Heyo,
I’m in Austin for the first time. Looking forward to their 24 Hour Hackathon starting today. But the internet moves on! More people keep writing great stories! And I’ve curated IMHO the best of the best :-) You can find all this month’s top stories in the March archive, but without further ado…
Here are the top ten tech stories of the week:
How Chris Messina Works, and What’s the Future of AMAs? Chris is internet famous for inventing the hashtag, and his new company, Molly.com, is more than MDMA’s namesake. It was great to learn more about how he sees the internet and why he does the work he does. Thanks Chris Messina for sharing your tech wisdom, like the quote below:
Picking the low hanging passwords by David Gilbertson. According to a not-at-all recent report by Keeper, there’s a 50/50 chance that any user account can be accessed with one of the 25 most common passwords. And there’s a 17% chance that the password is 123456. This strikes me as absolute rubbish, but it got me thinking, if I want to get unfettered access to some user accounts, and I don’t really care which accounts, rather than using ‘brute force’ by trying many passwords for one user account, it makes much more sense to flip that and try one password on many user accounts.
Read more Software development stories.
The Biggest Content Website You Never Heard Of: And Here’s Why by Rishi Sachdeva. In the entire journey, including the strategy and execution of our business model, we didn’t realise one critical shortcoming: it all relied on a platform that we didn’t own, a platform that was too powerful to let anything thrive on it for free — Facebook.com. By virtue of dealing directly with Facebook influencers/pages, we were essentially cutting the platform itself off from the equation.
Read more Social Media stories.
The 4 Layers of Single Page Applications You Need to Know by Daniel Dughila. Every successful project needs a clear architecture, which is understood by all team members.
Starsky Robotics Drove a Fully-Driverless Truck (and raised $16.5m from Shasta Ventures) by Stefan Seltz-Axmacher. Starsky Robotics is the only autonomous truck team with a product. I’m thrilled to announce that we drove a truck 7 miles fully unmanned. No safety driver behind the wheel, no engineer hiding on the bunk. We are the first company to make driverless trucks reality. Watch our GoPro footage.
Read more venture capital and self driving vehicle stories.
Blockchain Oracles Will Make Smart Contracts Fly by Doug von Kohorn. At a very high level, using an oracle means receiving data from outside of a blockchain. Said another way, an oracle provides a connection between real world events and a blockchain. In my opinion, all of the really interesting complex smart contracts require outside information — financial derivatives, gambling, stablecoins, identity…literally anything where you want to incorporate something happening in the real world.
Read more about Smart Contracts.
🔥 JavaScript Modules Worth Using 🔥 by Travis Fischer. A quick breakdown of the most useful JavaScript modules that I find myself using over and over again. This is an opinionated article that focuses on general-purpose modules and utilities that I’ve found invaluable to NodeJS and frontend JavaScript development. It won’t be exhaustive or include any special-purpose modules, as those types of awesome lists are indeed awesome but tend to be a bit overwhelming.
You Helped Us Raise $2600 for SF Marin Food Bank — $13,000 worth of food by Micha Benoliel. With each download we donated $1 to the SF Marin Food Bank. That $1 allows the Food Bank to provide $5 worth of food due to their ability to purchase in bulk. The $2600 raised could provide $13,000 worth of food thanks to SF Marin food bank or it could mean more much needed storage space. Debbie Bullish, Community Engagement Manager from SF Marin Food Bank, tells us: “Currently the warehouse comes in at an impressive 55,000 square feet. It’s built to hold 28m lbs / year, however we deliver 48m lbs/year, which is equivalent to 100,000 meals/day. We simply don’t have the capacity to run at full throttle and that is a grave shame considering the impact this charity is making.”
Read more Tech for Good and marketing stories.
How to tell a story in the blockchain world? by Mohit Mamoria. Blockchain has allowed for the first time in the entire human history for strangers to collaborate without having first to trust each other. And the implications that it is creating in the industries other than the finances is astonishing. This shift is huge! Who would have thought that the journey on which human species embarked upon thousands of years ago by painting marks on the cave walls would lead up to the day where the future of the entire species would revolve around telling stories.
An Open Letter to Banks about Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies by Peter McCormack. Dear Mr Bank Manager, This is not an easy letter for me to write. I have been a customer of yours for over 20 years. You were there with a loan for me when I bought my first car; you helped arrange the mortgage when I bought my first house, and you even helped me launch my first business. We have been through so much together. And I’ll let you into a little secret? You were my first! Don’t worry, I know I wasn’t yours. I think this is why this relationship means so much more to me than you.
And ICYMI From Around the Web
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). This 20 minute video — while a bit introductory — is funny as shit and hits on some of those iconic moments in the crypto movement, like comparing hacking the blockchain to putting a chicken back together from chicken nuggets and this guy’s irrational (and oddly motivational) optimism for BitConnect.
Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted.
Kind Regards,