fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Hiring a Personal Assistant? Look for these 4 traits.
By: Valerie Trapunsky
Tags: Startup, Virtual Assistant, Outsourcing, Personal Assistant, Hiring

Assistants are important members of any team. They are generalists that can support a wide range of projects and bring a much needed structure to the individuals and organizations who hire them.

The below 4 qualities are the ones always top of my list when evaluating a new assistant partner for our team.

1. Empathy

I put this at the top of the list because empathy is one of those traits that isn’t quickly or easily taught, yet is critical in this line of work.

It plays a role in simple things such as softening the language in an email when something that’s being dictated comes off as too harsh, or a reminder of a promise that needs to be kept. Having an assistant on your team that is able to see things from multiple perspectives can make the difference in salvaging a client relationship or getting that business deal. This takes a deep understanding not just of the boss’ needs but also the needs of others in the ecosystem.

2. Resourcefulness

Assistants must posses this quality to the extreme. Their job isn’t just mastering one industry, it’s providing support across various disciplines quickly and seamlessly. They have to know a lot, but more importantly they need to have the tools and network to figure out what they don’t know, and produce accurate results.

3. Resilience

Being someone’s right hand means learning how they work, how they best intake information, and their preferred communication style. Resilience comes up in a few forms:

The above entails receiving a lot of feedback on how NOT to do certain things. Being able to hear the feedback and not take it personally is huge.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs and business owners bring an assistant in when things get really busy … full calendars, high-traffic inboxes, and overloaded voicemails. Lots of moving pieces can create intense working environments. Assistants who succeed are ones that are able to take whatever is coming in stride and bounce back quickly from any downfalls.

4. Sense of humor

Lastly, if your assistant will be a person you interact with a lot in a given day — they should be someone whose company you enjoy!

Learn more: ChatterBoss is a customer-centric iOS messaging app that pairs best of class virtual assistants to busy entrepreneurs and business owners.
How to build a UX portfolio if I have never worked in UX?
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Careers, Design, User Experience, Portfolio, UX

A lot of user experience professionals who are active in our industry today have faced the question above when starting their career.

Let’s be honest: it’s a bit unfair.

“Portfolio” is a mandatory field in almost every job application form, regardless of the level you’re applying to.

But wait. I’m only able to be hired as a UX Designer when I have a certain number of projects on my portfolio. But if I have never worked in UX, how am I supposed to build a portfolio with interesting and relevant UX case studies?

You might be thinking: “well, with my school work”.

The reality is: not everyone goes through four or five years of design school before trying to find a job. As much as education systems sound great in theory, the reality is way less linear than that. People come to UX from many different places. They are developers, engineers, project managers, game designers, writers, art directors, strategists — and after some research (and a lot of thinking) they come to the conclusion UX is where they want to focus their careers moving forward.

To add to that: not everyone has access to higher education, and not every country has the same education system as the US. In Brazil, for example, bachelors and masters focused on interaction design or HCI were almost nonexistent a few years ago.

But yeah, not impossible.

Let’s break down a few possible paths to get you unstuck from this beautiful, painful paradox.
4 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Blogging
By: Wajeeh Khan
Tags: Work, Freelancing, Writing, Blogging, Education

4 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Blogging

I would’ve found success much faster if I had known these 4 things

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Blogging can potentially make you more money than an average day job. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and make a Google search right now. Better still, go to YouTube, and you’ll even find a bunch of bloggers giving a tour of the new mansion they just bought.

I’d like to believe their intention is to inspire people to take blogging seriously and give it a shot as a full-time career. Unfortunately, though, such stunts fail to offer an authentic picture of life as a blogger. Because it only tells you what the destination looks like, and not the things they should know about the journey itself.

So, let’s get one thing out in the open first. Blogging is not a “get rich quick scheme”. In fact, there’s a reasonable probability that you won’t make any serious money out of it in the first year.

I’m not trying to scare you off. It’s just a small effort of letting you know what to expect. I don’t want any of you taking the leap of faith for the money only. It’s a serious profession that demands years of hard work and commitment.

Nonetheless, there are things that you should know, to at least speed up the process a little.

It took me five years to start making a decent full-time income from my blog. Today, when I look back on my journey as a blogger, I see a bunch of things that wasted a lot of my time. Things that if I had known earlier, could have contracted the time it took for me to find success in blogging.

So, today I’ll talk about the top four things I wish I knew when I started blogging. I want you to know them upfront in hopes that these will help streamline your experience as an aspiring blogger.
International examples offer US a blueprint for aquaculture regulation in 2020
By: Friends Of The Earth
Tags: Oceans, Fishing, Conservation, Environment

International examples offer US a blueprint for aquaculture regulation in 2020

by Hallie Templeton, senior oceans campaigner

For many years, powerful corporations, assisted by the very U.S. agencies tasked with protecting and managing our ocean resources, have collectively been pushing for development of industrialized fish farms off the coasts of our shoreline communities. Our fisheries managers and other elected officials have done little to mitigate the looming environmental threats of such expansion. In many cases, they have overlooked those threats in an effort to increase opportunities for industrial aquaculture in U.S. waters.

Industrial fish farms, which hold many thousands of fish in giant net pens in the ocean, pump heavily processed feed, antibiotics and other chemicals into our waters. These water-borne factory farms unfairly compete with wild-caught fish at market and harm the ecosystem by allowing pesticides and high concentrations of untreated fish waste to flow from the net pens into our oceans. This is all in addition to the very real threat of industrially-farmed fish escaping these pens and outcompeting wild, native fish for food and mates, as we saw just a few years ago off the coast of Washington state.

Despite these serious risks, the Environmental Protection Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Marine Fisheries Service are allowing and even supporting development by corporations that push for bills and policies to fast-track these dangerous projects without proper environmental review or public input. Proposed bills like the 2018 Advancing the Quality and Understanding of American Aquaculture (AQUAA) Act would reduce transparency in the permitting process and ignore environmental impacts of new projects. Meanwhile, the federal agencies specifically tasked with protecting our oceans have churned out federal funding assistance to this industry and the Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of granting a Hawaii-based corporation approval to build a massive fish farm off the coast of Sarasota, Fla., all without meaningful public outreach or critical environmental review procedures.

However, momentum is building to stop EPA’s plan. A recent public hearing on the facility garnered a standing-room-only crowd of concerned citizens, decrying environmental risks like increased pollution and feeding the worsening red tide in the region. And in response to EPA’s plan, Florida localities have sensed looming danger from the industry: the cities of Sarasota Sanibel, and Holmes Beach all swiftly moved to formally opposed plans to permit the facility off Florida’s coast.
My Balls & Chain
By: Bradley Wester
Tags: Nonfiction, Contemporary Art, LGBTQ, Relationships, Sexuality

Madonna’s astrologer predicted precisely when I’d meet my husband. Cheryl, a comedian and astrologer, was part of a gal-pal threesome; Madonna and Sandra Bernhard were the other two. When I met Cheryl in 1989, Madonna’s and Sandra’s careers were peaking. Cheryl still had to make a living as an astrologer and decorative painter. The small company we worked for had big clients in the Hamptons. It was there, after days painting faux techniques on every wall, baseboard, and door of a new vulgar McMansion built on a former potato field, that Cheryl read my chart:

“You’re a consummate artist…blah blah. You should also write…blah blah blah.”

I was single, in fact, freshly heartbroken, and wanted some good news on the love-life front.

“You will meet Mr. Right at the very end of 1993!” Cheryl said definitively.

“Fantastic! Wait, it’s 1990. What do you mean I have to wait three more years?”

I whined.

“Sorry,” She said. “You’ll have a few false starts. But Mr. Right doesn’t come along until the very end of 1993. It’s as clear as day.”
Cover Up or Someone Will See You
By: Courtney Christine
Tags: Self-awareness, Religion, Self Improvement, Self, Poetry

Photo by Anton Malanin on Unsplash

Stay warm, we told you.

Here is a long skirt to cover your bare knees. And a dress too big — but don’t worry, you’ll grow into it.

And here. Another sweater — handknit with you in mind. Put it on before you offend someone.

Prayer shawls and sackcloth. Heavy drapes to hide your figure. Trust me, this is a good look for you.

Too hot? You get used to it.

Too itchy? Well, you can’t just strip it all off. Everyone will see. You do realize you’d have to peel off each layer to get at what’s scratching your skin.

Now you’ve gone and done it. A wide heap at your feet.

Some of us look away. Some of us try to shield you. Some grab your discarded clothing and fling it back, hoping it will stick. Go back to the way you were, they cry.

Some others draw closer. They sit with you in your nakedness. They sit with tall backs. They lean close.

I see you’re one of those who won’t rush to re-dress. You close your eyes and soak the sunlight straight into your blood vessels. You walk and don’t even mind when blades of grass get stuck between your toes. You run headlong into the ocean. You spin in circles, kicking up sand. You laugh.

Eventually you’ll go back to your garment pile. You’ll flap each one out in the wind. You might find one or two pieces that still fit. You might put one careful finger through a sleeve.

Or you might find, on a cold night, that a huddle by a fire is a better way to keep warm.
Tune Into Product Marketing Field Notes
By: Rebecca Geraghty
Tags: Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Management

Kicking off a weekly (b)log of observations and useful learnings on this field

Since entering product marketing in 2013 I’ve developed a fascination with a field where no two jobs are alike. Where expectations vary wildly by situation. A career path whose #1 FAQ is what its purpose even is (just Google “What is product marketing?” to see what I mean). And where every project demands a focused, roll-up-your-sleeves and just plain figure it out approach.

Against this backdrop I’ve started to think of myself as a less-than-silent observer of a field slowly emerging from obscurity into enough focus to understand its broad contours. I’m often asking the same basic questions:

“When you boil it all down, what do I really need to focus on to do this right?”

“What’s specific way to successfully approach this situation right now?”

“How to navigate my career in this — today, tomorrow, and long-term?”

I’ve explored questions like these in long-form articles for We Are Product Marketing, Product Marketing Alliance and other outlets. I’ve thought about them in large corporations to early-stage startups, and as a PMA ambassador, and Pragmatic alumni. I’ve connected with so many others making their way in the field seeking guidance and advice just like myself.

So I’m starting Product Marketing Field Notes to document a regular weekly learning log as I journey forward. These field notes will be short, to-the-point, and explore whatever strikes me most at that moment in time. And given that this role sits at the intersection of just about every team and discipline, I’m open to whatever that may be — from messaging to rockstar presentations, managing a meeting, and anything else that impacts how this job gets done.

I believe we’re translators, strategists, storytellers, gatekeepers, planners, creators and so much more. And with detailed notes of at least one path through this field we can be armed with a way forward to inspire out own.

If you want to learn along with me, tune into the field notes and lets journey together. See you next week!
12 Questions on the Future of Design
Tags: Industrial Design, Design, Technology, Graphic Design, Information Design

Dong-Ping Wong (Family): Buildings, mostly.

Jasmina Grase: I design everyday objects with a moment of discovery. Sustainable improvements to our fast lifestyle. Right now I’m a co-founder of “MIITO” and the studio “Chudy & Grase.”

Tim O’Reilly: I make books, conferences, and big ideas that help organize communities of practice — ideas like “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “makers,” or “open government” (“government as platform”).

Colin Raney (Formlabs): We design/make 3D printers.

Grase, Wong, Raney, O’Reilly, and Waldman

Matthew Waldman: I created NOOKA Inc. to bring the revolution of interface design to fashion and objects. That said, I’m best known for my timepieces that express the ideas of universal global language.

Emily Fischer (Haptic Lab): Physical projects and textiles that explore haptics — the body’s sense of touch.

Eric J. Winston (SFDS): Fabrication and design.

Hidden (John van den Nieuwenhuizen & Vitor Santa Maria): We design poetically simple audio projects.

Fischer, Desbiens, Winston, the Hidden team, and Perry

Justin Nagelberg (Parallelogram): I design objects that try and explore form and function in new, unexpected, and ideally more interesting or useful ways.

Nicholas Desbiens: I am an architect, computational designer, and, most recently, the creator of fahz, the 3D printing project that lets you put your face in a vase.

Marco Perry: Pensa is a consulting firm that works with startups and Fortune 500 firms for just about any consumer project. We spun off another company that makes the D.I.Wire, the first desktop CNC wire bender.

Bapu, Thrift, Danzico, and Nagelberg

Pavan Bapu: I’m the co-founder of a consumer electronics startup called Gramovox, and we reimagine vintage audio design with modern technology.

Liz Danzico: Chair of the MFA Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts, and creative director at NPR.

Scott Thrift (The Present): I’m an artist and I produce work on time.
Microsoft Excel — How Do I Quickly Create a Workbook with Multiple Tabs?
By: Don Tomoff
Tags: Microsoft, Excel, Automation, How To, Productivity

Let’s Do This

1 — Create tabs, color-coded if it makes sense

Create list of tabs — color code them the way you want the tabs to appear.

Example creating 50 rows of monthly dates; each year is a different color.

New Workbook — Create a Tab List

Create worksheet tabs (I use the ASAP Utilities add-in for this — covered previously in this Medium post)

Highlight cells to convert to worksheet tabs

Select ASAP Utilities → Sheets → 2. Insert multiple sheets…

Invoking ASAP Utilities to generate worksheet tabs from a List

The following dialog box pops up:

Make sure the “Color sheet-tabs..” option is checked

Click “OK”

ASAP Utilities Dialog Box — add Multiple Sheets

The new tabs are created in seconds…

New Worksheet Tabs created from List

Now, DELETE the TabList page.
Maybe You’ve Never Loved
By: Daniele Ihns
Tags: Love, Wisdom, The Masterpiece, Self, Psychology

The Older Woman

Then one day, an older woman came to her mother’s house. They were having a conversation about these topics. So the girl joined in and shared some of her experiences of love.

“I don’t know if anyone really loves me.” She said with a sad, fearful face like an abandoned puppy on a rainy day.

She told the older woman about her frustrations — how much her mother tried to control her, how much her father had been unfair to her when he left, how heartbroken she was when her boyfriend broke up with her, and how her friends were too selfish to listen to her stories.

The older woman listened patiently and, in the end, said only one sentence:

“Maybe you never loved.” The older woman smiled kindly and left.

It took the girl by surprise. From the other side of the table, her smile seemed so patronizing, sending the girl’s mind on a journey of defensive anger.

“How dare she say something like this? She doesn’t even know me. What does she know about love? Maybe she is the one who’s never loved.”

Little did the girl know that this was going to become one of her last tantrums.

To say that the older woman’s words had planted a seed in the girl’s mind is an understatement. Those words had gone straight into her subconscious like bullets, shattering her fragile ego and clearing the way for a whole new range of questions.
A Girl’s Best Friends
By: Susannah Mackinnie
Tags: Childhood, Animals, Life, Poetry, Storytelling

She’s always with those animals,

Cat, dog, horse,

Nearby, underfoot, in the way,

Companions, friends, guards.

She insists.

They love me

But I’m the boss.
What No One Tells You About 2 Steps of Manifestation
By: Rajesh Vairapandian
Tags: Law Of Attraction Works, Universe, Philosophy, Visualization, Self Improvement

Step 1: Do not break the chain

Day 1: You are so positive and filled with happiness and doing manifestation practices.

Day 2: Same as above

Day 10: Same as above

Day 11: A small thought of doubt is implanted in your subconscious mind

Day 12: That little thought of doubt/dis-belief grows faster

Day 13: You are trying to be positive but unable to focus on the positivity

Day 14: No result so far, no significant change or the manifestation of your desire

Day 15: You started blaming or thinking negatively about Law of Attraction and thinking over and over of your past or failures

Day 16: Again, you wanted to be on track with positive thoughts/thinking.

Day 17: No No No, Day 17 should be DAY 1. Have you understood the secret now? To be precise, if you are positive for 14 days and if you become negative entirely on the 15th day, then you have to start from day 1.

Negative thoughts will destroy all your hard work on the first fourteen days, and from day 16, if you want to back with a positive thinking mindset, it will be considered as Day1 because you have broken the chain!

Never get disappointed or never disbelieve for one day and spoil all the previous days’ efforts.

I have seen many practitioners in this mindset. They all do the right things. They all positive for several days, and when something is not coming their way, they start feeling low or sad.

It will make them to square one again. We all have only one life, and we should always keep our self-focused on the right thing. If your desire is not manifested, you never know something big might be there for you!

So, never get sad or depressed or feeling low for the delay of your manifestation. You will get what you create. You will get the best of the best. “Have a never-ending FIRM belief even though your manifestation takes time, is the secret.”
Understanding Transformers, the Data Science Way
By: Rahul Agarwal
Tags: Deep Learning, NLP, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning

The above figure must look daunting but it is easy to understand. So just stay with me here.

Deep Learning is essentially nothing but a lot of matrix calculations and what we are essentially doing in this layer is a lot of matrix calculations intelligently. The self-attention layer initializes with 3 weight matrices — Query(W_q), Key(W_k), and Value(W_v). Each of these matrices has a size of ( Dxd ) where d is taken as 64 in the paper. The weights for these matrices will be trained when we train the model.

In the first calculation(Calc 1 in the figure), we create matrices Q, K, and V by multiplying the input with the respective Query, Key, and Value matrix.

Till now it is trivial and shouldn’t make any sense, but it is at the second calculation where it gets interesting. Let’s try to understand the output of the softmax function. We start by multiplying the Q and Kᵀ matrix to get a matrix of size ( SxS ) and divide it by the scalar √d. We then take a softmax to make the rows sum to one.

Intuitively, we can think of the resultant SxS matrix as the contribution of each word in another word. For example, it might look like this:

Softmax(QxKt/sqrt(d)) (Image by author)

As you can see the diagonal entries are big. This is because the word contribution to itself is high. That is reasonable. But we can see here that the word “quick” devolves into “quick” and “fox” and the word “brown” also devolves into “brown” and “fox”. That intuitively helps us to say that both the words — “quick” and “brown” each refers to the “fox”.

Once we have this SxS matrix with contributions we multiply this matrix by the Value matrix(Sxd) of the sentence and it gives us back a matrix of shape Sxd(4x64). So, what the operation actually does is that it replaces the embedding vector of a word like “quick” with say .75 x (quick embedding) and .2x(fox embedding) and thus now the resultant output for the word “quick” has attention embedded in itself.

Note that the output of this layer has the dimension (Sxd) and before we get done with the whole encoder we need to change it back to D=512 as we need the output of this encoder as the input of another encoder.

Q: But, you called this layer Multi-head self-attention Layer. What is the multi-head?

Okay, my bad but in my defense, I was just getting to that.

It’s called a multi-head because we use many such self-attention layers in parallel. That is, we have many self-attention layers stacked on top of each other. The number of attention layers,h, is kept as 8 in the paper. So the input X goes through many self-attention layers parallelly, each of which gives a z matrix of shape (Sxd) = 4x64. We concatenate these 8(h) matrices and again apply a final output linear layer, Wo, of size DxD.

What size do we get? For the concatenate operation we get a size of SxD(4x(64x8) = 4x512). And multiplying this output by Wo, we get the final output Z with the shape of SxD(4x512) as desired.

Also, note the relation between h,d, and D i.e. h x d = D
Men Need to Consent, Too
By: Toni Tails
Tags: Relationships, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Feminism, Life

Men Need to Consent, Too

What’s good for the gander is good for the goose

image by Ulkar — purchased by the author

This is why feminism is important to all humans.

Consent isn’t a gender issue.

It’s an individual human issue.

Vulnerability = anti-masculine in our culture. Little boys are “sissies” if they cry.

Bottom line?

Let’s all respect each other as fellow humans and engage in sex with those who are enthusiastic.
Create a Network Graph in Power BI
By: Ednalyn C. De Dios
Tags: Network Graph, Visualization, Power Bi, Data Science, Towards Data Science

Data Science / Power BI Visualization

Create a Network Graph in Power BI

A quick start guide on building a network graph with a few simple clicks of the mouse.

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

In a previous article, I wrote a quick start guide to visualize a Pandas dataframe using networkx and matplotlib. While it was fun to learn and explore more about network graphs in Python, I got to thinking about how to present the results to others who don’t have Python or Jupyter Notebook installed in their machines. At TaskUs, we use Power BI for most of our reporting so I began to search for a custom Power BI visualization that can take the data and transform it into a meaningful network graph.

Enter Network Navigator.

Network Navigator is a custom visual in Power BI that is created by Microsoft. It allows you to “explore node-link data by panning over and zooming into a force-directed node layout (which can be precomputed or animated live).”¹ In this post, we’ll walk through the steps needed to create a network graph using the custom visual.

First, let’s get our data. You can download the sample dataset here. Then, we could load the data into Power BI Desktop as shown below:

Select Text/CSV and click on “Connect”.

Select the file in the Windows Explorer folder and click open:

Click on “Transform Data”.

Click on “Use first Row as Headers”.

Click on “Close & Apply”.

Next, find the three dots at the end of the “Visualizations” panel.

And select “Get more visuals”.

Point your mouse cursor inside the search text box and type in “network” and hit the “Enter” key and click on the “Add” button.

Wait a few moments and you’ll see the notification below. Click on the “OK” button to close the notification.

You’ll see a new icon appear at the bottom of the “Visualizations” panel as shown below.

Click on the new icon and you will see something similar to the picture below.

With the new visual placeholder selected, click on “Reporter” and “Assignee” in the “Fields” panel and it will automatically assign the columns as the Source and Target Node.

Let’s add labels by clicking on the paintbrush icon.

Click on “Layout” to expand the section and scroll down until you see the “Labels” section.

Click on the toggle switch under “Labels” to turn it on

and voila!

That’s it! With a few simple clicks of the mouse, we’re able to create a network graph from a csv file.
Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Losing My Voice
By: Tre L. Loadholt
Tags: Cry, Writing, Life, Essay, Creative Writing

Photo by Arantxa Treva via Pexels

Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Losing My Voice

A writer’s lament

And I know it’s the overwhelming year that’s nearly behind me and feverishly thinking about the one ahead of me but as a writer, I cannot lose my voice. I am not talking about the physical sound from the use of my vocal cords but my writer’s voice — the authenticity that is me.

There’s pressure all around us. As creatives, we strive to pursue a place in the artistic world where we can be heard, but in a sea of sames, how can our differences stand out? The one thing I do not want to lose as it pertains to my craft is my uniqueness.

I do not want to lose myself in the sea of sames. I have worked hard to carve out space in this world for myself and my way of giving people the ideas that come to me as I toss and turn at night.

This — this writing thing is my freedom song. I write about my life. I write about what I wish my life was. I write about the beauty of the lives of others. And I write about the untruths and could-bes and would-bes of this world. There is a space of peace that shows itself when I am writing.

There’s pressure all around us. As creatives, we strive to pursue a place in the artistic world where we can be heard, but in a sea of sames, how can our differences stand out?

I lose myself in the words.

Of late, I have felt as if I am pulling words from the pit of my stomach, stretching them out to their true length, and delivering them to a wholesale warehouse for direct manufacturing. What I’m trying to say is, it’s been hard.

If you’re reading this and nodding your head in agreement, I wish I had the answer. What I have told myself to do is, “Practice more. Stress about things less. Just write, Tre.” It’s working. Little pep talks have become my friends.

Every so often, I have to remind myself that no matter how many clones there are touting the same advice, using the same template, and running around after each other to see who can push out the most articles per week, I must remain who I am.

Of late, I have felt as if I am pulling words from the pit of my stomach, stretching them out to their true length, and delivering them to a wholesale warehouse for direct manufacturing.

And who I am is my voice.

I have lasted five, almost six years on Medium and fourteen on WordPress, growing each year and giving a little bit more of myself at the same time too. I refuse to follow a cookie-cutter pattern or waddle behind a crowd chasing too-good-to-be-true outcomes.

I want to stand in line by myself, but I also want to share that line with others who will not strip the beauty of themselves away to put on the skin of those who lose themselves just to get ahead. I am here. I work hard to keep my presence pure. I don’t want to be like anyone else.

But sometimes I feel like I’m losing my voice. And should it seem like I have dear reader, I urge you to tap me on the shoulder and bring me back to earth.

Please.
Use Min-Width, Not Max-Width, in Your CSS
By: Jacob Bergdahl
Tags: CSS, Technology, Development, Programming

Use Min-Width, Not Max-Width, in Your CSS

Your websites should be mobile-first, not mobile-last

I am unhealthily addicted to inspecting the websites I visit. Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve been a developer for too long, but I really do enjoy dissecting the websites I stumble upon as I surf the internet. Sometimes I’m stuck dismembering a website for hours, ultimately forgetting why or how I even arrived at the website in the first place.

You learn a lot when you dissect other peoples’ websites. I’ve seen clever JavaScript optimizations and mind-blowingly genius CSS hacks. But you at least see a lot of terrible code. I would like to talk about one common design flaw that I’ve seen far too frequently. Max-width.

Let’s say you want your images to have a width of 100% on mobile devices and 50% on desktop. You could accomplish this by typing this CSS:

An example of desktop-first CSS. The default width of images is set to 50%, and is then increased to 100% for devices with a small screen width. The image is made by the author.

You could also enter this CSS and achieve the same result:

An example of mobile-first CSS. The default width of images is set to 100%, and is then decreased to 50% for devices with a large screen width. The image is made by the author.

In the first example, we set the width of images to be 50% by default but increase the width to 100% for devices with small screen widths. Meanwhile, in the second example, we default at a width of 100% for images and then reduce the width to 50% for devices with large screen widths.

These two pieces of code will produce the same result. As such, you might feel inclined to believe that choosing between them is arbitrary. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The website will take longer to load for whichever device has to load more CSS rules. In the first example, mobile devices have to load two rules, while desktop devices need to read only one. In the latter, the roles are switched. The first example is desktop-first, while the latter is mobile-first.
How To Implement a Great Onboarding Architecture in Your App
By: Avi Tsadok
Tags: iOS, Onboarding, Development, Programming, Architecture

Create an Onboarding Coordinator

Note: This is just a suggestion on how to implement a decent solution to the problems mentioned above.

First, we need to create a singleton to manage your onboarding. You can call it a coordinator, router, manager, service — it doesn’t matter. The point is that this coordinator will be the only object that’s aware of the order of the components. It will also be the only part of your app that holds the logic of what to show next.

The coordinator can have a reference for the navigation controller so it can push the next component when needed.

It’s best practice to create an enum to describe the stages of the onboarding:

The onboarding coordinator needs to hold two values — the list of the stages (actually, the list of the enums) and a pointer that represents the current user position in the onboarding. This value can be persistent for a later restore.
Cypress — Dec.2/20
By: Jennifer Hammersmark
Tags: Outdoors, Mountains, Skiing, Mental Health

Dr. Jen uses her own experiences, skiing, books, movies, and real people to help curb the pains of life

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You’re Not Alone: All 20-Somethings Are Just As Confused
By: Itxy Lopez
Tags: Self-awareness, Advice, Life Lessons, Life, Self

You’re twenty-years-old, and you want to take the year off of college, but people will go on without you. You feel left behind.

You’re twenty-one, and you see people moving into apartments, but you’re still at home. You feel like you’re not growing.

You’re twenty-two, and people are graduating from college, but you still don’t know what to do with your life. You feel like you’re lagging.

You feel lost. Confused. Stressed. Conflicted.

You feel like you’re not enough. Like you’re not doing enough.

You feel like you won’t figure this out. Like everyone will move on without you.

You’re not alone. All twenty-somethings feel this way. We just don’t talk about it. And maybe someone needs to start that conversation.
Inclusive Design Principles
By: Inclusive Design
Tags: Microsoft, UX Design, Design, Bias, Inclusive Design

That’s one kind of exclusion.

At Microsoft, our CEO Satya Nadella has given us a very strong mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more. If we’re going to do that, we need to think hard about the “every” in that statement. Building for every person means we can’t just let our instincts run unchallenged. We’re humans, which means we bring our biases to everything we do. If we don’t realize that, we’ll automatically create exclusion in everything we build. There’s someone out there, with a different set of abilities from yours, who wouldn’t be able to use or enjoy your product the way you would. Who is that person, and what would you do to even the playing field for them? That’s the first principle of Inclusive Design: Recognize Exclusion. It means examining what you build, and recognizing who would be excluded from using it.

Gaming, for example can require fine motor skills to compete, or even to get going on a new game. But what if you have limited mobility? Or if you’re brand new to video games? The Xbox engineering team came up with a new “co-pilot” feature that allows two controllers to work together, so that two people can control the same character, or car, or whatever’s featured in the game. Now a more advanced or skilled player can play alongside someone who might need more assistance. It opens up gaming to all kinds of people, including folks with disabilities or temporary injuries, newbies, kids, and people who just want to play together without competing against each other. The Xbox team recognized who was being excluded, and found a way to help bring them into gaming.

This is not an easy process, and sometimes the hardest part is realizing that exclusion just happens when we don’t pay attention to our biases. When we do pay attention, we can turn exclusion into a weapon for good. If we know those points of exclusion are out there, we can hunt them down, use research and testing to understand them, and use them to fire up our creativity.

There’s a beauty in recognizing exclusion. It calls on our humanity and our powers of empathy. And when we answer that call, beautiful things happen for our products, our customers, and us.

So let’s hear from you, what’s your story of exclusion? And did something meaningful come out of it? Let us know in the comments below.
5 Ways to Make Your Life Better (Inspired by Queer Eye)
By: Katie Sheps
Tags: Queer Eye, Mental Health, Inspiration, TV Shows, Self Improvement

Make a change to your wardrobe.

“I couldn’t give a sh*t about fashion. Style is dressing the way that you feel confident and what is appropriate for you, your age, body type.” — Tan France

As much as I wish I had Tan France picking out styles for me and telling me how much more confident I look in them, I instead have a Pinterest board, online shopping, and myself.

Tan’s approach to style in the show is to take inspiration both from what the hero currently wears and they’re fashion icon. He then uses his fashion know-how to find simple pieces that blend together and fit nicely on the hero. I combined Tan’s approach with a minimalist approach.

In terms of sorting out my wardrobe, I didn’t want an entirely new one. That would be expensive and it wouldn’t be a ‘make better’, it would be a ‘makeover’. Instead, I sorted my clothes into three piles; what I wear day-to-day, what I love wearing but need to replace (because it’s damaged or old), and what I don’t wear (which can be given away to a charity shop). Of course, there are some items that I need to keep as they’re for specific activities — namely interview clothing and snowboarding gear. Overall, I managed to halve my wardrobe using this technique.

Creating a Pinterest board to understand what kind of style I like (and using the board for inspiration) has been a lifesaver for me. Well, maybe that’s a bit of an extreme statement: it’s been beyond helpful to understand what kind of clothing and styles I would like to achieve going forward. It has helped me to hone my style so that I now look more put-together day-to-day.

If you want to change up your wardrobe, I highly recommend giving your current one a clear-out and in the meanwhile start pinning outfits that you like so that you can be more intentional with what you buy in the future. I may be a tomboy at heart but I have been thoroughly enjoying the fashion side of this ‘Queer Eyeing’ project!
Five Projects That Will Give You a Good Grasp on Computer Vision
By: Ran, Reine
Tags: Machine Learning, Technology, Software Development, Computer Vision, Deep Learning

Five Projects That Will Give You a Good Grasp on Computer Vision

Complete python tutorials that will help cement some of the most important CV concepts if you go through them

Photo by Matt Noble on Unsplash

Hello Internet! In this article, I’ve collated five computer vision online tutorials that anyone can easily follow through and learn from. I personally think that learning theoretical knowledge is sometimes too mundane and building mini side projects can be a great way to supplement one’s learning.

Many online tutorials or projects that I’ve gone through often only teach a portion of the entire project and you’ll often have to reference other materials to make the project work as a whole. That’s why, the following few tutorials I’ve collated are all suitable for beginners as each project will work in its entirety.

That being said, please feel free to leave a comment here (or in their original articles) if you run into problems and want some extra help! :)
Top 8 web design trends
Tags: UI, Design, Web, Trends, Graphic Design

I've collected everything that surprised me over the year in the visual web design landscape, summarized it, and ambitiously listed as “Top 8 web design trends”. Some of the trends have been kicking all over the internet for quite a long time, some — just dipping it’s toe to the water, and some, I think, will preserve their vogue in 2021 and later.

1. Emotions everywhere 😌

From our daily messaging platforms emojis successfully transmitted to user interfaces. Highly used in buttons, modals, feedback reviews, or replacing icons, emojis can evoke a sense of familiarity, positive emotions, and can raise the spirits.

If you are bored of using the same photo profile pictures on your team web page — try a fun way to represent yourself, your team, or your user persona — generate a custom cartoon avatar. It looks appealing and may help connect with your audience instantly. Try iPhone memoji generator or bitmoji for that purpose.

If you need a particular animoji or emoji from different platforms, you can find them all in a comprehensive emoji library — emojipedia.
6 Incredible Self-Care Tips You Can Apply Quickly
By: Anangsha Alammyan
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Ideas, Self Improvement, Self Care

I started this year on a high. With some incredible plans ahead of me, I could only see a year full of possibilities and potential.

However, the pandemic hit India in March. Since then, all of us have been more or less shut inside our homes, with nothing to stare at all day long except the four walls.

In such a situation, I found it challenging to take care of my day job, my studies, and my writing. On several days, I felt burned out, so exhausted, that I had to drag myself out from my chair, collapse on the bed, and fall into a disturbed sleep.

It was a struggle, but I survived.

If there is one lesson I have learned from the tough times, it is this: hustling for your goals is essential, but caring for your mind and body is more important than anything else.

I am fortunate that I learned this lesson sooner and saved hundreds of hours I might have stumbled on and on for, without achieving significant results.

The outcome has been encouraging. I find myself in a better, more positive mood on most days. I have been told that my optimism is infectious, and I have been inadvertently spreading joy and positivity to the people around me. By aligning my self-care routine with my goals, I have also been able to achieve better results both at work and in my studies and writing.

After introspecting on the growth I have achieved in the personal front, I have come up with six incredibly simple acts of self-care that you can incorporate in your daily life. If you apply these daily, you will not only be more cheerful and jovial but also start seeing fantastic results in your work and side hustle.
Querying real time video with serverless ML on Google Cloud
By: Paddy Green
Tags: Machine Learning, TensorFlow, Computer Vision, Google Cloud, Google Cloud Platform

Capturing Webcam Footage with Cloud Functions

With a maximum run time of only 540 seconds, cloud functions automatically spin up and down a resource in order to execute a script. Cloud functions are run almost exactly as they are triggered making them very useful when running in real time. For my solution I used 3 separate cloud functions. One for downloading an image from a webcam and doing basic quality checks like background subtraction and measuring blurriness with a Laplacian kernel, one for downloading a 540 second video from a webcam and a final high memory function to run OpenCV/Tensorflow on the captured images.

Cloud Functions are priced according to how long your function runs, how many times it’s invoked and how many resources you provision for the function. The invocation cost was insignificant with a cost of $0.40 per million calls. Inbound Data is free so it doesn’t cost anything to read thousands of GBs from each web camera. Outbound data to the same region is also free so I chose to use a global storage bucket.

After running one function per camera I used Cloud Trace to decipher the cost per day for both the recording of an image and for that of a video.

Cloud trace for image capture cloud functions

Costs per camera for the recording of an image and quality checks

(30000ms/100ms)* $0.000000231 = $0.00007

Costs per camera for a 540 second video recording

( 540000ms / 100ms ) * $0.000000925 = $0.005

In conclusion, cloud functions are a useful tool for recording webcams and used scarcely should not be too expensive.
Best Open Source Annotation Tools for Computer Vision
By: Laurent Montier
Tags: Machine Learning, Annotation Tools, Computer Vision, Labelling, Data Visualization

If you are a Data Scientist working in Computer Vision, you also probably realized that you need a fast and simple labeling tool for at least one of these two reasons:

to create your datasets for PoC or R&D experiments

for PoC or R&D experiments to ensure the quality of your data so that it won’t affect the performance of your Deep Learning algorithms

I dug far into the world of computer vision labeling and realized that it is filled with quite an impressive number of tools (see these three awesome-lists here, here and there, or this blog post). I spent quite some time comparing the most promising (and active) projects to learn that most of these tools were designed to reach only one among three targets:

If you want to open a business in labeling and you need:

- advanced project management features

- tons of features so any task can be done

- automation tools to increase efficiency If you belong to a startup you probably require:

- APIs or at least, simple ways to connect the labeling tool to private APIs

- An intuitive user experience (UX) so each annotator you are temporarily hiring can start working instantly If you are working on your own and you:

- don’t care about APIs / project management

- just want to start tagging as fast as you can!

Here is a quick list of my favorite tools which allow annotating bounding boxes (detection) and polygons (segmentation) for computer vision applications.

If you find out these tools do not work as expected, try to run them in Chrome!
Understanding Monte Carlo Simulation through Basketball
By: Vinicius Monteiro
Tags: Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo Method, Python, Basketball

Using Monte Carlo in Basketball

Gif by the author on Giphy

To provide you with a better perspective on what I’ve explained and to have some fun, I’m going to demonstrate how it works through a specific scenario that can happen at the end of a game of basketball.

Basketball is a complex sport (isn’t it just about putting a ball in a basket?!). It has many constraints and conditions that are constantly being analysed to make the best decision. Players and coaches are always watching for the right position on the court, time on the clock, the number of fouls, timeouts left and more. There are a lot of variables that come into play, literally.

It’s often compared to Chess as some characteristics are similar, for example, each player/piece has its role and function, a lot of both games are about opening lines and creating space, misleading. ‘fakes’ are also key. Both games make extensive use of set plays that explore these aspects.

The most crucial part of the game, without a doubt, is the end when scores are closed, within two or three points difference, for example. A team can win or lose in a blink of an eye, hence forcing players and coaches to get the most creative.

A common situation is: A team is down by three points, with 30 seconds left on the clock — is it better to try to take the three (a longer, hence more difficult shot) to tie and go to overtime, OR to try a quick two (usually shorter, easier shot), try to intentionally foul a bad free throw shooter in next possession — hoping that he/she misses one-shot or both — and go for another quick easier two and possibly win the game, or go to overtime?

Salman Khan, from Khan Academy, addressed exactly this situation [2]. It was a question by Lebron James, for which Salman Khan answered and demonstrated the best decision using Monte Carlo simulation.

Monte Carlo Simulation to Answer LeBron’s Question

In this post I’ll do the same, but with one minor difference. I’m going to take into account that according to NBA rules, a player can’t simply intentionally foul ANY player from the other team with under two minutes left in the game. It has to be the one with the ball. Otherwise, there are consequences.

With under two minutes left in the game (and from 2016, at the end of any quarter), if a player fouls another player that is away from the ball, the team is awarded one free throw and retains the possession of the ball, there is no opportunity for the rebound. It’s crucial to emphasize that the TEAM is awarded one free throw — this means that the team can select any player on the floor to attempt the shot (most likely a high percentage free throw shooter) [3].