring the reputation of accounts and applications unwieldy and nonoptimal. Even by doubling Facebook’s security staff from 15,000 to 28,000, an undoubtedly impressive number, each employee would still be responsible for the security of approximately 71,000 users: a truly excessive number. The New York Times The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal Moreover, the problem of policing Facebook is exacerbated by a lack of informed consent. When users agree to take a quiz on their favorite 90’s sitcom character, many aren’t aware that their data as well as their friends’ data will be given to corporations such as Cambridge Analytica (unless they read the fine print of Facebook’s API). Moreover, the quiz can even be removed at any time and replaced with hundreds of duplicates if or when a security member flags an application. Thus, unless users take the extra effort to tediously analyze exactly which pieces of data they are allowing these firms to use, they will remain incapable of preventing exploitative attacks on their personal data and privacy. Furthermore, even against this backdrop, the US government has yet to help users understand when their data is being collected. This is largely due to the fact that the United States remains one of the only major countries in the world lacking such a form of legislation. In 2016, retracted FCC regulation that would have prevented internet service providers (ISPs) from selling data without users’ consent. Moreover, legislators have resisted taking any action against Silicon Valley, asserting that they are overly intrusive and would stifle innovation. Congress It is thus in the absence of regulation that a technological revolution is necessary in order to allow people to share and connect with one another while still having the peace of mind that their personal data will remain secure and protected. government Enter the : a distributed ledger where each person can access and control who has their information, and Hub token, a system on which: blockchain actual, verified accounts build reputation scores through interactions, data is proprietary and only given out in specified situations, and a company’s change in reputation for the worse can cause a retraction of data permissions. Hub token was created with the goal of solving the problem of virtual trust by allowing users to assess trustworthiness at a distance across applications. Rather than having the protocol’s value come from extracting personal data as in the example of Facebook, the value of Hub’s Human Trust Protocol instead lies in the decentralization of trust and reputation building by users. Trust is inherently built into Hub’s network, which establishes confidence by incentivizing positive interactions between its users. Reputation data is available only upon approval from the owner, allowing users to engage in the communication of confidential information in a respectful manner. Moreover, the Human Trust Protocol will allow users to access the reputation scores of other people or organizations with whom they transact online and will additionally prevent the accessing of their own information by other parties without prior permission having been given. Therefore, any disclosure of private information rests solely in the hands of the user who rightfully owns their personal data. The Human Trust Protocol will thus promote the maintenance of trust and reputation among originally trust-less parties, build legitimacy by allowing actors to place a stake in interactions, and economically incentivizes users and organizations to engage in fair behavior online. On top of that, Hub is also dedicated to handling Sybil attacks and to continually revising its economic structure as the protocol grows. Personal data and privacy have the potential to be of immense value to users. Yet, it will continue to be exploited in our current ecosystem as centralized companies like Facebook remain unable to resolve the serious problem of community policing. In a world where bad actors are increasingly influencing serious outcomes, decentralized organizations need to step up and create a new order that solves these problems. Hub strives to be the leading solution to this previously unsolvable problem. With and Niall Sohan Kyle D’Souza For more information about hubtoken.org, please read our whitepaper . here

Why Facebook’s Data Leak Demonstrates the Need for a Decentralized Alternative

We are in the age where data is becoming an urgent issue, In this post Ill cover a matter that I thought about around a year ago, the privacy led (and how mobile phones got away with it). privacy If you google you wont find anything meaningful regarding this post, so lets start with : what is privacy led ? privacy led What is privacy led ? Back at the days I used to work for Intel RealSense group (A very exciting group, You get to see a lot of cool stuff), I came to learn about the term privacy led there, It was used both by us and our customers to describe the small led on the camera, indicating the camera is working and that video is actively being streamed to your PC. You can find this led on every web-camera and on your laptops these days. Once we got into drones, robotics and other devices (Cameras are going everywhere these days) the requirement for privacy led dropped. It seems there was active regulation around this led when it cames to webcams and PC (The camera on your laptop considered a webcam). This regulation didn't continue to robots and drones. No photos please Why privacy led is important ? The name say it by itself , If someone is taking your video this led is an indication that you agree for your privacy to go away. The privacy led indicates that even if you own the device, the device is hackable and that losing control over the device doesn't mean losing control over your privacy. This is becoming even much more important these as we see it everyday in , It is no longer people who watch you but machines as well and they never get board, never limited by the amount of cameras and remember for good. dataloop.ai In these days is questioned aggressively regarding its user’s data handling and I believe we are just scraping the surface here when it comes to data collection and capitalization, Not just by Facebook but by the entire tech world. Facebook A great example for this data abundance a , Maybe your there as well ? site offering access to many cameras that didn't change their password If one thing is for sure then data sharing is required, It should be clear to the person being tracked that he is tracked if for some reason his device is hacked. simplicity Checkout this famous photo of how . Mark zuckerberg is handling his privacy led settings The two privacy domains I distinguish between two privacy domains as they will be treated very differently, The public domain and the private domain. Though in many cases the line is blurred,I believe eventually regulators will sort every case into one of these. The personal domain The personal domain is your home or device. Its a place you own the rights for data collection (fancy word for video or voice capturing). The personal domain should become much more protected, just like webcams notify you they are active I would expect regulators to make sure every personal device to comply with these, both for voice and video under the assumption every device is hackable. The weird exception Why do cell phones don’t get the privacy led ? My feeling is that since mobile phones have started as a digital cameras they got away with it, It doesnt make sense to put a led on handheld camera device — you are choosing to be exposed by clicking on a button, but since the year 2000 cell phones have upgraded themselves to fully functional hackable computers with embedded cameras, regulation hasn't caught up with the change and the industry has no motivation doing it by itself. The public domain On the public domain privacy is dead, Get use to it. Since the year 2016 we have more cameras on the planet then humans and this grows exponentially. We are entering an era where there are cameras everywhere, They are smart enough to monitor everyone and have enough compute power to do it all the time. So just like mama said, Behave yourself in public. This can go very far though , for example in China there is already a plan for large scale surveillance system, giving every person a public behavior score that effects every aspect of life,The plan(Social credit system) was initiated in 2014 and going online these days — . check it out here Different approach from regulators is seen on the EU, where the new regulations are going effective in may 2018 to protect personal data much better. AFAIK GDPR dont deal with privacy leds. GDPR How secured is the privacy led ? Kind-of … Its very dependent on the manufacturers and operating systems, but in most cases one of the following overrides will work: Camera settings Registry hacking (Windows) Driver settings Camera firmware (The code on the camera itself) hacking. One thing worth mentioning is that Apple mackbooks have the led connected to power, which all of the above will fail to override the privacy led but You can say a lot of things about Apple but they do keep top priority to their users experience, privacy included. even Apple got some heat on the matter. Summary Privacy leds should get into full gear on every personal device, both for video and sound capturing. Regulators should apply simple step for data privacy on our personal sensors, put privacy led on personal devices and make sure they are Apple style privacy leds. As for everything else but your own device and home, Get use to it — You are being watched, in some countries more then others.

Intel

Microsoft

Who watches you ?

From now on, my tweets are ephemeral. Here’s why I’m deleting all my old tweets and the AWS Lambda function that does it for free. Stuff and opinions I’ve only been a for a little over a year and a half. Before that, I lived as most people do in an apartment or a house. I owned furniture, more clothing than I strictly needed, and enough “stuff” to fill at least a few moving boxes. If I went to live somewhere else, moving for school or family or work, I packed up all my things and brought them with me. Over the years, I accumulated more and more stuff. one-bag nomad Adopting what many would call a minimalist lifestyle has rapidly changed a lot of my longstanding views. Giving away all my stuff (an idea I once thought to be interesting in principle but practically a little bit ridiculous) has become normal. It’s normal for me, now, to not own things that I don’t use on a regular basis. I don’t keep wall shelves packed with old books or dishes or clothing or childhood toys because those items aren’t relevant to me anymore. I just keep fond memories, instead. Imagine, for a moment, that I still lived in a house. Imagine that in that house, on the fridge, is a drawing I made when I was six-years-old. In the bottom right corner of that drawing scribbled in green crayon are the words “broccoli is dumb — Vicky, Age 6.” If you were in my house and saw that drawing on the fridge, would you assume that the statement “broccoli is dumb” comprised an accurate and current account of my opinions on broccoli? Of course not. I was six when I wrote that. I’ve had plenty of time to change my mind. Social media isn’t social I have a friend whom I’ve known since we were both in kindergarten. We went through grade school together, then spoke to and saw each other on infrequent occasions across the years. We’re both adults now. Sometimes when we chat, we’ll recall some amusing memory from when we were younger. The nature of memory being what it is, I have no illusion that what we recall is recounted with much accuracy. Our impressions of things that happened — mistakes we made and moments of victory alike — are coloured by the experiences we’ve had since then, and all the things we’ve learned. An awkward moment at a school colleague’s birthday party becomes an example of a child learning to socialize, instead of the world-ending moment of embarrassment it probably felt like at the time. This is how memory works. In a sense, it gets updated, as well it should. People living in small communities remember things that their neighbour did many years ago, but recall them in the context of who their neighbour is now, and what their current relationship is like. This re-colouring of history is an important part of how people , , and . heal make good decisions socialize Social media does not do this. Your perfectly preserved tweet from five days or five years ago can be recalled with absolute accuracy. For most people, this is not particularly worrying. We tend to tweet about pretty mundane things — things that pop into mind when we’re bored and want someone to notice us. Individually, usually, our old tweets are pretty insignificant. In aggregate, however, they paint a pretty complete picture of a person’s random, unintentionally telling thoughts. This is the problem. The assumption made of things written in social media and on Twitter specifically is a very different assumption than you might make about someone’s notepad scribble from last week. I’m not endeavoring to speculate why — I’ve just seen enough cases of someone getting publicly flogged for something they posted years ago to know that it does happen. This is weird. If you wouldn’t assume that a notepad scribble from last week or a crayon drawing from decades ago reflects the essence of who someone is why would you assume that an old tweet does? now, You are not the same person you were last month — you’ve seen things, read things, understood and learned things that have, in some small way, changed you. While a person may have the same sense of self and identity through most of their life, even this grows and changes over the years. We change our opinions, our desires, our habits. We are not stagnant beings, and we should not let ourselves be represented as such, however unintentionally. Ephemeral tweets If you look at my Twitter profile page today, you’ll see fewer tweets there than you have fingers (I hope). I’m using — a lightweight utility I wrote for use on — to delete all my tweets older than a few days. I’m doing this for the same reason that I don’t hang on to stuff that I no longer use — that stuff isn’t relevant to me anymore. It doesn’t represent me, either. ephemeral AWS Lambda The code that makes up ephemeral is written in Go. AWS Lambda creates an environment for each Lambda function, so ephemeral utilizes environment variables for your private Twitter API keys and the maximum age of the tweets you want to keep, represented in hours, like . 72h var (	consumerKey       = getenv("TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY")	consumerSecret    = getenv("TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET")	accessToken       = getenv("TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN")	accessTokenSecret = getenv("TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET")	maxTweetAge       = getenv("MAX_TWEET_AGE")	logger            = log.New())

func getenv(name string) string {	v := os.Getenv(name)	if v == "" {		panic("missing required environment variable " + name)	}	return v} The program uses the library. It fetches your timeline up to the Twitter API’s limit of 200 tweets per request, then compares each tweet’s date of creation to your variable to decide whether it’s old enough to be deleted. After deleting all the expired tweets, the Lambda function terminates. anaconda MAX_TWEET_AGE func deleteFromTimeline(api *anaconda.TwitterApi, ageLimit time.Duration) {	timeline, err := getTimeline(api)

if err != nil {		log.Error("Could not get timeline")	}	for _, t := range timeline {		createdTime, err := t.CreatedAtTime()		if err != nil {			log.Error("Couldn't parse time ", err)		} else {			if time.Since(createdTime) > ageLimit {				_, err := api.DeleteTweet(t.Id, true)				log.Info("DELETED: Age - ", time.Since(createdTime).Round(1*time.Minute), " - ", t.Text)				if err != nil {					log.Error("Failed to delete! ", err)				}			}		}	}	log.Info("No more tweets to delete.")

} Read the full code . here For a use case like this, AWS Lambda has a free tier that costs nothing. If you’re any level of developer, it’s an extremely useful tool to become familiar with. For a full walkthrough with screenshots of how to set up a Lambda function that tweets for you, you can read . The set up for ephemeral is the same, it just has an opposite function. :) this article I forked ephemeral from Adam Drake’s , a Twitter tool that has many useful functions beyond keeping your timeline trimmed. If you have more than 200 tweets to delete at first pass, please use Harold to do that first. You can run Harold with the flag from your terminal. Harold deletetimeline For sentiment, you may like to . download all your tweets before deleting them Why use Twitter at all? In anticipation of the question, let me say that yes, I do use Twitter besides just as a bucket for my Lambda functions to fill and empty. It has its benefits, most related to what I perceive to be its original intended purpose: to be a means of near-instant communication for short, digestible pieces of information reaching a widespread pool of people. I use it as a way to keep tabs on what’s happening I use it to comment on, joke about, and commiserate with things tweeted by the people I follow By keeping my timeline restricted to only the most recent few days, I feel like I’m using Twitter more like it was meant to be used: a way to join the conversation and see what’s happening in the world — instead of just another place to amass more “stuff.” right now. right now. right now Thanks for reading! If you’d like to hear more about how I make my life better with tech, you can follow me here and on Twitter . For coding concepts explained with poorly-drawn doodles of food (and syntax highlighting!) go to . @hivickylai VickyLai.com I hope you have a really great day. :)

Why I’m automatically deleting my old tweets using AWS Lambda

Give everyone the credit they deserve Pair is more popular than ever. The benefits are clear: greater knowledge-sharing, less mental fatigue and better code, to name a few. It seems that the trend toward more collaborative coding will only grow in the future. In light of this, announced in late January 2018 that it now supports co-authored commits. programming GitHub Why co-author? Prior to this ability, pair programming meant that your GitHub activity would only reflect the commits which you personally made. When your partner was driving and you were navigating, your contribution was not recognized. With frequent role switching, this may not seem to matter all that much. The fact is, though, that you each only got half the credit you deserved. With co-authored commits, you both get full credit for every commit. And there doesn’t seem to be a limit on the number of co-authors, allowing for even more collaborative contributions (perhaps a whole class working together on a project). How to co-author Taking advantage of this new feature is easy. The exact steps depend on where you make your commit (command line, website, or desktop app), but the process is essentially the same. After your commit message, add a “trailer” with the following format: Co-authored-by: Partner Name partner@example.com Just make sure you leave a blank line before the Co-authored-by, and you should be all set. See the if you need more specific instructions. official GitHub help document Now that you know how, start co-authoring your commits today!

Power up your pair programming with co-authored commits on GitHub

trading bots are used by traders to take the fear and emotion out of their trading. These bots allow you to run trading strategies 24/7 (assuming the exchange is working properly) and provide the customization needed to make the bot trade anyway you like. We’ve compiled a list of the best open source (and free) crypto trading bots currently available. Crypto tools All of these bots are available to download and require just a bit of command line experience to get up and running. Even though they are free, each offer many features to keep your automated trading profitable. Gekko (Technical Experience Needed: Beginner) Gekko is currently the most popular open source crypto trading bot with over 6,000 stars on Github. Right out of the box, users are given a web GUI that allows them to import historical market data, backtest their strategies, and run them live on their favorite exchange. One of Gekko’s strong points is its ability to chart results from backtesting and live trading which makes it perfect for beginners to immediately start running a strategy. It also has extensive documentation on how develop your own strategies. Gekko Pros: Frequent Updates Support For Many Exchanges Active Community Easy Installation Simple User Interface Paper/Live Trading Modes Trade Notification Support Via Plugins Gekko Cons: Minimal Details for Backtesting Results Overall, Gekko is an excellent tool for both novice and advanced traders, their simple web GUI makes it easy to quickly backtest and analyze your strategies. Even though the backtesting results view is missing some key performance indicators such as maximum draw-down and win percentage, it is still an excellent tool to have in your trading toolbox. We recommend you run Gekko on your local machine to test and develop your crypto trading strategies. Once you have your strategy ready to go live, install it on a VPS like to guarantee 24/7 uptime and low latency trades. Vultr Zenbot (Technical Experience Needed: Intermediate) Zenbot is an extremely popular and well-maintained crypto trading bot that can be run on your desktop or hosted in the cloud. Out of the box, it comes with over a dozen trading strategies that you can configure and immediately start trading on your favorite exchange. If you are familiar with javascript you can also try your hand on developing your own strategies. provides all code used for the built in strategies and gives examples on how to use technical analysis indicators in them. Zenbot’s repository Zenbot Pros: Frequent Updates Support For Many Exchanges Active Community Paper/Live Trading Modes SMS, Discord, & Many Other Notification Services Detailed Backtesting Results Zenbot Cons: No User Interface (Completely Command-Line Based) Backtesting can be Slow Zenbot is another excellent crypto trading platform for traders to automate their strategies. If you are familiar with using the commandline, you will have no troubles at all getting setup and running. Zenbot also comes with some very helpful utilities such as a to help you optimize the parameters on your trading strategy. We highly recommend installing it locally on your machine for strategy development and faster back testing. Once you are ready to take your strategy live, install Zenbot on a VPS like to ensure your crypto trading bot never goes offline. genetic algorithm backtester Vultr Enigma Catalyst (Technical Experience Needed: Advanced) Enigma Catalyst is an algorithmic trading platform for crypto traders built on top of the well-known . This platform is made for experienced python developers looking to develop, backtest, and live trade their strategies across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges. Catalyst is still in its early stages of development but already has support for some of the best statistical and machine learning libraries. Zipline project Catalyst Pros: Great Documentation Active Community Statistical Analysis and Machine Learning Library Support Catalyst Cons: Minimal Exchange Support for Live Trading Lengthy Installation Process Difficult to Setup in the Cloud Enigma Catalyst currently supports live trading across Bitfinex, Bittrex, and Poloniex. However, integration with other exchanges is planned for releases in the near future. This tool is perfect for you if you have an advanced trading strategy and need a platform powerful enough to implement it. . Easily report your cryptocurrency capital gains with CryptoTrader .Tax Originally published at www.cryptotrader.tax on April 13, 2018. subscribe to coinmonks newsletter

The Best Open Source (and Free) Crypto Trading Bots

Long before youtube, skype, twitter, blogging and cloud computing. Nicolas Negroponte — Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — drew the following diagram to represent convergence of the computing, telecommunications and content industries. In the late eighties, if you wanted a make a phone call, you had to use a landline or a mobile phone. To watch videos, you needed a video player. To listen to music, you needed a music player. To read a newspaper, you had to buy a physical one and to run software, you had to install it on your computer. What is now obvious is that the internet protocol made it possible for these three industries to speak the . We can now make phone calls, watch videos, listen to music, read newspapers and use software on the internet. same language Convergence changed how we consume these services as well as how they are produced. Production of videos, music, news and opinions became decentralized. Anyone can create videos on youtube, music on spotify or publish a blog. We are at the threshold of a new convergence. The coming together of “money” creation, trading and transfer. The is the technology shift that makes this convergence possible. blockchain copyright 2018 — www.tokenchanger.io Before proceeding, let’s understand the scale of of this convergence. The total market for money creation (stable tokens) is all the money in the world — . The daily volume for spot forex transactions is . Global money remittances was worth in 2016. $90 trillion $1.6 trillion $575 billion There are already a mish mesh of services that portend what is to come. There is Tether and TrueUsd, that offer blockchain based money backed by USD in the bank. There is Ether Delta and Ox that offer blockchain based trading systems. The basic condition for convergence is that money creation, trading and transfer must be a seamless experience for the end user. This means that these three activities must happen on the same blockchain. currently offers the best possible condition for convergence. With its graphene blockchain, smart coins and decentralized asset exchange. Start-ups like bitspark are adding the transfer component. Bitshares The use of stable tokens (usd, euro, yen etc) for trading will serve as an enabler for convergence. The ethereum blockchain has the highest number of cryptocurrency tokens in circulation. cryptocurrency That is why is betting that the first large scale implementation of convergence will happen on the ethereum blockchain. Token Changer uses ethereum as its primary blockchain. Token Changer On the Token Changer platform anyone can pegged to fiat currencies. The platform offers a point and click interface for trading tokens including stable tokens. For transfers, the platform implements DApps (decentralized financial applications) for licensed financial institutions. These DApps are used to move value in and out of the blockchain. create stable tokens The whole process of creating, trading and transferring money is seemless for the end user. On the production side, minting of stable tokens is decentralized.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive April 13th, 2018

@chandralingamChandra Lingam

@bigiluiBigi Lui

@rakshithvasudevRakshith Vasudev

@Michael_SpencerMichael K. Spencer

@cabot_solutionsCabot Technology Solution

@pmbanugoPeter Mbanugo

@gusnisbetGus Nisbet

@stpeStefan Pettersson

@upside9Upside9

@chengweizhang2012Chengwei Zhang

@chengweizhang2012Chengwei Zhang

@theMartecThe Martec

@EngineOrgEngine

@BlockExBlockEx

@foundercollectiveFounder Collective

@jareekboyYaroslav Levishchev

@BBerdahBrice Berdah

@Primas_OfficialPrimas

@find.exchangeFind.Exchange

@luklukluhuringsantosoLukluk Luhuring Santoso

@ChrisHerdChris Herd

@patrickleetPatrick Lee Scott

@patrickleetPatrick Lee Scott

@benjcalBenjamín Calderón

@hubtokenHub

@eran_39947Eran Shlomo

@victoria.devVictoria

@james.kyle.lemonKyle Lemon

@lucaswylandLucas Wyland

@alexis.bizalionAlexis Bizalion

@chandralingam
Chandra Lingam

@bigilui
Bigi Lui

@rakshithvasudev
Rakshith Vasudev

@Michael_Spencer
Michael K. Spencer

@cabot_solutions
Cabot Technology Solution

@pmbanugo
Peter Mbanugo

@gusnisbet
Gus Nisbet

@stpe
Stefan Pettersson

@upside9
Upside9

@chengweizhang2012
Chengwei Zhang

@chengweizhang2012
Chengwei Zhang

@theMartec
The Martec

@EngineOrg
Engine

@BlockEx
BlockEx

@foundercollective
Founder Collective

@jareekboy
Yaroslav Levishchev

@BBerdah
Brice Berdah

@Primas_Official
Primas

@find.exchange
Find.Exchange

@luklukluhuringsantoso
Lukluk Luhuring Santoso

@ChrisHerd
Chris Herd

@patrickleet
Patrick Lee Scott

@patrickleet
Patrick Lee Scott

@benjcal
Benjamín Calderón

@hubtoken
Hub

@eran_39947
Eran Shlomo

@victoria.dev
Victoria

@james.kyle.lemon
Kyle Lemon

@lucaswyland
Lucas Wyland

@alexis.bizalion
Alexis Bizalion