• The founder’s guide to AngelList

      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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    • What is one of the most common mistakes beginner developers make

        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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      • 10(+) years in the Labs

          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
        • Passcode Data Protection by Using FPGA and Verilog

            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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          • GTK: The First Analyzer Run in Figures

              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

                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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              • 9 Reasons Why Students Don’t Want You as a Teacher

                  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.
                • Did It Have to Take So Long to Find a Bug?

                    image1.png

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

                    • Translation
                    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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                  • Patroni cluster (with Zookeeper) in a docker swarm on a local machine

                    • Tutorial

                    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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                  • How to prepare for PMP exam in 60 days

                    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

                      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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                    • Is headless e-commerce right for your business?

                        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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                      • How To Build a Password Management Software Using JAVA?

                          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?

                            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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                          • Top 10 eCommerce Platforms to Boost Business Productivity in 2021

                              An eCommerce platform empowers startups, SMEs, and large enterprises to manage multiple online business processes such as website, marketing, sales, and operations.

                              The top eCommerce platforms handle online business tasks efficiently, and this finally helps enterprises in expanding their productivity.

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                            • Modern Google-level STT Models Released


                                We are proud to announce that we have built from ground up and released our high-quality (i.e. on par with premium Google models) speech-to-text Models for the following languages:


                                • English;
                                • German;
                                • Spanish;

                                You can find all of our models in our repository together with examples, quality and performance benchmarks. Also we invested some time into making our models as accessible as possible — you can try our examples as well as PyTorch, ONNX, TensorFlow checkpoints. You can also load our model via TorchHub.


                                PyTorch ONNX TensorFlow Quality Colab
                                English (en_v1) link Open In Colab
                                German (de_v1) link Open In Colab
                                Spanish (es_v1) link Open In Colab
                                Read more →