fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Vegan for Keeps Submission Guidelines
By: Camille Deangelis
Tags: Animal Rights, Writing, Vegan, Veganism, Personal Growth

Good work fueled by a Fair-Trade oat-milk dirty chai latte.

Thanks for your interest in joining our community!

What we are looking for: cultural criticism (particularly literary, extra-particularly #kidlit, which inspired the name of this publication), “white learning” and vegan-oriented social justice, reflections and experiments on personal growth and creativity through a vegan lens, interviews with vegan artists, veganized heirloom recipes, and plenty more that falls under the category of “we’ll love it when we see it.”

cultural criticism (particularly literary, extra-particularly #kidlit, which inspired the name of this publication), “white learning” and vegan-oriented social justice, reflections and experiments on personal growth and creativity through a vegan lens, interviews with vegan artists, veganized heirloom recipes, and plenty more that falls under the category of “we’ll love it when we see it.” While we would be glad to publish your journey-to-veganism story, in order to write for us we ask that you be 100% committed to an ethical vegan lifestyle (meaning that you are all in for animal rights). If you’re “transitioning,” you can let us know when you’re actually vegan.

If you’re “transitioning,” you can let us know when you’re actually vegan. We believe in excellent writers making an excellent livelihood, and that is why we suggest you pitch Tenderly first, since they are an official Medium publication (and as such can actually pay you beyond what you’ll make in the Medium Partner Program, which you should definitely sign up for before you start writing for us!)

A further note on writers making more money: we’d be delighted to re-publish posts that originally appeared on your personal blog.

Submissions should be free of grammatical and typographical errors. If we catch more than one, we’ll stop reading and ask you to revise and resubmit (ironic, yes, but like most editors these days, we do not have time to edit!) Do your utmost to write in accordance with Medium’s Curation Guidelines.

To be added as a writer, simply leave a comment on this post to introduce yourself. Once added, you’ll be able to submit drafts for our consideration.

We’ll be tweaking these guidelines over time, so do check back periodically. Feel free to comment or tweet to us with any questions you may have, and thanks again!
Self-Care: You Need It Too
By: Pj Ryder
Tags: Self Care, Support, Mental Health, Psychology, Caregiving

Self-Care: You Need It Too

How caregivers can learn to care for themselves

When you’re caught up in life, busy attending to bills, housework, pets, and maybe even a family member or two, it can be really easy to forget yourself. I don’t mean forgetting your personality outside of being a caregiver. I mean if you’re always busy caring for someone else, who is going to care for you?

Photo by Keenan Constance from Pexels

Rianne Grace made an excellent point in her story What My Self-Care Looks Like Today: Self-care is not always pretty, but it is necessary.

My family has a long, long history of health issues, from cancer to diabetes to fibromyalgia. As one of the healthier members of the family (not to mention the youngest) I was left with a lot of the heavy lifting, so to speak. I was born a year or so before my mom was diagnosed with fibro. The intense lack of energy from the disease left her pretty well chair-bound for the better part of four years. She’s since learned to manage it better and can get around normally. However, this caused me to grow up with the caregiver mentality.

What is the caregiver mentality, you ask? It’s where you’re so used to caring for another person, physically or emotionally, that it shapes your entire view of living. I was always the able-bodied young ’un who was obligated to help because I could. Because of that, I can’t stop myself from trying to help every single struggling person I come across.

I became so focused on supporting my struggling family members, I forgot that I was struggling too.

Now, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to have this caregiver mentality. And I’m certainly not saying it was anyone’s fault; it’s a good thing to want to help people. What I’m trying to say is to be sure you’re taking care of yourself. I became so focused on supporting my struggling family members, I forgot that I was struggling too. Take it from me that once you’re focused on caring for someone else’s needs, it can be very easy to forget that you have needs as well.
Create a Running Docker Container With Gunicorn and Flask
By: Maroun Maroun
Tags: Docker, Python, Gunicorn, Programming, Kubernetes

Running With Local K8s via Minikube

Assuming you already have Minikube running on your machine, follow the steps below.

In order to use local Docker images, you need to run:

eval $(minikube docker-env)

Note that you should do that on each terminal you want to use.

Next, build the image:

docker build -t marounbassam/hello-flask:v1 .

Run on kubectl and expose the deployment:

$ kubectl run hello-flask --image=marounbassam/hello-flask:v1 --port=8003 --image-pull-policy=IfNotPresent

$ kubectl expose deployment hello-flask --type=NodePort

Now we can reach the endpoint of our application:
Lowering Your Stress During the Holidays
By: Synthia Satkuna, Ma Candidate
Tags: Stress, Emotions, Mental Health, Validation, Psychology

Taking It Easy

This Christmas holiday season, we get to sit down with the people we live with and share a feast where we acknowledge the things that happened to us, both the bad and the good.

Without the bad, it can be hard to appreciate and enjoy the good. We savour the good because it is a luxury, and we lap it up. We deserve happiness, just as much as the next person, so there’s nothing wrong with a little enjoyment every now and then.

Photo by Nabil Boukala on Unsplash — I liken happiness to honey and it’s okay to enjoy it sometimes.

More often than not, a lot of us are plagued by ongoing stressors. Stress can impact a lot of areas in our lives, including our relationships and our perceptions of reality.

As studies have shown, emotions can and will influence how we process neutral information. While it’s okay to be stressed sometimes, when your stress impacts your ability to make credible and reliable decisions, we sometimes need to take a step back and keep it easy.

If we cannot control the outside forces that bother us, the only thing left to do is influence how we respond to those terrible situations.

If that means doing a minimalist version of sought-after rituals and traditions, then that might be what you need. For example, let’s say you typically go all out in decorating your home to be that picturesque image for your neighbours to admire.

This year, it’s more than okay to take a break, especially when we’re feeling more tired than usual. Plus, at the end of the day, we celebrate Christmas for the warmth and goodness it provides us, and not necessarily for the aesthetic luxury.

Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash — Nothing like a little warmth and joy.

There’s nothing wrong with working hard either, as long as you know how to pace yourself and take it easy. While we have a long year ahead of us, we need as much relaxation as we need, especially if we need to continue to fight our proverbial monsters. For now, we are readying our armour, ready to tackle and slay our demons, once and for all.
Strategies for Learning New Skills Faster
By: Deepak Kumar
Tags: Startup, Learning To Code, Learning, Entrepreneurship, Programming

Strategies for Learning New Skills Faster

Like programming

Learning any new skill has become easier than ever due to the internet. We are just a few clicks away from any information.

Do you know that most people take an average of 25–30 days to complete a 30-hour course on Coursera/Udemy. Online MOOCs have a completion rate of less than 15%, which means that out of 1,000 people registered in a course, 850 of them never complete the course, and drop out.

But why do people drop out in the middle of a course? What could be the reason? Is the course not good, or don’t we have enough motivation to continue?

I conducted a survey of around 200 people, and here is what they say.

Survey Response — 1

Survey Response — 2

Some key insights:

More than 55% of people said they take more than one month of time.

More than 70% of people have a course-completion rate of approximately 50% or less.

Now, let’s see what the approaches are to learn any new skill faster.
You’ve Settled in as an Engineer. Now What?
By: Tim Hwang
Tags: Personal Development, Startup, Software Engineering, Learning To Code, Programming

You’ve Settled in as an Engineer. Now What?

How to avoid the plateau and continue to grow

Photo by True Agency on Unsplash

Congrats! You’ve settled in at your first job. You’ve made it past the initial wave of impostor syndrome and have some idea of what you’re doing and what you’re good at. You might’ve even received a promotion or two. You’re no longer wildly floundering every day and are able to at least flounder in the right direction. You might even be on your second or third job at this point. You actually feel like a real engineer now.

Now what?

It’s common to feel a sensation of plateauing after an initial few years of hypergrowth. This is only natural: Growth comes from new information, and the supply of novelty provided by a job quickly dries up as the years pass by. Up to this point, simply engaging with your job was enough to provide steady improvement; now, you must actively seek new information to keep growing.

Before proceeding, I want to clarify one thing: being happy with where you are is perfectly fine. You might feel entirely comfortable with plateauing, and that doesn’t make you any less of a person. If you’re content and have job security, congrats — you’ve won. It’s not worth it to burn yourself out trying to level up if you’re not motivated to do so.
I Wish Marketing Was Easy
By: Ali Mirza
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Growth

.. but it’s not.

Last week I was talking to a brilliant app developer. He launched his app few months ago and now he wants to “market it”.

BTW this is very typical in the startup community. We build our apps / products and then start thinking about getting users.

This is what I told him.

If developing an app is hard, marketing it is 10x harder (ali)

Why?

There are 100s of apps that are launched daily. It’s hard to get people’s attention for your product.

I read product hunt daily and I can’t even name 3 apps / products I saw there this morning. I saw a lot of cool stuff but, I can’t name any right now.

I wish I was wrong but marketing is not easy.

If you think of marketing as an after-thought, you will FAIL.

Marketing != Selling

Marketing = Educating

Start educating your potential users as soon as possible.

You can use content marketing as a medium. I know its a big word, but content marketing is not hard. It’s actually very simple. Here are some simple steps.

1 — Create a website (or landing page) for your app

2 — Install an email capture form on the home page

3 — Install Google Analytics

4 — Add a blog to your website

5 — Do some research and come up with 10 articles you can write. If this seems scary, just look at your competitor’s blog. What type of content they are producing. Steal some ideas from there.

6 — You can also use a tool like Buzzsumo to get some viral content ideas.

7 — Write and publish one article every week.

8 — If you suck at writing, it’s OK. That makes 2 of us. You can find ghost writers on Fiverr.com or Upwork.com

9 — You should also submit your startup to directories like Product Hunt, Beta list, and Startup list.

10 — Setup Google Alerts on your niche keywords and reach out to people who are writing about your industry or competitors. This is what I did to get my app featured in some news outlets.

Here is the step by step process > Free press for an app

Yes, marketing is HARD, but you can do it.

Again, just think of marketing = educating.

Your job is not to just to create beautiful apps. You have to tell your target audience about it. You kinda owe it to them.

Start educating people about your idea the day you write your first if statement. (ali)

Now over to you. Are you working on a startup?

How are you educating your target audience about your product?
Objectron: Real-Time 3D Object Detection with Smartphone
By: Mikhail Raevskiy
Tags: Deep Learning, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision

DEEP LEARNING

Objectron is a new SOTA dataset, recently presented by Google AI, which intended to improve 3D object recognition in videos. The dataset contains 15 thousand short video clips, each containing annotation of 3D boundaries of objects. The dataset contains both real clips and synthetic ones, that is, generated based on real ones.

What is the problem

The dataset is designed to facilitate the process of training models for 3D objects on 2D image and video data.

While 2D prediction only provides 2D bounding boxes, by extending prediction to 3D, one can capture an object’s size, position, and orientation in the world, leading to a variety of applications in robotics, self-driving vehicles, image retrieval, and augmented reality.

To do this, the researchers have collected a dataset that contains information about the structure of 3D objects and improves the accuracy of object detectors.
We Design Reality With Words
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Media, Social Media, Writing, Creativity, Philosophy

Before a pandemic chewed through our livelihoods and collective mental health, summer used to be silly season. News slowed down to a crawl, trivia and oddities took their place, and life read a little easier for a while. But now? It’s been surreal season for so long constant overwhelm is the new normal. If words matter to you and you’re concerned about the political climate, you may have come to regard writing with suspicion and doubt. Is there no other way to earn a living with words than by oozing fear, greed, and anger in print or riding the coat tails of celebrities who behaved badly? Recycling the worst of the zeitgeist ad nauseam is no way to improve it, defunding dumb may be more effective.

If there’s no financial incentive to produce garbage then the trash will eventually take itself out. Meanwhile, the internet is a dump, digital detritus abounds, and everyone is scavenging for meaning.

We don’t have to be seagulls.
Human Ego and Aspirations Are the Driving Forces Behind Engineering Decisions
By: Emmanuel Sys
Tags: Programming, Startup, DevOps, Software Development, Software Engineering

The Choice

Let’s start with an example that might be 👀 inspired by a real situation.

The team needs to make a technological choice by introducing a new event broker. There is none at the moment. The two contenders are Kafka and Pulsar.

Developer A has significant experience with Kafka in real life situation. They mention the complexity of Kafka operations at scale and vouches for Pulsar. Developer B is a proponent of Kafka, as it became a standard in the industry and has strong support overall. They have little experience working with Kafka though. Both agree that we only have basic requirements with no change in workload for the foreseeable future and these two solutions would both fit the bill. The rest of the team is less opinionated.

After hours of meetings and point-by-point comparisons against a technical criteria grid, Kafka is chosen. Everybody agrees it’s perfectly sound decision-making, the rationale behind the choice is documented, and the team proceeds with the implementation.

But are the true motivations of this choice ever evoked?
AWS CDK Continuous Integration and Delivery Using Travis CI
By: Thomas Poignant
Tags: Startup, AWS, Travis Ci, DevOps, Programming

Open Pull Requests to Validate Your Deployment

The best strategy I have found to deploy the code to AWS is to have one branch per stage ( dev , pre , pro ), so every time a new commit reaches one of these branches, we are deploying the actual stack. Yes, it looks like GitOps!

But we don’t want to blindly deploy our CDK stack on an AWS account. So I have an automatic way of opening pull requests when something is merged to the main branch:

Process of opening pull request

Each time something is merged to the main branch, we have a specific job that runs cdk diff -c stage=<STAGE> and opens a pull request to the destination branch.

For that, we use the script below. As you can see, it runs cdk diff and uses the results to open a pull request using the GitHub CLI:

Now we have to call this script inside Travis, so our .travis.yaml file will look like this:

As you can see, we are now using some env variables to specify our AWS Credentials in addition to our GitHub Token. Please make sure to encrypt them before committing them in your repo.
Want To Increase Your Readership Today?
By: Katy Velvet
Tags: Writing, Medium, Business, Entrepreneurship, Work

Want To Increase Your Readership Today?

Come join us at The Narrative.

As of today, The Narrative — an independent publication designed to house some of Medium’s most influential writers is now accepting submissions to become a contributor.

With over 1300 followers up to date, we use a editor-based model that allows writers to self publish as they please — much like The Partnered Pen.

As Medium’s userbase keeps growing, I understand that it may become increasingly difficult to get views on your articles. This is why I decided to re-brand the publication and use a model that has been working for a lot of active users.

We currently have the following categories:

Arts & Culture

Life Lessons

Career Growth

World Travels

Poetry

Why self-publish?

It’s easy for your article to get lost in a publication, especially with the amount of activity going on Medium these days. When you self-publish, other writers will instantly receive a notification for your article. This will not only help you gain a few new followers, but it will also provide more exposure for your writing too.

Things to remember.

As an editor of The Narrative, editing the posts of other authors without their permission will be frowned upon. Please be mindful of this when contributing to the publication.

The Narrative does not promote any hate speech or plagiarism. If you violate these terms, we will immediately revoke your participation from the publication.

Supporting other writers is highly encouraged. To keep the publication a positive space, we recommend you to read the work of others, highlight and comment as much as you can.

Thank you for your interest in becoming a part of The Narrative. We look forward to hearing your stories.
Interesting AI/ML Articles On Medium This Week (Dec 12)
By: Richmond Alake
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, AI, Data Science

Some adults know Santa Claus isn’t real. But that doesn’t stop deep fake Santa Claus from making an appearance this Christmas. Thomas Smith explores an AI video generation tool that produces deep fake Santas. These synthetically generated Santas can utter words from provided scripts.

Jair Ribeiro visualises a future where his daughters experience the comfort and efficiency of automated driving cars.

Also, If you are a fan of Game Of Thrones, then Sajid Lhessani’s unique take on the association of programming languages and GOT characters is an article you have to read.

These are just examples of the interesting articles I came across this week. Feel free to scroll through my compiled list of AI/ML/DS articles that are sure to provide some form of value to ML practitioners.
5 Habits That Are Holding You Back From Being the Best Writer You Can Be
By: Itxy Lopez
Tags: Creativity, Writing Tips, 5 Tips, Habits, Writing

5. Complaining. Period.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

“This is unfair.” “How come I haven’t made that much yet?” “Why is everyone else doing better than me?” “How come she gets to do that?” “Why is this platform changing again?”

It’s impossible for people not to complain. We’ve got a lot of crappy feelings inside that are slamming against the cage of our ribs, hoping to escape. But I do know that we can practice becoming aware of when we complain. We have the ability to stop ourselves from looking like further ungrateful bumbling idiots. (No offense. Also, I’m kidding. We’re not idiots. We’re human.)

Complaining only accomplishes one thing: making you feel like crap. Other than that, it doesn’t benefit you. It doesn’t act like a slingshot and fling you closer to your goals.

This journey is unfair. You might as well accept that now because once you do you can ask yourself this question: Am I going to keep complaining or am I going to do something about it?

For example, let’s say a website made a change you don’t like. What can you do? Reach out to them about it. Take action. And if they don’t get back to you? Get over it. Seriously. What are you going to do? Keep complaining? No one cares.

When I find myself feeling envious of someone’s success I tell myself one thing: “If you want those results, then start working as hard as them.” or “If you want to make that much money, stick around as long as them.” Keep working — that’ll get you the results you want.

You can also acknowledge all the ways life is fair to you. You’re not making $1,000 yet, but you earned $100. You don’t have 50 comments, but you have five. You’re doing what you love. You’ve made friends. There’s a lot of greatness to acknowledge. Don’t let your self-pity, anger, or jealousy get in the way of it. Let that gray cloud move along so you can see the sun.
Organizing as an Indie
By: Andrew Jackson
Tags: Software Development, Startup, Indy, Productivity, Programming

Shaping an Idea

I started off using a mind-mapping tool as everyone thinks of them. That starting bubble, just one or two words that sum up the app. It usually gets changed to the app name later, but for now, you need that title to identify this mind map. A few I’ve used for apps are Countdown, Timer, Shopping List, and Barcodes. Even though you don’t know what apps they became, you know a little of what they are for already.

From that initial bubble, it’s easy to just start adding every random thought that comes into your head that you want to capture, which mind-mapping tools are designed to handle well. With that said, I do like to add a very minimal starting structure. I add three nodes immediately: Purpose, Technical, and Design. These will later be split into more nodes, but at this point, my mind is flitting between these aspects, so I need to group things very loosely.

Purpose

This is where the idea of the app is formed. They are either statements or multiple nodes in a question-and-answer format. That way, as I progress, I can add more answers. None are right — they are all options at this stage. I also chain nodes to back up a statement, which can often lead to questioning that statement later. Nodes here will often become technical items or user stories that you can either move from purpose or link to, depending on whether the idea is fully formed.

Technical

As you start defining the purpose of your app and sometimes the design, you’ll start running into things you’ve never done technically. Add them here. You’re building your research list for later and getting that worry about how hard something is out of your head.

Design

Like the technical node, this is a holding area to quickly get thoughts out of your head, allowing you to revisit them and probably iterate on your previous thoughts. Design, for me, covers everything on how I want to present the app.

I always start with Name and Icon, which are usually the last things to get finalized, but as the app progresses, new ideas keep occurring.

I’ll also start capturing thoughts on how I want the app to look, which is usually heavily influenced by the latest trends and anything I haven’t done before, so it will be nav bars, tab views, single screen. It inevitably won’t stick as the purpose and technical aspects evolve, but again, the idea is to stop dwelling on this irrelevant thought now and comforting yourself that it won’t be forgotten.

The start of an idea

After a few minutes, you’ll get a mind map you can start fleshing out with more and more detail until you are ready to create actionable items:

Photo by the author.

Every mind-mapping tool gives options to style things as much as you want, changing node shapes, colors, adding images. If it helps to add visual clues to where your thoughts are going, do so. I tend to stick to the default formatting applied. For some really big topics, I will add an icon to make it easy to identify later.
Your Code Should Read Like a Book
By: Zachary Minott
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Clean Code, Software Engineering, Startup

Your Code Should Read Like a Book

It makes life easier for everyone involved

Photo by Fabian Grohs on Unsplash

There’s a pandemic among programmers. Long functions, broad and nondescriptive names for functions, classes, and variable names, overly commented code, disorganized structure, and a lack of overall streamlined flow.

It’s much too often that I take a peek at someone else’s working code just to notice that I have to exert a strenuous amount of effort just to understand what it does in the first place.

I have to try my best to reason about ambiguous variable names such as i, k, num, counter, etc. What type of num are we representing, and what is the purpose of the operations that surround it? What is the purpose of the counter? What is it tracking? Why is it there?

I have to constantly jump all over the class to see how each function builds on top of the other functions around it, just to realize that the names of each function don’t really tell me anything about what the function does.

I’d even have to sometimes read paragraphs of comments that explain the purpose of what a function might do, but still, I shouldn’t have to be reading an essay to simply understand what a function does. I should be able to reason about this simply by taking a quick glance at the function.

Your code should read like a book. Just how a book is structured through paragraphs and chapters that follow a descriptive story that flows in a streamlined and progressive fashion, your code should be structured and designed in a way that I can enter into a class and be able to understand its purpose within moments of engagement. Please don’t make any developer, including yourself, who is looking at your code have to embody Sherlock Holmes in order to deduce the purpose and meaning behind what you wrote.

What exactly should you do?
Is Angular Still Alive?
By: Chameera Dulanga
Tags: Programming, Angular, React, Vuejs, JavaScript

Let the Stats Speak

Stack Overflow Survey

In this survey by Stack Overflow to find what the most loved, dreaded, and wanted web framework is, React and Vue placed first and second, respectively, in both the Loved and Wanted sections. Meanwhile, Angular placed third. As I remember it, Angular had a lead on React in those categories in 2018.

NPM trends

The NPM trends graph above shows us the number of downloads of each framework overs a period of time. The screenshot shows the stats over the past six months, and we can see that React clearly holds the lead with almost 9 million downloads. Vue and Angular are in a tight contest for second place.

Another feature in NPM trends is that it shows the data from GitHub as well. In the screenshot below, you can see the number of forks, stars, and issues of each framework:

These stats again emphasize Angular’s loss of users. Angular only has 67,000+ stars, while both Vue and React are well ahead with 158,000+ and 175,000+ stars in their GitHub repos.

State of JavaScript

The 2019 State of JavaScript includes another report generation platform on JavaScript, and you can find various kinds of comparisons there. The figure below shows the responses of the users, whether they will use it again or not, whether they have heard of the technology, etc.

As we can see, the highest number of users are likely to use React and Vue again rather than Angular. Also, the number of users who voted “I’ve used it before, and would NOT use it again” is higher for Angular than the other two. This means Angular is losing its users rapidly.
How To Decouple Data from UI in React
By: Suhan
Tags: JavaScript, React, Technology, Software Engineering, Programming

Approach A. Custom Hook

Let’s create a custom hook — useSomeData — that returns the properties someData , loading , and error regardless of the data fetching/management logic. The following are 3 different implementations of useSomeData .

With Fetch API and component state:

With Redux:

With Apollo GraphQL:

The 3 implementations above are interchangeable without having to modify this UI component:

But, as Julius Koronci correctly pointed out, while the data fetching/management logic is decoupled, the SomeComponent UI is still coupled to the useSomeData hook.

In other words, even though we can reuse useSomeData without SomeComponent , we cannot reuse SomeComponent without useSomeData .

Perhaps this is where Render Props and Higher Order Components do a better job at enforcing the separation of concerns (thanks again to Julius for highlighting this).
This is How Seth Godin Changed My Life For Good
By: Rebecca Murauskas
Tags: Self Improvement, Business, Mental Health, Writing, Life Lessons

This is How Seth Godin Changed My Life For Good

Shattering the illusion of corporate security and picking myself

Seth Godin and Rebecca Murauskas. Photo by Akimbo Staff.

It’s 5:30 PM two days before Thanksgiving, and I step into an elevator with the COO of the Fortune 15 company that I work for.

He and I have a good relationship and a shared interest in mountain climbing that we chat about periodically. I’ve also been working on a huge transformational project with him for a few months, and our camaraderie has expanded.

As the ground floor nears, he turns to me and says, “Have you heard about the leadership summit we want to host?”

“Yes,” I reply. I was privy to some vague chatter and had started to marinate on ideas.

“Sounds great! How may I be helpful?” I add.

“We want to gather our top leaders for a week and make a big impact.”

I remember thinking, fantastic! We can make the event engaging and fun. Maybe release pieces of our transformational project? Plan it over a year and build up the hype.

As the elevator doors open, he casually mentions, “I was thinking right after Easter would be a good time.”

I froze. I can imagine the look on my face was sheer terror.

This “important man,” who was my boss’s boss, wanted us to pull together 6,000 people from across the US to an unknown location for a week’s worth of a leadership summit with four months of planning time during the holidays while we still did our “regular jobs.”

My internal first blush reaction was nothing short of four or five curse words. I may have mustered a fake smile as he turned to hop in his car.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” he shouted.
10 rules for better dashboard design
By: Taras Bakusevych
Tags: Design, Dashboard, UX, Data Visualization, User Interface

One view to rule them all

Dashboard design is a frequent request these days. Businesses dream about a simple view that presents all information, shows trends and risky areas, updates users on what happened — a view that will guide them into a bright financial future.

For me, a dashboard — is an at a glance preview of the most crucial information for the user at the moment he is looking at it, and an easy way to navigate directly to various areas of the application that require users attention. The term “dashboard” is a metaphor for a car dashboard, sometimes also called the cockpit area, usually near the front of an aircraft or spacecraft, from which a pilot controls the aircraft.

Working on enterprise projects for years, I have designed countless dashboards. And every new one is the next challenge for me. A good dashboard can be a daunting thing to design. Based on my experience, I put together a list of useful suggestions to help you in the future. Whether you just starting, or are seasoned designer, I’m sure you will find something interesting here.

1.Define the purpose of the dashboard.

Like any other view in your product, the dashboard has a specific purpose that it’s undertaken to serve. Getting this wrong renders your further efforts meaningless. There are multiple popular ways to categorize dashboards based on their purpose(Analytical, Strategic, Operational, Tactical etc).

To keep things simple I will divide them into 2 more general forms:

Operational dashboard

Operational dashboards aim to impart critical information quickly to users as they are engaged in time-sensitive tasks. The main goals of the operational dashboard are to present data deviations to the user quickly and clearly, show current resources, and display their status. It’s a digital control room designed to help users be quick, proactive, and efficient.
5 Untouched Writing Genres You Can Opt For
By: Niyati Jain
Tags: Creativity, Work, Self Improvement, Freelancing, Writing

5 Untouched Writing Genres You Can Opt For

Philosophy with fiction can be a good combination, learn how.

Photo by Ella Jardim on Unsplash

Writing genres are various categories in which your writing can fall. While some genres have grown with their writers and readers over time, others are probably not even heard of. Some of the prominent genres that have gained attention over time include:

Poetry

History

Short story

Narrative

Biography

Self-improvement

Fiction including romance, Horror, sci-fi, crime, fantasy.

But there are some equally fascinating genres that are like the roads less traveled by. Some of them were limited to a time period in history and have lost their imprints in today’s world. While others could not gain much traction due to other lesser-known reasons.

In this article, I am going to talk about 5 such writing genres that could be added to your list. Even though they are chosen by relatively fewer people, this doesn't conclude that they are difficult to write in. So let's get started:
7 Quotes by Albert Einstein That Will Change How You Think
By: Sinem Günel
Tags: Creativity, Education, Psychology, Advice, Inspiration

Albert Einstein is considered one of the smartest people in history. So smart that after his death, the pathologist who inspected his body stole his brain.

Thomas Harvey took Einstein’s brain even though the genius clearly stated that he didn’t want his brain or body to be studied after his death.

And even though it turned out that Einstein’s brain was really different from the majority, his genius wasn’t always obvious.

When he was young, Einstein’s parents even thought that he was disabled because he was slow to learn and didn't talk until he was four years old.

Yet he became obsessed with science at the age of five when his father showed him a compass for the first time. In the following decades, he didn’t only develop the theory of relativity and several other inventions that changed the way we see and experience the world but also left us with wisdom on how to live better lives.
Efficient Biomedical Segmentation When Only a Few Label Images Are Available @MICCAI2020
By: Makoto Takamatsu
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Medical Imaging, Computer Vision

Computer Vision

Efficient Biomedical Segmentation When Only a Few Label Images Are Available @MICCAI2020

A Proposal for State-of-the-Art Unsupervised Segmentation Using Contrastive Learning

MICCAI 2020

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In this story, Label-Efficient Multi-Task Segmentation using Contrastive Learning, by the University of Tokyo and Preferred Networks, is presented. This is published as a technical paper of the MICCAI BrainLes 2020 workshop. In this paper, a multi-task segmentation model is proposed for a precision medical image task where only a small amount of labeled data is available, and contrast learning is used to train the segmentation model. We show experimentally for the first time the effectiveness of contrastive predictive coding [Oord et al., 2018 and H´enaff et al., 2019] as a regularization task for image segmentation using both labeled and unlabeled images, and The results provide a new direction for label-efficient segmentation. The results show that it outperforms other multi-tasking methods, including state-of-the-art fully supervised models, when the amount of annotated data is limited. Experiments suggest that the use of unlabeled data can provide state-of-the-art performance when the amount of annotated data is limited.

Let’s see how they achieved that. I will explain only the essence of ssCPCseg, so If you are interested in reading my blog, please click on ssCPCseg paper and Github.
The Cone of Silence: Speech Separation by Localization
By: Mikhail Raevskiy
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, AI, Data Science

The model produces an audio track with the speaker’s speech and predicts the speaker’s position in relation to the microphones. The neural network handles audio recordings where speakers speak simultaneously and interrupt each other.

The neural network isolates sound sources for a particular corner. By decreasing the angle exponentially, the model localizes and separates sound sources in logarithmic time. The algorithm works on audio recordings with any number of moving speakers. Based on the results of the experiments, the model produces state-of-the-art results both on the problem of localizing the source of noise and on the problem of separating speakers.
I Thought I Was Some Bigshot Writer, Then I Submitted to Real Publications
By: David Majister
Tags: Writing, Creativity, Writing Tips, Rejection, Humor

WRITING

I Thought I Was Some Bigshot Writer, Then I Submitted to Real Publications

Like ‘America’s Got Talent,’ but awkwarder

Photo: Francisco Osorio on Flickr / CC-2.0

“Sorry, sir, your card is declined.”

A declined credit card only happened a few times in my life, and my heart sinks every time. It feels like I did something wrong, even though it’s always been a machine error.

Did I overspend? Did someone hack my bank account? Am I overdrawn?

The questions spin around my mind — all from a declined card.

Now, I’m getting used to that feeling.

I used to think I was special. I used to believe I could write. Then I started submitting to publications, and boy is it a wake-up.

When I wrote my first articles, I was like one of those singers on America’s Got Talent. I wanted to get them published. Give me the microphone already!

In my imagination, I could already hear the audience screaming in adoration.

Then I sang and — oh no —

It’s not that the audience started laughing. It was more of an awkward, silent grimace.

You know those people who annoy you because they clearly think they’re somebody? They think they’ve got it, even though it’s obvious they don’t. I’m sorry to say it, but I was that guy.

I believed I wrote incredible articles that no-one would decline.

It’s easy to believe that when you don’t write anything. Life’s so much easier when you avoid stepping out, avoid creating, keep it all inside, where it’s pristine and perfect. You can admire that beautiful blank canvas, and nobody will ever judge.

I stopped being pristine. I started submitting. The beautiful articles that I spent so many hours crafting.

“Thank you for your submission; we’re going to pass on this article.”

Simon Cowell, how could you?

If you want a wake-up call, start submitting to publications. It’s a ride like no other.

And nope, I’m not ready to stop submitting yet. No matter how many times I get declined, here’s to one more try.
Deploy a Production Django App With Elastic Beanstalk (Part 2)
By: Zack Petersen
Tags: Python, Database, AWS, Django, Programming

Setting up S3 — Static and Media Storage

Up to this point, we have a working Django app deployed on Elastic Beanstalk Amazon Linux 2. Congratulations! However, we still need to set up S3 so the site shows styles and we can upload images — which would be nice, considering it’s an image of the day app!

Create a group and user

First things first: We need to create an IAM user with programmatic access so our application can access the S3 bucket we’re creating next. Best practice here is to create a group with the appropriate policies attached and add a new user to the group. Note: I highly recommend creating a new user for the application’s S3 access. Using an admin user opens all kinds of security risks.

In the AWS services search bar, look for IAM. Navigate to IAM → Groups → Create New Group. Set the group name to something like “S3FullAccess” and go to the next step. Here, search for “S3” and select AmazonS3FullAccess . Click on the next step and create the group.

Now, we’ll navigate to “Users” and add a new user. Name the user whatever you want, I’ll go with “iotd-s3-access” and select “Programmatic Access.”

Click to permissions and add this user to the group we created. Click through and create the user.

After the user is created, you will get a success notification and be able to save the Access key ID and Secret access key. Important: if you don’t save these credentials here, you will not be able to see them again. You will have to delete this user and create a new one to get credentials again.

Download the .csv file with the credentials in it and head back over to the iotd project settings file. Add two new settings at the end of iotd/settings.py — we’re not going to add the keys, but instead references to them:

if 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID' in os.environ:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = os.environ['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID']

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = os.environ['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']

Committing the actual keys in your settings file is a dangerous idea. It poses a security vulnerability if anyone were to gain access to your project’s code (GitHub or otherwise). Instead of keeping them in the settings file, we’re going to add them as environment variables and pull them into the settings file securely. Docs here.

Create a bucket

Before we get into environment variables, navigate to S3, and create a new bucket. Make sure to turn off the block public access. We’ll need the images stored here to be public to show them in the API and have access to them later on. Name your bucket whatever you want. I usually recommend enabling versioning, but this is optional. Click “Create Bucket” and we’re all set.
Tools for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Analytics
By: Sarah Mason
Tags: Machine Learning, Analytics Platforms, Artificial Intelligence, Analytic Applications, AI

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

By tools for analytics, the reference are to apps that allow for environments to create solutions, language, libraries, and even graphical user interface to manipulate data for insights from information. There are many tools for data analytics. What is available?

Tools

Anaconda provides environment for Python and R including machine learning for mac/linux/windows. After downloading the app and installing, the environment can be customized to include variety of data science tools with libraries. Anaconda is used desktop but also exists as a cloud version.

JetBrains is an organization with a lot of apps for specific goals. There is PyCharm for Python, DataGrip for Databases, RubyMine for Ruby, and more. For analytics, the tool set and ability to integrate across their tools is unique. The positive is creating full apps that have artificial intelligent components or subcomponents and code for other pieces of the app in languages like PHP that can work together in a JetBrains solution.

Google has a few analytics tools, most notably, Looker and Google Cloud Platform.

Microsoft Access, Azure, Excel, and Power BI all provide analytics and data service.

IBM has SPSS and Watson tools there are cloud and local versions of each platform. SPSS provides analytics and smart menus in a graphical user interface. Watson is famous for its performance on “Jeopardy” January 14, 2011 where it was tasked with competing against humans in trivia. Now, it is a service that can be tasked with data challenges.

Salesforce has Tableau which is a business oriented analytics service.

Snowflake is a data warehouse and analytics provider providing data services.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

I have experience in cloud and local tools. Cloud is trending, easy, and has great benefits. Artificial Intelligence is highly integrated into tool platforms with a range of how much control the developer or user has in method and performance. The introduction of smart menus and graphical user interfaces for analytics has changed the way many approach data analytics and data science. It is more friendly and requires more knowledge of how processes work to gain results with meaning and coherence.

Conclusion

There are different ways and tools to develop a solution for knowledge from data. Analytics done in code is more control and provides specific results. Using a toolset that has blocks is less control and provides results that are based on subunits creating a tradeoff on control, how a process works. Last, using an app and selecting by forms and menus is little control over process, easy, and will process according to parameters with little seen of the computation. Choice is there for tools specifically with machine learning and artificial intelligence, however best fit for the situation and conditions is important.
Tell the World About It, Even if the World Doesn’t Care
By: Nick Plante
Tags: Software Development, Productivity, Blogging, Life Hacking, Writing

I migrated my blog last weekend. Over ten years worth of articles! (though I should say that I haven’t blogged regularly since 2013) Goodbye self-hosted static site with CSS from 2009. Hello Medium. It’s possible that I’m a little late to this party.

In the end, I didn’t end up importing everything. Because Medium appears to lack the ability to auto-import articles from Jekyll (preposterous! who would have thought?!), I had to manually migrate — or at least extensively edit — most of the content. Only the top 50 or so articles that were receiving significant traffic from Google Analytics made the cut. So I had an excuse to cheat a bit and discard a lot of the chaff.

Looking back on the rants and raves of 20-something me (the way that soon 40-something me will look back on 30-something me), even the best of those posts can still seem rather embarrassing. Misplaced enthusiasm for absurd tools, often impractical NIH-ism, and terrible grammar are among the many crimes of my youth. It’s also readily apparent that the tech industry as a whole has evolved a lot; 2007’s developer best practices were not what we would today consider practices at all, let alone preferential practices. Such is progress.

Reading through those old posts was also inspiring. It reminded me that at one time a regular writing schedule served a super important developmental function for me. It’s widely documented that there are a bunch of pretty great benefits that one gets from writing on the regular. It helps you organize and reframe your thoughts, it can be therapeutic during hard times, and improves memory recall. If nothing else, it’s a fantastically cheap type of external memory. Writing something down means you never have to ask “what exactly did I do yesterday, anyway?” or “how long did that crazy project take me and what did I actually learn from it?” (anyone who doesn’t manage their life through daily TODO lists is definitely missing out on an awesome party).

The most important benefit for me was that writing in public was a way of committing myself to certain things, on a certain schedule, at a time when my life was pretty much completely unscheduled. Knowing that I had to publish an article every week, or every month, or on any schedule really, ensured that I was continuously learning things that were worth talking about, and later, building things that had enough value to share… even if I was sometimes inventing those things just so I could share them. And even if no one was listening (which was frequently the case).

Not everyone needs this sort of framework for self-discipline. But it sure helped me when I needed it most.