fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Why Programmers Should Write Tutorials
By: Fernando Souza
Tags: Software Development, Startup, Tutorial, Programming, Writing

Why Programmers Should Write Tutorials

The best people teach

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash.

Imagine this situation: You receive a task to implement a new feature in your company’s software. You think it will be easy because you did something similar a few months ago. Just copy, paste, and be happy. You even start doing something else not related to the problem because you have the time.

A few hours before the deadline, you open your old code and panic. You don’t understand any of what you have written or why you chose those data structures. You start to check the test code if you are lucky enough to have coded one.

After you run the tests, make some changes to see what happens, and search for alternatives on Stack Overflow, you are finally able to understand the code and implement the original task.

In the end, you wasted a few hours (and encountered a lot of self-doubt) just to remember that you had to install a library that was not in the original documentation. One single command. It is inevitable not to feel frustrated.

You have probably gone through this situation during your life as a programmer. The more years of experience you gain, the greater your chances of facing this again — just because you did not write it down.
How to Create a Minimalist Work Environment
By: Kahli Bree Adams
Tags: Business, Startup, Work, Productivity, Freelancing

How to Create a Minimalist Work Environment

File it or bin it ?— A quick checklist for decluttering your desk

Photo by Aleksi Tappura on Unsplash

Marie Kondo is all the rage. But even before tidying was in vogue, we all knew that getting rid of clutter is one of the best things we can do to create a more efficient work environment. Yet for some of us (myself included!), this can be a daunting task. We often like to hang on to things.

But a messy desk can be distracting and makes us less productive. So it’s time to check what’s in front of you and start sorting!
Your Product Needs a Product Design Workshop to Scale
By: Patrycja Paterska
Tags: Business, Startup, Design, Agile, UX

Domain knowledge & technical expertise meeting for the first time

A Product Design workshop is a perfect and probably the most time-efficient way to clash your vision with the reality of building digital products. You are an expert in the field, with the domain knowledge of your business.

For the designers or developers participating in the workshop, although it might be their very first time they encounter the problem you’re trying to solve, they possess the knowledge about the technical, ecosystem or customer constraints involved in digital product development.

Vision clash is the key element here: you confront your domain knowledge with their technical expertise to deliver the best product possible. Together, you can decide on the best technology to develop your project, access how big of a team you’ll need and how much time and money it will take to deliver the first version to the end-user.

Split the product’s growth into stages

Somehow, every new business founder’s secret wish is to give your users everything you have and, preferably, all at once. But this often results in a massive backlog, overbearing cost estimation, and an app that takes a lot of time, but more importantly, a lot of money, to get on the market.

The main role of a well-conducted Product Design Workshop is to use research and research-based methods to help you divide your product development into relevant and manageable stages (from the money & tech perspective) that will also make your idea profitable business-wise as soon as possible.

Dividing the project’s focus into short-term, mid-term and long-term goals gives you more space to manoeuvre and react to the market changes. You can react to your users’ direct feedback and scale your business accordingly.

Establish a doable and profitable MVP scope

Time-to-market may be your competitive advantage, if well thought-through. A quicker MVP, even if some advanced elements get pushed to the second stage, allows your users to be introduced to your brand new solution quicker. And to you, it’s a chance to monetize your solution quicker.

At EL Passion, a two-day workshop allowed us to build a solid foundation and mutual understanding that resulted in an MVP prototype delivered in just 2 weeks. With the traditional process approach, this tempo would not be possible.

Thinking now will save you time & money later

Apart from accelerating the project quickly, a workshop is a high-intensity meeting, where the team can talk risks, and decide on the vital project points. From experience, we know there are some elements that not all stakeholders agree on. Treat a workshop as an opportunity to find solutions supported by everyone at the table (sometimes it’s not possible, and then you can go with the next-best thing: an old school compromise).

But it is worth it. Reaching a consensus on the project’s core functionalities will speed up the actual development and can minimize changes you’ll want to make later in the project.
10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make
By: Eugen Eşanu
Tags: Design, UX, Design Thinking, Product Management, Creativity

The saying that “good design is obvious” is pretty damn old, and I am sure it took different shapes in the previous centuries. It referred to good food, music, architecture, clothes, philosophy and everything else.

We forget that the human mind changes slowly, and the knowledge you have about human behaviour will not go old for at least 50 years or so. To make it easy for you, we need to keep consistent with a couple of principles that will remind us of how to design great products. We should be told at least once a month about these small principles until we live and breathe good design.

The human brain’s capacity doesn’t change from one year to the next, so the insights from studying human behaviour have a very long shelf life. What was difficult for user twenty years ago continues to be difficult today — J. Nielsen

Revisiting: Don’t Make Me Think

Steve Krug laid out some useful principles back in 2000, after the dot-com boom which are still valuable and relevant nowadays. Even after his revised version, nothing changed. Yes, you will tell me that the looks are more modern and the websites are more organised and advanced (no more flash!). But what I mean about that is — nothing has changed in human behaviour. We will always want the principle “don’t make me think” applied to any type of product we interact (whether it is a microwave, tv, smartphone or car).
Tips on Passing Your AWS Certification
By: Don Restarone
Tags: Programming, DevOps, AWS, Career Development, Startup

1. Actually Build Something Using AWS

Just like any good student of computer science, I decided to purchase a handful of online courses to help me prepare for the exam. While the courses provided a structured learning experience and were effective at outlining the theory at a high level, I found myself struggling to learn effectively by following along with the simple “hello world” examples.

I found the hands-on exercises presented by the instructors to be far too simple and not representative of what you would be doing in the real world. Who runs Nginx/Apache on EC2 without SSL/TLS or a JavaScript function on Lambda without a handful of libraries in node_modules ?

This is not to say that instructors/courses are ineffective at preparing you for the exam — they are perfectly adequate for you to pass — but if you are like me and learn best with a hands-on, in-depth approach, then you might need to do a bit more than just pull httpd from ECR to your Fargate cluster and call it a day.

So right after learning the high-level theory for a particular service, I skipped the instructor-provided labs and decided to get some real-life hands-on experience by either migrating a particular app of mine from Heroku to AWS or simply deploying one already on AWS in a different way. In the interest of having everything under one roof, I also migrated from Godaddy DNS to AWS Route 53.

By the end of my practice/study period, I had migrated all my apps out of Heroku (four to be exact). So in addition to slashing my hosting costs by over 60%, I also gained valuable hands-on learning. A win-win situation in my book. Here is my AWS bill compared to Heroku:

Heroku (left) vs. AWS (right). I went from spending $126 USD/month to $42 USD/month.

For each app migration, I made a conscious effort to use a particular service set from AWS that would cater to the needs of the app. For example, for a large enterprise-grade Rails app, I made sure to use RDS for the PostgreSQL database, ECS on EC2 for application servers, and Codepipline for CI/CD. For a small agency website, I figured a T2.micro EC2 instance with certbot would suffice.

I embraced serverless when I migrated a React app hosted on Heroku to AWS using nothing more than an S3 bucket, a Cloudfront distribution, and an SSL/TLS certificate sponsored free of charge by ACM.
7 Ways to Limit Scope in Your Code
By: Nick Hodges
Tags: Software Development, Startup, Mobile, Software Engineering, Programming

7 Ways to Limit Scope in Your Code

Easy methods you can adopt to keep your code clean, concise, and testable

Photo by Ludovic Charlet on Unsplash.

As a general rule, developers should limit the scope of variables and references as much as possible. Limiting scope in every way possible, from the big things (never, ever use global variables) to the subtle little things a language can do (declare const whenever possible), can contribute to clean, easy-to-test code.

The limiting of scope has all kinds of benefits. First, limiting the scope of a variable reduces the number of places where a given variable can be modified. The reason we rightfully abhor global variables is there is no telling where or when a global variable might be changed. A global variable hangs out there like that last donut in the break room. You know you shouldn’t touch it, but it’s so tempting and easy just to grab that variable and use it for whatever you need to do. Limiting the scope of a changeable thing reduces the chances that it will be changed in a way that it shouldn’t be — or worse, in a way you don’t even know about.

By definition, limiting scope is also a main feature of object-oriented programming. Encapsulation is probably the first thing you think of when you think of OOP, and its basic purpose — its whole reason for existing — is to formalize the process of limiting scope. They don’t call it “information hiding” for nothing. The term “information hiding” really means “Hide the scope of your variables so much that they can’t be changed except in the exact way you let them be.” Encapsulation enables you to ensure that data you don’t want to be exposed isn’t exposed. And if it isn’t exposed, it can’t be changed.

Limiting scope also limits the ability for people to depend on code that they shouldn’t be depending on. Loose coupling — the limiting of the dependencies within a system — is a good thing. Tight coupling is a bad thing. Limiting scope makes it harder for one class to latch on to another class and create dependencies that make code hard to test and difficult to maintain. It also makes it harder for changes in one area of code to have secondary effects in other, coupled areas. There is nothing worse than changing code in (metaphorically speaking) New York City and having that change cause a bug in code all the way over in Los Angeles. This is commonly called “Action at a distance” and is something that should be avoided like a bad burrito.
Old Mortality
By: Mark Kelly
Tags: Death, Nonfiction, Technology, Coronavirus, Funerals

My uncle died a few weeks ago. He didn’t die from the virus, but his funeral was affected by the ongoing restrictions. Today those of us too distant or too numerous to attend got to watch the crematorium service live-streamed to our laptops or smartphones. It made what would always be a sombre experience surreal and grimly affecting.

It was a one-way connection, so I could see my Mum, Dad, widowed Aunt and other family members playing their part, but couldn’t interact in any way. They were all respectful, socially distanced, and in most cases mask-wearing. It seemed almost disrespectful to be watching remotely in comfort and casual attire, like a ghost at the feast.
Why Consumer Emotions Are Difficult to Read
By: Jean-Marc Buchert
Tags: Advertising, Feelings, Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Psychology

Consumer Emotions Are Highly Contextual

Many theories around emotion psychology have emphasized the universality and innate nature of emotions. They assume that we can detect facial patterns that express each time the same emotion, whether it is fear or joy.

However, when famous psychologists Schachter and Singer had the idea of injecting epinephrine into patients, they realized the deep ambivalence of our emotions. After making them wait in a room in the company of fake actors, they confronted them in two situations.

In one, the actors complained rather loudly about the difficulty of filling out a paper and expressing their anger openly. On the other, they showed enthusiasm and excitement by making paper airplanes and playing with them.

Quite strangely, in the first case, participants affected by adrenaline also experienced significant anger, with no other connection. Meanwhile, in the second case, they showed euphoria in sync with the scene they had experienced.

What the researchers then realized is that our emotions are not self-generated but are largely defined by context. The situation in which we may both feel joy or anger for the same internal stimulus (be it adrenaline, dopamine, or any other physiological reaction).

As a result, our body or mind defines less what we feel, than the interpretation we make of what we feel. In this precise situation, participants inferred from cues in the situation that their beating heart was the result of anger or joy, and thus experienced that sentiment.

Hence, the growing importance of the experience and context of consumption in marketing. Marketers have noticed the power of contextual targeting to get a more emotional impact. For example, P&G’s “Thank you, Mom” campaign played when people were watching the Olympics with their families. As such, it gets a big resonance from mothers thinking about their sons’ bright futures. The ads wouldn’t have had the same meaning when watched at a different time.
Announcing Cross-Chain Group - A Blockchain Interoperability Resource
By: Matthew Hammond
Tags: Tech, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Blockchain, Programming

We are thrilled to announce that Summa has partnered with Keep to form Cross-Chain Group; a working group focused on furthering blockchain interoperability.

Cross-Chain Group is an industry resource dedicated to promoting the research, design, and implementation of cross-chain technology through collaboration, development, and educational events. By working closely with projects, chains, and technologists at the forefront of blockchain interoperability, we hope to drive innovation that leads to a more functional and robust ecosystem.

At Summa, we build cross-chain architecture and interoperability solutions that break the silos between chains, allowing liquidity, users, and value to flow more freely throughout the ecosystem. Our work on Stateless SPVs, Blake2b support in Ethereum (EIP-152), and Zcash MMR’s (ZIP-221) all promise to help bridge the gap, bringing some of the largest chains closer together.

“The initiative brings together two like-minded teams that want to see the industry mature through collaboration and connectivity,” said Matt Luongo, Project Lead at Keep. “Working with Summa and their cross-chain architecture means we can address more users on more chains. We look forward to bringing other teams into the fold who share this vision.”

Keep, a chain-agnostic provider of privacy technology for public chains, has shown tremendous dedication towards driving interoperability. Our shared vision of a fully interoperable ecosystem made them a natural partner for us. We’re working closely with their team to build the cross-chain solutions necessary to bring privacy to all chains and will share additional details as they become available.

“Partnering with Keep was a natural fit. Their tECDSA work allows smart contracts to write to the Bitcoin chain, which complements our read-optimized SPV work,” said James Prestwich, Co-founder of Summa. “Together, our technologies enable a wide array of interoperability use cases.”

Meaningful discussion, collaboration, and alignment between companies will drive innovation in interoperability and lead to more functional and user-friendly solutions. While Cross-Chain Group is currently invite-only, we would love to hear from projects, investors, and members of the community about the work they’re doing in interoperability and the ways that we can support them.

If you’re working on solutions that further cross-chain interoperability, please reach out at https://crosschain.group/

We’ll be continuing the conversation on interoperability next week with our new series, Blockchain Interoperability & Cross-Chain Communication. Until then, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter to ask questions and learn more.
Is There a Difference Between Open Data and Public Data?
By: Lewis Wynne-Jones
Tags: Government Data, Open Data, Public Data, Data Science, Big Data

There is a general consensus that when we talk about open data we are referring to any piece of data or content that is free to access, use, reuse, and redistribute. Due to the way most governments have rolled out their open data portals, however, it would be easy to assume that the data available on these sites is the only data that’s available for public consumption. This isn’t true.

Although data sets that receive a governmental stamp of openness receive a lot more publicity, they actually only represent a fraction of the public data that exists on the web.

So what’s the difference between “public” data and “open” data?

What is open data?

Generally speaking, “ open data “ is the information that has been published on government-sanctioned portals. In the best case, this data is structured, machine-readable, open-licensed, and well maintained.

What is public data?

Public data is the data that exists everywhere else. This is information that’s freely available (but not really accessible) on the web. It is frequently unstructured and unruly, and its usage requirements are often vague.

“Only 10% of government data is published as open data”

What does this mean?

Well, for starters, it means that there’s a discrepancy between the open data that exists in government portals and public data in general. This is an important distinction to make because while there’s a lot of excitement surrounding open data initiatives and their potential to transform modern society, the data that this premise rests on — open data — is only a fraction of what’s needed in order for this potential to be realized.

The fact is this: the majority of useful government data is either still proprietary or stowed away in a filing cabinet somewhere, and the stuff that is available is being released haphazardly.

Does it matter?

Does it actually matter that there’s a distinction between these two kinds of data? Well… yes.

Open data, because it represents such a small portion of what’s available, hasn’t lived up to its potential. People, like me, who have very high hopes for the open data movement haven’t yet seen the ROI (economically or socially) that we were supposed to. The reason we haven’t is manyfold, but this distinction is part of the problem.

In order for open data to be as effective as predicted, the line that demarcates open and public data needs to be erased, and governments need to start making a lot more of their public information open data. After all, we’re the ones paying for it.
5 Valuable Lessons I Learned About Development After Multiple App Failures
By: Zachary Minott
Tags: Self Improvement, Software Engineering, Startup, Life Lessons, Programming

Lesson 1: Perfection Is the Dream-Killer

Ah, perfection. The quintessential idea of what we aim to achieve and in turn romanticize in our minds. It’s that overwhelming desire to achieve the exact outcome that we envision in our minds. We have high hopes that it’ll seize the attention of all those who interact with the final creation.

Nothing has impeded my ability to make forward progress in development more than striving for perfection.

It made me feel like whatever it was I was building out wasn’t good enough.

I wouldn’t celebrate little wins. I wouldn’t focus on atomically approaching tasks. I wouldn’t focus on simplicity. I wouldn’t focus on refactoring. I wouldn’t know where to even start because my mind was way too focused on the big picture rather than the problem I was trying to solve right in front of me.

This isn’t to say that being a big-picture thinker isn’t important at all. The idea you lay out for yourself is the driving motivation behind an entire project after all.

But that doesn’t mean you should delay deployment solely because you aren’t where you want to be quite yet.

Perfection takes time. Perfection is not something you can simply strive for. Rather, perfection is the result of the tiny achievements and improvements you make throughout the entire lifetime of the product you’re developing.

Perfection is seen in the eyes of the user — not the eyes of the creator.

That’s why rather than aiming to be perfect, you should deploy the imperfect and be willing to alter your course as a response to the results you sequentially see from tiny wins. If you can’t adapt, be fluid, and be dynamic in the way you move forward through development, you’re only setting the stage for failure to take the spotlight.

Be willing to be criticized. Be open to the notion that you won’t achieve that perfect idea in your head. Be aware that the imperfect may just be the precursor to perfection that you’ve been looking for.

What’s important is that you’ve developed something more functional and valuable than you did the day before.

Focus on the small wins, and as time goes on, every tiny thing you achieve will evolve together into a fluid and functional application that people will want to use because you focused more on building out the little things very well rather than everything all at once.

Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Develop, refine, simplify, deploy, fail, reiterate, and you’ll eventually build an even better Rome than you imagined.
Bird Brains May Be Smarter Than We Thought
Tags: Philosophy, Animals, Intelligence, Psychology, Science

3. Comparing Corvids and Ape

Despite a long history of intelligence testing in apes, as well as in various corvids, there is no direct comparison between these two animals using a single comprehensive panel of tests. The PCTB in fact has been used to compare a wide range of non-primate animals like monkeys, parrots, and dogs, which makes a lack of direct comparisons surprising. The authors of a paper just published in the journal Nature: Scientific Reports aimed to fill this gap.

Simone Pika is the lead author of a paper titled “Raven's parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills”, reporting on their work to adapt the PCTB to hand-raised ravens. The main goal was to stick to the methodology of the PCTB closely, to enable direct species comparison, yet to adapt the test methods for ravens who use their beaks instead of thumbs.

Pika called this the Corvid Cognition Test Battery (or CCTB).

The authors bundled the many individual tests into larger groups which tested the animal’s understanding of: causality, quantity, space, communication, and theory of mind.

The subjects were eight hand-raised ravens, tested after they were fully hatched at four months, eight months, twelve months, and 16 months of age. Comparisons to non-human primates (chimpanzees and orangutans) used previously published primate studies.

The primary findings within the birds studied was that cognitive skills remained the same throughout the study period, and were approximately the same across types of cognition. In other words, raven’s impressive cognitive skills are already fully developed across a wide range of skills when they are only four months old.

Cognitive performance of ravens at each age from 4–16 months (image by Pika et al., 2020)

The ravens performed very similarly in both physical and social cognition, with their highest scores in quantitative skills, and lowest in spatial skills. The authors had a hypothesis going into this study that the ravens would perform higher in social than in physical cognition, given their complex societies and long-term monogamy.

The author’s hypothesis that ravens develop cognition very quickly was supported by their data showing that their performance didn’t vary over time and was already at a high level at four months of age.

The final hypothesis was that ravens would match apes in social intelligence because of their known complex social interactions, and that they would perform worse than apes in physical cognition. Their last hypothesis was not fully supported by their data. Ravens performed similarly to chimpanzees and orangutans in both physical and social intelligence. Only the raven’s spatial skills suffered in the comparison, all other skills matching the great apes.
3時間で本格的なJupyterHub環境を構築！！そう、Kubernetesならね
By: Yoshimasa Hamada
Tags: Jupyter Notebook, Google Cloud Platform, Data Science, Kubernetes

JupyterHubのトップページに以下のような2つのユースケースが紹介されています。

1. If you need a simple case for a small amount of users (0–100) and single server take a look at The Littlest JupyterHub distribution.

2. If you need to allow for even more users, a dynamic amount of servers can be used on a cloud, take a look at the Zero to JupyterHub with Kubernetes .
Enhance Your Learning by Calculating The Learning Compression Score
By: John Von Neumann Ii
Tags: Books, Self Improvement, Reading, Education, Productivity

Enhance Your Learning by Calculating The Learning Compression Score

A (futuristic) method of assessing a source’s learning efficiency

Learning compression score = Quality / Size reduction

Calculating Learning Compression Score

This method, which I will call “Learning compression score”, is a (futuristic) method that I can imagine will accelerate learning.

Essentially, this “score” says how efficiently you learn things from a particular source in terms of time e.g. two similar articles may talk about the same idea, but one of them explains it in half the time required to read it.

So how can we “calculate” the compression score of a source? Let’s say you are aware of a book containing 70,000 words but, instead, there’s an article summarizing the book in only 1,000 words. In other words, the source has been compressed by ~99%. This, however, is just a component for calculating the learning compression score.

In order to calculate the compression score, we have to “calculate” how much (subjective) “quality” we have retained from the original source. Often, the quality goes down when summarizing sources, but in rare cases, it might even go up.

Let’s say we have retained 80% of the “quality”. Now, in order to calculate the compression score, we have to divide 0.8 with 0.01 = 80.

This number essentially means that every second you spend on reading the summary, you learn things 80x faster than when reading the original source.

Futuristic Method To Enhance Learning?

I think we can become more and more precise and efficient in calculating things like how much calories, proteins, and vitamins certain food contains. In fact, we might even be able to do such things in the future via brain augmentation by simply staring at food.

Perhaps it might even be possible to calculate more precisely how valuable and efficient a certain source would be to read for us. I mean, we already are doing that (subconsciously) based on our feelings of curiosity, joy, and so on.

What do you think of this concept?
Grace: Self-Discovery Oracle Card
By: Jordin James
Tags: Spirituality, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Self, Psychology

Grace is when you wake up in your deepest darkness and realize someone put flowers around you while you were sleeping.

Grace is both what prompts and carries you through your evolution. Grace is your guide on the spiral path deeper into yourself.

This spiral path leads you so deep into yourself that you find oneness with all that is. Grace shows you what it means to belong to the infinite as well as to yourself.

Grace is what helps you hold the mighty paradox of, “Things are not okay,” and, “All is well.”

There is always enough grace to carry you from this moment to this moment.

Let grace carry you.
Life Isn’t Supposed to Be Lived Alone
By: Maclin Lyons
Tags: Self-awareness, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Life, Self

Stop isolating yourself and start living.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

It takes a special type of person to be fine living in the woods completely on their own. I wonder if they are truly happy.

Maybe, but I know that’s not me. Isolation is a punishment for most people.

Being social is good for you.

I do love spending time alone. I am such an introvert that I look forward to the times when I know I don’t have to talk to or be around anybody. However, I know I couldn’t live like that all the time.

I use my alone time to recharge from being social, but I need to spend time with my family and friends. I never regret going over to a friend’s house or having my partner sleep over. I never wish I hadn’t gone to visit my parents or my brothers.

It’s a necessity to interact with other people, to feel their energy and to have great conversation.

I can spend a couple days alone and feel fine, but after several days, I feel lonely. I feel a little sad. My mental and physical health are better when I’m socially active.

It’s important to step outside of your introspection and focus on other people. When I catch myself being too self-absorbed, I turn to my social circle to pull me out.

I always feel better when I take my attention away from myself and whatever issues I’m going through and live in the moment with friends and family.

Aristotle said that human beings are social animals. We thrive on interaction with our peers. We depend on it for our overall well-being. It helps to keep our mind and communication skills active.

Think about it. When you’re alone, how much speaking do you do? Can you develop your interpersonal skills by yourself? Muscles atrophy if you don’t use them. That goes for any type of practice.

We aren’t meant to live in complete silence. Meditation is great, but only for a period of time. Even monks socialize with each other.

Interacting with others is great for mental health. It can decrease feelings of depression and loneliness. Having others to talk to can help you deal with feelings of anxiety.

Being a productive member of society can certainly improve your mood and self-esteem. Knowing that other people are counting on you can give you purpose and lift your spirits.

When you feel like isolating yourself, try to go out into the world instead. Make an effort to hang out with friends. If stepping outside is too much, then a phone call is a good first step. It’s always good to at least have someone to talk to.

There are too many possibilities and opportunities in life that are waiting for you. You’ll miss out on most of them if you keep to yourself. You’re one of billions. You fit in somewhere. Don’t hide from the world. Go out and find your place in it.
Medium Writer Resources
By: Casey Botticello
Tags: Medium, Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Medium Partner Program, Writing

Medium Review | Blogging Guide

Medium is one of the better known free blogging platforms. The site features amateur writers alongside well known…
Why Assemblage Had To Remove Its Submission Requirements
By: Jonathan Greene
Tags: Writing, Creativity, Standards, Integrity, Publication

Why Assemblage Had To Remove Its Submission Requirements

How To Get Better, Not Bigger

Photo by Enrico Mantegazza on Unsplash

Once upon a time, it made sense to have well thought out submission requirements that writers would read before making a decision on whether or not to apply to be a writer to a publication on Medium. Then the tide shifted and a deluge of “writers” descended on these screens like ants to an errant apple. And here we are.

As of today, October 2, 2020, Assemblage is removing its submission requirements from all of its publications. No, that does not mean it is now open for anyone to apply. Exactly the opposite. Submissions are closed indefinitely. Because this is what it has come to.

Widespread plagiarism, disastrous creative “coaching”, and the overwhelming entitlement of the Internet writer have all led to this. When you spend half of your publishing time each day reviewing submissions from “writers” who didn’t read the guidelines, tout their favorite Medium writer as themselves, or say they are applying to grow their audience first, you get a little tired.

Not to mention that the more you uphold journalistic and creative standards as a bastion for your publication, the more sour “writers” bemoan the fact that you are restrictive and elitist. The amount of email flagellation that goes on because of the word no is beyond comprehension.

Even writers who make it to the party often fall under the spell of creative egoism and fail to see the forest for the trees. If The New York Times can say that they won’t publish work by a freelancer who also publishes for The New York Post than why can’t Assemblage say that it won’t add writers who choose to write for Illumination, Illumination-Curated, The Innovation, Never Fear, or An Idea? (and Be Unique — added October 30, 2020, and now Paper Poetry — added November 15, 2020)

The new-fangled, self-indoctrinated “writer” believes that a publication owned by one person, run by one person, with all the work done by one person should kowtow to every Tom, Dick, and Sally that wants to write everywhere and anywhere, no matter how high the pyramid, but also still wants to write here. Sorry.

I thought by exposing the most disingenuous Medium strategies that it would curtail the ragtag submissions and spam sham follow-for-follow flavor hounds hellbent on hedonism, but I was wrong. Again. It’s a runaway train of glad-handing and fakeness and ego massage that will never leave internet writing. This is what it has become.

But fortunately, at Assemblage, we don’t have to be or want to be what it has become. We’ve always fought against it since back in the days of Redoubtable and Uncalendared. And now we will continue to fight to make sure we are always getting better, not bigger.
Men’s Vs. Females’ SHAMPOO
By: Sabana Grande
Tags: Health, Marketing, Humor, Satire, Life Lessons

But what about men?

Are they smarter?

Pfttt.

Photo by Christopher Ott on Unsplash

MEN’S Shampoos

Science has dictated that men and women simply care about different things in their shampoos and that’s okay. Men also have a process for choosing their hair care products and marketing companies are aware of that.

Without further ado, here are the things men care about:

1. It Says Shampoo

Somewhere on the bottle. Does it work for a specific type of hair? Does it cater to dandruff-ridden scalps? Doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it says shampoo. If it doesn’t say shampoo but says shower gel that’s basically the same thing as well.

Marketing companies are cleverly taking advantage of this by writing “Shampoo” on their shampoo bottles. And we’re just falling right into their trap.

2. It Cleans Fucking Everything

As a man, I like to know that my shampoo can also wash dishes, my car, my clothes as well as my barbecue. It needs to be able to clean everything. Who wants different cleaning products anyway?

However — going back to my first point — we don’t read anything on the shampoo bottle as long as it says shampoo (or shower gel which is the same thing).

Marketing companies have catered to this by making our shampoos:

6 in 1

We don’t know what the 6 things are. But we assume at a glance that since the shampoo does 6 things, it can probably clear up oil spills as well as being used as paint remover… probably. So as long as it says 6 in 1 or 8 in 1 or whatever, we simply assume that is the alpha shampoo. The one shampoo to rule them all.

And we buy the crap out of it.

3. SIZE

Size matters to guys. The third most important thing that guys look for in shampoos is the size. And marketing companies are clearly aware of this.

What we want in our shampoos is that they come in as many liters/ gallons as possible in one container, so we don’t have to buy one ever again.

I bought my last shampoo when I was just in 6th grade. It came in a giant oil can which said 6 in 1 on it. I lugged it around and it dispenses shampoo right under my bathroom sink.

All kidding aside, if our shampoo bottles aren’t at least the same size as buckets, we ain’t buying.
How Anxiety Can Be Your Secret Creative Superpower
By: Jason Mcbride
Tags: Creativity, Mental Health, Comics, Anxiety, Life Lessons

How Anxiety Can Be Your Secret Creative Superpower

It’s not always about worst-case scenarios

Image by Jason McBride

I used to control my anxiety by reminding myself that my brain was making things out to be much worse than they were. That worked for several years.

But, this strategy gradually lost its effectiveness as the state of the world around me decayed. First, I lost both my parents within five months while dealing with a mysterious gut infection that led to me being hospitalized, where I discovered I had kidney cancer.

That was 2019. After my successful surgery, I thought things had to get better.

Then 2020 came. It seemed like my anxiety was laughing at me as I freaked out, unsure if I was rational or irrational.

Now I have a new strategy for managing my anxiety. I have learned to be grateful for it.

Because of my anxiety disorder, my brain works differently. I have learned that my anxiety is my secret creative superpower.

Image by Jason McBride

Image by Jason McBride

You might wonder if you can calculate the volume of water a towel removes from your body after a shower by weighing the towel after you use it.

Image by Jason McBride

If you have an anxiety disorder or are neurodivergent, you may not know that thoughts like these were strictly a middle-of-the-night phenomenon for most people.

Random thoughts like these are always passing through my mind. In my world, for better or worse, it’s always 3 am.

I have anxiety brain.

I imagine that my brain has two extra parts: a random idea generator and a worst-case scenario generator. There is a narrow tube that connects these two machines. When my anxiety spikes, it’s because the random thoughts generator is funneling all of its output into my worst-case scenario generator.

Image by Jason McBride

Image by Jason McBride

Image by Jason McBride

Thanks to my anxiety, while many people are limited to the occasional three o’clock musing, I am inundated with exquisite, weird thoughts all day long.

These thoughts fuel my creativity and allow me to entertain friends, family, and strangers. While I may never have a million-dollar idea, I do not doubt that I will have a million one-dollar ideas. And that will get me to an even better place — creatively connected to people like you.

Image by Jason McBride

Your anxiety brain doesn’t have to only produce doomsday scenarios. You can use your overactive imagination to fuel your creativity. Let’s face it. Anxiety is your imagination run amok. Once you learn to harness that power, even just a little bit, you unlock a creative superpower.

Having anxiety means looking at the world differently. Is there anything more powerful than that? Every scientific, cultural, and artistic advancement in the Earth’s history has been made by weirdos who look at the world differently and imagine something better.

That can be you. Turn your anxiety brain into your secret creative superpower. The world needs you!
Understanding Recursion With Examples
By: Diana Bernardo
Tags: Startup, Coding, Technology, Java, Programming

Understanding Recursion With Examples

Read it again, and again, and again, and again…

Photo by Josip I. on Unsplash.

What is recursion?

Open a browser and type “recursion” on Google. Did you notice the “Did you mean: recursion” message?

Photo by author. Screenshot of Google.

Click on that message. It will appear again. Click again. There it is again. Click it… OK, enough.

You’re now beginning to understand what recursion is. If you scroll down on that very same Google page, you will see this:

“Recursion: the repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition.”

Even recursion’s own definition is recursive.
The Architecture of. Multilayered Storytelling through…
By: Giorgia Lupi
Tags: Data Visualization, Design, Journalism

For each story we consider and pursue a topic we believe may be of particular interest to explore, ranging from current affairs to historical or cultural issues. Sometimes choices are driven by a fascination we have, sometimes by a compelling dataset we find and we would start from, other times we choose to present events and topics that are hot at the moment. We then analyze and compare different kinds of datasets trying to identify and reveal a central story, hopefully a not-so-expected one.

We start from a question or an intuition we have and work from here, then try to put the information in context and find some further facts and materials to potentially correlate. Every time we aim at moving away from mere quantity in order to pursue a qualitative transformation of raw statistical material into something that will provide new knowledge: unexpected parallels, not common correlation or secondary tales, to enrich the main story with.

In this respect our work here cannot be considered data-visualization in the pure sense: we are not just providing insight into numbers but into social issues or other qualitative aspects as well.
2015 year in review for Graph Commons
By: Burak Arikan
Tags: Open Data, Big Data, Social Network, Productivity, Data Visualization

We wish you a peaceful and happy new year! This graph image is generated from The Emoji Graph.

2015 year in review for Graph Commons

2015 was a year of great new beginnings for Graph Commons and for our mission to provide an open network mapping platform, so that everyone can collectively involve in the act of mapping networks as an ongoing practice.

This post was originally posted in the Graph Commons Journal.

Here is our progress in 2015:

May

After six months of development, the new version of Graph Commons released on May 28th 2015 and witnessed a momentum of interest from people with varying interests, backgrounds and skill sets.

June

Network mapping at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris (view all workshops)

Video tutorials released on network mapping using the new graph interface.

SIMPOL data Hub started on financial systems simulation and policy modelling in EU.

July

August

Force Atlas 2 layout feature released to provide better organization of large graphs.

Graph Commons API alpha version released.

Mobile view of graphs improved.

September

Graph Commons Hackathons site released for announcements and documentation.

Structured Journalism and Network Mapping Hackathon brought together programmers, activists, and journalists to create tools for network mapping and analysis using the API.

Private plans announced to help build a sustainable platform while supporting free public graphs.

Graph Commons Slack Channel started for community chat, questions, discussions, meeting people, sharing work.

October

November

December

Workshop at The Brown Institute, Columbia Journalism School (view documentation).

Networks of Dispossession project’s large prints and touch screen maps featured in the exhibition at MAXXI Museum in Rome.

Better Filters released, enabling graph authors to compose their custom filters depending on the graph context.

Node embed released for publishers to embed information cards in their publications.

iklimadaleti.org, new journal on ecological justice, launched using graph embeds and node embeds.

Better site wide search released (Elastic Search), so you can search among all public graphs, nodes, and members on Graph Commons.

Coming up in January 2016…

API refinement with general search, graph analysis + more API wrappers

New Hackathon: Creative Use of Complex Networks, Jan 9–10

Thank you everyone for your great support and encouragement. We will continue to provide an ever-growing connected knowledge base and support a network-literate community flourishing around it.

We wish you a peaceful and happy new year!
Gestalt in visualizations
By: Arushi Singh
Tags: Design, Psychology, Gestalt, Data Visualization, Infographics

Gestalt principles or laws are rules that describe how the human eye perceives visual elements. These principles aim to show how complex scenes can be reduced to more simple shapes. They also aim to explain how the eyes perceive the shapes as a single, united form rather than the separate simpler elements involved.

“Gestalt” refers to “shape” or “form” in German; the principles — originally developed by Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), an Austro-Hungarian-born psychologist. — were improved later by Wolfgang Köhler (1929), Kurt Koffka (1935), and Wolfgang Metzger (1936).

Researchers have integrated all of these theories to show how people unconsciously connect and link design elements. Here are some examples of how they manifest in the work of data visualization-

Similarity

The human eye tends to build a relationship between similar elements within a design. Similarity can be achieved using basic elements such as shapes, colors, and size.
I Thought I Had Coronavirus, But it Was Really a Panic Attack
By: Darcy Reeder
Tags: Covid Diaries, Covid 19, Mental Health, Anxiety, Coronavirus

My daughter and I were at the clinic first thing in the morning, getting tested for COVID-19. I felt much better than the night before, when I was afraid I was going to die, when I couldn’t speak without gasping for breath.

“I know it’s hard, but you need to find ways to stay calm.” The doctor looked me straight in the eyes. “Anxiety just makes breathing difficulties worse.”

I liked the doctor, was thankful she was testing us, but I also felt offended. Sure I was a little anxious right now, but who wouldn’t be? The sickness came first, then the anxiety, not the other way around. How dare she suggest my wheezing, my gasping, was just anxiety.

Just anxiety. Just. The doctor didn’t say that. That was my own mind, my own shame, belittling my experience, needing a test result to tell me this was the coronavirus. Because if my difficulty breathing was not COVID-19, if it was a mental health issue, it felt shameful, embarrassing, pathetic. It felt like my fault.

I’ve been medicated, gone through lots of fantastic therapy, for my depression and anxiety in the past, and yet part of me still carries the societal stigma. I worry I’m supposed to be able to heal my mental health issues through the power of positive thinking, that if I do enough yoga I’ll be fixed. That when I lapse into obsessive, negative thinking, when panic takes me over until I can’t breathe, that means I’m a failure. And that feeling of failure just piles on another layer of anxiety. Layers upon layers, smothering me.

It’d been, what, maybe 4 days, since my husband and I smugly talked about the people freaking out? As if we weren’t them, as if we were somehow above the drama, the panic.

The doctor took my blood pressure. 147/83, shockingly different than my usual uber-low 100/60. Anxiety can raise our blood pressure. Anxiety can make it hard to breathe.

“I need you to try to stay calm,” the doctor said again.