The Robot Framework and the RPA tooling the team at Robocorp have built around it are a breath of fresh air in the world of Robotic Process Automation.

Robocode makes it easy to get started even if you have no programming experience, yet unlike visual RPAs from UI Path, Automation Anywhere or Electroneek, it allows experienced programmers to leverage the full power of Python when needed.

One aspect of the system that still requires some work, however, are its logging capabilities.

The Robot Framework was originally built for acceptance testing in software development. Once you try to implement complex process…

Product-market fit is “the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its product” (Eric Ries). This moment is hard to measure, and most, like Marc Andreessen, suggest you should just “feel” it.

It can be disconcerting to blindly wait for a feeling you haven’t experienced before. To give us some guidance, the father of growth hacking Sean Ellis proposed a way to measure your product market fit using a simple survey:

Just ask a user, “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?”

Based on Sean’s experience running growth…

Whatever it is you’re building, there is a good chance you’ll want to monetize the project in the future.

And with monetization, come the many challenges of storing and manipulating financial data.

Below, I will look at the data types you should and should not use for monetary information in Postgres. I will then discuss additional considerations when using these types with JavaScript and Hasura.

Monetary types in PostgreSQL

⚠ Real/Double Precision (Float)

Used to store variable-precision, approximate values.

The type many beginner developers unknowingly choose to store financial transactions is floating point.

After all, Float is the default type for numbers in common languages including JavaScript, and…

Philippe Starck, a renowned industrial designer, once said:

“A designer has a duty to create timeless design. To be timeless you have to think really far into the future, not next year, not in two years but in 20 years minimum.”

Born in 1990, I witnessed the internet evolve from text to immersive audio-visual experiences. And throughout, I wondered—can design be timeless on such a fast-changing medium as the web?

Starck’s own website unfortunately wasn’t up in 2000, but archive.org has preserved landing pages of many other agencies of the day.

Are you ready to jump into the time machine…

This is a Udacity Data Science Nanodegree Capstone project.

A small startup can afford to target users based on broad-stroke rules and rough demographics.

Once a company grows to the size of Starbucks, with millions of daily customers, and $1.6B in credit stored on loyalty cards, they have got to graduate to a more sophisticated method to target their marketing.

One such approach, cluster analysis, uses mathematical models to discover groups of similar customers based on variations in their demographics, purchasing habits, and other characteristics.

Below, I will explore a customer transaction and marketing offer dataset graciously provided by Starbucks.

…

Branding case studies often read as somewhere between obvious and grandiose. You’re either looking at established companies with a 20/20 hindsight, or reading a digital agency portfolio sales pitch.

Just as business strategy, real-world branding is in fact neither superfluous, nor inaccessible to mere mortals.

Below, I’ll explain why every founder should consider their brand from day one, and share some of the thinking that went into the identity of Pona, my home-cooked food marketplace startup.

What is a brand and why does it matter?

Branding is all the ways you convey to current and prospective customers what they can expect from your company. …

When I teach design, my first two messages are:

1. You don’t need to wait for anybody’s permission
2. Opportunities for improvement are all around you

Today, I’m going to put my words into action, and show how a simple air con remote can be improved through the design method.

I hope you learn something from my process, and maybe even accept my challenge to repeat the same exercise with another device you’ve been frustrated by all your life!

Product vision

A good first step for a product design project is to define its vision — to think through your assumptions, user needs, the…

Born in a country, which was on the verge of collapse a mere one year after my birth, I never found a place which I could call home.

But no, I do not mind this at all.

As the saying goes, “home is where the heart is,” and my socio-spatial independence has allowed me to find a niche in my heart for each and every bit of culture I have encountered during my travels.

Although a far cry from the nomads you hear about today, my parents always had a global outlook, even when the Iron Curtain hung intact. …