The right offer will give you the right clients Getting clients. Making sales. It’s the cornerstone to making any business work. Yet so many businesses are getting the key piece to doing this totally wrong. Or they’re doing it poorly but don’t recognize what’s causing them to struggle to bring in new clients. What’s this key missing piece? A compelling offer (aka, your messaging) that grabs your dream clients by their eyeballs. Whether you’re making your offer in person, over the phone or via your website, there are three big offer mistakes that cause dream clients to click away, say “no” or run screaming in the other direction (or all three). If you’re having problems booking clients or selling your products, the first thing you should look at is how you’re communicating your offer. In this article and video, you will learn what to focus on in your sales conversation so that your clients will be encouraged to sign up to your program, how to connect with what your clients need from you, and finally, how to communicate with your clients so they’ll be more than willing to pay for your services, even at higher fees. Read it or watch it and let me know what you think. If you got some nuggets of wisdom from watching this video, please share this video post with a few of your friends. Prefer to Listen? #1: You’re focusing on the “how” instead of the transformation The first big mistake that you might be making with your offer is that you’re focusing too much on the “how” of how you help people change or get results. This is the part of your sales process that talks about the number of sessions they get with you, how long those sessions are, how many modules they get in your program, how many DVDs or CDs, or how long the things are. That’s the process of how you help your clients and not the transformation you provide. For example, if I’m your client and you’re going on and on about the number of sessions I get when I sign up with you, I may be sitting there thinking, “Oh my gosh 12 sessions, I don’t have time for 12 sessions.” Or I read your sales page and it touts how your program has over 40 modules in it, I’m certainly thinking, “Whaattt? How am I going to get through all that?!” (That’s a true story about a program from a marketing guru I was considering investing in and didn’t for exactly that reason.) As the person who is providing the service or product, you may thinking that packing more in and highlighting how much stuff your clients get is a great strategy, but the “stuff” isn’t really what your potential clients care most about. What they care most about is the transformation that’s going to happen from working with you , i.e., the results they’ll get, like how their business is going to improve, how much happier they’ll feel, and how much easier something will be. Instead of focusing on how many sessions that somebody gets, how long they work with you, focus on the transformation you’re going to give them. If you’re a health coach for example, focus on how much healthier is the person going to feel, how much more energy they’re going to have, how much weight they can lose, how they’re going to feel great about being a great mom because they’re feeding their kids healthy and nutritious that they can make in less than 10 or 30 minutes for example. That’s what your best clients really care about, not the process or how many sessions or how long the sessions are. Do your sales conversations or online sales pages focus on the details of how you deliver the results instead of the results themselves? If so, make sure you change that right after you’ve finished reading the rest of this post. #2: You’re not solving a big problem that your dream clients feel they have Another huge messaging mistake that entrepreneurs make is focusing on solving a problem that your ideal clients don’t think they have and/or solving a problem that they don’t feel is really important to solve. When creating any offer or messaging, you must first and foremost think from your dream client’s perspective. What do they think are their really big problems? Which ones do they want fixed NOW? Which problems are so urgent or painful that they’ll do just about anything to solve them? These are the real problems your ideal clients feel they have… and they may be different than the ones you as the expert know need to be solved. That’s where many people get tripped up with creating their offers and messaging. I’ll give you an example of focusing on the real problem of your clients. When I was working with , his introductory live program was called The Millionaire Mind Intensive. The hook — the motivator — that got people to travel from all over the world to attend his events was the dream of being a millionaire and having no more money problems. When people read the sales page for the Millionaire Mind Intensive or heard about it, they’d think, “I want to be a millionaire.” And, the message appealed to a primal internal desire everyone has: the need for safety and security (in this case, financial security). If Harv had called the event The 3-Day Personal Development Extravaganza, no one would have showed up! T. Harv Eker But, the interesting part is that The Millionaire Mind Intensive wasn’t about the latest investment strategies or business methods. It was all about mindset and personal development. It was about the inner changes you have to make in order to become a millionaire. As the expert Harv knew that if you have belief systems that keep you from feeling good about being wealthy, they’ll stop you from consistently making or accumulating a lot of it. The “promise” of learning how to become a millionaire got people in the door so people could get the transformation they actually needed to do that. Ask yourself: “Do my offers focus on a big problem my dream clients feel they have?” If not — or you’re not sure — you need to fix that, pronto! #3: Your offers are drowning in jargon One other mistake that I’m going to share with you today that people make when creating their offers and messaging is loading them up with industry jargon. For example, if you’ve been in the personal development world for awhile, or you’re a coach, healer or transformation expert, you’ve been steeped in the language of empowerment, inner balance, feeling peaceful and being inspired. But those words are all industry jargon and they’re not the words your ideal clients are most often using to describe their problems and desired solutions. You may not think what you’re saying is foreign to your clients, but it is. Jargon can be really hard to spot because we’re all so used to using terms common in our niche or market (and why it’s so helpful to ). get an outside set of eyes on your offer In the coaching industry, for example, your ideal clients don’t walk around saying, “I wish I was more empowered and inspired to build a profitable business and get my life more balanced with kids and work.” They don’t say that. What they do say are things like “I wish I can just connect with my dream clients” or “I wish I could just get booked,” or “I wish I could make more money in my business,” or “I wish I could have a business and do the work that I really want to do and feel like a great mom, too, and not feel like I’m sucking at both of them.” So you have to think, “What words are your dream clients using when they’re talking about their problems in their heads or when they’re talking to their friends about their problems?” That is how you start getting clear on the language you should be using in your offers and throughout your brand messaging. If you’re struggling to attract and book loads of your dream clients, grab your offers and go back through this post to find out where your messaging may be off. Share your thoughts! After reading this article and/or watching the video, what changes do you need to make to your offers? What are you already doing right? And if you liked this article, I’d be honored if you shared it. ❤ Drop a comment below! You decided long ago that life was too short to spend it working a typical J-O-B, so you made the leap into pursuing your passion. You’re committed to making a difference in the lives of your clients… and the world. You’ve even built a business around it. But instead of having more freedom, income and fulfillment in your life, you’re running 24/7 because you’re just not bringing in enough clients at fees high enough to make your business work financially. Let me assure you, raising your fees AND having a full client list IS possible… and it’s possible for you! Book more clients today + get paid more while doing the work you love! Click here now! I help heart-centered go-getters build wildly successful, purpose-led businesses and joyful, fulfilling lives by combining smart, practical strategies with powerful mindset and spiritual principles. Step by step I guide you through making the changes you need to go from overwhelmed, confused or just getting by to living an authentic, soul-aligned and rich life in every way. Welcome! I’m Christine Parma. Get access to exclusive training, personal feedback and coaching… for FREE! Join the Successful Women Entrepreneurs community to get access to exclusive training, coaching and support to help you build a wildly successful business you love and a life you love even more! Click Here Now! You’re passionately dedicated to doing work that sets your heart on fire, supports the kind of life you want to have and makes a big difference beyond the dollars it puts in your bank account. But, you’re drowning in DIY how-to information and struggling to make progress. It’s time to stop spinning your wheels and get your work out into the world! Click Here to Learn More. Stop running yourself ragged to earn way less than you deserve by serving private clients at low fees. It’s time to package up your brilliance into your own signature system that gets clients get amazing results so you can charge more — and get it — with integrity and ease. Profit Now with Premium Programs! Originally published at christineparma.com .

fees

The 3 Big Offer Mistakes That Repel Your Dream Clients and Keep You Struggling

Understanding what constitutes Art, what it means to the human experience, and the consequences of Superintelligence on the freedom of human expression. Art exists for two entities — the Creator and the Recipient. For the former, it is the tangible result of various internal mental processes combining with an intent to convey them, tainted by emotion and experience. It is the physical manifestation of the artist’s perception and cognition. For the latter, it is a medium of connecting with a Universal truth. It is the ultimate cathartic experience, meant to fill the Recipient with the sentiment felt at the time of creation by simply exploring the piece. It is not bound by time, context, or a shared meaning of social structure or understanding of the world — it is simply felt, at some point, by some Observer who has voluntarily or involuntarily opened their mind and become Recipient. Art is not scientific or formulaic — it is feeling and emotion driven. Yet it is not without technique — an artist must conform to a certain level of shared meaning with the world, adapting forms, structures and shapes that create representations that can be understood by a wider audience. Yet, there is no constraint, limitation or universal law describing the extent to which the artist must conform to these frameworks. Thus, unlike in science, math, or anything logical, art is individualistic and guided by the Artist’s free will. It is perhaps the freest form of humankind possesses — not limited by language, logic or medium. expression While art is without purpose, it is with intent. It is with the artist’s intent of conveying the barest form of truth; the present state of the soul; a portrayal of the version of his existence at the time of creation. Therefore, it is not simply the consequences of an individual’s actions at a time of an emotionally charged mental state that constitute art — it is his intent to transform those into a vehicle of communication. Machine learning refers to the idea of feeding computers with huge masses of data, and equipping them with algorithms to be able to sort, filter through and create representations of the information. Advanced image-recognition software, then, once fed with enough pictures, paintings, or pieces of art, should be able to churn out its own version of art, using rules, finding patterns, extracting properties and making generalisations. But to what purpose? Some could argue that the phenomenon of Art has wide-ranging uses and implications in the industrial world. It can be combined with logic, language, consumer-behaviour statistics and an understanding of the mind to create successful advertisements and commercials. Art can be used with space to create sculptures, civic spaces and public areas. Art could be combined with faith, resulting in purposeful architectural wonders — chapels, cathedrals, mosques and temples. Granted, a consequence of Art is that it can be used to make money. It is not uncommon for economically and politically motivated parties to capitalize on a fleeting moment of human vulnerability and emotion to sell an experience. And thus was created the science of . human design Perhaps AI systems can churn out effective, captivating Perhaps companies will no longer have to hire designers to create websites, posters and advertisements. Perhaps governments will no longer require creative personnel to craft political campaigns. After being fed with various paintings, styles, descriptions of sentiments and an understanding of space, AIs can use human-supplied tools, frameworks and information to create representations. But as they get smarter over time, the human intervention and influence required to program, maintain, and monitor the robot will decrease. And one day, the robot will become smart enough to maintain itself. And some days later, it will program another machine — several other machines — to churn out designs as well. designs. The claim that robots are capable of design and not Art is idealistic — a comforting thought to hold on to as we contemplate the destruction, loss and corruption of one of our most organic forms of communication. But does the research support it? Apparently not. Lamus is a computer that composes and produces music. A conducted by researchers at the University of Malaga asked a group of 250 participants, including professional musicians, to distinguish between human-produced music and music composed by Lamus. study “The computer piece raises the same feelings and emotions as the human one, and participants can’t distinguish them”, researchers said. , an autonomous art-making program, has already sold paintings to the SF MOMA, the Tate Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum. It paints not with pixels, but with paint on an actual canvas. Benjamin Grosser’s uses background audio, sounds of conversation and its own ‘internal mechanisms’ to create paintings. So AIs appear to be fulfilling the criteria of ‘evoking sentiment and feeling in the Recipients’ to be classified as Art. However, do they do so with intent? AARON Interactive Robotic Painting Machine AIs are non-conscious — a non-conscious entity possess intent? can The current of intention indicates that it involves which sound suspiciously like elements of cognition. Therefore, this suggests a machine must have the in order to create Art. definition planning & forethought, ability to think So if a machine think, can it create Art? can Wait — you need to answer the question ‘Can a machine think?’ first. Can a machine think? Humanity is not equipped to answer that question. We don’t fully understand how the human mind works, so we don’t know exactly what ‘thinking’ entails. We may, through trial and error, and large datasets, be able to create robots that and human behaviour, a result of ‘thinking’. But if we can’t operationalize or define the term ‘thinking’, we can’t devise a test to measure it. replicate imitate Then how do we measure machine intelligence? Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, said that the question ‘Can a machine think’ was too broad and “too meaningless to warrant discussion”. Instead, he proposed an Imitation Game — a test to see how well can machines could humans. Any machine that could fool a judge into believing that they were communicating with a human would pass this ‘Turing Test’. imitate It is a popular misconception that passing this Turing Test renders a machine ‘intelligent’ — this is false. In his paper, Turing does not make any direct associations between success on the test and machine intelligence. Yet, people associate the two, because, in humans, cognition guides behaviour. When there is a change in behaviour, we are often able to attribute it to a change it the functioning of the brain, i.e. a change in cognition. However, the behaviour of the machines is a function of the data it receives. A change in data causes a change in behaviour. Therefore, the success of a computer on a Turing Test cannot be attributed to its internal mechanisms OK — what if we somehow invent a test to measure machine intelligence, and find it to be cognitively indistinguishable from a human, thus capable of expressing intent? Then, perhaps, we can with certainty say that these ‘generally intelligent’ entities can produce Art. But it’s worth pondering — if they are creating Art, to whom does it belong — the robot, or the artist that programmed it? Will these new entities also learn to cultivate emotion, or will it simply reflect the biases of the programmer in its Art? Will the emotion that is evoked from the art piece be those that the programmer intended to convey? Or maybe we’re looking at this all wrong, too scientifically, too technically. Maybe the machine the Artwork — a vehicle of communication, an extra layer of complexity added to convey the Creator’s truth. is The earliest Homo sapiens drew on the walls of caves 42,000 years ago. Later, our ancestors discovered paper, canvas, sculpting materials and tools. Years later, graphic design was born. Evolution shows a pattern of discovery, innovation, and an ability of the human race to adapt and adopt these new paradigms, changing the way we convey meaning and interact with the world at each stage of history. Maybe embracing this new medium is simply humanity’s way of adapting to make the timeless, fluid concept of Art more relevant in tomorrow’s world.

Discovery

AI’s Biggest Crime Yet — Stealing the Freedom of Human Expression

Are you irritated with trying to use SIRI to record your voice? Dumping ideas or dictating a response to an email becomes laborious if you have to pussy foot around SIRI’s transcription limitations. Maybe you are like me where the ideas I come up with are so fleeting and “in the moment” that the discipline of dealing with SIRI just kills the opportunity. The discipline to organise, enunciate and repeat. And the agony of waiting to see if SIRI even heard you. Ive discovered a workaround and here is how I’m doing it: on iPhone: “Hey Siri”“Dink”“Record”****iPhone starts recording video with audio****I talkI have to use the iPhone screen to stop recording but it works! On Apple Watch ** Long Press crown to invoke SIRI*****“Dink”“Record”A red record button appears.I press it.It starts recording.A stop button appears for me to end the recording when I’m done. If you try it now, it probably won’t work for you. So how does it work for me? Well, I stumbled across something really simple, effective and easy to use… and I’ve never seen anybody else using it so I thought it ought to be shared in the off chance you share my frustration. An often unused feature of SIRI is its ability to open an app with just the app name. So here is the trick… if you find an audio or video iOS or watch app that has the name “record”, then SIRI will open it and run it as if it was a generic SIRI instruction. In the case of the iPhone App described above I used the app “Record” which has an auto record capability. This means that when you open it, it immediately starts recording video until you end the recording. This suits me because I often just use the Record app to capture ideas or email dictation for transcription to Evernote or email later. In the case of the Apple Watch I’ve installed a watch app called Record that just records audio. Its saves locally and then automatically backs-up to your iPhone so it works great. I have a PA so I share the recorded dictation with her and she takes over from there for me… but even if you are doing your own transcription it is so fantastic just being able to have a flow of consciousness without the technology getting in the way. As an inventor I am always coming up with flashes and intuitions that are lost if not immediately captured so this has been an essential tool for me. Hope you can use it too. Update: just wanted to add that the two quick record apps I use are “Just press record” (which is displayed as simply “Record” in your home screen and when using Siri) and “Quick record”. Thanks and good catch Dano Lee. https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/just-press-record/id1033342465?mt=8

Flow

Apple

How to use SIRI to record Audio or video

Nowadays, SEO is not all about optimizing content for right keywords and getting backlinks to your website. SEO factors are changing every year and thus, you have to put more efforts to rank #1. SEO is a vast concept and it’s better to stay updated with every new terminology that endures in SEO world. You might have heard webmasters talking about Crawl Budget and Googlebot. Wondering what is Crawl Budget? Does crawl budget have anything to do with my website ranking? Let’s dive in to update SEO knowledge. What is crawling in SEO? Google sends its bots called Googlebot or Google’s Spiders (probably not as scary as real spiders) to crawl your web pages and index the words and content within. Once the crawling is done, these results are put into Google’s index. Thus, it is important that Google should easily find all your Web pages. Hence, to make all URLs easily found by Googlebot, sitemap is a must. If your site has few hundred of URLs then the search engine will crawl your website easily. But, if you have a website with thousands of pages and many new URLs are auto-generated every day then Google might not crawl all of these pages. Thus, prioritizing what to crawl, when to crawl and how much to crawl becomes important. Now comes the crawl rate and crawl budget into the picture. Don’t worry — it’s not difficult to understand this concept. What is crawl budget? Crawl budget is derived from two very important factors: Crawl Rate and Crawl Demand. Considering the crawl rate and crawl demand of your website, we can define the crawl budget as ‘the number of web pages or URLs Googlebot can or want to crawl from your website’. Crawl Rate Limit: Crawl Rate limit is introduced so that Google should not crawl too many pages too fast from your website leaving your server exhausted. Crawl Rate limit stops Google from making too many requests as it may result in slowing down your website’s speed. Crawl rate may spike up or drip down depending on: Your site’s speed: If your site speed is slow or server response time is low then crawl rate limit drops and Googlebot crawl only a few of your pages. If your site is responding quickly then crawling rate may increase. You can set crawl rate limit in search console. However, setting high limit doesn’t guarantee high crawl rate. Crawl Demand: If the demand for indexing your web pages is low then Googlebot will avoid crawling your pages. Google says that popular and updated content has higher crawl rate demand. Crawl demand depends on the popularity of your web pages as well as the freshness and originality of your content. Thus, your website’s Crawl Budget is defined as the number of URLs Googlebot can or want to crawl depending on your website’s crawl rate limit and crawl demand mutually. Got it? Great! But the bottom line is, you want Google to crawl all your web pages and you want that Googlebot should keep revisiting your website for new pages. Obviously, you don’t want to miss out the traffic on pages which are not crawled by Googlebot. So, let’s see what factors can affect crawl budget. Pages that add low or zero value will decrease your crawl budget. Thus, make sure you remove all low-value-add URLs. Outdated content is not preferable. Update your website time to time giving new fresh content to your users. Duplicate content can ruin your website. Come up with original content. Duplicate Meta and Title Tags can cause disasters. Remember, it’s better to have no Meta and Title Tags then to have duplicate ones. Nobody likes a slow loading website. Optimize your website speed for both mobile and desktop views. Here’s where you can check your website’s speed: . Pagespeed Insights User comes first. Always do it for your users and not for Google. Fulfill your users’ demands rather than impressing Google by doing unwanted optimizations. Here is a snapshot showing PageSpeed Insights for a price comparison website called Pricekart.com Now is the time to answer some of the questions that may be rising in your minds. 1) How to increase crawl budget? You can increase your crawl budget by: Giving fresh and original content to users. Making sure that your page response time is quick. Avoiding Infinite spaces and proxies in web pages. Making sure that every URLs in your website should add value to your user. Here’s where you can get your website audited for technical errors that are preventing your website from ranking high: . Get SEO Audit Report 2) How to check crawl budget? You can use the free tool given by Google itself, . You can easily check your crawl stats here. Also, you can check server errors and crawl errors and optimize your site to increase your crawl budget. Google Search Console Here’s a snapshot from Google Search Console showing crawl variations over a period of 90 days. 3) How will crawl budget affect your website ranking? Obviously, if many of your web pages aren’t getting crawled, you’ll never see traffic on those pages. Low crawl budget can lead to low ranking as many of your pages will never rank in Google. Thus, you need to make sure that all your important pages must be crawled by Google. High crawl budget doesn’t guarantee high rankings. It’s all about quality and demand. To increase your website ranking you can opt for our . We are best in the market to provide you all the SEO help you need. Note: Profession SEO Packages 4) How to check crawl demand? When a topic or a search query becomes popular and frequently searched by users in Google search box, the popularity of web pages giving information related to it also increases. Thus, we can say that demand has increased and Googlebot are out now to index more and more pages which can be displayed as SERP but making sure that user experience is not degraded. You can check what is trending by using and try to make your content revolve around what is trending in Google World. Google Trends Here’s a snapshot showing Google Trend stats for keyword ‘search engine optimization’. Verdict: Crawl budget is an important factor to be considered while doing SEO for websites. Very low crawl budget means Google doesn’t like your web pages much. Very high crawl budget doesn’t guarantee high ranking. Also, you don’t want very high crawling as that might overload your server. You can’t increase or decrease your website’s crawl budget by simple setting some limits. However, you can make your site capable enough to have a sufficient crawl budget by taking care of factors like good unique content, updated information and high page speed.

Google

What Is Crawl Budget And How It Will Affect Your Website Ranking?

Photo by on Curtis MacNewton Unsplash Let’s face it, not everyone knows or cares what a tester is doing every day and how is she/he doing the testing. The most common opinion that I have heard is that testers are doing quite a boring job, clicking around and trying to find defects or to break the application. Well, that’s true, but there is much more than that. During the years I have dealt with many typologies of managers. From ones seeing the testing activity as part of the development process, understanding what software testing is and what is not to the ones seeing software testing as some additional thing to do after you finish the development, some kind of checking that the door is closed. You can easily spot which ones I prefer, don’t you? But we don’t have the possibility to choose, not every time, that’s why we need to adapt. A good way for us is to sit with our manager and set together the proper expectations with respect to the testing activities. I got to the point to think that a manager should know the following about software testing and more than that, about testers. 1. Software testing is not bulletproof If you have a person or group of people called “testers” exercising the functionalities of an application and struggling to find any possible defect, does not mean that after they give the “go-live” approval, that application will be defects free. Usually, the software testing includes also the following: understanding the business of the application under test; designing the scenarios to test a specific functionality; thinking to all possible scenarios an user can exercise the functionalities of the application; Having all the above accomplished and having a very good testing coverage, being it manual or automated, doesn’t make you 100% sure that no defects are going to be found by the end users. Also, if an application is tested does not mean it has zero defects. 2. Software testing is hard to estimate I’m getting very often the following question: “When do you think the user story are you working on can be put in Done column?” And my answer comes: “It depends.” Well, yes, it really depends. When it comes to estimate the effort of testing, I have seen that many testers are making more like some or they led themselves driven by their own gut or experience. And that is because in most of the cases, testing a certain functionality is much more than going through each step of the acceptance criteria, do some clicking and deciding which step passes or fails. It also requires a closest look to the following aspects which might become variables in your estimation equation. guesstimates Encountering other defects while testing your piece of functionality. This leads to investing more time than expected in trying to figure out how to reproduce those defects or if they are blockers for you or not. Running into user acceptance criteria inconsistencies which requires more time spent with the product team to clarify these. Regressions. Or parts of the application we wouldn’t expected to be affected by the latest code. Finding defects and spend the time in discussing and documenting them. And then wait for those defects to be fixed, for you to be able to make confirmation testing and then regression testing to be sure that the fixes did not break something else. Change requests. Testing servers down time or failed builds. Photo by on ben stern Unsplash 3. Rushing the testing before the end of the cycle is not the best solution If you are working on cycles (Sprints if you follow the Agile methodologies) you know well that it happens very often that testers get the code to be tested 2–3 days before the end of the Sprint. Obviously, this is not a rule. There are cases when true Agile works, and testers and developers are working together in delivering the functionalities. But, let’s think to the first scenario and assume the Sprint is two weeks long. You, as tester, spend the first week preparing the test cases, thinking and documenting the test scenarios based on the user acceptance criteria, prepare some test data or even write the skeleton of your automated tests. Maybe test some of the user stories that are finished to be implemented. Then there come a couple of days when nothing much happens. And after that, here you are one day before closing the Sprint and more than half of the user stories part of the initial commitment are suddenly ready for testing. When you happen to have such bottleneck, better propose to your manager to look closer to some other aspects of the delivery process too. Reaching to the point when testers get overwhelmed at the end of the Sprint and rushed to close all the user stories might be caused by some other process aspects that are not working very well. Take away! :) I think it is part of our duties as testers to create awareness of what software testing means and what does it implies. I would also like to encourage the testers to work with their manager in setting accurate expectations with respect to their testing activities and to not compromise the quality of their application under test because of some external pressures.

3 Things Your Manager Should Know About You As Tester

Created with https://canva.com Puns definitely intended, keeping some alive is essential for a healthy life in reality and production. connections Redis Pubsub is pretty awesome, along with the swiss-army-knife-esque ( as we at like our functions lispy :)). Redis standard can be interpreted as Pubsub connections are undying, meaning they can survive long idle times. Carmine — all-Clojure Redis client Clojure Swym documentation Source — https://redis.io/topics/clients Sounds like the perfect story. And like every perfect story, it is not perfect :/, a paradox. Redis client connections have been the topic of numerous discussions, across tech stacks (Issue links at the bottom of the post). How does one ensure long-living connections or undying connections for their Pubsub clients? How do the connections get recycled without holding on to deadbeats, in the client connection sense? What is the best config to handle this? Surely we are not the only ones on the face of this planet to encounter this At we have scenarios where Redis Pubsub pushes out events primarily to purge any cached data. The cache is distributed across load balanced services. Hence the events need to reach the far depths of the service to purge all relevant data. Swym, really That’s the crux. So it is critical for it to be healthy. Thanks to some inexplicable issues with our Redis service on Azure, our Pubsub connections will die out for “no” reason. Ideally, we would like to be alerted when those go down, so something can be done, or even better, to keep them alive as much as possible. Are you alive even? According to the client, the connection is alive. According to the Redis server, the connection is kinda alive, but not really. Here is an example Client state 1 Publish 1 Subscriber 1 … A few minutes later … Connection state 2 Publish 2 Subscriber 2 — nope, can’t hear you Another case is when Redis clustering kicks in with secondary shards, kinda rendering the previous connections invalid, or the Redis instance decides to reboot. So we had two main issues Connection failures are not notified as an “error”, in most cases. These are system failures and should be reported to devops/tools so something can be done about it Connections should not fail because of idleness. The connections should continue to survive periods of radio silence, reducing the number of stale connections (read 1). One potential way to manage TCP timeouts - by setting to some reasonable value instead of defaults (300 in my case). > but as you see in the screenshots, the connection “existed” at 322, maybe my client TCP needs to be configured as well. This seems like a configuration issue, or is it? tcp-keepalive https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/1810, Using the source Carmine is a great library with all things one can think of, and shoutout to for putting such awesome pieces of Clojure out there. I started with a reading of the source, like Master Yoda would counsel (may his memory last longer than these redis connections :/). I was happy to see a few and code TODOs in the source. Peter Taoensso outstanding issues The issue has been open for years. So, naturally, this presents an opportunity to roll up my sleeves and figure out a way. Redis (v3.2+) has had “PING” on Pubsub connections for a while now. This means that connection idle time can be managed with a series of heartbeat pings. Here is how carmine’s works with-pubsub-new-listener Start a long-running thread with a to poll on the connection socket stream future-call When a reply is received, pass it back to the message handlers. There is one big issue with this — as a Clojure future catches an error within the thread of execution and does not notify anyone unless another thread tries to realize the future. In this case, the future never finishes evaluation unless there is a socket read/timeout error. This needs a timely poll to check the evaluation state of the future. Here is some code to show that, (require '[taoensso.carmine :as car]);(def conn-spec {:host "localhost" :port 6379}) ;; replace with your spec(def l (car/with-new-pubsub-listener conn-spec {"ps-foo" #(println %)} (car/subscribe "ps-foo")))(realized? (:future l)); false (def l-status (future (while (not (realized? (:future l)))(println "realized" (:future l)))));;realized #object[clojure.core$future_call$reify__6962 0x154a8d5 {:status :pending, :val nil}] ;;...... A lot of logs later ...... ;;realized #object[clojure.core$future_call$reify__6962 0x154a8d5 {:status :failed, :val #error {; :cause nil; :via; [{:type java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException;   :message java.io.EOFException;   :at [java.util.concurrent.FutureTask report FutureTask.java 122]};  {:type java.io.EOFException;   :message nil;   :at [java.io.DataInputStream readByte DataInputStream.java 267]}]; :trace; [... <<truncated>> ...]}}];; That doesn’t sound like the best use of CPU cycles. So first thing, add a way to callback an error handler in the — This will allow end clients to be notified of connection failures and retry based on the exception. future-call Next up, add a future call to PING in case there are no messages received after a specified timeout ( in the conn-spec, default to 30 seconds). Add timely heartbeats when the connection goes idle. ping-ms With those two in place ( :)), here is what it looks like, using my new library (require '[taoensso.carmine :as car])(require '[redis-pubsub.core :as pubsub])(def keepalive-l ( conn-spec{"ps-foo" #(println %)"pubsub:ping" #(println "ping" %)"pubsub:listener:fail" #(println "listener failed - add try again" %)}(car/subscribe "ps-foo"))) pubsub/with-new-keepalive-pubsub-listener ;; prints ping [pong pubsub:ping] after 30 seconds of idleness ;; When listener fails, immediately a callback is fired; listener failed - add try again [pubsub:error pubsub:listener:fail #error {; :cause nil; :via; [{:type java.io.EOFException;   :message nil;   :at [java.io.DataInputStream readByte DataInputStream.java 267]}]; :trace; [... <<truncated>> ...]}] After running test cases successfully, time to share the goodness with other people. There is a opened on the main library project, but it could take a while as I might have broken other deeper test cases (I hope none). So here it is as an add-on library ( , yay!) that can be included with carmine. With that, you can give your connections the heartbeat they need. Pull Request my first on clojars Thanks for reading! Do try it out and let me know how you have handled it in your Clojure services? Shameless plug — If you are interested in being more than a reader, let’s work together — :)! we are actively looking to work with cool people like you References https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/redis-db/MwHnkLLs070 https://github.com/andymccurdy/redis-py/issues/386 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8678349/subscription-to-redis-channel-does-not-keep-alive https://github.com/ptaoussanis/carmine/issues/15, https://github.com/ptaoussanis/carmine/issues/201 http://rossipedia.com/blog/2014/01/redis-i-like-you-but-youre-crazy/ P.S: You have come this far :), maybe you’d like my other Clojure posts too, just putting it out there - _At Swym, we use Clojure for a lot of things. And invariably, we have ended up with use cases where macros are deemed…_hackernoon.com Clojure Macros — Lessons from unspoken symbols _Clojure is a language I am learning as I work on awesome stuff at Swym Corporation. When I came on board last year, I…_hackernoon.com Destructuring Clojure with Javascript

Stacks

Timely

Trace

Read My Stories

Keeping your connections alive — A Clojure - Redis story

The more I learn about coding, the more inspired I get about how creative and revolutionary some of these ideas are. From the readability of Ruby, to a world of hashes in , these ideas keep renewing the way we think and evolve the tech world all the time. Javascript “No Logic/Coding in Front End” This was a common stereotype that I noticed was common among up and coming developers at Makers Academy, when consulting them over their job prospects and interests. In our company we have found it very difficult to find a mid and senior level front end developer to join our team. It does make me think about whether this attitude is something that contributes towards developers not wanting commit to the front end. But recently the front end has been revolutionised with multiple ideas such as CSS grids, the standardisation from Bootstrap and the use of … components The Before Here we show how pages are made up typically. (Using the dev tools mode in Chrome (Apple + Alt + I and then going to the Elements Tab) shows the HTML code of the page) We put all the elements of the page in between the body tags of the HTML code which outputs to the page. This seems like a totally fine way of doing thing but the question is, what if had lots of pages and we wanted the header and footer to be on all of them? We would be copying and pasting that code a lot on each of our pages which would be quite an inefficient way of doing things. The Refactor Mindset (In Vue.js) Whenever DRY (Do Not Repeat Yourself) appears in code, it means one thing… we can refactor it into something reusable, that is referred to! There are a few suggestions for this such as using partials, but the most popular one over the last few years has been to use Components, as popularised by the Facebook developers using React.js. Lets look at an example using Vue.js, which is similar to React.js. I like Vue.js because it is more readable and clearer then React imo. Our components are stored in vue files, and its parent vue file refers to it, usually called App.vue. Each vue file always has the same structure where it is divided into three parts; <template> < script> // HTML of the component goes here /template>
<script>
/ / Code goes here
</ < > style </ > style So lets split up our code and put them into a separate vue file in a folder called components. We’ll take out the footer code and put that into Header.vue. The HTML goes inside the template tags, and we create a variable in the data hash that contains the text. // Header.vue < > template < > header < > p {{ headerText }} </ > p </ > header </ > template < > script { : { : ,
    }
} export default data headerText "This is the header" </ > script < > style </ > style In our original App.vue file, we refer to that newly created header component we just created. <template> <br>
        <app-header></app-header>
        <hr>
        <h1>The Article</h1>
        <article class="article">
            Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
        </article>
        <hr>
        <footer>
            <p>This is the footer</p>
        </footer>
    </div>
</template>
<script>
import appHeader from './components/Header.vue'
export default {
  components: {
    'app-header': appHeader,
  },
};
</script>
<style>
</style> // App.vue < = > div class "container" In the script, we import that component using the component hash, then we use that name into its own customly named html tag, in this case we called it <app-header>. We can use the name ‘header’ but because that is aleady a tag name that exists we want to avoid these names as to avoid any conflicting code. This is how Vue refers to its components, which is different to React.js. So lets do the same thing with the Article and Footer section. <template> <h1>The Article</h1> <article>{{ articleText }}</article> < script> // Article.vue < > div </ > div /template>
<script>
export default {
    data() {
        return {
            articleText: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."
        }
    }
}
</ < > style </ > style Now the footer… <template> < script> {{ footerText }} < > footer </ > footer /template>
<script>
export default {
    data() {
        return {
            footerText: "This is the footer",
        }
    }
}
</ < = > style lang "css" </ > style The final App.vue; <template> <br>
        <app-header></app-header>
        <hr>
        <app-article></app-article>
        <hr>
        <app-footer></app-footer>
    </div>
</template>
<script>
import appHeader from './components/Header.vue'
import appArticle from './components/Article.vue'
import appFooter from './components/Footer.vue'
export default {
  components: {
    'app-header': appHeader,
    'app-article': appArticle,
    'app-footer': appFooter,
  },
};
</script>
<style>
</style> < = > div class "container" After all this work, its the same look exactly. But now we have reusable components! This means that any other page we want to create, we can import in those components and use it. And what is great is that its very easy to tell which component has been imported in, and where in the page it is in by just looking at the template section. Front End Revolutionised Components are super flexible and reusable which are great for huge websites. Even elements such as buttons and forms can be components and therefore reusable throughout. The styling of each component can also be included within it, which is great for consistency of the branding of the website. Another reason why components are great is that logic from functions can also be added to each component. This really changed the way websites were created as the logic was typically put in a completely separate place to the HTML. Now, it is added into the component which means that the logic is linked to it right there and can be easier to find. This means that a lot of the logic is now mixed in with the front end, allowing for a more full stack experience for front end devs and at the same time putting less stress on the the backend which only contains the code that is relevant to what it is trying to do. (It seems like this will be the battle of the component based Javascript framework! Who will win?) I hope everyone will have a great May day bank holiday weekend, cya next time!

Facebook

Super

Winner of Noonies 2020 for the award Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year - APPS.

2020 - Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year in APPS

<Lets code! />

Front End Refactored — Components with Vue

Starting from where we ended, let’s continue on discussing different boosting algorithm. If you have not read the previous article which explains boosting and AdaBoost, please have a look. Link: https://medium.com/@grohith327/boosting-algorithms-adaboost-gradient-boosting-and-xgboost-f74991cad38c Gradient Boosting: Moving on, let’s have a look another boosting , gradient boosting. Gradient Boosting is also a boosting algorithm(Duh!), hence it also tries to create a strong learner from an ensemble of weak learners. This is algorithm is similar to Adaptive Boosting(AdaBoost) but differs from it on certain aspects. In this method we try to visualise the boosting problem as an optimisation problem, i.e we take up a loss function and try to optimise it. This idea was first developed by . algorithm Leo Breiman How is Gradient Boosting interpreted as an optimisation problem? We take up a weak learner(in previous case it was decision stump) and at each step, we add another weak learner to increase the performance and build a strong learner. This reduces the loss of the loss function. We iteratively add each model and compute the loss. The loss represents the error residuals(the difference between actual value and predicted value) and using this loss value the predictions are updated to minimise the residuals. Let us break it down step by step. In the first iteration, we take a simple model and try to fit the complete data. You can from the above image that the prediction values of the model of the ground truth are different. The error residuals are plotted on the right side of the image. The loss function is trying to reduce these error residuals by adding more weak learners. The new weak learners are added to concentrate on the areas where the existing learners are performing poorly. After three iterations, you can observe that model is able to fit the data better. This process is iteratively carried out until the residuals are zero. After 20 iterations, the model almost fits the data exactly and the residuals drop to zero. # Gradient Boostingfrom sklearn.ensemble import GradientBoostingClassifier clf = GradientBoostingClassifier()# n_estimators = 100 (default)# loss function = deviance(default) used in Logistic Regressionclf.fit(x_train,y_train)clf.predict(x_test) XGBoost(Extreme Gradient Boosting): has taken data science competition by storm. XGBoost seems to be a part of an ensemble of classifiers/predictors which are used to win data science competitions. Why is this so? why is XGBoost so powerful ? XGBoost XGBoost is similar to gradient boosting algorithm but it has a few tricks up its sleeve which makes it stand out from the rest. Features of XGBoost are: Clever Penalisation of Trees A Proportional shrinking of leaf nodes Newton Boosting Extra Randomisation Parameter In XGBoost the trees can have a varying number of terminal nodes and left weights of the trees that are calculated with less evidence is shrunk more heavily. Newton Boosting uses Newton-Raphson method of approximations which provides a direct route to the minima than gradient descent. The extra randomisation parameter can be used to reduce the correlation between the trees, as seen in the previous article, the lesser the correlation among classifiers, the better our ensemble of classifiers will turn out. Generally, XGBoost is faster than gradient boosting but gradient boosting has a wide range of application # XGBoostfrom xgboost import XGBClassifierclf = XGBClassifier()# n_estimators = 100 (default)# max_depth = 3 (default)clf.fit(x_train,y_train)clf.predict(x_test) Conclusion These tree boosting algorithms have gained huge popularity and are present in the repertoire of almost all kagglers. I hope these two-part articles would’ve given you some basic understanding of the three algorithms Reference: _Simplifying a complex algorithm_medium.com Gradient Boosting from scratch https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2433761/16128_FULLTEXT.pdf

Different

Gradient Boosting and XGBoost

“Black and white shot of geese flying in formation with cloudy sky in Boulder” by on Ethan Weil Unsplash At , we have been following the concept of having small inter-disciplinary teams, which we call Solver Teams (the concept is beautifully , we took a lot of inspiration from them). As fate would have it, I got to lead a team responsible for building the Machine Learning platform for Squad, from scratch. Squad explained by Spotify While I have been working on large projects for over 2 years now, this was my first time taking on a more formal role. A solver team lead is more a Project Manager than a People Manager, so I was not just managing, but also executing. This probably made the much-dreaded transition easier. I enjoyed and learnt a great deal these past few months and . But I am glad to announce that by the end I was much less than I was at the start. leadership I totally sucked in the beginning awful How did I become less awful? By learning from my own experience, but more so from the feedback that I got from the team. I recently collated these lessons and 1–1 notes during my quarterly retrospection (ignore the fact that it was my first time trying it, and stay impressed), and realised that it would make for a good read for people who are/were/will be in the same boat as me. Here are some ideas I found useful: Nurture an environment where all ideas are worth sharing A team is a cocktail of all the different personalities that the members carry. Not everyone will be equally comfortable in sharing an idea they might have. Some people might not be confident about their ideas (which might not be a correct judgement on their part), some would avoid speaking unless directly spoken to, while some are not just used to speaking amongst that particular group of people yet (maybe it’s a new team). Despite all this, how do you get everyone to share ideas? What I have learnt is that . Questions that I frequently ask, when we have a problem at hand, are: you can get people to share ideas that they have by asking the right questions What do you suggest we do? What do you think are some ways we can solve it? Do you think there is a case where the solution will fail? . Give them time to think. More than that, . Chris Voss describes this as “ ” in his book “ ”. It is not in the same context, but I have seen it work because the premise remains the same. Effective pauses make people gather their thoughts and think. A typical conversation at the office goes like: Ask these questions, and then pause let silence encourage the other person to speak effective pause Never Split the Difference : So, there is this issue. What do you think should be done? : Interesting… What do you think should be done? : …? : … :) : … : … : Well… I guess we could try doing X? : Makes sense, what do you think the situation would look like if we do X? : There might be some issues with this particular thing, but that can be handled if we do a little tweak to X. : Looks good, will the design hold when we also have to do this other thing we had in the backlog? : Hmm, let me think more and get back to you? : Sure! John Doe (hypothetical teammate) Ketan Bhatt JD KB JD KB JD KB JD KB JD KB Everyone who faces a problem also knows at least one way to solve it. Sometimes that way is all that is needed, sometimes it might need some tweaking. Otherwise, you can always suggest something you think might work and then discuss the solution further. You do this enough number of times, people automatically start doing this on their own, refining their ideas, and then finally coming to you to share what they have got. And since now there are more people sharing their ideas, your solution bank just grew larger, and the quality of your team’s problem solving, as a unit, goes up. Woot woot! Build an Event Loop We have all been there. The project kicks off with meticulous plans, timelines, and metrics that we vow to keep track of. A few weeks into the quarter, the timelines and the metrics aren’t being tracked with the same punctuality, if at all. I fell victim to this as well. We, as engineers, have an inherent inclination towards execution. It becomes easy to forget/procrastinate updating the timelines, backlog, skip stand-ups, planning for the coming weeks, etc. What follows is a loss of visibility: Your team doesn’t know where it is heading, will we meet our goals, are we on the right track? The other teams lose sight over what is going on with your team You catch hold of issues, that can jeopardise the goals, too late. Course correction becomes harder. Learning from mistakes and guidance from my lead, . We got this from a which is a must read if you are making the transition for a developer to a managerial role. here is a suggestion: build yourself an Event Loop , and block your time explicitly for following it FirstRound Post by David Loftesness A lot of us follow something of this sort already, I found that making it explicit just works better for me. My Event Loop Balance thy sprint well My learnings are perfectly explained by Alan Page, Quality Director at Unity, in . Specifically: his Manager Readme The ACM framework (Ambitious, Comfortable, Mundane). The idea is that if you look at the work you do over a week / sprint, some of that work is new, challenging, or ambitious, a big chunk of work is stuff that you’re just really good at (comfortable work), and you may end up with some work that you’re overqualified for, or is boring, but that just needs to get done (mundane). We should work together to make sure you have enough ambitious work that you are challenged and growing, if you’re not learning something new every week, that’s something we should work on together. We also want to minimize your mundane work. Often, your mundane work may be someone else’s ambitious work. Vikas Gulati, CTO at Squad and my mentor, often points to the following diagram, from , for explaining roughly the same thing: this First Review post Skills vs Challenge It is common knowledge that any good developer won’t be too happy if they don’t see themselves growing. But an overlooked fact is that growing is a continuous process, and not a badge that you get by working hard for a month. , and it is often too late by the time one realises that some irreversible damage has been dealt. . Some tasks are challenging but provide gratification early, while for some it might come in much later. It is easy to burn out people by assigning ambitious tasks to them one after the another (with good intentions on your part) Another important aspect is gratification Your sprint is like a dessert. Too much sugar? Thank you for the Diabetes. Too little? Is it even a dessert? And what about the nuts and cherries? Can’t have too much or too few of them as well. The perfect dessert is just the right amount of sweet, with nuts and cherries that randomly surprise you when you take a bite. A sprint, much like a dessert, should be a good mix of challenging and comfortable work, with wins spread for good measure :) These lessons might be just common sense to some (you have my respect people), but I felt that knowing these things explicitly just helped me channel the team’s strength in a better manner, and, thus, do justice to their talents. If you’re a talented developer who believes she’ll be a good fit for Squad — we’re hiring !

How I stopped being awful at managing: Leadership lessons from a Dev

image source: news.bitcoin.com Thanks to the advancement of trading technologies, in the last ten years, securities trading, especially in the developed world, has experienced massive disruptions. From the rise of sophisticated derivatives to the emergence of super-intelligent robo-traders, the industry is experiencing disruptions like never before. Now, with the blockchain technology joining the game, things are about to heat up even more. But before we discuss how the combination of blockchain and AI seek to change the securities market, let us look at the advancement of robo-driven trading and how it is shaping the industry. Robo-trading involves the application of powerful algorithms powered by big data to make investment decisions and execute trades. Unlike human traders, the robo-traders can process vast amounts of data and make decisions a zillion times faster with no human emotion or bias thereby improving decision making. Algo-driven techniques such as High-Frequency Trading (HFT) came about after the 2008 global financial crisis and have since then impacted the global securities market in a big way. According to Credit Suisse, as , the trading volume of U.S. shares has more than doubled since the rise of HFT and high-speed trading strategies. The advancement of AI in the subsets of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning has also made significant progress, making it possible for the algorithms to read relevant trading news as it emerges and act on it instantly. quoted in Business Insider However, this technique is not without flaws as was evident in 2013 when and posted a tweet that two explosions had hit the White House injuring the then President Obama. The algorithms interpreted the post as true news, sending shockwaves through the markets with the Dow plunging 143 points. hackers accessed the AP Twitter account The Combined Power of AI and Blockchain Now with the blockchain technology, algorithmic trading is about to pass a significant milestone. The technology has the power to reduce the costs and complexity of trading while ensuring increased trading speed and a secure settlement process. Solutions such as are utilizing blockchain and AI to make the trading process smoother and to eliminate intermediaries. Traditionally, securities traders rely on brokers and the big banks as the go-betweens, a process that is not only costly but also lacks transparency and leaves room for human error and fraud. ThinkCoin The distributed ledger technology eliminates the reliance on third parties in a transaction by making it possible for securities buyers to buy directly from the sellers with each party keeping its side of the contract. In the blockchain-powered trading solutions such as ThinkCoin, the smart contract technology is responsible for overseeing the transactions and solving disputes when they arise. Blockchain is also making algorithm-driven trading more accurate by verifying data integrity before it is run in algorithms to inform decision making. Here also the distributed and immutable nature of the technology makes it almost impossible to manipulate the data stored in it so that there are minimum instances of fraud. When compared with traditional options, blockchain powered trading and investing platforms are the safest. Another application of the blockchain technology in trading is in regulatory compliance. Blockchain solutions such as are utilizing the smart contract technology to enable crypto traders adherence to regulatory requirements by setting up the determining criteria in the product and ensuring that only the qualified can buy it. While the project hasn’t identified how it will impact driven trading, there is no doubt that it will be of much benefit. Polymath The Bottom Line With the blockchain and AI growing exponentially, the future of security trading is bound for major disruptions. Long gone are the days when human emotions would cloud trades, and inaccurate data could wreck havoc in the markets. The big question is what the future holds for human traders and financial advisors in this age of super-intelligent computers. This is the time for the forward thinking to start exploring the technologies and determine the ways through which they can complement it. While the blockchain and AI-powered algorithms can crunch numbers and make an investment decision, they can’t offer the human touch. And is it has become evident in the past, the human touch is an essential component in trading and investing. Traders and financial advisors should, therefore, start investing more in investor relations.

Instantly

Twitter

Why the Future of Securities Trading is in the Hands of Blockchain and AI

Photo by on Pawel Kadysz Unsplash Hello! Long wait is over. We are launching our latest product in the global marketplace today. Eulercoder is launching QuickGames — a global distributor of HTML5 and Android Games. We spent past three months in curating, building and testing our HTML5 games and today is the day we are ready to hit the market. QuickGames (An Eulercoder company) already partnered with many channel partners to distribute our games globally. We have over 230+ HTML5 games that we are distributing worldwide through our channel partners. Our simple pricing model and integration APIs make the integration of our games seamless and easy. This article covers all the information about QuickGames, our services, products, pricing model and basic FAQs. So let’s get started… QuickGames Partner Network — Yes, we are looking for distributors in the US, Canada and Australia 😉, Shoot us an email — hello@eulercoder.com Our Services 💼 QuickGames supports all the major devices and platforms, we have developed High Quality HTML5 games that be played on any device without downloading it. We support Android, iOS, Desktop, Browsers, In-flight entertainment systems, Smart TVs, OEMs or your own website or app. Our powerful APIs (99.9% uptime) let’s us integration our games on any platform. Eulercoder Games Mobile App 📱 Our beautifully designed mobile app can be easily white labeled and used anywhere. Our Mobile App has full support of Subscription APIs, Social Sign In, Social Leaderboard, Liked Game sections, User settings etc. Here is our mobile app demo. Web Portal 🖥 We are building our latest Web portal with top open source technologies — React, NodeJS, , GraphQL, Docker and AWS for servers. We want to make sure whatever we develop is the top notch product. As a tech company, we strive to create high quality and scalable web apps. gaming TypeScript APIs 🌐 We support many powerful APIs. We also build APIs if there is any specific requirement for our partners. Games API — Get the full list of all the games. Publisher API — API for publishers, get your publisher key and start using our games. Subscription API — If you would like to charge your users a subscription fee on monthly or weekly basis, we support that as well. Liked Games — Save liked games for users. User Activity — We have built APIs to save user activity, let users start where they had left. Pricing Model 💁🏻‍$ Our pricing models is very simple, no hidden cost, flat fees. We distribute games on 50–50% revenue share. So, 50% of the total revenue a partners make including but not limited too apps, web portal, browser and anywhere where our games are being played. Flat 500 USD/month if you would like to use our Mobile or web portal. 1000 USD/month if you would like to use both. All the handling, hosting, support, maintenance, required changes and customizations will be done by us. Who can join our partner network? 🤷🏻‍ Frankly speaking any company or person, though it’s good to have some userbase or network in the market for initial user acquisition. Telecom operators VAS Companies B2C companies Airlines FAQs 💁🏻‍ ​There is no specific requirement, just shoot us an email, let’s get our contract and NDA signed and we are ready to hit the market. What are the basic requirements to join Games partner network? ​It depends on how effectively we communicate and get things done, if you would like to use our mobile app or web portal, it can take upto one week for all the customizations and integration of all the required APIs. How long does it take to complete the integration? ​We usually sign the contract for 2 years and it can be easily extended. Contract lasts for how many years? ​You can cancel the contract anytime but you have to give one month of notice period. We don’t want our partners to leave us though. 🙈 What if I would like cancel the contract? If you like to join our partner network and distribute our games, please shoot us an email — hello [at] eulercoder [dot] com , we would love to hear from you and bring our games on your platform. You can also directly schedule a call to discuss about partnership . here Affiliates? If you have good network in the major telecom companies or if you can bring partners in our network, let’s talk, we are offering upto 10% of the total revenue to our affiliates. Write to us — hello [at] eulercoder [dot] com with subject “Affiliate Partner…” Ok, that’s all I have for now. More news in the upcoming weeks. Are you a developer? Would you like to help us in building QuickGames website? Let’s talk! Show Some Love. we are growing slowly as a company and a community. If you like what we are doing, show some love. Also Hey, if you like what you just read, please this resource by hitting the green “ ” icon, it on so that other people may also stumble upon this. like Recommend share Twitter or Facebook You can always contact me personally on or over . on to get access to more updates on Eulercoder in future. Linkedin Mail Follow me Medium

Bringing HTML5 games to life. Launching Eulercoder Games — QuickGames

An example of the future of quantum computers, created out of their past. Many people have contributed to quantum over the last century. Through their work, we now have an immense understanding of the quantum realm. And we can control it to make new and better technology. physics One emerging example is quantum computing, which is currently going through a revolution in the sophistication and availability of prototype quantum processors. They now have enough quantum bits to , and are even for anyone to experiment with. A hardware and software ecosystem is beginning to form, with big companies like IBM and Google as well as a host of startups. play Battleships available on the cloud I decided to use one of the cloud based devices to celebrate the giants on whose shoulders we stand. I took images of 16 Nobel prize winning quantum physicists, and I combined them. I did this using quantum superposition. This is a phenomenon which effectively allows a quantum system to be doing multiple things at once. Specifically, I created a quantum superposition of the file names for the 16 images, creating something that simultaneously represented all the files. This might sound quite complex, but the current crop of quantum SDK’s make it easy. I used the QISKit SDK, which is the one with native support for IBM’s devices. _Happy First Birthday, QISKit!_medium.com Looking back on a year of QISKit With QISKit you control the quantum computers with simple Python. The code required to set up the superposition is just the following simple four lines. program.h( qubit[b[0]] )program.h( qubit[b[1]] )program.h( qubit[b[2]] )program.h( qubit[b[3]] ) Once this code is executed, the superposition exists in the quantum chip. But since this is a tiny device, sitting in one of the coldest points in the universe (created in IBM’s Yorktown Heights research lab) it is not very accessible. To make our creation into something more tangible, we first have to extract some sort of an output. This is where the superposition stops being the kind of thing you’d find in sci-fi, and becomes something more mundane. Though superpositions are highly powerful a quantum computation, allowing us to take faster routes from input to output, they aren’t so interesting at the end of one. In fact, at this point, they are little more than a fancy random generator of binary strings. within So that’s what happens to our superposition of filenames. We ask the for a filename, and it just spits one of them out randomly. By repeating many times, we can get statistics on how often each one turns up. quantum computer This information was then used to construct our image. The alpha channel of each of the 16 images was chosen so that the strength of an image corresponded to how much the quantum computer liked it. Everything, from constructing the quantum program to processing the results, was done in . this Jupyter notebook Ideally, all 16 images should be equally represented. But current quantum processors are not entirely free of noise. For one thing, there is a slight tendency for quantum bits to flip from to . Filenames with more 0s will therefore be more likely to have their images turn up. This is probably why we get a good view of Max Planck’s mustache (0000.png) and Schrödinger’s glasses (0100.png). The devices will have to improve a bit before Serge Haroche (1111.png) gets fair treatment. 1 0 Even so, the average of all these physicists has a definite character: Pretty old, mostly white, and very male. This might be largely representative of the past of our quantum endeavours, but it won’t be the future. Cloud based quantum processors, and their accompanying SDK’s, put opportunities for quantum breakthroughs in the hands of everyone with an internet connection. Whether you want to do science or make a game, you can try it out with a quantum computer. _Battleships with partial NOT gates_medium.com How to program a quantum computer _A simple example of how to play with a quantum computer_medium.com Making a quantum computer smile _I am a theoretical physicist. My job is to think about things. Actually doing things is left for more capable people._medium.com Playing with the world’s most advanced technology When we create a superposition of quantum programmers in a few years, hopefully it will look very different.

A superposition of quantum physicists

Recently Node.js Project released 10.0.0 and which is the 7th major release and will be LTS(Long term support) in October 2018 and will be supported for 3 years. Note: Node.js project usually do two major release in an year, one in April and other in October OK! This is fine but what are the new feature and are they worth looking at? let’s find out ! Error Handling Improvements Before Node v10.0.0 the only way to match errors in catch clauses was to check for the error message which made difficult to analyse, debug. For Node Version≤10.0.0 About 300 commits were ( ) made on this and now we have error codes to ease constant error-checking which was just a error message previously. check here For Node Version≥10.0.0 (async generator, async iteration inbuilt promise execution and array performance improvements**)** Performance Improvements reduce/map/filter huge performance boots Use of V8 v6.6 have huge performance boosts, function like reduce, map, filter has become 10 times faster.promises. All of these serve as a small but significant — and permanent — performance boost for applications built using Node.js. Experimental Promisfied Versions of the ‘fs’ Functions Introduction of util.promisify to wrap functions which provide a callback API but this is an experimental feature, may be in October release, functions of the fs return promises directly. HTTP and HTTP/2 Improvements HTTP/2 protocol supports TCP multiplexing, which means that TCP handshakes have to be handled only once and the server can reuse an already existing connection to send the response of multiple requests through the same connection. It also supports server push, so when the browser requests an HTML file, you can send along the necessary JavaScript scripts and CSS stylesheets before the page is loaded and parsed. The browser realizes that it will need more round trips to requests all the necessary information to properly render the site. Below is the sample example to use HTTP2 But browsers only support HTTP/2 over SSL so some kind of edge proxy is required, like for Nginx in production. Cryptographic Support and Security Imporvements Supports for the OpenSSL 1.1.0 security toolkit is added in 10.0.0 which is the latest version of the open source cryptography and toolkit for Transport Layer Security and Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL) protocols. Cryptographic support for ChaCha20 cipher and Poly1305 authenticator is also added. In October they are planing to expand the options available for using “ ” cipher suites, the current gold-standard for encrypted communication on the web and add more comprehensive cryptographic library. AEAD : The npm v.6.0 release line is concerned with security. This was spurred in part by a survey showing that 97 percent of JavaScript developers worldwide rely on open source code at least in part for their projects, and that 77 percent of those are concerned about the security of doing so. To better document — and fix — module vulnerabilities and potential dependency conflicts, npm moved to acquire the Node Security Platform, the definitive source of known JS package vulnerabilities. Side note In fact, npm v.6 contains a new shortcut specifically to address this: A proactive step allowing devs to swap out for updated or better-fit versions before anything breaks, “npm audit” totally rocks. npm-audit allows users to recursively analyze dependency trees to identify potential conflicts and insecurities. JavaScript language improvements There are lot of language improvements some of them are : of the try statements no longer calls for a parameter Catch clause , which now returns exact slices of source code text, and mitigations for side-channel vulnerabilities to prevent information leaks. Function.prototype.toString() V8 “introduces”: , String.prototype.trimEnd() String.prototype.trimStart() Improved diagnostics trace events (Super time saver) ⏲ Debugging the code in 10.0.0 is super duper easy, now we have trace events that create a manual tracing to a category and when enabled pass the diagnostic code to a file which can be read by google chrome dev-tools. No more cli to be used for creating traces for code, now we have javascript API that helps enabling/disabling trace events dynamically. Full support for N-API Wait ! but what is N-API ? Its an API for building native Addons in Node.js. It is independent from the underlying JavaScript runtime (ex V8) and is maintained as part of Node.js itself. This API will be Application Binary Interface (ABI) stable across versions of Node.js. The N-API provides an abstraction surface over the V8 APIs so changes in those can be handled in a higher level layer, resulting in a more stable surface that native addon developers can use. So far it was an experimental feature, but it has been promoted to stable in Node v10, i think its the time to start using it 😺 Take away Stable module API, one that is not influenced by the changes in Node.js’s V8 JavaScript engine API layer makes upgrading a whole lot easier, streamlining production deployments and ease the maintenance The Experimental Node-ChakraCore 🚀 Node.js originally ran only on Chrome’s V8, but lately it’s implementation on Microsoft’s which is under development will open the door for VM diversity. By using the N-API, it is easier to create bindings for different VMs, so porting Node.js to other runtimes will be a lot easier. It will especially be useful for IoT developers. ChakraCore If you are new to Node.js or looking for a starter kit with everything in place to start writing your logic, use : https://github.com/dg92/node-express-postgres-redis-starter-kit I am happy to receive any feedback may be positive or negative. THANK YOU! If you like this article, please recommend and share to help others find it!

Microsoft

Node.js 10.0.0, What to expect as a Backend developer/Security enthusiast?

Episode 17: An interview with Bharath Rao, CEO and founder of CryptoDisrupted http://LEVERJ.io Trent interviews Bharath Rao, CEO of . In the interview we discuss decentralized exchanges, derivatives trading, the 2008 market crash, and the future of crypto trading. http://LEVERJ.io Also . available on iTunes For more episodes of , or . Crypto Disrupted subscribe on YouTube subscribe and listen on iTunes

YouTube

Decentralized Leveraged Exchange with Bharath Rao

The title is a lie. This concept, however, is a in . Go ahead and grab a cup of Java, before we dive into the concept of primitive data types. primitive concept Java Boolean, char, byte, short, int, long, float, and double are all primitive data types in Java. These are all words that Java knows. These values are stored in the , as opposed to the . Variables that are on the stack are accessible directly from memory, and can run very fast. Objects are on the heap, and take more time to access. stack heap Every primitive type in Java has a wrapper class. has short Short has int Integer has long Long has boolean Boolean has char Character has float Float has double Double has byte Byte The wrappers have methods attached to them that the primitive types do not have. These include… Image from tutorialspoint.com Image from tutorialspoint.com Image from tutorialspoint.com Wrapper classes are primitives are also stored differently in memory. The wrapper classes are stored on the as a reference to an object on the . stack heap class PrimitivePost{public static void main(String args[]){//declearing a boolean, this returns true or falseboolean t = true;// declaring characterchar a = ‘G’;// declaring bytebyte b = 4;// declaring shortshort s = 56; // declaring intint i=89;//declaring a longlong l = 244843984;// declaring a float — for float use ‘f’ as suffixfloat f = 4.7333434f; // declaring a double — default fraction value is double in javadouble d = 4.355453532; System.out.println(“boolean: “ + t);System.out.println(“char: “ + a);System.out.println(“byte: “ + b);System.out.println(“short: “ + s);System.out.println(“int: “ + i);System.out.println(“long: “ + l);System.out.println(“float: “ + f);System.out.println(“double: “ + d);}}

A Concept More Primitive Than The Cavemen

Chain

Amazon

Sentiment Analysis in Cryptocurrency

Last week I put an open invitation to anyone in tech to DM me for advice, mentoring or career questions. I had an overwhelmingly large response, which I’m just getting around to answering to everyone. The topic that came up quite a bit was about money. Everyone gets super uncomfortable with this topic, which is part of the issue. I know a lot of people in tech that really enjoy their field, they take it very seriously and a passion for technology drives them. However, this can lead to some situations where companies can take advantage of you, because you’re happy to be paid less than you’re worth in the market. Am I getting mugged off? So, how do you know if you’re being paid at the right level? First, remember something is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. Let’s say you work in a rural country town, in a Java development house, the in town. Now if you look online and see that the average salary for a Java developer in the US is $150,000 (making that up), but you get paid $100,000. Is it a fair comparison? No. Because market rates are driven by demand. If you quit the company because you were being underpaid, you’d be out of work. So now you’re being paid $0. only one That was an extreme example, but it’s important to know the “market” around you. My biggest worry about anyone reading this article is you leave a job and end up unemployed or compromising. A few questions to ask: Do you know the other companies in your area that specialise in the skills that you have? Are they hiring? Are they ? performing well Are they the sorts of places you’d to work? want Let’s say you work in a large city, you work for a medium size company (300–1000 people), the company is (making a profit, or growing) and you get paid $100,000 as a mid-level Javascript developer. doing well You look online and see that the average is $130,000 in your area. Are you getting ? . mugged off Probably So, what do you do about it? Quit and go somewhere else? What if you love where you work? You really need to answer this question: Why should the business pay you more money to do the same thing? If you get good at answering that question (and you can convince them of your answer) then you’ll keep that skill your whole career. First, sort out the performance perceptions Does your manager think you’re doing an awesome job? In your last performance review (assuming you have them) were you rated highly? It’s really common that someone thinks they are doing a fantastic job but their manager doesn’t agree. This makes it really, really hard to negotiate salary. Your manager will become your advocate to convince whomever to pay you more money to do the . same job If your manager thinks you’re a peanut, you probably need to find a new manager or understand why and work on that. If your peers think you’re fantastic, people outside your team agree and your manager still thinks you’re doing a bad job, you have a bad manager. I heard that company X is paying [20%] more This is the event that sparks off the whole insecurity about people’s salaries. They get a phone call from a recruiter saying “company X is hiring [your skillset] and the role will pay $$$”. This makes people sit up and say, hey wait a minute! But, there’s some things to take into account before you storm into your bosses office and demand a 50% raise- Companies who are growing normally pay above market rate Large companies typically pay more than smaller ones Financial institutions (e.g. banks, insurance) typically pay well above market average Recruiters , you still have to negotiate when you accept an offer and people often end up with a lot less than they expected exaggerate the package It’s worth inquiring if there’s a (more than 20%), but don’t burn any bridges with your current employer until you know more. If you setup a discussion with your manager and say “Company X offered me 20% more, therefore I’m being underpaid”, the most likely response will be “have you had an interview, have you gotten a ?”. big gap written offer If no, you’ll probably look a bit daft. So you’ve just broken some level of trust with the person that needs to advocate your salary. The table flip This probably sounds obvious, but the easiest way to get an increase is to speak to that recruiter, get the offer letter and take it to your boss. If you’re performing well, the company values you, then they’ll . You just got a raise and didn’t have to switch jobs, great! likely match the offer , before everyone goes rushing off to do this, a couple of problems: However They might call your bluff, accept your resignation, and you liked working there, so now you’ve just lost your job. You start at the new place and it’s horrible, so you’ve just left a place you liked, in a job you enjoyed for a wage you were kinda managing on anyway, for a dump. Ooops. You’ve just broken some level of trust with your manager, this is a risky move. Also, you can only play this card once or twice before a company will just see you as disloyal and likely sideline you in projects and promotions. So, is there another way that’s less drastic? Yes, just ask for a raise! The rules of the raise I’ve split this up into 3 sections depending on the size of the company you work for. For all of these there’s a formula that I find works, you need to of these as a justification for why the company should pay you more. present all 4 Your personal situation requires more money. eg. cost of living in your area has gone up, you’ve just had kids, you want to buy a house. Whatever that is, be prepared to answer that question. Situation. Don’t assume that your manager you’re being underpaid. Especially new managers. Do your research, know the names and places of companies that are hiring and how much they’re willing to pay, or use sites like glassdoor.com to get a $ figure. Market. Tell them that you’re worth more somewhere else. knows . your performance has been good/great, so you should be paid well accordingly. Remind them of your great performance, things you have done and times they have awarded, congratulated you. Performance The value you’re providing to the company is more than what’s on your job description. For example, you’re mentoring junior developers, which is training them up, doing the company a huge favour. You’ve stepped up and taken on more responsibilities. Value. Worried that you won’t remember all this? . You might be really nervous pitching this whole thing and forget some of your key points. Write it down There’s this absurd misconception that this is about being brash and bold. The main reason most people don’t get a pay-rise when they ask for one is that they don’t make a good enough justification for it. Good luck!

Checkout my Pluralsight courses!

Can we talk about tech salaries…

Persist ~ 70% faster; restore ~ 80% faster, your mileage may vary A few days ago, commented on where I shared how we automate our release process with . can be summarized with “ ” Andrew Stiegmann a blog post of mine CircleCI Andrew’s comment Hey, is there any reason you use CircleCI cache instead of a workspace? I read up on that explains the difference between a cache and a workspace. Their diagram does a great job explaining all that: a CircleCI blog post CircleCI cache vs workspace. Source: CircleCI blog post Our CircleCI workfow contains of five jobs, each needs access to and a bunch of generated files in folders. Our “build job” as outlined in the diagram is where we install all npm packages and generate the files in the folders. We use a monorepo (more about that ), which results in a lot of packages hoisted to the root directory. node_modules dist dist here node_modules Migrate from a cache to a workspace The main change here is in the file. First, the directive needs to be replaced with . Likewise, any occurrence of needs to be replaced with an directive. .circleci/config.yml [save_cache](https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#save_cache) [persist_to_workspace](https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#persist_to_workspace) [restore_cache](https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#restore_cache) [attach_workspace](https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#attach_workspace) In our case, that change alone improved persistence of data by about 60% (from 67 seconds writing to the cache to 27 seconds persisting to a workspace), while restoring it in a subsequent job dropped from 35 seconds with a cache to 12 seconds with a workspace (a roughly 65% performance gain). Bonus improvement — prune node_modules So far so good, but while I was at it, I dug a bit deeper. For a while now I’ve had an eye on our directory size… 🙀 Have you ever checked yours? If so, I’m quite sure you’re with me here. If not, go ahead and check yours, then come back here — I’ll wait. node_modules Heaviest objects in the universe — based on estimates Alright, now that all readers understand what I mean, let’s continue. In our case, the size of is 553 MB. Does it have to be though…? Definitely not! There’s no need to have files, documentation assets, tests, temporary files, etc. All these files have to be compressed and decompressed when we share it across jobs on CircleCI, regardless of whether we use a cache or a workspace. node_modules *.md I’m aware of two options, so I implemented both and compared them to make an informed decision on which one to choose. node-prune TJ Holowaychuk built that for one of his products and open-sourced it at . It’s a tiny Go command that can be installed in a single line. In our case, it takes 3 seconds to install and run the command. The output of the command looks as follows: https://github.com/tj/node-prune node-prune doing its job on CircleCI That’s 136 MB of unnecessary files dropped from the directory. That’s also 136 MB less data to be compressed and decompressed when passing data from one CircleCI job to the next. node_modules Now, persisting data to a workspace takes 20s, a roughly 70% improvement compared to the original implementation of using a cache. Restoring that data takes 7 seconds, a total of 80% faster than what we had originally. yarn autoclean I wasn’t satisfied with only one option to prune . Whenever possible, it’s a good idea to have a few extra data points. node_modules I found as documented at . This command cleans up as part of the command. yarn autoclean https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/cli/autoclean/ node_modules yarn install Running that resulted in slightly slower performance results compared to . took about 20 seconds longer (because it runs ) which is 17 seconds more than what requires to get installed and prune the dependencies. Persisting the repository to a workspace took 23 seconds (about 65% faster than compared to a cache) and restoring the workspace was “only” about 70% faster. node-prune yarn install autoclean node-prune Conclusion This table taken from the PR I opened at work summarizes the results: CircleCI cache vs workspace I completely dropped the cache for now, mainly to keep the PR small and manageable. I’m playing with some thoughts to see whether a cache could help speed up multiple workflow runs. In our case, we save 2.6 minutes for an entire workflow on CircleCI. If you have similar results, or a completely different experience, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment or clap if you found this interesting (those claps are encouraging to write and share more 😀).

BUNCH

CircleCI Performance Difference Between Cache and Workspace

is a dapp that is a mix between ebay and cryptokitties. This is an article written from one of our talented developers. Junktion We are looking for anyone who wants to collaborate with us, but are on the lookout for the following in particular. A developer that feels comfortable making a cryptokitties or eBay clone using reactjs. An all star marketer that can share our message with the world. A writer with a passion for crypto to write our blog. One of our developers, Josh is from Japan and has worked on software made for Toyota. This is what he wrote for us on why he joined. Why I Joined The Junktion.io Team When I first learned about the project it definitely got me thinking as to how I could potentially grow into a new field of Ethereum. We have so many Dapps popping up but I think there is a lack of Dapps that actually deal with our off chain needs. Let’s be real here, we’re not exactly doing everything “onchain” yet.We still buy(and sell) physical items offchain/offline. While we buy a lot of things online, but what do we do with the items that we don’t need anymore? There are a few outlets for that right now, eBay being the prominent one but do you know how much fees eBay and PayPal takes per transaction? Check by our founder it’s insane! this article Patrick Manfra What Junktion.io is trying to solve makes sense, it’s a new outlet. This one has so many more capabilities than prior selling outlets. We think it will become the new norm. We are creating a circular economy, but also incorporating traditional cryptocurrency. You get paid with scraps, buy with scraps, exchange scraps for other coins, buy a new laptop, sell your old laptop, you get paid with scraps…. so on. This is the circular economy. See what I mean here? Yes we used to do that with eBay, but the more you buy and sell on eBay, the more fees you get to pay, not very exciting and we’re not really pushing ourselves to innovate. Junktion does things Ebay can never dream of doing. This is why we are recruiting talented people to achieve these goals. This is not saying that eBay is bad, I’m not dissing eBay, I’ve bought and sold a lot on eBay before and it works, not perfectly nor efficiently but it works. Building A New Frontier For The Blockchain Era What I’m saying is that we’re on the verge of a new era, the Blockchain era. We have an opportunity to upgrade what we have and the technology to do so, we can bridge the gap that separates our digital assets and physical items. We’re setting up a platform, a bridge. We are here fix the the marketplace, and help the adaptation of the blockchain technology as a community that thrives for innovation and change. I joined the team as a developer because I believe in the project. I believe that we can do more, that we can make a better platform than the current options that we have. As a developer I find new technologies fascinating especially when it tries to deal with the things that are not directly tech related, bridging that gap. A Marketplace That Is driven Through The Blockchain, Just The Thought Of That Excites Me. We want people who feel the same to join us and solve these issues at hand, from a development, marketing or strtegic insight. If you anything of value to add please reach out to us. Imagine a sentimental item you own being immortalized on the blockchain, being a part of the blockchain. Isn’t that thought enticing? or interesting at least? We’re still looking for people to join the team, help us build a better marketplace. Email us at info@junktion.io Joshua Aquino Developer at Junktion.io We can use all the help we can get. Donate: Bitcoin: 3HeE5QY1Cnk7TCC7gXBAyMm6zXLdTtkMzh Ethereum: 0x496e41bc14c65b2019472cffdae205bd53e1634a

Ethereum

Dapp

eBay

The Verge

One of the fastest growing startups in the dapp space is recruiting

If you’ve been considering transitioning your career to blockchain development, this article is going to be right up your alley. As you might know, the blockchain is essentially a of cryptocurrency transactions. It keeps track of all cryptocurrency activity, who owns what proportion of it and the time it was executed. It’s like a giant book of records! massive ledger The , unlike traditional, centralised banking ledgers. Cryptocurrency transactions are recorded in ‘blocks’, with ‘blocks’ containing timestamps and transaction data, giving it the name ‘blockchain’. Any information that gets loaded onto the blockchain goes through a series of verification steps by multiple ‘nodes’ or computers (like in the image below). They interact with each other until a consensus is reached on the validity of the data, before getting accepted into the blockchain. This is what makes the information on the blockchain reliable and trustworthy. blockchain is decentralised and public. Anyone can access it It’s important to note that while the blockchain was developed for tracking bitcoins, blockchain technology has the potential to be used across many different industries and domains. Essentially it could be used to record anything of value! As say, “The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions, but virtually everything of value.” Don and Alex Tapscott, authors of Blockchain Revolution What does this mean for you, and why should you be a blockchain engineer? Many startups are now using blockchain technology in myriad ways, from This has created numerous opportunities for blockchain engineers. global payments, to music sharing, and even tracking diamond sales. There are a couple of paths you can go down as a blockchain engineer. In simple terms, you can: Build applications using the blockchain technology. Focus on developing the blockchain technology itself and the things that interact with it, like developing a new blockchain protocol or currency. Building decentralised applications (DAPPS) is where a lot of the opportunities lie. It’s where a lot of blockchain engineering roles have opened up for developers, as evidenced by the steep rise in job opportunities shown below: The above graph shows that the number of job opportunities in the blockchain domain has increased from 0 to just under 4000 between 2010 and 2017. Clearly it’s a rapidly growing profession! To seek some expert insights, we interviewed Cadel Watson, Junior Developer at , , Blockchain and Technology Consultant at and , Founder of and , asking for their thoughts on becoming a blockchain engineer. We asked them three key questions to help you navigate your way through this complex and nascent field. . AgriDigital Michael Buchanan DigitalX Vaibhav Namburi Five2One Dveloper.io Here goes Question 1: What are the key skills and attributes needed to be a blockchain engineer? According to Watson, aspiring blockchain engineers need to be comfortable with learning as they go, since it’s a new and emerging space. He emphasises the importance of ‘adopting a new mindset’ which focuses on efficiency, scalability, and distributed computing. It’s more than learning just another programming paradigm. Another great suggestion by Watson was to not just focus on developing the hard programming skill sets, but also learn about the economic side of blockchain engineering. Knowing about concepts like incentivisation, supply and demand, and opportunity cost might sound cliché, but it couldn’t be more vital to understand in the blockchain development context. If you want to be effective as a blockchain engineer, you’ll need to be a hybrid of a junior economist, a software developer, a data geek and auditor. Buchanan says that becoming a blockchain engineer is a level playing field, where anyone with the time and dedication can become an expert. He highlights the importance of problem solving skills, and the ability to discover and process information, while judging its accuracy, as the two most important skill sets to have. “One of the most exciting things about working with such cutting-edge technology is that anyone with the time and dedication can become an expert — it is really a great leveller,” says Buchanan. “But the ability to quickly pivot is absolutely necessary — the technical abilities of blockchains, the tools available for developers, and the documentation of these decentralised networks and associated tooling are evolving so fast that the need to constantly stay on top of new developments and massive platform changes and updates is vital to not get left behind.” Adding to that, Namburi says that an enormous amount of energy is needed to keep pace with the rapid changes in the blockchain space. The pace of change in blockchain technologies is really fast, and one has to be agile and quick to adapt. For blockchain engineering to be right for you as a career, you need to be excited by the constant speed of change! Question 2: What sort of experience is transferable to being a blockchain engineer? “The autonomous operation of blockchain makes it an unforgiving world. One mistake or bug can literally cost millions,” says Watson, who mentions the transferability of vulnerability analysis and comprehensive testing in this context. He feels that because the code developed for blockchain is highly sensitive and mission critical, engineers with skills in embedded programming would be well suited to the challenge. Buchanan lists the importance of data analytics, traditional programming or software development practices, and knowledge of cryptography as the most transferable skill sets in the blockchain world. Given that it’s a new space, being able to navigate developer discussion forums like Github to build applications is key. You need all the support you can get! Namburi says that knowing the fundamentals of object oriented programming, cryptography, system architecture and test driven development would be very useful experience to have under your belt. Clearly, there’s no silver bullet as to an experience that is going to be of the most value given the dynamic nature of this career. But overall, a combination of skills and experience in any of the above domains would be highly valuable. Question 3: What resources are available to train in blockchain engineering? Watson says that because blockchain is very new, there are no formal qualifications that help you upskill as such. New concepts appear everyday, and since it’s quite easy to get overwhelmed, he says that brushing up on the basics of how a blockchain works and how each chain differs (Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc.) would be a smart move. He also believes that a good foundational knowledge of economics is key. “Blockchain technologies are fundamentally economic instruments. It’s really helpful for developers to have an understanding of basic concepts like incentivisation, supply and demand, and opportunity cost,” says Watson. Buchanan advises that developers should “spend a few months reading mailing lists, social media discussion forums, and development hubs to get an idea of how the software is developed, how changes are proposed and made, and to learn and listen to the community leaders that will give insights into the direction of valuable projects.” However, he also warns against being influenced by biases in the information of these communities, especially since a lot of folks have vested financial interests in the success of certain blockchain projects. For those wanting to stay ahead of the curve, Watson says we’ll start to see more specialists in the field of “tokenomics”: the application of economic concepts to blockchain models. “Fundamentally the question they address is designing mechanisms to push people’s behaviour in certain directions. It’s a small field currently but is beginning to take off.” If you’re keen to do an online course, Namburi recommends choosing the blockchain development course on to learn about developments in the Ethereum realm. He also suggests attending workshop in Sydney if you’re interested in learning the Ethereum ecosystem. UDemy by Stephen Grider Bokky Poo Bah’s Ethereum Having said that, there are many great blogs and articles you can use to educate yourself. Another great resource we found is this , which goes through everything you need to learn to become a blockchain engineer. But at the end of the day, nothing beats getting your hands dirty and online course by Blockgeeks just doing it! Ready to ramp up your tech career? Australia’s leading tech companies are looking for new talent right now! check out our latest job listings here .

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive May 6th, 2018

@christineparmaChristine Parma

@ava411Avantika Mehra

@ricrichoRic Richardson

@digitalvijayDigital Vijay

@mihaelatetcuMihaela Sfat

@aravindbaskaranAravind

@puyan-weiPuyan Wei

@pyanPuyan Wei

@grohith327Rohith Gandhi

@_ketanbhattKetan Bhatt

@sadie-williamsonSadie Williamson

@tvicky002Vikesh Tiwari

@decodokuDr James Wootton

@ideepak.jsdDeepak Gupta

@trentlapinskiTrent Lapinski

@jennifer.greenbergJennifer Greenberg

@bigurbBlake Urban

@anthony.p.shawAnthony Shaw

@mikeniklesMike Nikles

@patrickman6Patrick Manfra

@theMartecThe Martec

@christineparma
Christine Parma

@ava411
Avantika Mehra

@ricricho
Ric Richardson

@digitalvijay
Digital Vijay

@mihaelatetcu
Mihaela Sfat

@aravindbaskaran
Aravind

@puyan-wei
Puyan Wei

@pyan
Puyan Wei

@grohith327
Rohith Gandhi

@_ketanbhatt
Ketan Bhatt

@sadie-williamson
Sadie Williamson

@tvicky002
Vikesh Tiwari

@decodoku
Dr James Wootton

@ideepak.jsd
Deepak Gupta

@trentlapinski
Trent Lapinski

@jennifer.greenberg
Jennifer Greenberg

@bigurb
Blake Urban

@anthony.p.shaw
Anthony Shaw

@mikenikles
Mike Nikles

@patrickman6
Patrick Manfra

@theMartec
The Martec