Founded by a veterinarian, we are doctor-forward and doctor-led at every level, elevating the clinic experience for pets and people alike. We’re challenging the status quo by prioritizing our team’s happiness and development to create more sustainable and fulfilling veterinary careers. It was critical to us when we founded Bond Vet to keep veterinary professionals in every level of the business. From our veterinarian co-founder Dr. Zay Satchu, to our Medical Operations team of DVMs and LVTs, our experienced team members help to make clinic life better and smoother every day because they’ve been there, too.

Bond Vet

What happened this week in the crypto markets? The Arca Funds Portfolio team discusses reduced volatility in Bitcoin, Ethereum’s fate, and a few positive developments in usage across financial services. Blockchain Should we really be watching the crypto market every second? Every new technology has its ups and downs. However, most of them don’t give you minute-by-minute updates on how the experiment is progressing. Imagine if Thomas Edison was giving you real-time progress updates while inventing the light bulb. As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” The market comes with 24/7 trading and pricing, and a whole slew of media outlets trying to predict its future. Sometimes, it’s best to just have a long-term view and avoid everything else in between. cryptocurrency Okay, but since we’re watching, where’s the volatility? It was actually a relatively calm week, with Bitcoin rising 3% while most other large-cap coins and tokens traded in a fairly tight range (+/- no more than 10%). In fact, much of the daily volume throughout the entire space has been sucked out, with Coinbase down 83% from its January highs. Some of this can be attributed to August, but it’s also a sign of where we are in the technology cycle. Many crypto projects have just gone dark, with numerous ICO’s now down over 90% from all time highs. Bitcoin volatility has been muted recently, holding prices relatively steady to its history. There seems to be a stand still between the bears and bulls, as both parties are fighting hard to hold key levels of resistance/support. trading volume The SEC decision on Bitcoin ETFs One central piece of news has a few holding their breath — the VanEck Bitcoin ETF proposal. Many in the space view a rejection of this proposal as a catalyst to new lows, while an approval would be the eutectic point that turns the market around. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, it was that the SEC rejected a total of 9 ETFs (ProShares, GraniteShares, Direxion), citing a concern of fraud and manipulation in the cryptocurrency markets in general. However, the next day, the SEC stated that they will review the disapproval orders on all of the ETFs, on the grounds that the decision was made by SEC staffers, not senior officials. Encouragingly, the market barely budged on the news, showing a sign of maturity or fatigue. While the Arca teams continues to be , it nevertheless will be a topic of conversation for the foreseeable future. announced outspokenly against a Bitcoin ETF Taking a Long-term View The price of Bitcoin remains at $6700. While some market participants are exhausted waiting for the bull market to return, we feel it is important to recognize that the bull market has, in fact, never left. What we are experiencing is an exponential uptrend, one that traditional finance has yet to see on such an accelerated timeline. When looking at the charts over the last year, it is easy to look at an 8-month snapshot, and focus on the downtrend signaling a significant bear market. However, zoom out, and the thought process shifts towards that of a continuous overall uptrend stemming from as recently as 2016. Bitcoin Price chart — YTD Bitcoin Price chart — Since Inception In this era of unprecedented growth, it is easy to label Bitcoin a ‘bubble’: mass speculation with little adoption. But we stress caution when comparing the digital asset class to that of a traditional financial asset class. In fact, we continue to believe it isn’t an asset class at all, but rather a technological architecture that will support and underpin all asset classes in the future (see the ). World Bank Bond-i bond news As in November, it is important to discuss the difference between their Futures market and that which is currently available (CBOE). Bakkt plans to launch physically backed Futures, whereas the CBOE currently does not offer a physically backed market, instead settling on spot price in US notional currency. What Bakkt offers allows institutional investors to physically purchase Bitcoin-backed Futures. Bakkt gears up to launch their federally regulated market for Bitcoin The ramifications of this on the market are unknown, but seem positive. One potential shortfall could be found in mining Bitcoin. Since Bakkt must back their contracts with physical Bitcoin, a sizable quantity will be removed from circulation. Since these assets will no longer exchange hands, miners will not be able to process transactions on the blockchain and therefore will receive less rewards (denominated in BTC). However, this may bode well for the price of Bitcoin itself, as miners would not mine Bitcoin if it were not a profitable endeavor. Therefore, the price of Bitcoin should equilibrate towards a region of profitability. Is Ethereum still 2nd Banana? In other news, Ethereum had an important on Friday regarding its system wide upgrade in October 2018. Three major points of contention for this call were: developer call difficulty bomb (increasing the difficulty of finding an ETH block) ether issuance (amount of ETH issued) and ASIC resistance. Each one of these points has an immense impact on the future of the Ethereum blockchain — as such, developers, large stakeholders, and miners were all in attendance, with many incompatible viewpoints from each respective party. After two hours of deliberating, it was decided that all members should reconvene on August 31st — we will be listening closely for the outcome of this important meeting. The negative price action of Ethereum and all ERC-20 tokens YTD suggests not just a downturn in crypto sentiment, but perhaps a fundamental move away from this protocol in favor of other platforms. Getting this call right will be one of the key drivers of creating alpha in 2019 and beyond, as ETH is still the 2nd largest cryptocurrency by market cap. For now, when it comes to “app stores”, , and one of the reasons that Ethereum has been viewed as such a promising cryptocurrency and blockchain protocol to date is that no other blockchain has attracted such a large army of developers. That could be changing, but it takes a lot of time, money and focus. Ethereum has been able to attract so many developers largely because Joe Lubin and ConsenSys have educated developers, given them a home, put them to work on practical use cases, and evangelized the decentralized world like crazy. But is ETH really dead? Ethereum is still the leader in the clubhouse For a look at some of the “success” stories built on Ethereum, check out Popular apps such as Metamask ( ), Augur ( ) and IDEX ( ) all post extremely low user bases compared to traditional applications. Arca CIO, Steven McClurg, worked at Electronic Arts Mobile when the iPhone launched in 2007. According to McClurg, “ ”. Despite billions of dollars spent on Ethereum Apps, there have been fewer active users in total than in the first 3 days of Apples iOS launch in July 2008 (10mm downloads). 40 Ethereum Apps You Can Use Right Now. 1 Million+ 43 daily users 1,565 daily users Apps are a commodity. They are only successful when they are properly marketed to the right user base The reason? Many Ethereum apps don’t need a blockchain? They clumsily require their own token to use, damaging User Experience? An extremely slow Ethereum network? Likely all three. For specific information about investing in the 3 private Arca Funds, click here . Notable movers and shakers VeChain (+23%) and WaltonChain (+55%) both finished the week strong as they each announced that they have begun manufacturing RFID chips for beta testing. VeChain is building enterprise-focused IoT systems, whereas WaltonChain aims to tackle retail IoT systems. With production kicking into gear, an exasperated market found a pair of horses to bet on this week. (VET) (WTC) Lisk ( ) gained 28% last week, in anticipation of their mainnet release on August 29th. Lisk, a Javascript based smart contract platform, allows developers to deploy and develop their own blockchain and dApps. LSK Nano finished the week up 68.2% on news that they hired their first official advisor, Andy Woolmer. However, it looks like this was a volume spurred price surge, as daily volume ($100MM+) reached its highest levels since May, surpassing the tepid $7M daily volume of late. (NANO) What we’re reading this week World Bank issues first “blockchain bond” The World Bank has implemented the first full issue of public bonds via smart contracts utilising blockchain technology. As a result, a complete securities lifecycle was carried out using a private Ethereum blockchain — from placement, to the issuer’s performance of its obligations to investors, including settlement. This is the future of blockchain in financial services, and why Arca views Crypto not as an asset class, but as an infrastructure that will ultimately support all other assets classes. More on the Bakkt Bitcoin Futures exchange We mentioned the positive implications of the Bakkt project earlier, but this op-ed from the new CEO of Bakkt goes into more detail regarding physical settlement. Importantly, the new daily Bitcoin contract will not be traded on margin, use leverage, or serve to create a paper claim on a real asset. Deloitte 2018 global blockchain survey The fact that Deloitte is even conducting this survey is reason enough to be bullish on this technology, but the results speak for themselves. “ ” Even though blockchain is rolling out in a more moderated fashion than expected, its adoption remains promising. The view further down the road is an inspiring one. We see blockchain enabling a completely new level of information exchange both within — and across — industries. Problems mixing Bitcoin with traditional Wall Street ingenuity Caitlin Long does a masterful job discussing the difficulty Wall Street will have applying traditional methods of leverage, rehypothecation and margin to Bitcoin and other cryptoassets. While some solutions are easier than others, this is an opportunity for much of the bad practices on Wall Street to be reset via careful thought and planning. Crypto Exchanges Join Winklevoss Backed Self-Regulatory Group Self-regulation and best practices is a positive for the industry dAPPs struggle — takes time to develop Per the Ethereum discussion earlier, it’s easy to see why the pendulum has swung so far negative, as the dAPPs built on Ethereum have just not performed. That said, ? Most of the crypto problems can be traced back to poor UI and UX, which is a solvable problem over time. anyone remember using LinkedIn for the first time in 2003 Arca in the News Crowdfundinsider.com from Arca CIO Steven McClurg regarding the SEC’s decisions on Bitcoin ETF proposals. As Steven eloquently puts it, “Bitcoin was created to decentralize and disintermediate. ETFs are the opposite of that. They centralize and intermediate.” Needless to say, we are not excited about Bitcoin ETFs. published thoughts And That’s Our Two Satoshis! Thanks for reading everyone! Questions or comments, just let us know. - The Arca Portfolio Management Team Steven McClurg — Chief Investment OfficerJeff Dorman — Portfolio Manager / Head TraderSasha Fleyshman — TraderKatie Talati — Head of Research Disclaimer: This commentary is provided as general information only and is in no way intended as investment advice, investment research, a research report or a recommendation. Any decision to invest or take any other action with respect to the securities discussed in this commentary may involve risks not discussed herein and such decisions should not be based solely on the information contained in this document. Statements in this communication may include forward-looking information and/or may be based on various assumptions. The forward-looking statements and other views or opinions expressed herein are made as of the date of this publication. Actual future results or occurrences may differ significantly from those anticipated and there is no guarantee that any particular outcome will come to pass. The statements made herein are subject to change at any time. Arca Funds disclaims any obligation to update or revise any statements or views expressed herein. In considering any performance information included in this commentary, it should be noted that past performance is not a guarantee of future results and there can be no assurance that future results will be realized. Some or all of the information provided herein may be or be based on statements of opinion. In addition, certain information provided herein may be based on third-party sources, which information, although believed to be accurate, has not been independently verified. Arca Funds and/or certain of its affiliates and/or clients hold and may, in the future, hold a financial interest in securities that are the same as or substantially similar to the securities discussed in this commentary. No claims are made as to the profitability of such financial interests, now, in the past or in the future and Arca Funds and/or its clients may sell such financial interests at any time. The information provided herein is not intended to be, nor should it be construed as an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy any securities. This commentary has not been reviewed or approved by any regulatory authority and has been prepared without regard to the individual financial circumstances or objectives of persons who may receive it. The appropriateness of a particular investment or strategy will depend on an investor’s individual circumstances and objectives.

“That’s Our Two Satoshis” — Crypto Market Recap 8/27/18 (BTC, ETH, VET)

Overview: 8 Decimal Capital In 2016, the Bank for International Settlements estimated that the outstanding global bond debt amounted to $127 trillion and SIFMA estimated the U.S. bond market to be around $39 trillion (according to a study conducted by Federated Investors). Vocean is a blockchain company dedicated to building one of the world’s first crypto bond and financial contract marketplaces as a bond management system built on smart contracts instead of traditional intermediaries. The platform encompasses a technologically advanced use-case and provides the components necessary for a robust decentralized financial ecosystem as bond trading on Ethereum will begin in December 2018. Bonds have existed since 2400 BC, with deep roots in our financial system. At a variable or fixed interest rate, bonds are fixed-income investments used by entities (corporations or governments) to raise money and finance a variety of projects for a defined period of time. In 2016, the Bank for International Settlements estimated that the outstanding global bond debt amounted to $127 trillion and the U.S. bond market to be around $39 trillion (according to a study conducted by ). SIFMA estimated Federated Investors , Berkeley’s Vice Mayor, believes that blockchain technology and crypto bonds have the potential to ultimately revolutionize public finance. Ben Bartlett In December 2017, when the Trump administration implemented a tax decrease for corporations, , Berkeley’s Vice Mayor and a strong advocate of the crypto bond, had the idea to use blockchain technology to revolutionize public finance. According to Ben Bartlett: Ben Bartlett “Currently, governmental entities sell their bonds to banks who then resell the bonds to numerous intermediaries before reaching an investor. Each intermediary charges fees and markups. The UC Berkeley Haas Institute estimates that bond issuers lose approximately $4 billion annually as a result of this process. Furthermore, the costs of issuing and administering bonds make it impossible for small investors and regular people to purchase them. As a result, the people are losing out on a major form of wealth building.” In the traditional financial industry, the issuing, trading, book-keeping, and clearing of financial contracts are operated by centralized agencies, such as banks and brokers. Although centralized systems provide trust in the traditional financial ecosystem, their fees remain high with low efficiency. Additionally, there are risks around information asymmetry and leakage, as well as frauds and scams, such as the Enron scandal and Ezubao Ponzi scheme. With blockchain technology, the bond system can finally transition towards a more decentralized method, transforming the over 4,000-year-old system. Smart contracts allow financial contracts to be coded and transactions to be executed in a secure, traceable, and irreversible way without the need of third parties. is a blockchain company dedicated to building one of the world’s first crypto bond and financial contract marketplaces. The marketplace is a bond management system built on smart contracts instead of traditional intermediaries such as brokers, underwriters and clearing houses, reducing transaction costs and increasing market transparency. To ensure scalability, contract matching is handled off-chain while only contract details are recorded on the blockchain, preventing congestion on Vocean’s Blockchain. Group Vocean Bond Issuing and Management on Vocean (Source: ) Vocean’s deck Vocean offers a complete ecosystem to issue and trade bonds and derivatives without centralized agencies. To issue a crypto bond, the steps are as follows: The bond issuer submits a Bond Offering Disclosure (BOD) to the Vocean Ecosystem with all the information necessary for investors to assess the project’s financial health. A credit rating system grades each project to help investors evaluate the project. The Bond Offering Agreement (BOA) is then submitted to the Vocean Ecosystem with all the investment requirements and terms. Vocean’s off-chain Bond Issuing Network (BIN) broadcasts the BOA to its community, in which private negotiation channels can be created between the issuer and bond investors. Once the terms are finalized, an Escrow Management Contract (EMC) is created for investors to sign the BOA and deposit their tokens. Investors can submit their supporting votes by subscribing to certain shares of the bond offering. The voting period ends when the hard cap is reached and all the voting shares are converted to investment shares of the bond. If the voting process fails, the bond issuance is cancelled and the EMC returns all of the voting shares to the voters. The crypto bond is finally issued and settled on the Vocean Blockchain. The crypto bond is managed by the Vocean Interchain Protocol (VIP) through a Bond Management Contract (BMC). To mitigate the investment risks, Vocean also introduces several features such as amortized payment, escrow account, project disclosure, credit rating, fund release based on milestones, etc. Dynamic collateral management is also offered to respond to market price changes with built-in multi-layer safeguards, minimizing counter-party and operational risks. Additionally, Vocean is providing risk hedging tools to help institutional players enter the cryptocurrency system and satisfy their basic needs of risk management and mitigation. Vocean’s team has a strong financial and tech background comprised of Fortune 500 tech companies, research institutions, and financial banking enterprises. Vocean is currently incubated by Biboxlab, an incubator launched by the digital asset exchange Bibox, and Node Capital, a venture capital firm focused on blockchain projects. The team is composed of highly qualified members with years of experiences in equity, fixed income, derivatives and risks management from financial companies such as Morgan Stanley, Citi, and GE Capital. The core technology team also hails from a strong Fintech background working for companies including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bloomberg, as well as leading technology companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and Oracle. Vocean is ready to disrupt the bond and financial ecosystem with blockchain technology. Overall, the platform encompasses a technologically advanced use-case and provides the components necessary for a robust decentralized financial ecosystem. Voicean’s platform encompass a wide range of features, including bond issuance, trading marketplace, hedging infrastructure, credit rating system, dynamic collateral management to risk management. As for timing, Vocean is solving the current lack of fixed income asset derivatives in the cryptocurrency market. Bond trading on Ethereum will start in December 2018, and we are excited to see the transformational changes Vocean can bring to the bond industry. Sources: whitepaper: . Group Vocean https://vocean.io/ deck: . Group Vocean https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vocean.io/docs/voceanpd.pdf . (Aug. 2018). “Story About Crypto Bonds.” . Retrieved November 12, 2018 from the TwoGap Medium Publication: . Luong Hoang Anh TwoGap https://medium.com/twogap/story-about-crypto-bonds-68edf4deabf7 Investopedia. (2018). “Bond.” INVESTOPEDIA. Retrieved November 12, 2018 from Investopedia: . https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bond.asp Knowledge Center. (2018). “5 Bond Market Facts You Need to Know.” . Retrieved November 12, 2018 from The Motley Fool: . The Motley Fool The Motley Fool https://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/5-bond-market-facts-you-need-to-know.aspx . (May 2018). “Ben Bartlett on Tokenizing Municipal Bonds to Fund Community Impact Projects in Berkeley.” . Retrieved November 12, 2018 from Medium: . Sarah Brooks Medium https://medium.com/@sarah_brooks/last-night-ben-bartlett-berkeley-vice-mayor-gave-an-inspiring-talk-at-crypto-underground-on-how-8781792499f8 . (April 2018). “The Smart Path: Solving for Zero Assets with Blockchain Technology.” . Retrieved November 12, 2018 from Hackernoon: . Ben Bartlett Hackernoon https://hackernoon.com/the-smart-path-solving-for-zero-assets-with-blockchain-technology-566ece753da0 Federated Investors. (May 2017). “Infographic: The Bond Market.” Federated. Retrieved November 12, 2018 from Federated Investors: . http://www.federatedinvestors.com/FII/daf/pdf/G45692-06_2017.pdf 8 Decimal Capital: Shape the Blockchain Future | | | | Medium LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Website Email: contact@8dcapital.com if you have any more questions about this topic. 8 DECIMAL CAPITAL is a multi-strategy investment firm focusing on token and equity investments. 8 Decimal currently has more than 40 portfolio companies with an AUM of 60M USD. The investment team consists of more than 10 venture capital veterans, researchers, and trading professionals. The advisory board comprises Fan Zhang (Former Founding Partner of Sequoia Capital China), Karen Chen (Former CEO of UBS China) and Ben Bartlett (Vice Mayor of Berkeley). Based on the professional fund index ranking agency Token Metrics , 8 Decimal was ranked second out of the 51 active crypto funds. 8 Decimal is also well-received in China, named one of the top 10 funds in the blockchain industry by both 36氪（36Kr.com） , Chain Capture , and Odaily , as well as named one of the top 20 funds by Tsinghua X-Lab and Youth Education Chain League.

Vocean Is Introducing a Crypto Bond — Disintermediating the Four Thousand Year Old Centralized…

It started with the Slack channel aptly named “wtf”. Jamal stared at his screen, perplexed by the convoluted SQL query he was trying to decipher. he typed into the channel, pasting the 800-line query. The query twisted and turned, joining tables in a mind-bending maze. He could imagine a big red button, warning “Do Not Touch!” The team used the “wtf” channel to bond over the legacy code they had inherited. It contained years of contributions from countless developers, many of whom were lost to the sands of time. The codebase was the nucleus of the company, but sometimes it felt like an artifact from the Jurassic period. ”Hey @channel, what in the actual f*** is this mess?” Ayse chimed in instantly. “Ugh, that part of the code is the stuff of nightmares. Let’s just say Vladimir was ‘creative’ with his use of SQL and ORM libraries.” Jamal smiled. Ayse always managed to say what everyone was thinking. The two of them had bonded over their mutual hatred of Vladimir’s legacy code in the past. He quickly typed a reply, “I’m so down. Want to team up on Operation: Vladimir’s Revenge?” Ayse responded with a gif of Rosie the Riveter flexing her muscles. “Let’s do this!” “I know that area of the code has gotten out of hand. Vlad’s libraries were state-of-the-art back in the day, but modern ORMs would make this so much cleaner. It’s well past due for a refresh,” added Shirley, their tech lead. Ayse and Jamal volunteered eagerly to lead the migration to a modern ORM. As the resident SQL experts, they dove into researching options. “Sequelize is way too bloated! We need something lightweight like Knex,” argued Ayse. Jamal shook his head. “But Sequelize has way better documentation and support. We’d be shooting ourselves in the foot not to use it!” Back and forth they went, each arguing passionately for their preferred tool. But finally they reached an agreement - for this massive undertaking, Sequelize’s popularity tipped the scales. They dove into the work, heads down, squashing bug after bug. The next step was mapping out just how deep the Vladimir mess went. Ayse and Jamal worked late into the night, tracing dependencies, untangling convoluted logic, and building a checklist. When they finally compared notes, their eyes widened in disbelief. “86 files? Seriously?” Jamal groaned. But their resolve only strengthened. They would be heroes who slew the Vladimir dragon and rescued the codebase from its own cruelties. Over the next month, Jamal and Ayse carefully executed the plan. Their Slack banter kept the mood light even when they encountered gnarly tangles of code. The work was meticulous, but they kept chipping away. Ever since Vladimir had left the company years ago, his clunky home-brewed ORM had languished, accruing technical debt like layers of dust. Finally the day arrived. Jamal took a deep breath and clicked “Open Pull Request”, merging hundreds of commits into one massive change. Ayse gave him a high-five. “This is it - the moment we’ve been waiting for!” The PR linked to their checklist, now fully green. Shirley felt uneasy reviewing such a massive PR. As the tech lead, she knew it was her responsibility. But each time Ayse and Jamal presented it, she found an excuse to postpone. “Let me review it over the weekend,” she would say, or “I need another day to properly vet this much code change.” Deep down, Shirley feared something might slip through the cracks in their refactor. The PR loomed over her like a ominous storm cloud that she couldn’t bring herself to confront just yet. They decided to have the team review the PR thoroughly before merging to production. Smaller changes were cherry-picked so progress wouldn’t stall entirely. The next few weeks were a flurry of comments, reviews and re-reviews. Merge conflicts flooded the “wtf” channel as other team members integrated their work. Jamal and Ayse patiently rebased, squashing bugs as they went. Finally, it was time for the big merge. On Friday afternoon, they all gathered around Shirley’s computer for the climactic moment. With a deep breath and closed eyes, she clicked merge. They all stared, waiting for the green checkmark of success. Finally, it flashed onto the screen. “Huzzah!” cheered Ayse and Jamal, exchange a high-five. They were giddy with excitement to see their work go live. But just twenty minutes later, the PagerDuty alerts started dripping in. Ayse and Jamal stared at their phones, smiles fading. “No no no, this can’t be happening,” Ayse said, frantically scrolling through the alerts. Errors were cascading through the system. Their faces turned ghostly white. They rushed back to the office, hearts racing faster than their cars. Jamal sprinted to his computer, pulling up dashboards. Errors everywhere.”How did this happen? It was working perfectly!” Ayse said, fists clenched. They worked feverishly through the night, reverting code deploys, digging into log files. Reverting such a massive change that touched so many parts of the codebase turned out to be an even greater challenge than they anticipated. Simply rolling back the merge didn’t undo all the downstream effects of the refactor. Jamal and Ayse worked through the weekend trying to unravel the complex knot of code. But with each file they reverted, new bugs seemed to emerge. Key parts of the system no longer functioned as expected. They raced to push out fixes while also trying to rollback their work, but it was like trying to unbake a cake. By Monday morning, they were exhausted and no closer to resolving the issues. The codebase was now in an even more fragile state. After an emergency meeting, the team made the difficult call to pause all new feature work and rally everyone to help “unmerge” the refactor. It took two entire days of around-the-clock debugging to roll it back fully and restore stability. As they combed through logs and code, Jamal had an idea. “What if we search for all conditional usages of the ORM and see if any were missed?” He searched for all conditions used across the codebase. Most looked syntactically correct. But then Ayse spotted one without a space after the if. “Wait, show me that one again,” she said. Jamal pulled it up and her eyes widened. “Of course, our regex is looking for if followed by a space. But it’s valid JavaScript to omit that space.” They dove into the specific file and saw the problem immediately. That single if statement without a space had been overlooked in their rewrite. And because it was calling an important validation function, its error was cascading downstream. The offending regex was tamed and submitted back into the codebase. With the bug now fixed, Jamal excitedly opened a new pull request to merge their changes. However, Shirley was still hesitant to approve it. “I know you both worked really hard on this, but I’m just not confident enough yet to merge it,” she said. “As annoying as it is, another bug could still be hiding somewhere. Perhaps we should put this pull request on hold for now and turn our attention to other priorities. We can revisit it again in a few sprints after some of the pressure has eased off this feature.” Jamal pulled out his phone with a sigh as he and Ayse closed the unfinished pull request. “Welp, I suppose it’s time to memorialize this bug fix that will never be,” he said wryly. He opened the team’s “wtf” channel and typed out: “#wtf guys, I think we just found THE bug to end all bugs in Vladimir’s code. Took us weeks to track down but we’ve got a 100% fix. Too bad it will now live in purgatory forever thanks to bureaucracy! This one’s going down in history as the most perfectly solved yet completely undispatchable issue ever. You’re welcome future developers!” [Next part of the series: Killing One Bug with Two Stones]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Technical Debt

Vitiligo 

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सफेद दाग

白斑

bệnh bạch biến

白癜风

I’ll not deny it. I love being in a physical office with coworkers. I love being around people with the same objectives and challenges. It gives me strength and motivation. When we started , Weverton and I worked apart (São Paulo and Florianópolis). And we decided to have a fully remote company. SourceLevel A few months later and now everybody in tech works remotely. Some CTOs I’ve been talking to has asked me how I’ve been managing my team. The truth is, I’m still learning how to do it, but here are some takes and learnings I had. Daily meetings as team-building I’ve been using daily meetings more as a way to bond over an objective than to follow the usual (and outdated) guidelines to answer what you’ve done and what roadblocks you’ve encountered. Since the daily meeting is usually the only opportunity to see and talk to them for the day, I don’t mind talking a little bit about how’s your day been going, how you’re dealing with COVID and isolation and what happened after you took your pet to the vet the day before. I know it may be oversharing and too personal, but a working environment is made of people, and people like to bond. People tend to delay asking for help, including myself In a physical office, it’s easier for me to see if someone is struggling with something. Usually, because that person will be vocal about it. 🙂 Going remote, the same person will be more prone to bash and try to finish the task by themself. Even if asking something over Slack or over a call could solve the issue in less than 5 minutes. That happens a lot to me. Make sure people start to notice this behavior and ask for help! Have a all-hands on Fridays if you have a small team I like to finish a week with a call with everyone. It’s is the chance to see people from other teams and talk about what they accomplished that week and how they are feeling, on a work or personal level. I especially like the feeling that “we’re not alone” that this meeting brings. Teams should have a goal+retrospective+metrics meeting every week Usually, on Mondays, each team gather and discuss their plan for the week: What did we accomplish last week?Which deliveries will be done this week?What needs to be decided by next week?Do we need help from someone else? It’s essential to have a checklist and write down what was discussed. Next week, you’ll be able to have a mini-retrospective on what happened and what to improve. Also, this meeting works to build a shared understanding of the objectives and a common goal. It’s not a list of tasks to be done by yourself. It’s a team effort, and everyone is committed to it. It’s also incredibly useful to have metrics to discuss. It’ll guide you on where to improve next. Which metrics you need will depend on the purpose of the team. Respect some time off. It’s not an issue Everyone’s working from home. And there’s a lot of distractions that will happen. Deliveries from post mail services, dogs barking, the electricity failed (happened to me more than once). And, of course, getting a coffee or snacks. In an office, it’s easy to spot that you’re not there at the computer. Not remotely. Don’t expect people to reply to a message immediately. For that matter, I even suggest that people disable notifications from every app. Don’t worry. People will get back to you. Be always open for a quick video call I still prefer to have a 5-minute video call than to have a lengthy and truncated message exchange, especially if it involves more than two people. Be ready for a quick video call. I suggest using (even Zoom allows to call a contact without a scheduled meeting). Whereby.com And as a manager, be open that people can “interrupt” your work whenever they want. For me, you don’t even need to message me first. Keep that distance short! What about you? Well, those are my tips that have been working for my team and me. Since SourceLevel is a Brazilian team, we’re a . It may not work as well for low-context organizations, which may prefer asynchronous and more isolated tasks. high-context team Also, check my . top 10 tools that I use to run my startup Do you think you can apply those tips? What works for your (now) remote team?

Time Off Isn't An Issue: The Key Practices Helping Me Lead Remotely Right Now

Multiple times a day, the President of the United States types a thought into his phone, my pocket buzzes, and I read his message. I don’t watch the news anymore. On TV we get perspective on the white house in the form of a few selected clips from a longer press conference, where someone (who at some point spoke to the president about talking points) gives evasive answers to leading questions from journalists, which are then re-cut and heavily editorialized by major news networks (before being replayed 4 times an hour for 24 hours). I get a direct, disintermediated line to the president. In fact we all have a direct, disintermediated line to anyone who has a twitter account. This more heavily interconnected substrate of information-sharing networks has changed the incentive structure around the media business and deteriorated the integrity of the press. Our information may no longer be mediated through a few select media outlets, but it is still filtered through the mass decisions around sharing and not sharing within information networks. In the much flatter, more open information sharing network that now exists between humans through social media, building up long term institutional credibility and heavily investing in reputation over years is not the best approach to propagating information. An institution like the New York Times could have 10 million subscribers, but if a brand new dotcom publication with 5,000 subscribers created an article that effectively convinced readers to share it (retweet, post, etc.) it could surpass the reach of the NYT and make more money from advertisements. What does propagation through these networks select for? Among other variables it selects for intensity of emotional and moral language, as well as affirmation of political perspectives within a network. The below is a visualization and description from an NYU study: Link to Source ( ) here People tending to follow and retweet others with similar political views is a known phenomenon, and one that should have been anticipated as information sharing became more flat. If presented with 10 possible narratives around a news event, the average person doesn’t have time to vet each one of those articles. Instead, known cognitive biases (in this case confirmation bias) will have an influence over which one they read. And then the impact of that bias becomes magnified when they retweet just that one article to their politically like-minded sub-network. The distinct importance of the above study is that this network environment rewards not just political alignment, but also strength of moral or emotional language (each use of a stronger moral or emotional word increasing re-sharing by 20%): this means that the cumulative biases of re-sharing nodes in the social media news network produce not only echo-chambers, but also increasing polarization of narratives. Many of us only encounter overstated affirmations of our own political predispositions. To return to the original example of the NYT versus a new dotcom news source — if the dotcom news source caters shamelessly to a particular political perspective and uses extreme moral and emotional register, it will likely succeed more in this substrate information network than the NYT will. What we consider “good” journalism is less fit for survival in this environment. On the positive side, a more interconnected, flat, open information sharing network makes it more difficult for a single node that has massive betweenness and centrality to create a single false narrative (meaning a state controlled universal propaganda machine is difficult). On the other hand, a system with only 5 news channels only needed to inculcate a small population of journalists in major institutions with journalistic integrity to maintain a proud, honest, and effective press. This more open and equal information sharing environment may actually create negative societal consequences. Many of us are exposed to false narratives that are all the more insidious because they have become adapted specifically to our own biases through this systematic selection mechanism. Even putting outright false reporting aside, this environment rewards reporting that is “false-ish”. Ad-hominem attacks rather than nuanced discussion of ideas appeal more easily to more people. Selective representation and mischaracterization without outright lying can allow a journalist to more effectively cater to an audience. As an example, in the NYT profile piece on Jordan Peterson, author Nellie Bowles takes a comment Jordan Peterson makes about “enforced monogamy” (a phrase used academically to describe social conventions that encourage monogamous pairings), and characterizes it as “…interventions that would redistribute sex” ( ). here It’s difficult to know if this was a mistake or intentionally misleading, but it’s easy to understand that ‘suddenly famous Canadian psychologist wants to forcefully redistribute sex’ is going to get a whole lot of re-sharing from folks whose political perspective makes his demonization appealing. This choice, which many would consider either dishonest or a journalistic error, no doubt improved the reach of this article (and this article is riddled with similar tactical decisions). The decision may seem wrong at first blush, but it is the “right” decision in that it makes the article more fit (or effective) in the current media environment (and incentive structure). Condemnation by association, particularly in environments where exchanges take place in a public forum and expose both parties to third-party heckling, allows for an impassioned and vilifying response to a public disagreement without the other person in the debate doing anything wrong whatsoever, and without engaging with the content of their points. For example, in Erin Baba’s (Daily Beast) response piece to a twitter spat with Elon Musk ( ), she accuses him of attacking journalism and science. He, having recently launched a rocket into space and landed the engines back onto earth, vertically, contends that he has not attacked science — but does protest misleading journalism. Then, this paragraph appears in her response article: here “Now, we can argue semantics here. Did he actually attack science? Is a tweet actually journalism? Has he ever even read any of the articles I’ve written? Honestly, none of that really matters. What matters is that the aftermath of Musk’s tweet essentially proved my entire point. Because before he commented on my tweet, it was floundering in relative obscurity. Let’s be honest, I’m a pretty small-bananas science journalist with a medium-size following. But after Musk replied, my mentions descended into madness.” (again, ) here This is a journalist saying that the accuracy of the truth claims made on each side of a disagreement don’t matter, what matters is that a bunch of random other people on the internet also had opinions (which in some way demonstrates the villainous nature of her opponent). Then, most of the rest of her article is screenshots of random people’s comments, tweets, or messages. These tactics may get clicks, but they undermine the credibility of the writers’ entire profession. What’s worse is that the great press institutions like the NYT are adapting to survive by compromising journalistic integrity and becoming more click-baity, more shamelessly partisan, and less reliable in quality (perhaps because other, new, news sources are making more money and snatching up some of the more talented journalists). Journalism like this is more suited to survive in today’s environment, however it precludes the press from effectively fulfilling the higher role they once had in society — empowering the masses with truth, sitting apart from politics while identifying the flaws of political narratives. Journalists haven’t suddenly lost journalistic integrity, or been generationally replaced by lower caliber writers: technology changed the substrate of information flow, and a more interconnected network changed the incentive structure around journalism, which changed journalism. And now as people re-discover a desire for reliable information and perspective, even turning back to the legacy institutions that were once credible they find something that is sometimes indistinguishable from the shameless pandering of clickbait sites. Interestingly, new forms of media are beginning to fill that market gap: podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience ( ) that have longer-form discussion (or in other podcasts’ cases, longer-form reporting) are gaining followings that are competitive with major news networks. CNN has around 866k viewers a day (in Q1 2017: Fox 1.72m, MSNBC 781k… ) and JRE varies regularly from around 600k to 1.5m views on YouTube alone per episode — significantly more if you include other mediums like apple’s podcast app. JRE here Going forward, audience demographic difference will probably reinforce the trend away from cable news toward podcasts: the median age for a CNN watcher is 60 and for Fox and MSNBC the median age is 66 (according to Nielsen Live ). here Perhaps the shift to long form podcasts has to do with the decaying ability to trust institutions being substituted with trusting a person whose perspective you grow to appreciate through extensive exposure. And, in the podcast world, the individual often has more or less complete control over the production rather than being subordinated to a larger institution or network. Obviously, there are both positive aspects and dangers to the news audience putting their trust in individual podcasters. We have yet to see how this plays out. All of this begs the question of how to best operate in today’s media environment, here are a few thoughts (please share any ideas to add to this list in the comments): Read books, favoring books that have withstood the test of timeIntentionally seek out perspectives that contradict your own: follow people you disagree with Remember, most of what you read is crap The thing that everyone is talking about is not normally the most important thing that’s happening Listen to podcasts Be wary of believing something either because you want it to be true or you fear it is true Surround yourself with people who are capable of arguing in good faith I’ve had a strong aversion to engage even in writing medium posts because I don’t think that the public forum of our generation (the internet) allows for the kinds of dialogues that I am interested in. We must leave space for intelligent people to entertain and articulate ideas without endorsing them. We must leave space for the discussion of ideas without ad hominem attacks. We must engage in debate with the intention of seeking truth, not victory. And we must reform the bond of trust that allows us to believe all of those things about those with whom we disagree so that we can respond to a disagreement with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

The Disintermediation of the Media: How Bad Journalism Came To Be And Why It Persists

The retail investor does have an advantage in the capital markets — but it isn’t agility and it isn’t localized expertise One of the most frequently asked questions I get in providing research and consulting to retail capital market participants [i.e. “retail investors” or “mom and pop” investors] is, “ ”. The answer is “yes”; but it isn’t what most expect it to be. Most expect it to be agility — the ability to buy and sell quickly because of a lack of scale; or localized expertise — that because of lack of scale the retail investor can take concentrated positions in market sectors or specific companies in which they have an “expertise”-advantage [e.g. a medtech salesman investing in medtech, etc.]. Neither are really the case of the retail investor’s advantage. what is our advantage — does the little guy have any advantage in playing this game? First, despite the trading prowess of some retail investors [and some do in fact have the gift of “reading the charts”] most fail to outperform “the market” by trying to time the market [without listing any specific statistics or sources — a simple Google search and 15 minutes time will prove this out]. This is, at this point, just a well accepted “fact” of capital markets. So, without spending much more time on it, agility has effectively on the performance of retail investors. Again, I encourage those reading this to vet this out via third-party data [as I’m confident you’ll find that this is an accepted fact in the capital markets]. zero benefit But what of localized expertise? Well, being an expert in a field or market vertical can be helpful or even advantageous to a certain degree — no doubt; but often this operational-level expertise doesn’t translate to the capital structure level or to the capital market level. For instance, being an expert rig hand [on an oil or natural gas rig] might provide an expertise into the operations of an oil or natural gas company; but, as we’ve seen over the last few years in the Energy Complex, operations can and often are well-overwhelmed by the capital structure. Plenty of excellent oil and natural gas operations have been forced to restructure via Chapter 11 bankruptcy because of capital structure flaws. This is despite having fine [or even superb] operations. The dislocation, in this example, of believing that the operations of a company are perfectly correlated with the financial health of a company can lead to catastrophic outcomes for investors [especially those with localized expertise]. Thinking, because of localized expertise, “we can’t go into bankruptcy because we’re an excellent operation” can lead to catastrophe. In some cases, cases where an investor doesn’t realize what they “don’t know”, localized expertise can be a net-negative. [A quick backward-look at most Social Finance platforms and/or message boards will show examples of this “net-negative being described]. But if the retail investor isn’t advantaged in agility or localized expertise, what exactly is the retail investor’s advantage? Pain tolerance. Really, that’s it; or, put a bit more softly, leveraging structural constraints that are in place for larger entities that are NOT in place for smaller entities [e.g. the retail investor]. Really, this is it folks. Without writing a full dissertation, I’ll give an example that recently made a lot of sense as a research and consulting breakout via the ATLAS platform. [To be clear, we’re not the only shop providing research and consulting services to retail investors and we’re not the only shop leveraging the retail advantage to the max utility]. We recently provided research and consulting on an energy debt issue [a bond] that had fallen from being priced at over 100 cents on the dollar to being priced at 7 cents on the dollar. The bond had fallen in pricing because of [1] commodity volatility and [2] a lack of visibility at the underlying company into forward looking viability. Put simply, the underlying company [obligated to pay the interest on the bond and obligated to repay the initial investment into the bond at the bonds maturity] was sick; . But, we didn’t think the company [and by way of that the bond] was 7 cents on the dollar sick [for many reasons that we can’t outline here nor would you want to read that dissertation in its entirety]. very, very sick How or why would this bond, if it wasn’t as destined for doom as the price was implying, trade to this level? Wouldn’t other investors step in and buy the bond as it reached “fair pricing”? Why would the investors holding the bond in the first place sell at “unfair” or “inefficient pricing”? The answer to all of the above [among other things] is . structural constraints Most of the holders of this particular bond were midsize to larger size mutual funds, broker-directed accounts, etc. All of these, in this particular instance, had risk-management policies in place that forced selling of debt at certain price points. All of these, in this particular instance, also had risk-management policies in place that prohibited buying of debt trading at or below a certain price point [which limited the buyside activity and embellished the sellside activity]. Why are these risk-management structural constraints in place if they’re so inefficient? Because usually they aren’t; usually a bonds trading price is reliably indicative of the underlying firms viability [READ: the company responsible for maintaining the obligation]. Usually these structural constraints work as intended. Usually. But, not always. That’s where the retail investor has its advantage. In being able to pick through certain and bonds which have overshot the “efficient” price landing because of accelerated/exacerbated selloffs driven primarily [or at least secondarily] by structural constraints. Leveraging this “domino effect” inefficiency [in pricing] to max utility is a huge advantage of the retail investor. stocks Remember, the retail investor is responsible for of his or her own investing successes and failures. There is zero risk-management governance on the retail investor. Put another way, the retail investor has full optionality as to how to invest, when to invest, and at what allocation; and that’s hugely powerful. For me, this is the one quantifiable, uniform advantage of the retail investor. The single advantage that translates across the entire investor base as a class. Again, I think it’s hugely powerful as well. all Now, the retail investor is still tasked with either individually assessing each opportunities inefficiency OR paying somebody/something to assess each opportunity for it — but, again, this is at least an option; picking through the “bin” of investments that the larger entities [in successive fashion] can’t pick through. Regarding the bond used in our example, we ended up dialing in a cost basis below 10 cents on the dollar [an average pricing]; and the bond now trades into the mid-$90s [not inclusive of the well over 100% annual yield we’re owed on the bond — just for holding the paper]. The facts are that the retail investor is largely disadvantaged in the capital markets; these are just the facts. We can all try to “just make it up” that we aren’t, but we are. I think more retail investors should consider [risk-adjusted for their own personal use cases] leveraging in-market structural constraints in trying to maximize the utility of each dollar and of each risk unit assigned to their wealth. The hope is that this note leads to much deeper research by the reader and, maybe, ultimately experimentation with some degree of leveraging the advantage. Good luck everybody.

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