fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
10 Useful ML Practices For Python Developers
By: Pratik Bhavsar
Tags: Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Python, Data Science, Machine Learning

→ ML in production series

Come join Maxpool — A Data Science community to discuss real ML problems!

Sometimes as a data scientist we forget what are we paid for. We are primarily developers, then researchers and then maybe mathematicians. Our first responsibility is to quickly develop solutions which are bug-free.

Just because we can make models doesn’t mean we are gods. It doesn’t give us the freedom to write crap code.

Since my start, I have made tremendous mistakes and thought of sharing what I see to be the most common skills for ML engineering. In my opinion, it’s also the most lacking skill in the industry right now.

I call them software-illiterate data scientists because a lot of them are non-CS Coursera baptised engineers. And, I myself have been that 😅

If it came to hiring between a great data scientist and a great ML engineer, I will hire the later.

Let's get started.

1. Learn to write abstract classes

Once you start writing abstract classes, you will know how much clarity it can bring to your codebase. They enforce the same methods and method names. If many people are working on the same project, everyone starts making different methods. This can create unproductive chaos.
How to Actually Slow Down or Speed Up Time
By: Christopher Kokoski
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Life, Psychology, Productivity

The warp speed of adulthood

Eventually, I grew up to realize that all those 30-somethings weren’t so old after all. It wasn’t until my late twenties and early thirties that time started to really accelerate for me.

I don’t remember the exact moment. But, I do remember often thinking, wait, wasn’t it just Christmas last month?

Years flashed by in a blur.

It’s true. Time really does seem to move faster when you’re an adult.

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” — Henry Van Dyke

Psychologists discover why time speeds up

To understand how to manipulate time, we need to first understand why time appears to sometimes change speeds.

As it turns out, this time distortion most likely involves three separate psychological concepts:

Forward telescoping

Proportional theory

Perceptual theory

Forward telescoping

Put simply, forward telescoping is thinking that events happened more recently than they actually occurred. Psychologists believe this may be the reason for the perceived “speeding up” of time.

A good example is movies. Did you realize that the first Harry Potter movie came out in, gasp, 2001? Or that Dumb and Dumber came out in 1994. That’s basically the same period as the ancient Egyptians.

Our brain tricks us into thinking events like birthdays, graduations, or even deaths happened more recently than they did. This perceptual error results in the apparent acceleration of time.

Proportional theory

Time might also “speed up” because of how we perceive time based on our age and the proportion of time we may have left to live. This is the proportional theory, suggested by Paul Jent in 1877 (So, around the time I graduated high school).

Here is how Steve Taylor, Ph.D., describes this phenomenon in his Psychology Today article, Why Does Time Seem to Pass at Different Speeds?:

At the age of one month, a week is a quarter of your whole life, so it’s inevitable that it seems to last forever. At the age of 14, one year constitutes around 7% of your life, which seems to be a large amount of time too. But at the age of 30, a week is only a tiny percentage of your life, and at 50 a year is only 2% of your life, so your subjective sense is that these are insignificant periods of time which pass very quickly.

Perceptual theory

According to a 2013 article in the Journal of Mind and Behavior, the perceptual theory states that time passes faster or slower because of how we perceive our moment-by-moment experience. The impact of aging on time perception might also be a factor.

This theory suggests that time perception is affected by how much information we process at any given moment.

Our intensity of focus and perception, then, is the hidden key to controlling time.
Please answer all of these questions
By: John Markowski
Tags: Self-awareness, Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Psychology, Questions

Am I the only one who can’t eat and listen to music at the same time?

Am I the only one who counts the number of deodorant strokes to make sure each ‘pit gets exactly 8?

Do you hate-watch TV? Yeah, me neither.

What one word follows you around day and night? For me it is regret. With mediocrity a close second.

Is it wrong to love all of these clown sightings?

Is it OK to see everything as grey? Or is it gray? Is it a defense mechanism or am I a good listener and fair and balanced?

I love flowers, the New York Mets and My Chemical Romance. Weird, huh?
Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience
By: Paul Arterburn
Tags: Work, Design Thinking, Psychology, Thoughts, Productivity

Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Productivity (and happiness) peaks with these 10 factors

In his book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

Clear goals—expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high. Concentrating—a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention. A person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness—the merging of action and awareness. Distorted sense of time—one’s subjective experience of time is altered. Direct and immediate feedback—successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed. Balance between ability level and challenge—the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action. A lack of awareness of bodily needs—to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it. Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.
Mastering Difficult Conversations at Work
By: Nilohit Kanwar
Tags: Work, Careers, Workplace, Mental Health, Productivity

🐣 Mastering Difficult Conversations Step-By-Step

Consider this scenario — a colleague made a comment that made you or your teammates feel uncomfortable. The colleague thinks it is amusing, but the comment is simply inappropriate.

Naturally, you need to talk to them about what just happened. But how do you bring it up without making things uncomfortable?

Well, here’s how.

📌 Step 1: Prepare

This step is all about setting the stage. Gather your thoughts and calmly inform the other person, that you would like to discuss the event — don’t bring up the conversation suddenly. This makes conversing less intimidating, more effective, and also shows that you’ve taken the time to reflect on your feelings.

Also, keep a positive tone when you propose this discussion. Be ready with an opening statement and some precise examples of the behavior that you want to change.

Make a plan but definitely don’t write a script. In fact, this should be a general rule for any conversation you ever have, however important it may be. It’s a waste of time to write a script in your head because things will never go word-to-word as you expect them to.

Remember that the purpose of this discussion is to find a solution and not to make the other person feel like they’re in trouble!

📌 Step 2: Listen

Never enter a difficult conversation with a ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ attitude. Go ahead and ask why they did what they did.

Grant them the benefit of the doubt and don’t automatically assume that they intended to hurt someone. Instead, give them the space to express themselves and show them that you heard their reply, without necessarily agreeing with it. Remember that acknowledgment is not the same as agreement.

Most importantly, make sure that your actions reinforce your words.

Saying “I hear you” while fiddling with your phone is 100% insulting and 0% convincing!

📌 Step 3: Express

This step is all about ensuring that you are heard as well. With assertion, you need to tell them the truth about what you think. Burying your feelings won’t allow you to have an authentic conversation.

One tactic that can help you here is to find an overlap in your viewpoints. As the other person is speaking, assess their tone, and listen to their words. Do you find anything even remotely similar to what you want to tell them? Pick up their words and use these words to begin your sentence.

The other person is more likely to listen and agree to what you say if they think your words are chosen from their sentences.

📌 Step 4: Solve

The last step is all about finding a solid, long-term solution to the problem that led to the discussion in the first place. Going through the turmoil of discussing an uncomfortable or sensitive issue is a waste if you don’t end the conversation with a proper conclusion.

However, as you conclude the talk, make sure that the person agrees with you because they are convinced that you are right, not because they feel sympathetic towards you.
Customer Journey Analytics will make you more money.
By: Alfred Sasko
Tags: Data Science, Marketing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

The purpose of this article is to share with fellow sales, marketing professionals and data scientists how to approach quantitative part of customer journey mapping, namely to answer questions:

How many buyer personas do we have? What are their unique characteristics? How can we adapt the marketing strategy concerning buyer personas to increase marketing ROI? How accurately can we predict buyer persona from the first customer purchase transaction?

Dataset

As most of the companies keep data related to customer journeys confidential, the use case will be demonstrated on Google Analytics Sample Dataset.

The sample contains obfuscated Google Analytics 360 data from the Google Merchandise Store, a real e-commerce store. It sells Google-branded merchandise.

The data is typical of what you would see for an e-commerce website. It includes traffic source, content, and transactional data.

How many buyer personas do we have?

It is not an easy question. What are the criteria to segment buyer personas? One approach is to compare customers using RFM analysis answering questions such:

When recently did they buy (Recency)?

How often do they buy (Frequency)?

How much do they spend (Monetary value)?

The clustering algorithm can effectively group similar buyers to clusters which significantly differs from one another. It also suggests what should be the number of clusters (aka buyer personas).
Neural Network From Scratch: Hidden Layers
By: Pavel Ilin
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Python, Data Science, Programming

Hidden Layers

Why do we need hidden layers? Perceptrons recognize simple patterns, and maybe if we add more learning iteration, they might learn how to recognize more complex patterns? Actually, no. Hidden layers allow for additional transformation of the input values, which allows for solving more complex problems.

Every hidden layer has inputs and outputs. Inputs and outputs have their own weights that go through the activation function and their own derivative calculation.

This is a visual representation of the neural network with hidden layers:

From a math perspective, there’s nothing new happening in hidden layers. You can check all of the formulas in the previous article. We’re using the same calculation of the activation function and the cost function and then updating the weights. The feature of the hidden layer is hidden in the back propagation part.

First, we’ll calculate the output-layer cost of the prediction, and then we’ll use this cost to calculate cost in the hidden layer. Let’s implement it in code.
Pitch Deck Layout for Early-Stage Startups
By: Nicolas Carteron
Tags: Management, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital, Pitch Deck

Once again…

As I’ve already discussed here, a pitch deck is a fundamental corporate document that helps you share your company’s story with the world. This story is specific to you, your company, and your circumstances.

No template or generic structure will ever be a perfect match for you. You’ll have to tweak and adapt them.

This notwithstanding, there are best practices you ought to follow at an early stage to maximise your chances of success.

Without further ado, let’s look at those.
How My App Failed Before Making It to the App Store
By: Neil Kakkar
Tags: Programming, Startup, Mobile, Failure, Productivity

Phase 1: Scope Creep

When I was thinking about the project, I’d get excited. Why only me, there must be lots of other people who’d want this, too! And, while I’m learning things, why not learn other things as well? I’ve been meaning to learn Lisp as well: let’s build the server in Lisp.

Warning to future me: The smallest experiment I think I can run is rarely the smallest experiment I can run.

So, now I’m building this blazing fast app that has a server built with Lisp.

My rationalization for the server: HackerNews loves Lisp. So, if I build something with Lisp, it will get more upvotes, which means more people will come to the landing page, and so, more sales. This is hilarious in retrospect.

Through all of this, I already had a design for the app in mind. Swipe left if you don’t remember the card’s answer. Swipe right if you do. Tap to show the answer. On startup, you get this card view.

You can then go to a second screen with a list of cards, a way to add cards, and remove them.

The quickest thing — Revise, hence one-click. The slowest thing — Thinking about new cards to add, hence two-click.

Of course, if there are a server and sync, I’d need a login as well. Oh, and what about export? That gives people confidence that their cards won’t get lost.

And since I’m competing with Anki, a quick import from Anki.

This was daunting, given how little time I had (an hour after work every day — I didn’t want to stop other projects because of this).
The power of analytics
By: Charlotte Rushton
Tags: Analytics, Analysis, Marketing, Digital, Digital Marketing

Analytics are a great way of tracking the sucess of your website and marketing campaigns — but what is the best way to use this data?

This post has moved to https://wool.digital/blog/the-power-of-analytics
El “viaje del héroe”: las 12 etapas por las que atraviesa un innovador
By: Jaime Sotomayor
Tags: Startup Lessons, Startup, Tech, Storytelling

Former Country Manager at Wayra Peru. Singularity University GSP14 Alumni. Blogger at Semana Económica. MIT Innovator Under 35. www.jaime.pe

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Is Blue The Color of a Gender?. Before Second World War Pink Was The…
By: Ajay Sharma
Tags: Gender Equality, Colors, Advertising, Marketing, Psychology

Pink Was Masculine Until…

The most popular conditioning applied to color psychology is pink versus blue. These two colors have drawn attention with their advertised line- pink is for girls, blue is for boys.

Old pictures reveal that children wore white or light-colored dresses.

But in 1914, The Sunday Sentinel, an American newspaper, urged mothers to “use pink for the boys and blue for the girls, if you are a follower of convention.” Four years later, Ladies’ Home Journal reiterated it in these words, ‘‘The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. It went on until the Second World War. Boys who wore pink dresses fought in the Second World War.

As the war ended, the clothing convention changed; now a reversed trend emerged.

The University of Maryland historian and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America, Jo B. Paoletti says the colors were not gendered until the 1950s. And pink for-girl, blue for-boy became a norm in the United States and product manufacturers settled on pink for girls and blue for boys.

According to Lise Eliot, the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, it is the social conditioning which makes them pick up and internalise gender roles.

As far as I know, no study supports that our brains and genders are wired according to the colors.

Casting Color into a Gender

Brands can work outside gender stereotypes, but it doesn’t always happen. In most instances, they target specific genders to sell their products and services.

The University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen conducted a simple survey in 2012. He asked men and women a direct question–What is your favorite color?

In response to this survey, blue turned out to be the most popular color across the board, followed by green for men and purple for women. This survey showed that blue is men and women’s favorite color. 42% of men picked blue as their favorite color compared to 29% women.

Though, Philip Cohen is not convinced about the results. He thinks these are the outcome of a marketing ploy.

Research by Stephen Palmer at Berkeley also offers the same preference for blue.
5 Useful Tips With Python Dictionaries
By: Yong Cui
Tags: Programming, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Python, Machine Learning

1. Create Dictionaries With Keys Specified

When you write a Python script, you may need to define some global variables. However, when you update these variables in your functions somewhere later, you have to be explicit about these variables being global. A trivial example is shown below:

Global variables

I’m not a big fan of this coding pattern involving the use of the global keyword. When you have multiple global keywords across multiple functions, it’s tedious work. Instead, you can use a dictionary object to capture all related variables. In this case, you can update the dictionary directly because it’ll be located by your interpreter globally. Here’s the modified code:

Dictionary of parameters

As you can notice in the code snippet, I use the fromkeys class method to instantiate a dict object. There are a few advantages to using this instantiation method:

Your code is more readable because it’s clear to the readers what parameters you’re using with this script. In this case, we only have param0 and param1 .

and . When you get the values of these keys of the dictionary using the square bracket, you won’t get the KeyError exception because all of the keys that we specified have the None as their initial values, as shown below:
Submit to From the Library
By: Laura Manipura
Tags: Readinglist, Book Review, Writing, Reading, Books

Submit to From the Library

Please join me in celebrating books, writing & writers

About

From the Library celebrates books and writers. I publish articles and poems about writing, authors, books, and other literary topics. I am also inviting book reviews, reading lists, literary analysis, and medium author biographies and/or resumes.

Request to Contribute

To be added as a new writer, please request as a comment below. Tag @lauramanipura to get my attention, then link me to your user handle using the @ sign.

Tag Your Drafts

Please tag your drafts.

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The Primary School Writing Advice That Helped Me Become a Writer
By: Chandrayan Gupta
Tags: Advice, This Happened To Me, Writing, Self Improvement, Books

The Primary School Writing Advice That Helped Me Become a Writer

Without knowing it, a schoolteacher decided my fate in one afternoon

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Back when I read my first Enid Blyton novel, I remember feeling a jolt of wonder and excitement, the thrill of experiencing something new. As I read more books, my mind conjured up more stories of its own, adapting and building on the plots I read weekly.

In primary school, we were read a story which contained a piece of dialogue I really liked. And when the teacher afterwards told us to write a one-page story ourselves, I made sure to include it. But I felt guilty doing that. All the stories swirling around in my head, and the one I’d just penned down, were built on the work of others. I had no talent of my own. I felt like a fraud.

When asked to read out what I’d written, I sheepishly narrated the purloined tale. Sure enough, a girl two columns away raised her hand and complained that I’d stolen the dialogue. What ma’am said next drove away my guilt and, in the long run, guaranteed my becoming a writer:

Most writers draw inspiration from the work of others. Many great works by renowned authors are derived from other stories. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it means you’re using your own creativity to craft new stories from existing literature, and that’s commendable.

I’m paraphrasing, of course. This happened over a decade ago. But the essence of what she said has stayed with me all these years.
How to Maintain Structure and Routine During Quarantine
By: Jon Hawkins
Tags: Psychology, Productivity, Mindfulness, Self, Covid 19

Circadian Rhythms, and Avoiding the Laziness Trap

Do you ever abruptly wake up, only to discover that the time was 2 minutes before your alarm was set for? That is your Circadian Rhythm in full swing.

In a nutshell, this is your internal body clock, and it follows your daily cycle because you have set it to act that way. It tells you when to eat, sleep and exercise. And you set it by waking up early every day for work, eating, exercising and sleeping at the times you do. It’s why you to feel hungry at lunchtime and tired in the evening.

It plays an important biological role in your day to day life. Circadian Rhythms release certain hormones to help you function properly. Melatonin, for example, is released at the right moment, to help you feel sleepy.

The problem is that self-isolation has released you from the cycle of day to day work. You no longer have to wake up early in the morning. If you wanted to, you could completely ignore your Circadian Rhythm. You could stay awake even though you feel tired and stay asleep despite having had sufficient time in bed if you really wanted to.

But I urge you — keep waking up early in the morning in accordance with your internal body clock.

Why? Because by changing your sleeping pattern, you are inadvertently changing your Circadian Rhythm. Whenever you wake you, you are training your body to wake up at that time. Your internal body clock will drastically change with this rhythm, and the correct hormones will start to be released at a completely new and distinct time in accordance with your waking hours.

Before you know it, you don’t start feeling tired until 2 am, and you struggle to wake up at 10 — when only a week ago you were waking up at 6.30 am with ease.

And trust me. From experience — although it’s easy to adjust your Circadian Rhythm from waking up early to later, the same can’t be said for the other way around. It takes weeks, and an unbelievable amount of willpower to retrain your Circadian Rhythm back to early mornings once they are lost.

And this leaves you susceptible to the Laziness Trap.

In his book, “The Laziness Trap,” Pastor Andy Farmer urges you to avoid the above at all costs. It’s a downward spiral into complacency. Once you start exposing yourself to a lazy lifestyle, your body gets used to it. You start getting fatigued and tired by simple day to day tasks — and because of this, it’s almost impossible to break out of it. Before you know it, you have wasted weeks of valuable time that could have been spent elsewhere.

The solution to this problem is simple. Avoid the trap altogether. You can do so by maintaining your Circadian Rythm. It’s as easy as waking up when your body tells you to, eating an early breakfast and keeping your mind active only for as long as your body is telling you it is able.

I implore you to make a conscious effort at this, to ensure you can maximise the days you have at home.
Why journalism schools are teaching students artificial intelligence
By: Francesco Marconi
Tags: Journalism, Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, Media, University

“These technologies have much more in common with power tools than sci-fi superhuman robots — in the hands of a skilled user, they act as a force multiplier in the speed, breadth and scale of content that can be produced.”

We opened the session at Columbia Journalism School with an overview of best practices when deploying new technology, followed by hands-on training on two tools widely used by newsrooms around the world: Automated Insights and Wibbitz.

Representatives from each platform gave students an overview of their software, answered questions and provided suggestions for how students could improve their automated content.

“Learning AI tools before hitting the newsroom will hopefully put me one step ahead in understanding how to save time on simple tasks and concentrate on more complex ones,” said Cecilia Butini, a Columbia Journalism School student who attended the workshop.

What the workshop facilitators found most surprising was how quickly every aspiring “automation editor” understood how to use these tools in such a short period of time.

Wibbitz CEO Zohar Dayan presents the principles of video automation

“It was amazing to see a room full of future journalists dive in and start using a brand-new tool that they were just introduced to minutes prior,” said Zohar Dayan, the co-founder and CEO of Wibbitz. “Not only did they create great videos, but we also saw that they really enjoyed the process.”

Text Automation

Wordsmith is Automated Insights’ text automation platform.

During the workshop, participants learned how to turn data into a text report using Automated Insights, an AI tool that enables journalists to develop dynamic templates that convert structured data into human-readable articles. This approach works well for sports, finance and any other form of structured story

Video automation

Wibbitz’ Control Room let’s journalists automatically turn story URLs into videos

Students learned how to operate Wibbitz, a platform that utilizes image recognition to create rough-cut videos composed of archived images and videos that match a given text automatically.

Here’s a great example of an automated video produced by two Columbia Journalism students, Deanna Paul and Taryana Odayar:
Developing Your Philosophers Toolkit
By: Jon Hawkins
Tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Books, Self

Validity & Soundness.

These are terms you might have heard before, but in Philosophy — they have a special type of meaning.

To discover the truth of the argument, there are two things you’ll need to establish.

a. Validity

First and foremost — you need to know whether an argument is valid. Validity refers to the logical part of an argument. In short, it asks whether what has been presented logically follows.

It does so without concern for the truth of the premises. Instead, it assumes, for the sake of argument, that what is being said is actually true.

Therefore, an argument is valid where, if the premises are true, it logically follows that the conclusion is true.

A really simple example would be is Aquinas’ cosmological argument for the existence of God —

Premise 1: Everything that exists has a cause.

Premise 2: Infinite regress is impossible (that is, the chain of causes has to stop somewhere — it can’t go on for infinity).

Conclusion: Therefore, there has to be a first causer. We call that being “God.”

This argument is valid because if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Premise 1 & 2 are true, it logically follows that the conclusion is true.

If the argument isn’t valid, it’s incoherent and doesn’t logically follow — so you should just reject it. But if it is valid, then to determine the argument’s truth; you must go on to assess whether it is sound.

b. Soundness

You’ve now established the argument is coherent— in effect, it’s logical and could be true.

Now you need to ask yourself whether it really is.

This is where soundness comes in, it focuses on each individual premise — and evaluates their truth.

Therefore, an argument is sound if and only if, the argument is valid, and the premises are in fact true.

This is often difficult to establish, of course. In the cosmological case, to determine whether the argument is sound you have to run through each premise, and ask:

Does everything really require a cause?

Is infinite regress really impossible?

As this is a discussion on the existence of God, Philosophers are happy to admit the cosmological argument is valid — but whether the premises are true is widely debated.

If you conclude that the argument is sound, then the conclusion is true. In this case, if the cosmological argument is sound — God really does exist.
I Wrote my Autobiography by Accident
By: Mark Kelly
Tags: Short Story, Memoir, Nonfiction, Writing, Autobiography

I Wrote my Autobiography by Accident

Right here on Medium

Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash

For anyone who has struggled to find a narrative thread or any hint of consistency in my Medium posts — join the club.

I started in October and have uploaded, or written from scratch, almost 100 articles. And to some extent I have deliberately tried to introduce variety, flipping between novel extracts, present-day vignettes and teenage songs and poems.

If I still like them, I figure maybe someone else will — my approach has been akin to throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.

It has only become clear to me over the past week that the slices of life I have presented are all pieces of the same jigsaw. This is compounded by the fact that all of my attempts at fiction end up being based on real life situations, with just the thinnest of fictional veneers applied on top.

So, when correctly ordered, an ever more complete picture starts to emerge.
How to Be Indistractable
By: Nir Eyal
Tags: Life Lessons, Startup, Self Improvement, Technology, Productivity

After five years of research, writing, and experimentation, I’m proud to share my new book with you.

Indistractable is a guide to learning “the skill of the century,” the power to control your attention and choose your life.

Some of my readers have asked me about why I decided to research distraction after writing the best-selling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

Three reasons:

First — I wrote this book because I needed it.

As someone who has always struggled with distraction, I wanted an answer to the age-old question of why we do things against our best interests.

I’d say I’d hit the gym but wouldn’t. I’d promise myself I’d finish that big project but would procrastinate for another day. I’d want to be present with my friends and family yet check my phone instead. I needed to know why I did these things and desperately wanted strategies for how to do what I said I would do.

Second — Given my unique experience in the industry as someone who has helped countless companies design habit-forming products, I understand distraction’s Achilles’ heel.

To be clear, I didn’t write Hooked for the big tech companies. We wrote it for people building products and services that could truly improve people’s lives if they would only use the product!

Hooked taught designers how to use the same psychological principles that make Instagram, YouTube, and online gaming so engaging to help people build healthy habits in their lives. Five years in, countless companies have used the Hooked Model for good.

Unfortunately, there’s also a downside to products designed to be so engaging. Sometimes we overuse these products and we find ourselves distracted. However, throwing away our phones and swearing off social media aren’t practical solutions for most of us. “Digital detoxes” and 30-day plans didn’t work for me.

I love my devices and wanted practical ways to get the best out of tech without letting tech get the best of me.

Third — I think it’s important to fight the notion perpetuated by some tech critics that tech is addicting everyone and “hijacking our brains.” The truth is much more nuanced.

The fact is, while some tech does addict some people, the vast majority of us are not pathologically addicted.

Believing we’re powerless makes us less likely to do something about the problem. We have way more power than we think.

There’s no doubt many products are designed to be engaging. But would we want it any other way? The price of progress is a world of products so good we want to use them! Of course, there are bad actors who use deceptive practices and those companies deserve greater scrutiny. However, if we hold our breath waiting for companies to make their products less engaging, we’re going to suffocate. So why wait?

There’s so much we can do right now to become indistractable.

In Indistractable, I describe a four-part research-backed model that will help you finally live out your values and do what you say you will do.

You’ll also learn:
Don’t Be Afraid to Be a Pain
By: Rianne Grace
Tags: Mental Health, Mental Illness, Life, Psychology, Depression

Shhh. I’m gonna let you in on a secret. Ready?

Doctors don’t know everything.

I know, I know — they’re the experts! But it’s true.

They don’t know what it’s like when you’re lying awake at 3 am, staring at the ceiling and wishing you could sleep.

They don’t know that your new med is helping, but the whispers in the back of your mind saying awful things still won’t go away.

They don’t know that, even though you’re bathing more often and you haven’t tried to hurt yourself, you still can’t hold a job or keep your home clean or get back into your favorite hobbies.

They didn’t know, before my second hospitalization, that I thought my recovery had gone as far as it could. That it wasn’t good enough. That I didn’t want a future that looked like my current reality.

They didn’t know because I hadn’t told them. Doctors can’t read your mind, so self-advocacy is critical.

You have to speak out or they can’t help you.

If you have a difficult time speaking up for yourself, there are a few things you can try. Practicing what you want to say might help. You could also explain everything to someone you trust and bring them along to your next appointment to back you up.

If you can’t articulate what you need to say in the office, try journaling at home and then bringing your journal with you. You can read from it directly, or write a brief summary and have your doctor read it.

Also? Your treatment team works for you.

If this med helps but the side effects are too much, tell them. You can probably try a different medicine.

If you’ve heard of a new treatment you’d like to try, ask them about it. If they can’t provide it themselves, they can probably refer you to someone who can.

If they suggest a treatment and it scares the crap out of you, be honest. They might be able to explain how it works and reassure you, or they might know of an alternative that you feel better about.

Communication is the key here. Talk to your team, and let them help you. It’s that simple, and that hard.

Don’t be afraid to be a pain!

I know how depression can convince you that you cause problems for everyone, or that you don’t deserve help, or whatever. Negative thoughts come in many flavors, but I’m here to tell you that they are wrong.

You aren’t a problem. Your team wants you to open up so they can help you. You deserve to get help and you deserve to get better. I promise.

Do it. Speak up. I’ll be here, cheering you on.
6 Things I Remind Myself to Prevent Anxiety-Driven Overthinking
By: Terence Shin
Tags: Self Improvement, Mental Health, Life Lessons, Productivity, Philosophy

6 Things I Remind Myself to Prevent Anxiety-Driven Overthinking

#2. Don’t feel sorry for yourself.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Introduction

If you’re an over-thinker or a perfectionist, it’s very easy to get lost in your own thoughts. I happen to be both. On top of that, I’m still trying to figure out who I am as I navigate through my twenties.

I know the feeling of spiraling downwards so deep that you don’t see a way to get out. Sometimes I get so lost in my head that I question everything that I do which is an extremely toxic thing to do.

That being said, I’ve also learned a couple of things that I try to constantly remind myself so that I don’t fall into the trap of self-deprecating introspection. While I’m not a psychologist, I have found that nailing these ideas in my head has helped keep me away from my negative thoughts.

This article is as much for you as it is for me — I want this to serve as a reminder that anyone can come back to.

With that said let’s dive into it!
The Short Form Experiment
By: William, Dollar Bill
Tags: Short Form, Advice, Freelancing, Nonfiction, Writing

The Short Form Experiment

It actually works!

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

Too many Medium writers experience the same dilemma: We write something good only to have tumbleweed as our audience. And then months down the road when we manage to attract a few followers, that masterpiece has become ancient history.

About a year ago, Medium declared there would be no republishing of old stories unless the writer added something of value to the old piece. And that makes sense to me. There’s no shortage of articles to read on the platform. Including reruns would only serve to bloat the glut. So how would we revive that story we think contains so much value for the reader?

Enter Dr. Mehmet Yildiz of Illumination, who made a suggestion and offer I couldn’t refuse. Why not publish a short-form post as a teaser for our long stories we feel might have some value to the reader, and then include an embed at the end to bring new viewers to the old masterpiece?

I have followed the marketing advice of several different advisers in what is all too often a vain attempt at attracting an audience to my work. And mostly, it hasn’t worked very well. A drib here — and a drab there is about the best I could do. Facebook groups? Twitter? LinkedIn? Pinterest? Many Stories? All a big “meh.”

So anyway…I’m taking a crack at the short-form strategy. And while it’s not miraculous, I am seeing results. This morning, I found a few reads on 24-minute stories that were more or less moribund. I’m quite sure those viewers came from the short-form teasers.

Illumination allows writers 3 short-forms per day in each of its 3 publications. And if you really need to exceed that quota, I see no reason not to simply self-publish. Your followers just might find that short form and be interested in pieces they’ve overlooked.

I’ve been on Medium with a purpose for almost 3 months now. And with over 200 stories published, it would be really easy for even a diehard fan to miss something good. Why not lead the reader to what you think is your best work? It doesn’t really take all that long to write 100 words.

As with all the suggestions on garnering an audience, it’s at least worth a shot. And this one actually is working for me. Just sayin’. Where there’s a will there’s a way and all that positive stuff. Give ’em hell. You’ve but one writing life to live.

More writing suggestions:
For 8-Hours My Life Became an Episode of SpongeBob
By: Isaiah Mccall
Tags: New York, Spongebob, Self, Storytelling, Television

The more I grow up the more my life becomes an episode of SpongeBob.

No, not the ones where the main characters play in an imaginary box or spend the afternoon jellyfishing. My life is becoming one of the tragic episodes of Spongebob.

Thankfully, tragedy can be hilarious if it isn’t happening to you.

Don’t believe me? Well, if tragedy weren’t funny “America’s Funniest Home Videos” wouldn’t have run for 31 seasons and the guys from the show “Jackass” would likely stop punching Steve-O in the balls so many times.

As adults, sharing our tragedies is how we cope and subsequently laugh at them. And this is why SpongeBob works for all ages.

One second you’re watching a sponge and his aquatic friends go on a silly adventure, and the next, that same sponge is giving his best friend a cake that says: “Sorry About the Scabies.”

So, at my own expense here’s a great story of how I ended up in Rock Bottom — *ahem* I mean Queens, New York at 2 AM.
How I Passed the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification in 5 Days
By: Arunn Thevapalan
Tags: Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Machine Learning, Data Science

How did I prepare for the exam?

I primarily used 2 resources.

I highly recommend you to stick with the same too. The mock tests and external paid courses are absolutely unnecessary. Trust me; it’s easier than you think.

The Plan

Day 1: Azure Training Webinar Day 1 [3hrs]

Day 2: Azure Training Webinar Day 2 [3hrs]

Day 3: Azure Fundamentals Learning Path — Part 1,2,3 [3hrs]

Day 4: Azure Fundamentals Learning Path — Part 4,5,6 [3hrs]

Day 5: Review of my short notes [1hr] + Examination [2hrs]

As you would notice, I used only these 2 resources and booked my examination on Day 3. The plan is simple as it can get; let’s quickly go over the resources.

Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day

This is typically a 2-day webinar held by the Azure Training team to help more professionals get familiar with the Azure cloud platform. You can check for the next scheduled event from this link. They have these multiple times a year.

In my opinion, these are the best way to get started. Everything you need would be explained clearly by the trainers, and you get to ask questions to them and clarify any doubts you may have.

Think of it as a crash course into the content to have a good overview of what you will be tested upon. If not for these, I wouldn’t have even attempted the exam. They talk about what’s tested on the examinations and were helpful to kickstart my preparation.

Azure Fundamentals Learning Path

If the webinar were the crash course, the learning path would be the in-depth text tutorial. Yes, I said text! I personally like text materials because they let me skim through and take notes easily at my own pace.

I spent the next 2 days going through the learning path, solidifying all the concepts I listened to on the training day.

Azure Fundamentals Learning Path (Screenshot by Author)

There are questions to check your understanding at the end of each learning path, and by logging into your Microsoft account, you may save your progress (like I did above).

If you went through both the above resources, you will naturally feel comfortable about the exam and don’t have to waste money on any mock tests or additional courses.

Bonus Tip: Though practical experience is not required for this examination, knowing Azure Portal and the interface was helpful for me. So if you’re not familiar with the Azure Portal, feel free to create a free trial account and play around familiarizing yourself with the icons and the overall offerings of Azure.
The Truth behind the Story
By: Danielle Darden
Tags: Brand Story, Marketing, Storytelling

Brand stories come to life, sometimes in a good or bad way.

In brand storytelling, I say it’s better to be safe than sorry and tell a fictional story. Yes if the brand tells a story and they don’t state if the story is real or not they can get some publicity. The whole bad publicity is better than no publicity can cause attention but will have consumers doubting your brand… I’d prefer to stay away from that and tell a great story. Making stories relatable and personable is key to connecting with the audience; I believe a brand can do so, without using a real person. Plus this gives the brand to create their ideal consumer and inspire them to “live like their brand.” It is very important for the audience to be able to tell whether a story is real. Certain stories can make an audience feel a certain way with their emotions and it should be an ethical responsibility for the brands to tell if a story is real or fake. If not, it can cause problems later on especially when there is no reason to lie.

For example, The clothing company Hollister created a fictitious brand story, BBC wrote in 2009 “US fashion brand Hollister uses logos and labels bearing the date 1922, but the company was only founded in 2000.” The clothing store would have still been well known without the fictitious branding.” Sometimes fabricated stories can work to cause attention and shock the audience. The company, Plan Norway created a fabricated story about a 122-year-old girl named Thea and how she was getting married. The blog showed her whole process of the bride-to-be causing awareness to young brides. The Huffington Post wrote in 2014 “The campaign was intended to inspire people to get involved in stopping child marriage on a global scale by sponsoring girls in developing countries. Plan International’s sponsorship program connects donors with children in need of aid. In exchange for monthly contributions toward ongoing Plan projects in the child’s community, the sponsor receives updates and letters from the child.”

Huffington Post was able to interview Olaf Thommessen, National Director of Plan Norway. Thommessen explained that “Plan Norway’s goal with the Thea project was to mobilize Norwegians to stop Thea’s wedding before the little girl made it to the altar on Oct. 11.The plan worked. Concerned Norwegians reportedly called the police to alert them to Thea’s plight.” Even though the company didn’t mention the story was fake right away, they wanted their audience to do something. Their story was created for a call-to–action which I can respect as a smart marketing strategy. They made the girl seem real to cause awareness and finally reveled that she was a fictitious character.
React Sans JSX
By: Justin Travis Waith-Mair
Tags: React, Software Engineering, Jsx, Babel, Learning To Code

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

One of the best things to happen to JavaScript would have to be Babel and process by which one could transpile from one version of JavaScript to another. Not only has this allowed the adoption of modern JavaScript to be accelerated, but it has also opened the doors for other important inventions that improve our JavaScript experiences. A wonderful example of this is JSX.

JSX is an XML like structure that allows one to express component rendering in a syntax that is similar to HTML(even though it is not HTML) and therefore in a way that is familiar. Though it is used in other projects, JSX is primarily associated with React. It is how components are built. In fact, it is so common, it might be surprising to some to know the JSX is used outside of React. JSX is not part of ECMAScript (for now) and sending raw JSX to your browser would not work very well. To make it work one depends on a build process to convert JSX into real JavaScript. The most common build process typically uses Babel, Webpack, Typescript, or some combination of those three.

Given all that, what if I told you that you can write React without a build process which means no Babel to transpile JSX into regular JavaScript. React has official docs on using React without JSX, but one may ask why would you do that?

There are, in my opinion, two obvious reasons to not use JSX. One is that you have a mostly static web page, and only need to use React to control a widget or a section of the web page that needs functionality. Bringing in a whole build process can be overkill for something that simple. The other reason is that it is good to understand what is happening when your code is transpiled from JSX. The more you understand what’s happening under the hood, the better you are at writing and debugging your application.