What to Read in Tech

Greetings from the other side of the Internet,

John Perry Barlow passed away yesterday. He was 70. His obituary by Electronic Frontier Found’s Cindy Cohen can be read here. Mr. Barlow co-founded EFF and it promotes freedom of expression in digital media. If you have 3 minutes, read A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (excerpt below) while listening to Grateful Dead’s Cassidy (a song he wrote).

“Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

A deep breath for the internet’s free thinkers.

Onto our top 22 tech stories of the last week:

Dev Stories

Writing an easing function; a slightly interesting story by David Gilbertson. “I should say at the outset that there’s no real point to this blog post. I had a thing to do, I did the thing, and was moderately pleased with the result. I enjoy reading of such tales from other developers, so I thought I’d share my story. Recommended music pairing for this post: the new Awolnation album.”

Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try GIST Planning by Itamar Gilad

Announcing CodeSandbox 2.5 by Ives van Hoorne. 20 new features, a redesign and a rewrite. Boom!

Top 50 Developer Tools of 2017 by StackShare. The 4th annual StackShare Awards! 🎉

Interview with Simon Chan on the Future of Microsoft To-Do by John Gruber. Oh, inside the challenges of building a do-to list!

You are doing Stand-ups wrong! by Juliet Lara. “How do you control people from talking too much? If they do talk way too much that the allocated time, there are some subtle and fun ways to let them know they have gone over the time, bring in a timer, squeaky toys, or mini football to pass around once their time is up.”

Blockchain

A Multi-Trillion Dollar Blockchain Use Case by Taylor Pearson. “There are a few blockchain supply chain use cases which have the potential to restructure the industry. One particularly impactful use case is making it easier for small suppliers to get more financing on better terms.”

Bringing the blockchain to React Native by locropulenton. “Despite the fact of the non existence of an Ethereum Wallet or Browser for React Native to interact with cross platform decentralized mobile apps, it’s possible bring the blockchain to React Native.”

Can an Entire City Run on the Blockchain? by Quora. “While it’s the undisputed business hub of the Middle East, Dubai has set an ambitious goal: To be the first blockchain-powered government in the world by 2020.”

Popular Use Cases of Blockchain Technology You Need to Know by Febin John James. “Most of your ownership records are stored in paper ledgers. These can be tampered. The data on Blockchain cannot be altered. On a Blockchain there are two things. A block and a chain. At a very high level, it is just a chain of blocks.”

Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s Substantive & Technical Road to $100K by Kerati Apilak. “The objective of this article is to examine the fundamental path to a price $100,000 per bitcoin…”

The Flippening: Ethereum vs. Bitcoin by Kenny Li. “Mining Ethereum blocks takes about 14 seconds per confirmation compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes.”

More Crypto World

My Super Secret Crypto Turtle Strategy Revealed by Daniel Jeffries. “A trading system is about discipline. And most people won’t put in the effort to make it work for them. They won’t go through all the steps necessary to become a master.”

4 Cryptocurrency Trends to Watch in 2018 by TechRecaps. “Despite a down month for the market at large in January, cryptocurrencies are still rapidly growing as technological assets and consumer products.”

IOTA: Real-world use cases are coming by Chris Mueller (aka IOTASUPPORTER). Curious about where IOTA’s headed? Read this.

Think like the SEC before you ICO by Brittany Laughlin. “Last year ICOs raised $5 billion across 800+ projects and even more are expected this year. There is a lot of enthusiasm but still more questions than answers. One of the pressing questions is how ICOs will be regulated by the SEC. There are no firm directives yet but there are growing legal standards on what to consider before launching an ICO.”

Top 10 Points Made By the SEC and CFTC Congress Testimony On Cryptocurrencies by Howard Marks. “Jay Clayton, Chairman of the SEC, and Christopher Giancarlo, Chairman of the CFTC, testified in front of Congress on cryptocurrencies. Here are the 10 most important takeaways from Jay Clayton’s remarks.”

Oh, Facebook…

Facebook’s EPIC Run Comes To An End by Lou Kerner. “I’ve been following Facebook’s run since it’s birth in 2004. I was running Bolt Media at the time, and we were the largest social network in the world for a brief time in between Friendster & MySpace. I was buying websites started by 16, 18, 20 year old kids, and I was the first person to call Mark and offer to buy the company, when he had about 1,000 kids at Harvard on it.”

Marketing

Don’t Start with Why! by Yonatan Kagansky. “It’s like saying: in order to be an American president, you need to start with being relatively tall. It is true: on average, American presidents are, and were, much taller than the average American. Yet though being tall is an advantage, height wasn’t the core driver behind people who later became presidents. It took a lot of talent, resilience and luck to get to the presidency.”

Startup Talk

Are You Working on a Side Project or a Startup? by Founder Collective. “Plenty of potential $100 million companies fail because they raised capital as if they would become billion dollar unicorns. The problem is that it’s hard to tell how big an idea can become at the outset. It wasn’t immediately obvious that an operating system for Altair microcomputers, a search algorithm for academic papers, or a social network for Harvard students would become three of the defining tech companies of our times!”

How to Secure Your First Round of Funding by Will Goto. **“**The purpose of your story should do two things: (1) Identify who you are as cofounders and that you are able to run a company together without dysfunction. (2) You have the ability to build what you want to build, and, if your idea doesn’t work out, the ability to build something else.”

…And Don’t Forget About Physics

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Doesn’t Mean You Have Telekinesis by Alex the Younger. “It’s not the act of seeing that changes the circumstances of particles, it’s the other variables that must be present in order for us to see.”

Until next time, don’t take the realities for granted.

Kind Regards

David Smooke, @AMI