Head of Legal, Chief Legal Officer, General Counsel, or Chief Legal Advisor; whatever you want to call it — the role is a key position for startups (and in the corporate world) as a company’s primary source of legal advice. With any , growth brings inevitable roadblocks or problems. This is why boards, founders, and CEOs are bringing this role in-house to provide value-driven solutions and advice on complex legal issues to help the company succeed. Deemed “one of the mightiest figures in the C-suite” by , an in-house lawyer can save your business time, money, and effort. successful startup The Economist If you’re debating whether or not it’s the right time or decision to protect your startup, we break down everything you need to know about bringing on a lawyer in-house. While no company’s path is the same and industry needs vary, we examine the basics to see if an in-house lawyer may contribute to or inhibit growth. How an In-House Lawyer Can Improve Company Performance The verdict? Research (and data) proves that a highly-skilled Chief Legal Officer (CLO) or lawyer can improve company performance. Robert Bird, Professor of Business Law at University of Connecticut and President of Academy of Legal Studies in Business, explains: “CLOs can rapidly apply legal judgment to regulatory problems facing the company and ensure that firms are fully compliant with relevant rules. A strong CLO will protect company value from being lost through government penalties and needless litigation.” In addition to ensuring a company is compliant and protected, Bird continues: “Studies have found that elite CLOs are associated with less insider trading, accurate earnings forecasts, and fewer threats of litigation in the companies they serve.” Below are a few key statistics on how an in-house lawyer can benefit your company. Lawyer-run companies face up to . Over with counsel in top management are more likely to issue accurate forecasting. Companies with general counsel better by insiders. 74% less litigation 40% of companies mitigate informed trading Below, we dive into what exactly the role entails and how having a trusted legal advisor in-house can impact your company’s growth — and bottom line. What Does an In-House Lawyer Do? While every company has specific legal issues or needs, it’s likely that no two days are the same for an in-house lawyer. The describes the top three priorities for corporate law department leaders as: “improving functional effectiveness, increasing efficiency, and safeguarding the company.” Acritas 2020 State of Corporate Law report The responsibilities can range anywhere from privacy law to dispute resolution. On top of the day-to-day legal duties, the role of an in-house counsel or CLO has expanded to what’s now a strategic business partner that supports the organization, works to improve processes, and navigates complex challenges. Typical responsibilities include: Review and advise on documents, contracts, or dealsAdvise the CEO, board, or senior management on a variety of issues Oversee delivery of legal services or resources Lead internal audit or compliance programs Create and lead legal strategy to protect the company Manage other team members in the legal department A Chief Legal Officer (CLO) specifically may provide counsel for the board of directors, chairman, CEO, and other senior management. Consider if your hire will have board-level authority on every high-value transaction or strategic decision. What to Look For in an In-House Lawyer On top of legal experience, an in-house lawyer should possess initiative, management and leadership skills, and business acumen to balance high-stake responsibilities. Be sure to hire a person with the attributes you need. Most companies hire a generalist who is skillful and experienced in managing outside counsel as needed. If you feel you need a specialist in-house, then create a plan to make sure all legal issues get addressed properly. Below are some of the legal services lawyers specialize in: Business formation and registration Business succession planning Mergers and acquisitions Taxation Employment Business litigation and dispute resolution Compliance Property acquisition and transfers If your lawyer isn’t able to provide all of the legal services your company needs, consider finding someone who can build (and manage) a team or has an existing network of specialists in specific areas of the law. When Should Your Startup Hire an In-House Lawyer? Every startup is unique so there is no one right answer. However, depending on what your startup is at, there are criteria you can use to make a decision. If you’re debating between letting go of outside counsel or bringing it in-house, consider the following. stage of growth Alex Montagu, the founding partner at Montagu Law, explains: “The legal requirements of a company are informed by its revenues, the number of employees it has, the nature of its business, and the industry and locations in which it operates.” Of these requirements, Montagu explains what matters the most: “The most important factor is the company’s revenues. Typically, companies that have less than $20 million in annual turnover would be better off using outside counsel rather than hiring a full-time in-house lawyer because they are unlikely to have enough legal work to justify having one on staff. What’s more, one lawyer may not have the expertise to handle the different types of legal work that the company may require.” There are also legal issues to consider if your company plans to expand globally, including creating new entities, tax implications, , and dispute resolution procedures. employee hiring Company Example: FinTech Startup with $5 Million in Annual Turnover Imagine a well-funded start-up in the FinTech space that has $5 million in annual turnover. The company is headquartered in New York but intends to grow internationally and provide its services in the U.S., Europe, and other countries in Asian regions. The company will need a specialist in: Corporate law to help with corporate work in relation to taking new investments. Intellectual property law to register its trademarks in the countries in which it intends to operate and to advise on how to protect and safeguard its technology. Employment law to advise on labor law and its employment policies. Privacy lawyer to ensure compliance with GDPR and other privacy laws. Transactional law to put in place and negotiate its contracts (with customers, vendors, and other parties). Real estate law to negotiate any lease-related issues. A single lawyer may not have the expertise to handle all of these assignments. At $4 million in revenue, the chances are that none of these tasks will have the requisite volume to justify a full-time in-house lawyer. Therefore, at this stage, the company would be better off using an outside law firm, rather than hiring a full-time counsel. However, a typical mistake that companies (like the above example) make is that they choose a mid-size or even a large law firm to handle all of their legal needs. While this may appear convenient, it can be than using smaller, more competitive boutique firms that specialize in these areas. more costly In-House vs. Outside Legal Counsel An in-house lawyer can add value to a fast-moving startup. They are trained to think in a certain way, to analyze problems, digest dense details, and come up with creative solutions. This training is invaluable for startups that may move quickly and make decisions on the fly. However, there are costs and potential drawbacks (as with any business decision) to consider when debating between in-house and outside counsel. Benefits of In-House Counsel Robert Bird explains, “A CLO is a dedicated attorney with a single client – the company – and will typically be more familiar with your business than an outside attorney with many different clients. A company with a CLO is a company armed to meet the complex legal challenges of twenty-first-century business.” Having a dedicated lawyer in-house means they’re part of the team, hands-on, and proactive to provide a more urgent response than outside counsel would. As your trusted advisor, in-house counsel has interests that better align with your company’s objectives. For , they aim to protect and guide the company in the right direction — while owning the outcomes with greater responsibility. sensitive or risky matters Drawbacks of In-House Counsel According to the , “in-house lawyers are sometimes – unfairly – viewed as inhibitors of business growth. Their natural and necessary risk aversion can put them at odds with colleagues seeking growth at any cost or who prioritize customer service over corporate protection.” Acritas 2020 State of Corporate Law report Internal conflict due to risk aversion is a common theme for business owners too. Aside from employee growth opportunities, on the surface, a lawyer’s risk aversion may impact the number of new business opportunities or deals a company makes. John Ross, the CEO of , explains: “If our counsel has hindered us in any way, it’s through vetoing deals that we otherwise would have made because he felt they might be too risky.” Test Prep Insight Because the trust exists there, Ross says “…while they may directly seem like missed opportunities on the surface, there is no telling what a failed deal would have truly cost us.” Lastly, an in-house counsel is typically hired as a generalist with a wide-ranging set of practice areas. If your company has specific needs (like intellectual property), you may end up having to expand your team or bring on a specialist to help. What is Risk Aversion? Well-known in finance and investing, risk aversion is important to keep in mind when it comes to legal decisions that impact your business growth and profitability. person as someone who “has the characteristic or trait of preferring avoiding loss over potential gain.” Risk aversion typically depends on the level of investment and whether or not it would cause financial distress for a company. In-house legal or counsel are known to be risk-averse when evaluating contracts, deals, and opportunities. CFI defines a risk-averse Risk aversion to the point that it blocks a business opportunity, partnership, or landing a new deal may bring resistance from the team. But having a lawyer available ensures someone is there to keep an eye on risk and suggest modifications. How to Balance Risk Aversion When trying to scale your startup or reach high growth goals, below are some tips on how to balance growth with a “no-person”. Consider before you bring on a general counsel if they are willing to be flexible. Your attorney shouldn’t immediately come back with a “no” to every idea because of the possible risk factor. They should be flexible, empathetic, and patient. The goal is to address problems by coming up with a solution to mitigate risk, but also takes into account the final decision maker and what’s best for the business. Build a trusting relationship with your counsel that shares the same vision as you — to keep the company protected with an understanding of your product and where you would like it to go. Hiring your first in-house lawyer can be challenging — especially as a . Once you decide that it’s time to hire, determine your company’s near and long-term legal needs and consider the role for your first in-house counsel, you can start looking for the right candidate with these tips. first-time entrepreneur

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Here is a story that we all know, CryptoKitties caused a viral sensation in 2017 and sent prices for some kittens well into the six figures. What’s more, the game clogged up the entire Ethereum Network delaying transactions and causing a pile-up of unprocessed transactions. As such, the developers behind CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, created a new blockchain specifically designed for blockchain-based games and digital collectibles (also known as a non-fungible token, NFT). With NFT, every asset on the blockchain is unique and is therefore not replicable. This unique aspect is written inside the metadata of the token itself and can be seen as a permanent, unalterable certificate of authenticity. NFT can solve the unfair status quo that game companies control access to digital items. Imagine this: you buy character skins and emojis from the world’s most popular game, Fortnite, but you do not really own these items. If you get banned for whatever reasons, the company can drive you off the platform and take your items and account away from you. Dapper Labs has teamed up with NBA (National Basketball Association) and NBPA (National Basketball Players Association) to create NBA Top Shot, a fully-licensed NBA experience for collectors and gamers. For the first time ever, NBA fans can truly own a piece of the action and trade with friends in a new kind of hoops economy. Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Flow, believes that just like the PC era, entertainment and games are also leading the large-scale popularization and application of blockchain technology. This was the original intention of Dapper Labs when it developed CryptoKitties on Ethereum. At the end of 2017, CryptoKitties became the top-selling DApp, with a total sales volume of 40 million U.S. dollars. The Flow-based NBA Top Shot absorbed the experience from CryptoKtties and got rid of its limitations on the Ethereum Network. In just 3 months, NBA Top Shot’s transactions between users have exceeded 21 million US dollars, and the user retention rate is as high as 75%. In addition to the NBA Top Shot, Flow hopes to support more applications to succeed. Therefore, it is promoting a healthy and prosperous ecosystem built by developers, creators, FLOW token holders, and network operators. In addition to Flow, it has a lot of development tools and libraries, such as Flow Playground, Flow SDK, VS Code Extension, etc. More importantly, Flow’s smart contracts can be upgraded, and developers do not need to completely abandon the old contracts. The nature of blockchain is established on a foundation of trust and permissionless. Creators, developers, and users do not need anyone’s approval to do their own things. This means that one can unleash their talents without any restriction. In the world of user-generated content (UGC), Dapper Lab and its Flow project create a blockchain ecosystem with a solid foundation, cutting-edge concepts, and user-friendly experiences. It narrows the gap between real-world use cases and blockchain technology to provide more users with convenient and friendly ways to use decentralized applications. Also published at https://medium.com/block-insight/to-flow-or-not-to-flow-a6ff0a4ffd26

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What makes content great? How do you know if the content you’ve written measures up? Good content, obviously, ranks higher and brings in more readers. But great content is so much more than that. For content to be great, it should hit home with your readers, hook them in so they don’t leave your blog or page, and make a positive impact on them. Of course, it should also rank higher on SERPs so that it reaches your readers in the first place. Now let's explore a few of these hacks. So whether you’re a writer, blogger, or part of the content marketing department of a firm -  you’ll need these simple tactics to improve your content’s performance and ace content metrics. Title Optimization: Creating Eye-Catching Headlines Before the reader even gets to your article, they’ll see the title. According to a study by Copyblogger, around 80 percent of visitors on any webpage read only the title. In other words, if your title (or headline) isn’t up to the mark, you’re going to lose out. Here’s how you can optimize your titles to get better content metrics. 1. Try answering a question. Or maybe, include something that satisfies your readers' curiosity. A hook is anything that compels your readers to click on your content. Any specific number can be a hook of your title. Or it could be certain words that immediately trigger a response from your readers. Use a hook in the title: 2. No matter how well written your article is about a particular topic. If your title doesn’t contain the right keyword, it won’t rank higher on the SERPs. So there’s a chance your readers will miss out on your content. Get the right keywords: Here one example from Buzzfeed. 3. : Call to actions are words that carry a certain level of force or “push” behind them. They psychologically persuade your readers to click on your article. By using words like “now”, “today”, “need to”, you make the readers feel like they absolutely must read your content. This helps improve your click-through rate. Create a sense of urgency in your readers Check out this example from Huffington Post. Write A Winning Introduction If your readers do not know why they should read your content in the first few lines, they’ll just move on to another blog or article. It’ll reduce your engagement time and increase the bounce rate. So grab your reader's attention from the get-go. Do not dawdle. And most importantly let them know what your blog is about in the first few lines. Pro tip: Include your primary keyword in the first 100 lines of your introduction. It helps Google’s algorithm to understand exactly what the topic of your content is without crawling down further. Use A Lot Of Videos And Images Visual content such as infographics, videos, and images can optimize the viewer’s engagement with your content. It also helps increase the dwell time on the page. A study by Hubspot says that marketers found that including videos in their content increased their dwell time by 80 percent. Just make sure the videos and images you use on your site are optimized for SEO. First of all, remember to scale the images. If you’ve got images that do not fit with the site’s bandwidth, it can increase the time taken for the web page to load. And it’s not a good idea to make your viewers wait. Also, remember to add the alt text and title to your image. Adding a keyword in your image title is a fantastic idea, as it helps the image rank even if your content doesn’t. An alt text makes your content more accessible to visually impaired readers using a screen reader. Kissmetrics, in 2012, went as far as to say that the captions on any image in your content are read 300 times more than the body of your content. So missing them out can affect your content performance without you even being aware of it. Long-Form Articles To The Rescue Long-form articles help facilitate scanning and scrolling by viewers. It’s a well-known secret that longer articles do get higher SERP rankings as well. Google also recognizes sites with more long-form content as an authority on a subject. There is also a simple correlation between longer content and backlinks - the more content you write, the more you can link out to trusted sites. But you’ve got to be careful with long-form articles. If not structured well, they can come off as monotonous and boring. Try using catchy subheadings to break up the content. A little humor, images, and memes wouldn’t be such a bad idea either. Take a look at what Daily Mail does. They list out the key essence of their long-form articles right at the beginning to capture viewers’ interest and compel them to spend time on the site. Laughter Is The Best Medicine If you’re looking for a way to engage your readers and keep them on your page for a longer time, adding humour to your content is the right way to go. It keeps the article light and conversational, and encourages the viewer to scroll further down the content. Memes are an excellent way to add humour to your content. They also make your brand more relatable, especially if you’re targeting a younger audience. The best thing about memes and humour? These have the potential to go viral. So if your content has a lot of memes, interesting pictures or humorous graphics, it is more likely to be shared by your readers. Think of all the site traffic and social engagement that can come your way. And you don’t need much to create a meme, just a little sense of humour. Don’t Forget Your Header Tags Header tags are unfortunately not given as much attention as they should be getting. Breaking up your blog into H1, H2, H3s, and H4s is the easiest way to make it more scannable and readable. Look at how SearchEngineJournal uses keywords in their H3s (sub-headings) and appears in the Featured Snippets. Do not forget to include the keywords in your article (that’s where all the juice is). Using a long-tail keyword in a header tag can increase its chances of being on Google’s Featured Snippet. Even H3s from listicle-style articles (if they contain a high-volume keyword) often get featured on the snippet. Content Is A Masterpiece For content to perform well, there aren’t just two or three factors you need to keep in mind - there are several! Think of it this way, if ranking content that aces all metrics is your special dish, then images, formatting, backlinks, etc. are the ingredients that go into creating it. Every part is essential to creating a masterpiece. While offering our to our customers, we use these tactics and follow best practices to give the best results to the end-user. We know that these hacks work because we've seen them work for our customers. content writing services

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The need for video games has grown. In 2020, the video gaming industry was worth $159.3 billion. That is a significant increase of 9.3% from 2019. Player needs and expectations are evolving too. They now expect frictionless and more convenient UX. In this article, we'll discuss six video game development trends for 2021 that show how the industry is changing. The Fast Adoption of Cloud Gaming The cloud gaming market is growing at an astounding rate. , Gaming-as-a-Service will hit $450 million by 2023. According to studies Many technologies have already been transforming the market. Cloud services such as PlayStation Now or Google Stadia enable running resource-intensive applications without additional hardware investments. In 2021 and beyond, game developers can use these cloud functionalities to unleash their creative freedom. Here are several benefits of the cloud for the gaming industry: Developers do not need to purchase expensive hardware anymore. As a result, the number of people creating new cloud-based games will grow. A new class of games will hit the market. They will be designed for the cloud and will not be technically restricted. Complex formats, such as virtual environments, will be taken to the next level. Game designers will build realistic VR worlds that will be hard to distinguish from real-life ones. New game genres will appear, while the strict boundaries between the genres we know of today will be merged and combined. Players will experience fast and frictionless online gaming. There will be no need to install games or upgrading a gaming PC performance. The only thing they need is a fast internet connection. Cloud gaming creates new opportunities for multiplayer games. Cloud serves as a vital communication bridge between disconnected players. That has led to the growth of the battle royale genre. One such example is Awakening of Heroes. That is a free-to-play 5v5 MOBA game featuring RPG and battle royale elements available for Android and iOS. The company to provide great player experiences. On the other hand, they empowered game developers to reduce infrastructure complexity and minimize costs. invested in a Google Cloud gaming solution The Rise of Virtual Experiences The demand for VR experiences has grown since the outbreak of Coronavirus. Virtual reality plays a fundamental role in many industries, from employee training to e-learning. Gaming is no exception. When playing games, people want to travel to new realities and find themselves in situations they have never experienced before. Now, are not new concepts in the gaming industry. However, they have not reached their full potential yet. VR and AR VR gaming provides players with an immersive, user-centric perspective of game action. They can both experience and influence the game environment. During , the company revealed the introduction of a brand-new VR headset. Namely, they plan to unify the entire VR hardware lineup into a single headset – the Oculus Quest 2 all-in-one headset. Facebook Connect 7 in September 2020 They also plan to make smart VR glasses with Ray-Ban in 2021, which will make VR technologies more available. Mobile Games will Continue to Grow The number of smartphone users is continuously growing. , there were is approximately 2.4 billion mobile gamers in 2020. That is about 30.7% of the world's population. Impressive, right? According to research studies People love mobile games because they are intuitive, simple, and easy-to-start. Above all, they are always with them. 5G will improve mobile gaming experiences. Given that, it is not surprising that many console and PC game leaders will focus on mobile games in 2021. For example, of the game in October 2019. That has helped them attract a large number of new players. Call of Duty launched a mobile version Another example of mobile game development adoption is Epic Games. The company abandoned Apple Store and Google Play and created its store. They hosted their Fortnite game there with a much lower commission and no restrictions. The Adoption of Cross-Platform Gaming The growing need for multiplayer games has led to cross-platform support. With the help of cloud gaming, players want to connect across multiple consoles and devices. Game developers need to keep up with this trend. In 2021, they will focus on introducing new solutions for cross-gaming opportunities. Some are Minecraft, Fortnite, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. examples of cross-platform games Unsurprisingly, that can be a challenge for the gaming industry since many gaming companies often work in isolation and strive to build a loyal fanbase and isolate it. The Growing Need for Inclusivity Video games are a great way to combat social inequality and address issues such as racism, sexism, or homophobia. For example, Sims is synonymous with inclusion and diversity. It allows players to create their characters by choosing their skin color, nationality, body type, etc. More game designers will focus on inserting personalization into their games. The goal is to allow players to individualize their characters down to the tiniest detail. That way, gaming companies can attract a wider audience and build trust by being more receptive to different social groups. Evoking the Feeling of Nostalgia Companies in multiple industries are . Its main goal is to (re)capture the users’ attention by tapping into popular trends from the past. Disney is a perfect example of how nostalgia marketing works in the filming industry. The company transformed classic cartoons into live-action films. That enabled them to re-engage their fans, as well as attract younger generations. investing in nostalgia marketing The gaming industry is no exception. Can you remember the time when you played Super Mario Bros or Deux Ex? Millennials are craving for these moments in the past. And, game developers have recognized this trend. Sure, remastering gaming classics is easy. It requires a lot of work and dedication since games need to be compatible with consoles from the past. For most of these games, there is no suitable hardware nowadays. Conclusions The needs of users have changed. Players expect faster, simpler, and more convenient user experiences. With cloud technologies, game developers will provide better mobile gaming experiences and enable cross-platform gaming.

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At work, do you need to be a stronger weightlifter to outdo more senior guys? Not necessarily. The difference lies in learning. You will come to a point where knowledge gathering from more senior peers becomes less enriching. While reading, you might stumble upon an article describing an obscure tool or innovative technology that could solve your product’s issue. After some time, people may come to you for advice, a senior manager asks for your opinion. Fast-forward, you end up in a software architect role. Turn your learning into a routine In the beginning, the challenging thing is to get organized. Gather your knowledge sources first First, write down your small knowledge source catalog of various personal and company blogs, articles, podcasts, and newsletters. Start making the list on your own, then ask others about the top feeds they find valuable. I don’t suggest googling it, as, in the current era, there is actually too much noise and too many low-quality sources. Keep your list small, up to eight sources maximum. If you identify any source as irrelevant, out of scope, or simply not insightful enough, drop it. Quality is key. Make no compromise. Throughout the journey, some of the articles will refer to other useful blogs, thus expanding your own knowledge source. Allocate your time I recommend creating a daily learning block in your private and company calendar each morning. Mine is called . In the beginning, 30 minutes is more than enough. The more senior you get, the more of your time you can invest in learning. Read&Post In case anyone puts a conflicting meeting in your schedule, kindly ask them to reschedule unless it’s critical. Most importantly, be persistent. Preserve your intrinsic motivation. Initiate your daily routine and improve it over time. You will get used to it in a couple of weeks and others will start recognizing your extra value in a few months. It is natural to end up skipping 2–3 of your daily learning sessions each month. Get ready to spend more time than expected on it during the first week. The daily routine My learning time consists of the following: First, I go through my knowledge source list, while opening what seem to be the most -valuable posts in separate browser tabs. Then, I pick the top 1–2 articles, depending on my mood, my gut feeling, or the writer (you’ll start to recognize them over time). The top trick I recommend is to avoid the trap of todo lists treated as a pool of other potentially valuable articles worth reading in the future. You’ll never read them. Moreover, it creates an improper and negative connotation of duty in your mind, making your learning path less appealing. The only exception here is to use a ‘read later offline’ app, such as or , to tag articles you can come back to in the same day, like while you’re commuting. Pocket Raindrop Finally, I share the valuable pieces I’ve found across the company to dedicated channels ( , for example). Over time, more people will contribute too and you’ll end up learning from others. Slack Advanced tips: Grow your knowledge library I end my daily learning routine by saving my most treasured articles and sources in a separate folder or document. Reason being, it is amazing to build and have the list of wisdom and answers you trust at hand. All of a sudden, you can provide solutions in a shorter time frame, as opposed to relying on “Google help”. The invaluable side effect is, by manipulating the top quotes and links, the ideas will better persist in your mind. There are many tools out there I tried to help with tagging various sources. After several experiments, I circled back to the most simplistic approach: having a basic folder structure categorized by the domain of interest, i.e., for technical, , or leadership content. managerial Each file in the category folder represents a different topic of interest. For handling files, I prefer using markdown syntax as it helps keep the file content of links and quotes clear and understandable. The knowledge library folder is then synchronized with cloud storage (i.e., free tier) to make sure nothing gets wiped out accidentally. Eventually, create a free Github repository similar to . In terms of files management, I’m a big fan of editor due to its simplicity and great search features. No complex tooling. Google Drive this Atom I advise you to let your knowledge library grow as soon as you get comfortable with the previous steps of the daily routine, not before. Find your feed management app After you get used to spending your morning time learning, I advise trying out a feed management application. Most of them have a free tier, which already covers most of the features. My top picks are or . inoreader feedly The reason the app is worth your investment, is that it unifies your different sources of blogs, podcasts, and newsletters in one single spot, while distinguishing the read vs. unread posts, thus saving your time spent with browser tab orchestration. Manager’s conclusion In the world of software development, a manager should understand that knowledge sharing and learning are the highest background priority. Such company skill adoption is a long-term initiative, as opposed to one company OKR cycle. When we embrace the culture of intrinsic learning and knowledge sharing, we gain a competitive advantage in feature delivery, pace, and hiring. Talent attracts talent. Set the groundwork for domain-specific knowledge-sharing channels. Contribute to it yourself. Create regular knowledge-sharing sessions with an assigned owner (architect, guru, or staff-level). Make the learning and sharing responsibility explicit in your career growth scheme. Rather than ‘generously’ providing paid sources, help your people in learning habit adoption and in the sources gathering step. Create an environment where people are incentivized to post blogs. Make it explicit by allocating the time in the form of a ticket, handled by community people. Reward it. Market it. Summary Do not let your adventure die by staying in the workforce area for too long. To give you an advantage and keep one step ahead, consider reusing anything relevant in my and feed lists. Now, it’s your turn. Set the calendar morning slot. programming managerial Marian provides coaching and mentoring to various levels, helping organisations to succeed in building products. engineering managers and leaders across Stay tuned for the next post! 💪 Cover Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

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The new crypto rally, predictably, caused a new surge of interest in cryptocurrencies, launching a new hype cycle. However, this time the market and players behave differently from the last cryptorally in 2017. Let’s take a look at what people expect of crypto in 2021. The hype train has slowed down During the last cryptorally we saw a lot of “blockchaintourism” by corporations and other institutional players - they played around with blockchain for a few weeks and then dropped it. This fueled the hype train even more, as every attempt “to go crypto” was widely publicized, but didn’t really add anything to the industry. However, in 2020, the trend shifted. Nowadays, according to the Deloitte , companies aren’t interested in experiments with blockchain anymore and don’t see it as “free money”. They look for pragmatic solutions to business problems and make blockchain technology work for their specific needs. Blockchain Survey Besides, large investors also started to think of cryptocurrencies in a more practical way as the industry matured. “The type of investors in this bull run are very different. They’re super sophisticated institutional investors like legendary Paul Tudor Jones, [Stanley] Druckenmiller. This is the most sophisticated investors, the smartest people in the room, buying the bitcoin quietly. It’s not a FOMO thing, so it’s very different from 2017. This cast of characters, these companies, these investors were not in bitcoin back then”, - said Tyler Winklevoss, early bitcoin investor, co-Founder of Winklevoss Capital. His opinion is supported by other experts in crypto and finance. "I am positive this is not November 2017. Listen, the market got way, way overbought. It was overbought by every statistic, every metric you can look", - said Galaxy Digital'sCEO Mike Novogratz. According to him, today the main driver for growth is adoption. "Insurance companies, asset managers, big institutions haven't bought bitcoin yet and they want to", - added Novogratz. Does it mean that the hype around blockchain, Bitcoin and crypto is over and it is all about practicality and rationality now? No, not at all. Any asset that shows rapid growth inevitably generates a lot of interest from small investors and traders and causes FOMO and we can see that already in the crypto market. But despite the fact that Bitcoin in February 2021 has reached $58 000 compared to $20000 in December 2017, the hype is noticeably lower. To be fair, the fact that the industry matured and lost “novelty factor” is not the only reason - mainstream media all over the world have other topics to highlight, so the new cryptorally is a bit lost to the general public, Exchanges are overloaded Well, another proof that the hype is still there, albeit lower, is the influx of traffic and new users crypto exchanges are facing. In December 2020 traffic to major crypto exchanges than in November and almost twice as high than in the beginning of the year.  Interestingly, there is no major shift in shares of major exchanges in this traffic. Some relatively new players are gaining momentum, but traffic to the “whales” grows almost equally. was 23% greater And it has already started to cause issues: some crypto exchanges suffer from outages due to overload. It reminds us of the latter stage of the 2017 crypto rally, when major trading platforms also couldn’t keep up with the demand. People seek info Another sign of crypto audience calming down is a shift is search queries: instead of just searching basic information on cryptocurrencies people started to look for statistics, charts and actual data. Queries like “Bitcoin price chart” and “Bitcoin price analysis” are becoming more and more common. Huge financial brokers, such as , note a significant increase in such requests. The audience not only looks for ways to earn on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but also wants to know for sure whether these ways actually work. Libertex Technical analysis and cryptocurrency price action started to slowly replace “gurus” that relied only on their status as a proof of their predictions. The audience finally realized that Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is just another asset, just like stocks or fiat currencies. And it can be traded as that easily, just in one click, as we can see on the . Libertex trading platform example “We treat the cryptocurrency market the same way we treat Forex or the stock market. We provide the same indicators and tools for traders in all markets. And in contrast to 2017, today we see very few impulsive, almost instant purchases made by new users. Most of our customers analyze crypto assets thoroughly before buying”, - said Michael Geiger, the CEO of Libertex financial broker. In other words, cryptocurrencies lost their “magic” status, so people became less affected by hype and started to rely on logic and analytics. It may be disappointing for some, but it shows that the industry has finally matured.

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Where are crypto markets heading in 2021

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an innovation powerhouse. It autonomously learns on its own and evolves to meet simple and complex needs, from product recommendations to business predictions. As more people and services produce data, more powerful AI is necessary to process it all. AI chipsets that use edge computing are the solution. Cloud computing has been the leader for AI chipsets for years. When cloud tech came about, it was unlike anything before it. However, edge computing is newer and faster, which makes pairing it with AI the best solution for handling the sheer amount of data the world is producing and exchanging. The Growing Market By 2025, edge computing as the leading type of AI chipset. The growing demand for and use of data is the main driving force for this shift. While cloud computing has historically handled data with speed and efficiency, the amount of data usage is exponentially increasing. will overtake cloud computing With the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, better Wi-Fi speeds, and smart cities coming into play, data is more abundant than ever. All this growth will ultimately be too much for cloud infrastructure to handle alone — it cannot compute such vast amounts of data, even with plenty of AI algorithms and transistors. On top of the existing edge computing market growth, the COVID-19 pandemic adds extra acceleration. With people staying at home, digital usage has gone up through actions like working from home and shopping online. With these actions comes more data. Now, these factors require better AI chipsets. They must be cost-effective while remaining efficient and addressing the shortcomings of cloud computing. Fortunately, edge computing takes care of each of those categories. Where Edge AI Excels Edge computing is not going to replace cloud computing completely — at least, not immediately. Instead, the two will work side by side for years to come. The distinguishing factor, though, is that edge AI chipsets excel where cloud chipsets fall behind. Packing in many more transistors into each AI chipset, edge computing will perform more accurately. These chipsets will be more customizable, too, to function within each AI system. This benefit means their scalability will far exceed that of cloud chipsets, which is a critical factor in storing and transferring data. Edge AI chipsets use this scalability to store more data locally. With the data more immediately available, the latency that comes with cloud computing is no longer an issue. In fields with time-sensitive operations, like health care, every second counts. AI should be able to detect and alert professionals of health issues without latency. Ultimately, these edge chips fall into two categories. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are ideal for applying “trained” AI to existing systems. Business intelligence can use FPGAs to track and predict consumer trends, among other things. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) can perform the task of refining, or “training,” these AI algorithms. On top of their functionality, these edge AI chips are more practical. They are smaller, more cost-effective, and generate less heat. On a large scale, they’ll save on cooling costs, which worldwide. is a primary concern for data centers These chips function well with smartphones, tablets, robots, and wearables, in addition to data centers. They’ll improve the overall experience for consumers and businesses alike as they get rid of latency and increase dependability and efficiency. The Privacy Factor There has been a shift within the tech industry in the United States. Amidst big tech scandals and the cyber-scams that come with the pandemic, privacy and security are now major priorities. Edge computing AI chipsets provide those features through better cybersecurity protocols and more local storage. Privacy and security are the final selling factors for these chipsets. The growth and impact are undeniable. Edge chipsets are here to stay and improve how people use and produce data. With the pairing of AI, every task, no matter how small, becomes simpler. Transfer speeds become faster and business predictions become more reliable. 2021 will encourage this growth for years to come.

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How Edge AI Chipsets Will Make AI Tasks More Efficient

When dealing with VBA for Excel, you'd be forgiven for thinking that your code would work with Excel only. However, the fact that VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is common to all the applications within Office Suite opens up a host of possibilities. For instance, you can capture data in Excel via a user form and then automatically export it to a Word document. The beauty of this is that everything executes in the background. In other words, you don't need to manually copy data from Excel, search for the correct Word document to paste this information, save the file, and then close Word again. Our book addresses these topics. VBA Automation for Excel 2019 Cookbook In this article, we’ll look at recipes for: Creating a new instance of Word Writing and formatting text Copying data into Word Using templates and bookmarks By the end, you’ll be able to create Word documents from within Excel. Technical requirements These recipes were written and designed to be used with MS Office 2019 and MS Office 365, installed on either Windows 8, 8.1, or 10. If your hardware and software meet these requirements, you are good to go. Demonstration files can be downloaded from . https://github.com/PacktPublishing/VBA-Automation-for-Excel-2019-Cookbook Please visit the following link to check the Code in Action videos: . https://bit.ly/3jQRvVk Creating a new instance of Word The first step in the process of creating a Word document from within Excel requires some changes to the available references. To be specific, we have to set a reference to Word's object library in the VBA Editor. Without this step, Excel cannot communicate with Word at all, let alone create documents and paragraphs. In this recipe, we will be creating a new instance of Word from within Excel. Getting ready Open Excel, and activate a new workbook. Save the file as a macro-enabled file (*.xlsm) on your desktop and call it Word_Interaction.xlsm. Sheet1 should be active. Press Alt + F11 to switch to the VBA Editor, and then insert a new module. It goes without saying that MS Word must also be installed on your computer in order for the instructions in this recipe to work effectively. How to do it… Here’s how to link Word to Excel: 1. In the VBA Editor, click on Tools | References. The References – VBAProject dialog box will open: Figure 1 – The References - VBAProject dialog box 2. Scroll down the list of available references until you find Microsoft Word 16.0 Object Library. Earlier versions of Word will have a different number, but will still refer to the Word object library: Figure 2 – The Microsoft Word 16.0 Object Library selected 3. Once selected, click on OK to save the selection and close the dialog box. Note
: The reference to the Word object library is only valid for the Excel workbook you're currently working in. Every new workbook will have to be referenced to Word in exactly the same way. 4. Create a Sub procedure to initiate Word from within Excel. There are several ways of doing this, but for this recipe, we will be using this specific technique: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
wdApp.Visible = True
wdApp.Activate
End Sub Set 5. Press F5 to run the procedure, or to test it, if you will. A new instance of Word will appear on your screen. Close the Word application once you know that the Sub procedure is working. 6. Opening Word without opening a new document is not very useful. Add the next lines of code to the Sub procedure to open a new document: CreateWordDoc() wdApp Word.Application wdApp = Word.Application wdApp
.Visible = .Activate
.Documents.Add Sub Dim As Set New With True End With End Sub Note: Because we need to use the Word.Application keyword every time we refer to MS Word, the loop structure makes it easier to refer to Word.Application via the wdApp variable. If you now run the procedure, Word will open again, this time displaying a new document, . Document1 Close Word, but don't save the document. Return to the VBA Editor in Excel. These steps will enable you to create a new instance of Word from within Excel, using VBA for Excel. How it works… Enabling the Microsoft Word object library for this Excel workbook made it possible to use Word keywords and methods within Excel. These keywords can open an instance of Word, as well as a new Word document, all from within Excel. Writing and formatting text It's all very well to know how to open Word with a new document available. However, we need more than this. A heading for the new document would be a good start, but that is still not enough. Formatting the heading is also necessary, and will round it off professionally. In this recipe, we will be writing and formatting text. Getting ready Make sure Word_Interaction.xlsm is still open, and that the VBA Editor is active. How to do it… These are the steps to enter and format text in Word: 1. To add text to a Word document via Excel, add the following line of code: CreateWordDoc() wdApp Word.Application wdApp = Word.Application wdApp
.Visible = .Activate
.Documents.Add
.Selection.TypeText Sub Dim As Set New With True "Employee Information" End With End Sub 2. Press F5. Running the Sub procedure will now result in a new instance of Word, with a new document open, and the line of text in the Sub procedure at the top of the page. Close Word without saving, since there is more code to add to our procedure in Excel: Figure 3 – New instance of Word, with document and text 3. It is quite clear that we need to do some formatting here. By starting a nested loop structure, this will save us repeating the keywords. Furthermore, if you haven't done it so far, you can use IntelliSense to assist you with all the Word keywords. Add the following lines of code to the VBA Editor: CreateWordDoc() wdApp Word.Application wdApp = Word.Application wdApp
.Visible = .Activate
.Documents.Add .Selection
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter
.BoldRun .Font.Size = .TypeText .BoldRun .TypeParagraph .Font.Size = .ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft
.TypeParagraph Sub Dim As Set New With True With 'Switch Bold on 16 "Employee Information" 'Switch Bold off 'Enter a new line 11 End With End With End Sub 4. When you run the Sub procedure now, there will be a marked improvement in appearance: Figure 4 – Formatting done via VBA in Excel Using these principles, users will be able to format a Word document with VBA coding in Excel. Copying data into Word We could have opened Word manually and achieved what we've just done, but the whole purpose of the exercise is to do it from Excel, so that data in a spreadsheet can be written to the Word document automatically. What we need to do now is select data, copy it, and then paste that as part of the opening and formatting process. In this recipe, we will be copying data into Word. Getting ready Make sure that Word_Interaction.xlsm is still open. Activate Sheet1, and enter the following data: Figure 5 – Working data How to do it… Follow these steps to copy text from Excel to Word: 1. Create code to automatically select whatever range is on a sheet: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
With wdApp
.Visible = True
.Activate
.Documents.Add
With .Selection
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter
.BoldRun Switch Bold off
.TypeParagraph Set 'Switch Bold on
.Font.Size = 16
.TypeText "Employee Information"
.BoldRun ' 'Enter a new line
.Font.Size = 11
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft
.TypeParagraph
End With
End With Range( , Range( ).End(xlDown) _
.End(xlToRight)).Copy
wdApp.Selection.Paste
End Sub "A1" "A2" 2. Run the Sub procedure to check your coding. We know that the first part will work, but in this case, we need to see whether the data on our spreadsheet was copied into Word: Figure 6 – Excel data copied and pasted into Word 3. Saving the Word document is what we need to do next. When you add these lines of code, pay attention to the changes in the With statement: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
With wdApp
.Visible = True
.Activate
.Documents.Add

With .Selection
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter
.BoldRun Switch Bold off
.TypeParagraph Set 'Switch Bold on
.Font.Size = 16
.TypeText "Employee Information"
.BoldRun ' 'Enter a new line
.Font.Size = 11
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft
.TypeParagraph
End With

Range("A1", Range("A2").End(xlDown) _
.End(xlToRight)).Copy
.Selection.Paste
.ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 Environ("UserProfile") _
& "\Desktop\EmployeeReport.docx"
End With
End Sub 4. The last thing we need to do is close down the document, and finally Word itself. Just add the following two lines in a new line after the filename: .ActiveDocument.Close
.Quit 5. When you run the procedure now, you will see Word open briefly, and immediately close again. If you want to eliminate that, simply comment the following two lines out: ' = True
' .Visible .Activate 6. We're still not done, because every time we run the procedure, the file is replaced without giving us the option of saving it under a new name. We need to add code to create a unique filename every time we run the procedure. By declaring a new variable, SaveAsName, and then assigning a formatted version of the Now function, we can create a unique name for the file every time it is saved. Add these two lines after .Selection.Paste: SaveAsName = Environ( ) _
& _
& Format(Now, ) & .ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 SaveAsName "UserProfile" "\Desktop\EmployeeReport " "yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss" ".docx" 7. Every time you run the procedure now, a new file with a unique name will be saved. Following these instructions will enable you to automatically copy data from Excel into Word. How it works… Here’s an explanation of what we did. Selecting data in Excel is not a new concept, and neither is copying. Saving it in a Word document with Excel VBA requires making use of the Environ function, as well as formatting of the filename. This will ensure that a new file is created every time the Excel VBA procedure is executed. Using templates and bookmarks To copy an entire Excel spreadsheet and paste it into Word doesn't make sense. You could rather have done everything in Word from the beginning, saving you the whole effort of copying from Excel and pasting in Word. The point is, if you have an existing Word document or even a Word template, and you regularly need to export selected information from a spreadsheet in Excel to this template, this is the way to do it. The word automation acquires new meaning if you can link Excel with Word in this manner. In this recipe, we will be pasting Excel data into a Word document at a specific bookmark. Getting ready Make sure that Word_Interaction.xlsm is still open, and that the VBA Editor is active. How to do it… We need to do the following: 1. Open the Word document that was saved to the desktop. Delete the inserted table (select only the entire table – no lines before or after, click the contextual tab, and then ) Layout Rows & Columns | Delete | Delete Table 2. Enter the short sentence Latest information on employees in the open space. 3. Insert a bookmark in the first open line after this sentence. Click on . The dialog box will appear. Enter a name in the textbox, and then click on to close the dialog box: Insert | Bookmark Bookmark Bookmark name Add Figure 7 – Bookmark name 4. Click on , and save the file as a Word template. The file extension is .dotx. Call the file EmployeeReportTemplate. File | Save As 5. Depending on the operating system and the version of MS Office on your PC, the file will be saved in a specific folder, dedicated to template files: Figure 8 – Folder for template files 6. Close the file and return to the VBA Editor in Excel. 7. Add the following line of text in the code window to open a specific file, and not just a blank document: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
With wdApp
.Visible = True
.Activate
.Documents.Add Set "C:\Users\User\Documents\Custom _
Office Templates\EmployeeReportTemplate.dotx" 8. Because we're making use of a template, we do not need any of the formatting we did for the previous document. Delete the following lines of code: With = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter 'Switch Bold on = 16 'Switch Bold off 'Enter a new line = 11 = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft End With .Selection .ParagraphFormat.Alignment .BoldRun .Font.Size .TypeText "Employee Information" .BoldRun .TypeParagraph .Font.Size .ParagraphFormat.Alignment .TypeParagraph 9. Use the GoTo method to instruct Word exactly where the copied data from Excel must be inserted. That's why we created a bookmark in the Word template. The final coding for the entire procedure should look like this: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp Word.Application
Dim SaveAsName String wdApp = Word.Application wdApp .Activate

.Documents. "C:\Users\User\Documents\Custom _
Office Templates\EmployeeReportTemplate.dotx"

Range("A1", Range("A2"). (xlDown) _
. (xlToRight)). .Selection.Goto wdGoToBookmark, , , "ExcelTable"
.Selection.Paste

SaveAsName = Environ("UserProfile") _
& "\Desktop\EmployeeReport " _
& Format(Now, "yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss") & ".docx"

.ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 SaveAsName
.ActiveDocument. .Quit Sub As As Set New With '.Visible = True
' Add End End Copy Close End With End These instructions will enable you to create a template in Word, and then automatically place content from Excel into the Word document at specific bookmarks. Inserting Excel data into a Word template can be done with Excel VBA. Inserting a bookmark in the Word template enables Excel to send data to a specific insertion point for the data to be pasted. See also Visit for more information on the GoTo method. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.selection.goto To read a more in-depth guide check out our book , authored by Mike Van Niekerk. VBA Automation for Excel Cookbook You can get 25% off at . Use discount code (Promotion running from 10th February through 15th March). http://packt.live/3u1fPtG 25VBA

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How to Create Word Documents Within Excel VBA

The decentralised finance industry grows larger and more sophisticated by the day. In early 2020, the DeFi industry reached its billion-dollar milestone. Less than one year later, it’s already , reaching over 40 billion at one point. That’s unprecedented growth in such a short period of time. grown by 4000% . Source: defipulse com But despite the overwhelming influx of new interest and investment, our new digital economy is . Thankfully, its flaws are not systematic human greed or corruption, or inequality or exclusivity. Its issues are mostly on the technical and social level, and so in theory will be resolved over time and with wider participation. far from perfect What does liquidity mean in crypto? One of these fixable flaws of the crypto economy is a lack of liquidity. Liquidity means that an asset can be In a perfect DeFi world, digital assets would move fluidly between exchanges, apps and wallets. easily bought, sold, or traded. The greater the liquid depths of the cryptocurrency market, the faster our new financial system can be implemented and adopted. A fluid economy is a powerful one, opening up new financial opportunities and freedom for everyone - not just the upper echelon of Wall Street bros. However, there is still a lot of friction when it comes to buying and exchanging cryptocurrencies. There are centralised exchanges like Coinbase which people can buy from. Yet the whole point of crypto is to decentralise banking power and distribute funds across a global community, rather than centralised entities controlling the supply. Centralised exchanges typically and the private keys which secure them. Even Coinbase can their customers when they like. own or have custodial access to your funds easily lock out It feels like we are just we have today. mimicking the failed financial system The number of people who hold enough “disposable” cryptocurrency to share and spread it around is still relatively low. So to grow the decentralised economy, many crypto projects offer incentives or rewards for crypto holders to (supply liquidity) and sustain this fast-growing ecosystem. contribute their funds One of these methods is , also known as . This can generate very attractive returns and passive income for any person, even with small amounts. liquidity mining yield farming How does liquidity mining work? Liquidity mining, also known as yield farming, is the act of providing liquidity to a Decentralised Exchange (DEX), which are made up of liquidity pools. DEXes usually suffer from lower liquidity compared to centralised ones, since the latter attract external vendors, such as Market Makers (MM), to support their liquidity. Liquidity has three main aspects: ​​means how quickly orders are processed. Delays occur when the liquidity is low, sometimes even taking several days to execute. For highly liquid pairs, you can always buy and sell in several seconds. Speed is the gap between your Bid and Ask orders in the order book, signaling low liquidity. In a liquid market, the spread is low, which means you can buy and sell the asset with minimal losses almost instantly. Spread means the difference between the expected price and the actual price at which particular trade is executed. In a liquid market, a trader can buy or sell a large order without moving the price significantly. Slippage To ensure sufficient liquidity, centralised exchanges usually work with Market Makers. By adding liquidity, MMs are creating an active trading environment for buyers and sellers. With DEXes, users don't need to trade via an order book, as it is replaced with an Automatic Market Maker (AMM), a smart contract that regulates and facilitates . DEXes allow users to exchange one token for another in a liquidity pool, without an intermediary. Anyone can contribute their tokens to a pool to increase its supply. direct peer-to-peer trading Source: Uniswap AMM To attract these contributors, known as , Uniswap offers rewards that are paid every time a trader pays transaction fees. liquidity providers In this way, decentralised exchanges are trying to maintain a : while the trader pays a small commission to the DEX, the liquidity provider earns rewards by providing the needed liquidity. symbiotic ecosystem One trading pair is represented by the two tokens in each liquidity pool. Most DEXs require providers to contribute an equal amount of tokens to the pool. What are the risks associated with liquidity mining? 1. Smart Contract Risk There is a risk that the Smart Contract has a bug that can be exploited. In 2020, a lot of protocols suffered when these were found by hackers, resulting in significant losses. vulnerabilities in the code 2. Project Risk It is always important to check if the project conducts regular external security audits. In addition, big projects, such as Uniswap or Compound, have open-source code which means everyone can check the code for potential weaknesses 3. Impermanent Loss The most complicated risk associated with liquidity mining is impermanent loss - a temporary loss of funds due to the volatility in a trading pair. The larger the change is, the bigger the loss. For instance, a 2x price change results in a 5.7% loss compared to simply holding your assets. The loss is the same regardless of the change in direction. You can find additional information regarding impermanent loss . here What affects liquidity mining profitability? Profitability for liquidity providers depends on the market balance, i.e. . In the case of yield farming, the system functions very differently from traditional trading, as the more providers contributing to the pool, the lower the profitability. supply and demand As a result, in the early days of liquidity mining, the demand for trading significantly exceeded the size of the liquidity pool. Consequently, interest rates in liquidity mining were much higher and ranged from 50% to 1000%+ per annum.  As the number of miners grew, the interest rate dropped to 10-20% APY. Even with this lower return, the profitability of liquidity providers is still quite high when compared to other methods, such as staking. How much can you actually earn with liquidity mining? It's hard to estimate the potential profit as the percentage of returns fluctuates every day. It depends on the total size of the liquidity pool, your percentage share in it, trading volume, and the asset price. As an example, you can find the potential APY for three popular ETH - stablecoins liquidity pools on Uniswap, Balancer, and Sushiswap: Additionally, not every pool is profitable due to the significant price fluctuations. Even though the APY is usually lower for stablecoin liquidity pools, you are able to reduce the impermanent loss risk. You can find more data regarding different liquidity pools on the website. Liquidityfolio How can I earn DeFi passive income? Now is a great time to become a liquidity provider. The industry is scaling fast and liquidity supply needs to meet growing demands. Various projects run liquidity engagement programs, such as ours at Network. Mysterium Our liquidity campaign is aimed at maximizing providers’ rewards. After the first month of the campaign, the MYST/ETH pool doubled in size. Top liquidity providers were able to generate up to in one month! 10% return in MYST Find more information about our liquidity campaign in our . You can also check out to track rewards and participants. blog the campaign’s website

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DeFi & Crypto Passive Income: How to Get Started

Previously, we shared our thoughts on driven by our hands-on expertise in PWA development. This time around, we decided to dive deeper and explain the . Progressive Web Apps major difference between PWA and Native App However, it should be noted that there is no winner here since the choice depends on your particular needs and business requirements in the first place. For instance, people open web pages and consume twice as much content on their smartphones as they do on desktop devices, according to . And the number of users who opt for mobile devices will only keep skyrocketing. So it’s no wonder why most efficiently-run companies use both PWAs and Native Apps in order to stay ahead of the mobile domain curve. SmartInsights Now, before we can share our insights on which solution can best serve your users or fit your business goals, let’s start by refreshing our memory of what Progressive Web App is. Simply put, Progressive Web Apps are web-related solutions that combine features of a website and a Native App. In other words, these are websites that mimic a Native App behavior, thus creating an app-like experience. Here are the major : PWA benefits It can run on any device or OSYou don’t need a large budget to develop a PWA You can save your money and resources since it is developed only once All new features are available automatically once you issued an update You can rely on SEO practices since a PWA is a websiteIt feels and looks like a Native AppIt’s memory-friendly and takes only a small portion of the device’s storage It can work offlineIt has rock-solid security since it based on HTTPS, which allows browser-to-server encryption On the other hand, there are a few as well: drawbacks It has limited functionality on some OS Fast battery consumption since a PWA requires more CPU PWAs may not have full access to as many device’s features as Native Apps That said, any business can develop a PWA solution to expand its digital footprint and ensure a delightful user experience. However, some companies may consider developing a Native App as of the features that a PWA still can’t provide. But again, it’s only for you to decide which option to adopt for your business goals. Now, let’s get to Native Apps. Native Apps are written to run on mobile devices, providing enhanced performance and a broader scope of features compared to PWAs. These apps types are developed for specific OS platforms (usually built separately for Android or iOS) or even for particular smartphones. In fact, almost any app you download from Google’s Play Market or Apple’s App Store is a native solution by its very nature. Generally, there are four most widely-accepted programming languages that developers use to create Native Apps: Swift or Objective-C for iOS Java or Kotlin for Android However, there is an alternative — you can utilize cross-platform frameworks like React Native. We at Brocoders have been using this for over 9 years now. It allows building hybrid apps in JavaScript-like code and submitting the final solutions to both Android and iOS platforms in one go. React Native apps demonstrate outstanding efficiency and feel almost like native ones. product development approach Benefits of Coding Apps with React Native Now let’s move on to the key Native Apps . pros over PWAs Enhanced performance and UI/UX Since code is written for a specific device or a particular OS, a Native App integrates seamlessly with its ecosystem and gets access to all APIs. It’s faster and provides greater capabilities in terms of UI/UX experience. Besides, Native Apps can smoothly interact with other native apps offered by Google or Apple. Monetization privilege Unlike a PWA that requires a custom payment processing solution, Native Apps can be monetized using in-built App Stores’ payment systems. Users can then make purchases and buy subscriptions with ease. App Store Support While PWAs are SEO-friendly, Native Apps got App Store Optimization (ASO) and Apple Search Ads (ASA) alternatives instead. These are cost-efficient approaches (keyword research, eye-catching titles, meta descriptions and so on) that allow you to acquire new users by increasing your rank in App Store’s search results. Besides, users can rate your app, which by itself is an additional traffic source (if your rating is positive). Security PWAs have decent security since they run under HTTPS. However, Native Apps have primary access to all the device’s hardware and software features. That said, it’s much easier for a developer to implement the best security algorithms such as two-factor authentication. Besides, a Native App must meet the requirements of multiple standards set by app stores before it can be approved. On the flip side of the coin, Native Apps have a few . weak spots Costly development You need at least two development teams to build a project from scratch for each platform. Thus, you can ensure that both Android and iOS users will utilize your mobile app. Moreover, the final product requires constant updates and maintenance on two different OS. Need time to launch As mentioned above, Native Apps should be approved by Google’s Play Market or Apple’s App Store first before users can download them. The process can take up to a week or more. In some cases, apps can be rejected for several reasons, such as plagiarism or copyright infringement. If you have a tight time-to-market deadline, it’ll be way faster to create a PWA instead of time-consuming native platforms. Native Apps are not indexed or listed in the search engine, so you’ll probably have to reach out to third-party advertising services or buy promotional campaigns on popular websites in order to promote your app. Installation routine Users don’t like it when they are forced to go through the searching, downloading and installation processes. Especially when they just need to make a purchase or take a quick glance at a catalog, for example. That’s why they would rather . use a website or a PWA instead Native Apps vs. Progressive Web App Comparison Now let’s make a comparison table to enable a clearer insight. Wrapping up With a bunch of advantages of both Native Apps and PWAs, it’s crucial for you to ponder over every detail and choose the right course based on your business strategy and resources that you have at the moment. As you can see, PWAs and Native Apps are equally vital for any business type and size, whether that be startups, fast-growing companies or enterprises. In some cases, you may need a fast and cost-efficient solution, so it’s better to opt for a PWA. On the other hand, a PWA may not provide a required performance level or cover all the device’s features. In such a way, you may want to consider developing a Native App. Otherwise, you can create both to enhance the customer experience and reach a wider audience. With almost 100 successful projects under our belt, our in-house software engineers have substantial experience in creating future-proof PWAs and React Native Apps. We are excited to help you reach your business goals and build new innovative projects together. Please don’t hesitate to if you want to learn more about the latest PWA vs Native 2020 trends. drop us a line

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Institutional interest in digital assets is building. Decentralized finance and digital assets leaders described what comes next. By John Payne for Aves Lair DLCC (Digital Capital Lending Corp) is a member of Aves Lair’s Winter 2020 accelerator cohort. Digital assets were once widely regarded as novelties. Recently, however, they have begun to emerge as practical investment vehicles for traditional institutions. But much work remains to be done to build the infrastructure to connect institutions with the growing digital asset ecosystem. Clearer regulatory guidance, robust prime brokerage offerings, and the continued development of the digital asset space will not only clear the path for traditional institutions’ participation in the digital asset class, but also shape how institutions use these assets. Aves Lair recently hosted a by leaders in the digital asset and decentralized finance (DeFi) space that centered on the topic of bridging the gap between traditional institutions and digital assets. Dean Somes, Vice President and Wealth Manager at BNY Mellon and former senior portfolio manager for a Dallas-based family office, moderated the discussion, quizzing the participants on a range of subjects relating to digital assets, some of which are covered here. panel discussion The panelists included James Runnels, Co-founder and CEO of Digital Lending Capital Corp (DLCC), a full-service, institutional-grade prime brokerage for digital assets and member of Aves Lair’s Winter 2020 accelerator cohort; Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto, CEO of commodity digitization and tokenization ecosystem Atomyze and member of DLCC’s Board of Directors; Kevin Kang, Founding Principal at BKCoin Capital - a digital asset hedge fund; and Darsh Singh, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer at digital asset and cryptocurrency-focused investment fund Hazoor Partners. To hear the full conversation, click . here : Summary Institutional interest in digital assets is building. Price movement, infrastructure, buy-in from name-brand institutions and clearer regulatory guidelines could catalyze widespread institutional adoption. Clearer regulatory guidance will empower further institutional participation, but the decentralized nature of digital assets may pose challenges to regulators. A digital asset prime services offering that boosts liquidity, centralizes margin management, and guides investors through the complex digital asset landscape should draw significant institutional investment in digital assets. DeFi may still need some time to establish itself in the mainstream, but in the interim, new regulation-compliant digital asset options for investors could come online, as well as more accessible digital asset applications; digital assets might emerge as a institutional asset class; and provably scarce digital assets could spearhead a “wave of innovation.” Price movement, infrastructure, buy-in from name-brand institutions and clearer regulatory guidelines could catalyze widespread institutional adoption of digital assets. Digital assets - including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as a steadily increasing number of digitized commodities, collectibles and tokens - are a nascent asset class, but look prime for widespread adoption in the not-so-distant future as rising cryptocurrency prices and the emergence of clearer regulatory guidelines and infrastructure - especially prime brokerage - gradually align. Today, institutional investors hailing from the traditional finance world are only just beginning to engage with digital assets. This is partly the consequence of digital assets’ becoming “really hard to ignore,” as Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto described it, with the price of Bitcoin in early February after rocketing past last month - two price levels Hightower-Sellitto described as “breakout points” - and prominent investors, including Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller, “publicly announcing they’ve been investing in the space.” breaking $40k $30,000 It was not the recent cryptocurrency boom per se, however, that prompted institutional investors to take note of digital assets. Rather, as Hightower-Sellitto contends, institutions had been - and, in the main, still are - “waiting in the wings, ready for the right” moment to enter the space. Hightower-Sellitto noted that traditional investors are “doing their research,” “building out [the] infrastructure” to invest in and trade digital assets, and acquainting themselves with the landscape of potential counterparties offering digital asset investment services. Moreover, Hightower-Sellitto posited that institutions await the emergence of tools, such as borrow-and-lend, trade execution, liquidity and research, along with clearer regulatory guidelines, to facilitate their entry to the digital asset space. These factors will play an essential role in the transformation of digital assets from niche investment vehicles to an asset class with buy-in from major institutional investors. Indeed, James Runnels emphasized the importance of infrastructure - particularly in the way of prime services - in securing “widespread adoption” of digital assets among traditional institutional investors. Runnels expressed that “a prime brokerage offering will help facilitate a lot of institutions coming into the space,” and argued that prime services for digital assets will also benefit asset allocators and managers. The goal of DLCC’s endeavor to build a prime services offering for digital assets, Runnels said, “is to help our clients institutionalize their own product,” such that clients “can start to attract some outside capital.” “A large portion” of crypto fund managers, Runnels continued, “are just managing proprietary capital; they haven’t had the ability yet [or] the resources to start attracting outside capital.” “Infrastructure,” Runnels added, “would be a significant move to really get some momentum going behind [funds’ attracting outside capital].” Kevin Kang suggested that buy-in from name-brand institutional investors and institutionalized infrastructure will allay institutions’ wariness about the nascent digital asset space and encourage them to allocate capital into the space. Kang named infrastructure as the “biggest catalyst” to institutions’ allocating capital in digital assets en masse, and pointed to Fidelity’s product launch in 2020 as the moment when “institutional investors started looking at [the digital asset space] more seriously.” “As more big investors start to jump into the space,” Kang argued, hedge fund portfolio managers will not be burdened with as much career risk when they decide to allocate a portion of their portfolio into a digital asset like Bitcoin. Infrastructure may promote widespread adoption of Bitcoin and other digital assets by serving as accessible platforms that can reach mainstream consumers and sidestep some of the more arcane aspects of blockchain technology. Darsh Singh argued that widespread adoption should be measured not by the “wealthiest people using” blockchain technology, but by the “most amount of people using it.” In his view, people using an application built on top of this infrastructure without knowing that it is powered by blockchain technology, uses Bitcoin “behind its payment rail” or has a “stable coin behind it through a smart contract in Ethereum” will prove more meaningful indicators that blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have achieved widespread adoption than the prestige or deep pockets of early adopters. Clearer regulatory guidance will empower institutional participation, but the decentralized nature of digital assets may pose challenges to regulators. Institutions’ concerns about digital asset trading can be mitigated by clearer regulatory guidelines, which will foster greater certainty and confidence. Hightower-Sellitto described regulatory “gray area” as a key factor behind many institutions’ unwillingness to engage with digital assets so far. “When you’re looking for investors to participate in some of these digital assets,” she went on to say, “you need to be able to list them on exchanges that can trade them where there can be valid prices” unaffected by price manipulation. With respect to regulatory guidance, Hightower-Sellitto argued, the more, the better. Under the present paucity of clear guidance, investors are left with no choice but to speculate - like looking to Biden administration appointments for clues on the future direction of digital asset regulation. “The certainty to operate,” Hightower-Sellitto concluded, will make it easier for institutions “to adopt these assets.” Growing institutional participation in the digital asset space may nonetheless be already “forcing regulators’ hand,” according to Runnels. As the number of regulated entities “getting involved in at least Bitcoin, whether it’s Fidelity...PayPal [or] State Street,” grows, pressure will mount on regulators to release clearer and more comprehensive guidelines. Moreover, Runnels suggested that regulation will likely have a positive effect on the industry, protecting consumers and clients, and even creating efficiencies. The latter is especially true at the “broker-dealer level,” Runnels argued, and will help pave the way for “more widespread adoption,” since most institutions work with a “broker-dealer or a bank” when they get involved in a new asset class. Clearer, more robust regulatory guidelines will shed light on how broker-dealers and banks can participate in digital assets and offer an “on-boarding ramp” to their clients. DLCC and other proactive players intend to adapt some legacy norms and best practices for the digital asset space, which “would allow for more traditional finance to...participate in [a] manner that they’re accustomed to.” In Runnels’ view, the convergence of foresighted companies such as DLCC tailoring their service offerings to meet traditional finance’s standards and more thorough regulatory guidelines on digital assets will create a more “robust offering” benefitting all parties involved. Traditional prime brokerage for an asset class that is anything but “will be a perfect starting point,” Kang agreed, “to provid[ing] institutions services that borrow from best practices and regulatory frameworks familiar to institutions. Kang cited BKCoin’s practice of working with Copper for some of the fund’s investors, ensuring that the fund “can only move assets with their permission.” The decentralized nature of digital assets like cryptocurrencies, Singh cautioned, means regulatory clarity may prove slippery for assets that lay “largely beyond the bounds of traditional finance and regulated institutions.” Singh pointed to permissionless money transfers - especially cross-border money transfers - that take place outside of a regulatory framework as an example of the myriad ways that digital assets circumvent traditional approaches to governing the use and exchange of assets. A digital asset prime services offering that boosts liquidity, centralizes margin management, and guides institutional investors through the complex digital asset landscape while helping them get the most out of their capital could draw significant institutional investment in digital assets. The lack of a comprehensive prime services offering for digital assets in today’s market, in Runnels’ view, prevents liquidity from flowing into emerging crypto assets. “There [are] a lot of talented teams out there that are offering...a tremendous amount of liquidity in the space, but it’s not necessarily tech-driven yet; it’s more driven by traditional phone calls or social media apps,” Runnels continued, suggesting that this presents an opportunity for prime services offerings with the technology needed to link up liquidity and the digital asset space - especially locate, margin, and borrow and lend capabilities - to bridge the gap. Kang pointed to margin as a particularly important area where digital asset prime brokerage can meet the needs of institutional investors. The ability to “manage the margin in a centralized place, instead of...across ten different exchanges” would be “a huge step forward,” Kang asserted. Digital asset markets differ from traditional ones in many ways - making it all the more necessary, Hightower-Sellitto argued, for institutions interested in participating in the space to do so with counterparties, such as those offering prime services. Cryptocurrency marketplaces are “highly fragmented” and devoid of interoperability - in the Bitcoin marketplace, for instance, multiple providers create a consolidated price. Hightower-Sellitto stressed that “the right technology” could cut through the confusion of multiple prices on different exchanges. Moreover, many cryptocurrency exchanges “are fully funded or have very little margin or leverage available on them,” which might mean that an investor who wants to sell on an exchange has “got to have [their] cash there or [their] other crypto...to buy another crypto” on that exchange. This idiosyncrasy of many digital asset marketplaces can stifle the efficiency of investors’ capital, which, Hightower-Sellitto expressed, underscores the value of “technology and providers” who can maximize the bang investors get for their buck (or coin). DeFi may still need some time to establish itself in the mainstream, but in the interim, new regulation-compliant digital asset options for investors could come online, as well as more accessible digital asset applications; digital assets might emerge as an institutional asset class; and provably scarce digital assets could spearhead a “wave of innovation.” “I think...big names will be coming into the [digital asset] space,” Hightower-Sellitto posited, particularly banks and investors that are currently on the hunt for opportunities. In five years’ time, she envisions a host of DeFi options that can both “meet investors’ needs in terms of compliance, but...also bring some of the advantages of a DeFi environment to digital assets.” More ways that mainstream consumers can adopt digital assets represents an exciting area of possible growth in the “next one...or two years,” according to Runnels. These applications could include “the ability to utilize a stable coin for payment, dollar-to-dollar, one-to-one,” or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which can take the form of collectibles or other scarce digital items - like baseball cards, or even a piece of art, in digital form. Kang envisions digital assets becoming an institutional, investable asset class with macro hedge funds having large-cap and mid-cap crypto specialists, and institutional investors exploring a wider range of investment strategies, such as borrow and lend, or allocation to a “momentum...or trend-following strategy to accumulate more Bitcoin.” Singh contends that the availability of “provably scarce digital assets” will spur a “wave of innovation” resembling that which followed the advent of the internet. Singh expects enterprises and leaders who can figure out ways to make it “easier for people to access and navigate” the world of digital assets to benefit from this expected surge of groundbreaking technology and applications. Traditional institutions are increasingly interested in digital assets. Among multiple factors, infrastructure, especially to facilitate institutional-grade prime services in the digital asset space, clearer regulatory guidance, and innovation will pave the way for mass institutional participation in digital assets. To learn more about Aves Lair and the Aves Lair accelerator program, visit aveslair.com , or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter .

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An Insider’s View on Digital Asset Opportunities for Institutional Investors

*Stop spreading yourself too thin!* I attribute this trait to our wandering minds. ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’ notion seems apt for this. * When I started doing Frontend web development, I felt I should also learn Backend Technologies (Java for ex.) since that might be more valuable. * Next, when I started doing a little more full-stack development, I really felt I should level up my DevOps skills and get familiar with AWS/ Azure/ Google Cloud, Deploying code, Bundling code, Package Management etc. * Next, when I started focusing on these aspects, I felt I need to establish my presence in the open source community i.e. do some side projects, contribute to existing projects, speak at meetups, conferences and so on. The list almost seemed never ending as I tried to jump from one thing to the next to get more skills under my belt. This is exactly what I believe led me to spread too thin for a brief period of time. I was scratching the surface on a variety of things but not really solid or expert with any. It was during my 1:1 meetings with my then manager that we realized I might be trying to excel at too many things at once. It is great to have a growth-oriented mindset of continuous learning but it has to be meaningful, phased out and planned carefully. One must pick their battles in order for quality development and skill building. I would suggest each of you to reflect on the same i.e. list down what are your areas of focus for growth. If the list seems too big, then you are in the ***spreading too thin*** bucket and need to downsize it to the top 1-3 items depending on time and resources at your disposal. If there is not a concrete list that you can come up with, that is an indicator as well. You need to ideally come up with the list on your own or work with your manager/ mentor on one. Thank you for reading! Feel free to connect with me on and always interested in a chat! Linkedin: Anand Safi

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On Spreading Yourself Too Thin (and Other Dev Career Reflections) 

This article is just a note for something I forget the most: my LocalDB instance names. Sometimes when I open (SSMS) I lose time thinking and trying to figure out what is the name of my LocalDb. SQL Server Management Studio The solution is simple: open the terminal and run SQLLocalDb.exe i, where stand for . i information Now you can see the list of configured DBs. To use it in SSMS remember to use Windows Authentication. If you need more info about a specific instance, just run SQLLocalDB.exe i "InstanceName" where of course must be replaced with the real name you are looking for. InstanceName This command displays some info about the specified SQL instance: this info includes the version, the owner and the current state. If you want to have a list of all available commands, run SQLLocalDB.exe -?. These commands allow you to create and delete SQL instances, stop and start existing instances and so on. It's important to remember that here the spaces are treated as delimiters, so if your DB includes spaces inside its name, you must surround the name with quotes.

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Retrieving your SQL LocalDB Instance Name: A How-To Guide

Use your coding and writing skills to win $2000 plus bragging rights on the world’s greatest tech publication! Sponsored by Wix, the premier website building tool, Hacker Noon is conducting a writing contest, with to be awarded to the best submissions, each month throughout the competition. $2500 in prize money If you’re a web developer OR a website-builder, you can win $2000 on Hacker Noon, every month, . starting March 1st Contestants will use , Wix’s open development platform, to create web pages and applications and write about their amazing creations on Hacker Noon. Velo Velo was built to accelerate the development of web pages and applications, and there is no community better than the talented Hacker Noon community to show the world what Velo can do. How to Enter the Velo Writing Contest Entering the contest is easy as 123…4 1. Build something amazing using and 2. Write an article about what you built 3. with the following tags: and (then, enter 6 more tags pertaining to your article) Velo use at least 1 Velo API Submit the article on Hacker Noon velo build-velo-web-app 4. Once your article is published, share it on Twitter with in the caption #velo Contest Rules and Guidelines Below are the rules, guidelines, and FAQs about the competition. Who can enter the contest? You must be 18+ to enter. You can be a professional web dev or a complete amateur enthusiast. There are no location restrictions, you can enter the contest from anywhere in the world. Do I have to post under my real name? Not so comfortable about sharing your work publicly? No worries! t under a pseudonym and if you are a finalist, we’ll contact you privately to award your prize. Create a new Hacker Noon accoun Do I have to use a Velo API in my project? Yes, you must use at least one Velo API for your story to be eligible for this contest. Learn more about how to use them here. In order to qualify, your website shouldn't be static. Velo gives you the ability to connect your backend or any custom business logic with Velo APIs. To do this, don't forget to enable Dev mode! What can I create? Almost anything under the sun, as long as it follows Basically, keep it SFW: building a Tinder clone is A-OK, but don’t use Velo to break into the adult film industry. Hacker Noon’s general submission guidelines. How long will the contest run? (UPDATED) The contest will run for a total of 3 months: March 1st to June 30th, 2021, with prizes awarded at the end of each month. The first round will run until April 30th and we will start accepting submissions on March 1st. Round 1: Any submissions received after April 30th will automatically be counted for the second round which will run until May 31st. Round 2: Any submissions after May 31st will automatically be counted for the final round which will run until June 30th. Round 3: How we Select Finalists and Distribute the Prize Money At Hacker Noon, everyone’s a winner! … except when we have limited prizes to give out. In that case, only 5 people can be winners. A monthly prize pool of will be distributed amongst them in the following manner: 5 winners will be selected at the end of each month. $4,250 Best Story Contributor gets $2,000 Runner-up gets $500 Every month, Hacker Noon will select the 5 best stories from the 10 posts with the most traffic. Other than cash, you also win the prestige of being published on Hacker Noon and have a cool new project, or suite of projects, to add to your amazing portfolio. Can I submit more than one entry to the contest? Yes. Contestants can submit as many Velo stories as they want each month. The more the merrier; the more you submit, the more chances you have of winning. However, you can only win 1 prize per month. For example, if you submit three amazing stories in 1 month, we will choose the best one to award you for. If I already won a prize, can I still enter the next session? Yes. Even if you won a prize in the first session, feel free to enter the 2nd and 3rd sessions and try to score a ! hat trick Learn More About Velo Want to learn more about Velo before you get started? Check out these resources: https://www.wix.com/velo https://www.wix.com/velo/blog https://www.wix.com/velo/forum/community-discussion https://www.wix.com/velo/forum/tips-tutorials-examples If you need some inspiration, once they start rolling in. check out the current submissions We wish you the best of luck in this contest! If you still have any questions about the contest, or are interested in partnering with us to run your own writing contest on Hacker Noon, please feel free to . get in touch

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Mech games don’t receive much love. Despite having a long history, not many of them are released. Worse, most of the games that come out are based on the western concept of mechs: slow, lumbering war machines with guns strapped to them. Enter M.A.S.S. Builder, an answer to the prayers of mech game lovers everywhere. Fans of the Japanese mech style of jetpacks, articulate hands and melee weapons had to make do with the PS-exclusive Gundam Versus and Gundam Breaker series. In 2019, Daemon x Machina graced the Switch before coming to PC a few months later, helping deprived fans scratch their mecha itch. That said, there is one game not many people talk about. M.A.S.S. (Mechanical Assault Skeleton Suit) Builder successfully completed its Kickstarter campaign in April 2019 and quietly released on Steam as an Early Access title on the 13th of September 2019, coincidentally the same day that Daemon x Machina released on the Switch. Its developers, , have been working on it since then, adding new content to the game over the years. Vermillion Digital M.A.S.S. Building is Freedom Options for the centre-front armour At its core, M.A.S.S. Builder is a mech game about making cool mechanical soldiers and going off to fight aliens with them. The game’s customisation is the star of the show here. The eponymous M.A.S.S. Units share similar inner frames with numerous armour pieces to choose from. And my god there is so much choice! There are a dizzying array of customisable areas for the player to mess around with. There isn’t just “head” customisation, there’s also face, upper head, and lower head. Each one has four paintable areas and six decal slots to alter. Paints even come in metallic and glowing varieties. It all comes together for a stupid amount of customisation that is is the real meat of the game. Improving Mech Performance While daunting at first, these numbers make sense before long Customising the performance of the M.A.S.S. Unit itself has its own expansive customisation system. There is a massive tech tree that allows players to get their mech to fit their playstyle. There are upgrades that give M.A.S.S. Units more fuel for boosting around or to be more structurally stable in order to hold heavier weapons. Some upgrades even have a visual effect such as a shield-boosting upgrade giving floating shields. Later on, key upgrades become available that allow players to really specialise. There are key upgrade options that allow M.A.S.S. Units to specialise in one particular area of combat. One upgrade makes it easier to exploit elemental vulnerabilities. Another improves melee weapons at the expense of ranged ones. It’s also worth noting that M.A.S.S. Builder has really taken inspiration from Gundam. While there aren’t any options for the iconic v-fins, most of the armour choices can have their designs traced back to a Gundam series which is certainly a selling point after the disastrous launch of Gundam Breaker Next. The potential for Gundam-like customisation is so great that many fan-made designs in this game are imitations of classic mobile suits like the and the from Gundam Wing. Gundam Unicorn Tallgeese The icing on the cake is the game’s expansive photo mode. It has plenty of poses for M.A.S.S. units to put on with a satisfying range of options to take advantage of. Our Review of M.A.S.S. Builder’s Mech gameplay Unfortunately, the gameplay mechanics are clearly a work in progress. Targeting is clunky at best and frustrating at worst. Switching a target lock from a distant turret to the pack of angry aliens in melee range is surprisingly difficult. The game’s AI has a tendency to form up into large packs of enemies which turns combat into a game of exploiting that behavior to lay into those packs with area of effect attacks.  It can be fun to do and is made satisfying by the customisation. After all, the M.A.S.S. units aren’t just for show and building them to fight using certain weapons and playing to that build is always fun. Weapon Customization The barrel dictates how the weapon fires Ranged gameplay is pretty straightforward but gets a good amount of variety by way of weapon customisation. Parts can change how the weapon is gripped as well as the projectile type. Ballistic weapons range from a tank cannon-like semi automatic to a mech-scaled minigun. Energy weapons, a Gundam staple, bring pew-pew in the expected flavours of ballistic analogues like semi- and fully-automatic and continuous laser beams. M.A.S.S. Units may also deploy with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and laser-shooting drones. Melee combat seems to be Vermillion’s focus and is reasonably well fleshed out. Melee weapons have their animations changed based on how they’re customised. Their weight and grip style will affect their speed and how they get swung about. There’s plenty of variety for the weapons themselves with the usual assortment of bladed and blunt weapons like swords and hammers as well as more exotic choices like drills. The game will automatically assign an animation style based on the options chosen and has a wide range of options in that department. Movement is pretty light, as one would expect from this type of mech. M.A.S.S. units charge forward at full sprint and stop on a dime. The boost recharges pretty fast and moves the mech fast, too. Overall, M.A.S.S. Builder does have functioning gameplay that could do with much more polish, which isn’t so bad considering that it still has time to tighten up. What really sells it is the incredible customisation that it offers that uniquely interacts with gameplay but not too much. M.A.S.S. Builder Story Review Well, the story serves as an excuse to put the M.A.S.S. units in battle in a very anime-like flavour. It’s told through visual-novel style scenes and some mission dialogue that work but aren’t very engaging. The writing is alright. Unfortunately, there are quite a few grammatical errors in the writing which can detract from the storytelling. The premise is fairly standard. Humans live in shelters trying to survive an alien onslaught perpetrated by a species called Quarks. It has a reasonably wide cast of characters with backstories told in a menu. There is a decent amount of intrigue in the story to keep things exciting. It’s not the deepest story ever or the best told. It treads well-trodden ground well enough and ties the game’s mechanics together. Final Thoughts In its current form, M.A.S.S. Builder would be a pretty average game if not for the fantastic customisation. It has some of the best mech game customisation to exist both visually and in terms of M.A.S.S. Unit performance. Unfortunately, it's held back by its mediocre gameplay and storytelling. Still, if you want to make cool-looking robots, this game will do just fine. The promise of new updates down the line keeps things exciting, too. Lead image credit: Vermillion Digital’s Twitter Also, be sure to check out: Top 10 Gaming Laptops with RTX 30 Series Graphics Cards What the Acquisition of Bethesda Means for Xbox How to Use Wabbajack to Install Skyrim Modpacks

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During the latest Nintendo Direct, revealed new details on Monster Hunter Rise, including new monsters, some returning ones, new locations, and more for the upcoming game. The upcoming game is due out for the Nintendo Switch console later this March. Capcom The new trailer offers a look at some of the game’s newest monsters, the Rakna-Kadaki and Almudron, along with five classic returning monsters. It also showcases residents of the Kamura Village uniting together in order to fight off the incoming Rampage. Once the hunters leave the village, they will be able to explore the Lava Caverns and the Sandy Plains as new hunting locales. Players will have access to various tools and companions to face the coming Rampage, including the Wirebugs, Palicoes and Palamutes, and Wyvern Riding. The trailer also showcases defenses players can use for the Stronghold, the primary defense systems for Kamura Village. The Stronghold has options to use against monsters, including barricades to slow them down and installations to dissuade their advances. Ultimately, the hunters will have to work together to stop the monsters of the Rampage. Monster Hunter Rise Trailer Capcom plans to release more details on the Rampage later on. Monster Hunter Rise hits the Nintendo Switch on March 26. You can check out the newest trailer for the game below. Other News in Gaming: Street Fighter V Season 5 Kicks Off: Dan & Rose Join the Fight What the Acquisition of Bethesda Means for Xbox Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Film Announcement

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Monster Hunter Rise Trailer Showcases New Monsters, Locations & Returning Favorites

The potential of the GameStop (GME) stock was first discovered on in the fall of 2020, and soon the GME market price started to rise, creating more hype on social media, and eventually culminating in a short squeeze of Melvin Capital’s position, which lost them about $13 billion. r/WallStreetBets Since this happened, I’ve talked with the founders of blockchain projects operating in this climate and asked them what they think about DeFi and the fintech market in general. Some of the founders suggested that now may be a great time for decentralized finance to finally hit the mass market. Others disagreed, and we separated their opinions into three distinct groups, which you can find in this article below. GameStop timeline GameStop mania truly started to pick up steam late January 2021, when r/WallStreetBets started hyping GME, the stock of the embattled game retailer. GameStop, which saw its revenues severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, was also targeted by Melvin Capital, which bet on GME shares hitting rock bottom. Melvin Capital had been shorting GME , while increasing its short position until it exceeded the free float of stocks, a discrepancy noticed by Reddit traders back in October 2020. since 2014 A surfaced on the Reddit board, which suggested traders could organize a short squeeze for Melvin Capital. The conversations and hype increased, which brought the price of GME to a record high. Melvin Capital had to close its short position, ending up with a $13B loss. GME itself went through a wild price swing, starting off at below $5 just six months ago. video During the peak hype on social media, spiked on two occasions to a record of $347.51 and a lower peak at $325, when Melvin Capital was forced to buy and cover its short position. The short squeeze turned into a social media competition to break the logic of markets, as traders swore to give up profits just to make a point. GME GameStop: The Repercussions Despite the social media buzz, one name stood out; a user known as Keith Gill, who used the moniker RoaringKitty for his YouTube persona. Gill went through a before the US House Financial Services Committee with the goal of clarifying unpredictable market effects, trading stops, and a concerted effort for a short squeeze. hearing Gill’s testimony that he only used publicly available information on the for GME. Despite his participation on Reddit and highly influential persona, Gill claimed he was not trying to create a mass movement of investors. held the position short interest The community of r/WallStreetBets is still alive and well, and it still works to amplify stock selection signals. The signature profanity and apparent mindless risk-taking also hasn’t slowed down in the slightest. While this swarm behavior of investors was noted, in the end, it was Robinhood who took the brunt of the criticism for stopping orders. The rules of a short squeeze would have raised GME prices even higher if the Robinhood app had to order more shares. allowed more new buyers The hearing centered on the role of Robinhood in essentially manipulating the market, with most of the questions aimed at Vlad Tenev, one of the co-founders of the trading app. But the hearing also set the floor for potential repercussions for retail traders using social media. So far, US lawmakers have not started tackling these trends in earnest, with only tangential rules such as the act potentially holding social media companies responsible for some of the content within. Section 230 What the r/WallStreetBets case exposed was a form of investor swarm behavior. The stock selections are often driven by memes and popularity, creating a market force to be reckoned with. As of February 2021, it is still unclear how US or international authorities will handle the potential for groups of traders deciding on a specific stock or a strategy. Repercussions for the fintech industry The GameStop saga happened at a time when fintech was expanding, and expecting multiple investment markets to open for retail. Fintech first tackled banks, allowing relatively high international money transfers at a lower cost. Later, apps appeared for investing in various assets. The process also coincided with the rise of cryptocurrencies, where wallets immediately opened the opportunity to buy highly volatile assets. In general, fintech-based investment remains a free-for-all in 2021. There are indications that regulators are more concerned about the proper liquidity and capitalization of large-scale market participants, which is also easier to measure. But the potential for so-called behaviors also opens the door to closer observations for social media content. “social contagion” One of the growing markets for risky assets, known as crypto-based decentralized finance, is a hotspot for social contagion behavior. DeFi projects often expose themselves to social media, attempting to with the promise of high yields. The problem with newcomers, however, is that it is possible to sway the price of an asset, but when the driver of group behavior slows down, this may lead to deep losses in the personal finance level. draw in newcomers There were also personal consequences for Keith Gill, who will now face a for misrepresenting his persona, and acting as an amateur investor when he actually had a deep knowledge of finance and accounting. lawsuit For now, almost all Reddit personas remain anonymous and there are still no barriers to sharing stock tips on social media. The US Department of Justice followed the Congress hearing with its own , but the outcome of that is still to be determined. Due to social media amplification, the reliance on may also have to evolve and reflect unexpected events and even illogical trades. criminal investigation algorithmic trading What do the founders of blockchain startups think? DeFi Pessimists Matthew Niemerg, President of the Aleph Zero Foundation - Aleph Zero is a high-throughput, enterprise-grade public blockchain platform powered by a state-of-the-art, DAG-based consensus protocol that is designed from mathematical principles. Ian Campbell, DeFi Product Manager SUKU - SUKU is the link between decentralized finance, transparency, and traceability in supply chains. Infrastructural Players’ Opinions -  GateHub is the largest wallet provider on the XRP Ledger, your digital asset wallet for the Internet of Value. Eric Polo, Head of Product, GateHub - This is a digital assets management solutions company helping businesses transit from conventional technology platforms to DeFi systems. Vikram R. Singh, CEO, Antier Solutions - An open application platform powered by a peer-to-peer computing protocol and a decentralized licensing system. Tom Trowbridge, co-founder Fluence Labs - One SDK for passwordless, WebAuthn, and social login. Sean Li, CEO Magic - A fast and open blockchain for scaling Ethereum applications and cross-chain finance. Stephen Tse, Harmony CEO, Harmony DeFi Believers - AlphaPoint is a white-label software company powering crypto exchanges worldwide. Igor Telyatnikov, CEO & Co-Founder, AlphaPoint -  An Australian-based blockchain startup. The company has been offering fiat on/off ramp solutions to the DeFi platforms. Charlie Karaboga, CEO & Co-Founder of RelayPay -  Interplanetary Crypto Token Exchange. Alexander Kaplin, CEO of ICTE Founder of - A merchant system and online marketplace with a unique marketing model. World Token - LATOKEN Exchange is the easiest way to access money and assets worldwide. Valentin Preobrazhenskiy, CEO of LATOKEN — Donut is a mobile app providing the easiest way to earn high APY on your money through the power of DeFi. Neel Popat, CEO of Donut - A mobile shopping and investment app. Brian Goldberg, Blockchain Advisor at PAYMYNT Financial - A revolutionary payment system that drives the Dream Channel economy. Jonny Peters, Founder & CEO, Gazecoin Igor Telyatnikov, CEO & Co-Founder, AlphaPoint As a white-label exchange software provider serving a global client base, we stay tuned to the regulatory changes that may affect client compliance requirements worldwide, and we’re continuing to see regulatory clarity and acceptance. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the US recently clarified that national banks and federal savings associations can provide cryptocurrency custodial services for customers. The OCC sees banks providing crypto custody services as a modern form of traditional bank activities related to custody services. Never in our almost eight-year history have we seen higher demand to launch digital asset exchanges and offer access to cryptocurrencies, and we believe this is fueled by the positive regulatory stance and corporate interest in this new asset class. While DeFi has introduced new decentralized offerings to the market such as lending, borrowing, and on-chain insurance, we also see the demand for these same services integrated with crypto as the underlying assets from CeFi institutions booming. Charlie Karaboga, CEO & Co-Founder of RelayPay Within the last few years, we’ve seen how we can reimagine borrowing/lending without the centralized intermediaries. DeFi lending projects are going for mainstream adoption with their increasing abilities and applications. Similar to lending, stock trading also has unnecessary intermediaries and the majority of the world's population cannot access popular stock markets due to these inefficient gatekeepers. Robinhood meant to democratize trading for the masses, but GameStop's case and a trading halt once more justified the importance of DeFi. Until corporations tokenize their stocks, we’re unfortunately a bit limited. However, I believe DeFi can act as an “L2” for stock trading in the near future. Alexander Kaplin, CEO of -  Interplanetary Crypto Token Exchange ICTE We at ICTE are certain that DeFi blockchain technology is advanced and mature enough to support the requirements of all sectors of the global financial market, like high-frequency trading, trusted composition data, and trading strategy transparency at reduced overhead costs. DeFi ensures that you have full control of your assets and no one else can access, use, freeze, or take your assets without your permission. You are also free to find other providers and venues to exchange your assets with. All your actions are associated with your trading address and your positioning in the market is transparent. This is very beneficial for personal security because your address is the only identity you would have on the market, and you are otherwise anonymous as a trader. The personal control of your assets, anonymity, and transparency are the most important values that DeFi would bring to the financial world, especially in cases like GameStop. The blockchain would show the movement of assets from lenders to investors to the open market, and short-selling would be more easily identifiable -- even if a single trader utilizes multiple addresses to execute their strategies. Now is definitely the time for DeFi to be fully adopted. Founder of World Token DeFi has created balancer pools, vaults, yield farming, algorithmic stablecoins, and these developers are just getting started. Network fees have been outrageous but it has not stopped further adoption of new and innovative protocols. Trustless protocols are far safer than anything we currently have in traditional finance and the GameStop fiasco proves that. A group of internet strangers can short squeeze billions of dollars from hedge funds and the government starts to step in to protect the funds from losing too much from their own behavior. There's no meddling in DeFi as code is law and autonomous immutable protocols will take over. Valentin Preobrazhenskiy, CEO of LATOKEN DeFi is like a "clubhouse" of finance. Money and assets are way simpler to access, and simplicity means new use cases, such as startups' "global IPO" crypto exchange listings , aka IEOs, or asset tokenization. DeFi reminds me of a clubhouse because it is driven by communities. GameStop's coordinated short squeeze highlights the growth of communities with social networks as LATOKEN reviews . Communities are strong in crypto, and their willpower can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if it is about adopting a better currency. While GameStop and crypto are very different assets, I think some hedge fund managers would be less likely to short-sell crypto after this case of community power. Don't get me wrong, short-selling is necessary to prevent bubbles, and institutional and retail investor rights must be protected. Neel Popat, CEO of Donut The GameStop craze proves that the current financial system remains broken for everyday investors. Whether it's the monetary system or market-shifting hedge funds, the status quo is built for insiders. DeFi shifts the paradigm, giving the everyday individual access to a better and inclusive suite of financial products. It’s only just starting to reshape financial services, from high-yield savings to borrowing, but DeFi is actively providing a much needed catalyst for change. Brian Goldberg, Blockchain Advisor at PAYMYNT Financial The GameStop fiasco has not only exposed the fragility of our financial system, it highlighted the fact that access to investments is an issue faced even in the most advanced economies. DeFi will rise this decade as a way to empower individuals to invest how and when they want - with minimal intervention. Jonny Peters, Founder & CEO, Gazecoin The future of feature film funding is an NFT/DEFI  model that allows investors to buy and trade characters in a movie!  We are about to release a model that allows investors  to buy and stake “film character” NFTs to receive a film token, a token that can be zapped into film royalties. Matthew Niemerg, President of the Aleph Zero Foundation While DeFi has seen a recent surge of interest, I do not think it is ready for mainstream adoption, even after the enhanced attention the GameStop stock received within the WallStreetBets Reddit community. Several factors come into play, but they almost all boil down to user experience. Most participants in DeFi are still “power users” and many lack the requisite skill set to audit smart contract code or to manage private keys appropriately.  This level of increased risk and uncertainty is a large barrier for mainstream adopters. Retail investors will most likely come to DeFi through centralized on-ramp/off-ramp service providers who will not only vet the quality of the DeFi projects but provide a simpler (and more traditional) portal for accessing these innovative products. I think we are seeing this being built out in various CeDeFi products, particularly by centralized exchanges as they begin adopting new business models to compensate against loss revenue as power users migrate to DEXs. Ian Campbell, DeFi Product Manager SUKU What happened with r/WallStreetBets, Gamestop shares, and brokers like Robinhood is just one indicator that DeFi is NOT a solution in search of a problem. The problem is very real. The DeFi value proposition is that, due to its decentralized nature, there are no third-party intermediaries who can halt trading or shut down the exchange. However, adoption of any new technology requires a slow, deliberate transition. When email first launched, sending messages required knowledge of coding languages and pretty significant technical savvy. Only after a few years were user-friendly interfaces added to make email simple for everyone. Interacting with and using DeFi protocols is evolving at a rapid pace, but I don’t believe that it’s ready for mainstream use. With that said, more and more traditional traders are finding themselves “falling down the rabbit hole.” The more traders who join DeFi, the more investment is made into infrastructure to make it mass-market user friendly.  It may take a few years, but I believe that DeFi will inevitably cross the chasm on the adoption curve and become mainstream. Tom Trowbridge, co-founder Fluence Labs GameStop demonstrated the urgent need for both DeFi and tokenization; the danger of a single, for-profit company determining when/how over 20 million investors can trade became clear as did the totally antiqued, legacy exchange infrastructure with multi-day (!) settlements, which tokenization eliminates. But what the DeFi innovation explosion has really demonstrated so far is the power of composability, which makes it so simple to build.  What if we can bring that same composability to the entire web – imagine being able to take any existing application, fork it as easily as a DeFi service, quickly add some features, and launch it without having to rebuild backends or pay for infrastructure.  This is possible with a decentralized peer-to-peer hosting service and a blockchain based economic layer that compensates authors based on the use of their code by sharing in hosting revenue. This is the future, and it is possible right now. Sean Li, CEO Magic DeFi has been gearing up for mainstream adoption since 2018. Many talented developers and well-funded startups have poured an incredible amount of work into fundamental infrastructures powering blockchain applications, such as layer 2, identity and key management, smart contract tooling, node infrastructure, and fiat on-ramps, etc. Through the thick and thin of the market, the culmination of all of these persistent efforts have made it possible to build DeFi applications that are indistinguishable from the Web 2.0 experience - mainstream adoption is already here. Stephen Tse, Harmony CEO, Harmony Now is the time for DeFi to start going mainstream. As we saw with GameStop and other stocks recently, the centralized financial system has reached its breaking point with many challenges. In centralized finance, brokers and companies can decide to stop trading, but in DeFi, individuals can freely manage their funds for investing, trading, and lending. The centralized financial system relies on two-day settlements, which is why the entire system froze waiting for capital to settle. Harmony enables two-second settlements for transactions as demonstrated by our cross-chain Uniswap port on the mainnet. We envision the mass migration of global finance markets coming on-chain in the next few years. Eric Polo, Head of Product, GateHub The GameStop fiasco is the latest large-scale exposé on why many are reluctant to enter the traditional financial markets. Most notably, it left many thinking that markets don't actually evolve organically but rather just do what they were created to do. In DeFi, the markets are (or at least should be) fully controlled by transparent and auditable code, creating a level playing field. In the past few months we have seen moves by institutions and regulators that were aimed at “protecting investors,” but they mostly achieved just the opposite. DeFi is only in its infancy, but with time it will evolve and there will be a large uptick in users, giving everyone the opportunity to truly own their money and the responsibility that comes with it. Vikram.R.Singh, CEO, Antier Solutions The explosive rise of GME is a testimony to the overhauling impact of decentralized finance and the crumbling legacy finance. In the pre-DeFi era, those in power could easily delist assets or block opportunities for potential business cases. With DeFi , it is a truly democratic stage that bestows the credit to those who deserve to be in power. I won’t be surprised to see a lineup of more consumer services embracing P2P payment alternatives.

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Is it Time for DeFi to Go Mainstream After the GameStop Craze? 

We've been working recently on writing rules for detecting errors in regular expressions in Java code. Regular expressions are a common feature of modern programming languages, and it's easy to take them for granted. By their very nature, they pack a lot of power into terse little packages and unfortunately that introduces a lot of room for error. In I talked about the kinds of errors our newly implemented rule about character classes found in open source code. my last post Today, I’ll talk about boundaries, another regex feature that can lead to bugs when used incorrectly, and a rule of ours that can help you avoid such issues. I’ll also talk about complexity and maintainability in regular expressions and our rule that can help you find regular expressions that are too complex. Boundaries Boundary markers such as and allow you to anchor the regex pattern to the beginning and end of the line (or string depending on which flags you use) respectively. This means that when you want to match a literal or , you need to escape these special characters with a backslash. ^ $ ^ $ And if you fail to escape or then you may end up with a pattern that doesn't match anything at all. In order to detect such problems, we offer a rule ( ) pointing out cases where a boundary is used in a way such that it can never produce a successful match. Here’s one example of this problem that we found while checking code on GitHub: ^ $ java:S5996 - Regex boundaries should not be used in a way that can never be matched Pattern.compile( ) "^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_.][@.](!#$%&*()-+=^){8,30}$" Source (UserPassword.java) Another case where this rule applies is if you use an end-of-line/string boundary at the beginning or a beginning-of-line/string at the end. This could be a case of confusing the meaning of and : ^ $ Pattern.compile( ) ".*A^" Source (MongodbDocumentSerializerTest.java) Complexity Regular expressions are powerful and often terse. Unfortunately, that terseness often makes them hard to read and understand for your teammates, for readers of your code, and even for your future self. Ultimately, they often become a maintainability nightmare. Consider for example the following regex for matching dates: "^(?:(?:31(\\/|-|\\.)(?:0?[13578]|1[02]))\\1|(?:(?:29|30)(\\/|-|\\.)(?:0?[13-9]|1[0-2])\\2))(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\\d)?\\d{2})$|^(?:29(\\/|-|\\.)0?2\\3(?:(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\\d)?(?:0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|(?:(?:16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))$|^(?:0?[1-9]|1\\d|2[0-8])(\\/|-|\\.)(?:(?:0?[1-9])|(?:1[0-2]))\\4(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\\d)?\\d{2})$" Can you tell what kinds of dates would be matched by this? Would you easily be able to add additional types of dates to it or remove types? Me neither. Another example, one might say the example, of a complicated regex is one that is commonly used to match email addresses, which can be found (and you’ll see lots of versions of it flying around on the internet). I won’t include it in this blog post for space reasons, but it’s more than 6,000(!) characters long. here And perhaps the worst part is that we’ve been guilty of using this regex internally. To us, reusing an overly complicated regex without understanding it sounds like a trap. Whether it works or not may depend on your situation, including which email addresses you want to consider valid and which invalid. For example, if you wanted to write an email to yourself at your local mail server, the mail application shouldn't stop you from addressing the mail to `host@localhost` (a.k.a. Local Host), but when validating email addresses for a web form, you might want to restrict addresses to non-local domains. Now there probably aren’t many people who would be able to tell whether the "standard" email regex would accept `host@localhost` or not by just looking at the code. And certainly it would be a decidedly non-trivial engineering effort to change it to not accept an `@localhost` address if it does (or vice-versa). To help you keep track of complicated regular expressions you’re using, SonarQube, SonarCloud and SonarLint offer a dedicated rule for finding regular expressions with complexity that exceeds a configurable threshold: . java:S5843 - Regular expressions should not be too complicated This rule is inspired by the concept, developed by SonarSource, and takes into account how all the regex operators, combined with each other, raise the complexity of a given regex. Here’s what it says about the date regex from above: cognitive complexity Now, what makes this regex so complicated? The fact that it verifies that the date doesn’t just fit the general format of a date, but is a valid date to the point that it only allows the 29th of February if the year is a leap year. In this case, it’d be preferable to use a simpler regex to only match the general format and then write a plain Java method to check that the numbers make sense and whether it’s a leap year. An even better solution would be to delegate that logic to a dedicated library and use it from there. When you find yourself in the process of writing (or reusing) such a complicated regex, you should first ask yourself whether you couldn’t easily solve the problem without using regular expressions at all. The next best option is using a combination of multiple simpler regular expressions applied in chain, one after another (such as first using one regex to split the input string and then using others to process each part of the string). If that’s not possible, try to split the regex into multiple parts and document each part or at least assign it to a variable with a meaningful name. Then, once you’ve gotten your regular expression(s) down to a manageable size, the rules for specific features like character classes and boundary markers can help you make sure your pattern matches what you think it does. At that point, with complexity and accuracy handled, you're nearly done. All that's left to worry about is stability - as in the stability of your application. That's right, a regex gone bad can bring down your application. So next time, I'll talk about the humble regex's potential for stack overflows, and what we've done to help you prevent it.

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Getting Regex Boundaries Right: A How-To Guide

We've been working recently on adding rules to help write better regular expressions in Java. I've talked already about rules to and with . Those rules help you make sure your regular expressions are accurate and maintainable. Today I will show you how to make sure that the regular expression won’t crash your program. find errors in character classes the use of boundary markers and overly complex regular expressions As a brief reminder: regular expressions are a terse and powerful mechanism for matching patterns in strings. Part of the power of regular expressions is that a pattern can concisely describe a string that might be much larger than the original pattern. Sometimes much, much larger. Sometimes enough to overflow the stack and crash your application. Due to the way regular expression matching is implemented in Java (and many other languages/libraries), matching a pattern may - depending on the regex - require stack space proportional to the length of the input. This means large inputs could cause the program to crash with a when you try to use the regex. StackOverflowException We ran into this problem in our own code when analysis tried  to find comments containing at least one word with more than a given number of characters. For this we used a regex similar to , which would cause the analysis to crash on source files containing sufficiently long comments. To prevent problems like this for our future selves as well as for you, dear users, we implemented a rule which can detect problems like this: #(.|\n)*\w{3,} java:S5998 - Regular expressions should not overflow the stack In theory any regex is susceptible to stack overflow if it contains a repetition that contains some sort of branching, such as another repetition or an alternative. However, for some regular expressions the length of input required to make them crash is much larger than for others. To account for this, our rule tries to estimate how much stack space a regular expression will consume relative to the input size and only raises issues on regular expressions whose stack consumption exceeds a configurable threshold. One way to avoid stack consumption in regular expressions is to use . Possessive quantifiers are created by adding a to a quantifier (e.g. instead of ). Doing so disables . In addition to avoiding issues with catastrophic backtracking, making a quantifier possessive allows a pattern to be matched without consuming stack space. The problem is that sometimes backtracking is necessary and using possessive quantifiers to disable it may leave you with a regex that can never match any input. possessive quantifiers + x*+ x* backtracking Consider for example the regex I cited above: : If we try to fix the stack overflow by making the quantifier possessive, we end up with . This regex can never match anything because any input that could be matched by will already have been matched by and, being possessive, it won’t give it back. Luckily we have a rule that warns you about issues like this: #(.|\n)*\w{3,} #(.|\n)*+\w{3,} \w (.|\n)*+ java:S5994 - Regex patterns following a possessive quantifier should not always fail So how would one properly fix this issue? In our case, we decided to get rid of the regex altogether since there wasn’t really a good reason to use a regex here. But the regex could also be salvaged easily enough by getting rid of the alternation. The intent of was to match any character, including line breaks, because . does not match line breaks by default. The proper way to match any character would be to enable the flag, which can also be enabled from within the regex using . So either or would work (the latter of which also works when using methods that don’t involve ). .|\n DOTALL (?s) Pattern.compile(“#.*\\w{3,}”, Pattern.DOTALL) ”(?s)#.*\\{3,}” Pattern.compile Another regex susceptible to stack overflows would be something as simple as . Here the alternation can be removed by using a character class instead, which doesn’t require stack space to match: . Luckily we have a rule that finds alternations that can be replaced by character classes and suggests just that replacement like in the following code: (a|b)* [ab]* Spring Boot java:S6035 - Single-character alternations in regular expressions should be replaced with character classes Regular expressions are a truly powerful feature. Because great power comes with great responsibility (and great opportunities for screwing things up, or confusing your colleagues and future-you), we now offer a total of 24 rules targeting regular expressions. They are all available today in SonarCloud. These three rules around avoiding stack overflows are available starting from SonarQube 8.7, but the rest are already released. You can see them all at . rules.sonarsource.com Finally, note that some of the rules perform in-depth automata-based analyses on your regular expressions to identify issues as accurately as possible. This is an extremely promising approach and we will probably discuss this feature in a future blog post because we truly believe it’s amazing. This will for sure bring A LOT to regex code quality in general, so stay tuned!

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive February 23rd, 2021

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