fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
We’re All In This Together?
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: Covid 19, Salsa, Equality, Coronavirus, The Bad Influence

We’re All In This Together?

No. Clearly we’re not.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” A proclamation by the pigs who control the government in the novel Animal Farm, by George Orwell.

It was only back in February that home secretary for the UK, Priti Patel labelled any person earning less than £25,000 a year a “low skilled” or “unskilled” worker. Now, amid the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, it is those workers who’re helping to prop up the country in lockdown.

Coronavirus is not some grand leveller: it is an amplifier of existing inequalities, injustices and insecurities.

The trite slogan ‘We’re All In This Together’ is simply bollocks. There’s no equality on display. The virus isn’t some grand leveler affecting everybody in society in the same way. In case you haven’t heard, old people are more susceptible than young. The weak are more likely to be infected. And those on the low-end of the poor scale, the social-economically deprived people feeding the trough of the rich, are even more likely to be exposed to the virus.

Are the super-rich, holed up in their bunker, really in it together? Is Gwyneth Paltrow really concerned for my well-being as her in-house chef whips up another batch of smashed avocado smoothie?

It’s time to debunk the myth.

‘Be Kind’ is what the governments are preaching. They need the populace to stay calm. They need the ‘workers’ now to be in the front-line in order to protect the system. They need you now more than ever.

Boris Johnson lavishes praise on a Kiwi worker. A woman who stayed by his bed all night long ensuring he didn’t succumb to the virus. By her side was a Portugese health worker. Two vital women that helps the National Health Service to tick over. The irony here being that both would have difficulty getting visas in the Uk’s Brexit future. Migrants help the system tick over.

Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock

The day Dominic Raab encouraged us all in the UK to clap for the workers who’re risking their lives to keep society going, the government restated that some of those same people won’t be allowed in the country come January 2021.

“Low-skilled” people would not be able to apply for a UK work visa.

In It Together until you’re no longer useful or needed. Who’ll take their place? Who among the wealthy are willing to step into their shoes? What will become of the the migrant care workers, hospital porters, bus drivers and cleaners who are keeping us safe and keeping society functioning.

Are the cleaners essential during a pandemic but non-essential when the pandemic clears? If recognising our common humanity is something we can do when Boris Johnson is admitted to intensive care, the same should be possible for all people, regardless of their immigration status. All migrants’ rights should matter. Not just in a crisis, but all the time.
My Stories of Failing to Make Money Online
By: Atanas Shorgov
Tags: Money, Personal Story, Marketing, Blogging, Freelancing

Medium

As we are on Medium, I can’t talk about it. Some people make money here. Big bucks! Not me.

In all seriousness, I like writing on Medium. The user interface is nice and clean. Easy to write and easy to read. It has a huge visitor base and you can even get paid for writing. It has all I want from a platform for writers.

You have to give a few compliments when they’re deserved. Of course, Medium has its drawbacks, nothing is perfect. You know about them.

They had to add the monthly subscription to make more money, but it’s only $5/month. Not much for most people. I am not subscribed. I read some free stories and write from time to time, and I don’t really need the subscription. Yes, it will be cool to read some more, but that’s life.

How much do they pay writers is the big question?

Not much is the short answer. They have a complicated model of claps linked to your stories that are published behind a paywall. Writers can choose whether to publish them for free or not.

Some claps can give you more money, depending on how often the person who is subscribed claps. You can find some articles here describing it in detail.

Medium is my favorite place to write and I would be super happy to earn some extra cash for a beer or two, but I don’t even publish my stories behind a paywall.

First, I don’t think I offer such high-quality writing that people should pay to read it.

Second, I get almost no views anyway.

Third, I actually made a few stories eligible to earn money, which contradicts my first point, but I saw how little Medium pays when you don’t have any followers and your stories get 30 views at most.

Fourth, writers should first get people to read them, a couple of thousands of followers under their account. Start getting a good amount of views and reads every day, and then try to earn money from it.

I’ve read stories of writers making a few thousand per month here, but it’s less than 1% of the total amount of writers that regularly post.

Earnings: $0,35
3 Lines Story — She’s a Magic!
By: Pawan Kumar
Tags: Poetry, Writing, Relationships, Love, Poem

“The way she laughs is classic,

When she is near him everything look cinematic,

He looks her like may be she is a magic.”
Write for Analytics Vidhya
By: Team Av
Tags: Analytics Vidhya, Machine Learning, Writing, Data Science, Contribute

Analytics Vidhya is on a mission to create the next generation data science ecosystem. We aim to make data science knowledge accessible to as many people as possible. We aim to play an active role in enabling people to create products enabled by Data Science.

So, if you can create pieces of work which make data science easier to apply, we promise to put it in front of the world.

What can you expect by writing for Analytics Vidhya?

Visibility in front of our community — We have an awesome community passionate about data science. Millions of people across the globe use Analytics Vidhya as their source of knowledge. Your work will be put in front of this community.

— We have an awesome community passionate about data science. Millions of people across the globe use Analytics Vidhya as their source of knowledge. Your work will be put in front of this community. Recognition as a subject matter expert — Many authors have got unparalleled recognition through their posts and work on Analytics Vidhya. There is no reason why you will not get it.

— Many authors have got unparalleled recognition through their posts and work on Analytics Vidhya. There is no reason why you will not get it. Get feedback on your content from our Editors — We know how to make content which people love. We will provide you with feedback based on this experience.

What do we expect from you?

High-quality content- Our focus is on creating high-quality content as it helps the community effectively. We maintain this bar across all pieces of work and are looking who share the same passion.

Our focus is on creating high-quality content as it helps the community effectively. We maintain this bar across all pieces of work and are looking who share the same passion. Consideration of any feedback provided on your writing. We will provide you feedback through private notes on Medium.

provided on your writing. We will provide you feedback through private notes on Medium. We need the content to be free from any plagiarism. Any plagiarism, if detected would lead to a ban of the author and deletion of all the articles.

Here is what you need to do next?

Kindly go ahead and fill this form for us. We will add you as a writer on our publication and you can go ahead and share your stories with us!

Who owns the work?

Any content which is published on the Analytics Vidhya Medium channel would continue to be owned by the Original Author completely.

Can you earn money by publishing on Analytics Vidhya?

The aim of Analytics Vidhya is to make data science knowledge accessible to everyone. In order to do this — we need a healthy mix of free articles and paid articles. We encourage people to share as much as they can with the community for free, however, authors are free to put their articles behind the Medium payment wall.

Got more questions?

Please feel free to share your questions through comments below — we will be happy to talk/discuss.
Bulldozer Brain vs. Rabbit Brain in Meetings
By: Xiao Ma
Tags: Meetings, Inclusion, Work, Psychology, Random Thoughts

There are countless articles on the Internet teaching people how to speak up more in meetings. A few of them are not complete bullshit.

What if we think about it the other way around? Instead of focusing on individuals who tend to be quietly thinking in meetings, how about we try to make meetings more effective and inclusive in the first place?

Awareness

First and foremost, we should recognize that people think in different ways. We have bulldozer brains, rabbit brains, and anywhere in between. This awareness on its own is fundamental for us to think about meetings differently.

Structure

Structure is critical. Before meeting, prepare an agenda and share it with the attendees in advance. Even better, share written documents that frame the meeting discussion and give people time to read through them. In meetings, make sure everyone has a chance to speak up. After meetings, shares notes and encourage follow-ups.

I love our meeting structure at Medium, which reflects our inclusive culture. The check-in and tension rounds are specifically designed to give everyone an opportunity to speak up. Participating in check-in rounds makes it easier to speak up later in the meeting. I recently learned from a post about check-in arounds that “pre-meeting talk” is actually a psychologic research topic. Academic literature suggested that pre-meeting talk is a strong indicator of meeting effectiveness.

Attention

Pay extra attention to folks who are quiet. Are they in deep thinking? Do they need a few more seconds? Do they have enough context? Do they show any signs that they want to speak up but couldn’t find an opportunity to start talking? Call them out if they are comfortable being called out.

Pause

From time to time, we can collaboratively pause for a few seconds for everyone to take some time to think and an opportunity for everyone to jump into the discussion. Taking a pause is especially important before we switch topics because once the topic is switched, it pretty much cuts off the opportunities for bulldozer brains to express anything.

Follow-up

Follow-up with people after meetings. Give them more opportunities to share their perspectives outside of meetings, either in person or in writing. Show them that you want to listen to them and value their thoughts. It will encourage them to speak up more in the future.

At Medium, we have an internal version of the site called Hatch. It is for everyone in the company to share their thoughts no matter if they are slow or fast thinkers in meetings. It became a unique part of Medium’s culture.
Porque o Double Diamond não é o suficiente
By: João Traini
Tags: Design Process, Ux Translations, Startup, Product Management, UX

Why the double diamond isn’t enough

The design process doesn’t end with prototyping. Unfortunately, designers are more often than not are pulled off a…
How Today’s Marketers Are the Architects of Consumers’ Choice
By: Jean-Marc Buchert
Tags: Customer Experience, Decision Making, Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Customer Service

Framing Good Default Choices

This may have already happened to you: you have just taken out a new insurance plan, but one year later this plan changes its price. So instead of changing, you don’t bother and keep the same plan.

Economists Samuelson and Zeckhauser have described this human tendency as status quo bias. Individuals prefer to choose and keep the default option rather than make the effort to select other options.

For example, they studied the use made by university professors of their pension plan. They found that more than half did not change the way their contributions were allocated, although they may have got different marital situations.

From the marketer’s point of view, this psychological bias is sometimes used to take advantage of consumers’ weaknesses, as shown by automatically renewed subscriptions that the consumer makes no effort to change. But it can also be used to help consumers make simpler and more effective choices.

For example, in French restaurants, there is always the option of a menu of the day that the customer can choose if they don’t want to think about it. In good restaurants, the chef then serves the customer with the dish that they feel is most appropriate at the time and season. This allows them to discover new things and often even eat better.

In many administrative, banking, and insurance services, there is usually no default choice, or the default choice is not the most optimal for the consumer. The consumer thus gets lost in the range of choices available and, if they don’t have a lot of time, they often make bad choices.

A good idea for the marketer would be to invent a good default choice, in which the consumer can find himself without overthinking.
Survivor’s Guilt: The Psychological War After My Daughter’s Traumatic Birth
By: Real Coach Monk
Tags: Hospital, Mental Health, Parenting, Mental Illness, Mental Health Awareness

Photo by Colton Jones on Unsplash

My daughter did not come into this world in a normal fashion. The typical build up to the birth of a child in America — the smiles, Lamaze classes, the swerving through traffic when the contractions start, the push, the scream, the glow, and taking the baby home all bundled up a couple of days later — none of that happened for us when my daughter was born.

Nothing that anyone would consider normal happened at all.

Survivor’s guilt is something that people experience when they’ve survived a life-threatening situation and others might not have. It is commonly seen among Holocaust survivors, war veterans, lung-transplant recipients, airplane-crash survivors, and those who have lived through natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and floods. — Dr. Diana Raab, Psychology Today

Six weeks into the pregnancy we were told my wife had a miscarriage. We were encouraged to schedule a D & C to get rid of “it.” A week later they found a heartbeat.

At that same trip to the emergency room, they discovered my wife had a tumor.

20 weeks in, my wife’s water broke. We were told that if we could hold on for another four weeks my wife could be checked into the hospital because then our daughter would be “viable”. We were consulted by one doctor to go ahead and “terminate” because most babies in our daughter’s situation have a hard time surviving. The doctor said statistically babies in our daughter’s situation had a 1% chance of survival.

At 26 weeks, after two weeks in the hospital, there were more complications. The doctor made the call to prep for delivery around midnight. I’m calling people on the phone to let them know, but no one is picking up. I’m all by myself as the doctor starts giving me a rundown of both real and hypothetical scenarios, some of which involve the deaths of my wife and daughter.

They cut my wife open. Pulled my daughter out, then I followed them back into a room where they stuffed my daughter full of tubes and hooked her up to a ventilator. She weighed 2 pounds, 2 ounces.

In the room, the doctor says there’s a good chance she’ll make it past the first week. They’ll re-evaluate after that. If she makes it.

I don’t get to hold my daughter for 8 days. I only get to stare at her through the glass and trust she’s going to be okay.

And the days progress. 149 of them. Teams of doctors. Countless nurses and nurse-practitioners. Countless plans, evaluations, theories, hours, sitting, waiting in limbo.

Finally, we get to come home.

Why did I get to come home?
Distributed Orchestration with Camunda BPM, Part 2
By: Simon Zambrovski
Tags: Microservices, Orchestration, Camunda, Bpm, External Task Pattern

The term Orchestration in Microservice context might be ambiguous. To get it clearer, I would like to propose the following classification:

SOA-like orchestration

SOA focuses on remote communication between services, built around business capabilities. Central process engine synchronously calls distributed services remotely. The integration is performed between the state-handling process engine and the state-less service.

I’m over-simplifying it a little here and describing a “bad-design/misunderstood-SOA”, since in essence SOA was NOT about stateless services, but was sometimes implemented this way.

Synchronous orchestration

There are two different implementation styles of this class of systems.

The Connector integration pattern is used, if the process engine is calling the service (S1, S2, S3) using the selected protocol directly (usually HTTP). The RPC integration pattern is used, if the engine calls a local delegate and these are invoking a remote service (S1, S2, S3) via selected protocol (HTTP, Java RMI or any other synchronous protocol).

In both cases, the integration requires the engine and the services to be online simultaneously. The engine might know the location of the services or use a registry or a broker (remember the Webservice triangle) to resolve this and the services use invocation-oriented implementation to execute work on behalf of the process engine.

Message-driven orchestration

Instead of synchronous invocation, the central engine might send messages to queues or topics and the stateless services subscribe to those. The simultaneous availability of the engine and the services is not required. As a result the services use a subscription-oriented implementation to execute work on behalf of the process engine.

Asynchronous orchestration

There are two types of implementation depending on the messaging abstraction in use:

The messaging infrastructure might be middleware (for example using a central messaging bus) offering the concept of queues (Q1, Q2, Q3). The engine send asynchronous messages to services (S1, S2, S3) using queues. Instead of using queues, the process engine may publish the information to pre-defined topics (T1, T2, T3). The topics subscription may be a part of the process engine (aka External Task Pattern as displayed above) or be on the centralized messaging middleware.

Distributed orchestration

The orchestration itself is distributed. Instead of separation between state-full engine and stateless services, the services become state-full (and get their own means of handling state e.g. using orchestration) and the integration takes place between business processes (e.g. running in process engines PE1, PE2, PE3).

Distributed orchestration between process engines

This style of orchestration has been introduced in the last article (see Part 1 of this series), in which I shared my thoughts about the decomposition patterns of orchestration. In this part, I focus on more patterns and implementation strategies using the External Task Pattern.
Daily blog of the first-time founder #26
By: Alex Kuznetsov
Tags: Startup, Flutter, Dart, Mobile, Programming

As I said in a previous post, I decided to focus on mobile apps. I have figured out, there was my previous issue in Flutter.

I spent all the evening trying to connect API and mobile. I’m nearly there. I think tomorrow a basic working prototype will be ready.

Primary metric

DAU: 4

Users

Users/prospective users talked to today? 1

What have you learned from them?

Ui needs improvement

Goals

What are your top 1–3 goals for the next 2–3 days?

Flutter prototype

What most improved your primary metric?

Talking to users

The Biggest obstacle?

Frontend

Morale

On a scale of 1–10, what is your morale?
The trouble with 16:9
By: Jan Schultink
Tags: Design, Presentations

This tweet by a highly competent designer flashed by:

https://twitter.com/johnmaeda/status/839284888075448323?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It is work in progress on a presentation. You see what direction he is taking: the big headline on the left, rather than across the slide, and a paragraph of very small text.

I think this might be a format that many presentations will use:

More and more display devices are now wide screen (which is a great format for movies)

Headlines that stretch all across very wide screens are unreadable.

The best visual compositions / layouts are not very wide ones

Increasingly, we use presentations to send beforehand, without actual presenting/verbal explanation, hence the need for explanatory text

In my presentation app SlideMagic, I stuck to the 4:3 aspect ratio for slides, enabling you to put the headline across the slide, and added an optional slide out panel for plain text that turns the 4:3 composition into a 16:9 one.
Simpler Financial Management with 5 Expense Groupings
Tags: Accounting, Financial Planning, Small Business, Expense Management, Entrepreneurship

Simpler Financial Management with 5 Expense Groupings honeyguide Follow Nov 13 · 1 min read

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

It is fairly common to see expenses listed in alphabetical order or in some hard to follow default order within financial statements. This means your Rent expense and Telephone expense may have Salary expense wedged in between. Play this out across the many expense categories that show up on your financial statements and finding any meaning in the numbers is difficult.

It’s just a bunch of words and numbers.

Expense groupings can help better organize your expenses to make the review more intuitive.

A great starting point is 5 expense groups into which all other [expense categories] are grouped.

Salary & Services [Payroll, Accounting Services, Contracted Labor]

[Payroll, Accounting Services, Contracted Labor] Office & Occupancy [Rent, Property Expense, Repairs, Internet]

[Rent, Property Expense, Repairs, Internet] Branding & Marketing [Advertising, Travel, Events]

[Advertising, Travel, Events] Business Administration [Supplies, Software, Bank Fees, Taxes, Interest]

[Supplies, Software, Bank Fees, Taxes, Interest] Discretionary [Meals, Entertainment, Miscellaneous]

Now when you select the appropriate expense category for each transaction, that category will roll up into the group, and the financial statement is broken down into smaller, more manageable, pieces. Financial analysis just became simpler.

If you need further guidance on how to create expense groupings feel free to schedule a complimentary advisory session.

honeyguide | ending paperwork for creatives
14 Beneficial Tips to Write Cleaner Code in React Apps
Tags: Programming, Nodejs, React, JavaScript, Frontend Development

4. Avoid the Boolean Trap

When deciding your output, be extra careful when it comes to primitive booleans, used to determine the output value of something.

It’s known to be a code smell and it forces the developer to look at the source code/implementation of the component to be able to make an accurate assumption of the result.

For example, let’s say we declared a typography component that takes these available options: 'h1' , 'h2' , 'h3' , 'h4' , 'h5' , 'h6' , 'title' , 'subheading' .

How would you figure out how they’ll be applied when they’re passed in like this?

const App = () => (

<Typography color="primary" align="center" subheading title>

Welcome to my bio

</Typography>

)

Those who are more experienced with React (or more appropriately, JavaScript) might already guess that title will proceed over subheading . The way the order works, the last one will overwrite the previous.

But the problem is that we won’t be able to truly tell how far title or subheading will be applied without looking at the source code.

For example:

Even though title wins in this case, the text-transform: uppercase CSS line still won't be applied. This is because subheading declares higher specificity with text-transform: none !important; in its implementation.

If we aren’t careful enough, it might become really difficult to debug a styling issue, especially when it won’t show any warnings/errors to the console. This can complicate the component’s signature.

Here’s just one example of a cleaner alternative to re-implement the Typography component that solves the issue:

const App = () =>

<Typography variant="title">Welcome to my bio</Typography>

Typography:

Now, when we pass variant="title" in the App component, we will be assured that only title will be applied. It saves us the trouble of having to look at the source code to determine the outcome.

You can also just do a simple if/else to compute the prop:

But the biggest benefit from this is that you can just do this simple, clean one-liner and call it a day:
Your Ultimate Data Manipulation & Cleaning Cheat Sheet
By: Andre Ye
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Analysis, AI, Data Science, Statistics

X-Variable Cleaning Methods

Applying a function to a column is often needed to clean it. In the case where cleaning cannot be done by a built-in function, you may need to write your own function or pass in an external built-in function. For example, say that all values of column b below 2 are invalid. A function to be applied can then act as a filter, returning NaN values for column elements that fail to pass the filter:

def filter_b(value):

if value < 2:

return np.nan

else:

return value

A new cleaned column, ‘cleaned_b’, can then be created by applying the filter using pandas’ .apply() function:

data['cleaned_b'] = data['b'].apply(filter_b)

Another common use case is converting data types. For instance, converting a string column into a numerical column could be done with data[‘target’].apply(float) using the Python built-in function float .

Removing duplicates is a common task in data cleaning. This can be done with data.drop_duplicates() , which removes rows that have the exact same values. Be cautious when using this — when the number of features is small, duplicate rows may not be errors in data collection. However, with large datasets and mostly continuous variables, the chance that duplicates are not errors is small.

Sampling data points is common when a dataset is too large (or for another purpose) and data points need to be randomly sampled. This can be done with data.sample(number_of_samples) .

Renaming columns is done with .rename , where the parameter passed is a dictionary where the key is the original column name and the value is the renamed value. For example, data.rename({‘a’:1, ‘b’:3}) would rename the column ‘a’ to 1 and the column ‘b’ to 3.

Replacing values within the data can be done with data.replace() , which takes in two parameters to_replace and value , which represent values within the DataFrame that will be replaced by other values. This is helpful for the next section, imputing missing values, which can replace certain variables with np.nan so imputing algorithms can recognize them.

More handy pandas functions specifically for data manipulation can be found here:
The Insanity of Mind While Hunting for a New Job
By: Tarun Gupta
Tags: Interview, Mental Health, Job Search, Job Hunting, Jobs

I can never forget the day I was told by my manager to start looking for a new job, it was my father’s birthday. I was happy until 6.30 in the evening because for the first time I had gifted my father something expensive out of my pocket and he was so joyous when the gift presented him as a surprise. But all of my happiness faded in a matter of minutes when I was told to begin my job hunt. In the midst of this chaotic event, I was given an assurance that I have some time with me to find a new job and that gave me some sense of security and mental peace that at least I have some time to fight my way to a new job.

After this frenzy of an event, I started studying and preparing for job hunt by the standard template known to us software developers. I was somewhat calm because I knew from my conversation with my boss that I have time to search for a new job. But a turn of events happened in the coming weeks, due to some internal and not disclosable reasons, I was told to start serving the notice period. At that moment, it felt like that the floor beneath my feet is suddenly gone.

Here, I was planning my job search on the sole parameter of having enough time to mitigate out of the situation. I was psychologically prepared to go out and search for a new job but one heavy blow that I got was that I was told that I will not be receiving my performance bonus which was due at the end of month because of the escalation of my notice period. I felt cheated. Coming from a middle class family, my parents had to take up a loan for my education and these kind of bonuses help a fella like me to help get rid of these student loans as soon as possible. As every other individual with a student loan, I was planning on putting my performance bonus into my student loans to reduce them by a significant amount in a single strike. But I was devoid of that opportunity.

Nothing hurt me more than this not even when I was asked to search for a new job.

Given the escalation of the situation, I had to revamp my strategy to give me rapid results. I consulted my friends and family and presented them my situation. After hearing their advice and opinions, I formulated a path ahead for me and it worked wonders. I am going to share my strategy with you and I hope that it helps all of you out there searching for a new job or may need to search sometime in future.
Vision Statement
By: Tony Tran
Tags: Social Media, Blockchain, ICO, Startup, Bitcoin

As I type this story, America is getting ready for bed. Our Operations Chief, Q, is heading out to lunch with investors in Hanoi and somewhere between the darkness and the light, is the blur.

We see it twice with each complete cycle because the blur is not the end. Dawn is the beginning of light and dusk is the beginning of dark. The blur is always the beginning, and that’s where we’re at with cryptocurrency today. I’m thankful for this because it means that the future is nearly upon us. I can almost see it ahead, and my vision is crystal clear.

I see that we will one day wake up and go to bed as a unified global mesh. Our activities will feed into an endless value chain and each person is fairly compensated for every second that they give to the network. The value they provide would come in many forms, from answering questions, to hosting experiences, to verifying transactions, to creating content. Fair compensation would come in the form of Enzo, a stable cryptocurrency base on the intrinsic properties of Time, to deliver a vast digital economy of equal opportunity.

I see developers hard at work, creating thousands of digital places where people can provide value for each other. Instead of extracting value from consumers, developers are compensated through the Samaritan Protocol for facilitating the exchange of value between them.

I see a day where there are thousands of different places where people can go to trade with the world, and thousands of virtual places where people can go to connect with others. At these Crossroads, the Enzo people earn is blind to their age, country, and race. Instead, it will be based solely on their contributions to the network.

EON Bridges the Gap

We want to create a digital economy that doesn’t exist today. It is a digital economy that blurs the line between the physical and the digital. This is an ambitious vision, but it’s one that is well within reach and blockchain technology can fast-track our pursuit.

Billions of people are already providing value to society in digital places — they just aren’t getting paid. They’re on message boards and in games, in social apps, and chat rooms. They’re transacting offline, dealing online, and everywhere in between. Then there are many billions more who aren’t even tapped into any network. They are the bank-less and the under-served that holds our world up. For the first time, we can include them all.

This is the vision for EON (Enzo Open Network): a digital data economy of equal opportunity.

It would be a world where people are compensated for their time, and a world where developers are compensated for creating novel pathways that let consumers provide value for each other. It would be a world where people win together by working together. It would be a digital world built on Enzo — secured, private, and accessible via our GGUI (Gateway Graphical User Interface), Alfa.

We, the world, can move forward as a whole — the way we always thought we could. The way we always thought we would. In this world, everybody wins.
A Letter to Students Who Just Started (or Are About to Start) Coding Bootcamps
By: Megan Lo
Tags: Software Development, Coding, Startup, Learning To Code, Programming

A Letter to Students Who Just Started (or Are About to Start) Coding Bootcamps

My experience in coding bootcamp can hopefully help you overcome anxiety and nervousness before your first day

Photo by Tonik on Unsplash.

Hi, my name is Megan. First off, I want to congratulate you on starting/being admitted to the bootcamp of your choice! You may wonder, “Who is this stranger writing a letter to us about a coding bootcamp?” I am currently nearing the end of a coding bootcamp with Flatiron. Yeah, I know. I am not done with the program yet, but it does not mean I cannot write an article for you. As I am preparing my final project, I wanted to write this not only for myself but for anyone who is reading this today.

Are you feeling nervous? Anxious? Maybe some imposter syndrome? It’s normal to feel this way. It’s a new chapter of your life. You either:

Probably just left your old job behind and are about to make a major career change that will change your life forever. Are currently working part-time so you don’t have to worry about your expenses while taking classes at night and gaining new skills in the meantime to prepare for a career change. Simply want to learn some new skills and/or brush up on your web development skills. Are like me, who just graduated from college (or high school and decided not to go the traditional college route) and are hoping to look for better job opportunities and skills.

Feel free to comment if I have left some of you out! I want you all to feel included while reading this.

A little about myself: I am currently in the Immersive Software Engineering program with Flatiron. There are so many categories out there, but I hope I could include you in this letter — even if you are attending other types of coding bootcamps.

Every company sets their programs differently. I had to complete 100+ hours of pre-work before my first day of bootcamp. Before that, I had to go through a behavioral interview and then 80+ hours of prep work before the tech interview. Was it intense? Quite. But I enjoyed it a lot — especially the tech interview. Admittedly, I did postpone my tech interview several times just because I was so nervous and felt like I was not ready for it at all. I hope you all don’t make my mistake because I should’ve done the interview earlier. Once again, congratulations! You made it!

I remember feeling super excited when I received a call from my admission specialist that I got into the bootcamp I had been eyeing for months. He told me all about the prep work I had to do and I thought, “Yes! I love more coding!” But then sometimes I felt a bit unmotivated and my code would go untouched for days.

And guess what? On the last two weeks before my first day of bootcamp, I had to rush to finish all my work so I could catch up and start with my intended cohorts. *Show of hands if you’re also a procrastinator.*

These issues may sound familiar and resonate with you.
The Evolution of View Linking in Android
By: Siva Ganesh Kantamani
Tags: Programming, AndroidDev, Software Engineering, Kotlin, Mobile

Data Binding

The Data Binding Library is a support library that allows you to bind UI components in your layouts to data sources in your app using a declarative format, rather than programmatically.

The Data Binding Library generates binding classes for the layouts, which we can use in Android components like Activity and Fragment . Data binding is a sort of declarative solution with type and null safety.

To make a layout support data binding, we have to wrap the content of the file with the layout tag. This will generate a binding file of that layout with a reference to all of the views in it. Have a look:

Wrapping the root content inside a ‘layout’ tag

Once we’ve finished that part in the XML, a binding class will be generated, and we need to use it in the View class. This binding-file instance contains all of the views in the layout. Have a look:

Data binding in the ‘View’ class

This seems to be a reasonable solution, but data binding is created to solve more complicated problems than just linking views, such as the layout file accessing Data classes to publish data from the XML itself and loading remote images using binding adapters.

These sort of things made Data Binding a complicated library to solve the view-linking problem. By nature, data binding is created to solve complicated issues because it creates a longer compile time and also errors are hard to understand.
7 Stories Behind the World’s Most Popular Machine Learning Algorithms
By: Sithan Kanna
Tags: Machine Learning, Algorithms, Data Science, Creativity, Management

The world of AI/Machine Learning is evolving fast. If you’re like me, keeping up with the latest developments can seem like trying to reach a destination while walking on a treadmill. Sometimes it’s worth it to just step off, pause, and look back at the origins of many of the paradigms and algorithms that got us to where AI is today.

We are very fortunate that many but, sadly, not all, of the inventors who shaped AI are alive today. It can be inspiring (if sometimes intimidating) to hear about pivotal moments in the field from the very people who made them so significant. To that end, I’ve included the following seven videos (taken from past interviews and talks) because of what we can learn from these luminaries of our profession.

Together, the videos shine a light on the history of these algorithms, particularly on specific problems these researchers were trying to solve. Their solutions eventually led to the invention of the algorithms themselves. This glance at the past provides a deeper understanding of the methods and suitability of the algorithms for different applications.

The videos also give us a glimpse into the thought processes behind these inventions. An understanding of these mental processes might, in turn, help us apply these similar processes to solve the problems our field currently faces.

Finally, the videos provide an entertaining history of the development of the algorithms, analogous to the way the “origin stories” in comic books help readers understand the “back story” of popular heroes and heroines.

The Seven Stories
These Are 5 Ways to Check Your Progress on Medium
By: Mike Ortega
Tags: Writing, Self Improvement, Writer, Success, Writing Tips

Medium writers always try to check their progress using their earning dashboards. It is not a good idea to check the dashboard on medium to check your progress. Medium is not all about money. On medium, every writer can write to give world knowledge and further can change the lives of the people.

Medium earnings do not tell medium writers' progress, but it depends on many factors.

1. Are readers commenting on your stories

Are readers commenting on your stories? If they are doing it, then your work is being appreciated by them. Medium is a social media platform, the interaction between you and the reader is necessary for engagement.

To create a relationship with the reader, create engagement with them. Try to write content that entertains and teach readers. They will interact with your work.

More comment you get by readers, it means your work is getting appreciated by the reader and you are doing well. Write the number of times readers are commenting on your spreadsheet this will help you track your engagement.

2. Pay attention towards readings to clap ratio
Creating and mounting an EBS volume to a Windows Amazon EC2 Instance
By: Yan Cui
Tags: Cloud Computing, Programming

If you’re reading this post you probably already know about Amazon Elastic Block Store, aka Amazon EBS, one of the many services provided by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem.

An EBS volume can range from 1GB to 1TB and can be mounted to an Amazon EC2 instance as a device, each EBS volume can be mounted to one instance but multiple volumes can be mounted to the same instance. To mount an EBS volume to an instance you have to first log into the AWS Management Console and follow a few simple steps.

Creating a new volume

1. Once inside the AWS Management Console, click the Volumes link under Elastic Block Store in the Navigation panel:

2. Click the ‘Create Volume’ button:

3. In the pop-up form, choose the size of the EBS volume you want to create and select the availability zone (remember, the EBS volume needs to be in the same availability zone as the instance it needs to be attached to):

Click “Create” to create a new EBS volume.

Attaching an EBS Volume to an Instance

1. Once the EBS volume is created and its status changed to ‘available’, select it, and click the “Attach Volume” button:

2. In the following pop-up, choose the instance you want to attach the volume:

Mount the EBS Volume as a drive

1. Now that the EBS volume is attached to the instance, remote connect to the instance, go to Start –> Run, and enter “diskmgmt.msc” to start the Disk Management tool:

2. In the Disk Management tool, right click on the new disk, which is “Offline” right now and bring it “Online”:

3. The disk then needs to be initialized, right click again and select “Initialize Disk”:

4. Choose whether to initialize the disk with MBR or GPT:

5. You’re almost there! Right click on the unallocated space in the initialized disk and create a “New Simple Volume”:

and follow the steps in the wizard.

6. A 10GB volume will probably take 5 ~ 10 mins to format, and once it’s done you’ll be able to see the drive:

Parting thoughts…

As mentioned in Membase’s documentation here, when using an Amazon EC2 instance as a Membase cache server you can use an EBS volume to alleviate the risk of losing your data when an instance fails because the EBS volume can be attached to another instance to effectively restore the node.

Another fun fact about EBS and Amazon EC2 is that Windows 2008 instances are backed and run directly from an EBS volume because of the sheer size of the images themselves! Which is why for every Windows Server 2008 instance you are running you’ll find a 30GB EBS volume attached to that instance, and every AMI you create will have a matching EBS snapshot. And the implication of this is that, if you’re using a Windows instance to run Membase, you won’t need to create additional EBS volumes to store the Membase sqlite files. BUT, there’s a catch, if you terminate the instance manually or through a scaling down event the EBS volume will be deleted too, so be sure to take this into consideration when deriving your strategy for deploying and scaling your Membase cache clusters.
Stashed.
By: Keith R. Higgons
Tags: 100 Naked Words, Fiction, Writing, Relationships, Love

What’s the difference between self-preservation and hiding?

Between private and public?

Today, it seems hard to tell.

One person’s safety will end up another’s hell.

Stashing.

Is it damaging?

Or is it a shield?

Is it an infliction?

Or is it an accommodation?

Being Stashed.

Is it mistreatment?

Or is it protection?

Is it wrong?

Or is it right?

Deliberate or unintended, it’s complicated.

If one missed the other, would they tell?

If one wanted the other, would they call?

If one needed the other, would they ask?

The economy of love can lead to an abundance of pain.
Hoopers: Website Redesign
By: Guilherme Torres
Tags: UX Design, Design, Ironhack, UI Design, UX

Creating a new design for a basketball community platform

After intense weeks of hard work at the Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp, it was time to prepare for the final project.

The students were introduced to real clients facing real problems.

Among all the business, Hoopers got my attention. They are a basketball community that works as an athlete-centered media platform. They also map and transform basketball courts, as well as creating specialized products for the community.
The Three Phrases of a Money-Hungry Medium Writer
By: Amy The Maritimer
Tags: Life Lessons, Writing, Writing Tips, Writers On Writing, Personal Development

This is how you can become the writer you want to be without selling your soul

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been taking a break from Medium to finish writing my book and try ghostwriting. This has given me some time to think about the habits of other writers on here, particularly new writers.

This is not a hit-and-run on all new writers. If the shoe fits (ie: It pisses you off), I guess it’s about you.

There are many new writers who are very talented and I really enjoy them personally and love reading their writing. This is because they are awesome people, who are humble and actually care about our craft.

To them, our craft is not just another way to move up the ladder of life: It’s not a get-rich-quick-scheme.

The craft of writing is their life.

I have been writing on my own for a while and I’ve been on Medium since 2019. I still consider myself a newer writer with a lot to learn about this platform.

There are many secret inner operations on this platform. You never know what the curators will like, what the Medium publications will accept, or who the next new “star” on the platform will be.

Honestly, most of us who have been on here for a while gave up fairly quickly on finding that information out because we care about writing, not about visibility and making money.