‘Smart contracts’ is a misnomer. Despite its name, digital agreements. Smart contract code only run when triggered by an . In other words, you need an external process to trigger the smart contract. smart contracts on Ethereum are not self-executing external account In this article, we’ll build a solution to this problem. You’ll learn: Why we need off-chain smart contract automation Use cases for smart contract automation How to deploy serverless functions with the Serverless framework Finally, we’ll go through , a fully-functional smart contract automation service that you can run and deploy out-of-the box. You can use this project as a base for building custom smart contract automation that fit your needs. serverless-ethers Just clone and hit deploy! The serverless-ethers sample application is open source and available on Github. Read on to learn why we need automation and how it works. The Problem: Smart contracts are not self-executing ⏳⚙️ Imagine that we want to implement a smart contract with a function that should be automatically executed every 1 hour. How can you accomplish this? You can’t. This is with plain Solidity smart contracts. Despite its name, ‘smart’ contracts in Ethereum are not self-executing. You need an external source (either human or machine) to call the smart contract and execute its code. not possible The most a contract can do is enforce a 1-hour interval between executions, for example: { (block.timestamp >= lastTriggeredAt + hour);
  ...
} ( ) function runMe public require 1 The above require() statement ensures that there is at least an hour in between executions. Otherwise, the transaction reverts. However, somebody still needs to call the smart contract for the code to run in the first place. An Aside on Self-Execution Technically, it is possible to use to automatically execute certain operations. One example of this is ’s COMP distribution. Once an address has earned 0.001 COMP, any Compound transaction (e.g. supplying an asset, or transferring a cToken) will automatically transfer COMP to their wallet. function modifiers Compound Governance You can implement the above logic in a function modifier (a decorator), wrap the modifier around a function, and have the logic automatically executed whenever the function is called. The caller will pay the gas required for the additional logic. However, not all smart contract systems follow this approach. One reason is that it can lead to unpredictable gas usage, since these modifiers may only run under certain conditions. It also forces additional gas fees onto a random subset of users, who just happened to be the unlucky few selected to ‘rebalance’ the contract. Finally, still needs to call the smart contract for the code to run. somebody Common Use Cases for Smart Contract Automation DeFi protocols already rely on some kind of off-chain smart contract automation. MakerDAO relies on third party to monitor the collateralization ratios of debt positions and liquidate any undercollateralized position. Other DeFi protocols have similar needs. Keepers There are two, often overlapping use cases around off-chain smart contract automation: You want to execute a contract under a certain condition. Automated Triggers: You want to know when a contract is in a certain condition. State and Event Monitoring: 1. Automated Triggers You often want to execute a contract periodically or under certain conditions. For example: Rebalancing a pool periodically Closing out voting rounds in a DAO / governance process Poking oracles to refresh data Paying out pro-rated dividends for security tokens 2. State and Event Monitoring You want to know if certain conditions are met. For example: You want to know if a value in a smart contract has changed You want to be notified of all Access Control changes You want to know when a specific smart contract Event was emitted The Solution: Serverless functions? The above use cases sounds like for a serverless function. By going serverless, we can deploy code without provisioning anything beforehand, or managing anything afterward. It’s easier than ever to make your idea live. a good fit Quickstart: Going Serverless with the Serverless Framework The gives you everything you need to develop, deploy, monitor and secure serverless applications. We’ll be using it to speed up our development and reduce mental overhead. Serverless Framework > npm install -g serverless
> serverless -v
x.x.x Let’s quickly go through how the Serverless Framework operates. You can if you’re just interested in seeing things working. Read on to learn more about the Serverless framework. skip ahead 0. serverless.yml All of the Lambda functions and events in your Serverless service can be found in a configuration file called the . It defines a service with Functions and Events. serverless.yml service: serverless-ethers provider: name: aws runtime: nodejs12.x environment: CHAIN_ID: 3 DEFAULT_GAS_PRICE: 60000000000 functions: myFunc: handler: functions/myFunc.handler events: - schedule: rate(2 hours) Under the property, you define your serverless functions. In the above example: functions We have a Function called . myFunc The property points to the file and module containing the code you want to run in your function. handler The property specifies Event triggers for the function to be executed. events You can have multiple functions in a single service. 1. Functions A Function is an AWS Lambda function. It’s an independent unit of deployment, like a microservice. It’s merely code, deployed in the cloud, that is most often written to perform a single job. exports.handler = { }; // functions/myFunc.js async ( ) function event, context // Do anything Functions are just normal JS functions. They can take an event object as payload. 2. Events Events are the things that trigger your functions to run. Events belong to each Function and can be found in the events property in . serverless.yml You can use the trigger to automatically execute functions periodically. For example, to run the myFunc function every 2 hours we specify: Scheduled Events # serverless.yml functions: myFunc: handler: functions/myFunc.handler events: - schedule: rate(2 hours) You can also specify the schedule using : cron schedule expressions # serverless.yml

events:
  - schedule: cron( * * ? *) # PM UTC 0 12 12 If you are using AWS as your provider, in the service are anything in AWS that can trigger an AWS Lambda function, like: all events An AWS API Gateway HTTP endpoint request (e.g., for a REST API) An AWS S3 bucket upload (e.g., for an image) A CloudWatch timer (e.g., run every 5 minutes) An AWS SNS topic (e.g., a message) And more… That’s all you need to know for now. To learn more about the Serverless framework, check out . the docs With the Serverless Framework basics out of the way, let’s jump into the service. serverless-ethers Introducing serverless-ethers is a fully-functional Serverless service that you can deploy and run out-of-the box. serverless-ethers git git@github.com:yosriady/serverless-ethers.git serverless-ethers
nvm use
npm install clone cd You can use this project as a base for building custom smart contract automation. It comes preconfigured for AWS, but can be modified to work with other cloud providers such as , Azure, and many others. GCP The project is structured as follows: serverless-ethers ├── contracts/
│   ├── abis/
│   ├── abis.js
│   └── addresses.js
├── /
│   └── exec.js
└── serverless.yml functions contain smart contract ABIs and addresses. contracts/ contain JS functions that implement the business logic. functions/ describe the service’s configuration. serverless.yml Let’s look at each section in detail. Aside: Sample Smart Contracts I’ve written and deployed a sample smart contract for testing purposes: pragma solidity ^ ;

contract DummyStorage { ; _currentValue; { _currentValue;
    } { ;
        _currentValue = ;
    }
} // SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0 0.6 .10 ( ) event Write address indexed source, uint256 value uint internal function ( ) view ( ) get public returns uint return function ( ) put uint value public emit ( ) Write msg.sender, value value The smart contract has the following functions: DummyStorage is a read-only function that returns the contract’s current value. get is a write function that updates the contract’s current value. put The sample contract is verified and . Feel free to use it to test your functions! live on Ropsten 1. Smart Contract ABIs The directory contains the of contracts the functions interact with. In the sample project, it contains the ABI for the DummyStorage contract. contracts ABIs ├── contracts/
│   ├── abis/
│   │     └── DummyStorage.json
│   ├── abis.js
│   └── addresses.js You can think of an ABI as a smart contract’s public API specification, kind of like an OpenAPI specification. You need the ABI to call a contract’s functions. The contracts/ directory structure lets us import both the contract ABI and address like so: { abis, addresses } = ( ); DummyStorageABI = abis.DummyStorage; DummyStorageAddress = addresses.DummyStorage; // functions/exec.js const require '../contracts' const const We’ll need these in our function. 2. Functions The function uses to load contract ABIs and call a smart contract: exec Ethers contract = ethers.Contract(
  DummyStorageAddress,
  DummyStorageABI,
  wallet,
) RANDOM_INTEGER = .floor( .random() * ); tx = contract.put(RANDOM_INTEGER) // Initialize contract const new // Call smart contract function `put(uint)` const Math Math 100 // returns a random integer from 0 to 99 const await Loading the contract ABI and address gives us an abstraction with all the functions of our smart contract, including and . ethers.Contract get() put() In the sample function, we call with a random integer. exec contract.put() 3. serverless.yml Before you can run the exec function, you’ll need to specify some environment variables in your serverless.yml: # serverless.yml service: serverless-ethers provider: name: aws runtime: nodejs12.x region: ap-southeast-1 timeout: 30 environment: DEFAULT_GAS_PRICE: 60000000000 MNEMONIC: ... SLACK_HOOK_URL: ... uses the following environment variables: serverless-ethers : Default gas price used when making write transactions. DEFAULT_GAS_PRICE : 12-word mnemonic used to derive an Ethereum address. Make sure it’s if you intend to write data to Ethereum! MNEMONIC funded with Ether : The example sends messages to Slack using . You can get this URL from your Slack dashboard. (Optional) SLACK_HOOK_URL Incoming Webhooks You can change your deployed function’s environment variables on the fly from the AWS Lambda console. make sure you do not store keys in plaintext in production. Use a secure parameter store such as when storing credentials such as mnemonics and API keys. Since every project has its own security requirements and setup, we leave it up to readers to decide how they want to approach storing secrets. Important Note: AWS Secrets Manager Running locally You can use the command invoke local to run your functions locally. This is great for testing! serverless CLI > serverless invoke -f Starting...
Contract ABIs loaded
Ethers wallet loaded
Contract loaded
Sending transaction...
:white_check_mark: Transaction sent https://ropsten.etherscan.io/tx/0x72204f07911a319b4e5f7eb54ad15ed666cfc1403b53def40c9d60188b176383
Completed local exec true Deploying to AWS Deploying is as easy as y: serverless deplo > serverless deploy
Serverless: Packaging service...
Serverless: Excluding development dependencies...
Serverless: Creating Stack...
Serverless: Checking Stack create progress...
........
Serverless: Stack create finished...
Serverless: Uploading CloudFormation file to S3...
Serverless: Uploading artifacts...
Serverless: Uploading service serverless-ethers.zip file to S3 (2.95 MB)...
Serverless: Validating template...
Serverless: Updating Stack...
Serverless: Checking Stack update progress...
.....................
Serverless: Stack update finished...
Service Information
service: serverless-ethers
stage: dev
region: ap-southeast-1
stack: serverless-ethers-dev
resources: 8
api keys:
  None
endpoints:
  None : : serverless-ethers-dev-exec
layers:
  None functions exec That’s it! You now have a live serverless function that you can use to automate and monitor your smart contracts. You can use this project as a base for building your own smart contract automation. In Closing Congratulations! You learned about: Why we need off-chain smart contract automation Use cases for smart contract automation The Serverless framework How the serverless-ethers sample application works Feel free to let me know if you found this useful, or if you have any questions! I’d be interested to know what your automation use cases are. Star the repo if you found it useful! The serverless-ethers sample application is open source and available on Github. Extra: ChatOps support with Slack Included with serverless-ethers is a function to help you integrate with Slack. postToSlack successMessage = ; postToSlack(successMessage); const `:white_check_mark: Transaction sent https://ropsten.etherscan.io/tx/ ` ${tx.hash} await The function makes use of a environment variable that you can get from your . Once set up, you’ll be able to notify Slack whenever a transaction was sent successfully: postToSlack SLACK_HOOK_URL Slack console It’s a nice and simple way to monitor your functions. Extra: Monitoring Smart Contract Events So far, we’ve only implemented the ‘Automated Trigger’ use case. What about monitoring smart contract state and events? You can use the Ethers v5 to periodically monitor for certain events. In your function, you can do the following: Events API filter = contract.filters.Transfer(userAccount, ); logs = contract.queryFilter(filter, , ); logs.forEach( { .log(log.args._to, log.args._value);
}); // Given the following Event: // event Transfer(bytes32 indexed node, address owner) // Get the filter (the second null could be omitted) const null // Query the filter const 0 "latest" // from block 0 to latest block // Print out all the values: ( ) => log console Assuming that you want to have this function execute periodically (e.g. every 5 minutes), you’ll also need to store a flag that keeps track of the last block the function has seen since the last execution. Event monitoring is especially useful if you have an Access Control whitelist that you need to keep an eye on. With an event monitoring function, you can notify a Slack channel whenever new addresses are whitelisted for admin roles. Very handy! Previously published at https://yos.io/2020/07/04/serverless-smart-contract-automation/

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If you don’t have any definite preferences in design, you should try dark colors, because dark themes look so stylish and become more and more popular. That is why we decided to find the most amazing React, Angular and Vue admin templates with dark themes. If you ever googled admin templates then you probably know that there are tons of them and that is fine to be on the fence about which one to choose. If you are not sure whether to use admin dashboards templates or not you can read the article about the . The incorrect choice of an admin template may lead to a giant waste of time and money – so it’s the decision you should think about for a while. benefits of admin templates The history of dark themes is full of misunderstandings and data inaccuracies. Some people might say that the first OS with a dark mode was Apple’s System in 1991. But we all can agree that the origins of the dark mode probably can be found in coding. Developers use dark themes since the dawn of time. If you like dark designs like we do our team here to share the best admin dashboard templates 2019 with dark themes! Light Blue Admin Dashboard Light blue template is one of the most stylish and modern templates on the Internet. The design concept was developed by a professional UI expert. It’s built with transparent blocks and has a deep background. The designer picked colors that match the dashboard transparency style perfectly, every detail is in its place and the dashboard looks complete. It has a huge amount of ready-to-use UI components in the same style: widgets, buttons, calendars, charts, etc. The whole template resembles a well-structured, “made to order” dashboard which can meet all your business requirements, whether it’s SaaS, IoT or CRM, CMS systems. Light Blue template is a premium dashboard, but you also can find a which has a familiar design but less amount of ready-to-use UI components. The cost of the premium template is $59,95. free version The template has 4 different versions based on the framework used in development – so you can pick the one that fits you: Light Blue React Light Blue React Node.js Light Blue Angular Light Blue Vue Learn more Demo Luna Admin Theme Luna admin theme is a premium admin template with a flat and dark design concept. The white navigation bar on top, the blackish navigation panel on the left side of the dashboard, color components and a dark background create an elegant looking and friendly design. The template provides you with a wide range of analytical tools – you can visualize your data with a huge amount of metrics and charts. Since Luna has three  monitoring pages one of which is a modern world map that shows the activity of your website users, it becomes a great template for monitoring and administration web applications, project management system or other custom projects. In the UI elements section, you don’t see a great variety of elements, charts, icons, etc. But it’s enough to start any type of projects you want. If numbers, charts, tables, and metrics are in demand in your project, Luna admin theme will become a good tool for compiling and analyzing any data. Black Dashboard Angular Black Dashboard Angular is a recently released dashboard, made with angular-cli. It can be named a bold experiment in design since its dark background is in stark contrast with a true red color of the dashboard elements. A navigation bar is designed using Bloody Mary gradient while some linear charts are made using colors that flow smoothly from bright red to dark blue. Bloody Mary gradient is also used in the buttons and that makes the whole design looks fascinating. The design concept looks remarkable, but the brightness of the red navigation bar moves the focus from UI-components and charts, which is logically incorrect. The dashboard doesn’t include a great variety of UI-components, but it’s enough for not big and complicated projects. In general, we can say that the dashboard is memorable with the unique navigation panel. If you see attractive the gradient in this template, you can try it and you will not be disappointed – especially considering that the template is free. Learn more Demo Corona Admin Template Corona is a very compact and nice-looking admin template. The template offers a simple and clean design. Every component works just well with the dark theme and its colors don’t shift your focus away from the information on charts and numbers. Among distinctive features in the design of the dashboard are colored icons within the navigation bar and 249 flag icons of different countries! The template is easy-to-use and easy-to-understand, it has a lot of UI-components like sliders, notification, buttons, and loaders which look just great and match the template perfectly. It’s a good choice for those developers who value simplicity over complication design and those who have clients all over the world. Learn more Demo AdminPro Dashboard Template This template shows a fascinating balance between a vibrant color palette and a dark background, but if you enjoy the template with the first look, you enjoy it more while using it. This template is packed with a wide array of ready-to-use UI elements, icons, widgets, etc. You can find more than 500 UI elements in there, 25 sample pages, and 3000 icons! It allows to customize a project to your needs very fast using available components and tools in the template. Furthermore, you can assign different animation effects to the elements like fading, zooming, bouncing, so you make the dashboard look special. If you value small features in the design that don’t have a great impact on the quality of work but do have on the pleasure from work, this template is a good choice. The cost of this dashboard is $45. Learn more Demo Right Admin Template The template has a minimalistic material design. You can see the dashboard window on the background surface which color flows from dark to the shade of red ruby. Seams and shadows provide meaning that you can touch the main window and a logout button designed like the windows shut down button looks pretty nice. The dashboard isn’t overloaded with unnecessary elements and has all you need to build an admin template for not a big project in e-commerce or corporate business. It also will be very helpful to the communication of your team, since the template has a tagged interface where developers made 3 out of 5 blocks devoted to mails (that support sending documents), messages and recent activity. The template provides every functionality required in an admin template for e-commerce, like charts, forms, tables. The Right is a simple and useful admin template, and it costs just 8$! Learn more Demo YoraUI Admin Template The premium YoraUI admin template features a modern and colorful design. The design concept maintains a good balance between color elements and dark background, but the amount of opposite colors of the spectrum on one screen sometimes makes it hard to focus on the information you need. The elements are separated using borders and decent spacing. The navigation panel is in the same color as elements on the dashboard, which may lead to a confusion of the borders between the dashboard and the navigation panel. So the design is worth looking, but more than that, you can be surprised by the available opportunities for customization. The template has a lot of customized chart libraries, over 1000+ icons to choose, forms, 18 additional pages, apps like Todo list, Email, Gallery and widgets! You will spend a lot of time to customize it and adapt to the needs of your projects, but you can get any necessary functionality from this template. Developers understood it and built the template with SaaS to make customization easier. Learn more Demo Frest Frest – Clean & Minimal Bootstrap Admin Dashboard Template is a beautifully crafted, clean & minimal designed admin template with Dark / Light Layouts, Animated Icons & RTL options. Frest, a powerful admin dashboard template built on Bootstrap 4 is developer-friendly, rich with features and highly customizable. Learn more Demo Text source: - React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap & React Native templates and themes. https://flatlogic.com The link to the original article: Writing Documentation For Your JavaScript Project

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Top 7 Dark-Themed Admin Templates For Your Next Project

Sometimes we want to show menu item content in a separate tab for various purposes. In this tutorial, we will discuss the process of opening a custom menu item in new tab from popular multivendor marketplace Dokan's vendor dashboard. If you are wondering how can you generate a new menu item in the vendor dashboard, you can find the details . here So we take a look at this bit of the code: add_filter( , ); {
 $urls[ ] = ( => __( , ), => , => dokan_get_navigation_url( ), => ); $urls;
} 'dokan_get_dashboard_nav' 'dokan_add_help_menu' function dokan_add_help_menu ( $urls ) 'help' array 'title' 'Help' 'dokan' 'icon' '' 'url' 'help' 'pos' 51 return This part brings you a custom menu item with "Help". When you click on the help menu item, it should redirect you to the `help` page. You can see title and - these two are the keys and there are values against these keys. If you want to change the label from Help to anything else say contact, this will be the modification: title url add_filter( , ); {
 $urls[ ] = array( => __( , ), => , => dokan_get_navigation_url( ), => ); $urls;
} 'dokan_get_dashboard_nav' 'dokan_add_help_menu' ( ) function dokan_add_help_menu $urls 'help' 'title' 'Contact' 'dokan' 'icon' '' 'url' 'help' 'pos' 51 return Say we want to navigate through wedevs.com instead of a page inside the vendor dashboard. We have to remove as the value of the key . dokan_get_navigation_url() url So we change the value of the key here like this: url add_filter( , ); {
 $urls[ ] = array( => __( , ), => , => , => ); $urls;
} 'dokan_get_dashboard_nav' 'dokan_add_help_menu' ( ) function dokan_add_help_menu $urls 'help' 'title' 'Help' 'dokan' 'icon' '' 'url' 'https://wedevs.com' 'pos' 51 return Paste the above code in your child theme's functions.php file and then try to visit the vendor dashboard. It should show you the menu item with title Help. Now if you click on the item, it will redirect you to weDevs.com site. Our next step is to open the link in a new tab. Here we will require a bit of custom , because Dokan doesn't allow you to add values for target attribute in <a> tag. JS For adding custom JS in your page we need to add the following block of code in your child theme's functions.php file. We have to use hook to do that. wp_enqueue_scripts add_action( , ); {
 wp_enqueue_script( , get_stylesheet_directory_uri(). , array(), , );
} 'wp_enqueue_scripts' 'enqueue_custom_js' ( ) function enqueue_custom_js 'custom' '/scripts/custom.js' false true Here, you can see we have used so we have to build this directory. In order to build the directory, please navigate through wp-content/themes/child theme folder. Inside the child theme folder, create a folder named script and inside the script folder, create a file named custom.js. /script/custom.js Now, inside the custom.js file, add the following block of code: ( { link = .getElementsByClassName( )[ ];

link.addEventListener( , (e) => {
 e.preventDefault(); url = e.target.getAttribute( ); .open(url, );
})
})(); ( ) function var document 'help' 0 'click' var 'href' window '_blank' Done! Now visit the vendor dashboard and click on the 'help' menu item. Click on the item. You will see it opens in a new tab. Feel free to let us know if it helps! You can follow me on and on . GitHub Twitter

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Remote work has become the most transformative labor trend of our lifetime. Long before ‘social distancing’ became a household term, businesses chose to operate with remote teams because of its benefits. In a recent by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics, they found there was a 159% increase in remote work from 2007 to 2019. Whether your company has been planning to be remote-based for years or the need to adapt came suddenly, remote work is an opportunity for any business to operate with more efficiency, resilience, and flexibility. survey I’ve been building a fully remote team for more than two years, and managing remote teams for many more so have been asked a lot of questions about managing remote teams. These are the most common questions and answers to help you navigate this, broken into 3 sections: General Productivity Hiring ‍1. What are some of the advantages of remote work? Recruiting becomes easier since companies aren’t limited to just hiring locally. Instead, they can choose from a global pool of talented applicants. In addition, companies experienced with managing remote teams are more resilient. With the right practices and good structures in place team members become more resourceful, independent, and effective communicators. This means teams run smoothly, even in the face of unpredictable circumstances. From the perspective of an employee working remotely, advantages go beyond saving money on transportation or meals. Employees gain more flexibility in organizing their work life and their personal lives. This can mean having more free time to spend time with family. Many people also find they focus better working remotely because they encounter fewer distractions compared to working in an office. All of this makes employees want to stay at the company for longer. ‍ 2. What are the biggest drawbacks of remote work?‍ Communicating while working remotely can be challenging for employees. When you work from home, you can’t just ask your co-worker sitting next to you when you have a question about something. Similarly, building social relationships with colleagues requires extra attention, since informal chats during coffee breaks or after-work drinks are not possible the same way they are for office workers. Remote workers may also struggle with new distractions when working from home, like having kids, dependents, and roommates in close proximity. But these challenges can be resolved by rethinking work routines. For companies, the main challenge is promoting more work autonomy and building more trust in employees. This requires better documentation and a different way of measuring performance — not by the number of hours, but by results. ‍ 3. Do people want to go back to work at an office space after working remotely?‍ Everyone is different. Some people find themselves more productive and enjoy the autonomy of working remotely. Some prefer an office environment, and others work best with a mix of both. I recommend that companies maintain flexibility. Experiment with remote work but maintain the option to use office space for certain meetings or types of communication. This way, if employees need to work remotely because of an extreme circumstance, the company is prepared to handle it. 4. What are the ‘best practices’ of remote work? Remote work relies on three fundamental principles: , , and . autonomy trust transparency First, working remotely means working to be productive. At Microverse, we embody that principle in a saying: “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than asking for permission.” This encourages team members to be proactive to solve complex problems rather than wait for approval. autonomously Second, . Managers need to trust that team members will do the right thing and do their job correctly. Team members can foster trust and enable more autonomy for themselves by getting the job done consistently. autonomy requires trust And third, . Team members need to have access to the right information at the right time, so it’s crucial to be diligent about documentation. That goes for every meeting, decision and action item, onboarding and staff processes, experiments, and metrics — almost every detail of your business. autonomous work is enabled by transparency With these three principles, you can create a virtuous cycle of autonomous work: Team members have the right information when they need it without depending on other people. They make better decisions based on the right data, increasing mutual trust between the team and management. 5. How do we adopt better documentation practices? Make writing documentation as easy and frictionless as possible by using the right tools for your team. At Microverse, we use . Other options are , , or . Whichever you select, the tool should keep documentation simple and make it available to everyone. In our company, we follow the principle to be transparent by default — only restrict access if there is a strong reason. Notion Confluence Slite Coda GoogleDocs The trick is to make writing documentation not feel like documentation — it should write itself. For example, the Microverse team rarely responds to questions by typing an answer. Instead, the response is always a link (e.g., to Notion) where to find that information. If it’s a novel question, we write the answer in our open documentation system and send that new link. This takes more time than typing a response, but it helps everyone find answers on their own. ‍ 6. What are the essential tools to work remotely? A good tool for video conferencing. Our preferred tool because of the quality is , which we use at Microverse. Zoom A tool for high-bandwidth communication, meaning communication that captures and conveys more than written text. I recommend to record and send short video messages. Loom A tool for easy and well-structured documentation of everything from meeting notes to your team handbook — as mentioned we use . Notion A messaging tool like for short, written communication. At Microverse, we use because we like that it organizes conversations in thematic threads. Team members can easily search through threads and channels and since most conversations are publicly available, it is a great tool for documentation, too. Slack Twist (Note: For informal conversations about family, pets, workouts or holiday plans, we use Slack.) PRODUCTIVITY 7. How will switching to remote work affect our productivity?‍ Remote work has many advantages that increase productivity in the long run. In transition, productivity may slow down as employees adapt to new practices. Keep in mind that temporary conditions at home can hurt productivity. For example, when schools are closed during a pandemic, parents struggle with the double responsibilities of caring for their children while working at home. ‍ 8. How do we manage the wellness of our team when working from home for a long period of time?‍ Employees need to avoid a feeling of social isolation. can create structured opportunities for their team members to connect with each other. Virtual coffee breaks and other types of virtual meetings, from daily stand-ups to all-hands meetings are important. Companies It is really important to encourage remote employees to periodically disconnect from work, too. Setting fixed working hours and disabling work notifications while on a break and on weekends is strongly recommended. ‍ 9. How do we know if our team is being productive? Should we track hours?‍ Many managers of remote teams want to know whether their employees work two, eight, or 15 hours a day. But measuring the hour's employees' work tells you nothing about their results. I strongly advise you don’t measure inputs like work hours, or outputs like the number of meetings they held. If you want to know how productive employees are, measure outcomes. The amount of new software pushed in production, the number of bug fixes, or how many contracts the sales team closed are good examples of outcome indicators. ‍ 10. What do you do if employees are less productive when working from home? ‍ Some work interruptions are inevitable. Parents who are working at home have a lot on their hands with schools and child care centers closed due to the pandemic. As a manager, showing empathy can alleviate a lot of stress for your team. Be sure to communicate with your team that they are not expected to be as productive as in normal times. However, if family life keeps distracting employees from work duties, the company can advise on how to set up a proper work environment. Having the right hardware and a dedicated room free from distractions is a good place to start. Setting norms, like uninterrupted work hours, can also make a big difference. Working in pairs can be a useful technique for employees struggling with distractions. Have team members call each other in pairs and keep the video and audio open while they work. Feeling accountable to another colleague like this helps some employees stay on task. Lastly, if necessary, managers can install more regular check-ins or strict accountability mechanisms like daily stand-ups with affected employees. However, as trust and autonomy are fundamental for successful remote teams, these measures should only be thought of as short-term. MEETINGS 11. How can we make our meetings more productive?‍ A basic rule is to have an agenda outlined ahead of every single meeting. Everyone needs to know the items to be discussed and the expected outcomes of the meeting. I would also advise having a participant volunteer to keep a watch on time for each section of the agenda. Every meeting also needs a note-taker. This helps to keep the conversation focused and creates a record of the meeting for anyone who couldn’t be there. A meeting should close with a list of action items, including the ‘what’, ‘who’, and ‘when’ of action plans. ‍ 12. What are some good tools to improve our meetings?‍ Start with a good work environment with little background noise and the right hardware. You don’t need to invest in the best headphones on the market, but a set of proper headphones — and microphones — not the ones that are in your laptop — are a minimum. Next, invest in the best video conferencing software. As mentioned, is generally considered the best. Depending on your company’s budget and requirements of infrastructure or data regulation, you might opt for a different provider. Zoom As the founder and CEO of a fast-growing company, I have a lot of meetings, so I appreciate a tool that helps me to organize them. My recommendation: Avoid having meetings spread out throughout your entire workday, or you won’t be able to get anything done. automatically moves meetings into blocks to help maximize focus time. Clockwise Lastly, make sure that meeting documentation is easy and frictionless for everyone. HIRING 12. Should we hire people in other cities/timezones?‍ If you are limiting yourself to only hiring locally — or in a single time zone — you are limiting your talent pool. If you can hire in any time zone, anywhere in the world, you are able to find the best person for the job regardless of where they live. Having a team spread across time zones is a unique challenge for management. Paying attention to proper documentation, improving asynchronous communication with video messages, and measuring performance by outcomes instead of inputs work will make your team more successful. ‍ 13. What should we pay attention to when hiring someone for a remote position?‍ Make sure they want to join your team for the right reasons. It is not uncommon for a candidate to look for remote work because they want to be a digital nomad. Be wary if they only want the job so that they can constantly travel. Some might interpret “flexible” work times as working some hours here, some hours there. Try to ensure that applicants have the level of commitment that the position requires. Ideally, candidates already have previous experience of working remotely and managing their own time. If they are new to remote work, plan the onboarding accordingly to give them the guidance they need. ‍ 14. How do we interview people remotely? ‍ As a basic rule, do not drop any interview step you would consider important in local hiring practices. Whether it is testing for technical knowledge or probing to see if the candidate is a cultural fit, make sure you find a way to implement every step remotely. Not all steps of the interview process have to be carried out through a real-time call or video meeting. The interview needs to cover the experience with and expectations towards remote work. Be clear about both the benefits and challenges, and ask them about their own strategies to stay productive when working autonomously. ‍ 15. Will I save money hiring remotely?‍ The short answer is yes. If you are hiring flexibly in locations and time zones across the world, you will be able to access talent at lower costs than in most big cities or Western countries. However, saving money should never be your main motivation to transition to remote work. The main benefit of a remote workforce is access to a more diverse talent pool — and the advantages that team diversity brings to your business. Remote work is one of the most transformative economic trends the world has seen in generations. For employers and workers alike — not to mention our global society and our natural world — the rewards are too compelling to ignore. As mentioned, these are some of the most common questions I get asked about remote work. But there are so many more. Check out our for answers to more of your questions. Feel free to with any other questions or comments you have! Ultimate FaQ for Remote Work Tweet at me (Image by Oksana Ivanchenko)

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As the CEO of a proxy service and data scraping solutions provider, I understand completely why global data breaches that appear on news headlines at times have given web scraping a terrible reputation and why so many people feel cynical about Big Data these days. At the same time, I recognize that we have great clients who do important work with Big Data and see this in action on common websites most people use each day. This article is going to describe some important examples of how web scraping can positively affect our lives in addition to offering some ideas on how to do it ethically. Web Scraping as a Force for Good Almost anything in the world can be used for good or evil, Big Data included. It all depends on the intention. Here are my favorite examples for web scraping uses that add value to the internet in a significant way: Price aggregator websites For many of us, price shopping is great fun, even when it’s for things we don’t really need. If you’re looking for a new laptop, electric mixer, or noise-canceling headphones, the options are numerous. At the same time, if you want to book a charter on a multi-million dollar yacht, Big Data has got you covered for that as well. Whether we are booking flights or hotel rooms, buying cars, or private jets, there seems to be an endless array of sites that are bringing the competitive advantage back to the consumer for a diverse range of goods and services. And all that is thanks to web scraping. Tracking Fake News Journalistic integrity is increasingly becoming a worldwide concern because fake news can be dangerously disruptive to almost every facet of our lives, from events in politics to information about health. are combatting the problem with solutions that include machine learning algorithms that can process large amounts of data from thousands of sources and determine the level of accuracy and political slant, among other factors. This development represents a significant advance in the sharing of information and that will benefit everyone. A handful of startups Reputation Management Not only is the market highly competitive these days, but consumers are as sensitive as ever. Brand monitoring and reputation management are essential to protect the good standing of products, services, and even your name. As long as companies scrape data legally, billions of sources can help them ensure a spotless reputation for consumers, brands, and anyone who operates in the public eye. Tracking World News & Events Web scraping can be used to track statistics from events shaping our world, from economic statistics to financial market indicators to the effects of communicable diseases. Examples of the latter include the partnership between Oxylabs and students from Stanford, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech for the website, in addition to our cooperation with the University of Lugano in Switzerland for the production of . TrackCorona CoronaMapper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) There’s something about the David vs. Goliath story that makes people root for the underdog. Think Rocky facing an intense match in the ring when hope seems to be lost, or the 300 Spartans facing an army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Persia. One doesn’t need to go to history or fiction to find these stories. We see them every day in the form of small businesses competing with the major players. is a particularly challenging arena, so web scraping can be used to research specific search terms, title tags, targeted keywords, and backlinks. This valuable data can be used to map out an effective strategy that will get content ranked high in search results. SEO Academic Research Researchers at academic institutions are in an enviable position in the modern age as the internet is giving them an almost unlimited trove of data that can be used for academic papers and research studies. When data is public, it is one of the signs that should encourage communication about genuine web scraping to benefit the wider society. Ethical Web Scraping At Oxylabs, we want to get the message out there that web scraping can be used positively. There are transparent ways to get the job done so individuals and businesses can get the data they need to drive their businesses forward. Here are some guidelines to follow to keep the playing field fair for those who gather data and the websites that provide it: Only scrape publicly-available web pages. Ensure that the data is requested at a fair rate that doesn’t compromise the server or is confused for a DDoS attack. Respect the data obtained and any privacy issues relevant to the source website. Scrape with the intent to add value and/or context to the data with the end user’s interest in mind (such as the “fake” news example above). Study the target website's legal documents to determine whether you will legally accept their terms of service and if you will do so - whether you will not breach these terms. To add, every proxy resource provider uses proxies of varying quality from different sources. Hence, partnering up with a verified and trusted proxy service provider completes the equation. A synergistic relationship based on transparency and cooperation can balance the equation for all parties involved and drive the evolution of Big Data forward for the benefit of everyone. While the above recommendations aren’t the law, they can start the conversation in forming a code of ethics that may prove to be useful in further legitimizing the use of web scraping for purposes that add value to the internet. Partnering up with a trusted proxy provider that embodies similar core values is essential to that process. A Final Word The internet is still the most significant source of Big Data known to humankind, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. In this day and age, it would be foolish to let it blind us to the endless possibilities that lay before us. Everyone can benefit from harnessing the insights hidden in the never-ending supply of Big Data, thanks to web scraping practice. With ethics in mind, web scraping can open up new worlds of information that will connect people, organizations, and disciplines. Like any tool we can choose the best intention, and make Big Data a force for good. References https://oxylabs.io/

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by Psychedelic Bart 🏰 ⚔️ 🌹 🌮 🔑 🧡 🔥 🕶️ 🤝 🆙 Too many people still leave their BTC on exchanges. Rookie mistake! 1. HODL your OWN private keys. It’s not hard. 2. Run and use your OWN full node. I recommend Coldcard Wallet. 3. Invest in a Bitcoin hardware wallet. This has been one of the best experiences for me. There are tons of brilliant minds out there! 4. Attend Bitcoin meetups, and meet Bitcoiners in meatspace and/or VR. If you don’t care about your privacy, you lose your right to it. 5. Mix your coins. Never brag about your stash. Bad actors are everywhere. 6. OPSEC OPSEC OPSEC. They are all distractions. 7. Ignore shitcoins. The odds are against you. 8. Avoid trading. You’ll never buy in at the perfect price. 9. Dollar cost averaging. You were once in their shoes. 10. Help out newbies. This makes HODLing much easier. 11. Lower your time preference and live within your means. I highly recommend & . 12. Listen to podcasts. Stephan Livera Tales from the Crypt 13. Learn to code and contribute to our revolution! Originally published on citadel21.com is a Bitcoin cultural zine. We publish Bitcoin-only content by Bitcoiners around the world in volumes on a monthly basis 🧡🔥 Citadel21 Follow on Twitter 🏰 @ctdl21

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This article will touch on how data science can be used in SEO and look at how correlative analysis should be used during the content creation process. For those not familiar with these topics, there will be examples and pictures but as should be expected when covering any complicated topic, the scope of the article will be limited to the main purpose. It always bothers me when I see the recent trend to present SEO using the term ‘scientific search engine optimisation’, I understand that it's a great way to allay the fears of CEOs and business owners, but it does rankle. All digital marketing efforts should be based on some hard data, and SEO’s have been doing this since the year dot. Whether that was pushing the limits of keyword densities back in the day, to enumerating backlink profiles to judge competitiveness, these were always approaches. data driven There should be no place for the ‘publish and pray’ method that most within the industry will have encountered at some stage. Rant over. How Can Data Science Help Organic Rankings? As search engine optimization specialists, we have a huge amount of data at our fingertips. Whether this is pulled from Google dorks. From proprietary data sources such as Ahrefs, Majestic etc. Or from a private calculated method using our own metric. I’m thinking back to  ‘thirst’ as a way of calculating whether a keyword was worth pursuing, which relied on MOZ’s link data, keyword volume and Keyword Planner’s CPC. The point being that a data driven approach to SEO and digital marketing in general will; Reduce the time to rank Uncover key phrases that you can compete with. Indicate the resources needed to compete. Dictate your content strategy Stop the misallocation of resources These are only some of the benefits, this list could be much longer, the point being, that if you are not taking a data driven approach to your decisions and allocation of resources, you are going to lose to the little guy, with a smaller budget and more RNR time. What Is Correlative Analysis & How Can It Help Me Rank? The last two years have seen a huge compression in the SERPs, where many of the articles for highly competitive keywords all look pretty similar and cover the topic in the same way. Why is this? Cue the rise in correlative analysis tools. We’ve always matched our content to the search intent Google shows in the SERPS and then tailored content creation around what was already ranking. But correlative analysis have taken this arduous process and simplified it. tools for SEO Correlative analysis tools allow us to scrape the top 100 results for a search term and see which factors correlate to higher rankings. The simplest example of this is 'word count'. If Google is rewarding articles with a word count of between 1000 and 1200 words, then this is where we need to aim with our article. Likewise, if Google is rewarding sites that load in under a second, or that have a keyword density of 3.2% or … To understand how deep into this you can go, take a look at the small part of a CoraSEO report below. This is from some months ago and the developer adds new metrics all the time. The key is not to have everything perfectly lined up, but to hit the important notes. Like everything it’s a case of time/cost vs reward. Whilst CoraSEO is great for folks who want to get at the data directly, you'll need a fair amount of experience to interpret it correctly. There are a number of other tools on the market that hide a lot of the data and only present the user with limited highlighted insights. I’m only going to cover the ones that I’ve used to give a flavour of what's out there. Different Tools For Different Tasks You wouldn’t use a hammer to cut down a tree, nor a saw to mend a fence. Some of these tools are suited to certain workflows and SEO goals such as quickly optimising existing content or giving your content writers the best briefs possible, whilst others will help you build the perfect page structure for your PWA’s landing pages. SurferSEO Set up by brothers from a little Polish town, has a very intuitive interface that allows you to focus on the main aspects of page optimisation. There are a large number of options still available under the hood, but Surfer does an excellent job of keeping things simple. If you need your writers to access the tool, they won’t be lost and they've recently added a content writing module. SurferSEO The page audit tool is great at highlighting where you can improve and bring your page into line with the competition covering basic things like keyword in the Title, url and meta description, the exact and partial keywords in your h tags, content and codebase and more technical aspects such as Time To First Byte(TTFB) and . schema It’s perhaps important to note that SurferSEO uses something called to calculate the optimal occurrences of words and phrases on a page rather than the more common method. They’ve done a great job of explaining the difference on their blog. True Density TF-IDF CoraSEO If the other two tools on this list have opted for a streamlined approach that takes care and hides the data behind carefully designed interfaces, takes the opposite route. Cora It’s a self hosted windows application that can take 30 mins to run covering almost every aspect of a page that you could want to analyse. At last count it compared over 400 factors and dumped everything out into an excel spreadsheet so that you could examine the data yourself. To be clear, these are not the types of spreadsheets that you can send off to a writer, the data has to be interpreted but can uncover important insights. It calculates correlation using 2 methods and then ranks the signals for you, giving you actionable information. Page Optimiser Pro Kyle Roof’s leaked test showing how he ranked a local site by only using ' content and keywords sprinkled precisely into the right places confirmed what many of us believed for years. lorem ipsum' Google can not parse your content and assign it some sort of quality score. The amount of processing power required to do this just doesn’t make it feasible on any large scale. That’s not to say that they don’t have some algo that they run on highly competitive key phrases, but when you consider the breadth of content published all the time, even Google are not capable of something like this. Kyle Roof capitalised on his fame and brought to market. I got in at the beta and saw some great results using it, but I don’t want to comment on it too much, as I moved to SurferSEO and Kyle’s team have continued to update it’s features including various options for the aggressiveness of optimisation, a content editor and much more. POP There are other tools out there, SEO PowerSuite have a module for TF-IDF content optimisation and there a couple of others, but these don't offer the same breadth of data that the 3 above do. Depending on your site(s) and your workflow and your goal, one of these tools may be more suited than the others. Below I've pulled out 3 use cases, but your milage may vary. Task 1 # Page Optimisation The optimisation of an existing page is probably the most common task I’ve used correlation analysis tools for. The main reason for this is simple, you can get much quicker results working with an existing piece of content, than publishing a new article. If you just need to check keyword densities and TF-IDF then text-tools.net is a great and affordable tool for the task. You add your keyword and target url and it breaks down how you stack up to each of the competition and highlights any common missing phrases in your content. Perhaps the one caveat with this simple tool is that your article does have to be published and available to be crawled for it to do its thing, so it can’t be used earlier in the content creation process. Whilst the prevailing wisdom is to keep the your keyword density below 2.5%, like most SEO ideas, this is rehashed wisdom from 2014 that doesn't stand up to real world investigation. You'll quickly find that it depends on your niche and that many of your successful competition are a lot more aggressive. NB - Page Optimizer Pro and SurferSEO are equally apt for revising and updating content. They give you much better and deeper analysis of things to improve on your page but at that additional cost. Task 2 # Content Creation & Content Briefs Producing high quality content briefs for your writers is essential. If you leave the entire process up to the writer, you run the risk of getting back a poorly researched article that might not match the target search intent. It should all be a system, quality inputs produce quality outputs. Giving your writers a topical structure including key phrases you want mentioned will always lead to better articles, particularly if you have a high churn of writers that need to become familiar with your site’s audience, tone and your structural expectations of the content. Both Page Optimizer Pro and SurferSEO have features that can help with the process without you getting too bogged down in the weeds. Both Surfer and POP have a content creation tool baked in to assist your writers in ticking the needed boxes as they write. Alternatively you can review the the lexical recommendations and include what you want in your briefs. Task 3 # Templating If you are building a progressive web application with hundreds or thousands of landing pages for different target phrases or geographic locations. You need to have the optimal structure across all these end points. To give you a better understanding, let me give you the example of playfinder.com who are targeting the following types of keywords across the UK and Ireland. Rugby Pitches & Clubs in (and the derivatives which would include rent, pitch etc) {CITY/TOWN} Basketball Court Hire in (and the derivatives) {CITY/TOWN} { } Sports Facility Hire CITY/TOWN You get the idea, each of their circa 9,000 pages are hyper targeted to a set of keywords and a geo location. Some things to consider when building your landing page template would be; How many times your keyword is used in H2 tags The optimal keyword density LSI keywords that should be used in the body of the article The number of partial match phrases need in H tags Word count The process for building out a template for this type of situation might work like this. Run Cora reports for key locations that you have ascertained to be competitive. Average out the results. Pick out the key factors that correlate with higher rankings. Hand off to your structural requirements to the web designers. Obviously the greater the number of locations you use to build your data set, the better the results will be across all locations. And the better your page template, the more organic visitors you’ll get with less links and less need to rebuild the pages in the future. - Avoid changing your url, page content or codebase for low volume, low competition keywords. It's always better to do it right the first time.  Whilst Google does reward some types of queries for freshness, it’s gotten much better at discerning which types of queries should get a bump when you update or add content, changing your content or codebase will often result in a reduction in rankings for a time until GoogleBot comes back and spends the processing power to reevaluate your page. NB. TLDR FAQ What is SEO data? SEO data can be defined as any data that can lead to actionable insights to improve your site’s position in Google’s organic index. How is data science used in SEO and digital marketing? Data science is an integral part of SEO and digital marketing and all decisions and allocation of resources should be based on a data-driven approach. How do you analyze SEO data? Analyzing SEO data and using it to improve your organic position can be done in many ways. The first step is to identify the key data points and compare your site with your competitor to find where you need to improve. Which is better data science or digital marketing? If you are looking for a great salary and love crunching numbers, data science is a career path with lots of opportunities. If you are more creative, digital marketing might be a better choice. How is machine learning used in digital marketing? Machine learning has been touted as a way to improve conversions for advertising accounts, offer visitors of e-commerce stores items they may wish to purchase based on their previous spending habits and been used to improve UI UX designs. But behind the scenes, Google uses machine learning to analyse user behaviour and reward sites and pages that fulfil the users search intent. Will AI take over digital marketing? Yes AI will take over digital marketing, in fact Skynet has already composed chart topping music, created paintings that have sold for thousands of dollars and optimised Adwords accounts to creatively move money out of advertisers accounts and into Google’s coffers. The end is nigh for Digital Marketing. Murrough Foley You can find on . Murrough Foley Linkedin

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