Design Systems: A Front-End Engineer's Guide to Efficient Atomic Design

Welcome to the first blog post in our new series, “ .” How Technical Writing Can Supercharge Your Startup In this series, I’ll show you how technical writing can benefit startups, from gaining visibility to building trust with your audience. As a provider of to startups, I’ve seen the positive impact well-crafted content can have. writing services Today, I’ll start with an overview of how technical writing can boost your startup’s growth. Stay tuned for more posts on why writing is a vital tool for startups. Technical writing plays an important role in the success of a startup. It involves creating clear, concise, and user-focused documentation that explains how a product or service works. “ ” Put yourself out there, but stay on the hunt for dissenting opinions from smart and respectful people. Strong views, weakly held. Writing software is halfway between writing a novel and building a bridge. Technical writing tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncrasies that traditional publishing would not accommodate. Lean into them. Technical content is either timely or timeless, with almost nothing in between. Image credit- “State of Developer Relations”- you can access the full report here. The person who writes down the plan in an organization/startup has tremendous power. If you want to find the up-and-comers at a tech company, look into who’s writing the plan. Though they may not be coming up with all the ideas, you’ll know they have the energy, motivation, and skills to organize and communicate ideas in a written form. Surround yourself and your startup with “lateral thinkers” who can’t help but come up with variant perspectives on everything they see in your product or service. They won’t always be right, but they always challenge your thinking and writing. Investing in technical writing can have a substantial impact on your startup’s success. It not only benefits your users but also contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of your internal operations. Remember that the goal is to produce documentation that is clear, concise, and understandable to your intended audience. As a result, user satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth will increase. Remember- Media formats are cyclical. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms and Twitter is aphorisms-as-a-service. Hip-hop brought back poetry. Montaigne pioneered the essay format and blogs brought them back into vogue. Startups should write more manifestos, blogs, clean docs, and integration guides. What is Technical Writing? Over the last 3 years, I’ve worked off and on documentation, integration guides, and technical blog posts for 20+ startups. I started contributing during my role as a at Auth back in 2021 and helped developers transition to the new open-source user authentication. developer advocate SuperTokens – an alternative to Auth0, Firebase I found I enjoy writing and documentation, It is satisfying to produce high-quality that benefits others. technical blogs technical writing https://twitter.com/TheAnkurTyagi/status/1715444967173218413?embedable=true I’ve read a lot of technical writing and documentation resources over the years. I’ve written about and I’ve collected together my notes both to help me remember key points later in my career, but also as a tool to help me think about writing now. why every engineer should write GPT has revealed how much writing is pure pablum. Bland, lifeless, uninsightful, unoffensive, and not worth the price of the ink it was printed with. so good writers will become more important for your startups who can build and write excellent technical blogs and ChatGPT plagiarism is a complete non-issue. If you can’t out-write a machine, what are you doing writing? If you’re a developer interested in writing technical blogs, I’ve written a complete dedicated blog on . what technical writing is and how to write good technical blogs My Writing Principles When doing technical writing, I always try to keep the following principles in mind. The goal of writing is to make tasks as simple and efficient for users as possible. Developers prefer to be shown rather than told and prefer to learn by doing. Help your users achieve their first success as soon as possible. Keep it simple and write in simple language. Why is Technical Writing Important for Startups? I’ve been writing technical content for the last 3 years. Here’s what I learned: Clear technical blogs and documentation help end users understand your product quickly and efficiently, reducing frustration and increasing satisfaction. Thorough technical writing shows that you take your product and your users seriously. It boosts your brand’s trust and confidence. New end users can quickly become proficient with your product if they have access to well-organized, easy-to-follow guides, integration, and docs. Well-structured technical blogs and documentation improve your website’s SEO, helping potential customers find you more easily. As your startup grows, you’ll need to onboard more employees. Good technical writing and documentation are essential for training new hires efficiently. Here are a few examples of excellent engineering blogs: The Cloudflare Blog DoorDash Engineering Blog The Netflix Tech Blog Detailed technical blogs and documentation demonstrate that you have a well-thought-out product and business strategy, which can be appealing to potential investors and partners. End-user feedback from technical blogs and documentation is often invaluable for improving your product and identifying areas of confusion. Well-written blogs and documentation can be easily translated into other local languages, enabling you to reach a broader, global audience. Having superior technical blogs and documentation can be a significant differentiator, giving you an edge over competitors. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1610695967715610624?embedable=true Good Technical Writing = Organic Developer Marketing Developers have a reputation for being averse to marketing, but that’s not necessarily true. In reality, developers are gaining purchasing power and respect within businesses of all sizes. Employers recognise the importance of investing in tools to help developers stay productive and happy because good developers are difficult to find and retain. The variety of developer tools has increased dramatically, ranging from IDEs to higher-level abstractions and paid services like GPT, including low-code tools. Technical writing is a successful developer marketing strategy rooted in authenticity and understanding the audience. Startups should spend time with developers, both online and in-person, to grasp their needs and preferences. Technical content should be genuinely helpful and educational, and it is often more effective when created by a fellow developer. Options include in-house engineers, developer advocates, community writing programs, freelance writers, independent software engineers come writers like . myself Developers are present on platforms like X formerly Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, and LinkedIn and love to read well-written technical blog posts. Why Technical Writing Strategy Stand Out? While I’ll admit that big tech companies and startups are getting better at reaching developers. I spent 13 years as a hands-on software engineer and technical leader before starting my as a marketing developer, so here are my thoughts on why technical writing is a great asset for startups. blog Business-to-developer marketing (“B2D marketing”) describes and technical writing is one of the best ways to do it while being genuine, authentic and interesting. marketing initiatives designed to reach developers Gimmicks like swags, free food coupons, free t-shirts or exclusionary events centred around alcohol are not the way to go. Many startups struggle with B2D technical marketing because developers are more difficult to reach than the average consumer. Be interesting- Writing is by far the fastest way to get feedback from developers in software engineering. Build a cool project with your product, write about it and share it in public to get feedback and iterate. We all developers appreciate honesty. In recent times, I personally liked the blog page of . They’ve written some very cool blogs and achieved very good growth from their written content. Supabase As a startup, this means you should be honest about your product in the community. Many big tech hire – someone with a technical background who will champion their product at live events. developer advocates Big tech companies like have teams of these people to give talks at conferences, do training sessions, and write technical content about their company’s products but the developer advocate role is not a good fit for most of the startups- because they’ve to moved fast and unfortunately many developer advocates are lazy and below average people. Google/Amazon/Meta/Netflix Startups need highly skilled engineers in tech who can write and build their engineering blog a platform where people want to come every single week if not every single day. Startups must leverage technical writing and documentation as tools. marketing Image credit- “State of Developer Relations”- you can access the full report here. Role of Technical Writing in Effective Communication We can write many different types of technical content for software developers. is important, but very few startups leverage documentation as a marketing channel. Documentation can help end-users see how to use your product in the real world. Tutorials and how-to guides is created with the goal of increasing the top of your funnel and may be published on external partner sites for increased reach. Hashnode, DevTo, HackerNoon, and DZone are all free places to publish developer content. Awareness-driving content on your website allow you to engage readers and increase sign-ups. Blog posts Sponsor independent writers or senior engineer who writes a technical blog on their website or newsletters. How Technical Writing Ensures Clarity and Understanding Always write good examples by starting with real code this builds trust with clients and investors while writing in public. My tactics for writing in public: Someone recently in my Twitter DM asked me – “Hi Ankur, I’m a big fan of your blog but I have got a question- how do you deal with writing in public? People on the internet are such assholes, sometimes.” I’ve often heard the advice “ ”, but I’ve gained a huge amount of knowledge from reading internet comments on my posts and other people’s posts from strangers over the years, even if sometimes people are jerks. Either turn off or Don’t read the comments Always talk about real facts and be honest I mostly talk about facts – either facts about startups or developer advocates about my experiences as a writer. In general, I’d say that people’s comments about facts tend to stay pretty normal. The main kinds of negative comments I get about facts about my mistakes. I mostly try to head this off by trying to be self-aware about my knowledge level on a topic and saying “I’m not sure…” when I’m not sure about something. Edit and refactor mistakes I make many mistakes in my blog posts because I write about a lot of things that are on the edge of my knowledge. When people point out mistakes, I edit the blog post and fix it. Generally, I’ll stay near a computer for a few hours after I post a blog post on my Twitter or LinkedIn timeline so that I can fix mistakes quickly as they come up. Bridging the Tech Knowledge Gap: The Core Challenge in Startup Developer Relations Program The report mentions that Content Development was a top job activity for Developer Relations practitioners in 2023, with a distinction between Content Development related to Education (55%) and Technical Content Development, such as documentation (50%)​. This highlights the importance of technical writing and content creation in engaging with and educating developer communities. survey Top 3 Questions Every Startup Must Ask Before Starting a Technical Blog Starting a technical blog can be a significant step for a startup, as it requires a thoughtful approach to ensure it serves its intended purpose effectively. Ask these questions if you’re starting a new blog for your startup. the purpose of writing the target audience the kind of content to be created Identifying the blog’s aim is crucial, whether it’s raising brand awareness, supplementing documentation, building an audience, or establishing thought leadership. Secondly, understanding and narrowing down the audience helps in tailoring the content accordingly. Lastly, deciding on the content format, whether it’s tutorials, roundups, case studies, features, Q&As, comparisons, or opinion pieces, aids in maintaining a consistent and engaging blog. That’s it for this blog. I’ll keep writing on this topic and share more insight about more specific features in the next blog. Stay tuned Until then, here are some of my most popular blogs you might like to read. Software Developers, Why Haven’t You Started Technical Writing Yet? How to Build Scalable Microservices with Amplication How to Use HarperDB Custom Functions Looking forward to sharing more about the power of technical writing in upcoming post. Also published . here

Technical Writing for Startups Matter: Here's Why

স্টার্টআপ ম্যাটারের জন্য প্রযুক্তিগত লেখা: কেন তা এখানে

Technisches Schreiben für Startups ist wichtig: Hier erfahren Sie, warum

La redacción técnica para empresas emergentes es importante: este es el motivo

La rédaction technique pour les startups est importante : voici pourquoi

स्टार्टअप्स के लिए तकनीकी लेखन मायने रखता है: यहां जानिए क्यों

スタートアップにとってテクニカル ライティングは重要: その理由は次のとおりです

스타트업을 위한 기술 문서 작성이 중요한 이유: 이유는 다음과 같습니다.

Redação técnica para startups é importante: aqui está o porquê

Техническое письмо для стартапов важно: вот почему

Startup'lar İçin Teknik Yazı Önemlidir: İşte Nedeni

Viết kỹ thuật cho vấn đề khởi nghiệp: Đây là lý do tại sao

初创公司的技术写作很重要：原因如下

Use Case The current cloud era is dominated heavily by Kubernetes (k8s). While the DevOps team manages App lifecycle (deploy, scale, upgrade, downgrade, etc.), the App developer needs to build a similar environment locally. So before shipping the App, developer is required to ensure DevOps lifecycle is not impacted by any of the changes s/he makes. So it is very much necessary for a Developer to have a local k8s cluster for testing. In short, this blog post demonstrates the following flow. Assumption You have , and installed on your host. docker kubectl KinD You have go version go1.20.3 installed on the host. However, older version should work too. This complete setup is build on Ubuntu 22.04.2 host. If you are using another OS/platform, then you might need to modify the commands accordingly. Let Start... Prerequisite Setup Clone the repo [~]# git clone https://github.com/simplyatul/godevsetup.git
[~]# cd godevsetup Now using KinD, create local k8s cluster with a control plane node and two worker nodes. [~/godevsetup]# kind create cluster --config ./kind-local-k8s-cluster-baremin.yaml --name local-dev
Creating cluster "local-dev" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.26.3) 🖼
 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦 📦 📦  
 ✓ Writing configuration 📜 
 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️ 
 ✓ Installing CNI 🔌 
 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾 
 ✓ Joining worker nodes 🚜 
Set kubectl context to "kind-local-dev"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-local-dev

Have a question, bug, or feature request? Let us know! https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/#community 🙂 You can see that the control plane node and worker nodes are installed and running as separate containers. [~/godevsetup]# docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                  COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS          PORTS                       NAMES
9d2f27169e21   kindest/node:v1.26.3   "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up 47 seconds                               local-dev-worker2
2b198d465d81   kindest/node:v1.26.3   "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up 47 seconds                               local-dev-worker
96f3a760a02a   kindest/node:v1.26.3   "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up 47 seconds   127.0.0.1:33519->6443/tcp   local-dev-control-plane Step 1 - App Development I have written a simple App in Go. You can do this in any language of your choice. The App exposes a ReST API on port 8080 and returns the hostname. Check the code. You can run the App locally using and then hit the following command from another terminal. GitHub go run main.go [~]# curl localhost:8080
Hostname: ubuntu-jammy Once you complete the coding, commit it. Optionally, you can push it to the remote repo as well. Step 2 - Containerize The App Build the docker image [~/godevsetup]# docker build -t godevsetup:latest . Run it locally and check once [~/godevsetup]# docker run --rm --name godevsetup -p 8080:8080 godevsetup:latest

# From another terminal
[~/godevsetup]# curl localhost:8080
Hostname: 48143ca71c90 Step 3 - Push Image Into Your Cluster Here we will push the container image onto the cluster nodes created by KinD [~/godevsetup]# kind load docker-image godevsetup:latest --name local-dev
Image: "godevsetup:latest" with ID "sha256:aa7dbb2842050be8c1635ff117ef938e3cf7fb0c32d56d9a7fe16ca73fda0f62" not yet present on node "local-dev-worker2", loading...
Image: "godevsetup:latest" with ID "sha256:aa7dbb2842050be8c1635ff117ef938e3cf7fb0c32d56d9a7fe16ca73fda0f62" not yet present on node "local-dev-worker", loading...
Image: "godevsetup:latest" with ID "sha256:aa7dbb2842050be8c1635ff117ef938e3cf7fb0c32d56d9a7fe16ca73fda0f62" not yet present on node "local-dev-control-plane", loading... You can inspect image is loaded [~/godevsetup]# docker exec local-dev-control-plane crictl images
IMAGE                                                     TAG                 IMAGE ID            SIZE
docker.io/library/godevsetup                              latest              aa7dbb2842050       869MB
registry.k8s.io/etcd                                      3.5.6-0             fce326961ae2d       103MB
registry.k8s.io/kube-apiserver                            v1.26.3             801fc1f38fa6c       80.4MB
registry.k8s.io/kube-controller-manager                   v1.26.3             cb77c367deebf       68.5MB
registry.k8s.io/pause                                     3.7                 221177c6082a8       311kB
docker.io/kindest/kindnetd:v20230330-48f316cd             <none>              a329ae3c2c52f       27.7MB
docker.io/kindest/local-path-helper:v20230330-48f316cd    <none>              37af659db0ba1       3.05MB
registry.k8s.io/coredns/coredns                           v1.9.3              5185b96f0becf       14.8MB
docker.io/kindest/local-path-provisioner:v0.0.23-kind.0   <none>              c408b2276bb76       18.7MB
registry.k8s.io/kube-proxy                                v1.26.3             eb3079d47a23a       67.2MB
registry.k8s.io/kube-scheduler                            v1.26.3             dec886d066492       57.8MB Step 4 - Deploy On Local K8s Cluster I have created a Nodeport Service along with the deployment. Check the file. Create the Service and the deployment. yaml [~/godevsetup]# kubectl apply -f godevsetup-nodeport.yaml
deployment.apps/godevsetup created
service/godevsetup-nodeport created You can check the Service and pods are created [~/godevsetup]# kubectl get all
NAME                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/godevsetup-78fbdfb985-4tmz2   1/1     Running   0          3m59s
pod/godevsetup-78fbdfb985-frl2d   1/1     Running   0          3m59s
pod/godevsetup-78fbdfb985-x77g4   1/1     Running   0          3m59s

NAME                          TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
service/godevsetup-nodeport   NodePort    10.96.245.170   <none>        9090:30123/TCP   3m59s
service/kubernetes            ClusterIP   10.96.0.1       <none>        443/TCP          52m

NAME                         READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/godevsetup   3/3     3            3           3m59s

NAME                                    DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/godevsetup-78fbdfb985   3         3         3       3m59s You can also observe the App pods are created inside the worker nodes [~/godevsetup]# docker exec local-dev-worker crictl ps
CONTAINER           IMAGE               CREATED             STATE               NAME                     ATTEMPT             POD ID              POD
a310b2cf0201d       aa7dbb2842050       5 minutes ago       Running             godevsetup               0                   66781797eb650       godevsetup-78fbdfb985-frl2d
fea54fa36f629       c408b2276bb76       54 minutes ago      Running             local-path-provisioner   0                   d03b938684afd       local-path-provisioner-75f5b54ffd-k7xfb
b11289f372caf       5185b96f0becf       54 minutes ago      Running             coredns                  0                   0b51dcb843021       coredns-787d4945fb-wqxst
ee14e1dc8ff83       5185b96f0becf       54 minutes ago      Running             coredns                  0                   e7a1e535bb183       coredns-787d4945fb-g7xnq
99a540c5658fb       a329ae3c2c52f       54 minutes ago      Running             kindnet-cni              0                   eb134c7507011       kindnet-gmzxc
aaebc183b9f6a       eb3079d47a23a       54 minutes ago      Running             kube-proxy               0                   a7b50875a469f       kube-proxy-6wj5v

[~/godevsetup]# docker exec local-dev-worker2 crictl ps
CONTAINER           IMAGE               CREATED             STATE               NAME                ATTEMPT             POD ID              POD
b2d32e5b552f7       aa7dbb2842050       5 minutes ago       Running             godevsetup          0                   872cff6cf3ea3       godevsetup-78fbdfb985-4tmz2
9ae704f8c8669       aa7dbb2842050       5 minutes ago       Running             godevsetup          0                   e186f3ccda549       godevsetup-78fbdfb985-x77g4
79013566e33e8       a329ae3c2c52f       54 minutes ago      Running             kindnet-cni         0                   959abab06b391       kindnet-tg2jl
0611eaced1aad       eb3079d47a23a       54 minutes ago      Running             kube-proxy          0                   49477d56a66c8       kube-proxy-96f5x Step 5 - Verify The Functionally Since we have created a NodePort Service, we can access the service using Node’s IP First, identify the Node IPs [~/godevsetup]# kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME                      STATUS   ROLES           AGE   VERSION   INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE             KERNEL-VERSION      CONTAINER-RUNTIME
local-dev-control-plane   Ready    control-plane   58m   v1.26.3   172.18.0.4    <none>        Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS   5.15.0-72-generic   containerd://1.6.19-46-g941215f49
local-dev-worker          Ready    <none>          57m   v1.26.3   172.18.0.2    <none>        Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS   5.15.0-72-generic   containerd://1.6.19-46-g941215f49
local-dev-worker2         Ready    <none>          57m   v1.26.3   172.18.0.3    <none>        Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS   5.15.0-72-generic   containerd://1.6.19-46-g941215f49 The INTERNAL-IP is the IP of the worker node. Now access the API’s ReST endpoint using any of the Node’s IP and Port (Port is mentioned as in our file) nodePort: 30123 yaml [~/godevsetup]# curl 172.18.0.4:30123
Hostname: godevsetup-78fbdfb985-frl2d

[~/godevsetup]# curl 172.18.0.2:30123
Hostname: godevsetup-78fbdfb985-frl2d

[~/godevsetup]# curl 172.18.0.3:30123
Hostname: godevsetup-78fbdfb985-4tmz2 Cool.. We are done. Now if you want to Enhance (or Bug-fix) your App, restart from Step 1. But before that, remove the Service and Deployment. [~/godevsetup]# kubectl delete -f godevsetup-nodeport.yaml 
deployment.apps "godevsetup" deleted
service "godevsetup-nodeport" deleted Sign Off… This blog covers how to set up a local k8s cluster using KinD. And how can we leverage it for the App deployment and testing. Thank you for reading the post. Please comment on how you find this. Connect me on to get updates on future blog posts. Twitter Also published . here

How to Set up a Local K8s Cluster Using KinD

I am a marketing consultant who has spent 10-years working with technology and technology-enabled services companies. I’ve spent the last six months poring through the account-based marketing and experience templates, frameworks, and models I have developed to determine a Web3 adaptation. Initially, I went into this exercise assuming that very little, if any, of the developed frameworks would be applicable in Web3. On the contrary,  Web3 growth initiatives could benefit substantially from the program marketers  perfected in Web2 B2B SaaS sales through account-based marketing and experience. Traditional B2B Marketing in Web2 Several marketing strategies were effective for Web2 B2B SaaS companies. Such companies typically create a strong brand identity with a well-designed website and regularly create informative and engaging content. Instead of influencers, B2B SaaS companies in Web2 worked hard to build relationships with targeted analysts, subject matter experts, and reporters to ensure favorable coverage of key leaders in their vertical. These subject matter experts and reporters worked to help promote these companies and their products or services. Key digital marketing engagement strategies, such as Google AdWords, LinkedIn, Content Syndication, automation platforms, and programmatic advertising, were the key to reaching the target market. Web2 companies invested in their growth strategies across social media, search engine optimization, and online advertising. Many unicorns used ABM to build their growth engines. Adapting ABM for Web3 Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on key accounts that are most likely to convert into customers. By taking a targeted approach to marketing, businesses can better nurture their relationships with key accounts and close more deals. Over the last ten years, high-growth B2B SaaS companies discarded the old one-size-fits-all approach to marketing; instead, they tailored their marketing efforts to specific key accounts. Primarily driven by the advent of automation programs to support targeted marketing, ABM became the marketing darling of the last decade. Two fundamental principles underlie all ABM strategies: 1. Define your target market The first step to any good marketing strategy is to define your target market. You can ask: Who are our ideal customers? What do they look like? What are their needs and pain points? When you have a clear picture of your target market, you can then identify the key accounts that are most likely to convert into customers. 2. Personalize your approach One of the benefits of ABM is that it allows you to personalize your marketing approach. You no longer have to rely on generic marketing messages; instead, you can tailor your messages to specific key accounts. Growth in Web3 Companies: ABM in Blockchain Infrastructure Like Web2 companies, Web3 companies have either a B2B model, B2C/B2D, or a B2B2C2D sales and marketing model. Ultimately account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to business-to-business (B2B) marketing in which an organization treats each of its key accounts as a market in itself. Fortunately, the Web3 space is both nascent and emergent; it is easy to identify and refine the universe of people and the personas that are interested in B2B solutions as a Web3 company, adopting a Market of 1 Mindset at the outset to define targets, and design personalized engagement campaigns. For example, there are only 200,000 Solidity developers, several dozen Web3-first VCs, less than , and potential B2C purchasers. These numbers suggest that identifying and targeting critical personas across developers, potential consumers, or investors is, if not simple, at least doable. 20 million custodial and non-custodial wallets Additionally, B2B companies in the Web3 space are easily segmented, including all of the protocols at any layer and the blockchain infrastructure companies. Many of these are directly analogous to Web2 enterprise and infrastructure companies in that they provide back-of-office functionality to companies or blockchain applications, from storage, security, hardware, and more. These companies build a decentralized infrastructure that enables secure and efficient transactions on the blockchain. Some leading blockchain infrastructure companies include BitFury, Blockstream, and ConsenSys. Web3 Growth Campaigns: The Most Important Persona is Developers The key persona for blockchain companies is developers; everyone from the layer one protocols to the layer 2s, to the decentralized application startups, and more depend on developers. The universe of both is defined and small, and the path of engagement is straightforward. Unlike the Web2 world, where Reddit, GitHub, LinkedIn, blogs, and Google reigned supreme, in the Web3 world, it is Twitter, gated Discord Channels, Telegram, Signal, and technical white papers. Engaging Developers Some strategies can be effective in engaging developers. Developers are global and distributed. 1. -Host regular meetups and events that focus on topics developers are interested in. This is a great way to get developers engaged and involved with your brand. Country-Specific Meetups 2. Make sure your website and online presence are developer-friendly. This means having clear and concise documentation, helpful resources, and easy-to-use tools. Digital Presence — 3. Offer developers free trials or discounts on your products or services. This is a great way to get them to try out your offerings and see the value they can bring. Free Trials + Gas Fees: 4. Get involved with the open-source community. Share your insights beyond just your product. This is a great way to build relationships with developers and show them that you’re invested in their success. Contribute Authentically 5. -Keep your platform up-to-date, and emphasize security. This shows that you’re keeping up with the times and invested in providing the best possible experience for developers. Updates are Hard in the Decentralized Space ABM goes beyond traditional lead generation and demand creation techniques by considering each critical account’s specific needs and wants. It is a more personalized and customized form of marketing designed to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its key accounts. These are guiding frameworks that map on particularly well to the Web3 world. This article was first published here.

Account Based Marketing In Web3

The is a community where people in the developer relations field can chat and help each other out. But this post isn’t about that group… We’ll get to that. This is an article about you: the startup founder or manager who’s trying to hire your first developer relations person. This article is here to help you by example. DevRel collective I’m not the first to write about this problem. Taylor Barnett . Be sure to check it out! wrote a great piece on this as well But first, let’s make sure we have the terminology right: Developer Relations is a field that encapsulates all the different roles that facilitate the communication between an organization and third-party developers. That can include a developer advocate (such as myself), a developer evangelist, community manager, and much more. But getting started is pretty hard. How It Started started this by opening this thread on the DevRel collective community Slack: Wesley Faulkner “Hey y’all I need a temperature check. I’m getting a lot of LinkedIn solicitations for ‘first developer advocate’ roles. Here’s just a snippet of the last one I got: With that, we are looking for our first Developer Advocate* to create our Developer Relations strategy from scratch. There’s no set playbook, but you’ll thrive in this role if you’re passionate about educating developers.” His response to this was: “Thank you for reaching out, but I’m not interested at this time. Hiring someone to execute and do strategy is really hard. Time and time again, I’ve seen this go south in a hurry, and no one wins in that situation. If you review the job description, it is heavily biased towards action. With a first role, there’s a lot to do, and without focus and direction, the results will not only seem scattered externally but internally as well. It’s as if you wake up in a field and want to get out, so you bolt off in a direction. Then it feels like you’re going nowhere, so you turn around and go in the opposite direction. All that work and time gets wasted.” My suggestion is to create a solid strategy and direction before getting someone to execute it. You could even hire a contractor or consultant to help with that. Better yet, make that the first role you hire. You wouldn’t open a restaurant with just servers on staff, would you? You would get a manager to make sure that all tasks are delegated responsibly. Why wouldn’t you take that same approach with DevRel?” I (Shai) am currently the first developer advocate at , and I can very much empathize with those sentiments. Lightrun What Do You Do? A former boss of mine is running an open-source company without a DevRel person. He asked for my help, so I popped into a Zoom meeting with them. It was clear they felt uncomfortable asking this, but it’s the obvious question: “What do you do?” What Does a Developer Advocate Do? I can answer this about my job, but I can’t provide an answer for other developer advocates or developer relations. The reason is that our jobs vary too much and include a lot of flexibility. An open source company that targets big data will have completely different needs from a close source enterprise debugging tool. The job of a developer relations advocate in both companies can be completely different. As a result, a perfect candidate for the job at Company A might be a terrible candidate for the job at Company B. How Do You Begin? With Lightrun, our founders interviewed a lot of developer relations people. This didn’t take off. Part of this is the huge demand we have in the market right now. We’re getting a lot of solicitation over LinkedIn by just having that job title. But another part is the vagueness of our job descriptions. If I’m considering a job, I’d like to know if I’ll be able to do it. I’d like to know what it would require. Unfortunately, that’s something the employer needs to define for the employee… Not the other way around. Lightrun solved this problem by hiring me. Since I was already a part of the team, I understood the product. I’m a company founder and effectively did developer relations for 20+ years in one way or another (we just didn’t call it that). Since I know what’s needed and understand the company/culture, I could draw up a plan and decide what needs to be done. When we grow this activity, additional DevRel staff can fit into the framework I’m constructing here and improve it with their experience. Right now with the proverbial “blank slate,” I very much feel the words Wesley wrote about and can understand why people don’t want to be the first developer relations person in a company. Founder in DevRel? Most companies don’t have an experienced person on staff already. But most have a technical founder. When reaching out to developers, a lot of the founders do this in an ad hoc way. You post to Reddit or set up a blog and try to get some developers to use the product. That’s all great and could be the starting point for a developer relations role within the company. But the trick is to turn this into something that’s more strategic and actionable. Are you hiring a developer relations person just to write blog posts? Where can that person contribute? What are reasonable KPIs? What would the day of a developer relations person at your company look like? What’s the chain of command? Is marketing in charge or is it the CTO? If you can’t answer these basic questions, you don’t have the infrastructure in place to hire a developer relations person. You can hire the “best” person out there and be disappointed because they won’t know what to do. I know, a lot is thrown on the shoulders of founders, but if you’re a B2D (business to developer) company, then you pretty much need to understand the role in depth. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time managing and evaluating the work of the developer relations person. Some Other Thoughts Wesley’s thread struck a serious nerve in the community with 63 responses. Here are some highlights, which I think are the perfect TLDR for this post: “The inevitable reaction in these situations, 3 – 6 months in, is either ‘You’ve gotten great results from your efforts, but we’re not seeing the vision or the strategy part done. Maybe you’re not the one to do that part.’ Or, you focused on the strategy portion, so you get ‘Nice execution on the strategy, but we’re just not seeing the results on the ground. Maybe DevRel doesn’t actually work.’ It is an absolute strategy for failure.” — David G. Simmons “I’ve seen a number of these first hires fail this summer and now the engineers, first advocates themselves, feel imposter syndrome and otherwise about DevRel. And it was the stakeholders’ fault for not having their strategy known to their hire.” — Tessa Kriesel “This is a well-articulated response with understandable examples. VP of Eng/Mkt should do a lot of legwork in these small companies on that strategy piece BEFORE hiring the first DevRel.” — Dewan Ahmed “It’s been a different experience for me. As a first devrel at $CURJOB, I had a lot of existing trust with the founder/exec team and executing on a couple of tactical things (docs, tutorials, forum) helped build some credibility. The main strategic goal when I was hired was ‘get more pageviews,’ though since then it has been refined since.” “We’ve been working toward a strategy, but one hard thing about a strategy at a small company is that it is difficult to formulate. It’s hard to do internally (to make the time) and hard to know who to trust to come in and consult. It’s hard to find the right fit (esp when you are still trying to do the tactical stuff at the same time).” “I doubt I would have had the same success without the deep trust I had with the founder.” — Dan Moore This article was co-written with . Wesley Faulkner Wesley Faulkner is a first-generation American, public speaker, and podcaster. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and a staunch supporter of racial justice, workplace equity, and neurodiversity. His professional experience spans technology from AMD, Atlassian, Dell, IBM, and MongoDB. Wesley currently works as a head of community at SingleStore, and in addition, co-hosts the developer relations-focused podcast Community Pulse and serves on the board for SXSW. Originally published at . The New Stack

How to Make Your First Developer Relations Hire in 2022

Today, Machine Learning powers the top 1% of the most valuable organizations in the world (FB, ALPH, AMZ, N etc). However, 99% of enterprises struggle to productionalize ML, even with the possession of hyper-specific datasets and exceptional data science departments. Going one layer further into how ML propagates through an organization reveals the problem in more depth. The graphic below shows an admittedly simplified representation of a typical setup for machine learning: There are three stages to the above process: Experimenting & PoCs: : Jupyter notebooks, Python scripts, experiment tracking tools, data exploration tools. Technologies : Data scientists. Persona : Quick and scientific experiments define this phase. The team wants to increase their understanding of the data and machine learning objective as rapidly as possible. Description Conversion: : ETL pipelining tools such as Airflow. Technologies : Data Engineers. Persona : Converting finalized experiments into automated, repeatable processes is the aim of this code. Sometimes this starts before the next phase, some times after, but the essence is the same — take the code from the data scientists and try to put them in sort form of an automated framework. Description Productionalization & Maintenance: : Flask/FastAPI, Kubernetes, Docker, , Technologies Cortex Seldon . : ML Engineers. Persona : This is the phase that starts at the deployment of the model, and spans monitoring, retraining, and maintenance. The core focus of this phase is to keep the model healthy and serving at any scale, all the while accounting for drift. Description Each of these stages requires . Therefore, it is only natural that there are many potholes that a ML team can run into along the way. Inevitably things that are important downstream are not accounted for in the earlier stages. E.g. If training happens in isolation from the deployment strategy, that is never going to translate well in production scenarios — leading to inconsistencies, silent failures, and eventually failed model deployments. different skills, tooling, and organization The Solution Looking at the above multi-phase process in the image above, it seems like a no-brainer to simply reduce the steps involved and therefore eliminate the friction that exists between them. However, given the different requirements + skillsets for each phase, this is easier said than done. Data scientists are not trained or equipped to be diligent to care about production concepts such as reproducibility — they . Therefore, what is required is an implementation of a framework that is from the get-go. are trained to iterate and experiment flexible but enforces production standards A very natural mechanism to achieve this is a framework that exposes an automated, standardized way to run ML pipelines in a controlled environment. ML is inherently a process that can be broken down into individual, concrete steps (e.g. preprocessing, training, evaluating, etc), so a pipeline is a good solution here. Critically, by standardizing the development of these , organizations can lose the cycle of destruction/recreation of ML models through multiple tooling and steps, and hasten the speed of research to deployment. pipelines at the early stages Furthermore, if a data scientist has of these pipelines from training till deployment, a large portion of the technical debt issues mentioned above immediately dissolve.  They can test their models in a near-production/production environment whilst training them, and unify their tooling and codebases closer to production. ownership If an organization can incentivize their data scientists to buy into such a framework, . However, the devil is really in the details — how do you give data scientists the they need for experimentation in a framework that is enough to be taken all the way to production? then they have won half the battle of productionalization flexibility robust It's hard for data scientists to write ML pipelines So why don't data scientists just write these pipelines themselves? The simple answer is that they are not equipped to do so. In my opinion, currently, the tooling landscape is too split into frameworks that are ML tools for ML people, or Ops tools for Ops people, not really satisfying all the boxes I mentioned in the last section. As a concrete example, here is a , a tool normally used to create ML pipelines: snippet to create a simple training pipeline with Kubeflow name= ,
    description= ) output_template = str(output) + + dsl.RUN_ID_PLACEHOLDER + analyze_output = output_template
    transform_output_train = os.path.join(output_template, , )
    transform_output_eval = os.path.join(output_template, , )
    train_output = os.path.join(output_template, )
    predict_output = os.path.join(output_template, ) dsl.ExitHandler(exit_op=dataproc_delete_cluster_op(
        project_id=project,
        region=region,
        name=cluster_name
    )):
        _create_cluster_op = dataproc_create_cluster_op(
            project_id=project,
            region=region,
            name=cluster_name,
            initialization_actions=[
              os.path.join(_PYSRC_PREFIX, ),
            ],
            image_version= )

        _analyze_op = dataproc_analyze_op(
            project=project,
            region=region,
            cluster_name=cluster_name,
            schema=schema,
            train_data=train_data,
            output=output_template
        ).after(_create_cluster_op).set_display_name( )

        _transform_op = dataproc_transform_op(
            project=project,
            region=region,
            cluster_name=cluster_name,
            train_data=train_data,
            eval_data=eval_data,
            target=target,
            analysis=analyze_output,
            output=output_template
        ).after(_analyze_op).set_display_name( )

        _train_op = dataproc_train_op(
            project=project,
            region=region,
            cluster_name=cluster_name,
            train_data=transform_output_train,
            eval_data=transform_output_eval,
            target=target,
            analysis=analyze_output,
            workers=workers,
            rounds=rounds,
            output=train_output
        ).after(_transform_op).set_display_name( )

        _predict_op = dataproc_predict_op(
            project=project,
            region=region,
            cluster_name=cluster_name,
            data=transform_output_eval,
            model=train_output,
            target=target,
            analysis=analyze_output,
            output=predict_output
        ).after(_train_op).set_display_name( )

        _cm_op = confusion_matrix_op(
            predictions=os.path.join(predict_output, ),
            output_dir=output_template
        ).after(_predict_op)

        _roc_op = roc_op(
            predictions_dir=os.path.join(predict_output, ),
            true_class=true_label,
            true_score_column=true_label,
            output_dir=output_template
        ).after(_predict_op)

    dsl.get_pipeline_conf().add_op_transformer(
        gcp.use_gcp_secret( )) @dsl.pipeline( 'XGBoost Trainer' 'A trainer that does end-to-end distributed training for XGBoost models.' : def xgb_train_pipeline (
    output= ,
    project= ,
    cluster_name= % dsl.RUN_ID_PLACEHOLDER,
    region= ,
    train_data= ,
    eval_data= ,
    schema= ,
    target= ,
    rounds= ,
    workers= ,
    true_label= ,
) 'gs://your-gcs-bucket' 'your-gcp-project' 'xgb-%s' 'us-central1' 'gs://ml-pipeline-playground/sfpd/train.csv' 'gs://ml-pipeline-playground/sfpd/eval.csv' 'gs://ml-pipeline-playground/sfpd/schema.json' 'resolution' 200 2 'ACTION' '/' '/data' # Current GCP pyspark/spark op do not provide outputs as return values, instead, # we need to use strings to pass the uri around. 'train' 'part-*' 'eval' 'part-*' 'train_output' 'predict_output' with 'initialization_actions.sh' '1.2' 'Analyzer' 'Transformer' 'Trainer' 'Predictor' 'part-*.csv' 'part-*.csv' 'user-gcp-sa' Glancing at the above, one can spot a few things that would make it hard for a data scientist to produce and own this pipeline independently: Data is not versioned. There is ops-centric language like clusters, kubernetes secrets and dsl Exit handlers. Docker Image and Bash Know-how required. Arbitrary data formats and no schema control. Untracked metadata and configuration. Invariably, a data scientist at this point either needs to learn how to circumvent the above, or a more engineering driven team has to take over, which leads us right back to the original problems described above. Higher-order abstractions democratize engineering paradigms In order to get data scientists to really create production-ready artifacts, they require an Ops (read pipelines) tool for ML people, where they can use higher-order abstractions at the right level for a data scientist. In order to understand why abstractions are important, we can cast an eye towards how web development has matured from raw Javascript scripts (the Jupyter notebooks of web development) to the powerful React/Angular/Vue-based modern web development stacks of today. Looking at these modern frameworks, their success has been dictated by providing higher-order abstractions that are easier to consume and digest for a larger audience. They did not change the fundamentals of how the underlying web technology worked. They simply re-purposed it in a way that is understandable and accessible to a larger audience. Specifically, by providing as first-class citizens, these frameworks have ushered in a new mechanism of breaking down, utilizing, and building the HTML and Javascript that powers the modern web. However, ML pipeline-ing tools do not have an equivalent movement to figure out the right order of abstraction to have a similar effect. components In order to expedite such a movement, me and some like-minded individuals decided to create , an open-source MLOps framework to create iterative, reproducible pipelines. ZenML is an exercise in finding the right layer of abstraction for ML. Here, we treat This means that data scientists are exposed to pipelines directly in the framework, but not in the same manner as the data pipelines from the ETL space ( , et al.). Pipelines are treated as meaning they can be compared and analyzed directly. Only when it is time to flip over to productionalization, can they be converted to more 'classical' data pipelines. ZenML pipelines as first-class citizens. Prefect Airflow experiments — Within pipelines are steps, that are abstracted in E.g. There is a , , and so on. Paradigms that are way more understandable than plugging scripts into some form of orchestrator wrapper. familiar ML language towards the data scientist. TokenizerStep TrainerStep EvaluatorStep Each pipeline run tracks the metadata, parameters and can be compared to other runs. The data for each pipeline is automatically versioned and tracked as it flows through. Each run is linked to git commits and compiled into an easy-to-read YAML file, which can be optionally compiled to other DSL’s such as on Airflow or Kubeflow Pipelines. This is necessary to satisfy other stakeholders such as the data engineers and ML engineers in the value chain. Additionally, the interfaces exposed for individual steps are mostly set up in a way to be easy to extend in an idempotent, and therefore a distributed, manner. The data scientist can therefore scale-out with different processing backends (like Dataflow/Spark) when they are dealing with larger datasets. Of course, ZenML is not the only mechanism this — Many companies build their own home-grown abstraction frameworks to solve their specific needs. Often-times these are built on top of some of the other tools I have mentioned above. Regardless of how to get there, the goal should be clear: Get the data scientists with as little friction as possible, incentivizing them to increase their ownership of the models after deployment. as close to production as possible This is a win-win for every persona involved, and ultimately a big win for any organization that aims to make it to the top 1% using ML as a core driver for their business growth. If you like the thoughts here, we’d love to hear your feedback on ZenML. It is and we are looking for early adopters and ! And if you find it is the right order of abstraction for you/your data scientists, then let us know as well via our — looking forward to hearing from you! open-source contributors Slack Also published at https://towardsdatascience.com/why-ml-should-be-written-as-pipelines-from-the-get-go-b2d95003f998

How To Productionalize ML By Development Of Pipelines Since The Beginning

Initial Thoughts provides Feeds, which allow developers to build event-driven applications similar to social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, in a matter of days versus months or years. Stream also provides Chat, a product that enables developers to rapidly build out a fully functional chat application for everything from a one to one messaging platform similar to WhatsApp to live stream chat experiences like that seen on Twitch. Stream As of today, over 500 million (and growing) end-users rely on Stream’s services to interact and engage with applications they love — that developers have built with Stream’s technology. Ok, now that we are done with our shameless plug, we want to share some thoughts about a different part of building a tech company — developer marketing. What is it? How can you use it? In this post, we’ll outline the key areas in which Developer Marketing can help your business thrive by addressing the techniques that we have tried, tested, and practice here at Stream. The Challenge In your typical business, a sales team reaches out to businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C). However, in today’s world, of technology startups (SaaS, IaaS, etc.), the focus of engagement has shifted towards developers (B2D), who consume API driven platforms to power their applications at scale. While developers consumers, they react differently than your typical consumer. They are even more skeptical and analytical, and they know when they are being marketed to and are turned off by the pushiness of traditional sales models and advertising. are Marketing to developers means thinking like developers (and it’s still challenging, even when you do so). Most developers are constantly reading and learning about the newest methods and technologies, so they already have a pretty good idea of what is out there and works well. Developers decide on new technologies to use by experimenting and building to find pain points, ways around them, and to later share findings within their communities. They need to see the technologies in action and play with them in low-risk, “curiosity” scenarios before making the decision themselves to bring them into their core stacks (be it for personal or professional use). Here at Stream, our core userbase consists of developers. In fact, it’s 95–100% of our core userbase, and the majority of us are developers, as well. Because of our own experiences with “being marketed to” and finding the technologies we now use, our Developer Marketing team spends a tremendous amount of effort towards connecting and collaborating with fellow developers. This is not just to win them over, but to ensure that their experience with our product, APIs and SDKs is nothing less than amazing. Strategy #1 — Create the Connection Developers are inherently skeptical and want to try your product first hand. Here at Stream, we put an immense amount of effort towards creating API walkthroughs that allow developers to easily guide themselves through how our API works. In fact, our efforts paid off when we one the for our unique onboarding process. Programmable Web’s Developer Experience award For example, our guides the developer through the process of creating a chat application with a hands-on approach. It focuses on what developers want to see — code and the underlying SDKs that power the chat product. In less than 3 minutes, developers have a solid and fundamental understanding of how our chat product works. Stream Chat API tour We do the same for by guiding users through the process of creating users, adding an activity, and so on. This process creates a connection between Stream and our end-user, the developer. We do this because for the longest time software was built to attract product and purchasing managers who were managing a development team. Instead, we focus on putting the developer first. Stream Feeds In addition to our live onboarding guides, we have several API tutorials that show developers how to build on top of Stream Feeds or Chat with Android, iOS, React and React Native. These are regularly tested to ensure that they are always in working condition. Never “set it and forget it” and always be one step ahead of your code should things go awry. Strategy #2 — Blogging Blogging has always been a traditional way to get the word out about your company. The problem is that too many companies try to sell their company too hard in the process. To developers, this doesn’t provide an analytical justification to purchase or even use their offering. It actually comes across with a negative connotation. Remember, developers do not like to be marketed to. They can smell it from a mile away, and they hate it. Rather than writing a blog post about your company and all of the bells and whistles that your product offering comes with, try speaking the same language as your core developer audience. Write about common use-cases, development stacks, your engineering team, anything that doesn’t smell like marketing fluff. At Stream, we have a wide variety of blog posts ranging from the time it takes to buy and implement Stream vs. build the product from scratch to how we migrated from one language to another. These are the types of posts that win developers over and allow you to establish trust and, eventually, a relationship. The rule of thumb with a blog post is to give 90–95% of your wisdom away for free and hopefully, that proves your expertise as a thought leader in the space. Because you are perceived as an expert, you won’t have to actively “sell” to the developer; instead, it’s a collaborative requirement gathering to execute together. Submit your blog posts to publications on such as , or where developers will discover your content, fire off a Tweet or two, make yourself known and developers will come to you — as long as you’re not too pushy in your writing. Medium Better Programming Dev.to Strategy #3 — Live Like a Developer Live where developers live. Developers are a rare breed. They spend the vast majority of their time on the internet, pushing code to GitHub, reading through hundreds of links on , trolling , and believe it or not, blogging about their latest accomplishments on platforms such as . Hacker News Reddit Medium Now, I’m not a huge fan of advertising for the reasons listed above, but newsletters work great and will help your marketing team gain company exposure among developers — if you hit the right channels. Cooper Press is a great source for finding developer-focused newsletters that have both a high open and click rate. Depending on what we are promoting, we vary what we channel we promote on, but React and Mobile weekly have done exceptionally well for us recently. Strategy #4 — Swag, Swag, Swag Every developer loves swag. That means anything from t-shirts to stickers and even socks! If you’re going after a specific company and want them to use your product, surprise them with some swag to make them feel loved. Recently, the team over at Heroku sent Stream a box of t-shirts and Heroku branded socks. While it may seem silly, this won over our developers and we’re now using Heroku for some of our services. A great service for this is . Swag.com On the other hand, LinkedIn reached out about their recruiting tool by sending our team a 16x16” book with fun facts about their software. Although nice, that was received by laughter within the office. Although this was meant for a business representative, nobody wants a book full of information about your product. It goes without saying, but please don’t do this. Final Thoughts Let’s face it; marketing to developers is not an easy feat. You need to live, breathe, and think like a developer. And more importantly, you shouldn’t overdo it, or you will come across as desperate. With a small team, you can make serious moves from a developer marketing standpoint. You simply have to follow the steps above. Happy developer marketing! ✌️

Developer Marketing Guide: 2020 Version

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that CometChat has been selected for the Techstars Boulder Accelerator Program! It gives us immense pride to be the First Indian Startup to be selected into the 3 months long Techstars Boulder program. With Techstars acceptance rates being less than 1%, this is a really big milestone for CometChat. Techstars Boulders is one of the most proficient accelerator programs out there, aimed at solving problems of businesses and building the best companies from the inside out, from founders to leadership teams, to the company and their community. Their alumni include companies like Sendgrid, DigitalOcean and Sphero. As part of the program, Techstars will incubate the company in its US location. Under the program, CometChat will have access to Techstars resources such as mentors, financial and infra resources for life. This would include access to Techstars network of more than 10,000 entrepreneurs, 2,700 investors and 1200 alumni companies. There is no doubt in my mind that with access to such a wealth of talent and product wisdom will help make our product immensely useful for the developer community. There is precedence- Digital Ocean & SendGrid have become some the most popular tools in a developer’s toolkit after they graduated from Techstars Boulder. Wait, there is more… This news coincides with our reimagining of CometChat into two product variants — CometChat Go & . CometChat Go (our current product) is a plug-n-play chat solution for ready-to-use software platforms such as WordPress, BuddyPress, SocialEngine and more. Whereas, CometChat Pro offers highly scalable & modular Chat SDKs & APIs for developers. Apart from saving hundreds of developer hours for adding voice, video & text chat in mobile apps and websites, CometChat Pro helps developers create a custom chat experience using their own preferred tech stack and programming language. CometChat Pro As the decision making power has gradually shifted from the CIOs of companies to developers there is a booming market of B2D (Business to Developer) startups emerging looking to empower developers and catch a pie of the growing developer mind space. We have always had a developer-centric mindset and this is reflected in our product philosophy. We hope to help developers in every stage of the learning curve, beginner to expert, implement real-time chat & HD voice/video calling in their apps. I believe we are at the cusp of a big milestone in the journey of CometChat. While on one hand, the Techstars program will help us enter the US market and establish corporate channels and expand our presence in a big way, on the other hand, rolling out CometChat Pro and CometChat Go, will ensure we are ready for highly evolved and quality obsessed customers. Moving forward, we plan to be quite active in the developer community by contributing and dialogue. Various things are underway to meet, converse and educate developers around the world. We want to leave a lasting impression in their minds as a voice that speaks for them and a product that works for them. Growing the community will transform us from our humble bootstrap roots to a growth-focused enterprise. For us, our mission is clear- If you need chat in your app, think CometChat! Founder, CometChat Anant Garg Originally published at www.cometchat.com .

Joining Techstars, CometChat Pro and The Road Ahead…

provides proprietary A.I. based typing biometrics technology (a.k.a. keystroke dynamics) to truly identify users by the way they type on their keyboards. TypingDNA interviewed , CEO of to know more. Kevin William David Raul Popa TypingDNA Hi Raul, So tell us about TypingDNA? Simply put, TypingDNA recognizes people by the way they type. The way you type on your keyboard (both on PC and mobile) is unique and can be used for authentication. This is similar to how you identify a person by other biometrics like fingerprint, voice and other behavioral traits. The cool thing about typing biometric authentication is that it can be used in the background which creates a frictionless experience for the user. Tell me more about why you are building this? Traditional username and password alone are not enough. We see more and more attacks and hacks on the platforms we use daily to listen to music, do payments, chat with others and the list goes on. We believe that a truly secure login authentication is a combination of something only the rightful person knows (login credentials) and is (biometrics) with no UX compromise. We engineered TypingDNA to let developers easily do that. How is TypingDNA different from what already exists in the market? First, compared to other 2FA like SMS (most used one to date), the user experience is greatly improved. You don’t have to switch devices anymore, get delayed SMS, pay an extra fee when you are outside of the country and so on. Second, our customers discovered in their independent testings that our matching accuracy is higher compared to other companies that they tried. Also, we can achieve similar matching accuracy after seeing only 1 or 2 previous typing patterns of a user where other companies have to look at 5 to 10 previous samples at least. Last but not least, our customers love the easy to integrate API that we built. Some of the similar companies are , , and . They developed similar . At the same time, we face indirect competitors in the 2FA industry who use SMS or any other 2FA method. KeyTrac BehavioSec BioCatch technology Who uses TypingDNA? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies? TypingDNA is used to prevent identity frauds in online banking, online and where second factor authentication is required. Roles vary from developers to CEO but for sure most of them have a technical background. B2D is actually our go-to-market strategy and it works. learning Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success? We recently launched the which is a free authenticator that generates 2FA OTP verification codes right in your browser (no more switching to your phone) and is protected with your “TypingDNA” pattern. It’s the first app that is consumer oriented and uses typing biometrics as a security feature. We believe there is a lot of education to be done because a lot of people don’t know that such a feature exists. Ultimately, this will open a new market for us. It was featured as #1 product on and wrote about it which brought us a lot of exposure and signups. TypingDNA Authenticator ProductHunt TechCrunch What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you? The integrations we have with proctoring companies are really interesting, the fact that we can automate identity verifications in online exams is pretty valuable. Some of the largest universities are using our technology through the proctoring companies that integrated us. Being part of the emerging online education and helping make it safer and more affordable is something definitely impactful. Finally, What are the products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them? For marketing, we use apps like (onboarding, email campaigns, CRM, etc.), (SEO tracking) and all of the popular social media for advertising (wherever developers are). Hubspot SEMrush Originally published at siftery.com .

Friction less authentication based on how you type

Technologically, near-term issues — voice activated earpieces and surveillance capitalism — offer a mixed bag. Political issues bleeding into the future — rise of autocrats and new WMD — are taking a dark, dystopian turn. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Technologically, the near-term future issues Apple said to debut voice-activated Siri AirPods in 2018, water-resistant model in 2019 — “[ T[he fully wireless earbud-style headphones…[will add] ability to activate Siri just by voice, rather than by physically tapping the AirPod in your ear, as [now]…[shifting] to a voice-first interface device…. .” [2019] will add…water-resistance… to protect against ‘splashes of water and rain,’ rather than full submersion https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/22/apple-said-to-debut-voice-activated-siri-airpods-in-2018-water-resistant-model-in-2019/ _Is the Content Worth the Price?_medium.com Virtual Assistants — Where’s the Beef? Obama isn’t happy with Facebook and Google, either — “Google and Facebook aren’t just…companies — they are ‘public goods’ with a responsibility to serve the public …. ’They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways’…. . [A] duopoly…contributing to a fractured media environment that allowed users to construct alternate realities, without a common set of facts ‘We have to have a serious conversation about, what are the business models, the algorithms, the mechanisms, whereby we can create more of a common conversation. And that can not just be a commercially driven conversation’ …. .” [He] made a point of saying he was opposed to the heavy regulation…[but] comes amid an increasing drumbeat of criticism of Facebook and Google https://www.recode.net/2018/2/27/17057686/barack-obama-facebook-google-speech-mit-sloan-regulation-public-good Congress should close the loophole allowing warrantless digital car searches — “Fourth Amendment…protects individuals from illegal searches…to their digital lives…[so] unless law enforcement [has]…a warrant, the government cannot search a person’s phone or computer**….** [But] as ‘connected cars’ become increasingly linked to people’s digital identities, there is a risk…police will use [an] exception to conduct digital searches without warrants …. [Supreme] court has extended warrant protections to cell phones and vehicle GPS tracking , and…currently reviewing whether law enforcement…should be required to get a warrant to obtain cellphone location information from wireless carriers…. . [Now] law enforcement…can stop and search a vehicle based on probable cause without having to get a warrant… . … …. Next-generation vehicles generate gigabytes of data while driving…[and] law enforcement could gain access…without a warrant For example, police could access in-car apps that contain sensitive information, such as… travel history , social media apps that store messages … past purchases …[and] likely be unlocked when police pull over a driver [Also] drivers may be intimidated into revealing their passwords during a stop, as has happened…at border crossings Already, some police use special devices…to circumvent built-in security measures on citizens’ phones and quickly copy their contents — similar devices could be designed for cars…. …. .” [Despite] risks, a car’s ability to collect information is not inherently privacy-invasive ….Policymakers should close this loophole Just as Congress has been working to close the loophole for cloud computing, it should…require law enforcement…to obtain a warrant https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/25/congress-should-close-the-loophole-allowing-warrantless-digital-car-searches/ Political issues bleeding into the future When the Cat’s Away … “[I]t’s springtime for strongmen_…._ [China’s] Xi wants to be emperor, not president. Russia’s Vladimir Putin wants to be czar, not president. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to be caliph, not president. Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wants to be pharaoh, not president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban wants to be king, not prime minister. And Iran’s Ali Khamenei already has the most coveted title du jour, supreme leader …. [Trump’s] comfortable with foreign strongmen, but [with]…Putin and Xi, seems to be awed by them, and may even be envious of them…. ….[ [He’s] also reflecting a widespread exhaustion in the country …[starting] ‘with Bush getting bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan’ Also] who’d look at our democracy…as a model for emulation? It takes $1 billion to run for the White House, Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery…[with] our own major state-run network, Fox News, that treats our president as ‘Dear Leader’ …. [There’ also] more refugees on the road around the world…to be very useful boogeymen for all these strongmen, who combine a kind of aggressive nationalism of historical destiny…[with] defense of national boundaries ….[This] works to tighten their grip on power…and to deflect attention from how much they and their cronies are stealing …. ” [Changes] have come so fast for some people that they’re looking for leaders who will…stop the winds of change and bring back the 1950s ….[But] there’s technology…for autocrats to use facial recognition, cyberspying or data mining to more efficiently track, arrest and silence all of them. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/opinion/trump-strongmen-democracy.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront _History teaches men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. [Eban]_medium.com Quicksand of Our Past Putin claims Russia has nuclear arsenal capable of avoiding missile defenses — “[New] nuclear-powered cruise missiles capable to hitting any point on the globe…[Putin] warned that Moscow would consider any nuclear attack, of any size, on it or its allies an attack on Russia that would lead to an immediate response**….** ” [A] cruise missile…propelled by a nuclear-powered engine…[has] practically unlimited range…[and] able to fly close to the ground and follow an unpredictable flight path, rendering existing missile defenses ‘useless’… a major breakthrough. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/putin-claims-russia-has-nuclear-arsenal-capable-of-avoiding-missile-defenses/2018/03/01/d2dcf522-1d3b-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html?utm_term=.e9d6667f4985 _April 2000, as millennium celebrations passed into history, Silicon Valley luminary, Bill Joy, wrote a provocative…_medium.com Civilization’s Anti-Human, Not Machines An alien cyberattack? As if we didn’t have enough to worry about — “[A]n alien message from outer space could contain malicious data designed to wreak havoc on Earth…[because] impossible to ‘decontaminate with certainty’ and could pose an ‘existential threat…. [ Many] debated whether humanity would benefit from contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, or ETI…. So far, no one has heard anything very life-like …. …. [ [Still] it is cheaper for ETI to send a malicious message to eradicate humans compared to sending battleships’ There’s] several different types of malicious communications. A simple one might contain a threat like ‘We will make your sun go supernova tomorrow. True or not, it could cause widespread panic’…. . .… Messages that contain big diagrams, algorithms or equations could come with viruses hidden in them…[or] algorithm needed to decompress them could also be code…[that] could unleash the malware…[or] header of such a message might read: ‘We are friends. The galactic library is attached It is in the form of an artificial intelligence which quickly learns your language and will answer your questions ’Extraordinary steps could be taken to isolate the artificial intelligence…[but] efforts to imprison an [AI]…delivered by extraterrestrials would probably fail. Even a military-style experiment could go awry…[if] the artificial intelligence could offer a cure for cancer in exchange for an increase in computer capacity…. ‘ …. .” We can never exclude human error and emotion’….Once the artificial intelligence is out, it could do all kinds of damage….Understanding the risks is what’s important The potential benefits from joining a galactic network might be considerable https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/28/an-alien-cyberattack-as-if-we-didnt-have-enough-to-worry-about/?utm_term=.31fb55499331 Find more of my ideas on Medium at, . A Passion to Evolve Or click the Follow button below to add me to your feed. Prefer a weekly email newsletter — no ads, no spam, & never sell the list — email me with dochuston1@gmail.com “add me” in the subject line. May you live long and prosper!Doc Huston

News — At The Edge — 3/3

Even putting the two words next to each other looks out of place — “Developer” “Marketing” — I almost want to put a period between the two words to create a literary Chinese wall. When I joined Algolia’s marketing team last August, I felt at home pretty immediately. In addition to having followed the company from day one and been a fairly outspoken fan, I also found myself for the first time in a long time in a familiar, engineer-dominated environment. I often joke that our PMs are engineers, our sales team are engineers who sell, our marketers are outspoken engineers, our CEO & CTO are engineers who make executive decisions — the whole company is composed of engineers who X, and our users are engineers, too. Algolia feels a lot like the group of friends I grew up with: our high school band became a LAN party after midnight. There are Googlers & physics teachers, mobile developers & product managers among the bunch. I parted ways with computer science three classes into my CS minor in college, favoring mathematics & guitar over building compilers for calculators in UCSD’s underground computer labs for four years. Nearly one year into the Algolia adventure, I regularly explain to candidates that developer marketing is the highest calling for the modern marketer because there remain hurdles to be solved, seemingly insurmountable challenges, and the opportunity is enormous — the era of the engineer has well begun, so knowing how to talk to them at scale is one of the largest opportunities to be seized. Developer tools (B2D) companies are popping up as fast as the consumer & business products they enable, but the questions that need to be answered become increasingly difficult to answer, the hurdles taller and taller. Paid Advertising: How do you advertise to someone that hates advertising? While not developer is allergic to advertising, it’s certainly an audience that is solicited often enough that they are numb to the usual methods. B2B marketing to buyers in marketing/sales/HR all have an established norm of selling the dream: every “That one thing you wished your current suite of tools could do is exactly what we do!” — every ad ever. Try telling a senior front-end developer that your UX tools are 100% customizable and completely intuitive with no learning curve, or tell a mobile developer that your Offline SDK is super powerful but won’t make their app super heavy to download — now do that all in a sponsored tweet, banner ad on StackOverflow or sponsored post on /r/webdev “We cost less give you more!” AND Field Marketing: How do you scan the badge of an attendee who got 3 recruitment offers in the time it took you to shake their hand? One of the core reasons developers are so anti-sollicitation is that they are solicited constantly. They know what marketers know, that developers are the best champions of a product inside their company. No CTO in their right mind will force a team of developers to use a tool or framework that they hate. Interestingly enough, developers are much more open to trying new products than your typical marketer or salesman; however, convincing them that your product is better than what they’re already using is extremely tough. When Algolia goes to developer events, we know that asking to scan badges is going to be a pain point, and that following up with developers after an event is nearly pointless if they don’t genuinely have an interest in using your product right now. Opportunities: Authentic Marketing Every hurdle represents an opportunity, and one of my favorite parts about working for a B2D brand is that authenticity is worth it’s weight in gold. lend themselves very well to authenticity, and has helped us guide which programs & initiatives we spin up in the marketing team. Algolia’s company values Here are a handful of experiments/methods we’ve been using to build authentic relationships: Make a great first impression Earlier this year we decided to take a different approach to how we attend developer events to make a different kind of first impression. We still give out stickers, tell people about what makes Algolia great, and give out business cards; however, we had a huge increase in engagement at Twilio Signal this past May because we made one decision: the money that we normally spend on event-specific swag was donated to charity. Unexpected results of doing authentic initiatives For every badge that we scanned at Twilio Signal — 200+ badgets from 171 different companies — we donated our swag budget ($10/attendee) to Women Who Code and gave out accompanying “Yes We Code” stickers. We didn’t advertise heavily our initiative, as we didn’t want it to feel like a forced promotion, but in the end, word of mouth at the conference spread and we had developers coming up to our stand asking “are you the ones donating to Women Who Code?” The owner of this initiative is Alexandria Avritch, and she wrote up a piece on the topic here . Build Trust through Education Every audience can be tricky to get. One thing that makes developers unique is their desire to learn, improve, iterate. It’s part of the job, it’s part of professional development, and, for developer marketing, it’s a great tool. For years Algolia has been publishing blog posts on everything from & to and how we keep our t. Some of these blog posts are the result of frequent questions we get from our users or community, and some of them are just the result of a large hurdle that we had to overcome that we’d rather prevent other developers from experiencing. how our Engine works how it’s built How we test for Failure Offline mobile SDKs so lightweigh This past quarter one of our solutions engineers, Raphael Terrier, a long-time friend from my previous days organizing hardware conferences, joined our team to focus 100% on producing educational content, such as this video. He’s also working on releasing a full-blown School of Search. Getting Started with instantsearch-react We organize two recurring events — TechLunch & Search Party — the former brings together the tech community over various topics like security or chatbots for a monthly lunch in our office with guest speakers. As we scale up initiatives for developers around first impressions, we will continue to look through the lenses of education and knowledge sharing, with the ultimate goal being to take everything we learn, everyone we meet, and putting it all in front of our community. Honesty as an Asset One of the hardest things to do is speak honestly about competitors. We have two major categories of competitors — turnkey solutions that are less tools for developers and more tools for companies that don’t want to commit developer resources to search. The other is open-source, the dominant method of building search today. When the popular turnkey solution Google Site Search announced it was shuttering, Algolia published a blog post not about why Algolia would be the best thing to switch to, because we’re only the best solution for companies that have developer resources, and didn’t want other GSS users to experience frustration with our tool not being what they expected. When questions were raised by the community about Algolia’s utility to GSS users, we tried to respond honestly about developers would be necessary to be successful with Algolia, and to paint an accurate picture of the search landscape. In that same month, we began writing a series comparing Algolia to ElasticSearch, specifically focussing on using ES to build consumer-grade search. This required us to deeply understand the advantages of ElasticSearch, be honest about where we are good and about where we fall short. _Before comparing Algolia to Elasticsearch, it's good to understand a few things about the nature of search. Search…_blog.algolia.com Comparing Algolia and Elasticsearch For Consumer-Grade Search Part 1: End-to-end Latency Building Awareness through Giving One of the places Algolia has been most successful in creating lasting positive impressions has been through a handful of Algolia implementations that we did on websites popular with developers: ProductHunt, FontAwesome, HackerNews, and, more recently, CSS Tricks. In addition, after scratching our own itch and building documentation search for our own website, our own DocSearch tool is now live on 300+ API documentation sites, allowing us to enable millions of developers each month to find answers to their problems. One of the most common ways that developers say they first heard of us is through these experiences. It’s a great way for us to demonstrate Algolia’s value, and, because we spend a good amount of time making sure these implementations represent the best of what we think Algolia can do for those services, they put our best foot forward (at least as much as our users will let us). Avoiding Allergies while Scaling I often say that Marketing’s job at Algolia is to scale up not-burning-developers. In short, we’ve come this far without burning developers, so all we need to do is not burn them as we scale. Avoiding Allergies and remaining Authentic will be key to our success, but being aware of every Allergy and authentically speaking to tens and hundreds of thousands of users in the coming years will require scrutiny at every stage. The reward is clear: developers are building the future, and, for developer tools, being in their good graces means being built into the feature. Getting to that future is one of the most interesting challenges & opportunities for any marketer.

Developer Marketing: Allergies & Authenticity

The following study will evaluate the performance difference between rebalancing on a periodic interval and holding. By examining different intervals, we can determine which rebalancing frequencies had the largest performance increase over simply holding. This study was set up using the following constraints. Trades & Data Data was collected from Bittrex starting on March 15th 2017 and ending on October 20th 2018. All of the data points were collected as exact bid and ask values for each asset. This provides the precise prices that would have been used if trades were actually executed at each time. Additionally, all trades included the .25% fee which is standard for Bittrex. A trade from LTC to XRP would therefore first trade from LTC to BTC (which would incur a .25% trading fee) and then from BTC to XRP (which would incur another .25% trading fee). The result is a fee model that is as accurate as possible. Rebalance Period The primary variable for this study is the rebalance period. A rebalance period is the specific amount of time between each rebalance. So, a period of 1 day would result in a rebalance every single day at the exact same time. In this study, the rebalance periods that will be tested are 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month. Learn more about rebalancing for cryptocurrency. Portfolio Size The portfolio size for this study has been fixed at 10 assets per portfolio. Learn more about how the number of assets in a portfolio affects performance. Asset Selection Constructing each portfolio was done at random. All assets which were available between March 15th 2017 and October 20th 2018 on Bittrex were included during the selection process. This amounts to a total of 110 different assets. The list of assets which were included in this study can be found by navigating to the backtest tab in the Shrimpy application and then selecting the same timeframe as the one mentioned above. Learn more about how to build a strong portfolio. Backtest A backtest is the process of using the trade data from the exchange to simulate how a strategy would have performed over a given time period. This is often used to test the viability of a strategy by running it through large data sets. In this study, we used backtests to compare the results of rebalancing to those of buy-and-hold. The number of backtests we ran for each portfolio size and rebalance period pair was set to 1000. Read more about backtests or run your own. Performance The performance for each backtest was determined by taking the final rebalancing value and comparing it to the final buy-and-hold value. This was done by using the equation: (Rf — Hf) / Hf, where Rf is the final rebalancing value and Hf is the final buy-and-hold value. MONTHLY REBALANCES The x-axis is the performance increase that is experienced for each portfolio due to rebalancing on a monthly basis. The y-axis is the number of portfolios which falls into each performance bucket. This means if a backtest was run and the result was a performance increase of 115% when compared to buy-and-hold, we would add a “1” to the 100% — 125% bucket. A monthly rebalance is the longest rebalance period that will be examined in this study. Rebalancing on a monthly basis resulted in a median portfolio performance boost of 60% over buy-and-hold. 80.2% of all portfolios which used monthly rebalances performed better than buy-and-hold. WEEKLY REBALANCES The x-axis is the performance increase that is experienced for each portfolio due to rebalancing on a monthly basis. The y-axis is the number of portfolios which falls into each performance bucket. This means if a backtest was run and the result was a performance increase of 115% when compared to buy-and-hold, we would add a “1” to the 100% — 125% bucket. Rebalancing once every week resulted in a median portfolio performance boost of 95% over buy-and-hold. 87.3% of all portfolios which used weekly rebalances performed better than buy-and-hold. DAILY REBALANCES The x-axis is the performance increase that is experienced for each portfolio due to rebalancing on a monthly basis. The y-axis is the number of portfolios which falls into each performance bucket. This means if a backtest was run and the result was a performance increase of 115% when compared to buy-and-hold, we would add a “1” to the 100% — 125% bucket. Rebalancing once every day resulted in a median portfolio performance boost of 168% over buy-and-hold. 89.5% of all portfolios which used daily rebalances performed better than buy-and-hold. HOURLY REBALANCES The x-axis is the performance increase that is experienced for each portfolio due to rebalancing on a monthly basis. The y-axis is the number of portfolios which falls into each performance bucket. This means if a backtest was run and the result was a performance increase of 115% when compared to buy-and-hold, we would add a “1” to the 100% — 125% bucket. Rebalancing once every hour resulted in a median portfolio performance boost of 94% over buy-and-hold. 83.0% of all portfolios which used hourly rebalances performed better than buy-and-hold. COMBINED RESULTS The x-axis is the performance increase that is experienced for each portfolio due to rebalancing on a monthly basis. The y-axis is the number of portfolios which falls into each performance bucket. This means if a backtest was run and the result was a performance increase of 105% when compared to buy-and-hold, we would add a “1” to the 100% — 125% bucket. Rebalancing on any time period resulted in a median portfolio performance boost of 100% over buy-and-hold. 85.0% of all portfolios which rebalanced performed better than buy-and-hold. Each cell in the table is the median portfolio performance of 1,000 randomly selected portfolios over the period of March 2017 to October 2018. Comparing each of the 4 rebalance periods to each other, daily rebalances has demonstrated the highest performance over the timeframe that was backtested. CONCLUSIONS Rebalancing backtests illustrate exciting results in regards to portfolio performance when compared to buy-and-hold. Without time consuming involvement, complex set up, or expensive tools, rebalancing has established itself as a powerful strategy for cryptocurrency users. Simply setting up a portfolio and then forgetting about it with an application like Shrimpy would have provided a median performance increase of 100% across all rebalancing frequencies. Due to the low resolution of rebalancing frequencies, it would be appropriate in the future to perform a detailed analysis of every possible rebalance period to find the most optimal rebalance period. REBALANCING WITH SHRIMPY Shrimpy is a free application which automates the rebalancing strategy. Our dedicated tools for asset allocation, backtesting, and indexing the market are the most powerful in the industry. Whether you are an or individual, our solutions are designed to solve the most pressing problems facing portfolio management in the crypto space. institution Sign up today by clicking . here If you still aren’t sure, try out the demo to see everything we have to offer! Shrimpy Demo Don’t forget to check out the , follow us on and for updates, and ask any questions to our amazing, active communities on & . Shrimpy website Twitter Facebook Telegram Discord Leave a comment to let us know your experiences with rebalancing! The Shrimpy Team Originally published at blog.shrimpy.io .

Cryptocurrency Portfolio Rebalancing: Bittrex Analysis

I’ve been convicted of not being . I guess I never saw the point of feminism in a world and society that I — personally, in a subjectively and possibly skewed way — see as populated by humans, puppies wearing onesies and cute kitten GIFs. This story is about the former. One of them. Humans. Coders. Programmers. Developers. Call ’em whatever you want. I like calling them humans. Cylons seems plausible, but far-fetched. This one just happens to be female, and she’s awesome at it. At coding, at being who she is, and without being overly obvious about any of it. “feminist enough” Truth be told , I was always rather surprised and slightly confused as to why they don’t, but … I never believed or even thought women cannot code here’s the thing about programming: if one isn’t exposed to it in one way or another, chances are they won’t realise it’s even an option. My parents certainly still don’t get how I make a living from staring at a screen seven hours a day typing colourful characters. The lack of female coders I believe is less about the and more about . I don’t think women need to be “empowered” to code. Just like most 21st century human beings, both women and men are entirely able to make life choices, and for it came down to one between doing something she hated and something that seemed interesting. Allow me to illustrate: “feeling incapable of programming” “hey, I never really thought it was an option” Madalina How things can change in just a couple of years … The age-old question from parents, friends, relatives is always and as you see illustrated in the above image, that often changes shape. Some people go through two or even three different careers throughout their life and that’s fine too. Some people start out as engineers only to realise 10 years down the line their soft skills are so spot on, they’ll veer off into management, while others eventually get tired of flipping burgers and become data scientists. It’s all good, if it gets you out of bed in the morning! “What do you want to be when you grow up?” As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a graphic designer. — Madalina D. Two decades ago being a graphic designer was a different story. It involved pencils, paint and God (and designers) knows what else. A decade later it involved Photoshop, Illustrator and the likes. And today… it may very well involve code of all things! And lots of it. CSS, JavaScript, HTML. Because designing something graphically has become designing visual experiences. While the initial dream remained, its application has changed. Enabling that dream took nothing more than a simple suggestion — from me (the author) in this case. The power of suggestion at its best! I was going through a time when I didn’t quite know which way to go with my career, as regardless of studying to become a dental technician, regardless of it actually being a dream at one point, it turned out to be a nightmare. This suggestion could have not come at a better time! — Madalina D. And you‘ve got to ask, can people be blamed for attempting the obvious career choice? Absolutely not. In 2018 quite possibly over 50% of the careers one can have did not exist twenty or even ten years ago. And it has nothing to do with gender. When I started writing code in 2007, I didn’t see a career-path either, and just so we’re clear, unlike Madalina, I am a dude. I just did what I liked doing, hoping for the best. Some understood the sudden change, some less so. My friends, being a younger generation, many of them understood immediately the benefits of programming and saw it as a viable career-path. My parents however, struggled initially, and were somewhat sceptical. Eventually, after advice from others, they started to see the advantages of software engineering and the career opportunities it can generate. — Madalina D. Because it can. Coding, programming, architecting digital user experiences is for all intents and purposes a young field that opens up a floodgate of opportunities for both juniors and seniors. And many of those roles are fun and empowering. From websites to ebooks, from mobile apps to desktop apps, from enterprise software to data visualisation, from augmented and virtual reality to home automation, and many more in between, it’s all there to be discovered and enjoyed. By anyone who wishes to. The mere idea of writing code can be fun, be that the act of learning and discovering how to do it, or writing it. I love the idea of just being able to plug my headphones into my ears, listen to the latest Armin Van Buuren album, while writing code, being productive through using using one’s imagination and skills, only to find the day has flown by. — Madalina D. There is a programmer slang for that feeling and it’s called . It’s actually one of the very few jobs that allow people to do this, besides being a janitor and washing the floors of a seemingly endless eerie hallway. And it seems this experience of being in the zone is quite genderless as well. Sure, it does look a tad antisocial from the outside, possibly even to an extent that would worry some behavioural psychologists, but working as a coder is a lot more social than most people might think. “being in the zone” The work atmosphere is very positive and fun(ny). Working in a mostly male environment — a sausage-fest of sorts — can actually have advantages if you’re in the right team. Men tend to be more willing to help a female junior, starting out in her programming career, than they would another guy. Especially if we’re talking about a girl whom they get along very well with. A largely male environment proved — for me at least — to be a more relaxing and enjoyable one than a largely female team. — Madalina D. Wait! What? So sausage-fest teams aren’t a problem? Well, no, not as big of a problem as they’re often made out to be. I think we need to look at the core of what makes humans, well… humans. And that is our ability to think and act accordingly. I’d still like to believe that people by default are genuinely good, and that racism, chauvinism and all the other “isms” of the modern world are nothing but our individual failures to recognise ourselves for what we really are, and what that really means — what it really means to be human, and how humans can collaborate best to achieve common goals. Engineering teams are actually great for developing these skills and breaking down the barriers of hundreds of years of somewhat misguided evolutionary gender specificity. I think software engineers are in fact one of the most welcoming bunch when it comes to females joining their teams and the industry in general. And here’s the message. Go for it. Seriously. Discover coding, discover programming. Madalina did exactly that. She had no clue if it would be a great fit for her or not, but giving it a try surely can’t and won’t hurt. Try. Try and see if coding represents who you are, and if it’s something you could be seeing yourself doing for the the foreseeable future. Programming is a fantastic profession — and yes, fantastic, even in a bit of a magical sense — but as all professions it needs the right amount of passion for one to be truly successful in it. — Madalina D. And finally, what you’ve all been secretly waiting for since the beginning of this article, here’s the puppy in a onesie and the cute kittens GIF: Courtesy of Imgur: https://i.imgur.com/REao1zb.jpg Courtesy of SoEpic.net (I assume…) — Attila Vago writer of codes, blogs and things that live on the web. Programming polyglot, pragmatic doer, member of the “taking care of business” crowd, with a no nonsense attitude. An easily inspired inspirational individual with a strong predilection towards most things nerdy, good, carnivorous food, and Lego. Uses a Mac. Exercises at 6 a.m. HackerNoon and Quora author.

Women Can Code: from Dental Technician to Frontend Developer

The quintessential VR racquet-ball simulator, Racket: Nx Ah yes, virtual reality. Bring it up during any regular water-cooler chat, and you may receive a of from your peers. Now, let’s assume that virtual reality interests , otherwise you’d be . wide variety responses you somewhere that isn’t here And if you’re on the fence about jumping into the VR pool, you might be having a few recurring thoughts: What makes than interacting with each other’s digital avatars the way? interacting with each other’s digital avatars in virtual reality cooler old And which virtual reality platform is the ? And ? W ? Are ? Do you need a large playspace, or ?! best what software should you buy hat kind of experiences can you expect there really no “real” games will your cupboard suffice Stop and breathe deeply for a moment. One, two, three, four. Exhale. Better now? Lovely! Fortunately for both of us, this article answers of those dubiously worded questions. , allow me to articulate upon a prime benefit of VR that is _a_nd totally unlikely to cross the mind of anybody who has yet to submit to our c̶u̶l̶t̶ glorious way of living. none Instead super awesome VR slams your favorite HIIT class, any day of the week. I will sing this point to the high heavens . every single chance that I get A 2 hour back-to-back session of Eleven: Table Tennis, Sparc, and Thrill of the Fight in ascending order , with a gym membership I can go weight training while I awkwardly solicit the friendship of other gym-dwellers, and then I can sneak a dip into the hot tub before showering without anybody calling me out!” “But Gabriel , you absolutely can. And I’d never knock anybody for keeping that lifestyle alive. But why would I pay $10 to $20 or for a single interval-training session when doing in VR is 100% aerobics, 100% of the time? Yes more virtually anything Even with the recent attention that VR has received from the media, it doesn’t immediately click with most people (who haven’t played with the platform) that gaming in VR is quite literally the opposite of gaming on a flatscreen. VR has you walking around your room, bending over to pick virtual objects up off your floor, using repetitive arm motions to interact with the environment, bending your hips to throw harder punches, ducking to dodge bullets, dipping or crawling on your floor to crouch. In simple VR apps where physically intense movement isn’t even prioritized, you are STILL burning calories. . Just for wandering around your playspace The result of 2 hours spent playing zero-gravity frisbee in Echo Arena The difference is this: hours spent sitting down. Not to mention that it is to binge on fatty junk food while cozying up in a seat. using VR equates to hours spent standing up and using your body to navigate a living environment vs. significantly easier Notably, it is also much harder to cozy up with when you’re lost in what could totally pass for , a place where you would naturally need both hands free of Cheeto dust. Yknow, in-case you get spooked or something. anything Wes Craven’s vacation home Get to the point already! Alright, fine. Take a long, hard look at apps such as , or , or , or . Tell me that, given the primitive nature of commercial-grade VR in today’s market, we don’t already have a means of disrupting the standard gym model. Thrill of the Fight Holopoint Audioshield Sparc These are all “games” that have you, the player, twisting and shredding your arms and core in order to score points or compete against other players. Sparc could be an actual sport if its lobbies were coded to contain more than 3 other humans at one time. Thrill of the Fight is boxing, but you don’t ever lose teeth or sustain irreversible brain damage ( ). unless you’re younger than age 13 On average, I burn between 650 to 725 calories within roughly an hour spent playing Thrill of the Fight I get it- not all gym experiences are born equally. Some charge more, some charge less. Some charge more for crappy services and some charge less for the best goddang fitness training you’ll find in your life. In my opinion, the best gym is the one that . Period. So why would I choose VR over a membership? fits into your lifestyle Simply put: I’m choosing to boost the marginal utility of my PC. I keep up-to-date because I’m already a PC gamer. And by “gamer,” I mean geek. Which means that I’m speaking with the authority of a geek, to my fellow beloved geeks. I you! my GPU understand With the additional price of $350-$600 for a good , plus the one-time cost of whichever app or game that you’d like to exercise with, you’re set for a full-body workout routine that you’re free to complete from the comfort of your bedroom. For as long as you want, whenever you want. HMD If you add in a set of adjustable ($250-ish on sale) and then you also take advantage of your running shoes and actually , you’ll be covered for years. Unless, of course, your fitness goals call for a . Or your . Bowflex dumbbells with them go running bench set PC blows up In which case, you’re on your own. Conclusion In its current form, VR is taking the time that lazy people, like me, would normally spend being sedentary. And it’s offering a wonderful incentive to be… well, sedentary. not More than that, it’s offering a legitimate method of building fitness in exchange for hours spent gaming. I mean look at this guy, who lost ! Granted, I think that there is . 10 pounds in a week playing Skyrim VR a ton of potential here for the technology to be picked up by pro-athletes And we may eventually see v-sports become a part of the . Using a pair of optical lenses and two “hands,” we can without a hitch. And we may not currently see proliferation of peripherals such as or , but the technology is out there. sports entertainment industry simulate table tennis VR treadmills haptic suits that simulate resistance Before things heat up for VR, however, there needs to be a greater adoption of the existing tech and a . This way, prices on HMDs can feasibly go down and VR-friendly base systems will become more available/accessible/affordable. really hefty boost in market volume Who knows, maybe televised v-sports will become a multi-billion dollar industry by 2030. Or, maybe not. Either way, once VR hits a smartphone-like boom, expect to see the platform develop its athletic capabilities by leaps and bounds. Have you mixed VR into your fitness regimen?

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