Ball

BUNCH

Fetch

Super

Target

A different way to manage state in React

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This list concludes top 14 web designer skills you must have in 2018. You can learn and improve your web design skills to become better. With the rapid development of the internet, Web designers and web developers have become quite popular in recent years. With popularity, however, comes competition, begging the question, how does one improve their web design and development skills in order to remain competitive? , obviously, they have clear boundaries and divisions of labor in their professional roles. With the development of technology and changes in product design, the skills of web designers are no longer limited to design, but encroach on becoming “ ”. Web designers vs. web developers full stack designers What skills do web designers need? How does one go about maximizing their salary in this field? You can get answers to all these questions in this article. Mockplus has summed up a for your reference. We hope it will help you to in your quest of becoming an excellent, well-paid web designer. How does one become a web designer? web designer skills list for 2018 Before looking into the web designer skills list, let’s clarify what a web designer does in a company, and what kind of skills are required. Below is a web designer job description template: Web designer job description from Workable This Web Designer job description template is optimized for posting on online job boards or careers pages. It is easy to customize for your company and specific designer or developer duties and responsibilities. Post Now on Job Boards Web Designer Responsibilities Include: Executing all visual design stages from concept to final hand-off to engineering Conceptualizing original website design ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness to complex roadblocks Job brief Weare looking for a talented Web Designer to create amazing user experiences. The ideal candidate should have an eye for clean and artful web design. They should also have superior user interface design skills. The successful candidate will be able to translate high-level requirements into interaction flows and artifacts. They will be able to transform them into beautiful, intuitive, and functional designs. Responsibilities Execute all visual design stages from concept to final hand-off to engineering Conceptualize original website design ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness to complex roadblocks Create wireframes, storyboards, user flows, process flows and site maps to communicate interaction and design ideas Present and defend designs and key deliverables to peers and executive level stakeholders Establish and promote design guidelines, best practices, and standards Requirements Proven work experience as a web designer Demonstrable graphic design skills with a strong portfolio Solid experience in creating wireframes, storyboards, user flows, process flows, and sitemap Proficiency in Photoshop, Illustrator or other visual design and wire-framing tools Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for rapid prototyping Experience working in an Agile/Scrum development process Excellent visual design skills with sensitivity to user-system interaction Ability to solve problems creatively and effectively Up-to-date with the latest Web trends, techniques, and technologies BS/MS in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design or aVisual Arts subject Through the description of the required skills in the job template above, we can get a general idea of what a web designer does. It provides lots of information about what skills are needed, which design tools one should master, and which technical skills are required. For a better understanding and to help guide new Web designers, Mockplus has divided Web designer skills into three categories: professional skills, technical skills, and soft skills. Web Designer’s Professional Skills Then from the aspect of professional skills, the necessary proficiencies of web designers are as follows: 1. Design Tool Craftsmen always have a set of tools. As the job descriptions listed above, a web designer must use several essential design software applications. Although it is now possible to design websites in a web browser, tools such as Photoshop, Sketch, and Mockplus are very useful tools for image processing, icon design, and prototyping. Using the right tools at the right stage will make your work more effective. : powerful image processing for graphic and web design. PS (Photoshop) : referred to as “AI”, is a very good vector graphics processing tool, mainly used for font design, graphic design, product packaging design, book /magazine layout, and illustration design. Adobe Illustrator : referred to as “AE”, is a graphic video processing software introduced by Adobe. In a nutshell, it is a dynamic version of PS, which is very powerful with a complicated operation. Adobe After Effects : a powerful , free for download. Mockplus interactive prototyping/wireframing tool : An online design collaboration tool for digital product teams, including designers and engineers. It connects your design work from design to development and helps teams with design handoff. Mockplus iDoc 2. Design Sense Having a good sense of design is very important for web designers. Web design is more than just making a good-looking website. You must have an understanding of design elements such as typeset, images, and basic design principles such as layout principles, and more. form design principles 3. UX Design UX stands for user experience, or how people feel when they use the site. To provide a good UX, you need to research your users to help create user personas ( ) and use sitemaps to lay out pages and content. This helps you understand the user’s path during actual site visits. Through repeated testing, a website’s design can be improved, ameliorating user experience, and thus increasing user conversions. 18 Free Excellent User Persona Templates for inspiration 4. Responsive Design With the growth of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, more and more people use small screens to view and read web page information. As a web designer, you should understand the principles of responsive web design to keep your web pages readable on small screens. ( ) 12 best responsive web design tutorials to get you started! 5. Graphic Design . If you are a web designer with graphic design skills, this will enhance your marketability. Web design is different from graphic design 6. Adobe Animate Animation can make a dull web page dynamic. An appropriate animation will make your website more attractive. Especially for name-brand clothing, cars, film, and television websites, an animation is particularly important. Visual impact will help with brands identity and recognition. Web Designer’s Technical Skills With the rapid development of web development technology, the requirements for web designers are getting higher and higher. In addition to being proficient in professional skills, understanding the necessary web development language will have a longer-term benefit for you. 1. HTML Some people might not think Web designers should master HTML, however, whether you are a developer or not, you should know basic HTML/CSS. This will help you to more easily read, edit and solve problems. However, depending on your actual work as a designer/developer, the level and scope you need to know may be even broader. In any case, you should be aware of how styles and colors are controlled and adjusted by code. These skills are extremely useful in the long run. 2. CSS CSS and HTML are partners in website development and are the basic building blocks of web page structure and style. HTML determines the structure of the site, and CSS handles the visual appearance. For example, CSS lets you adjust colors, change fonts, or add stunning backgrounds. 3. JavaScript With the ability to write design code in HTML and CSS, you can help render yourself more competitive by learning to program in JavaScript. As a web designer you know JavaScript, that may help you solve big problems in actual work. In addition, according to a survey by StackOverflow, JS is the most popular programming language for . full stack developers 4. Web Server Management Most web designers think they can ignore the server, but the web server and downtime issues are inevitable. You don’t need to be a back-end expert, but understanding how a web server and its basic features work will help you solve problems faster. Web Designer’s Soft Skills Now that we’ve discussed professional and technical skills, we should look at adding some soft skills to help keep our web design work more organized. 1.Time management Whether you are a freelancer or work for a company, time management skills are important. The rapid updating of project iterations means that the design must also be updated from time to time. Good web designers need to manage their schedules and follow up on project needs. 2. Project Management Project management is a key job skill in almost every industry, and web design is no exception. Good project management skills not only benefit the project but also benefit your career. 3. SEO SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is useful for anyone building a website. Web designers and web developers should at least understand the basics of SEO, and that will be a plus for your work. Many factors can affect the ranking of a website in a search engine, from the content of the site to its inbound links to its download speed, performance, and its mobile-friendliness. All of these are factors that web designers should pay attention to when designing. Once you know SEO, you can use these factors to make the site more attractive to search engines, thus making it easier to find for customers. 4. Customer Service Although customer service is not a technical skill, providing excellent customer service is a requirement in order for a good web designer to win customers and achieve better results. Even the best web designers/developers may fail. Summary: This list concludes the top 14 web designer skills you must have in 2018. As you can see, there is no mystery to becoming a web designer. These skills form the foundation for the knowledge required. Keep learning and improving your Web designer skills, that’s the only secret to becoming a good web designer. More resource for web designers: The Best Mockup & Wireframing Design Tools & Apps for UI/UX Designers in 2018 10 Best Steps Guide on How to Become a Web Designer The Best UI/UX Design Books & Resources for Designers (Updated)

Adobe

Top 14 Web Designer Skills You Must Have in 2018

This year’s been a really crazy year for me. I dropped out of university, left my job and went full time on . 8x Protocol Today I’m excited to announce I’ve also sold The (http://thehomeworkapp.com). Reflecting back over the past 6 years, I’ve been able to showcase the fact the app has: Homework App Received 2.5M+ downloads globally Been used by 100,000 students every month in over 90+ countries Featured on the front page of the App Store, Forbes, Yahoo and more. Received the Apple WWDC Scholarship + many more awards Text Enlarger As cheesy as it might sound, the path to this point has been really special. I initially started coding when I was 12 because it seemed like something that was kinda fun to do. My first app was an app to help me say goodbye to my Dad at the airport via my phone screen. Making it was a massive challenge, I’d relentlessly copy StackOverflow snippets hoping they’d work and read O’Reilly’s books on development. The hardest bit was trying to figure out the programming concepts presented and applying them. iOS Here’s how the app looked at the end: I started off charging $1 per download. The days someone would purchase my app I’d buy something from the school cafeteria. Home of Tapping (a.k.a HOT) I was massively into Runescape and MapleStory so I wanted to try making my first game, although without graphics. Since I couldn’t afford a graphic designer to hire one and was horrible at drawing myself I decided to create a game to see who can tap a button in various game modes. As you can tell, my design skills were pretty immature. Although I’m still pretty happy with the hard light effect I managed to create on the buttons. By the time I finished HOT I wasn’t blindly looking at tutorials and could improvise more when it came to writing code. I probably spent a year on this project and a few more on the side. HOT got a few 10,000 downloads but probably less than $100 in ad revenue. The Homework App I think by this point I was a basic iOS developer but creating a CRUD application was still beyond my reach. One day after failing to remember to do my homework I thought I’d get an app to help me. Despite not having the best design abilities, I had an eye for design and knew there was an opportunity to create a better looking app than the existing ones out there. It also was the perfect application of a CRUD application so I didn’t need more convincing to start developing. I think to get the very first version of The Homework App out the door I spent ~ 6 months building, designing and testing the application. My user testing team was basically just my parents and sister who would give me feedback on how easy/hard it was to use the app. To date, they’re still the best UX testers. Version One, the OG. For me, this was a big step up compared to my previous applications in terms of design and engineering. Luckily the hard work paid off and I got 100 downloads on the first day launch of the application — with no marketing whatsoever. This was a massive deal for me. My business intuition told me it was probably a good idea to keep working on this one rather than jumping to the next idea haha. A few days later I got my first email from a user asking for a feature request, this was my introduction to product development and listening to user feedback. As the years went on, I had to learn to prioritise and learn who to listen to and who to ignore. All by trail and error unfortunately haha. The app continued to advance over the next few years and it slowly morphed into something bigger than I had initially planned. The Good I think what blew me away was when I saw real people use the app and share it, without me even knowing they existed in the first place. Seeing reviews from students all around the world thanking me for creating something that they *truly* enjoyed using and made a true difference in their life never got old. I think one of the craziest things was waking up, searching for my app on Google and seeing this from Forbes: For a teenager, in New Zealand, to see that was pretty breathtaking. Like I got featured on Forbes without even reaching out? Lessons Making products is really, really hard. Late 2016, I felt the app had lost its design edge but also needed some critical updates such as cloud syncing. The best approach, although painful, was to recreate the app from scratch and reimagine the entire experience. I spent a few months creating wireframes and high res images for the refreshed look, and then another few months coding and testing the new version. The update was meant to be spectacular: Cloud syncing (highly requested feature for years) Slick new design that was very iOS 10 centric Cool new dashboard that had cool animations In addition, I had made changes to the revenue model by making it subscription based rather than a one-time payment. The end result of it all? 175 one-star reviews in 2017, a lot of angry users and lots of lost revenue. People were angry, confused and mad about the new update. It didn’t conform to their expectations and their sense of familiarity had been completely shattered. It took about 6 months to a year for the dust to settle but there were a lot of learnings I took from this experience: Rock the boat, but don’t rock too many things that people don’t have any connection left with what you created originally Gather lots of view points and feedback. If it doesn’t match your expectations, listen even closer — don’t ignore it (I did exactly the opposite). The larger you build something, the more fragile it becomes. From revenue streams to product choices, make sure you understand what it is you’re changing and the impacts they could have. Are you ready for the worst case? Closing I’m still inspired with the fact that I managed to reach millions of people, from my bedroom. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed growing up making iOS applications over the past few years, however it’s time to move on to bigger things. As cliche as it sounds, crypto is the one thing I’m probably going to be dedicating the next decade of my life to. What makes crypto exciting is the intersection of politics, economics and technology. I’m still extremely clueless about how societies work, economies are made, wars are started and what money really is. Learning about all of these topics is going to provide my inner curiosity the kind of hunger it desires. Until then, it’s back to square one with 8x and starting fresh on a brand new venture. Peace!

Apple

Google

The Homework App, the end of a 8 year iOS journey.

This guide is designed to help you avoid letting your emotions dictate your trades. Buying and trading cryptocurrencies can be an emotional experience. It’s fast-paced and there are lots of different kinds of trades and purchases to make. Some people try to make money off the volatility of cryptocurrency prices through short-term day trading. Others are looking to hold long-term investments and hope the cryptocurrencies they buy will be a store of value. All this makes buying and trading cryptocurrencies fun and potentially profitable. But it can also be charged with FOMO and FUD, which creates a risk of making decisions based on emotion rather than facts. To mitigate risk and avoid losing funds in the cryptocurrency market it’s crucial to keep emotions in check. The following guide is designed to help you avoid letting your emotions dictate your trades. 1. Make a plan The most important thing before starting to trade is to have a clear idea of what your goal is when investing in cryptocurrencies. Before buying any cryptocurrency ask yourself these questions: How does buying crypto fit with your finances in general? Do you have other savings? If not, is crypto the best way to start investing? Would a safe vehicle make more sense to start? Can you afford to lose the money your thinking of using to buy crypto? Do you know about the risks and the volatility of cryptocurrency markets? How will you use your cryptocurrencies: buy and hold, or trade? 2. Do Your Research It’s critical to do background research into the cryptocurrencies you might buy and their underlying technology. Be sure to read the project’s whitepaper. Look for cryptocurrencies backed by good technology and an active community. Though these two things are no guarantee of success, they will help you better understand what you’re buying. 3. Choose the Right Trading Exchange Choosing is about figuring out which one will help you reach your goals based on your plan. Some of them have dozens and dozens of coins available for purchase and trade, while others list only a few. Some allow you to cash out your cryptocurrencies into fiat currency while others do not. Some allow you to purchase cryptocurrencies with fiat while others do not. Finding out which is best for you is essential. Here are some factors to consider: the right platform Using an exchange in your country helps with meeting legal requirements. It’s also easier to make deposits or withdrawals in your local fiat currency using your bank. Location: Take a look at the exchange you want to use. What coins are available? What trading pairs? Can you buy cryptocurrencies with a fiat currency deposit or only with another cryptocurrency like Bitcoin? If you are looking for a long-term investment, an exchange with basic pairings will best. If you are looking to speculate on the market with day trading, on the other hand, you may need an exchange with advanced trading features. Coins and trading pairs available: Platform security is critical. What kind of login procedure does the site have? The stricter it is, the better. Make sure the platform does everything possible to protect your funds from hacks. Check online for news associated with the platform and any reported risks. Another part of security is access to the exchange’s support team, which helps you get in touch if anything does go wrong or you need help. Security: 4. Know your limits You have to know how much you can spend and . How much you want to spend depends on your plan (see point 1 above). Investing in cryptocurrencies carries significant risk so you should only spend what you can afford to lose. Once you set your limit, stick to it. Do not decide to spend more on a whim or because of FOMO. This can lead to stay within that limit disaster. 5. Take advantage of limit orders Limit orders can protect you from losses if cryptocurrency prices drop quickly. A limit order lets you set the lowest limit to which you will allow your cryptocurrency price to fall to before selling. Limit orders also help lock in gains. For example, you buy a coin at 20 dollars per coin. If you expect the value to rise quickly you could set a limit order at $19.99. If the price falls dramatically, the platform will automatically sell your coins at $19.99. If the value of the coin rises to 25 dollars per coin, you can change the limit order to $24. Most exchanges will have a limit order system. Before you start to buy cryptocurrencies, test out the limit order system. It’s not a perfect science but limit orders help to limit losses and secure gains. 6. Don’t obsess over market charts Right now, it’s the nature of the cryptocurrency sector for prices fluctuate dramatically. This is part of what is appealing about trading crypto. Prices can change in seconds, which creates profit opportunities. At the same time, the volatility can be an emotional rollercoaster. Watching market charts can cause your blood pressure to rise and trigger emotional responses, leading either to panicked selling or to buying high as a result of FOMO. While market charts are valuable, I speak from experience in saying that staring at them 24hours a day is not the best way to keep emotions under control when buying cryptocurrencies. Conclusion Buying and trading cryptocurrency can be exciting and potentially profitable. But it also comes with risk and high emotions. The points laid out above can help you keep a level head_._ Subscribe to my channels Medium and Twitter if you like my articles and want to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. If you have any questions about this article, please comment in the section below. Thank you!

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6 Ways to Keep Your Emotions Under Control When Trading Cryptocurrencies

Augmented and virtual reality has become the next big move in the technology. Undoubtedly, the dawn of this revolutionizing era has lightened up mobile application development by delivering life-like experiences to customers. The rapid conversion in businesses urges to raise the market share of augmented reality app development into the mobile app market.“ ” — Tim Cook A sizable portion of the population will have AR experiences every day, thus soon will become an essential part of daily lives AR apps change the way people interact with the brands. It utilizes the device’s camera towards the object, image, location, and users can see digital information in forms of graphics, objects, video, and audio right on the screen. To create persuasive AR apps, you need an experienced and excellent team of AR developers who leave no stone unturned to deliver what’s best as per your branding needs. After an insightful research on the AR app development companies, we have filtered the top leading companies which possess the best ratings worldwide. Clavax — Delivers Immersive Virtual Experiences through Powerful AR/VR Apps Clavax is an award-winning organization which follows the principle of building and implementing great ideas that empower the clients’ businesses through innovative enterprise solutions. With a decade-long experience in mobile app development, Clavax has become one of the ace players in Augmented and virtual reality app development. Backed with a robust architecture, experienced AR developers, and modern AR toolkits, they are ready to deliver apps with advanced functionalities and show augmented data on mobile screens. They have built an efficient and smart AR estimation tool to provide accurate estimates to their customers under a minute. · Pricing: $25 — $49 / hr · Employees: 50–249 · Founded: 2011 · Location: San Jose, CA To know more : Visit Website 2. AppsChopper — AR App Development Services to Create Real-World Illusions AppsChopper is a leading mobile app development firm offering innovative AR-VR app solutions for custom business needs. Their AR developers are well-versed working on popular tools like Vuforia, ARToolkit, Wikitude, and many more. They have catered different industries like entertainment, food, aviation, automobile, and manufacturing with their AR expertise. The prime focus of the company is to deliver tailor-made app development services to startups, agencies, and organizations across the globe. By leveraging the strategic AR app development capabilities, you can get advanced AR apps at cost-effective prices. · Pricing: $50 — $99 / hr · Employees: 50–249 · Founded: 2011 · Location: New York, US To know more : Visit Website 3. Gravity Jack — Builds Custom Augmented Reality Experiences A full-service, custom software development firm, Gravity Jack specializes in building mobile apps, augmented and virtual reality. They have a formidable team with an exclusive ability to recognize and augment any real-world object, through their propitiatory Adroit platform. Adroit solves complex problems, by unlocking the full potential of AR to deliver ideal user experiences. With hands-on experience in the cutting-edge AR technologies, the qualified team of AR developers offers compelling AR apps in a brief time. · Pricing: Undisclosed · Employees: 10–49 · Founded: 2009 · Location: Liberty Lake, WA To know more : Visit Website 4. CitrusBits — Aims to Create Truly Disruptive Mobile Experience for Users Headquartered in the USA, CitrusBits is one of the recognized mobile app agencies with proven AR development expertise. With years of experience, the company provides interactive AR apps for both startups and seasoned businesses. They are known for delivering an end-to-end augmented reality app development approach that includes everything like 3D modeling, animation, computer vision, spatial audio, and frontend/backend development. The team guarantees to deliver amazing customer experiences that increase your customer engagement rates. · Pricing: $100 — $149 / hr · Employees: 10–49 · Founded: 2005 · Location: California, USA To know more : Visit Website 5. HiddenBrains — Explores the Unmatched Potential of Augmented Reality Technologies Hidden Brains is a renowned software & IT company offering deep industry knowledge in AR app development services. By using the power of Augmented reality, the company has a strong portfolio in developing the most captivating AR apps and redefine the way customers interact with the businesses. They have a team of app developers, digital producers, 3D artists who work collaboratively to deliver result-driven AR/VR apps for multiple industry verticals. · Pricing: <$25 / hr · Employees: 250–999 · Founded: 2003 · Location: United States To know more : Visit Website 6. Intellectsoft — Custom Augmented Reality App Development Services Intellectsoft is a top AR development company offering the best AR experiences for different verticals. They have immensely knowledgeable AR developers who create high-quality apps for both Android and iOS devices. Whether it is emotion-invoking AR experiences to object and pattern recognition, the company delivers insightful perspectives into your operations and significantly increase accuracy and efficiency. With extensive experience and strong skills, they give a brand-new level of experience to your customers. · Pricing: $50 — $99 / hr · Employees: 250–999 · Founded: 2007 · Location: Palo Alto, CA To know more : Visit Website 7. Dogtown Media — Intuitive Augment Reality Development Solutions Founded in 2011, Dogtown Media is a well-known AR app development company offering the best app-making expertise to build amazing apps. The company follows end-to-end augmented reality solutions as per the specific need of the clients. Leverage their strategic advantages to deliver lifelike user experiences by bridging the gap between the real and digital world. Strengthened by the right blend of creativity and experience, the AR developers suggest you the right features to scale your business’s growth. · Pricing: $100 — $149 / hr · Employees: 10–49 · Founded: 2011 · Location: Venice Beach, US To know more : Visit Website 8. 8ninths — Revolutionize Business through Augmented Reality Apps A Settle-based augmented and virtual reality company, 8ninths provides platform solution and services for industries across all the verticals. The company is actively into the development of AR applications for enterprises on leading platforms like Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and more. The main aim is to solve complex problems with creative strategy and eloquent engineering. · Pricing: $150 — $199 / hr · Employees: 10–49 · Founded: 2008 · Location: Seattle, WA To know more : Visit Website 9. Cortex — Interactive and Intuitive Augmented Reality Experiences Based on the robust portfolio, Cortex has an experienced team to develop amazing augmented reality experiences for both web and mobile platforms. They have strong expertise in the latest technologies including Unity 3D, 360 videos, 3D models, and Web GL. The company has a creative and qualified team that evaluates every aspect of your business to seek out the full potential of innovation. · Pricing: $50 — $99 / hr · Employees: 50–249 · Founded: 2009 · Location: United States To know more : Visit Website 10. SubVRsive — Harness the Power of AR to Create Extraordinary Results From 360 Videos to cutting-edge AR solutions, SubVRsive build AR apps that drive brand engagement. It is a full-service augmented reality app development company which is focused on creating impactful AR/VR experiences for their customers. They have a robust portfolio that enables them to develop powerful AR apps which improve user interaction, boost user interest and strengthen brand loyalty. · Pricing: Undisclosed · Employees: 10–49 · Founded: 2015 · Location: Austin, TX To know more : Visit Website These are top augmented and virtual reality app development companies that offer their unique solutions worldwide. Choose your ideal partner and get started with your next AR app.

Dogtown Media

Intellectsoft

Microsoft

Top 10 Leading Augmented Reality(AR) App Development Companies in US

The past 1 year or more has witnessed the dawn of a new technological era with the emergence of the revolutionary Blockchain technology. The distributed ledger tech is facilitating solutions to the problems faced by many industries- from healthcare, real estate, supply chain, logistics, to education. We’re currently witnessing the adoption of this tech across many such sectors. News has been abuzz with many such collaborations and partnerships leading to the launch of Blockchain-based pilot projects. Owing to its myriad use cases, Blockchain is continuously receiving endorsements from global leaders, veteran industry experts, and even rising entrepreneurs. In fact, Blockchain is heralded as the harbinger of the next big industrial revolution. If you are looking to make a successful living then a career in Blockchain technology just might be the right thing to pursue. Before thinking about starting a Blockchain technology career you may want to get into the basics of what Blockchain technology is. Well, the distributed ledger technology was initially developed as a way to account for the peer-to-peer digital currency, Bitcoin, by a person or a group of people who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Since its inception, the technology has made many leaps and today it has gone beyond just Bitcoin and is now starting to serve use cases beyond cryptocurrencies, as discussed above. The active deployment of Blockchain across industry sectors and the enthusiasm for a technology that has the potential to start another technological revolution has stirred up the demand for Blockchain related jobs. As per a report by Upwork, the worldwide freelance website, Blockchain topped the list of the 20 Fastest-Growing Skills on Upwork for Q1 2018. TechCrunch, on the other hand, reported in an early 2018 article that Blockchain careers are in huge demand because Blockchain jobs were then the second-fastest growing in the labour market. The article illustrated that at the time there were as much as 14 job openings for 1 Blockchain Developer. Even though Blockchain is making waves, the job sector is comparatively new and the career path is one that hasn’t been tried before. Therefore, starting a career in this field might be as experimentative and the path to success as innovative as the technology itself. For the longest time, a good college degree has been considered the gateway to getting a high paying job. In fact, students have been following the same path all along- get good grades in school to land up in the class of a good college, study an in-demand course, and finally pass out and get a high income earning job. This has although changed ever since. In fact, many college grads are leaving school with massive debts on their head. As per a news, US college student debt has reached a gigantic USD 1.5 million. While there are others who complete their education but are not able to find a job relevant to their major. A consequence of the aforementioned disparity in education and skills has led to companies struggling to find the ideal candidates. In the technologically advanced times of today, there is a growing consensus that skills are more important than a candidate’s education. Education in Blockchain Since Blockchain technology is still in its infancy, those looking for a career in this revolutionary field will have to understand that their career path will be entirely different from the technology entrepreneurs who made their mark before them. To establish a successful career in this field a candidate should understand that the need of the hour is people who can continuously improve upon their skills. Since Blockchain is continuously evolving, it is very essential for candidates to stay up to date with development in the field. If you want to kickstart your career in the Blockchain industry right away, then you must renounce the thought of following the traditional education process. Instead here are the steps to follow! Understand the fundamentals Unlike any other technology of the time, Blockchain comes with a unique value proposition. Just how the advent of the Internet stirred up another era, the Blockchain tech has commenced the start of a value exchange revolution. The understanding of this is very critical to the start of a career in Blockchain. Features such as decentralization, Daaps, and Smart Contracts are the essence of Blockchain and it is essential that anyone wanting to begin their career in this industry should be aware of the essence of it. For a Blockchain Developer, technical skills in the distributed ledger technology form the backbone of their career. A good place to start is Solidity for the development of Smart Contracts, and JavaScript for the development of a website. In fact, learning a programming language can also help you land a part time job until you hone your Blockchain-related skills. Hence, a degree in Computer Science or the like can prove to be very helpful here. Instead of joining a professional course or going for formal education, one can opt for online education programs that have gained a lot of prominence in the digital times of today. Go for training in cryptography Assets are moving from the physical world to the digital realm. As a result, cryptography is gaining much significance. The distributed ledger technology of Blockchain plays a crucial role in asset management, as it is the tech that facilitates the protection of the digital assets through the art of cryptography. Big organisations depend on cryptography to secure their assets, and any failure in the deployment of codes can have a devastating impact on the privacy of these organisations as well as the users. For a successful career on Blockchain, aspirants must go for a high level cryptography course from reputed online sources such as Udacity, Coursera, etc. Gain knowledge of Distributed Computing Theory and its use cases In the current times where technology has proliferated to all new levels, reliability and security have become two of the most important issues that affect the users, organizations, and the world as a whole. This is where Blockchain comes into play! Through distributed computing Blockchain tech offers a solution like never before. However, the deployment of Blockchain is plagued by excessive energy consumption and myriad other issues such as scalability. Aspiring Blockchain students need to understand these issues and arise at solutions for the successful implementation of Blockchain across sectors and industries. Be a part of the Blockchain community Cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology Blockchain have thriving communities that are responsible for the promotion of the cause of the revolutionary tech. Today, there are several cryptocurrency projects in the market. These projects offers rewards for completing tasks. For a budding student of the Blockchain industry, it is crucial that she/he partakes in such projects as they function as on-the-job training mechanisms. To be able to participate in these projects, a students would be required to reach out to the Blockchain startup and offer your services that help with the community outreach, be it leadership talks, event organization, or developing applications on Blockchains. Starting this way will give you, as a Blockchain student, the leverage of working and networking with the right people in the niche industry. Create your own path There is no doubt that jobs in Blockchain are flourishing, but the future holds even more potential for those working in this cutting edge technological field. This is the right time for aspiring students to get involved in the community and create their own path to career success. For Blockchain it is not yet important to spend years in formal education. The above mentioned strategies should definitely help in charting your path. _How hackers find the best tech jobs. The official job board of the publication, Hacker Noon! How hackers start their…_jobs.hackernoon.com Dope Tech Jobs by Hacker Noon

Waves

Chain

Techcrunch

How to Start Your Career in Blockchain Technology?

This is Part 2 of a three-part series about creating visualizations for dissecting data and models. and code, including a Jupyter Notebook with the visualizations in this post, is on . Part 1 can be found here GitHub Decision Boundaries When you train a classifier on a dataset, it is using a specific algorithm to define a set of that separates the data points into specific classes. Where the algorithm switches from one class to the other are called . On one side a decision boundary, a datapoint is more likely to be called as one class — on the other side of the boundary, it’s more likely to be called as another. hyperplanes decision boundaries Boundaries are fuzzy, but they illustrate where key ‘decision points’ are made by the model. This visualization compares 10 algorithms on three two-dimensional datasets with different intrinsic properties. Taken from . scikit-learn.org Importantly, decision boundaries are not confined to just the data points you provided — they span through the entire feature space you trained on. The model can predict a value for any possible combination of inputs in your feature space. If the data you train on is not ‘diverse’, the overall topology of the model (decision boundaries and classification regions) will . generalize poorly to new instances This is important to know for models you throw into production, or try to reuse on orthogonal datasets. There is nothing inherent to a machine learning model that will warn you if the model is not appropriate for another dataset. There is nothing that will tell you ‘this data point is very different from the ones I learned on.’ Understanding the limitations of existing models and the decision boundaries they learned is helpful for repurposing and reapplication, especially in instances where retraining or transfer learning are not possible. Selecting Models Training a classifier requires data and an algorithm. Choosing an algorithm is an iterative and often experimental process. Rarely am I able to correctly select the appropriate algorithm that will perform best on a particular dataset on my first try. So why is that? Why is there no ‘one model to rule them all’? Can’t we just throw a neural net at every problem? The “ ” states that search and optimization algorithms with excellent performance for one class of problems will not excel at others. In other words, there is no universally-useful algorithm across all data. Selecting the right approach takes intuition, an understanding of the data and goals of the analysis, practice, and time. No Free Lunch Theorem Average ranking of supervised learning algorithms (scikit-learn) over 165 supervised classification datasets from the . Gradient boosting is excellent, but is outperformed for many datasets. This analysis also does not taken generalizability or interpretation of the model into account. Image taken from the very excellent Penn Machine Learning Benchmark (PMLB) Olson, et al., available on PubMed . Examining decision boundaries is a great way to learn how the training data you select affects performance and the ability for your model to generalize — especially if you’re someone who learns tactilely. Visualization of decision boundaries can illustrate how sensitive models are to each dataset. And it’s a great way to intuitively understand how specific algorithms work, and their limitations for specific datasets. Decision Boundary Plots in Bokeh In , I discussed using Bokeh to generate interactive PCA reports. Here I’ll discuss how to use Bokeh to generate decision boundary plots. Part 1 Training a K-nearest neighbor classifier (K=3) on the first two principal components of the iris dataset. Each class has its own color, with corresponding decision boundaries. Data points with outlines indicate test data with the model’s prediction as the outline. In the case where the outline is a different color, the model misclassified that datapoint. My goals for this visualization tool were three-fold. Given a model and a dataset: I want to see which data points were used for training, to understand if the distribution was appropriate I want to see which data points were used for testing, and ‘where’ the classifier is challenged with accurate predictions I want to see the decision boundaries for each class, to understand if/how the model will be useful for prediction for future, unseen data points In addition, the code should be as generalizable as possible — it should accept any sci-kit learn classifier and any dataset with any number of classes. Note that a limitation of the approach is that it only works on two-dimensional data currently, so transforming the data (with e.g. PCA) is necessary. In the future, I may explore visualizing multi-dimensional decision boundaries in two/three human-interpretable dimensions. Below, I’ll walk through key components of the visualization. Mesh Grids A major component of the tool is automatically generating the ‘mesh grid’. This is a set of coordinates upon which the model will make predictions, which are then visualized to reveal the decision boundaries. I designed the mesh grid algorithm such that it is tuned by the data itself. Two key aspects of the mesh grid are how far apart they are ( or step size) and the window in which you want to visualize predictions ( ). step, bound I use a bound and steps to define a new 2D array in the existing coordinate system. To generate and values, I used the average distance between data points within each axis of the 2D dataset: bound step # set bound as a % of average of ranges for x and y
bound = 0.1*np.average(np.ptp(matrix_2D, axis=0))
    
# set step size as a % of the average of ranges for x and y 
step = 0.05*np.average(np.ptp(matrix_2D, axis=0)) is the 2D dataset. The numpy.ptp function calculated the peak-to-peak distances in your data along a specified axis. The size defines the resolution of the mesh grid. The smaller the size between data points, the larger the resolution. matrix_2D step step With , I then generate the window for populating the mesh: bound # get boundaries
x_min = matrix_2D[:,0].min() - bound
x_max = matrix_2D[:,0].max() + bound
y_min = matrix_2D[:,1].min() - bound 
y_max = matrix_2D[:,1].max() + bound The final mesh is generated by creating a value with the bounds at each step. Here, the function comes in handy: numpy.meshgrid() mesh = np.meshgrid(np.arange(x_min, x_max, step), np.arange(y_min, y_max, step)) Finally, you can simply use a trained classifier to predict values across the entire mesh: predictions = trained_clf.predict(np.c_[mesh[0].ravel(), mesh[1].ravel()])
predictions = predictions.reshape(mesh[0].shape) Dataframe of a meshgrid with predictions. Training and Test Data The other fun part of developing the tool was figuring out how to visualize data points that were used for training and testing. I iterated over a few design choices and settled on a final one: Training data and test data will be colored by their class Test data will have an additional element: a bold outline indicating the predicted class for that data point A HoverTool will give the true class and the predicted one I’m pretty happy with the results, which you can see below. The final UI makes it easy to see which data were used for train/test and immediately see where the model does a poorer job. Decision boundary for the 2D PCA of the iris dataset, zoomed in at the virginica (yellow)/versicolor (green) interface. The HoverTool shows is shown over a datapoint in the ‘test data.’ The ‘truth’ for this point is virginica but the predicted value is versicolor. There’s more detail on how to implement this UI element in the Jupyter Notebook, including how to add additional touches like HoverTool labels. Feel free to have a look and play with it! Interpolation/Extrapolation Interpolation is estimating properties of data within the boundaries of a given dataset. Extrapolating is looking beyond your dataset to make accurate predictions. An example of interpolation is estimating a missing feature in your dataset for a particular instance. Say you have developed a new material, and you’re able to measure its thermal properties but not certain conductive ones. Using a model, the missing property values could be estimated based on the other factors. But what if the material is from the data you have in hand? You have to trust that the model is able to generalize well and can extrapolate the missing value. very unique Application of an existing model to new data points is very dependent on the decision boundaries of the model. Let’s look at a simple example. Two Random Forest models trained on the same data, including the same training and test split. On the right, the model has a higher accuracy, but also a strange decision boundary. Above, you can see two Random Forest models trained on the same data, including the same training and test split. On the right, the model has a higher accuracy, but also a strange decision boundary. At PC1=2, as you move from PC2=-1 to PC2=1, the model will switch from versicolor to virginica to versicolor to virginica. Importantly, this strange decision boundary is close to actual instances of the data. Though the model on the right is more accurate, the decision boundary will result in very different predictions and the model may be overfit. Non-Linearity I want to finish this post by discussing data sets requiring non-linear decision boundaries, and fold in a little about how dimensionality reduction techniques can be used to expand which models can be used. The is often used to demonstrate manifold learning techniques and the limitations of common clustering methods (such as agglomerative clustering or k-nearest neighbors) on complex manifolds. Swiss Roll A 2D swiss roll with two classes (purple, red). Try to cleanly separate the purple and the red bits with a linear function — you can’t! This is a simple example where non-linear functions will be valuable. As one would expect, a linear function does a very poor job in defining a decision boundary that properly splits these data. Here’s Logistic Regression in action: It’s doing its best. Meanwhile, Random Forest has no problem on these data. It essentially carves a box around the center (though it’s not learning anything about the ‘curvature’ of the data). Random Forest ‘decides’ that anything within a specific set of bounds is green. Though it’s entirely inappropriate for these data, let’s look at how a multi-layer perceptron (or feed-forward neural network) behaves on these data: Results from a 16 x 16 perceptron. As you can see, we approach 100% accuracy, and then decision boundary in the center overlaps with Random Forest strongly. However, you can see the upper left corner is all green. The ‘green’ decision boundary will extend out into infinity in that direction. You may be asking, “Why do we care about any of this? My data is not a swiss roll.” Here’s what I think: ‘Accuracy’ is a poor metric for the fitness of a model for all use cases. Overfitting is a common challenge and understanding overfitting takes practice and intuition. Going beyond single numbers to build ‘model sense’ and ‘data sense’ are helpful for me to gain better intuition about data. Models get repurposed often. The generalizability of a model matters, particularly when deploying in dynamic systems (e.g. an advertising platform with new products on market, a healthcare system with new treatments coming out each month). Robust models that allow you to simulate state-changes in a system fascinate me (what if the patient received treatment Y instead of X? what if they had a mutation in this gene versus that?) but are tricky to achieve in practice — decision boundaries strongly affect ‘what if’ predictions. I hope you enjoyed this post! . . Part 3 is coming up in November! Part 1 can be found here The notebook for this post can be found on GitHub

Yellow

Creating visualizations to better understand your data and models (Part 2)

This is the fourth in a series of articles highlighting the many applications of Artificial Intelligence. Manufacturing and Distribution, the supply chain, does not always get as much publicity as the latest technology trend or the newest financial vehicle threatening to bring the global economy to its knees. Nonetheless, it remains the backbone of the economy. Some of the sexiest firms out there are in this sector — Tesla is a manufacturer, Amazon is a distributor. Manufacturing and distribution is also a hotbed of AI development. There are innumerable points along the supply chain where Artificial Intelligence can add value. Here are a few examples: Predictive Maintenance Twenty years ago I was working with a predictive modeling firm that had a proprietary neural network solution. One of our clients was a global semiconductor manufacturer. They told us that every hour of downtime in their chip fabrication process cost them $250,000. This was an expensive, highly complex manufacturing system. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I met an engineer with a fastener manufacturer at a trade show. He told me that they sold their fasteners for only a tenth of a cent, but that they produced them “faster than a machine gun can fire”. It wasn’t $250,000, but over the course of an hour, they ended up producing a an amount of inventory of significant value. Regardless of the type of manufacturing you’re engaged in, downtime is the bane of your existence. For decades, manufacturing systems have been loaded with sensors to monitor the state of the equipment. With the coming of the “internet of things”, the sophistication of these sensors, and their ability to aid in diagnostics through pulling data from the web, has increased exponentially. AI-driven predictive modeling in process control is moving beyond “signal health” into the more complex “system health”. System health is about pattern recognition — there may be group of sensor readings that serve as a precursor to an event that historically has led to a downtime incident. If a neural network can recognize this pattern, maintenance can be scheduled which will either minimize or eliminate that downtime. System health is about pattern recognition — there may be a group of sensor readings that serve as a precursor to an event that historically has led to a downtime incident. Machine learning solutions like neural networks are well suited to this type of predictive modeling. With the significant costs associated with manufacturing downtime, AI can have a massive impact on efficiency, and ultimately profitability. Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) Sales & Operations Planning is an arcane admixture of art and science, a field for prognosticators charged with the thankless job of matching sales projections with manufacturing output. Being able to understand the ebbs and flows of your supply and demand is central to a sustainable manufacturing operation and effective supply chain management. S&OP is fairly complex to engage in if you have one product. For most businesses, there are many skus, in some cases thousands. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist to run these multivariate predictive models, but it doesn’t hurt. AI is here to help. Neural networks can be very effective when it comes to these complex systems. A well trained neural network has the potential to deliver better results than the traditional statistical techniques like multiple regression. Fine tuning supply to meet demand can lead to reducing the carrying cost of inventory. This type of improved planning and forecasting can lead to millions of dollars of savings through the whole supply chain. Repetitive Tasks A strong supply chain relies on a group of manufacturers, partners, distributors, and customers working closely together. There is a great deal of communication necessary to keep products flowing in a timely fashion to the right places. The type of communication that’s necessary often revolves around queries and workflows. Queries like: “What’s the status of my order?” “Please send me a copy of my sales receipt” “Please issue me an RMA number so I can return this order” “I want to cancel my order” These types of repetitive questions clog up call centers, often taking up over 50% of the call center’s available time. Luckily, they also lend themselves to natural language processing — chat technology. A chat agent can be deployed on an extranet which allows your supply chain members to submit their queries. The query can trigger a workflow within the chat agent. The agent will ask questions of the supply chain member in order to collect the information it needs to resolve the inquiry. Without any intervention, order status can be updated, an RMA number can be issued, a receipt can be emailed — queries can be resolved. Moving these repetitive tasks and workflows away from your contact center to a self-service conversational agent frees your human agents to spend more time on the more challenging issues your supply chain has to deal with every day. It also gives your members availability to 24/7 service. This new found efficiency and improved customer experience will strengthen your supply chain community and ultimately improve profitability. These are just a few examples of how an investment in AI can pay off handsomely for manufacturing & distribution companies. Wherever you may reside in the supply chain, you should be investigating the value of this new AI technology. AI in Action: Healthcare AI in Action: Financial Services AI in Action: Entertainment and Media Ken Tucker is a business consultant specializing in AI and Analytics.

Amazon

Tesla

Timely

AI in Action: Manufacturing & Distribution

Today I want to speak something interesting. It's about Smart contracts on top of the Bitcoin cash Blockchain. For those of you who don't know what is Bitcoin cash. Bitcoin cash is a hard fork of the Bitcoin Blockchain in which people spoke about scalability and transaction fee, the volume of transactions. i.e in simple words Bitcoin, the community decided to create a new blockchain which can accommodate a larger size of blocks and less transaction fee on the transactions. Apart from all that instant transaction is there to blow up your mind, I mean practically no that instant but its really better than bitcoin transaction speed. If you don't know what is a fork, let me help you to understand it, A hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of the Blockchain, and nodes running previous versions will no longer be accepted by the newest version. hard fork What's so special about Bitcoin cash? There isn’t a much of a difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. Both of them are built to serve the same purpose “Peer to Peer Digital cash”. Below are some of the interesting facts about the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash Can we create smart contracts on Bitcoin Cash? Yes! we can write smart contracts on Bitcoin Cash. Well, let me tell you what are the difficulties we gonna face in writing the Bitcoin Cash smart contracts. Community & Developers working on writing Bitcoin cash is in the early phase. So, Be prepared you to need to do your homework ready by yourself not a lot of people are there as of now to help you on your coding the Bitcoin Cash contracts. We are going to use a high-level language named “Spedn” for coding our smart contracts. Haskell is used for testing Bitcoin cash smart contracts. Let us code our first Bitcoin cash smart contract: Install Haskell Toolkit on your device. $ curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh 2. Create a new project: $ stack new my-project$ cd my-project$ stack setup$ stack build$ stack exec my-project-exe 3. To launch run : $ stack ghci 4. For a list of Haskell commands: $ stack 5. Clone the “Spedn” $ git clone https://github.com/sriharikapu/Spedn.git or $ git clone https://bitbucket.org/o-studio/spedn.git 6. Build “Spedn” $ cd spedn/spedn$ stack install 7. Create a directory for a smart contract: $ mkdir samplecontract$ touch ExiringTip.spedn$ nano ExiringTip.spedn 8. Let's consider a case for writing our smart contract: Let’s assume Alice want to tip a waiter Bob with a paper wallet but she wants to be sure that the coin will not get lost due to Bob losing the paper. This contract locks a coin in such a way that Bob can redeem it at any time but if he didn’t do so in 7 days then Alice can get it back. contract ExpiringTip(Ripemd160 alice, Ripemd160 bob) {    challenge receive(Sig sig, PubKey pubKey) {        verify hash160(pubKey) == bob;        verify checkSig(sig, pubKey);    }    challenge revoke(Sig sig, PubKey pubKey) {        verify checkSequence(7d);        verify hash160(pubKey) == alice;        verify checkSig(sig, pubKey);    }     challenge cancel(Sig Sig) {        verify checkSequence(8b);        verify checkSig(Sig, PubKey);    }} 9. Compile your smart contract: $ spedn compile -c mycontract.spedn 10. Compiled contract template: <alice> <bob> 2 PICK TRUE EQUAL IF 3 PICK HASH160 OVER EQUALVERIFY (...) Open source

Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash Smart contract

journey sponsor Learn how to build fullstack web apps with Laravel 5, Laravel Mix, Vue js, Bootstrap 4 & Sass Fullstack Web Development With Laravel and Vue.js Making Things Realtime With Pusher in Single Page App Real Time Single Page Forum App with Pusher Laravel & vuejs for this series we going to learn how to create CRUD and some extra feature like Report, Sale page in Laravel with use some business logic like a inventory management and so what is inventory management system ? is app that use for track sale,purchase ,payment imagine you have a dealer or distributor you have a little product and doesn’t require sophisticate program may be this tool it’s fit for you in this post I’ve explained how this we learn from start to end the inspiration project has become from LaravelInventry sathish43/LaravelInventry a simple Laravel 5.4 project that found on Github for learning purpose we gonna make small different while use 5.7 seriously we gonna learn with real life coder they don’t watch more tutorial on Udemy or Many Tut site so much they jump in to code forest and try to understand using debugger with intercept code flow and watch how variable change when pass over over function they learn the best practice from a thousand expert developer on Github the intent of this post that make table of content post that detail post has add to later in the start part 0, we prepare the environment for dev I’huge fan of but they have bought by AWS in 2017 that integrate to AWS service make that becomes complete Cloud Development Environment cloud9 we gonna learn how to use Cloud9 and setup necessary tool requirement Amazon account and credit card (if not use local alternative) you gonna learn basic linux command base on Centos element of Aws Cloud9 how to change PHP version part 1 we install and setup Laravel 5.7 and Github repository and deploy to Heroku because keep project live on EC2 charge some cost in the free way I choose Heroku for make live demo you gonna learn how to setup Laravel 5.7 and Mysql on AWS linux base on CentOS install AdminLTE that make your frontend life easier basic git command simple Github repository how to deploy any commit to Heroku that make your app stand live rely foundation for your app and much more.. Part 2 we gonna create simple CRUD series remember this demo app is simple we gonna follow them Customer a data about customer that buy your product in this section you gonna learn how to create boilerplate file with migration how to create fast and simple CRUD function how to create version control database table with Laravel migration how to craft a simple form and table with Bootstrap way Suppliers in this section you gonna learn how to create boilerplate file with migration how to create fast and simple CRUD function how to create version control database table with Laravel migration how to craft a simple form and table with Bootstrap way Product in this section you gonna learn how to create boilerplate file with migration how to create fast and simple CRUD function how to create version control database table with Laravel migration how to craft a simple form and table with Bootstrap way Category in this section you gonna learn how to create boilerplate file with migration how to create fast and simple CRUD function how to create version control database table with Laravel migration how to craft a simple form and table with Bootstrap way Sale in this section you gonna learn how to create boilerplate file with migration how to create simple CRUD function how to create version control database table with Laravel migration how to craft a complex form with Bootstrap Report in this section you gonna learn how to create PDF with Laravel how to create date range picker Closing Sponsor The Ultimate Advanced Laravel Pro course (incl Vuejs) Laravel 5.7 Ecommerce Shop Learn More. Closing Notes: common pirate get on black pearl if you need explore Ocean with me Github may be we could find some code treasure if you need fundraise that journey

Flow

Heroku

Create simple inventory management from Laravel

I can’t wait for startups to die. Sure, I’m writing this on my Surface Book 2 from a lively cafe in Budapest while staying in an and tracking my activity with my Aria. So yeah, I like the products of startups. But I still want them to die a miserable death. Microsoft Airbnb Fitbit I believe the peak of American greed and capitalism has found its golden child in the startup culture, especially as it is peddled by Y Combinator and their ilk. I daresay I need not explain what makes startup culture the quintessential embodiment of the failed American Dream. Shrink the corporate timeline down to a decade ( ), give the masses what they want ( ), and sell at the peak ( ). Unicorn hunters. ship it! that elusive product-market fit IPO FTW! Startups make me sick, and I don’t think I’m the only one. The bootstrapping movement is much easier to swallow from a moral and historically-informed vantage point, but it’s still just startup culture on a smaller scale. When notoriety, global reach, and exorbitant wealth are your end game, your ambitions are vapid. No matter how good your product is, it’ll never be anything but a trinket. The world benefits from toys. I like toys. And it benefits from the capitalism that startups are founded upon. But that doesn’t justify the means. The reason startups should die is because they cease to be artists (if I may personify them for a moment) the moment they bring on investors and drive everything for the sake of profit. In the beginning, startups are gloriously chaotic environments —like stepping through the enchanted wardrobe into Narnia where everything is fresh, uncharted, and dangerous. Pure optimism, coupled with life-changing vision, fueled by all-or-nothing courage. It’s magical. And then the magic fades, and the reality of a startup sets in. Seed rounds, profit-driven bottom-line decisions, bringing on a board, giving away your equity, managing PnL, hiring, firing, marketing, selling, incorporating, taxes, keeping customers happy, scaling, etc. The business of a startup kills the creative spark that ignited it. Art is transformed into business; creativity into capitalism. But what if the choices weren’t solely between founding a startup, becoming a freelancer, bootstrapping your business or working a 9–5 job? What if monetary gain and the bullshit around running a business (I know, I’m a co-owner of one) could be removed? What if the magic of a startup stayed magical . . . because money was never allowed to be either the goal or the master? What if there was a fourth alternative: . Here me out on this. the Creative Studio I wasn’t allowed to take photos. I did anyway. I recently had the privilege of seeing some of Leonardo da Vinci’s horse sketches (and potentially, his only surviving bronze sculpture) in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary. As I walked through the very well-crafted biography of this (potential) da Vinci sculpture, I witnessed the deep struggle between artist and human. Leonardo had to survive and provide for basic needs (especially his life essentials, such as wood panels, clay, pencils, oil paints, etc.), and this came about through the most common form of funding for art in human history: the commission. A patron commissioned a piece to immortalize themselves, their spouse, their family, their estate or any other whim of fancy to display their wealth and power. And so, Leonardo complied (more towards the beginning of his career. In his later years, he was picky because he could be.). They provided the capital, and he provided the art. Shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone. The striking contrast between this approach and today’s Venture Capitalists (modern-day benefactors) is the intentions behind it; while benefactors seek to display their already-attained wealth, venture capitalists seek to 10x it. VCs exist to create wealth — not use it. And this is why artists are able to maintain their creative spark within a benefactor model as opposed to the oppressive, capital-driven dictatorships thrust upon the startup world: the art is an end in itself. The wealthy patron displays the art for all to see; he does not seek to get a return of 20% by selling it to the highest bidder. The art is valued . Benefactoring inherently values the artist and his work; the venture capitalist (and therefore, startup) values what the artist’s work could add to their investment funds. as art And this changes everything. When a creative talent is respected, their process is respected. When their process is respected, their art flourishes. They aren’t driven by deadlines, market demand or any other external factor. They don’t exist to make other people rich. They are respected to create and focus solely on creating. Guys, we made it!! But why hasn’t this crossed over into how art is created in the 21st century? Technical startup founders are brilliant creatives. They take their digital medium (code, hardware, data science, etc.) and create something truly original. They paint themselves into their code. Yet they are treated as entrepreneurs, not artists. And as such, they are forced to follow the predefined path of capitalism. So why do talented, smart, creative artists continue to throw the best years of their lives at the siren call of the VC? Why do they willingly shipwreck their lives upon the shores of the capitalist regime, only to find that the treasure promised wasn’t worth the slavery demanded? Because the beckoning of wealth, fame, and power blinds them. They don’t want to create something beautiful for beauty’s sake: they want a shortcut to renown. Or perhaps it’s because there is no currently viable fourth option. They have no choice. But I think there is a fourth option. Like Clair Underwood embracing her own identity apart from her tyrannical husband and assuming her power in the fifth season finale of there is a fourth wall to break_._ There is another way. You be a technical artist and not start a startup. You can be valued for your work without sacrificing it upon the alter of the VC gods. You can have your cake and eat it too. House of Cards: can After all, a man cannot serve two masters. You will either serve your art or serve the system. I want to build a Creative Studio for the 21st century. I want to empower the modern artist to just fucking create art while still getting all the benefits (financial included) of a successful startup — without sacrificing their art and lives in the process. I’m going to start by curating a community of other technical founders and modern-day artists that are sick of the startup culture. It failed. It’s dying. The statistic that 90% of startups fail isn’t a badge of honor — it’s a sign of rigor mortis. I want to help people like me find freedom to create within a world driven by greed. So let’s talk. Let’s dialogue. Let’s bring back benefactoring and prove to the world that startups aren’t the only way. Let’s create together. Email me, leave a comment, reach out on Twitter. Whatever. Because if you are like me, you’ll want this as badly as I do. And I won’t need to seek you out. P.S. Yes, I co-own and operate a startup. We’re about to launch. It’s what will get this new project funded so I can help other people avoid the pain and torture of what I went through. Don’t start another startup. Let me take one for the team. P.P.S. I’m working with a fellow technical artist in Budapest, Hungary to get this started. It’s not just theoretical. We’re doing it, whether anyone else joins or not. Want in? Contact me.

Funding

Y Combinator

Making the world's first all-natural smart clothing!

Let startups die.

I signed the contract on 1st of April and almost seven months later my web app, , is ready. Netcrumb It’s been a long journey, with a lot of ups and downs, but my big minimum viable product is live. Netcrumb is a web app that will help people to create one page WordPress websites faster and easier. Probably, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but if you want to read my complete journey, I wrote a few parts: Intro Part One Part Two Part Three If you don’t want to read the previous posts, let me tell you the story in a few words. Last year I had an idea to create a web application that will help people build WordPress websites faster and easier. On 1st of April, this year, I hired a small agency from Bucharest, Romania, to create the app in three months for 16,000 EUR. It took them almost seven months to complete what we discussed initially, and I was asked to pay 4000 EUR more. That is why I wrote $23,000 in the title, and after I made the conversion with xe.com, 20,000 EUR is more than $23,000. The app looks and works great at this point, but would I do it again? NO. I’m a mobile developer, and before starting this project, I thought that for me to learn the technologies required for this project, it would take at least one year. I don’t want to complain, but I will write a post where I will try to help people understand how to choose developers to build their projects. I’m a developer, and it was very hard for me during these months. I imagine that someone with no technical knowledge has fewer chances of paying and building something they dream. About the App It takes hours or days to search for a WordPress theme, buy, then learn to customise and finally launch your website. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that after they buy a theme, it doesn’t look as promised. That’s because you have to do more customisation. If you ever built a WordPress site, I’m sure that you know the struggle. With Netcrumb I’m reversing the above wrong process. How Netcrumb works? Select the design, colours, assets and add text. Once you like what you created, buy the design. Netcrumb will convert everything into a WordPress theme. Download it and install on your WordPress panel Being an MVP, you will still have to download and manually install it on your WordPress panel, but once you do that, it will not require more customisation. It should take less than 30 minutes to build a one page WordPress website. What are the PROs and CONs? I will start with the PROs: Fast ( Saves you at least a few hours ) Easy to use Beautiful designs Unlimited edits The CONs: Only one page WordPress sites Limited designs Manually download and install the theme The BETA pricing for a theme it is $19. Thinking to look for a co-founder Being a solo founder is hard. I have a lot of ideas in my mind, but I don’t think I can do everything. I started alone and I will continue alone in the next period, but I’m thinking to find someone that can help me with the non technical aspects of the business. I’m wondering where do you find a co-founder? Friends are the first in the list, but what if none of my friends are interested in Netcrumb? How do you find someone that wants to put the same amount of work as you or has the same passion or desire to succeed? If you have any suggestions, leave me some comments. Raise money, bootstrap or learn the Netcrumb’s stack To take the app to the next phase I need more money ( $50,000 — $100,000 ) Firstly, I need to see how people will respond to the MVP, but I have to think in the future, no? If I will have customers, bootstrapping will not be an issue, but what happens when you have clients, but not enough and you discover that you need to change things or add new features. Without money, raising or bootstrapping, the only solution will be to build everything by myself. In this case, who will promote the business? The answer is: a co-founder. I will try to get as much feedback as possible in the next months and based on that I will decide on the next move. You never realise how many decisions you have to make, even in a not launched start up. Moving from London to Bucharest It was the end of May or June when I came back to London from a Bucharest trip, and I asked myself “Why I’m living in London?”. I moved here two years ago for new opportunities, but the only things I’ve done was work. As a self-taught developer, the last few years were devoted to work, and I will continue to do that, but I think that everything else is necessary too. You need balance in your life otherwise you cannot continue like that forever. You might be wondering why I move from such a great city. I’ve received this question a lot of times in the past few months, and there are several reasons. Making relationships in London is hard. Not talking about finding the love of my life, as I already have a fantastic girlfriend, but making real-life friends. I have great colleagues at my job, but everything ends after a day of work. Most of the people live far from each other, or they have other commitments like wife or kids. You always have to plan meeting other people in advance. People in London are educated and polite, but I feel like a person that doesn’t belong here. Health system is broken from my point of view I had some terrible back pains this year. After visiting an emergency hospital, a physio several times and with two private insurances, I couldn’t find out what I had. I asked for an MRI, but I’ve never received it. These are just a few reasons, but there are many more in my mind. I’ve resigned from my job on 30th of August and on 31st of October is my last day. I’m happy for everything that I learned here and for every person that I meet, but it’s time to go to my home country. Netcrumb will use the Stripe account that is registered with the UK company that I have and will remain like this, at least for the next months. New article published The most significant achievement in August was publishing an article on HackerNoon. I know it’s not much, but it was my most read article to date. I have 2800 Views and 1100 reads. It’s a story where I explain how I worked on a mobile app for ten months and I made less than $ 70. You can read the story here I focus on why monetising a project from the beginning is very important and what mistakes I did during that time. Free $1,000 AWS Credits I don’t know if you are aware, but if you have a startup that requires any AWS stack, you can apply for a $1,000 promotional credit that is available for two years. I applied for the Builders package, but they have two more packages which can give you more credits. For example, the Portfolio package can give you up to $15,000 credits. Check them. Anyway, I applied, and I received a fast response from Amazon that I was accepted to receive $1,000 in free credits that include a lot of areas. My expenses with AWS were in the last months around $150 in total, and the bill went to around $65 in August. Now I know that if Netcrumb will not scale too much in the next year at least, the hosting was paid, but who doesn’t want to scale? Total Subscribers and Readers In the last few months, I wrote some posts with the idea of making people aware of Netcrumb. A few thousand read my articles, but I managed to get only 174 people to subscribe to the mailing list. The downside of this type of strategy is that you don’t have a target audience. Most of my articles were published on two publications on Medium: The Startup and Hacker Noon. I have a mailing list collector inside the posts, but it was not enough. I guess that the best thing to do is to try and send as many people as possible on your main website and target the right audience with the posts. One thing that I would probably do different today: If the MVP is not easy to do, build an audience first. Let me give you one example for my case. I could have done a WordPress themes directory ( free and paid ), or as suggested by an online friend, Nitesh, I could have created the service that Netcrumb is offering manually. Total Costs The most important part of building a web application when you are not the developer. Building Netcrumb.com — 20,000 EUR; I paid only 18,500 EUR so far as my initial budget was 16,000 EUR, but I will pay the rest in the following months. I will convert the 20,000 to USD via xe.com and the conversion is $23,100. AWS ( Before receiving the credits ) — $155.28. Mockflow ( I will probably cancel ) — $22.80 x 8 months = $182.40. Betalist — $120 ( Had a campaign with them — ). Read the review I do not remember other costs or they might be small. Total = $ 23,557.68 That’s a lot of money! Can you imagine how stressed I’m if Netcrumb will be successful or not? The app is amazing and works great, but clients and time will tell. Conclusion It was an interesting thing to do the project management instead of the development, but it is only the beginning of the long journey. The hard part will start now. I’m thinking to create a goal like “reach the first $3000 or $5000 in sales” and explain what I will do to get there. Nathan Barry’s story from ConvertKit is amazing and inspirational. It took him one year and 8 months to reach his goal of $5000 in recurring revenue, but he did it. If you want to read it: http://nathanbarry.com/category/the-web-app-challenge/ I might do something similar in terms of writing. Let me know what you think about Netcrumb! If you have any questions please ask or DM on Twitter: ! @theivandrag Originally published at www.netcrumb.com on October 28, 2018.

Stripe

7 Months And $23,000 Later My Web App Is Ready

The most effective way to learn something new is to find an incentive to do it. I discovered that mine was building a school. Backstory 4 years ago I quit my investment banking job to move into programming inspired by the ambition of facing new challenges and driven by the desire to build products. The path was very exciting but not . It wasn’t easy to get familiar with the basic programming concepts. It wasn’t easy to feel autonomous and complete a whole project alone. It wasn’t easy to fully understand the code I copy/pasted from StackOverflow. easy After 6 months of learning coding I built an online school ( ) to teach coding and other digital skills. The goal was to offer courses that reduce the amount of pain I experienced during my programming learning process. lacerba.io The school focused on the Italian market, since we spotted a huge market opportunity: most talented people were unhappy with their career, or even worse, they were unemployed, so we focused on offering them a new opportunity: move their talent into digital jobs. My co-founders and I we were unable to cover most of the topics we were teaching in our courses, so we started to look around for impressive startups and professionals in order to have talented teachers on-board to teach in-demand skills. Now the platform has become the entry-point for everyone in Italy looking to acquire digital skills. The Breakthrough Today I felt like a “real developer”. I have several projects in production, 2641 contributions on Github in the last year, I run dev ops by myself and I manage a team of 4 developers. Looking back I realize that most of my improvements are not just related to the the coding itself. What accelerated my learning curve was the chance I had to share knowledge with the teachers of our school. The process we follow to release a new course for our school is the following: identify a macro topic that our users should learn to be competitive ask to our trusted network if they know anyone who is skilled on the topic brainstorm about the topic, why is it crucial, benefits, downsides, difficulty to learn and then we define a syllabus together record the courses together, providing real time feedback go for a beer after the course is recorded with the teacher ( ) mandatory edit the course market the course assist our community It’s a lot of work, time consuming and also not easy, but there is an opportunity to go deeper into topic we are teaching in every single step. We went trough this process more than 100 times now and every single time we learnt new best practices, better ways to solve problems, technology trends and complementary skills. For example, I started my developer career learning Ruby. Since then I was able to build almost anything using just Ruby on Rails and some front-end tricks. We recently decided to build a course on a front-end framework and we got in contact with a VueJS developer. The last project I built has a ruby api only as a backend and VueJS as a front-end. This happened because I had the opportunity to discuss Vue with the teacher before creating the course. I helped him record the course watching Vue in action and I immediately realized how fast and simple it made building a project. But most importantly we had tons of discussion about this language. Learning Vue by building a project was then easy: I knew where to look, what to expect and the basic concepts behind it. Something similar happened with complementary skills, for example SEO, basic marketing or UI and UX fundamentals. Building a school was the most effective way to master my developer skills and acquire complementary skills. My first step into blockchain development In the last few years, as most of the professionals in the coding or startup industry, I started learning about blockchain technology. At the beginning I focused on understanding the main concepts of the blockchain such as consensus, smart contracts, multisig, cryptography, … Suddenly I felt like I was going trough the same issues I had in the past while learning to code. But this time it was even worse. Blockchain is still an emergent technology, and a reliable hub of knowledge is missing. The whole ecosystem is fragmented and there is no clear entry point for aspiring blockchain developers. Every blockchain community has different views, which are, most of the time, are very hostile to each others’ and not open to external discussion. It’s also very common to find never-ending discussion about blockchain projects related to the currency but not much about its technology value. The current ecosystem makes very hard to find answers to crucial questions like the following: Which blockchain platform fits my needs? What are the best practices of blockchain development? How can I be sure what I am building is secure? Craftain What is the best way to get deeper into blockchain development and at the same be valuable for anyone who has the same goal? Again, build a school. I called Simone, a friend of mine who was involved in the blockchain space and asked him to help me building a blockchain school for developers. The idea is to build project-based online courses on real-word applications built by blockchain platform creators. For this reason, we are teaming up with the leading blockchain projects teams in order to provide the most relevant development courses. The goal is to create a knowledge hub where aspiring developers can learn blockchain development, understand different technologies and get the skills required to build their applications. No matter if an aspiring blockchain developers is looking to get hired in the industry, create a DApp, build a crypto startup or just understand how blockchain works, is the entry point to learn and stay updated on the latest development trends. Craftain Build something that gives you incentive to learn from others You don’t have to build a school to learn something new. But if you are looking to go deeper into something, start by learn from experts and find an incentive to do it constantly. Building a school incentivizes me to stay updated on new blockchain projects, meet talented people in this industry and have open discussions with them. is the result of our desire to learn from experts and we firmly believe that everyone who is excited about blockchain technology will love sharing their expertise with us. Craftain 🚀 Want to know more about Craftain? Start here ! 🔮 If you are working on a blockchain-related project you can contact us to collaborate .

Dapp

I wanted to go deeper into blockchain development. So I built a school.

I’ve recently stopped writing so much and started producing videos. I find I can teach better in videos than I can with text and it’s much easier for me to produce content. I’ve launched a programming series called “James❤Code”. In my series I discuss anything to do with computers and programmer. I’m a bit of a know it all and I enjoy sharing knowledge with others. In my first episode I discuss using PHP to scrape Google Suggestions on the terminal. PHP runs perfectly fine on the terminal and I’ve used it many times to run PHP code as a process. I hope you enjoy my first video …

Scraping Google Suggestions with PHP at the terminal

I receive a lot of emails from crypto enthusiasts asking for advice on how to “break in” to crypto. And I totally get it! After all, crypto is a highly technical and multi-disciplinary field that moves at a breakneck speed.  Having been on the other side, I know and empathize with the struggle of trying to “break in”. I’ll tell you a secret though: to become as much an “expert” as anyone else in space. But what gives me the clout to create an experts program that promises a pathway to being at the top of the field? Well, to answer that I’ve got a story for you, one that’s full of the nitty, gritty truth about passion, dedication, and just plain figuring things out. there is an opportunity for who is passionate and dedicated anyone That’s why we’re building a training program for enthusiasts of crypto to become experts of crypto. How I “broke in” … and more importantly, why I first heard of Bitcoin through the grapevine in 2013 during my time at Andreessen Horowitz. I was told it was a big deal, so naturally, as any curious venture capitalist would be, I was eager to learn more. I stayed late at work one night, downloaded the Bitcoin Whitepaper, and spent the night reading it. And I have to admit, even though I made it to the end, I honestly had no idea what to think of it. I thought. So I set it aside. I went home and got on with my life. “I’ll come back to this later when I have time,” I thought.  A few months passed and I continued hearing chatter about Bitcoin: developers on HackerNews bantering about it in endless comments, people on Twitter tweeting sound bites of mythical sounding predictions, and even journalists were latching onto the phenomenon producing articles with headlines like: … and so on. “If it makes so much sense to everyone, why doesn’t it make sense to me?” I asked myself. At that point, I knew I needed to make a more serious attempt at figuring out what I was missing.  I blocked off an entire weekend to figure this thing out once and for all. In preparation, I scoured the internet and bookmarked any articles that talked about Bitcoin. When the weekend finally rolled around, I just sat there and read, hoping for enlightenment. Before I knew it, Sunday at midnight had arrived and I was nowhere closer to that enlightenment.  But, there was a nagging feeling that told me I had to keep going at it anyway. So I did the same thing the following weekend…and the weekend after that. In everything I read, I’d discover something else I didn’t know. So then I’d go read about that. Before I knew it, I was hopping around the internet like a rabbit, going from reading about “trustless” money to economics, cryptography to finance, even philosophy to history.  I had suddenly found myself in an infinite web of subjects and concepts and topics, all being crammed into my brain while I tried to make sense of how they connected, and what it all meant. The more I learned, the more it made me think of things I had never thought to question before. For example, I grew up assuming our accepted financial system was the only option. I never questioned it. And frankly, living in America, I never really needed to. But for the first time in my life, I was running across the works of intelligent people who were deeply examining the system with very logical and relevant challenges.  As I continued deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, I had a gut feeling deep down inside that all of this information was going to be important. It was a feeling I couldn’t explain in words, but also couldn’t deny — something about it just felt right.  You know when you have those moments? When you’re struck by something that can only be from your gut and you’re motivated to a specific action? That was me in this moment. Frankly, everyone arrives at crypto with different motivations. Some have lost trust in the central government and see it as a way to creating trustless money. Some have lost trust in financial entities (like banks) and see it as the opportunity to build a trustless financial system. Some have lost trust in internet giants and see it as a chance to reinvent the internet. Despite differing specific motivations, a common theme emerged — .  Paradoxically, my developing interest wasn’t sparked over the loss of trust, but rather from beginning to feel uneasy about having .  For the first time in my life, I was forced to recognize my state of oblivion and acknowledge that I needed to look under the covers to really understand the systems that our society operates within, whether that be financial, economic, or social. I began to question how each of these systems worked, the power structures within these systems, the authority of various actors in these systems, and the incentive structures in these systems. Through all this questioning, a major realization was taking hold: To do things more openly, fairly, and effectively.  All along, I had been approaching crypto as just a technological breakthrough. But I realized that it doesn’t stop at the technology, it merely starts there — it’s a movement. A revolution. But falling in love with an idea as vague as this, and actually making something out of it are two very different things. I was eager to do something but had no idea where to start. Even though I had spent weeks immersing myself in this world, I didn’t have a clear vision in mind for what I wanted to do in it. “Why was everyone freaking out about this?” “Bitcoin is a fundamental breakthrough in Computer Science.” “Bitcoin reimagines how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era.” “This is the distributed trust network that the Internet always needed and never had.” loss of trust too much trust one of the biggest potentials of crypto was going to be its ability to break down some of the entrenched, ineffective, and corrupt systems we have in place today and re-imagine them from the ground up. I fell in love with the idea. Getting down to the real work of figuring it out I considered the industry leaders that I looked up to, like Nick Szabo, Vitalik Buterin, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, to name just a few. They seemed to have a clear vision — whether it was or a or — while I was hopelessly lost. I wished I had their clarity. But wishing wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Neither was sitting around, reading an endless number of whitepapers, books, and blog posts. I knew that I needed to stop reading and start doing. To put my knowledge to work. To solve a real problem. As I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, that’s easier said than done. At the time, I had and was looking for my next endeavor with crypto, but had no idea how to apply my newfound skills as a web engineer within that space. I remember peeking into the Bitcoin core repo one night and thinking, “No way, I’m not smart enough for this. This is genius level shit. Maybe I should just stick to web development.”  At times of uncertainty, I have found that talking to mentors can be immensely helpful in clarifying my thinking, and in speaking to one, he told me that if I truly believed in crypto, I should look at Coinbase. “They’re the most trusted crypto company out there, and you’ll learn a lot,” he said. And so I did. A few weeks (and many interviews) later, I found myself silently screaming and jumping up and down as I got off a call wherein Coinbase extended me a full-time offer. Looking back, I’m thankful for every day I had at Coinbase; they took a chance on me, giving me an opportunity to learn and contribute. Coinbase was my platform to “break in” and fully immerse myself in this world I had spent so much time studying and thinking about. Observing and contributing to the inner workings of the world’s most trusted cryptocurrency company was an unforgettable learning experience that I knew would serve any future goals I had.  And so when I eventually left Coinbase in early 2017 and ventured out on my own, I had an entirely new knowledge base, and felt more strongly than ever that crypto was developing into a massive movement that could revolutionize all sectors of society. But what would this revolution look like? What problem could I tackle? What problem did I to tackle? Moreover, I felt like I still had so much more to figure out, and new concepts were continually grabbing my interest and time. smart contracts world computer trustless money recently graduated a coding bootcamp care Shit, where did all these ICOs come from? In the meantime, I was so busy and that I wasn’t even paying attention to all the hype around me — i.e. . Everywhere I looked, new projects were springing up and raising millions of dollars with nothing but a website. Somehow we had gone from dreaming about more open, fair, and efficient financial, economic, and social systems, to being bombarded with scammy ICOs, ideological debates, and pure hysteria. It was disheartening, to say the least. I wondered what the hell was going on. Was really the end result of a movement we all thought would change everything? Greed, hype, and manipulation? After months of disappointment, it dawned on me that there was a much bigger problem at play, and this problem wasn’t specific to crypto. The ability to have a sound discourse about any topic was becoming nearly impossible. The internet had become a place that was no longer about sharing knowledge and information, but was instead concerned with promoting agendas and opinions. Something was deeply wrong. I realized that I had lost trust in what people were saying on the internet and we needed to fix it. I also realized that for the first time, I felt what everyone else was feeling — a profound loss of trust. learning writing the ICO boom this Fixing trust on the internet This is why was born.  At TruStory, we want to To give people a platform to agree or disagree on facts, rather than opinion. To give people a sacred space where the individuals of that platform make decisions collectively rather than the owners of that platform or another outside source, like a government. We’re doing this through a social network that crowdsources fact-checking, just as Wikipedia crowdsourced facts, starting with facts in crypto.  We have a small team of crypto experts that is responsible for the vast body of knowledge that gets curated and validated on TruStory. Why are we asking you to join us? TruStory make it easy to identify what is true and what isn’t. We want you to join us and become one of these experts. An opportunity for you to break in I’ve been on the other side; I know how daunting it can be to not know where to start. There is a massive amount of information to learn and a plethora of things to do in crypto, but it’s hard to navigate without much structure or purpose. As you saw from my journey, it took years of wandering around in crypto before I figured out my place. If I had some sort of guidance or a structured process for learning, I would’ve gotten to this point much sooner. You may be in the same spot I was in a couple of years ago, looking for ways to “break in.” But sitting on the sidelines wishing you could get some time on the court doesn’t get you time on the court — you need to roll up your sleeves and put in the work to make it happen. That’s why we want to give passionate and hard-working enthusiasts who genuinely care about crypto an opportunity to “break in”. We want to give you a platform where you can not only accumulate knowledge, but also where you can disseminate your knowledge to the rest of the world, and . Just like Coinbase was a stepping stone for my career in crypto, we want to give you the same step up. We want to take a chance on you. Regardless of where you are in this journey — beginner, intermediate, or expert — you’re welcome to join us. get credit for it The TruStory Experts Program What are you going to get out of this? Let’s see: You can read all the articles and whitepapers you want, but at some point, all the concepts need to be connected together. We’ve assembled the best resources to give you the foundational knowledge needed so the rest of the concepts make sense. Everything from Medium posts to podcasts to YouTube videos. Primers on the industry Reading about knowledge is useless without applying it. Through validating and curating content, you’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned and it will go from being like a foreign language to something very natural. Breaking in is impossible without a brand. By curating and validating content on TruStory, you earn tokens which serve as your reputation on the platform. They symbolize not only how much you’ve won, but also your mastery on a particular topic, such as stablecoins. These can, in turn, be used to signal your understanding of crypto or your contribution to a project. The most important thing when you’re embarking on a journey is the people accompanying you on the adventure. We have a tight-knit group of people who are intrinsically motivated by crypto: the technology, the legality, etc. Every aspect except speculation. Being with other intellectually curious people is inspiring on its own, but greatly accelerates your learning as well. Hands-on experience Reputation A high-caliber peer group What would make you a good fit? You are fascinated by crypto and it increasingly consumes your attention. You are curious and love devouring information (Twitter, Wikipedia, Subreddits, etc). You are eager to put your knowledge to work by contributing in a meaningful way. You believe in our mission and get frustrated by ignorance and misinformation online. Do you need to be an “expert” to join? No. At least not in the traditional sense. Who we call an “expert” is simply someone who is well-versed with a subject because of compounded knowledge — knowledge that took a sustained effort over many weeks or months to acquire. It’s a consequence of having spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and obsessing about something.  That’s exactly what you’ll get to do with us. All we need from you is genuine curiosity and an ambition to change the world for the better. We’ll give you the rest. Join us What are you waiting for? Sign up now! :) https://boards.greenhouse.io/trustory/jobs/4128579002

Andreessen Horowitz

Coinbase

YouTube

It’s not too late to “break in” to crypto

Looking at how HTTP 4xx Status Code RFC has evolved Reading about 4xx status codes might seem dull, but it has been a source of ( ?) debate over the years. A of has since been ( might be a better word) by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), so I will look at what it was, what it is now, and the consequences for you, my fellow developer. religious lot ambiguity clarified changed Pick your poison Here’s a pseudo test case, using a plausible but unspecified request library: const body = {title: "Ethel the Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying",ISBN: "no clue"}; request(url, body, {"Content-type":"application/json"}).then(success).catch(failure => {...}) Everything is correct: the headers are right and the data is well-formed. However, one of the values is not valid (ISBN), and the server can’t process the request. What are the options? Return status 400 Bad Request Return some other 4xx status Return , with an error encoded in the response body 200 OK What the standard once said about 400 status code The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications. Circa 1999. Note it specifies “malformed syntax”. In the ISBN example shown, there was no malformed syntax…it’s just a bad data value that’s the problem. For this reason, people objected to sending a 400 back for bad data, since the standard was very specific to what 400 meant. Later on, status code . This status code was about the semantics of the request, not its syntax. If the request data was uninterpretable, then a 422 response seems to better adhere to the standard. 422 was added Alas, times have changed, and sending a 422 in response to bad data is . seemingly frowned upon What the standard now says Circa 2014. Here’s the : latest text The 400 (Bad Request) status code indicates that the server cannot or will not process the request due to something that is perceived to be a client error (e.g., malformed request syntax, invalid request message framing, or deceptive request routing). This is a broader definition than the original, not restricted to syntax errors, but it doesn’t mention data errors specifically. What to make of that? One clue can be found by taking look at about custom status codes: what it says HTTP status codes are extensible. HTTP clients are not required tounderstand the meaning of all registered status codes, though suchunderstanding is obviously desirable. However, a client MUSTunderstand the class of any status code, as indicated by the firstdigit, and treat an unrecognized status code as being equivalent tothe x00 status code of that class, with the exception that arecipient MUST NOT cache a response with an unrecognized status code. So your client code doesn’t have to now how to handle every status code, just the class (first digit) of the status code. Okay, but what do you do with that first digit? For example, if an unrecognized is received by a client, the client can assume that there was something wrong with its request and treat the response (BadRequest) status code.  The response message will usually contain arepresentation that explains the status. status code of 471 as if it had received a 400 So here are the relevant clues, which I’ve highlighted. The first is that registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) organization. So the spec is not speaking of a “standard” status code. It goes on to say that if a status code is unrecognized, then handle it like a 400 status code. there is no 471 status code The implication here is that your 400 status code handling logic is the logic used for unrecognized status codes. Therefore, the 400 status code handler logic of your client is your 4xx error that occurs should be capable of being dealt with by your 400 status code handling logic (even if less than ideally). same fallback, generic, all-purpose handler. Any So, can I define my own 4xx status codes then? You but there should be a reason to do so. Needless to say, all error statuses, custom or otherwise, should be in your API. can, documented The only good reason to use a non-standard code ( ), is because you expect it to be handled differently from a 400 error. In other words, you are using a special status code to (hopefully) trigger better handling behavior in the client. and there are plenty of them What if I later find out that my custom status code conflicts with some other custom status code defined elsewhere? define what your server’s status codes mean, and you’ve for every request you support. You have your service act as a proxy for another service’s status codes! That would be bad. If you need to relay information to a client from another service that uses a status code for other reasons, then pass that information in the error message (using whatever documented status code is appropriate), or log it. You documented them never, ever, ever What about option #3: 200 OK with error body? I’ll give you my opinion, based on personal frustration: Was the request okay? If not, why are you saying it was by passing back a 200 OK, then, in the body of the response, say that it wasn’t? You contradict yourself doing that, and make the client do extra work. really The other issue is: What is the of your error response? Is it a simple string? An Object? Is is reasonable to expect the client to have custom code to parse and display YOUR error body, as well as B’s and C’s and D’s services’ error bodies? Isn’t this non-standard? Wasn’t the whole point of your not using a 4xx code to stick to the standards (as you interpreted them)? shape 400 is okay in most cases A 400 status code handler is the fall back handler. As per the standard, it has to handle all status codes that are not handled elsewhere. Those may be registered status codes, or custom. The one exception could be one of prioritization. It may be that the usual data-related 400 status is due to a data validation error, caught by the server, but missed by the client. Something to fix, but perhaps not urgent. On the other hand, there might be some condition occurring on the server (SQL syntax error, for instance), that needs immediate attention from a database administrator. A more specific status code, sent to and handled by the client, may alert the user to call the help desk (or, have the server send a 5xx code instead). Remember, standards are updated and refined all the time, so it helps to read them from time-to-time and not rely on other’s (perhaps outdated) interpretation. This goes for what is said here, as well.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive October 28th, 2018

A different way to manage state in React

@david-gilbertson
David Gilbertson

A different way to manage state in React

@david.gilbertson
David Gilbertson

Top 14 Web Designer Skills You Must Have in 2018

@soulless
Amy Smith

The Homework App, the end of a 8 year iOS journey.

@kermankohli
Kerman Kohli

6 Ways to Keep Your Emotions Under Control When Trading Cryptocurrencies

@mina.down
Mina Down

Top 10 Leading Augmented Reality(AR) App Development Companies in US

@Marktedson
Mark Tedson

How to Start Your Career in Blockchain Technology?

@jatinmadhra
Jatin Madhra

Creating visualizations to better understand your data and models (Part 2)

@gaurav_bio
Gaurav Kaushik

AI in Action: Manufacturing & Distribution

@burloak26
Ken Tucker

Bitcoin Cash Smart contract

@sriharikapu
Aaron Swartz

Create simple inventory management from Laravel

@krissanawat
Krissanawat Kaewsanmuang

Let startups die.

@senorcodecat
Cory Decker

7 Months And $23,000 Later My Web App Is Ready

@dragosivanov
Dragos Ivanov

I wanted to go deeper into blockchain development. So I built a school.

@Ugolino
Ugolino

Scraping Google Suggestions with PHP at the terminal

@jamesjefferyuk
James Jeffery

It’s not too late to “break in” to crypto

@preethikasireddy
Preethi Kasireddy

The Request Sent Bad Data; What’s the Response?

@jlowery2663
jefflowery

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive October 28th, 2018

@david-gilbertsonDavid Gilbertson

@david.gilbertsonDavid Gilbertson

@soullessAmy Smith

@kermankohliKerman Kohli

@mina.downMina Down

@MarktedsonMark Tedson

@jatinmadhraJatin Madhra

@gaurav_bioGaurav Kaushik

@burloak26Ken Tucker

@sriharikapuAaron Swartz

@krissanawatKrissanawat​ Kaewsanmuang

@senorcodecatCory Decker

@dragosivanovDragos Ivanov

@UgolinoUgolino

@jamesjefferyukJames Jeffery

@preethikasireddyPreethi Kasireddy

@jlowery2663jefflowery

@david-gilbertson
David Gilbertson

@david.gilbertson
David Gilbertson

@soulless
Amy Smith

@kermankohli
Kerman Kohli

@mina.down
Mina Down

@Marktedson
Mark Tedson

@jatinmadhra
Jatin Madhra

@gaurav_bio
Gaurav Kaushik

@burloak26
Ken Tucker

@sriharikapu
Aaron Swartz

@krissanawat
Krissanawat Kaewsanmuang

@senorcodecat
Cory Decker

@dragosivanov
Dragos Ivanov

@Ugolino
Ugolino

@jamesjefferyuk
James Jeffery

@preethikasireddy
Preethi Kasireddy

@jlowery2663
jefflowery