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This blog post is a written transcript of the FOSDEM Talk: “Infrastructure drifts aren’t like Pokemon, you can’t catch ’em all”, by Stephane Jourdan – CTO and founder This talk covers three major topics: Infrastructure as Code: all the good intentions and the ideal world each of us expected when we started using it, and how it’s actually going in everyday’s Ops life. We will see that how it started is probably different from how it is going and from what we expected. We will then “drift” together, using Terraform and AWS and share some war stories that we heard from infrastructure teams, and how things sometimes went really wrong for them. We will finally present driftctl, our open source answer to infrastructure drift problems. Infrastructure drift: definition Let’s first agree on what is infrastructure drift: infrastructure drift is what happens when the reality of your infrastructure doesn’t match your expectations. This phenomenon is also known as “Oh my god” in production when things unexpectedly go wrong. Infrastructure as code: an ideal world How it all started When it all started, we had this vision of an ideal world, and a bright future that Infrastructure as Code was to offer us, like Plato’s Republic was for society a while ago. With Infrastructure as code, we were supposed to have one single source of truth (the state file in the case of Terraform). We were supposed to have versioning of the code with git. The code was to be so great that it would be self-documenting. In this ideal world, we would have testing everywhere: on the pipelines before and after tdd and bdd etc, like the rest of engineering. Collaboration would be a bliss between teams. Infrastructure would be immutable: we could scale it up and down and throw the rest away. GitOps would be everywhere: CI/CD for infrastructure, no more locally running things. And basically all the credentials would be under control and multi-cloud would solve all our problems because you know what they say: “API everywhere”… and we would have the skills to handle all those APIs, and the time to do this greatly. How it is actually going Marcus Aurelius, the roman emperor a few centuries after Plato wrote to himself: . As it happens we are not Roman emperors but our ideal Republic is not to be expected either. How it started is not exactly how we see it going. “Do not expect Plato’s ideal Republic” In our team, many of us were quite experienced but we wanted more feedback on what we were building. So we just asked hundreds of infrastructure teams, SREs… etc around the world where they were standing in their Infrastructure as Code journey. Basically what they told us was that changes were still happening outside of their Infrastructure as Code: mainly manual changes and scripts that are changing tags, or lambdas updating things after deployment, etc… A lot of changes are still happening outside of their Infrastructure as Code scope, be it Terraform or Pulumi or whatever infrastructure tool they use, it doesn’t matter. Do not expect Plato's ideal Republic - Marcus Aurelius A bunch of other things go wrong for them as well. The scope of their changes is not very often fully committed because of broken processes. People are still changing things manually on their AWS web console and then backporting the changes in Terraform until Terraform starts “screaming”, which means that people are still running Terraform locally with the right access keys on their own laptop. Terrible processes…  and everybody knows that once you click everywhere on your console, a lot of other things are deployed on the background and so your Terraform code doesn’t reflect exactly what’s actually deployed online. Many people we talked to were aware of the good practices about testing requirements. They knew  frameworks like Terratest, etc… but most of them never had the time to either learn or write those tests. Sometimes they were just too costly to run for them. The lack of communication obviously makes things worse: even in these Covid19 times, “Async” communication is still a major issue between teams. Immutable infrastructure also is still a great struggle to achieve. A lot of the new projects are running more or less around this principle, but people also still have legacy to deal with, like thousands of VMs running every day. Lots of people are still gaining console access. And guess what ? unless you lock them down completely, which is sometimes just not possible because they are your boss or your customer, or because they are “this very special co-worker” who needs to do “that special thing” manually on the web console… That’s where problems happen. People with AWS console access tend to change things Many people are also facing skill issues. For example, if a full team very skilled on GCP has a new project that for some reason needs to run on Azure, as all the specifics of this provider are not immediately mastered, they often end up with bad practices in their Infrastructure as Code deployments. And basically for lots of them, everything that has an API is still not under infrastructure code: we heard terrible stories about GitHub accesses, or DNS records or anything that can be used with Terraform that wasn’t yet by far deployed with it. Drift happens All those  behaviors have something in common: they generate drift.  While drift is pretty cool for cars, the discrepancy between intention and reality can lead to major issues, disasters, or security misconfiguration. Drift can be a real major pain. To deal with it, most of the people that we met put something in place like and in a cron tab or in CI/CD somewhere before and after some commits, but were still missing things. terraform plan apply $ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: added, changed, destroyed 0 0 0 We love Terraform and all Hashicorp products. Terraform is an excellent provisioner but it’s not fair to use it for something it’s not meant to do. If anything is outside its scope, it’s just normal that Terraform doesn’t catch it. There are a lot of changes that cannot be seen by Terraform. Many of us expected in cron tabs or in CI/CD to report changes because some of the resources were managed by it, but unfortunately as we are going to see, it is not always the case. terraform plan Stories from the trenches The following stories are based on real stories that we heard while interviewing infrastructure teams. We simplified them to make them easy to understand with some code. How an intern with read-only access ended up with rogue administrative access and keys (without anyone noticing) The first story is about an intern with read-only access, ending up with access keys controlled by no one. Those keys were linked to an administrative policy, which nobody noticed. To gain a better understanding of this story, let’s look at this very simple Terraform configuration file: We have a user with a key and a policy attachment for read-only. Let’s apply this configuration: $ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: added, changed, destroyed 9 0 0 Now let’s move to the AWS console: here we can see again this intern user and the key that was created by our own code. The story goes like this: This intern went to the DevOps folks and complained that he couldn’t use his key for whatever reason. The team was in a rush, so they quickly logged in to the management console, they deactivated the first key and created a new one, perfectly sure they were going to remember it and add it to Terraform in just a few moments. On top of that, Terraform was to notify them if they forgot anyway. What do you think happened?  Let’s check with a on this user. terraform apply $ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: added, changed, destroyed 0 0 0 Basically nothing… While this very simple use case may have led you to think that this specific key and user would be noticed and reported it was not the case. So the story continues with this intern: the intern comes back one hour later complaining that he still couldn’t do what he needed to do. As the infrastructure team did not have the time to look into it, they just gave him administrative access so that he could change whatever he needed to, thinking they would revert through his permissions quickly after. What do you think Terraform found in this case with a , as we have a policy attached to the IAM user and everything is managed by terraform? terraform apply This team was sure that this was to be reported in or terraform plan terraform apply. But it wasn’t the case because basically it’s out of the control of Terraform. It’s just an attached resource, it doesn’t work like that. $ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: added, changed, destroyed 0 0 0 So the team forgot about it, they went on with the day and it was only weeks after that they realized they had an intern with an administrative key out there in the wild, uncontrolled by anyone, not even mentioned as “deactivated” on the code. How an intern with rogue Administrative access opened everything to anyone on IPv4 and IPv6 (still without anyone noticing) The next story starts with a process: as you know, you can have lambdas, scripts etcetera that have administrative access to some resources on a very limited scope. In this case someone with an administrative access just opened everything to anyone on IPv4 and IPv6 and no one noticed anything. So how did it go? Let’s go into the console > VPC > us-east-1 > Security groups So we have our super secure security group that we created using Terraform, with a rule that is attached to it. As we can see in the AWS console, we have our “super secure security group” and we have our ssh rule for allowing ssh to this local network For the sake of simplicity we are doing this demo manually here, but someone or something could change this specific super secure security group and could allow anything anywhere on any kind of networks on IPv4 etc… and name it very, very carefully “temp” (you know, like those temporary rules that we’ll remember soon to change…) So what happened here is that something, with the correct access rights allowed anything to anywhere on this network behind this security group. This team expected any kind of rules that was added or modified to be reported on terraform and and basically the support team went weeks or months with such a rule live on their system without any notification. while it is true for a rule it is not true for a new rule $ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: added, changed, destroyed 9 0 0 How a scripting issue created a billing nightmare Our last story is about a team that was building a lot of stuff on S3. They were putting a lot of their binaries there and removing them. So obviously they removed the versioning. For some reason (long story short) someone activated versioning on all the buckets for the company including this one but they were pretty sure that it wasn’t going to be an issue because it’s the default on Terraform to not be versioned. But the code didn’t explicitly say it so. Let log in on the AWS console and go to S3> bucket Now we are on this bucket that we created using the terraform code above, and basically we are going do manually what they did through script: we are just going to enable bucket versioning. So now Bucket versioning is enabled. Let’s check with a what was reported: terraform apply $ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: added, changed, destroyed 9 0 0 Nothing. So this poor team versioned for weeks hundreds and hundreds of terabytes a day of binaries until they received the bill… Solutions at hand There are a lot of solutions in our ecosystem to work around the kind of things that we just saw: CI/CD Integration (Jenkins, Terraform Cloud, Atlantis, env0…) Static Analysis (Checkov, TFLint, TFSec,…) are there to help you analyze your code before you actually push to your CI system (or if they are deploying the CI/CD systems, they are there to prevent you to push things like “allow anything to anyone” directly on the code) Testing & Verification like Terratest (written in Go), InSpec (for the “older” of us, it’s written in Ruby and comes from the Chef days). Policy & Compliance (Sentinel…) They are a very different set of tools, very cool and very protective. Driftctl That’s where drift control enters: we built driftctl to manage this drift and be alerted on all the discrepancies between the state and the reality on the AWS accounts. Let’s just use the same terminal and the same session that we had previously. drift control will basically report you all the changes that you could not see with or . terraform plan terraform apply $ driftctl scan -- tfstate: Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=us-east )
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-west )
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-north )

Found deleted resources:
  - Table: rtb c5a9bb483ee6eaaf, Destination: / Found unmanaged resources:
  aws_security_group_rule:
  - Type: ingress, SecurityGroup: sg ca93f95fcc338, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Source: ::/ - Type: ingress, SecurityGroup: sg ca93f95fcc338, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Source: / aws_iam_access_key:
  - AKIASBXWQ3AYRSNQN5EY (User: INTERN mszmf)
Found drifted resources:
  - AKIASBXWQ3AYWWYX72GX (User: INTERN mszmf) (aws_iam_access_key):
     ~ Status: => (computed)
Found resource(s)
- % coverage
- covered by IaC
- covered by IaC
- deleted on cloud provider
- / drifted IaC from //./s3/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./vpc/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./iam/terraform.tfstate -1 -3 -1 -0 10.0 .1 .0 24 -0746 0 -0746 0.0 .0 .0 0 -8 -8 "Active" "Inactive" 26 84 22 3 not 1 1 22 from Now, we can see the rules that allowed “anything to anywhere” on IPv4 and IPv6 and we know that there are rules that were not expected. We also have the policy attachment of that intern we talked about. So probably with your eyes of administrative people, DevOps, whatever you are, it doesn’t match. It should ring a bell that something is wrong here actually: what about this new access key? Even if you’re not a security person, if you have a new access key created out of nowhere, reported to you, this should ring a bell. Let’s go ahead and create a new bucket and call it “Fosdem 2031”. Obviously this bucket is not in Terraform because we just created live on the console. It’s perfectly normal for Terraform not to report you that this specific bucket was created right now. But this is the job of driftctl to report that you have both unmanaged resources that were created and deltas from managed resources. $ driftctl scan -- tfstate: Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=us-east )
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-west )
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-north )

Found deleted resources:
  aws_route:
  - Table: rtb c5a9bb483ee6eaaf, Destination: / Found unmanaged resources:
  aws_s3_bucket:
  - fosdem2031
  aws_security_group_rule:
  - Type: ingress, SecurityGroup: sg ca93f95fcc338, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Source: ::/ - Type: ingress, SecurityGroup: sg ca93f95fcc338, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Source: / aws_iam_access_key:
  - AKIASBXWQ3AYRSNQN5EY (User: INTERN mszmf)

Found drifted resources:
  - AKIASBXWQ3AYWWYX72GX (User: INTERN mszmf) (aws_iam_access_key):
    ~ Status: => (computed)

Found resource(s)
  - % coverage
  - covered by IaC
  - covered by IaC
  - deleted on cloud provider
  - / drifted IaC from //./s3/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./vpc/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./iam/terraform.tfstate -1 -3 -1 -0 10.0 .1 .0 24 -0746 0 -0746 0.0 .0 .0 0 -8 -8 "Active" "Inactive" 27 81 22 4 not 1 1 22 from Let’s focus on the VPC here: if we change an existing rule… … we can see it in the diffs in driftctl $ driftctl scan -- tfstate: Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=us-east ) 
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-west ) 
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-north )


Found deleted resources: 

  aws_route: 
  - Table: rtb c5a9bb483ee6eaaf, Destination: / Found unmanaged resources: 
  aws_s3_bucket: 
  - fosdem2031 

  aws_security_group_rule: 
  - Type: ingress, SecurityGroup: sg ca93f95fcc338, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Source: ::/ - Type: ingress, SecurityGroup: sg ca93f95fcc338, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Source: / aws_iam_access_key: 
  - AKIASBXWQ3AYRSNQN5EY (User: INTERN mszmf) 


Found drifted resources: 

  - AKIASBXWQ3AYWWYX72GX (User: INTERN mszmf) (aws_iam_access_key): 
    ~ Status: => (computed) 

  aws_S3_bucket: 
  -fosdem2031


Found resource(s) 

- % coverage
- covered by IaC 
- covered by IaC 
- deleted on cloud provider 
- / drifted IaC from //./s3/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./vpc/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./iam/terraform.tfstate -1 -3 -1 -0 10.0 .1 .0 24 -0746 0 -0746 0.0 .0 .0 0 -8 -8 "Active" "Inactive" 14 50 7 4 not 1 1 14 from The other things we can do with drift control is ignore some resources that you do not want to see reported for whatever reason you have. So you can also filter using the same system as AWS CLI. For example, you can filter just for S3 buckets if you are not interested in the rest. $ driftctl scan --filter "Type=='aws_s3_bucket'" $ driftctl scan -- tfstate: Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=us-east )
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-west )
Terraform provider initialized (name=aws, alias=eu-north )

Found unmanaged resources:
  aws_s3_bucket:
  – fosdem2031

Found resource(s)
– % coverage
– covered by IaC
– not covered by IaC
– deleted on cloud provider
– / drifted IaC from //./s3/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./vpc/terraform.tfstate --from tfstate://./iam/terraform.tfstate --filter "Type=='aws_s3_bucket'" -1 -3 -1 2 50 1 1 0 0 1 from It’s pretty cool for auditing purposes, for monitoring purposes etc… And that's a wrap! Thank you very much for reading through all this talk transcript. If you wish to gain a better understanding of driftctl, please visit our or our . We also have a series of  short that you can watch to get started in minutes. product page advanced tutorial demo videos For any questions, feel free to open a discussion on GitHub or visit us . discord

Newsflash - "People with AWS Console Access Tend to Change Things"

Don't get me wrong, I adore a long hike, a damn good glass of wine, and snuggling with my kid during storytime (I don’t have one yet, but I’ve heard it’s the best thing that will ever happen to you, so I'm looking forward to it). But this cult of "work-life balance"...it makes my skin crawl. Like some cosmic accountant is tallying my joy points and yelling, "Not enough 'life' in your ledger, buddy!" The image of perfectly compartmentalized life, neatly sliced into work hours and blissful non-work...well, it's delusional. Real life? It's messy, exhilarating, and occasionally kicks you square in the teeth. That's not a bug; it's the best (and worst) feature. Let's stop chasing shadows and get brutally honest. The sooner we dump the "balance" baggage, the sooner we can craft a life that actually – spikes of intensity and joyful downtime included. works "Balance" - The Great Productivity Killer The problem with balance is this: It assumes focus happens in neat little chunks. An hour here for a Zoom call, an hour there for that spreadsheet...sound familiar? Here's a newsflash: your brain hates this fragmented crap. Science backs it up. See "flow" – that glorious state where time blurs, the world recedes, and you're crushing it – craves deep dives, not surface-level skimming. But building momentum to get into flow, takes space and focused time. Not the chopped-up mess we're sold as "balanced productivity." Think of those days stuck in meetings, email ping-pong, and constant, pointless context switching. It's not about hours worked; it's about intensity diluted, focus shattered. This isn’t work-life balance; it's a recipe for mediocre output and soul-crushing frustration. Beyond Balance – Mastering the Rhythm But, if balance is a myth, what actually works? Think less about a seesaw and more about an epic drum solo. There's power in those bursts of intensity, the crashes of focus. You know those sessions where an idea clicks, where work takes on a life of its own? Those are the moments you need to double down. Let your schedule serve the work, not the other way around. But drums without a pause…that's just noise. It's in the silence that the rhythm gains power. So, those "downtime" moments everyone tells you to feel guilty about? Consider these alternative possibilities: Deep rest isn’t about weakness, it's cognitive refueling. Your brain does vital background processing during "offline" time. A change of scenery can be a creative supercharger. A museum visit or a bike ride – it could spark the solution you've been agonizing over. Indulging in something utterly pointless has merit. That trashy novel/TV show? Let it reset your mental palate. It might make space for brilliance the next workday. This rhythm of intense-focus/deep-rest, it's dynamic, messy, and way more potent than bland "balance." Permission to be Selfish Newsflash: your worth isn't measured in chore charts and perfectly split 50/50 parenting. This "equal distribution" idea sounds noble, but it ignores the glorious chaos of our unique strengths and the realities of ebbs and flows. There'll be seasons where you lean hard into work, passion exploding, deadlines whizzing by. Your partner might pick up more slack at home, not because they're a martyr, but because they believe in what you're building. Then it shifts, and that energy flows the other way – it's a fluid dance, not an accountant's balance sheet. Same goes for internal prioritization. Some days, the gym just won't happen; a crisis takes precedence. And you know what? That's okay. Obsessing over the "shoulds" misses the point. Give yourself the radical grace to make today’s call as needed. No self-flagellation necessary. ...Let's be real, will there be some logistical juggling and communication breakdowns in all this? Hell yeah. But wouldn't you rather navigate those hiccups than carry the constant, low-grade guilt of failing to live up to an unattainable balance? Tools & Tactics for the Anti-Balancer Designate chunks of time where you are ruthless about distractions. No email pings, no "quick chats." This is your zone; defend it fiercely. Experiment with the length that works for you – maybe it's 90 minutes on, a 30-minute break, then back in. The Focus Block: Life's gonna throw admin, errands, and "low-stakes" tasks at you. Lump these together to minimize disruption. Have an "Admin Hour" where you power through the tedium, freeing up larger mental spaces for meaningful work. Batch the Bullsh*t: Our brains crave cues. Mark the start and end of your workday with a specific action. It could be a dedicated workspace, a special mug for work hours, or a brisk walk to mentally "commute" – anything that signals to your brain "focus time" or "chill zone activated." Ritualize Transitions: Just as you schedule work bursts, protect restorative chunks. Even 20 minutes of true downtime adds up. Visualize unbroken streaks of self-care on a calendar – it gets addictive in the best way. "Don't Break the Chain" for Rest: If you live/work with others, this isn’t going to happen solo. Explain your need for focus blocks, and negotiate how you'll navigate shared responsibilities. It won't be flawless, but ditching the resentment of unspoken expectations is half the battle. Communicate Your Rhythm: Beware the Balance Backlash A word of caution, anti-balancers – don't let this turn into a glorification of burnout. You hear folks bragging about "the hustle," about all-nighters as some badge of honor. Nope. That's just bad management with fancy branding. Here's the difference: Feeds on external validation, relentless to the point of harm. Hustle Culture: Serves your deeper goals and is balanced by deep replenishment. Intentional Intensity: You know when you're crossing the line – the body and brain will send signals. Respect them; that's self-preservation, not weakness. The Wisdom of Seasons We're obsessed with linearity – growth charts, career ladders, everything measured in a relentless upward crawl. But nature does her finest work in cycles, in bursts and retreats. It's okay for our lives to mirror that. We can have bursts of intensity, followed by alternative priorities/rest in both the micro and the macro. There'll be seasons of outrageous output, fueled by passion or simple necessity. Then come the fallow periods, seeming "unproductive" by external standards. But something's brewing beneath the surface: ideas cross-pollinating, energy stores rebuilt. Trust this process. Think of this rhythm overlaid over a lifespan: Your 20s might be fueled by exploration, by bursts of intense learning balanced with the messiness of finding your footing. Your 40s could be marked by focused execution, where the foundation you built allows for bigger swings. Later years might prioritize different legacies – mentorship and creative freedom that wouldn't have been possible in the head-down scramble. Reject society's timeline telling you it should all happen concurrently. Each phase has a distinct beauty, a different kind of "balance" unfolding over decades, not hours on a clock. Redefining Success If balance is a mirage, what do we measure our lives against? Here's where it gets personal and rebellious: Not about output, but how often you lose yourself joyfully in the of creation. Moments of Flow: act How many commitments spark genuine excitement, versus dragging you down with obligation? The "Hell Yeah" Test: Not about degrees, but the curiosity that survives when nobody's grading you. Learning as Lifeblood: Do you make something, teach something, or spark something bigger than your individual career climb? Legacy Beyond Self: Can you be fully present, truly vulnerable, with those who matter most? Depth in Connection: Let's be brutally honest – most of these won't fit neatly into some productivity spreadsheet. Because here's the thing: life's too short for bland "balance." The moments that spark your soul, the work that sets you on fire, the connections that leave you breathless – these defy neat categorization. It's in the dynamic tension, the willingness to embrace the unexpected, that we find the damn good life. Think about it: that feeling when you get lost in a creative project, time blurring at the edges. Or the deep satisfaction after a challenging workout. Or the belly laugh with a friend that leaves you feeling lighter than air. These are the moments that give life texture, that make it worth living. The nine-to-five, the perfectly scheduled weekend – those are just the backdrop. Let's get to it, shall we? Have a great weekend! Scott Also published here

Work-Life Balance? Yeah, That's for Losers

কাজ জীবনের ভারসাম্য? হ্যাঁ, এটা পরাজিতদের জন্য

Work-Life-Balance? Ja, das ist für Verlierer

¿Equilibrio trabajo-vida? Sí, eso es para perdedores.

L'équilibre travail-vie? Ouais, c'est pour les perdants

कार्य संतुलन? हाँ, यह हारने वालों के लिए है

仕事と生活のバランス？そう、それは敗者のためのものだ

일과 삶의 균형? 응, 그건 패자를 위한 거야

Equilíbrio entre vida pessoal e profissional? Sim, isso é para perdedores

Баланс между работой и личной жизнью? Да, это для неудачников

İş yaşam dengesi? Evet, bu Kaybedenler için

Cân bằng cuộc sống công việc? Vâng, đó là dành cho người thua cuộc

工作与生活的平衡？是的，这是给失败者的

Hey there. Scott here. Today, let's rip apart some lazy clichés about success (one of my favorite things to do). You know the drill: "Find a mentor." "Surround yourself with the right people." Blah, blah, blah. There's this whole industry built on pimping out "gurus" promising secret keys to the magic kingdom. You'll pay some six-figure mastermind fee to sip bad coffee while some pay-to-speak “thought leader” on stage feeds you recycled platitudes. Here's the newsflash nobody wants to tell you: The fastest way to master something is to TEACH it. You think mentors got to where they are by sitting on their butts waiting for handouts? Hell no. They learned in the trenches, by DOING. They made mistakes, learned from them, and figured out how to do it better next time. Real wisdom isn't downloaded – it's forged in the fire. Teach it to Keep It Let's talk about brain science for a second. There's this thing called the "protégé effect." Turns out, when you EXPECT to teach something, you learn it on a deeper level. Why? Because it forces you to organize your thoughts, spot holes in your understanding, and break things down in a way that makes sense to someone else. You think those business influencers got all their knowledge overnight? Nope. They started out fumbling their way through, probably screwing things up just as much as the rest of us. But somewhere along the way, someone asked them a question, or they started explaining their process, started explaining all the things they figured out by doing…and BOOM. Lightbulb moment. Think about it – have you ever truly understood a concept until you had to explain it to a total newbie? Suddenly, all that fuzzy thinking goes out the window. You have to crystallize that stuff. That’s where the magic happens. The Ultimate Hack: Don't Seek, BE You want a mentor? Flip the script and become one. Find someone a few steps behind you on the path. Offer to help them out. You don't need to be the ultimate expert – just further along than they are. Here's the crazy thing: in the process of mentoring, YOU'LL level up faster than you could have imagined. Suddenly, you're revisiting stuff you thought you knew, only to see it with a whole new perspective. Your mentee asks questions you never thought of, forcing you back to fundamentals. Boom, lightbulb moments all over again. This isn't about charity. It’s pure, calculated selfishness (while simultaneously helping out someone else). "But Scott, I Have Nothing to Teach!" This is the #1 excuse I hear every time. I call BS. Every single one of you has something valuable to share. The trick is that it might not be what you think. Maybe you just: Figured out this crazy productivity hack for squeezing an extra hour into your day. Took your dog through basic training without losing your mind. Mastered a killer 20-minute bodyweight workout. Found a budgeting app that finally stopped you from blowing all your cash every weekend Think that stuff's too basic? Wrong. For someone struggling with those things, your 'basic' skill is worth its weight in gold. Your secret is the starting point someone else is craving. What makes you valuable as a mentor isn't just knowledge, it's relatability. When a 'guru' is on some pedestal, that creates distance. People are afraid to ask the "dumb" questions. however, were just in those beginner shoes. You remember the suck, the confusion, the "why the hell can't I get this" vibes. That makes you approachable. You, The Overflow Effect Here's the part no one tells you about 'pouring into others': it creates this crazy energy loop that comes back to you tenfold. Think about it like this: Every time you invest in helping someone else, you: Solidify your own understanding. Build confidence like a damn muscle. Gain clarity about your own path. Open doors to unexpected opportunities. Form valuable connections with people motivated to grow. Remember the old rule, "Give without expectation of return?" Guess what – the universe isn’t stupid. Your generosity creates this abundance mindset shift. New insights start rolling in. You notice solutions to problems you were stuck on. That side project you had on the back burner suddenly starts picking up steam. Call it karma, call it energetics, whatever. Helping others unlocks something that directly fuels your own success. From Talk to Action Enough philosophizing. You're a doer, right? Okay then, here's your homework. This is how you (start) to be a mentor, build a mentoring loop, and start helping others, while simultaneously, helping yourself. Don't try to be all things to all people. What specific skillset or knowledge have you been geeking out over lately? That's your jam. Don't overthink it – just pick something you genuinely enjoy talking about and feel you can provide a little guidance on. Niche Down: We're not going straight for paid mentoring here. Start small. Could you offer: Low-stakes offers: A 30-minute Q&A session in a relevant Facebook group? A mini-training video on a single, super-specific topic? A one-page PDF cheat sheet that breaks down a complex process? Zoom Office hours every Friday afternoon? Pull people in from LinkedIn. Social media, baby. Tell your network you're open to helping a handful of folks with [your niche topic]. Let your enthusiasm for the subject shine through – that's how you attract like-minded people. Don't worry about looking fancy. People connect with real. Put it out there: Overcoming Your Inner Critic Guess what? Your brain's gonna freak out. Imposter syndrome will throw up roadblocks. You'll hear whispers like: "Who the hell am I to teach this?" "Everyone else knows this stuff already." "What if I give bad advice and look like an idiot?" Here's how you fight back: Flip it: That fresh perspective is gold. "Who am I to teach this?" I'm the perfect person to teach this because I just figured it out myself. Nope. They don't. That's your ego talking. Everyone starts somewhere. Don't underestimate the value of a "beginner's mind." "Everyone else knows this stuff." Dude, relax. No one expects perfection. Focus on being helpful, sincere, and open to learning your mentees. That humility builds trust like nothing else. "Bad advice = idiot" alongside This Is YOUR Learning Lab The beauty of starting small is it takes pressure off. This isn't some permanent contract you're locked into. You're dipping your toes, testing the waters, and evolving right along with the folks you're helping. Don't worry about having all the answers right this second. Be transparent about your journey. People love rooting for the underdog. Your scrappiness and genuine desire to help are your winning qualities. Now you’re wondering, ok - I’ll do it… but I’ve never done this before. No problem, here’s how to start. First Interactions: Set the Stage Your goal isn't to be some all-knowing sage. No, you're the supportive guide on the side – here to provide helpful signposts and cheer your mentees on. With that in mind, here's how to kick things off on the right foot: – Ditch the generic "What do you need help with?" That’s too damn open-ended, especially for newbies who likely don't know where to start. Instead, dive into the specifics: Ask Powerful Questions "What's your biggest pain point with [your niche] right now?" "What's one small win you'd love to achieve by the end of this week?" "What part of this process feels the most overwhelming/confusing?" These force focus and get them thinking strategically rather than flailing around in overwhelmed. – Beginners get obsessed with end results. They want to hit some arbitrary number or get that dream outcome NOW. Your job is to bring them back to Earth: Instead of: "How do I make $10k a month?" ask "What's one concrete thing you can do to move closer to that goal?" Focus on Actions, Not Outcomes today This creates manageable momentum and prevents paralysis. Progress is your real measure. – Let's get real: a lot of people are addicted to the struggle. Watch out for red flags like, "I don't have time," "This won't work for me," and "I've tried all that before." Your job is to call gentle BS. Don't be mean, but be firm: Challenge Excuses "If you found just 15 minutes a day, what could you chip away at?" "Great! What makes your situation different?" "That might be true, what could you try instead? else Don't let them off the hook with their self-limiting story. You're here to crack open possibility, not coddle comfort zones. Beware of Scope Creep Early on, set clear boundaries. Are you offering a one-time Q&A? Ongoing email support? Be specific about what's included and what's not. Your time is valuable. Generosity doesn't mean martyrdom. Also, beware of those who confuse freebie mentoring with therapy. Your job isn't to fix their entire life. Keep steering things back to specific action within your area of expertise. Celebrate Every Damn Win This is HUGE. Most folks spend an unhealthy amount of time fixating on what they accomplished. Flip the script. When they share even the smallest victory, go BIG – shout their praises, share their wins, and give 'em virtual high fives. haven't This wires their brain for success more than anything else you could do. You Are the Ultimate Beneficiary It sounds counterintuitive, right? Shouldn't your focus be on value? That's part of it, but here's where the secret kicks in – mentoring unlocks hidden growth avenues for YOU in ways you don't expect. giving Your mentees won't hold back. They'll tell you which explanations landed brilliantly, and which instructions left them scratching their heads. This kind of direct critique is pure gold for honing your communication skills and pinpointing gaps in your understanding. Feedback Loop from Hell: Remember those "dumb" questions that used to plague you? They make you a better innovator. Every time you're stumped by a newbie's inquiry, you must flex your creative problem-solving muscles to find new ways to explain complex concepts. Forced Innovation: Turns out, having someone count on you is damn motivating. When you promise a mentee you'll tackle a certain topic or show them how to do something, welp, now you gotta walk the walk. No hiding behind lazy procrastination anymore. Accountability on Tap: The universe works in mysterious ways. When you throw out generous energy, those ripples come back multiplied. Maybe a mentee connects you with someone who solves a key problem for your business. Maybe that blog post you cranked out to explain a topic suddenly leads to paid collaboration offers. Unexpected Opportunities: This is pure social dynamics. By actively being the leader, the teacher, and the one with (even a little) more experience, you naturally step into a different social role. People begin to look at you differently. Their belief in fuels belief in yourself. Leveling-Up by Association: you Don't Just Mentor, Find Your OWN Mentors Now, here's the twist: even as you become a rockstar mentor to others, don't think you've outgrown being mentored yourself. Always seek out people a few rungs further up the ladder than you. The game never really ends. Look for people who: Embody the results you want to create. Share your values and energy. Have different skills or areas of expertise than your own. It's tempting to only get involved with the most famous, "successful" folks. Sometimes, the greatest mentoring relationships blossom with someone not that far ahead of you – they still remember the challenges vividly. A Call to Arms Listen, I won't sugarcoat this. Stepping into the mentor role ain't always easy. It requires commitment, vulnerability, and the willingness to confront your own BS alongside those you help. But you know what's harder? Staying stuck in the eternal student loop. Spinning your wheels, forever waiting for that perfect course, magic guru, or secret roadmap to fall from the sky. Here's the truth: the knowledge you need is already inside you. All that's needed is unlocking it. By sharing your journey, embracing the messiness of learning, and pouring into others, you create this unstoppable flow that benefits everyone involved. The world is starving for real. People are sick of the overpolished, "I've got it all figured out" BS. What they crave is someone willing to admit they don't have all the answers and figure things out alongside them. That's where you come in. Your imperfections are your biggest assets. Your willingness to show up, share your wins and losses, and lift others up as you rise – that's what makes a true difference. So, my challenge to you is simple: Pick THAT ONE THING you're most excited about right now, and start talking about it. Find those one or two people who could use your support, and offer a helping hand. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Mess up. Admit what you don't know. Learn out loud. This is what creates that overflow effect. This is how you tap into something you haven't even fully glimpsed yet. The Anti-Guru Movement This isn't just about self-growth. It's bigger than that. It's about flipping the script on the entire model of success. Imagine a world where knowledge flows freely, where collaboration wins over competition, and where anyone with drive and curiosity can find the support they need to rise. We're the ones who have to create that world. We're the anti-gurus, the knowledge rebels, the ones who pave the way for something bolder, better, and far more sustainable. So go forth, my friends. Teach. Share. Connect. Lift as you climb. The best form of knowledge seeking is knowledge creation – so unleash that inner wisdom you don't even realize have, and watch the magic unfold. That's a wrap, folks! I hope this ignites some fires. I'd love to hear what you think. Have a great weekend! Scott Also published here

The Anti-Guru Movement: Reconsider What Mentorship Is All About

Jews have become the perfect scapegoat for extremists on both sides A few months ago, before it was rebranded to ‘X’ by the richest moron on the planet, I left a comment on a Twitter post. The poster was an Asian woman, who had experienced some racism while living in Sweden. I’d had some negative encounters there myself, but because they were less about race and more about xenophobia, I made it clear that — aside from being Jewish — I was just a “white dude.” Shortly thereafter, someone replied: “No, you’re not. Jews aren’t white.” Another commenter agreed, and yet another called me a “parasite.” Interestingly, none of these comments violated Twitter’s new TOS. My main takeaway — aside from how terrible the site has become — was how some people’s lives are so shitty that the only thing they can cling to is their “whiteness.” As if it’s a flex. Newsflash: it’s not. But I digress. We’re not here to talk about sad white men. We’re here to talk about anti-semitism, which, unfortunately, has a much broader coalition behind it. While hating Jews has a long and storied history, it’s the people behind the hate who have changed However, from the looks of things, it seems as if it was always there, right beneath the surface. Just like how Trump allowed bigots and racists to show their true colors, October 7th did the same thing for antisemites. That’s why you see all the people tearing down posters of kidnap victims. Chants of “From the river to the sea” at rallies. Jewish college students having to hide from their classmates. There’s even a that just came out that said half of Gen Z sides with Hamas. Not the Palestinians, but Hamas itself. What does that tell you? poll I can hear the argument now: “But but but…Israel!” So let’s talk about that. No one is condoning what Israel and especially what Netanyahu have done. But how are Jews in America and other countries responsible? Why are they being , , ? harassed attacked killed Furthermore, the Israeli people are not the Israeli government. “But they voted for him!” Did you vote for Trump? Or Bush? Or Reagan? Was Putin elected, or Xi? Sometimes, we end up with leaders who don’t represent our best interests. Sometimes we’re dealt a crap hand. It doesn’t automatically make every single person in the country culpable. But that’s not even the real issue here. The real issue is that the situation is so complicated that it’s above most people’s pay grades Actual scholars and historians, people who have been studying this their entire lives, have trouble grasping all the details and nuances. What makes you think, in the weeks or months you’ve been following this, that you’re an expert? Furthermore, where did you get your information from? TikTok? YouTube? Again, it seems similar to the people on the other side, who learned everything they know from Facebook. Or Newsmax. Or Fox News. very In other words: You don’t know shit. You know what you’ve seen from 15-second video clips that are part of an algorithm specifically designed to trigger you, in order to keep you on the platform. That’s why both the far left and the far right are so misguided. And, frankly, why they’re so similar. Because in the internet age, nuance doesn’t exist. And it certainly doesn’t go viral. What does go viral? Extremes. Anything that makes your blood boil. Anything that further amplifies the feedback loop you’re stuck in. Anything that posits the simplest solution to a complex situation and completely eliminates any nuance or shades of grey. If you can throw in a convenient bogeyman for good measure, so much the better. For the right, it’s usually “wokeness” or other dumb buzzwords like CRT and “defund the police.” For the left, it’s pretty much anything Trump or one of his surrogates does or says. In most cases, there is a clear firewall between these messages. But once in a while, they align. In this instance, the Jews are the perfect punching bag for both the social justice warriors on the left and the racist goons on the right. The only good news — if you can even call it that — is that most people are not like this. While it might look like half of Americans are MAGA and the other half are “progressives,” both, in fact, are minorities. Most people (like myself and you probably) fall somewhere in the . We just don’t get as many clicks. middle So, where do we go from here? How do we fix what’s happening in Israel and Gaza? What’s the correct way forward? I have no fucking clue. And neither do you. And that’s fine. It’s not our job to figure all that out. Our job is to filter out all the clickbait and noise and to get the most accurate information possible. Our job is to elect leaders who will steer us through situations like this one with courage and compassion. Our job is to try and ensure the peace and prosperity of all individuals, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or religion. Lastly, it’s to stop blaming the Jews for everything. Between trying to pass for white, counting all our money, and controlling Hollywood and the media, we have enough on our plate already.

One Thing Both the Far Right and the Far Left Agree On? How Much They Hate Jews

Oh, let me tell you about PR agencies and the sour taste they're leaving in the mouths of journalists everywhere. It's become an infuriating trend in the world, where PR agencies have seemingly forgotten the basic principles of effective communication and instead resort to spamming journalists with irrelevant and self-serving content. media It's a plague that's eroding the trust and professionalism that should exist between public relations professionals and the media. First of all, the sheer audacity of these PR agencies to send out their pitches to massive mailing lists is mind-boggling. It's as if they believe that a shotgun approach is the most effective way to get their clients' messages across. PR Agencies Bombard Inboxes They bombard inboxes with generic emails that could have been sent to anyone without a shred of personalization. They've forgotten that journalism is about building relationships, about understanding the needs and preferences of the journalists they're reaching out to. But that's just the beginning of the problem. PR agencies rarely bother to engage in meaningful conversations with journalists. Instead, they treat journalists like passive recipients of their pitches. It's as if they don't recognize that these are professionals who have specific needs, interests, and deadlines. A personal touch, a well-crafted pitch that takes into account the journalist's beat and style would go a long way, but no, that's just too much effort for these PR agencies. Even more frustrating is their complete disregard for the submission guidelines and "contact us" pages of websites. It's as if they believe that rules and guidelines don't apply to them. They clog up the inboxes of journalists who have clearly stated their preferences for communication, and it's incredibly disrespectful. It's like showing up uninvited to a party and refusing to leave. But the icing on the cake is the sheer lack of newsworthy content in their pitches. Instead of sending interesting and relevant stories, they flood our inboxes with nothing but promotional materials for their clients. Blatant PR Agency Spam Ugh, don't even get me started on PR agencies that spam! It's like they've never heard of the word "relevance" or "respect." These companies think they can inundate our inboxes, our social media, and even our phone calls with their mindless, robotic messages as if that's the key to successful public relations. But let me tell you, it's the fastest way to earn the wrath of the very people they're trying to reach. It's also beyond annoying. I mean, do they really think I have all the time in the world to sift through their generic, one-size-fits-all pitches? Newsflash: I don't! I have a life, a job, and other important emails to attend to. Spamming is the lazy marketer's way out, and it shows a complete lack of respect for my time and attention. And the worst part is that these PR agencies often don't even bother to personalize their messages. It's like they copy and paste the same tired pitch to everyone in their database. What's more, it's a blatant violation of privacy. I never signed up for this, and I certainly didn't give these agencies permission to fill my inbox with their irrelevant junk. It's invasive and disrespectful, and it only serves to erode trust in the PR industry as a whole. But perhaps the most infuriating thing about these spammers is that they make the real professionals in the PR world look bad. Legitimate PR practitioners work hard to build meaningful relationships, craft targeted pitches, and respect the boundaries of the people they're trying to reach. But when these spam-happy agencies flood the landscape, they tarnish the reputation of the entire profession. In the end, these PR agencies that spam are just shooting themselves in the foot. They're sabotaging their own efforts by alienating the very people they're trying to engage. Where Is The Cool News? It's as if they've forgotten the fundamental purpose of journalism: to inform and engage the public with real news. Instead, they treat us as if we're an extension of their clients' marketing departments, and it's infuriating. It's not just about receiving pitches that are irrelevant and self-serving; it's about the erosion of trust and respect in the relationship between PR professionals and journalists. The media plays a crucial role in disseminating information, shaping public opinion, and holding institutions accountable. It's a responsibility that journalists take seriously, and it's disheartening to see PR agencies undermine this noble mission by inundating us with junk or promotional content about a new product or service. Journalists want news. Not advertising in disguise. The sad part is that this approach is not only ineffective, but it's also counterproductive for their clients. Journalists are more likely to ignore pitches from PR agencies that don't respect their time, preferences, and professional standards. In the end, the clients are the ones who suffer, as their messages are lost in the flood of uninspired and truly boring PR articles. The Audacity Of Many PR Agencies Let's also talk about the audacity of many PR agencies and their shameless attempts to exploit the hard work of website owners and content creators. We need to address this issue and make it clear that their practices have no place in the world of responsible and fair media. The Self-Serving & Entitled PR Agents.  - No Cash Here! PR agencies seem to have this warped sense of entitlement as if they can waltz into the virtual storefronts of our websites and hang their promotional PR client content in our windows without any financial consideration. It's as if they believe we exist solely to provide them with free advertising for their clients and their own income. Well, that's not how it works, and it’s time someone called these freeloaders out. Website owners have invested countless hours, resources, and, yes, thousands of dollars in building and maintaining their online platforms. Our websites are the result of passion, dedication, and a commitment to delivering valuable content to readers. We've painstakingly crafted our platforms to provide informative, engaging, and entertaining content. They're our creative spaces, and we've worked hard to cultivate an audience. So, who do these PR agencies think they are? Why should they expect us to provide them with no-cost promotional PR placements for their clients (free advertising space?) Just because they represent clients with promotional materials doesn't mean they get a free pass to our platforms. We're not in the business of giving away our hard-earned space and audience for the benefit of their clients' pocketbooks. If they want to leverage our websites for their own gain, they should be ready to pay for the privilege. It's a simple principle that applies universally in business – you want something, you pay for it, especially if that something contains promotional material. It's not only a matter of basic respect for content creators and website owners but also an acknowledgment of the value we bring to the digital landscape. We are an essential part of the online ecosystem, providing information, entertainment, and unique perspectives to our audiences. Our platforms are not billboards for to exploit at their convenience. PR agencies The time is now for PR agencies to rethink their approach. They need to recognize that website owners and content creators are not here to be exploited for their financial gain. If they want to use our platforms for their promotional purposes and line their own pockets, they should be prepared to compensate us fairly for the privilege. It's not just a matter of money; it's a matter of principle and respect for the hard work and dedication that goes into building and maintaining a successful website. They need to recognize the value of building relationships with journalists, personalizing their pitches, respecting submission guidelines, and offering genuinely newsworthy content. It's not just about getting coverage; it's about being a respectful and valuable part of the media ecosystem. Until they do, journalists will continue to have a bad taste in their mouths, and the media landscape will suffer as a result.

PR Agencies And The Sour Taste They're Leaving In The Mouths Of Journalists Everywhere

Let's learn about via these 60 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Compliance /Learn Repo 1. Promoting Reliable Decentralized Finance: An Interview with 2 Experts Ever since Bitcoin first came into play in 2008, the cryptocurrency space has never been deprived of concerns. 2. Bye-bye Google Fonts: German Court Rules That Google Fonts Is Not in Compliance with GDPR Google Fonts is a data privacy concern. Learn why you should care. 3. Astra Protocol Brings Decentralized Compliance to Sandbox's Metaverse by Setting up Compliance Hub Astra Protocol, a cutting-edge legal and compliance layer that provides unparalleled security to public blockchains, announced the launch of a Compliance Hub. 4. ‘It’s Never Too Late To Learn a New Language’: Yair Solow, CEO of Centraleyes Startup interview with Yair Solow, founder and CEO of Centraleyes. Learn more about the company and different solutions. 5. Blockchain Regulations Must Empower Those Outside the Traditional Banking System Banking and finance instruments have slowly evolved from being exclusively accessible to the fortunate few to becoming widely accessible to the masses, who are now able to transact with relative ease and accumulate wealth. 6. Worried About Your Crypto's Custody? Outsource Everything Except Key Management A year into my stint at the Bank of France, I was still struggling to understand why they employ cryptographers. One day, I saw them huddled around a white board for a few hours and struck up a conversation. They walked me through their highly sophisticated key management solution that included everything from certificate signing mechanisms to deep traffic inspection contraptions. Baffled by the complexity of it all, I resorted to my go-to cryptographer question - "So, where are the keys?". The key storage, as it turned out, was outsourced to "a cool startup here in Paris.” 7. The Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing Your Cybersecurity Compliance Whether they know it or not, any business with an internet-exposed edge has to take cybersecurity seriously. 8. Why We Need Regulatory Compliance in Web3 A conversation with Sakhib Waseem of Astra Protocol on why regulatory compliance is both needed and a positive development for the Web3 space as a whole. 9. How to Build a DevOps Culture Within Engineering Teams 10. Report: 10% of Crypto Exchanges have 'Good' Cybersecurity in Place 11. Conquer GDPR Article 32: Locking Down Data Segregation and Identity-Based Access Understand the importance and tools of implementation for data segregation through access control GDPR compliance to address Article 32. 12. Faster is Safer: How Software Physics Beats Human Psychology The idea that we make software safer by releasing it slower is an illusion. Here's why. 13. How Cloud Provider Compliance Affects Your Application Compliance Cloud is evolving fast and already becoming a significant part of the software ecosystems. With this growth, becoming compliant on standards such as ISO, PCI-DSS, HIPPA, builds confidence for you to trust the cloud in terms of security. 14. A Guide to HIPAA Compliance in 2021 & Its Benefits Following HIPAA laws provides a higher level of safety for your corporation and its leaders. 15. The Massive Uber Hack: Technical and Legal Implications In this article, I analyze the technical and legal implications of post-data breach, the risks & possible exonerations in the eyes of extent laws & regulations. 16. Concordium Blockchain valued at $4.45 Billion in its Last Private Sale is now Live Concordium is a public, layer-1, proof-of-stake blockchain with a unique ID layer at the protocol level to assist with regulatory compliance. 17. 3 Solutions for Sharing and Managing Your Zoom Recordings Recorded a Zoom meeting, now what? How do I efficiently share it with people around my organization? How do I restrict access to such a recording? I want my marketing team to only view this recording so how do I segregate access? 18. Providing Proof in an Untrusting World Dragonchain's hybrid platform provides blockchain-based measurable proof  for selective transparency, accountability, and regulatory compliance. 19. Compliance is Not a Guarantee Against Data Breach When it comes to combating the ever-growing threat posed by data breaches, most organizations believe that compliance is key. With cybercriminals targeting governments, small businesses, and other essential infrastructure- the need to minimize the impact of these attacks is at an all-time high. 20. 10 Factors to Prepare for CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) Be ready for CCPA with these top 10 critical factors 21. Readable Legal Documents Are No Longer a "Nice-to-Have" By writing your company’s privacy policy in a clear and structured way, you influence how privacy policies are written and designed in huge organizations. 22. Cloud Compliance And Regulation Resources Customers and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) share the responsibility of security and compliance. Thus, the organization would have the freedom to have architect their security and compliance needs, according to the services they utilize from the CSP and the services they intend to achieve. CSP has the responsibility to provide services securely and to provide physical security of the cloud. If, however, a customer opts for Software-as-a-service, then the CSP provides standard compliance. Still, the organization has to check if it meets its regulations and compliance levels to strive to achieve. All Cloud services (such ad different forms of databases) are not created equal. Policies and procedures should be agreed upon between CSP and client for all security requirements and operations responsibility. 23. How to Optimize Your Salesforce Security Companies implementing Salesforce’s internal security solutions may find their customizations limit visibility into the risks that can impact other processes. 24. How Website Accessibility Affects Your Tech Brand’s Reputation and Success If your website isn't easily accessible by readers with disabilities, you aren't only losing revenue opportunities, but you’re at risk of legal problems. 25. Data Leak Prevention with Databunker We hear the horror stories of data leaks almost every day. Some require a sophisticated attack to gain shell access to the servers. Some happen over the web using the SQL injections in the web apps. As a result of this attack, your customer data can be dumped and personal data leaked. 26. How does IT Process Automation Help in Improving Business Productivity Discover how IT process automation help in improving business productivity. 27. 8 Cloud Compliance Frameworks and Why Cloud-based Organizations Need Them Cloud compliance frameworks help an organization to keep its database secure and private. In this article, you will eight such frameworks that can guide you. 28. Your CI System is a Terrible Compliance System of Record - Here are 5 Reasons Why Jenkins, GitLab, Travis, Circle CI are great for DevOps but not so great for your compliance records - here's why. 29. Establish Your Data Team Early Using These Tools and Techniques Start building your data strategy team and architecture as soon as you can. A one-person data team can make a massive difference to your success as you grow. 30. The deal requires Twitter to be compliant with Musk's request. But not with "past practice" Twitter v. Elon Musk Court Filing is part of our Legal PDF series. Part 10 of 31.FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS-The Final, Agreed-upon Term-Ordinary Course Covenant 31. New Data Privacy Laws Are an Opportunity, Not a Threat The New York Times declared the 2010s as “The Decade Tech Lost Its Way.” And it’s easy to agree when you look back at the Cambridge Analytica scandal, tech companies who consistently got off easy after privacy violations and the rise of sweeping new regulations to protect personal data. 32. How a Data Privacy API Abstracts and Simplifies Privacy and Compliance Data privacy and compliance are hard! Let a data privacy API help. 33. SOC 2 for Startups: Save Time and Money In The Long Run There is no better time for startups to undergo a SOC 2 Examination. See the top reasons how a SOC 2 audit can boost your startup. 34. FTC Mandates for Direct-Selling and Ecommerce Industries Ensuring legal compliance is crucial for direct selling companies to avoid legal issues and maintain the trust of their customers and distributors. 35. An Overview of Legal Compliance as a Service How to automate compliance with legal software. 36. Multi-Cloud Environment and Hurdles of Incorporating IAM Understand the aspects of deploying IAM in multi-cloud environments and how businesses can ensure maximum security and privacy while moving to the cloud. 37. How to Ensure your SaaS is Compliant - For Developers This article reviews what kinds of compliance certifications and regulations exist, what they mean for developers, and how to begin the certification process. 38. "Hackers Need To Get Lucky Only Once" - Excerpts on Fighting Crypto Hacks, Theft and Fraud What do trust & safety leaders expect in 2022 with the rise of blockchain and crypto? Find out why next year is the year for compliance, regtech, trust & safety 39. How Compliance Management System Tools Are Changing the Compliance Landscape Compliance management system tools are changing the compliance landscape. 40. 5 Things You Need to Know About CCPA Compliance The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is meant for those companies to comply with which have customers in the Golden State. The statute “represents a shift in perspective” for data. The state legislature has certain aspects that must be taken seriously by compliance practitioners if their companies are to be in compliance with it. 41. CCPA: Compliance Issue and Major Fraud Risk The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) signals a major step in online privacy rights for California consumers and will likely make its way onto the national scene in the near future. In fact, research shows that 80 percent of businesses predict that CCPA will become national law at some point in the next five years. 42. How a Data Privacy Vault Protects PHI for Healthtech Users With healthcare apps and wearables that gather customer PHI, healthtech companies need a data privacy vault to ensure HIPAA compliance and build customer trust. 43. International Tech Sanctions: A Summary for Startup Founders In this article I'll give you a quick overview of the concept of international sanctions, how they work and how it may impact a FinTech company, especially from the standpoint of technical implementation and tools. 44. 10 Things I Did To Increase CloudTrail Logs Security It's crucial to safeguard CloudTrail logs and enhance the security of them, to meet compliance regulatory requirements and internal business needs. 45. Crypto's Value Is Not Relevant To Investigators, Criminals Are The UN estimates $2 trillion annually is involved in money laundering, and a small but significant percentage is done with crypto. Despite the crypto winter... 46. An In-depth Look at Shadow IT How should IT departments respond to shadow IT? Is it realistic, or even practical, to track 100% of all IT resources? Should there be a more managed approach? 47. 3 Ways to Share and Manage Zoom Recordings Recorded a Zoom meeting, now what? How do I efficiently share it with people around my organization? How do I restrict access to such a recording? I want my marketing team to only view this recording so how do I segregate access? 48. People, Not Systems, are the Real Vulnerabilities in the Workplace Why companies need to reevaluate cybersecurity to reduce risks within the flow of work. Remote work and SaaS apps make securing people more important than ever. 49. Why Websites Need To Be ADA Compliant Did you know when a company website is not ADA Compliant, a lawsuit can be filed? 50. How to Build a Compliance Culture by Improving Employee Engagement in Your Company Creating a culture of compliance means that the organization understands that compliance is critical. 51. Understanding The Importance of SOC2 Compliance for Data Centers Businesses rely on Data Center SOC2 Audit Reports for critical business decisions concerning outsourcing services. It helps customers build a sense of trust. 52. Ethereum High Transaction Fees Discourages New Participants From Entering the Ecosystem This article talks about blockchain, FATF and NFTs. 53. 10 Important 409a Valuation Compliances to Know In this article, we will discuss some of the important considerations in the 409A valuation in order to comply with the law. 54. What Makes Zero Trust Better And Different From Traditional Security Traditional vs zero trust? Learn how zero trust outperforms the traditional model by delivering improved security, flexibility and reduced complexity. 55. LCX Announces Venture Program To Invest Up To $2.5M In Compliant Token Sales At the core of LCX’s infrastructure is their native LCX Token, aiming to elevate the platform to greater heights. 56. 5 Tips for Integrating Security into Development: Part 2 In this second part of our series, we explain five additional tips to help you code more securely, from leveraging existing frameworks to protecting data. 57. Regulatory compliance needs to become mandatory for all cryptocurrency exchanges Regulatory compliance needs to become mandatory for all cryptocurrency exchanges 58. How Novel Technology Boosts Compliance in Pharma Compliance programs aim to promote transparency, safety, and efficacy in the industry. However, achieving compliance in pharma can be complex and costly. 59. Newsflash - "People with AWS Console Access Tend to Change Things" This blog post is a written transcript of the FOSDEM Talk: “Infrastructure drifts aren’t like Pokemon, you can’t catch ’em all”, by Stephane Jourdan – CTO and founder 60. Building a MongoDB NoSQL E-Commerce Data Model MongoDB supports ACID transactions, and its cloud offering is PCI DSS compliant. It's one of the best NoSQL options for e-commerce. Thank you for checking out the 60 most read stories about Compliance on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

60 Stories To Learn About Compliance

Let's learn about via these 51 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Terraform /Learn Repo 1. 6 Free Terraform Tools to Facilitate a Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Have a multi-cloud infrastructure? These free Terraform tools will help you to reduce costs and make your multi-cloud efficient. 2. Developer Trends from Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar 27 Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar is a regular time to take a look at what trends are changing our industry. 3. Serverless API with Terraform: GO and AWS [Part 2] In part 2, we'll go over deploying serverless API to AWS Cloud with Terraform. 4. How a Unicorn Startup in Japan Leveraged the Power of Microservices Startup experience in Mercari. Road to microservices from monolith. 5. Getting Started With Creating, Managing an AWS ECS Cluster With Terraform In this tutorial, you'll define AWS resources using Terraform and how resource definitions translate to actual resources created on AWS 6. Basics of AWS Tags & Terraform with S3 - Part 1 In this video course, you'll learn the basics of AWS tags and Terraform with an S3 bucket. 7. How to Test Terraform the Right Way In this blog post, you'll learn about why you should be testing IaC and the best platforms to get started with. 8. Static Code Analysis  for Infrastructure as Code Using Azure DevOps Pipelines This article explains how to set up static code analysis for infrastructure as code using Azure DevOps pipelines. 9. Should Deploying Production Infrastructure be Hard? Below I'll explain why I built terra_boi to deploy Clientelify, why I think it was downloaded 1,000 times in the first 10 days (despite not promoting it anywhere), and why deploying an application to production shouldn't suck. 10. How To Manage Infrastructure With Terraform What is Terraform? 11. Getting Started Provisioning an AWS EKS Kubernetes Cluster with Terraform Learn how to provision an AWS EKS Kubernetes cluster with Terraform. See a full step-by-step tutorial. 12. How Infrastructure as Code Is Forcing a Revolution in Cost Management You might have read our beta launch blog post, which describes how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is driving the third datacenter revolution (the first two being virtualization and the move to public clouds). In this post, I want to go deeper into looking at how IaC is driving a new need and approach to cost visibility and management. 13. Automating User Management in the Company Have you ever faced the challenge of automating users in your company? 14. Introducing Driftctl: Your IaC Security Belt We recently released the first versions of driftctl, a new open-source project for infrastructure developers, DevOps, SRE, and cloud practitioners, with the goal of helping manage all kinds of drifts. 15. Deploying a Terraform Remote State Backend with AWS S3 and DynamoDB In this article, we are going to be deep diving into remote state management in terraform. 16. Another Reason to Use Docker Recently I was working on a project which includes Terraform and AWS stuff. While working on that I was using my local machine for terraform code testing and luckily everything was going fine. But when we actually want to test it for the production environment we got some issues there. Then, as usual, we started to dig into the issue and finally, we got the issue which was quite a silly one 😜. The production server Terraform version and my local development server Terraform version was not the same. 17. Building Maintenance Mode for your API Gateway Using Terraform In my previous blog post, I went through how to create a maintenance mode page for your application, and how to implement it using Terraform and github pages. But the website is just one part of an Application, and often there’s also a public (or private) API that also needs to have a maintenance mode. Let’s see how we can do that using Terraform on API Gateway. 18. How to Deploy a Django Application on AWS with Terraform The final goal of this guide is to create a scalable and reproducible setup of the Django Web Application on AWS using Terraform. 19. How To Sync Terraform Config And .tfstate File For Existing AWS Resources Terraform is a great (and dominant) infrastructure automation tool. It is multi-cloud, can build all sorts of resources, and in some cases supports API calls to build resources before the native tooling from cloud providers does. 20. Managing Active Directory Objects with Azure AD Provider for Terraform Learn how to manage Active Directory Objects with Azure AD Provider for Terraform. See examples of how to authenticate and grant the correct permissions. 21. Why you should take care of Infrastructure Drift When talking about infrastructure drift, you often get knowing glances and heated answers. Recording gaps in your infra between what you expected to be and the reality of what is, is a well known and widespread issue bothering hundreds of DevOps teams around the globe. 22. Managing a GitHub Organization With Infrastructure as Code This post will share our experience in adopting infrastructure as code (IaC) to manage GitHub organization resources. 23. Using Jupyter/TensorBoard In Any Cloud With One Command Using Terraform Provider Iterative for bespoke Machine Learning & Data Science on AWS, Azure, GCP and K8s 24. The Top 5 DevOps Tools and Services to Consider as a Startup A collection of DevOps tools can significantly enhance your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and increase engineering productivity. 25. Change the Name of your AWS S3 Bucket in Terraform Without Breaking Things Learn how to rename an AWS S3 bucket in Terraform. See renaming process of Amazon s3 bucket in a few simple steps. 26. Exporting Your GKE Cluster to Terraform Cloud: A Guide with Challenges and Solutions In this article, I'll share our journey at ANNA Money from using our Kubernetes installation in GCP to the managed Kubernetes service by Google and GKE. 27. Hashicorp's Terraform: A Introduction Join us in the journey of learning Terraform. This blog series aims to provides a guidance for essentials to be known while working with Terraform. 28. A Handy Guide to Migrating Terraform State to GitLab CI/CD Migrating Terraform state to GitLab CI/CD is a GitOps best practice that allows multiple engineers to work together to develop infrastructure. 29. How Namespace and Terraform Can Manage Kubernetes Environments In the last several years, Kubernetes has become the “go to” standard for managing and orchestrating containerized workloads. Thanks to it’s vendor agnostic nature, you can easily run Kubernetes almost anywhere, and in fact, all the major cloud vendors offer a managed Kubernetes service (AWS EKS, Google GKE, and Azure AKS). 30. Building a “Maintenance Mode” with Terraform and Github Pages As you may have seen, we just launched our public beta of env0 last month. As part of the run-up to the launch, our dev team had to go through and make sure everything about our infrastructure was ready for ongoing public use: one element being creating a maintenance mode for both our Application and our public API. 31. How To Migrate An Existing Infrastructure into Terraform Terraform is a powerful tool to have in your toolset. 32. How To Setup Continuous Integration Pipeline By Using Terraform And GitLab CI Terraform is a fantastic tool for managing your cloud infrastructure, especially if your assets are hosted on multiple cloud providers. 33. Learn How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline Using GitLab for your Website We'll run through how to build and configure a CI/CD pipeline to deploy your business's website using AWS, Terraform & Gitlab. 34. How to Optimize for Iteration: Choosing Your Early Startup's Tech Stack As we’ve discussed in a previous blog post, product development is hypothesis testing. This is especially true in the early stages of a company when you need to confirm or reject your hypothesis as quickly as possible. This process is then repeated until you (hopefully) reach product-market fit. To get there, your team needs to be able to work and build at a pace that allows for this constant and rapid iteration. 35. What Really Propelled The Cloud Revolution: A Developer's Perspective An overview of the main trends that have pushed the Cloud industry — and the world — forward, in the past decade and a half. 36. Sanity-Checks with Playwright in Fargate container on schedule There is often the need to check whether your production system is working as expected. Playwright is a great way to test if everything is going to plan. 37. From “Feature branches” to “Feature environments” with Terraform “The advantage of feature branching is that each developer can work on their own feature and be isolated from changes going on elsewhere.” (FeatureBranch) 38. Serverless API with Terraform, GO and AWS, Part 1 Knowing how to build REST API with latest tech is cool. You know what's even cooler? It's being able to deploy it to the cloud! I'll walk you through the process of building simple, server-less application using GO, AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, Dynamodb) and Terraform. 39. Improve Your IaC With a Specialized Management Platform Most often, there is no point in implementing an in-house solution as the cost and effort of building and maintaining it may exceed its potential benefits. 40. Kubernetes Terraforming on Linode: Linode + Terraform + Kubernetes = Cloud Nirvana Let's discuss the process of "Terraforming" a Kubernetes cluster on Linode using Terraform to help organizations efficiently manage and scale  infrastructure. 41. 10+ Best Resources to learn DevOps in Depth [Online Courses] DevOps is one of the most in-demand skills from employer and there are many job opportunities lying for full stack developers, distinguished engineers and DevOps professionals. If you are an experienced Java programmer or a full-stack web developer, and want to become a DevOps engineer then you have come to the right place. 42. Ad Hoc Environments for Django Applications With ECS, Terraform and GitHub Actions This article will show how software development teams can build on-demand environments for dog-food testing, quality review, internal and external demos and oth 43. Create Your New Reality With Wirehole And Other Awesome Automation Tools **UPDATE October 13, 2020 - The mjtechguy/terransible-wirehole Github repo now supports deploying to Digital Ocean and Hetzner Cloud as well! 44. GraphQL Is Not a Silver Bullet GraphQL is not a configuration language, also not a transformation language, a replacement for SQL, and definitely not Terraform. 45. Building an AWS EKS Fargate Cluster with Terraform How to build an AWS EKS Fargate cluster using terraform. 46. Terraform Configuration Syntax Overview All you need to know to get started about Terraform Syntax. 47. Is Terraform Still Useful? Terraform is an agentless infrastructure tool used mainly by DevOps for infrastructure management. Find out why you should use Terraform for infrastructure. 48. 6 DevOps Trends in 2022 That DevOps Engineers Should Adopt The role of DevOps engineers, their responsibilities, growth opportunities, a set of important soft & hard skills, and most importantly, DevOps trends in 2022. 49. Deploying an Open Source Secure Video Conference Server [A How To Guide] In this article, you'll create a new DigitalOcean account using a free credit link. Then, you will clone a GitHub repository, and use Terraform code to initialize, plan and apply resources to your account, using a preconfigured image from DigitalOcean and your custom domain name. Finally, you will access your account remotely via SSH and execute two scripts to configure both your video conference server and Let's Encrypt SSL to enable HTTPS. 50. Newsflash - "People with AWS Console Access Tend to Change Things" This blog post is a written transcript of the FOSDEM Talk: “Infrastructure drifts aren’t like Pokemon, you can’t catch ’em all”, by Stephane Jourdan – CTO and founder 51. Introduction to AWS Log Insights as CloudWatch Metrics A step-by-step description of how to create an AWS Lambda to convert Cloudwatch LogInsights into metrics Thank you for checking out the 51 most read stories about Terraform on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

51 Stories To Learn About Terraform

Let's learn about via these 46 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Infrastructure As Code /Learn Repo 1. How To Configure CloudFront Using CloudFormation Template I recently worked on implementing CloudFront for s3 bucket files. Most of the tutorials were doing that using console management(UI) but we at Blue Sky Analytics prefer “code as infrastructure”. So I had to do this using CloudFormation. With the help of a few StackOverflow links and tutorials, I was able to write CloudFormation Template. 2. How to Test Terraform the Right Way In this blog post, you'll learn about why you should be testing IaC and the best platforms to get started with. 3. The Relevance of Infrastructure-as-Code Concepts in Security So what is Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) anyway? IaC is a process that automates the provisioning and management of cloud resources. 4. Change the Name of your AWS S3 Bucket in Terraform Without Breaking Things Learn how to rename an AWS S3 bucket in Terraform. See renaming process of Amazon s3 bucket in a few simple steps. 5. Using a Product-Led Growth Mindset to Improve User Experience How changing the development mindset to a product-led-growth one can improve the user experience by focusing the thought process for the team's members. 6. What Really Propelled The Cloud Revolution: A Developer's Perspective An overview of the main trends that have pushed the Cloud industry — and the world — forward, in the past decade and a half. 7. Static Code Analysis  for Infrastructure as Code Using Azure DevOps Pipelines This article explains how to set up static code analysis for infrastructure as code using Azure DevOps pipelines. 8. 6 Free Terraform Tools to Facilitate a Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Have a multi-cloud infrastructure? These free Terraform tools will help you to reduce costs and make your multi-cloud efficient. 9. How to Create an Azure API Management Instance using Bicep Lang via Azure DevOps The more I use Bicep, the more I love it. This is what ARM Templates should have been. 10. Deploy Docker Using Ansible 11. Smart E-bike Kits: A Tour Inside Our Servers The Idea 12. Learn About Infrastructure as Code in 5 Minutes and Why You Should Use It Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of managing and configuring an infrastructure using configuration files, rather than manually editing configurations 13. Improve Your IaC With a Specialized Management Platform Most often, there is no point in implementing an in-house solution as the cost and effort of building and maintaining it may exceed its potential benefits. 14. Managing a GitHub Organization With Infrastructure as Code This post will share our experience in adopting infrastructure as code (IaC) to manage GitHub organization resources. 15. Why Learn Any Other Programming Language When You Can Learn Typescript? Use TypeScript in all your projects and all use cases without any limitation. You can now do frontend, backend, infrastructure and machine learning in one progr 16. Code as Documentation and Assessment Documenting IT networking lab procedures in code rather than word-processor documents enables more authentic, equitable and consistent assessment. 17. AWS CloudFormation Template Basics Get started creating IaC using CloudFormation templates. 18. Why Understanding Infrastructure-as-code is Critical to Scaling Your Technology Infrastructure Infrastructure as code (IaC) is one of the most important trends in modern IT development. Read about the benefits of IaC and how to implement it. 19. How Infrastructure as Code Is Forcing a Revolution in Cost Management You might have read our beta launch blog post, which describes how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is driving the third datacenter revolution (the first two being virtualization and the move to public clouds). In this post, I want to go deeper into looking at how IaC is driving a new need and approach to cost visibility and management. 20. How To Manage Infrastructure With Terraform What is Terraform? 21. Codify your SaaS Apps: The Answer to the Unmanaged SaaS Jungle A phenomenon we have encountered often, when helping companies overcome drift, is a common neglect of the entire SaaS toolchain. Learn why this is troubling. 22. Three Ways to Scale Your Apps with Render When your app is experiencing high traffic or utilization, you need to scale your service to handle that load. We’ll explore three ways to scale your apps. 23. Building Your Infrastructure With Just a Diagram This hands-on tutorial will teach you how to create infrastructure via the AWS Application Composer Console. 24. Check Out the Principles and Best Practices of Infrastructure as Code for 2023 Infrastructure-as-code is a very important concept to understand in the DevOps world today. 25. How To Migrate An Existing Infrastructure into Terraform Terraform is a powerful tool to have in your toolset. 26. Hashicorp's Terraform: A Introduction Join us in the journey of learning Terraform. This blog series aims to provides a guidance for essentials to be known while working with Terraform. 27. 2023 Will Be the Year of Kubernetes (and Other Predictions in the Cloud and Infrastructure Industry) Dive into the new year’s top cloud and infra-tech trends, straight from a cloud and infrastructure technology fanatic. 28. Introducing Driftctl: Your IaC Security Belt We recently released the first versions of driftctl, a new open-source project for infrastructure developers, DevOps, SRE, and cloud practitioners, with the goal of helping manage all kinds of drifts. 29. Cloud Application Infrastructure from Code (IfC) Presents a relatively new concept of Infrastructure from Code (IfC) as the next logical step in cloud automation 30. Project-as-Code: The Catalyst DevOps Needs If you are familiar with Docker, Terraform, and the CI platforms (eg: Jenkins, CircleCI, Codeship), you already know the power of Declarative DevOps. It can make development easier by being repeatable, predictable, and fast. Supporting technologies both hide complexities and offer important reuse by supporting simple structured syntax in an easy to create and read file. Each technology has codified much of its domain allowing developers to author and instrument with nothing more than a text editor. 31. I Got a New EKS Cluster Running And Terraform Code in 2 minutes AWS EKS + Terraform + Cloudskiff do the job 32. B2B Fintech Trends for 2021: Storage, Security, Cloud Migration, IaC As CTO at Altar.io, a large part of my work revolves around observing the forward-looking industry trends (including fintech trends) that affect how we create innovative products. 33. Why you should take care of Infrastructure Drift When talking about infrastructure drift, you often get knowing glances and heated answers. Recording gaps in your infra between what you expected to be and the reality of what is, is a well known and widespread issue bothering hundreds of DevOps teams around the globe. 34. The State of Cloud Automation and the Promise of Infrastructure Automation The Cloud has become a familiar feature of the tech stacks at most organizations and is becoming much more than a place for server resources. At present, almost everything in our digital landscape is connected to a Cloud in one way or another. 35. From “Feature branches” to “Feature environments” with Terraform “The advantage of feature branching is that each developer can work on their own feature and be isolated from changes going on elsewhere.” (FeatureBranch) 36. How To Setup Continuous Integration Pipeline By Using Terraform And GitLab CI Terraform is a fantastic tool for managing your cloud infrastructure, especially if your assets are hosted on multiple cloud providers. 37. Creating and Provisioning Azure Container Apps with Bicep Using Bicep, we can deploy Azure Container Apps quickly and easily! 38. Building a “Maintenance Mode” with Terraform and Github Pages As you may have seen, we just launched our public beta of env0 last month. As part of the run-up to the launch, our dev team had to go through and make sure everything about our infrastructure was ready for ongoing public use: one element being creating a maintenance mode for both our Application and our public API. 39. Application Deployment: Recipe for Great Serverless Strategy This is true for the most part, but Serverless apps also have a certain property that can make their deployment and maintenance time consuming. 40. Exporting Your GKE Cluster to Terraform Cloud: A Guide with Challenges and Solutions In this article, I'll share our journey at ANNA Money from using our Kubernetes installation in GCP to the managed Kubernetes service by Google and GKE. 41. What is Everything-as-Code? Examining  the Explosion of "as Code" Buzzwords If you’re confused when you read about “[some software term] as code” or “everything as code,” all you really need to know is that we’re talking about automation: The thing we use to do tedious tasks for us, or orchestrate tasks when they become too large and complex for manual methods. 42. Creating a Instance Scheduler using AWS CDK The AWS CDK is a software development framework to define cloud infrastructure as code and provision it through CloudFormation. The CDK integrates fully with AWS services and allows developers to use high-level construct to define cloud infrastructure in code. 43. Cloud-Native Yay or Nay: Reasons to Use Cloud-Native Technologies Cloud-native has been the talk of the town for quite some time now. Some developers think it’s just hyped way too much and will soon diminish from the limelight. Others think cloud-native will revolutionize software development and is here to stay! 44. Newsflash - "People with AWS Console Access Tend to Change Things" This blog post is a written transcript of the FOSDEM Talk: “Infrastructure drifts aren’t like Pokemon, you can’t catch ’em all”, by Stephane Jourdan – CTO and founder 45. How Do You Manage Helm Charts? Whether you love it or hate it, Helm is a ubiquitous tool for managing Kubernetes applications. You can use it in many different ways which is great, but can also be overwhelming. 46. Terraform Configuration Syntax Overview All you need to know to get started about Terraform Syntax. Thank you for checking out the 46 most read stories about Infrastructure As Code on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

46 Stories To Learn About Infrastructure As Code

166 Stories To Learn About Devops Tools

Let's learn about via these 63 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Devsecops /Learn Repo 1. Softagram - Making Code Reviews Humane The story of Softagram is a long one and has many twists. Everything started in a small company long time ago, from the area of static analysis tools development. After many phases, Softagram is focusing on helping developers to get visual feedback on the code change: how is the software design evolving in the pull request under review. 2. How To Dockerize Your Pen-testing Lab [feat. Kali Linux] Tools & Skills 3. Why you should take care of Infrastructure Drift When talking about infrastructure drift, you often get knowing glances and heated answers. Recording gaps in your infra between what you expected to be and the reality of what is, is a well known and widespread issue bothering hundreds of DevOps teams around the globe. 4. Stop Leaving Secrets In Your Code to Help Your Developers Be Security-Focused There's one area that some developers fall short on—security. The most widespread security vulnerability is leaving secrets in code. 5. Software Ages Like Milk, Not Wine: Why Open Source Vulnerabilities Matter Malware attacks in open source ecosystems have exponentially increased in the last 2 years. How do we build cybersecurity that scales to meet this challenge? 6. How DevOps Evolved Into DevSecOps The rise in cybercrime and the sophistication of attacks has made security a crucial part of the development process and not just an afterthought. 7. Building an Airtight Security Funnel Step-by-Step In this article, we’ll walk through SharePass’s patent-pending security funnel, providing a step-by-step guide to building out your security pipeline. 8. Using GitHub Protected Branches to Make SOC 2 Audits Suck Less “Hey, can you meet with our SOC 2 auditors’ for a couple of hours next week to talk about our SDLC process?” Oh no! This question continually causes heartburn and eventual headachesfor software engineers. Spending multiple hours in a conference room explaining to auditors how your team deploys changes, what a pull request is and explaining how infrastructure as code works is not how engineers would describe a productive afternoon. 9. Why Hybrid Deployment Could be the Best Solution for Better DevSecOps DevSecOps is gaining popularity rapidly because it’s the only well-defined methodology to integrate the entire application development process while addressing security as well. 10. What's Stopping Everyone From Going Serverless? In this article, we'll look at what are the security hazards in serverless and what factors will drive its development in the following years. 11. What is Secure SDLC? Software Development Life Cycle is a framework that describes the software life cycle. Its purpose is to help build quality development processes. 12. 4 Ways to Better Implement DevSecOps in Open Source Code Security is of paramount importance to every DevOps team today. You can deliver excellent applications in lesser time due to agile development methodologies like DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. However, if your application is not extremely secure, there’s an imminent threat of attacks. Today, hackers are more proficient than ever, which means your applications need a security strategy that makes them impenetrable and keeps you one step ahead of hackers. 13. Hacking Your Way Through Microservice Architecture With an emerging pattern of organizations embracing the DevOps framework, adopting Microservice Architecture is steadily gaining the respect it deserves. 14. Using Open Source AWS Amplify JS with Cognito to Secure Angular Apps This article shows how to set up the Cognito UserPools JWT authentication flow and how it will integrate with an Angular Web Application. 15. Automating Security in DevOps: Top 15 Tools Cybersecurity is a big concern for many companies. With data breaches happening more and more as attacks increase in sophistication, teams are looking at all of the options they have to prevent them. 16. Closer Than You Think: Bridging the DevOps-Security Gap The advantages of moving security into the DevOps lifecycle early are well-studied. For example, Puppet’s 2019 State of DevOps Report details numerous ways that both security and DevOps improve when security is integrated into DevOps earlier (aka: Shift Left). 17. The Less Understood Dangers of Secret Sprawl and What Devs Can Do to Fight It When developers refer to secret sprawl they are typically referring to the unwanted distribution of secrets across multiple platforms, services and machines. 18. Shift Left Security: The Best Approach For Modernistic SDLC In this post, we’ll discuss what shift left security is, what shift left security approaches there are and why, in the long run, it’s crucial to your success. 19. Balancing Cybersecurity Risk with Technological Innovation: Using Policy as Code The costs of security events are often far-reaching. Shifting security left to using policy as code can help to ensure security. 20. Introducing Driftctl: Your IaC Security Belt We recently released the first versions of driftctl, a new open-source project for infrastructure developers, DevOps, SRE, and cloud practitioners, with the goal of helping manage all kinds of drifts. 21. Why Doesn't Your CI Pipeline Have Security Bug Testing Software Engineering has Changed with CI/CD 22. Reveal Go Module Vulnerabilities With Xray Golang developers care a lot about security and as Go modules become more widely used, they need more ways to assure these publicly shared files are safe. 23. Serverless Computing, Low Code/No-Code to Dominate DevOps Trends in 2023 What are the new up-and-coming trends for DevOps? We count to 5 and give you what is on the horizon for 2023. 24. Application Security Posture Management: An Overview Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a holistic approach to managing the security posture of applications throughout their lifecycle. 25. What is Threat Modeling and Why Should you Care? Threat modeling is typically conducted from the design phase and onward in the development process. 26. DevSecOps is the key to safeguarding assets and value Developing and deploying AI-powered systems and applications is a complex business, especially in our extended remote reality. 27. Security In DevSecOps: 3 Principles To Follow When an organization commits to DevSecOps, a fundamental shift takes place across teams. Security becomes everyone’s responsibility, which requires some rules. 28. API Architecture: Components and Best Practices While API Architecture and API Design are different, when it comes to securing them, both need to be kept in focus. 29. DevSecOps: Shifting Left and Shifting Right Organization’s ability to cope with the complexity of delivering software at high velocity, with confidence and excellent quality, in a multi-speed IT landscape and hybrid environments has become a reality with the DevOps best practices like continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. But there have been shifting approaches that are confusing to Devops people, 'shift left' and 'shift right.' So, the question is, what exactly are we shifting here? 30. What's Hot in 2023?🔥 Top 8 Technology Trends You Should Know The article covers eight technologies that are worth to invest in 2023. 31. What happens after you accidentally leak secrets to a public code repository What happens after you accidentally leak secrets to a public code repository. 32. Leading CISOs and DevOps Teams Are Leveraging DevSecOps DevSecOps is a major evolution of the cybersecurity practice. Today, companies leverage several automated tools. This creates complexities in DevSecOps. 33. Where is DevOps Going in 2021? Efficiency, speed, transparency — all of this is possible with DevOps. In 2021, AI, data security, assembly lines, and more will take over as DevOps trends. 34. Free Extension To Scan Go Vulnerabilities in Visual Studio Code If you’re a Golang developer using Visual Studio Code, keeping at-risk Go Modules out of your apps just got easier, and for free. 35. DevSecOps and DevOps: A Deep Dive In this series, I will describe what DevSecOps is, how we can implement it in AWS and how to can increase security in our operations. 36. The Essential Guide to Zero Trust on AWS ECS Fargate Zero Trust architecture is one method to secure your online infrastructure from unauthorized users. This guide covers the how and why of getting it to work. 37. Things You Must Know About git-crypt To Successfully Protect Your Secret Data Many software projects use secrets - usually, keys to external APIs or credentials to access an external resource such as a database. Your application needs these keys at runtime, so you need to be able to provide them when you deploy your application, or as a step in preparing your deployment environment. 38. Security and AI: How to Make Sure DevSecOps Delivers Results Software and systems are the backbone of most organizations. When an application fails or a system is breached, it can lead to dire loss and harm. 39. What is DevSecOps? - 7 Best Practices for Effective Automation in 2021 DevSecOps is the theory of incorporating security activities within the process of DevOps. 40. The Everything Guide to Data Collection in DevSecOps Collecting wide swaths of observability and security data is key to a high-quality digital experience. Find out what you need to know to get started. 41. AppSec: SecDevOps or DevSecOps? Do We Need to Choose? Guide to the What and the Why The talks emerging around DevSecOps and SecDevOps, define and differentiate the other. While the overall goal may be the same, they are different in practice. 42. The Urban Myths of Secure Coding: Part 1 Urban myths about secure coding are easy to manage when you have the right tools in place and best practices to follow as guidelines. 43. A Brief Overview of Kubernetes Architecture Here, we talk about the various components within a Kubernetes architecture. Read further to know more! 44. How To Block Security Vulnerabilities from Penetrating Your Code As continuous software deployments grow and become the accepted standard, security measures gain even more importance. From development and all the way through to production, security requirements should be adopted by all teams in an organization. 45. Enterprise Cloud Security Guide: Secure Application Development This article focuses on DevSecOps and explores how to secure applications during DevOps and the security of the platform itself. 46. 5 Tips for Integrating Security into Development: Part 2 In this second part of our series, we explain five additional tips to help you code more securely, from leveraging existing frameworks to protecting data. 47. Deep Dive Into DevSecOps: Heroku Flow Edition An Overview of DevSecOps and How to Automate It 48. 7 Best DevOps Security Practices: DevSecOps and Its Merits DevOps has transformed the way operational engineers and software developers reason. Gone are the days when a code was written, implemented, and managed by operations. The DevOps model has remodeled the system of product and application production. As a result, faster results have become the pinnacle of delivering at the speed which the market demands. 49. What are ENV Files? - Pros, Cons, Alternatives What are ENV files and why as an industry should we move away from them?Three months ago we stopped using ENV files. 50. How not to choose your open source libraries Enterprises see open source as important, but they also find security to be a main barrier for adopting open source dependencies. Vulnerable software is by definition not secure, but that does not mean we judge security by the number of vulnerabilities. We highlight this by looking at two commonly used libraries, OpenSSL and GStreamer. 51. Container Security Tools to Try in 2023 7 Strategies and associated tools for your container security workflows. 52. Hacking Unikernels Through Process Injection [A Step by Step Guide] A lot of people have this mistaken notion that unikernels have this 'unhackable' characteristic about them. This is untrue. They absolutely are hackable depending on what is deployed and how they are configured. 53. 5 Tips for Integrating Security into Development - Part 1 In this two-part series, we’re bringing you secure coding best practices and practical tips that you can lean on when integrating security into development 54. State of DevOps Cloud Solutions [Update: 2020] Every company claims to have a cloud/hybrid DevOps platform that enables and powers developers working remotely. Time to make order of the chaos.* 55. It's Raining Cyber Attacks: Cybersecurity in the Cloud With the latest news and advancements in the cybersecurity world, we will see how these new rules impact modern cloud applications. 56. How to Solve the Security Challenges of Digital Transformations Digital transformations is a top-of-mind task on every company's agenda. Recent data from Tech Pro Research survey proves it: last year 70% of organizations either pursued a digital transformation strategy or are
crafting one. 57. DevSecOps Introduction: Clear Instructions on How to Build a DevSecOps Pipeline in AWS [Part 2] Welcome to second part of the DevSecOps  series.  In the second part, we will turn ON/OFF the inbuilt led of ESP32 using AWS Device Shadow Service. Before starting, let's do a recap, in Part 1 we have connected the ESP32 MCU with AWS and able to publish Messages to IoT Core.  The following series split into two parts (refer below) with very simple and clear instructions to provision a CI/CD pipeline adhering to DevSecOps principles in AWS. Everything covered from scratch you won't face any difficulty understanding. In case of any clarification, drop me a note on LinkedIn. Feel free to explore them with ease, skip to the one which is relevant to you. 58. Newsflash - "People with AWS Console Access Tend to Change Things" This blog post is a written transcript of the FOSDEM Talk: “Infrastructure drifts aren’t like Pokemon, you can’t catch ’em all”, by Stephane Jourdan – CTO and founder 59. The Day we Started to Protect DevOps with Blockchain I still remember February 2018 very well. Many people were in a really bad mood when it came to Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), mainly because the price of most cryptocurrencies made a nose dive and the Disillusionment started. 60. Your Top 5 Software Composition Analysis Questions Answered With the fast growth of the usage of open source in all industries, the need to track its components becomes dire as ever. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is an open source component management solution for providing and automating visibility into the open source in your software. 61. An Open-Source Tool For Security Scans Of Container Images — Vilicus Vilicus is an open-source tool that orchestrates security scans of container images(Docker/OCI) and centralizes all results into a database for further analysis 62. ‘Security’ in Cloud-Native: Everything You Ever Want To Know Enterprise networks and data security risks have never been this monumental as they are in today’s day and age. Nonetheless, traditional approaches, including those used by operators of public clouds, are essentially more or less the same. 63. DevSecOps Introduction: Clear Instructions on How to Build a DevSecOps Pipeline in AWS [Part 1] DevSecOps is the new buzz and definitely a potential candidate to scare people in the ever-changing software industry. When I heard the term for the first time, my inner voice said it out loud, "When just this Happened, and why SEC is sandwich between them ?". Later on, to look cool, I started adding DevSecOps on my profile, but the dire consequence was a complete disappointment. DevSecOps isn't just restricted to understand security by heart & fit it with DevOps. A good analogy would be not to imagine your ex with someone, especially with your girlfriend/wife. It is all about "Shift left on Security" i.e. to introduce security as early as possible in the SDLC. Though I am not going to bore you with the definitions and concepts as I am a practical person. Thus, my objective here is to demonstrate how DevSecOps works in reality. The following series split into two parts (refer below) with very simple and clear instructions to provision a CI/CD pipeline adhering to DevSecOps principles in AWS. Everything covered from scratch you won't face any difficulty understanding. In case of any clarification, drop me a note on LinkedIn. Feel free to explore them with ease, skip to the one which is relevant to you. Thank you for checking out the 63 most read stories about Devsecops on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

63 Stories To Learn About Devsecops

In this post, I will explain how you can survive a bear market and how to cope and prepare for the next bull market cycle. The bear market is the most brutal period for most people in crypto. I say most people because you can make money in any market. The preparation for a Bear Market starts from a bull market, even as far back as the previous bear market. You leverage on previous experience and learn. Learn to take profits in a bull market. Bet on builders and invest in utility projects. DYOR and DCA. Zoom out, take a break, and touch the grass. TL;DR Hold on For Dear Life - HODL Imagine growing your portfolio from zero to a hundred thousand dollars to watch everything go belly up. You will need to hold on for your dear life. HODL is a misspelling of HOLD, which means holding on to your coins and tokens during volatile market movement. There is a lot of speculation about the crypto market and Bitcoin price, and the general sentiment is that Bitcoin will be worth upwards of $100k in a few years. This makes holding seem the best thing to do in the long run. Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking you to hold on to your tokens. The Best Strategy? Many people go into the crypto market without a strategy other than HODLING. This is fine in a bull cycle, but what happens in more nuanced situations? You find HODL isn't nearly enough as you watch everything seemingly go to zero. But in these scenarios, many HODL memes ask you to Diamondhand. In my opinion, HODL and Diamond Handing are terms popularized by whales and influencers to get you to hold on while you are being used as exit liquidity. As much as the community is an essential part of Web3 products, you must never forget you are trading items in a capitalist market where no one is a true friend. In a bear market, the only coins worth holding are those with excellent fundamentals and use cases, products that have been tested and proven to work. HODL according to your risk appetite. And if the markets get too harsh, Hold on For Dear Life! BUIDL Are you a blockchain product, or still have it in the conceptualization stage? The best time to build is during a bear market. building Why? you may ask. Well, I have a few reasons for this: It is easy for projects to do well in a bull market when everyone is euphoric and a lot of money is pumped into the crypto market. It is during the bull cycle that a lot of people invest in hopes of making maximum gains. In a bear market, people are fearful and more cautious about what they invest in. If you can pull investors during a bear, that's a good indicator of the quality of your product. A bear market allows you to learn what people want and iterate. During a bear, people focus more on utilities, as such projects are usually filtered out. If your product survives a bear, it will do exceptionally well in a bull market. Take Profits Learn to take profits in every type of market. As I mentioned earlier, HODL is a tool used by people who manipulate you into being exit liquidity. Many people in crypto view selling as a taboo, a shame. There is even a slur, "paper hand," for those who sell. Be a Paperhand Because of the volatility of the crypto market, people have become delusional about what profit means. Many traders often gun for those high percentage profits, but they don't realize these are fringe events. Not every coin or NFT will do an x100 price movement. In the stock market, a 10% profit is a lot, so why don't you take it in crypto? If you mint an NFT or buy a token that does x2 of the initial amount invested, that is already a 100% profit. However, most people do not sell but hold on in hopes of making more. Newsflash, you will most likely end up holding a bag if you do not sell. When faced with the dilemma of holding or selling, always ask yourself if would you be happy to sell at a lesser price if the market falls. Are you willing to let go of part of the value your assets have gained? Set a price beneath which you won't be comfortable or happy selling. If you made a huge sum of money, take profit regardless of whether the price could go up or not. There is no shame in selling, and the only money you is the one in fiat. really own Take profits while the market is going up and down. Remember, the crypto market is speculative, profit is profit, and Fiat is king. DCA Dollar-Cost Averaging is a trading technique where you take a fixed amount of money and divide it into equal parts to purchase an asset over some time. DCA helps to reduce risk to you due to volatile market conditions. It can also be a great tool to help you invest long-term with little cash. During dips, inexperienced crypto traders rush to fill their bags, thinking they bought assets at a discount, only for the market to go further down, leaving them with heavier bags. A DCA strategy would have helped them avoid the rut they fell in. According to , if you bought $10 of Bitcoin every week for the past 3 years, you would have turned $1,570 into $4,165, which is a +165% profit. dcabtc.com DYOR The bear market is the best time to invest; however, be careful in what projects you are investing in. You need to Do Your Own Research. There are several metrics you can use to judge a project. In a future post, we would take an in-depth look into Doing Your Own Research. However, the following can help you make a form of calculated guess: 1. Community At the heart of successful Web3 products is community; community is essential because they are the ones who will buy and use your product. As a potential investor, you need to look at the community and try to gauge their outlook and convictions about the project. Interact with them, hear their opinions and concern, and take note of how the project team handles FUD. However, this is not foolproof. Projects with great communities can still fail for a number of reasons, especially if they fail to deliver. 2. Utility When investing in a coin, project, or NFT, you are essentially buying a piece of a company. So, ask yourself, what does this company offer? What tools, products, and services are they offering? As I mentioned earlier, the bear market filters out low-quality products, so if you are holding on to an expensive but low-quality product, chances are that you will get burnt. Always bet on builders. They will most likely still be here after a cruel bear because they offer essential services and valuable products. 3. Team The success of a project heavily depends on the team; how competent are they and do they have a proven track record? It may be hard to evaluate the team given the nature of anonymity in Web3. However, a lot of great builders are doxxed; a team with good intentions shouldn't be afraid to dox. This is not to say that anonymous builders are nefarious in nature, quite the contrary because a lot of Web3 products are built by anonymous people or entities operating with pseudonyms. Zoom Out We often fail to see the big picture when looking at charts and price movements of our crypto assets. Bitcoin is in a better place than it was two years ago and in a far better place 10 years back. Bitcoin and, by extension, the crypto market has been steadily growing, hitting a $2 trillion market cap in 2021. In contrast with the $121.94 Global Domestic Equity Market capitalization. Invest Only What You are Willing to Lose Preparation for a bear starts in a bull market. You don't want to invest all your life's savings because it could all get wiped out in harsh market conditions, and if you are lucky, you could lose a small percentage. This brings us to DCA and taking profits, which I mentioned earlier. You can only survive a bear if you already took profits in a bull cycle. This profit can be used to DCA into solid projects during a bear, and you could use that money to buy a house or pay your bills. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has tips to help you invest wisely. Go Outside and Touch Grass The bear market can be brutal on your mental health, so stop looking at the charts, go outside and touch the grass. That's the best thing you can do in certain situations. Just ignore everything and come back during the next bull cycle, and get plenty of exercises. WAGMI!! Also published here. lead image source.

How to Successfully Navigate a Crypto Bear Market 

Adobe recently announced their purchase of Figma for $20 billion US dollars, immediately causing feelings of betrayal and disgust amongst web developers worldwide. How is this betrayal? Why all the disgust? Adobe has a history of letting their own products stagnate, then eventually killing them off or abandoning them altogether. Back in 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia, who was Adobe’s only true rival at the time. Macromedia had an innovative design software called Fireworks, which was a very versatile tool for putting together website layouts using vector graphics and was basically an early version of Figma. Fireworks integrated seamlessly with Dreamweaver, another Macromedia product for creating websites that was considered state-of-the-art at the time. Adobe decided to abandon Fireworks in 2013 to promote Photoshop and Illustrator use in designing website layouts, even though neither of those programs had key development integrations such as HTML or CSS tags. For the past decade, Adobe has had to contend with Figma, a San Francisco based startup that makes a great web design and development app, using vector graphics and allows for team collaboration online. Figma is easy to use, and can really speed up the development process by streamlining the creation of wireframes, user interfaces and visual site design. Adobe XD is basically Figma with a clunkier and somewhat awkward interface, but is used for the same purposes as Figma. One major difference is that for individual or freelance developers, Figma is free whereas Adobe XD starts at $10/month. Here is where the betrayal and disgust set in…it is clear that Adobe considers themselves to be the Microsoft of web development, swallowing up rivals and offering stale products that offer little to no innovation. Several years ago Adobe switched to a subscription based model, abandoning the ability to purchase their software at a fixed price. Certainly it won’t be long before Figma is put behind a paywall and left to slowly deteriorate like so many of Adobe’s other products over the years. Adobe makes claims that Figma is not a “direct competitor.” If that is true, then who exactly is their direct competitor? Why are software companies seemingly free from antitrust laws? How is any of this good for web developers? In their press release, : Adobe stated “With Adobe’s and Figma’s expansive product portfolio, the combined company will have a rare opportunity to power the future of work by bringing together capabilities for brainstorming, sharing, creativity and collaboration and delivering these innovations to hundreds of millions of customers.” Here is a newsflash Adobe: developers already collaborate, share and create every single day without Adobe having to step in and corner the market on “collaboration”. Like Microsoft, Adobe is essentially the opposite of open-source. Their arrogant and condescending behavior shows little to no respect or concern for actual web developers and designers. I have been in web development since the late 1990s, back when the field was called web design. Having used Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and other products, I can say with certainty that their software has really not fundamentally changed or evolved over the past 25 years. Figma was an innovator, taking a “web first” approach to vector graphics, and was a better product than Adobe XD…and, they offered it for FREE. Now, I know that nothing is really “free.” Clearly Figma has been positioning themselves to be bought out for a ridiculous sum of money for quite some time, and they did it. Hooray for you, Figma. Just like so many other Silicon Valley startups, you create something innovative and exciting, and then sell out and that’s the end of the innovation. All this is to say that independent web developers need to collaborate with open source platforms as much as possible. One bright side of this predictable corporate acquisition is that hopefully this will encourage further interest in true open source design projects, such as . https://penpot.app It is much harder for developers who work on bigger teams or large corporations to switch to open source alternatives, but for freelancers and smaller groups the time has come to stop supporting Adobe or any other tech giants who continually show such contempt for the people who use their products. Featured image, HackerNoon Stable Diffusion.

Adobe Pigs Out (Again)

Adobe Pigs Out (otra vez)

Adobe Pigs Out (encore)

एडोब पिग्स आउट (फिर से)

Adobe Pigs Out (再び)

Adobe Pigs Out (de novo)

Adobe Pigs Out (Một lần nữa)

Adobe Pigs Out（再次）

Enabling NFT Royalties With EIP-2981

Habilitación de regalías NFT con EIP-2981

SQL-first Bun is a SQL-first Golang ORM for PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MSSQL, and SQLite. SQL-first means you can write SQL queries in Go, for example, this Bun query: var num int
err := db.NewSelect().
    TableExpr("generate_series(1, 3)").
    Where("generate_series = ?", 3).
    Limit(10).
    Scan(ctx, &num) Generates the following SQL: SELECT *
FROM generate_series(1, 3)
WHERE generate_series = 123
LIMIT 10 SQL is still there, but Bun helps you generate long queries while protecting against SQL injections thanks to placeholders: ? Where("id = ?", 123)     // WHERE id = 123
Where("id >= ?", 123)    // WHERE id >= 123
Where("id = ?", "hello") // WHERE id = 'hello'

Where("id IN (?)", bun.In([]int{1, 2, 3})) // WHERE id IN (1, 2, 3)

Where("? = ?", bun.Ident("column"), "value") // WHERE "column" = 'value' Using Bun, you can write really complex queries, for example, the following Bun query: regionalSales := db.NewSelect().
	ColumnExpr("region").
	ColumnExpr("SUM(amount) AS total_sales").
	TableExpr("orders").
	GroupExpr("region")

topRegions := db.NewSelect().
	ColumnExpr("region").
	TableExpr("regional_sales").
	Where("total_sales > (SELECT SUM(total_sales) / 10 FROM regional_sales)")

var []items map[string]interface{}

err := db.NewSelect().
	With("regional_sales", regionalSales).
	With("top_regions", topRegions).
	ColumnExpr("region").
	ColumnExpr("product").
	ColumnExpr("SUM(quantity) AS product_units").
	ColumnExpr("SUM(amount) AS product_sales").
	TableExpr("orders").
	Where("region IN (SELECT region FROM top_regions)").
	GroupExpr("region").
	GroupExpr("product").
	Scan(ctx, &items) Generates the following SQL: WITH regional_sales AS (
    SELECT region, SUM(amount) AS total_sales
    FROM orders
    GROUP BY region
), top_regions AS (
    SELECT region
    FROM regional_sales
    WHERE total_sales > (SELECT SUM(total_sales)/10 FROM regional_sales)
)
SELECT region,
       product,
       SUM(quantity) AS product_units,
       SUM(amount) AS product_sales
FROM orders
WHERE region IN (SELECT region FROM top_regions)
GROUP BY region, product Structs and tables Bun allows you to map Go structs to database tables using struct-based models, for example, the following code: type Model struct {
    ID        int64 `bun:",pk,autoincrement"`
    Name      string `bun:",notnull"`
    CreatedAt time.Time `bun:",nullzero,default:now()"`
}

err := db.ResetModel(ctx, &Model{}) Generates the following table: CREATE TABLE "models" (
  "id" BIGSERIAL NOT NULL,
  "name" VARCHAR NOT NULL,
  "created_at" TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT now(),
  PRIMARY KEY ("id"),
) You can then select/insert/update/delete rows using Go structs: model := new(Model)
err := db.NewSelect().Model().Where("id = ?", 123).Scan(ctx)

model.ID = 0
res, err := db.NewInsert().Model(model).Exec(ctx)

res, err := db.NewUpdate().
    Model(model).
    Set("name = ?", "updated name").
    WherePK().
    Exec(ctx)

res, err := db.NewDelete().Model(model).WherePK().Exec(ctx) See Bun documentation for details. Golang ORM So what about the Golang ORM part? Bun allows you to define common table relations using Go structs, for example, here is how you can define belongs to relation: Author Book type Book struct {
	ID		 int64
	AuthorID int64
	Author	 Author `bun:"rel:belongs-to,join:author_id=id"`
}

type Author struct {
	ID int64
} And then use method to join tables: Relation err := db.NewSelect().
	Model(book).
	Relation("Author").
	Where("id = ?", 123).
	Scan(ctx) SELECT
  "book"."id", "book"."title", "book"."text",
  "author"."id" AS "author__id", "author"."name" AS "author__name"
FROM "books"
LEFT JOIN "users" AS "author" ON "author"."id" = "book"."author_id"
WHERE id = 1 See ORM: Table relationships for details. Connecting to a database Bun works on top of database/SQL and supports PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MSSQL, and SQLite. To connect to a PostgreSQL database: import (
	"github.com/uptrace/bun"
	"github.com/uptrace/bun/dialect/pgdialect"
    "github.com/uptrace/bun/driver/pgdriver"
)

dsn := "postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/test?sslmode=disable"
sqldb := sql.OpenDB(pgdriver.NewConnector(pgdriver.WithDSN(dsn)))

db := bun.NewDB(sqldb, pgdialect.New()) To connect to a database: MySQL import (
	"github.com/uptrace/bun"
	"github.com/uptrace/bun/dialect/mysqldialect"
	_ "github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql"
)

sqldb, err := sql.Open("mysql", "root:pass@/test")
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

db := bun.NewDB(sqldb, mysqldialect.New()) To log all executed queries, you can install bundebug plugin: import "github.com/uptrace/bun/extra/bundebug"

db.AddQueryHook(bundebug.NewQueryHook(
	bundebug.WithVerbose(true), // log everything
)) Executing queries Once you have a model, you can start executing queries: // Select a user by a primary key.
user := new(User)
err := db.NewSelect().Model(user).Where("id = ?", 1).Scan(ctx)

// Select first 10 users.
var users []User
err := db.NewSelect().Model(&users).OrderExpr("id ASC").Limit(10).Scan(ctx) When it comes to scanning query results, Bun is very flexible and allows scanning into structs: user := new(User)
err := db.NewSelect().Model(user).Limit(1).Scan(ctx) Into scalars: var id int64
var name string
err := db.NewSelect().Model((*User)(nil)).Column("id", "name").Limit(1).Scan(ctx, &id, &name) Into a : map[string]interface{} var m map[string]interface{}
err := db.NewSelect().Model((*User)(nil)).Limit(1).Scan(ctx, &m) And into slices of the types above: var users []User
err := db.NewSelect().Model(&users).Limit(1).Scan(ctx)

var ids []int64
var names []string
err := db.NewSelect().Model((*User)(nil)).Column("id", "name").Limit(1).Scan(ctx, &ids, &names)

var ms []map[string]interface{}
err := db.NewSelect().Model((*User)(nil)).Scan(ctx, &ms) You can also return results from insert/update/delete queries and scan them too: var ids []int64
res, err := db.NewDelete().Model((*User)(nil)).Returning("id").Exec(ctx, &ids) What's next? To get started, see the documentation and run examples. Bun comes with many plugins including OpenTelemetry instrumentation that enables distributed tracing and metrics. Using tracing, you can monitor performance using one of the open-source tracing tools that work with OpenTelemetry. Many DataDog competitors also support OpenTelemetry. Besides, you can export metrics to Prometheus and visualize them using Grafana or a popular alternative.

Introducing Bun: A Golang ORM 

Life is about trial and error. Sometimes we get it right; others make us want to curl up in bed for the day. In this slogging thread, our community shared the main lessons they've learned throughout lo life. From exercising to investing in education and seizing the day, these tips are the wake-up call we need. This Slogging thread by Mónica Freitas, petar.btc, Amy Shah, Favour Amadi, Limarc Ambalina, Jack Boreham, Adrian Morales and Daniel Guzman occurred in slogging's official #random channel, and has been edited for readability. Mónica Freitas Dec 14, 2021, 2:50 PM What are some life hacks you wish you knew growing up? petar.btc Dec 14, 2021, 3:17 PM Start going to the gym in my teenage years. I'm 38 now and my body feels older. Amy Shah Dec 14, 2021, 3:44 PM Start learning to computer program as early as possible. 👆 1 petar.btc Dec 14, 2021, 3:54 PM Amy Shah, Second that. Would be a very profitable salary hack 🙂 Favour Amadi Dec 15, 2021, 4:18 AM Move my body. Even if it's for 10 minutes, just move it. Doing this brings mental clarity, focus and confidence to take on the day. Limarc Ambalina Dec 15, 2021, 8:49 AM Not sure if it’s a life hack, but live each day like it is on purpose. Humans want what they don’t have. Kids want to be adults. High school students want to be college students. College students want to be successful adults with careers, adults want to be in high school again. Limarc Ambalina Dec 15, 2021, 8:50 AM I think the key to happiness is realizing that the now is so important and that every day is something to be cherished. The key to happiness is realizing the good things you have now and cherishing them. Limarc Ambalina Dec 15, 2021, 8:51 AM Another thing I wish I realized sooner was: everyone cares more about their own insecurities than yours. Do you know how you look at your hair 10 times a day to get it right? Newsflash high school kid, everyone is too worried about how they look to care about a few strands of your hair that are off-center. Jack Boreham Dec 15, 2021, 11:22 AM Just focus and put the effort in! My teachers at school always used to tell me to focus, but I didn't. I've realised that now! Focus and effort go a long way, and if you put in enough of it, you can achieve what you want to achieve. Jack Boreham Dec 15, 2021, 11:23 AM Also, don't put too much pressure on yourself, life is crazy but also unexpected and beautiful, it will all turn out okay. Adrian Morales Dec 15, 2021, 2:02 PM Scheduling and to-do lists! I can be very scatterbrained sometimes, but having a simple checklist of things to accomplish for the day has done a lot to organize my day-to-day workflow. Setting small goals for yourself via checklist in pursuit of achieving bigger goals goes a long way! Daniel Guzman Dec 15, 2021, 2:50 PM Learn how to manage your money throughout the whole month. I guess that would have changed the way I manage my personal finances hahaha. Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 7:54 PM petar.btc, I think in the same line, doing yoga just to be able to stretch. As it is now, I can barely touch my toes standing. It'll be way harder when I'm older 😂 Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 7:55 PM Amy Shah, true! It'd make life easier Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 7:56 PM Favour Amadi, I second that! It always helps. Though during the winter, it does take a lot of willpower to work out or just get out of the house and move. Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 7:57 PM Limarc Ambalina, ah Limarc, that's beautiful. I think on some level we all know we should be in the moment, and enjoying every day like it's our last, but we just forget. How do you remind yourself of that every day? Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 7:59 PM Limarc Ambalina, hahaha yup. We always think we're the star of the show. We've got to relax. There are not that many Regina George's in the world 😂 Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 8:01 PM Jack Boreham, small and steady wins the race. The saying is old. We struggle a lot with doing a task continuously if we don't see immediate results. Just got to remind ourselves to keep putting in the work. Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 8:02 PM Jack Boreham, I've learned that too. It's okay to improvise and not have things figured out 💛 Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 8:03 PM Adrian, that's a nice one. And I think that keeps us driven: when you get to check a thing off the list, it feels amazing! Mónica Freitas Dec 15, 2021, 8:03 PM Daniel Guzman, hahaha same! I wished someone had taught me early on how to do taxes 😂 petar.btc Dec 16, 2021, 12:01 PM Mónica Freitas, Stretching is immensely important! I have back problems and it's necessary for me to stretch every day. I fail to do it, though. 👍 1 Mónica Freitas Dec 16, 2021, 8:19 PM petar.btc, that sucks! Just today I saw a video of a chiropractor doing his thing and I'm really curious to know if that actually makes a difference. I imagine in your case, it could help, but I'm not 100% sure. Mónica Freitas Dec 16, 2021, 10:37 PM The best advice I can give is: don't worry so much. No one has it figured out. We're just copying out of each other and trying to navigate life through inspiration and method. There's no one or right way of doing you. So, accept improvisation and detours! It's part of life. Mónica Freitas Dec 16, 2021, 10:39 PM Also, be kind! It costs nothing and takes far less energy than being rancorous and enraged. Limarc Ambalina Dec 17, 2021, 2:38 AM Yeah sorry to get philosophical on you haha but for some more practical life hacks, seriously as petar.btc stretching in the morning feels amazing and sets you up well for the day. Another one I learned is prayer. Even if you're not religious and don't believe in God, prayer is good for your life because it reaffirms what is important to you every night and helps you work toward those goals. In a way, it leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Limarc Ambalina Dec 17, 2021, 2:39 AM If every night before bed you say in your head "Please help me to lose weight and help my blog to get more viewers", magically nothing is going to happen for you. HOWEVER, if in your mind you keep saying that every night, you'll start to unconsciously do more things to reach those goals. You keep reminding yourself every night that those things are important to you and thus maybe when you're deciding between a burger for lunch or a balanced home-cooked meal, you might be more inclined to choose the latter. petar.btc Dec 17, 2021, 12:17 PM Limarc Ambalina, Thank you for sharing this. I'm a Bible-believing Christian and know the power of prayer personally 🙏😇 Mónica Freitas Dec 17, 2021, 3:08 PM Limarc Ambalina, YES! A bit like manifesting! Visualizing the goal in your head as if you have already achieved it helps us picture the steps to get it and work harder.

Life Hacks You Wish You Knew Growing Up

Newsflash: 87% of ML projects fail! This article covers the top 7 data engineering gotchas in an ML project. The list is sorted in descending order based on the number of times I have encountered the issue multiplied by the impact of each occurrence on the overall project. 1. “I Thought This Dataset Attribute Means Something Else ” Prior to the big data era, data was curated before being added to the central data warehouse. This is known as schema-on-write. Today, the approach with data lakes is to first aggregate the data and then infer the meaning of data at the time of consumption. This is known as schema-on-read. As a data engineer, be wary to use datasets without proper documentation of attribute details or a clear data steward responsible to keep the details updated! 2. “5 Definitions Exist for the Same Business Metric — Which One to Use” Derived data or metrics can have multiple sources of truth! For instance, I have seen even basic metrics such as “count of new customers” having multiple definitions across the business units. As a data engineer, if a business metric is being used in the model, ensure to look for all the available definitions and their corresponding ETL implementations. 3. “Looks Like the Data Source Schema Changed” This one is extremely common in large distributed teams. Schema changes at the source database are typically not coordinated with downstream ETL processing teams. The changes can range from schema changes (breaking existing pipelines) to semantic changes that are extremely difficult to debug. Also, when business metrics change, there is a lack of versioning of the business definitions making the historic data inconsistent. 4. “ETL Pipeline Logic for Training and Serving is Identical... Not Really!” The typical reason for model performance skew during training and inference is due to discrepancies in training and serving pipelines. While the logic may start-off identical, fixes made in one pipeline may not be reflected in the other. Especially avoid scenarios where training and serving pipelines are written in different languages. 5. “Slow Poisoning of the Models” It is easier to detect 0–1 kind of errors with data pipelines. The problems that are the most difficult to debug are the ones where a table is being updated intermittently or joining to tables not being updated correctly. In such scenarios, the models will degrade gradually and adjust to the changes. The key is building appropriate to detect and prevent bad quality data during ingestion. circuit breakers 6. “All the Datasets Managed by a Given Team Have the Same Quality” This is a classic mistake. Not all datasets from the same team may be reliable. Some of them are updated and managed very closely while other datasets might be irregularly updated or have poorly written ETL pipelines! Always develop validation rules for any input data used by the models. 7. “Systematic Data Issues Causing Bias in the Overall Dataset” If errors in the dataset are random, they are less harmful to model training. But if there is a bug such that a specific row or column is systematically missing, it can lead to a bias in the dataset. For instance, device details of customer clicks are missing for Andriod users due to a bug, the dataset will be biased for iPhone user activity. Similarly, sudden distribution changes in the data are important to track. To wrap up, I believe ML projects are a team sport involving Data Engineers, Data Scientists, Statisticians, DataOps / MLOps engineers, Business Domain experts. Each player needs to play their role in making the project successful. This article is a subset from a broader list of " 98 things that can go wrong in an ML project. "

7 Gotchas(!) Data Engineers Need to Watch Out for in an ML Project

A few weeks ago, Simon Stone, Lead Engineer at the IBM team, announced that , leaving a lot of developers with existing applications in a cloudy situation . Blockchain IBM will significantly reduce its efforts in the Hyperledger Composer project wondering what to do next The good news, here at we have been working in an Smart Contract framework that , so you don't have to think about managing the complexities of communicating with Fabric directly, but still running a native Node JS chaincode on it. Additionally on top of it, we're building several tools to make the developer’s life easier, like a dev environment ready to be used out of the box, just like you used to work in . WorldSibu runs natively in Hyperledger Fabric Composer Right now Convector supports Hyperledger Fabric already, and we're planning to add support for multiple Blockchain techs soon, stay tuned! In this example, I'll show you how you can easily migrate from Composer to . This can be done without too much efforts since we share pretty similar concepts. Convector The first difference between the two is the language. Composer has decided to go with its custom designed language to define the different pieces of a smart contract. Convector on the other hand is crafted using , a super set language based on Javascript that has been gaining traction because of all the rich features it has, like optional strong typing and abstract syntax trees (AST) generation to create tools around the code. Typescript In Composer, a Business Network model is defined by essentially three components: : houses and listings Assets buyers and homeowners Participants: buying or selling houses, and creating and closing listings Transactions: When we were designing Convector we stoped here and thought: assets and participants are basically models compound by different properties, and even more, participants can sometimes act as the one making an action, or the one the action is being made on! We wanted to keep things as simple as possible, and give the developers the ability to express their ideas with a more software development friendly terminology, thus we decided to create two fundamental concepts inside the framework: A reference to in the real world, tangible or intangible, describing its properties. It might as well be a participant in the network. Models: something A set of rules on how you can interact with the models. Controllers: Based on those two fundamental concepts you can build everything you need for your chaincode and yet have enough flexibility to express your logic the way you need. The following piece of code defines the Marbles example in Composer. namespace org.hyperledger_composer.marbles enum MarbleColor {o REDo GREENo BLUEo PURPLEo ORANGE} enum MarbleSize {o SMALLo MEDIUMo LARGE} asset Marble identified by marbleId {o String marbleIdo MarbleSize sizeo MarbleColor color--> Player owner} participant Player identified by email {o String emailo String firstNameo String lastName} In Convector you write it this way: export enum MarbleColor {RED,GREEN,BLUE,PURPLE,ORANGE} export enum MarbleSize {SMALL,MEDIUM,LARGE} export class Marble extends ConvectorModel<Marble> {@ReadOnly()@Required()public type = 'io.worldsibu.marbles.marble'; @Validate(yup.number())@Default(MarbleSize.MEDIUM)public size: MarbleSize; @Validate(yup.number())public color: MarbleColor; @Validate(yup.string().email())public owner: string;} export class Player extends ConvectorModel<Player> {@Required()@ReadOnly()public type = 'io.worldsibu.marbles.player'; @Validate(yup.string().email())public id: string; @Validate(yup.string())public firstName: string; @Validate(yup.string())public lastName: string;} Since Convector runs on Javascript, you can have expressions for validations and restrict the data your model contains in a more expressive way. We have created a set of useful decorators to help you achieve this and save you some code while keeping the models readable (and reducing risks!). There are two properties a model must have, a which is a unique identifier for this model class and the which is an unique identifier for each model instance. If you don't specify and id field, Convector will declare a string field for you. type id Chaincode Logic In Composer the chaincode logic, a.k.a the rules that defines what you can do with the data, resides in 3 different layers: ACL, Transaction Models, and Transaction Functions. First, you start by defining the access permissions in the ACL (access control list): rule Default {description: "Allow all participants access to all resources"participant: "org.hyperledger_composer.marbles.player"operation: ALLresource: "org.hyperledger_composer.marbles.*"action: ALLOW} Then you define the transaction model: transaction TradeMarble {--> Marble marble--> Player newOwner} And finally you define the transaction function: async function tradeMarble(tradeMarble) {tradeMarble.marble.owner = tradeMarble.newOwner; const assetRegistry = await getAssetRegistry('org.hyperledger_composer.marbles.Marble'); await assetRegistry.update(tradeMarble.marble);} In we simplified all this logic using Convector Controllers @Controller('marble')export class MarbleController extends ConvectorController { @Invokable()public async create(@Param(Marble) marble: Marble) {await marble.save();} @Invokable()public async trade(@Param(yup.string()) marbleId: string,@Param(yup.string().email()) newOwner: string): Promise<void> {// use this.sender for authorization checks const marble = await Marble.getOne(marbleId);

marble.owner = newOwner;

await marble.save(); }} You can define the transaction model using the and decorators. Any Invokable method will be exposed as a transaction, and the Params describe its signature. You're not restricted to primitives only, you can pass as well, Convector will parse all complex objects for you. @Invokable @Param Models You can define the access rights using , which is the sender’s fingerprint, unique per participant. You can do all sort of things with it, even attach multiple senders to a single participant if you want. This is the flexibility it provides so you can define your own rules. this.sender And finally, you write all the necessary extra logic for the transaction function. You can do almost all kind of operations in here, as long as they are deterministic and use no external data other than the ledger data. For querying the ledger, every model has some useful CRUD methods like or , , and . There are some others like , which retrieves the history of updates for that model, to duplicate an asset or to batch assign properties to the model. getOne getAll save update delete history clone assign Client Access If you want to test the above methods in Composer, this is what you usually do: const namespace = 'org.hyperledger_composer.marbles';const factory = businessNetworkConnection.getBusinessNetwork().getFactory(); const dan = factory.newResource(namespace, 'Player', 'daniel.selman@example.com');dan.firstName = 'Dan';dan.lastName = 'Selman'; const simon = factory.newResource(namespace, 'Player', 'sstone1@example.com');simon.firstName = 'Simon';simon.lastName = 'Stone'; const playerRegistry = await businessNetworkConnection.getParticipantRegistry(namespace + '.Player');await playerRegistry.addAll([dan, simon]); const marble = factory.newResource(namespace, 'Marble', 'MARBLE_001');marble.size = 'SMALL';marble.color = 'RED';marble.owner = factory.newRelationship(namespace, 'Player', dan.$identifier); const marbleRegistry = await businessNetworkConnection.getAssetRegistry(namespace + '.Marble');await marbleRegistry.add(marble); const tradeMarble = factory.newTransaction(namespace, 'TradeMarble');tradeMarble.newOwner = factory.newRelationship(namespace, 'Player', simon.$identifier);tradeMarble.marble = factory.newRelationship(namespace, 'Marble', marble.$identifier);await businessNetworkConnection.submitTransaction(tradeMarble); In Convector, we have adapters to be able to use the same controller and model in the client applications. const adapter = new FabricControllerAdapter(configuration);const playerCtrl = new PlayerControllerClient(adapter);const marbleCtrl = new MarbleControllerClient(adapter); const dan = new Player({id: 'daniel.selman@example.com',firstName: 'Dan',lastName: 'Selman'});await playerCtrl.register(dan); const simon = new Player({id: 'sstone1@example.com',firstName: 'Simon',lastName: 'Stone'});await playerCtrl.register(simon); const marble = new Marble({id: '1',size: MarbleSize.SMALL,color: MarbleColor.RED,owner: dan.id});await marbleCtrl.create(marble); await marbleCtrl.trade(marble.id, simon.id); Each adapter has its own internal logic, the for instance, handles the network profile for communication with Fabric, but Convector is not tightly coupled with Fabric, so the community can create different adapters based on their needs. This is exactly how we plan to support other blockchains in the near future, by replacing the adapter with a new implementation.Adapters don't have any special treatment inside convector, they just dictate the communication with the blockchain layer so that the standard adapters that we have in Convector can be replaced by a custom implementation provided by the developers or the community. FabricControllerAdapter Conclusion Composer and Convector share a lot of similarities, yet they took different architectural paths. With the Convector controllers you pretty much are in control of all the logic inside the chaincode and have much more flexibility to design architectural decision you consider are appropriate for your use case. We're constantly adding new features to the framework and that might be useful for the community. You can create new issues or even at any time. we'll love to hear from you about new features drop a PR in our github Join the community at Discord! Get the code!

Migrating from Hyperledger Composer to Convector Framework — Marbles Example

via Inc.com GROW Back when I was in college (for the short amount of time I attended), there was no . In fact, I would argue it’s something you can’t fully , no matter how diligent the curriculum. There’s no class that walks you through how to stomach the ups and downs of the journey. major for entrepreneurship learn in school I never finished college, but I went on to . It’s a story I tell in full in my book, but the shortened version is that in 1977 I was just a kid that had started a flea market , with my dad as my business partner. My senior year of high school, we bought a hardware store to expand our business, and I told my dad I wanted to give college a shot. become a successful entrepreneur All In: 101 Real Life Business Lessons for Emerging Entrepreneurs, business One day, I was in my Introduction to Business Management class, and the teacher stopped me and said, “You come to school in a suit?” I explained, “I have a business with my dad. After class, I leave school to go sell to clients.” My teacher asked if I would speak to his sales class. I said sure. What I learned shortly after was that my teacher had never run a business much bigger than a little storefront on the Ocean City boardwalk in New Jersey. And here I was, working like a dog just to pay for these classes — which took little more than nothing to pass. I felt like school wasn’t going to teach me what I actually wanted to learn, so I left. Now, I’m not saying to not get your education. Part of me regrets not finishing college for the experience of it all. But I do consider college to be a bit of a double-edged sword. Anyone who knows my story and the businesses I have built knows that I’ve reached success in many different industries. I’ve also had a few failures along the way as well. I don’t claim to be some know-it-all with a silver-bullet business solution that’s going to turn your goose gold and send your company to the top of the NASDAQ overnight. Newsflash: that guy with the silver bullet doesn’t exist. What has allowed me to become a successful , however, is the fact that I’m just a curious, determined person who knows how to adapt to the changing times and compensate for my shortcomings. I learned all I know on the street, talking to clients, knocking on doors, and pounding the pavement. entrepreneur You don’t need an MBA to do what I do. In fact, you don’t even need to spend any money to learn these lessons. 1. Always be on time. No matter what. This may sound like a no-brainer, but if you want to achieve any serious goal in life — always be on time. It’s part of being a professional, and it’s an easy thing to make part of your routine. It shows your customers and business partners that you have integrity. It shows that you can be trusted. It shows that you care and respect their time, and that when you say you’re going to do something, you mean it. 2. Be positive and smile. Who wants to be around unhappy people? No one wants to work with people who have bad attitudes. Be nice to everybody, and I mean everybody, all the time. You’ll be amazed how important “gatekeepers” like receptionists and assistants are to your success. You saw the move Wall Street, right? How did Bud Fox get in to see Gordon Gekko? He buttered up his secretary. Be like Bud. Be nice to everyone. 3. Return calls in less than 24 hours. When I was building my first company, Wilmar Industries, it drove me crazy to hear customers complain that they hadn’t gotten a call back for three days. Wilmar may have become a massive company, but I was a mom & pop entrepreneur at heart. I felt (and still feel today) like every single person you do business with matters. It doesn’t matter if it’s a customer or a big-wig investor. I constantly told all my employees, “No one wants to feel like they have been left blowing in the wind. If you want their business, you better be responsive. Call everyone back within twenty-four hours, no matter what.” I was so passionate about this, I had a personal 800 number installed in my office just for customers. If I was in my office and the phone rang, I’d pick up and say, “Bill Green speaking, what can I help you with?” It was no publicity stunt, the CEO answering calls directly. I sincerely wanted to help any customer at any time. 4. Find a mentor. Looking back, I can pinpoint all the different mentors at each fork and pivot on the road that helped me move past whatever obstacle I was facing at the time. Mentors are valuable teachers, and often times become close friends. They are knowledgable, patient, and willing to teach — under the assumption that you are willing to listen, learn, and take what they say and run with it. Nobody becomes successful alone. Even the world’s most accomplished entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business leaders today have mentors. We’re all learning from each other. 5. Look successful, act successful, be successful. People want to do business with successful people. So guess what? You have to look and act like you belong in the room to win people’s business. You have to believe in yourself before anyone else will. Some people call this “faking it until you make it,” but you can’t fake it. You have to put yourself in the mindset that you believe in everything you’re doing and everything you’re going to deliver on. It’s all about having a positive attitude and making your intentions clear to the world. You may not be the most sharply dressed person out there, but you have got to make an effort to do your best with what you have. I’m not saying you have to drive an expensive car. But you need to drive one that’s clean and presentable, if you want to be taken seriously. 6. Sweat everything. Remember the book, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” that came out in the nineties? I read it and took it to heart when it came to my personal life. Who cares if your spouse doesn’t put the cap on the toothpaste or if your kid keeps spilling milk at the dinner table? Life is too short to be that much of a stickler. But let me tell you, I hate that book when it comes to doing business. You’ve got to sweat the big stuff, the small stuff — you’ve got to sweat everything. It all matters. Especially when you’re running your own company. 7. Winging it is not a strategy. And finally, when it comes to succeeding in business, here’s one sentence you never want to hear, or say yourself: “It’ll work out.” Really? How do you know? Business isn’t always predictable. You can’t just sit back and wait for life to happen because when you do, unexpected stuff usually happens. You have to be smart. You have to be prepared. You have to walk in to every situation with a well-devised plan of attack. I can’t stress this enough. When starting your own business, “winging it” is not an option. Do your homework, and know everything you can about everything you can think of that’s relevant. The more you know about a customer, a product, a market, or even an employee, the greater advantage you have. And I’m not just talking about business and sales. I’m talking about everything you do in this world. This article originally appeared in Inc Magazine.

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