fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Vignelli Subway Map is an Effective User Design
By: Allen Hillery
Tags: Design, Dvhistory, New York City, Maps, Data Visualization

Emphasis on text, numbers and data points will lead the audience to the information we want them to know. Cole Knaflic’s book, Storytelling with Data outlines the following principles for effective visualizations:

Understand the context of what you need to communicate.

NYC subway riders needed to know how to navigate the system from what line to use and how to get to the platform. This also needed to be done in a consistent manner.

2. Choose an appropriate display to visualize it.

Subway riders needed visuals to help them understand where they were within in the station as well as along the subway route. There are various ways to display this information via maps, diagrams and text.

3. Eliminate clutter.

The signage used in the subway system prior to the 1970’s were in disarray and had inconsistent lettering and positioning. The subway maps had a lot of extra information that most likely confused subway riders and slowed down the processing of the information.

4. Draw attention where you want your audience to focus.

Subway riders first and for most want to know where they are and where they need to go. The use of color, arrows and lettering are a few of the ways this begins to help as they enter a station — possibly for the first time.

5. Choose a visual display that will allow your audience to do what you need them to do.

There are various displays that help subway riders navigate the system. It’s important that as someone enters the system who may not be familiar to be able to identify and understand at first glance where to look for navigating the station, subway line information and service changes.
Flutter Future Tutorial — Asynchronous Dart Programming
By: Mahmud Ahsan
Tags: Async, Await, Flutter, Dart, Future

Asynchronous programming is very important for mobile application development. In Flutter framework, there are 2 ways to do asynchronous programming.

Using Future Using Streams

In this tutorial we will learn how to do asynchronous programming using Future

Futures:

Dart is a single-threaded programming language Future<T> object represents result of asynchronous operation which produces a result of type T . If the result is not usable value, then the future’s type is Future<void> A Future represents a single value either a data or an error asynchronously

There are 2 ways to handle Futures:

Using the Future API Using the async and await operations

Let’s write a program and see the output:

Future delayedPrint(int seconds, String msg) {

final duration = Duration(seconds: seconds);

return Future.delayed(duration).then((value) => msg);

}

main() {

print('Life');

delayedPrint(2, "Is").then((status) {

print(status);

}).catchError((err) => print(err));

print('Good');

}

Output:

Life

Good

Is

Here we defined a delayedPrint function which is a mocked asynchronous operation and sends a value after the seconds reached. Here we also used the Future API’s then method. So when the program runs, we see 'Is' is printed after all the normal operations.

To learn Dart programming language and Flutter framework check out my new course with a discount on Udemy: Mastering Dart Programming | For Flutter Developers

But sometimes what we need, after completion of one operation and the data it returns, we want to do something else. In that case we can use asynchronous operation in synchronous fashion.

Now let’s run the following program and see the output:

Future delayedPrint(int seconds, String msg) {

final duration = Duration(seconds: seconds);

return Future.delayed(duration).then((value) => msg);

} main() async {

print('Life');

await delayedPrint(2, "Is").then((status){

print(status);

});

print('Good');

}

Output:

Life

Is

Good

In this case, we used async and await keywords. await basically holds the control flow, until the operation completes. To use await within a function, we have to mark the function by async keyword. Which means, this function is an asynchronous function.

Source: My Blog
Le Dev’hackers Day : une journée workshop sur les services AWS!
By: Cyrille Grandval
Tags: Aws Cloudfront, Darkmira, AWS, Aws S3, Workshop

in In Fitness And In Health
A Better Approach to Dark Mode on Your Website
By: Juan Cruz Martinez
Tags: Design, JavaScript, Programming, Web Development, CSS

A Better Approach to Dark Mode on Your Website

Learn how to implement Dark Mode today

Image by the author

Dark Mode seems to be here to stay. Initially, it was mainly used by developers in their code editors, but now it’s all over the place, from mobile, desktops, and now even the web. Supporting Dark Mode is more and more turning from a nice to have to a must-have. Of course, it depends on your niche, but if you are here, chances are, you want to implement Dark Mode on your site or for your clients.

When it comes to dark mode for websites, there are multiple approaches on the web, and I’d like to talk with you about two different approaches — with one being the easiest to implement, and the second being my preferred option, and the option that I actually used to implement Dark Mode on livecodestream.dev.

Let’s get started with the first option.
Why Your Startup Needs Founder-Market Fit
By: Catalin Ionescu
Tags: Startup Lessons, Startup, Business, Startup Life, Programming

Why Your Startup Needs Founder-Market Fit

What comes before product-market fit

I’m a senior Ruby on Rails engineer with a background in building enterprise software for SaaS companies. My co-founder is also a senior engineer with a background in building enterprise data processing pipelines. We co-founded a start-up to build an appointment management system for dental clinics and beauty salons. Building the MVP, around 2018, was the best experience!

My co-founder had a dentist friend who was eager to use our CRM in her dental practice. She also recommended us to another dentist and a beauty salon owner, so that by 2019 we had three active businesses using our CRM, all customers acquired through word of mouth.

By mid-2019, we wanted to grow our business since we had a fairly complex product already in place. This is when the founder-market fit consideration hit us. Both of us were excited to build enterprise software, but neither was interested in appointments management software. When we were talking to customers, during our sales process, you could easily tell that there was no spark of passion for solving scheduling problems. We followed Stephen Fry’s strategy for talking to customers early.

There are four signs you need to follow when considering founder-market fit:

Founder’s professional experience

Founder’s obsession

Founder’s personality

Founder’s background

Let’s break these down.
The world needs your creativity, imagination, and contribution
By: Fahri Karakas
Tags: Imagination, Self, Creativity, Life, Inspiration

The world needs your creativity, imagination, and contribution

A reflective exercise bridging your heart’s desires and your mind’s adventures

Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash

As the job markets are being transformed by Covid-19 and the bigger technological shifts triggered by artificial intelligence, many professionals are worried about their future job prospects.

In times of such uncertainty, imagination and creativity are your biggest assets. They will help you navigate uncharted territories. They will also enable you to think differently and create your own creative assets.

Research suggests that jobs that require creativity are less susceptible to automation and machine learning.

The things that make us uniquely human, weird, and creative suddenly have become our biggest asset — precisely because these cannot be replicated by machines, robots, and algorithms.

This is why industries built on imagination and creativity have recently become the fastest growing sectors throughout the world. For example, creative sectors in Britain have become more valuable (£87 billion a year) than car, oil, gas, aerospace and life sciences sectors combined. 1 in every 11 employees now work in creative sectors and roles — and this proportion is bound to increase even faster.

Most innovative and cutting edge tech sectors including AI, AR, VR, 5G, 3D printing, animation, computer games, and film require high levels of creativity on a daily basis.

Think about it. Some of the most valuable brands in the world are all about imagination: Pokemon, Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond, Marvel, Barbie, Superman, Game of Thrones, Hello Kitty, Disney, Pixar… All are entirely built on the power of imagination.

In the imagination era we live in, each of us must develop ourselves as creative artists and entrepreneurs.

We need to rethink ourselves as creative leaders and architects of the future. We should exploit the extraordinary opportunities presented to us by the creative and digital sectors.

Creativity and imagination are the greatest assets we can develop. They are boundless. The more we create and use our imagination, the more it expands infinitely.

How do we tap into our creativity?

I have written a set of articles on this topic. Together, these articles provide you a lot of creativity exercises and imagination experiments you can apply in your life.

Check out the collection of these exercises below:

A Digital Collection of Creativity Exercises
Broadcasting Actions — Integrate your React-Redux App with your backend
By: Ofir Attia
Tags: Express, Coding, Websocket, React, Web Development

What are WebSockets?

The WebSocket API is an advanced technology that makes it possible to open a two-way interactive communication session between the user’s browser and a server. With this API, you can send messages to a server and receive event-driven responses without having to poll the server for a reply. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API

With WebSockets we have the ability to build web applications that rely on near real-time responses, while we send something, we can get it at the same time we are not doing long polling activity to fetch the data from the server, in fact, there is a pipe that we can communicate between the client and the server and this pipe is always opened.

What applications can be developed with WebSockets? chats, real-time analytics websites and more.

In this article I am going to show you how we can utilise WebSockets and integrate it to the React-Redux ecosystem by “dispatching” actions directly from the backend and reduce the effort of the development when it comes to event handling.

Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash

So let’s start with the story for this article, we have a website with support chat, the communication is done via WebSockets and the technology will be based on React-Redux.

How you would design such kind of support chat? feel free to comment and share your ideas.

The source code will be shared at the end of the article

To build such kind of chat, we need the chat component that will handle the messages list, we need to define the redux for the chat that will store those messages, we will have the backend to setup the WebSocket server and api to trigger the broadcasting of the messages to the relevant sockets in the chat and last but not least, the client socket that will initiate the connection and will hold the reference to the store to dispatch the actions that being thrown to the system from the client to the backend and back to the client.

Seems complex? Not at all! In the following, I am going to show you the code so you can understand the role of every component in our solution.
The nuclear family, and what’s wrong with everything
By: Brigitte Pellerin
Tags: Openness, Society, Tolerance, Family, Children

David Brooks hits the nail squarely on the head

Delighted to see this amazing piece by David Brooks in The Atlantic.

During this period [between 1950 and 1965], a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965. Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950 – 65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

It was fragile for many reasons, an important one of which is that it relied on women being home to look after husband and kids.

Clearly, that’s not a proposition many people want to buy today. I mean, sure. Some do. Some women are perfectly happy, fulfilled and content being a stay-at-home wife and mother. Which is fine. Everyone deserves the happiness that suits them.

It’s just that you can’t force women to stay home in order to re-create an 1950s ideal that was itself a freakish blip in the history of humanity.

I’ll say it slowly: The nuclear family, the mom-dad-and-two-kids-in-the-burbs, was a massive sociological and cultural mistake.

No, not your own personal family. I’m sure you’re fine. That’s not what I mean.

I mean society’s focus on having the nuclear family be the centre of everything, which is something some lawmakers and most moralists try to move us back to because they have happy memories of their own childhood or something.
Why the Left Never Offers Solutions to Problems
By: George Chambers
Tags: Diversity, Society, Equality, BlackLivesMatter, Racism

We never hear specifics from organizations like Black Lives Matter to solve racism

Photo by Julian Wan on Unsplash

Organizations like Black Lives Matter are great at pointing out problems they think exist but never offer logical solutions with specific goals and metrics.

We’re told by BLM, Antifa, and grifters like Robin DiAngelo there’s “systemic” and “institutional” racism. Racism is everywhere and all White people are racist! Activists get away with making racist accusations against a particular group without any consequences. As long as you make racist accusations against certain groups of people, it’s ok.

The race industry never comes up with specific solutions that are logical with defined metrics and goals. The most infamous idea is defunding police departments which hurt the poor inner-city minority groups who get victimized by intraracial violence within the community. BLM or the media never cover talk about those parts of the issues.

People who the industry deems “problematic” can’t ever rid themselves of their bestowed original sin of racism given by the anti-racist movement which accuses an entire race of being racist. There aren’t solutions to rid people of their supposed inherent racism. How do we solve the problem with no solutions to do so?

As long as you make racist accusations against certain groups of people, it’s ok.

There’s no sense of urgency from the Left to define actions that would eliminate all racism. If that was their real mission, it would be a noble effort. The Left needs racism to exist. If it isn’t a problem, a big part of their movement goes out of business. The 20k corporate speaking gigs for Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi must go on! Therefore, we only hear how terrible and doomed certain people are.
The Founding Father of Bling
By: Rachelle Bergstein
Tags: The Bookshelf, Hip Hop, Diamonds, Music

In 1987, a decade before the term “bling” invaded popular vernacular, underground hip-hop star Biz Markie came to upstart jeweler Jacob Arabo with an unusual request. Biz wanted a signature piece, something so big and eye-catching that it worked as a costume: in other words, something fans could see from the stage.

Arabo appreciated the challenge and got to work, designing the now iconic four-finger ring that spelled “Biz” in diamond-studded script. “Nobody back then would make something like that,” Jacob recalls. The performer loved it, wearing it not just at concerts but also for photo shoots and on the cover of his hit single “Just a Friend” that released the next year. The “Biz” ring had become part of Markie’s signature look and Arabo had unknowingly discovered his signature style.

After that, Arabo’s custom business took off. He made his clients comfortable: despite his exquisitely tailored suits and throwback pomade waves, he, like most of the rappers and athletes he catered to, had the faint shadow of the outsider, a memory of the time when the path to success was still poorly lit. But where had this renegade jeweler gotten his start?

In 1979, a young man named Yakov Arabov immigrated to New York City with his family. They were Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan, then a part of the Soviet Union, and they arrived in the States with very little money. Arabov, just fourteen years old, enrolled in high school but felt compelled to help his parents with their financial troubles. In the United States, the young teenager wanted to build a professional career even before he graduated. He considered becoming a photographer, or a hairstylist, but he signed up for a six-month government course in jewelry design.

After learning how to use the tools of the trade, Yakov Arabov anglicized his name to Jacob Arabo, left school, and found a job at a jewelry factory where he earned $125 a week (approximately $338 today). It was a good salary for a sixteen-year-old boy, but Jacob wasn’t there for just lunch money; he had grand ambitions of earning enough to take care of his entire family. Within a few years, by the time he was twenty, he quit and opened his own retail stall on Sixth Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street, in the heart of New York’s diamond district.

Arabo displayed his creations in the window, which immediately stood out from the others on the block due to the unusual size and scope of his designs. His competitors told him he was wasting his time with showpieces; rather, regular income came from walk-ins, usually men in the market for diamond solitaires and young couples shopping for wedding rings. But Arabo hadn’t come all this way to spend every day dropping white diamonds into knockoff Tiffany settings. He remembers:

“Before I went into the business my friends told me — don’t. What are you doing, there’s sharks all around you, they’re gonna eat you alive. I said, I guess I have to become a shark.”

Jacob Arabo had already cut his teeth. The next step was learning the hunt.
US Proposes Another Sale Of Weapons To Taiwan Amidst Tension With China
By: Steven Psaradakis
Tags: Society, Taiwan, War, USA, China

The Trump administration has proposed yet another sale of weapons to Taiwan, this time involving a $2.37 billion Harpoon defence system by Boeing.

This comes in the immediate wake of the threat of sanctions imposed by China on all companies involved in such deals, including Boeing.

China has recently expressed its strong disapproval of any such deals between the US and Taiwan, referring to them as actions that “severely undermine China-US relations” as well as the “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”

“The United States maintains an abiding interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and considers the security of Taiwan central to the security and stability of the broader Indo-Pacific region,” the State Department said. It said the sale would not alter the military balance in the region.
When Sacredness Was Endemic to All Things
By: Samantha Wallen
Tags: Love, Soul, 100 Naked Words, Poetry, Creativity

Pavel Jedlicka @freeimages.com

I will decide to love the empty book of your body, the blank pages of sages hermiting stories deep within you. The ones I will never come to know because they inhabit the mystery that animates your soul. No matter what kind of degree in advanced humanity I achieve, I can never graduate into the school of your secrecy. Not the secrecy that comes from willful withholding, but the secrecy of what can never be known of you, even by you.

I once heard that a couple had this line in their wedding vows: “I promise to never know you.” This was their way of putting the mystery I speak of at the center. For to thoroughly know something is to lose sight of it altogether. This is how they healed the damage of divinity being separated from nature. This is how they used their love to reach back to an earlier time, a time before the divorce of matter and spirit, when sacredness was endemic to all things.

This is how I will now hollow out a tree to enunciate love. This is how I will soak all the fiber and form it into the empty pages of your precious singularity, so I never, ever, forget your story of eternity.
Geofencing: Impact, Spending, Limitations, and Examples for Marketers
By: J. M. Dooley
Tags: Marketing, Technology, Digital Marketing, Advertising, Business

Geofencing: Impact, Spending, Limitations, and Examples for Marketers

How do you strategically acquire customers with digital tools in a specific area?

Geofencing — also called location-based marketing — is a type of mobile ad targeting that involves a two-step process as follows:

Mapping out a specific geographic area where you want digital ads to appear.

Triggering the ads when someone enters the virtual fenced-in area.

Geofencing goes beyond standard geographic targeting by homing in on very specific locations down to streets — or even buildings like malls or restaurants — and serving ads to consumers who enter those “fenced in” areas.

The ads themselves only show when someone crosses the virtual fence. They manifest in a variety of ways, including alerts on smartphones or internet-enabled devices, ads on digital billboards, and app notifications.

Keep in mind that geofencing relies on app notifications and GPS information, both criteria that consumers must opt into before they can receive the ads.

A creative example of a successful geofencing campaign was Burger King’s Whopper Detour, a campaign that resulted in millions of downloads of the Burger King app and over a half a million coupon redemptions from the promo.

In a move that can be construed as either brilliant or evil (or a bit of both), Burger King targeted consumers who were either inside a McDonald’s restaurant or within 600 feet of one.

When a consumer entered one of the geofencing locations, the Burger King app pushed a coupon notification that enabled the user to get a Whopper at Burger King for just a penny.
【📣資料工程師來開講】在求職市場我有價值嗎？如何歸納經驗 成功攻略跨國新創
By: Taiwanese In Data Science
Tags: Overseas Jobs, Job Hunting, Interview, Taiwanese In Data Science, Data Engineering

We aim to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and support everyone in the field.

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Go Functions (Part 3) — Variadic Functions
By: Sher Chowdhury
Tags: Variadic Functions, Google, Go Programming, Golang

Photo by Anthony on Unsplash

Variadic functions are functions that are flexible about the number of arguments you can pass into it.

This article is part of the Functions in Go series

Variadic functions are defined using the 3-dot-notation, ... , here’s an example of this, where shoppingList ( line 8) is a variadic function.

Line 21: We call the shoppingList function with 3 string arguments.

Line 8: The ...string indicates that “items” is a variadic input parameter. This tells Go to capture all the arguments into a string slice variable called “items”.

Lines 10-11: This just confirms that items are indeed a string slice variable that housing all the arguments.

Lines 13–15: The for-loop iterates through the slice and prints out each slice entry.
The Clarity Trap: How to Keep Creating Despite Uncertainty
By: Brandon B. Keith
Tags: Advice, Writing, Self Improvement, Self, Art

The Clarity Trap: How to Keep Creating Despite Uncertainty

3 Things to Remember

Photo by Andreas Brücker on Unsplash

I have a friend, who writes beautifully.

But what happens to him happens to many of us artists before embarking on a project. He falls in love with the idea yet feels the enormity of it.

Therefore, he wrestles with questions — How do I start? How much time will this take?

Then, after several days of inconsistent obsession and no answers, he convinces himself the project is not worth pursuing.

At least, not until he receives full clarity and direction.

And this is all before he even completes the first draft.

Life can feel like an unending maze. And doubt and uncertainty can be dizzying. But how do we find direction? How do we know that what we’re doing is right, for sure (for sure)?

Along my creative journey, I’ve found helpful practices that have helped me endure the fog of uncertainty. Here are 3 tips to remember the next time you’re waiting for clarity.
Technology and Sex: On Everybody’s Mind These Days
By: Ilexa Yardley
Tags: Universal Relativity, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Data Science, Circular Reality

Zero and one is female and male, literally, and figuratively.

TechSex

Biology and technology share a circular relationship, both dependent on zero and one, one real, the other virtual (both real, both virtual). Genetics and neuroscience are dependent on technology and technology is dependent on a circle (zero and one is circumference and diameter, literally and figuratively). Technologists have to use both in order to algorithmically ‘code’ either (artificial intelligence shares a circle with human intelligence).

Literature, with, or without, sex (well, there is no such thing as literature without sex) tells the same story. You need genetics and neuroscience for both. Zero to one is one to zero (zero and one is one and zero). Sex and death share an uber-basic (and necessary) circle. Again, X and Y is zero and one, virtual and real.

So, to get to the bottom of everything (and, also, the top) it’s all about the zero and the one. Where did they come from? What are they trying to do, to us, (with us, for us) really?

Now we’re into physics (and philosophy). Absolute zero is perpetual motion. Easily proven these days, the conservation of the circle is the core dynamic in nature (zero and one as circumference and diameter) (basis for technology) (and biology). Also, time and space. The circle is conserving itself so technology and biology (time and space) can, also, conserve themselves. (Reproduction in any discipline is the conservation of a circle.)

So where are we with this, then? What does it mean? There is no such thing as zero. Zero and one (zero and infinity) are joined, and separated, by pi. This removes the problem called infinity.
Let the record show.
By: Ben Edwards
Tags: Personal, Trump, Society, Politics, America

John Pavlovitz has been on fire recently — or I should say I just became aware of him and his writing during the campaigns — and it’s great. He’s a pastor, in North Carolina, so he adds diversity to the group I tend to tune into, but he often writes from a place I recognize in myself.

On this, the day when we will swear in a wholly unqualified person to the most powerful position in the world, John has declared his strong opposition to Trump. You’ll sympathize with many of the emotions he has and statements he makes. The idea that we want — maybe even need — to tell the world that we are NOT OK with Trump or those who supported him has. a strong pull for me. That is the thinking behind the marches and protests so many of us will participate in this weekend.

And while I know I just introduced my plan to deal with life under Trump. I like this idea well enough that I am reiterating Pavlovitz’s proclamations here for my current and future self:

I do not believe this man is normal.

I do not believe he is emotionally stable.

I do not believe he cares about the full, beautiful diversity of America.

I do not believe he respects women.

I do not believe he is pro-life other than his own.

I do not believe the sick and the poor and the hurting matter to him in the slightest.

I do not believe he is a man of faith or integrity or nobility.

I do not believe his concern is for anything outside his reflection in the mirror.

I believe he is a danger to our children.

I believe he is a threat to our safety.

I believe he is careless with our people.

I believe he is reckless with his power.

I believe America will be less secure, less diverse, less compassionate, and less decent under his leadership.

“And if I prove to be wrong, it will be one of the most joyful errors of my life. I will own these words and if necessary, willingly and gladly admit my misjudgment because it will mean that America is a better and stronger nation, and the world a more peaceful place.”

And like John, I’d love to be wrong. Even with all that we have seen thus far, I still hope that Trump decides to serve all the people of his nation rather than just the one he has served his entire life.
An example of the elegance of clear and simple speech in poetry
By: Dan Mccarthy
Tags: Remembering, Observing, Writing, History, Art

When I write a poem I try to keep the words as simple and true as I can manage. The temptation to show-off with language is always there, and the temptation to force meaning will make me pause and doubt the words. I know that the music is in the plainsong of language and that meaning is in the precise and simple statement of what we experience and observe.

I was in school with Jeff Harrison. Here is one of his poems. I like his poetry because he is able to be skilled and direct. He uses language that you can hold on to. He can be very smart, but he doesn’t let being very smart get in his way.

Here’s how he explains it:

I tend to dislike deliberate obscurity, for instance, and I tend to gravitate toward poetry that is seriously engaged with both experience and language.

A poem:

Visitation

by Jeffrey Harrison

Walking past the open window, she is surprised

by the song of the white-throated sparrow

and stops to listen. She has been thinking of

the dead ones she loves — her father who lived

over a century, and her oldest son, suddenly gone

at forty-seven — and she can’t help thinking

she has called them back, that they are calling her

in the voices of these birds passing through Ohio

on their spring migration. . . because, after years

of summers in upstate New York, the white-throat

has become something like the family bird.

Her father used to stop whatever he was doing

and point out its clear, whistling song. She hears it

again: “Poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody.”

She tries not to think, “Poor Andy,” but she

has already thought it, and now she is weeping.

But then she hears another, so clear, it’s as if

the bird were in the room with her, or in her head,

telling her that everything will be all right.

She cannot see them from her second-story window —

they are hidden in the new leaves of the old maple,

or behind the white blossoms of the dogwood —

but she stands and listens, knowing they will stay

for only a few days before moving on. 2006

You can visit his web site here.
JavaScript ES2020 Features With Simple Examples
By: Carlos Caballero
Tags: Es2020, Programming, Front End Development, JavaScript, Typescript

Introduction

ES2020 is the version of ECMAScript corresponding to the year 2020. This version doesn’t include as many new features as those that appeared in ES6 (2015). However, some useful features have been incorporated.

This article introduces the features provided by ES2020 in easy code examples. In this way, you can quickly understand the new features without the need for a complex explanation.

Of course, it’s necessary to have a basic knowledge of JavaScript to fully understand the best ones introduced.

The new JavaScript features in ES2020 are:

➡️ String.prototype.matchAll

➡️ import()

➡️ BigInt

➡️ Promise.allSettled

➡️ globalThis

➡️ for-in mechanics

➡️ Optional Chaining

➡️ Nullish coalescing Operator
What Can We Learn From Quibi’s Failure
By: Darshak Rana
Tags: Business Strategy, Business, Marketing, Technology, Social Media

What Can We Learn From Quibi’s Failure

Prevent these mistakes to succeed in your startup

P.C — The Author

With a new craze of binge-watching, online streaming services are on the boom.

Yet, Quibi, ‘the could-be’ streaming video giant, pulled the plug on their service on October 21, 2020, within just six months of their startup.

Their main USP was short entertainment videos under 10 minutes. Because of our busy schedules, their theme looked promising. Moreover, having many A-list star cast featuring Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Teigan, Sophie Turner, Liam Hemsworth, etc., made it look like a fairy tale venture. Even the telecommunication investing giants like Disney, Sony Pictures, MGM, 21st Century, Warner Bros, etc., helped Quibi raise $1.75 billion of funding to commence their startup.

Despite this great startup, what went wrong?

Did the cut-throat competition kill Quibi, or it sabotaged itself?

When Fortune Magazine asked Quibi’s management about their failure, they replied, “Our failure was not for lack of trying; we’ve considered and exhausted every option available to us.”

Up to an extent, their answer is agreeable but went wrong exactly? Could they have saved their business, or was it predestined to fail?

Though the authorities blame the COVID Pandemic situation as a significant reason for their debacle, it’s not easily digestible because the facts mentioned in #6 proves otherwise.

Let’s find out their mistakes and how they could have prevented it.
Two Reasons Why You Should Market Your Services When You’re Drowning in Work
By: Kahli Bree Adams
Tags: Freelancing, Business Strategy, Business, Marketing, Small Business

Two Reasons Why You Should Market Your Services When You’re Drowning in Work

…and never in famine periods

Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash

Picture the scene: Business is going well; in fact, it’s going superbly! You’re drowning in work, staying up late to finish all your projects and running on caffeine. The last thing on your mind right now is marketing your services.

After all, you have clients to look after and projects to finish! There’s no second to waste; marketing can wait! Guess what? Wrong!

According to a 2019 Australian Freelance Market survey, a shocking 40.81% of freelancers reported feeling stressed about marketing themselves, and a quarter (25.09%) said they’re worried about the feast and famine cycle. I would expect that once the marketing issue is addressed, the feast and famine problem will decrease significantly.

Let’s take a look at the two main reasons why marketing should remain a priority even if you’re up to your ears in work.
How well did The Jetsons really predict our future?
By: Larissa Rosa
Tags: Tech, Future, Diversity, Gender Equality, Jetsons

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When I was about 8 to 10 years old, my favorite TV show by a great far was the Jetsons. Maybe it was an early sign of my passion for technology. And although I only got to see it in Brazil around 94, this American animated sitcom was first aired in the U.S. in 62 (with a second and third season aired only way later in 85 and 87). It is amazing how they got to predict so many things that are only starting to take place right now.

From left to right: Judy, Astro, George, Elroy and Jane Jetson, and the robot maid Rosie.

For those of you who don’t really remember — or weren’t even born when it was a hit –, the show was about a family living in the future, in a town called Orbit City, using flying cars and living and working in suspended buildings. They also used teleconferences and smartwatches, and were surrounded by all sorts of robots, like their house helper Rosie — a ‘typical’ maid –, and Didi, the voice assistant to family’s teenage girl Judy, who she referred to as her “virtual diary”.

Every time I hear about an upcoming voice assistant, or a company developing a new flying car model I get impressed by how producers Hanna-Barbera managed to go so far on their imagination. Also, it confirms a well-known phrase by Walt Disney that “if we can dream it, we can do it”, right?

But how well did the Jetsons really predict our future? Apart from the amazing wonders of tech, it shows an all-white family living in a world where there is absolutely no diversity. The opening of the sitcom shows wife Jane getting money from her husband George’s wallet — yes, paper money¸ that she has to ask for — because she takes care of the house while he goes to work presentially, with other men. The only upside in this future is that George manages to go home from work and disconnect (kudos!) to enjoy time with the whole family while they are actually talking to each other (here is hoping!).

Back in 62, producers imagined a future with no sharing economy, no digital money, no gender-equality or any diversity what-so-ever. In the Jetsons scenery, although people get rid of most daily house chores and travel differently, the means of consumption, the education system and the job market continue to respect the same models of hierarchy as the decade they were written in. Maybe it’s just easier to predict technology than society! Anyways, I’m really happy writers were WAY OFF on their guessing and that we have been redesigning our society models and values… a small step at a time.
Routing in React without React-Router
Tags: React Hook, React, Reactjs, JavaScript, Javascript Development

Using React’s Context API and hooks to perform routing.

I have been using React JS in my projects for quite some time now and am used to managing routing in my app using the react-router package. I have always been keen on having as little dependencies in my apps as possible, so, I always felt perturbed by the use of this particular package in simpler apps which did not have complex routes. Recently, while working on a project I decided to use a custom solution to handle the routing, using the Context API and hooks. I will go on to describe the solution with some code samples.

In another post, I will describe how I integrated the above mentioned solution with Firebase (Firebase Authentication).

First we need to create a navigation provider , the navigate method will be used to navigate from one route to the other from within the routes.

We first create a context using

React.createContext()

Then, we create a provider, NavigationProvider, with the help of the context we just created. The render function returns a Provider encompassing it’s children.

The navigate method uses the history object’s pushState method to create a new history entity.

The Route component returns the component (screen) that is it’s child if the url matches the name of the route (value of the ‘href’ attribute). Else, it returns null. So, only the screen whose route name matches the url is rendered. Below is an example that demonstrates all of the above.

Now, you only need to wrap the screen components (or page components as some like to call it) with the corresponding Route component. For example,

<Route href="Home" >



<Home> </Home> </Route>

Considering you run this locally, localhost:3000/Home would render the Home component.

To navigate from within the component just grab the navigate function from the NavigationContext that we created previously. We use the the useContext hook provided by react.

Like this,

var navObj= useContext(NavigationContext)



navObj contains the navigate function which can be used to navigate to a different route. For example, to navigate to the “Login” screen

navObj.navigate('/Login')

As simple as that ! I hope this helped you if you wanted to try something different for your routing needs. The part 2 of this guide will show how this can work with Firebase Authentication to secure private routes.

Thank you for your time.
I created Pac-Man in C#/.NET Console
By: Fabio Stein
Tags: Technology, Game Development, Coding, Dotnet, Csharp

Scene

Now with a working base for rendering and controls it was time to define the game map with the player, objects and ghosts. I decided that the map should be easily edited and with that in mind I implemented a Scene class that was responsible for loading a .txt map file and store the game state with the current 2d grid state, positions and entities.

Game Constants

After defining some game constants, our base map.txt looks like this:

?????????????????????

?...?...........?...?

?.?.?.?.?????.?.?.?.?

?.?...?...?...?...?.?

???.?????.?.?????.???

?.?...?.......?...?.?

?.?.?.?.?? ??.?.?.?.?

?...?...?@@@?...?...?

?.?.?.?.?????.?.?.?.?

?.?...?.......?...?.?

???.?????.?.?????.???

?.?...?...?...?...?.?

?.?.?.?.?????.?.?.?.?

?...?.....C.....?...?

?????????????????????

Of course, some implementations were still missing, like game fruits and other logic, but for this step it was going good enough.

So, for now the logic was still basic, load the text file and set each position of our grid (2d array) to the respective character in the text, then it’s time to implement something a little bit more complex. Let’s think about the game movements focusing on three objects, the player, score and ghost, when the player moves towards a score position, after he exits that position what character are we going to set in that position? It might look obvious, an empty space, for this case it works but what if the ghost is moving towards a score position and after it leaves that position? A general approach wouldn’t solve this, instead we need to store which object was in that position before, then we will create some ‘layers’ in each position and with that we can have a ordered list / sequence of objects that are in the same position and we’ll display only the top layer of each position and when anything moves we just move that top layer position in front of another position and automatically the previous position will display the correct character.

For this logic the LinkedList is the perfect choice to these ‘layers’ approach, I’ll not write about this data structure in this post but I strongly recommend that you read about if you’re not familiar with it.

Then our 2d char grid became a grid of LinkedLists and I created a base class (EntityBase) for every entity in the map, then the map loading sequence was the following:
Kaggle User Survey Dashboard— 2019
By: Akshaj Verma
Tags: Dashboard, Analytics, Rstats, Data Science, Data Visualization

A dashboard made using R, Flexdashboard, and the Highcharter library to analyze Kaggle’s user survey conducted in 2019.

As we bid adieu to 2019, I wanted to explore and analyze the state of data science ecosystem especially the participation of women in data science and the perennial R vs Python debate. That’s when I stumbled upon a survey conducted by Kaggle in Oct, 2019 which they’ve made available here. This is one of the biggest surveys conducted with 19,717 responses.

In this dashboard, I’ve attempted to analyze 2 major themes —

Women In STEM. R vs Python for data science.

This blog post is broken down in 3 different parts — Home, Women In STEM, and R vs Python. I will cover the key findings here.
We can transform the energy sector away from fossil fuels to renewables, now
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Climate Emergency, Climate Change, Energy, Electricity, Renewable Energy

IMAGE: EDans (CC BY)

Take five minutes to read this article in Fast Company, “We know how to build an all-renewable electric grid”, which uses links to academic articles, to illustrate the feasibility of reforming the power generation infrastructure of a huge country like the United States, resulting in its complete decarbonization and the generation of enough electricity to recharge all land transportation, as well as being able to heat buildings, produce steel using electrical power, and to create enough renewable electricity to produce hydrogen for a host of other requirements. All this without the need to resort to nuclear energy, which nobody wants in their back yard.

Progressive improvements in renewable energy mean it is now possible to use sustainable power to feed national grids in advanced industrial economies: science can now refute the lies spread by people like Donald Trump.

Transforming our energy generation infrastructure is one of the most urgent tasks in tackling our climate emergency: electricity generation creates around 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, transportation contributes around 14%, while a great many industrial processes that today use energy obtained through fossil fuels can be converted to electricity.

Converting to clean electricity means more than illuminating our homes and powering the national grid: we would be creating a source of energy to help boost the sectors of the economy that produce the remaining 75% of greenhouse gas emissions. Cars and electric buses, domestic and industrial heating and cooling systems along with energy-intensive factories. The transition to renewable energies will lead to a drastic reconversion of the balance of payments of many countries and the development of a new geopolitical order, but it will also play the biggest role in mitigating the effects of the climate emergency, meaning we must do it as soon as possible. It is no longer a matter of infrastructure amortization cycles: it is a question of survival.

Our climate emergency is a tragedy of the commons on a global scale: the rational and selfish decisions of each nation have worsened circumstances for all. Why should anybody reduce its greenhouse gas emissions when they are so reliant on the energy resources that emit them? But if we all follow that rationale, which is what we’ve been doing for a long time, then we will all suffer the cumulative impacts of all those emissions. In other words, what is best for each country is worse for the planet as a whole. At the same time, what is worse for each country, over time will benefit the planet. At this point, that’s the only viable solution.
Build an RSA Asymmetric Cryptography Generator in Go
By: Purnaresa Yuliartanto
Tags: Startup, Encryption, Software Development, Cybersecurity, Programming

Background

Secure communication is essential for a business to provide strong trust. Furthermore, it is mandatory by most governments to encrypt personal identity information (PII) when sending information to another business party.

Asymmetric cryptography is a universal approach for encryption in information exchange applications.

In my experience, I found some new businesses have a hard time to generate their pair of asymmetric keys. Then they ask my team to generate the key pair for them.

By principle, that’s a broken security practice. Because the private key should only be seen and kept by the owner, if my team creates the private key for them, they actually run the risk of business information leaking into my team because they have seen it.

Another situation that I have noticed often is another party generating the key which does not match the specifications. We requested a 2048 bit, but we got 1024 bit from the business partner.

From that observation, I think building a portable asymmetric cryptography generator that can run everywhere is a good idea.

An application that can run on most platforms with little effort is a useful tool — having that capability can solve most of the initiation phase to establish secure communication.