We know that an unforgettable trip is built on the special experiences you share with friends and family

Peek.com

peekcom

Airbnb is the last sizable player to take a curated approach to tourism and travels with experiences and activities. It is a crowded space, especially if you consider that Silicon Valley tech giants like Airbnb, one of the latest sizable players to take a curated approach to tours and activities, Expedia, and TripAdvisor are all competing to attract the billion of tourists around the world. But many of the disruptors are smaller — yet fast growing — companies and startups. At the Skift Global Forum in New York City recently, Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom said “tours and activities might move higher on the company’s list to top priorities.” Vatcan City. (Photo by on ) Ilya Yakover Unsplash Despite being crowded, the market is so big that it “remains relatively untapped,” according to a report titled: . Skift State of Tours and Activities Tech 2017 “The tours and activities segment is one of the largest segments in the travel industry today, second only to flights and accommodations in terms of annual spending, both in the U.S. and abroad,” the report reads. Les Sables-d’Olonne, France. (Photo by on ) Sweet Ice Cream Photography Unsplash “Not only is the tours and activities market highly fragmented, dominated by small local suppliers rather than large operators, but the act of booking tours and activities itself has traditionally been a last-minute affair.” With the launch of Airbnb Experiences in the fall of last year, the space has seen a lot of new deals and mergers, with many players disrupting the industry to let travelers book a wide range of activities as part of their travel plans. GETYOURGUIDE ( ) is a travel startup that allows people to book activities, meals, and tours in different countries. It has recently announced through which it has raised $75 million. GetYourGuide getyourguide.com a new funding round “Over the last two years, GetYourGuide’s management realized this is a $150 billion market. Not even a percentage of that is being transacted with online intermediaries today,” , the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider. Johannes Reck If we execute well this is a potential $20 billion company so we should not sell early. The platform offers more than 31,000 tours, activities, and attractions in over 7,300 destinations. GetYourGuide is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. MUSEMENT Musement ( ) is a digital travel companion that lets travelers discover and book things to do. It is known for being a consumer supermarket for tours and activities, but also aimed to add services like point-of-sale tools for museums, activity venues, and tour operators; help airlines upsell their customers on activities; and have pop-up stands near major attractions to sell tickets in-person. musement.com The company the acquisition of ( ), a startup founded by ex-Googlers and and headed by CEO to create mobile travel guides using an algorithmic approach. This is a “a major milestone for Musement’s users and partners alike,” said Alessandro Petazzi, Musement co-founder and CEO. has recently announced Triposo triposo.com Douwe Osinga Jon Tirsen Nishank Gopalkrishnan Our vision is to build the best in-destination activities discovery and booking platform. Together, Musement and Triposo now have a base of more than 12 million users. Musement, with more than 10 million app downloads — about 40 percent coming from North American and Western Europe — offers activities in 200 countries, 50,000 destinations and five million points-of interest. Musement is headquartered in Milan, Italy. FAREHARBOR FareHarbor ( ) is an online booking and reservation management platform. In November 2016, it acquired Hawaii-based competitor Activity Link Systems, a provider of software for the activity industry. The company has recently launched a new business-to-business tool, , a predictive pricing platform powered by artificial intelligence to help operators select optimal rates for activities. fareharbor.com FareHarbor Telescope “Machine learning is all about data learning from data. We’re in the perfect spot with the millions of bookings coming through FareHarbor,” said @Mark Mangurian, VP of Business Intelligence at FareHarbor. The platform, co-founded by , serves more than 5,000 tour operators, booking agents and concierge desks hosting more than 50,000 bookable activities in 50 states plus Canada, Australia, Mexico, the UK, British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Tahiti. Lawrence Hester FareHarbor is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. KLOOK An interesting venture capital or merger play in the sector this year is a $60 million round raised by ( ), a Hong Kong-based travel startup that specializes in helping travelers book trip activities and logistics for when they are overseas. The latest funding is in addition to the $30 million Series B raised back in March. Klook klook.com “Imagine walking down a road in Phuket, Thailand: instead of negotiating with an agent, you open the app and you can book directly with the best price,” co-founder and CEO Eric Gnock Fah . told TechCruch To a certain extent, from a legal and compliance angle, the company is already an IPO candidate. The platform said it processed 5 million transactions in 2016 and most recently it acknowledged about 1 million monthly bookings from its mobile app or online, mostly within Asia. Some 120 destinations and 30,000 travel activities are within Klook’s curated network. Klook is headquartered in Hong Kong, China. PEEK Another interesting player in this space is Peek ( ), which bought rival Zozi ( ), both consumer marketplaces and enterprise software businesses, this past spring. peek.com zozi.com “The average consumer wants to book an activity in a few hours,” Peek co-founder and CEO . “And if you talk to most tour operators, they actually still function in a lot of spreadsheets and phone calls.” Ruzwana Bashir told Tnooz We have the largest product team out of anyone in this space. We’ve done the most work on the technology side, and I think that’s really because we see ourselves as a technology company first nice and foremost. Peek grew 10 times in the last two years with more than 160 million users (as of 2016). Peek is headquartered in San Francisco, California. WITHLOCALS Withlocals ( ), a marketplace for personalized travel experiences, has just closed it’s Series A with funding of over $4 million. According to the company, the goal is “to capture at least 20% of this fast-growing market.” withlocals.com “The world of mass tourism, where one size fits all, is coming to an end,” said , CEO of Withlocals. “Travelers today are looking to get off the ‘TripAdvisor circuit’ to instead have unique experiences personalized around their interests and personalities.” Matthijs Keij We created Withlocals so tourists can experience cities like the locals do. Inspired by Airbnb Experiences, the platform counts over 10,000 people currently offering their services as hosts on the site. They do it from 22 countries. The site is available in English, Dutch, German, and Spanish. Withlocals is headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

6 companies disrupting the tourism industry

After spending months studying front end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and Git), and weeks building my portfolio (well, actually two portfolios, because I didn’t like how it ended up looking the first one), I managed to in less than a week after I started looking for one. land my first job in the web development industry It all happened very fast: 👉 On a , I finally managed to finish my and choose five job offers I found on LinkedIn and Seek.com.au to send my updated resume with links to my portfolio. Tuesday morning portfolio 👉 The in the afternoon, I received an email from the COO of one of the companies I applied to saying that he loved my story and how I presented myself on my website (a.k.a. my portfolio). He offered me to have an interview the same week, on Thursday afternoon. same Tuesday 👉 On morning, I reviewed some JavaScript concepts and practiced the most common interview questions (more details on this later). Wednesday and Thursday 👉 On , I ended up having a 2-hour interview with the COO and two senior developers in which I mostly explained how I reached the point in which I wanted to change careers from Telecommunications Engineering to Web Development in my 40s. The technical side of the interview was somewhat focused on general concepts, nothing too specific. Thursday afternoon 👉 On , I received another email saying that they thought my profile will be a good fit for the company, and they sent me a coding challenge to deliver on the following Monday and present before their senior developers. Friday morning 👉 I spent working on the coding challenge during the weekend (GitLab link), and on Monday morning, I went to the company to answer questions about the development process and programming in general. They focused on specific sections of the challenge, and they were interested in knowing why I had chosen certain approaches to solving problems. They also made corrections and constructive critiques, which I received with gratitude because what I want is to learn and improve. 30 hours 👉 On , I got a job offer. The COO told me that the team was happy with my result and with how well I responded to improvement suggestions. I was happy with the offered salary (which I discussed during the interview process) and eager to start working at the company. Monday afternoon Background I have made an effort not to sound arrogant or narcissistic when I talk about myself when sharing my experience. If during the text you read you have that impression, my sincere apologies since that is the last thing I want. Warning: Let me tell you about myself first, so you can evaluate this experience of getting a software development job better. Even though I wasn't a professional software developer before getting this web dev job, computers weren't a strange thing to me. I had my first PC 25 years ago, and I learned how to use it by myself. I have also studied Telecommunications Engineering, which gives me a deep understanding of computer networks and technology in general. Since I was 18, I had played with developing websites, but always as a hobby, nothing too serious. I haven't had training in software development, and the few concepts I knew were the result of tinkering with technology. The process of studying web development I’ll do my best effort to make a and to present myself as truthfully as possible, so here I go. long story short In my previous job, I worked for 11 months in a technology company doing my first purely software development related work. Before that, I had developed some Bash scripts and a couple of modifications to existing codebases, mostly in simple languages, nothing involving pure OOP, for example. They hired me to implement an open-source software in a networking module to allow a device to send and receive SNMP messages. The problem was that, even though the vendor said the software should work, it didn’t. This obstacle became an enabler to accept my boss’ suggestion: The only C programming I had done was more than 10 years in the past at university, and it was a really simple application, so I tried to manage his expectations by telling him that I would do my best, but there were no warranties of this working out. “Could you develop a C implementation specific to the device?” So, I focused on re-learning C and doing the best job I could do given my limited knowledge. I managed to build a functional implementation in about 8 months. I lost count of how many times I , , and had . But the important thing is that and I finished the project. Then I thought: 🤔 felt frustrated wanted to quit impostor syndrome attacks I didn’t give up “Considering this experience, why don’t I just change my career path to Web Development, which is something I wanted to do for many years?” During my whole professional life, I've had timid attempts of becoming a web developer. I read a PHP book when I was a teenager that enabled me to build a simple website for a family member, and made some simple websites for some other clients. I mostly used just HTML and CSS on Microsoft Frontpage and Dreamweaver (yes, I’m that old). When I started studying Telecommunications Engineering at university, I abandoned this hobby almost completely, and after finishing university I didn’t touch HTML or CSS for the following 8 or 9 years of corporate work. Books I read and courses I took So, after my last job, I decided to go and, once my contract ended, I didn’t look for another job. Instead, I started learning web development full time (and living off savings and my wife’s work, which was an awful experience for someone accustomed to being self-sustained). all-in on web development 0️⃣ The year previous to this last job I had completed on Udemy (I can highly recommend it), which gave me an overall understanding of . Then, I dove deeper with front-end related technologies. The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele how much work becoming a web developer really is 1️⃣ I started with HTML and CSS by reading “Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to Html, Css, Javascript, and Web Graphics”, by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, 2️⃣ Then I moved on to JavaScript by reading “Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd Edition: A Modern Introduction to Programming”, by Marijn Haverbeke (which I yet have to finish) and doing , on Udemy (the best software development course I have taken so far!), The Complete JavaScript Course 2021: From Zero to Expert!, by Jonas Schmedtmann 3️⃣ Once I finished the previous course, I took another Udemy course: . React - The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router, Redux), by Maximilian Schwarzmüller 4️⃣ I also poured some sprinkles of Git and design here and there. Since I started with HTML and CSS to the point in which I felt confident enough to build my portfolio, four months went by. Building the best portfolio I could build From what I was reading in forums and on Twitter, I knew a portfolio will increase my chances of getting hired in the web development industry, especially without having direct experience in it. To maximise the chances of getting hired, the portfolio needed to include: 0️⃣ A . In my case, damiandemasi.com was available, so I took it. I also registered the colo.codes domain, as it's my nickname on social networks. custom domain name 1️⃣ A with immediate in the way of a “contact me” button and an option to download my resume. catching hero section calls to action 2️⃣ A with at least two projects. These projects will need to display my JavaScript knowledge and the use of APIs. This section should also include links to the live versions of the projects, as well as a GIF or video of the project being used (a sort of demo), and a I followed to create the project. The objective of all of this is to show how I approach coding challenges, the decisions I make, and how I deal with problems. Since I didn’t have commercial experience as a web developer, this section was the only way in which I could present my work. projects section description of the process 3️⃣ A with at least three articles. These articles should display how I address the , and how well (or bad) I communicate in English (which is not my native language). I found this to be a perfect excuse to dig deeper into some specific aspects of the projects I already described in the previous section, such as the different uses of the React hook. blog section description of technical concepts useState 4️⃣ An , with easy and clear ways to access my profile, as well as my , profile, and Twitter. Even though my resume could have been accessed from the hero section, I believe having redundancy (without spamming) is a way to ensure the important parts of the portfolio (like the resume) aren’t overlooked. In this section, I went and presented myself as I am. By doing so, I could push away employers that were not compatible with my personality and attract the ones that really liked how I am, thus speeding up the job selection process. I also briefly highlighted the technologies I was familiar with. In the end, this proved to be a correct approach, because both, the COO and CEO of the company that hired me mentioned that they loved how I presented myself online. about me section LinkedIn resume GitHub full-on honest mode 5️⃣ A to demonstrate that I have a proven track record as an employee and team member. I used my as the source material for building this, and I provided links to my LinkedIn profile so potential employers could see I was not being dishonest. social proof (reviews) section LinkedIn recommendations 6️⃣ And finally, a . In it, I offered three different ways of contact: an , a , and a completely functional (thanks to ). People have different preferences when it comes to contacting a potential employee, so I wanted to offer as much flexibility as feasible. contact section email address LinkedIn link form Netlify As you can see, the portfolio is like a , and it should include projects and articles that display the way you work. When I linked my Twitter, GitHub and LinkedIn profiles, I made sure all of them were , fully complete, and cohesive in content and looks with how I wanted to present myself to the world. repository of your professional life up to date The process of building the portfolio was the longest in my web developer want-to-be journey. I started by building the projects, then writing some articles, polishing my GitHub, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, ensuring my resume was up to date and fitted into just one page, and finally, building the portfolio itself. I used extensively for bouncing ideas back and forth and asking for feedback regarding my projects and my portfolio itself. What could feel right for me often wasn’t for others. I found the and subreddits massively helpful throughout this process. Reddit /r/webdev /r/careerquestions Applying for jobs and preparing for the interview The job application process was pretty streamlined. I used and Seek.com.au to look for positions that were related to what my knowledge was up to that point. As a rule of thumb, if I was proficient in of the technologies and requirements the job post asked for, I would apply for it. LinkedIn Jobs at least half I ended up applying to 🖐 on a Tuesday morning, and having ☝️ interview offer on the afternoon of the same day, even though they were looking for a senior developer (but they didn’t ask too many requirements for the job position). I never heard from the other four applications. Even though I prepared quite a lot before starting to apply for jobs, I can’t help feeling . five job postings one I got lucky Once I knew I had secured an interview, I started preparing for it. I decided I would train for the , so I could speak fluently on those, and also prepare for the most important , as I knew I will be interviewed by senior developers. I had just a day and a half to prepare, so I didn’t stress too much about it (there is only so much you can do in such a short time frame). most common interview questions JavaScript-related questions Resources I used for preparing for interview questions For the general interview questions, I used these awesome videos by : . He also has a playlist about LinkedIn profile tips that I can recommend. Jeff Sue Common interview questions and answers For the technical questions about JavaScript, I used these videos for preparation: 5 Must Know Interview Questions for Javascript! Learn Closures In 7 Minutes Event loop | Will javascript wait? JavaScript Promises In 10 Minutes Callback and arrow function introduction in array I also reviewed some of the most basic and important JavaScript concepts from the . notes I took whilst studying JavaScript The first interview I arrived at the first interview five minutes early and ended up having a 2-hour interview with the COO and two senior developers. We spoke about the company, my professional past, the reasons behind my migration from Argentina to Australia, and my working rights in Australia. But the most important subject was as a new career path. Whilst I was answering this question, I allowed my to display through my answers, and that was exactly what they were looking for: someone enough about software development to sit for several days trying to , and with the whatever necessary to progress from a junior to a senior developer. the reason behind why I have chosen software development enthusiasm and passion passionate solve a problem disposition to learn Another concept that I left very clear during the interview was my : I know that I have a lot to learn, and I don’t mind or being corrected because that is how I can learn. . I’m also able to because that is how I can improve my work. , and I see myself as a student, ready to absorb knowledge, and also as a teacher, ready to explain and share knowledge. I think this is the wisest way of approaching a software development career, and they agreed. growth mindset admitting mistakes If there is something I don’t know today I will say it, and I will be eager to learn it accept criticism Ego and pride have no place in this process To sum up, during the interview, they focused on: : they wanted to know if I will be in this industry for the long run and if my objective was to become a senior developer. Passion : if I was able to respond well to feedback. Growth mindset : stick to the problems until a solution is found. Not throwing in the towel The coding challenge and second interview After the first interview, I was offered a . I had to build a colour picker app in React, that needed to comply with certain requirements. It was a Friday and I needed to present it on the following Monday, so I had the weekend to do it. I ended up spending in total developing the app, and I managed to fulfil most of the requirements, although . Once I finished (a couple of hours before the second interview) I sent the code to the developers. coding challenge 30 hours it wasn’t perfect During the second interview, I was asked why I have chosen certain ways of doing things instead of others. The senior developers were pocking the code here and there asking me . In the end, I think they were evaluating if I really knew what I had done. They offered some , which . Even though the app didn’t work 100% as expected, they were happy with the achieved result. why I have done what I did constructive criticism I embraced happily After that second interview, I was told that the developers were happy with my performance during the coding challenge and , so they ended up offering me a job at their company. how I reacted to criticism (feedback) Lessons learned during my first weeks as a software developer During my first weeks working as a software developer, I have faced a (JavaScript, React, Ruby on Rails, SCSS, etc.) that I’m still wrapping my head around one step at a time, the way are used in a professional environment, and how a performs. massive codebase Git and GitLab software development team I found myself having a relentless thirst for knowledge, and I can’t help feeling a bit like an impostor, although I know this is a normal feeling, and, during the interview process, I left very clear the fact that I’m still learning. The journey has just started My journey in the software development world has just started. This is a career path that demands learning new technologies often. I can see myself being a senior developer five years from now, mentoring juniors, and, why not, having my own entrepreneurial projects. Also published here

How I Successfully Ended My One Week Job Hunt

Basic Principles for New Managers Let’s talk about what makes a good weekly report for a manager. We’ll look at a typical report from an inexperienced new manager, then contrast it with a good report. This will set the stage to introduce you to some important conceptual building blocks of the management world: , , and . bad projects metrics taking ownership At , we pride ourselves on training managers to write good weekly reports. If you’ve never been a manager before or never written a weekly report to your boss, I hope this explanation will be a helpful resource. Relationship Hero A Bad Weekly Report Let’s start by diving into an example report from a new manager who’s used to being an individual contributor. They usually email me something like this: * Wrote 17 pages of informational materials and emailed them to the appropriate people * Called all of our suppliers and purchasers to speak about next month’s orders * Organized the company bookshelf by jacket color What does this report tell me? It lists their , which merely indicate how they spent their time. If the tasks seem easy, maybe I’ll think they’re being lazy at work. If the tasks seem hard, maybe I’ll think they’re a highly motivated worker who is putting in 16-hour days. But guess what? It doesn’t matter! tasks What matters is what results they’re getting. Is organizing the company bookshelf a high-priority task? If not, then I would rather have them work a 4-hour week and do something that matters, instead of a 100-hour week organizing the bookshelf. So their report is focusing on the wrong stuff here. A Good Weekly Report Here’s how this manager should have written their report for this same week: 72% of all sections are now written (was 60% last week). Wrote 17 pages this week.Completion date: Still March 3 Creating an Instruction Manual **Repainting Office Walls**Stalled this week due to unexpected snowstormCompletion date: March 15 (was March 11) **Warehouse Reorganization**All supplier and purchaser data is now recorded in our spreadsheet (task 3 of 5)Completion date: Still March 20 Believe it or not, this report is about the exact same week as the bad report. But clearly there are major differences. First, the good report is like “Creating an Instruction Manual”, not by the employee’s individual tasks like “wrote 17 pages”. In fact, “wrote 17 pages” is the least important thing in this whole report, just a minor note at the end of a section. The bad report had made it seem like such an important piece of information to share, but in the good report it could even be taken out entirely. organized by the company’s projects Second, the good report is about each project’s . For the “Creating an Instruction Manual” project, its status is that its completion deadline isn’t slipping; it’s still on track March 3. Its progress is that it’s 72% completed, up from 60%. status and progress The “status” is a claim you’re making about your ability to deliver the project’s end result at a certain time, and the “progress” is evidence in support of that claim. Seeing the progress makes me more convinced that you’re actually going to deliver on the completion date you’re promising. Note that while both status and progress are important, status is more important than progress. Hypothetically, if you were saying that the completion date is holding firm at March 3 but your progress only went from 60% to 61% this week, I’d figure you must be planning to kick things into higher gear soon, like by pulling an all-nighter on March 2. As long as you deliver the project in an acceptable state on March 3, that’s fine with me, I just appreciate knowing the progress to date or lack thereof. Ok you’ve learned that a good report is organized by projects, and tracks each project’s status and progress. Now you can see why the first report is bad. For example: Wrote 17 pages of informational materials and emailed them to the appropriate people In order to process the significance of “wrote 17 pages this week”, I’d have to know how many pages you’d already written before this week, and how many you have left to go. Do I know these things off the top of my head? No, and I don’t want to know, because I’m not the one managing the project. I just want to know the project’s status and progress. Also look at the “Repainting Office Walls” project, where nothing happened this week. It’s still a project that I asked you to manage. It was never even mentioned in the bad report, and this is a common mistake that new managers make, which makes me feel like they are “dropping projects”. You might think that if no progress was made on a project this week, then there’s nothing to report on. But without seeing the project and its status written in your report, I’ll worry about whether it’s still on track to get done by its March 11 deadline. In our example, the manager realized (I hope) that the completion date for Repainting Office Walls would probably end up being later than March 11 due to an unplanned lack of progress, but their bad report didn’t provide any visibility into the project whatsoever. Tada! By the way, did you notice that the good report doesn’t contain anything about organizing the bookshelf? Why is that? …It’s because I never assigned them to manage a project relating to our bookshelf. If organizing the bookshelf were somehow related to the “Repainting Office Walls” project, like if we’re trying to make our walls match the colors of our books, then you should report that the “Repainting Office Walls” project has made some progress toward completion this week. Otherwise, not every task that you do needs to show up in the report. If you report every task that you do, it then you’re just focusing on how busy you are, but not how productive you are in the big picture. Know Your Projects Knowing your projects is key to organizing your weekly reports, as well as to actually prioritizing and doing your tasks. In the bad report, I can see from your reported list of tasks that you’ve been taking actions to help out on various projects. But as a manager, . you need to fundamentally shift your thinking to be about the projects instead of the tasks The corporate matrix has just been revealed to you Before you do any task, you should be clear on which project you’re managing, and what the definition of “success” is for the project. If you ever don’t know the answer, then you should talk to your boss, and maybe you’ll learn that there is no answer yet! So then you’ll need to work with your boss to define your project. Defining projects is actually an important part of being a manager. Once you know what projects you’re managing, consider how your tasks relate to your projects. For example, let’s say you’re a manager at and a task you want to report on is . Relationship Hero “recorded an example of taking a new client’s phone call” Why did you do that task? …Because it helps train our relationship coaches to do their job. Ok but what I’m really asking is, what did you do it for? project …You did it for the Phone Operations Training project, which is a sub-project of a larger project that we call Operational Skills Training & Maintenance. So in your report, instead of writing an action you took (“recorded an example of taking a new client’s phone call”), you’ll want to first identify which project you’re reporting on (Phone Operations Training) and its status and progress. After that, sure, you can potentially mention the actions you took if you think it’s valuable to do so. Know Your Metrics What does it mean to report on a project’s “progress”? Here’s an example of progress from the good report: 72% of all sections are now written (was 60% last week). Wrote 17 pages this week. Creating an Instruction Manual Presumably, when the Creating an Instruction Manual project first came into existence, you and your boss had agreed that the percentage of sections written is a good measure of progress for this particular project. (Note that if there are other important pieces to this project, like if you’re also responsible for getting each section reviewed with the engineering department, then your project’s metric should reflect the progress of those other pieces too; it shouldn’t just be “percentage of sections written”.) Another example: **Warehouse Reorganization**All supplier and purchaser data is now recorded in our spreadsheet (task 3 of 5) For the Warehouse Reorganization project, you had originally sat down with your boss and written up a list of five tasks that must be done to make the project complete. Now, in your weekly reports, your metric for the project might simply be the number of these tasks which have been accomplished. Different projects have different measures of progress, known as . Defining a project’s metrics is part of defining the project itself, which, again, is an important part of being a manager. metrics Think of NASA’s Mission Control: Tracking a project’s metrics These people in the picture are holding their breath during a rocket launch, hoping it’ll reach its destination successfully, because there’s always a big risk that it might veer off course or blow up. That’s how your boss feels when you’re managing a project. The boss knows that the project has its own guidance system on board (you’re managing it), but they’re still holding their breath and hoping that the project doesn’t veer off schedule or create other headaches. From looking at the picture above, we know somebody at NASA decided that the biggest TV screen at mission control should show a map of Earth with a bunch of curved green lines on it. No doubt this visualization is highly informative to Mission Control about the rocket’s current status and progress. A project’s metrics are like the TV screen that your boss (and you) are watching at Mission Control. In our example good report, you can see how each project’s metrics can be reported with plain text. But when there are a bunch of different metrics, it becomes hard to digest them all in plain text. That’s why managers often report their metrics using graphs and other visualizations. These are just like the monitors at Mission Control. metrics dashboards Take Ownership The bad report was written by an employee who considered their actions to be their accomplishments. This is characteristic of an individual contributor, not a manager. The difference between an individual contributor and a manager is that the individual contributor’s accomplishments are the tasks they perform, while the manager’s accomplishments are the projects they own and their metrics. means putting yourself in a position to take credit for a project’s successes, and also to be held accountable for its failures. It means the buck stops with you and cannot be passed upwards/downwards/laterally. Taking ownership The author of the bad report is evidently not taking responsibility for the effect that their week’s actions have had on the company’s projects and success metrics. They’re passing the buck to their manager. Your project When you take ownership of a project, it means , constantly monitoring your project’s status and making all necessary adjustments. Occasionally, you’ll propagate an alert up the chain that a deadline will be missed or help is needed, but otherwise your boss doesn’t have to worry about your project because they know that you’re owning it. you’re your own mission control So, back to your weekly report. Now that we’ve explained all the relevant principles, it boils down to just a couple simple steps: If you don’t know what they are, you need to clarify that ASAP to make sure that your actions are not going to waste. List all the projects that you own If your progress metrics are too numerous or too complicated to digest in plain text, then make some kind of dashboard visualization. Report on each project’s status and progress By the way, this advice is not just for entry-level managers. Every senior manager, director and executive in the company is working from the same basic principles outlined here — the only difference is the scope of their projects. When you take ownership of bigger projects, you’ll get a promotion.

How to Write Your Weekly Report

Will robots take my job? Last Tuesday saw the official launch of and 5 days later we have passed 500K visitors and 4M page views. Will Robots Take My Job? To say this surpassed any expectations we had would be a major understatement. This is a recap of how the project got started and the first 5 days after launch. The Back Story Just over a month ago launched . I’ve freelanced on and off for over 10 years, so I was happy to back the documentary, and joined the Slack community. Dann Petty Freelance TV has also joined and messaged me, and we started talking about the possibility of working together on a project. We decided to start with something small and quick to see how we might like working together. Dimitar Raykov Dimitar mentioned his idea of building a website around a in 2013 about the probability that jobs would be automated thru Machine Learning and Mobile Robotics. report published I’ve been interested in the AI/ML space for a while, even co-founding . BotList BotList We’ve already seen many chatbots assist people in their jobs, even replacing them in some instances, the and categories are good examples of this. HR Travel We decided to move forward with the project. Just showing the percentage automation risk, would not make for a very interesting user experience, so we looked for additional data that would help. We found additional information about the jobs in the report via the website. We were able to download salary data and estimates for number of people employed. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics The Build Dimitar would handle the design & front end and I would handle the backend and hosting duties. We wanted to make it easy for people to find jobs, since the report only covered 702 jobs, finding similar jobs would be an important feature. We decided to go with to achieve this. Their search matching is great (even with misspelled words) and the synonym feature would make it easy to find related jobs. We signed up for the trial and thought the free tier would mean we’d get able to run the site with no cost — more on that later! Algolia We started working and I built a quick prototype on using Bootstrap, while Dimitar worked on the design. LaravelPHP Once the design was complete, Dimitar built the pages out in static html pages, and passed them over to me to integrate. Some fun features we added as we worked: Algolia Instantsearch to power the job search autocomplete, why reinvent the wheel. Easy job page link copying and sharing to Twitter and Facebook. Custom open graph share images for each job. Random color palette for each visit. Go ahead and try it! Each visit you’ll be assigned one of ten palettes. All in the build took about 3 weeks, of us working on evenings and weekends. I setup the website on a droplet I had for other projects, and the site was live, just nobody knew it. We share the site with a few friends and got some early feedback. Digital Ocean The Launch Given my affinity for that seemed to be the obvious place to launch our project. I reached out to and discussed the project with him. He agreed to hunt it for us. Dimitar created the thumbnail image we wanted to use for the product on the site, and prepared some images to show some of the features, and we passed those on to Ben. Product Hunt Ben Tossell The site appeared on about 3:15am (et) on Tuesday (May 30th). I like to be around when something is first hunted, to add a comment and respond to any immediate questions. Since I was up, I decided to also post the site to , and Dimitar posted it to . Product Hunt Hacker News Designer News We immediately got traction on all three sites. We quickly moved to the 2nd spot on Product Hunt, and my post moved to the front page of and . As I was going to head to sleep, I noticed the visitors start to tick up. Google Analytics showed we have 48 people on the site, that jumped to 88, and then to 327. No going to bed now. Designer News Hacker News It wasn’t until about 5am when I finally got to bed, the visitors peaked out at around 440 users. After my short nap, had to get up and get the kids ready for school, I saw that we’d been written about in The Next Web. That had pushed our visitors higher, we had over 500 visitors on the website. Featured on The Next Web homepage This site estimates how likely you are to lose your job to robots We quickly passed the Agolia free tier limit and upgraded to their Starter package. 1M operations a month, we should be good with that. Dimitar started to reach out to journalist to help spread the word about the website. Having the initial success, helped frame the outreach, which would lead to further success. Visitors continued to rise through the day, the article from TNW was syndicated to a number of sites, including MSN and AOL. We jumped to 822 visitors and then peaked out during the day at over 1400. Day 2 We continued to get have articles written on all sorts of website, most interestingly not just in the tech space. General news sites in Arizona, Texas and Washington state wrote about us, and a post on lead to a massive jump in visitors. BarStoolSports A New Website Tells You The Likelihood Of A Robot Taking Your Job And When It'll Do It By We peaked out with about 2000 visitors on the site! We were rapidly approaching the Starter tier limit on Aloglia. I couldn’t justify the $300 to upgrade to the next tier, and started investigating alternatives. I tweeted about the situation, and Algolia responded and offered to help us out by raising our usage limit. That saved us a bunch of time and worry, the support from Algolia is much appreciated! The full search alternatives to Algolia wouldn’t have been much cheaper and a lot more work. Running our own server with Lucene or Elasticsearch would have been one option, but the cost of hosting and the time sunken to get that operational wouldn’t have been a good use of my time. Our best alternative would have been to switch to , no additional server would be required and writing a JSON API around the search would have been relatively straight forward in Laravel. Thankfully none of this ended up being required. TNTSearch for Laravel Scout Day 3 We had a very steady stream of visitors all day, ended by topping the sub-reddit. InternetIsBeautiful <a href="https://medium.com/media/cc095486140faf2980bf79cee104bf22/href">https://medium.com/media/cc095486140faf2980bf79cee104bf22/href</a> Although we finished the day with over 5000 votes, we unfortunately didn’t make the Reddit popular page, perhaps next time! Day 4 I decided it was best to upgrade the server, we were getting pretty steady visitors and although the server was handling the load pretty well, I wanted to have some spare capacity, and ensure the pages loaded very quickly for our visitors. makes it ridiculously easy to setup servers, my only concern was adding SSL to the new server. I used on the original server, but you can’t do this until you’ve pointed your DNS to the server. Luckily I remembered that I had some unused SSL certificates in my account. I ordered a SSL cert, and in a few minutes the new server was up and running. Laravel Forge LetsEncrypt Namecheap I crossed my fingers as I updated the DNS to the new server. Luckily we managed to get things migrated with zero downtime. The extra capacity came in handy. Although we didn’t get another big surge in visitors, the average was higher thru the day. We did end the day with a peak of 1600 visitors which appeared to be coming from Google search. We’re still unsure what caused that surge in visitors. Day 5 Finally some time to breath. The weekend lead to lower visitors levels, but with about 300–400 visitors on the site through the day, we’re still pretty happy! The Results Although we topped the Product Hunt homepage for a while on launch day, we ultimately ended up in the 2nd spot. Falling behind Andy Rubin’s Essential phone. Product Hunt votes for May 30th, 2017 We have close to 950 votes, I’m hoping to reach the 1000 vote club for the 4th time before soon :) We stayed on the Hacker News homepage for a few hours, we topped a popular sub-reddit for 3 days, and appeared in many popular sites, including: TheNextWeb, LifeHacker, Mashable, MSN, FoxNews, AOL, BarStoolSports, BusinessInsider, Geek.com, Vice, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, and Fortune. Google Analytics summary for the first 5 days By the end of Saturday, just 5 days, over 500K people have visited the website and generated over 4.2M page views, an average of over 6 pageviews per session. We expect the visitors to slow down, even a significant drop will leave us with a lot more traffic than we expected. Top 10 Searched Jobs The Lessons Just because you build something small and quick, doesn’t mean it won’t have a big impact. Will Robots Take My Job? is easily the most successful personal product launch I’ve been involved with. Yes I’ve been involved more high profile, high traffic launches, but those involved big marketing teams and big budgets. We are a developer from Upstate New York, a designer from Bulgaria, with no budget. Make it fun Dimitar and I had fun building the website, and working together for the first time, but that’s not the only thing what I’m referring too. We made the website fun for our visitors. Instead of being dry and just displaying numbers, we injected some fun into the website. Any job highly likely to be automated was presented with a “Your are doomed message”. Make it Shareable Although it wasn’t easy we made it so that every job had a custom share image, so when people shared their job on social media it presented their specific automation likelihood rather than a generic image. Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 100K visitors, which we think is large part due to our custom share images. Be Available Via email, via social media, via comments. We tried to respond to anyone and everyone who had a question or comment. We believe this lead to more articles, more shares and more votes. It takes time, but if you don’t dedicate your time to your project why should any one else. Be Grateful Both Dimitar and I are very grateful to everyone who wrote about, shared or just visited the site. None of this would have been possible without you. We’re especially grateful to Algolia for the support, we may need to discuss raising operations limit again 😁. If you haven’t had a chance to visit yet, go ahead and try it out now. Come back and leave a comment with what you think. Will Robots Take My Job?

From Idea to 4M Page Views in 4 Weeks

Source: Unsplash Everyone talking how we will go to soon. Guess again, we won’t, there is one big problem, Mars Mars is pretty far away. We can’t go there, technology does not exist. Mars is pretty far away “It’s six orders of magnitude further than the space station. We would need to develop new ways to live away from the Earth and that’s never been done before. Ever.” Sam Scimemi,Nasa’s director of the International Space Station Let’s put this in perspective, as we recorded Earth and Mars where the closest 34.8 million miles from each other. The farthest is 250 million miles apart. It’s important to notice that both Earth and Mars rotate over Sun, while for Earth it takes only 365 days to close the circle for Mars it’s longer. Mars goes around the Sun every 687 days. How long should take us to go from Earth to Mars? If we check the history of traveling on that route, we will see the average time: Something between 150 and 300 days. Mariner 4 (1965) — 228 days Mariner 6 (1969) — 156 days Mariner 7 (1969) — 131 days Mariner 9 (1971) — 167 days Viking 1 (1976) — 335 days Viking 2 (1976) — 360 days Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2006) — 210 days Phoenix Lander (2008) — 295 days Curiosity Lander (2012) — 253 days Source: National Geographics We can’t bring with us all that we need It’s not the same if in a rocket is robot or human. , they need to have a water, and oxygen. Also, there is a fuel, the rocket needs a lot of it just to get to the Mars. It’s double more for round trip. That is the main reason why is the trend one way ticket to Mars. In order to stay alive in the space people need to eat something There are no round trips. Getting off from the Earth A Mars mission would be on a much larger scale than almost anything we’ve done before, it’s not the same as regular mission. , astronauts and all the supplies and materials needed to get to Mars. Rockets would have to make several trips to drop off supplies and pieces for a vehicle into low-Earth orbit. Still, there is no rocket that can take off from the Earth’s surface and escape its gravitational pull to reach space carrying the weight of a large spacecraft Then everything should be built in the space before a rocket could be ready to start a journey to the Mars. But, there is a problem with a fuel, . During half that time, they experience the heat of the sun. If objects are not well managed there is a big possibility that everything will blow up before the start. objects in low-Earth orbit travel all around every 90 minutes Radiation make us problem too In May 2013, NASA scientists reported that a possible mission to Mars may involve a great radiation risk based on the amount of energetic particle radiation detected by the RAD on the while traveling from the Earth to Mars in 2011–2012. . The agency’s career radiation limit for astronauts is 1 sievert Mars Science Laboratory The calculated radiation dose was 0.66 sieverts round-trip But, we are trying to It’s everywhere on the news, NASA, SpaceX and some other companies are trying to do it. . They are not trying to send us, yet. They just want to make an opportunity for it and prepare everything. They are trying to build a technology that will be able to bring people to the Mars The future of technology is unpredictable I guess we will find a way and send the human to Mars before 2030. You know what is the awesome thing about it? From 1930–2030 will just pass 100 years. In that 100 years human development increase from the point where we launched our first successful mission to space to the point where we are able to walk on the Mars surface. Source: Geek.com It really seems to be like a movie. Next step is Mars, then we will discover alien civilization and then if we are lucky they will not colonize the Earth. One last thing… If you liked this article, click the💚 below so other people will see it here on Medium.

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