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sekou

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Full Stack Software Engineer with 10+ years of professional experience.

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Tanzania may have the lowest GDP of the three port countries mentioned but Dar es Salaam has the largest population compared to the smaller cities of Mombasa and Durban. From what little I understand the Tanzanian government may be in the best place politically to use these stress tests to focus more attention on port health and capabilities. I'd be happy for anyone else to weigh in.

ActivityPub potentially helps to solve this. With enough well-exposed/accessible connections to sites or posts you might be able to traverse around a network and collect similar items. There are a lot of other challenges there but it's a possibility.

Start Self Hosting 4 years ago

I'm not affiliated but I came across some software called Yunohost (https://yunohost.org/) recently, a Debian-based OS that tries to be user-friendly for self-hosting applications. Not sure how much it's being maintained.

One of the more compelling new features looks to be Live Translate built into the keyboard for 48 languages using Private Compute Core. I'd be curious about accuracy but I'm glad things moving forward in that space.

Like the render on the Lockheed Martin site the first thing that came to my mind was Africa. This could be a solution for heavy-load cheap transport across huge swaths of land where road or rail infrastructure would be inefficient or too expensive to develop. It could help extend commerce beyond coastal regions both on the continent and worldwide.

This is wonderful. Long ago MS Publisher had templates that allowed you to build paper airplanes. I remember discovering this as a kid in elementary school with my friends.

I've used mostly Android phones in the past I was trying to decide whether to get the Z5 Compact or finally try Apple with the iPhone SE. After nearly a year with my first iPhone I'm ready to switch back. How has your experience been with that phone?

I think this article hints at what may have been one of the causes of that change in direction. It appears that Russia faked black radical activism in social media in order to intentionally sow division in the US. But that action plays into the larger current political climate where it's "either you're with us or against us" by default rather than "even if we don't agree on everything, let's make progress where we do agree."

This excellently shows the problem with how value is currently assessed in the social media landscape. The "In case you missed it" algorithm-based organization of tweets and the focus on video to "increase engagement" at any cost are same reasons why there has been a widespread backlash against Facebook. On the other hand, building your feed from the ground up granularly is one of the larger differences between Twitter and Facebook.

3D Color Print 8 years ago

It's amazing to think that not long ago we marveled and scoffed at the prohibitive cost of 2D computer printing, going from simple monochrome printouts to highly detailed full color physical manifestations.

In addition to the attention to design detail it speaks to the brand strength of Apple that if any of their competitors released a phone with a similarly unconventional screen shape it would have been a weakness that would drastically affect the acceptance of the phone, even if it was engineered in the exact same way. The notch is truly a feature only Apple would be able to have success with.

As many have said, there's more to this than just one type or the other. It might be worth considering taking a more intentional look at organizing teams around similar circadian rhythms. Some of the most productive work I've done was with a team that really started gaining momentum in the afternoons and sometimes into the evenings. I think many who deviate far from the "norm" self-select into late-night service industry positions. There are a lot of misconceptions around "early birds" or "late workers" that could be explained by varying sleeping patterns.

I think the first country to do this will be an interesting thing to watch, particularly as older models for society appear to be increasingly dysfunctional.

There have been articles over the last few years that have highlighted the dangers of idolizing and prioritizing innovation. I too hope for increased attention to craft and design of software in the future.

Yeah I believe it's about 2/3rds down the page under the heading "Links to generated websites." It's a far cry from the old Dreamweaver days. I could see running into some complexity with CSS. Things like which units to use (em, vh/vw, %, px, rem, etc), building a readable selector hierarchy, or using newer CSS technologies like CSS grid or animations.

This is a cool idea. I think this technology could potentially assist front-end developers and the designers who work with them even though there's still a fair amount of craft involved. Browser compatibility has gotten better on the desktop in recent years but the mobile appearance of websites is as diverse as ever. It might be interesting to explore "mobile-first" or "progressive enhancement" applications of this technology.

Learn to sell 9 years ago

Casting a wide net is simply part of the game, of course, but wasting your prospect’s time is bad selling. Every good sales professional knows this, which is why the best ones put in the time, effort and attention to detail to make their pitches – even the opening ones – as tailored and relevant as possible.

The book "High Probability Selling" by Jacques Werth offers some good solutions to approaching sales with the intent of quickly connecting your product to the customers who want or need it most.

I think if we're talking about compilation as an analogy we're talking about being able to customize the phone to very specific specifications before it's manufactured (battery size, camera type, headphone jack, etc) and then having the phone constructed in the same sealed kind of way any modern phone is made. That might be interesting if the manufacturing process could be made cheap enough.

While growth has slowed in recent years, 6 of the world's 10 fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2010 (https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_cha... ). While Kenya isn't included among those countries it has also shown robust growth. It may be that this growth is unfairly geared toward the wealthiest Africans but I think you'd find that the life of the average Kenyan has improved markedly in the last 20 years.

A surprising amount of phenomena in today's world can be explained around this theory. Every prediction in the "Further Expectations" section has in a way come to pass. As far as his prediction that money becomes "less important" it's possible that within a century VR will recreate a number of the experiences you would need material wealth to obtain today. A trend has already begun with younger generations giving preference to virtual experiences. It's still hard to tell if that's a world I'd want to live in.

I started small and it's been somewhat effective, but I haven't stopped completely. What works well for me is only opening Facebook in private mode in my browser (which has other benefits as well, I was growing sick of seeing ads in FB from other sites I was using.) I have to log in every time I use it so I'm forced to think about it first. I do this on desktop and on my phone. I still use it but a lot less.

Salman Khan's One World Schoolhouse does a good job exploring this topic I think. On the one hand many students struggle with what he calls a "swiss cheese" understanding of math: lacking mastery of fundamental concepts that leads them to struggle as they grow older. On the other hand he advocates for a more holistic approach to learning overall from the beginning, exposing children to various subjects and exploring how everything is connected.

Instagram was on the path to becoming a true rival to Facebook, that's why Mark Zuckerberg bought it. They had very savvy engineers working on a fantastic product; that's still true it's just happening under different ownership. Facebook didn't beat Snapchat with Facebook, it beat them with Instagram. They tried copying features directly to Facebook from Snapchat and that fell flat.

I remember reading Instagram blog posts and having a sense that engineering the product well was something they held to high importance. Since then they've been acquired by Facebook but their team still seems driven by those kinds of values.