fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Month at a Glance — August. A breakdown of the latest happenings…
By: William Mckenzie
Tags: Nft, Sto, Blockchain, Tezos, Defi

Ecosystem Insights

August was another record-breaking month for contract calls. As the month concluded, contract calls for August were over 3.2M. This increase represents a change of over 18% as comparative to the previous month, and an over 2x increase since April 2021.

As we continue to witness this surge in on-chain metrics it’s beginning to become clear that things are starting to compound. This compounding effect can be vastly attributed to multiple protocol upgrades introducing new sets of features. Features such as gas optimizations, consensus changes, and more have enabled applications to spring up on Tezos that were not previously possible.

We can reflect the aforementioned to the rise and growing interest of economically sustainable and environmentally friendly NFT’s on Tezos and DeFi.

H=N (hic et nunc) has attracted heaps of attention and artists to the platform through its low minting costs and focus on environmentally friendly alternatives like Tezos. As the disparage and knowledge gap begins to shrink on just how costly other networks are in terms of fees and an environmental standpoint, we can expect to see more artists gravitate towards more sustainable alternatives.

The above is precisely what we witnessed yesterday with OMGiDRAWEDit’s tezzard NFT launch. In just a mere hour and forty-five minutes, the entire 4200 piece NFT collection sold out. For 15 tez each at auction, users and early adopters were able to seize a stake in what was the first generative avatar pfp project on their own FA2 smart contract on Tezos. History was made that day, hopefully you were able to participate!

On that very same point, OneOf, a new NFT-based platform on Tezos has launched! With numerous high-profile artists of the likes of Quincy Jones, Doja Cat, and more planning to drop NFT’s on the platform; the push towards full mainstream adoption begins. Be sure to collect your free NFT’s on the site!

Not to be left out, we’re beginning to see further growth within DeFi. Plenty, the largest DeFi application currently on Tezos, has just surpassed $50M TVL (total value locked) since its launch in May. Bender Labs and the Plenty team have also recently announced a collaboration together in building cTez.

The security token landscape has been met with some interesting developments as of late as well. In our previous baking sheet, we recently learned of three European banks teaming together for the development of a new token standard on Tezos, DAR-1.

There’s currently over $4B in STO’s slated to take place on Tezos. As the STO landscape continues to evolve from nascent to being able to handle the potential load of billions-trillions in value, we will likely see Tezos retain an important part in this transformation.

However, as we begin to move towards September let’s stay tuned for the injection of “protocol H”!
How to participate in the Instaraise IDO
Tags: Blockchain, İdo, Cryptocurrency, Tezos, Defi

How to participate in the Instaraise IDO Instaraise Follow Sep 8 · 4 min read

Just one day to go before our public sale goes live. Instaraise public sale will begin on our own platform at 14:00 UTC on 9th September 2021

Please go through this article carefully for hassle-free trade.

Below are the details of the sale :

Start time : 9th september 1400 UTC

End time : 11th september 1400 UTC

Token Symbol : $INSTA

MAX : 2000 XTZ

MIN : 50 XTZ

Token Price : 0.092 USD

Total no. of Tokens for Sale : 980,000

Total Raised Amount : $90,160

Token Address: KT19y6R8x53uDKiM46ahgguS6Tjqhdj2rSzZ

How to avail $INSTA in the sale

All the Users who have done their KYC on the Instaraise platform will be able to participate in the sale. The KYC whitelisting will be closed 2 hours before the sale starts

Below are the steps to participate in the sale

Note**: The images displayed below are for demo purpose only, actual data may differ!

Go to our Platform: https://instaraise.io/

If you haven’t connected your Tezos wallet to our website yet, Click on “Connect wallet” and connect your preferred wallet for the purchase.

A pop up window will appear displaying all the supported Tezos wallet on our platform. Click on your preferred wallet and link it to our Website.

If you have already connected your wallet to our website, skip the previous step.

Now go to the home page of our website and Click on “View Projects”

This page will show all the previous as well as ongoing sales on our platform

Click on the displayed “Instaraise Public sale” card which will start at 14:00 UTC on 9th September

Pool details, your allocations, pool status and time remaining will be shown here.

Page displaying all the information regrading the Public Sale

Pool Information

Your allocations

To invest in the pool, Click on “Invest in pool”

A pop up window will appear in which you just have to enter the amount of $XTZ you want to invest.

Once the amount is filled, Click on “Confirm” to execute your purchase.

And that’s it! If your purchase is successful, you will see your tokens in the “Your allocations” section.

The Public Sale will be done on a First Come First Serve basis, so make sure to participate early before the pool gets exhausted (in 72 hours)

Note** Only those users who have completed their KYC on our platform will be able to participate in our IDO

If you still haven't completed your KYC, please go through This article: https://medium.com/instaraise-official/instaraise-public-sale-specifications-e7fadbfdff32 to complete your KYC.

Or directly go to this link and complete your KYC

For any queries, join our main channel: https://t.me/Instaraise
This Week in Signal Teams — Litecoin, FTX, Tezos, Fantom, Elrond, 0x
By: Jason Hamlin
Tags: Ftx, Litecoin, Tezos, Crypto, Defi

Litecoin Announces OmniLite for Tokens, Smart Contracts, NFTs

“The Litecoin Foundation is proud to announce the release of OmniLite!” — Jay Milla, Marketing Director

Summary

OmniLite is an open-source platform that facilitates the creation of decentralized tokens and smart contracts along with crypto-assets such as tokens and NFT’s.

OmniLite, being a layered protocol built on top of Litecoin’s blockchain, takes advantage of its reputable network security and low fees.

The tokens created via OmniLite can be considered to be an extension of Litecoin and as a result, the transactions from these tokens are recorded on its blockchain. Consequentially, all digital assets created via OmniLite benefit from the network advantages Litecoin has to offer.

The creation of OmniLite will also facilitate the creation of stablecoins on top of the Litecoin blockchain

Significance

With OmniLite, creating on top of the Litecoin network has now become significantly easier. This should attract new developers and lead to new apps and platforms built on top of Litecoin.

Price at the time of FTX Signal: $178. View LTC on FTX.
Instaraise Public Token Distribution(Specifications)
Tags: Blockchain, Xtz, Tezos, Crypto, Defi

We are pleased to announce that the $INSTA public distribution will be happening from 9th September on Instaraise.io and MEXC Global.

We are happy to share that we are the first Tezos platform to organize a token distribution on a centralized exchange. Users will be able to buy $INSTA tokens on Instaraise’s own IDO platform and on the MEXC Global platform.

Details and dates for MEXC token distribution will be announced soon.

$INSTA Public Distribution Specifications

This part describes the specifics of the $INSTA Public Distribution

Start Time: 9th September 2021

Period: 72 hours or till all tokens sold out

Price: $0.092

Total Number of Tokens for Distribution: 1,500,000

Max Investment : 2000 XTZ

Minimum Investment: 50 XTZ

Vesting: 100% unlock at listing

Please go through the article to understand how to qualify for the IEO and IDO rounds.

How to Qualify for the Instaraise IDO round :

To participate in IDO, you need to complete the KYC process.

Go to our Website: https://instaraise.io/

Click on “Connect Wallet” to connect your preferred wallet to our website.

After the wallet connection Click on “View Projects”

Click on “Apply for KYC”

Start your Verification process by clicking on “Start Verification process with Synaps”

Follow the steps involved in the KYC process and your details will be reviewed.

You will receive an e-mail notification once your profile has been verified.

Now you can participate in our IDO event by simply Going to our Website: https://instaraise.io/projects and participate in the Public token distribution on September 9, 2021.
GC Update — SpicySwap Mainnet. We’re gearing up for mainnet release!
By: Genius Contracts
Tags: Uniswap, Decentralized Exchange, Tezos, Smart Contracts, Tezos Ecosystem

We’re gearing up for mainnet release!

Hello friends, here at Genius Contracts we’re officially back in the lab. We’d like to present the final SpicySwap development update before mainnet.

We’re happy to announce that an agreement has been reached with a Tezos-focused development company for the SpicySwap audit, with the code review to be started as soon as possible. This is the final step that is needed to set a mainnet date. We will be releasing SpicySwap on mainnet in the first week of October, with the complete audit report and incentive farms.

The journey to mainnet is almost complete. Our goal is still to create the best DEX on Tezos for users and for builders, so having the audit complete is critical to mainnet stability. We’ve also released a minor UI update on the SpicySwap interface, implementing user feedback that has been received over the past month of testing. Work on the analytics and user dashboard will be ongoing. As we get better data from mainnet, we will be able to display deeper metrics on the SpicySwap interface.

Otherwise, we will be gearing up for release by fortifying our cloud infrastructure, making more UI/UX edits, and continually testing the SpicySwap core protocol. We appreciate the continued support for Genius Contracts and SpicySwap.

SpicySwap Incentives

Upon release, we will be deploying a number of incentive farms with the aim of bootstrapping a base layer of liquidity on SpicySwap. All farms will use Spicy LP.

Main farms: sDAO/WTZ ->SPI and SPI/WTZ -> sDAO

The sDAO/WTZ farm will emit a total of 20m SPI, as promised at pre-sale time. In addition to that, we will be putting up a portion of the remaining GC sDAO for a long running SPI/WTZ farm.

SalsaDAO Ecosystem farms: RSAL/WTZ, GSAL/WTZ, wTACO/WTZ

These SalsaDAO utility tokens will each get a smaller farm that emits SPI, using SPI left over from the pre-sale.

Tezos Ecosystem farms: hDAO/WTZ, QUIPU/WTZ, PLENTY/WTZ, FLAME/WTZ, and ???/WTZ

SpicySwap is not a DEX built for trading just SalsaDAO-affiliated tokens, and to that end we will be setting up farms for popular tokens from around the Tezos ecosystem. These farms will emit SPI left over from the pre-sale. This list is not locked down yet, but will give a good example of what we’re aiming for. This will help make SpicySwap a great place to trade many different tokens.

Going further, in the future we will be holding an sDAO vote to decide what currency to use for a special bonus farm (???/WTZ -> SPI).
Homebase is live on Tezos mainnet!
By: William Mckenzie
Tags: Governance, Homebase, Dao, Blockchain, Tezos

What is Homebase, anyways?

Simply put, Homebase is a web application that enables users to create and manage/use DAOs on the Tezos blockchain. This application aims to help empower community members and developers to launch and participate in Tezos-based DAO’s.

DAOs in general can be seen as communities without centralized authority, while also providing mechanisms for community members to trustlessly collaborate.

Homebase currently provides two DAO types/templates — registries and treasuries. Treasuries allow for pooling and spending funds through community voting processes.

Registries provide treasury functionality and additionally enable communities to maintain a registry of some sort; where adding, removing or modifying the registry are all handled through voting processes. Use cases go from a curated token registry to a curated NFT marketplace.

Nestor Amesty of dOrg, the partner organization involved with designing Homebase, shared a few words on his background:

dOrg, the organization I work for, has been in charge of the design, front-end implementation, integration to the BaseDAO framework and contracts and has also contributed in product development and architecture design. I am a fullstack web3 engineer with a strong ethereum background and a member of dOrg. I have personally contributed to projects and organizations like TheGraph, DeversiFi, Aragon, Daostack, Boardroom and Polywrap. My role on Homebase has been serving as the front-end and integrations tech lead, while also contributing to the architecture design of Homebase and BaseDAO.

Nestor was also kind enough to share what has changed since Homebase’s initial conception.

The core concepts and functionality have not changed, but the implementation plan and details, along with some parts of the BaseDAO architecture definitely have. For instance, at first, there weren’t DAO templates/types, and all DAOs were envisioned as completely generic and customizable. However, the actual implementation for this was not only very complex, but also difficult to present and be used by Homebase users. So core functionality and most common configurations were abstracted into what BaseDAO and Homebase call “templates”; allowing users to select the configuration that best adapts their use case. It is worth noting that this concept of templating is well used by other proven DAO frameworks on ethereum. The biggest challenges have been, without doubt, providing an easy and understandable interface for users to interact with DAOs and their mechanics. This has led us to go over several design iterations, adding more notifications and pointers for users, creating our own indexer to improve performance, among other things. We expect that with further UX iterations and development of the platform, additional resources for users, and adoption in general, the DAO experience, through Homebase, on Tezos, will become something natural among communities.

In regards to the BaseDAO framework for Homebase, Pasquale Pinto of Serokell provided some extra input.
Design thinking workshop — step by step guide
By: Taras Bakusevych
Tags: Design, Workshop, Design Sprint, Design Thinking, Facilitation

Usually, large companies will have multiple user groups, products, and an abundance of problems and questions. In those cases better to run hight level interviews and workshops that focused on framing the problem first, and only after that do you plan follow-up workshops to find solutions to those problems.

3. Always run a pre-workshop research

You don’t want to start asking basic questions, to get up to speed with the audience. Researching as much as you can before the workshop will help you better identify knowledge gaps that you need to close. It helps also to build your credibility quickly, which essential to effective coordination of the group.

4. Choose the relevant activities

After you have set a clear objective, it's time to pick the right tools (activities) to reach it. Choice of activities will depend not only on expected output but also on time you will have and participants you can invite.

When you need to build Empathy

It is one of the cornerstones of design thinking. Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position. Building empathy is a great starting point for your workshop. It will help you understand our customers, what are they trying to achieve, what drives them and what challenges they facing in the process.

Some activities that will help you build empathy:

Proto Personas, Empathy Map, Journey Map, Jobs To Be Done, VPC. Customer Profile.
Announcing Our Summer Creator Workshop Series
By: Medium Creators
Tags: Workshop, Creators, Events, Writing, Medium

Announcing Our Summer Creator Workshop Series

Develop your writing skills, meet our team, and start drafting your next Medium story Medium Creators Jul 16·2 min read

This summer, Medium is hosting three free workshops for creators — all of them geared toward helping you generate ideas, write and revise drafts, expand your audience, and connect with your readers. Whether you’re new to Medium or an established author, we hope you’ll join us.

How to Write an Essay Everyone Wants to Read: 5 Steps to Craft Meaningful Personal Narratives

July 29th, 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET. Watch the recording here.

A well-written personal essay inspires, enlightens, and moves readers. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to choose an angle for your essay and craft a narrative grounded in your voice, perspective, and experience. By the end, you should be equipped to write (or revise) a story that will resonate with editors and readers alike. If you’re participating in the Medium Writers Challenge, we highly encourage you to attend.

Don’t Post and Ghost: 5 Ways to Connect With Your Readers On and Off the Page

August 11th, 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET. Watch the recording here.

Connecting with your audience after you publish a story is as important as the story itself. This workshop will give you tangible ways to use social media and other tools to connect with your readers, build an audience, and drive deeper engagement.

7 Great Ideas for Your Next Story: How to Beat Writer’s Block and Press Publish

August 31st, 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET. Watch the recording here.

All writers psych themselves out sometimes. We start but never finish. Or maybe we can’t even start. In this interactive workshop, we’ll spend time freewriting and working through a series of timed writing prompts. By the end, you should have at least seven promising ideas for your next Medium story.

Bring your story ideas, your Medium drafts, and an open mind. And if you’re unable to make it, not to worry — we’ll record each of these workshops and share those recordings in Creators Hub.

Got an idea for a workshop we should run in the future? Let us know in the responses.
Pokemapping: a simple process to replace personas
Tags: Workshop, Pokemon, UX, Personas, UX Research

Using Pokemapping in design (and beyond! 🚀)

Now you’ve got your groups, you can use them in design.

Take the user-journey we imagined in the example above: the check-in and boarding journey. It has several steps: arrive at the airport, check-in, give off bags, go through security, board plane. You’ll now go through the journey with each group you found: where are the pain-points in the journey for people traveling with kids? Where can we add extra value for people with heavy bags? Or take two or three groups: what if a person is on a business trip with his son and has limited English understanding, what happens in his version of the user-journey?

To make your case stronger, corroborate your features with other data like surveys and analytics. How many people fall into the group ‘heavy bags’? How often are people traveling for business or holidays?

To be fair, you might say: “But Matthijs, I can do that with personas too?” And I would answer: “Not really!”

Let’s say we created two persona’s ‘Bob Business with a frequent flyer pass and knows the layout of the airport like the back of his thumb’ and ‘Jolly Jane who goes on a holiday with her kids, who’s confused and scared by the airport’. First of all: that’s stereotypical and misogynistic. Secondly, it’s too broad to use as a designer (how can I design for someone who’s confused AND has kids AND is scared). Thirdly, we can’t ask follow-up questions (“why is she scared?”) because there are no transcripts to go back to. Fourthly, we can’t corroborate with other data (how many people resemble the personas ‘Jane’ and ‘Bob’? Unknown. How many people are we excluding who are not falling into these two personas? Also unknown).

Another way you can use this method is to go back to the usercards. As Designer, you can take three random user cards and imagine how they’ll go through your newly designed flow. It’s a lightweight usability test.

Limitations of Pokemapping 😱

The limitations of Pokemapping are that it’s context-bound. Your interviews were related to one topic (remember, from step 1?), so your groups are not reusable for other topics! This is different from personas, which are meant as ‘evergreens’. Just because someone is always printing receipts after buying one of your products, does not mean they will want to print your support-documents!

Pokemapping is also not a replacement for traditional analysis: tagging your transcripts and doing in-depth analyses. You’ll gain different insights from that, especially when using a tool like Dovetail where you can combine findings from multiple interviews!
Training workshops — from colleagues for colleagues
By: Patrick Rölike
Tags: Improvement, Workshop, Scrum, Training, Agile

We kept pondering that question quite some time. We know we have some very bright people amongst our colleagues. And we also have more than enough colleagues willing and able to learn. So how to combine these two factors?

Some background information

We were experimenting with this for years now. To understand why this is not an easy question you need to understand how we are operating — or better, how we are invoicing:

Bauer + Kirch started out with a product which was — and still is — sold to customers via licensing. But most of our revenue is made with individual development for our customers. That means that we are not selling a product or licenses but time and material.

So every minute not invested into a project is a minute not bringing in money.

Although this is somewhat true for product companies as well it is not that visible when your license fees keep coming in. If you stop investing time and effort into your products your customers will cancel their subscription at last — but it will take some time for them to become that annoyed.

We needed to find the balance between spending every minute on projects (and therefore stagnate in matters of technological expertise) and learning all the things we would like to improve ourselves in (but neglecting out projects and customers).

Discovering new ways

Things changed a few years ago when we restructured most of our teams using Scrum.

Our Sprint Planning is based on a mix of velocity and team capacity: We usually sum up the time of every team member spent at work during a sprint and the amount of work done, i.e. burned User Stories. For upcoming sprints we estimate how many hours we expect the team to work (subtract vacations, sickness and such) and — et voilà — we “know” how many User Stories we want to tackle this sprint.
Who are the Bridge Builders?
By: Fabiola Moscato
Tags: Workshop, Skill Development, Immagination, Lost Generation, Cooperation

Leaving the Island in order to Come Back

It is relevant to notice that our land, which has always been enriched with dominations from all over the world, today shows instead difficulties in accepting the diversity between the islanders themselves. During the meeting, we understood that the reason that drives us away is perhaps that it is easier to do something if you don’t have to give explanations to anyone.

In Sicily it is also easier when you don’t want to challenge yourself, giving up studying or travelling. The latter two are powerful tools to get in touch with the world and therefore with yourself, to know and share. All the participants in the workshop are studying, everyone has travelled at least once and everyone knew they were there for this reason. Unluckily there are many young people in the conditions of our target who did not attend the meeting because they are far from this kind of moments whose only goal is simply and wonderfully to bring people together.

“In Sicily, even not studying, it could make you a hostile person.”

Skills acquired…

It is necessary to believe in a diversity that unifies. This does not happen in our city because there is a widespread fear of what is unknown. For example, according to the participant Pierpaolo, we are so used to being dominated that we never ask for respect from those we host. He tells us to notice a university citadel colonized by young people from small villages near Palermo. The latter are young people who run away from their families because there is no offer near them, so they choose to study but many of them are not able to respect the surrounding environment, they pollute and Palermo continues to relax, being dominated once again.
8 things to keep in mind while conducting your first workshop
By: Garima Shukla
Tags: Design, Workshop, Workshop For Kids, Education, Art

Over the years, I have made this a mission of mine to “Spread Art & Design”. I was fortunate to conduct multiple workshops in the last few years for a diverse set of audiences ranging from kids(4+) to Adults.

Sharing my learning here so that if one wants to teach art/design by workshops, they can avoid mistakes that I might have done and kickstart from my learnings.

1) Prepare & practise -

Be prepared with the content of the workshop & practice it a few times in advance. Do a trial run beforehand with the presentation, camera, mic & other setups. This will help you in focusing more on the attendees during the workshop. Also, keep a few add ons handy so that in case you finish the workshop earlier than expected you can talk about those points.

2) Keep it interactive -

Keep some time aside for Introductions & Q&A. This will help you to understand your audience better as well as help them to open up with you. Keep the session engaging instead of a monologue which will allow you to form stronger connections.

3) Don’t be too formal-

Often, the process of learning something new can be really stressful. When conducting workshops you should also focus on reducing the stress for the attendees to help them easily navigate with the new learnings. Using humor at places or talking about your struggles when you started or more honest insights will help the attendees relate with you and be more comfortable.

4) Encourage people -

Positive feedback work wonders to nurture passion and learning. Praise attendees for their small attempts & encourage them to make mistakes & be okay about it while they are trying new things.

5) Be patient -

Some people take more time when they are trying out things for the first time. So have patience while they are figuring out how to execute what you are demonstrating. Repeat the process again in case needed. Don’t be in a hurry to wrap up the workshop.

6) Be approachable -

Let attendees ask questions or discuss anytime during the workshops & even let them know that they can reach out to you even after the workshop to resolve their queries.

7) Teach, don’t preach -

Conduct the workshop with a mindset of sharing your knowledge & helping others. Be kind & humble in your approach. Keep it conversational.

8) Have fun -

Have fun yourself while sharing your learnings this will help the attendees to have fun as well.

I hope you find this article helpful :) Feel free to share it with others!
A Chat with an Executive: Alex
By: Nicole Baxter
Tags: Clubs, Society, Workshop, Tech, University

Clubs and societies are great avenues for students to gain experience and skills, and make friends with shared interests, who they’ll keep for life. Here at Get Australia, we believe that what truly makes university societies so great is the people behind them — the members who support the events, and the executives who work tirelessly behind the scenes to organise them. We’ve sat down with a series of executives to find out more about who they are and what they do.

Alex Waite

Society involvement and position/s: Marketing Director at UTS Tech Society, as well as various faculty positions and working with other IT societies.

What’s your favourite event that your society runs? I loved running weekly workshops with my team this semester, varying from tech skills to career information. Seeing people come week to week and learn new skills was really great and was an amazing way to give back to the community. I also loved our welcome drinks — the chance to have a drink and laugh at lightweight first-years struggling to hold their own is always a fun night.

What’s your favourite thing about being involved in your society? I love that in my six months as an executive I’ve met so many people that I wouldn’t have met if I wasn’t involved, from first-years to senior industry representatives. I’ve also made so many good mates in my time as an executive and getting to work with and for these people is fantastic.

What is an interesting fact about you? In the past 12 months, I’ve had more than ten different hair colours, from quirky colours like purple and green, to normal colours like black and my natural brown. I’m now a blonde, but who knows when I’ll get tired of that.
Your Chance to Collaborate With Professional Authors
By: Kern Carter
Tags: Workshop, Newsletter, Writing, Authors

CRY has partnered with Toronto Writers Collective (TWC) to share this incredible opportunity for emerging writers. TWC’s mission is to inspire and empower the unheard through writing and they’ve done just that for a countless number of writers.

Please read below and apply if you’re interested. You DO NOT need to be from Toronto to participate.

Do you have a story to tell? The Toronto Writers Collective is offering the opportunity to celebrate and amplify powerful voices in collaboration with 8 professional authors. Your voice, your stories.

Between July and September, emerging authors will create new works that explore the themes of: Hope, Courage and Survival. Selected pieces will be published in a new Front Lines anthology. Through writing together and listening to others, writers discover and cultivate their voices, inspire others with their stories, and celebrate the diversity within their communities.

The deadline to apply is June 15 at 5 p.m.

Apply Now

More about the Write On! Program

The Toronto Writers Collective has published three anthologies in its Front Lines series. Over 50 emerging authors have been given the opportunity to work with professional authors to develop craft and have their voices heard.

As a Community Arts Development program, Write On! III encourages the artistic development and personal growth of the writer/participants. By working with professional artists, the emerging authors will learn new skills, improve literacy, explore different genres, and have their work published and presented. By creating a community inclusive of race, ethnicity, class, age, gender, sexual orientation, neurodiversity and physical ability, the TWC’s Write On! III Program celebrates creativity, expression, and voice.

The 2021 Write On! III Program will use the TWC method to create new material. The 10-week mentorship will give 6–8 writers in each group the opportunity to develop and hone their writing skills and submit edited material for publication. Applicants will be selected based on their submitted material and included in a group based on their availability to work with the mentors.

Each workshop will be one and a half hours long with additional consultation possible by mutual agreement. The day and time of the workshops may be adjusted based on the mentor’s and participant writers’ availability. Poetry, fiction, biography, memoir and lyrics are genres that have been previously published.

Result of the writing: What to expect

Each emerging author can submit up to six pages of edited material: 1,750 words for fiction, biography, or memoir. A 50-word biography will accompany the finished material. Final editing and assembly will occur during the months of September and October.
How to ruin a Design Sprint in three steps
Tags: Workshop, Design Sprint, Design Thinking, Design Sprint Facilitator, Facilitation

How to ruin a Design Sprint in three steps DSA Follow Apr 3 · 3 min read

“The easy way out usually leads back in” — Peter Senge

It’s only human to want to make things easy. We’ve seen lots of novice Design Sprint Facilitators (and not only) trying to make things easier by hacking the process.

The so-called hacks are:

1. Stop all discussions by using the note-and-vote method extensively.

Talking is overrated anyway, and teams can align and make risky decisions in silence by simply writing ideas on post-it notes and voting with dots.

2. Remove the Deciders from the process.

Deciders have a personal agenda anyway, and they only care about imposing their solution to the team. They are pretty opinionated and are very focused on results, killing the joyful and playful team spirit.

3. Don’t include the customer until the very end.

There’s no point in bringing in the customer perspective early since there’s testing at the end. Talking with customers from the beginning requires time and effort, and the team already knows what the customer problem is.

In our experience, these three hacks can have the opposite effect and cost the sprint success. That’s hard to see as these tactics seem to work, making it easier for the Facilitator to manage the process and tick all the boxes in their schedule. But in the background, the team might be completely lost and misaligned due to the lack of conversations, direction, and hard facts.

Here are three tips that work and we encourage facilitators to do instead:

🗣 Encourage healthy debates

Any group of people will need to shift their perspectives to align and reach a consensus. People will change their point of view and embrace change only by listening to others, learning what others know and seeing things through their eyes.

This means the Facilitator will have to manage sometimes difficult conversations, but the effort will be totally worth it.

👑 Collaborate with the Decider

Research shows that for team members to feel safe, trust each other, and express their opinions freely, they need strong leadership. In a design sprint, the Decider is the one who guides the team with vision and personal accountability.

Facilitators need to understand the critical role a Decider plays during a sprint and work together towards a common purpose — to help the team perform.

👩‍💻 Build empathy with the Customer

When you want teams to create human-centric solutions, you need to start with the “human” first. When a team manages to build empathy with the customer early on, they become more engaged, more passionate about solving that problem, and easier to align towards a common purpose. The outcomes will be better as the team will work with customer insights rather than their assumptions.

Facilitators need to find and bring these customer insights into the process and create a seat at the table for the ultimate beneficiary of a design sprint: the Customer.
Medium’s Creator Workshop Series Is Back
By: Medium Creators
Tags: Medium 101, Workshop, Creators, Writing, Medium

Medium’s Creator Workshop Series Is Back

Four free workshops to help you improve your writing, earn money on Medium, and find your niche Medium Creators 2 days ago·2 min read

Medium is hosting four new, free workshops for creators this fall. We hope they’ll help you hone your writing and self-editing skills, earn money for your work, and move a few steps closer to publishing your next story. No matter your level of experience, you’re welcome to join.

Immediately Improve Any Story: Let’s Make Your Draft or Published Post Even Better

September 29th, 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET. Register here.

Writing is a process of constant rewriting. And on the internet, nothing is ever finished. In this workshop, we’ll explore five tactical ways to improve anything you’ve written (whether you’ve already published it or not). We encourage you to bring a Medium draft so you can apply these tips in real time.

Your Guide to Monetization on Medium: Getting Paid for the Stories You Publish and the Audiences You Build

October 14th, 12 p.m. PT/3 p.m. ET. Register here.

On Medium, anyone with a perspective to share can build an audience and eventually earn money for their work. Here, we’ll break down the two ways you can monetize your stories: the Partner Program and Referred Memberships. We’ll also share best practices for growing your earnings over time. Please bring your questions!

Write What You Know: Turn Your Professional Experience Into Stories Readers Want

October 26th, 10:30 a.m. PT/1:30 p.m. ET. Register here.

No matter what your career may be, chances are you’ve honed a particular area of expertise (or 12) over the years. Medium is the perfect place to share what you know with a broader audience — and to connect with other thinkers and leaders in your field. Join us for a workshop that will inspire you to deliver your knowledge and experience to a new audience in fresh ways.

Write With Us: An Hour of Dedicated Writing Time for Medium Creators

November 9th, 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET. Register here.

Bring a draft, an outline, or that story idea you’ve been kicking around for the last few months. In this session, we’ll share a few optional prompts and spend most of our time just writing. By the end, you should be a few steps closer to pressing “publish.”

If you can’t make it, we’ll share recordings of each workshop in Creators Hub as soon as they’re ready. And in case you missed it, our summer workshop series was a hit — here are the highlights:

Got ideas for future creator events? Drop a line in the responses.
[Live Virtual] 3 Days Agile Testing for the Whole Team Workshop 1/2021
By: Prathan D.
Tags: Workshop

Workshop: Agile Testing for the Whole Team

Delivered: 3 days

Date: Monday, October 11, 2021 — Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Time: 09:00–17:00

Language: Thai

Location: Bangkok, Thailand

All of the knowledge and experiences are delivered using Zoom Meeting and Miro as live interactive workshops that enhance participation and keep focus.

Register to seize the knowledge and experiences

You can register to get the ticket at

This workshop we have 4 type of the tickets following the list

Ticket Type A: My company pay for me

Price: 25,000.00 THB (Not including VAT)

For a group registration 5 tickets up get discount 15%, contact for the information at [email protected]

The invoice and the tax/receive invoice, name of the payee is company name

Ticket Type B: I pay by myself

Price: 10,000.00 THB (Not including VAT)

The invoice and the tax/receive invoice, name of the payee is the participant name who pay for themselves

Ticket Type C: I am lecturer in the university

Price: 5,000.00 THB (Not including VAT)

Ticket Type D: For VP, SPV, or C-Level

3 free tickets

1 ticket for the 1 company

Send the email to request the ticket to [email protected]

Agile Testing for the Whole Team Workshop

Created and maintained by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

Image from Agile Testing Fellowship website

Co-authors of Agile Testing: A practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, and Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Intro, present their.

Delivered the knowledge and experiences to you by Prathan Dansakulcharoenkit
What Are You Waiting For? | Write Here 12
By: Jolie A. Doggett
Tags: Workshop, Writehere, Writing, Writing Prompts, Writing Tips

Hey writers! In case you missed it, the recordings of our Summer Creator Workshops are now available on the Creator’s Hub!

In these workshops you’ll learn how to craft the perfect essay, how to connect with readers and grow your audience, and how to beat writer’s block and put your work out there (← that’s the class I taught!).

Click the link below to access all of this valuable information directly from Medium editors and let’s get into this week’s prompts!

THIS WEEK’S PROMPTS

“I would be so happy if …”

Finish the above sentence. What would make you the happiest person in the world right now? A maple syrup and bacon donut (they exist!)? A text from someone special? The end of the pandemic? Let your imagination soar and tag “Writehere.”

What are you waiting for?

For a new season of your favorite show to start streaming? For someone you care about to make the first move? For the right moment to express your true self? This is your sign, the time is now. Stop waiting and start writing and tag “Writehere.”

What’s something you want to be an expert in?

Last week, we asked you to share your expertise. This week, let’s be honest about the skills we’re lacking. What’s something you wish you understood better? What do you wish you knew more about? Write it out and tag “Writehere.”
Community Launch
By: Ethereum Optimism
Tags: Rollup, Optimism, Ethereum, Layer 2

Today marks a major milestone for OE: with our latest protocol changes running stably on mainnet, it’s time to begin opening up deployment! Anybody who meets our launch criteria can apply to be whitelisted on mainnet and will be approved within 2 weeks.

With over 750,000 transactions since our last protocol release, it’s. finally. time. The days of scalable, composable ecosystem growth are upon us. Additionally, this will kick off the process of increasing our TPS limit, starting with a doubling next week.

Why no full deployment?

While we are incredibly excited to be opening up to more projects, the OVM is still in beta. We have not fully disabled the whitelist just yet, and we’re still keeping the transaction throughput limit below L1 levels.

We have one more major upgrade upcoming in the next 3 months that will remove a majority of the remaining OVM DevEx hurdles. In general, if you will have to maintain a significantly different base of contracts (e.g. due to code size or gas) to maintain OVM compatibility, we suggest waiting for the next release to smooth things out. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on discord if you have questions!

What do I do?

If you’re as excited about this as we are, come deploy! You can check out the whitelisting criteria here, and when you meet the criteria, you can apply here.
Understanding Fees in Optimistic Ethereum: Part 1
By: Ethereum Optimism
Tags: Uniswap, Uniswap V3, Ethereum, Ovm, Optimism

As an Ethereum L2 at the tail end of a major L1 gas crisis, our most frequently asked questions are:

How cheap ($) will transactions be on Optimistic Ethereum? What will determine transaction costs on Optimistic Ethereum?

Unsurprisingly, these answers are fundamentally related. In this post, we’re going to tackle question #1, sharing concrete figures for what fees users can expect in the near term. Question #2 is a bit more involved — we’ll be sharing more in an upcoming Part 2.

Our system currently reduces baseline user transaction costs by ~10x-50x. The table below lays out these savings by transaction type, which will improve substantially over time.

However, these baseline costs are just that — a baseline. Like with any chain, there are fundamental capacity constraints which must be controlled with variable cost. In Optimistic Ethereum, we target a gas limit with an EIP1559-style pricing mechanism. This means that if it experiences too much demand, the protocol will increase fees until transactions/day fall back under the limit. We will maintain control of the targeting algorithm at launch to test what real-world parameterization should be before enshrining it into the protocol.

Keeping OE safe and stable is our priority, so our congestion pricing will target 50,000 transactions/day on Uniswap launch and maintain a price floor of 1.5x the base L1 cost to the system (still 9x+ cheaper for the user). We’ll increase this 50,000 limit (which is already close to the daily volume of all of Uniswap on L1) up to theoretical system limits over time as the system proves to be secure in production.

As for question #2 — as it turns out, knowing what will drive fees on Optimistic Ethereum is important to us more than anyone. Without an understanding of the economics which shape how Optimistic Ethereum behaves, it could be easy to implement the wrong optimizations. Next week, we’ll dive into the fundamental drivers of fees, and how different architectural decisions affect them. Here’s a sneak peek for the adventurous. 😉
“ Nothing is impossible”
By: Ansa Asim
Tags: Growth Mindset, Optimism, Positive Thinking

Audrey Hepburn said very beautiful line 👇🏻

“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I m possible ”

Human is the best creation of GOD.Then why you don’t believe on HIM and say i can’t do this .(Mujhsay nhi hoga) If you have firm believe on God no need to worry about anything then ,

If you think to do something which is very close to your heart but find it difficult and you don’t wanna take risk . what we do then? We just give it a title it is impossible..It is just as the idiom “Grapes are sour” .

Just keep one thing in the mind If you are energetic , emotionally powerful,strong then nothing is impossible .God create you not because you don’t do that thing which are out of your range . Do that thing which you like , which you love. If you want to go to a place which you love the most but the place is so far then buy the tickets ,travel and go .Don’t be lazy .

If you want to be successful but it seems to be very difficult.Don’t worry at all .Just stick to it and keep on trying with work hard. One day you’ll definitely successful in the life.

I just want one thing from anyone____ When you’ll get success just give a lesson to others,inspire them , write and say a line NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE

People always fear to take risks and this is the reason they don’t reach the post where they want …There are so many examples who take risk and now enlisted in the successful people

Everyone will be successful person one day if they believe on God and kept on trying and at the end everyone will say

“Nothing Is Impossible ”. If you like or dislike it and want to give any suggestion and advise about improvement or anything else .I would love to know

Thank you so much!!!
Diabetic Cyborg Life 4/23: Refuse/Resist
By: Adam, Diabetic Cyborg
Tags: Covid 19 Crisis, Politics, Optimism, This Happened To Me, Life

The way I approach life is usually one of optimism, but something has just got to give. I accept that it is the crush of terrible leadership and paranoia of being so vulnerable to this disease, but venting needs to occur sometimes. Yet, I refuse and resist giving in to the ease that is anger, despair and hate.

The time those emotions basically controlled my life was during my 20s. I prefer to think I am more emotionally stable now. This might just be a fanciful way of self-delusion that I am not angry when the pot is frothing and about to boil over.

Somehow, I feel that metaphor is more apt to describe the social atmosphere of America now though. This started on the same note as that crock is bubbling soon to simmer over. That force of good inside me took stock and saw all that does is make it worse.

Call it Buddha, God, Jesus, Yahweh, Ganesha or Allah I call it peace in a time of great sadness. Relying on outside forces or gods is one way of dealing with the sadness that inundates society now.

However, you find peace, I pray and hope you can find that harmony as millions will die because of something so small you need an electron microscope to see.

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