fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
I’ve Made Just Over $2 on Medium for Two Months in a Row
By: K Ann
Tags: Blogging, Writing For Fun, Writing For Money, Writing, Ｍedium

I’ve Made Just Over $2 on Medium for Two Months in a Row

I know I don’t write consistently but I write what I want, when I want, and it’s fun

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

I joined Medium in October and that month I made $0.17. I wrote more consistently in November and made $2.37. I was happy about that because it was a huge leap from the previous month. I didn’t bother doing the math, but I know that was a large increase.

I didn’t join Medium thinking I would make a lot of money. I know it’s possible, and I wouldn’t complain if I made it into the $100/month club at some point. The friend who told me about Medium in the first place said at the time one of his articles had $0.04 on it and I thought that was pretty cool.

The truth is that I really like to write. I have a blog on my small business’s website, but it’s a little too specific for Medium. I have cross-posted a few articles with varying results, but for now I think I’ll separate the two. I’ve tried having a personal blog for fun but I never kept up with it and now it’s been almost two years since I added to it.

I get to write for work sometimes, but I don’t always get to pick the topic. I did a guest blog post for a local trails association over the summer. I wrote about my favorite parts of my job and I got to choose what I wrote about, but that’s not always the case. Most of the time I write short posts for Facebook and Instagram and slightly longer stories for a press release for an event.

So far on Medium, I’ve written about my job, podcasts I listen to, my at-home yoga practice, my dog, and, most recently, a story about getting a horse out of a ditch. I might be slowly discovering my niche, because I love to write about animals and these stories are usually funny. I have more animal stories on my list of topics, so I think I’ll be posting some of those in the near future.

I see articles once in a while that talk about how we can’t just write what we want to write and expect to make money on Medium. One podcast I listen to, The GaryVee Audio Experience, says otherwise. Gary Vaynerchuck encourages his listeners to create the content they want to create. That way, it’s more meaningful and authentic.
Create Humor Anywhere
By: Laura Mcdonell
Tags: Personal Growth, Spirituality, Productivity, Humor, Optimism

Interested in a Daily Faith Boost?

This post comes from a devotional series called 4:00 AM Faith. It is written each morning and sent in a condensed format to several people. If you are interested in receiving a daily faith boost, email me at lmcdonell2001@yahoo.com and specify if you would like it to be sent as email or text, and if phone number, provide the number.
It’s Lonely at the Top
By: Mandy Fard
Tags: Learning, Inspiration, Work, Careers, Leadership

Image Courtesy of Author

You probably have heard the term it’s lonely at the top. The top, in this case, refers to people who are in leadership positions like managers. It is used to reference the fact that managers have to make decisions that people won’t be happy about. For instance, suppose your manager tells your team they have to work in the coming weekend. How popular will that decision be for the team?

It’s unclear where the phrase originated. Some believe it came from the 1972 song by Randy Newman called, “Lonely at the Top.” However, it’s likely to have been coined much earlier than that. Whoever coined the phrase, there is no doubt what it means. When you are in a leadership position, you won’t have the friends you used to have.

Image Courtesy of Author

While people may not enjoy the decisions you are left to make, they will respect them. Of course, that depends on how you present those decisions. If you are not firm in your handling of decisions, people will read this as being weak. Once that occurs, you will have a difficult time recovering from that perception. Be firm and don’t waiver.

You should get as much information as possible before making decisions. Plenty of leaders will fly off the handle with decisions. They won’t take into account that more information is needed before making the decisions. This causes the wrong decisions to be made. The people who are affected by these decisions will get angry, and you will lose credibility as their leader. Again, once that happens, you will need to work hard to gain their trust back.

When you accept a leadership role, accept the responsibility that goes along with it. People aren’t going to like every choice you make. They need to come to terms with that. You can have an open forum with them to discuss decisions that affect them. However, you are the one who has been put in charge of those decisions. Make them with confidence.

You are going to make mistakes with several decisions. When you believe you have all the necessary information, new facts may emerge to throw the original concept out of whack. There isn’t much you can do about it except finding alternative actions and decisions. Your confidence will mean much for your credibility when this occurs. However, when you exude that confidence, your team will give you the respect you deserve.
Is FOMO Sabotaging Your Financial Well-Being?
By: Chad Hensley
Tags: Budgeting, Money, Social Media, Millennials, Personal Finance

The role of social media

Last year researchers at the University of Glasgow set out to better understand just how serious FOMO is and how social media affects young consumers. The study involved 467 students between 11 and 17 years old. They were each asked to assess their psychological and emotional well-being, including depression, anxiety, sleep quality, and self-esteem. Generally, the teens who were most active on social media reported higher feelings of anxiety, lower self-esteem, and worsened sleep quality. The study hypothesized that social media has subjected users to a new form of societal pressure to always be available, regardless of the repercussions.

But FOMO isn’t just bad for our mental health. It’s bad for our wallets, too.

Another study found that many consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 are combating FOMO with their credit cards. The data shows that almost 40% of millennials have gone into debt to try to keep up with their peers’ social lives. When a friend suggests doing something they can’t actually afford, 27% of millennials report feeling uncomfortable saying “no.” And of the 40% of millennials who have gone into debt to keep up with their friends, 73% have kept their financial struggles a secret.

“Almost 40% of millennials have gone into debt to try to keep up with their peers’ social lives. When a friend suggests doing something they can’t actually afford, 27% of millennials report feeling uncomfortable saying “no.”

Tips to avoid FOMO spending

Is FOMO wreaking havoc on your financial situation? The good news is you’re not alone. Here are a few things you can do today to combat the fear of missing out:

Include the fun stuff in your budget: While you probably won’t do much long-term financial damage with the occasional boozy brunch or taxi ride home, you’re better off calculating these expenses into your monthly budget rather than trying to avoid occasional luxuries all together. The more realistic your budget is, the more likely you are to stick to it.

Be an event planner. By far one of the simplest ways to avoid the fear of missing out (while steering clear of credit card debt) is taking control of your social life. When you are involved in organizing social events and activities for friends, family, colleagues, and other members of your social circle, you can encourage everyone to do things that fall in line with your financial priorities.

Have a social media detox: Our dependence on mobile devices is well-documented. In fact, from dog videos on Instagram to family vacation photo albums on Facebook, American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with content. Try fighting FOMO by cutting back on screen time and concentrating more of your attention on personal goals and achievements.
Introduction to SQL for Data Analyst
By: Riza Purnaramadhan
Tags: Sql, Data Science, Database, Data Analyst, Programming

Types of SQL Commands

The types of SQL commands that I find a lot are divided into 4 types, namely Data Definition Language(DDL), Data Manipulation Language(DML), Data Control Language(DCL), and Transaction Control Language(TCL), but a data analyst, actually enough to master DDL & DML, because in fact they often interact with type DDL & DML commands, maybe if you want to be a database administrator then will often interact with DCL & TCL command types. The following is a picture of the distribution of the types from the SQL commands:

Image Created by Author

Data Definition Language (DDL)

DDL (Data Definition Language) is a command that functions more to manipulate database structures, such as creating, modifying, and deleting. The following are the commands contained in the DDL and their functions:

CREATE: create a database or table.

create a database or table. ALTER: change the structure of the table, such as changing table names, adding columns, changing columns, deleting columns, and assigning attributes to columns.

change the structure of the table, such as changing table names, adding columns, changing columns, deleting columns, and assigning attributes to columns. DROP: delete database or table.

Data Manipulation Language (DML)

DML (Data Manipulation Language) is a command in the SQL programming language that is used to manipulate data in a database. The following are the commands contained in the DML and their functions:

INSERT: insert new data into a table.

insert new data into a table. SELECT: selects and displays columns from a table or even multiple columns from a table.

selects and displays columns from a table or even multiple columns from a table. UPDATE: change/edit data in a table.

change/edit data in a table. DELETE: delete data from a table.

Data Control Language (DCL)

Data Control Language (DCL) functions to control and manipulate the database permissions itself. Simply put, Data Control Language (DCL) functions to control access rights (Privileges) and manipulate the USER Database. The following are the commands contained in the DCL and their functions:

GRANT: this command is used to grant admin permissions to a user.

REVOKE: unlike GRANT which grants access rights, REVOKE has the right to revoke the access rights of a user.

Transaction Control Language (TCL)

TCL commands deal with transactions in the database. The following are the commands contained in the TCL and their functions:
FoodPanda Got Annoying Bugs
Tags: Qualityassurance, Testing, QA, Bugs, Foodpanda

Everyone living in southeast Asia already knows about FoodPanda. FoodPanda is a mobile food delivery marketplace owned by Berlin-based company Delivery Hero SE and operates in about 50 countries. It is mostly active in the Asia Pacific, Bulgaria, and Romania. It is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

We are also regular users of this application, as with our current situation with COVID-19 and all the pandemic issues food delivery application was helpful to provide the food in the doorstep with no human touch needed.

But we as testers, we were curious to see what are the full capabilities of the application so we do what we do best we got it STACKED.

Below you will see the issues or bugs we found while only trying to order food through the mobile application.

BUG # 1 (Occurring on iOS Devices)

Every user usually notices these offers that FoodPanda is offering every week or every month. It is such an amazing offer (as shown in picture A) they have but sadly when one of our testers clicked on one of the offers he got the message pop up in the second image (as shown in picture B).

Issue:

The user when clicking the offers he is expected to see another screen showing the list of the restaurants who have this offer applied to. But in our case, we got a pop-up message, which is :

A. It is noticeable that the pop-up message shown is an error message.

B. The navigation to the next screen or window was interrupted due to several possible ways.

Expected Result:

New window screen showing the list of restaurants that the offer applies to.

Steps To Recreate:

Open the FoodPanda Application Login if you are not logged in The homepage will show like Picture A Click on the “Shop Malaysia Online” offer A pop-up message should appear

Actual Result:
The Non-Coder’s Guide to Image Classification
By: Marguerite Siboni
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Data Science, Image Classification

These thousands of images are given to the model along with their correct category to teach the model patterns that do and don’t occur in images of hot dogs. This process is known as training. At the start of training, a model can not guess categories very well because it hasn’t had a chance to learn much. As it makes incorrect guesses, it adjusts it’s method of evaluating to try not to make that mistake again. As it makes correct guesses, it reinforces the process it used to get the correct answer.

Google Image search is constantly scraping¹ the internet gathering images to give us a useful tool. At the same time, it is creating a large dataset to classify images in to just about any category. Anywhere that you are storing or sharing photos, there is likely some sort of data collection happening behind the scenes by the company you are using for that task.

There is a lot of discussion to be had about the ethics of companies gathering and utilizing data that I will not get in to here. For the purpose of understanding image classifiers, it is important only to understand that it takes several thousand images of something to create a tool that can classify that object. Image classification is becoming increasingly ubiquitous for several reasons including that large imagesets are now readily available.

Neural Networks

The most effective type of model for processing images is called a neural network. Neural networks are named after the neurons in our brain because they are built to process information and recognize patterns in a manner that mimics the neurons in our brain.

In a neural network, information is passed from one point (known as a node) to the next to move through stages known as layers. In the image below, each square is a node and each column of squares is a layer.

Neural Network with 4 layers and 16 nodes

The input layer (leftmost column) consists of all the pixel information from a given image. The output layer (rightmost column) consists of each category of classification for the image.

Pixels shown at input layers and categories shown at output layer

Between any pair of adjacent layers, there is math going on from all nodes of one layer to all nodes of the other layer. In the image below, there are arrows added for every relationship where the neural network is making a calculation.

Relationships between nodes are shown by arrows.

In order to make a classification, each node combines the information from the arrows pointing to it. This combination leads the node to either turn off or turn on. Nodes that are on and on to varying intensities. If the node is turned on, it will pass information on to the next node and this process repeats.

At the output layer, the node for the category that is turned on to the highest intensity is selected as the classification for the image.

Each of these layers are a particular type of neural network layer known as a Dense Layer.
The Red, White, and Blue
By: Greg Beatty
Tags: Flags, Politics, Relationships, Fiction, America

A contemporary American fable

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Gayle reached out to touch her client on the arm. “Barkhado, this is sure to pass. And we did help your daughter. Some.”

Barkhado nodded, silent. She straightened her hijab and posture with dignity, let one hand rest on her daughter’s shoulder, and made her way out the door with speaking.

“What’s her problem?”

Gayle looked at her receptionist, startled. Nancy was usually just the right blend of professionalism and warmth. She rarely overstepped, and when she did, it was always with a note of compassion. To have her sound so abrupt startled Gayle into sharing more than she usually would have.

“It’s her little girl. The current political climate’s got her daughter terrified. She’s started crying any time she sees the American flag, or any other combination of red, white, and blue.”

“Well, maybe they should just go back where they came from.”

Gayle saw red herself for a moment. She took a breath, then another. “Nancy, last night Barkhado’s little girl started crying uncontrollably when she saw her father. In his Marine dress uniform. Which is blue, with red stripes and a white hat.”

She stared at her receptionist. Nancy just shrugged. “So?”

“But…” Gayle wasn’t sure she could say more without lashing out. She carefully and consciously stopped speaking. She went back into her office, taking great care to close the door as quietly as Barkhado had. For now.

THE END
#018 — Drones in Mining with Emmanuel de Maistre
By: Ian Smith
Tags: Commercial Drones, Mining, Drones, Photogrammetry, Podcast

Redbird, a French drone software company, was recently purchased by Airware, an American drone software company. A few weeks before the sale was made public, Ian and Emmanuel, Redbird’s then-CEO (now VP of AEC at Airware), recorded this podcast episode. Emmanuel and Ian discuss how large mining and construction companies use drones and why they’re important to them. Get a glimpse inside of Redbird as the negotiations for the sale of the company were likely well underway.

Listen to the podcast on the website by clicking here.
İyi Yazmak Üzerine - Part II
By: Safa Kutlu
Tags: Yazmak, Blogging, Türkçe, Kitap, William Zinsser

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Amazingly, a cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death! Wouldn’t want to turn on the light and see a headless cockroach running around. Yikes! __________________ Thanks…
By: Terry Mansfield
Tags: Poetry, Nature, Cockroach, Fun Facts, Short Form

How long can a cockroach live without its head?

Amazingly, a cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death!

Wouldn’t want to turn on the light and see a headless cockroach running around. Yikes!

Image from Encyclopedia Britannica

__________________

Thanks for reading.
Meet Hiroki | NEM Japan Lead
Tags: Nem, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Japan, Spotlight

Hiroki aka ‘The Ninja’ came to visit the NEM Team in Melbourne last week and we had the opportunity to sit down with him and learn more about NEM Japan and also show him what we’ve been working on. He also met with some of our Ecosystem Members in Australia and learnt more about the projects that are utilising the NEM Blockchain.

Hiroki is currently the Country Leader for NEM Japan and has been working with NEM since April 2018 and was previously volunteering before that. His focus is on educating the community by hosting NEM101 meetups in different cities around Japan and to increase the popularity of NEM payments. He is now using what he’s learnt in Melbourne to work on expanding his team to focus on growing business adoption.

He previously worked at adidas Japan as a Product Development Co-ordinator and helped manage trade shows. He discovered NEM through his interest of Bitcoin and blockchain technology and was convinced that NEM could not only be used for transactions but could also become a platform for social change.

Hiroki meeting our Ecosystem Members
Silent Night Shattered
By: Andrew Wlos
Tags: Creativity, Creative Writing, Poetry, Poem, Haiku

Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.

Follow
How to create a Virtual environment in Pycharm?
By: Tharaka Munasinghe
Tags: Pycharm Ide, Virtual Environment, How To, Python

Hello!

If you are a newbie to python, you probably need to learn how to create a virtual environment for your python project. So, this article is for you 💙

What is a virtual environment?

In Python, a virtual environment creates an isolated environment for each project. By doing this, every project can have its own dependencies regardless of what dependencies the other project are employing.

Why do developers need virtual environments?

Let's understand the question of “why?” with a simple example:

Imagine that you are working with 2 projects, project A and project B. Project A works with TensorFlow 1.10.0 while project B works with TensorFlow 2.3.0. In such situations, installing the versions globally may create conflicts. Therefore in such situations, maintaining dependencies of each project in isolation is very useful.

As you now know why virtual environments are required, let's get started with creating one!

Step 1: Create a new project

Create a new project and give it a name

Then, select the radio button with the label “New environment using” and select Virtualenv from the dropdown.

Step 2: Create a virtual environment

Next, give a location to the virtual environment and select the base interpreter.

Screenshot by author

Here, if you check the checkbox labelled “Inherit global site-packages”, all the globally installed libraries and packages will be inherited by this project’s virtual environment.

When you click on the “Create” button, the virtual environment will be created.

Screenshot by author

Once the virtual environment is created, you can see the venv directory under your project folder (see the image below).

Screenshot by author

Bravo! you have now created the virtual environment for your project.

Any edits, deletes or installations of new packages to this virtual environment will only be available for the particular project. It will not interfere with the other projects that you work on.

Step 03: Installing a package to the virtual environment

As the virtual environment is now set up, you can install any library into it by using the command

pip install <package-name>

Example: I am installing NumPy to my virtual environment

pip install numpy

Now, if you go to File → Settings →Project →Project Interpreter, you can see NumPy installed in my virtual environment

Screenshot by author

Now you can continue with your project and install dependencies without interfering other projects.

Hope you learnt something useful 😊

Stay home! Stay safe!
Transmutation
By: Kara B. Imle
Tags: Meditation, Poetry, Nature, Love, Poems On Medium

Photo by KS KYUNGon Unsplash

If you were a guru

and I were a wildflower

I would grow quietly next to you

while you meditated under a baobab tree.

Rain, wind, sun and shade

see me swaying at your knee

while you breathe, or forget to breathe

or shift to ease your breath.

I watch the tree’s magic slowly

twine its branches up your spine

its night-blooming flowers falling

freely into your open palms.

When your crown begins to grow roots in the sky

I smile: you

are nearly at the gates now.

And the day your hair unfurls young leaves

I sing you the story of yourself

in words you can finally hear.
Redux in React
By: Nicky Liu
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Reactjs, Redux, Developer

Want cool Future Vision Merch? Check out our store here

React is all about moving parts that pass information to each other. You will notice sometimes you have really long chains that go through several containers and several components. This can be a hassle if the data got messed up in one of the steps and you have to slowly backtrack and look through each part to find the error. there is where Redux comes into play! Redux stores all of your state information in a separate object, and any component can get the information it needs from this object. So instead of going home => container1 => component1=> component2, it will go home => Redux Object => component2. Lets see how this all works!

First is the reducer function.

You have two objects that are separate from everything else, the state and the action. The state contains, well, the state of your page, and the action contains the instructions to update that state.

let state = {name: "abc"}

let action = {type: "JOE-IFY"}

To allow action to modify state, you need a function.

function changeState(state, action) {

if (action.type === 'JOE-IFY') {

return {name: 'Joe'}

}

}

If the action type is ‘JOE-IFY’, change the state of name to be “Joe”. There can be many different commands to change names, typically a switch case it used. However, to make sure a null or undefined is never returned a default case is added that returns the previous state.

function changeState(state, action) {

switch (action.type) {

case 'JOE-IFY':

return {name: 'Joe'}

default:

return: state

}

}

Now if you ran the changeState function with the state and “JOE-IFY” you would get {name: “Joe”}.

If you had another action type, for example to change the name to “Bob” it would look like:

function changeState(state, action) {

switch (action.type) {

case 'JOE-IFY':

return {name: 'Joe'}

case 'BOB-IFY':

return {name: 'Bob'}

default:

return: state

}

}

Now if you instead ran it with the function “BOB-IFY” you would get {name: “Bob”}. This changeState function is called the “reducer”, as it reduces the state and action into a new state.

You can make it more complicated as well, since an action can have multiple attributes.

let state = {name: "abc"}

let action = {type: "CHANGE_NAME",

newName: "Spooderman"}

You will have to change the function such that it changes the state of name to that of newName. Something like:

function changeState(state, action) {

switch (action.type) {

case 'CHANGE_NAME':

return {name: action.newName}

default:

return: state

}

}

This is the gist of how a reducer function works.
8 Strategies Taylor Swift Used to Launch ‘Folklore’
By: Paul Martin
Tags: Taylor Swift, Marketing, Music, Folklore, Digital Marketing

8 Strategies Taylor Swift Used to Launch ‘Folklore’

She personally thanked fans with the help of tech

Credit: Taylor Swift

Dropping her latest album Folklore, released on July 24th, Taylor Swift broke several chart records within its first week.

Though from the outside it looked very organic, almost accidental, a closer look reveals Swift and her team at Republic Records used multiple tactics and strategies to maximise the impact of the launch.

There’s plenty to learn, so let’s dive in.
moving towards AND
By: Ani Vidrine
Tags: Personal Growth, Spirituality, Poetry, Metaphysics, Transformation

Poems From The Porch

photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash.com

Please acknowledge both the Light and the dark

within and around you

so that you may embody humility, compassion, and wisdom.

~

Please acknowledge both the scientific and the romantic

within and around you

so that you may appreciate a variety of perspectives.

~

Please acknowledge both the mythological and the literal

within and around you

so that you may embrace multiple ways of knowing.

~

Please acknowledge both the known and the unknown

within and around you

so that you may recognize the fractal nature of reality.

~

Either/or reconcile in and in the cosmic dance of transformation.

~

What dualisms do you espouse

that leave you feeling

self-righteous,

isolated, and

paralyzed?

~

Allow the and to happen

and you will feel the empowerment of resurrection.

~

For resurrection includes the either and the or

in a new configuration that receives, and then offers, healing.
“I wanted to do the deal but i couldn’t convince my partners” isn’t an Explanation, it’s an Excuse
By: Hunter Walk
Tags: Startup

While this hasn’t happened to any of our portfolio CEOs in a while, there’s one reason for a VC passing on a funding round that just sets me off: “I wanted to do the deal but couldn’t convince my partners.” This isn’t an explanation, it’s an excuse.

If you are a check-writing partner at a venture fund and you offer up this sentence to a startup CEO it means one of three things:

a) You blew the process by not enrolling your partnership

b) You didn’t want to put your neck on the line in the face of some resistance

c) You never believed in the first place, and are blaming your partners versus just passing

When I’m on the cap table I can help a founder navigate this to try and avoid going the distance with a potential investor. And if you’re a GP with tough firm dynamics, I can maybe help you navigate those. But if you put founding team through a full diligence and take them to a partner meeting, only to come back with this, RIP.

On the flip side, I do think it’s is fine for a VC to honestly say things like “we’ve got a lot of institutional scarring around your vertical so I’m going to need a little more time and help to get my partners comfortable.” Or, “I’m not going to be able to move as quickly as you need because of some firm dynamics, so unless you can stretch your timeline a bit, it might not make sense for us to take this forward.”

That’s all part of building trust and visibility for a CEO into the way you operate. And a founder working in an industry that has some hair on it, or is otherwise less understood by the generalist investor, is of course going to need to help their sponsor and her partners. Maybe I’ll write a separate post at some point about the process with investors who have a “prepared mind” for your startup versus those who are still developing their own thesis.
The Secret Society of Seltzer
By: Allee Manning
Tags: Social Media, Beverage, Seltzer, Facebook, Community

I am now the sort of person who knows about things like limited-edition coffee seltzer, because I have become a member of a somewhat-secret seltzer society called “Now Fizzing.” (My entry is granted after I track down members on Twitter and share my seltzer-loving truth.) It’s a closed Facebook group that’s been around since November 21, 2014, and it’s composed of more than 3,100 members from around the world. Within the group, its members offer and ask for tips on where to find sought-after flavors and brands (the Polar Seltzer’s seasonal flavors are always a huge hit — right now, everyone is on the hunt for its Blood Orange Lemonade, Starfruit Lemonade, and Strawberry Lemonade Seltzer’ade flavors), share selfies and videos of themselves trying new kinds of seltzer for the first time (called “seltzies” and “fizzeos,” respectively), and discuss other aspects of their lives through the lens of the drink that has brought them all together. There’s a two-year-old “star” of Now Fizzing, the daughter of a member who is being filmed doing a March Madness–style seltzer taste test. The group even has its own lexicon: Seltzer is “fizz,” unflavored varieties are “ghosts,” and other clear sweetened beverages that are simply masquerading as seltzer are called “snakes.”

Now Fizzing was launched about a year before seltzer became the “it” drink that it is today. There has already been much ink spilled over the beverage’s meteoric rise, but to this day, even the makers of seltzer find themselves stunned and confused by the sudden trendiness of their product. Lisbeth Crowley, senior brand manager at Polar, tells me that the brand considers itself “[an] overnight success 136 years in the making” but can’t seem to figure out why this has happened. (Polar’s website states: “It’s not unusual for us to hear about people traveling hours to get their hands on some or hoard them once they learn we’ve stopped production [on a limited-edition flavor]. We even get passionate emails, tweets, and posts about how certain flavors are life-changing (yeah, seltzer drinkers have a knack for hyperbole.)”)

Chris Taylor, senior vice president of Boylan Bottling Co. and a member of Now Fizzing, chalks up seltzer’s trendiness to all the innovation going on within the space, paired with the drink’s positioning as a healthy alternative to juice or soda. Say what you will about the seltzer craze that has swept the nation, tweet your vitriolic La Croix memes, or lambast the millennials for their obsession with something you see as (literally) devoid of substance, people love this drink. But few people love it as much as the Fizz Fam does.

“On paper, [Now Fizzing] sounds crazy,” admits Jon Solomon, the New Jersey–based record label head and radio show host who created the group with his friends four years ago. “But I think when you’re part of it, you realize that it’s this unexpectedly wonderful, special thing.”
The Dictatorship of Time
Tags: Satire, Writing, Ideas, The Bad Influence, 50 Words

The perpetual battle against this cruel dictatorship; bureaucrats monitoring our every move, enforcing the system, waking us each morning with their inane beeping.

You can escape the clutches of time, throw away that alarm clock, get into work when you are ready because…

Lateness is simply a state of mind.
An invitation to be a part of Literary Impulse — a literary magazine
By: Editorial Literary Impulse
Tags: Short Story, Poetry, Literature, Writing, Writing Tips

An invitation to be a part of Literary Impulse — a literary magazine

For its inaugural edition. Inviting poems, stories and creative non-fiction.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” Tolkien says through Gandalf. And we thought starting a literary space like this would a good way to do something with the time we have.

So, with due humbleness, we hereby invite you to be a part of Literary Impulse’s journey, a new entrant into the world of Medium Publications. A few rules that we will follow are —

It is a literary magazine. We love literature. And for literature, we are here. We will publish a total of 10 pieces every fortnight.

5 poems

2 very short stories (3000 words)

2 creative non-fiction essays (<2000 words)

1 review — of a book, or art piece, or even a poem (<2000 words) If we get enough entries, the first edition will come out on 3rd May, or then we will wait for the next Sunday. No listicles. Nor self-help articles. No motivational essays. We don’t care if the writers are enrolled in the Medium Partner program. Submissions open all around. Please check the SUBMISSION GUIDELINES page for details. Once you share your desire to join us, and we add you, you can share as many entries as you want.

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.” E M Foster.

Since it is a new publication, we are also looking for Editors. For that email at impulseliterary@gmail.com. And we will take it from there. For now, Nachi Keta and Priyanka Srivastava are editors.

But, remember that if you are an editor, none of your pieces shall be published on LI.

We are tagging some of you. Please comment on the Submission page and let us know of your willingness. Ask your queries, if you have any, here.

If you know a fellow writer whom you think shall be a great addition to a “literary venture” such as LI, please tag him using the comment thread of this Story.

One of the Lost Generation stars, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once said, “that is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” We are looking for those souls with whom we can share that feeling of belonging.

We invite

Thank you and Best of luck. Don’t forget to tag people in comments, if you feel like this is a good thing. Let’s see how this “experiment” fairs.
How Does It Feel, Mr. Tree?
By: Aysia C.
Tags: Poetry, Fiction

How Does It Feel, Mr. Tree?

I know for certain you must feel

Photo by Gilly Stewart on Unsplash

A poem:

How does it feel?

I know for certain you must feel,

the winds ripping at your chest.

You’ve been on this earth for so long,

that death may be your only wish.

How does it feel

When beasts choose your skin for their meal,

when young children become obsessed

with picking your hairs by the throng,

when axemen want you to perish.

How does it feel?

I pity you much with great zeal

and in my heart, you’ve made a nest.

Dear Mr. Tree, so bold and strong,

I pray you have no more anguish.
Melbourne startup Brauz closes $2.25 million seed funding round
By: Mat Beeche
Tags: Funding, Innovation, Commerce, Brauz, Ecommerce

Melbourne-based retail app Brauz has announced the close of a $2.25 million seed funding round, which will be used to help accelerate the expansion of the startup’s curated online shopping marketplace.

As the app’s features continue to grow, the startup is aiming to increasing the number of partnerships with stores, with the goal of partnering with 2000 stores by mid-2018, before leaping to 20,000 by 2020.

Currently in beta, Brauz helps personalise a customer’s shopping experience by using a predictive algorithm which uses a customer’s preferences to recommend numerous products, brands and offers.

Recommendations on the app refer a shopper to a traditional bricks and mortar store, rather than their online shopping platform, showing them where exactly they can find the items they’re interested in nearby.

Select items on the platform can also be viewed in virtual reality (VR) through a basic VR headset, such as the Google Cardboard, allowing shoppers to browse products in a realistic fashion.

Beginning its journey in 2014, the startup was established by founder Lee Hardham as a way to empower brick-and-mortar stores in the growing digital economy.

Launching only four months ago, Brauz underwent a rapid spurt of growth in expanding its brand partnerships and features, a phase which Hardham attributed to having a locally-based development team, which now contains 7 members.

“We’re excited to be building and growing our platform with some of the best talent in the local industry. Having in-house developers has allowed us to innovate faster, meaning we can control our own growth,” he said.

Brauz stated that the company had previously received offers from investors totalling $9 million, although these were declined since the investors didn’t match Brauz’s “brand values”.

Securing the $2.25 million total funding, the startup will look to expand on the platform’s existing technology features through research and development, as it gears up to further its offering internationally.

To support the global expansion, the startup has announced that it will be heading to the US in September for its Series A funding round, with Hardham saying he’s looking forward to watching the business grow over the next six months.

“We have a one-of-a-kind offering, and people are recognising the potential impact our technology will have on the retail industry,” he said.

Image: Lee Hardham.
Anatomy of a Power Call in Talko
By: Talko Team
Tags: Communication, Productivity, Mobile

The ability to flow between LIVE talking and messaging in Talko calls is one of the features our customers love most. It keeps the conversation together in one place. It allows key moments to be bookmarked for later reference and followup. It makes distributed, mobile teams more productive.

Of course, many Talko calls are simple — LIVE and fast. Get done, get back to work or home to see the family. We love those types of calls as much as anyone!

But others involve both LIVE and not-LIVE conversation that may extend over time. They often include photos and/or metadata (tags and flags), which are later searchable. Design reviews, project planning calls and account status calls are examples where this is common.

This screenshot is an example of what such a call looks like in practice. It’s from our own team’s use of the app. The topic is the technical design for a feature we’re adding to our Slack integration. The call has a subject — “#slack #bidirectional”. You can see how the conversation flowed:

Hemant rang Shir. They talked for 51 seconds. They realized they needed more clarification on the feature requirements. So they added Matt to the call as a guest. The three of them spoke LIVE for 40 minutes. During those 40 minutes Shir posted a text message (masked) and there were 3 bookmarks created. Those bookmarks are synchronized to the spot where the discussion on that topic happened. If anyone needs to recall how we agreed to “populate slack pairwise”, they needn’t listen to the 40 minutes of conversation (nor review meeting minutes). They just tap the bookmark to listen at that moment. This replay ability was especially helpful for Shir in this call because he’s new to the team and is coming up to speed on our technical designs. Later the same day — after Shir, Hemant and Matt had hung up — Shir had some more specific design ideas. Hemant wasn’t available at the time. Instead of waiting for him, Shir sent a voice message, enabling Hemant to listen on his own time. While listening to the message, Hemant bookmarked what Shir said about the “internal protocol buffer”. He knew he’d want to come back to that and follow up with Shir. Finally, Shir and Hemant re-connected LIVE for ~11 minutes. During this time, they solidified a final design.

This is one example of how Talko helps busy, on-the-go teams get important stuff done in a pain-free way. Plus it’s fun:-)

We’d love to hear what you think of these capabilities!
Quick Start: Unboxing Istio Service Mesh
By: Kwong Hung Yip
Tags: Service Mesh, Rancher, Istio, Kubernetes, K8s

To all who are serving their duties and staying at home or, I hope you are doing well during the spread of the coronavirus epidemic.

As a Kubernetes developer, Istio service mesh might have drawn your attention, you might urge to explore it but you found that you needed a Kubernetes cluster first. An easier option to prepare one is Minikube or MicroK8s, these two platforms are fully supported by Istio. Furthermore, you might want to try it with a multiple nodes cluster, which is closed to your production environment in the future.

Set up a multiple nodes cluster is not a single-command task, but it is practically achievable and affordable. I had discussed how to set up my home lab with the Rancher server in my previous post, and I will tell you how did I learn Istio with my home lab.

A brief introduction

Istio Service Mesh improves service-to-service communication in Kubernetes cluster by allowing the fine-grained control and monitoring the traffic. While Kubernetes Service gives the basic load balancing function above Pods, Istio takes one more step, which makes both incoming and outgoing traffic from Pods manageable and configurable by injecting an Envoy proxy sidecar into the Pod.

The advantage of sidecar pattern is transparent to applications, in the other words, it means you don’t need a delegated client in your code; your call to other services within the mesh is only a plain REST call; service discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking, or retry policy can be decoupled from your application. The independency from applications gives you the freedom for program language or tools selection and you still can enjoy the benefit of Service Mesh.

Install Istio

Installing Istio is pretty straightforward, the Istio Getting Started Guide is more than enough to get started but first, you need to have your Kubernetes cluster ready. I prepared my cluster with the Rancher server, and Istio also supports other Kubernetes platforms likes MicroK8s and Minikube.

After downloading the package and set istioctl CLI in the PATH variable, I installed Istio with the demo profile, the profile installed the istio-ingressgateway service for later use. I also appended the istio-injection label into the default namespace, afterward for each Pod created in that namespace, an Envoy proxy will be injected into the Pod.

istioctl manifest apply --set profile=demo

kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled

My example setup

Referring to the helloworld example from Istio, I prepared an example starting from an empty yaml file, and I believe that is the best way to verify my understanding.

The example aimed to expose a simple Nginx service outside of the Kubernetes cluster and assumed that the service was rolling out a new version. At this point, half of the incoming requests had already routed to the new version, and another half were still handled by the old version. The following diagram shows the deployment overview and relationship among different resources, and all yaml files can be found in my GitHub repo.
Power’s off
By: Antoinette Nevitt
Tags: California, Current Events, Poetry, Climate Change, Wildfire

Power’s off

a poem about PG&E’s decision to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of homes in northern California.

Photo by Joshua Newton on Unsplash

We have no power

in our town –

no water from the well,

no lights,

no toilets,

no refrigerator,

no stove.

The inconvenience

goes on and on.

But neither are

there tankers in the sky

or toxic smoke and embers

erupting from wildfire tornadoes

creating their own weather

like a surprise from hell,

no to-go bags in the car,

or worries that we won’t

get out in time.

So, I could not be more grateful

for the blue sky,

for a quiet day that isn’t

like the last one

for a California town

as the winds pick up.
Have No Time to Write?
By: Jon Hawkins
Tags: Creativity, Productivity, Work, Success, Writing

Time management

It seems obvious, I know. But time management is actually how I find time to write. When I am faced with what feels like 101 things to do in a day, I always revert back to the ABC Prioritisation method.

The ABC method is a psychological method that was popular in the 1970s. It involves categorising everything on your to-do list into three categories:

Item’s A are of most importance, B second importance and C least importance.

Of course, you have to be careful when categorising tasks. A lot of people fall into the trap of wrongfully categorising tasks they don’t like in to list C as an attempt to avoid doing them, even if they are important. So when categorising tasks, make sure to answer honestly, rather than picking tasks you enjoy.

Most days, for part-time writers who have a lot of other things going on, writing will fall on the C list, given the overabundance of important day to day tasks taking priority on the A list. Here, writing is supererogatory, it’s great if you can get all your other more important tasks done in the day and still have the time to write, but it’s not required.

If I’m being honest, it’s on very few occasions that I will write when it falls on my C list, when something is at the bottom of the pile I very rarely get to it.

Instead, the time to write is when the task falls on your A list. These are days where you have few or no other important tasks to do, weekends, days off, holidays. Here, writing can have your undivided attention and will allow you to produce your best work. No distractions, just time to sit and work.

A common response to this is usually “those are my days off, I want to relax!”

Perhaps you are right, but part-time writing ought not to be a chore. You should enjoy writing and want to prioritise it above lazy days off. And if you don’t wish too, then perhaps you are not cut out to be a part-time writer, or perhaps you ought to change what you write about or the way you go about it so that you do.

The best thing about the ABC model is that it ensures that you make the most of each day, preventing procrastination and only taking time off when you are satisfied that you have fulfilled your full potential.