fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Why you should use MobX
By: Alon Bar David
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Front End Development, React, Programming

Advantages of MobX

MobX has minimal boilerplate

Redux is notorious for it’s boilerplate. Here’s a simple api call recipe in redux, something every app has in one form or another:

That’s a lot of code to do something very simple, and that’s before we’ve added the minimal libraries to make redux usable in non-trivial applications — redux-thunk/ redux-saga , reselect (for momoization) and normalizr (for normalization).

In contrast a MobX store that does the same would be written like this:

And for those who are wondering that is exactly the same functionality as the previous redux example. Beyond being more concise it’s also much clearer and direct, there’s nowhere for extra functionality to creep up at you.

Unlike the redux example it automatically memoizes and there’s no need for thunk or saga to work in a real app. (It doesn’t normalizes though, that takes a bit more work to do)

There are various attempts to reduce the boilerplate — from redux itself, such as the actionCreatorCreator (I cringe just hearing that name) to full-fledged conventional libraries like ducks. Unfortunately they either didn’t live up to their claims or haven’t gained much popularity.

The extreme amount of boilerplate code isn’t limited to the logic layer part of creating redux reducers. It’s also added to the consumer part — react components:

Another option for state management in React is to use the Context api.

Let’s make the same api example with Context and Hooks:

That’s not too different from the MobX example — we only add createContext and Context.Provider . However we need to use Context.Provider and useContext every time we want state that needs to be used separately.

The more your application grows and state moves up the tree the more this becomes a common occurrence until your top level component looks something like this:

If you follow Kent C. Dodds’ guidelines on how to build state you’ll probably say that this shouldn’t happen because state should only be as close to the usage as possible and not all of it should stay at the top.

Unfortunately I find that a lot of common use cases require state to be hoisted to the top of the app — anything that needs to be shown in 2 sections of the app (such as in the main window and the sidebar, or navbar), for example: notifications/messages , authentication (and my user info), showing if a feed/group has more items to show, number of online users and a lot more.

Since you often bundle state and actions together with MobX it also lessons the problem of prop drilling — it’s much easier to send a single prop down several level than multiple ones, which makes your lower level components simpler.
How Ambition and Drive Contribute to Living a Balanced Life
By: Victoria Ichizli-Bartels
Tags: Ideas, Self-awareness, Gaming, Balanced Life, Ambition

Even when making almost daily progress in many of these and gaining points for them, I somehow didn’t feel like I was having fun. Then I realized that I had the ambition to write the book, the excerpt from which you are reading now, first. I wanted to see it come together and become a completed product.

So that was the game I wanted to excel in then, and I wanted to try the others later.

In the Balance Game, I used weekends and holidays to recharge, and I collected stars when I managed not to work too much on projects and work activities at those times.

But when I became aware of a burning passion, I made an exception for that one “ambition project.” I allowed myself to be creative in this project in my free time and weekends too. Mobile, scraps of paper, and the computer were all used as soon as creative thoughts appeared.

Awareness, kaizen, and gamification helped me enjoy this project and anything else that called for my attention on the weekends. This “ambition project” turned out to be a great game to play whenever I had a break between enjoying time with my husband and children, visiting family members and friends, or doing household chores or other things around the house, and I took a little time for myself.

I discovered that being creative in a project I was passionate about was one of the best things I could do for myself.
Within the Next 30 Years: Humanity Will Be Transformed by Exponential Growth
By: Singularity University
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Evolution, Brain Computer Interface, Abundance, Singularity University

A Quick Recap: Evolution of Life on Earth in 4 Steps

About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system, the sun and the Earth were formed.

Step 1

3.5 billion years ago, the first simple life forms, called “prokaryotes,” came into existence.These prokaryotes were super-simple, microscopic single-celled organisms, basically a bag of cytoplasm with free-floating DNA. They had neither a distinct nucleus nor specialized organelles.

Step 2

Fast-forwarding one billion years to 2.5 billion years ago, the next step in evolution created what we call “eukaryotes” — life forms that distinguished themselves by incorporating biological ‘technology’ into themselves. Technology that allowed them to manipulate energy (via mitochondria) and information (via chromosomes) far more efficiently. Fast forward another billion years for the next step.

Step 3

1.5 billion years ago, these early eukaryotes began working collaboratively and formed the first “multi-cellular life,” of which you and I are the ultimate examples (a human is a multicellular creature of 10 trillion cells).

Step 4

The final step I want to highlight happened some 400 million years ago, when lungfish crawled out of the oceans onto the shores, and life evolved from the oceans onto land.

The Next Stages of Human Evolution in 4 Steps

Today, at a massively accelerated rate — some 100 million times faster than the steps I outlined above — life is undergoing a similar evolution. In this next stage of evolution, we are going from evolution by natural selection (Darwinism) to evolution by intelligent direction. Allow me to draw the analogy for you:

Step 1

Simple humans today are analogous to prokaryotes. Simple life, each life form independent of the others, competing and sometimes collaborating.

Step 2

Just as eukaryotes were created by ingesting technology, humans will incorporate technology into our bodies and brains that will allow us to make vastly more efficient use of information (BCI) and energy.

Step 3

Enabled with BCI and AI, humans will become massively connected with each other and billions of AIs (computers) via the cloud, analogous to the first multicellular lifeforms 1.5 billion years ago. Such a massive interconnection will lead to the emergence of a new global consciousness, and a new organism I call the Meta-Intelligence.

Step 4

Finally, humanity is about to crawl out of the gravity well of Earth to become a multiplanetary species. Our journey to the moon, Mars, asteroids and beyond represents the modern-day analogy of the journey made by lungfish climbing out of the oceans some 400 million years ago.
Dockerizing Angular App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: Typescript, Angular, Docker, Programming, Web Development

Dockerizing Angular App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version

Learn How to Dockerize and make it a deployable image

Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash

Docker is an enterprise-ready container platform that enables organizations to seamlessly build, share, and run any application, anywhere. Almost every company is containerizing its applications for faster production workloads so that they can deploy anytime and sometimes several times a day. There are so many ways we can build an Angular App. One way is to dockerize the Angular app with nodejs backend and create a docker image so that we can deploy that image any time or sometimes several times a day.

In this post, we look at the example project and see the step by step guide on how we can dockerize the Angular app with nodejs as a server.

Introduction

Example Project

Dockerizing the App

Running The App on Docker

Summary

Conclusion

Introduction

Nowadays, it’s very common to dockerize and deploy the Docker image in the production with the help of container orchestration engines such as Docker Swarn or Kubernetes. We are going to Dockerize the app and create an image and run it on Docker on our local machine. We could also push that Image into Docker hub and pull it whenever and wherever we need it.

Here is the complete guide on how to develop an Angular app with nodejs as a backend server. If you are not familiar with the process or you want to know before studying this guide, I would recommend you going through it.

Javascript Version

Typescript Version

Prerequisite

As a prerequisite, you have to install Docker for Desktop (whatever your OS is). Please follow this link to install Docker on your laptop. Once installed you can check the Docker info or version with the following commands.
Pre-Sale Information
By: Crypto Fights
Tags: Dapps, Gaming, Ethereum, Startup

Since we are just a couple of days out from our pre-sale I wanted to detail all the information you will need to know about how it will work and how to purchase.

CryptoFights Pre-Sale will go LIVE on September 19th at 12pm EDT. When the timer strikes zero you will need to refresh the page and the buy buttons will be unlocked for purchase. All items listed will have a 30 second refresh showing the current inventory left. Buy fast as items are a first come first serve style. This means that while supplies last or who gets their ethereum transaction in first.

The PRE-SALE WILL ONLY BE LIVE FOR 14 DAYS. LIMITED QUANTITIES AVAILABLE.

Ways to Purchase:

Mobile: Coinbase Wallet (formerly Toshi), Cipher

Desktop: Metamask

Ethereum(ETH) will be the cryptocurrency used for buying items. Please make sure you have enough ETH ready for the pre-sale as if you wait your item might be sold out.

Prices are displayed on the right hand side.

Prices in ETH

PRESALE: https://presale.cryptofights.io

💵💵NEW REFERRAL PROGRAM — MAKE 10% OF ALL PURCHASES💰💰

We have just launched our referral program at the bottom of our pre-sale page. You need to have either the metamask wallet or mobile wallets to have your link appear. If it doesn’t appear but still want to use it you simply paste your ethereum wallet address on the end like so:

https://presale.cryptofights.io/#WALLETADDRESSHERE

Example:

How to see your items in the ENJIN Wallet

Download and install the ENJIN Wallet if you haven’t already. Once installed you can either create a new wallet or import an existing wallet. You want to IMPORT your wallet from metamask or cipher/toshi. This is the easiest way since you do not have to transfer items from one wallet to another.

Enjin Wallet Import Screen

After you import you will see your items in the collectibles menu.

Enjin Wallet CryptoFights Items

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns you can either join our Discord Server, Telegram Group, or email us.

Check out the how to play guide wiki entry.

Game Trailer:
How to Manage Versions using Maven BOM, Gradle and GitHub
By: Vladimír Oraný
Tags: Tech, Java, Gradle, Groovy, Github

I have noticed that many great frameworks such as Spring Boot, Grails or Micronaut are using Maven bill-of-material (BOM) to manage versions of their dependencies aligned. Using BOM you can constraint the versions of transitive dependencies as well as it allows you to specify just the group and name of the module ane let the version be determined by BOM.

I wanted to bring the same smooth versions' management into our project so I've created a seed project to generate the BOM files easily. Although there is a java-platform Gradle plugin which is designed for generating BOM files I got inspired by the approach taken by Micronaut team and created a project which generated the BOM from a simple properties file and publishes it into GitHub Maven repository using GitHub Actions.

Creating BOM

You can use the seed project to easily create your own BOM file. The project follows very simple conventions:

(optionally) declare versions placeholders such as groovy.version in file src/main/versions/_versions.properties declare desired module version in a file src/main/versions/<groupId>.properties (for example src/main/versions/org.codehaus.groovy.properties ) either explicitly such as groovy = 2.5.4 or using the placeholder defined before groovy = groovy.version create a release on GitHub or just push a tag to the repository to release a new version of the BOM

Once the GitHub Action is triggered by the new tag and when it is finished then the BOM will be available at https://maven.pkg.github.com/<your org>/<your repo> .

Please, follow the documentation for a further reference.

Using BOM

To use the generated BOM you have to add the following lines into your Gradle build:

repositories {

maven { url 'https://maven.pkg.github.com/<repo>/<org>' }

} dependencies {

compile platform('<your group id>:<your bom name>:<version>')

// some dependency declared in the BOM

compile 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy'

}

If you are still using an older version of Gradle you can also use the Spring dependency plugin:
Simple Notes App in Android (Java)
By: Rushi Ranade
Tags: Java, Beginner, Android, Notes, Android App Development

Programming the MainActivity

MainActivity.java imports

These are the imports needed for the application. If you don’t want to add this imports now, Android Studio will prompt you to hit Alt + Enter when you use them.

The main activity will already have an onCreate() method. Just above this method add the following line. This line will help us carry some crucial information to another activity through an Intent.

Next we are going to add the list of notes to the listView in the main activity. Add the following piece of code to the onCreate() method. So we are getting a list of files and adding them to an Array. Please ignore line 3 at the moment. Add it but we will come to it later. Then we are converting the array to an arrayAdapter with all filenames. Finally, we are adding the adapter to the listView.

Now we will write a program to create a note when the ADD Button is clicked. Add the following piece of code below the above piece of code in the onCreate() function itself. So first we will get the note heading and its content from the text fields and return an error if any text field is empty. Then we create a new file in the Android Internal Storage, and add the note content in it. The note heading will be in the file name, note_heading.txt where note_heading will be the note heading. Then we add the note heading to the listView.

And the final part of programming the MainActivity. Add this to the onCreate() function. When a user clicks on the heading in a listView he will have to see the content. Now, how do we go about doing that? We set a listener to the list items. We create an intent, to go to activity Note, and set heading as the value of the EXTRA_MESSAGE, which we had set at the beginning. And finally we start the activity, Note.
15 In Your Face Lessons from 2020
By: Marla J. Albertie
Tags: 2021, 2020, Life Lessons, Productivity, Success

What You Need to do to Succeed in 2021

Photo by Juan Ordonez on Unsplash

No need to write an introduction, the lessons say everything.

Read on…

Once again, this one is tried and true. When people show you who they are, believe it. I had to learn to stop making illusions out of what I wanted to see and simply believe what people show me whether it was good or bad. Life is precious, seriously. I know this sounds cliché. However, I had to ask myself on a regular basis, am I really living my life to the fullest, or am I living a life for someone else. I encourage you to ask yourself the same question. Who are you living for? People will have opinions, simply because they are entitled to them. You don’t have to always comment on anyone’s opinions. I have no right to argue with anyone’s opinions. People will state them and move on, therefore I shall do the same. I am careful about where I give my fucks. Somethings are not worth the argument, headache, worry, or irritation. Despite everything that has happened this year, life is good. I am alive and writing this article. That says a lot. It really is the small things that matter. Mindfulness is a real thing. Practice it, study, and do it. Your life will change drastically. Again once you become mindful, and I am no expert in it, however, like I said in number four, you become less concerned about certain things.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

7. Spend time with those who really matter to you.

8. Leave all petty stuff in 2020. Go into 2021 with a focused and intentional mindset.

9. Take a hard look at who you want to be in 2 to 3 years. Become that person now. Thanks Ben Hardy.

10. Always and I mean always have money set aside. Even if it’s simply $500. Life can change at the drop of a penny, therefore having something to fall back on is better than having nothing.

11. Get out of debt. Freedom comes when you don’t owe 20 credit card companies. I will leave this one here.

12. Figure out what is important. Ask yourself do you need or want something? There is nothing wrong with “wanting” anything. However, put your needs first, notice I said YOUR needs.

13. Learn a new skill or two. Always be a continuous learner. You never know when you will be asked to do something out of your comfort zone which will lead to something bigger and better.

14. Make a plan, and stick to the plan. However, give yourself grace if you deviate from the plan. There are 1000 different ways to get to your destination. Remember the journey is what matters.

15. Give when and where are you can. Even if it is $.25 or your time. It always comes back to you somehow, someway.

Finish 2020 strong. You are a winner. You are NOT defeated.
Pool Reward Token DAO — Penjelasan
By: Dao Maker Indonesia
Tags: Fintech, Startup, Decentralization, Venture Capital, SaaS

DAO Token Reward Pool — Explained

Three years of work make sure that the DAO token launches with an active reward pool from day 1, creating a growth…
The All-That-Really-Matters Top 3: Hope, Love, and Gratitude
By: Lon Shapiro
Tags: Gratitude, Writing, Love, Hope, Medium

#2: LOVE

Is there anything that can top the love a mother feels for her child?

If there is, I would say it’s the love a mother feels for somebody else’s child to the point where they save the child from a dangerous environment and give that child the chance to a remake his life.

In this heartbreaking story of a mother’s love, Carol Lennox touched me on so many levels. I grieve for her and all the mothers who have suffered, but it is also a story of inspiration and a call to action.

I feel inspired by the basic goodness of human beings. How else can we explain how a damaged boy, suffering from a traumatic childhood, could still show compassion and courage to a stranger who was being bullied in school? How else does that boy could grow up to be a good man, breaking the chain of crime and poverty that had damaged his family?

This story cries out for the need to help young black men and stem the tide of violent crime that engulfs our country.

There are far too many stories of good people dying due to a systemic lack of opportunity that goes way beyond excessive force used by the police.

#BlackLivesMatter
Content creators: be brave, not perfect
By: Hugo
Tags: Customer Experience, Marketing, Content, Brand Experience

If Netflix has taught us anything, it is the importance of responding to changing patterns of media consumption. They have carved out a dominant position by taking risks, and challenging convention, and their influence is re-shaping the entertainment industry. ‘Better Call Saul’ for example, doesn’t need a blockbuster budget and shot-perfect cinematography to pull-in the Emmy nominations or to rake in over 2.5 million viewers.

Brands should take heed. They’re increasingly investing in customer experiences, and social channels like YouTube and Facebook are an established part of the marketing mix. But the sheer volume of brands competing for attention is a significant challenge. Two years ago Mark Schaeffer, predicted the onset of ‘content shock’ and he’s now presented evidence that major brand publishers are finding it harder to gain organic reach.

Near-constant dialogue with consumers is shifting the focus away from long-distance forward planning and toward responsive frameworks. Embracing the freedom to manoeuvre within a responsive framework can be an intimidating prospect. That’s where the bravery comes in. At a time when consumers are struggling with too much choice, it’s the role of the content creator to craft powerful and distinctive brand stories, and to create adaptive content that thrives in fast-moving environments where attention is at a premium.

Good content creators in the digital industry understand this — they’re sharp, nimble creatives who can shape a project with the humble resources and inside the restraints they’re given. They listen to their clients, interpreting the project brief within the context of wider business needs. This means doing the best with what they’ve got, in the time they’ve got. That rarely amounts to perfection, but it always gets results.

To really create sparks between consumer and brand, these creators need to be willing to head into the unknown. They need to be able to compensate for client and agency fears, to evaluate the ‘what if’s of a project and then formulate a story with emotive value and beauty. By raising brand awareness through these visual stories they can, step by step, build relationships that matter.

All digital spaces are saturated with underperforming content, and they’re only going to become more so, but the brands with content that expresses their values while making the digital landscape a more enjoyable place to be will be the ones who float to the top.

This is an exciting time for brands and agencies to work together to achieve positive cultural brand change. There’s an extremely creative future ahead for digital content — we just need to be brave enough and curious enough to explore all the possibilities.

By Jade Tomlin, Art Director at Hugo & Cat

To find out more about connected brand experiences, drop us a line at hello@hugoandcat.com
Review: Faster R-CNN (Object Detection)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Neural Networks, Deep Learning

1. Region Proposal Network (RPN)

In brief, R-CNN [4] and Fast R-CNN [3] first generate region proposals by selective search (SS) [5], then a CNN-based network is used to classify the object class and detect the bounding box. (The main difference is that R-CNN input the region proposals at pixel level into CNN for detection while Fast R-CNN input the region proposals at feature map level.) Thus, in R-CNN [4] and Fast R-CNN [3], the region proposal approach/network (i.e. SS) and the detection network are decoupled.

Decoupling is not a good idea. Say for example, when SS has false negative, this error will hurt the detection network directly. It is better to couple them together such that they are correlated to each other.

In Faster R-CNN [1–2], RPN using SS [5] is replaced by RPN using CNN. And this CNN is shared with detection network. This CNN can be ZFNet or VGGNet in the paper. Thus, the overall network is as below:

Faster R-CNN

First, the picture goes through conv layers and feature maps are extracted. Then a sliding window is used in RPN for each location over the feature map. For each location, k (k=9) anchor boxes are used (3 scales of 128, 256 and 512, and 3 aspect ratios of 1:1, 1:2, 2:1) for generating region proposals. A cls layer outputs 2k scores whether there is object or not for k boxes. A reg layer outputs 4k for the coordinates (box center coordinates, width and height) of k boxes. With a size of W×H feature map, there are WHk anchors in total.

The Output of RPN

The average proposal size for 3 scales of 128, 256 and 512, and 3 aspect ratios of 1:1, 1:2, 2:1 are:

Average Proposal Sizes

The loss function is:

RPN Loss Function

The first term is the classification loss over 2 classes (There is object or not). The second term is the regression loss of bounding boxes only when there is object (i.e. p_i* =1).

Thus, RPN network is to pre-check which location contains object. And the corresponding locations and bounding boxes will pass to detection network for detecting the object class and returning the bounding box of that object.

As regions can be highly overlapped with each other, non-maximum suppression (NMS) is used to reduce the number of proposals from about 6000 to N (N=300).
Indians and Thank-yous
Tags: Indian Culture, Articles, India, Writing

Photo by Debashis RC Biswas on Unsplash

I don’t know what are the names of these gentlemen, but I can assure you the second one is from India, not through the Kashmir reference but through the lack of thank you in his comment. You would know this too, if you are an Indian, that Indians in all their sweet oriental loveliness and graciousness always do forget to say “Thank You”. I had seldom seen an Indian saying “Thank you” in his own place, mind you I am talking about those “Desi” Indians of 80's and 90’s not about these kids of today who change their nationality with every Netflix series they watch.

One would, and I too went through that stage, of thinking that it is because they have an elevated sense of importance, a kind of arrogance, impoliteness, shyness, but no these aren’t the reasons, as per how I view it. After all, these are Indians, when do Indians have such arrogance and such shyness, they are frank and lovely and innocent, to begin with. So what does this peculiar habit ascribe to, what does this point to.

I will give my reason for this habit, that maybe wrong or inaccurate, but I think this is because of the motto of the Indian Heritage, a great sentence in the Maha Upanishads- “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” which means the world is one family. Indians take pride in this saying and most of them follow this saying without even trying to or consciously knowing it, they consider everyone to help them by default, they consider everyone their family and this is the reason they don’t say Thank You’s. As they say “there is no sorry and thank you between family and friends”. Indians hold on to this principle a bit tighter than others.

But still, there is a question lurking around i.e. why do they start saying thank-yous when they visit places or they are new at places. Now some things should remain mysteries.

Any other theories? Post them in response. Thank You :-)
Navigating Into the World of Machine Learning
By: Bardh Rushiti
Tags: Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Ensemble Learning, Neural Networks

With the rapid expansion of Machine Learning as a field of research, it’s not easy to keep up with everything that is being invented and discovered.

I have created a graph that will make the distinction of the types of machine learning systems easier to understand.

It is useful to keep in mind there’s more than one way (ML algorithm) to solve a specific problem. Usually, there are several that fit and it’s your duty to identify which is the best algorithm with the given circumstances of its implementation.

Nowadays, everything is being solved with neural networks; why use a sword to cut bread, when a knife would be sufficient?

The ML landscape looked from above, has mainly four different directions:

In the following weeks, I will delve into each topic and discuss its nuts and bolts.

Sum up

Hope this article helped you get a clearer idea how the ML landscape is generally separated.

Did I miss any types of learning? Let me know in the comments below.

I’d love to hear your ideas on what you’d like to read next — let me know down below in the comment section!

You can always connect with me via LinkedIn.
Dynamic Programming Interview Questions: Unique Paths
By: Steffy Lo
Tags: Interview Questions, Python, Computer Science, Interview, Programming

Like our previous problem, we immediately know that we should use the bottom-up approach to solve this since we’re required to find all possible unique paths.

Base Case

In any bottom-up approach, we need to first establish some base cases. I think of base cases as cases that cannot be broken down any further — they’re the simplest form of a sub-problem. If I can compute them in one step, independent of any previous results, then it must be a base case. Usually a good start to finding a base case is to look at the problem’s smallest input size (i.e., an edge case). In our case, this would be m=1 and n=1. So how many unique paths if m=1 and n=1. It would just be 1.

OK — we have established a base case. Are there any more?

Remember that a robot can only move down or right at any point in time. That means that if m=1, the value of n doesn’t matter — there’s only one unique path to get there. Similarly, if n=1, the value of m doesn’t matter — again, there’s only one unique path.

Wow! This base case is even more insightful than the first one we established, which is merely a subset of this base case!

Moral of the story: Look for as many base cases as you can before trying to work your way up
The Ultimate Guide To Instagram Growth in 2020 | 3k Followers in under 3 Months
By: Songlarb, Deejai
Tags: Social Media Mar, Startup, Digital Marketing, Online Business, Instagram

Step 5: Grow an Audience and Communicate With Your Followers

Congratulations on publishing your first post on Instagram using the best practices approach. It is now time for the final step in this Ultimate Guide To Instagram Growth in 2020, which is to build a loyal community of followers.

Building a Community

As with treating your Instagram as a Business, you must also treat your followers as you would with your loyal clients and customers. This means interacting with them respectfully while engaging with their content frequently. Spend at least 15–30 minutes each day before or after you publish your post to like and comment on posts of your existing followers.

Moreover, revisit the list of large Instagram accounts in your niche that you have compiled and created in Step 3. With this list of Instagram accounts, go through their list of followers, and engage with Instagram users on their follower list by liking their posts or following their accounts (I recommend only following public accounts and skipping private accounts). The Instagram users following those large accounts are most likely also interested in your niche; therefore, there is a high probability your content will also resonate with them.

This is an important step in building brand awareness and establishing a large community of followers as it is an effective method of making those Instagram users aware of your account and your content. Without engaging with these users, you will only be reliant on your hashtags strategy to grow your followers. While this is possible for large and established Instagram accounts, it is vastly more effective to reinforce the hashtags strategy with this engagement strategy.

Misusing Instagram’s features will lead to an “Action Blocked” message

Best Practices

Following / Unfollowing Users: Follow a maximum of 25 users per hour with 10–20 being the optimum range you should stick with to stay on the safe side of Instagram’s rules. There is no precise number written on Instagram’s rules and policies; however, it is best to stick to the optimum range or your account will be “Action Blocked.”

Post Likes: When interacting and engaging with posts on Instagram, do not exceed liking more than 300 posts per hour, with the optimum range around 150–250. Again, there is no precise number written on Instagram’s rules and policies; however, it is best to avoid spamming likes and comments throughout your Instagram feed.

Action Blocked: An “Action Blocked” message is similar to getting a yellow penalty warning card on Instagram. You will not be able to like, comment, or follow (or all of the above) for a certain period and the visibility and reach of your posts will be inevitably affected. If you have read this guide and still did not follow the best practices outlined above and got your account “Action Blocked” it is best to avoid liking, commenting, or following any users for two-weeks time to lift your penalty from Instagram.
Design Documentation — Style Guides and Design Systems
By: Priyanka J
Tags: Design Handoff, Design Systems, Design, Style Guides, Design Documentation

What are Style Guides and Design Systems? The Style Guide establishes the root for visual presentations and a design system connects components, patterns, and visuals together to become one single source of truth for products and brands. Well, something like that and as there are many differences there are similarities as well. Style guides and design systems both save a lot of time and misunderstandings. They both increase the workflow and efficiency of the team. They are both documents with different content, they both have the same purpose — allowing multiple contributors to work consistently to create a consistently awesome experience for people and set a unified voice and tone for a brand.

The question is why don’t we simply call it documentation? Because they are simply just different kinds of documentations contributing to what is mentioned above and a lot more. Well, we can but there is a high probability that at some point we will have to explain the difference between the two in detail. Let’s begin with style guides as they are comparatively concise, compact, and visually viable to understand.

Style Guides

A style guide is a documentation of the guidelines for a brand’s visual and content elements. It defines the visual representation of a brand and establishes the root of its voice and tone. It is a document of the choice of colors, the prominence of the logo, and the language. It’s a document of all things you see, read, and remember about a brand. Companies, Agencies, brands, freelancers, designers, and developers deploy the style guide to avoid wasted time and efforts in bringing the brand’s message together.
String Theory
Tags: Ideas, Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Dreams, Psychology

how does a panic attack begin ?

nowhere like a wave deep out at sea

or like the wave which hides inside and

the smallest particles of matter or strings

which write the allegory of the cosmos

rain chant ring charm rain all day rain

when I close my eyes I wonder if I am imagining

it if I’m still asleep under the covers like a

dead man like a dead thing forgotten or

sleeping giant in a cave part of the mythical

cycle spring to winter

summer to fall birth to death
Grief is Not A Choice
By: Jacqueline Dooley
Tags: Death, Self, Mental Health, Grief, Parenting

There is a common theme that comes up, like clockwork, in the various parental grief support groups I belong to on Facebook.

It goes something like this: someone will describe an encounter they had with a dear friend or a trusted therapist or a family member (people who generally have the griever’s best interest at heart). This person will advise the bereaved that it’s time to stop grieving.

The sentiment comes in a variety of flavors. I’ll paraphrase a few of them:

It’s time to move on.

Your child would want you to be happy.

You can have another baby.

Let him or her go. (I wish I was kidding with this one)

You need to get over it.

This is just a bump in the road.

You can choose to embrace life and be happy.

All of the above statements, but especially the last one, imply that grieving is a choice, that one can simply choose to be done with it.

This brand of advice is rampant no matter the age of the child or the cause of death. When a grieving parent hears some version of “it’s time to move on” from a well-meaning friend or relative, particularly someone who we expect will understand our level of pain, it feels hurtful and dismissive. It can even feel like a betrayal.

This topic comes up so frequently in closed Facebook groups because many parents aren’t comfortable posting to their own feeds about the level of pain we’re in, so we retreat to the safety and solidarity of our fellow bereaved.

I also suspect that for some of us, the belief that there is an acceptable way to grieve (which includes a fixed time limit) is so ingrained in our psyche that it’s hard not to feel like a failure or a freak when you still find yourself grieving and heartbroken over the course of many years.
What’s New in Revit 2021
By: Dan Edleson
Tags: Revit, Design, Bim, Autodesk, Architecture

Welcome to Revit 2021. If you have been using the software for a while you will likely find moments of excitement with some of the new features (yay slanted walls!) while disappointment for a lack of others (search a hashtag or two on Twitter for some good grumbles). There’s a lot of what one would call minor tweaks, and I would say overall this is a good thing. Sure, there’s a lot Revit could do great, but it’s been doing a lot good for at least a decade, and until there’s a significant shift in the industry it’s still the most relevant BIM software out there.

In this post we are going to focus on Architecture specific features because that is the expertise of STEREO. We are also going to avoid diving into the new Generative Design features or Dynamo 2.5, as those things really require an in-depth exploration we will go into in later posts. So let’s look now at the features that are going to affect the way you work in Revit on a daily basis.

Linking PDFs

Aligned Tags

Striped Schedules

Turning Off Filters

Slanted Walls

Void Parameters

Survey Units

There’s some good stuff there! Hopefully it will help make your day-to-day workflow a little smoother. Anything new in Revit you’d be interested to see us go in-depth on? Let us know!
What I’ve Learned As A Fresh Grad Marketing During A Global Pandemic
Tags: Marketing, Self Improvement, Personal Development, Covid 19, Personal Growth

I’m sure that by now, many of you have had your fill of articles that tell you how to navigate your business in the current Covid pandemic.

Most of these articles come from industry experts with several years of experience under their belt; they are adept professionals who have many valuable lessons regarding the dos and don’ts of marketing.

Medium is full of these successful marketing gurus. I personally dig their content, mainly because their advice is almost always practical and comes with good intentions.

There’s just one small snag there: these articles aren’t really relatable. And I’m sure many of you in my position feel the same way too.

Unlike these experts, most fresh graduates have not had the chance to execute digital marketing campaigns or create content marketing strategies for their companies. Heck, some of us are probably still undergoing training!

The real issue here isn’t that the advice these marketing experts dispense isn’t good-in fact, they’re amazing- but speaking from a fresh graduate’s perspective, sometimes what we need in our moments of vulnerability isn’t professional counsel, but rather, some empathetic guidance.

It’s like how on occasion, you’d rather go to a friend than your parents or teacher for a listening ear- simply because they can relate better to you.

I’m pretty sure that there are many fresh graduates who just started their first full-time marketing job/internship in this Covid situation, and are utterly scared of how to proceed in their current job.

After all, no one wants to perform badly in their first-ever proper job, right?

If you’re a fresh graduate reading this, don’t worry! I’m here to give you some personal tips on how to approach your first marketing job. Do read on to find out.
Never as it Seems
By: Melissa Bee
Tags: Poetry, Photography, Nonfiction, Short Story, Chance Encounters

As we left the house for our walk, and I skipped down the steps behind the kids, magnetic energy stopped me in my tracks. I turned my head back to look in the direction of the vibe — the pumpkin. It was pulling me closer until I was staring straight into it.

I saw an entire world — our world.

Through the pumpkin’s fibrous strands and seeds, I saw branches, clouds, the Moon, darkness, light, and a watchful eye. The inside of the pumpkin resembles the physical aspect of our world. Then my mind went right on to thinking, in what other ways does this relate?

There must be a deeper meaning.

I may not have been able to carve that pumpkin, but Nature did.

The squirrels gnawed till their tummies were full.

Naturally, light found a way into the darkness of the pumpkin.

That was the message — light will always find a way to shine.

Light and darkness can’t exist without one another. I feel as though light is calling out to be seen.

That pumpkin could have stayed in the dark — but it didn’t. The energy drawing me to the chewed-up pumpkin could have been absent — but it wasn’t. Inspiration was born from it all.
Machine Learning Up-To-Date — Life With Data
By: Anthony Agnone
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Data Science, Programming

There have been breakthroughs in understanding COVID-19, such as how soon an exposed person will develop symptoms and how many people on average will contract the disease after contact with an exposed individual. The wider research community is actively working on accurately predicting the percent population who are exposed, recovered, or have built immunity. Researchers currently build epidemiology models and simulators using available data from agencies and institutions, as well as historical data from similar diseases such as influenza, SARS, and MERS. It’s an uphill task for any model to accurately capture all the complexities of the real world. Challenges in building these models include learning parameters that influence variations in disease spread across multiple countries or populations, being able to combine various intervention strategies (such as school closures and stay-at-home orders), and running what-if scenarios by incorporating trends from diseases similar to COVID-19. COVID-19 remains a relatively unknown disease with no historic data to predict trends.

We are now open-sourcing a toolset for researchers and data scientists to better model and understand the progression of COVID-19 in a given community over time. This toolset is comprised of a disease progression simulator and several machine learning (ML) models to test the impact of various interventions. First, the ML models help bootstrap the system by estimating the disease progression and comparing the outcomes to historical data. Next, you can run the simulator with learned parameters to play out what-if scenarios for various interventions. In the following diagram, we illustrate the interactions among the extensible building blocks in the toolset.

… keep reading
Blockport Crowdsale Announcement
By: Kai Kaïn Bennink
Tags: Startup, ICO, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin

In this article we would like to share some important changes regarding our Crowdsale start date, individual cap and rates & caps. Additionally, we updated our roadmap with more specifics for the coming year.

Crowdsale starts on 24th of January!

In the past few weeks we have gained tremendous traction from the crypto community, and therefore, we decided to pull the start time of the Crowdsale forward!

The new Crowdsale start time is set on: 24th of January 2018, 15:00 CET

Setting the Crowdsale start time forward enables us to spread the influx of incoming participants, giving committed community members more time to attain Blockport tokens.

Individual cap is 50 ETH

As a result from huge interest by our community we realised that there is a significant amount of people that want to participate with a large amount of ETH. Therefore, we have also decided to lower the individual cap from 100 ETH to 50 ETH in order to ensure that everybody has a fair chance to attain Blockport tokens during the Crowdsale.

Crowdsale rates & caps

In the past weeks we learned that we should not have pegged the price of BPT to EUR but to ETH. It is (almost) impossible to account for Ether’s price fluctuations during a month’s period and still maintain the same terms & conditions for every token sale participant. Therefore, to ensure clarity towards our community we are maintaining our current rates & caps in ETH.

This is for several reasons:

Changing the BPT rates has multiple implications since it affects the bonus structure and exposure to risk of early pre-sale participants. For example, if we would increase the BPT rates — to account for ETH price increase — this means that pre-sale participants will not receive the bonus as a reward for taking the risk to participate one month earlier than Crowdsale participants.

Secondly, we will not be able to lower the ETH cap, because this would mean a lower total supply of BPT for all Crowdsale participants. Additionally, lowering the hardcap will also lower the company’s absolute BPT allocation, which will be mostly used for rewarding our community members for supporting us (bounty + referral program). As a result, we would not meet our planned BPT budget and the community will have less room to obtain BPT tokens in the Crowdsale.

Roadmap updates

We made some small updates in the specification of our roadmap. Since we pulled the start date of our Crowdsale forward we have decided to release our Blockport 1.0 Beta in March 2018.

Blockport Roadmap

Summarized Crowdsale announcements:
Three Medium Writers who educate, entertain, and entice me to keep reading (and writing).
By: Rose Mary Griffith
Tags: Grief, Aging, Writing, Life, Top 3

When I first joined the Medium Partner Program, there was an awesome criteria in place for you to earn money: You had to both contribute your writing and be an active reader. You had to be part of the community supporting fellow writers. This meant you had to spend time reading, highlighting, commenting, and sharing others’ posts. It was a wonderful thing and I’m sorry that it disappeared somewhere in the last two years.

What this guideline forced writers consumed with putting words down was what we could pick up from someone else and learn. This is a developed habit that I continue to use to meet new writers, discover a different point of view, and broaden what I read in a day.

Here are three writers I’ve met on Medium whose writing touches, educates, and connects. Enjoy:

Hair to Dye For has this 60 year-old laughing and nodding in agreement and understanding. I let my hair do its thing a few years ago. Marie describes a woman’s connection to her hair, “I had turned fifty years old that summer and no longer felt I could tolerate trying to make myself in an image that pleased others while leaving me miserable.”

I’ve exchanged many comments with Florian telling him: You made me laugh, cry, and learn all in the same article. He writes so much that touches me in one way or another, it was difficult to narrow my pick. I chose this article because we both lost our fathers to wasting diseases — his to cancer, mine to ALS. Even within the time of dying, humor can be found.

Agnes and I have bonded over shared family stories. But don’t stop your reading there. Agnes writes intimate poetry, yoga-focused health articles, and socially attuned stories. If you are new to Medium (or been here forever!), connect with Agnes. She shares her support like a godsend carrying an umbrella on a rainy day.

Three — it’s a good thing we are limited to three because I have many great writers bookmarked and could easy write about six, nine, twelve … you get the idea. Enjoy!