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Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: how tech companies can cut through passive-aggressive media

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.1K

Entrepreneurs make for easy targets. Whatever your business is doing, it’s guaranteed to ruffle some feathers. But don’t be quick to blame the public. Most times, being sceptical of change is only logical.

Even those who buy into your product will probably expect it to fail. 20% of businesses shut their doors during their first year, and less then half survive for more than five. We may not know these numbers, but we know it from experience — most of them overpromise, underdeliver and ultimately disappoint.

As such, it’s no surprise that the internet is full of passive-aggressive tech coverage. No matter what you do, your business is going to be attacked and demeaned. No one is immune.

Look no further than the original iPhone’s early reviews. It generated a lot of negative coverage for the sake of negative coverage. CNET’s main complaints revolved over a lack of physical buttons, completely missing the entire point of having a touchscreen. A Techcrunch columnist went even further and outright damned it to failure. Sounds funny now, but 14 years ago these people were dead serious.

Of course, these days everyone is an expert and the comment sections matter more than the articles they follow. Unlike traditionally restrained media professionals, the overconfident amateurs on popular UGC platforms openly take pleasure in attacking whatever they come across. It might be their way of letting off steam from being bullied at work or having financial difficulties, but no matter the reason, you still have to deal with a bunch of people trying to paint you in a negative light. And that’s not easy.

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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
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10+ Biggest Remote Tech Jobs Aggregators Comparison

Reading time 7 min
Views 3.8K

There is a myriad of articles about where to find remote jobs, particularly in tech. Some of them are outdated and most of them don't provide detailed reviews. So that's why I decided to do my own research. I did a basic search by "React" skill (where possible) and expected to see mostly "Frontend Developer" vacancies.

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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
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Speech Analytics: Benefits and its New Importance in Telecommunication Technology

Reading time 3 min
Views 1.2K

Speech analytics is the process of analysing recorded speech, such as phone calls, to gather customer information to improve communication and future customer interaction. Speech analytics as a technology has been evolving especially rapidly over the last few years. It gives the ability to structure and analyse previously lost streams of insight-rich data, such as phone conversations. Empowered with this technology, operations can gather incredibly valuable business intelligence to drive call delivery performance improvements. It’s smart in that it automatically identifies focus areas in which customer service or sales teams may need additional call training which then, in turn, improves the call’s successful outcome. Speech analytics, as a process, can isolate buzzwords and phrases used most frequently within a given time period, plus indicate usage is trending up or down. This data is highly useful to call managers to spot changes in consumer behaviour so that action can be taken to improve customer satisfaction.

Zadarma is a leading global VoIP provider and offers a smart speech analytics feature as part of their incredibly easy to use telecommunications offering. The tool is free as part of the wider PBX phone system bundles, included in the free recognition minutes. Zadarma’s analytics feature allows data access to every internal or external call conversation. The benefits of speech analytics include:

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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
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The founder’s guide to AngelList

Reading time 4 min
Views 2.3K

AngelList is a social network designed to connect startups with investors and vice versa. The founders of it were dissatisfied with how opaque the VC world was, and found a way to increase the amount of available data. The project began in partnership with just 50 volunteer investors wishing to allocate $80 million in capital, and has grown to be the leading website of its kind. Over the past three years more than 75% of startups that received seed funding from American investors used AngelList to make it happen.

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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
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What is one of the most common mistakes beginner developers make

Reading time 2 min
Views 1.4K

It may seem that when you are a beginner, you'll do simple things only. No need to learn data structures and algorithms. No need to understand Big O notation, complexity and stuff like that. 

This couldn't be further away from the truth!

In 2008, when I just started learning to program, I spent a lot of time reading books on PHP and MySQL. Months later, when I felt confident, I took my first freelance project. It was a real estate website. A simple one. I used a custom-made ORM and everything worked just fine!

When I released it, the search feature quickly became sluggish and made the website unusable. 

I was wondering what the heck had happened. I figured out that database queries became very slow when there were over 200 real estate objects added to it. 

This is it. What worked fine during testing did not work in real life.

I was a self-taught developer. I did not know how to measure if my project scaled well. I didn't even know that I had to do it.

I thought algorithms mattered only for launching a spaceship.

If I had some basic understanding of algorithms, I would have known that the more the input, the longer it takes. 

I am not saying I would have come up with a robust solution as a junior, but I would have looked for a solution because I knew there would be a problem. 

Please, don't make the same mistake!

Of course, data structures and algorithms are much more than that and they apply differently depending on what you work on.

But a basic understanding of data structures and algorithms is a must for every software developer. 

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Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1 -1
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10(+) years in the Labs

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.2K

At the beginning of the year 2021, Qrator Labs is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. On January 19 our company marks the official passing of a formal 10 years longevity mark, entering its second decade of existence. 

Everything started a little bit earlier - when at the age of 10 Alex saw the Robotron K 1820 - in 2008, when Alexander Lyamin - the founder and CEO of Qrator Labs, approached the Moscow State University superiors, where he worked as a NOC engineer at the time, with an idea of a DDoS-attack mitigation research project. The MSU's network was one of the largest in the country and, as we know now, it was the best place to hatch a future technology.

That time MSU administration agreed, and Mr Lyamin took his own hardware to the university, simultaneously gathering a team. In two years, by summer 2010, the project turned out to be that successful. It courted the DDoS attack of a bandwidth exceeding the MSU's upstream bandwidth capability. And on June 22 MSU superiors gave Mr Lyamin a choice - to shut down or find money to incorporate.

Alexander Lyamin chose to incorporate with his own means, which effectively meant that the needed infrastructure must be built from scratch. The initial design should be distributed instead of concentrated within one network, which resources were not enough for this specific task. And by September 1, 2010, those first server sites were ready and running.

Flashback with us
Total votes 28: ↑28 and ↓0 +28
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Passcode Data Protection by Using FPGA and Verilog

Reading time 4 min
Views 2.7K

There are many situations when you need to protect your data, and different tools can be used to do that. For example, a safe. We develop a passcode data protection mechanism by using an FPGA board and Quartus Prime software. It allows demonstrating the basic concepts of a combination lock such as entering data, setting and checking a passcode, and displaying data.

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Total votes 5: ↑3 and ↓2 +1
Comments 0

GTK: The First Analyzer Run in Figures

Reading time 5 min
Views 969

For some people, the introduction of a static analyzer into a project seems like an insurmountable obstacle. It is widely believed that the amount of analysis results issued after the first run is so large that only two options seem reasonable: do not mess with it at all or refocus all people on fixing warnings. In this article, we will try to dispel this myth by implementing and configuring the analyzer on a GTK project.

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Startups going global: a guide to Product Hunt

Reading time 4 min
Views 2K

Product Hunt is a Y-combinator backed discovery platform, founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013. Conceived as an email list, it has gone on to become one of the most popular directories, raised $7.5 million in backing and was acquired by AngelList — a social network for entrepreneurs — in December 2016.

Exposure on the platform contributed to viral successes of Yo and Ship Your Enemies Glitter, and brought multi-million dollar companies, like Robinhood and Gimlet Media, to the public eye.

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Total votes 5: ↑5 and ↓0 +5
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9 Reasons Why Students Don’t Want You as a Teacher

Reading time 1 min
Views 1.5K
Teaching is hard! Finding a way to explain ideas and concepts, finding an approach to each individual among your students, each having a unique mind and learning capabilities. Being patient and creative, friendly but respective, kind but fair. You have to understand complex stuff and be able to present them in the simplest of ways. There are so many things that you must balance and consider in your work. Teachers, you are heroes, the every-day heroes! With this heroic work comes a responsibility. A responsibility of keeping yourself accountable for your student’s education. Some teachers forget about that and stay oblivious to the mistakes they are making. We’ve compiled a list of 9 Reasons Why Students Don’t Want You as a Teacher. We sincerely hope that it will help you to self-reflect, better connect with your students and achieve better results during your lessons.
Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1 -1
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Did It Have to Take So Long to Find a Bug?

Reading time 2 min
Views 1.8K
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Have you ever wondered which type of project demonstrates higher code quality – open-source or proprietary? Our blog posts may seem to suggest that bugs tend to concentrate in open-source projects. But that's not quite true. Bugs can be found in any project, no matter the manner of storage. As for the code quality, it tends to be higher in those projects where developers care about and work on it. In this small post, you will learn about a bug that took two years to fix, although it could have been done in just five minutes.
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Total votes 3: ↑2 and ↓1 +1
Comments 0

Russian microcontroller K1986BK025 based on the RISC-V processor core for smart electricity meters

Reading time 10 min
Views 6.7K
Welcome to RISC-V era!

Solutions based on the open standard instruction set architecture RISC-V are currently increasing their presence on the market. Microcontrollers from Chinese colleagues are already in serial production; Microchip is offering interesting solutions with FPGA on board. The ecosystem of software and design tools for this architecture are also growing. Seeming previously unshaken leaders have more often found themselves in resale ads, while young startups attract multi-million investments. Milandr also got involved in this race and today began supplying interested companies with samples of its new K1986BK025 microcontroller based on the RISC-V processor core for electricity meters. Well here we go, pictures, characteristics and other information, as well as a little bit of hype under the cut.


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Total votes 9: ↑9 and ↓0 +9
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Patroni cluster (with Zookeeper) in a docker swarm on a local machine

Reading time 20 min
Views 9.1K

There probably is no way one who stores some crucial data (and well, in particular, using SQL databases) can possibly dodge from thoughts of building some kind of safe cluster, distant guardian to protect consistency and availability at all times. Even if the main server with your precious database gets knocked out deadly - the show must go on, right? This basically means the database must still be available and data be up-to-date with the one on the failed server.

As you might have noticed, there are dozens of ways to go and Patroni is just one of them. There is plenty of articles providing a more or less detailed comparison of the options available, so I assume I'm free to skip the part of luring you into Patroni's side. Let's start off from the point where among others you are already leaning towards Patroni and are willing to try that out in a more or less real-case setup.

I am not a DevOps engineer originally so when the need for the high-availability cluster arose and I went on I would catch every single bump on the road. Hope this tutorial will help you out to get the job done with ease! If you don't want any more explanations, jump right in. Otherwise, you might want to read some more notes on the setup I went on with.

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Unicorns on Guard for Your Safety: Exploring the Bouncy Castle Code

Reading time 7 min
Views 923
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Would you like to see a new batch of errors found by the PVS-Studio static analyzer for Java? Then keep reading the article! This time the Bouncy Castle project is to be checked. The most interesting code snippets, as usual, are waiting for you below.
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Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1 -1
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How to prepare for PMP exam in 60 days

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.8K
Do you think of taking the PMP exam? Awesome! Do you know how to plan your preparation for the test? Here I’m going to share the plan of how to get prepared for the PMP exam in 60 days.

PMP exam = your own project


To begin with, let’s clarify: you’re ready to work hard and to follow the plan. Otherwise, this journey will take you forever. The key here is to perceive the PMP exam as your personal project and manage it like you're managing projects for your clients. The difference here is that you are your client yourself; and you are the resource to release this project. What is more, you will need not only to plan this project, but to execute the plan yourself too. On one hand, it will add an additional challenge. On the other hand, it will make things even more exciting to get them done.

What do you need to launch this project? First of all, the input data. This is actually what you usually need to start a project. I’m talking about the key performance indicators that we consider while planning a project. They are time, scope and budget. Of course, funds are important. As you have decided to take the test and to pass the certification you should be aware of the process: how much the test costs, how much the course costs, and other relevant expenses. Therefore, let’s move directly to the time and scope.

Time


You have 60 days in order to get prepared for the PMP exam, and that is why you need to define how much time you are able to allocate to get prepared for the tests daily.

Yes, daily, because 60 days is quite an intense period. I know that for some people it takes six months or even a year to get prepared for this test. However, the less period of time you have, the more advantages you finally get.

Here is the thing, for the PMP there is no shortcut. It is quite a big volume of knowledge that you need to obtain in order to pass this test.
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5 Most Popular IT Outsourcing Software Development Companies in India

Reading time 5 min
Views 2K

The global IT outsourcing market generated a revenue of $520.74 billion in 2019 and it is expected to surge at a CAGR of 7.7% during the 2020-2027 period. The immense growth of the market is due to the growing popularity of outsourcing software development companies across the globe. 

In fact, in 2018, India dominated the global IT outsourcing market with a 67.0% share and the Indian IT sector generated a revenue of more than $150.0 billion with a CAGR of 10-15.0% per year. 

The majority of small businesses, start-ups, and enterprises are inclined towards IT outsourcing companies for managing and handling their business. There are hundreds and thousands of outsourcing software development companies available on the internet but choosing the top-notch IT outsourcing company is a tough call because you might fall into the wrong trap

So, for that, I am going to shortlist the top 5 software development outsourcing companies in India that not only add value to your business but also help you to expand your business across the globe. 

I am going to prepare a list of parameters that will back the shortlisting of these top 5 IT outsourcing companies in India- 

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Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1 -1
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Is headless e-commerce right for your business?

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.9K
Is headless e-commerce right for your business?

Headless e-commerce is a hot topic in the media and industry events. Business owners who learn more about headless eCommerce (usually called “headless commerce”) start feeling uncomfortable, not understanding whether it is sufficiently important to implement it or not. No one wants to stay behind with technology, but retailers do not have money left for unnecessary toys either. Let's have a look for possible benefits and pitfalls.
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Total votes 3: ↑2 and ↓1 +1
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How To Build a Password Management Software Using JAVA?

Reading time 5 min
Views 13K

In this digital world, people prefer to work remotely. There are numerous tasks that each of us goes through every day. If I talk about an application's usage, then it has been predicted that there will be a 25% increase in global app downloads between 2018 and 2022

But it can be quite challenging for organizations to maintain and create multiple passwords. Hence, a password management software can be a great choice to manage this effectively. It is like your bank locker, where one can store numerous passwords. The users only need a master password to access the software.

Do You Know? 

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Fatal Fight: How we've got 5 million organic installs?

Reading time 8 min
Views 1.6K
Fatal Fight Android game

The story of Fatal Fight started in 2015. The time when going global and having 5 million downloads on Google Play Store seemed to be a dream of every game developer.

In this article, I will talk about the way we converted the dream into our actual reality. To make it super understandable, find a guide below where I will cover all the stages of development of Fatal Fight and even more.


Research


The idea of Fatal Fight hasn't just come from nowhere. Before understanding what game to develop, we needed to research what are the current gaps in the mobile games market. And, to come to this point, we took several steps.

First, we analyzed what are the most searchable mobile games in the Google Play Store. It turned out, the top 3 mobile games that users were looking for were the following:

  • Puzzle Games
  • Car Games
  • Fighting Games

Here we narrowed down our research. We were playing most downloaded games from each category to figure out if those games meet users’ needs while trying to answer what kind of challenges they have with those games.

As a result, Puzzle and Car Games had a wide range of mobile games with pretty nice UI/UX design and other characteristics. However, during the testing of the fighting games, the picture was quite different.

We were surprised by the fact that we could not find any proper games with satisfactory features. And I believe, not only we but also the dozens of users who were craving for favorable experience while playing a fighting game.

While asking ourselves the question “Why?” we found out that the main reason was the gameplay. The interaction between users and the games was complex. It was not comfortable to manage punching, kicking, jumping and other possible moves separately or even all at once on a smartphone.
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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
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