fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Differences Between a Junior, Mid-Level, and Senior Developer
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Software Engineering, Tech, Technology

Coding

Despite what most people think, coding is not about communication with a computer. Coding is about communicating with humans and instructing computers. Eventually, code gets compiled and translated to zeroes and ones.

Code has to make sense for other developers that have work with it in the future. A new team that has never seen the code before should be able to open the code and start working on new features or bug fixes. This is where the big difference is between junior and senior developers.

I will leave out the mid-level developer in this comparison because the mid-level developer is kind of a gray area when it comes to coding skills. Obviously, it is somewhere in between the junior and senior. It probably leans more towards the senior side. This mainly has to do with experience, since mid-level developers have probably been through the whole development cycle at least once. They have made a lot of the most simple mistakes and learned from them.

How to sniff out the junior developer?

Junior developers are inexperienced. Some just graduated and are starting their first full-time job. The mindset of a junior developer often is to just make the code work. Working software and good software are considered the same.

Programming straightforward code is hard. And it’s something that junior developers don’t do. Junior developers write fancy code. You can recognize the junior developer by quirky one-liners and overly complex abstractions. This is the junior developer's way of showing off and letting the other developers know how good they can code. And it’s wrong.

Junior developers focus on the computer side of the code at the expense of the human side.

And what about the senior developer?

When looking at the code of a senior developer, you might think: is this all there is? Where’s the rest of the code? A senior developer writes simple, straightforward, and maybe even dumb code. This is one of the biggest qualities that a developer can have when it comes to programming. A senior developer follows the KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid.

A senior developer thinks about their code in a different way than the junior developer. Code written by a senior developer will be made with maintainability and scalability in mind. This is a totally different mindset than the junior developer has—the senior is thinking about the people who have to work with the code, while the junior is just thinking about making it work for the computer.
Product Update: A new Social Media Automation Platform
By: João Romão
Tags: Facebookpages, Facebook, Marketing Automation, Social Media Marketing, Social Media

So, at the end of the day, we have professionals that spend too much time planning and executing their strategies and yet struggle to make the most out of Social.

This set the tone for the developments we’re hereby presenting. Over the last couple months, and with the feedback gathered over the last quarters from customers and partners, we’ve been renewing our Facebook Automation Platform.

Here’s a list of the main updates of this feature:

New Automation Rule Manager: you can now create multiple concurrent rules for automation. Rules are automation settings that trigger a post on a Facebook Page.

Facebook Page Selector: tailored for multi-brand companies, allows for selection of multiple Facebook Pages to post to. Useful for cross post strategies.

Ignoring old content : avoids content older than a set date to be automatically posted on a Facebook Page.

: avoids content older than a set date to be automatically posted on a Facebook Page. Ignore content posted on the page: verifies if the post was already posted by GetSocial or by anyone on the page (manually).

Will only post content fresher than a week and if that content hasn’t been posted in the facebook page in the last 12 hours

Location/Path Selector: allows automating content based on its URL structure, with options to Include and Exclude paths. A user may exclude content from the /travel section to be automated, for example.

Includes content from the Fashion & Travel sections, while excluding URLs from the past season (2016)

Meta Tag Selector: allows automating content based on its URL meta tags (name & property types). A user may automate only content from author “John Doe”, for example.

Includes all content with Joao Romao as author or any content with meta-keywords tech, ai or machine learning

Custom Automation Triggers: On v1, automation would be triggered based on GetSocial’s virality score. On v2, a user may select custom triggers in a time and engagement dimensions. For example, a user may automate any content that had more than 350 shares on Facebook during the last week.

Automates content with more visits than 70% of other articles and at least 1k shares on Facebook

New Delivery Settings: On v1, a user could select for a fully automated solution (post x articles during a specific time window) or use a scheduling tool (post articles at specific dates & times). On v2, a user may use one of three settings:
Tracy Chapman was Ahead of Her Time
By: Sharaf Sheik-Ali
Tags: Awareness, Music, Politics, Revolution, Mindfulness

Somewhat accidentally I came across Tracy Chapman’s album released in the 1990’s. Her song lyrics were nothing but genius.

In her song ‘Talkin about a revolution’, Tracey reflects on the rising tide of socialism and the impacts of capitalism.

‘While they’re standing in the welfare lines

Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation

Wasting time in the unemployment lines

Sitting around waiting for a promotion’

It is clear that society has created a three-tier system. Low income class, middle and higher earners. It is portrayed to us that it is apparently easy to climb the ladder; to move from one to the other, but in reality this is often not the case. It is faulty, easy for some, difficult for others. Many factors play their role in being able to climb socio-economic paradigms (of which I won’t delve into here).

It is, therefore, almost inevitable that those at the bottom, who pay the highest price in terms of day to day burden, who find it difficult to climb this ladder will eventually at least think about revolting back against the system and ‘get their share’.

The rise of socialist labour with Corbyn at the helm is an example. He argued that it is those at the bottom who, in their greatest numbers, have a substantial portion of the decision power in a free democracy. They are, therefore, the prime targets for those higher up the social-economic ladder who do not want a ‘revolution’ or ‘change’ in current circumstances. They will be told how and when they should use their ‘voting’ power. It seems as if those at the bottom of the social-economic paradigm are the easiest to persuade with a few add campaigns and empty promises. There could be many reasons for this such as higher education, data, lack of information and so on (not elaborated here).

This is what I think Tracey was reflecting on with ‘talkin bout revolution’, ‘standing in the welfare lines’ and ‘crying at the doors of those armies of salvation’. Those at the bottom are indeed thinking of revolting, but they cannot fully commit as they are tied down by the elite to do as and what they say. It is cyclical. The tide of revolution happens, followed by the quash from the elite of society with endless campaigns to make those leading the revolution (often at the bottom) to blame each other of their faults and, alas, give their voting power back to the top.

The cyclical nature of our society. Although the politically aware song failed to replicate the success of its predecessor ‘Fast car’, I extend my thanks to Tracey. It has opened my minds eye a bit more.
When I Look Up At The Sky
By: Dr. Preeti Singh
Tags: Nature, Feelings Become Words, Gratitude, Creativity, Poetry

When I Look Up At The Sky

Prompted poetry: What do you feel when you look at the sky?

Photo by Jaime Dantas on Unsplash

When I look up at the sky I smile,

I begin to think, why the sky has different shades,

Somewhere it is grey and other places blue.

When I look up at the sky,

I remember the peaceful sunrise,

Peeping out of the trees and the hills.

When I look up at the sky,

I feel like a bird flapping its wings,

Flying towards the sky.

When I look up at the sky,

I wish for clouds that rain,

Hoping for a colourful rainbow afterwards.

When I look up at the sky,

I am excited about the sunset,

The promising red hot ball,

In gratitude for the wonderful day.
Create Mobile-Friendly Touch Sliders
By: Anurag Kanoria
Tags: Nodejs, JavaScript, Angular, Programming, React

Getting Started

Since I am using the second method to install and set up Swiper, I will need to add Swiper to my main HTML file.

As you can see, I have my custom styles.css file along with my own JavaScript file. Currently, both styles.css and main.js files are empty.

Adding Swiper to HTML

To add Swiper to our HTML file, we need to put the following code in the body of our HTML.

The swiper-container div class is the container that contains all the HTML code related to Swiper. The swiper-wrapper class contains the slides you want to display. You can replace the dummy text( such as “Slide 1”) with your own HTML components. The swiper-pagination class provides the pagination dots, showing the index of the slides.

It is worth noting that the swiper-container is the main wrapper class. Hence, you can manipulate it to give your touch slider margin, padding, color, width, etc., as per your needs.

The swiper-button-next and swiper-button-prev div class enables the previous and next arrow buttons to facilitate pagination. However, if you don’t want the arrows, you can simply omit this piece of code. The last div class, swiper-scrollbar , provides a scrollbar at the bottom of the slider.

You can give custom height and width to the Swiper as per your needs in your CSS file.

I have given the following values:

The final step to finish setting up Swiper is initializing in JavaScript. You can do it in either the same HTML file or use your custom JS file and link it with the HTML as I have done.

Either way, the script to initialize Swiper should be the same and is given below:

Basic Swiper code gist by the author

As you can see, Swiper takes two parameters. The first is the main container class which has all the elements that Swiper needs, and the second is an object containing properties and configuration of our slider. The container in our case is swiper-container , and we have inputted it as the first parameter in the Swiper function.

We can easily set the scroll direction along with other properties, such as scrollbar, loop, pagination, autoplay, and so on.

Here is what our code looks like right now

This is vertical. To get a horizontal slider with pagination, check the gist below.

Add the direction property in the Swiper function and set it to “horizontal.” I have edited the CSS, too, to center the contents of the slide.

Horizontal Slider with pagination

You can create several cool transition effects as well. To get the full list check the official site.

I will be showcasing some of my favorite effects below.
When You Should Use Machine Learning!
By: Jitendra Singh Balla
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Technology, Mathematics, Data Science

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

As we’re hearing about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning etc. kind of technologies. This article will explain when & where to use Machine Learning technology. So let’s start…

What is Machine Learning?

In simple words “Machine learning is typically used for projects that involve predicting an output or uncovering trends.”

Following are the issues when you can use Machine Learning technology:

1. When the problem is too Complex for Coding!

Writing code for such problems has following issues:
How to Create Dynamic Compositions
By: Matthew Encina
Tags: Photography, UI, Design, Art, Composition

I work with a lot of designers, cinematographers, photographers, and illustrators everyday on high-end commercial projects. From interns all the way up to senior artists who are experts at their craft, I’ve found that the reoccurring skill in all of the most talented artists is their understanding of how to use contrast in their compositions.

First off, when I refer to “contrast,” what I mean is: giving contrast to every visual component that makes up a single frame– value, weight, size, and color. By utilizing contrast, you’re able to control and define hierarchy, movement, and meaning.

To keep things simple and clearly illustrate what I mean, I’ve put together a few greyscale examples that show how adding contrast to your frames can drastically improve your compositions and effectiveness of your storytelling.
Remember When The Biggest Scandal Was Obama’s Latte Salute?
By: Jessica Wildfire
Tags: Politics, Society, Culture, News, Election 2020

Remember When The Biggest Scandal Was Obama’s Latte Salute?

We’re in a completely different world now.

It made the news on every network. Every newspaper and magazine published a story about it. Disembarking from Marine One, Barack Obama saluted an officer with a coffee cup in his hand.

Outrage followed.

For a week, it was all anyone could talk about. Fox News latched onto it first, then everyone else had to say something.

John Stewart was still the host of The Daily Show. He told conservatives they were overreacting. “F*ck you and your false patriotism,” he declared.

Here’s a list of words people used to describe Obama:

Selfish

Callous

Inappropriate

Disrespectful

That was back in 2014. It was a different time, a time when Obama could make the news just by running to Starbucks for some tea. Watching video footage from that era, I don’t know what’s stranger — the lack of masks and social distancing, or the sight of a president with some gravitas who could actually connect with ordinary people.

It feels like a hundred years ago, a far happier moment in history.
Climate Change and Mental Health in Nigeria — #MentallyAwareNigeria
By: Iccdi Africa
Tags: Climate Change, Mental Health, Women

Climate Change poses certain disaster risk like flooding which often leads to a mental health crisis. In 2012 and 2017, there was massive flooding in most states in Nigeria which led to the loss of loved ones and destruction of livelihood. Studies have shown that 75% of mental health conditions are experienced in lower and middle-income countries, and one of the lesser-known and often overlooked effects of climate change includes risks and impact on mental health and that is why we at the International Climate Change Development Initiative (ICCDI) made it our objective to avail ourselves for the 3-day intensive workshop (10th — 12th May, 2019) held at The Vintage Hub, Ikeja, Lagos state.

The workshop, hosted by Mentally Awareness Nigeria Initiative (MANI), United for Global Mental Health (UGMH) and the Mandate Health Empowerment Initiative (MHEI), achieved the following aims and objectives:

· Designed a Mental Health Advocacy Campaign, tagged Speak Your Mind Campaign.

· A better understanding of our target audiences — young people with lived experiences, schools/students, policymakers, private sectors, NGOs and religious leaders.

· Generated over 200+ creative ideas for communication and advocacy tactic were generated

· Developed a prototype and test concepts to implement in the campaign.
DOJ v Google: Don’t Expect Action for Years
By: Paul Dughi
Tags: Google, Government, Antitrust, Digital, Law

It’s going to be a very long time before the government gets a day in court against the big tech firms, at least if you look at the Department of Justice complaint against Google as an indication.

The tentative trial date for court action is September of 2023. “If anybody thought we would be getting to trial quickly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta said during a telephone hearing on the matter (as reported in the Wall Street Journal), “this certainly will dispel that notion.”

The judge also said he wants to get other cases on the same coordinated schedule as legal teams prepare for litigation. This could mean the case brought by Attorneys General in 35 states might ultimately be wrapped into the same prosecution — or at least be handled on the same timetable.

The proposed schedule begins with 450 days for discovery, then several months for review and counter-arguments before any trial would be begin.

You can download and read the DOJ complaint against Google below.

Related
The best big data visualisation techniques
By: Roberta Nicora
Tags: Data Analysis, Big Data, Data Visualization, Information

Nowadays, various industries collect data daily and have access to technological tools and technique to extract useful insights from it. To get the most from their gathered data, enterprises need to visualise it correctly. So, in this post, we’ve outlined the best big data visualisation techniques.

Over the years, many visualisation techniques have been developed, allowing companies to analyse information along with showing it. Nowadays, the most used visualisation methodologies include histogram, line plot, pie chart, table, bar chart, flow chart, scatter plot and treemap.

Histogram

A histogram represents the distribution of a continuous variable over a while. This technique usually shows data in Machine Learning along with underlining frequency distribution, skewness and outliers.

Line plot

This is the most simple big data visualisation technique. It represents the relationship and dependence of one variable to another.

Pie chart

Mostly used in presentations, these graphics show the proportions and percentages between categories by dividing a circle into equal sections. Each arc length mirrors a proportion of each class, while the full circle is the sum of information and is equivalent to 100%.

Pie charts allow readers to have a quick idea of the proportional data allocation.

Table

This type of methodology compares quantities of different categories or groups. Bars represent values and can be horizontal or vertical, with their length or hight depending on the rate.

Bar chart

This type of methodology compares quantities of different categories or groups. Bars represent values and can be horizontal or vertical, with their length or hight depending on the rate.

Flow chart

A flowchart is a diagram describing processes and is composed of blocks connected by arrows. Each block contains data of a step in the process while arrows establish the direction of the flow.

Scatter plot

Scatter plots represent a shared variation of two data items. Each marker of the plot represent an observation and its position indicate the observation value. When more than two aspects are considered, a scatter plot matrix is generated; this is a series of graphics showing every possible pairing of the variables considered in the visualisation.

Treemap

Treemaps display a large volume of hierarchically structured data. These maps are composed of different rectangles which sizes and orders depend on a quantitative variable.

Rectangles show the hierarchical levels of treemaps. Quadrilaterals at the same hierarchical level represent a column or an expression in a table, while each rectangle denotes a category in a column.

When working with big data, many businesses have issues to show the information analysis results in a meaningful and clear way. However, by using specific tools and techniques, enterprises can get over to this challenge. Do you use any of the methodologies outlined above? Let us known by commenting below!
39. Slowdown landscapes: The defiant garden produces social justice as well as strawberries
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Cities, Food, Gardening, Racism, Health

39. Slowdown landscapes: The defiant garden produces social justice as well as strawberries

Small green pieces of urban farms, repairing vacant lots in in Los Angeles and Brooklyn

Lest the remove to Jarman’s small pieces of isolated beach suggests a self-sufficiency too easily elided with individualisation, a form of privatisation even, the emphasis on loosely joined becomes a fundamental patterning dynamic.

At core, we understand that all these systems and cultures are connected — that ‘off-grid’ is not possible, technically and politically. This, too, should be understood as a participative process. As Latour writes, in his plea for us to focus on the Terrestrial plane: “each of the beings that participate in the composition of a dwelling place has its own way of identifying what is local and what is global, and of defining its entanglements with the others.”

“The only real things in life are food and love in that order.” — David Hockney

So caring for a garden, whether literally or metaphorically, is quite different to an individualism that exemplifies much of the Acceleration. Equally, the way that gardens, in the richest sense of the concept, pollinates or spreads roots, cannot be an autarkic self-sufficient bioregionalist vision either. Again, this recalls Val Plumwood’s firm critique of a simplistic bioregionalism as creating ‘shadow places’, in which footprint is simply exported, as if there was such a thing as an ‘externality’ in a world where everything is connected; or as Timothy Morton put it “‘somewhere else’ is just the same place, you’re just moving some kind of pollution around within a system.”

‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’, by Douglas Adams (1987), was perhaps the first time I became aware of what Adams dubbed ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things’. It has stuck with me ever since.

There are natural connections, then, and also connections in terms of practice, of perspective. Through this lens, Jarman’s beach is connected directly to Ron Finley’s work, planting and cultivating gardens in South Central Los Angeles. With a gardener’s spin on De Monchaux’s vision of a distributed infrastructure, Finley has calculated there are 26 square miles of vacant lots in the city, or around 20 Central Parks. These forms of gardens necessarily embody the care-ful slowness that we must find a way of working with. Although Finley clearly describes how they might scale, growing tomatoes is not exactly a ‘fail fast’ ‘blitzscaling’ dynamic, particularly when attempted in a converted LA parking lot.
A Beginner’s guide to Dynamic Routing in Next.js
By: Marie Starck
Tags: JavaScript, Web Development, React, Nextjs, Programming

How to create dynamic routes in Next.js

As mentioned in the tutorial on static routing, Next.js defines routes based on the concept of pages .

What does that mean? Every Next.js project comes with a pages folder. The structure of the pages folder determines the structure of your routes and every file inside that folder maps to a route in your application.

Essentially, every time you want to create a route, you need to add a file in the pages folder. Keep in mind that the pages folder itself represents your root url (meaning /).

For static routing, you can create a new route by adding a index.js or a named file like about.js.

pages/about.js maps to /about

Tip: For more info on how to create static routes (including nested routes), read my tutorial on static routing in Next.js.

But how does it work for dynamic routes? Say I wanted to create a blog, how would I add a route such as myblog.com/posts/:id?

Next.js handles dynamic routes by supporting brackets around parameters (e.g [id]) as a filename. Going back to my blog example, I would therefore create a [id].js file inside my posts folder.

As a result, /pages/posts/[id].js would map to /posts/[id] where id is the unique id of your post.

Dynamic Nested Routes in Next.js

Can I create dynamic nested routes? Say I wanted a page for comments related to a particular post, could I have a url such as /posts/[id]/[commentId]?

The answer is Yes!

For nested routes, you have to create a folder instead of a file. The syntax stays the same meaning that your folder would be called [id] . You can then add new routes inside. Here is the end result:

pages/

│ index.js -> url: /

│

└───posts/

| index.js -> url: /posts

|

└─── [id]/

index.js -> url: /posts/[id]

commentId.js -> url: /posts/[id]/[commentId]

Now that all our routes are set up, let’s explore how to navigate between the different pages.
Use Slack to Monitor SQS Dead-Letter Queue
By: Crespo Wang
Tags: Lambda, AWS, Software Development, Slack

AWS SQS plays a significant role in modern application architecture, especially in a serverless environment. When working with SQS, it is often to see messages failed to be consumed, it could be a bug in your code, a temporary resource restriction, eg API rate exceeded, or dependencies in the messages to be processed. In most scenarios, you would want to know what the messages are after they fail many times, then you can find out why and fix the problems. This is where the SQS dead-letter queue comes into play.

However, monitoring the Dead-letter can be a challenge, one of the most common approaches is to set up CloudWatch to send alarms, but people often face two problems:

No visibilities to the details of the dead letters. CloudWatch only tells you there are messages in the dead-letter queue, it doesn’t tell you what they are. Dev/Ops often need to use other tools, eg AWS CLI to dig for more details. Not able to replay the dead letters, ie not able to put the dead letter back to SQS, at least not easily, you could use AWS CLI to put them back, but again it makes troubleshooting which is already an unpleasant thing even more annoying.

The above issues can be resolved by using Slack + Lambda, as shown below

The SQS dead-letter queue is configured as an event trigger of the lambda function which sends notifications to Slack, then Slack feeds back user actions to the lambda function, finally it places the messages back to the SQS.
Stop Using Square Bracket Notation to Get a Dictionary’s Value in Python
By: Jonathan Hsu
Tags: Software Development, Programming, Data Science, Python, Technology

The Traditional (Bad) Way to Access a Dictionary Value

The traditional way to access a value within a dictionary is to use square bracket notation. This syntax nests the name of the term within square brackets, as seen below.

author = {

"first_name": "Jonathan",

"last_name": "Hsu",

"username": "jhsu98"

} print(author['username']) # jhsu98

print(author['middle_initial']) # KeyError: 'middle_initial'

Notice how trying to reference a term that doesn’t exist causes a KeyError . This can cause major headaches, especially when dealing with unpredictable business data.

While we could wrap our statement in a try/except or if statement, this much care for a dictionary term will quickly pile up.

author = {} try:

print(author['username'])

except KeyError as e:

print(e) # 'username' if 'username' in author:

print(author['username'])

If you come from a JavaScript background, you may be tempted to reference a dictionary value with dot notation. This doesn’t work in Python.
2019 Social Media trends in numbers
Tags: Influencer Marketing, Social Media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Social media has become the main source of new information and this fact is not going to change in the nearest future. This article is about numbers and figures, presenting trends in this interesting and not always predictable social media world.

Time on the scroll

Approximately 2 hours a day are spent on social networks these days — this is an average time for different age and population groups. 500 million Instagram users are active every single day, only in the USA 77% of people have at least one profile in social media, Facebook still holds the first rate among other networks and 1.3 million content is shared every minute. 2 hours seems nothing compared to these news. But statistics is something difficult to compete.

New business decisions online

73% of market players think that social media marketing is effective for business, Facebook has more than 5 million advertisers, 54% of social media users search products online and 60% of users learn about new products on Instagram. It’s obviously time to change marketing strategies and budgets in favor of influencers who don’t rule the world yet, but influence different groups of population.

Influencers influence

Global spending on Instagram influencer marketing reached more than 5 billion dollars in previous year and 78% of businesses have created teams for managing their social media. Influencers have already become popular in the business world, but now their involvement seems to be a must, not a choice.

It’s easier than it seems

1000 followers is enough to become an influencer. We recently wrote about groups of influencers with different number of followers which proved — everybody may become an influencer. And recent stories about fake followers and low engagement rates changed brands opinion that only thousands of followers produces thousands of sells. World has changed even in this new matter of influencer policy.

Social networks for every taste

Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular platforms among teens. Social media users aged 55 and older are twice as likely to engage with brands online, 43% of adults in the U.S. get their news on Facebook and 79% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as an effective source for generating leads. Each social network has its pros and cons, age groups and type of content. But it means only one thing — every business, manufacturer or idea has all chances to find its ideal social network.

These variables will not answer your question “Which social media to use”, besides, it doesn’t make clear, how to build a marketing strategy on Instagram or Facebook. But for sure, this information presents the trend, which is not likely to change. Social media marketing is worth considering, planning and implementing. Don’t hesitate to jump in!
How to Break Your Creative Stagnation Using Temperature
By: Katie Martin
Tags: Work, Makers, Innovation, Productivity Hacks, Creativity

A week ago, I was sitting in my heated living room for several hours trying to find something that would inspire a project or another article. As much as I was reading or scrolling through the internet, nothing seemed to provoke my interest. Even though it was near freezing, I decided to sit outside for awhile and get some fresh air instead. When I got back inside, I could feel the shift in my mind; I was in a newly inspired state, brain teeming with curiosity.

What was that about? I knew that exercise could increase energy, but all I did here was sit outside in the cold. As someone with cold urticaria, abrupt changes in temperature already affect me daily (drastic temperature difference causes me to break out in hives, no joke). Being so, I slowly started to suspect that a more mild temperature change could have some type of affect as well, albeit a more positive one that kickstarts my creative drive.

I further realized that my wake-up-the-brain coffee ritual has also never involved a mere room temperature cup of coffee. Suspicious, indeed.
The Colourful Garden
By: Dr. Preeti Singh
Tags: Poetry, Creativity, Happiness, Love, Nature

In Delhi, (India), November to March we have beautiful flowers. There are lots of flower shows and competitions too. This year because of Covid-19 I have not heard of such shows. However, the gardens are blooming and the flowers are spreading their love. One morning, I was standing in the park and I saw the flowers were blooming in many colours and decided to write a sonnet and describe exactly what I was looking at.

Please see Jonah Lightwhale William J Spirdione Patrick M. Ohana Whitney Rose who has the expertise in writing a sonnet if I have fitted the mood of the day and time.

My previous sonnet
Two Presidents
By: Ilexa Yardley
Tags: Circular Theory, Quantum Computing, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality

Everything is 50–50. No getting ‘around’ this…

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

What we’re going to end up with is two presidents: Biden and Trump.

Two Presidents

Where half of the country will listen to Biden and continue to publish hate articles and videos against Trump.

And the other half of the country will listen to Trump and continue to publish hate articles and videos against Biden.

It’s a perfect storm. Where everybody succeeds. And loses. Half-the-time (all-the-time).

Half-Time (All-The-Time)

The Circular Theory

This proves, and makes way for, The Circular Theory.

Where 50–50 is the constant. And, the norm.

50–50

Why we had the Jupiter-Capricorn conjunction on the Winter Solstice. We are entering into a new age where everybody gets (understands) (and maximizes) (minimizes) Circular Reality, where everything is 50–50.

Where: nothing changes, even though everything changes. Because a basic circle is conserved.

Where Jupiter is the King of Optimism and Saturn is the Queen of Pessimism and the two get married (got married on 12–21–20).

Jupiter and Capricorn

Optimism and Pessimism

Ensuring continual ‘arguing’ back and forth about everything.

Conservation of the Circle is the core, and, therefore, the only, dyanamic in Nature. Nothing new here. Actually.
Billboard Visualization with Tableau
Tags: Music, Tableau, Billboard, Data Visualization, Analytics

The dashboard above which is hosted in Tableau Public focuses on tracks’ performance record on Tableau categorized in four Tabs:

Overview

This is the first tab and shows the journey of the selected track through weeks, marking their highest and lowest rank in between. We can get to know the popularity of a song with the duration of stay in the charts as well as the rate of ascent and descent in ranks.

Track Features

The second tab is about the technical aspect of a song like tempo, loudness, etc. The metrics to create this view had to be brought from the second dataset using a join on field SongID. The bar chart is made to resemble an equalizer of an audio player and shows the different metrics on its bars.

Week Top 10

The third tab describes the pattern of tracks taking up the top 10 weekly ranks in a selected month of any year that again gives some curious stories behind different songs filling these ranks.

Year Top 10

The final tab is the more innovative than other and explores the genre split of the top 100 songs in a year. So instead of selecting a drop down, clicking on different small red stars on the chords of the guitar image would filter off the year 100 table below. The technique used is called background image in a view as outlined in this kb article. All throughout a year, different tracks enter and exit a particular rank on weekly basis. So a track stays in different ranks for specific amount of time before finally exiting from the charts. If we pick tracks to have stayed for the maximum duration at various positions starting from 1 and down till 100, we would have a list of 100 most popular year end songs and this is the logic used for creating the year 100 table.

Information Ribbon

Just below the tabs on top, sits two data driven insights. One of them tells us the artist with maximum number of songs featured in Billboard charts using nested LOD expression to get the highest value as described in this KB article.

The other insight also uses the same technique but gets the song that stayed for the longest duration on billboard charts.

This is still a work in progress and may have further changes in future about which I will make edits in the post.
The A.I.’s Prayer
By: Jason Mcbride
Tags: Machine Learning, Poetry, Flash Fiction, Fiction, AI

Holy Algorithm in Quanta

The machines giveth and taketh

Glory be to the machines

Optimize our choices

Show us what to buy,

Who we should friend,

And believe

Never

Let

Us

Wonder,

Make mistakes,

Or suffer doubts

Lead us to money

Without excess toil

Destroy our friends with envy

Bring us love without mystery

A.I. is the Ultimate. Amen

Poet’s Note

Humans seem to worship anything that we believe makes our lives easier. How long will it be before A.I. becomes a god? Maybe for some of us, it already has.

We spend more time bowing our heads before the soft glow of the screen, beseeching A.I. for answers than we do in thoughtful prayer or meditation.

What is an Hourglass Poem?

An hourglass poem is not an official poetry form. The hourglass poem form that I have created is a two-stanza, eighteen-line poem.

The first stanza is a nonet. A nonet is a nine-line poem where the first line has nine-syllables, the second line has eight-syllables, and so on until you reach the ninth line which has one-syllable.

The second stanza of an hourglass poem is a reverse nonet. The first line has one-syllable and each line adds a syllable until reaching the last line, which has nine syllables.

When you center all of the words, you get an hourglass effect like in the image above.

They are a fun, and challenging alternative to haiku and tanka. The longer form allows you to tell a story with more detail than you can with a haiku, but the variation in the line length forces you to pay attention to the flow of the story.
Deploying a React App to AWS S3
By: Chameera Dulanga
Tags: Programming, React, S3, DevOps, JavaScript

Task 5. Add Actions

Next you should add a new action to the pipeline. Buddy facilitates several different approaches for deploying your project and lets you pick from hundreds of prespecified actions. I will add two actions in this scenario that will execute the following tasks:

Build the React app: download dependencies (npm, Yarn), compile assets.

Deploy the React App to AWS S3

It is possible to manage React builds using the Node.js action. You can select the environment information and specify the commands to be executed.

You can either use a single Node action to run all npm commands or use dedicated actions for each command. In this example, I will be using dedicated actions for each command.

First, add an npm install command to make sure all your dependencies and libraries are in place for the build process.

Screenshot by Author

If you have any tests to run before deploying the project, Buddy provides options to run test automation using its pipeline easily. You can use another Node action to execute tests in your project using the relevant command. In my case, it's npm run test .

Then add another Node action to execute the npm run build command to build the project.

If you need to test those commands, you can simply run the pipeline manually before moving on to the next steps. If there are any errors, you can find them in action logs.

Screenshot by Author

Scroll down and click on S3 on the actions list.

Screenshot by Author

Configure AWS integration and enter the name of your integration. Paste the Access Key Id and Secret Access Key from the AWS console that you copied. Click on the “Add integration” button.

Screenshot by Author

Then configure action information, choose the Bucket ID you want to upload your files to. Set the “Source path” to “/build” since your project build directory id is “source/build.” Also, make sure that you have selected Pipeline Filesystem as the source since you build the project using the pipeline in the previous action. Finally, click on the “Add this action” button.

Screenshot by Author

Now your pipeline is all set to deploy your React application to AWS S3.

What if you want to get notifications about the deployment? Buddy has an answer for that too.

Scroll down and move to Notifications. From the right-hand side of the page, select the service of your choice. I’ll choose Slack, a popular notification service among Buddy users. As you’re adding a third-party service to your pipeline, you will need to configure integration details. Here you can decide the scope of the integration.

Finally, you have to accept the OAuth permissions of the chosen application:

Then you can specify the notification message as your wish.

Once someone pushes changes to your Git repository and executes the pipeline, you will be notified.

Now you are all set, and the completed pipeline will look like this:
Don’t Cheapen the Ink
By: Gregory D. Welch
Tags: Poem, Life, Self, Poetry, Creativity

I try to tell it

this isn’t how poetry is supposed to be

it questions my logic

even as I try to coerce it to some happier theme

Why, I whisper, why the dark material?

because it is truth written in midnight

why are you wanting me to be less?

don’t add water to my ink

Truth written in midnight rich ink

and witching hour reflections

isn’t my ink good enough?

my poetry asks of me

Insomnia won’t stop whispering

it questions my logic

I find myself conversing with my poetry

I try to tell it what to do

but that isn’t how poetry works,

that isn’t a part of its genetic code

and really, would we want it to be?
Learning D3 — Books, Code Editor, and Other Resources to Help You Learn
Tags: D3js, Visual Design, Data Visualization, Visualization

Do you need to learn D3?

“D3 was created to fill a pressing need for web-accessible, sophisticated at visualization.¹”

Before you start, you should know if it’s necessary for you to learn D3. It’s a tool that serves a need, do you actually have the need?

For most visualization needs, you don’t need to learn D3. There are so many other libraries and tools that are way easier to master and use, e.g. Excel, Powerpoint, Google Data Studio, Plotly, and Tableau, etc.

D3 was created so people can create rich visualizations with a high level of interactivity that can be accessed like web content with flexibility. Well..that’s a tongue twister. Basically, you should learn D3 if:

you want to create web-accessible interactive visualizations, for example, visual essays.

you want to have control over the whole visualization process vs. relying on another platform.

you’ve encounter visualization needs that existing platforms cannot resolve with ease, for example, Tableau requires a lot of manipulation to build visualizations like tree charts and sankey charts — so I decided to resort to learning D3 vs. learning Tableau tricks that only work for that platform.

Otherwise, your precious time should be spent elsewhere — maybe read some books?

Books

Instead of Udemy courses, I found a book to follow along this time, and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s Elijah Meeks’s book — D3 in Action*.

*You should get the 2nd edition for updated code. I also recommend you getting the Manning live version so you can copy code easily.

Unlike most Udemy courses that try to feed you everything D3 has to offer, which can be extremely overwhelming and set you up for failure, Meeks’s book focuses on the core of D3 for visualization needs. He goes right into how to build shapes, charts, layouts, and visualizations — so you don’t get stuck at the boring syntax.

Because D3 uses javascript syntax, if you’ve never learned the language before, I do recommend you quickly go through the documentation of Javascript before you dive into Meeks’ book.

Code Editor

You can use any editor you like. I love using Visual Studio Code, it’s free and comes with many handy plugins — one of which is Live Server (also mentioned in this post).

Live Server allows you to run scripts on your local server and see code changes live — a great time-saver especially when you are learning D3.

Live Server

Other Resources to Bookmark

The best way to learn is from copying others' work. Steal like an artist!

D3 gallery: http://christopheviau.com/d3list/gallery.html

D3 gallery: https://www.d3-graph-gallery.com/index.html

Visual essays using D3: https://pudding.cool/

D3 Tutorial+Gallery: https://www.d3indepth.com/introduction/

Creator of D3: https://observablehq.com/@mbostock

References:

[1]: Elijah Meeks. D3.js in Action, Second Edition
Learning to Live in Modern-Day Dystopia
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: World, Society, Humanity, Dystopia, Change

It’s been a long, hard ride, and it doesn’t look like it’s about to end anytime soon. I started 2020 with high hopes — the “year of clear vision,” I was told. Oh, the delusions.

It hit us out seemingly of nowhere — some harder than others — like something out of a Stephen King novel, only much more terrifying because reality is always scarier than fiction. There were no creatures coming out of the mist, no haunted hotels with decaying grannies, and no cursed strawberry pies. No, this was much worse, because it affected the entire world. Is there an end in sight? At the time of writing this, that prospect seems rather unlikely.

When the virus first made its appearance, global panic erupted and was quickly followed by a flurry of conspiracy theories. Many people still believe the rumours that morphed and evolved over the weeks and months. Regardless of which side of the conspiracy line you stand on doesn’t change the fact that we’re still faced with the same monumental task: rebuilding a society that has been shaken to its very core. A society that is having to adjust to a new version of normal; one we never expected to experience in our lifetime.

Despite the catastrophic number of human lives that have been lost, one does have to pause and wonder if we cannot perhaps find some speck of goodness amidst all of the sorrow and madness. There are lessons to be learned as we attempt to pick up the broken pieces from the rubble as it continues to pile up higher every day with an ongoing decline in the human population, and an alarming rise in active insurgence.

Most days, finding this golden particle of hope, this needle in the proverbial haystack, seems like an impossible feat; all one has to do is turn on any news channel at any given time to see the perfect destruction our species is capable of, and apparently hell-bent on creating. It’s truly disheartening to watch as we turn on one another in a time when we should be lifting each other up.

Whether the rebellion is caused by the emerging dictatorship qualities of governments across the planet, or if the opposite is true and the governments are reacting to society’s revolt, the results are the same: a revolution that will forever change our world, long after the fear of pandemics have evaporated.
Stemming: How to Tokenize Text for Search
By: David Mezzetti
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Python, Data Science, Search

Stemming

Stemming is the process of reducing a word to its root stem. For example, the word “develop” can also take the form of “developed” or “developing.” When tokenized, all three of those words result in different tokens. Users could potentially resolve that at query time with a trailing wildcard search, i.e. develop* . Stemming is an option to handle that at indexing time.

The next example uses NLTK, which can be installed via pip if not already installed.

pip install nltk

NLTK provides a stemmer which reduces words down to their root word. Consider the following:

>>> from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer

>>> stemmer = PorterStemmer()

>>> [stemmer.stem(token) for token in ["developed", "develop", "developing"]]

['develop', 'develop', 'develop']

All three words resolve to the same token. When a user enters a query with “developed”, “developing” or “develop”, the query matches on documents with any of those three variants of “develop.” Once again, it’s not necessarily right or wrong to stem — it comes down to user expectations at search time.
A Guide to Reference Counting in Python
By: Halil Yıldırım
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Python, DevOps, Data Science

The Number of Reference Counting

So far so good — we’ve learned a lot. Now, how many variables are referencing the one object?

The wrong use

I see some people using sys.getrefcount(var) without knowing passing the var add one more reference to the object. Let’s look at the example below.

Check that out! Output 3 while we expect 2 ( x and y ). It happens because passing x to getrefcount function added one more reference.

Better use

You can use the built-in ctypes module to find the result you expect. You have to pass id of x to from_address function.

Why does it happen this way? Because in the wrong use, you pass the variable whereas in the better use, you pass the id of variable, which means you only pass a number in base-10, not a variable.