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There are spirals like the Milky Way. There are spherical galaxies and irregular blobby ones too. Some are big. Some are small. Astronomers collected data on nearly 400,000 galaxies in the Milky Way’s cosmic neighborhood, including the dozens above, for the Siena Galaxy Atlas.

6 Great Space Images in October

Juno is on the cusp of two even closer passes of Io. The spacecraft will make its 57th and 58th closest approaches, or perijoves (close passes), of Jupiter on Dec. 30, 2023, and Feb. 3, 2024, when it will get within just 930 miles (1,500 km) of Io's surface.

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Jovial Pictures Since it started orbiting Jupiter in 2016, NASA's Juno probe has been gathering rich images and data from the largest planet in our Solar System and its many moons, including just released pictures of Io,

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NASA's Juno mission has captured stunning new views of Jupiter's moon Io and its lava-scarred surface.

Jupiter's volcanic moon Io looks stunning in new Juno probe photos

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44,000 startups. 4,553 cities. “4 billion votes” It was such a blessing to get to know so many of your ideas and innovations from every corner of the world in 2021. The startup community amazed all of us with your hard work and persistence despite all of the challenges that we faced globally throughout last year. Not gonna lie, the competition got our hearts racing like Eurovision. We won’t let you wait for much longer, below are long-awaited results! ✨✨✨ To see who is a winner in each respective city, visit and pick a city. The name at the top of the list is the winner. (Compromised awards are under review.) startups.hackernoon.com The will announce the winners per region in their respective cities. Startups Winners Announcement Series 🔥 Central Europe Central Europe has always caught our attention with the talented pool of people in tech community. But were they able to get through 2021 despite the pandemic? Let’s cheers to the most outstanding amongst 4,500+ startups who have been working hard this year: Basel, Switzerland An overwhelming vote for ~ in their mission of helping machinery companies drive more service revenues from their installed base MachiQ Software Berlin, Germany We have with a whooping 538 votes! Let’s support Plan A with its mission to help companies to measure, monitor and reduce their environmental footprint. Plan A Düsseldorf, Germany It doesn’t get any easier with Kicking off in helping people organize online schedules more easily. EasyWeek! Geneva, Switzerland Manage code quality? We have to give props to for their startup! SonarSource Hamburg, Germany Taking over Hamburg is , an acoustic device to reduce noises in vehicle cabins. No more annoying sounds on the road 🚗 ReCalm Köln, Germany Small business? Hoping to manage your marketing campaign? is winning the vote! rankingCoach Lausanne, Switzerland is a Swiss-based company focused on cryptocurrency management solutions built for financial institutions. Metaco Leipzig, Germany empowers companies to operate and utilize drones for the most effective industrial data applications. FlyNex Mainz, Germany is growing sustainable digital mobility startups! Next Mobility Labs Munich, Germany wins for top-line, high-security international Identity Management! ORY Stuttgart, Germany Remote desktop application? Ask anywhere. AnyDesk Vienna, Austria , an IT company enabling privacy-preserving big data applications in the digital age. Mostly AI Zug, Switzerland Way to go 1762 votes for the first provably live pure Proof-of-Stake (PoS) CBC-Casper blockchain designed for real-world applications. CasperLabs! Nyon Calling for robust data solutions for impact-driven organizations! Havuta LLC Zürich is revolutionizing small business lending to give easy access to capital to those who need it most: SMEs ✨ Teylor Heidelberg, Germany is an innovative HR startup providing a solution for fast and efficient recruiting of employees with simple job profiles. Talk'n'Job Stuttgart, Germany Congratulations for winning this title! AnyDesk Moving on to our buddies in... 🔥 Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is home to many familiar big names in our start-up world. Trace history for Miro, Telegram, and Grammarly and you know where they are from. Who is the next generation for Eastern European startups? Budapest, Hungary is a platform for mobile app development, enabling tens of thousands of developers to automate integration, testing, and deployment. Bitrise I__ __ stanbul, Turkey Leading here is - a brand new software intelligence platform- helps organizations deliver faster, high-quality products by connecting their DevOps tools. Oobeya Kraków, Poland is a human cloud platform that connects global enterprises with European software houses, offering tech talent as a service. Talent Alpha Kyiv, Ukraine 281 votes for , an AI powered app where people can swap faces in the videos, GIFs and images in just a few seconds. Reface Sofia, Bulgaria 387 votes for __ __378, leading Blockchain and DLT solutions company that specializes in helping enterprises and blockchain startups design, build and scale innovative solutions using Blockchain & DLT! LimeChain Warsaw, Poland is a next-generation blockchain document management software (DMS). DoxyChain Yerevan, Armenia Whoever clicked to vote for was sure a vote, because it ended up winning as a full-service software provider delivering Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning solutions for businesses. SmartClick smart Almaty Just like the name suggested, provides one pass to dozens of gyms and studios. 1FIT Debrecen got all the coders ranked figured out! CodersRank Kharkiv is complete solution digital assets management! Pics.io Minsk, Belarus with 243 votes is the first blockchain-powered sports media platform. Scorum Moscow, Russian Federation 1 e-grocery company in Russia with 26 votes and #1 on our HackerNoon board for Minsk. SberMarket Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation leads this area as a personal finance application that rewards responsible spending and savings. CoinKeeper Kazan, Russian Federation Smelling a sweet victory? 3d App designers for flower bouquets is in the house! Flowito Western Europe 🔥 Brexit? Pandemic? It seems like startups in Western Europe still keep their spirits regardless. Startups in Western Europe that stood out in votes this year go to: Antwerp is on a streak! As a bug bounty platform, it ensures online security through a crowd-sourced platform for computer experts. intigriti Belfast A record-breaking 10,003 votes? is an independent coffee shop. Come grab a coffee! Bobs & Berts Birmingham What’s happening in Birmingham? We have , an innovative UK-based advanced lithium battery developer aiming to accelerate the global shift to cleaner. Aceleron Bordeaux 30 is an open-source web framework for building modern apps and websites with Vue.js. NuxtJS Boulogne-billancourt is a software company that provides an in-store analytics platform to optimize operations. DiGEiZ Brighton In for some jam? offers musical education services. BIMM Bristol Another tasty victory for Western Europe is enabling the strongest digital encryption on the internet. KETS Quantum Security Brussels A fashionable win for , a social fashion network. You scan barcodes in fashion shops and see every influencer wearing those outfits! Share your wishlist with your friends and earn cashback. SCANDALOOK Cardiff is a technology company developing end-to-end digital connectivity for the point-of-care diagnostics market. Bond Digital Health London A whooping number of 1085 vote__ __ offers hardware based cyber-security solution for authentication and encryption in a wired local network. Crypto Quantique Edinburgh Hopping up on the crypto movement, just launched last year but they are already rocking it at making crypto accessible to everyone. Zumo Ghent 5379 votes for ! A Belgian InsurTech startup that helps insurance providers all over the world to better connect with their digital customers. WeGroup Glasgow specializes in single-cell analysis transforming the life sciences. Biomage Paris Show some love in the city of love for , a sports platform that is connected to a mobile sports coaching application. AirFit Aberystwyth enables artificial intelligence, data science & digital innovation solutions for the agriculture, biotech & life sciences industries. Agxio Norwich Congratulations for the amazing win of 1124 votes! WATR Charleroi Congratulations for your amazing win! Hirering Gibraltar Give a round of applause to Fortknoxter! Waltham Abbey is ruling the area with its amazing 72 votes! RPAIR Antwerpen Rocking up Antwerpen area is the rising startup ! Willow Egham What’s happening in Egham? Proudly announcing winning the Noonies this year! ATA.ONE Leicester Leicester is calling the name of as the winner for the region! DeadHappy Macclesfield Who else but ? Congratulations on dominating the award! AeroCloud Northern Europe 🔥 Want to listen to some music? Spotify. Need some games to kill time? Candy Crush. What about a quick call to someone you haven’t seen in a long time? Skype. These are all startups that originated from Northern Europe! Noonies, let’s take a look at the upcoming generation of startups from Northern Europe that hopefully will see an even bigger and brighter future. Gothenburg, Sweden Shipping was never made for small shippers, so took on the mission to built an end-to-end logistics platform to empower small businesses to spend less time and money on shipping and more time on growing their businesses. Sendify The Netherlands provides a virtual platform for many kinds of conferences and events. Let's Get Digital Helsinki, Finland A curated collection of public basketball courts in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area called . Everyone is welcome to submit to their local court. Koripallopaikat Lund, Sweden develops an antibiotic-free, safe and effective treatment of vaginal fungal infections. Gedea Biotech Luxembourg, Luxembourg 🚀 is a job-matching platform that connects developers and tech experts with CTOs and team leads from the best tech companies across Europe. 👾 nexten.io Malmö, Sweden Feeling studious, Noonies? __ __e is a tool for Google Classroom, that enables formative matrix assessment towards course learning objectives directly. StudyBe Oslo, Norway is the platform supports a unified API across all connected device categories, removing significant friction for app developers. Domos Labs Reykjavík, Iceland __ __s is a mobile-first technologically advanced neo-bank. Indo service #S__ __ tockholm, Sweden is the biggest blockchain start-up in Sweden. Double winner of the most prestigious nomination in Nordics 'NyTeknik 33-listan', winner of the Deloitte Fast 50, and now Noonies Award! ChromaWay AB T__ __ allinn, Estonia Passing 1000 votes is a fully digital and decentralized ecosystem for all actors in supply chain. OBORTECH Vilnius, Lithuania is an easy-to-use money app for cards and accounts. Via Genome, users can open a business or a merchant account or a personal one with dedicated IBANs, access transfers, exchange currency, process payments, and manage the funds. Genome Aalborg Digura A legaltech offering tenants fast, digital and reliable legal assistance Aarhus Partisia Market Design provides secure, simple, efficient solutions for auctions and exchanges realizing the potential of the market. Helsingborg is a hi-tech company developing cardiac occlusion devices and other vascular implants. Occlutech Tallinna is an AI-powered system for marketing automation in social networks. POSTOPLAN 🔥 Southern Europe Southern Europe’s economy went through a hard time this year due to a huge reduction in tourism. But our startups are of course always headstrong, from Spain to Italy and all the way through Greece. Who are the heroes rising amidst changes of Southern Europe? Skopje is a versatile software development company that solves the business challenges of SMBs, big brands, and brave hearts with awesome ideas. CodeChem Sliema Sounds like just a relaxing exhale. is a holistic health and wellbeing app built to allow users work on the development of their physical, mental and spiritual health Few Tajonar is a company of experienced business & industry entrepreneurs offering solutions to industries based on cutting-edge technologies. das-Nano Tarragona is a technology-based company focusing on the production of integrated microsystems. IMICROQ Terni is an ICT-based integrated solution that is able to modulate, respond, assist and learn to control most home activities. Mind Tirana is a video content and e-commerce platform for the Balkans built on top of an Albanian language specialized search engine. Gjirafa Torino develops and commercializes algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence to increase the autonomy of small satellite missions. AIKO T__ __ orres Buy online groceries like you would buy offline with personalized picking as fast as in 4 hours with Vedras 360hyper! Trento is a music-based platform built around streaming platforms that allow users to discover new emerging artists and make new friends. Brots 2021, what a YEAR. Congratulations to all of the startups that made it to the top winning list for Europe! Stay tuned for Startup awards in 2022 and let’s cheers to a new year of more innovative ideas, bold innovations, and robust creations from you, Europe 🌷 More Information: If you’re a winner, please answer ! If you’re a reader, participant, just a curious individual, consider answering one of our interviews . this interview here Read the FAQs about or . Startups here here To see all of the winners you may visit , pick any city and view the name that appears at the top. this site If you’re interested in partnering with us, we invite you to look through some of these or reach out to our business department. unique sponsorship options Perhaps creating your very own tickles your fancy or maybe you have a whole new idea for how we can partner! writing contest Thank you to all of our sponsors! We truly appreciate your contribution to the tech world and thus the future! The Startups Awards are sponsored by: , , , , , , , , , , Blockster Brex FreeCodeCamp LaunchDarkly Coil Udacity Udemy Vercel Asia Pacific Transgender Network Bybit Everscale Network This post was written by An Le and edited by Natasha Nel. If you have any questions or concerns or would like to report a discrepancy please email ellen@hackernoon.com.

Meet the Winners of Startups in Europe

Letters. Personal Records. Dated Notes.

The notes on Sculpture

Linear Perspective

Table of Contents Introduction The objective and need for the CLIP algorithm The working procedure of the CLIP algorithm Limitations Realtime Applications Introduction CLIP aka “Contrastive Language Image Pre-training” is one of the renowned algorithms discussed in a white paper named “Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision” published by researchers at OpenAI - An artificial intelligence research laboratory. The major consumption of CLIP is done in the use cases based on computer vision that uses an algorithm named “Dall-E 2” which was also developed by the Open AI team. More precisely, CLIP is being used as a helper model for the “Dall-E 2” algorithm. But don’t misunderstand that CLIP is not powerful as it is consumed as a helper model :) Despite being a helper model, CLIP is considered an important step in deep learning research. We can implement CLIP for separate problem-solving even without “Dall-E 2”. In this article, we can discuss the objective, working procedure and some of the pros & cons of the CLIP through some real-life examples and how we can simplify the life of our deep learning projects. The objective and need for the CLIP algorithm The primary objective behind the CLIP algorithm is to find a particular text from a list of texts which is more similar to the given image. For example, Let us consider the following image as input- And let's say we have some of the texts in a given list- A photo of an airplane. A photo of a bird. A photo of a bear. A photo of a giraffe. A photo of a car. The primary task of a CLIP model is to match the most appropriate text from the given list to the input image as shown below- Fundamentally, this is an artificial neural network that considers each text in the list as a class and assigns a probability value for each text corresponding to the image. Logically, the text that gets the maximum probability value can be considered as the output. One big positive aspect of the CLIP is that it already knows all the words in the “English” language. Some of the characteristics of the CLIP model that makes it special when compared with other similar algorithms are- The CLIP model is not restricted to a single word in the text. Instead, it tries to extract every piece of information from all the words in the input sentence and all the pixels of an image. It never forgets to remember all the aspects of an input image such as the objects in the background, colour, shapes etc. For example, Let us consider the following input image- All of the texts in the given list except the last one look like a logical match for the input. Any other model would have struggled to reach a high conviction probability value for a particular class. However, the CLIP would have analysed the patterns for all the aspects in this image such as the kennel, cell, dog etc. The sunlight seems to be coming from outside to inside. Hence, it should be an indoor structure. Also, there is a presence of an animal instead of a human. Hence, it should not be a Jail but could be a Kennel. Such kind of advanced analysis considering all the aspects of the image & text might not be possible for other models in the same league. CLIP has also been seen working well in Optical Character Recognition use cases which is not possible in similar models- Other branches of computer vision such as geo localisation, facial emotion recognition etc also seem to be working well with the CLIP model. CLIP has shown great zero-shot performance even in unseen inputs. Also, it doesn't expect the text to be in a single word such as “cat”,” dog”,” bird”,” car”.” plane” etc. Instead, it can comprehend a group of words logically framing a sentence. This feature is not generally seen in other models. The working procedure of the CLIP algorithm The CLIP algorithm has been trained on 400 million images with paired text descriptions that make it highly knowledgeable about the universe and confident in solving complex tasks with complex images and texts. The Imagenet dataset consists of only 1.2 million images. 400 million is almost 300 times that of 1.2 million.  Most of the 400 million images are directly scraped from the internet which makes it a highly diversified and large collection that increases its pattern detection capability. For the development of the CLIP architecture, we need to encode both the images and corresponding texts into mathematical vectors. This is because a machine learning algorithm won't able to infer the information if it's in a visual or textual format. Hence, we need to convert them into numerical values. Image input is converted into a mathematical vector using a Transformer or Resnet algorithm The textual input is into a mathematical vector using a Transformer algorithm- Since we have a list of Image-Text pairs, we need to denote it using certain alphabets. Each image is denoted as I1, I2,I3...IN etc. Each text is denioted as T1,T2,T3…TN etc. After that, we need to build a similarity matrix with each of the images as rows and each of the texts as columns. As mentioned in the above image, the diagonal image-text pairs will have more similarity as they are referring to the same context. The non-diagonal elements are random pairs that do not belong to the same context. Hence, their similarity value will be low. The goal of the optimisation functions will be to increase the similarity value for the diagonal pairs as much as possible and decrease the similarity between non-diagonal image-text pairs. At one point in learning, the model will be able to learn the hidden patterns that match the images and texts that belong to the same context and differentiate the images and texts that belong to different contexts. This procedure is technically called . “Contrastive pre-training” CLIP is considered a “computationally efficient” algorithm. This is because they use the transformer algorithm to encode images and texts which access the data in a parallel fashion. If we use other algorithms such as LSTM or RNN, they tend to access the data for encoding in a serial fashion which might consume a lot of time and space. Since the CLIP can match an image with a long sentence, the researchers usually create a text prompt something like “A photo of a _____ “. Then, while iterating through a list of texts, the computer program automatically fits every single word from the list into this text prompt like- A photo of a plane A photo of a car A photo of a dog etc. This text is then encoded and matched with the encoded vector of the input image for calculating the similarity value. Limitations Challenges related to scalability On datasets with training splits, the performance of zero-shot CLIP is on average competitive with the simple supervised baseline of a linear classifier on top of ResNet-50 features. On most of these datasets, the performance of this baseline is now well below the overall state of the art. Significant work is still needed to improve the task-learning and transfer capabilities of CLIP. While scaling has so far steadily improved performance and suggests a route for continued improvement, researchers estimate around a 1000x increase in computing is required for zero-shot CLIP to reach overall state-of-the-art performance. This is infeasible to train with current hardware. Further research into improving the computational and data efficiency of CLIP will be necessary. Challenges related to zero-shot performance It is found that CLIP’s zero-shot performance is still quite weak on several kinds of tasks. When compared to task-specific models, the performance of CLIP is poor on several types of fine-grained classification such as differentiating models of cars, species of flowers, and variants of aircraft. CLIP also struggles with more abstract and systematic tasks such as counting the number of objects in an image. Finally, for novel tasks which are unlikely to be included in CLIP’s pre-training dataset, such as classifying the distance to the nearest car in a photo, CLIP’s performance can be near random. Challenges in understanding the images that are out of the training set (distribution) While zero-shot CLIP generalizes well to many natural image distributions as investigated, the researchers observed that zero-shot CLIP still generalizes poorly to data that is truly out-of-distribution for it. For example, CLIP learns a high-quality semantic OCR representation that performs well on digitally rendered text, which is common in its pre-training dataset, as evidenced by performance on Rendered SST2. However, CLIP only achieves 88% accuracy on the handwritten digits of MNIST. An embarrassingly simple baseline of logistic regression on raw pixels outperforms zero-shot CLIP. Both semantic and near-duplicate nearest-neighbour retrieval verifies that there are almost no images that resemble MNIST digits in our pre-training dataset. This suggests CLIP does little to address the underlying problem of brittle generalization of deep learning models. Instead, CLIP tries to circumvent the problem and hopes that by training on such a large and varied dataset, all data will be effectively in-distribution. This is a naive assumption that, as MNIST demonstrates, is easy to violate. Unable to generate captions Although CLIP can flexibly generate zero-shot classifiers for a wide variety of tasks and datasets, CLIP is still limited to choosing from only those concepts in a given zero-shot classifier. This is a significant restriction compared to a truly flexible approach like image captioning which could generate novel outputs. CLIP does not address the poor data efficiency of deep learning CLIP also does not address the poor data efficiency of deep learning. Instead, CLIP compensates by using a source of supervision that can be scaled to hundreds of millions of training examples. If every image seen during training of a CLIP model was presented at a rate of one per second, it would take 405 years to iterate through the 12.8 billion images seen over 32 training epochs. Combining CLIP with self-supervision and self-training methods is a promising direction given their demonstrated ability to improve data efficiency over standard supervised learning. Realtime Applications Some of the areas where CLIP has been used for solving real-time use cases are: There is a website called “paint.wtf” where we can play Pictionary. The players here will be judged by the CLIP. CLIP can be used for implementing filters such as “NSFW  (Not safe for work)”. “DALL-E”, an algorithm by Open AI is using CLIP as a helper model as we discussed earlier. CLIP is used to index photos on websites like . Unsplash CLIP can be used to find appropriate images for complex languages such as poetry, riddle, rhymes, novels etc. CLIP can also be used to pick images that are corrupt or distorted. A new research paper titled, ‘ ,’ demonstrates how a supervised inversion method was used to get effective representations of corrupt images. Inverse Problems Leveraging Pre-trained Contrastive Representations Released in 2021, a generative model called CLIP+VQGAN or Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network is used within the text-to-image paradigm to generate images of variable sizes, given a set of text prompts. However, unlike VQGAN, CLIP isn’t a generative model and is simply trained to represent both images and text effectively. Conclusion It is an undeniable fact in the deep learning industry that CLIP has paved a way for the development of lof advanced algorithms for solving complex use cases related to image processing and NLP. CLIP can be considered an innovative aqueduct between computer vision and NLP. Also, Since it does not require task-specific training data, it is possible to feed huge amounts of text data and it would slowly get better and better at more unrelated tasks. We can together eagerly wait for the breakthrough advancements that CLIP will be provided in the future. I hope you have got a basic introduction to the concept behind the CLIP algorithm in a lucid manner. I have added the links to the research paper in the reference section which you can use in case you need to refer to the in-depth implementation. References CLIP documentation from Open AI - Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh, Gabriel Goh, Sandhini Agarwal, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Pamela Mishkin, Jack Clark, Gretchen Krueger, Ilya Sutskever “Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision" - Sriram Ravula*, Georgios Smyrnis*, Matt Jordan, Alexandros G. Dimakis, The University of Texas at Austin, NeurIPS 2021 “Inverse Problems Leveraging Pre-trained Contrastive Representations" Katherine Crowson, Stella Biderman,, Daniel Kornis, Dashiell Stander, Eric Hallahan, Louis Castricato, and Edward Raff "VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance"- Radford, Alec; Narasimhan, Karthik; Salimans, Tim; Sutskever, Ilya (11 June 2018). (PDF). . p. 12. (PDF) from the original on 26 January 2021. Retrieved 23 January 2021. "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" OpenAI Archived Johnson, Khari (5 January 2021). . VentureBeat. from the original on 5 January 2021. Retrieved 5 January 2021. "OpenAI debuts DALL-E for generating images from text" Archived Ramesh, Aditya; Dhariwal, Prafulla; Nichol, Alex; Chu, Casey; Chen, Mark (12 April 2022). . : . "Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents" arXiv 2204.06125

CLIP: An Innovative Aqueduct Between Computer Vision and NLP

CLIP: un acueducto innovador entre la visión artificial y la PNL

CLIP : un aqueduc innovant entre la vision par ordinateur et le TAL

क्लिप: कंप्यूटर विजन और एनएलपी के बीच एक अभिनव एक्वाडक्ट

CLIP: コンピュータ ビジョンと NLP の間の革新的な水路

CLIP: um aqueduto inovador entre visão computacional e PNL

CLIP: Một cống dẫn nước sáng tạo giữa thị giác máy tính và NLP

CLIP：计算机视觉和 NLP 之间的创新渡槽

Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 3 (of 3), by Isaac Asimov is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . Volume III, BEYOND FUSION: Antimatter BEYOND FUSION Antimatter Is there anything that lies beyond fusion? When hydrogen undergoes fusion and becomes helium, only 0.7% of the original mass of the hydrogen is converted to energy. Is it possible to take a quantity of mass and convert all of it, every bit, to energy? Surely that would be the ultimate energy source. Mass for mass, that would deliver 140 times as much energy as hydrogen fusion would; it would be as far beyond hydrogen fusion as hydrogen fusion is beyond uranium fission. And, as a matter of fact, total annihilation of matter is conceivable under some circumstances. In 1928 the English physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902- ) presented a treatment of the electron’s properties that made it appear as though there ought also to exist a particle exactly like the electron in every respect except that it would be opposite in charge. It would carry a positive electric charge exactly as large as the electron’s negative one. If the electron is a particle, this suggested positively charged twin would be an “antiparticle”. (The prefix comes from a Greek word meaning “opposite”.) P. A. M. Dirac The first picture of the positron (left) was taken in a Wilson cloud chamber. On the right is C. D. Anderson, the discoverer of the positron. The proton is not the electron’s antiparticle. Though a proton carries the necessary positive charge that is exactly as large as the negative charge of the electron, the proton has a much larger mass than the electron has. Dirac’s theory required that the antiparticle have the same mass as the particle to which it corresponded. In 1932 C. D. Anderson was studying the impact of cosmic particles on lead. In the process, he discovered signs of a particle that left tracks exactly like those of an electron, but tracks that curved the wrong way in a magnetic field. This was a sure sign that it had an electric charge opposite to that of the electron. He had, in short, discovered the electron’s antiparticle and this came to be called the “positron”. Positrons were soon detected elsewhere too. Some radioactive isotopes, formed in the laboratory by the Joliot-Curies and by others, were found to emit positive beta particles—positrons rather than electrons. When an ordinary beta particle, or electron, was emitted from a nucleus, a neutron within the nucleus was converted to a proton. When a positive beta particle, a positron, was emitted, the reverse happened—a proton was converted to a neutron. 160 A positron, however, does not endure long after formation. All about it were atoms containing electrons. It could not move for more than a millionth of a second or so before it encountered one of those electrons. When it did, there was an attraction between the two, since they were of opposite electric charge. Briefly they might circle each other (to form a combination called “positronium”) but only very briefly. Then they collided and, since they were opposites, each cancelled the other. The process whereby an electron and a positron met and cancelled is called “mutual annihilation”. Not everything was gone, though. The mass, in disappearing, was converted into the equivalent amount of energy, which made its appearance in the form of one or more gamma rays. (It works the other way, too. A gamma ray of sufficient energy can be transformed into an electron and a positron. This phenomenon, called “pair production”, was observed as early as 1930 but was only properly understood after the discovery of the positron.) Of course, the mass of electrons and positrons is very small and the amount of energy released per electron is not enormously high. Still, Dirac’s original theory of antiparticles was not confined to electrons. By his theory, any particle ought to have some corresponding antiparticle. Corresponding to the proton, for instance, there ought to be an “antiproton”. This would be just as massive as the proton and would carry a negative charge just as large as the proton’s positive charge. An antiproton, however, is 1836 times as massive as a positron. It would take gamma rays or cosmic particles with 1836 times as much energy to form the proton-antiproton pair as would suffice for the electron-positron pair. Cosmic particles of the necessary energies existed but they were rare and the chance of someone being present with a particle detector just as a rare super-energetic cosmic particle happened to form a proton-antiproton pair was very small. The Bevatron began operation in 1954. Physicists had to wait until they had succeeded in designing particle accelerators that would produce enough energy to allow the creation of proton-antiproton pairs. This came about in the early 1950s when a device called the “Cosmotron” was built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island in 1952 and another called the “Bevatron” at the University of California in Berkeley in 1954. Using the Bevatron in 1956, Segrè (the discoverer of technetium who had, by that time, emigrated to the United States), the American physicist Owen Chamberlain (1920- ), and others succeeded in detecting the antiproton. The antiproton was as unlikely to last as long as the positron was. It was surrounded by myriads of proton-containing nuclei and in a tiny fraction of a second it would encounter one. The antiproton and the proton also underwent mutual annihilation, but having 1836 times the mass, they produced 1836 times the energy that was produced in the case of an electron and a positron. There was even an “antineutron”, a particle reported in 1956 by the Italian-American physicist Oreste Piccioni 162(1915- ) and his co-workers. Since the neutron has no charge, the antineutron has no charge either, and one might wonder how the antineutron would differ from the neutron then. Actually, both have a small magnetic field. In the neutron the magnetic field is pointed in one direction with reference to the neutron’s spin; in the antineutron it is pointed in the other. Bubble chamber photograph of an antiproton annihilation. In 1965 the American physicist Leon Max Lederman (1922- ) and his co-workers produced a combination of an antiproton and an antineutron that together formed an “antideuteron”, which is the nucleus of antihydrogen-2. This is good enough to demonstrate that if antiparticles existed by themselves without the interfering presence of ordinary particles, they could form “antimatter”, which 163would be precisely identical with ordinary matter in every way except for the fact that electric charges and magnetic fields would be turned around. If antimatter were available to us, and if we could control the manner in which it united with matter, we would have a source of energy much greater and, perhaps, simpler to produce than would be involved in hydrogen fusion. To be sure, there is no antimatter on earth, except for the submicroscopic amounts that are formed by the input of tremendous energies. Nor does anyone know of any conceivable way of forming antimatter at less energy than that produced by mutual annihilation, so that we might say that mankind can never make an energy profit out of it—except that with the memory of Rutherford’s prediction that nuclear energy of any kind could never be tapped, one hesitates to be pessimistic about anything. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Isaac Asimov. 2015. Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 3 (of 3). Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved May 2022 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49821/49821-h/49821-h.htm#c40 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 3 (of 3): Beyond Fusion - Antimatter

Establishing a bond between remote employees in the virtual office culture is quite challenging. To ease it, we have Virtual Team building activities. Virtual Team Building Activities refer to those group team building activities usually carried out using any collaboration platform like . These activities' ultimate goal is to bring their teams together virtually despite being apart geographically. Google Meet, Zoom How Does Virtual Team Building Bring A Value into Teams? Meeting deadlines and finishing the tasks in the pipeline is essential. However, Virtual Team Building activities allow you to ensure your team stays in line. Here are few points that emphasize how remote team activities add value. Establishes a good relationship among the peers and allows them to collaborate better on work. Will give a break to remote employees from their work routine, and this small break will help them focus better on work, increase productivity. Trigger employees' ; thus, the chances are high that remote employees will apply similar strategies to solve work-related problems. lateral thinking ability When you hire a remote team, Virtual team-building activities help you get your team to engage, interact, and bond with one another. Several remote development companies with the remote developer and employees practice these virtual remote team building activities. Best Virtual Team Building Ideas and Activities Here we have come up with some virtual remote team building activities and games. 1. Happy First Minute - Unusual Icebreakers Icebreakers provide an excellent kick start to a virtual meeting. It spontaneously creates a quick connect, to be precise, a personal connection with teammates. Before starting the virtual meeting, ask any easy ice-breaking questions like share the emoji you used today while texting? What is your go-to Web series to watch at night?. How To? Give everyone one minute to answer the question. This activity helps remote employees to understand one another better by standing in their shoes. 2. Catch-up Over a work Talk with Idea Board Try to get the remote teams to think about some new ideas and concepts. It may be for an upcoming project, or it may be for the current work. A small talk over work ideas can break the myths revolving around remote work culture. Get a whiteboard or excel or document sheet from your regular collaboration tool, start the Idea talk and see how the team responds. How To? This idea board talk builds a rapport with your team. 3. A Virtual Coffee Station A Virtual Coffee Time is the best time to meet friends and colleagues virtually and A simple way to manage remote teams is by encouraging coffee chat moments. chat. Allow your team to grab their favorite coffee or any beverage and block the calendar for the break. How To? This Coffee Chit Chat will allow remote co-workers to dig the happy moments and boost their minds. 4. Quick Book Review in a Non-review Way Hosting, Read a Book activity is a fun and exciting activity. You can suggest this for only readers and book lovers of your team. Once in eight days, host a virtual book club and request the participants to express their view on the particular book they liked the most. How To? This activity triggers instant conversation, and in the end, a healthy understanding happens between the team members. 5. Virtual Pooling of Knowledge Share and encourage team members to share information on the latest trends and technologies. Give updates on work and review the work, provide ideas and suggestions to improvise. Utilize screen sharing and code sharing tools to impart and suggest ideas and help to solve complex codes. How To? An informal mentoring or pooling enhances your team's quality and additionally builds trust. 6. Virtual Office Olympics An easy way to increase team activeness, weekly online gaming activities, also referred to as can be held. These activities can be either online paid games or interactive virtual games. "office Olympics," Form teams and invite them to play online team games such as Pictionary, trivia, virtual board games, virtual puzzles, to name a few. Office Olympics like the kitchen treasure hunt, pick me up can be included. How To? These games directly contribute to team involvement, interaction, and bonding. 8. Pic Talk Visual Icebreakers are sometimes needed. An image or graphical picture quickly shows what it signifies. Show and Tell is becoming quite a popular trend in virtual team meetings. Show an image, a picture, or a graphical image and question what it describes. You may also draw half the picture on the sheet and share, requesting to fill the remaining. How To? This activity stimulates the brain, refreshes the mind, and acts as a brainstormer. 8. Discuss Over Plans for Vacation Given the current situation of pandemics, traveling is not advisable. Virtual Team Vacation is an ideal activity, as it gives individuals to discuss their plans and trips. For this activity, pair up two members and ask them to discuss their vacation plans in a one-on-one call with each other. Later, one member must brief the travel plan of another person to the group. How To? This activity enhances listening abilities and communication. 9. Interactive Virtual Meetings In the Digital age, one needs flawless virtual team management. So, use collaborative tools to manage and proceed with the virtual team meetings. Use tools like Uber Conference and Google Hangouts to interact with the team effectively. How To? The main idea is to streamline productivity. 10. Online Movie Date Increase the flavor in remote team management with entertainment quotient "Movie Night" Using and other techniques, stream a movie to your remote teams and ask to leave a review in the chat. How To? Video Conferencing The activity enhances interaction and channelizes communication. Bottom Line: When you hire a remote development team, the only major issue in remote employees is  chances of feeling lonely. Following the above engaging and interactive Virtual team building activities is the best way to make your remote team active and productive.

Virtual Team Building Activities For Remote Teams In 2022

The craze for learning programming languages is very high. These days people have one question in their mind and that is which programming language should one prefer in 2022 and why? So The Themeselection is sharing here the Top 10 Demanding programming languages 2021 . In this detailed article, you will get to know what a specific language offers you and how it is getting into the trends. All these mentioned striking programming languages hold high scopes for the upcoming era. We have made this detailed list of the top 10 striking programming languages 2022 as per the recent survey. For programmers, coders, and other developers seeking development work, it’s never been more important to stay updated on the programming languages being used throughout the world. Although some of these languages share key similarities others require an entirely different level of understanding. Besides, having a deep knowledge of the right programming language can help land the right job or find work in a particular field. If we look at pay-scales then the following were some highest paid languages last year. Credit: Stackoverflow Here we are going to discuss the top 10 striking programming languages for 2022. The list contains the following languages: Rust TypeScript Python Kotlin Go Solidity Dart C/C++/C# Swift Javascript Sources Used: Stackoverflow Stackshare Hired Github Google trends Note: We have prepared this list after researching and observing the performance, demand, and usability of each in 2021. Although, this data may change as data can’t be static. Some languages in the list may seem new to you but we have included them because of the scope they possess. In the end, it depends on users as everyone has different interests and tastes. Also, we did not single out the first and last place. Today, the choice of language depends on the scope. Therefore, the main indicator is the frequency of use in different areas. Now, let’s head to the list…!! Rust Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. While Rust is syntactically similar to C++, one thing that it can guarantee is memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references. As per the survey, Rust has been for consecutive four years. Impressive, isn’t it? This huge popularity shows that those who have had the opportunity to use Rust have fallen in love with it. Stack Overflow’s most loved language Credit: Stackoverflow Besides, Rust allows you to store data on the stack or on the heap and determines at compile time when memory is no longer needed and can be cleaned up. This allows efficient usage of memory as well as more performant memory access. Companies using Rust: Dropbox Coursera Figma Discord Advantages: Better memory safety due to the compiler Easier concurrency due to the data ownership model that prevents data races Zero-cost abstractions So, both beginners and experienced programmers can kickstart with Rust. In the way it is used, the language is close to established alternatives. TypeScript Typescript is a well-known name. Since its release in 2014, it is growing rapidly and maintaining its place in the list of top 10 striking programming languages 2021. It is developed by Microsoft. Well, it has emerged in response to growing dissatisfaction with JavaScript. Soon after its arrival, It impressed the Google team so much that they began working on developing TypeScript, instead of developing a new language. Credit: Stackoverflow Basically, TypeScript was used as the main programming language for the Angular2 + SPA structure. Even, Vue.js team is also using typescript as they announced in 2018 to develop new versions of its framework. The reason behind its popularity is, it is easy for developers to write and maintain codes. Furthermore, it offers a complete description of each component of the code and can be used for developing large applications with a strict syntax and fewer errors. Companies are diverting towards typescript. Following are some companies that are using typescript. Slack Vox Media medium Accenture ViaVarejo Advantages: Class and Module Support. Static Type-checking. ES6 Feature Support. Clear Library API Definition. Build-in Support for JavaScript Packaging. Syntax Similarity to Backend Languages (Java, Scala, .Net) In addition, it is well-structured and easy to learn. Its extended toolbox makes application development quick. With such benefits it offers, TypeScript is expected to supersede JS in 2020–2021, making it one of the most sought-after programming languages in the future. Nowadays many of the JS frameworks provide support for typescript. You can check and which are made using typescript . Modern Admin - Angular 10+ Bootstrap 4 Admin Dashboard Template Apex Angular Admi Template Python Image credit: Teahub Python is trending nowadays like never before..!! It is the biggest competitor to Javascript. Especially because of the rising trend of AI..!! Most often, Python is used in Data Science, Machine Learning, Web Development, Computer Science Education, Computer Vision, and Image Processing, Game Development. Besides, it is considered one of the easiest software languages to learn and master. Also, Python is undoubtedly the best starting language for beginners. Often named one of the world’s most popular programming languages, Python powers the backend stacks of many startups and is essential in the growing fields of data science and AI Credit: Octoverse.github According to many reports and ratings, is rapidly gaining popularity and has every chance of moving JavaScript from the first place. Many biggies are using python for example: Python Instagram Spotify Amazon Facebook Advantages: Very easy to use and learn Emphases on code readability Wide-ranging library support Open-source programming language Have a good community support Can scale complex applications Build a prototype Credit: Google trends As you can see how python has surpassed javascript in the past 5 years. Besides, it has a very wide range of applications like Web & Desktop Development, Network Servers, Machine Learning, GUI Based Desktop applications, In Enterprise and Business and Data Science, etc. Kotlin was developed by the Jet Brains team in an attempt to find “something better than Java.” Many experts claim that the goal has been achieved. Like Go, Kotlin cannot be called the trendiest programming language. But statistics show that demand is growing. Kotlin The effortless interoperation between Java and Kotlin makes Android development faster and more enjoyable. Since Kotlin addresses the major issues that surfaced in Java, developers have rewritten several Java apps in Kotlin. According to the , is one of the five most popular programming languages in the world. It beat competitors such as Java and Python, giving in only to Go and Scala in its field. Hired rating Kotlin Credit: Hired Companies using KOTLIN Coursera Uber Pinterest Post mates Advantage: A good compiler An Efficient programming language Provides an improved run-time performance Absence of raw types. In addition, the number of Kotlin users in the Github community is growing incredibly fast. According to a report from Octoverse, Kotlin ranks 4th among fast-growing programming languages. Go Well, is the least known of all the programming languages, but that doesn’t mean it is something you neglect..!! It was developed by Google in 2007 for APIs and web applications. Go In the past few years, Go has become one of the fastest-growing programming languages. According to Some programmers, it is a great alternative to Python. Credit: Google Trends As per the latest Report, Go has been going down. Although, it is necessary to draw your attention that Go has been maintaining its position consistently on the list. There may be some break downs but it has grown up to a level where it can’t be ignored…!! Credit: Hired Go is Ideal for minimal web applications, APIs, and web servers. Besides, it includes some features like C-like semantics, memory management, high performance, and modern data structure support. You can use it for system and network programming, big data, machine learning, audio, and video editing, and more. Here are some notable firms that have done so: Google Apple Facebook Docker The New York Times BBC Advantages: It Is Fast Easy To Learn Well-Scaled Comprehensive Programming Tools So, according to the trends and reports, despite its fall in the current time it is wise to keep it in check as it has maintained its popularity over the years. It is possible that Go can rise again. Solidity Now, we would like to pay attention to . Well, this programming language is not in the list of the best version of Stackoverflow or Octoverse. Moreover, it is not into the top 10 Pypl and TIOBE. Similarly, even in hired Solidity did not become one of the most sought. Solidity So, “Why Solidity is on the list?”. As we said at the beginning, one of the major factors is the scope. When interviewing Stackoverflow regarding Blockchain development, most often respondents mentioned this one. It’s a well know fact that demand for over the past year has grown rapidly. By almost by 517%. This technology is completely new because it is not yet very popular. But the benefits of the blockchain and statistics indicate that in the coming years the situation will change radically. Blockchain specialists Blockchain technology has emerged as one of the most promising services in recent years. It holds great potential to transform the workings of the financial sector. Living in a highly digitalized world, a range of large and medium-sized enterprises are exploring blockchain technology services in order to make a place in this competitive market. Thus, the demand for qualified solidity developers will increase. As it is the best for Blockchain today. Therefore, in 2021 the demand for specialists will be very large. This programming language is supported by the fast-growing EOS platform. It is Ethereum’s main competitor. So, If you plan to connect your life with the blockchain, then you must learn exactly Solidity and C++. Dart: Dart is a client-optimized programming language for apps on multiple platforms. It is developed by Google and is used to build mobile, desktop, server, and web applications. Dart is an object-oriented, class-based, garbage-collected language with C-style syntax. Dart can compile to either native code or JavaScript. Before Google announced Flutter, Dart was nowhere to be found. However, since the announcement of Flutter in Google I/O, Dart has got drastic attention among mobile developers as an alternative to React Native. The developers who didn’t like JavaScript as the programming language found Dart as an alternative option. As big companies like Google, , etc adopted Flutter, the popularity of Dart raised considerably. Alibaba Credit: Stackoverflow Advantages: It is open-source. Dart is really flexible Easy to learn It has great tooling support It ensures productivity Dart can be compiled both and . AOT JIT Companies using Dart: Google Useinsider Pickio Agora Besides, Almost every major Text Editor and IDE has great support for the Dart language. You can use heavy IDEs like Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, and Android Studio, or use simple editors like VS Code, Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, Atom, etc. So you are free to choose whatever editor you are comfortable with. C/C++/C Yes, these are three But, as we said, the main focus is the scope. C/C++/C# are equally often used for game development. If you are confused about where to start refer to different programming languages. As we know, the gaming industry is very huge and is gaining more and more momentum every year. Besides, Demand for the quality of games is growing, therefore, qualified developers are always needed. As per the report, about 50% of the world’s population spends time to video games every day. Not only in Gamin Industry but Embedded applications such as robotics, 3d printing, Operating systems, drivers, Desktop applications such as graphics suites, desktop word processors, etc... uses this language. Also, all three of these programming languages occupy fairly high positions in all ratings. So, in the Hired list, they were in 13–15 places Credit: Hired Companies Using C# Delivery Hero Microsoft Accenture ViaVarejo Stack Overflow Companies using C++: Evernote LinkedIn Microsoft Opera NASA Facebook Companies using C: Twitch GitHub Telegram Messenger MasterCard Lime Swift Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. and the open-source community, first released in 2014 As name sands for, It is a powerful and intuitive programming language. It is useful for macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and beyond. Besides, writing Swift code is interactive & fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive. In addition, Swift includes modern features developers love. Swift code is safe by design, yet also produces software that runs lightning-fast. Credit: Stackoverflow As you can see in the report above, it is in the list of top 10 most loved languages 2020..!! And why not? It offers some amazing advantages as follows: Rapid Development Process Easy to Read and Write Requires a lot less code Improved Performance and Safety Easy to Integrate with Objective-C Companies using Swift: Lyft Uber Slack Artsy Credit: Armadsen Furthermore, since Swift is promoted by Apple, its popularity and community support are increasing. In fact, a study of the top 110 apps on the app store showed that 42% of apps are already using Swift. If only the 79 non-game apps are considered, the results are that 57% are using Swift, while 43% are not. Although the Swift community is growing fast, still it is significantly smaller as compared to any other open-source language. According to the latest StackOverflow Developer Survey, only 6.6 percent of the 87.354 respondents use Swift. JavaScript JavaScript is the most famous programming language today. Despite the flaws that triggered the creation of add-ons such as CoffeeScript, Flow, and TypeScript, JS is still the most sought after in many areas. It is widely known for adding interactive elements to web applications and browsers. Most front-end developers prefer JS. However, the Node.js runtime provides significantly more features than just front-end development Credit: octoverse is the most popular language, according to a Stackoverflow survey. The same survey showed that 66% of respondents like to work with JS. 17.8% of respondents want to master JS. JavaScript Credit: Hired As you can see, Javascript is still ruling the software development world..!! Many big companies are using Javascript, for example: Microsoft PayPal Groupon Google And why not..!!? It offers some amazing advantages as follows. Advantage: Runs instantly inside the web browser No compilation requirement Offers a very responsive interface to a website Highly multipurpose languages Simplistic implementation You can check Sneat Bootstrap 5 HTML Admin Template, and both are made using Javascript. Materio Vuetify VueJS Admin Template It can also be used to create animations and control the web interface. Another benefit is its support for all modern browsers. JavaScript can also be used for backend development with the help of Node.js. Conclusion: So, this was the list of the Top 10 Striking Programming languages 2021. As we have covered the 10 significant languages here, there are several that we have not mentioned. But the demand for relevant specialists will be very high. Among them are: Scala Ruby Java Objective-C PHP Well, despite there being some on the list and some are not, it is not necessary that you just go with the flow..!! You can choose the language you feel is more relevant and find it easy to work with. It will be beneficial to learn any of these languages. So, pick your favorite and kickstart your journey…!! About Themeselection: ThemeSelection, provide selected high quality, modern design, professional and easy-to-use premium and free , and UI Kits. bootstrap admin templates You can check which is one of the best free bootstrap admin templates. Chameleon Free Bootstrap Admin Template Also published at https://dev.to/theme_selection/top-10-striking-programming-languages-2021-4d2h

Top 10 Programming Languages To Learn in 2022

Virtual team building makes remote teams feel as tight-knit as office employees to support purpose, vision, and enthusiasm and grow as a company. The future of work is remote work, and when it's done right, it improves employee productivity, creativity, and morale, psychologists' research finds. The number of employees who said they couldn't concentrate at their desk in an office increased by , and the number of employees who couldn't access quiet places to do focused work when working in an office went up by 13%. Similarly, has found that employees who worked from home were reported to have higher job satisfaction and reduced levels of burnout and psychological stress. 16% research Bringing that teamwork and collaboration to the virtual world can be difficult, but it is not impossible. Also, virtual teams are increasingly growing because most people prefer to work from home. With this increase of remote working, companies mustn't forget that these are real people behind their screens, and creating a solid rapport with one another can bring your team closer together. What Is Virtual Team Building? Virtual team building is essential because people have felt very isolated over the past couple of years. When a group is a part of the virtual team-building experience, they are getting to know their team, so the usual team bonding people complete in the office can be done virtually. Why Is Virtual Team Building Important? While returning to face-to-face work is slowly coming back into our lives, many companies are also looking at mixing in-person work with virtual work. Since this is happening, it is vital that every team member feels and knows that they are a part of a team. A study found that "87% of remote workers feel more connected through the use of video conferencing". So, to promote the use of video during team building activities. Icebreakers for remote teams are activities to start a virtual meeting involving everyone and making quick, personal connections with your remote co-workers. Use these virtual team-building activities and icebreakers to connect with your team better and conduct effective remote meetings. Benefits Of Virtual Team Building: The main benefits of virtual team building activities include: among remote employees Supports Collaboration because of working from home Combat Loneliness Increases Productivity Boost Team Morale and generate new ideas Encourage Creativity between team members Improve Communication to work during difficult times Boosts Motivation Supports Innovation Management amongst the team members. Builds Strong Relationships and taking care of employees’ mental health. Reducing Stress Here is a list of 10 virtual games, icebreakers, and activities you can do with your virtual team to build that strong company culture. This list includes: free virtual team building ideas quick virtual team building games virtual team building activities for conference calls best team building activities for work from home ways to make virtual meetings fun online team building activities for conference calls fun virtual team games for work Let’s get to it! The 10 Best Online Games and Icebreakers for Remote Employees Ice Breaker This is such a classic game to complete in person that it just needed to be added to this list. Ice Breakers are a great way to virtually get to know your remote team. This activity can be done in two different ways. The first way is to find an Ice Breaker list online that gives you a lot of questions to ask. On the contrary, have your team members answer questions themselves and send them to one individual. That person can print them out and cut them up to be picked from a hat. Either way, it's a fun way to get to know your team and learn a bit more about each other. Two Truths & a Lie Another game that is very popular in person (such as this one) may also be applied to the virtual world because it's good for people to play games they're familiar with. Have each employee think up of their two truths and a lie so that the other members can guess. This game is excellent for introducing your team to one another and building that social connection. With so many different aspects of picking from within your own life, this game always makes people laugh and ask questions for clarification. Online Team Meeting Virtual Scavenger Hunt What is great about this game is that the teams are going to have to work together to find all of the items. Split your virtual team up and give everyone a list of things they have to see in their house. Have some fun with it! Please give them a specific task like finding a green stuffed toy or blue pencil. Then, do something abstract, like finding something with an eye on it. After finding all the items, individuals can show their findings on the video chat, and their teammates can say whether or not that fits the bill. It's a great way to have fun with a timer and for lots of laughs to be had. Video Charades Who doesn't love a good game of charades? With the acting, jumping, and overall fun, your team will love this virtual Zoom game. Create a list from an online generator and privately message the individual with their topic on Zoom. Then, have them act it out for their team to guess, and voila, you have video charades! This online team-building exercise can bring a lot of social interaction to your team. In addition, it will leave your team with new memories of one another, and they are going to be excited for the next game day. Time Traveler Everyone has thought about what life would be like in a different time period. So, first, have your team discuss which time period they would like to go to and why. Then, get them to properly explain everything about this time period and how they would even make a living, survive, or their goals. This is a great way to introduce your team's imagination into the conference calls because daydreaming is fun for everyone. You can even give bonus points to people who want to act out their time period! Teamwork Photo of Your Life Challenge Creating a personal connection with your virtual team can be difficult because you are all apart. That is why it's essential to show your personal and human side, not just the business version of yourself. Have each team member take a picture that sums up their life. Yes, this isn't easy, but it can make them think a lot about themselves. Afterward, have them write up a short explanation of why this picture represents them. You can post this in a group chat or do a short presentation during a video conference. Either way, this is one that people will enjoy because everyone is going to know a bit more about their colleagues. Can You Hear Me Now? This is an excellent twist to Pictionary. Every team member has a turn of being the Describer. The Describer only has three minutes to describe how to draw an item using only simple shapes. For example, if it was a car, then they could say that you have to draw a rectangle and have two circles side by side at the bottom. Afterward, have everyone share their image. This is an excellent way to laugh with one another as your compare each other's drawings. The Describer gets the point for every person that draws the correct item, and whoever draws correctly gets the point too. Guess the Workspace/Refrigerator Want a guessing game that is fun and thought-provoking? Have each team member take a picture of either the inside of their refrigerator or their workspace. Get everyone to send their photo to one person and post them all up onto a group chat. Allow your team some time to look at the images and figure out which picture is connected to which teammate. This activity is a great way to try and bring each other into your home while still being private at the same time. It can also encourage your team to clean up their space before taking a picture, and they might be grateful for that. Tiny Campfire Everyone likes S'mores because they're delicious. Send every member a little kit with a tea light, marshmallow, graham cracker, chocolate, and a toothpick if you have the budget. Pick a day where your team is going to have a campfire together and have them all set up in front of their workspace. Take this time to share ghost stories around your tea lights while enjoying a S'more on the business. This is a great way to create memories together and to relax. With such a fun activity, your team is going to tell everyone about this idea. Pancakes vs. Waffles Pose the question to your team members: 'Both pancakes and waffles are about to disappear from the universe forever. Which one should go and why?' Your team needs to come to a unanimous decision on which one is allowed to stay and which one is disappearing. Once this has been decided, someone else can suggest another food or topic that is up for debate, like carrots. This game can get intense quickly because people can nominate anything for debate. If they want to put love, humanity, or family up there, then they can. With such freedom to choose the next topic, it is sure to keep people talking and allow them all to get to know each other more. You can more ideas for team building and icebreakers for remote meetings from the video below: Virtual Team Building Activities Are you looking for a remote job? Team building activities, on the other also allow remote team managers to become familiar with every employee's talents and skills, making for more efficient task delegation. Therefore, make sure you connect with your virtual team because you work together for most of the day. Also, suppose you're looking to join a virtual team or find any remote job. Find a remote position, learn about remote interviews, remote working tips, tools, and more, as work from home provides the ability to have a better work and home life balance. Frequently Asked Questions Some common questions to come up with for companies managing remote employees for the first time and are looking for fun remote team-building activities and games. Why is Virtual Team Building important? Virtual team building improves team effectiveness, leads to closer-knit teams and heightened collaboration levels, brings a team closer together, and creates a culture of psychological safety, which is essential for a team to be high-performing. Best Practices For Virtual Team-building. Regular check-ins & constant feedback sessions with your remote teammates Provide training, workspace upgrades, wellness packages, and technology allowances Conduct employee wellness programs Conduct daily stand-ups and 1:1 meetings Encourage social interaction Set clear expectations Promote fun Watercooler Chats How do you boost team morale virtually? Virtual happy hours, coffee catch-ups, and other fun activities are easy to keep morale high when times are tough, and connectivity is low. How do you make a virtual meeting more fun? Breaking up the monotony of online remote meetings is essential to keep people from falling asleep, feeling awkward and to boost participation and team involvement: Let people take ownership Keep meetings short and on-task Play games throughout the meeting Utilize interactive features on Zoom etc Use fun quizzes, trivia, and icebreakers Incorporate real-world objects Conduct fun interactive polls How do you motivate your team virtually? Align the remote team around the company goal so that everyone understands how they impact it. Create incentive programs to attract employee participation in remote team activities Provide the team with all the required remote tools Create and foster a growth mindset. Never miss a way to increase communication among teammates Introduce recognition and employee awards program to boost motivation Address trust issues by interacting more with remote employees. Tools for virtual team building. Virtual Escape Room Squad Squabble Virtual Icebreaker Plop Quiz The Team Quest QuizBreaker Water Cooler Trivia Team Building Slack Extensions like Donut First published here

10 Team Building Activities to Boost the Morale of Your Remote Teams

How are we going to work on team spirit in this remote world? While most typical team-building activities don’t work over Zoom, these do. Although there are plenty of mega lists of virtual team-building activities online, I decided to prepare this for busy CTOs based on recommendations of other CTOs in the alphalist.cto private slack channel. TOP 5 Virtual Team Building Activities for Tech Teams 1. AWS GameDay What - more work? Somehow just a break from routine is enough to have fun - even if it's tech. 3 Things that make AWS GameDay different from the daily grind: Risk-Free -  The best part about AWS is that it's risk-free. The challenge is real but the data you are playing with isn't and there will not be any mess for the company to clean up afterward. Scoring - Gamification makes things more fun - pity it doesn't exist in real life. The code produced by the team is graded and they compete with each other on a scoreboard. Time Limit - Nothing like the rush a ticking time brings Here is how works. Other than the AWS Onboarding Video series, your team is on its own. They need to solve a DevOps challenge for a fictional company. AWS GameDay typically starts with a kickoff planning session, followed by a morning of discovery and problem solving sessions. Then there is a late morning recap, break for lunch and then teams spend the afternoon building, troubleshooting, and hopefully deploying. AWS GameDay 2. Spreadsheet Wars (source: ) MuseumHack Spreadsheets are fun. Everyone on your team knows some formulas. Now its time to challenge them to build tools using spreadsheets online like Design a choose your own adventure story. Create a beat-box harmony using sound scripts. Compete to reproduce the best pixel art - use famuos artworks for inspiration .Build a tool that someone would pay at least $5 to use. Make a recipe generator. 3. Virtual Escape Rooms Pre-Covid, Escape rooms were a great team-building activity. And they still are. Just virtually. You can decide to make your own using a LARP like or use one of the many . GatherTown online escape rooms From a build vs buy perspective, we think Buy is best. Though we hope someone will sell a virtual world equivalent of an escape room soon. 4. Chocolate Tasting Virtual Event Who doesn’t like chocolate? This makes it more inclusive than its sister events: wine-tasting and beer-tasting. The best way to engage in the services of a professional ‘Chocolate Tasting Virtual Event’ provider.  This enables you to have a professional chocolatier curate the tastes and take care of the entire culinary journey for you. Most providers will talk about the way chocolate is made, how the different methods allow for diverse tastes and you can even make your own truffles.   Ensure team participation by making sure to take dietary requirements into account though. 5. Drawing Game Pictionary is a great party game. But even adults like it too! Online Pictionary is a free platform that generates drawing prompts, provides a canvas and scoring. At each player’s turn, they receive a word as a drawing prompt. They draw while the other users watch their canvas in real-time and guess. The system allocates points to the correct guesses. Skribbl NERD ALERT:  Up the nerdiness by mixing nerd words to the drawing prompt deck. Words like: Example Nerd Words for Pictionary Serverless LAN RAM Kubernete Wifi (remember no symbols :)) Database Trojan Virus Blockchain Cryptocurrency Machine Learning NoSQL (send me your drawings :)) Telephone Pictionary Pictionary + Broken Telephone = Telephone Pictionary. Not only is typical telephone Pictionary hilarious with garbled prompts, but the online makes it even funnier by generating bizarre phrases as drawing prompts - or each player can write their own. First, each user writes/generates a wacky sentence. That sentence is then passed onto another user who draws it. The drawing is then passed on to another user who describes it in a sentence. That sentence is then passed on to the next user who draws it. In the end, you get to see how one wacky sentence garbled even further. Gartic Phone - The Telephone Game In Conclusion 'Neccessity is the mother of invention' it seems. Now even remote-first workplaces pre-Covid can benefit from a lot more resources on this topic. Which one have you tried? Let me know in the comments!

5 Virtual Team Building Activities for Tech Teams

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote employees and Work from Home arrangements were becoming increasingly common. An 2019 State of Remote Work Report found that 54% of U.S. workers work remotely at least once per month, 48% work remotely at least once per week, and 30% work remotely full-time. is forecasting a 25-30% increase in working remotely with adoption increasing proportionately with the amount of time we spend in shelter at home and work from home conditions due to COVID-19. Owl Labs Global Workplace Analytics But even for companies who are used to working remotely in part, there can be a real challenge to keeping team members motivated and connected with no in-person connection or central offices. Here are a handful of ways some companies are pushing the boundaries of social distancing with the technology and a little creativity. Zoom Yoga, Virtual Pub, and #DesperateHouseWise Cooking Classes , an online money transfer service has implemented activities across their 13 global offices to help with employee health and well being during COVID-19 remote work conditions. Transferwise Transferwise Zoom Yoga sessions. Creative ways that Transferwise reaches employees as individuals and build a sense of wellness within the team include: Zoom Yoga, an open class held every morning by a trained member of the team to wake up the body and settle the mind. They also offer a 45-minute mobility training session and a 20-minute meditation via zoom for a more mindful and balanced work day. Virtual Pub held every Friday at 5 pm. The team has dubbed their meeting place “The Wisers Arms” where they enjoy an end of the week drink together and catch up with the team. TransferWise’s Global Head of People Operations, Rose Stott said, “We’re fortunate as a company that we already had a culture of working from home but adapting to that full time is a shift for many, especially the social aspect of work. Activities like our excellently named #desperatehousewise virtual cooking class, or art workshops via Zoom not only make sure that employees take their breaks but also gives them a chance to be creative and catch up with the team to talk about things besides work.” #DesperateHouseWise Cooking Class Lunch, Games, & The Buddy System , one of Australia’s largest digital consultancies, has transitioned from a central office in Sydney with remote employees on other continents to all hands working from home. Web Profits WebProfits team in Sydney office Kath Chalhoub, head of Creative for Web Profits said, “Now more than ever, a sense of community and closeness is essential for not only maintaining team vibes and rapport, but also to ensure your business operates smoothly when this period of our lives passes (and it shall pass!).  With this in mind, we’ve opted for regular communications and team initiatives to help people feel connected as well as reminding them that this is for the short term…” Web Profits is doing daily communications between leadership and weekly team roundups on Zoom to keep everyone in the loop but they are also holding: Daily Lunch Sessions on Zoom in which the team is invited to dine with each other remotely from 12-1 PM, sharing not only what’s on the menu for the day, but any new talking points and conversations to be had on a personal level. The Buddy System is something Web Profits is testing --  random group conversation sessions where people can come together to discuss things outside of their collaborative priorities. A time to break down siloing between projects and get to know other team members and what they are doing. Team Games Afternoons are specially scheduled events where the team can play virtual Pictionary or, most recently, have a virtual Easter Egg Hunt. Fancy Dress Days & Scavenger Hunts According to Francesca Baker, Marketing, Communications, and PR representative for charity, the team is quite social and used to working in the Guildhall Office. Now they use daily video calls to catch up, discuss wins, and make plans -- but they have interjected some fun things like fancy dress days and scavenger hunts. The Lord Mayor’s Appeal “We’re trying to make the calls more about connection and communication as much as work and business. Well being and mental health are really important to us, and we think the workplace is really instrumental in that.” Campfire Talks , an AI-powered team chat and free alternative to Slack, is using campfire talks on Zoom twice each week for one hour to let team members talk about things they are passionate about -- “our hobbies, interests, what we do in our free time, our families, customs, and anything that comes to our minds. The basic idea is that one person gets to present every campfire so that everyone in the team has a chance to speak… Chanty "The goal is twofold - to learn more about the people we work with and to take everyone’s minds off the virus pandemic. So far, it’s been working out incredibly well and people participate every time. We get lots of laughs and we plan to continue this practice even when we go back to the office,” Dmytro Okunyev the Founder of Chanty said. Honorable mention... Since it doesn’t strictly apply to a human team, honorable mention goes to , 13th-century historical site and nature conservancy including the Gardens, Hawk, & Owl Centre. More specifically it goes to the Muncaster Castle Bears -- 80 handcrafted, dapper teddy bears who have annual events with visitors including a now-canceled Easter Egg Hunt. Muncaster Castle The Muncaster Castle Bears Kym Armstrong, Curator, and Custodian at Muncaster Castle, assured us that the bears, “are a team”. And that they have, “been keeping themselves in high spirits by having an Easter Egg Hunt.” I’m not sure what social distancing means for a phalanx of well-dressed, handmade teddy bears but their is charming and watching it for me summarizes how quarantine feels to some of us -- everything proceeding, perhaps not as expected, but still proceeding. (Note: My daughter assures me this video is funny and cute, not an austere commentary on isolation, so we will take her word for it.) home video Author’s Bio Justin Roberti has a background in media and fine arts and has been writing and doing PR/marketing for over 20 years for Fortune 500 and startups in media, gaming, consumer tech, mobile tech, fintech, and blockchain. He is the PR Director for blockchain agency . Zage.io Previously published at https://medium.com/@justinroberti/creative-ways-companies-are-keeping-teams-sane-connected-through-covid-19-wfh-mandate-eec2f7a412

Creative Ways Companies are Keeping Teams Sane And Connected Through WFH Mandate

once wrote, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” is a good embodiment of this principle, even if their spin on that saying might contain more swear words. Bill Gates Cards Against Humanity According to co-founder , celebrated its . It’s an impressive milestone, considering the company got started with a scant raised on Kickstarter before it quickly started generating , and if the planogram at my local Target is instructive, became the most popular tabletop game of the holiday season — taking up more space than and combined. Max Temkin Cards Against Humanity tenth-anniversary last night $15,570 millions of dollars in revenue Monopoly Clue We’ve written previously about how it’s possible to , even just , but it’s worth unboxing a couple lessons from this company’s impressive if unlikely success. build massive businesses with minuscule amounts of money $10,000 Find a Real Use Case — Even if It’s Silly has written about the , and though a product like this might seem like the ultimate frivolity, it fills a distinct need. Board games have become more mainstream over the last decade, but that growth came mostly in the form of resource management slogs like , and “ ” experiences which have strong sci-fi themes and required dedicated focus for hours on end. Eric Paley paramount importance of use cases Euro-style Settlers of Catan Ameritrash The “party game” category hadn’t seen meaningful innovation since the Reagan era and the advent of . Enter Cards Against Humanity, which perfectly combined the mid-century aesthetic and cynical sense of humor favored by late Gen X and Millennial audiences. It’s a fun game that can be set up and played quickly with no knowledge of Cthulhu required. Pictionary In Marketing, Creativity > Cash Unlike so many upstart consumer brands, I don’t think Cards Against Humanity has ever purchased a Facebook ad. Instead, they focus their marketing efforts on creating outrageous campaigns that earn them media far beyond their ability to pay. Sometimes, this takes the form of partnerships with established brands, like the popular PAX video game convention, for which they created (oatmeal for gamers). In a more highbrow effort, they teamed up with celebrity chef David Chang for a . PWNMEAL cuss-filled critique of haute cuisine More often, their efforts take the form of de novo, Dada-esqe happenings. They and another . Most famously, they solicited from their fans in return for…nothing. Another time they raised $100,000 to dig a giant hole in the ground as a response to existential ennui following the election of President Trump, all the while earning press from , , , , , , , , , , and many more outlets. earned $180,000 selling bull excrement $500,000 selling Trump Bug Out bags $71,145 NPR The Guardian Engadget CNBC Time Business Insider Polygon Daily Mail The Huffington Post Polygon None of these marketing programs were expensive, in fact, many likely broke even, but all of them did a good job and creating opportunities for building word of mouth appeal. When Pynchon meets Pokémon In an era of billion-dollar fundraises, $10,000 doesn’t seem like a sufficient sum to accomplish anything impressive, but with a long enough time horizon, and an off-kilter sensibility, you can create an important company with less money than you need to buy a used Mazda. Joseph Flaherty is the Director of Content & Community at Founder Collective, a seed stage VC firm that has backed Uber, BuzzFeed, PillPack, SeatGeek, Cruise, HotelTonight, The Trade Desk, and a couple hundred other startups.

Ten Years and $10,000

Google’s latest A.I. experiment is a web-based drawing tool called that converts your rough scribbles and doodles into beautiful, symmetrical icons/clipart that you can download for free. It works on your phone, computer or tablet and uses artificial intelligence to guess and suggest a more polished icon or symbol to replace your drawing. AutoDraw The program uses the same technology found in — an online game developed by Google that uses neural network artificial intelligence to guess what a user has drawn (it’s like playing Pictionary against a computer). The Al learns from each drawing, increasing its ability to guess correctly in the future.   AutoDraw also lets you draw freehand, without suggestions. Just like any other basic drawing app, you can fill and resize objects, change colors, add text in different fonts, draw polygonal shapes, etc. Quick. Draw!

Google’s AI Based AutoDraw Turns Your Rough Scribbles Into Beautiful Icons For Free

Rails 5 Imgur Clone Handle image upload and painlessly with Carrierwave and Cloudinary and deploy on and share your photos fast with the world. management Heroku Hi everyone, today I’m going to show you how to do image share and upload in your Rails 5 application very easily. This is what I have learned by browsing several outdated tutorials, blog posts and a bunch of documentation. Most of the articles out there are older Rails version 4 so, I hacked together the steps for integrating into Rails 5 which I’m currently using on some of the projects and continue to use more. Plus in the process, we are going to build an imgur clone today by adding all the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionalities. It is going to be a 2 part series explaining every bits and pieces. This tutorial is going to very beginner friendly and also suitable to intermediate to advanced users. Now, let’s start some coding, shall we? First, let’s create a new rails project in your terminal by doing: rails new rimgur It’s always good practice to start using Git right away so, we are going to follow the same practice here: git init git add . git commit -m ‘project init’ Let’s test our app in the browser by using this command to boot up our server. rails server And then go to localhost:3000 in your browser. You will see this. Rails default home Great, your app is running successfully. Open the project in your favorite IDE or text editor. Now we are going to create a controller. rails generate Open file and an action pics_controller.rb index class PicsController < ApplicationControllerdef endend index Create a view file for our index action in app/views/pics/index.html.erb Open and write some dummy text like index.html.erb “Hello” Now, we are going to create a route to display the page. Go to and write this. config/routes.rb . . . Rails application routes draw doroot 'pics#index'end Okay, this line simply means you are setting path to controller and action. root pic index And you should or whatever you wrote. “Hello” Now, we are going to create our model like this. rails generate model Pic Awesome, now we have some routes and model setup and now we can start integrating our image handling system. First, open your and then put these right anywhere in middle. Gemfile gem 'carrierwave'gem 'cloudinary' Second, run in your terminal to install the gems and then restart your server. bundle Third, we will generate our image uploader like this. rails generate uploader Image Go to and add this inside our class. app/uploaders/image_uploader.rb include Cloudinary::CarrierWave And comment out everything else in the file. IMPORTANT! Now, create a new file in the directory name and then add this. config/initializers cloudinary.rb . . [ ] . [ ] . [ ]**end Cloudinary config do | | config config cloud_name = ENV 'CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME' config api_key = ENV 'CLOUDINARY_API_KEY' config api_secret = ENV 'CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET' ** Okay, let me explain this. We are adding all the configuration variables dynamically and securely. I’ll explain later more in details. Open and then put this. app/models/pic.rb , class Pic < ApplicationRecordmount_uploader :image ImageUploaderend And then run to add our schema. Your should have something like this: rails db:migrate db/schema.rb , : . , : . , : create_table "pics" force :cascade do | | t t datetime "created_at" null false t datetime "updated_at" null falseend Now we’’ll generate a migration to add our to image uploader pic model. rails generate Open your and add this. <timestamp>_add_image_to_pic.rb :: [ ] , , class AddImageToPic < ActiveRecord Migration 5.0 def add_column :pics change :image :stringendend And then run to add it to our schema. rails db:migrate Great, our database part is done and now we going to add CRUD functionalities to our app. Open your file like this routes.rb resources :pics Let’s check our routes by doing in your terminal. And you should all the actions routes. rails routes Create all the action methods like this in your pics_controller.rb **class PicsController < ApplicationControllerdef end index def newend def end create def end edit def end show def end update def endend** destroy Thanks, everyone for reading it so far, hope you enjoyed it. In the next part, we will finish our application and also take it live. See you, in the next one.

Rails 5 Imgur Clone Tutorial…Part 1

A great power to use when looking to engage users in an app or product is giving them creative freedom. When people are allowed to be creative, they engage more with a product and once that creativity gets social it all becomes fun, not to mention highly addictive. Moreover, when people are not limited to predefined paths or actions in an app’s usage, giving them additional options or even absolute freedom can spike interest for an app. A creative being People are by nature creative beings. Creativity gives subconsciously a feeling of satisfaction and grabs the attention of the participant. When people are given the option to become creative, they can provide solutions to problems and make tasks fun. This feeling of satisfaction engages a user in the process. “Creativity is a drug I cannot live without” — Cecil B. DeMille I had an opportunity to see for myself how that creativity feeling could be used to grab the attention of people and engage them into a specific cause: while working on an interactive installation project, my team had to create something that would motivate people to recycle batteries. Based on that concept, we decided to create a magic flute where people could generate music simply by throwing their batteries down the flute holes. When this installation , it was really astonishing to see that not only children but adults too, got in line for a chance to compose their own music piece while recycling! Recycling was not boring any more, but a fun and interactive game. was placed in the biggest mall in town is a great example of how leveraging creativity can be fun and addictive. With Legos, people can connect and assemble pieces in many different ways to create different structures, buildings, vehicles or whatever triggers their imagination. Building upon this concept has created the Lego empire, making it one of the most popular brands out there. Legos transcend age and time and will probably continue to do so for a long time. Lego If you are wondering if people can get creative, let’s have a look at Facebook. It wasn’t that long ago that Facebook brought out emoticons in the “Like” button. A lot of people used those as a voting mechanism soon after. Remember seeing anything like this around? Creativity for fun — The social aspect So, does this apply in apps too? Leveraging people’s creativity within an app can really engage people and make their usage fun and challenging. All this, when it involves multiple users as well as social media, can really make an app stand out from the crowd. A really good example of this concept is the . The Dubmash app, allows users to create their own videos and lip sync different songs, making the process really creative and fun, especially when sharing the result with friends and other players. Dubmash app How about pantomime? We are all familiar with the age-old game of pantomime. As mentioned before, when creativity is combined with social mechanisms, the fun can really start. And fun brings in masses of users, also making them loyal players. This explains the wide reach of apps like . In this app, users are provided with specific words on different topics and they win by being most expressive and creative when describing these words to their teammates. Charades The famous Pictionary follows the same concept. It is a game where users get creative and draw specific words to the other players, who they try to guess what the word is. We have all been there. It’s fun, competitive and addictive. The has taken advantage of that concept. In that app users have to guess what others are drawing in an addictive and creative endless social loop. Draw something app The same concept was applied in the messenger app. During message composition in a chat, users are allowed to send over a doodle, making communication a lot more fun. Viber Creativity that creates addiction Leveraging creativity to create addicted users in a product is not that uncommon in the apps world. A great example is . In the Tinder app (or any other dating app) users are given the option to like or dislike a person and if both like each other, then they can start chatting. The absolute goal is to meet that person in real life. Initiating that chat though, is really challenging. It requires a lot of creative thinking in order to grab the attention of the person on the other side. Pretty much like real life. A user’s profile may get dozen of matches daily, but turning even one of them into an actual live date depends on their creativity. And that challenge is highly addictive! Tinder But what about those that cannot take that extra step or are simply not that creative? Well, there are numerous apps that capitalize on this and share “creative lines” to get the process started (yes, there is a business opportunity everywhere). A simple app store search will show you how many such apps there are. Freedom as a power Nobody likes being told what to do. Most people do not even like to follow a path that has been predefined for them. Giving users the feel (even if that is not actually true) that they have the power to do things their own way in order to take advantage of the value of an app, can make them engage even further. Giving the freedom to users to leverage their creativity is a really common approach. It has been used in games for years. Instead of giving users specific steps to follow, game designers let them be creative and have multiple options of proceeding through the game. Let’s have a look at , for example. Not everyone can level up in the same way. The player acting as Mayor is given a blank map to start with, and must expand the city with the budget provided. What a great opportunity to show how creative you can be! Other games, (i.e. the ), are also great examples of this approach. Users define their own strategy and creativity in the game and they can achieve the win in a number of different ways. This approach makes users addicted and they end up playing for hours, since their progress is relevant to how creative their strategy can be. SimCity Age of Empires Giving freedom of usage to users will always bring about new ways to achieve goals in ways that keep them engaged. Personalization is a part of this freedom that can be given to a user. It’s similar to the free-to-define strategy in the Age of Empires game mentioned above or the free-to-construct anything Lego concept. It lets you create what you want and customize it however you wish in order to use in an app. You can see that in social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram etc. People visit them daily, checking their timeline or wall. Have you ever thought what your timeline really is? Since you joined that platform you were given the freedom to customize and follow whoever you wanted to, during your daily interaction with the platform. More or less, your wall is the puzzle you created based on your interests or needs. These two personalized points of contact with the app are what brings you back every day. When we initially started work on , our aim was to move from traditional surveys to a more mobile-appealing environment, within mobile apps. When designing the product, we decided that a mobile-appealing survey should only include single choice and multiple choice questions, what we call “closed type” questions. We decided that we should not use open-ended questions where users could type whatever they were thinking, since we thought nobody would bother typing on a mobile phone screen. We did not realise that we were actually limiting users to a few predefined choices. I still remember the day when we decided to change that. It was nothing short of an epiphany for us. Removing limitations and giving freedom to users on how to use our platform and how to provide actual feedback on product questions resulted to enormous feedback, increasing completion rates and retention in surveys. Removing these barriers and letting users free, brought about a significant increase in user participation and engagement on the platform. Pollfish future The is a prime example of how combining creativity, social mechanisms and freedom of choice can make an app a success with highly engaged and interested users. Prisma is an app that transforms photos to paintings by using AI. This is accomplished by giving users the ability to choose from a set of predefined filters. With Prisma anyone can be an artist! In a recent announcement, Prisma now let users free to create their own filters and then apply them to their own photos. This can be seen as capitalizing on the above-described concepts and giving users the freedom to express their own creativity and then share the results with others. Prisma app To conclude, humans are by nature highly creative beings. Investing in creativity and combining it with social mechanisms can make things fun and addictive and really drive in-app engagement. Users that are allowed to be creative, make choices and take initiatives, they will enjoy any task or process you ask them to be involved in. Removing barriers and leaving users free is the underlying secret that can make a change. And most of the time, that does not mean that you are compromising your initial app . Perception is everything, and if users perceive themselves to be the deciding force in the app it can definitely help. Allowing creative freedom in an app is an integral part of good app design. design

Leveraging freedom and creativity to impact retention in mobile apps

Developer-driven development

Yesterday I was discussing with a client answering some of their questions about our solution. Among many other things they were curious about our and how could we notify them in a case of high traffic on their API. Simple! We send you an email if someone is about to reach their API quota. 3scale API management “alert system” Almost at the same time I was answering this question I think I heard myself saying… “wait, what?! emails?!”. Kind of we were not offering a more modern solution.We ended the call, and I was left with a furious willing of hacking around to see how we can improve this experience. I had to find out! This is the story of my morning hack. apologizing Expected result in Slack Connecting blocks🔌🏗 I don’t know about you, but when I think about notifications, I usually think about . That’s where I try to gather all the automatic reporting for the I use. This hack will send notifications to Slack. Slack tools Also, sadly, our engineers won’t have time to build a nice alert API so I will have to work with the source I have: . an email There are many mail APIs like or that will let you get emails and parse them, but that was a lot of overhead to deal with (OAuth, filtering emails, …). The best solution would be to send notifications to a designated email address and parse them there. Context.io Nylas offers exactly this feature with their product. They give you an email address where you can send all emails to be parsed. It includes a parsing UI where you define variables you want to extract. Zapier Parser Finally, to have more flexibility on the message formatting we won’t plug directly Zapier to Slack but instead, use Zapier webhook action to send extracted data to an app hosted on . Glitch We are building a complete serverless solution 😇 Webhook integration form on Slack Setup Slack 🤖💬 To be able to send a message to your Slack team we would need to created an integration. Follow this , it should guide you to configure the integration. There, You will define on which channel the notification will be sent. When you are done, keep the Webhook URL handy, we will need later. Incoming Webhook link Zapier parser UI Setup Zapier parser and trigger 📥⚙️ On Zapier, we will start by configuring the email parser . Once you have an address, send there an example of your notification email so we can setup a template. In few seconds the email should be received by the parser and you should see it appeared. Then, highlight variables you want to extract from the email and give them names. here Once template is defined, we will configure a to connect the email parser with our app. In the , select app to trigger with the action. If you test this step, you should be able to retrieve the message you previously sent to email address. Zap Zap Email Parser New Email Parser The app 🎏💻 The app will expose a route , where Zapier will send a request containing the extracted data. You can check on Glitch and remix it with your own variables. POST /hook my example In the file, you should add values to the variables. Get the Hook URL we previously created on Slack, and add some personality to your notifications adding a username and icon. The variable should be a random string, we will use it to identify that the request comes from Zapier webhook. .env ZAPIER_SECRET The message formatting is happening on the file. You can check the from Slack to run formatting tests. slack.js Message Builder Webhook configuration on Zapier Add webhook action to Zapier 🎣⚙️ Now, that our app is up on Glitch we can add an action to our . Zap Add a Webhook action of type POST pointing to the URL https://YOUR_GLITCH_APP_NAME.glitch.me/hook In should return a JSON payload. Then define the variables that will be sent to the app, and map them we the extracted ones. Secret header for security Finally, for security purpose, we will define a header named with the same value as the environment variable we defined earlier. X-zapier-secret ZAPIER_SECRET Test and enjoy 🎉🎊 And this it, you are done now 👍Test the flow and see if the message renders the way you want. When you are happy with the result, turn the on. Zap Expected result on Slack Now you can ignore email notifications as they are all sent to Slack in a beautiful and comprehensive way. If you want to enhance this flow we can later add , but that needs a bit more work. actionable buttons Let me know what you think of such hacks! Image by Markus Petritz found on Unsplash

Turn boring email notifications into actionable Slack conversations

Have you heard about Glitch?I am sure you did, it’s the new product launched earlier this year by , the company behind and . Fog Creek Stack Overflow Trello Here is the simple pitch: Glitch is an online IDE mixed with collaboration and community features like in . Github After using it I wanted to share some feedback and vision on how this tool can be used by Developer Advocates. These are the Glitch fish. 🎏 The aha moment 😲🎉 I had visited their homepage a numerous number of times when it was still named Gomix. But I never really got the point of using Glitch until I’ve seen and at doing a demo on stage fews ago in San Francisco. Jenn Schiffer Anil Dash DevXcon During the demo they presented a new feature called , the idea is that in your code highlight a specific line and ask for help. The same way you would do it in the office and tap your colleague’s shoulder to get some fresh eyes on your issue. “Ask for help” Here, by clicking on a button you can ask the community to come help you. If you have remixed (cloned) someone’s project they will be notified, and it’s also posted on Glitch homepage. How it looks from coder’s perspective How people see it on front page glitch.com When I tried to get help, I waited a long time, even though I was the only one asking for help. It’s still a new feature and a new product, give it some time 😉. Context is key On the helper side, this is also a great tool, as it gives you more context around the problem. You see what the coder is trying to build, and have an overview of what could go wrong. It’s hard to have this context on an online forum or on Stack Overflow. People have tried to use like or , but it is really limited to frontend code. tools Codepen JSfiddle Sometime people would share their github repo with the support team. Great idea on paper, but then it’s a pain to debug and make sure you have the same environment as theirs. Using Glitch, you see exactly what the coder is seeing. You can be more helpful in your comments and mentoring. How could you use it for your DevRel efforts?👩‍🔧👨‍🔧📣 Before they launched this community-based “ask for help” feature, I was really seeing Glitch a nice online IDE to build some fun hacks. Now, I really see the whole potential when you are an API provider. It gives you new ways to interact with your community. Give life to your coding-samples 🐛🦋 Generally, API providers would provide some coding samples on how to use their SDK in the context of a small app. It usually sits on a Github repo. And sometimes come with a live version of the example hosted somewhere, so people can try. But there is still some friction before the developer tries to deploy their own for their own need. Fork the repo, clone it locally, install all the dependencies, update the framework version, launch it and test. This could be a hassle and another drop-out in your conversion funnel. With Glitch, hackers could “remix” your example, modify it, and see results live in a matter of seconds. You’ve earned some precious minutes in your . “time to Hello World” Inline support💬 As we’ve seen, with the new help features, you will get notified as the owner of a project if someone is asking for help. It means you can be reactive and answer developers quickly to “un-stuck” them. It gives a positive experience. You can even organize your projects by language or framework (so far, only Node is supported), your language experts will be notified specifically. Brand awareness and community rewarding🎁 Glitch is really community centered, there are literally tons of projects to discover. You can use it at your own advantage. You can encourage your active community developers to publish their projects on Glitch. It helps them get recognized as great hackers and it helps your community with more examples available. There are also some curated categories like or Getting your projects selected in those will help reaching more developers. Featured Community Picks. It’s really thought for platforms🔌🛠 Look! They have a special section for us: Glitch for Platforms What’s next?🎏 Try it, start a new project there, and experiment how this changes developer experience. Personally I’ve used it to build a Slack bot for . At first, I thought I would do something that people can re-use and adapt, but I have seen also some potential as “serverless” alternative. So now the app is more complex and I will use it to distribute our Slack bot. That’s always an option. 3scale Check the project . here I would love to hear your thoughts on the tools you are using for your DevRel reach.

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