fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Big Changes Around The Globe Due To CoronaVirus
By: H K Jashim
Tags: Coronavirus, Zoom, Coronavirus Update, Remote Working, New Normal

As we are inching towards the end of the year and keenly watching every coronavirus update, let’s look back what changes this virus brought about.

In the midst of Corona Pandemic the globe has witnessed many sifting. We had to adopt a new normal condition, the ecosystem has reversed surprisingly — the wild animals roam on the streets and watch curiously the human species locked inside the houses. We lost relatives and neighbors and our fellow mates, we saw the human crisis in Italy, the unimaginable sight of New York City’s empty street, the painful line of deceased wrapped in white- it was difficult for all us. But we would look at the brighter side and stay positive. In the pandemic chaos, we will see some positive impact caused by coronavirus.

Temperature has dropped to 5°C post the mandatory lock-down.

During the peak of the corona crisis; the global daily co2 emission plunged to17%. The researcher says the decline in surface transportation, the global co2 and nitrogen oxides emission declined by 12%.

Remote working is the part of new normalcy.

Buffer report suggests that 98% of remote employees would like to continue working remotely for the rest of their careers.

The Economist reports that could be over 1 billion remote workers by 2035.

Working from home half of the week can reduce greenhouse emissions by 58 million tons every year — Global Workforce Analytics

By 2028, 73% of all teams will have remote workers — Upwork

14% of remote workers have a disability or chronic illness — Gitlabs remote work survey

Major changes has witnessed education sector in this year. Education being digitized has now become more accessible and affordable.

Crime rate has declined significantly.

Less Car on the road resulted in Environment has become greener and purer the air.

Most importantly, we had lots of time for our families. Sympathy, empathy and humanity as if have been restored in our heart and we started feeling for others. We become more connected to our near and dear ones. We will leave behind the pandemic tragedy soon but wouldn’t let the race of life evaporates these human values.
Work Futures Update | 2020 Retrospective
By: Stowe Boyd
Tags: Coronavirus, Remote Working, Update, The Future of Work, Distributed Work

The URLs to the greats are below. I know it’s duplicative, but a/ there’s no way to embed or copy-paste a Notion table into Medium, b/ Medium doesn’t have support for tables, and c/ don’t even ask how I managed to get the URLs pasted into Medium, at all.

(You can also access the Notion page that I used for the table above, here. Remember to select the ‘great’ view in the ‘updates’ table, or you can try the other views, like ‘honorable’ for honorable mentions.)

I think 5 Ways to Stop Corporations From Ruining the Future of Work, In Exploring the effects of trust, task interdependence and virtualness on knowledge sharing in teams, and Kill your performance ratings were perhaps the most important essays this year regarding the future of work.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Anne Helen Petersen offered many engrossing and insightful writings this year, and deserve our admiration.

I started this effort as a means to an end: I plan to write a series of posts on the most important themes of the future of work and decided to start with a retrospective. Here it is. The series is in the works. I plan to turn it into a book, about which more coming soon.

Thanks for your interest. I can’t wait to get 2020 behind us.
Spark Performance Optimization Series: #1. Skew
By: Himansu Sekhar
Tags: Data Engineering, Big Data, Query Optimization, Spark Optimization, Spark

Spark Performance Optimization Series: #1. Skew

Copyright: © HanLockwood

In Spark cluster data is typically read in as 128 MB partitions which ensures even distribution of data. However, as the data is transformed (e.g. aggregated), it is possible to have significantly more records in one partition than in another. This significantly uneven distribution of records in partitions is called Skew.

→ Up to some degree a small amount of skew can be ignored in the range of 10 percent.

→ But large skews can result in spill or worse, out of memory errors.

Skewed data after aggregation

Let’s imagine we have four partitions of data as shown above and when they come in at 128 MB each they are roughly the same size in terms of number of records and number of MBs. However, once we perform a group by city, the first 3 cities are roughly uniform but the last city is significantly larger (almost 2x larger than cities A, B, and C) requiring more RAM than the other cities which results in a skew. (uneven distribution of records in partitions)

If city D is 2x larger than cities A, B, and C

→ that means it is going to take 2 times as long to process assuming it takes n number of seconds per record and twice as many records will take twice as much time.

→ Also it requires twice as much RAM,assuming n MBs per record and twice as many records will take twice as much RAM.

The Consequences will be,

→ The entire stage will take as long as the longest running task. If you see from an execution stand point in time, the entire job which will process these 4 partitions simultaneously will take as long as the slowest of these which in this case is city D.

→ But the worse problem is that we may not have enough RAM for the skewed partitions. If we did not plan for the skewed partitions we are going to exceed the maximum capacity of the executor in terms of handling the RAM required to process the skewed partitions.

What can we do to mitigate Skew? 🤔

→ The first problem we need to solve is the uneven distribution of records across all partitions which results in slower tasks.

→ Mitigating the RAM problem which causes Spill or out of memory errors can only fix symptoms but not the root cause.

Strategies for fixing skew:

→ Enable Adaptive query execution if you are using Spark 3 which will balance out the partitions for us automatically which is a really nice feature of Spark 3.

→ Employ a skew-hint, With the information from these hints, Spark can construct a better query plan, one that does not suffer from data skew.

→ Salt the skewed column with a random number creating better distribution across each partition at the cost of extra processing.

To be continued……….

Read more about these strategies at:
Collect and Store Streaming TimeSeries data into Amazon TimeStream DB
By: Prasanth Mathesh
Tags: Lambda, Data Engineering, Kinesis, Time Series Data, AWS

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Introduction

This implementation guide discusses serverless architectural considerations and configuration steps for deploying the Streaming TimeSeries Data Solution for Amazon TimeStream DB in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It includes links to a code repository that can be used as a base to deploy this solution by following AWS best practices for security and availability. The code snippets used in this demo have been placed in GitHub for reference.

Components Basics

AWS Lambda

Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.

Amazon Timestream

Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database service for IoT and other operational applications.

AWS Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams ingests a large amount of data in real-time, durably stores the data, and makes the data available for consumption.

The streaming data pipeline will look alike as given below after the deployment:

TimeStream DB Pipeline

Getting Started

AWS Kinesis Setup

Create timeseries-stream DataStream with a Shard a given below.

Kinesis DataStream

Amazon TimeStream Setup

Create a database named ecomm in the same region as kinesis datastream and table named inventory in database ecomm using the gists shared in github

TimeStream DB

TimeStream Table

AWS Lambda Setup

Create a Kinesis producer to create and ingest time series data into the kinesis data stream which has to be read in the same order. To do so, create a kinesis consumer. The python SDK examples used for this article has been kept at github repository TimeStream.

Producer and Consumer Logs will be available in cloud watch.

Producer Logs

Consumer Logs

The written results can be quired using the query editor of Amazon TimeStream.

select * from “ecomm”.”inventory”

limit 10

TimeStream DB Output

Deployment

Serverless framework makes deployment and development faster. Deploy Lambda Producers and Consumers into AWS and schedule them to run based on time-series event triggers or any schedule. In a typical production scenario, the producers might be outside of the cloud region and events might arrive through the API gateway.

Conclusion

In most organizations, Timeseries data points are written once and read multiple times. It is clear that time-series data can be collected and stored using serverless services. Though Timestream can be integrated with various AWS services, kinesis is chosen since it has data retention and replay features. The next article about time-series data will have a use case using kappa data processing architecture.
身為DBA 旨在處理一切Data Issue - Data Engineering/Data Pipeline vs ETL Pipeline vs ML Pipeline
Tags: Database Administration, Data Engineering, Machine Learning

What Is Data Engineering and Is It Right for You? - Real Python

In this article, you'll get an overview of the discipline of data engineering. You'll learn what is and isn't part of a…
Differences between ETL and ELT. Traditionally, companies use ETL…
By: Vincent Jiang
Tags: Data Engineering, Big Data, Elt, Cloud Computing, Business Intelligence

Traditionally, companies use ETL pipeline to connect production systems with data warehouses. This however has changed a lot in recent years since businesses require more flexibility and cost saving.

From the technical perspective, there are two main differences between ETL and ELT,

ETL pipelines transform data on a third-party server, while ELT pipelines transform data within a warehouse.

ETL pipelines transfer data into the warehouse after transformation, while ELT pipelines transfer raw data into the warehouse.

Benefits of ELT

No need for a separate storage and computation, the work is done by the computational system itself. Data transformation and loading happen in parallel, so less time and resources are spent (as only filtered, clean data is loaded into the target system) ELT works with high-end data engines such as Hadoop cluster, cloud or data appliances. This gives is additional performance and security. The processing capability of data warehousing infrastructure reduces time that data spends in transit and makes the system more cost effective. Low maintenance after the system is set up

Drawbacks of ELT

ELT is not all perfect.

A lack of comprehensive run-time monitoring statistics and information.

There’s also a lack of modularity because of set-based design for optimal performance and the lack of functionality and flexibility resulting from it.

ELT requires higher understanding of the data itself since load and transform happen at once. If performed by an engineer, he/she would need business knowledge about the data.

Comparison between ETL and ELT

What to use for your data projects?

With ETL, analysts need to foresee every step of the data pipeline prior to transformation. Engineers are required to integrate, clean, and prepare data for per an analyst’s request. This of course would require a lot of upfront cost. Moreover, it would cost more efforts and resources and make changes.

In the modern era of data engineering however, data stack has become much more integrated and flexible to business use cases. Thousands of data analysts today are using Acho to warehouse, integrate, transform and analyze their data without having to set an ETL pipeline. All data is hosted and transformed on cloud within one system. To learn more about how Acho does ELT for data-intensive projects, check out https://acho.io/data-engineering
Apache Kafka and Google Cloud Platform Guide
By: Himanshu Negi
Tags: Data Engineering, Bigquery, Dataflow, Google Cloud Platform, Kafka

In this article, you can find a step by step quick start guide on how to send messages from an Apache Kafka topic to Google Cloud Platform using the apache beam data pipeline running on dataflow and create Data lake and Data Warehouse hosted on the cloud for big data analytics.

I already have messages on my Kafka server and if you want to learn how to move database records to Kafka please go through my other article here.

So first we will be moving the data to google cloud storage(GCS) which is a RESTful online file storage web service for storing and accessing data on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. For that, you need to create an account on GCP. Google provides a free tier account and you can create it here. Once you have created the account you can create the bucket using the GCP guide. You would also need to create a service account to get the key which would be required to connect to google cloud services for that use this guide. I have created a bucket called kafka_messgages and folders called customers where I will be storing files.

Now that we have the service account JSON key let push data to the bucket. I would be converting the data into Parquet format before loading it into the bucket. In this code, you would need to provide the bucket name, the path of your service account key, and the Kafka server.

Get the code here. Let’s check if we have the messages in the buckets.

You can see have three new folders with timestamps and inside we have the data.parquet file. Now, let's create a dataflow job that will move the data from cloud storage to BigQuery. First, you need to create a table in Bigquery. I have created a dataset called kafka and inside that, a table called customers.

In order to run apache beam dataflow job from your terminal you need to install cloud sdk from here. Then create a virtual environment python3 -m venv gcp then activate it source gcp/bin/activate and then pip install apache-beam

then pip install "google-cloud-storage" and pip install "apache-beam[gcp]"

You can find the code here and edit the file.

Now, let’s run the python file

Now go to GCP console then to dataflow you will should have a new job running.

It will take around 4–5 minutes to run the job. Once it is completed now lets checks Google Bibquery if the data was succefully loaded.

That should give you a quickstart on how to migrate your data to Google Cloud Platform.
Estruturação e organização de um time de Analytics
By: Julio Oliveira
Tags: Teamwork, Data Engineering, Analytics

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
Construindo um pipeline de dados na AWS
By: Rayane De Araújo
Tags: Data Engineering, Data, Analytics, Engenharia De Dados, Engenharia De Software

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
A Year in Review: Data Science and Cybersecurity — The Data Standard
By: Koosha Jadbabaei
Tags: Data Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning

With 2020 quickly coming to an end, the field of cybersecurity is expanding more than ever and has proven to be essential in our technology-driven society. Research firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that by 2030, there will be 91 billion devices, with 10 connected devices per human. In addition to human devices like phones and computers, breaches of security of the finance and banking industry, federal government agencies (as recently experienced with concerns of foreign intervention in the US election), and other devices like self-driving cars and even doorbell cameras have been significant issues for companies and people, and have created a large demand for increased investment in cybersecurity.

Data scientists have been established as key players in cybersecurity through their ability to utilize AI and machine learning to identify, predict, and block threats. A study by MeriTalk found that 84% of respondents used data to block threats. Also, a study by Capgemini found that nearly two-thirds of survey respondents agreed that AI lowered the cost of detecting and responding to breaches by an average of 12%, prompting an increase in AI budgets by 29%. Looking forward, research firm Markets and Markets expects a sharp increase in AI investment over the coming years, up to $35 billion by 2025. Even with more investment in the cybersecurity field, a large barrier for the utilization of AI and big data in cybersecurity is a data science talent gap. The MeriTalk study demonstrates how the single largest issue federal government agencies have in fighting against security breaches is the lack of skilled personnel. Along with the investment in AI and machine learning, finding skilled and experienced data scientists will be essential for the future of the field, and 2020 has proven to be a great step in the right direction for cybersecurity.

Make sure to look out for The Data Standard’s full report on The State of Data Science 2020, coming January 6th!
Lets Build An ELT Pipeline Part I: Introduction
By: Jonathan Duran
Tags: Dbt, Data Engineering, Docker, Airflow, Elt

Photo by tian kuan on Unsplash

*Alert 🚨* For the sake of everyone’s attention span, I will be breaking up this project over multiple articles… Not sure how many, I am kind of making things up as I go 😊.

Prerequisites

High level knowledge of Docker, Dockerfiles, and Docker Compose.

Some familiarity with Airflow.

Ability to provision an S3 bucket and Redshift cluster.

Awareness of Redshift charges and AWS billing.

Overview

Why ELT? It works really well for smaller teams with little to no engineers to spare for analytics. A well rounded data team is expensive especially for startups who’s number one focus is building out the product.

Taking the more traditional ETL approach means pulling a software engineer or two away from building the application, and toward maintaining pipelines, and transforming data to meet the needs of data analysts and data scientists.

By adopting the ELT paradigm, the data engineering stage ends once data is loaded into a data warehouse in its raw, unaltered form. Using a tool like DBT makes it really simple for data analysts to take over the transformations and database modeling necessary for their analysis.

ELT will be the star of this project.

Extract

We will begin by using the NYC Open Data API to pull some Motor Vehicle Collisions data into our local project.

Load

The collisions data will be uploaded to an S3 bucket and subsequently loaded into a Redshift cluster.

⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ I do not believe Redshift is a part of AWS free tier services, so please research the cost and make sure to pause your clusters every time you are done with it. Alternatively, you can use an RDBMS like Postgres or MySql for this project. ⚠️

Transform

Once the raw data is in our data warehouse, we will use DBT to create a few data models and materialize them as views in Redshift. We will also create some schema and data tests against our data.

Looking Ahead

This was an introduction to what should be a fun project. In the next article we will work on setting up our docker environment, and making sure Airflow, Postgres, and DBT are configured correctly.

Check out the second article in this series.
Growing with your firstborn
By: Anna Riley
Tags: Growth, Poem, Motherhood, Family, Daughters

Over the years, we followed life’s path,

And enjoyed family, friends, and each other.

We’ve stayed close and still have our chuckles,

And laughed on this journey of daughter and Mother.
Muddy
By: Lennie Varvarides
Tags: Play, Storytelling, Poetry On Medium, Motherhood, Childhood

I see them.

Of course I do.

I know how one is expected to interact.

The joy that one is supposed to feel and yet, I do not feel it.

/

I see it.

Of course I do.

As large as a stain on a white blouses and I still refuse to engage.

I will not even permit tiptoeing. Not unless it is impossible to avoid, but even then it must be performed with trepidation and visible annoyance.

/

It is too late.

She has run off.

The little cute child with matching waterproofs, is out of reach.

Unstoppable.

There she goes. There it is, that big splash that hits even the side of her well protected ears. The murky water slowly making fun of her white elephant hat.

I’m waiting for the mother to screech….But she doesn’t.

I look around the foggy landscape for a sign, perhaps the child’s mother has not noticed yet?

“Was that fun?” she asks in a sweet honeysuckle tone.

The girl giggles her response.

Of course she does. She is two years old. What does she care if the muddy water is on her skin, or in her ears, or stuck to her hair? What uses does she have for being clean?

In that moment; the one with the giggle and the splash, the one that I can still see now sparking up like fireflies, I acknowledge a grave mistake. One that I alone have made.

/

I think of that perfectly wonderful, well prepared and well mannered mother often. The one with the loose hair sitting around a relaxed expression and I feel completely jealous.
I Want Big Love
By: Lee Ameka
Tags: Christmas, Poetry, Motherhood, Love, Family

I don't want stars

or fairy lights

in trees too green

for summertime

coconut snowflakes

or sparkling red wine

Mama, I hurt

I want Big Love

I don’t want more stories

from far away

Some child, not mine

yes, let him be safe,

let him lie warm

by his own mama

Tell me the stories

you used to tell

Your own Big Love

How did you say?

That’s right; my hands, my tiny hands

were your own Big Love

all that you were

and wanted to be —

Mama, I love

I have Big Love
Unfulfilled Dreams
By: Rotaract Club Of N. M. College
Tags: Haiku, Motherhood, Love, Haibun, Dreams

As she lay that day in the operation theatre,hoping to hear a cry, all the thorns which pricked her all along disappeared that night. The little angel that made her go wild sometimes was now the only reason to stay alive. As the years passed by she could see the miracle happening. All her torn dreams this baby was fulfilling. Today as she lay on the same bed counting her breath, the sight of her baby was enough for her to peacefully shed off her mortal flesh.

_through her eyes

I see my dreams being stitched,

relieving me of all guilts_

-Simran Karkera
Forgetful Mom
Tags: Morning Rituals, Motherhood, Mother, Family, Morning Routines

It was a soggy morning after all.

The sun hasn’t shine and the cloud is still hanging in the sky. The alarm yelled and woke her up. She got rid of the blanket and push herself to get up in the middle of a cold morning. She looked up to the right side, her husband was still snoring. Silently, she moved and put her feet gently on the ground.

“It’s time to wake up,” she said to herself.

With heavy and half-asleep eyes, she walked to the door and opened it. She approached their son’s room and push the door. She looked at their son’s face and then kissed him gently. “Good morning, sleepyhead. I love you. “ The boy kept sleeping.

She moved to the bathroom, wash her face, and didn’t have any time to see herself in the mirror. She went to the kitchen, checked the rice-cooker, and saw the rice left-over last night. She removed all of the leftovers, sunk the inner of the rice cooker in the water, and let it aside in the sink.

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

She opened the fridge and grab some carrots, spinach, and eggs. She cut and cleaned the vegetables, and made a vegetable omelet for breakfast. In her mind, there was nothing but how to make her son and husband full that morning.

As a mother, as the queen of the house. We always busy taking care of the member of our family. How’re the husband’s clothes? What time will the school start? What’s the snack for today? What menu should we cook this morning?

All about the children’s and the husband’s sake.

When do we think of ourselves?

This morning, I woke up earlier and got this thought.

Why are we so busy in thinking care of them? Is it because of a pure love? Or we are afraid if the husband thinks that we are not a good wife, or the children think that we are not a good mother? Do we really care about it?

Photo by Joanie Simon on Unsplash

I am not a really morning person. I woke up at 6 or 7 and prepare breakfast shortly after. Didn’t have time to take a bath or even a peaceful glass of coffee in the morning. Peaceful here means no “mommy, what’s cooking?” or, “honey, what’s for breakfast?” questions from the troops.

Today, it’s different.

I woke up at 3.30, took a bath. “A real bath”, not just water pour on my skin and speedy soaping. No. It was a mindful bath, I enjoyed the cold water runs through my skin and relish the scent of the soap.

Then I did my morning prayer, in silence. In calm.

When it was done, I cleaned my workstation and start typing this for me.

As a reminder not to be a forgetful mom again.
Women Are More Than Becoming Mothers and Wives
By: C S Bhambra
Tags: Relationships, Motherhood, Abuse, Women, Female Empowerment

Women Are More Than Becoming Mothers and Wives

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash

A woman is first an individual, a unique human being with a vast amount of strengths, abilities and skills. Who she is, is not solely defined by her marital status or her motherhood. Who she is, is who she is inside her heart.

Women especially in the western world live a very different lifestyle to their female ancestors. They have rights and roles which many women didn’t have. Although there are still inequalities such as lower pay for women in many countries, in general women have more roles other than being housewives and mothers.

Women have fought for these rights and now the modern average female strives for career goals and may have children at a later stage of her life (or not have children at all).

Yet despite these changes, women are born into a world that is male-dominated and still there is a huge pressure for women to conform to having children and getting married. These can be beautiful, yet unfortunately for many, there are dark truths that need to be addressed.

Although I’m not a feminist, I am a woman, I have many women in my life and I’m fed up with these pressures and assumptions imposed upon women! It screams ignorance & lack of understanding of the reasons as to why there are women who choose (or life has chosen) for them to not have children or not be married.
Why You’re Still Not Winning at Life
By: Sylvia Emokpae
Tags: Parenting, Motherhood, Social Media, Energy, Technology

My husband has always said that he wants to leave a legacy. I never understood until recently what that meant, when I started writing. I want to, in the most cliche way possible, add value to this world. I have found my voice through writing and discovered that by sharing my stories I can help others feel that they too can get through harder times. So, at the moment, this is what I’m doing, whenever I possibly can.

I have to plan meticulously in order to be able to work around our son’s sleeping routine. At the moment, it’s 5 AM and I know I have at least 1.5 hours to write before Andriel wakes up, so I’m doing alright for time.

I plan a lot for what I will do while my son is asleep because when I’m with him, much of my time is his. And since I don’t have all day like most people without kids, the time I spend working on my goals is extremely crammed into bouts of productivity.

I imagine Flash, my now new alter ego, taking my place as my son goes to bed. He types as if the world is ending. He tackles the rest of the house like the world depends on it. He comes to a halt at the sound of the baby monitor before doing one last round to finish the fight with the villain — the washing machine. A bra wire breached the security of the premises and Flash sweats as he fights for his life. Frantically, he wins the battle and quickly gets changed into me again when it’s time to go into the baby’s bedroom — and deal with a soiled diaper, for that’s what life boils down to in the end.
Who I am and Where I’m going
By: Rivka Suleymanov
Tags: Occupational Therapy, Motherhood, Wife, Graduate School, Youngadult

My name is Rivka Suleymanov. I am a 22-year-old mother married to my wonderful husband Ilan. We have been married for almost three years now and have a beautiful 14-month-old daughter. She brings so much light into our lives and my husband and I learn from each other every single day as parents. I am currently an Occupational Therapy student who is one year away from receiving a BS/MS degree in Occupational Therapy.

To say that I always knew where I would be five years ago would be an understatement. Graduating high school at the age of 17, I was not ready to take on the world but there were moments in my life that encouraged me to take a step in the right direction. At the age of 22 to accomplish what I have now is very inspiring to me but I know it is just the beginning and their is much more to come.

I am no writer, editor, or journalist. I want to start writing posts and articles on experiences that I have gone through that can benefit someone out there. My joy in life is to provide for others especially my family. I truly believe that this is the reason I had an inner calling to become a wife and mother at a young age. However, I could have just become a stay-at-home-mom (which is amazing and I applaud all the moms out there) but I knew I wanted to pursue a career in Occupational Therapy as this profession has had an impact on me since I was a child. This year during the 2020 pandemic, my school changed things to online schooling in March, and let me tell you, it was NOT easy with a 5-month-old at home with you. I would have a babysitter watch her for a few hours a week whenever necessary but for the most part, I had to manage it all; mom life, school life, housework, time for my spouse, time for myself.

This is my current situation, with tears of joy and stress along the way. My goal in this platform is to provide tips I learned along my journey as a continuing student, mother, wife. Sharing my passions as well as how I manage to balance it all. My life may not be as interesting as the CEO of the next leading business or even a Harvard graduate pursuing areas of technology. However, I do know that if I can help or provide any sort of insight, I would be happy with just that.
My second child came home on my birthday!
By: Anna Riley
Tags: Poem, Motherhood, Birthday, Daughters, Grandparents

When the time came for our trip home

I wondered what your older sister would do or say.

I remained optimistic and figured once she saw you,

That all would go okay.
I.M.J. — A Story of Hope. You Are my Reason to Be
By: Krista Mollion
Tags: Motherhood, Love, Gratitude, Children, Life Lessons

You Are my Reason to Be

When everything feels dark, you put your little hand in mine

I see your chest rising and falling in sleep and the sound of your breath comforts me in my darkest moments

Your little voice when you play by yourself fills the room

You are talking to your dolls

I wonder what magic is going through that head of yours

You still believe in fairies and mystical creatures

How wonderful that age is

You dress up in your princess costumes and dance around the room

You light up my life

There were times that is the only light guiding me

When I’ve almost lost hope, overwhelmed by others’ cruelty

I want to thank you for your innocence, your unconditional love, and your simple yet real dependence on me

You help me keep going day-in and day-out

Sometimes I think it wouldn’t matter if I ceased to be

The world would continue just fine

Some would miss me and some might be relieved

But not you

You are my everything still and will be for a few more years to come

I need to be there for you and you alone

You don’t judge me nor demand too much

You don’t suck up my soul nor try to drown me

You are simply you

Everything is straightforward

Our little routines, your primary needs, your loves

It is all pure

At night, I whisper to you

And I see how you derive joy from my presence

There is no malice nor judgment

You are the only one

I owe you so much

Thank you, my little one
What is First Love really like?. It is the purest form of love where…
Tags: Mom Love, Motherhood, Moms, First Post, First Love

“I love you every day. And now, I will miss you every day.” — Mitch Albom

Pexels (Shamia Casiano)

It is the purest form of love where both the persons love each-other immensely, there is no insecurity but a beautiful bond between two souls.

Where we are sure that we are what we are before that person and for only that person’s happiness, we did a lot of things unknowingly.

It is a feeling that we can’t express in words, where our happiness is the priority of our partner. Where there is no need to tell us what we need, our partner just understands it.

Even one day without that person made us realize what our life is without her.

So what first love is really like?

Love without any commitment, where no I love you is needed, where we don’t do unnecessary things to make her realize she is important, where just by seeing each other half of the tensions vent away, something like this. But there is a fear one day, one has to cry in the pain of losing another one.

I am talking about everyone’s first love, our love with our Mother (MOM) genuinely it’s the first love for us. And we can’t express it in our words because feeling is the same in everyone’s heart but memories are different.
Baby travel bag checklist
Tags: Baby, Motherhood, Parenthood, Diapers, Baby Care

Baby travel bag checklist

Travelling with your baby? Don’t hush while packing. There are a lot more essential thing to pack for your baby. It is very important to plan well before hand and don’t miss what your baby requires the most.

Trying to figure out what to pack? Here we are with the checklist:

· Diapers: Pack of diapers pant should be on priority. They are disposable, easier to use and comfortable for baby while travelling.

· Changing pad: Carry a few plastic bags or disposable changing pads while changing a baby’s diaper pants.

· Baby wipes: They’re the multi-tasker of all diaper bag essentials — handy for wiping baby’s bum, your hands and the changing pad

· Hand sanitizer: a must in this covid-19 situation

· Blankets: it will be helpful to wrap your baby and protect from cold winds or you can also, use it to cover up while breastfeeding.

· Mosquito repellent: protect your baby from the uninvited bites of mosquitos.

· Pacifiers: keep them in a clear bag with extra nipples.

· Baby food

· First aid kit

· Diaper rash cream

· Baby lotion

Quick tips:

· Use a waterproof diaper bag to carry it all.

· Keep an extra outfit handy at all times.

· Pack medicines and liquids in separate plastic pouches.

· Keep each baby clothing item in a separate compartment
Keep your baby relaxed with diaper pants.
Tags: Baby, Motherhood, Parenthood, Diapers, Baby Care

Keep your baby relaxed with diaper pants

The pant style diapers are designed like an underwear garment that can be pulled up easily. The pant diaper has an elastic band around the waist that upholds on baby’s waist. It keeps you and your baby relaxed all day. They are easy to change. It causes less friction around the legs than the old-style regular diapers. The elastic waistband ensures that baby dry pants will stay at a place even if the baby is active.

When the baby is active and does not stay still, the regular diapers flips over their stomach. At this stage, Doobidoo baby pants are easier and more convenient. These pant diapers make sure that the baby can move with agility as they are always curious to see and learn new things. At the growth age of your baby, changing nappies become a daunting task. It becomes a challenge to make your baby lie down just to change the diaper as they don’t stay in one place. With diaper pants, there is no fear of leakage, no fuss around, more comfortable and protects the soft and delicate skin of the baby from rashes.

Away from home? No problem. You don’t need to find a right place to change diapers as these diaper pants are easy to put and take off.
A Christmas Wish
By: Bill Evans
Tags: Reflections, Christmas, Motherhood, Family, Unconditional Love

Sean on Ben Bulben — photo by William E Evans, © 1991

Dear Sean –

Let me begin with this: how could I have ever competed with an enormous replica of the Millennium Falcon and all those Star Wars figurines?

Along with the other presents your mother packed around the Christmas tree, stacked on chairs, on the sofa, the table. A townhouse living room jammed with her presents until moving about was near to impossible. Only the clothes gifts were mine.

A well-kept secret pact between you and your mother? Perhaps on her part, it was. When your brother came along, she showered Ryan the same.

This need to overwhelm you guys with presents seemed like a compulsion. She needed you to understand she loved you both and had no better means to express it — she the gifted artist, this was the best she could do?

Her mother hadn’t done even that much with her own upbringing–covering for the unconditional love she couldn’t provide. Her mother said over and over she never expected her only child would amount to much. She learned the wrong lesson from her mother.

Your mother won your love when you were born. Didn’t she understand her love was enough to win yours?

My Christmas wish is you’re doing OK out there across the country. That you can forgive your mother for her crippled ways. I think she still has the Millennium Falcon stashed somewhere–which breaks my heart. Yet I know she loves you.

And we all miss Ryan.
Mother Mind Calamity
By: Teresa D Hawkes
Tags: Chimeras, Motherhood, Mother Mind

Females can become mothers.

To be a mother is to surrender your own body to Nature

as it unfolds inside you into a human being

who will walk this Earth beside you

for a time

then break away and become their own person

with their own hopes, dreams, desires, and deeds.

Modern scientific evidence suggests a mother and her children swap DNA such that the child’s DNA (that new combination wrought by the mating between mother and father)

lives in her brain and changes them both into chimeric beings composed of each other.

Women live that way,

surrendering self,

becoming someone else composed of both mother and child.

It makes us vulnerable to men,

our cruel and violent children.

Men never surrender to such intimate goings-on as

sharing breathing, feeding, sleeping with another person,

instead, they take.

They take from women as fetuses take. They insist only they matter, as a fetus matters to the mother in whom it lives and grows toward its own life.

Women have accepted this fetus relationship with strange grown men

because our minds are good at surrender and enfoldment

to help another live.

Because of this, men expect free food and all services necessary to live from women, all those things they got from their own mothers. They expect all women they encounter should just be there for them, no holds barred, no questions asked, like their moms were — and if their moms weren’t,

such men hate and punish other women all their lives.

For our love and trouble, they throw us the bones of lifelong cages and disrespect.

These are the arrangements their societies are built on.

But, men are not fetuses or growing children,

and for their sake, the Earth’s sake, and our sake,

we should all stop pretending they are.
Try not to Underestimate the Power of a Good Financial Planner
By: Dipankar Debnath
Tags: Stock Market

In the wake of the progressing Covid-19 pandemic, numerous individuals are hoping to reduce expenses and better oversee costs. Some may see monetary organizers as a superfluous cost, yet in actuality, a shrewd relationship with an accomplished monetary organizer will set aside you cash in the short-and long haul, and will help you climate the difficulties of a changing economy. CFP Board, a philanthropic association committed to supporting proficient norms in close to home monetary arranging, underscores how the direction a monetary organizer can give goes past the outside of stocks and venture guidance. Rather it underlines the advantages of a drawn out arrangement to help individuals meet their monetary objectives. Just people who have satisfied CFP Board’s thorough necessities can consider themselves a CFP® certificant, so be certain your organizer is a confirmed CFP® professional.It’s essential to take note of that not all monetary counselors have made a guarantee to act in their customers’ eventual benefits. As a feature of their affirmation, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM experts focus on CFP Board to go about as a guardian — consistently — while giving monetary exhortation to a client.”As you start to think about how best to deal with your monetary future, you should feel sure realizing that with a CFP® proficient, you’re working with somebody focused on giving the exclusive requirement of monetary arranging,” as per the LetsMakeAPlan.org website.Some of the vital advantages of a progressing relationship with a monetary organizer include:

Making an arrangement. Particularly during seasons of vulnerability, making objectives and building up monetary plans can add to your true serenity.

Understanding the laws. Monetary organizers can clarify the ramifications of the most recent enactment on individual budget, for example, the SECURE Act, which carried changes to retirement ventures, and the post-COVID CARES Act, which brought new monetary arranging open doors for people and independent companies.

Streamlining innovation. CFP® experts are up on the most recent instruments for dealing with your cash. Innovation takes into account faster and simpler conversations of individual budget issues including stock exchanges, yet in addition rebalancing portfolios, charge misfortune collecting, making annual duty projections, and getting ready for long haul monetary objectives, for example, instruction or retirement.

Seeing the 10,000 foot view. A monetary organizer can help you make a stride back and look at how your monetary information fit into an arrangement that consolidates income, costs, assessments, and bequest arranging. A certified organizer realizes how to keep this higher perspective in center, yet in addition how to adjust it as life conditions change.
4 stages of technical analysis trader
By: Srinivasan Metta
Tags: Technical Analysis Trader, Options, Stock Market, Technical Analysis

A technical analysis trader/investor goes through 4 stages. In this post, we will discuss what are the qualities of the trader/investor in each stage and how he advances to the next stage. The four stages of the technical analysis trader/investor are

Beginner

In this stage, trader/investor is just getting started in technical analysis. He might have either invested/traded with stocks using fundamental analysis or might have not have much experience with investment/trading. He is excited about the potential and is immersed in learning about market setups and leveraging using the power of options. Also, he is excited to place the trades with the knowledge learnt.

Intermediate

In this stage, the technical analysis trader/investor would have made some good profitable trades and also might have experienced big draw downs that could seriously affect his trading/investment capital. At this juncture, he begins to understand that trading/investment is not a quick rich scheme and should have a risk management in place to protect his portfolio. In this stage, he finds it challenging to achieve his goals and is seeking ways to achieve his goals without losing his capital.

Advanced

In this stage, the technical analysis trader/investor begins to separate himself from novices. He understands that his trading success depends on his mindset, risk management and systems as specified below.

He starts treating trading/investing as a business and develops a trading plan. He follows the activities specified in the trading plan consistently. In this stage, he spends considerable time working on his beliefs about himself, market and money reading books, listening to successful traders etc. Also, he develops systems/framework with position sizing/risk management in place ( scan lists, entry, exit, strategies — all documented in trading plan) that enables him to achieve consistent growth and returns in all market conditions.

Pro

In the advanced stage, the technical analysis trader might be able to make a living with trading/investing income. This stage is an extension of the activities that he does in the previous stage. In this stage, he continues to hone the execution of the processes he has set for himself as per his trading plan and may reach greater heights. He also has metrics in place such as expectancy ratio, winning percentage (check out this ) to measure the systems he has developed. In this stage, he has a system that can achieve consistent results in all market conditions backed up by results and understands that one needs more capital to make more returns with less risk. He becomes a business owner ( raises capital from others) and achieves greater returns helping others reach their goals along the way.

Do you know which stage are you in? You cannot reach your destination if you do not know where you are. Once you know where you are, check out this training page that can be used as a guiding post to advance to the next level.
Understanding MACD
By: Yutong Xie
Tags: Finance, Trading, Technical Analysis, Investing, Stock Market

It says “MACD(12,26,9,exponential,no)”. Let’s first understand these parameters and then understand the blue and yellow lines.

12: the number of periods used to calculate the fast moving average (SimpleMA). 26: the number of periods used to calculate the slow moving average (SimpleMA). 9: the number of periods used to calculate the moving average of the difference between the slow moving average and the fast moving average. exponential: calculate exponential moving average of the difference between the slow moving average and the fast moving average. no: let’s ignore it.

The blue line is the difference between the slow moving average and the fast moving average. The yellow line is the 9-period exponential moving average of such difference. MACD just means how the blue line oscillate around the yellow line. The bars marks the difference between the blue line and the yellow line.

As you can probably tell. When the blue line is above the yellow line, it means the difference between a fast and a slow moving average is big relative to the exponential moving average and vice versa.

MACD measures strength of trend

So by construction is measuring how different is the fast MA from the slow MA and how this difference compares with it’s exponential MA. This is measuring how strong the current trend is. The blue line is high and different from the yellow line when the stock price rises a lot. Again, this is contemporary. I am not saying that the stock price *will* increase a lot.