Personal Cyber Security

In today’s digital world, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your personal cyber security is up to date. With the ever-growing number of threats on the internet, it’s essential to take the necessary steps to protect yourself and your data.

The first step in protecting yourself is to be aware of the threats that exist. The second step is to use the right tools to protect yourself. There are many different types of cyber threats, such as malware, phishing, and ransomware.

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How To Avoid Spending Too Much Time on Social Apps

We all know how easy it is to get sucked into social media apps like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It’s easy to lose track of time by scrolling through your newsfeed and watching videos. 

But spending too much time on these apps can harm your mental health and productivity. 

How To Interview A Product Manager?

“A great product manager is both trusting and trustworthy.
She knows the difference between trust and blind faith, and invests in building a working environment where people have each others’ backs.
She sets an example with her own behavior and works from the assumption that people have good intentions. She listens and always strives to understand others’ context, point of view and perspective.”

— Lawrence Ripsher

An interview – like yoga on the water – is a tricky thing.

An interview is always a challenge.

It’s far from a perfect solution but in many cases, it’s the only option you have in order to decide if a person will be a good fit to your needs.

In some roles you will need more technical skills and in some it will be more about the leadership and strategic thinking.

The main aspects you wish to have in a product manager for a technology company:

1. Intellectual ability
2. Great Communication skills
3. Leadership
4. Culture Fit
5. Deep understanding of what users want
6. Strategic thinking
7. Analytical capabilities
8. Technical knowledge
9. Entrepreneur at heart

Below are some ideas for questions that will help you identify if the person have some of these aspects. It’s still “work in progress” so if you find something ‘funny’ please let me know.

Do You Need A Binary Repository?

Any developer knows that you must have a source code repository (e.g. Git) but from time to time I get the question “why do I need a binary repository”?

Here is the short answer:

Faster and more secure software development – Any company is a software company these days and the best companies release updates on daily/hourly bases. The ability to push updates quickly is a real competitive advantage. The minute you have few engineers on your team you wish to avoid ‘fetching the all internet’ with every ‘npm install’.
A binary repo will give you the option to cache these libraries and make sure you are working with the correct ones (vs a hacked one). From the developer perspective, it is a big boost for their productivity as it saves time during development and on each build. Even better, from the DevOps perspective, the ability to control all the packages/libraries (and scan them for vulnerabilities) is a huge advantage. It enables the internal engineering team to control the releases better as they have full transparency (e.g. quality, performance, security, licenses, etc’) on everything the ‘compose’ the release version. Check the 12-factor app manifesto for more on dependencies (declaration and isolation).

Raspberry Pi As Security Camera With Motion Detection

It was a fun weekend project I did with my kids. We started with a new Pi Zero and in a few hours (of many ‘paths’ to nowhere) we got into the point of having a useful security camera. The useful part is when the camera sends you alerts (email or Telegram messages) when it detects movements.

We open the package and connected the Pi Zero to a USB power, a keyboard, a mouse and monitor. We cut a bit a corner by buying an SD card with NOOBS on it but it wasn’t working (nothing was coming up on the screen when we boot the Pi). So we downloaded a new version from Raspian Jessie 4.4 from NOOBS and install it. Now when we boot the Pi we got a new screen. We open the terminal and typed:

Hey Google, Talk To Crested Butte Powder

It was another amazing conference in Crested Butte – The Winter Tech Forum (or try the short version of its name).

It’s been over 11 years since I first came to learn about it. The quality of the people and the venue with the passion to hack and learn, make it an experience that is unique and amazing.

The first couple of days are composed of sessions and lighting talks at the evenings. But on the 3rd day, we have a hack day where people can go wild and build something fun.

This year, my hack was a Google Assistant App that tell you if it’s a pow day.
You can just say something like: “Ok Google, talk with Crested Butte Powder” and you will be able to ask it if it’s time to run for the mountain.

You can see it in action with the code at: powder-day-cb.glitch.me or if you are on a mobile device (Android or iPhone with the Assistant App installed) – click here.

Of course, you can just say it to the Google Assistant…

May you have lots of powder days with sunny sky!

 

Actions On Google – GDD Europe

Google Developer Days (GDD) are global events showcasing the latest developer products and platforms from Google. It’s like Google I/O but not in California. It was a fun event and we had the chance to meet many developers and talk about interesting challenges and opportunities.

We just finished this talk on “Actions on Google – Why? What?” at Google Developer Summit and you can find the slides and the video recording below.

 

 

Like with any new platform, the first question you might have is why?
In this case, it will be something like “Why do I need an assistant app? I already have a native and a mobile app”, right?

Here are few points to keep in mind:

Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag: