Worknet

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THE GARDEN SPIDERS: BUILDING THE WEB

Collabolancer is an open-source proof-of-concept decentralized freelancing marketplace, that enables seamless collaboration between employers, workers, and solvers. The idea behind Collabolancer is to connect fellow workers to collaborate in completing the work provided by the employer, and then integrating a dispute settlement system involving a solver. Collabolancer is built on a decentralized framework to provide additional benefits for all parties involved and offers further options that previously could not be achieved in a centralized freelancer marketplace system. Current situation The gig economy has grown into a strategic economic sector. shows that 54% of the United States workforce do not believe that the standard type of work existing in today’s marketplace will continue in the same form in 20 years. That number includes both freelancers and non-freelancers. Of course, freelancers are especially aware of this, with 65% of full-timers continually updating their skills as the world evolves. The data The employment market is somewhat precarious today, with 57.3 million people having freelanced in 2017. Statistics point to a majority of the United States workforce becoming freelancers by 2027. It is now evident that 47% of all working millennials freelance more than any previous generation, showcasing how technology plays its part in the growing market. However, along with the rapid growth of the gig economy, market players who are dominated by the centralized gig economy platform are unable to answer various challenges and problems that arise. There are several problems caused by the centralized freelancer's marketplace system which are described in detail below: Trust problem According to this , trust and safety are essential to the success of a gig economy platform. Workers need to know that they will get paid, that the employer is legitimate, and that the working conditions are reasonable and safe. article Employers must be sure that the worker can do the job, can be trusted to represent the company properly, and will not steal or partake in any fraudulent or criminal activity. Furthermore, as these assignments are often short and require quick fulfillment, marketplaces need to quickly and accurately vet the identities of different prospects and opportunities. Central authority The Centralized freelancer's platform is run by the central party with the highest authority. This authority is even able to provide a suspension up to the deletion of a worker's account. High entry barrier for new freelancers Less experienced freelancers are often not the preferred choice. On the other hand, newbie freelancers sometimes only want to get work experience and build their portfolios, but there is no way to do that with a high entry barrier. Apart from that, the nature of doing business in the centralized freelance marketplace makes transaction fees quite high. About 5% to 30% are going to the intermediary platform, not to mention the fees for withdrawing funds. This also creates some barriers for new freelancers because they don’t receive 100% of their freelancing revenue. Employer tends to retain ownership of the intellectual property According to this , there are several improper employer practices in the gig economy, such as theft of intellectual property and interference with contractual relations. article An example might be a copyright infringement whereby workers create and therefore own the intellectual property to a specific type of work, but the employer improperly takes both control and illegal ownership of this and hence profits from it. The common employer rationale being: “I paid for it so I own it” is a frequent misconception. Collaboration and innovation will be limited As stated by this , limited collaboration is among the top problems associated with hiring gig workers. Apart from that, naturally freelancers always come and go, also because there is no adequate framework that guarantees that every worker involved in the collaboration will get any rights according to their portion. article Other than that, the bidding mechanism creates a centralized, and individual-centric ecosystem, so there is no benefit in collaborating with others, even though collaboration can actually solve more problems and will lead to more innovation. There is no built-in dispute settlement system According to this , this is a very trivial issue as disputes are bound to occur when transactions are carried out between the buyer and seller, (freelancer and client). Disputes are resolved by single centralized entities that question the objectivity of the resolutions made, that are not directly integrated into the system. article Solution proposed by Dr. Adrian McCullagh Ph D. (IT Sec), LL.B., GAICD, Ph.D. is a simple set of questions consisting of Fraud, Intermediaries, Throughput and Stable Data, that can be used to see how likely it is that current blockchain technology will disrupt the concerned industry. FITS Checklist By looking at the above problems and the current situation from the centralized freelancer marketplace sector, we can be sure that this is one that the blockchain will seriously disrupt as a  trust problem exists here, which includes Fraud. In addition, there is a centralized party which is the Intermediary and does not need high transaction Throughput to be viable, and furthermore requires valid Stable portfolio data. The Collabolancer blockchain is designed to counter these issues and present a workable solution. The solutions built by Collabolancer can be broadly explained as follows. Trust economy: Beyond the gig economy As stated by this the trust economy is a labor market which, like the gig economy, is characterized by freelance work instead of employment. However, unlike the gig economy, it is governed by a new set of rules which are more humane and equitable. These new rules empower independent workers to take ownership and control of their reputation, their network, and ultimately, of their independent careers. The trust economy is built on these principles: article People, not platforms and their network of contacts. own their reputation data We can work together freely . without middlemen The highest relationship is the service relationship , not between the middleman and the client. between the worker and client Regarding the reputation data, in this case, Vincent Marle stated that “work experience, reforms to qualifications should be directed towards the validation of work experience and making them obtainable through different routes” (Vincent Merle, 1997). Collabolancer provides an immutable way to store every worker’s submission and contribution, and make them accessible through their profile, that results in the creation of a valid worker portfolio. Collabolancer also utilizes the decentralized network, so a relationship occurs directly between the worker and the client. A collaboration that is transparent and ‘final’ Blockchain based solutions can bring more fairness into the system. In this case, a built-in collaboration mechanism instead of an individual ‘bidding’ mechanism provides equal opportunities to all workers, including those who have the goal of earning money, and those who have the goal to grow their portfolio. In addition, blockchain based solutions also bring transparency and finality to the process, hence we can guarantee that the employer will definitely pay for the worker’s completed submission as stipulated in the agreement. Collabolancer provides a ‘contract’ that consists of a Project Contract, Proposal Contract, and Team Contract. Each contract contains a fund vault and provisions and is visible to everyone. Blockchain based dispute resolution system Blockchain dispute resolution mechanisms have . Most notably, they can be very cost effective for all parties involved, as they obviate the need for the arduous process of litigating in state courts, and decisions are enforced automatically. This circumvents lengthy and often expensive battles to enforce judgments. many advantages Collabolancer provides a dispute resolution system based on these principles, and to ensure smooth execution of dispute resolution, every party should include their ‘commitment fee’ from the beginning of their agreement. This ‘commitment fee’ will be frozen until the project status is completed. Incentive system Collabolancer provides incentives in the form of cashback, whereby the  percentage can be set in the config, where every party who has done a good job will receive this cashback. In this way, reputation and hard work can be tokenized! Collabolancer also provides incentives for the dispute solver, namely when the solver votes for the winning party in the dispute, the commitment fee from the solver who voted for the losing party will be distributed to the solver who voted for the winning party. Transaction details There are a total of 18 custom transactions built in the Collabolancer blockchain application, which can be explained as follows: RegisterEmployerTransaction (101) This custom transaction creates a new address and registers it as an employer. The employer has the right to post a new project and select the winning team to work on his project. RegisterWorkerTransaction (102) This custom transaction creates a new address and registers it as a worker. Workers have the right to make proposals to employer projects and set provisions for collaboration with the team. Workers also have the right to accept or reject team contributions, and also can submit the final work to the employer. Besides being a leader, the worker can also apply to join another worker to collaborate together. RegisterSolverTransaction (103) This custom transaction creates a new address and registers it as a solver. The solver has the right to settle the dispute by casting a vote to the party they believe is standing on the right side. PostProjectTransaction (104) This custom transaction can only be executed by the employer. The purpose is to post a new project and set some project properties on an asset. PostProposalTransaction (105) This custom transaction can only be executed by the worker. The purpose is to make a new proposal and become a proposal leader. This proposal can be set to enable collaboration, as well as set to be a solo proposal. Workers need to pay a commitment fee, to incentivize collaboration. So instead of competing with another worker, it is more engaging to collaborate, and avoid both large commitment fees and the penalty, if their proposal is not selected by the employer. JoinTeamTransaction (106) This custom transaction can only be executed by the worker. The purpose is to join or apply for a proposal as a team member. StartWorkTransaction (107) This custom transaction can only be executed by the employer (the project owner). This is executed when an employer selects a winning team to work on the project. The rest of the not-selected proposal then needs to pay a ‘Not Selected Penalty’ that will be distributed to the winning proposal. SubmitContributionTransaction (108) This custom transaction can only be executed by the team member. The purpose is to submit their contribution to the team. The contribution is then embedded in their profile, and the applicable team member becomes the owner of the contribution. LeaderRequestRevisionTransaction(109) This custom transaction can only be executed by the team leader. If the leader doesn’t like the submitted files, they can make this transaction to request a revision. After maximum revisions are reached, the applicable team member will be rejected, and their commitment fee will be distributed to the team leader, and their participation is stopped. SubmitWorkTransaction (110) This custom transaction can only be executed by the team leader, that is being selected in a project by the project owner. The purpose here is to submit their work to the employer. The submitted work is then embedded in the leader profile, and the specific leader becomes the owner of the submitted work. EmployerRequestRevisionTransaction (111) This custom transaction can only be executed by the project owner (employer). If the owner doesn’t like the submitted files, they can execute this transaction to request a revision. After maximum revision is reached, the project status will be rejected. Then the prize will be returned to the employer. FinishWorkTransaction (112) This custom transaction can only be executed by the project owner. After the owner accepts or rejects the work, the status will be set to finished or refused, and a timestamp will be set. As the prize is not claimed yet, everyone has a lag time (default to one day), as the frozen period until the is then available to be executed. workFinished claimPrizeTransaction ClaimPrizeTransaction (113) This custom transaction can only be executed by a project member, whether it is the owner, leader, or team member. After the frozen period is over, and/or after all disputes are closed, this transaction can be executed, then the funds, plus the , will be claimed and sent to their profile balance. This scheme is fair to everyone. cashback TerminateWorkTransaction (114) This custom transaction can only be executed by the team leader. It is executed when the leader and team member have submitted all work according to the project provisions, but the employer doesn’t mark the work as . So after the is passed, the leader executes this to change the project status to terminated, then after a frozen period, the prize can be claimed. finished maxTime CancelWorkTransaction (115) This custom transaction can only be executed by the employer. It is to terminate work transactions, cancel work, and is designed to protect employers from irresponsible workers when they do not submit any files until the maximum time limit runs out. The employer can cancel the work, and after a frozen period the prize can then be claimed and returned back to the employer. Canceled work is final, and can't be open to any dispute, as it is clear that the leader is not submitting any work until the maximum time limit expires. OpenDisputeTransaction (116) Disputes are categorized in the following two forms, the leader vs the employer, and the team member vs the leader. A respected litigant can open a dispute if they feel aggrieved. Dispute mechanisms are provided to be a way of solving issues regarding their work. A dispute can be opened during the frozen period and it will be possible to vote for the dispute within the maximum time period specified by the litigant, after that the dispute can be closed. VoteDisputeTransaction (117) This transaction can only be executed by the solver. The solver will cast a vote to the applicable dispute, and pay a fee. CloseDisputeTransaction (118) This transaction can be executed by everyone, but can only be executed when the maximum time period expires. Voting will be calculated based on the solver's balance as their voting weight, and the winning party will be the one who has a larger total voting weight. The losing solver’s fee will then be distributed to the winning solver. User interface Available Project List Post New Project Dialog Project Details Page Open Dispute Dialog Dispute Details Cast Vote Dialog Worker Profile Page Future development There are several aspects the author would like to mention regarding the future of Collabolancer: Collabolancer is currently being built based on the Lisk SDK v3.0.2, with the release of the Lisk SDK v5, the author wants to develop Collabolancer by following the latest Lisk SDK standards, which of course will provide great benefits for this project. Several transactions can be added to further support the trust economy. For example, to allow file owners to incentivize their work, custom transactions can be made for the ‘transfer of ownership’ along with transfers of funds, so that the owner can monetize his work. The dispute resolution method can be improved according to future studies. The dispute resolution system that is currently integrated is just a proof of concept, and cannot fully answer the fairness of the system. For example, by implementing a delegate system just like Lisk's DPoS algorithm. Apart from that, the vision and main ideals of the Collabolancer project have not been fully achieved, but only on a proof of concept level. Therefore, the author wishes to continue the development until the project becomes a workable product that can ultimately have a positive impact, especially for the freelancer marketplace field. Naturally, the author appreciates all feedback and suggestions, as well as input from all parties for the future progress of this project. For this purpose, the author has created a special area to accommodate these suggestions and feedback, at https://collabolancer.featureupvote.com/ Conclusion Collabolancer is the author's first project in the blockchain field, and he would like to highlight that the architecture and features presented by the Lisk SDK provide the highest possible convenience for blockchain application development, without sacrificing application quality and security. Therefore, the author is very impressed with the features offered by the Lisk SDK, and hopes that Collabolancer can be a serious project in the near future that can make a real impact in the freelancing field. Resources Collabolancer Demo: https://collabolancer.com Collabolancer Blockchain Explorer: http://52.142.12.208:6040 Collabolancer Faucet: https://faucet.collabolancer.com Collabolancer Source Code: (Backend), and (Frontend) https://github.com/aldhosutra/collabolancer https://github.com/aldhosutra/collabolancer-client Collabolancer Feature Request Board: https://collabolancer.featureupvote.com/ Disclaimer: This blog post was written by our community member, Aldo Suhartono Putra ( ) as part of his participation in the Lisk Builders program. LinkedIn profile Vincent Merle, The evolution of systems of validation and certification: What are the possible models and what are the issues for France, Vocational Training European Journal No. 12 September – December 1997/III, Page 35 Alexandra Miller, Blockchain: a new frontier for dispute resolution, https://kennedyslaw.com/thought-leadership/article/blockchain-a-new-frontier-for-dispute-resolution/ Dr. Adrian McCullagh Ph.D., LL. B., Blockchain Technology is not a Commercial Panacea to Every Problem, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blockchain-technology-commercial-panacea-every-dr-phd-dr-adrian/ , What’s Wrong With Hiring a Gig Workforce? Pretty Much Everything, Dr. John Sullivan https://drjohnsullivan.com/articles/whats-wrong-with-hiring-a-gig-workforce-pretty-much-everything/ Jolly, What is The Trust Economy, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LHDKBUPYUPgJ:https://jollyhq.com/blog/what-is-the-trust-economy/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de Koilop Official, Challenges, https://medium.com/koilopofficial/challenges-d85051c823a5 The Spiggle Law Firm, The Rights of Workers in the “Gig Economy” Part 2, https://www.spigglelaw.com/employment-blog/the-rights-of-workers-in-the-gig-economy-part-2/ Trulioo, Ensuring Trust in Gig Economy Platform, https://trulioo.medium.com/ensuring-trust-in-gig-economy-platforms-3e67944794e3 Upwork, Freelancing in America: 2017, https://www.slideshare.net/upwork/freelancing-in-america-2017

Collabolancer is a Decentralized Freelancing Marketplace

In the SaaS sphere, it is widely agreed that Net Promoter Score (NPS) should be a key performance indicator of any Customer Success Team. As an agreer myself, I believe we should take this idea even further. I believe that all departments should track this metric because each is trying to develop a customer's loyalty. In this article, we’ll share a ready-made action plan to increase your NPS score; an indicator that your customers are happy. The strategies discussed in this plan have helped our team at NetHunt to increase our NPS at 32% in half a year. We’re happy to share our results. Let's dig in with the basics and then dive deeper into the strategies marketing, sales, and product teams need to use to develop company growth whilst increasing NPS score. What is NPS, and Why is it Important? is a metric that tracks how a company's product or service is being perceived by their customers. As a , it's already regarded as a primary KPI for customer success teams to monitor. Net Promoter Score (NPS) direct indicator of growth and customer satisfaction But we believe this particular metric can be more widely used. A top NPS score results from an aligned effort of the development, marketing, sales, and customer service departments. Only their combined knowledge of feature development, audience, correct messaging, lead nurturing, and timely customer service, used together, can result in a high NPS score for a business. How to Calculate an NPS Score? It’s a good question, but not as good as the question we need to ask our users to figure out our NPS score. Yep, all we need to do is ask our users one, simple question. How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization/Product/Service] to a friend or colleague? Answers should be given rated on a linear scale from one; not likely, to 10; definitely. It looks a little something like this. Based on these answers, customers fall between three different categories, laid out below. After running the survey, waiting, and receiving all the answers, it’s finally time to calculate your NPS score. It’s a big moment if you’re doing it for the first time. Is it high enough? Should I be nervous about the health of my business? Luckily, the maths is simple enough. All we need to do is subtract the percentage of Detractors away from the percentage of Promoters. NPS = % of Promoters - % of Detractors What is a Good NPS score? There are no set-in-stone rules for NPS scores, but you can generally consider It's all relative, and the best gauge you can get on a current NPS score is by comparing it with one from a previous time-frame. Similarly, you can try to find an industry-standard NPS score as a . Finding out you're outperforming competitors is always a pleasant surprise. anything above 30 to be okay . benchmark for your score Some thinkers believe that any NPS score higher than 0 is good since an NPS score can be in the negatives. Whilst it's always good to stay in the positives, . The higher your NPS score, the better. I'd recommend not setting your bar this low The road to an entirely satisfactory NPS score is long and winding; many people say it is infinite. Industries constantly evolve, user needs and expectations are always increasing. However, this isn't the downside for NPS score collection; it's just part of the journey. The downside of NPS scoring is that it often brings many false-positive results, so you should take it with a pinch of salt. How Often Should an NPS Score be Calculated? Again, . NPS score frequency changes based on variables such as differences between transactional and relationship-driven business models, user lifecycle, and product update frequency. Many companies choose to run their NPS surveys every six months, but it's up to you. there are no rules Here is our 👇 recommended NPS survey interval pattern An initial survey should be carried out between . 7 - 14 days after user registration A moment-of-truth survey should be carried out between . 30 - 90 days after the initial survey A third survey should be carried out . 90 days after the second survey A recurring survey should run after initial surveys have been completed. quarterly In fact, here are a whole bunch of actionable tips for NPS scoring from our team. 🔥Tips for measuring NPS scores 🔥 Ask regular clients as well, because their brand perception is free to change over time. Don’t limit your NPS surveys to just first-time buyers. They might not be used to new features or UI; they might even be angry. This is likely to change. Don’t survey customers immediately after a major product update. Whilst it's an excellent way to gauge customer behaviour, it's best not to include an NPS survey at every touchpoint. Don't overdo NPS surveying. Your product isn’t the same fit for every customer segment. It’s best to make NPS scores more actionable by attributing different scores to specific cohorts. Over time, you’ll be able to track how each product change has affected each cohort individually. Don’t send an NPS survey to your whole customer base at the same time. How can an NPS Score Effect Customer Loyalty? As customers ourselves, we don't formulate our opinions based on a product alone. It's all parts of equal , , and that have the desired influence on customers; should be the foundation of every department's customer-facing activities. The marketing and design teams, to sales and customer service employees, and of course, the developers should all be working towards the same, collective NPS-driven goal. branding customer service value delivery customer centricity The Marketing Team The most significant impact the marketing team can have on an NPS score is by ensuring the perception of product value for a client is the correct one. The marketing team should create and (ICP). They need to make sure that this messaging addresses relevant pain points and they should guarantee that a user's post-registration experience is as they would expect it to be. open lines of communication messaging that resonates with a business's ideal customer profile Imagine the marketing team made a point of a client being at the centre of everything they do. Then, a customer has a problem with their purchase, and for whatever reason, it takes a week to get it fixed. Similarly, if you shout about a product's functionality whose release date isn't due for another year… to acquire more, slightly disappointed, leads. Both scenarios affect your NPS score, and worse, your brand-consumer trust. Example: We need to make sure marketing output is transparent and pays attention to our clients' emotional needs. to ensure that any user or potential user feels safe, valued, and understands the value the product is giving them. Use accurate wording At NetHunt, each marketing team member passes a training program once they have joined our company. Going further, they spend some time with the Customer Success Department, listening to demo calls and internal discussions to understand the product further. After the world went remote in 2020, the marketing team joined demo calls online to understand customer questions and to learn how to speak a customer's language. The marketing team maintains an extensive product knowledge-base. The days when 'customer personalisation' meant inserting a customer's name into the email subject line are behind use. Everybody's at it, and it barely registers with our customers anymore. We use proper tools to segment our customers and apply a personalised experience across our customer engagement activities. We send our customers educational content based on their preferences and needs. Similarly, when we run any promo campaigns, we send our customers personalised offers. These offers are based on the product features they use most. The marketing team needs strictly personalised messaging. If you can see that a customer uses email campaign functionality in your CRM system a lot, offer a discount on email search functionality. The customer is provided with something valuable, which increases their odds of being upsold to. Example: While we believe that the product team should work with detractors, we believe that the marketing team should work with promoters to the same extent. You've got an incredible, loyal audience, who are ready to provide a case study for your website and write reviews on websites like G2 and Capterra. Use it. It's bound to positively influence potential buyers who are shopping around for a product like yours. The marketing team should actively engage with promoters. The Sales and Customer Success Team Technology is the best weapon for your sales and success teams. Having data scattered around different tools and programmes whilst trying to aggregate and analyse it is a nightmare. Maintaining superior customer relations is much more comfortable with a well-implemented Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software in place. CRM was basically designed to bump up customer engagement metrics like NPS scores, it's a no-brainer. CRM helps the marketing, sales, and customer success teams identify the most effective acquisition channels, which content converts best at every stage of the buyer journey, the most efficient sales strategies, bottlenecks in your funnel, and which customers require the most attention. It can also be used by the development team to understand the ways in which customers use a tool, which features stick, and where any gaps lie between customer expectation and the tool’s reality. CRM offers an unmatched customer experience. , ensuring a business never misses a single lead. Having automated follow-up sequences set up for after a lead registers on your website, they will immediately enter the sales pipeline. CRM doesn’t take a day off . Effective communication is the cornerstone of any successful business; it brings loyalty. A user might be ready to forgive a little product big, but a delayed response from the Success Team means they lose faith in your wider business. CRM guarantees first-class communication with customers via segmentation Bulk email send-outs and email templates work in unison to send hundreds of emails in minutes. Spend your time on something more worthwhile, create more content for your nurturing sequences. CRM automatically enriches customer profiles with data and schedules send-outs, disabling the need to babysit your inbox all day. Afterwards, you’ll have access to an aggregated history of all your communication channels inside neat and tidy customer records. Most CRM systems integrate with your favourite communication channels, such as social media or website live chats. You can set automated alerts for common pre-churn signs, such as low-account usage or unsuccessful payment attempts. Pre-churn customers need to be communicated with via a customer success representative. CRM prevents customer churn. Going further than CRM, there are many other actionable tips for sales and success teams to implement to improve their NPS score. 1. Use Real-Life Scenarios on Demo Calls: Potential buyers don’t remember all the buttons on all the menus in your system. However, they will remember stories you tell them about these features that might have a particular emotional impact. Our customer success team doesn’t simply open an account and walk a new client through every button. Instead, they show that new client what they can achieve with the product as a whole. Tips for successful customer success demos ⬇️ A for every buyer and the industry they are in. personalised story that a customer can accomplish within their own, unique context and the tech stack they own. Specific tasks and results A or a moment. The underlying goal of each demo is to bring a customer closer to these moments. 'that's what I need' 'looks easy to start with' 2. Change from a Customer Support Model to a Customer Success Model. If you're an enterprise-size company with enough resources to separate your technical support and customer support departments… awesome. Otherwise, when you're counting the pennies, we strongly recommend switching to a . Customer success ensures customer satisfaction through correct product usage. It goes beyond the one-time fixes to one-time problems that a support team would usually offer. customer success model Problem-solving is a customer success team's final resort; instead, it looks to prevent a problem from ever occurring. It adds value to the customer's experience; it is proactive, not reactive. 🔥 How to implement a customer success strategy, at a glance 🔥 . Apart from the newsletters and the in-product notifications, we run live webinars to walk-through any new features added to NetHunt. Educate your customers . Every one to three months, our customer success managers do their homework and review client accounts. They look at a customer's initial enquiries within the system, their communication history, and determine whether a pain point has soothed. Ultimately, they book an assessment call with that customer to offer more specific product-usage advice. Run assessment calls . Having a community adds immeasurable value to your product, and in the social media era, it's easier than ever to implement. Customers gain a network of like-minded peers that share similar values and share common challenges. The business gains another line of external support representatives. Bring customers together as a community . It's common for businesses to implement competitive aspects to their teams to boost performance. We're not into that; we like cooperation. In the face of particularly daunting hurdles, it's better to discuss them as a team. We know each other's weaknesses as well as we know each other's weaknesses. Everybody has something to offer. Promote communication, not competition 3. Speed up your response time. Obviously. Answer customer queries as quickly as you can. We're shocked but grateful at the number of users who have switched to our CRM from a competitor because their response time was too slow. It's best to assume that your client's business is dependent on your product, and any difficulties they face can be critical. We don’t hide from our customers, and . Regardless of whether it’s email, Facebook, website chat, or in-product chat, we stick to a strictly to . More often than not, the customer success team is ready to jump on a quick demo call to get a ticket resolved in the fastest time possible. we’ve got loads of open lines of communication two minutes maximum response time for every customer If a customer doesn't feel much like chatting, we'd recommend to have loads of how-to content on YouTube, blog, and in the Help Center. No stone is left unturned in getting to the bottom of our customer problems. As a result, we get loads of lovely feedback from our customers on websites such as G2. The Product Team Apart from focussing on product improvement, development, and evolution, the product team needs to . Your customer success managers are your customers' voice, and they should translate each product challenge to the product team and make a case for any missing feature that will enable customers to gain from the product. collaborate with the customer success team more The product team needs to act on NPS surveys. We found that the response rate with detailed feedback is over 35% when the product team contacts a customer. Once we receive NPS survey results and notice any cohort has a specific complaint or suggestion about our product, the product team itself reaches out to selected respondents to further investigate. Our customers are contacted by multiple departments - marketing, sales, customer support; however when they see a message from the product team, the people who are responsible for product development, it makes them understand that the company means business. The aim is for our customer to understand that we're absolutely dedicated to providing a world-class customer experience. Our Results Along the same themes of openness and transparency, we want to share our NPS score with you. In our most previous NPS survey, . We're incredibly proud of this considering the average NPS for other SaaS companies is 30. We improved our score by 8 points in the last 6 months, meaning we overtook Dropbox, . we scored 33 which has 32 Don't worry; we understand that there's a long way to go… considering Google Drive's NPS is 50! We asked the NPS question to every customer using our product for more than three months as an in-product pop-up banner. If the customer didn't respond, we showed them the same banner one week later.We achieved a 17.6% conversion rate of those who responded to the survey, which we’re happy with.We ran the survey via TypeForm. This platform is convenient to set up and automatically calculates final NPS scores. The picture below is a screenshot of the dashboard. , an NPS score is a fantastic way to understand and bring your business closer to your customers. It opens the door to better customer conversations and gathers valuable insights from heavy users of SaaS products. Of course, it's not the only metric with which we can evaluate product success. But rather, it measures the success of your business as a whole, being influenced by various factors such as sales team communication and missed tickets from customer support. To wrap up Only through company departments' combined efforts and a common customer-centric approach can a business build stronger relationships, achieve better numbers, and grow. Good luck! Previously published at https://nethunt.com/blog/how-to-improve-the-nps-of-saas-product/

How to Raise the Net Promoter Score of Your SaaS Product by Bringing Your Teams Together

Apache Cassandra — The minimum internals you need to know

.NET is a software development framework and ecosystem designed and supported by Microsoft to allow for easy desktop and web application engineering. It’s a popular free platform currently used for a lot of different types of applications as it provides the programming environment for most software development phases. .NET best suits the businesses that look for a wide range of features like web-based services, desktop software, and cloud infrastructure support. Microsoft started working on .NET framework in the late 90’s. Since then this tool has undergone a great transformation and now is accompanied by a rich ecosystem represented on the picture below. .NET ecosystem before 2016 .NET development platform The .NET comes in three flavors: .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin. These implementations combined are called .NET development platform. Each of them contains frameworks and libraries to build various applications. .NET framework The .NET Framework is the first and the oldest implementation of the platform. It includes three main application models — WPF, Windows Forms, ASP.NET Forms — and Base Class Library. is a UI framework used for creating graphical interfaces primarily for desktop client applications on Windows OS. WPF uses the capabilities of Extensible Application Markup Language ( ). Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) XAML is a GUI class library within .NET Framework. Windows Forms are used to develop desktop applications with rich graphics that are easy to update and deploy. Windows Forms While the previous two components are designed for desktop engineering ASP.NET is used to develop dynamic websites and web applications. There is the in its core that gives the opportunity for developers to write ASP.NET code using different . Common Language Runtime is an application virtual machine that manages memory, implements code access security, verifies code safety, and provides execution of threads and code. ASP.NET. Common Language Runtime (CLR) .NET languages provides the most common functionality like classes in namespaces and is the core of the , a set of reusable interfaces, classes, and value types that are closely integrated with the The combination of FCL and CLR constitute the .NET Framework. Base Class Library (BCL) Framework Class Library (FCL) Common Language Runtime (CLR) . As .NET Framework supports only Windows-based devices and the need for a cross-platform package occurred. .NET Core .NET Core was released in 2016. It’s a cross-platform re-build of .NET Framework. Unlike the old version, engineers can now use the product on Linux and OS X and create applications that aren’t necessarily tied to the Windows family. The new system aims at conquering the cloud space as some providers like Digital Ocean are Linux-driven. Not only .NET Core is cross-platform, its different versions can be installed side-by-side on the same device. .NET Core includes ASP.NET Core and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). is an API created by Microsoft and used to develop the universal apps that run across all compatible Microsoft Windows devices, i.e. Windows, Windows Phone, and . Universal Windows Platform (UWP) HoloLens is a re-build of ASP.NET that happened to be a more modular framework than its predecessor. ASP.NET Core allows you to build mobile backend, web apps and services. It’s also cross-platform and runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux. ASP.NET Core Xamarin The third implementation is called Xamarin and is used for mobile applications and Mac products. Originally, Xamarin was designed independently from Microsoft and was a proprietary product until Microsoft acquired it in 2016 making a fully open source branch of the .NET platform. Xamarin uses the Mono runtime and a version of the .NET Framework adjusted to work with APIs for iOS, Android, and Xamarin.Mac. To get an elaborate overview of this product, check our article. Xamarin pros and cons All runtimes use a common infrastructure that makes the entire ecosystem work. It provides runtime components, languages, and compilers. .NET Standard In 2016 Microsoft also introduced , a library that combines APIs from .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin allowing engineers to use a single base class library rather than mastering three different ones related to each .NET implementation. This step unified the ecosystem and brought a higher consistency into reusing components across different platforms. .NET Standard .NET ecosystem after 2016 .NET development platform is best served with Visual Studio IDE used for building, debugging, and publishing applications across all platforms and devices. Currently, the most popular implementations of .NET are .NET Core and Xamarin. So, let’s look deeper at the advantages and drawbacks of using .NET development platform. Most of the points can be applied to the entire ecosystem, while some of them relate only to its specific components, which we’ll specify in the respective sections. Pros of .NET development Object-oriented software development model .NET is based on the . OOP is a development model with the idea of breaking down software into smaller pieces that are easier to manage and combine. OOP compartmentalizes data into objects, i.e. data fields, and describes objects behavior and contents through the declaration of classes. object-oriented programming (OOP) A modular structure helps define behavior of objects and their interactions without managing object inner attributes. OOP simplifies programming by making the code manageable, easier to test, and respond to recurring issues. It also eliminates unnecessary programming and generally means less coding for developers. .NET makes it possible to reuse code and components, save time and — subsequently — the cost of development. Reliable and simple caching system Caching means keeping data in a temporary storage place to call it faster when needed. The stored data is the result of an earlier information request or the duplicate of information stored in other places that would take longer to retrieve from. The caching system in .NET is robust and simple to use. It’s also designed to be extensible. The Object Cache class allows developers to create a custom cache implementation to be used for improving performance and scalability of Windows client and server applications. Visual Studio IDE An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a single product for programmers which makes application development easier by providing all tools to write and test software. Visual Studio is a Microsoft IDE used for building, debugging, and publishing applications across all platforms, including Android and iOS. The Visual Studio is integrated with .NET and provides the features of language-specific environment. The key features of the Visual Studio IDE: It’s used as a single IDE for all .NET applications The IDE has integrated compilation and debugging features The solution can be used for applications based on code written in different languages The Visual Studio allows for customizing the environment to match user preferences On top of that, offers a wide range of editor extensions from Microsoft and other providers to enable team collaboration, , third-party connections, cloud development management, etc. Visual Studio Marketplace continuous integration _Over the last 10 years, continuous delivery has become one of the most discussed development practices. Making software…_www.altexsoft.com Continuous Delivery and Integration: Rapid Updates by Automating Quality Assurance Cross-platform design and language independence of .NET Core .NET Core is a cross-platform .NET implementation that allows the code to run on OS X, Windows, and Linux. Unlike the original .NET framework — which is only partly open — .NET Core has a fully open source code which ensures that a wide engineering community can continuously contribute to its development. If you’re writing in C#, F#, or Visual Basic, your code will run on each of the compatible operating systems. This enables companies to reach the widest variety of platforms staying within the .NET ecosystem. At the same time, cross-platform design and language independence ensure that the whole .NET community with a large pool of different engineering skillsets shares experience. Currently, .NET supports more than 25 languages including C#, Visual Basic.NET, J#, Managed C++, IronPython, and IronRuby. .NET language independence Flexible deployment and easy maintenance One of the important .NET Core features is flexible deployment. It can be installed as a part of your application or require a separate installation. The modular design allows for including all the dependencies you need. The deployment itself is as easy as copying a folder. Another benefit is that you can have multiple .NET Core versions running side-by-side on the same machine to cover different projects and seamlessly perform deployment tasks. Universal .NET Standard Since 2016, the .NET ecosystem was enhanced with a large class library called .NET Standard. It’s based on the number of base class libraries for .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin. These are used to work with common functions such as graphics rendering, database interaction, and manipulations with XML documents. The .NET Standard library greatly simplified developer’s work. Prior to .NET Standard, a programmer had to redevelop an application or a library for the new platform and then distribute all the updates across various platforms. Currently, the library supports all dependent libraries across applications. However, you should check version compatibility to successfully leverage .NET Standard. You may check your product compatibility with .NET Standard here and track updates on the Microsoft documentation site Large community .NET has a large community of developers. Interestingly, it unites engineers from small, midsize, and enterprise-grade companies. This means that almost any issues can be solved with the help of community members. Since .NET Core is open source, its libraries, runtime, and compiler are available on GitHub and have many contributions. According to , two .NET products are in the shortlist of the most popular technologies: .NET Core is on the fourth place and Xamarin took the ninth. Stack Overflow 2018 survey Most popular frameworks Stack Overflow Survey 2018 On top of that, there is an independent organization called that fosters open development and teamwork around the .NET ecosystem. .NET community and commercial developers use it as the main forum for idea exchange. .NET Foundation Automatic monitoring in ASP.NET ASP.NET has built-in automatic monitoring. The Windows Web Server strictly monitors web pages and applications that run on it. In case any issues such as the memory leaks or infinite loops occur, it immediately alerts about them. This allows for directly correcting these behaviors and creating new processes. The monitoring ensures higher stability and transparency of .NET applications. Disadvantages of .NET development Even though .NET is considered one of the strongest engineering platforms out there due to an extensive infrastructure and proven product development history, it comes with a set of problems. Limited Object-Relational Support As we mentioned above, .NET uses the object-oriented programming (OOP) language model. This model is based around the objects rather than “actions” and data rather than logic. The support of data-oriented software application development in .NET Framework is provided by the . Entity Framework Entity is an object-relational mapper ( ) that bridges between the object-oriented .NET Framework and relational (SQL) databases. Some engineers consider that Entity Framework isn’t flexible enough and may not support all available database designs. This also means that there’s a chance that at some point Entity Framework may not be supporting new database designs. Another problem is that the framework may eventually become abandoned by Microsoft, which will force you to accommodate some new technology that the vendor suggests instead. ORM On the bright side, we haven’t encountered the problems with Entity yet, so it remains a debatable point. Vendor lock-in The second drawback is partly connected with the previous one. .NET is run and based on Microsoft. While .NET Core and Xamarin are open source, the whole ecosystem is far from being the community-driven. This means that your products still depend on the supplier and decisions made by Microsoft. Licensing cost Building .NET apps isn’t cheap regardless of open source technologies. Mostly, your expenses will be spent on Visual Studio IDE and other additional collaboration and quality assurance services that Microsoft offers to simplify you work. As of today, the base version of Visual Studio will cost you for one engineer. An enterprise release that includes various cloud, enterprise mobility, QA features and more will be about $3000 per year. However, you still can try to become to have a number of subscriptions for fee. $539/year Microsoft Partner Even though you can use .NET Core on Mac and Linux machines, the best way is to use Windows for .NET engineering which also comes with licensing costs. The barrier will be even higher if you’ve never used Microsoft products before and you have to migrate from say AWS cloud ecosystem to Azure. The gap between release and stability Perhaps, this problem cripples all Microsoft products rather than .NET stack only. But it’s definitely worth mentioning. The newly released products lack proper documentation, support, stability, and are prone to drastic changes. In one of , our architects decided to use a fresh DocumentDB (now ) but then were forced to design custom data architecture as the product suffered a number of technical issues that could jeopardize the entire project. AltexSoft projects Azure Cosmos DB One of users has vividly described this issue: “ Y Combinator My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology evangelism articles/videos is that it always seems like Microsoft has juuuust gotten their new hotness to work, and is telling the world that it’s awesome, and ready for production. Then you go to implement it, and as soon as you leave the perfect world of their demo, it all falls apart, and THEN you find out the docs were written for the beta version, and no longer apply, so you’re left guessing at the right invocation signature for the method you need.” Minor disadvantages include performance issues that occur due to garbage collection in closed systems. And, generally, managed environments are slower that those that communicate directly with hardware. When to use the .NET . Usually, the business needs are growing and your software has to scale with it. .NET provides scalable environment and allows for redesigning ongoing applications in order to match with the growing needs of the business. Scalable products In case you need the app that will work across platforms .NET will be the great choice as most platforms are covered and you can reduce development effort while expanding your desktop or mobile app to other operating systems. On top of that, .NET can be used for such specific engineering cases as gaming (including Xbox) and AR development (including HoloLens). Cross-platform needs. It’s still a debatable point whether .NET is designed mostly for enterprise use. But Microsoft makes sure to provide the widest toolset possible to build and cross-integrate enterprise products, both internal and public ones. It also supports a robust . Enterprise-scale infrastructures. enterprise mobility ecosystem This article is a part of our “The Good and the Bad” series. If you are interested in web development, take a look at our blog posts on: The Good and the Bad of Xamarin Development The Good and The Bad of Angular Development The Good and the Bad of JavaScript Full Stack Development The Good and the Bad of Node.js Web App Development The Good and the Bad of ReactJS and React Native The Good and the Bad of Swift Programming Language Originally published at AltexSoft’s blog “ The Good and the Bad of .NET Framework Programming ”

The Good and the Bad of .NET Framework Programming

Everything I’ve read about blog posts says I need a large image to start. So, here goes… First, I must say I’m quite humbled that anyone cared to read . I approached that last entry with a perspective that a couple dozen people would read it over the course of a few weeks, if that. As of writing this, it’s sitting at over 2,000 reads, several Twitter shares including a Microsoft MVP, an engineer on the Entity Framework team, and a co-worker asking if that was actually me out of the blue. Takeaways: check the ‘tude, and refine the message. my first blog So, to the point. My main impression from the last article is that there’s a strong thirst for good Entity Framework resources. The issues are well-known, the frustrations are felt by many, and people want to know what to do. That’s what this entry is about. Step 0) Generation Brass tacks time; here are the packages I’ll be working with. (TLDR; if you want to play with it yourself.) GitHub repo The main package that brings in the EF Core runtime as well as the components needed to work with SQL Server. Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer Provides InMemory support allowing us to do easy as pie mocking. It should be noted, though, that it doesn’t enforce relational constraints. Since its most popular scenario so far is with testing, that’s not an issue since the whole point of tests is to verify things. Even so, the capability for a fast, albeit volatile, memory database is very much there. Imagination is the only real limit. Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.InMemory These are necessary to reverse engineer an existing database which is my preferred approach. I much prefer to work with SQL Server in all it’s ugly glory. Being able to define what you want your database to be (re: Let the Database be a Database) and letting the runtime suck in all the detail it can handle is a quick way to ensure you’re getting the most out of your code-first implementation. New version of EF comes out? Import it again. But, this is like buying a suit at a store. It’ll definitely work. It’ll even look good, but it will need some tailoring, and cufflinks are separate. In an actual product, remember that partials are your friend. Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer.Design Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools Providing the most unique feature is the .Net Reactive Extensions. These can be used in tons of different ways, but will work for demonstrating ETL capabilities. System.Reactive EF is still lacking in declarative actions that issue commands at the data store. This isn’t bad as being agnostic requires certain trade offs. Yet, EF is extensible which is what lets products like this exist. This product lets us have Update and Delete capabilities without needing to interact with entities at all. The Z libraries are solid, but I do have a problem with the pricing of their commercial bulk insert offering. What I’ll show here will get you most of what their bulk insert offering does albeit probably not as polished. This is a free blog, after all. Z.EntityFramework.Plus.EFCore You can install these with the following line: “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer”, “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.InMemory”, “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer.Design”, “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools”, “System.Reactive”, “Z.EntityFramework.Plus.EFCore” | foreach {Install-Package $_} Unfortunately, the take with .Net Core packages means all that will bloat to like 70 packages total with all its dependencies. To match the database I’ll be using, run the script . The point of this entry isn’t to go over the schema aspects but how Entity Framework can live in an application and how we can interact with it without it being a kludgey nightmare. Alas, I loathe two table databases “examples” with a passion. EfStore.create.sql The command I used to import the EfStore database is the following: Scaffold-DbContext “Server=(local);Database=EfStore;Trusted_Connection=True;” Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer -OutputDir StoreData Since partials our friends, lets partial out a shard of the context as {context_name}.Customizations.cs. Because we do this, we should watch out for the pregenerated OnConfiguring method in the context. You can delete this. are _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Step 1) Isolation I completely agree with the notion that we shouldn’t need to litter our code with DbContext references. Why would that ever be necessary? Yet, I still stand by my statement that the repository pattern is a throne of lies. It goes too far and lobotomizes Entity Framework’s potential. The primary point of contact can take many forms. In my example, since I only work with a SQL Server store, I called it . In an application dealing with many providers, it could likely become a factory or some sort of look up that would know how to expose the DbContext to the caller. DataService _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework As you can wrap the DbContext, you can also wrap the DbContextOptionsBuilder. I call this the . Yes, I do some implicit operator overloading to let the naked DbContextOptionsBuilder fit into the DataService’s methods without needing to do explicit casting and having it look weird, but it works well for conceptual demo purposes. In a production application you should put this away in a factory that the service calls or can be passed in if you want to invert your dependency. DataOptionsBuilder _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework After these, you have all the layering you need between your application and Entity Framework. You can completely rip it out and as long as the contracts remain the same, you don’t need to make any changes to your application code. This also shows why I had the ire I did in my prior blog entry. You don’t need these cookie cutter pieces dotting your applications like minefields for every little facet you want to expose. Save yourself some work and use the framework to your advantage. Granted, some people don’t like tying themselves too much to a particular framework. Protip: you lost that battle like five times over by time you write “hello, world” in a .net console app. If you instead want to be able copy/paste (with little modification) from one framework to another, there’s still no reason you can’t do that. Such a thing takes an incredible amount of work no matter what even if you only ever code in primitives and arrays. Things like this also make me angry at Visual Studio WCF proxy generation. Rolling a manual proxy factory is easy, gets you greater fidelity, and is much more consistent not to mention much lighter than the half dozen files Visual Studio plops into your solution. I digress. Step 2) Extension You might think the above is great alone. You have Entity Framework, and it’s not littering your code like your rude friend who never cleans up after himself when he visits. Yet, it’s wholly useless for what we need and doesn’t hold up to the claims I made in the last post. For that we need two things to meet the criteria I set out. The first part of this, , delivers a quality of life component in ClearCache methods and the show horse that destroys “EF can’t” claims, BulkInsert. The methods are straight-forward. One takes a selector so you can choose what to get rid of. The other clears everything. DbContextExtensions ClearCache _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Looking at the code you might go “but hoagsie, bro, you said IEnumerable was bad.” No, I didn’t. I said to break the love affair with it. We don’t want to cart around a collection of objects that might be thousands or millions of items large. We can still delay enumeration until we actually want to do something with it which is the purpose of IEnumerable. Also, this reinforces an important implicit paradigm I’m advocating: IQueryable is for fetching data and messing with it mid-execution whereas IEnumerable is for managing data we already have and can work with it in a simple manner. “But hoagsie, bro, don’t repos do that?” No, they don’t. As I illustrated in my last entry, repositories impose restrictions upon the data you serve back to the application and are resistant to change. Also, while today you need to select some products but do some processing on all them in another module, if a junior developer needs to refactor that module four months later to skip the first 30 for whatever reason, the IQueryable can roll with this. Repositories can’t unless you go back and change the part that calls the repository. The method works with SqlBulkCopy as I espoused. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Something that might be a surprise is the dedicated SqlConnection I setup for it. In my tests, the bulk copy object kept closing the underlying connection causing issues. So, we can create another connection. It is still streamed data so you can still shovel tons of data through it and you won’t be creating several connections. You have two and that’s it. BulkInsert The crème de la crème of the BulkInsert is what the give us. They provide a “just a few lines” way to create powerful, expressive transformations to objects that stream through the method. You have to be mindful of what you do in the transformation or else you’ll still put your performance in the trash. Still, I’ve seen this chew through records like nobody’s . Put the application that uses this on the close to the database to cut latency and watch it scream. Reactive Extensions business network I also provided a quick and dirty to provide a way to hook into the update notifications the SqlBulkCopy object provides. BulkHelper _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Lastly, the part that ties the implementation together is the . This lets the IDataReader overload of the bulk copy object understand our IQueryables and can subsequently handle anything we throw at it. QueryableDataReader _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Last but not least, we have our . These utilize the Z lib to gracefully wrap the IQueryableExtensions Where(Expression<Func<TEntity, bool>>).Update(Expression<Func<TEntity, TEntity>>) and Where(Expression<Func<TEntity, bool>>).Delete() features of the package without betraying it comes from somewhere else. _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework With these extensions, the code can still be almost completely ignorant of Entity Framework and the Z lib. Let’s look at the using block in Program.cs. using System.Linq;using System.Reactive;using BetterEntityFramework.Extensions;using BetterEntityFramework.StoreData;using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;using Data = BetterEntityFramework.DataService;using IsolationLevel = System.Data.IsolationLevel; The reason the “using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;” line is in there is because I call out to the builder options to show how we can interact with them. Putting that in a factory or a default provider implementation would leave the application aspects of the code 100% ignorant of what’s going on. Note that this is different from not pretending Entity Framework isn’t a dependency. It is. It always has been even with repositories. But, we don’t need to think about it and can let other components manage those concerns for us. That’s what it’s all about. only I did not create a “working” demo but instead opted for a recipe like scramble of examples so you can pick and choose and adapt the components to whatever you’d want to do without needing to scrape out my scenario code. Step 3) Live long and prosper

Better Entity Framework

Putting CSS in Javascript is pretty much the norm these days - but what if we could do the opposite? Recently, I've been reading quite a bit about , which gives developers the ability to directly interact with the CSS Object Model. Houdini One of the coolest things about it, is that it lets us put Javascript in our CSS. In the example below, I've created a background effect where the Javascript is inside the CSS. Every time you refresh, the background is randomized. Check the CSS tab below to see Javascript inside the CSS. You can even use CSS variables directly in your Javascript code, letting you use standard colors and other settings you configured in your stylesheet. Support for Paint Worklets As of now, these features only work in Google Chrome and Edge, and a few other browsers - so make sure you are using one of them when trying out the demo below. Demo https://codepen.io/smpnjn/pen/QWOZZjG Whenever you change the class of an element, the Javascript inside the CSS re-renders, meaning simply adding classes to an element can recreate complicated effects using different colors, as shown above! When you click on one of the options like Red/Blue - the only thing that changes is the class name of the div. What Are Paint Worklets? Paint worklets are a way to create images for your CSS using techniques familiar to you if you've used HTML canvas before. We can register custom CSS Paint Worklets by putting our worklet into a file and using the following line: CSS.paintWorklet.addModule('paint-worklet.js'); We can then use these paint worklets directly in our CSS using the function. Before we get to that, let's look at how we can create our file. paint() paint-worklet.js How to Create a Paint Worklet File in Javascript Let's create a basic paint worklet. Our paint worklet file will be called . It will contain a class that we register using the function. Ultimately, the class will work like any other Javascript class - but the function within the class is what will run to generate the image. paint-worklet.js registerPaint paint() The function has three arguments: paint() - acts as a canvas context, with all the normal canvas functions. ctx - contains information on the CSS element being painted upon, such as width and height. geom - contains additional information on CSS properties which we can register separately. properties Below, we will create our class, called . The code I've written below then paints random circles on the canvas, which are of random size and vary in terms of how blurred they are. BackgroundCanvas Within this function are various configurable options, such as count, blur, and radius, which lets us adjust how the effect will be rendered. class BackgroundCanvas {
    rand(min, max) {
        return Math.random() * ( max - min ) + min;
    }
    paint(ctx, geom, properties) {
        // Colors for background gradient
        let backgroundColors = [ '#000', '#000' ];
        // Colors for the circle colours
        let colors = [ '#202bc5', '#cc3d44' ];
        // Number of circles to render
        let count = 200;
        // The range of blur and radius values
        let blur = [ 10, 100 ]; // Min, Max blur
        let radius = [ 1, 40 ]; // Min, max radius
        // Clear out the entire canvas
        ctx.clearRect( 0, 0, geom.width, geom.height );
        // And use a blend mode to make the effect look cooler
        ctx.globalCompositeOperation = 'lighter';

        // Apply the background gradient
        let grd = ctx.createLinearGradient(0, geom.height, geom.width, 0);
        grd.addColorStop(0, backgroundColors[0]);
        grd.addColorStop(1, backgroundColors[1]);
        ctx.fillStyle = grd;
        // Fill the rectangle with the gradient
        ctx.fillRect(0, 0, geom.width, geom.height);

        // Then draw a circle for each value of count
        while(count--) {

            // Determine a random x, y, blur, and radius
            let thisRadius = this.rand( radius[0], radius[1] );
            let thisBlur = this.rand( blur[0], blur[1] );
            let x = this.rand( -100, geom.width + 100 );
            let y = this.rand( -100, geom.height + 100 );

            // Draw the circle, using the color, blur, and radius we defined
            ctx.beginPath();
            ctx.filter = `blur(${thisBlur}px)`;
            let grd = ctx.createLinearGradient(x - thisRadius / 2, y - thisRadius / 2, x + thisRadius, y + thisRadius);
            grd.addColorStop(0, colors[0]);
            grd.addColorStop(1, colors[1]);
            ctx.fillStyle = grd;
            ctx.arc( x, y, thisRadius, 0, Math.PI * 2 );
            ctx.closePath();
            ctx.fill();
        }
    }
}
  
// Register the class 'BackgroundClass' as being called 'BackgroundCanvas'
registerPaint('BackgroundCanvas', BackgroundCanvas); To register this paint module, add the following Javascript to your HTML document: <script>
CSS.paintWorklet.addModule('paint-worklet.js');
</script> How to use Paint Worklets in CSS We can add our paint worklet to our CSS with our newly created paint modules. Since we've registered our paint module, we can call it in our CSS to produce our background effect. Since we called our paint module BackgroundCanvas, adding it to our CSS looks like this: #paint {
    background: paint(BackgroundCanvasInline);
} Now our canvas code which we wrote above will run on the div, giving it the background demonstrated in the CodePen at the top of this article. #paint How to Add Javascript to Your CSS Since we can access properties in CSS from Javascript, we can put all our Javascript straight into a CSS property. One of the benefits of this is that we end up with Javascript directly configurable from CSS variables. As I mentioned, our Javascript will re-render whenever we change the classes of an element. So we can have different classes with different CSS variable settings, allowing us to change the Javascript by simply changing our CSS. #paint.red {
    --circleColorOne: "red";
    --circleColorTwo: "blue";
    --number: 200;
}
#paint.green {
    --circleColorOne: "#0054ff";
    --circleColorTwo: "#7fe427";
    --number: 250;
}
#paint.default {
    --circleColorOne: "#202bc5";
    --circleColorTwo: "#cc3d44";
}
#paint {
    --number: 300;
    --minBlur: 10;
    --maxBlur: 100;
    --minRadius: 1;
    --maxRadius: 40;
    --backgroundEffect: {
        let backgroundColors = [ '#000', '#000' ];
        let colors = [ var(--circleColorOne), var(--circleColorTwo) ];
        let count = var(--number);
        let blur = [ var(--minBlur), var(--maxBlur) ];
        let radius = [ var(--minRadius), var(--maxRadius) ];
        ctx.clearRect( 0, 0, geom.width, geom.height );
        ctx.globalCompositeOperation = 'lighter';
        let grd = ctx.createLinearGradient(0, geom.height, geom.width, 0);
        grd.addColorStop(0, backgroundColors[0]);
        grd.addColorStop(1, backgroundColors[1]);
        ctx.fillStyle = grd;
        ctx.fillRect(0, 0, geom.width, geom.height);

        while(count--) {
            let thisRadius = rand( radius[0], radius[1] );
            let thisBlur = rand( blur[0], blur[1] ),
                x = rand( -100, geom.width + 100 ),
                y = rand( -100, geom.height + 100 );

            ctx.beginPath();
            ctx.filter = `blur(${thisBlur}px)`;
            let grd = ctx.createLinearGradient(x - thisRadius / 2, y - thisRadius / 2, x + thisRadius, y + thisRadius);
            grd.addColorStop(0, colors[0]);
            grd.addColorStop(1, colors[1]);
            ctx.fillStyle = grd;
            ctx.arc( x, y, thisRadius, 0, Math.PI * 2 );
            ctx.closePath();
            ctx.fill();
        }
    };
    background: paint(BackgroundCanvasInline);
    padding: 2rem;
    font-family: -apple-system, Inter, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;
    border-radius: 4px;
    color: white;
    border-radius: 14px;
    font-weight: 900;
    font-size: 2rem;
    max-width: 600px;
    height: 400px;
} So that means you can change the blur, radius, color, and number of circles by just updating your CSS variables. We just have to update our paint-worklet.js file to execute our CSS. Our new paint-worklet.js looks like this: class BackgroundCanvasInline {
    static get inputProperties() {
        return ['--backgroundEffect'];
    }
    rand(min, max) {
        return Math.random() * ( max - min ) + min;
    }
    paint(ctx, geom, properties) {
        let parseCss = new Function('ctx', 'geom', 'rand', properties.get('--backgroundEffect').toString());
        parseCss(ctx, geom, this.rand);
    }
}

registerPaint('BackgroundCanvasInline', BackgroundCanvasInline); Notice that we can get our variable --backgroundEffect using the static get method. Then we execute our function using the new Function notation, passing in the appropriate arguments. Why Put Javascript in Your CSS? Adding Javascript into your CSS is pretty awesome - which is a good enough reason, but the main benefit being is you can keep all of your variables for color, size, and visual appearance of canvas elements directly stored in your CSS with CSS Variables. Using obviously has security implications - however, paint worklets are pretty limited in functionality and lack a globalThis/window object, or even fetch functionality. new Function() As such, the risk is minimal. I would still advise, however, that it is better to practice to keep your Javascript directly in the worklet itself, rather than in CSS. In any case, this application of paint worklets directly in CSS is an exciting way to render canvas-like functionality in CSS, and it's pretty cool to be able to dynamically use your CSS variables in Javascript. The full code for this article can be found on CodePen via this link. If you've enjoyed this article, for more dev content. follow me on twitter Previously published here: https://fjolt.com/article/javascript-putting-js-in-css

Exploring Javascript, CSS, and Paint Worklets: Why Put Javascript in Your CSS?

Learning Semantic Knowledge from Wikipedia:  Learning Concept Hierarchies from Document Categories

Leveraging Natural Supervision: Naturally-Occurring Data Structures

Authors:
(1) PIOTR MIROWSKI and KORY W. MATHEWSON, DeepMind, United Kingdom and Both authors contributed equally to this research;
(2) JAYLEN PITTMAN, Stanford University, USA and Work done while at DeepMind;
(3) RICHARD EVANS, DeepMind, United Kingdom. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Storytelling, The Shape of Stories, and Log Lines The Use of Large Language Models for Creative Text Generation Evaluating Text Generated by Large Language Models Participant Interviews Participant Surveys Discussion and Future Work Conclusions, Acknowledgements, and References A. RELATED WORK ON AUTOMATED STORY GENERATION AND CONTROLLABLE STORY GENERATION B. ADDITIONAL DISCUSSION FROM PLAYS BY BOTS CREATIVE TEAM C. DETAILS OF QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATIONS D. SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURES E. FULL PROMPT PREFIXES FOR DRAMATRON F. RAW OUTPUT GENERATED BY DRAMATRON G. CO-WRITTEN SCRIPTS C DETAILS OF QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATIONS C.1 Levenshtein Distance Levenshtein distance was calculated at the character level for edited versus non-edited texts using the default edit distance function from the Natural Language Tool Kit[10] package’s distance module (no transposition operations and substitution cost equal to 1). As an absolute measure, the distance metric indicates how many operations (insertion, deletion, substitution) are required to convert one string into another and is typically calculated with a dynamic programming approach to minimizing the cost of character-level edit operations for the conversion. However, as a measure dependent on the lengths of both input strings, comparing across edit distances becomes rather uninterpretable when the string sets differ in length, for example across sets of edited and unedited texts for characters, locations, plots, and dialogues. As we are interested in understanding the extent to which participants edited the output of Dramatron as a cohort, it is reasonable to normalise the distances with respect to their length, which we report in 6 (Right).To do this, we calculate a relative Levenshtein distance as the ratio of the raw Levenshtein distance between edited and non-edited (Dramatron) output text to the length of original Dramatron output. Conceptually, we can view the resulting measure as a proportional measure of interaction with our tool. Given that Levenshtein distance operations are character-level, and length is measured in characters, the proportion represents the a weighting of active versus passive interaction with Dramatron for the different levels of structure in the hierarchical story generation process. Positive scores for relative Levenshtein distance indicate one aspect of active writing with Dramatron, while negative scores for relative Levenshtein distance indicate one aspect of passive acceptance of Dramatron (choosing among generated text seeds is another aspect of interaction not accounted for with this metric).[11] C.2 Length Difference We note that for Mean Document Length in 6 (left), the means are both negative and positive, and are not scaled. This is to observed workflow differences per participant as well as to capture the directionality of editing Dramatron’s output. For the Mean Absolute Differences in 6 (center), we take the absolute difference between character lengths between original Dramatron output and edited output and normalize it with min-max normalization. C.3 Jaccard Similarity (Relatedness) To calculate Jaccard similarity, we first calculate the Jaccard distance, which is calculated by dividing the cardinality of the intersection of two sets and by the cardinality of their union. By subtracting Jaccard distance by 1, we obtain the Jaccard similarity. Jaccard metrics are scaled between 0 and 1, with 0 representing zero set similarity and 1 representing total set similarity. As Jaccard similarity simply compares set entities, one must specify the choice of entities to compare. In order to calculate the Jaccard similarity on Dramatron output and its edited counterparts, we apply a pre-processing pipeline to our texts, first tokenising sentences and words, and then generating a set of lemmas from word tokens based on their most probable part of speech according to WordNet [39]. The resulting scores are then lemma-based similarity scores between Dramatron output and participant edits, which we use as a descriptive measure of word choice similarity. Note that we do not calculate semantic similarity with embeddings, but simply compute set overlap at the lemma level. Lemmas are chosen to abstract over inflectional differences for words for a slightly more precise look at word choice. Future work should investigate alternative methods of assessing similarity, such as word mover distance [57] or BLEURT scores [100] C.4 Repetition We calculate repetition-based scores with open-source tools from [123], which calculate scores for various n-gram overlaps[12]. N-gram overlaps are calculated for unigram through 10-gram sequences, as well as for Total Consecutive Reptition (TCR) and Longeset Consecutive Repetition (LCR). To compute the Wilcox test, we use pairwise differences across corresponding features for chosen versus alternative seed generations (e.g. unigram to unigram differences, bigram to bigram differences, etc.). We do not weight differences by type of repetition feature. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. [10] https://www.nltk.org [11] From a linguistic point of view, insertions and deletions can range from deletion of entire words (e.g. this is really great → this is great) to the insertion or deletion morphemes to achieve a sociolinguistically marked effect (e.g. going → goin’, like to → liketa, etc). [12]I mplementation details at https://github.com/google-research/pegasus/blob/main/pegasus/eval/repetition/repetition_scorer.py. Authors: (1) PIOTR MIROWSKI and KORY W. MATHEWSON, DeepMind, United Kingdom and Both authors contributed equally to this research; (2) JAYLEN PITTMAN, Stanford University, USA and Work done while at DeepMind; (3) RICHARD EVANS, DeepMind, United Kingdom. Authors: Authors: (1) PIOTR MIROWSKI and KORY W. MATHEWSON, DeepMind, United Kingdom and Both authors contributed equally to this research; (2) JAYLEN PITTMAN, Stanford University, USA and Work done while at DeepMind; (3) RICHARD EVANS, DeepMind, United Kingdom. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Abstract and Intro Storytelling, The Shape of Stories, and Log Lines Storytelling, The Shape of Stories, and Log Lines The Use of Large Language Models for Creative Text Generation The Use of Large Language Models for Creative Text Generation Evaluating Text Generated by Large Language Models Evaluating Text Generated by Large Language Models Participant Interviews Participant Interviews Participant Surveys Participant Surveys Discussion and Future Work Discussion and Future Work Conclusions, Acknowledgements, and References Conclusions, Acknowledgements, and References A. RELATED WORK ON AUTOMATED STORY GENERATION AND CONTROLLABLE STORY GENERATION A. RELATED WORK ON AUTOMATED STORY GENERATION AND CONTROLLABLE STORY GENERATION B. ADDITIONAL DISCUSSION FROM PLAYS BY BOTS CREATIVE TEAM B. ADDITIONAL DISCUSSION FROM PLAYS BY BOTS CREATIVE TEAM C. DETAILS OF QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATIONS C. DETAILS OF QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATIONS D. SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURES D. SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURES E. FULL PROMPT PREFIXES FOR DRAMATRON E. FULL PROMPT PREFIXES FOR DRAMATRON F. RAW OUTPUT GENERATED BY DRAMATRON F. RAW OUTPUT GENERATED BY DRAMATRON G. CO-WRITTEN SCRIPTS G. CO-WRITTEN SCRIPTS C DETAILS OF QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATIONS C.1 Levenshtein Distance Levenshtein distance was calculated at the character level for edited versus non-edited texts using the default edit distance function from the Natural Language Tool Kit[10] package’s distance module (no transposition operations and substitution cost equal to 1). As an absolute measure, the distance metric indicates how many operations (insertion, deletion, substitution) are required to convert one string into another and is typically calculated with a dynamic programming approach to minimizing the cost of character-level edit operations for the conversion. However, as a measure dependent on the lengths of both input strings, comparing across edit distances becomes rather uninterpretable when the string sets differ in length, for example across sets of edited and unedited texts for characters, locations, plots, and dialogues. As we are interested in understanding the extent to which participants edited the output of Dramatron as a cohort, it is reasonable to normalise the distances with respect to their length, which we report in 6 (Right).To do this, we calculate a relative Levenshtein distance as the ratio of the raw Levenshtein distance between edited and non-edited (Dramatron) output text to the length of original Dramatron output. Conceptually, we can view the resulting measure as a proportional measure of interaction with our tool. Given that Levenshtein distance operations are character-level, and length is measured in characters, the proportion represents the a weighting of active versus passive interaction with Dramatron for the different levels of structure in the hierarchical story generation process. Positive scores for relative Levenshtein distance indicate one aspect of active writing with Dramatron, while negative scores for relative Levenshtein distance indicate one aspect of passive acceptance of Dramatron (choosing among generated text seeds is another aspect of interaction not accounted for with this metric).[11] C.2 Length Difference We note that for Mean Document Length in 6 (left), the means are both negative and positive, and are not scaled. This is to observed workflow differences per participant as well as to capture the directionality of editing Dramatron’s output. For the Mean Absolute Differences in 6 (center), we take the absolute difference between character lengths between original Dramatron output and edited output and normalize it with min-max normalization. C.3 Jaccard Similarity (Relatedness) To calculate Jaccard similarity, we first calculate the Jaccard distance, which is calculated by dividing the cardinality of the intersection of two sets and by the cardinality of their union. By subtracting Jaccard distance by 1, we obtain the Jaccard similarity. Jaccard metrics are scaled between 0 and 1, with 0 representing zero set similarity and 1 representing total set similarity. As Jaccard similarity simply compares set entities, one must specify the choice of entities to compare. In order to calculate the Jaccard similarity on Dramatron output and its edited counterparts, we apply a pre-processing pipeline to our texts, first tokenising sentences and words, and then generating a set of lemmas from word tokens based on their most probable part of speech according to WordNet [39]. The resulting scores are then lemma-based similarity scores between Dramatron output and participant edits, which we use as a descriptive measure of word choice similarity. Note that we do not calculate semantic similarity with embeddings, but simply compute set overlap at the lemma level. Lemmas are chosen to abstract over inflectional differences for words for a slightly more precise look at word choice. Future work should investigate alternative methods of assessing similarity, such as word mover distance [57] or BLEURT scores [100] C.4 Repetition We calculate repetition-based scores with open-source tools from [123], which calculate scores for various n-gram overlaps[12]. N-gram overlaps are calculated for unigram through 10-gram sequences, as well as for Total Consecutive Reptition (TCR) and Longeset Consecutive Repetition (LCR). To compute the Wilcox test, we use pairwise differences across corresponding features for chosen versus alternative seed generations (e.g. unigram to unigram differences, bigram to bigram differences, etc.). We do not weight differences by type of repetition feature. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv [10] https://www.nltk.org [11] From a linguistic point of view, insertions and deletions can range from deletion of entire words (e.g. this is really great → this is great) to the insertion or deletion morphemes to achieve a sociolinguistically marked effect (e.g. going → goin’, like to → liketa, etc). [12]I mplementation details at https://github.com/google-research/pegasus/blob/main/pegasus/eval/repetition/repetition_scorer.py.

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