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Ulta Beauty, Inc. operates as a retailer of beauty products in the United States. The company's stores offer cosmetics, fragrances, skincare and haircare products, bath and body products, and salon styling tools; professional hair products; salon services, including hair, skin, makeup, and brow services; and nail services. It also provides its private label products, such as the Ulta Beauty Collection branded cosmetics, skincare, and bath products, as well as Ulta Beauty branded products; and the Ulta Beauty branded gifts. As of March 10, 2022, the company operated 1,308 retail stores across 50 states. It also distributes its products through its website ulta.com; and mobile applications. The company was formerly known as Ulta Salon, Cosmetics & Fragrance, Inc. and changed its name to Ulta Beauty, Inc. in January 2017. Ulta Beauty, Inc. was incorporated in 1990 and is based in Bolingbrook, Illinois.

Ulta Beauty

For an enterprise to succeed, it’s no longer enough to launch a product that’s “good enough.” Businesses today must provide that are not only performant and highly available but also private and secure. high-quality digital experiences But how do you achieve all of this? One way is for DevSecOps teams to adopt an observability practice across your user experience and threat environments. By logging and analyzing both security and observability data, you can better detect and remediate a host of problems, such as performance issues, vulnerabilities, and security breaches, resulting in a higher-quality experience. that uses logs (and other means) to collect wide swaths of data In this article, we’ll focus on the ins and outs of wide-reaching data collection, and . We’ll look at the difference between observability data and security data, and how best to collect all this data. Then we’ll explore how to use this data to improve your app and finally see how to implement a centralized, one-stop shop for your data collection. how logs in particular can help you What is Observability Data? What is Security Data? Observability is a property of systems that defines what an operator can tell about the state of a system, both currently and historically. Leading from that, is the representation of that system state — think percentage of errors, memory usage, and flow of traffic. Observability data can be raw data recorded from various sources or down-sampled, aggregated, and processed data. observability data How is that different from security data? is the subset of your observability data that is used to discover security threats. If this seems fuzzy, that’s because it is! Security data For example, if an application exhibits slow response times, is it security data? It depends. Maybe the application is simply misconfigured for the current load, or maybe an attacker has compromised the system and is running a workload that has slowed everything down. Even what is typically not considered security data could be. For example, if a new CVE is disclosed for a particular library, you’ll need to know which services depend on that version of the library. And sometimes clear-cut cases of security data — for example, the identity of a caller to some API endpoint — also end up being useful for tracking non-security bugs. In the end, we can say that a piece of observability data might be security data…and it might not. It depends on the specifics of the use case, which often isn’t known until after the fact. The Three Pillars of Observability Data When we look at observability data, we often break it down into three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. Let’s look at those and how they might apply to both observability and security data. Logs Logs capture time-stamped events and provide a timeline of what happened to the system. For example, your application may emit a log message if it fails to connect to a database, and may write who performed a certain action to an audit log. Any non-trivial system will have many different logs. Recording and organizing these logs in a centralized logging system where they can be sliced and diced are a primary facet of observability data collection. Log analytics data is critical for monitoring, troubleshooting and investigating reliability and security issues, to get down to the root cause of “why” that issue occurred. Log data is often the most detailed information available about a company’s systems, so it makes sense to put that data to work, pulling log files across the organization for end-to-end visibility and faster troubleshooting. Metrics While logs generally contain textual information, metrics are numerical time series — for example, the number of pending pods in your Kubernetes cluster over time. Metrics are typically recorded periodically and can help identify trends and anomalies. Metrics are much more economical than logs. They don’t require parsing and transformation, and they cost less to transmit and store. Metrics are the vital signs of your system. Alerting is primarily built on top of metrics. Traces Distributed tracing associates an identifier with each request. A trace of a request is a collection of spans and references. You can think of a trace as a directed acyclic graph that represents the request’s traversal through the components of a distributed system. Each span records the time the request spent in a given component, and references are the edges of the graph that connect one span to the following spans. Traces are a very important tool for modern systems built on microservices, serverless functions, and queues. It provides a “chain of custody” to the system operators that is crucial for analyzing both performance and security issues. So how do these pillars cross with security data? . Nearly all security information comes from logs. While metrics and traces can help you understand when something is wrong (for example, the CPU is high), you most likely won’t know what is actually happening (in this case, the CPU is high because of a crypto-miner) until you examine the logs How to Collect Data Now that we understand observability and security data, why they are important, and where they come from, let’s look at some more practical aspects: how to collect data and how to use it effectively. Let’s look at each pillar, some best practices, and a few tools that can help. These steps apply to all your data — observability and security. Logs You probably have many logs created by your OS, Kubernetes, and your cloud provider. Your applications and third-party software also generate log files. However, standard logs bring several challenges: Accessing a wide variety of log files across many hosts is inefficient and not user-friendly. Log files will eventually fill the disk (unless you’re using cloud persistent storage). If you’re rotating log files to address the disk space issue, then you lose historical data. Your servers may crash from time to time. Disks can get corrupted. To address these issues, a best practice is to use a log collector agent on every host that ships the logs to a centralized observability platform. The centralized log management system will store the logs in durable storage, provide a query interface, provide aggregations and other transforms, and will retain the log backups as needed for compliance and finding historical trends. To alleviate some of the pain, it’s a good idea to use industry standards and tooling like OpenTelemetry ( ). For data collection specific to logs, open-source tools like and are also popular. https://opentelemetry.io LogStash Fluentd Metrics Metrics are somewhat easier to handle than logs since all metrics from any source can be represented uniformly as a single time series with a set of tags associated with it. Similar to the log collector, a metrics collector can run on every host and periodically read relevant data, such as CPU and memory usage of every process or the number of requests in flight, and send it to the observability platform. Application-level metrics can be collected in two ways: the application may expose a standard interface that the metrics agent can scrape or, alternatively, the application can be instrumented (typically using a library) to send its metrics directly to the observability platform. Data points are captured at fixed intervals and sent to an observability platform for analysis. For metrics, Prometheus is the undisputed king, designed to scrape application endpoints that expose application metrics. Grafana works very well to visualize your metrics. Tracing Traces are collected by instrumenting applications and services to intercept requests and attach an id that follows the request when making calls to other services. The traces are sent to the observability platform for analysis. For distributed tracing, Jaeger (originally developed by Uber) leads the pack. Other projects include Zipkin and Signoz. How is data used for improving application security? How do you use all this data to specifically improve your application security? Let’s consider the role that these pieces of observability data might play in the different aspects of incident detection and response. We begin with , which hinges on capturing metrics to detect abnormal activity. Monitored by an observability platform, these metrics will trigger an alert to the DevSecOps team. incident detection At this point, the team only knows that something abnormal is happening, but it doesn’t know if this is a security-related incident or not. To the incident, the inspection of logs becomes critical. If the incident is security-related, the team can use logs to determine how the malicious actors are accessing the system and further access by revoking access for compromised users or services. identify block Next, the team can use the combination of logs, metrics, and traces to , determining which parts of the system have been impacted and whether data was exfiltrated. By knowing the breadth of impact, the team can by making those components unavailable until they can be fixed. assess breach impact reduce the blast radius Finally, the team can use logs and metrics, specifically when performing a , to help in root cause analysis for all incidents, security or otherwise. The resulting actions may include , , or further. post-mortem tightening access control patching vulnerable systems fine-tuning the observability strategy What does this look like in practice? The elite level of observability comes when you integrate all the various data sources and technologies into a cohesive platform that allows you to gain insights into your system. You can build this yourself using many of the open-source projects already mentioned. While this offers high customization, it requires a lot of effort to build, maintain, and operate, especially if you want a system that is robust, scalable, and always available. Additionally, you also need to observe your observability platform. Another option is to choose a managed platform to handle the observability concerns. This allows you to focus on your core competencies. An example from Black Friday Let’s look at an example around Black Friday. With many sites — especially in retail — experiencing an uptick in user activity, how might leveraging observability data and a platform help mitigate security incidents? I found this about Ulta Beauty using metrics like invalid password attempts and login attempts per IP address and per country, all possible indicators of fraudulent activity. timely post Ulta pumps these metrics into an observability platform from Sumo Logic, which provides a Brute Force Attack dashboard to aid in incident detection. From there, an incident response team can begin analyzing logs to determine and address the root cause of the security incident, just as we walked through above. The platform from Sumo Logic ingests, aggregates, enriches, and retains all of the observability data. Sumo Logic lets you decide if you want to install data collectors locally or have hosted collectors running on AWS. It also integrates with observability staples like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, which can ease migration efforts and alleviate concerns about vendor lock-in. Conclusion Collecting observability and security data in wide swaths is key to a high-quality digital experience for your users. To succeed, you’ll need to rely on all three pillars of observability: logs, metrics, and distributed tracing. You’ll need to use this data to detect, isolate, and mitigate attacks. In the next post in the series, we will take a deeper look at monitoring, which is the next logical step. Once you have collected all this data, what do you do with it? Have a really great day!

The Everything Guide to Data Collection in DevSecOps

13 Retail Technologies That Could Help Brick-and-Mortar Businesses

www.wallstreetsurvivor.com I’ve made every mistake in the book picking stocks. I’ve bought too soon, sold too soon, bought for the wrong reasons, bought losers, sold too late, sold for the wrong reasons, and for sure, I’ve made still more mistakes that I am too embarrassed to admit. But I’ll admit them anyway in case you are inclined to make the same mistake. My shame is your gain. Let’s start with the most shameful, just to get it out of the way. (sidebar, if you’re new to Hacker Finances, start here: ) Hacker Finances: Introduction In 1995, Greg, my software engineer friend, joined a startup called Worldtalk Corporation. Worldtalk made a system that converted e-mail formats among the common formats at the time. When Worldtalk went public, I wanted to support Greg and cheer him on, so I bought some shares. Mistake Number 1: Don’t buy stock in a company just because your friend works there. Worldtalk lasted a couple of years, I think. The stock waned, sagged and schlepped to a significant loss before they were acquired. There was a time in the mid-90s just before the Internet Bubble, when ‘client-server’ was all the rage. Today, it’s called ‘Web Server’ and ‘API’. But at the time, it was novel as an architecture. Remote Procedure Calls were a thing and shared services seemed like they couldn’t fail to become huge. I had read about Gupta Technologies’ Initial Public Offering in the San Jose Mercury News and I bought some so I could get the first ticket on that rocket ship. All I knew about them was that they were a client-server company, but what more did I need to know? For starters, it would have helped if I’d known that they would miss revenue targets right out of the gate, quarter after quarter. I didn’t know. The stock languished, and never exceeded the IPO price. I held on for a year or so and finally bailed with a -82% beating. Mistake Number 2: Don’t buy a stock at the IPO. Yes, there are companies that never dropped below the IPO price, like MSFT and CSCO. But usually, they go down before they go up. Facebook is an example of this. Here is a chart showing the first 2 years of FB: The stock dropped from day 1 and did not return to the IPO price for more than 1–1/2 years. And you may have noticed in that TEAM had the same behavior. It was still trading below its IPO price, 6 months on. Stocks Versus Mutual Funds Part II When a company has an IPO, give it a few quarters before getting in so that all the polish that the bankers applied pre-IPO rubs off and you can see how they are really performing. Give the insiders who have been waiting to cash out time to sell their shares. Give the employees who’ve got vested options time to sell theirs. And give the company time to generate some financial returns so you can see how their sales are growing, what their gross margins look like, where they are spending their money and importantly, how believable their leadership are about how they will manage and grow the company. You can’t really get a feel for all of that until several quarters have elapsed. In the late 90s, it seemed that everyone was buying stock. Day traders populated Silicon Valley coffee shops the way that founders do today, and the stock market just went up. Venture capitalists and bankers were in a feeding frenzy: find a founding team with any kind of Internet idea, fund them, take them public, then lather, rinse and repeat as fast as possible. The general public’s appetite for newly public companies became insatiable. This chart shows the average first-day returns of IPOs from 1990–2016. www.quandl.com That substantial blip in 1998–1999 is the bubble. The more companies that IPO’d with stellar first days, the more retail investors like you and I wanted in. The grand champion, none other than our aforementioned VA Linux, had an IPO price of $30/share and closed the first day at $239.25, a 698% first day gain. It’s hard to see those types of numbers week after week and not become preoccupied with wanting a piece of the action. The more we retail investors wanted in, the bigger those returns became. It was a perfect bubble recipe. Those bankers and VCs made obscene amounts of money, primarily on retail investors like us. The Internet Bubble pushed the NASDAQ to $5,048 in 2000, a level it did not return to until 2015. That means if you’d bought a NASDAQ Exchange Traded Fund at the intra-day peak of 5,132.52 on March 10, 2000 and held, you would not have gotten back to even-money for 15 years. It was during that time that I bought the most sketchy of companies. Copper Mountain Networks, TheGlobe.com, and other flame outs I can’t even remember just took cash out of my bank account and tossed it into the wind. And boy, was it windy. Mistake Number 3: Don’t buy a just because everyone else is. stock After selling GPTA, I took the paltry remains and looked around for some place to make a bet. Really, I was just gambling. It turns out that Amazon.com had just gone public. I’d seen them succeed selling books, and just before they went public, they started selling music CDs. Buying online was obviously going to be a thing, so it was clear they had plenty of room to grow and they were the early leader. So I bought a few shares. I felt really smart for a couple of years. I mean, look at this chart: Amazon became the lead horse in the Internet Bubble. It split 3 times in 2 years [3] before the Big Pop and I had 12x the shares I’d bought. It was so heady, you may recall, that a now infamous Henry Blodgett [2] predicted Amazon, $240 at the time of his prediction, would hit $400/share in a year. It made that leap , topping out at $430. in 3 weeks Then the bubble burst, and I watched as AMZN plunged along with everything else. It bottomed in September of 2001, then gradually made a modest comeback. I finally decided to sell in 2003 because Amazon was still showing no profit, and taking on huge amounts of debt in order to grow their business. I made 5x on my small investment, but I lost faith. That was expensive. Since the time I sold, AMZN is up another 14x. That’s multiplied. 5x times 14x is a 70x gain that I walked away from. Mistake Number 4: Selling too soon. This one is tough, because you do need to pay attention and be ready to act if it starts looking like an investment has run its course. At the time I sold AMZN, I was still bruised and bloody from watching my Bubble stocks blow away, and I wanted a win so I could start to heal a little. So I took the profit. But now, I obviously wish I hadn’t. Enough self-flagellation. From all this experience, I’ve developed a few rules for how and when to get into a stock. I’d call these the right reasons: Only invest in businesses that you understand. Some businesses are simple, some aren’t. But if you don’t understand it, you can’t make sound judgments about the company’s performance or the feasibility of their product approach and competitive position. In addition to understanding their business, you need to understand their market. Is it a new market or service that they are creating, or is it an existing market that they are executing better than the incumbents? Is that market growing? If so how big can it get? Without that understanding, you can’t really have a sense for how big your investment can grow and you can’t really know when things are not going to get better for them and get out. We Hackers therefore will most likely stick to companies. That’s a pretty solid advantage since technology companies are growing faster than any other market segment. Five of the top ten companies by market capitalization are technology companies, and new ones are coming up regularly. So there are opportunities. technology Next, look for companies that you and your friends and family actually use. Actually using them means you probably have an implicit understanding of their business and their competitive advantages. Chipotle was one I should have bought. I actually did buy Yelp!, because I use it all the time and Yelp! ratings affect the sales of the businesses listed. That means Yelp! has leverage to sell advertising to businesses listed on it, which will drive Yelp! revenue. This appears to be true as their revenue has a compound growth rate 50% for 5 years. Google became the de-facto search engine more than 10 years ago and their growth not only outpaced their rivals, but accelerated. I kept seeing more and more friends and coworkers using it, so I bought shares in 2006. One that I’ve been watching for similar reasons is Ulta Salon, Cosmetics and Fragrance, Inc. It’s not a tech company, but I have teenage daughters and that is where they get their makeup and beauty products. And where all their friends get it. And I’ve seen more and more stores opening in the area. ULTA, the stock, is growing at 39% annualized over the last 5 years, and I’m taking a serious look at it. Here’s the Google Finance beauty shot: Notice not only the strong sales growth, but that the operating and net earnings % remain constant. Each new store adds incrementally to profit. That illustrates controlled, strong growth and a well run enterprise. Another key to picking good stocks is company leadership. What is the ethos of the CEO and his or her staff? I’d watched Netflix for quite a few years and considered . But I didn’t pull the trigger until after I’d read ‘Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility’[1], a slide-share that hit the front page of Hacker News. I was sure that there was a lot in there that was wrong. But what caught my attention was that Hastings had made operational innovation a pervasive directive in the company. He seemed to tell employees, regardless of their department, that as long as what they wanted to do was supported by data, they’d try it. Moreover, ideas that were implemented were also instrumented so they could be monitored to empirically prove whether they were effective. I was impressed. I got my buying opportunity when Netflix announced they were separating the DVD business from the streaming business. The market didn’t buy it at first and the stock price dropped from a high of $293 in 2011 (prior to their 7:1 split) to a low of about $64. There was no doubt in my mind that the world’s video entertainment needs were going to be delivered online, so I had no concerns about the market. And Hastings had convinced me he could execute. I bought close to that interim bottom and have held on since, watching them flourish on their way to becoming the Earth’s TV station. investing Company leadership matters and finding CEOs who have the intelligence and tenacity to drive growth and compete are always good bets. Can you say Musk, Bezos, Jobs and Hastings all in the same sentence? To recap: Don’t buy a stock because: Your friend works there Everyone else is buying it It just went public Don’t sell a stock: Too soon. Buy a stock because: You understand the business they are in You, or your friends and family, or businesses you know use it You understand the ethos of the company leadership and it resonates with you. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget [3] Stock splits do nothing to change the value of a company or stock, but during the Internet Bubble, it was a way for bankers to keep making money off of the companies they took public. Splits double or triple the number of shares available while reducing the share price by the same ratio so that the market cap is not changed. All shareholders get the additional shares added to their account, and the price reduced so that the value of their shares is unchanged. Most companies that have been around for a long time have split. Famously, one company that eschews it, Berkshire Hathaway, has been hugely successful for decades, but sees stock splits as an artificial and misleading attribute. BRK.A had an IPO estimated at $19. It’s currently trading at $237,199. That means that today, you need nearly a quarter million dollars to purchase 1 share of stock. The stock has never been split.

Hacker Finances: Stocks Versus Mutual Funds, Part III

DayAway is another Web2 business taking a delicate golden-sandaled step into Web3. They are launching their Founder’s Key NFTs – minting on January 12 – intended as an “exclusive membership and loyalty program that unlocks exclusive access to luxury experiences worldwide.” Travel and NFTs have both been sluggish in 2022, though the Deloitte 2022 Travel Industry Outlook was cautiously optimistic. The report was clear that there was no expectation of travel reaching pre-pandemic levels. It stated: “Travel’s green shoots have appeared, along with opportunities to encourage continued growth. Immediate imperatives include catering to the groups most ready to travel, and preparing for the next wave.” Research and Markets “Non-Fungible Tokens: Global Market” forecasts a steady rise over 5 years, with a 27.3% CAGR from 2022 to 2027. This represents a market increase from $37.6 billion to $125.6 billion. report DayAway provides curated luxury experiences – including elite experiences like stays in exclusive posh hotels, private sailing escapes, and tastings at Michelin-starred restaurants. Now they are expanding their offerings and offering them under a Founder’s Token NFT, which gives you lifetime access to purchase the special getaways DayAway offers at a discounted rate – a benefit that the holder has for life. According to the press release, “the Founder’s Key is a collection of 500 limited-edition
NFTs that will unlock a wide range of experiences and VIP benefits from hospitality, travel,
retail, wellness and F&B brands worldwide. It represents the highest, most exclusive tier of
DayAway’s membership and loyalty program.” We spoke with Founder & CEO at DayAway, Martha Waslen, to learn more about how they are connecting the dots between digital ownership and curated luxury experiences. Luxury items are thought to be somewhat recession-proof, but how have curated luxury travel experiences fared through this global financial crisis? “What I’ve learned from my experience in luxury fashion, beauty, and now hospitality, is that even in the wake of a financial crisis, there will always be a market for luxury and ultra-luxury goods and experiences. People may buy fewer of them, but the luxury customer doesn’t tend to adjust their taste and preferences, or ‘buy down’ in a bear market. If anything, they are more discerning and selective in their purchases, but the expectation of quality service, personalization, and attention to detail is far greater.” WASLEN: What makes DayAway founder's key distinct from other luxury-related membership NFTs? “DayAway’s Founder’s Key NFT is the first and only NFT membership that gives immediate, exclusive access to a token-gated luxury and ultra-luxury experiences in-real-life. We are offering founder-level access to a range of luxury experiences and events with the world’s most iconic brands. WASLEN: And unlike many NFT projects, you don’t have to wait for utility – Founder’s Key holders enjoy the value of their membership immediately and can keep enjoying that access for life or until the NFT is sold. Another unique trait, is that DayAway Founder’s Key NFTs will come with a 90-day, buy-back guarantee for primary holders in an effort to 1) protect the integrity of our luxury brand partners and 2) ensure that we are growing a high-quality community of like minded-travel and experience enthusiasts. We are that confident about the pipeline of partnerships, benefits and value we can create with the Founder’s Keys.” What are your plans to grow your network? “DayAway plans to release at least one new NFT membership collection each year with a wide range of utilities including hotel and travel perks, dining privileges, and wellness benefits, as well as regional-specific NFT collections. Eventually, we hope to have tens of thousands of token holders trading utilities and memberships within our community. WASLEN: As DayAway expands into more countries, adding more partners and benefits, all of the utility will automatically be available to our Founder’s Key holders, making it the highest tier of memberships in the DayAway ecosystem.” Who are some of your luxury brand partners for these IRL Luxury experiences? “We are so fortunate to partner with some of the most iconic brands in hospitality including Waldorf Astoria, Rosewood, Raffles, Hilton, and Preferred Hotels & Resorts, and we look forward to expanding our network into hospitality adjacent industries like yacht charters, helicopter operators, food and beverage, luxury retail, and beyond.” WASLEN: Are your users typically Web3 native, or leisure and luxury fans? “We expect to have a very balanced mix of both Web3 native token holders, and early adopters of our DayAway platform who are purchasing the Founder’s Key as their very first NFT.  We have been so encouraged by the response we’ve received from the Web3 community expressing how fanatical they are about travel, IRL experiences and their loyalty programs. We are certainly happy to target both audiences, and hope to integrate our Web2 and Web3 members into one community over time.” WASLEN: What are your plans for 2023? “We plan to release a much larger collection of Genesis Keys in Q2 that will come with benefits similar to the Founder’s Key, but they will not receive complimentary NFTs from all future DayAway collections. WASLEN: We also plan to release our first Bucket List NFT before the end of the year.  The Bucket List will be a series of once-in-a-lifetime, money-can’t-buy experiences curated by the world’s most reputable brands that will be auctioned off as one-of-one NFTs. We also currently have a vast number of privileges on our token-gated platform and intend to multiply the offerings this year.” Have you had to change your roadmap because of the bear market in digital assets? “Building our membership and loyalty program on blockchain has been on our DayAway roadmap since we launched our Web2 platform in May 2021. It was just a question of when our Web2 luxury hospitality partners would be most receptive to the idea. Of course, the bear market has created some challenges, or perhaps delays, over the last several months, but we feel confident that what we’re building at DayAway, and our adoption of Web2 users buying an NFT for the first time, will help us overcome market volatility because our NFT holders will actually be using our NFT, and not just pegging its value to the hype.” WASLEN: Conclusion Waslen exudes the grace and charm that distinguish DayAway’s luxury experiences and makes a compelling case. Although there are plenty of NFT projects that provide vouchers, discounts, and exclusives for rock shows, festivals, and travel it seems possible that the curated experiences of these Founder’s NFTs will find their audience even in what seems to be a time of global economic hardship. It’s good to see more NFT projects that are about utility first – and more Web2 businesses making a sensible transition into Web3. They are calling it a rewards program as well as effectively a lifetime membership, for as long as you hold the NFT. It opens the possibility that corporations and other hospitality businesses could consider using NFTs like DayAway’s as part of customer and employee incentive programs. The Founder's Key will mint on Thursday January 12 on . If you want your NFTs to lead you to a hitherto unrealized level of personal pampering – perhaps it’s the membership for you. OpenSea Cover image by from Pixabay Julius Silver

NFT Token-Access to IRL Ultra-Luxury 

The title and content of this article are inspired by — I’m 32 and spent $200k on biohacking. Became calmer, thinner, extroverted, healthier & happier. — by Serge Faguet, a tech CEO who uses a heavy combination of lifestyle, supplements, and detailed blood tests, to biohack his wellness and performance. Upon reading this, I was inspired, though I also realized I’ve been doing the same for years now — spending $0. Here is my way. My story I was never a fit or an athletic child. I hated PE. I would get down easily with a flu and I remember getting stomach problems a lot and nosebleeds when I got nervous. I was terrified of approaching strangers. I didn’t know what to say to most people, in most situations. Despite being a top student, I was terrible at goal setting and I struggled to keep attention in class. I didn’t know what I wanted from life and I never felt good in my body. When I got my first full-time job, it took a few months of pushing myself to hit my first burnout — before I knew what burnout meant. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and my body would itch too much for me to go back to sleep. My mouth would get constantly dry so I kept drinking water and going to the toilet every 30 minutes. Whilst sitting down at work I would be so restless that my legs would keep shaking under the table and all I could think of was getting out of there. I got my first panic attack whilst walking out of the train in the middle of a busy square one Sunday, and for a minute I thought I was about to die. I finally went to the GP and — having run all the blood, stool, and urine tests he had in stock — I got my diagnosis: ‘You’re perfectly fine but you really need to manage your stress levels. It’s making your body go nuts. Let’s review your lifestyle together…’ - Fast forward eight years and many a failed experiment later — I am finally at a place where I feel good on most days and I have developed a playbook of tools and techniques to nurture that. I have run 100k ultramarathons, , and physically, mentally, and socially I have gone to places I never thought I could. I am still learning and not content — I want to go further. Not just from unwell to well but from good to great, and beyond. managed large distributed teams at international tech start-ups Some call it biohacking, some just call it self-care. In either case, the goal is to live a better, stronger, healthier, more confident, more productive, and ultimately longer life. I’m not sure where I will draw the line yet (if any) but let’s start by listing a set of the most simple yet powerful tools and techniques I have tried so far. I will skip all the self-development I have done outside the health and wellness front (there is a lot!) — perhaps a separate post for that. Sleep ‘They’ say everything starts with fixing your sleep, and they are right. One of the first things I did was regularize my wake up time — to 7am, each day. The simple act of fixing the time does wonders for my wellbeing but also comes a long way towards simplifying my decision making, when it comes to questions of routine. Try it. My bedtime ranges from 11pm to 1am (harder to fix) but on average I do make sure I get at least 7 hours of sleep per night, throughout the week. I also have a rule about closing all my browser tabs and switching off all my email notifications after work, and not thinking about anything work related or having to do with planning the next day, 1 hour before bedtime, to help me wind down. Result? I’m more energized each day. I don’t sleep in until 10–12 on the weekend, as I used to. I have more time to do other things before work each morning. My sleep is well-balanced and restful, I take less than 10 minutes to fall asleep on average and I rarely wake up in the middle of the night. A bove: sleep data from my Oura ring. It’s not all due to the routine though — the results are closely linked to all of the following — Exercise I went from practically zero exercise (excluding walks) to starting each day with a 30 minute workout. The workout varies between strength, yoga, and cardio, but it provides me with 30 minutes of undisturbed clarity and a nice endorphin kick before breakfast, each day. Draining some of my excess physical energy before the day’s begun also helps me stay more focused at work. A study showing the effects of 3x / week 30 minute exercise on treating depression, versus Zoloft. I’ve never been prone to depression but my experience makes me believe it’s very similar with anxiety. Last year I focused these workouts on endurance running and I completed a 100k ultramarathon after 9 months, as a result. This year, I am focusing on muscle gain — I hired a PT to assist and . It works well for me to have clear goals to work towards, whilst maintaining some variety in terms of what those goals are. will post my progress as I go This was the first ultramarathon I’ve ran — finishing 3rd to my own surprise. The longest one I’ve done was 106km distance, 5km vertical elevation. It took me 23h 30m to complete. Diet & Nutrition The third so-called pillar of health is diet and nutrition. What had the biggest impact on my performance and keeping my energy levels relatively constant was regularizing my meal times. I never skip breakfast. I always eat lunch around 1pm, no matter what. And my dinner is always around 7 or 8. Apart from the obvious benefit of keeping my circadian rhythm in check, this provides a nice added structure to my day and respite from stress — I have a rule about savouring the moment and not doing work, whilst I eat. The next step has been the elimination of caffeine. I still drink green tea, but no black tea and no coffee. Cutting this has made me more alert and less jittery over longer periods of time (when I’m caffeinated I alternate between elevated states of mind with many thoughts racing through my head all at once, and slumps where I feel like crashing down). As with all the rest, it takes some adjusting for the body an mind, but the benefits far outweigh the short-run cost. I think this chart is self-explanatory. I bought and implanted a continuous glucose monitor and will be running a structured experiment on this soon, stay tuned! Next, I’ve eliminated alcohol — yes, I went from having a glass of whiskey on the rocks to wind down each night and the usual weekend party drinking — down to zero. Together with stress reduction, I think this is what has had the biggest impact on boosting the quality of my sleep, and I’ve got data from my Garmin to support that. It has also saved me a lot of money and generated extra time — by replacing the Friday night partying with Saturday 8am running club. My body battery peaking quite low (about 60%) on Saturday morning, after just a few drinks the previous night (data from my Garmin Forerunner 945). After a good restful night, I should wake up at 100%. Finally, I went vegetarian, about 6 months ago. The benefits of this are a bit harder to prove than caffeine and alcohol, as the results are not immediately obvious. I’m expecting the effect to yield more health benefits in the long run — akin to not smoking, though less extreme. Even though the opinion of experts on the effects of an entirely meat-free diet vary, being fuelled by a prevalence of plants is an advice in most playbooks. And even if the benefit of cutting meat entirely is negligible or non-existent, I think the environmental and ethical reasons alone justify this lifestyle choice. Note: none of this elimination has lead to me reducing my calorie or individual macro- or micro-nutrient intake, neither am I planning to do so. Mind The fourth and final textbook pillar of health is stress management. Let’s call it ‘mind’. It’s perhaps the least measurable and the most elusive one. Nevertheless, the impact of stress has a very tangible effect on the quality of both sleep and waking life, as shown above, in my first-hand experience. Doing the above-mentioned tweaks to sleep, exercise, and diet go a long way towards managing stress levels already. Other than these basic lifestyle factors and good social hygiene, there are coping mechanisms I employ. The most obvious and perhaps overhyped one these days is meditation. I used to meditate each day for 10–30 minutes before going to sleep and I do believe this was beneficial. It’s a bit like micro-therapy — allowing me to step back, savour my triumphs, name and examine my worries and fears (which alone makes them seem somehow more acceptable), and get some headspace to let ideas, memories, and sensations mix and settle into new patterns. I like the feeling I get when I meditate and the lasting effect of being kinder, calmer, and more open to things — even though I currently don’t have any hard data to prove this. That said, I stopped practicing daily about a month ago — as I feel I get similar benefits from other structured reflection opportunities I create — including my morning exercise and my 20-minute solitary walk home, at the end of each day. Most teachers say mindfulness is something to be practiced at all times and in all forms, and I like to think so. I may revert back to daily mediation practice, if I feel the need to. Lastly, most often at work, when I get stressed and filled with anxious thoughts, I make sure to get up and walk or stretch for 5 minutes, which goes a long way towards releasing the stress and calming my mind. It also helps with snapping out of the ‘tunnel vision’ this propels. With constant practice, this has become mostly automated — and though I’m a person high in anxiety by nature — I catch myself and intervene this way before spiraling in. My average daily stress trendline, over the past year. The average has been trending down from the peak of 43 in March ’20 to the low of 29, in February ’21 (a 67% drop). This period coincides with going through covid lockdowns, having to quit my previous job to launch my own startup whilst relocating to Singapore, and not being sure what the heck I’m doing, all the while. How You Can Get Started Don’t try to do it all at once. Set clear goals, pick your battles one at a time, and identify the right metrics to measure what works for you and what does not. Learn from each experiment. The beauty of this is that — although what I said above might sound like a lot — each new routine becomes automated after a few weeks and you don’t have to think about it, in order to keep good habits alive. As you may also notice, all of these interventions are free. The only things I’ve spent money on were smart devices (Garmin, Oura, and Muse), to help me quantify some key metrics and monitor progress — but progress is definitely also achievable without these. Other than that, I’ve spent some money on gyms and yoga classes when I wanted to work out outside of my home — I spent $0 though when I was training for ultramarathons. The beauty of an elimination diet is that it also costs virtually nothing — plus it has saved me substantial amounts of money on Starbucks and alcohol. Going forward, I will be running more structured diet-related experiments, in order to smoothen out my daily energy level fluctuations. I have not gone down the supplements route yet, though I am curious to explore whether this is something that can take me further, once I feel I have approached the limits of what I can do using these simpler and more holistic, and free techniques. I will probably start by running a series of blood tests, in the next few months to see where I’m at, then I will decide. The art and science of biohacking is still in its infancy and we don’t have a good understanding of many of the factors that drive both performance and the aging process. If I can stay in good health and minimize my internal and external wear and tear, in the next few decades there should be exponentially more technology coming onto the market allowing me to extend the quality and length of my life. Some believe the first person to never die has been born already. Who knows. And perhaps that’s besides the point. What I care about most right now is that I am turning 30 next month and I feel better and am achieving more than I ever did. That’s a good start. The only aging metric I currently have — cardiovascular fitness. It’s just a single indicator but it’s a start. Judging by how often I get sick over the past 2–3 years (almost 0) versus before, it seems to be a good marker of immune system functioning at the very least apart from, obviously, performance. — My upcoming #biohack experiments (in progress) Biohack #1: Weight, body composition, and range of motion Biohack #2: Energy levels, glucose, and afternoon slump (in progress) To see more and track my progress, follow me on and . Instagram Twitter

My $0 Biohacking Journey to Completing Ultra-Marathons

"Money rules the world," they say. I challenge this notion, asserting that it's not solely about money but the individuals who wield it. It always starts within. Throughout history, money has been entangled with power, influence, unique opportunities, and luxurious lifestyles, often clustering in the hands of a select few, creating an aura of exclusivity in society. How often have we witnessed the relentless pursuit of success and wealth overshadowing people's vision, causing them to forsake what is genuinely meaningful—their inner purpose, authenticity, and pride —in the frantic race for success and its trappings? Flashy things, expensive brands, lavish lifestyle demonstrated on social media – what’s the cost for it? In a world powered by “successful success” and social media domination, there are the ones who dare to say, “I am not trying to chase luxury. I am the luxury.” The Luxury of Being Yourself and Cherishing Your Inner Self The Ugly Duck (TUD) art collectible creators manifest this new paradigm of luxury. “We are not chasing brands. We are turning ourselves into brands,” is the manifesto of the brand. This philosophy behind this art collectible exclusivity reveals a deeply rooted human desire for Uniqueness and Individuality – a yearning to carve one's path and shape a world of personal choices. It's within this context that the Ugly Duck art toy emerges, embodying the unfiltered acceptance of the "ugly duckling" within every accomplished adult, coupled with the aspiration to possess opulent artifacts. There is nothing bad in loving luxury brands and the desire to surround yourself with nice things. But very often, it becomes the prevailing desire and the main goal. The Ugly Duck challenges that stigma, manifesting one’s uniqueness as a luxury. More than a material possession, the Ugly Duck art toy signifies audacious acceptance of imperfections and celebrates individuality. It stands as a testament to the rebellion against societal norms, inviting those who possess it to unabashedly embrace their authenticity. In The Ugly Duck world, owning a piece transcends flaunting wealth; it's about donning a badge of uniqueness, a declaration of a desire to stand apart. It encapsulates the spirit of those who refuse to conform, yearning for a life less ordinary. Each piece is not just an objet d'art but a personal statement, an assertion of identity through the lens of creativity and opulence. Does the Ugly Duck Character Live an Ultra-Luxury Life? Ultra-luxury starts from within, from accepting the truth, even if it’s ugly. "Beauty is overrated. Ugliness is real'' is the slogan of the TUD. Just like the Ugly Duck doesn’t stop being the same when turning into a beautiful swan, its character can be upgraded and downgraded easily. The power and the luxury are inside, not outside. It comes from within, and the glamor and chic of surroundings and the external world are just a consequence of cherishing and developing your uniqueness and talent. Things happen thanks to that ugly duck within. The Ugly Duck brand has collaborations with iconic legends like Mike Tyson and rising stars like the LA-based artist Punk Me Tender. And every single TUD Toy is luxurious in its essence. Within this paradigm, the Ugly Duck within becomes the source of empowerment. It signifies the resilience and strength derived from acknowledging one's imperfections and using them as stepping stones toward personal evolution. The external world becomes a canvas, a manifestation of the inner beauty and talent one nurtures. In essence, the Ugly Duck art toy inspires a shift in perspective, urging individuals to recognize that true luxury isn't confined to external appearances. You Can Be Ugly, but Never Negligent Details are important. When crafting the Ugly Duck, creators weave the narrative of "ugly" into a meticulously designed physical item. "Execution is always crucial. We strive for perfection in our imperfection," emphasize the creators of TUD. That’s why TUD is positioned as a premium collectible art toy coming in two sizes— M, and L, so that more people could fit it in their surroundings. The key features include a percentage of eco-recycled plastic, outstanding exclusive design, an in-built NFC tag for authenticity, limited and rare availability, and a high-quality collector gift box. The TUD art toy comes packaged in a premium gift box, ensuring a seamless experience upon opening. Detailed documentation and instructions accompany the toy, making it ideal for gifting without any concerns. No doubt, the TUD toy is a luxury item. It is created to be a premium art collectible. But it is a different kind of luxury. Not Dior, Balenciaga, or Chanel. We have crafted our own luxury, chanting the inner resilience, humble beginnings, and audacious authenticity. In a world full of false narratives, true luxury is what The Ugly Duck embodies—an ode to embracing imperfections and celebrating the unique journey of each individual.

What Is the New Luxury and How to Create It?

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . Of the Ancient Practice of Painting here Of the Ancient Practice of Painting If my Readers have followed me with any attention up to this point, they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull in Flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles, conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny that the strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you in Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull; aesthetically and artistically, very dull indeed. How can it be otherwise, when all one's prospect, all one's landscapes, historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life, are nothing but a single line, with no varieties except degrees of brightness and obscurity? It was not always thus. Colour, if Tradition speaks the truth, once for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a transient splendour over the lives of our ancestors in the remotest ages. Some private individual—a Pentagon whose name is variously reported—having casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colours and a rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun decorating first his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his Sons, and Grandsons, lastly himself. The convenience as well as the beauty of the results commended themselves to all. Wherever Chromatistes,—for by that name the most trustworthy authorities concur in calling him,—turned his variegated frame, there he at once excited attention, and attracted respect. No one now needed to "feel" him; no one mistook his front for his back; all his movements were readily ascertained by his neighbours without the slightest strain on their powers of calculation; no one jostled him, or failed to make way for him; his voice was saved the labour of that exhausting utterance by which we colourless Squares and Pentagons are often forced to proclaim our individuality when we move amid a crowd of ignorant Isosceles. The fashion spread like wildfire. Before a week was over, every Square and Triangle in the district had copied the example of Chromatistes, and only a few of the more conservative Pentagons still held out. A month or two found even the Dodecagons infected with the innovation. A year had not elapsed before the habit had spread to all but the very highest of the Nobility. Needless to say, the custom soon made its way from the district of Chromatistes to surrounding regions; and within two generations no one in all Flatland was colourless except the Women and the Priests. Here Nature herself appeared to erect a barrier, and to plead against extending the innovation to these two classes. Many-sidedness was almost essential as a pretext for the Innovators. "Distinction of sides is intended by Nature to imply distinction of colours"—such was the sophism which in those days flew from mouth to mouth, converting whole towns at a time to the new culture. But manifestly to our Priests and Women this adage did not apply. The latter had only one side, and therefore—plurally and pedantically speaking—NO SIDES. The former—if at least they would assert their claim to be really and truly Circles, and not mere high-class Polygons with an infinitely large number of infinitesimally small sides—were in the habit of boasting (what Women confessed and deplored) that they also had no sides, being blessed with a perimeter of one line, or, in other words, a Circumference. Hence it came to pass that these two Classes could see no force in the so-called axiom about "Distinction of Sides implying Distinction of Colour"; and when all others had succumbed to the fascinations of corporal decoration, the Priests and the Women alone still remained pure from the pollution of paint. Immoral, licentious, anarchical, unscientific—call them by what names you will—yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland—a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live was then in itself a delight, because living implied seeing. Even at a small party, the company was a pleasure to behold; the richly varied hues of the assembly in a church or theatre are said to have more than once proved too distracting for our greatest teachers and actors; but most ravishing of all is said to have been the unspeakable magnificence of a military review. The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles suddenly facing about, and exchanging the sombre black of their bases for the orange and purple of the two sides including their acute angle; the militia of the Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and blue; the mauve, ultra-marine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermilion guns; the dashing and flashing of the five-coloured and six-coloured Pentagons and Hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons, geometricians and aides-de-camp—all these may well have been sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious Circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his command, threw aside his marshal's baton and his royal crown, exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil. How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of the period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the time of the Colour Revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer tinge of word or thought; and to that era we are even now indebted for our finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more scientific utterance of these modern days. 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. Edwin Abbott Abbott (1995). Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/201/pg201-images.html 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 , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

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Since 1990

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