Let's talk about concept art, one of the main pillars in the digital art world. Concept art is the foundational and fundamental stage of any media industry project, where bold design choices are made and the best one is selected, shaping the overall style of the product. "Concept" refers to abstract ideas and fresh designs, while "art" entails the intentional use of imagination to create objects for immediate contemplation, which can be assessed for their aesthetic appeal in terms of appearance, sound, or even words. The exact origin of the term is not entirely clear, but some attribute its first mention to Walt Disney Feature Animation during the creation of characters for the first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in the 1930s. It was during this time that an entirely new profession, later known as "concept artist," began to take form and became highly sought after in the media industry.
Stand on two legs with code review
The problem
Unfortunately, when fulfilling their planned business goals, the departments of the organisation rarely take into account such a metric as solution code quality. And usually developers has no time for normal code review process.
The Power of Email Marketing: Engaging Customers for Business Growth
Email marketing has emerged as a vital tool for businesses to nurture customer relationships and drive growth. In this article, we will explore the immense potential of email marketing through personal experiences and examples from renowned companies. From personalization to segmentation, retargeting, and building anticipation, discover how these strategies can elevate your email campaigns and deliver remarkable results.
The Art of Personalization in Email Marketing:
Personalization is a key aspect of successful email marketing. Take, for example, Amazon's tailored recommendations and exclusive offers. By delivering personalized content that matches customers' preferences and interests, Amazon creates a sense of exclusivity and fosters customer loyalty. In my own experience, implementing personalization in email campaigns resulted in increased open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. It's clear that customers appreciate the effort put into crafting messages specifically for them.
How Java works with fonts
Hello!
In this article, I will try to briefly describe how Java Virtual Machine works with fonts. Once I needed to change the font used by the JVM and, surprisingly, found only pieces of legacy information about this. I spent a little time investigating the problem and now want to share this information with anybody who could find it useful. Feel free to leave any comments :)
Business Process Management Part 2. How to
This article is written in a how-to style. It is based on my personal experience and opinions, so it may omit some steps that are common in BPM practice but that I have not encountered in my work. The topic is broad, and each section deserves a separate article. Therefore, if you are interested in a specific topic, please comment, and I will prepare a more detailed description.
SwiftUI ScrollView and non-freezing parallax
Hello everyone! My name is Nikolai, I'm iOS developer.
I got the task where I should make scrollable content, with another one at the back. Both of them should scroll synchronously but backward should be slower - like background images in cartoons or videogames.
Run ForkJoinTask via custom ForkJoinPool in CompletableFuture sauce
In one of the tasks on the project, I had to wrap the ForkJoinTask collection in CompletableFuture for asynchronous execution and building data processing pipeline chains.
How to Create Effective Product Funnels with Event Tracking
Regardless of how mature the product is, its owner will always be curious about how it performs, what the conversion rates are, and what areas for improvement there are. One of the most important tools that product owners should get access to at some point in time is an event tracking system.
Exploring a possible implementation of non-blocking IO by writing a server on pure syscalls
How do people usually write a server if they don't really care about performance? A program starts, then starts accepting incoming connections from clients and starts a new thread for each client, which is engaged in servicing this client. If you use framework, like Spring or Flask or Poco there, then it does something like this inside itself - the only difference is the threads can be reused, that is, taken from a certain pool. It's all quite convenient, but not too effective (and Spring is bad). Most likely, your threads serving clients do not live long and most of the time they are waiting either to receive data from the client or to send it to the client - that is, they are waiting for some system calls to return. Creating an OS thread is quite an expensive operation, as is context switching between OS threads. If you want to be able to serve a lot of customers efficiently, you need to come up with something else. For example, callbacks, but they are pretty inconvenient (though there are different opinions on this).
Another option is to use non-blocking I/O in combination with some kind of implementation of user-space threads (fibers). In this article I will show you how to write all this with your own hands.
Setting Up an Experiment Environment for Data-Driven Product Development
As a product owner, it is common to face the question of whether to proceed with option A or option B. Or, which version of the screen should be implemented to achieve better results? Making such decisions can be challenging, especially when you are under tight deadlines with limited resources. Furthermore, such decisions are made based on personal judgment or copying the approach of a competitor, which can lead to suboptimal results.
The good news is that one can avoid such pitfalls by setting up a simple experiment environment that requires relatively low effort. In this article, we will describe how you can achieve this.
Instant Digital Signature Mode
In this note, we discuss the Instant Digital Signature (IDS) mode, which was announced earlier. While the main content of the IDS mode was already disclosed in a previous publication, we believe that additional specifications will improve understanding.
Machine Learning for price optimization
This is a translated and adopted article I wrote for the Aha'22 (30 May 2022) conference. It describes an approach to a marketplace prices optimisation. Here I've outlined some important definitions and tried to define the scopes and roles of ML, algorithms, and humans in optimal pricing. Although the article covers rather basic things, still, you can find out some new formulas and ideas, because these basics are somewhat "well-known only in a very closed clubs", and besides, the real gem found here is the detailed recipe for ML engineers how to build optimal pricing systems.
TRIZ: The Problem-Solving Methodology for Product Managers
Background
As a product manager with over a decade of experience, I'm always looking for new ways to enhance my skills and help other product managers advance in their careers. One area that many companies focus on during the job interview process is analytical and creative problem-solving. And as product managers, we encounter these types of challenges on a daily basis. It's important to stay sharp and continuously develop our problem-solving abilities. That's why I made it a habit to practice a logic puzzle every day. But I also wondered if there was a common approach to solving these puzzles. That's when I discovered TRIZ – the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. In this article, I'll provide an overview of what TRIZ is and how it can be applied in product management. Then, I'll apply TRIZ principles to solve a series of logical puzzles, showcasing the power and effectiveness of this methodology. So whether you're an experienced product manager looking to enhance your skills or someone who enjoys a good brain teaser, read on to discover the power of TRIZ!
If you find TRIZ to be a useful tool for problem-solving and innovation, there are many resources available to help you delve deeper into the methodology. The TRIZ Journal, for example, offers enough information on TRIZ, including case studies, articles, and other resources. You can also find books and online courses that provide a more in-depth look at TRIZ and how it can be applied in different industries and contexts. So if you're interested in learning more, there are plenty of opportunities to expand your knowledge and apply TRIZ to your work.
Business process management. Part 1. Why bother?
This is the first post in a series on Business Process Management (BPM). Having worked as a business analyst and product manager in various companies ranging from middle-sized startups to big corporations, I have observed differences in approaches to business process management - from almost complete disregard to excessive attention. So, I decided to share my views on the topic, why I think BPM is important, especially when a company grows fast and switches from the startup stage to a grown company, and what approach I think might work for a company of average size without involving too much time and resources.
Q1 2023 DDoS Attacks and BGP Incidents
Let's take a deeper look at the Q1 2023 DDoS attacks mitigation statistics and observations from Qrator Labs' perspective.
On the difference between regular functions and Lambdas
The point of this article is to explore Lambda functions, their dirrerences from regular functions and how they are implemented, based on C++, Python and Java programming languages.
Throughout this article I will be using godbolt.org to compile code and see machine code or byte code.
An introduction to the world of AI for designers
Every day a new neural network appears and every day more opportunities are opened to designers to simplify their workflow. Someone fundamentally refuses to use them, because “there is no life in machinex and technologies”, and someone is only happy to find a way to reduce the amount of work. Personally, I belong to the second type and want to share the most detailed gait on neurons I have acquired lately.
Networking for Programmers: How to Build Connections and Get Hired
As a programmer, building connections with industry professionals can help you in advancing your career. Whether you're looking for a new job or want to connect with industry professionals, networking can help you achieve your goals. In this article, we'll examine the importance of networking for programmers and share practical tips and techniques for making strong connections in the programming community.
From attending industry events to exploiting social media for developing soft skills and building a personal brand, we'll cover everything you need to know to network effectively as a programmer. So, whether you're just starting your career or looking to take it to the next level, read on to learn how to build connections and get hired through effective networking.
Google SSO for Kibana straightforward way on basic license
As many times before, I keep writing cheat sheets after the tasks which made me search a lot and glue things together before I found a solution. Long story short, this time I was asked to set up Google SSO for Kibana without switching from a basic license to a paid one. Kibana, by the moment, already had authentication set up and the customer wanted to log in there with the use of Google Workspace user accounts. Along with that, the customer wanted to keep user account which was already there, in Kibana. There was no need for role mapping or other advanced features, just plain SSO and that's all. As you probably know Elastic provides SSO feature only on paid license, so I have had no other way to get it working except for using 3rd party software. But first things first, let's list the steps we should go over: