fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
R.I.P. Dangerfields: The oldest comedy club in the world. (1969–2020)
By: Jason Chatfield
Tags: Comedy, Humor, New York, Dangerfields, Writing

Photo ©Copyright 2020 Jason Chatfield

R.I.P. Dangerfields: The oldest comedy club in the world. (1969–2020)

It may have been a bit of a shithole, but it was my shithole.

No Respect, I tell ya.

October 14, 2020

When I moved to New York 6 years ago, I had a notebook with 7 years worth of jokes in it that I’d been performing in Australia. None of them worked in New York. I flushed my notebook down the toilet at the Ludlow Hotel, blocked the toilet and fled as the water rose and flooded the bathroom. A worthy death for a such tired, dreadful material.

Over the following 3 years, I went out every night of the week, did 3–4 spots each night and worked up a new hour of material (ok, 35 minutes of actually decent material, 25 minutes of B and C-grade material.)

I got a manager, an agent, started booking casinos, clubs and doing TV commercials and shows. It was a lot of work, and it didn’t once feel like it. I loved every minute of going out there and building an act.

Auditioning to get ‘passed’ at clubs was nerve-wracking, but I managed to get my foot in the door at a few ground-level places to cut my teeth at some late-night spots. (Getting passed is getting approved to be put on their regular roster of comics. You send in your avails to the booker each week and they give you times/shows that you’ll be on that week. The hardest club to get passed at is The Comedy Cellar; the best club in New York.)

The first club I got ‘passed’ at was called LOL. It wasn’t so much a comedy club as a converted sex dungeon in Times Square with a cheap vinyl banner that said ‘LOL STANDUP COMEDY’ on it. It had two separate rooms inside running concurrent shows every night, filled with people from the mid-west who, 15 minutes earlier, had been told they were about to see Chris Rock, Louis CK and Tina Fey (not a stand-up comic).

As you can imagine, by the time my schlubby face got up on stage, they had realised how badly they’d been screwed and every night there were people asking for their money back. One time the booker got punched in the face by an angry punter.

I would perform there 2–3 nights a week, sometimes 3 or 4 shows in a night, 10–15 minutes apiece. Sometimes I’d be hosting, other times I’d close out the show. We’d do shows every night. In 100 degrees or in the middle of a blizzard. Working that club taught me to deal with hostile audiences and how to digest uncooked hotdogs. Before long, new management came in and I was turfed out the door along with a swag of other comics who had been working there since it opened.

It was at that point a booker I was working with at Broadway Comedy Club put me up to audition for Dangerfields. He’d been producing outside shows for both clubs and threw me up with a few other comics for consideration. I passed.

Within a month I was performing there 2–3 times a week, and booking road gigs at Casinos through their management company. It was my new home club.
An Idiot With a Plan Can Beat a Genius With Hope
By: Jon Brosio
Tags: Blogging, Motivation, Entrepreneurship, Life, Self Improvement

Is it just me or does it seem like the quiet ones that you least expected to succeed in high school are the ones now living the lives we all dreamt of heading into adulthood?

I mean, I guess I heard the idea of people "peaking" early — I just didn't have any true understanding of what that meant when I was younger.

Listen, I'm not trying to prop myself or anyone up in writing this — it's just something that's been on my mind.

I wasn't a part of the "popular" kids growing up. I had my friends and we were always kind of just doing our thing. Then — into adulthood, I moved away from home, "peeked" at what others from my graduating high school class were up to, kept my head down, and got to work.

Now, I'm making a very healthy living doing what I love to do and helping build a community of other badasses achieve the same for themselves.

It got me thinking about all the other weird kids I grew up with and how I notice a lot of them are doing really rad things in life. Of course, I'm able to see some of my own confirmation bias here — it isn't a perfect generalization, however I do think there is a trend.

I don't think I'm anything special.

Of course, I know that me being me is special — just like you being you is special.

What I mean is I don't have any special skills, knowledge or education that allowed me to accomplish what I have and I know there are millions of other people who fall into that camp as well.

In this piece, I'm going to go over the plan and share the strategy I have followed over the years that have helped me build, scale, and grow my online business so you can too.
The stars above inspire thoughts of perfection.
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: Self, Philosophy, Books, Psychology, Culture

The stars above inspire thoughts of perfection. We look up to see constancy, harmony, eternity and above all serenity. Just remember that mud and stardust are ultimately the same thing.

From Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

“Sit, Jessica. Look, how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins, -

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”

From Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) announcements from Cloud Next 2018
By: Dylan Graham
Tags: Gke, Google Cloud Platform, Serverless, Cloud Computing, Kubernetes

There was an almost overwhelming number of announcements at Cloud Next this year, so I want to focus on the technologies I care most about, Kubernetes and GKE!

GKE On-Prem

GKE On-Prem

This is an important evolution of GKE for people who want the flexibility and power of Kubernetes in their own datacentre, but don’t want to invest in whole teams to manage the entire stack. Joe Beda discussed having multiple layers of Ops teams in his talk at KubeCon 2017.

The GKE console will also provide unified management for your clusters across GCP and on-prem, super cool!

GKE On-Prem cluster (moscone)

Service Mesh - https://sebiwi.github.io/comics/service-mesh/

Service Mesh

Service mesh is thrown around in buzz-wordy evangelism these days, but as projects such as Istio mature, the benefits for security, observability, and traffic management are starting to make people take notice. Istio v1.0 was announced, showing the product has reached a point of API stabilisation that will lead to much greater adoption.

A Managed Istio (alpha) product was also announced that will remove even more complexity for GKE users.

Cloud Services Platform family

GKE Serverless add-on

If you already use GKE and want to provide a Serverless platform to your developers, this add-on looks ideal. Google also provided a form for requesting early access.

This could be useful if you want to develop on a Serverless stack that’s more portable than services like Cloud Functions or AWS Lambda. In the future, if many developers adopt a common Serverless framework (like Knative), your Serverless components could be less coupled to a specific vendor.

Knative

Knative

This one is more for the Serverless platform developers out there. Knative is a suite of building blocks for creating modern, container based, Serverless applications. Google teamed up with Pivotal, IBM, RedHat and SAP to develop this open source framework that was then used to build the GKE Serverless add-on.

Knative helps with three main use cases for Serverless:

Serving

Deploying and serving Serverless applicaitons and functions. Build

On-cluster container builds. Eventing

Loosely coupled eventing system compatible with CloudEvents.

Expect more of your favourite Serverless platforms and projects in the ecosystem to announce support for running on top of Knative/Kubernetes in the future, if they haven’t already.
I Knew Happiness Once
By: Kim Mckinney
Tags: Self-awareness, Mental Health, Happiness, Relationships, Poetry

I Knew Happiness Once

Sky Collection quote prompt №24

Photo by Denise Jones on Unsplash

Looking back to where I have been,

Trying to figure out what went wrong,

Where did you go, and why do you elude me?

I knew happiness once.

I need closure from our relationship,

But you refuse to go there,

Does growing apart just happen?

I knew happiness once.

That job of my dreams -

It was like living a nightmare,

When did I become a visitor and not family?

I knew happiness once.

The friends who disappeared,

Without even a goodbye,

Why did they not miss me as I missed them?

I knew happiness once.

I clung to you madly,

And yet you still left me,

Alone, afraid, and paralyzed.

I knew happiness once,

I spent hours analyzing the past,

Revisiting the times you filled my heart,

But you had left all of my memories.

I knew happiness once.

But I have left it behind.

Fickle and fleeting is no longer for me,

I built a strong foundation instead,

Ready to face any disaster.

I know happiness now,

It grows inside of me

And depends on no one else.
Collections in Python
By: Rajaram Gurumurthi
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Data Science, Programming, Java

Array

NumPy is a popular library for working with scientific and engineering data. Here, we highlight the array manipulation capabilities offered by NumPy.

A NumPy array is an N-dimensional grid of homogenous values. It can be used to store a single value (scalar), coordinates of a point in N-dimensional space (vector), a 2D matrix containing the linear transformations of a vector (matrix), or even N-dimensional matrices (not tensors though).

>>> import numpy as np >>> a_vector = np.array([1, 2, 3])

>>> print('vector shape:', a_vector.shape)

vector shape: (3,) >>> a_matrix = np.array([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]])

>>> print('matrix shape:', a_matrix.shape)

matrix shape: (3, 3)

Now, let us look at some of the frequently used array operations.

Query/Filter/Mask

>>> numbers=np.array([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]) # mask

>>> mask = numbers & 1 == 0

array([False, True, False, True, False, True, False, True, False, True]) # filter out the odds

>>> numbers[mask]

array([ 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]) # zero out the odds and retain the shape

>>> numbers * mask

array([ 0, 2, 0, 4, 0, 6, 0, 8, 0, 10])

Reshape

Reshaping simply rearranges the existing items in an array into a new shape.

# Reshape a row vector to a column vector

>>> row = np.array([1,2,3])

>>> np.reshape(row, (3,1))

array([[1],

[2],

[3]])

>>> np.reshape(row, (-1,1))

array([[1],

[2],

[3]])

Transform

All the power of NumPy comes from its ability to efficiently transform large arrays of data for scientific and engineering computations. This is really a vast topic and we will only touch upon a few key transformations here.

# Vector

>>> row = np.array([1, 2, 3]) # Scale

>>> row*2

array([2, 4, 6]) # Shift

>>> row + np.array([5,5,5])

array([6, 7, 8]) # Rotate by -90 degrees around the z-axis

>>> row = np.array([1, 2, 3])

>>> rotation = np.array([[0, -1, 0],[1, 0, 0],[0, 0, 1]])

>>> np.dot(rotation, row)

array([-2, 1, 3]) # Transpose

>>> rows = np.array([[1,2,3],[2,3,4]])

>>> rows.T

array([[1, 2],

[2, 3],

[3, 4]])

Sort

Sorting is a bit tricky. The Python sort function does not behave the same way as it does for lists.

# Sorting vectors on x-coordinate

>>> rows = np.array([[2, 1, 3],[1, 2, 3]]) # naive sort

>>> np.sort(rows, axis=0)

array([[1, 1, 3],

[2, 2, 3]])

# output does not contain the same vectors at all! # Correct method:

# Obtain the sorted indices for first column (x)

# and then use those indices to sort all the columns >>> ind = np.argsort(rows[:,0],axis=0).reshape(-1,1)

>>> ind = np.repeat(ind, rows.shape[-1],axis=-1)

>>> ind

array([[1, 1, 1],

[0, 0, 0]])

>>> np.take_along_axis(rows,ind,axis=0)

array([[1, 2, 3],

[2, 1, 3]])
5 Reasons to Create Your Own Medium Publication (And 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t)
By: Casey Botticello
Tags: Social Media, Medium, Journalism, Ideas, Writing

1. Control The Visibility and Distribution of Your Own Content

For new writers on Medium, there is a bit of a paradox when it comes to writing for publications. When you don’t have a large following and haven’t written for major Medium publications — it can be very difficult to become approved as a writer for any Medium publications. Conversely, once you are published in a few major publications — seemingly everyone wants your work.

For writers that want to control the circulation of their own content, creating a Medium publication can be a great option. I’m a big believer in the idea that you should never let others stop you from pursuing your goals. So I started several Medium publications to better showcase my articles. While this doesn’t magically grant you followers, it does allow you to pick and choose which stories you would like to feature in your publication. Even if your article is selected for a major publication, it will most likely be pushed off the publications “featured article” section, fairly quickly.

2. Gain Access to More Detailed Analytics

A second benefit of creating your own publication is the increased access to data analytics pertaining to your articles. Medium only gives writer’s a relatively small amount of data on their articles (number of views, reads, claps, fans, and some traffic sources). So any increased insight into your content’s data analytics is extremely valuable.

Below are screenshots of the enhanced “views” and “visitors” data that Medium publication owners have:

Views: The total number of views your publication has received on all posts and pages.

Medium Publication Views

Visitors: The average number of unique daily visitors who have visited your publication. Each visitor is counted once per day, even if they view multiple pages or the same page multiple times.

Medium Publication Visitors

3. Utilize Features Only Available in Medium Publications

When you create your own publication, there are several useful features that you gain access to. The two features I find the most useful are the “homepage promos” tabs and the “letters” function.

Homepage promotions enable you to add custom blocks to your publication that link your readers to a post, a feature page, or even, an external link (outside of Medium). Below is an example from one of my publications, Black Edge Consulting:
How My School Will Stay Open in COVID-Crippled Spain
By: Drew Sparkman
Tags: Education, Productivity, Travel, Coronavirus, Covid 19

A torrent of tragedy — that’s our dear year 2020 so far.

Assuming that we survive the perils of existence — those from nature and, even more so, those from our own misguided steps — and humanity’s distant offspring look back on the trials and tribulations of their bumbling ancestors, the narrative of 2020 would be ripe for future historians.

Perhaps even one of those defining years like 1060 and the Battle of Hastings or 1492 and the New World. Maybe 2020 will be called the Loss of Eden, defined by the singular and symbolic face mask that has essentially divided our life-intake system from the life-giving system.

And yet, when those future historians read the narrative of 2020, hidden amongst the fear and confusion and crises and death and sorrow, they will uncover brilliant gems of humanity at its best.

The selflessness and sacrifice of the world’s doctors and nurses are the crown jewel of 2020. And rightfully so.

However, there’s a small school perched on a hill overlooking city and port on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, and future historians looking for proof of humanity’s best would do well to pay attention.

This school — my school — overcame odds and immense pressure during the first wave of COVID. Many teachers knew little more than Gmail and the basics of a Google Doc. In the end, we kept quality online education rolling, just as paying parents had expected at the beginning of the academic year in September 2019.

And this is our strategy to once again do the impossible: stay open for the 2020/2021 academic in COVID-crippled Spain.
1 Critical Skill Successful People Often Lose Over Time
By: Todd Brison
Tags: Motivation, Personal Development, Entrepreneurship, Success, Inspiration

What happens when you only think

James’s experience reminded me of my time in France. I don’t know if you’re aware, but people who live in France speak French. I do not. Naturally, there was a bit of a communication gap.

I would walk into the office and hear a coworker say:

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, Todd?”

I would smile and reply with the only word I knew at the time:

“Oui!”

What did I say yes to? I didn’t know. Nobody ever returned later in the day expecting me to help beat a person to death with crusty baguettes, though, so I counted that as a win.

Still, I’m a communicator. I wanted to understand French, not just fake it.

My plan was to think my way to learning French. Each day, I sat in the cafeteria reading the French newspaper. I chewed on smelly cheese and thought: “Okay, they just used the word lancé, and I definitely saw that word in another story about a software company releasing a new product. It must mean launch.”

This process continued for months.

My employer moved me to France to work, but most days I just eavesdropped. One morning my coworker Margaux came in late and furious. That was the day I learned how to curse at trains. Another day I sat in on a meeting about the company’s media bank with four people. They spoke French the entire hour. I caught snippets here and there about mot-clés after the conversation had already moved 10 minutes ahead.

I thought and thought and thought and thought. The French language consumed me as much as any hobby ever had.

Finally, two weeks before I left the country, a reckoning.

A colleague opened the door for our meeting, looked me right in the eyes, and said:

“Est-ce que cette chambre vous convient?”

For the first time, the words instantly translated.

“Is this room okay?”

A chorus of invisible angels sang my praises. I understood! All the reading and thinking and listening quietly must have paid off. Euphoria had to be pouring out of my eyeballs. I’d never been so proud.

That lasted for about 1.2 seconds.

I opened my mouth to reply. I couldn’t. Why couldn’t I reply?

Because I still couldn’t speak French.

Ashamed I couldn’t answer more thoroughly, I just nodded and muttered my old standby: “oui.” She gave me that look you give sad puppy dogs, and said: “Faut-il parler en anglais?”

I nodded miserably.

Yes, we should speak in English.
LOL — Issue 26
By: Arihant Verma
Tags: Storytelling, Poetry, Writing, Pornography, Lolissue

I reproduced a poem that I’d written An Ode To Cockroaches on an Instagram post where she’d written a photo poem Ode To Spiders

She messaged me and shared me this poem, saying that she went batshit crazy after she read this. This poem is so confrontational and intense, with the roaches reference, it will make you shudder and awe.
The RSI² Leading Indicator. Detecting Trend Exhaustion Early in Trading.
By: Sofien Kaabar
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Python, Finance, Data Science

The Relative Strength Index

We all know about the Relative Strength Index — RSI and how to use it. It is without a doubt the most famous momentum indicator out there, and this is to be expected as it has many strengths especially in ranging markets. It is also bounded between 0 and 100 which makes it easier to interpret. Also, the fact that it is famous, contributes to its potential.

This is because, the more traders and portfolio managers look at the RSI, the more people will react based on its signals and this in turn can push market prices. Of course, we cannot prove this idea, but it is intuitive as one of the basis of Technical Analysis is that it is self-fulfilling.

J. Welles Wilder came up with this indicator in 1978 as a momentum proxy with an optimal lookback period of 14 periods. It is bounded between 0 and 100 with 30 and 70 as the agreed-upon oversold and overbought zones respectively. The RSI can be used through 4 known techniques:

Oversold/Overbought zones as indicators of short-term corrections.

Divergence from prices as an indication of trend exhaustion.

Drawing graphical lines on the indicator to find reaction levels.

Crossing the 50 neutrality level as a sign of a changing momentum.

The RSI is calculated using a rather simple way. We first start by taking price differences of one period. This means that we have to subtract every closing price from the one before it. Then, we will calculate the smoothed average of the positive differences and divide it by the smoothed average of the negative differences. The last calculation gives us the Relative Strength which is then used in the RSI formula to be transformed into a measure between 0 and 100.
On Being Held Hostage by Depression
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Journalism, Depression, Mental Health, Suicide, Life Lessons

For over four years, “You’ll never write again” is the mantra playing on a loop between my ears.

Vocation becomes affliction, soon demanding journalism and I break up. Although ours has always been a precarious union often funded by other work on the side, I’m bereft of purpose without it. Worse, I’m still hard-wired for the job. Curiosity keeps craving words and the blank page taunts me daily with threats of impending intellectual inertia.

So I placate curiosity with my library card, gorging on books in a bid to keep it — and myself — alive. It seems to work. But survival doesn’t pay. I need to start earning a living again, find a way to transfer my skill set to another industry, reinvent, rebrand, relaunch. This dehumanizing approach to work does nothing for my depression.

I’m not a fucking product, I want to scream, I’m a human!

So what if I’m fallible? News flash: We all are. And yet, with only the slightest touch of editorial alchemy, I transform my stay in Depressionland into a “sabbatical”, thus proving to myself my copywriting chops are still intact.

At the time, I’ve only been out of commission for two years. One word is all it takes to preempt awkward questions, one word is all it takes to conjure up the illusion of agency and success. Most importantly, one word is all it takes to slay the guilt and shame associated with not earning a living for so long.

But the word “sabbatical” rings hollow and feels awkward. Try as I might, I can’t get behind it. Besides, it conveys an aura of professional privilege that has always been alien to me. Case in point: I worked in Portugal under brutal financial austerity measures. As a result, my career is littered with the corpses of editorial endeavors that met an untimely end when public funding and advertising revenues ran out. What’s more, the lie touches a nerve. By passing off fiction as fact, I’ve become a full-fledged member of Depressionland’s cult of societal silence.

Not only have I turned on myself, but I’ve become complicit in the very thing I decry.
A Look Into The Future: The Value of Science Fiction
Tags: Storytelling, Science Fiction, Reading, News, Science

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading.” — Ray Bradbury

Food For Thought

The Value Of Science Fiction

Science fiction is the telescope that looks into the future. Through science fiction literature and films, we are able to address technological change, existential risks, and cultural crises that may define our future. This form of deep imagination is the ultimate form of preparation. It not only allows us to speculate what the future could look like, it also gives us tools to draw from when/if these or similar events actually take place.

To help prove our point, here are how some of the greatest sci-fi minds speak about the value of the genre. 😏🚀

Isaac Asimov:

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be…Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence…has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”

Ray Bradbury:

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Douglas Adams:

“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

Philip K. Dick:

“I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given us more lives than it has taken; we must remember that.”

Gene Roddenberry:

“For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.”

And finally, Arthur Clarke:
Entrepreneurship can‘t be taught
By: Lance Ng
Tags: Startup Lessons, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur, Founders

Business skills can be taught; entrepreneurial qualities like grit and risk tolerance are inborn.

So can entrepreneurship be taught? Most entrepreneurs and investors seem to think the answer is ‘no’. Most academicians and students think the answer is ‘yes’. — Amity University

I sincerely believe that exceptional entrepreneurs have what it takes in them from the day they were born, and I think most psychologists will agree with me. We’re talking about the unicorns; the ones that make it to a respectable IPO. Why? Let me explain with a simple but intuitive analogy.

Entrepreneurs are born, not bred

How does one cultivate a great world class musician, say a pianist? First you gather all the young kids who can play the instrument. You then ask respectable piano teachers to evaluate who had the innate talent and aptitude to go far. And then you get these teachers to take them under their wings and put them through years of rigorous training and dedication to the craft.

You do not however, make playing the piano seem very cool and glamorous to attract general interest in all children, get a bunch of people who have never played the piano to evaluate them, and then choose a large number as apprentices and hope that eventually a few of them would achieve greatness.

The same could be said of any other achievements that require a lot of talent, determination and passion to succeed. I believe being a successful entrepreneur falls into such a category, having failed miserably in one attempt, achieved minor success in another, and met and talked with many who fell into both ends of the spectrum.

Encouraging entrepreneurial ‘spirit’

Some governments or academic institutions believe that encouraging entrepreneurial spirit is the key to creating more successful entrepreneurs. I believe that is a mistake. Getting more people to try does not increase the odds of getting successful startups .

The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘spirit’ as “the prevailing or typical quality, mood or attitude of a person, group or period of time”. By this very definition it implies that any ‘spirit’ is temporary in nature.

Rather than developing an overall sense of ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, it might be better to identify individuals with inherently strong entrepreneurial qualities that will last — passion, grit, resourcefulness, risk-taking aptitude — and giving them the encouragement and assistance they need to fully develop their potential over the long and obstacle laden process they will surely face.

It’s cool to do a startup

With big money and so much glamour propaganda injected into entrepreneurship these days, I have met many young founders doing startups because it is now ‘cooler’ and less boring than working in a big corporation. They also tend to choose popular themes such as Artificial Intelligence or Blockchain because it’s easier to get investors’ attention. They quote Jack Ma or Steve Jobs as role models and use popular lingo like solving “pain points” that venture capitalists love to hear in pitches.
100 not-so-good things to do if you want to be a successful homesteader
By: Tauna Pierce
Tags: Homesteading, Environment, Edible Backyard, Off Grid Lifestyle, Sustainability

I saw an article recently about things you should learn if you want to be a good homesteader — or at least things you should master if you want to live a more self-reliant lifestyle.

It was a good list, and I can proudly say that between myself and my husband, we have pretty much accomplished — or, umm, at least practiced — very nearly the entirety of that particular list. We have been homesteading for the past several years, not completely off grid, but at the edge of it. We are much more self-sufficient than we were when we started, although we know we have many skills to learn before we can really hold our heads high.

What I have learned about people who want to give homesteading a go, is that many people love the IDEA of homesteading, but really have no clue as to what this lifestyle consists of.

There are a great number of articles and resources out there that show the pretty side of homesteading — beautiful chickens in the yard, a lush garden, homegrown food on the table… but there aren’t many resources out there that focus on the hard work, the lessons in ingenuity, the character traits that are a must.

Hopefully this article will drive two points home — Number one, it’s hard work. Every day. Number two, the rewards cannot be measured.

If you’re considering venturing off into this lifestyle, take a look at my list below. It will help you decide if you’ve really got what it takes. And for those of you who can relate, I’m sure it’ll make you laugh out loud a time or two — we’ve all learned many of these things the hard way!

Enjoy — and know that you can do anything you set your mind to. And if this lifestyle is something you want to undertake, if you’ve got the drive and determination, if you’ve got a good attitude and can laugh at yourself and at broken well pumps and muddy shoes and ‘possums on the porch, you will succeed and you will not regret the decision to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

Homesteading will truly change your life and make you stronger, wiser and tireder at the end of the day… and you’ll never want to move back into a conventional neighborhood ever again!

100 not-so-good things to be or do if you want to be a successful homesteader:
An Introduction to Message Queues With RabbitMQ and Python
By: Mohamad Fadhil
Tags: Python, Technology, Software Engineering, Programming, Python3

What Is a Message Queue in the First Place?

Message queues (MQ) are a fundamental concept in programming and software development. In a distributed system, a message queue is the backbone of the system. A message queue allows inter-process communication between services/applications in your system (eg. Service A can talk to Service B).

In MQ terminology, the service that emits the message is called the producer worker, while the service that listens and reacts to messages is called the consumer worker. This is how communication happens between the services.

You can scale up or down the number of producer and consumer workers running depending on their loads. For example, you may have two producers running in two VMs and ten consumers running CPU-intensive tasks across 10 VMs. You can also increase the number of workers during the day and shut down the workers at night (provided that your application traffic is a diurnal pattern).
One Book Inspired Alexander The Great And “The Warriors”
By: Erik Brown
Tags: Movies, Culture, Books, History, Writing

One Book Inspired Alexander The Great And “The Warriors”

March Of The Ten Thousand

Greek Hoplites — Via Wikimedia [Public Domain]

“Let us not, in the name of the gods, wait for others to come to us and summon us to the noblest deeds, but let us take the lead ourselves and arouse the rest to valour. Show yourselves the best of the captains, and more worthy to be generals than the generals themselves. As for me, if you choose to set out upon this course, I am ready to follow you; but if you assign me the leadership, I do not plead my youth as an excuse; rather, I believe I am in the very prime of my power to ward off dangers from my own head.” — Xenophon’s speech to the Greek mercenaries, “Anabasis” (The Long March)

Often many larger than life events in history are built upon the skeleton of events which came before.

Similarly, events within our more reachable cultural history often borrow from these events as well. Most times we don’t even notice the pieces which were borrowed to construct the larger event and the smaller cultural creations afterwards.

One of these events occurred in 401 BC in the Persian Empire. A war of succession took place between two brothers vying for the throne at a small Babylonian village named Cunaxa. The upstart Cyrus the Younger would attempt to remove his brother Artaxerxes II from power. Cyrus would raise and army and hire an insurance policy to make sure this happened.

The insurance policy would be the greatest armed force gold could assemble. This force consisted of a group of 10,000 or so heavily armored Greek mercenaries from various city states.

The army would be led by a Spartan general to boot — Clearchus. The force would march in tight phalanx formations, forming a spear-wielding porcupine appearance.

These mercenaries would be made up of tough adventurers, seeking fortune and glory. Their armor reflected the brilliance of the sun and their phalanx formation inspired dread from lightly armed infantries who would face them. Cyrus beamed with confidence — it would only be a matter of time before he sat on the throne. Victory would be a forgone conclusion.

Within hours the tides would completely turn. The Greeks would blow the force they faced off the battlefield, chasing them into the distance. Cyrus would confidently charge into battle with his cavalry to deal with the rest and be cut to ribbons. The rest of his Persian army would be scattered.

The Greeks would figure out the results of the battle the next day. Their employer was dead, and they were trapped far from home in a foreign land with no way out. To make matters worse, their leaders would be tricked into a meeting with Artaxerxes and be slaughtered.

Without generals and without a plan, a leader would arise to organize the group. Xenophon would convince the troops surrender wasn’t an option. They’d walk home through the heart of enemy territory together and once again see Greece. His story would be told in the “March Of The Ten Thousand” or the “Anabasis”.
Passing on a Legacy Without Reproducing
By: Mj Blehart
Tags: Self-awareness, Mindfulness, Writing, Inspiration, Life

When I got married, I was 42 years old.

My wife was 38. One of the things we came to realize early on in our relationship was that we did not want to have children.

We both love kids. In addition to our nephews and niece by blood, we have a number of other kids in our lives which we are Aunty and Uncle to.

We also agreed that had we met ten years before we did, this might have been a very different story. Back then both of us would likely have wanted to produce kids. Now, though, we both determined that that ship had sailed.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people have opinions on this topic. My wife, more than I, has gotten the “but you’re so good with kids! You’d be such a great parent” speech. I have no doubt I’d have been a great dad…but I also know that, now, in my 40’s, I have become too selfish and too set in my ways to be a parent.

One of the main reasons to produce children is to pass on your DNA. You keep your family line going, create the next generation, and theoretically pass on what you have learned when you have kids.

It’s in our makeup as human beings to pass on a legacy.

Some legacies, however, are not so specific. Kids do not necessarily wind up like their parents in any way, shape, or form. That’s totally ok, because we are all unique individuals, and in some cases being other than our parents is better for us (and quite possibly the world).

As a writer, my DNA, my legacy, are my words. Hopefully, they’ll manage to outlive me.

A legacy in words

The books, the blogs, and even the journals I create contain who I am better than my DNA could, and likely will still be here after I am gone. These are the children I am producing and leaving to carry on after I am gone.

Cheesy? Maybe — but that doesn’t make it any less true. Whether words of wisdom, bad poetry, comedy, fiction, inspiration, self-help and mindfulness, or what-have-you, the words I write will outlive me.

Arrogant? No, because no matter whether you think my words are crap or helpful and inspiring, they are out there. This is not about my ego, because I don’t write for my own ego. I write because it is what I am inspired to do.

Yes, I desire to make my living off my words. But that’s not egotistical or arrogant, it’s following my passion. I love to write. When I sit in front of a blank screen, I may struggle for a time, but I always manage to find words to share.

Much of our history comes from words and art. One of the things that drives me the most nuts about how schools tend to cut funding for the arts and music, but support athletics, is the shortsightedness of it all. Do we remember who won Roman athletic competitions, or Roman art, words, and music?

This has nothing to do with becoming famous (though I’d love to have that level of success of course). It is all about my desire to inspire, educate, and help other people in this world, whether via my fiction or non-fiction.
Factory Design Pattern. Overview
By: Daniel Liu
Tags: Backend Development, Design Patterns, Factory Pattern, Java, Programming

Overview

The factory pattern is a popular design pattern in Java because it is one of the best way to create an object. The general idea is allowing the user to create objects without exposing the logic behind it. Instead an interface is provided for the user to know what method to be called to create the object.

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

Implementation

Interface

Animal.java

public interface Animal {

void species();

}

Implement Interface

Dog.java

public class Dog implements Animal {

@Override

public void species() {

System.out.println("It's a dog.");

}

}

Cat.java

public class Cat implements Animal {

@Override

public void species() {

System.out.println("It's a cat.");

}

}

Bird.java

public class Bird implements Animal {

@Override

public void species() {

System.out.println("It's a bird.");

}

}

Factory

public class AnimalFactory {

// use getAnimal method to get object of type animal

public Animal getAnimal(String animalSpecies){

switch(animalSpecies.toLowerCase()) {

case "dog":

return new Dog();

case "cat:

return new Cat();

case "bird":

return new Bird();

default:

return null;

}

}

}

Use Factory

public class FactoryPattern {

public static void main(String[] args) {

AnimalFactory animalFactory = new AnimalFactory(); // Get Dog object through factory

Animal dog = animalFactory.getAnimal("dog");



// Call species method of Dog

dog.species();



// Get Cat object through factory

Animal cat = animalFactory.getAnimal("cat");



// Call species of Cat

cat.species();



// Get Bird object through factory

Animal bird = animalFactory.getAnimal("bird");



// Call species of Bird

bird.species();

}

} >> It's a dog.

>> It's a cat.

>> It's a bird.

Conclusion

Factory design pattern contains the logic of how the object is created. It is can also be used to contain all logic for creating new objects. This makes it easier to locate code instead of searching through the entire application. This also makes it easier to add new classes to the factory. If the logic for creating a new object is fairly simple you probably do not need a factory.
Finding Success On Medium
By: Mark Starlin
Tags: Self-awareness, Medium, Money, Success, Writing

Success on Medium is having an audience.

I am a musician. One thing most musicians desire is an audience. Making music for yourself is fine, but nothing compares to performing for an audience. That instant feedback, that energy, that connection. It is powerful stuff. It is the main reason musicians practice for countless hours and put up with all the hassles that go with live performance. Those moments on stage.

I want my writing to have an audience.

I used to find an audience for my short humor on Facebook. My friends and I would post goofy things and have fun commenting on them. Then Facebook turned into an infuriating, meme-infested ranting soapbox and self-promotional pitstop. The fun was gone. I tried publishing my own website, but it was a lonely experience. The only interaction I got was an occasional question. I pretty much gave up on fun interaction online until I discovered Medium.

I wasn’t sure my humor would find an audience on Medium. Thankfully, it did — in time. I certainly don’t have as large a following as some self-help gurus. So what? I would rather have a handful of readers who genuinely like what I write than thousands who are indifferent or just trying to emulate me.

As a musician, I have played for small audiences and thousands of people. I will take a small audience who is excited, dancing, and really enjoying the music over a huge audience giving me polite applause any day.

I can honestly say, if no one was reading my writing, I wouldn’t be writing. I don’t write for myself. I don’t journal. I don’t write as therapy. I don’t “have to” write. None of those are bad things. They are good. But I write for an audience (feedback, claps, response.) I want my writing to entertain or move readers, and that requires an audience.

On Medium, I have found a small, loyal audience. That is success to me.
About Me — Greyson Alman. American Football Coach/Personal…
By: Greyson Alman
Tags: About Me, Self, Nonfiction, Introduction, Writing

Bio

Background

I’m a 30 something-year-old Filipino-American who was born and raised in Southern California.

I got my B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Redlands. (A small liberal arts college in Southern California)

My plan was to become a High School Math Teacher after graduation. Like most of my plans, things did not work out like I originally planned.

American Football

Instead of becoming a teacher immediately after university, I decided to play American Football in Europe for one year first.

As usual, things did not go according to plan.

I ended up playing for three seasons in Europe (2 in Serbia, 1 in Poland)

Then I started coaching after my playing career ended. ( 2 seasons in Poland so far)

Since I have no plans to stop coaching anytime soon, it is safe to say my math teaching career is not likely.

ESL Teacher

In 2016 I was playing American Football in Poland. A language school approached me with an opportunity to teach English as a Second Language.

I immediately fell in love with teaching and have been doing it ever since. (in addition to my playing/coaching career)

Personal Trainer

My borderline obsession with self-improvement led me to become a Certified Personal Trainer.

The overachiever in me did not allow me to stop at one certification.

I have three certifications from the International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA):
The Seven Stages of Writing Grief
By: Susan Orlean
Tags: Writing Tips, Journalism, First Person, Writing

More from Susan Orlean Follow

Staff writer, The New Yorker. Author of The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and more…Head of my very own Literati.com book club (join me!)
The 3 Realizations That Happen During A Spiritual Awakening
By: Brianna Wiest
Tags: Spirituality, Life Lessons, Motivation, Psychology, Self Improvement

The beginning of a spiritual awakening is often a crude ending.

Though we imagine it to be a serene process through which we become acquainted with our innermost selves, it is often the opposite. This process does not comfort you to rest, it awakens you with a fire.

Most people embark on their awakening journey in the aftermath of what is referred to as a catalyst event: a breakup, job loss, or the passing of a beloved family member. It’s at this moment that our discomfort reaches a tipping point, and we are forced to reconcile the fact that we can no longer go on as we are.

It’s at this point that we often start searching: for truth, for dogma, for information, for knowledge, but mostly, for ourselves. What do we want, and what will it take to get it? Must we live like this forever? Is there a better, easier way to approach the world and our role in it?

A true spiritual awakening typically happens in three parts, and the realizations usually occur in the following order.

1. Something needs to change and I must be the one to change it.

The first and most formidable step is really a wake-up call. It’s the moment at which we realize that something in our lives needs to be amended, shifted or eliminated, and we are the ones responsible for making sure that happens.

The very first step of an awakening is the assumption of responsibility. When we recognize that nobody else will change our lives, nor is it their job to, we begin the important (albeit humbling) work of doing it on our own.

2. My habits, beliefs and behaviors are creating my life experience.

Once we do take responsibility for our lives and begin to make positive changes, another truth becomes clear: our habits, beliefs and behaviors are creating if not at minimum influencing our life experience more than any external circumstance is.

When we start to reclaim our power, we recognize that our potential is truly limitless, and we can create precisely the type of life we dream of having. The process of waking up is akin to realizing that we fell asleep in the driver’s seat, but we’re still behind the wheel.

3. I can use my power for the greater good.

When we recognize just how much power we have to create what we want to experience in life, we often use it to solve our own problems first.

However, the final step of a spiritual awakening is when we recognize that we want to use our newfound power for the sake of the greater good. When we only want to help ourselves, we have found our egos. When we want to help others, we have found our souls.

The way we may go about doing this varies. We may simply want to share information that will help others heal and improve themselves. We may want to show others greater compassion, or even embark on philanthropic work. In other cases, we may simply shift our careers or our spare time to get involved in activities and practices that promote wellbeing.

Regardless, it’s this three step process that leads people from lives of deep frustration and regret to empowerment and fulfillment.