We provide the Booking Ninjas application, a powerful PMS + CRM platform to meet specific needs of business organizations in the hospitality industry

Booking Ninjas

A not-so-simple question Dear software makers, What are we? Are we , who, , explore “the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness?” hackers in the words of Richard Stallman Are we who, , “are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft?” craftsmen, in the words of the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto Are we , j , or ? ninjas edis , gurus rock stars Stereotypes and Caricatures Personally, I wouldn’t want any of these titles, and I’m troubled that anyone would want to glamorize what we do with terms like I certainly don’t see anyone here where I work wearing leather pants and thrusting their hips toward a screaming audience (nor would I want to!). rock star. I’m somewhat fond of a caricature I grew up with, which was something like a pedantic, bearded, and pony-tailed dungeon master, similar to Comic Book Guy in — but that’s not something I see around either. It’s a stereotype, probably an old one, and it probably never reflected the truth. The Simpsons What exactly, then, defines those who make software? Doing Rather Than Being My experience is that the most defining characteristic of software creators is that we’re doers who want to solve real problems. Why create a wrench when there’s no bolt to turn? Why assemble the bolts and brackets and other parts, if the result doesn’t make life better for someone? A practical outcome, that’s what we’re after. Every day that I go to work, I want to write code that has a result. It could be calculating a statistic, delivering a message, booking a trip, paying a bill, or any one of a million things. But the essence of building software —the purpose, the motivation, the heart of it—is in the end goal. Without a final outcome, the activity of making software would cease to have any meaning. It would be the most dissatisfying experience in the world. What if we’re “engineers?” Now, in my opinion, that’s the definition of an Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University, has said, “science is about knowing, engineering is about doing.” What better description could there be of the heart and blood pumping through the software engineer than that? engineer. Doers are engineers. Science is about knowing, engineering is about doing. ~Henry Petroski Engineers are doers, with a caveat Engineers are doers, but with an important distinction. We’re not designers and we’re not mad scientists. We’re not, for example, the crackpot scientist Doc Brown from who is always running around imperiling space-time. Back to the Future As fun as Doc Brown is to watch, we wouldn’t want to be known as dangerous people. But, to get real world results from software, we do have to know something about the real world and that’s also embedded in the idea of engineering. Often, what we need to know to accomplish some task is knowledge that’s already available, if it would only be applied. In other words, the fastest and best way to achieve a result is to take what’s there and put it in action. How it all goes wrong The flip side is also true. Disregarding existing knowledge often results in disaster. A building constructed without sound engineering practices collapses to the ground. So as we work on the problems in front of us, we likely have a dozen real-world considerations flooding in at any moment, threatening to derail our efforts. Our only comfort will be that we’re aware of them and mitigate their impact. Take a normal, everyday business example: crunching some statistics for the visits to a website over the day‘s “peak hours” of 5am to 7pm. To even select the right data in the first place, we have to have knowledge of which time zone ( ) and time format ( ) the database uses. UTC ISO-8601 Even then, our effort may be thwarted entirely by a simple oversight. Although the times in the database are in UTC, “peak hours” happen in pacific time, which means they vary depending on whether its daylight savings time or not. When pacific daylight time is in observation, peak hours fall across one range in UTC (12pm to 2am) and across another (1pm to 3am) when pacific standard time is in observation. We’d need to take into account which time zone is actually in effect for the day in question, if we want to be correct. Knowing the body of knowledge that’s been gathered about the real world and then applying it through software, is therefore key to doing anything with software. This is why I have one burning message for programmers right now: Put the engineering back in software engineering What I mean is: become familiar with any science or mathematics that impacts your particular software domain. Not just computer science! Know any relevant statistics, physics, biology, meteorology, chemistry, geology, or psychology. Keep references near at hand. Make no assumptions and don’t pioneer your own path where good paths already exist. Know and follow standards. Seek out the tried and the true. The physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson once said, A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. These two guiding principles: knowing accepted science and applying already-existing, stable solutions wherever possible, will allow us to do more good for the world.

Put the engineering back in software engineering

Greetings and happy Thursday from your buddy Shane at Shells.com!  For those that missed my first installment of Ethical Hacking 101 -- start and then come on back here for part 2! there Now that you’ve got your White Hat on and have an understanding of the tools necessary for your role -- let’s dig deeper into other aspects of Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing.  In this installment -- we’ll go through the mindset you’ll need to have to be an Ethical Hacker, entry points to your systems that bad guys target, and preventative measures you can take to avoid disaster. Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testings: The cooler name for the effort associated with both of those terms is “The Red Team.” From Wikipedia: A red team is a group that plays the role of an enemy or competitor, and provides security feedback from that perspective. Red teams are used in many fields, especially in cybersecurity, airport security, the military, and intelligence agencies. The rule of the internet and its wildness is: there are no rules.  Nothing contained in your website code is off-limits.  People will find every bug in your system and have at it -- cracking your user databases and finding exploits in your payment systems are a few of the many targets that will be attacked. The villains of the internet are the epitome of Murphy’s Law. “If you make it, they will destroy it” -- Hmm, I guess now this is Shane’s Law, because I’ve made things and those internet ninjas came to destroy it. With this in mind, it’s always good to build your products and systems and thoroughly test them. Think how a ‘Hacker’ would and try to exploit your own setups, or learn from other exploits on the internet and patch your system on the fly. While you’re building it, you should be thinking, “how can I destroy this?”, so that you can prevent any future problems with your product. It’s a full-time practice, which extends to a lot of positions For most, having the time requirements to be a full-time security consultant for your own firm is taxing, exhausting, and sometimes soul-sucking. Have you ever battled a thirteen-year-old with a vendetta, 30,000 hacked computers at his disposal, AND he’s probably smarter than your IT team? If you ever run into him, make sure you win.  Fight the good fight on the internet with us as an Ethical Hacker.  Patch the exploits and loopholes hackers use to destroy our networks and products. Those 13-year-old script kiddies are resilient. I know, I use to be one. But back then it was different, we would take over chatrooms by using social manipulation tactics and scripts to flood people offline. Sometimes, my group of childhood hacker friends would hold websites hostage; and for nothing at all. Just sport. Ethical Hacking/Penetration Testing and its Benefits It should be known to you now that testing how far you can get into/mess with/break a system is ideal. We should be doing this for all of our networks, servers, products, or have somebody on the team to do so for us. Why? Because if we don’t, they will.  And THEY may not be Ethical, or THEY may be a robot designed to auto-infiltrate your systems. Finding any holes in your security and patching them (especially for newer products) is essential and usually pushed onto the Quality Assurance team and DevOps engineers to find. While there is no one solution or one way to go about testing and securing your setups, there are common ones that can be accessed through poorly written code on websites. Entry points can come from: Database (SQL) - Some software has bugs in it, or are just poorly written. Your database is your gold. See this xkcd. WordPress - If configured incorrectly, users can brute force your website.com/wplogin page. It’s usually wise to change your default login page to something like back-office, this can be done by installing a WordPress module. It’s also good practice to keep your WordPress up to date, using as little modules as you can. If one module gets hacked, your whole site does. WebServers (apache, nginx, nodejs ws, python ws) - Three words: Run. Trusted. Code. PHP Code - PHP is the most popular web development code. Remember, obscurity is not real security, so if you have spaghetti code, really consider re-writing it. Attackers may find something within your system that causes a certain reaction, which can lead them on to other vulnerabilities and nuisances. Be Ahead of the Curve Subscribing to useful security update websites based on the software you run is a good choice. With things such as WordPress having add-ons that can be hacked, it’s best to keep things to a minimum.  Just browsing Hacker News, or a popular one: Daniel’s Blog I for one get most of my security updates live on Internet Relay Chat (irc.shells.net #nerds) where the hacker scene is still booming. Being on the lookout for tactics used in the field. The weakest point of any system will always be “ .” Be strict and confidential. The Human Hackers are always finding new ways and tactics to get into systems. If you’ve done your job securing your system, your job isn’t done yet, as they’ll move on to social engineering. This is prevalent in many fields such as CryptoCurrency exchanges.  Hackers attempt to manipulate employees by pretending to be other employees to gain access to any of the systems, and from there plot new attacks. Simply spoofing a phone number and adding it to a group chat is a tactic one could use to gain access. For example, you’re now added to a group chat on your phone, you see a text coming in from your CEO and a few other members are there. Since the hacker can’t read text messages sent to that number, they have another copy of themselves in the group chat to be able to read replies and send new texts as the spoofed number. A simple “Hey, I’m out of town can you give X Access to Y?” and it goes from there. Maybe the e-mail address looks just like your boss’ email address? and at a glance it looks legit, but looking harder you realize it’s and you just submitted your quarterly reports to it. name@Microsoft.com name@Micvosoft.com Damn. That would suck, and it happens all the time. Closing part 2 of Ethical Hacking 101:  It’s simply the Good vs the Bad.  The only way to win is to be pre-emptive. By Shane Britt, Shells.com

Ethical Hacking 101: Part 2

At Hacker Noon, the first version of . we released on demand video calls with tech experts A big thank you to this first wave of tech experts! Anyone can learn something new today by ! booking a call with one of these smart people below Also, if you'd like to join the marketplace, invites are rolling, . here is the form Here is the first group of : Hacker Noon Experts Aazar Ali Shad Growth Marketing. I help startups with their growth marketing with all channels. Adrian Goins I connect dots. I comprehend data quickly and can explain complex subjects in common language. Adrian Raudaschl Product Manager, Physician, Academia, Healthcare, and Medicine. Alex Berke MIT Media Lab PhD student. Work experience: Google Search software engineer on news credibility projects, maker of election tech;  and publisher of "Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book About Math." Afroz Chakure Final year B.Tech - Computer Science and Engineering @ MIT-WPU, Pune Akash Joshi Building, Writing, Programming. React, JS and Python expertise along with early-stage startup experience. Al Chen Taught Excel to 30,000+ people. I blog and podcast about spreadsheets and data analysis. Have been teaching Excel for 8+ years. Amanda McGlothlin User Experience Expert. 15 years+ experience working with startups and brands including Nike, Belkin, Audi, Google, Pearson, Allstate, and Cisco. Anthony Watson Dinosaurs Can Code! I have been a brain for hire for over three decades mostly without any degree, so I must be able to code to get paid! Ax Sharma Security Researcher. Open source software, vulnerability assessment and disclosure, reverse engineering, threat hunting. Branislav Đalić Philosopher of code. CTO of ML startup, open-source contributor, threat analyst, educator. Bernard Moon Global VC Investor. Experienced startup entrepreneur and tech trend writer. Carlo Occhiena Product Manager, Founder. Former Digital Ops Manager in a corporation, Founder of Martech startup. Christopher Luc . Software Engineer. Full-time at WhatsApp; internships at Uber, Snap and Yelp Cynthia Huang Female hackathon ninja. I can advise on personal branding, public speaking, content marketing, strategy, operations, startups, product, crypto, cannabis, short term rentals and insurance. Daniel Chae Business Analyst. I run Course to Hire, a place to help people learn how to code and land jobs in tech, and write for StackOverflow as well! Daniel Wu Housing Innovation & Data Strategy. I'm a Harvard JD/PhD and product manager, and advocate for inclusive smart cities and data ethics. Also published in Bloomberg, TechCrunch, etc. Dave Mangot Successful DevOps Transformation. We coach web operations and adjacent teams at mid-sized companies to service delivery maturity through the broad application of DevOps principles and decades of experience leading change. David Smooke Yours truly. Founder and CEO of Hacker Noon. Doc Norton Agile/Leadership Coach. 35+ years continually learning in the software field as a consultant, Director, VP, and CTO. Emil Koutanov Winner of 2020 Microservices Thinker of the Year. Software architecture and engineering. Eugenia Kuzmenko Internet? What is Internet? Google certificated marketer, Facebook certificated adman, Hubspot certificated SEO-specialist. Fabio Manganiello Software engineer. Automation, IoT, machine learning and programming geek. Geshan Manandhar Lead Software EngineerIn addition to my full time tech work, I have been blogging for 14 years and mentoring people in the past years Jackson Kelley Software Engineer at Amazon. I also worked as a consultant for block.one during the launch of EOSIO. Jai Paul Blockchain DeveloperAn experienced programmer with a computer science background, I have been involved in cryptocurrency since the very beginning, in the early 2010s, and would call myself an expert. Jonathan Harel Funny techie! Data Science, Building websites, getting your idea out there - quick! Kahlil Crawford Content Strategist | Theorist. Content professional in the hi-tech sector using design, creativity, and collaboration to innovate. Kevin Davey Champion Algo Trader. Proven futures trader and 4 time best selling trading book author. Matt Klein Cyberpsychology Strategy Director. Cultural Strategy Consultant for Fortune 50 Brands, Acclaimed Writer & Startup Advisor. Monica Hernandez Moni Mission Control. I have the uncanny ability to be a human router and rally the troops for increased impact. My areas of expertise include the space industry and high tech sectors. Limarc Ambalina Hacker Noon Editor. I am well-versed in SEO, backlink strategy, and writing content that ranks on Google. Linh Dao Smooke Hacker Noon COO. Helped raise millions, and 2x sales for Hacker Noon 3 years in a row. Founded a nonprofit. Mother of Norah. Liyas Thomas Author of Hoppscotch. Helped build Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19), currently building one-stop solution for open source monetization. Madalin Valceleanu Mobile Software Developer. Enthusiast on clean, modular and components architecture, focused on make software design more understandable, maintainable, scalable, robust, and last and not least testable. Applying design patterns, SOLID principles and good practices, making the code not only to compile. Mahbod Moghadam Founder of Genius. I started two major companies and I am currently writing a book about how startups work, in addition to being a top angel investor with an excellent portfolio. Mark Meyerson Director of Agency. Marketing strategy and execution. Maxim Salnikov PWA Expert. Developer Relations. Michiel Mulders Allround Growth Consultant. I help (tech) startups with all aspects of growth: UX, marketing, content, startup processes, and tech. Miroslav Nikolov Remain human. Process management and app architecture. Nebojsa Todorovic Freelancing Uncensored & Uncut. 10+ years pro remote work on all major freelance platforms. Nicholas Resendez Let's Grow Together. I focus on relationships and communication to understand the needs of those looking to build for the future. Oloo Moses Full Stack Developer. Bsc Information Technology. Paul Bailey Systems Architect. 20 years of experience in full stack development and engineering. Pavel Pekanov I Imagine Things. Full-stack dev, product research, creative direction and all things design. Peter Thomas Creator: Karate Framework. Open Source and Java veteran, has been invited to speak at the Ministry of Testing Dallas, DevConf.IN, GIDS, Test Talks, Test Automation Guild, GraphQL Asia and Selenium Conf Tokyo. Also appears in the TechBeacon list of Test Automation Leaders to follow in 2019. Jean Machuca Creator of QCObjects. Software Developer with more than 20 years now experience working for large-scale projects in private and public sector. Ricardo Lopes Front End Engineer. Amusing article writer who also makes VR stuff. Rekt Capital Cryptocurrency Analyst. Four years full-time in the crypto markets. Sergey Golubev Project management, marketing & business consulting. ICO/STO/IEO projects (white papers, applications for grants, business plans, compliance documents drafts, tokenomica). Sergi Garcia Tech Product Marketer. I help tech startups find product-market fit. I have helped 100+ entrepreneurs with their Go-to-market strategy, Website UX and copy, Pricing & Packaging, and Customer acquisition. Sandesh Suvarna $1.4M App in 4 Minutes. Masters in Engineering Management. Sergey Baloyan Make crypto-projects popular. I can support projects with building overall concept, tokenomics, marketing and PR strategy and implementation Stanley Nguyen Software Principles Commentary. Computer Science Degree. Tanay Pant Author, Speaker, Evangelist. I have experience in leading Developer Advocacy teams in scaling startups, and creating developer marketing strategy for sustained growth of developer communities. Tian-Yuan Zhao Digital product designer focused on Web3.0 work through my boutique design firm called Round Sky Studios. I've been doing this type of work ever since 2015 when I first met Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum blockchain and have worked with companies such as ConsenSys, Kleros, Raise, Filecoin, Celo, and much more. 2nd Place Noonie Awardee in the Product Design Category for having written only 1 article on the intersection of digital product strategy/design + distributed computing + systems-level change. Usama Ashraf Software engineer, writer. Designing application architecture, Postgres, Node. Utsav Jaiswal Retired Dentist. Blockchain underworld expert who leads BD at Hacker Noon. Vaibhav Saini Physicist turned Entrepreneur. Springer Nature Book Author, IIT Delhi Undergrad. Yoram Kornatzky 20 years industry experience. Ph.D. Computer Science Find the up to date list of . Hacker Noon Experts at Experts.HackerNoon.com

Book a Call: The First 60 Hacker Noon Experts 

After a number of frustrating experiences at the DMV in 2016, Ryder saw an opportunity to provide better DMV information and faster appointments online. By February 2018, YoGov was doing $40K in monthly revenue without yet having written a single line of code. Davis Baer : What’s your background, and what are you working on? I’m Ryder, the founder of . I started my career in urban planning, working for the cities of New York and Vancouver, before founding my first venture-backed startup, , which offers financial management tools to rideshare drivers and other gig workers. YoGov SherpaShare At YoGov, we’re building the consumer layer on top of government services. Our initial target is the DMV (the Department of Motor Vehicles, for those of you outside the US), where we’ve proven that even the country’s most-maligned government office can support OMG-this-is-amazing experiences. Currently, our two most popular services are expedited DMV appointments, which we book on behalf of customers by monitoring the DMV website 24/7 for last-minute appointment slots and cancellations, and our Road Test Concierge packages, where we help customers secure a car and licensed driver for their DMV road tests through a marketplace of independent contractors (primarily Uber and Lyft drivers). We also offer several other government-related services powered by our independent contractor workforce, such as on-demand passport renewals and DMV line waiting. What I’m most proud of at YoGov is how scrappy we are. As a remote team of 17 that has raised less than $300K, we’ve already have tens of thousands of paying customers. This past February, we were doing $40K a month without having written a single line of code, and now we have monthly revenue in the hundreds of thousands. First version of the website (left) and a recent update (right), fall 2018 What motivated you to start YoGov? In 2016, I had to make multiple DMV visits over the course of a few months. The experience involved three office visits, multiple forms, numerous calls to banks and the DMV, several conversations with my car dealership, and a few notarized signatures. And all that to do one simple thing: transfer ownership of a vehicle between family members. When I actually figured out what I needed to do, it was actually incredibly easy, but what should have taken minutes took months. While waiting in DMV lines, I overheard others’ similar stories of confusion and frustration. All of this led me to ask myself: Why hasn’t the DMV experience changed in decades? Having started my career in government, working for the City of New York starting in 2006 and Vancouver a few years later, I reflected on the lack of progress I’d seen in the prior decades, and it became evident to me that government’s inability to adopt modern technologies and service models is a structural problem that governments can’t solve themselves — no matter how good their intentions. After my experience with the DMV, in a weekend I put up the first version of YoGov (called YoDMV at the time) and the idea was simple. What if I could simplify information and answer the same questions I had for other people? What if I could also help educate people on the appointment booking process. So that’s what I did and the response was incredible. People were leaving comments, live chatting me, sending emails — with thanks — but mostly with more questions. Then I started asking myself, how else can the DMV experience be improved? What went into building the initial product? In November 2016, I built a simple website on Wordpress to start helping people directly with DMV appointments and DMV information. I’d talk to people over phone and live chat, listen to their questions, and give them clear answers. I also spent time visiting the Oakland DMV often which is right down the road from me. That’s pretty much it. Putting together our first product with Zapier :) I wanted to see how far I could get without writing a line of code and it turns out, I could go very far. I started stringing together Wordpress, Ninja Forms, Zapier, Airtable, Stripe, Intercom, just to name a few. For example, very early on I wanted to help people with the DMV appointment process. The problem here was often people booked the wrong type of appointment or forgot about their appointment and didn’t get an email confirmation. I started offering to book DMV appointments for free, which would include email confirmations and reminders as well as email and phone support. What started happening was people would call and email us first because they didn’t want to wait on hold for 3 hours with the DMV, but of course, that became a bit overwhelming for me. At this time, I started building our Philippines team to help with bookings and customer support. This allowed me to not only get some sleep, but helped us fulfill DMV appointment bookings that we hadn’t yet automated. I soon discovered that we could often find earlier appointments if we spent enough time looking, and so we started our first paid service helping people with “express DMV appointments”. This was spring of 2017. And then a big moment came in June 2017 when I stumbled upon the opportunity to provide cars and drivers for DMV road tests, which has since become our flagship service. We had unfortunately booked the wrong type of appointment for one of our users. It turns out he needed a road test and not a regular office appointment. This user was especially upset because he’d paid for a driver on Craigslist to meet him and help him with the test, and he couldn’t get that money back. I got on the phone with him and offered to reschedule him as soon as possible and take him myself for his road test. I picked him up on the Berkeley campus, and as we drove to the DMV, he explained to me just how big a problem this was for college students and international arrivals like himself. Students and internationals alike often do not have access to a car and a licensed driver to accompany them for the test. They were all in the same boat, looking for someone to help them for 3–4 hours to pass their driving test. The next day I put up the first version of our road test car and driver concierge service and we were off to the races. How have you attracted users and grown your company? Since day 1 we’ve been live for customers and haven’t had any official “launch.” Frankly, we didn’t need it. Since I was talking to customers from day 1 to build our first content, then our appointment booking system, then our road test service, we’ve grown our services our customers. with This approach has always been my style and also one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from my previous company: To validate quickly with paying users and let customers call, text, and email you. These first customers came from blog posts I did and shared on social media as well as on Quora. Most of the effort was just being scrappy — posting content, getting users on the site, and then talking to them. Eventually, I added in a very small amount of Adwords and added in a referral program. In turns out, search has been very strong for us. People are actually searching for answers to their problems — I need a DMV appointment asap, I need a car for my road test — and we have services that help with both of those. Once we reached the thousands of users, we started seeing that people were coming to us through referral. To each of our services, I added a question, ‘How did you find out about YoGov?’, which I’d definitely recommend to get a signal of where people are coming from. quick People are searching for DMV answers, so we wrote content into our services What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue? We’re focused on helping consumers have a significantly easier time with the DMV (and other government services) so that’s who’s paying us. This is one of the biggest differences between us and other companies who’ve focused on improving government services: we’re laser focused on improving the experience for the consumer. I strongly believe that by focusing on improving the consumer experience with government services, we’re also helping governments themselves. For example, instead of getting 100 customers showing up at the DMV with the same questions and getting angry because they forgot a document, we’re helping answer those questions up front. For the DMV employee, it makes for a much more pleasant day. For our products at the moment — DMV express appointments, DMV road test concierge service, DMV line waiting concierge service, and a few others — we’re collecting payments via Stripe on our website. And for our concierge services, we pay out independent contractors for the actual service. To date, we have hundreds of independent contractors in a dozen states helping people with road tests. Our focus on a really great government experience has helped us grow significantly by word-of-mouth, referrals, and reviews — and has allows us to grow 1200% over the last year to a multi-million dollar annualized run rate. It’s allowed us to stay close to breakeven while at the same time, begin to build in our network effects. What are your goals for the future? As a team, we’re excited to completely change how people think about government services. “Remember the days before YoGov when we had to go to the city website and download forms and then spend an hour looking for information you needed and still being confused and frustrated? Now I just open up the YoGov app…” We’re not saying it’s going to be easy to get there but that’s our north star — to be relationship with government services. You can rest easy knowing that we’re taking care of things for you, and you can come to us for answers any time. your Our biggest challenge is creating that marketplace of services and we’re constantly asking ourselves questions around which products to build and when to build them. It’s more an operational challenge for us, and one we’re excited to take on. Our first product page, helping people get free DMV appointments in California What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? The biggest challenges we’ve faced has been communicating our mission to the government services themselves. We’ve focused on building a great experience for the consumers — giving them information, answering questions, helping speed up their government interaction. As a result, in one case, namely with the California DMV, they’ve wondered what our “angle” is in helping people. We’ve sorted it out with them and I think there’s finally acknowledgement that what we’re doing is helping the DMV too, but for a while we didn’t make the time to communicate with them. After all, when we help consumers with their government needs, there’s less pressure on government employees to do everything. Our goal is to continue to help governments save time and money. Going forward, we’re planning to be more intentional here in making that goal clear with governments from city to state to federal levels. Our clients frequently take selfies with our concierges after passing their road test! Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous? I catch up on start-up related podcasts on a daily basis, usually when I’m walking to our office. It’s just helpful before diving into to a million things, to get some perspective and inspiration. There’s a ton of good ones and I’ll usually have a couple actionable things I’ll do after every episode — whether it’s a change in thinking around marketing or talking to users or tactical advice on fundraising. The 20 Minute VC and This Week in Startups are two of the more frequent ones I listen to. If it’s particularly interesting insight or advice, I’ll share with our entire team as well. What’s your advice for entrepreneurs who are just starting out? My biggest advice for starting out would be to stay scrappy and ask yourself how you can make your company into a real business from day 1, as in start charging from day 1. It’s been said a lot but I think it’s worth underscoring, especially because we’ve taken this approach and been able to grow very quickly as a result. We’ve used our revenue to fund our growth with very little outside capital to date, and that’s given us a ton more freedom. Most importantly, it’s allowed us to stay super focused on working on the things that matter, quickly testing our hunches, and making decisions much quicker. You can accomplish so much more than you might think without writing a single line of code. We were able to create a pretty modern interface just linking together , , , , , , just to name a few. Wordpress Airtable Ninja Forms Zapier Intercom Slack Stay scrappy until you major investment to keep up with your growth, and then spend a lot of time thinking through exactly what you need to grow and reach your next major milestone. need Where can we go to learn more? We want you to stay in touch with you and answer your questions! Visit us at and follow us on and . Leave any question below too and I’ll reply as soon as possible. Or if you’d like to get in touch with me directly email me at ryder@yogov.org. YoGov.org Twitter Facebook This interview is brought to you by , a tool to schedule and automatically repeat your posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business OneUp

Founder Interviews: Ryder Pearce of YoGov

Crypto’s Next Catalyst: Gaming — Part 1

I’ve been building teams for over a decade. Even though I initially hated that part of my job, I grew to love the process of identifying, onboarding and integrating new engineers to my team. I recently signed a contract with a few companies to identify good engineering talent for them and while I was reviewing a few LinkedIn profiles, I was struck by how painfully similar they all were. Sure, job history and education details differ but in terms of skills, they all looked identical. They were all compliant. engineering buzzword Padding your skills In today’s world where what you project online is valued a lot more than who you really are, developers tend to fill their profile up with all kinds of skills. I’m guilty of that too. My own profile is filled with skills that I have some passing knowledge about. The last time I did anything meaningful with Apache Solr was back in 2010, so of course, I have it on my profile. I’ll admit that I’ve reached a stage in my career where I’m not marketing myself as a full-time programmer but I don’t remember the last time I added any skills to my profile or cared if anyone endorsed me for them. Speaking of endorsements — to all my well meaning, non-technical friends who endorse my skills on LinkedIn, please don’t. I appreciate the thought but some of you (I’m looking at you, my Sales and HR friends) have no idea what Hibernate is. If you thought it is a period of time where all body functions slow down and you drift off into some semi-unproductive state, you won’t be far off but you really don’t know what it is. that To my developer friends, I’m not blaming you. I understand why you feel compelled to add every technical skill known to man on your profile. I can see the thought process that’s going through your mind. You did some work with React, so you feel confident in listing that as a skill. At some point, you did an evaluation of Angular vs React, so why not add Angular (even though you technically never worked with it)? Everyone is looking for Node Ninjas¹ and because you already know JavaScript, why not list Node as well? Your DevOps engineer is playing around with Docker and at some point you will interact with it, so why not highlight the full-stackworthiness of your profile by adding it? Your site runs on AWS so regardless of whether you have actually provisioned an EC2 instance or not, it’s not really a lie to list that as a skill, right? And so on. Engineers as marketers As hiring managers, we have plenty of recruiting solutions but they all sit on top of an existing, inefficient process. Hiring managers typically start their search by looking for profiles that match some keywords. As a developer considering new opportunities, your goal is to at least show up in that search result. You might as well throw all manner of skills on your profile, just so you have the chance to be considered for a role. Forget nailing the interview and getting the job — the first step is to be seen. Developers are doing what marketers do with SEO. Making sure their profiles “rank” higher. Taking the SEO analogy further, by relying on keyword matching, hiring managers are only considering engineers who know how to market themselves. Knowing how to market yourself is an underrated skill to have but that has nothing to do with being a great developer. Unless there’s a fundamental change in the way potential candidates are identified and screened, you will always have developers who pad their profiles² and hiring managers who miss the opportunity to consider engineers who can’t stand out in the sea of resumes and profiles. [1] Don’t call yourself a Ninja or a Rockstar in your profile. I know plenty of good engineering leaders who work in awesome companies who would reject a profile simply based on that. Unless…see below. [2] I’m sure there are engineers who pad their profiles with all kinds of skills and can actually back them up. If you are one of them, more power to you. You can say whatever you want, including calling yourself a Ninja.

Buzzword compliant profiles

JavaScript has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a clunky, exclusively front-end scripting language. We saw some big developments in the JavaScript landscape during 2019, including the widespread adoption of React hooks and functional programming concepts, steady conversion to TypeScript, and continued domination of React in the front-end framework ecosystem. With all that progress, it can be difficult to keep up with the changes. So, I put together a list of the top 10 JavaScript articles I read over the past year. I believe these articles are important for developers to read. Many of them were written by influential JavaScript developers and thought leaders; others just had superb content. I chose them based on content and quality, and they are not listed in any particular order. 1. The State of JavaScript 2019 is a collection of statistics and facts describing the world of JavaScript in 2019. The State of JavaScript 2019 To not include the works of Sacha Greif and Raphaël Benitte in a list of influential JavaScript publications 2019 would be a huge oversight. The State of JavaScript in 2019 describes everything JavaScript: the continued popularity of React in the front-end framework ecosystem the rise of TypeScript quantitatively the demographics of JavaScript the new back-end frameworks and more For new developers looking to pick up the most in-demand skills and for seasoned pros (colloquially referred to as "JS Ninjas" by recruiters) looking to know their worth, this is an annual must-read. 2. A Complete Guide to useEffect is Dan Abramov's take on how to correctly use the useEffect hook in functional React.js. A Complete Guide to useEffect It would also be an incomplete list without citing work by Dan Abramov. This article from 2019 on useEffect() is simply a must-read. Dan describes why and how to refactor class components and lifecycle methods like componentDidMount to functional components with hooks. Beyond the official React.js documentation, this is a great place to start if you're interested and learning modern React with hooks. 3. Thinking in React Hooks describes how to change how you think about writing React.js with modern functional patterns. Thinking in React Hooks This and the next article continue the theme of functional programming and the emergence of React hooks in 2019. Amelia Wattenberger’s article speaks to the “why” of functional programming patterns in React.js and JavaScript more generally. 4. Why Isn't X a Hook? allows you to deeply understand the motivations behind React.js hook implementations and patterns. Why isn’t X a Hook? Dan Abramov’s second article to make the list in 2019 is a discussion about the philosophy underpinning React.js hook development. Hooks have taken the React.js community by storm and are certainly one of the highlights of 2019; this article illustrates some of the motivations behind the folks working on them. 5. Functional JavaScript: Traversing Trees with a Recursive Reduce is a case study about how to solve real-world problems with functional programming in JavaScript. Functional JavaScript: Traversing Trees with a Recursive Reduce James Sinclair’s 2019 public work on functional JavaScript is a true asset to the community. All of his articles are great but this one stood out to me for its elegance and utility in front-end web development. If you weren’t raised on functional languages like Scala, then some of these concepts may seem difficult to grasp at first but they're critical to writing testable, extensible, and composable JavaScript. This is another must-read for developers looking to write more functional JS. 6. JavaScript Clean Code: Best Practices is a great resource to help you to improve your code quality with JS best practices. JavaScript Clean Code - Best Practices After reading this article by Milos Protic and absorbing its wisdom, your coworkers will marvel at your newfound abilities to write clean JS. There's a ton of content in this piece and it’s all applicable, actionable, and correct. Please write JavaScript code like this in 2020! 7. Option Chaining is the best addition to JavaScript since async/await. Option Chaining I included this documentation published in MDN on option chaining because I think the feature is one of, if not the, most important new additions to vanilla JavaScript in 2019. Option chaining and nullish coalescing are amazing quality of life improvements that I think all JavaScript developers should use. Personally I use this language feature multiple times a day and it makes my JS code much cleaner and more readable. 8. I've Forgotten More JavaScript Than Most People Ever Learn picks the brain of a community thought leader. I’ve Forgotten More JavaScript Than Most People Ever Learn Most JavaScript developers will find this insightful interview of Kyle Simpson, “a living JavaScript classic, the truest embodiment of the spirit of open source” an interesting read. This is a worthwhile intermission from reading raw JS code and Simpson's insights about the past and future of the language are profound. 9. Design Patterns in Modern JavaScript Development features Singleton, Observer, and Facade patterns from a JS context. Design patterns in modern JavaScript development Kristian Poslek’s popular article on design patterns stands out in 2019. Even though he doesn't provide specific examples and code, I thought his insights were valuable enough to include in this list. This is an interesting read for those wondering how academic design patterns have a place in real-world JS implementations. 10. Fix Memory Problems helps us to debug Node.js/JavaScript memory leaks with Chrome devtools. Fix Memory Problems Kayce Basques discusses how developers can use Google Chrome to quickly debug JavaScript and Node.js memory issues. I included this technical write-up because I think the tools discussed here are important and helpful given Chrome’s dominance in the consumer marketplace and as the web developers browser of choice. (See .) Memory leaks are often hard to diagnose in a large JavaScript codebase and these tools have helped me in the past. The State of JavaScript 2019 I hope you'll take some time to read the articles listed above. I found these articles to be the most impactful, insightful works of 2019 in JavaScript-land and I hope you'll agree. Previously published at https://dev.to/heroku/my-top-10-javascript-articles-from-2019-1da6

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