fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Change an Application’s Theme Dynamically in Vuetify.js
By: Eyuel Berga Woldemichael
Tags: Vuejs, JavaScript, Programming, Vue, Software Development

Change an Application’s Theme Dynamically in Vuetify.js

Build and change themes to fit your app’s different purposes

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash.

Vuetify is a Material Design component framework for Vue.js. It provides a lot of features, including the ability to problematically change theme colors in your application. Enabling users to change themes is a good customization feature that gives their app a more personalized feel.

In this article, we will create a Vuetify web application that can dynamically change between themes at runtime and also switch between dark and light modes.

To start, we will create a new Vue.js application. We can do this through the Vue CLI on the terminal:

vue create dynamic-theme

Once that is done, we add Vuetify to our newly created app by changing our current directory to our app folder and running the following command:

vue add vuetify

Now we can run our application on development mode:

yarn serve

Open the application folder with the IDE of your choice and create a new Vue component in the src/components folder named ThemeChangerMenu.vue . This component will just be a standard Vuetify menu that will hold our theme choices and the dark mode switch. All the theme-changing logic will also be contained in this component.

Let’s start by adding the v-menu component to our template. We will use a button with an icon to open the menu and display our theme choices in a v-card component:

Let’s add a switch that will toggle between dark and light modes. To do this, we bind our switch to the $vuetify.theme.dark variable with the v-model directive, which will create a two-way binding with the variable:

To display and test our menu, import ThemeChangerMenu.vue to App.vue and place it inside the v-app-bar component:

We should now have a functional dark mode switch:

OK! We can now move on to the next part, which is to enable toggling between different predefined theme selections. Create a new data property called themes that holds an array of themes:

As you can see from the snippet above, we are storing an array of objects, each with a name and color definitions for dark and light variants of the theme. Then we display them on our menu:

The only thing we’re missing now is the setTheme method, where we’ll place our theme-changing logic:

When a theme is selected from the menu, we close the menu and then iteratively set the theme colors for both the light and dark variants. We also save the name of the theme, which will let us know which theme is currently selected.

Now our theme changer is fully functional:

Well, that’s all for this article. You will find the source code in this repository. Also, check out the demo on GitHub. Please share your comments or suggestions in the comment section.
11 Funny Software Licenses You Might Have Never Heard Before
Tags: Coding, Programming, Software Engineering, Software Development, Web Development

10. The Death and Repudiation License: No use by living persons allowed.

Copyright (c) 2003 why the lucky stiff This software is subject to either of two licenses (BSD or D&R), which you can choose

from in your use of the code. The terms for each of these licenses is listed below: BSD License

=========== Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy

of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to

deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the

rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or

sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:



The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in

all copies or substantial portions of the Software.



THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR

IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL

THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER

IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN

CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. D&R (Death and Repudiation) License

=================================== This software may not be used directly by any living being. ANY use of this

software (even perfectly legitimate and non-commercial uses) until after death

is explicitly restricted. Any living being using (or attempting to use) this software

will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. For your protection, corpses will not be punished. We respectfully request

that you submit your uses (revisions, uses, distributions, uses, etc.) to

your children, who may vicariously perform these uses on your behalf. If

you use this software and you are found to be not dead, you will be punished

to the fullest extent of the law. If you are found to be a ghost or angel, you will be punished to the fullest

extent of the law. After your following the terms of this license, the author has vowed to repudiate

your claim, meaning that the validity of this contract will no longer be recognized.

This license will be unexpectedly revoked (at a time which is designated to be

most inconvenient) and involved heirs will be punished to the fullest extent

of the law. Furthermore, if any parties (related or non-related) escape the punishments

outlined herein, they will be severely punished to the fullest extent of a new

revised law that (1) expands the statement "fullest extent of the law" to encompass

an infinite duration of infinite punishments and (2) exacts said punishments

upon all parties (related or non-related).
20/20
By: John Horan
Tags: Poetry, Elections, 2020, Coronavirus, Hope

Free for commercial use, DMCA

I’m waiting for this fever to break

God knows we’ve all had

As much as we can take

The circus clowns are drunk

And screaming obscenities

Everybody’s sick of

The incessant dread

If hope don’t break through this time

It’s all over

I’m waiting for this fever to break

People yanking levers across the sea

Will decide our fate

Masks to stalk tragedy

Masks hide hilarity

Masks for sanity

Masks because you never really knew me

Masks to bury me

Masks for the new me

Soon something new will be revealed

Hope it’s not a tragedy

Again

The screens have it in for me

I am waiting for this fever to break

A lifetime of waiting

Insisting

Persisting

This fever must break

One day soon

Like a levee

A pouring forth

A tsunami

Lost light creativity

Healing everybody

A thousand thousand possibilities

Renewed

Remaking me

Holy electricity

The whole world is saved

I am waiting for this fever to break

Through me.
Error Tracing With ES6 Classes and Sentry
By: Dennis O'Keeffe
Tags: Tutorial, Nodejs, JavaScript, Programming, React

How to Handle Sensitive Information

As a company, we do not want personally identifiable data from our customers being shared with a third party.

These tools are a way for us to help debug and trace back through a user journey to improve our product, and users trust us not to share this information.

There are a few ways that we can go about protecting ourselves, but one example I will give today is how we can implement our own “deny” or “block” list.

Let’s make some small updates to our SentryError.js and index.js files.

For index.js , let's update the info passed into main to include some dummy user data (and my public email):

Let’s say that we do not wish to share the name, user email, user’s manager email, or their address, but we do want to keep the ID for debugging issues. We can add a helper method to our class and set up a denyList that we can use in this method to recursively alter our breadcrumb data.

Why keep denyList outside of the class? There is no particular reason, but I find it makes it easier to write unit regex tests if this is abstracted, and it can be used for other third-party block lists you may want to set up. redactSensitiveInformation could also have been pulled out of the class for the same reason if it was reusable elsewhere.

Update SentryError.js :

redactSensitiveInformation uses the power of recursion. We basically want it to recursively check through an object to redact information that matches a regex.

This means that the following:

…will become redacted to the following with our current deny list:

denyList.some iterates through our regex array and if any regex matches, it will return "true." This helps us identify from our list which data to redact.

Let’s run node index.js again and confirm this in Sentry.

Victory!
Remembering a Night Sky
By: Craig Brett
Tags: Life Lessons, Space, Life, Science, Parenting

I have two childhood memories about the stars.

The first was a warm summer evening when my sister, brother and I talked our parents into letting us sleep outside. We spread our blankets and pillows on the balcony and lay down under a night sky filled with stars. In hushed voices we searched for meteors and counted satellites until slowly and one-by-one we drifted off to sleep.

The second memory was with my Dad. If we were outside at night he had a habit of looking up at the sky — to check the phase of the moon or find a planet. One night, we were returning home from soccer practice (or maybe we were walking our dog — details have faded with time) and he did what he usually did. He stopped to look up at the night sky.

But this time he had a question for me. Did I know how far away the stars were?

I remember it was a bitterly cold evening. Our feet crunched on frosted ground and his frozen breath hung in the air. When I stood next to him and also looked up at all those stars, I was thinking, ‘this is a question that might have a long answer,’ which means staying out here in the cold instead of going on into the house where we could sit near the fireplace and drink hot chocolate.

And then he explained.

The light from the stars that we see now has been travelling for thousands and sometimes millions of years to reach us. “If,” he said, pointing at a one part of the sky, “that star is a thousand light years away and it exploded today, we wouldn’t see the explosion for another thousand years.”

I was staggered. I forgot I was cold. This truth about the size of our universe unfolded in my mind like a flower before the sun.
Sarah Fuller, Owned the Football Kick
By: Ep Mcknight
Tags: Self Improvement, Startup, Life Lessons, Sports, Education

Sarah Fuller, Owned the Football Kick

A poem on the first female kicker who broke the male phenomena

Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash

Photo by CNN

Sarah Fuller, the Vanderbilt kicker

awoke one morning as a football player

by the day, her kicking changed her life

became the first female, to score

a Power Five college football game

with a new name, the Vanderbilt Kicker

one kick was all it took, but a life of training

paved the way, as she kicked her way into sports’ history

when opportunity knocked, her foot answered the door

and by the end of the play, Vanderbilt Kicker, she now reigns.

For additional reads:
Understanding the Confusion Matrix and How to Implement it in Python
By: Terence Shin
Tags: Machine Learning, Statistics, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Programming

Introduction

Anyone can build a machine learning (ML) model with a few lines of code, but building a good machine learning model is a whole other story.

What do I mean by a GOOD machine learning model?

It depends, but generally, you’ll evaluate your machine learning model based on some predetermined metrics that you decide to use. When it comes to building classification models, you’ll most likely use a confusion matrix and related metrics to evaluate your model. Confusion matrices are not just useful in model evaluation but also model monitoring and model management!

Don’t worry, we’re not talking about linear algebra matrices here!

In this article, we’ll cover what a confusion matrix is, some key terms and metrics, an example of a 2x2 matrix, and all of the related python code!

With that said, let’s dive into it!
Architecture & Style
By: Stanislas Chaillou
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Towards Data Science, Architecture

We build here upon a previous piece, where our emphasis revolved around the strict organization of floorplans and their generation, using Artificial intelligence, and more specifically Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs). As we refine our ability to generate floorplans, we raise the question of the bias intrinsic to our models and offer here to extend our study beyond the simple imperative of organization. We investigate architectural style learning, by training and tuning an array of models on specific styles: Baroque, Row House, Victorian Suburban House, & Manhattan Unit. Beyond the simple gimmick of each style, our study reveals the deeper meaning of stylistic: more than its mere cultural significance, style carries a fundamental set of functional rules that defines a clear mechanic of space and controls the internal organization of the plan. In this new article, we will try to evidence the profound impact of architectural style on the composition of floorplans.

Reminder: AI & Generative Adversarial Neural Networks

While studying AI and its potential integration to the architectural practice, we have built an entire generation methodology, using Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs). This subfield of AI has proven to yield tremendous results when applied to two-dimensional generation of information. As any machine-learning model, GANs learn statistically significant phenomena among data presented to them. Their structure, however, represents a breakthrough: made of two key models, the Generator and the Discriminator, GANs leverage a feedback loop between both models to refine their ability to generate relevant images. The Discriminator is trained to recognize images from a set of data. Properly trained, this model is able to distinguish between a real example, taken out of the dataset, from a “fake” image, foreign to the dataset. The Generator, however, is trained to create images resembling images from the same dataset. As the Generator creates images, the Discriminator provides it with some feedback about the quality of its output. In response, the Generator adapts to produce even more realistic images. Through this feedback loop, a GAN progressively builds up its ability to create relevant synthetic images, factoring in phenomena found among observed data.

Generative Adversarial Neural Network’s Architecture | Image Source

We specifically apply this technology to floorplan design, using image representations of plans as data format for both our GAN-models’ inputs and outputs. The framework being employed all across our work is Pix2Pix, a standard GAN model, geared towards image-to-image translation.
3 to read: Surviving tech | Improving subscriptions | Follow the Texas Trib’s money trail
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Farhad Manjoo, Matt Carroll, Media Criticism, Media Literacy, Journalism

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Dec. 1, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

How to survive the next era of tech (slow down and be mindful): Farhad Manjoo at the NYT is one of the more thoughtful commentators on the world of tech. In this, his last ‘State of the Art’ column, he has advice for consumers on to swim when the sea of technology always seems stormy. (btw: It’s a big swing in advice from his first column five years ago.) Whether you agree or not, he is a reasoned voice and is always interesting.

Logo: @Leighzaaah on Instagram

How to improve subscription registration & payment forms: The devil is in the details, as the saying goes. And it is always an unpleasant surprise to me how often registration and payment forms for news sites are clunky, too long, and confusing. Hello! Newsrooms, wake up, please. Reader revenue is the future. Make it as easy as possible for those readers to subscribe. Some nice examples for API by Gwen Vargo.

Where the Texas Tribunes revenue comes from: As advertising-based revenue models for media collapse, it has become increasingly clear that newsrooms need to lean on a variety of different revenue streams. The Texas Tribune is a shining example of that. Here’s how they do it. Interesting story by Freia Nahser for the Global Editors Network.
A Guide to Video Marketing
By: Brittany Jezouit
Tags: Marketing, Tiktok, Video, Better Marketing Archive, YouTube

“To get a good spot, the best way is to do location scouting. If you have enough time, go to the event location a day before the event takes place so that you can have a clear image of what the location will look like and what angles are best.”
A critical analysis of notification systems
Tags: iOS, Design, User Experience, Android, UX

What effect could the iOS notification system have?

iOS notification system respects the user’s behavior of ignoring a notification. It does so by pushing notifications to the lock screen once and if the user ignores it (by unlocking the phone without interacting with any notification), it resets the lock screen to its clean state. This; in my view, is a form of balanced interruption — it interrupts the user once but doesn’t keep getting in the way every time the user interacts with the phone.

However, it doesn’t do a good job at managing and organizing those notifications; especially important ones. Here’s a scenario –

Let’s say Bob is on an iPhone. He has a dozen Instagram notifications above a text message notification from mom. To worsen things; in a few hours, there are so many notifications in the notification center that he cannot go through each of them. He clears them all.

Badges are sprinkled across the springboard (image from https://images.homescreen.me/images/user5688/screens/screens_2x/564eb646544418ff.png)

This creates an imbalance — the most important notifications are lost in the shuffle as it is overwhelming to look at a huge stream of alerts in a single place (on top of that, iOS treats every notification as its own cell and does not group multiple notifications into one).

Now app badges are designed for this very purpose — so that each app can tell you that it needs your attention. However, too many badges could lead to divided attention, distraction and anxiety. Badges could have a similar effect to Android’s persistent notifications but only worse — they cannot be cleared easily.

How Might We...? Create a notification system that has balanced interruption but also provides powerful techniques for notification management. BONUS How might we..? Create a notification system that does not make notifications hard to manage by stashing them all in a drawer.

Triggers — what leads to a notification?

Currently, notifications are organized by time and by app. Android goes a step ahead though — in my observation over a few months, notifications seem to be organized by priority. For example, a call or a reminder may stay on top but other items get shuffled to the bottom of the list as more items accumulate over time.

In order to truly understand the different types of notifications, we must know the different types of triggers that cause a notification. A trigger (in this context) is any human or system that causes a notification on the end-user’s smartphone. When we look at a notification, we know the person or system behind it; and that is what makes triggers important.

Our smartphones do not categorize our notifications based on triggers. Here are some examples of the different kinds of triggers (and this just scratches the surface)–
How You Practice With Leetcode for Interviews Is Probably Bad
By: Nathan Patnam
Tags: Software Engineering, Interview, Programming, Leetcode, Technical Interview

Conclusion

To recap, Leetcode is not inherently bad. I think that Leetcode is kind of like riding your bike with training wheels, and in an interview, you won’t have those training wheels for support.

It’s always great to practice in an environment that mirrors what the real setting will be like. More often than not, the people interviewing you will probably be the same people you’ll be working with if you were to get the offer. You interviewers want to make sure you are smart, but also want to make sure you don’t have a big ego and are reasonably easy to work with.

Additionally, it’s 100% completely okay if you can’t solve a LeetCode problem and look at the solution. At the end of the day, we do all of this practice for a real technical interview, and I want to showcase what you can expect.

Data structures and coding questions being asked haven’t changed that much in the past couple of decades, nor will they change any time soon. Any effort you put in preparing for technical or behavioral interviews today will help you down the road when you interview again (or even at your job/making side projects.)

The next time you are practicing Leetcode questions, try remembering some of the points above and start treating practice like an actual interview. I used to record myself when I did Leetcode to see how I sounded. I had a bad habit of rambling or making stuff up (saying “Ummm” or “ugh”) when I didn’t know the answer. Over time I’ve gotten better at it, but I would have never noticed it without recording myself. It’s probably going to be awkward watching yourself, but self-reflection is arguably one of the best ways to get better at these things.
Part 2: Spin up virtual machine on AWS and use it to host your flask server
By: Elliott Saslow
Tags: Flask, Amazon Web Services, Developer, Cloud Computing, Ec2

2.33 Open the necessary ports

add SSH rule for port 22 with source ::/0 add custom TCP Rule for port 3333 and source 0.0.0.0/0 add custom TCP Rule for port 3333 and source ::/0

After you have added the rules, your security should look like this

Before anything more, navigate back to the running instances, and find your Public DNS (IPv4) number:

You might also want to copy down your IPv4 Public IP

2.4 Set up the Config file in .ssh folder on your local machine

Navigate to .ssh folder Open config file (if you don’t have one, make one without extension) Put the following text into the config file

Host virtual

HostName Your_Public_DNS_goes_here

User ubuntu

IdentityFile ~/.ssh/VirtualMachine.pem <- path_to_pem_file

Save your config folder and go to terminal

By typing the following command, you should be able to access your virtual machine:

ssh virtual

2.5 Adding your flask server to the new machine

So now flashback to part 1 of the tutorial. We made a Flask Server! Lets get this on the new machine and run our server remotely!

On your local machine go to the directory above flask_website. Type commands:

# Copy the files over

scp -r flask_website/ virtual: #ssh into the virtual machine

ssh virtual #change directories into the website folder

cd flask_website #start the server

python server.py

To now access the website, get your ip, and add :3333 to it, so in my case it would be: http://54.209.214.30:3333/

Or alternatively, you can use the following commands so that you can access the site at any time!

#ssh into the machine

ssh virtual #Go into the website directory

cd flask_website #start a tmux session

tmux #Run the server

python server.py
Podcast Episode #4: HCI, Design, and Portfolios with Philip Guo
By: Allison Chan
Tags: Design, Advice, Podcast, Interview, Data Science

Philip Guo is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD. His most recently taught classes are COGS 121: Human-Computer Interaction Portfolio Design Studio and COGS 127: Data-Driven UX/Product Design. In this podcast episode, Philip reflects on his teaching and research experiences in HCI and design thinking, and offers advice to students who are looking to build their portfolios and start side projects.

Background

Philip pursued a degree in Computer Science as an undergrad, but while his peers sought out industry positions after graduating, he was more inclined to follow a more research-centric route in academia. It was during his time in grad school when he became interested with how people interact with computers, rather than purely algorithmic work. This interest was expressed through the development of tools specifically for those doing computationally-based research, leading to the creation of Python tutor.

Philip created Python Tutor to help students visualize code by creating diagrams that they can view as their code executes. It allows programmers to “step through their code one step at a time” online, much like how a personal tutor would walk us through our code, drawing diagrams and explaining along the way. Python tutor is widely used by beginner Python classes in universities and by individuals learning on their own. Other languages are supported as well, including Java, C, and C++.

More on the differences between academia and industry, Philip talks about the trade-off between freedom and structure. With higher education, you are given more freedom to pursue your interests without necessarily needing a profitable outcome. Though of course, there is the aspect of obtaining funding for your research. It is not nearly as structured as industry where the profitable outcome is the general goal. Bigger companies have their own agendas and you are part of a team and have a specific role. Though, you also have more guidance and resources available to you. Like with all things, Philip says, deciding between academia and industry really depends on what your needs and goals are.
Paradox
By: Joseph Emmi
Tags: Motivation, Life Lessons, Goals, Life, Commitment

Is it not paradoxical that the thing I was trying to escape, the thing that I dreaded the most, is exactly the same thing that got me into the right place, where I wanted to be and by that, eventually taking me where I want to go next?

People say that you never know where life is going to take you. I can tell you that they are right.

For a long period of time, I was trying to escape from a job. Frustration, unhappiness, unsatisfaction, and at times even desperation. Feelings that, although put me down more than once, they also kept me going; they worked as a barometer of who I didn’t want to become, what I didn’t want to be and how I didn’t want to feel, and because of that, to keep looking, to keep working, to keep creating, but more important, to keep acting.

Now, one year later, I am here. I broke free. It didn’t happen by accident. It was hard work, commitment, dedication and sacrifice. It was not giving up despite the rejections.

The “funny” thing, the paradox, is that, despite now being part of a different company, it is that past that it used to be my present what it is moving me forward. All those things that frustrated me, are now a knowledge base that I can rely on, but that is also valuable.

The moral of the story it’s simple. You never know where things are going to take you, yes, but also, never take things from granted. Keep showing up, do the work, keep the goal in mind.

As hard as it can get at times, it is important to remember that time goes by. Whatever your present is, it will eventually become your past, but it can, or probably will, dictate your future. Is up to you how you play those cards.

It is a matter of action, repetition and stamina. Is a long term game, and you probably won’t get where you want to be on the first attempt, or the 10th, but nor will help you not doing anything, no keep trying and just quitting.

You can look back at being at the same place, or look back and contemplate how all the effort paid off.

Right now I look back, feel surprised and smile. Who would ever imagine?
I Need to Know — 40 Years of Narcissistic abuse have taken their Toll.
By: Markus Scorelius
Tags: Npd, Narcissism, Mental Health, This Happened To Me, Gods Presence

I Need to Know — 40 Years of Narcissistic abuse have taken their Toll. Markus Scorelius Follow Dec 25 · 4 min read

I see other people. Their world is different than mine.

Child alone parents house from pixabay.com

I need to know that I’m not a loser.

I need to know that I’m on a burden on everyone I talk to.

I need to know that people aren’t embarrassed to be seen with me.

I need to know that you know what happened in my life.
Starting your career during a pandemic: 40 young journalists enter a new journalism landscape
By: Charlene Arsasemita
Tags: Journalism, Fellowship, Innovation, Media, Updates

The response to this year’s GNI Fellowship call for applications was exciting and a great sign that many young people are looking to land their dream job in journalism. More than 1,400 students and graduates looking to kickstart their journalism careers applied for a summer placement. Leading European news organisations across 14 countries will now host 40 Fellows for eight weeks.

The GNI Fellowship seeks to bring young talent into newsrooms and help them become more diverse and interdisciplinary while staying at the forefront of the use of technology in journalism. For many aspiring journalists, the Fellowship is their first paid job and a step that can kick-start their career in journalism.

The Fellows were carefully selected by each host organisation for the skills they offer in digital and data journalism, audience and product development, verification and fact-checking, all of which are in high demand to help move the industry forward. Amid a pandemic, which has pushed many newsrooms to find new ways of producing journalism, these skills are needed more than ever.

Meet the Fellows

The cohort is a young group of aspiring media professionals with backgrounds that range from journalism to UX/UI design, and from computer science to philosophy. Here are the GNI Fellows for 2020 and the main areas they will focus on:

Area: Data Journalism and Visualisation

‘The GNI Fellowship gives me an opportunity to learn a new inspiring way of reaching and engaging audiences by using data and new storytelling formats. I am really looking forward to working at the intersection between journalism and design and connecting with the community of fellows from across Europe.’- Pilar Tomás Franco ‘I look forward to using new technologies and narrative formats to complement my previous journalistic experience. Because we need strong critical journalism and we need to make it ready for the future.’- Gabriel Rinaldi

Area: Audience engagement and digital storytelling

‘I’m most looking forward to have the opportunity to make meaningful change in the environmental sphere, learn from industry professionals and experiment with social content.’- Katie Anderson

Area: Fact-checking, verification and investigative journalism

‘The GNI fellowship is an exceptional opportunity to work with the best fact-checking journalists of a leading news organisation. I will get to learn about the state-of-the-art technological tools and latest innovative formats used in this domain. It is really exciting!’- Juliette Mansour

Area: Design and product development
About Me — Aria Dailee. Professional Geographer, budding…
By: Aria Dailee
Tags: Nonfiction, Autobiography, Introduction, About Me, Writers On Medium

About Me — Aria Dailee

Professional geographer, budding developer, and writer

Picture of me voting this year using an at-home voting booth (haha)!

Hello, everyone! I started writing on Medium in October 2020. Funny enough, I thought about starting in 2018 but decided against it. At the time, I didn’t think people would like my writing or even care what I had to say. However, I’ve had a change of heart and decided to give it a try. I’m really excited to start on this journey!

I’m a first-generation American. My parents immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean and met in New York. My father, unfortunately, passed away this year.

I’m a former online tutor with an educational background in geology (BS), geography (BA), and cartography (MS). Now, I’m a mineral commodity analyst by day and a writer by night! I love making maps, so I hope to incorporate a few in future articles.

I enjoy researching and writing about a variety of topics, but a few favorites are introspective personal essays, climate activism and sustainability, history, and tips about whatever skills I recently learned.

I’m one of those strange people that finds learning and working fun. I’m always learning a new skill. Right now I’m working on refining my graphic design and web and app development skills.

My Current Personal Projects:

As of December 8, 2020

My blogging website (The first website I’ve ever made from scratch!)

Updating a Mars weather app I made using Flutter (will link to it here once finished)

Teaching myself how to use Blender (I want to create some art and maybe a few animations)

I’m currently participating in #100DaysOfCode by learning something new in Python for the next 100 days.

Feel free to say hi and connect with me! Don’t forget to check out a few of my stories listed below. I’ll update this story periodically, so be sure to check back occasionally for future updates!
Wireframes, flows, personas and beautifully crafted UX deliverables for your inspiration
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Interaction Design, Design, User Experience, Personas, UX

When people think of UX Design documentation, the first image that comes to mind is dense, long, and heavily annotated wireframes, full of boxes and arrows that indicate how a system is going to function and behave.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Here are a few examples of UX deliverables that are well polished, legible and simple to understand.

Sketches

Wireframes

User flows

Personas
Let’s remember 2020 as the year we learned how to do things better
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Personal, Greetings, 2020, Ie University, Coronavirus

Let’s remember 2020 as the year we learned how to do things better Enrique Dans Follow Dec 22 · 2 min read

Every year at this time, I borrow some of the greetings created by my employers, IE University, to celebrate the holidays with my readers, those of you who use the site regularly, those of you who find yourselves here by chance, and those of you who read my content elsewhere.

It would be an understatement to see that this has been quite a year. Quite simply, it has been unprecedented. What’s more, wishing you all a better 2021 makes little sense: it would be hard for it to be worse than this one.

On a personal level, over the course of the year I have had to develop skills in an area, video, I was never comfortable with, and make it the cornerstone for my professional activities. I have had to give hours and hours of teaching with a mask on, and I have been able to reflect on the extreme difficulty of delivering content and conversing when half my face and that of the people I was talking to is hidden. Another of my main activities, conferences (and all the activity around them) has come to an end, bringing home to me the extent to which they inspired so much of my thinking and what I write about every day. My timeline on Google Maps has pretty much shrunk to a dot on the map, while the days are all very similar to each other, with the resulting negative impact on my creativity, which has certainly robbed me of my sparkle. To those of you who are still around, thank you for continuing to put up with me in spite of everything.

A very different year, this has been a time to think about many things, about our limits as individuals and as a society, and about the many problems that the pandemic has exposed, mainly that we need to do things differently now, and not in 20 or 30 years. Last year, my fears were based on years of research and reflection, but in 2020 we have experienced the evidence first hand.

Vaccines are now being rolled out, but we’re not out of the woods yet, and we should remain vigilant. Please continue to take all precautions. Let’s enjoy the festive season, but remember that we’ve lowered our guard before, and it only made things worse.

That said, my very best wishes to everybody. Let’s hope that 2020 will soon be a not-so pleasant memory. But above all, let’s not remember it as a lost year: even if it came at a high price… it taught us many things and that we can do things better.
30 Mission-Driven Startups You Should Know
Tags: Nonprofit, Tech For Good, Entrepreneurship, You Should Know, Startups

Many in Silicon Valley aspire to build products and companies that have the potential to create positive change on a large scale. Often, however, these companies can be difficult to find because they have smaller recruiting budgets, and their mission statements can get lost in the noise of startups claiming to be “changing the world.”

To help, we’ve decided to put together a list of mission-driven companies that are attempting to make a big impact on the world.

We tried to pick companies that:

have solutions that are technology-driven or at least tech-enabled

have similar hiring needs to a typical silicon valley startup

are focused on fulfilling basic needs of people who are typically underserved

Based on that loose criteria, we’ve put together a list of companies that we think are awesome and fit the bill.

Of course, we may have left some great ones off our list and would love to know who we missed! If after reading this list you want to learn more about these companies, here are two things you can do:
Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.1 : Creating the Real-Time Data Pipeline
By: Mark Rittman
Tags: Oracle Cloud, Obiee, Analytics, Big Data, Apache Kafka

Some time ago I posted a blog on what analytics and big data development looked like on Google Cloud Platform using Google BigQuery as my data store and Looker as the BI tool, with data sourced from social media, wearable and IoT data sources routed through a Fluentd server running on Google Compute Engine.

Read more at the MJR Analytics blog.
Azure Functions Express: Running Azure Functions locally using Docker Compose
By: Maarten Merken
Tags: Docker Compose, Docker, Software Engineering, Azure Functions

Every time I join a new project, I try not to rely too much on external environments when building and running the software that I’m working on. Most of the time, a DEV or CI environment is overrated and unstable. My approach is to run all the components locally and remove the external dependencies.

I already wrote about running a local SQL Express Docker instance, you will find this article to have the same merit:

If it were up to me, I’d write everything in Azure Functions, not everything fits the model, though. Maarten Balliauw explains this in more detail here: https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2019/10/02/dont-use-azure-functions-as-a-web-application.html

However, when I do develop an Azure Function, I like to run it locally first, without the interference of anything hosted in Azure or elsewhere. The fastest way of having such an experience, in my opinion, is using Docker and Docker Compose.

The term ‘ Docker’ is glorified by many and horrified by some, I consider Docker to be just another tool in my toolbelt, and a great one at that.

I think the reason I like Docker so much, is the versatility of the tool:

Do you have an ASP.NET Core Web Application? Docker.

How about an SQL Database? Docker.

Angular Frontend Application? Docker.

An executable that you’d likely run via a Windows Service? Docker.

Database Migrations? Docker.

Azure Storage Emulator? Docker.

Your entire CI/CD Jenkins Pipeline? Docker.

Local Azure functions with Docker and Docker-Compose

Everything I’ll mention here is compressed inside of the accompanied git repo below:

I’ve created a template C# Azure Functions project for you to scaffold that holds the following features:

An HTTP Triggered function

A Blob Triggered function with Blob output binding connected to a local storage account

A Queue Triggered function connected to a local queue

An easy “start and stop” way of hosting this function locally

What you will need to do first in order to get started:

Install Docker

Install Docker-Compose

Install Azure Storage Explorer

VS Code with the REST CLIENT extension

Clone the repo

Run the following command:

docker-compose up

First, you will see the Azurite image being pulled from Docker.

Next, you will see the Local.Functions project being built and containerized.

Finally, when both containers are ready, they are spun up inside of one network using their respective names:

Now, you can open up the Storage Explorer and browse the local.storage.emulator’s Blob storage and Queues:

Preparing the environment

Create two containers named; input-container and output-container.

Create a queue named; queue.

Working with the Queue

Add a new message to the queue via the Azure Storage Explorer

In a few moments, you’ll see the message getting picked up by the local.functions container.
A modern-day washing machine…
By: Tree Langdon
Tags: Relationships, Philosophy, Technology, Self Improvement, Science

I Confess. I'm In Love With An Appliance | News Break

I resisted for a long time and now I wonder why. Once I made the decision, I couldn't believe it took me so long to…
Why you should bring prototyping into your design process?
By: Lin Simon
Tags: Marketing, Prototyping, UI, User Experience, UX Design

Why you should bring prototyping into your design process?

Learn the value of the prototype, make a compelling design and boosting your product development process.’

Photo by UX Store on Unsplash

I’ve been with UI/UX design for nearly 5 years so far, every time when I present my design solutions to the stakeholders, I got different levels of feedback depending on how I demonstrate my works.

And I found an interesting fact is that if I only show my static design mockup with some basic user flows, people can roughly understand how I want to approach the problem, but it’s not easy for them to imagine how this design would work in the reality. So I have to be very articulated about every interaction detail of my design in order to better visualize the whole design concept for my audiences.

However, sometimes when I’m designing for a large scope project or a complex feature, it’s a bit difficult to clearly describe my idea by just showing static design mockups. So I’ve been looking for a better way to help me showcase my work without explaining too much? Then I finally landed on prototyping.

I started translating my ideas into an animated or playable prototype from different levels of tasks, it helps me largely reduce the communication cost and give people a simpler way to absorb the idea I provided.

In the past few years, I’ve tried a lot of prototyping tools in different use cases, I learned a lot from building those interactive experiences, it makes my design more vibrant and compelling, it’s also an important skill to me being a UX designer.
Why I Don’t Follow My Passion
By: Intisar Mahee
Tags: Passion, Motivation, Jobs, Careers, Career Advice

Why I Don’t Follow My Passion

Motivations can’t bring food to your table

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash

I’m a Digital Marketer by profession & a photographer by passion. You may wonder why I didn’t make my career in photography. I actually tried and learned a life-changing lesson that drove me to separate my career and passion.

I brought up hearing the words “Follow Your Passion”. Later found out that it’s the biggest misconception, motivational speakers give us.

The quote should be, “Follow your passion but not Blindly”.

I was confused at the age of 25, “from where should I start?”. The most common thought of us.

I didn’t have a shitload of money or any ovarian lottery, and passion related jobs pushed me to fail horribly.

But I didn't take it as a failure, I took it as a life-changing lesson and started my new beginning. I would like to share what are the lessons that changed my perspective.
Plug-in for Jira is live!
By: Oleg Seriaga
Tags: Dashboard, Jira Plugins, Atlassian, Project Management, Jira Reports

Vizydrop plug-in is available in Atlassian Marketplace.

We have integrated Vizydrop into the Atlassian ecosystem and happy to announce the availability of our plugin. Go and get visual answers from your Jira data.

Predefined templates popular among users will help you to get visual insights about your team progress.

Charts, pivot tables, facets.

Utilize all issue fields, projects, custom fields, changelog, status transitions, and work log.

Easy to use drag-n-drop editor with a user-friendly and comprehensive guide.

The report calculations powered by autocompleting help you to modify visualizations like a pro.

All your reports can be organized into dashboards.

Filter data with your saved JIRA filters, JQL or control data using built-in filters.

Data browser with data reveal allows you to drill down into concrete issues with just a few clicks.

Share and export reports. Export, print or share by link with colleagues, friends, your mom, and the whole world.

Use popular apps data sources and add custom sources. Create charts from files, links, Trello, Google Sheets, GitHub and etc.

Thank you for giving us a try. https://reports.vizydrop.com
How to Be Productive Without Being a Jerk
By: Chris Craft
Tags: Self Improvement, Self, Advice, Productivity, Life

How to Be Productive Without Being a Jerk

Efficiency with people is ineffective.

Photo by Şahin Yeşilyaprak on Unsplash

Our 7-year-old daughter called her older sister a jerk the other day. It wasn’t the nicest thing to say, but the label was accurate at the time and the moment was actually kinda’ funny (I laughed on the inside because I don’t want to encourage our children to say mean things to each other lol).

I’ve been writing a lot of content for various publications, projects, and clients lately. If you’re a writer, then you understand that writing takes a lot of focus. I’ve also had more virtual meetings with my team, clients, and prospects these days. With three children at home, distractions can come quickly and often. Once in a while, I have to gently pry our 5-year-old son from my arm when I’m trying to write or participate in a Zoom meeting.

All of this got me thinking, “Have I been a productive jerk?”

The honest answer is “Yes, sometimes.” But for the most part, I think I’ve been good at giving the people in my life their needed attention while remaining productive. Our family is full of creative people and I want to be a good example of how to be creative, productive, attentive, and loving.

Allow me to share my tips on how to be productive without being a jerk.