fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
I Hide you Everywhere
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Spirituality, Philosophy, Social Media, Love, Mindfulness

There are the times when I can feel the corners of my mouth spontaneously lifting upward before I break out into a smile, the one where the eyes sparkle.

Those smiles are as random as they are frequent now, triggered by nothing more than a burst of gratitude for still being alive.

A smile acknowledges a moment so that I might take stock of how precious this love is, how it demands protecting as much as sharing. And how it makes everything glow with gentleness, bestowing an aura of benevolence upon the world and everyone in it.

This love is the drug we all need, not to get out of our heads and have the trip of our lives but to survive and thrive together, as individuals and as a species.

It is as essential to human life as air and water.

And you can’t buy it, steal it, or demand it; you can only make it.
Return Of The Cool By Nick Grant Etches New Path
By: Richard Dicks
Tags: Music, Nick Grant, Return Of The Cool, Music Review, Hip Hop

Return Of The Cool is the name of the debut album released by Nick Grant on Janurary 13, 2017. This is his most recent offering since he dropped the A Seat At The Table (Plus One) EP a few months ago. He has put together a project that uses real instruments to create a hip-hop album which goes in a different direction than his peers. It has an old-school vibe that at times channels Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly.

It is easy to distinguish between the hip hop artists that take interests in other genres of music and the ones who narrow their view a little more. Nick Grant is one of the former telling HotNewHipHop, “I listen to a lot of different things. I don’t just limit myself to hip-hop music. I listen to jazz. I listen to Miles Davis, John Coltrane. I was heavily influenced by these people early on.” Return Of The Cool is a throwback to music being the vehicle used for true artistic expression.

I’ve heard better albums, but hearing this reinforces my hope in the rap game. In songs like “Return Of The Cool” he says “I’m movin too fast you need to speed up//girl your body’s the dopest I’m tryna re-up//we came from the bottom but nigga we up//the cool niggas is back to turn the heat up”. Grant vibes well with the instrumentals chosen and this is an album that will spin plenty of times throughout 2017.

Features on the album come from BJ The Chicago Kid (“Gotta Be More”) and Ricco Barrino (“Sing Along Song”) as well as B. Hess (“Return Of The Cool”) in addition to others.

Grant has been endorsed by other artists such as Nas and Andre 3000. Grant tells Billboard that getting the cosign from 3000 was important to him, “That’s somebody that I grew up on, grew up watching, and who I related to the most. He told me that I inspired him.” With props from one of the greats it is obvious that Nick Grant is on his way.
How to Inject Document in Angular
By: Jared Youtsey
Tags: Angular, Document, Typescript, JavaScript, HTML

Sometimes we just need to directly work with the DOM directly. I find this particularly so when doing things like scrolling to an element. How do you correctly leverage the document object in Angular?

import { DOCUMENT } from '@angular/common'; @Component({...}) // could be a service too!

export class MyComponent {

constructor (@Inject(DOCUMENT) private document: Document) {}

}

That’s it. Now, why write an article on something so simple? For starters, the best way to learn something is to teach it. Done. In addition, I’ve been doing full-time Angular development since the early alphas of Angular 2. I consider myself a guru-level Angular developer. However, I’m honest enough to admit that I still don’t know everything. One of my team members pointed this out in a code review. So, I learned something new today! Thanks, Ananthan!

Angular is evolving constantly. New features are added all of the time. As a developer, I love that I’m still learning new things and getting new features from the Angular team.

Be open to learning from anyone, anytime.

EnterpriseNG is coming

EnterpriseNG is a two-day conference from the ng-conf folks coming on November 19th and 20th. Check it out at ng-conf.org
Cincinnati Reds and Opening Day; A Brief History
By: Darren Hertenstein
Tags: Opening Day, Cincinnati, MLB

Opening Day in Baseball is a time-honored tradition. For one town it is a special time of the year and was the start for the entire league.

Cincinnati is the birthplace of America’s favorite past time (baseball) as a professional sport. The Cincinnati Red Stockings, formed in 1867, were the first team to recruit and play nationally (in 1869). They went undefeated from the start of 1869 until June of 1870, holding the only Perfect Season in Professional baseball history by going 65–0 in 1869.

Later, in 1935, Cincinnati hosted the first Night game in MLB history. This happened on May 24th, 80 years ago (1935) at Crosley field against the Philadelphia Philles. The Cincinnati Reds went on to play a night game against all other National League teams that year. The night games increased attendance by 117%, despite a dismal season.

The Cincinnati Reds got the honor, starting consistently in 1970, of becoming the first team to play in MLB by starting a day earlier than all the other Home games. This was something that had happened intermittently since 1939, but had not been a consistent theme to the league until the Big Red Machine era. It is still kicked off by the Opening Day parade, which was a much smaller tradition until 1970, but stopped being the first game of MLB league play in 2007 (due in part to an 8 year agreement with ESPN signed in 2005, which was extended in 2012).

Opening day is still basically a holiday in Cincinnati, even if we no longer get things started for the entire league. If anyone from Major League Baseball reads this: Please consider working closely with the City of Cincinnati in restoring this tradition, generations of Baseball fans in Cincinnati will thank you for it. Moving the parade to Sunday (sometimes Easter Sunday) would be a sacrifice many of us would accept, just to have that coveted first game of league play.

Best of Luck this season, MLB.

Originally published at www.founders-keepers.us on April 6, 2015.
CodeChain Seminar Week 3
By: Kiyun Kim
Tags: Blockchain, Events

CodeChain Seminar is already halfway through. The topic of the week was blockchain storage and Jingyeong Jeong and Juhyung Park walked us through storage related topics such as Transaction Format, Merkle Patricia Tree, Merkelized UTXO, etc.

Jingyeong Jeong, Engineer

Juhyung Park, Engineer

You can check out the presentation slides here.

Future Seminar Schedule

Place: SK Telecom T Tower 4th Floor Supex Hall

Time: 7 PM — 9 PM

[4th Week] June 14th (Thur)

Topic: Smart Contract

- Bitcoin Script Language

- Solidity/EVM

- CodeChain Script Language

- Script Language Use Cases: Atomic On-Chain Swap, Payment Channel, Escrow, etc

[5th Week] June 20th (Wed)

Topic: Sharding + Interchain

- Ethereum Sharding

- Cosmos

- Polkadot

- CodeChain Sharding

And continued from the CodeChain seminars, there will be the CodeChain Connect event in Seoul at the end of June. Stay tuned!
After the Last Time
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Musing, Being, Love, Poetry, Image

Whether we were sunk or not, wasn’t the question. You brushed your hair out of your mouth. The tiny trickle of sweat sketching out your jawline. I want to be here.

The candles, the secret, the changing touch. I breathe the whole night inside my lungs, barely capable. I have time, I have time to be here, and now the soft black cloth is underneath me.

Vaguely, I wonder what that material is. I don’t know silk from any other textile. I just want to see through it. I want it to be sheer, like a heart exposed to the world.

I wanted to be vulnerable, and I know I failed at that. You hate the walls. I hate the walls. I am opening half-way. I am crowded out already. The cell blocks of a living resentment that I keep pushing at, bulldozing nothing but my life.

It’s not hard to be here: it’s very hard, the concrete squeezing up my knees, changing legs into solid structures and waiting for the night wind to gust around them, pick them up for the couch now. And the time to lie back into the world.
What’s it really like to be 18 in America right now?
Tags: 18 In The Bay, Education, Big Stories Matter

This spring, Matter worked with a class of high school seniors in the San Francisco Bay Area to find the answer to that question. Through a series of projects — some written, others visual— the students told their own stories and captured a vibrant portrait of their lives. Here is the result: A raw, raucous and very real of depiction of what it’s like to be an American teen today.

—

Below, you’ll find a selection of essays, interviews, responses, and group projects. Read the rest in their publication, 18 in the Bay.

Can you use “J-cat” and “Fu Fu” in a sentence? Students teach us their language in their Urban Dictionary.

Seniors advise against overdosing in school, among other words of wisdom in their Survival Guide to High School.

Some wrote about their inspiration, others wrote about traumatic events or life-changing moments. A few chose to write a poem or rap.

We actually got seniors to talk to their parents — about being a single mother, about immigrating to America — and they learned that “it was rough being 18” back then too.

Students used Snapchat and Instagram to document a day in their lives. They illustrated what they think about, how they feel, and what they do in their free time. And everyone snapped a picture at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon.

Then we gave them a tumblr and let them go wild.

Help us paint an even bigger picture of what it’s like to be 18 in America right now. Join the conversation by responding to this post or any one of the assignment pages with your own thoughts, essays, interviews, graphs, or photos.
Membayar Hilangnya Panas Matahari
Tags: Book Recommendations, Writing Prompts, Books, Writing, Book Reflection

SIDPub believes that each story is a medium not only to learn but further weaves connection. Ultimately, through connection, people can empathize with each other. Empathy is the start of a greater action for the good!

Follow
Software metrics used for real-time steering
Tags: Software Development

A crucial dimension of best-in-class software development is quality. No matter how much code a highly efficient team writes, they won’t reach the top levels of the software success ladder if it’s not good code. Once you’ve mastered holistic transparency and efficiency, it’s time to take a look at how your organization measures code quality. With a 360-degree view of your entire portfolio’s codebase in a tool like Seerene, you can establish threshold values and automate notifications to ensure that your processes are quantitatively managed and continuously improved. You’ll know whether your developers are meeting acceptable quality thresholds or creating technical debt that you’ll need to address down the road.

As a result, teams can get early warnings to head off critical problems and resolve potential issues proactively throughout the entire development process. In order make the most of this insight, it’s crucial to assess the organization’s progress towards KPIs over time. For example, you might want to answer questions like, “Are we appropriately using the 10% of our time that’s been allocated to refactoring code so we can remove unneeded complexity and document knowledge?”

A key use case for these metrics is the real-time steering of both internal and outsourced development teams. Several stakeholders across a software organization — from managers to the c-suite — can benefit from more proactively directing teams and identifying low performers that consistently deliver poor code quality. In order to do this effectively, you’ll need personalized, permissions-based dashboards with data that can be sliced and diced for helpful comparisons across projects, teams, or vendors. They should feature relevant KPIs to help align the organization, including several that we’ve identified in previous chapters like effort, productivity, bug fixing ratio, technical debt, complexity, and documentation.
Poems and Prisoners and Death and History
By: Nicole Cliffe
Tags: Poetry, History

This poem, “My Grandmother Plays Emily in Our Town,” by Rachel Richardson, is very beautiful. I found it while reading “Shirt,” by Robert Pinsky, which Alex Pasternack quoted in his piece about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911.

And then, because I was interested in the person who wrote “My Grandmother Plays Emily in Our Town,” I came across “Escape Artists,” an essay on writing poetry with prison inmates, which is very much worth a read:

Leading a poetry workshop in such a place — a total institution, to use the anthropological term for a community defined by its complete isolation from the outside world — actually requires very little, in my experience. In showing up, the facilitator cracks open a door to the outside. In coming every week in good faith, he or she values the words of the people inside. These may seem small gestures to people who have the privilege to come and go as they please, to choose how to spend their days — but aren’t these gestures the foundations for any relationship, with people or with a poem? You show up. You listen. You open yourself to whatever you might find.

What’s nice, too, about “Escape Artists” is her suggestion that poets operating without the strictures that confine actual prisoners might benefit from some of the exercises and devices she uses with her students. Try it! Especially form. She quotes that wonderful Paul Muldoon line: “Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.” Maybe not a sonnet, but have you ever tried a sestina? They are so hard, and so rewarding. I have never forgotten this beautiful sestina I read in my college poetry group, inspired by “My Funny Valentine.” Write poems! I don’t write poems much anymore, except for, right, joke poems about current events, because a) I am not that good and b) I do not have a lot to say of deep emotional import, which is 99% of the good poems. I’m reading a book right now in galley form about just the summer Sylvia Plath was at Mademoiselle, and I don’t even like Plath as a poet, but she had so much more to say and feel than I ever have. Which, I don’t know, right, I’m a pretty happy person, and probably, if she had her druthers, Plath would have chosen to be a happy person over being a poet, and there are loads of happy poets, but I don’t think I have enough deep feeling to pull it off anymore. Even looking at my college poems, I feel like I was a crazier and darker and deeper person then, and now I’m more “la la la.” I don’t know. Are you more normal than you were ten years ago? Whatever normal means to you, of course.
Water: Investing in the Future
By: Ibillionaire Capital
Tags: Finance, Money, Investing, Water

Water: Investing in the Future

Does the need for new water technologies and services open the door for potential investors?

Continuing current trends mean that by 2030, global demand for water is expected to exceed supply by over 40%! Throughout many different nations in the world, lack of water supply may be the world’s biggest problem in the future and it’s important to be aware of the situation.

With increasing climate disruptions and a rise in extreme weather, there is the need for substantial investment in technologies that tackle the problem of water treatment as well as the infrastructure required with distribution.

Urbanization continues to change global water consumption, as well as the continued increase in water demand from population growth and changing diets. David Richardson, executive director of Impax Asset Management, a financial services firm in New York says, “Research by McKinsey Global Institute found that there is an estimated $7.5 trillion that will be spent globally over the next 15 years on water infrastructure.” That’s a huge amount!

Even Donald Trump agrees: Trump has labelled poor water quality as a major issue and a priority for the U.S. to address. It’s a basic human right to have access to clean drinking water, according to the United Nations, and will be a key global issue in the coming years.

Can the strong need for new water technologies and services to conserve, treat and distribute water open the door for potential investors? Yes, it certainly does.

Water, as a diversified source of investment, may create a significant opportunity for investors looking to contribute money to water-focused problems, by investing in the companies that are helping to tackle this issue.

The Pure Water Strategy from iBillionaire invests in companies that create products designed to conserve and purify water for homes and businesses. Such companies include Danaher Corporation, Ecolab Inc. and Aqua America Inc. and could make a worthy long-term addition to your portfolio.

A strategy like Pure Water allows you to gain exposure to water sectors like desalination, recycled wastewater and water infrastructure and gives you the opportunity to diversify your assets in a way that you may not have considered before.

So while other Wall Street Investors focus on oil, gold and other commodities, think about water as an interesting investment area. It could be a smart choice! Check out Pure Water here.
Opening up to a connected world: Technology as the driving force
By: Carl Frederique
Tags: Tech, Startup, Future, AI, Technology

Web Summit Main Stage (Photo courtesy of Web Summit Facebook)

It was my first time in Europe! My nerves quickly turned to excitement as I boarded my flight: destination — Web Summit 2016 in Lisbon, Portugal. On arrival, the Web Summit presence was loud and clear at the airport where attendees and speakers checked in before continuing into the city. The first night kicked off with Roberto Azevedo (Director-General of the World Trade Organization), Jose Manuale Barrosp (former president of the European Commission), and Tom Nuttall (columnist for The Economist) discussing the uncertainty our world faces amidst economic, political, and societal shifts, and how technology is the true underpinning factor. While change can be exciting and can bring about a more connected world, not everyone is reacting in the same way. Instead of being players in a more connected world, some are siding with protectionism in defense of their traditional statehood, human capital and, ultimately, their markets.

“Unfair trade” is often touted for the hesitancy and reluctance to fully open up to a global economy, but what’s at the heart of the issue is the rate of technological innovation and the ability to adapt. The effort required to transform societies to accommodate the new wave of technology is monumental. The entire spectrum of education, public training, financing, transportation, healthcare, and customer service will have to scale accordingly. We’ve already heard about the likes of self-delivering cargo trucks and drones — imagine if this industry takes off. Not only will there be ramifications for the transporting industry, but support industries such as side-of-the-road assistance, roadside restaurants, and hotels will be affected as well, which will impact the working class, which will deplete the jobs in this sector…you see where I’m going.

Photo by Benjamin Stooke

We’re all familiar with the story of automation replacing human labor, but this time around the scale and speed of change will be ramped up. The answer, according to a conference panelist, is preparation. As these changes unfold, a trickle-down effect will occur and impact us at a granular level. Undoubtedly, new legislation will be needed, and a tremendous amount of labor force training will have to take place as some jobs become obsolete and new ones arise. Think along the lines of zoning policy for drones, insurance and liability issues for at-home robots, new school curricula, repair shops for robots. Indeed, how we prepare will be indicative of how smoothly we transition into our future society.

I’ll continue to unfold my findings from the Web Summit as we wrap up 2016. My next piece will cover How the Integration of AI Into the Workplace Will Power Positive Health Outcomes.
His Long Sleep
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Transformation, Grief, Love, Poetry, Life

after Stephenie Meyer

Now call it marvelous: the monster made

of granite cracks, a landslide blossoming

where silence ever dwelt. The boy would fade

into oblivion, a beast, awesome

and horrible to step into his world,

a mockery of laughter, light — but she

is crystalline and silent, glasswork girl

who doesn’t know to turn her tail and flee,

she brings me down. A magma heart unfolds

where sorrow kept its stillness. She awakes

a dead boy dreaming, never to be cold

again. He only notices the quake

once all is shifted: beast by any name

awakes to boyhood. Nothing is the same.
Photographers, You’re Wasting Time on Instagram
By: Charles Tumiotto Jackson
Tags: Instagram, Photography, Social Media, Business, Marketing

Photographers, You’re Wasting Time on Instagram

Why professionals have a love-hate relationship with everyone’s favorite social platform

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

As a photographer, I understand how Instagram can be extremely attractive. Instagram seems to be a no-brainer. It’s a photo-sharing platform, and it’s also one of the most popular social media platforms. As you’ve learned by reading web marketing blogs online, you should work on your social media presence. And one of the first things you’ve learned is to focus on one or two platforms.

So, like everyone else, you made a choice: you’re going to work on your Instagram presence. As you’ve learned, if you do an excellent job on Instagram, you might not even need a website or a traditional portfolio! Instagram seems to be the ideal platform to work on if you’re trying to work on your career.

However, maybe you’ve tried it already, and your Instagram account isn’t taking off. You’re barely getting new followers, your engagement rate is rather low, and you’re not getting all the direct messages you were expecting.

So you start doing more research. Maybe you’re not doing things right after all. That’s when you start finding logical excuses. Instagram is ruled by a crazy algorithm that’s conspiring against you, so you end up buying ads to counter your frustration. Or, maybe it’s just the image compression making your amazing high-quality work look like garbage on Instagram. Or, perhaps it’s just the people disliking what you do. In any event, you were doing things right. It’s just Instagram trying to make money out of your frustration, is what your research would say.
Risk Takers
By: John O'Neill
Tags: Life Lessons, Risk, Aging, Poetry, Poem

Risk Takers

A Poem

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

Young children approach life

In a manner thought by adults to be very risky,

Or at least foolish,

Not so,

For they have not yet acquired the fears

That they will accumulate over time

Those that will often threaten to weigh them down

There is not the consideration of the possible consequences of their actions

So children’s behavior is not that of daredevils

They are more instinctual at this time in their lives

Young adults on the other hand

They choose jobs, friends, partners

Doing so often impulsively

Commitment and permanence are elusive concepts

At this stage of development

Some engage in reckless lifestyles

Drugs, alcohol taken in excess

Hooking up, using others merely as objects of pleasure

Driving as if they alone have a right to the road

Their awareness of consequences is only somewhat greater

Than when they were children

Yet they will be changed by their decisions

And life experiences

Become almost unrecognizable

To their earlier selves

As they mature and start to have careers and families

At times some will feel suffocated

And almost paralyzed by their chosen roles

So they may seek to escape by

Changing career, finding a new life partner

Indulge in a new philosophy and/or theology of existence

In retrospect their risks

Were not so great after all

For they can alter their circumstances

Ah, but some older people

Who with eyes wide open

Knowing how incredibly difficult it is

To maintain commitment, honesty, and love

In a relationship

Tempted to run away

Aware now of of all the obstacles

And accepting their own imperfections

And those of their loved ones

Knowing death awaits them

Choose continually to stay on the path

These are the greatest risk takers of all

Accepting the challenge of being true to themselves

Regardless of where it might lead them
TLDR How Twitch uses PostgreSQL by Aaron Brashears
By: Pavel Trukhanov
Tags: Postgres, Clustering, Postgresql, AWS, Database Administration

TLDR How Twitch uses PostgreSQL by Aaron Brashears

Real life with over 100 PG clusters in different regions.

Topology

As for Oct, 2016 Twitch

has ~125 OLTP database hosts, 94% of it is PostgreSQL

Some of the old and all the new are RDS

One cluster (the oldest) serves ~300,000 transactions per second

i2.8xlarge AWS instances allow to keep write latency down

uses Auto Scaling Groups for read replicas

uses ELB, but clients which cannot use the ELB use a local HAProxy

Some client applications remain in our own datacenter. Most are not sensitive to replication lag, so we set up read replicas on our own hardware to reduce query latency. To reduce replication bandwidth from AWS to our datacenter, there are only two first-level replication streams. From there, the replication cascades.

This lets clients have a query in a millisecond rather than a millisecond plus a 30ms round trip between DCs.

each datacenter has a host which is not part of the live read set, to run expensive ad-hoc queries and reports which are not sensitive to stale data. hot_standby_feedback = off and max_standby_streaming_delay = 6h

Over the years, we frequently shipped code which ran expensive queries, for example an aggregation or a sequence scan. To address this, we set a time limit per statement with an appropriate statement_timeout for every role.

PGBouncer

We provide a virtual schema name which aliases the database schema.

Each schema is limited in number of connections, so clients can exhaust only their own connection pool. Example pgbouncer.ini

[databases]

site_sitedb = dbname=sitedb host=127.0.0.1 pool_size=70 port=5432

sso_sitedb = dbname=sitedb host=127.0.0.1 pool_size=8 port=5432

At one point, CPU was hitting 100% running PGBouncer

We have configured 2 PgBouncer processes, each listening on a different port and thus splitting the load. A HAProxy is proxying to both of them.

Same balancing configuration is on Primary / Master database.

At one point, there were two PGBouncers in front of the master — one in AWS and one in our DC. There were significant performance issues with the proxy when the cluster was in a different region than the master. Now we’re using HAProxy to communicate between the regions and only rely on the closer PGBouncer cluster.

Problems
Disjoint Set and Tarjan’s Off-line Lowest Common Ancestor Algorithm
By: Shuo Wang
Tags: Data Structures, Disjoint Set, Programming, Python, Lowest Common Ancestor

Let’s apply the algorithm to an example binary tree:

Binary Tree (Image by Author)

Iterating through the binary tree post order, we first start at node 7:

(Image by Author)

Nothing much happens here, we make a set for node 7, with parent = 7, ancestor = 7, and size = 1.

(Image by Author)

Next we merge node 7 with node 3 and update its ancestor to node 3.

Now node 7’s parent and ancestor are updated, it is merged into node 3 as well, so the size of node 3 disjoint set is now 2. At this point we are done processing node 7, so we mark it as visited (colored black).

Node 8 is processed next, after creating SetNode for it, we can start printing the LCA’s for node pairs with node 8, in the current iteration, only node 7 has been visited, so we print out the LCA of node 7 and 8, the ancestor of the parent of 7:

LCA of 7 and 8: 3

Moving on, we reach node 3:

(Image by Author)

The parent and ancestor of node 8 are updated, and now we can print out the LCA of node 3 with 7 and 8:

LCA of 3 and 7: 3

LCA of 3 and 8: 3

Let’s do one more iteration of the algorithm for illustrative purposes:

(Image by Author)

Now we are at node 4 and we can print out the LCA of node 4 with 7, 3 and 8:

LCA of 4 and 7: ancestor of node 7’s root parent, or ancestor of node 3, 1

LCA of 4 and 8: 1

LCA of 4 and 3: 1

Notice at this point of the iteration, you cannot find the LCA of, say, 7 and 8 anymore, because node 3’s ancestor has been updated to 1, this is why Tarjan’s algorithm is an “off-line” algorithm, because you have to specify which pairs of nodes you want to find the LCA’s for before hand, so that the algorithm can find and store them during the course of its execution.

Of course, you can just store the LCA for every pair of nodes by running the algorithm and store them in a map for later use, but this is of size O(n²).

below is an implementation of the algorithm:
Family Matters Writing Prompt January 2021
By: Laura Fox
Tags: Writing Prompts, Prompt, New Year, New Year 2021, New Years Resolutions

Family Matters Writing Prompt January 2021

What changes will you make this year?

Image by Breakingpic on Pexels

Happy New Year!

In the spirit of new year’s resolutions, this prompt asks you to reflect on what you have learned over the last year and what changes you want to bring into 2021.

Maybe the pandemic has taught you the importance of spending time with your family. Maybe you have learned about the importance of setting boundaries and want to start being more assertive with your family in 2021. Or maybe parenting has been challenging and you want to bring what you have learned into 2021 so you can be a healthier parent.

Make sure to emphasise what changes you wish to implement this year. Do you think these changes are realistic? Maybe what you have learned from 2020 is that setting new year’s resolutions for 2021 isn’t for you.

Whatever your story, we want to hear it.

There is no right or wrong answer to this prompt. As long as it’s your truth, that’s what matters. Family Matters is always a safe place to share your perspectives on family and parenting.

Rules:

Your piece needs to be a minimum of 800 words.

Poetry is not accepted.

It must be written for the reader. Pieces that are written in the style of a diary entry generally do not give anything to the reader. Think about what message you want to get across. How do you want the reader to feel after they have finished your piece? Is there anything you want them to learn or look at differently?

Tag your work with “prompt”

Your work has to be related to family and/or parenting. Please tag your work with one or both of these.

Please tag your work with one or both of these. If you would like to enter this challenge but are not a writer for Home Sweet Home, please email an unpublished Medium draft of your entry to laurafoxwriter@gmail.com with “January 2021 Prompt” as the subject.

with as the subject. If you are currently a writer for Family Matters, submit your piece as you would with any other submission.

Follow Medium’s Curation Guidelines

Please read our Submission Guidelines and FAQs for more information.

The winner will be announced in February’s Newsletter. Make sure you are subscribed to it!

We are excited to read your entries.

Good luck!
The New Business Leader Will Know the Details: Here’s Why
By: The Carrera Agency Designing North
Tags: Startup Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Business Strategy, Leadership, Business

Tomorrow’s business winners will be the ones whose leaders drink up and celebrate *detail* without glossing over it. Their strategies will stand out as the most successful and influential across the organization. The new business leader, not should, but will know the details.

I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix lately. I never did before because I hate the feeling of sitting on the couch. My mind usually races: I could be writing, doing laundry, organizing my studio, walking my very bored dogs or rebuilding the kitchen. (The list in Swipes goes on forever). But I haven’t felt bad about this choice of late because there have been a few *characters* that have filled my head with good ideas to write about. And I’ve found them in unsuspecting places.

I’m totally behind with all the shows, but that’s the point of on-demand content, isn’t it? I will not succumb to any feelings of inadequacy about my timing, cadence, or consumption. I will openly admit that I am only on Episode 3, Season 5 of GOT. (is she really that far behind?) <~ ~> I know this doesn’t make me part of the cool content consumers club, but I’ll live (for now).

One of the old ones and one of those *characters* is the new lawyer that Steven Avery (convicted murderer) switched to on season 2 of Making a Murderer. If you haven’t been following this crazy story, it’s quite sad and horrific. Essentially, his new attorney, Kathleen Zellner, allows you to see this case in a completely new light. Which brings me to my thought bubble ~> Are Some Leaders Losing the Strategy Plot? Because Kathleen’s Not.
Pair programming with tomatoes
By: Stanislav Hamara
Tags: Software Development, Productivity, Programming

Over the last couple of months, our team has attempted to apply the Pomodoro pairing technique to our daily work routine. We’ve been more or less successful, so here’s more information on how it works:

What is Pomodoro?

Pomodoro (Italian for tomato) is a pairing technique that forces developers to split their work time into smaller units. The units of work consist of 25-minute-long sessions with 5-minute breaks in between, and a longer 20-minute break after every 4 sessions. During these sessions, you should be focused on your task and preferably undisturbed (by your other colleagues, Slack, BBC News, etc). After every session, developers switch their driver and navigator positions.

Why Pomodoro?

A recommended practice of pair programming is to swap the person typing at the keyboard every now and then. But realistically, does this sound familiar? One person is in the fury of refactoring or performing some other “creative” task, while the other one either takes a snooze or browses Reddit on their phone for new fish tank ideas (definitely not me).

Pomodoro ensures that this does not happen by forcing you to switch the pairing roles regularly, resulting in more productive, focused bursts of work. It also ensures that you take breaks, which prevents losing focus.

Conclusion

As I said in the beginning, we’ve tried this technique in our team with various combinations of developers, and everybody found it very easy to get used to. It is admittedly exhausting, but also very effective, to have these 25-minute-long chunks of work where your only worry in the world is your current task and nothing can distract you.

On the other hand, you have to be careful about following the pattern that Pomodoro proposes. Sometimes even when you’re not in the driving position, you might come up with an awesome solution to your problem that you need to type straight away. If that happens, you shouldn’t “steal” the keyboard from your partner (as it does happen on our team sometimes…), but instead let them know about your idea so they can incorporate it themselves.

Lastly, I’ve found parts of this technique very effective even when I’m working on my own (e.g. writing documentation). You can still use the time management part of Pomodoro even when you don’t swap the pairs.

P.S: There are a lot of handy apps that have pre-programmed timers that follow the Pomodoro time pattern, like Focus Keeper.
Top 15 Python Packages You Must Try
By: Erik Van Baaren
Tags: Software Development, Coding, Programming, Python, Productivity

Top 15 Python Packages You Must Try

A handpicked list of the most useful and surprising Python packages from PyPI

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Why do we all love Python? For starters, it’s a beautiful and easy to learn programming language. Another reason: it comes with batteries included, meaning Python has many excellent libraries included by default. But in my opinion, it’s the 230,000 user-contributed packages that make Python really powerful and popular.

Earlier this year, I showed you the 22 most downloaded Python packages in the world. Although that was fun and I learned a lot, it was also a bit frustrating. Why’s that, you ask? Because I was not able to show you my personal favorites!

In this article, I handpicked 15 packages that I found most useful during my 10-year career as a Pythonista. Let’s go!
XTRD Update: July 26th, 2018
Tags: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Altcoins

Weekly update #10

Summary

FIX Trading Community’s Annual Chicago Regional Meeting

Serg’s trip to Kiev, Ukraine

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Leverages the Blockchain

XTRD Weekly Crypto Market Update

Upcoming XTRD events

FIX Trading Community’s annual Chicago Regional Meeting

Recently XTRD CTO Serg Gulko participated in the “Bringing Cryptocurrency Into the Institutional Order Flow” panel at the FIX Trading Community’s annual Chicago Regional Meeting for a private institutional audience as one of the speakers and shared the script he prepared for the panel discussion: http://bit.ly/2JBgglW.

Serg’s trip to Kiev, Ukraine

Serg Gulko will be in Kiev, Ukraine from July 28 till August 12th working closely with the XTRD development team. Let us know if want to catch up in person. Serg’s announcement: http://bit.ly/2NAspKo.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Leverages the Blockchain

Great new article by our friend Daniel G. Viola, Partner of Sadis & Goldberg, LLP — JPMorgan Chase & Co. Leverages the Blockchain. Daniel is the Head of the Digital Asset and Compliance Groups at his firm and is also the founder of the Crypto Asset Webinars and the Blockchain Shift Conferences.

XTRD Weekly crypto market update

Another exclusive XTRD weekly crypto market update by Steven Aitchison — Youtube blogger and experienced crypto trader. This update contains a weekly market overview, the most important cryptocurrency news from the last week and useful crypto trading tips. Please find more details in our blog post: http://bit.ly/2uXZtUR.

Upcoming XTRD events

To increase awareness of our project and attract more clients, partners, and new community members, XTRD will participate/speak at these events:

Feel free to stop by our exhibition booths and say “hello” or ask tough questions during roundtables.
Human Centered Data Viz for Data Driven Humans
By: Joe Bernstein
Tags: Hcde, Dataviz, UX Design, Data Visualization, UX

A User Centered Case Study

Most clients approach me with a need for a dashboard showing certain exact requirements with no time, budget, or interest in probing questions. This client, though, wanted analytics for an education tool that had never tracked scores or metadata before. Even when I asked them what they needed to know, they said they weren’t sure, but they’d be happy to find out.

An undefined set of users? An undefined set of features? No prior legacy designs to work from? Bingo. This is a prime chance to break out my UX toolkit. The first step was to make sure that the client and I agreed on our problem statement:

How can we provide analytics such that the results can influence schedule, curriculum, and regulatory requirements using data-driven evidence?

Research Process

I arranged 10 interviews with some stakeholders that the client helped me identify. The first few interviews were strictly Q&A, but they provided contradictory suggestions and abstract answers that were difficult to turn into actionable advice. I was designing for a new space — the users didn’t have requirements or pain points yet. I needed to try a different approach. For my last seven interviews, I employed some card sorting exercises.

The engineering team had given me a list of 18 metrics they knew they could produce metadata for. I wrote each of these on separate cards and asked my interview participants to perform the following tasks:

Sort the cards into however many categories seem appropriate, then label the categories. Sort the cards in order of importance, from most important to least. If you could only pick five of these metrics, which would give you the most holistic view of the questions you want to answer?

By choosing these three specific tasks, I got insight into which categories are most intuitive to the user, which metrics are most/least useful to know, and how much overlap these metrics included. Most importantly, asking users to rank importance required them to vocalize their use cases, which had been harder to extract from open-ended interview questions.
Song for the Beija-Flor, Hummingbird
By: Renee Chen
Tags: Creative Writing, Poetry On Medium, Spirituality, Writing, Poetry

Dear Mother, let me be a vessel for a higher consciousness, for love,

show me what they look like in their highest and purest forms.

Dear Mother, pray for my lover, my family, friends and guardians,

pray for humanity, that we may all rise so we may do right by you.

Oh Mother, there’s a darkness darker than the dark I knew,

it is our collective pain, our collective suffering, our collective sins.

It transcends time, passing from generation to generation.

Each of us carries it within,

in our creaking bones and aching muscles,

the darkness divided amongst us.

Some carry a heavier load than others,

they are the ones with the most pain, they are the ones who need the most help.

Oh Mother, there’s a silence more silent than the silence I knew,

it is where darkness resides, it is its energy source, its womb.

It transcends dimensions, passing from plane to plane.

It lives within us,

in the spaces, cavities and voids of our bodies,

the silence disguises itself as peace.

For some, the stillness is too much to take,

they are the ones who make music, the builders of a bridge to the other side.

Oh Mother, there’s a light lighter than the light I knew,

it is brighter than the sun, softer than a feather, sweeter than a baby’s laughter.

It transcends boundaries, passing from cell to cell, atom to atom, string to string.

This is what we’re made of,

in body, mind, heart and spirit,

this light is what brought us into existence.

For many, the pull of darkness threatens to extinguish them,

they are the ones fighting the toughest battles, they are the ones who can swing the war.

Oh Mother, there’s a love lovelier than the love I knew,

it is kinder than Mother Teresa, more compassionate than Gandhi and wiser than Buddha.

It transcends consciousness, passing from him to her, to they, to you, to me.

This love is everywhere,

in the seen and unseen, tasted and untasted, in the felt and unfelt, heard and unheard, touched and untouched, thought and unthought,

love is what will save us.

Each of us have the choice to forge our own weapons of war,

but let us choose love, because John was right, all we need is love — unconditional, expansive, love.

Dear Mother, thank you for showing me the way,

thank you for helping me know what I previously only understood.
FT goes to JS Conference EU 18
By: Ft Product
Tags: Berlin, Jsconf, JavaScript

Last month we visited Berlin to attend JSConf 18.

Here are our personal highlights..

The FT’s Gabrielle von Koss — ‘When you assume, you make an error out of you and me’

Happy FT-ers at JSConfEU 18

Still excited!

Mood lighting

Remy Sharp, co-organiser of FF Conf — ‘Using a modern web to recreate 1980s horribly slow and loud loading screens’

Gabrielle von Koss (FT)
If California adopts single-payer, I’ll finally leave the state
By: Jd Rucker
Tags: California, Politics, Single Payer, Health Care, Socialism

It’s mildly ironic that on the 10th anniversary of me taking up residence in the state of California, I’m seriously considering moving my family out. It’s not the outrageous cost of living nor the left-leaning nature of the state even in the “conservative safe haven” of Orange County. Sacramento is now pushing for single-payer health care. If that makes it in, I’ll finally move out.

As is often the case with liberal ideas, the fantasy surrounding the proposal is so outrageous that many in the state will stick their heads in the sand (even further than they already do) and love on the idea while ignoring the consequences. They’re calling for free… everything: no copays or deductibles. This is why it has a chance of succeeding. People will hear that and instantly rejoice.

Of course, “free” is never free. You might be wondering how much this proposal will cost California tax-payers. The current budget is $183 billion. That’s a lot of money and it’s made possible by outrageously high taxes on residents and businesses. To make this single-payer plan work will require $400 billion per year. Yes, this plan will more than triple the current budget.

Let that sink in. I’ll wait.

I’m not rich but my revenue is above average. Even so, I’d by crushed by further increases in state taxes. No thank you.

As Aaron Bandler noted on DailyWire:

California already faces a $1.6 billion budget deficit this year, but the state’s debt problems are actually much worse than that, as the state faces unfunded liabilities of almost a trillion dollars. Given that the Tax Foundation has already ranked California as having the sixth-highest tax rates in the nation, the ensuing tax rates from implementing a single-payer healthcare bill system would be even more onerous and cripple the state’s economy. The problem with creating utopia is that reality eventually kicks in and the attempted utopia turns into a living nightmare, which is why states that have tried to implement single-payer have failed to do so. The price tag of the bill being put forward in the state senate suggests the same will be true for California.

The left is great at selling a dream. They’re like the junior high student council candidate who tells people how awesome it will be when they have Pepsi coming out of the water fountains. They’re in the business of making promises and blaming others for the consequences. No state exemplifies this better than California. I fear I may have to abandon the nice weather to find greener pastures soon.

Article originally published on Soshable.
An Overview of Consensus Algorithms
Tags: Blockchain, Tech, Algorithms

The galloping progress of the fledgling blockchain technology is out of one’s mind. This would-be revolution, which is merely 10-year-old, has been developing significantly over the past few years and branched out into new applications that can be hardly imagined before.

While we can dive deep into blockchain technologies in many ways: cryptography, identity privacy, data privacy, data storage, turing complete, incentives, throughput and latency of the system, security protection, threat model, how to deal with forks, and etc., the consensus algorithm is always the linchpin of all proper techniques, basically laying the groundwork for other features.

Consensus algorithm is a favorite research direction in distributed systems, a field of computer science in which components located on different network computers communicate and coordinate their actions. In fact, the blockchain itself can also be regarded as a type of distributed system.

This article will touch upon some of the most popular consensus algorithms to date, from classical consensus algorithms, proof-of-work (PoW), proof-of-anything (PoX), to the state-of-the-art multi-committee election.