Gratitude 2022

by rus

When I journal I always fill out a gratitude template of 6 things I’m grateful for but reading Tynan’s recent gratitude blog post has inspired me to follow in his foot steps and write my own yearly gratitude post. I want to develop as a writer and content creator for personal development and to help better understand my own thoughts so hopefully I will see you this time next year as well!

I’m really grateful for having a stable home. I tried hard to make Madrid work but after a painful breakup followed by the lockdown in 2020 it didn’t feel like a home any more. After re-learning to drive and spending 6 months living out of my car whilst travelling Spain, eventually I moved to Valencia and got a long term rental. I’ve been in Valencia for just over a year now and my flat is the longest place I’ve been able to call home since leaving England in 2014.

There’s art on the walls, rugs on the floor, books on the shelves, blankets on the sofa and Lego tucked away in different places. I’m writing this from Morocco and when I get home, everything will be as I have left it and I even describe it as a ‘home’ as opposed to ‘where I am staying’. My car is even parked in the car park!

I don’t really have much family so I am extremely grateful for the friends I’ve made and kept. I’ve been described by others as an introvert, which I’d agree with. Making, and keeping, genuine connections is extremely important to me but it is incredibly challenging to maintain those relationships with all the travelling that I have done over the years. I consider myself lucky to still be in contact with great friends in England, Norway, Thailand and Vietnam!

I’ve been in Valencia for just over a year now and have a fantastic circle of friends who, like me, travelled there at the tail end of the Covid pandemic to make a new home. Together we’ve had boardgame nights, barbecues, travelled all around Spain and to other countries like Morocco, we’ve even invested in each other’s businesses. Last year my birthday party was described by many as the best party they’ve ever been to, in part thanks to one of my new friends, Kenn, offering to DJ it. Two more friends got married last month and other’s are talking marriage and babies. These guys have helped me get over the lonliness of the pandemic, being hospitalised with pneumonia since getting Covid, several breakups and an irrational fear of public transport thanks to the media. I am truely blessed.

With the world opening back up I’m really grateful to be able to travel again. Driving around Spain was fun but being able to fly is even more fun. The original plan when moving to Spain was to visit more of Europe, which is back on the cards, but I’ve also discovered how accessible Morocco is! There’s a metro stop right outside my flat and it only costs €1 to get to the airport. Flights from Valencia, Spain to Agadir, Morocco are as low as €8, so for €18 it’s possible to get to Morocco and back again!

Since getting diabetes I’ve been forced to make a lot of decisions which are good in the long term but hard in the short term. I’m extremely grateful for those decisions and my health. I’m on insulin therapy now but my recent bloodwork show me to be in good health and blood glucose testing kits and insulin so far have been available easily. I have both feet, I’m able to see with out glasses and everything still works.

My business endeavours and teams have grown year on year. When I left the UK on 1st September, 2014, the original plan was simply to go to Thailand to get my health back and create a clean slate to relaunch my life from, before traveling to Poland to train with the European Security Academy and become a private military contractor. Deposits were paid, background checks were completed and I was due to start training 1st June 2015, before getting diagnosed with diabetes and having to cancel the courses on 11th May 2015.

Since then I pivoted and focused more on business, leadership, teams and marketing and in that time have been able to scale multiple businesses, have a successful acquisition and more recently invest in other people’s businesses, ideas and artwork, whilst still being able to live and work remotely. I am able to live the kind of life people dream about and write about and am incredibly grateful for that.

It might sound silly, but I’m grateful I started this blog. Originally the blog was just a fun coding exercise with a CRM I’d built for a job board. I wrote my own ORM before I knew what an ORM was and an MVC that used XML and XSLT to generate HTML, before APIs and SPAs were a thing back in 2002. The first post was 5th January, 2008, when I launched the code base as a blog to simply document my notes from work.

Since then I’ve migrated to WordPress and published 237 posts, of various quality, which have allowed me to reflect on my journey. Yesterday I found this old post from February 2013 where I dissed Pat Flynn (sorry Pat) and made the proud proclamation that I’d made £0.33. You’ve got to start somewhere and it’s quite humbling looking back and seeing some of the steps that lead me to where I am now.

Lastly, I’m extremely grateful to you guys, my readers. I know a lot of you come here to learn about changing the DRAC password on Dell hardware or how to create an NPM repository mirror, and I’m glad I’m able to help you solve the same problems I encountered during my IT career. Hopefully my writings might also help other disillusioned system administrators or software developers find a way out, if you need or want one, to a healthier way of life. After all, shift work is associated with higher rates of diabetes.

The featured photo is from the surf camp in Morocco I’m currently staying at. Being able to visit here, get surf lessons, warmth and sunshine is incredibly valuable for my mental health, and it’s hard to not be grateful whilst writing this with this view.

Discovering The South Of Morocco

by rus

Spain’s starting to get cold and is losing it’s sunshine, also I want to get back to a never ending summer, so I decided to spend a month in Morocco to learn more about this beautiful country.

Surfing in Tamraght

Taghazout is the most famous surfing destination in Morocco, but it’s tiny, lost it’s hippy vibe and has more scammers than soul nowadays. Further down the coast is another town called Tamraght with more surf and yoga camps as well as proximity to the same beaches. I have stayed in a few places and recommend Maroc Surf Camp for basic accomodation, yoga and surf lessons or the Riu Palace if you want more of a luxury resort vibe. The Maroc Surf Camp guys were happy to collect me from the Riu and take me out for surf lessons when I was staying there.

South Morocco Discovery With Intrepid Travel

I wanted to learn more about Morocco so booked the South Morocco Discovery tour with Intrepid Travel. If you decide to do this tour there are a few things of importance to note. Bring a water bottle with you, the tour guide provides fresh water along the route and having a water bottle makes it easy to refill. On a few nights you will be limited to a small over night bag, i.e. when you are in the Atlas mountains and camping in the Sahara, the rest of your luggage will be stored securely. Trainers were fine for the hiking.

Marrakech

I left for Marrakech a few days early as I knew there were some things I wanted to see that weren’t part of the official tour, namely the Yves Saint Laurent Museum. There are long queues at the door so it’s best to book your tickets online 24 hours in advance to skip the queues entirely! I recommend getting the combined ticket that lets you in to both the museum and the Jardin Majorelle, which is absolutely beautiful.

Aroumd

We left Marrakesh early in the morning and headed out to a small town in the Atlas mountains called Aroumd, where we got to start our adventure. After being dropped off by the mini van, we left our main luggage in a hotel and started a small, 1 hour, 3.5km hike up to the guest house we were staying in.

Upon arriving at the guest house, we were welcomed with traditional mint tea and lunch, followed by another hike of just under 4 hours, there and back again, to a shrine in one of the peaks. Whilst the guest house was cold, there were plenty of blankets and more importantly plenty of hot water in the morning, but I did get up first!

Ait Benhaddou

The next morning we hiked back down the mountain to the hotel we left our luggage in and boarded the minivan for the drive to Ait Benhaddou. The small town of Ait Benhaddou was built around 1,000 years ago and was an important point along a caravan route. Now it’s slowly being restored whilst being a tourist destination and featuring in films and TV shows like Time Bandits, The Jewel Of The Nile, The Living Daylights, The Mummy, Gladiator and Game of Thrones!

Ouarzazate – Zagora

In the morning we headed out to Ouarzazate and the Atlas Studios, Morocco’s version of Hollywood! Here they filmed Cleopatra, Black Hawk Down, Prison Break, Game of Thrones and more.

We did a tour of the Atlas Studios were we visited sets from Cleopatra and Gladiator and saw stunt cars, buses, trucks and planes from Black Hawk Down, Prison Break and Jewel Of The Nile.

Tamegroute – Erg Chigaga

Leaving the hotel we headed to the Erg Chigaga dunes for a night camping under the stars in the Sahara. On the way we stopped at the town of Tamegroute where we got to visit the local library and the underground Kasbah, before continuing on to the dunes, a camel ride and a camp fire!

One of the things I didn’t expect was just how amazing the stars are in the desert, that far away from light pollution!

Oulad Berhil

The next day was an 8 hour drive to Oulad Berhil by minivan. We were up early and driving so we could catch the sunrise from the sand dunes on the way back to civilisation! We stayed the night at the market town of Oulad Berhil.

Taroudant – Essaouira

We headed to the windy city, Essaouira, also featured in Game of Thrones where we would stay for 2 nights. Essaouira is a really cool city, it’s got a bit of a hippy vibe, a beautiful beach, lots of shops and is popular for kite surfing. In the morning we did a tour from a local guide, then the rest of the day was for ourselves, mostly walking, shopping, eating and visiting hammams and getting henna done!

Marrakech

Eventually back to Marrakech! The trip back from Essaouira to Marrakech took about 4 hours but then due to Morocco winning a world cup game took an extra hour whilst inside the city to get to the bus stop. Because the roads were locked up we then just walked back to the same hotel we started off at, not really a big deal.

This was our last night together as part of the tour, in the morning I took a taxi back to Tamraght for another week of surfing to book end the entire trip!

Travelling With Insulin Around Morocco

This was the first time I’ve travelled internationally since going on to insulin therapy for my diabetes so I was a bit apprehensive as I wasn’t sure how it would be received or whether I would be able to keep my insulin refridgerated.

The Maroc Surf Camp was really awesome, they let me store my insulin in the camp fridge and I also stored cool packs in the freezer. Whenever we went to the beach I would just bring my insulin in a cool box with the cool packs, really easy!

The Intrepid Travel tour were also really accommodating. Our guide, Mohammed, would help me at every destination talk to the staff of the hotel or guesthouse to get my insulin in a fridge and my cool packs in a freezer. The one day in the sahara that we did not have a fridge, a big ice box and a lot of cool packs were bought to last the 48 hours. It was also pretty cold at night anyway so would probably have been fine.

This trip has gotten me back to travelling again!

Financial Responsibility

by rus

I’m a massive advocate of personal responsibility and accountability, in all things, especially when it comes to health and finances. But I didn’t always use to be this way.

After graduating with 2 degrees I didn’t want to do and entering the job market out of necessity rather than choice, I ended up keeping up with the Joneses whilst drowning my misery in distractions. This lead to me maxing out my credit cards, and taking consolidation loans, multiple times whilst also permanently living out of my overdraft.

Eventually, I’d amassed a debt of roughly £14,000 across my credit cards, my overdraft and loans, and was paying off around £400pm just on the interest.

Taking Financial Responsibility

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Peter Ducker

In 2009 I started using a personal trainer at the gym and we were tracking all of my macros in my diet as well as the exercises and weights I was doing at the gym, I was losing weight and feeling great. Measuring and tracking had created an environment of accountability and responsibility towards my health, so I wondered what would happen if I started doing a similar thing for my finances.

Using the free Google Spreadsheet tool I created a finance tracking system where I accounted for all my income, all my outgoings, and all my debt repayments and by October 2010, after having crushing debt hanging over my head for nearly 9 years, I paid off all £14,000 in debt and became debt-free for the first time in my adult life. It was an amazing feeling. The original spreadsheet from 2010 is attached below!

Growing

After the success of paying off all my debts, I had discovered newfound freedom. Before things like saving for a mortgage or pension seemed out of my reach and genuinely impossible, but now I had created a method of being accountable and responsible for my finances. After clearing all my debts, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was forced to move from the shared apartment I was living in and opted for a more expensive 1 bedroom apartment all for myself for the first time in my life. This caused my outgoings to increase, but also my ambition. I wanted to learn how to drive as well as save money. In much the same way I created the Debt Management spreadsheet in 2010, I created a Savings Management spreadsheet in 2012 to track my savings and stay out of debt. Below is the real spreadsheet I used from 2012 to track all my incomes, my outgoings, and ultimately my savings. I managed to grow my savings from £752 to £5,060 from March 2012 to December 2012, by being accountable, responsible, and mindful about my finances. Not only did I spend the entire year out of debt, for the first time in my life I had savings!

Saving To Leave The UK

Part of the reason I was wanting to save in 2012, and learn how to drive, was because I wanted to do the Mongol Rally whilst also build my own business. In 2013 I had started to make a small amount of money through my own work but decided to take a huge risk and start hiring contractors on ODesk (what is now called Upwork) which I used my credit card to pay for. So in February 2013 my Savings Management became once again Debt Management, only with a big difference. Multiple streams of income! 🚀 I applied exactly the same accountability and responsibility processes to create a new spreadsheet that tracked my outgoings, my income, get all my debts paid off and start saving again. Using this system my net worth went from -£4,588 to £16,499 from February 2013 to December 2013! This foundation of wealth was eventually the safety net that allowed me to quit my job, move to Thailand and start operating my own businesses full time, rather than working for other people! My original 2013 Debt Management spreadsheet is below.

Statement Of Wealth

Now my life is very different, and I’ve had a complete reframe. Rather than have multiple spreadsheets for debt management or savings management, I have a single spreadsheet as a Statement Of Wealth. I have wealth in a few different places and it needs to be tracked differently. This new spreadsheet is less of a micromanaged budget and more of a wealth tracker. Below is an example of my statement of wealth. Whilst all the previous data was 100% genuine, you do not need to concern yourselves with my current financial situation 😝

The Secret

The philosophy behind my financial management spreadsheets and ultimately my statement of wealth are personal to me but hopefully will also work for you.

No One Cares About You As Much As You Do

In order to spend less I’d have to opt out of things. I’d go out on Fridays for 1-2 drinks then leave to be home by 10pm. This helped me stick to my budget but also my health and lifesyle choices as I was regularly training and eating healthily at the time. Whilst my friends would always complain that I was leaving early or encourage me to stay for just one more, there were never any negative repercussions once I’d pushed through the enevitable peer pressure.

Track Everything

I was tracking the food I ate, for my macros, this meant I had a predictable meal plan and food budget. All my bills were also largely predictable so it was easy to work out what my fixed costs were to sustain myself, i.e. rent, utilities, internet, food. After that anything extra could be allotted for either fun, debt repayment or savings. Once you have an idea of how much extra money you really have, you will find it can go a really long way.

Consistency

I do all my monthly accountability on the 1st of each month, including setting up my journal for the month ahead and my Statement Of Wealth. This commitment to myself means that the work always gets done and tracked. You are the most important person in your life, you need to put yourself first in order to help others and you need to make time for yourself in order to maintain accountability, responsibility, strong boundaries and self-respect.

Multiple Bank Accounts

Most people have just one bank account, everything goes in to it and everything comes out of it. This makes it quite difficult to properly budget. I recommend opening multiple bank accounts. I really had 3.

Income Account

Your Income Account is the account where all your income is received and utility bills and debts are paid out from.

Living Account

Each month (or every two weeks for Americans) whenever you are paid, transfer an allotted amount of money into your Living Account. Your Living Account is the account you use to pay for your food and fun, using the money you have budgeted for such activities. Ideally, your Living Account will not have an overdraft or any facilities to get you back into debt. This is the only card you should carry with you. Leave the rest at home.

Savings Account

Once your rent, your bills, and your debt repayments have left your Income Account and your budget has been transferred to your Living Account, anything left in your Income Account should be moved to your Savings Account, leaving a balance of around £20 in your Income Account so that you make sure you do not go overdrawn.

Find New Ways To Have Fun

I would usually go out drinking or clubbing on a Friday or Saturday. It was a way to be social, meet girls and let some steam off. It would also be very expensive, bad for my health and that lifestyle wasn’t conducive to creating high-quality relationships. Instead of paying £40-100 on drinking and clubbing on a weekend, one of the clubs offered salsa lessons every Tuesday from 7-9 pm for about £6. This meant I could go out, dance with girls, and socialise for a fixed cost and make much better connections. Also, I would feel great at work the next day.

Instead of buying new computer games each month for £40 for my PS3, I would buy second-hand ones at CEX for £7 then once I completed them I would return them in part exchange for the next game. By sticking to a spending limit of £10 per game I was able to play 1-2 new games a month for about £5 a month due to the part exchange cycle!

Read. Libraries let you rent books for free and nowadays Amazon Prime lets you read books for a fixed monthly cost on the Kindle as well. Reading is mindful, relaxing and you get to learn a lot, expanding your skillset, your worldview, and your conscious outlook on life.

Living a healthy lifestyle can also be incredibly cheap and help keep you accountable. I used to go to the gym each morning, then skate to work, do meal planning and meal prep on weekends and spend evenings and afternoons in the park juggling with my circus friends. All of that was incredibly social, helped keep me in shape and would let me develop in new ways.

Using Google Sheets

Formula

You can enter all the data and calculations by hand into Google Sheets but it’s easier if you learn how formulas work so the spreadsheet can handle all the calculations for you. The formula in a spreadsheet all start with an = sign.

Referring to a cell in the same sheet

All cells have an ID which is a combination of column (alphabet) and Row (numerals). A cell of ID B4 would be the second column along the top, B, then 4 rows down from the top. If you wanted to refer to this column in another cell you could do with by specifying =B4.

Simple Maths

You can do very simple maths simply by creating an equation using cell identifiers e.g. =B4+C4

Referring To A Cell In A Different Sheet

A Google Sheets spreadsheet can have multiple sheets in it, the tabs along the very bottom of the spreadsheet. In my example Statement Of Wealth, I have a summary sheet at the front which pulls in data from all the other sheets. You can do this simply by specifying the sheet identifier before the column and using an ! as a separator. e.g. =Crypto!B2 will pull data from cell B2 of the Crypto sheet.

Currency Conversion

If you want to convert one currency to another you can use multiply the column in question using the GOOGLEFINANCE function e.g. if cell B4 contains USD and you want to convert it into Euro you can use the following formula =B4*GOOGLEFINANCE(“CURRENCY:USDEUR”)

Statement Of Wealth Template

I have got an empty Statement Of Wealth template with some equations and formulas already in it that you can use as a basis for your own spreadsheet or you can look at the example again from earlier.

Start Today

You might be tempted not to do this, or to do it when you next get paid. For all things involving the self there is no time like the present. You fell upon this page for a reason.

Recommended Reading

HodlBot Review

by rus

HodlBot is a self managed crypto index fund. Essentially it maintains a portfolio for you that tracks the top performing crypto projects based on your requirements.

In November 2020 I deposited $250 into a crypto exchange and configured HodlBot to manage it using a HODL 10 Index strategy and in the 4 months since the portfolio has grown to a value of $1,013.11.

HodlBot supports 4 different index strategies HODL 10/20/30 where it rebalances your portfolio to the top 10/20/30 crypto projects as well as the Coinbase Index where it rebalances solely across the top projects available on Coinbase.

You can also create your own rebalancing strategy, blacklist specific projects you do not want to be a part of and define how often you want your portfolio to be rebalanced. I’ve left it at the default setting of once a month.

Each month HodlBot will rebalance my portfolio to the 10 top performing projects across the top of the market. As a comparison

ProjectPrice 2020/11/14Price 2021/02/12Growth
Bitcoin$16,326.81$47,645.28292%
Ethereum$475.97$1,780.55374%
HodlBot$250.00$1,013.11405%

Looking at the above chart, HodlBot has outperformed simply holding either Ethereum or Bitcoin. We are in a bull market and everything is trending up and this is one of many strategies available. I’m curious to see how the portfolio behaves if it’s left during a bear market.

EthicHub Investment Platform

by rus

What Is EthicHub?

EthicHub was formed in 2017 and is a crowdsourced lending platform, offering approximately 15% APR on investments of as little as €20.

EthicHub, for now, is focusing on the coffee growing communities near the city of Tapachula in the Chiapas state of Mexico.

Chiapas Mexican Coffee

Chiapas coffee is some of the best coffee in the world and probably the best coffee to come out of Mexico. The coffee bean planted in Chiapas originally comes from Guatemala but was planted in Chiapas due to the unique climate. The combination of high altitude, warmth, humidity, rain and volcanic soil have created perfect conditions for coffee to grow in, allowing for healthy harvests.

The Chiapas coffee is famous for its aroma, intensity and body, so much so that Starbucks actually offer a whole bean Mexico Chiapas Reserve that they describe as crisp and nutty with flavours of hazelnut and milk chocolate.

The Chiapas region also carries a fine tradition of artisanal harvesting techniques, harvesting the coffee manually and only selecting the best coffee grains that have reached full maturity.

From the FAO site, coffee production in Mexico has been on the decline since 2009. In 2009 In 2018 over 629,799 hectares of green coffee was harvested, producing 158,325 tonnes of coffee.

YearElementUnitValue
2009Area Harvestedha765697
2009Yieldhg/ha3454
2009Productiontonnes264472
2018Area Harvestedha629799
2018Yieldhg/ha2514
2018Productiontonnes158325
Values from fao.org for coffee farmed in Mexico 2009 & 2018

Looking at the data from fao.org coffee production is down by 40% from 2009 to 2018.

Presumably, EthicHub seeks to change that by crowdsourcing investment for different coffee growing regions across different parts of the coffee growing process.

Crowdsourced Financing

EthicHub is helping the communities of Chiapas, Mexico crowdsource financing to cover expenses for the following:

  • Fertilising
  • Coffee Harvesting
  • Weed Control
  • Exportation of Coffee
  • Insurance
  • etc

Using the coffee itself as collateral for the crowdsourced loan, which will be paid back upon sale of the coffee!

Whilst the interest rate on the loan is high, 15% APR, the local farmers will actually receive more than if they just sold on the local market to a broker as EthicHub aren’t just raising money for the farmers, they’re helping with exports and sales of the finished coffee too! This profit-sharing allows the communities to receive 50% of the export margin on top of the market rates they would have gotten initially, whilst allowing investors to get a healthy return.

Investment At Risk

EthicHub has achieved 100% success in the repayment of all financed projects since they launched in 2018, financing over 60 agricultural projects and fully repaying 40 of them since their recent press release.

Investment involves risk. As a general rule, you should only trade in financial products that you are familiar with and understand the risk associated with them. The risk warning described in each financial product below is not exhaustive, you should carefully consider your investment experience, financial situation, investment objective, risk tolerance level and consult your independent financial adviser as to the suitability of your situation prior making any investment.

The main reason I’ve written this review is to do some additional due diligence on my own investments because I have currently invested over €2,000 in EthicHub projects.

My Personal Investments

Since June 2020 I’ve tried to invest €100 in every EthicHub project that has appeared on the marketplace

It is too early for any of them to have generated a return yet, the first repayment date is January 15, 2021 so I will update this review as the project commences. My intention is to keep compounding investments in to the project as I believe in what they are doing and am passionate myself about coffee and crypto.

EthicHub Coffee For Sale

If you’re interested in trying the coffee out, it is also for sale from the EthicHub Shop in quantities from 250g to 1kg.

Update February 2021

7 months after my first investment in June 2020, some of the projects I’d invested in started to yield a return, as posted in the above image.

Whilst some of the returns are small, most are all over 5% with a high of 13% and that’s only after 90 to 224 days. Project 97 was actually invested in during June 2020 so a 13% return, in less than a year, is pretty good.

The returns were in crypto, xDAI specifically as it has lower transaction fees than traditional DAI, and pegged to the US Dollar but I immediately reinvested them back in to some new projects.

Actually getting the returns has given me a lot more faith and confidence in the project and I’m going to keep reinvesting as payouts occur, updating this review as I go along.

Affiliate Disclaimer

Anyone investing an amount of €100 or more in a single EthicHub project through one of my links will gain a 5 DAI or $5 USD bonus for themselves and for myself.

Boosting Remote Team Morale During The Coronavirus Pandemic

by rus

At the best of times, running a remote team is hard. At the moment the world is battling the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic, more and more workers are working from home instead of going to an office. People are in quarantine, unable to go outside and socialise. A lot of what was working before now isn’t, and people are having to change.

I live by myself and work with a remote team of 40 people throughout Europe and Asia, with time zones from the UK to Japan. I have not spoken to anyone in person or been outside, for 2 weeks other than to put the rubbish out.

This is what we did today to boost our team morale during this period of quarantine.

Playing Games Over Screenshare

We’ve had regular weekly meetings using Google Hangouts for the past 2 years. During this pandemic I’ve seen communities come together and use alternatives such as Zoom for the same purpose, to connect remote people together, there are many options

Today at work we played a game, using Google Hangouts that was screen shared from my desktop. The team used their mobile phones as controllers.

That game was JackBox Party Pack 3, is available on Steam for £18.99 and is cross-platform, Windows, Mac and Linux.

As of writing, there are 7 JackBox Party Pack games available on Steam. Each game comes with 5-6 mini-games where you can make guesses, answer questions, draw pictures and come up with funny one-liners! They are all good fun but my favourite game for a professional remote team is Guesspionage from JackBox TV 3 because it will not put the team in an uncomfortable position!

When you start a game on the computer it will generate a unique room code for you. You then visit https://jackbox.tv/ on your mobile phone and fill in your name and the room code, bringing you into the game.

We also played with my friends, which is what gave me the idea to bring fun to the office!

Rave Reviews

As you can see from the above screenshot, the team loved it and want to play again! We will probably do this every Friday from now on, even when the quarantine is over!

Steps To Play JackBox Party Pack With Your Remote Team

  1. Buy and install JackBox Party Pack (3) from Steam
  2. Start JackBox Party Pack (3) on your computer
  3. Click “Start” in JackBox Party Pack (3)
  4. Go to “Settings” and turn “Full-Screen Mode” to “Off”. Jack Box Party Pack (3) will now run in a window.
  5. Create a conference or meeting using your tool of choice, Zoom, Google Hangouts, whatever!
  6. Invite all your team, friends or family to the conference/meeting. Jack Box Party Pack can support up to 8 players at the same time!
  7. Turn your speakers up so your computer microphone can pick up the sound of the game, this is one time when you do not want to be using headphones for audio!
  8. Present or Share the JackBox Party Pack screen to your conference!
  9. Start a game!
  10. Get everyone to visit https://jackbox.tv on their mobile phones and enter their name and room code!
  11. Play and have fun!

My Amazon Seller Stack: 23 Tools of the Trade

by rus

Software and services to power your Amazon business.

I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2014 and over the years the strategies, services and tools I used have evolved just as much as the Amazon landscape has evolved.

There are now suites of tools dedicated to solving specific problems faced by Amazon sellers but as my business has expanded, becoming more of a business than simply a form of search engine manipulation, my needs have grown

My operational infrastructure and team has scaled to meet the demands of selling across 7 different Amazon marketplaces, allowing me to free up time to train for a Spartan Race and to expand our product range again, whilst also hitting record days in what is traditionally a slow quarter for E-commerce.

Whilst I firmly believe the core of our success is our philosophy of only launching products that genuinely help people and trying to be the best out there, our ability to scale across so many marketplaces and SKUs is undeniably down to the software infrastructure, services and team that the entire business operates on.

So I wanted to share the tools and services we use to say thank you to them for helping us so much.

I didn’t start out using all these products and services, new and smaller Amazon sellers might not need half of them, and whether they are the best is often subjective, but they are all what we are using right now to operate our business.

Operations

The day to day operations require tools that work, all the time, every time and our decisions reflect that

Google G Suite – Productivity & Collaboration

https://gsuite.google.com

I want to think about my business, not whether our emails are getting through. We use Google’s G Suite for email, documentation, calendar and hangouts. It just works and is ubiquitous. Very little on-boarding needs to be done with new hires and it’s easy to secure and configure. Amongst other documents, all our translations are stored as Google Sheets allowing for effortless collaboration.

Upwork – Hiring

https://www.upwork.com/

We have a core team of full time staff members, some core contractors who work for us on an ad-hoc basis, e.g. translators, and then there are the specialists we hire just to solve a single problem. We’ve been using Upwork since it was called ODesk and whilst it has had problems it’s also proven invaluable in finding good talent fast, as long as you know how to create good job descriptions and find the talent yourself. I’ve never hired someone who’s applied to a job post, I’ve always headhunted talent looking for a position.

Asana – Project Management

https://asana.com

All our project management is done in Asana, helping us stay focused on what the important tasks are and who is responsible for them. With a distributed team communication is key and being able to assign tasks, track responsibilities and work in progress whilst receiving real time notifications throughout a task lifecycle helps all of us keep each other on track.

Dropbox – Distributed File Store

https://www.dropbox.com/

Whilst we store Google Documents in Google Drive, we use Dropbox for all our business and project assets, e.g. labels, brand assets and purchase orders records. Google Docs are great to collaborate on in a web browser, but Google Drive doesn’t let you sync a business and personal account locally, Dropbox does, and setting all our staff up with their own company Dropbox accounts is really easy, as is sharing files.

Grasshopper – Global Phone Numbers

https://grasshopper.com

We use Grasshopper for our customer service numbers, allowing us to give customers in the US a toll free number to dial! It provides a useful desktop application for taking calls from a laptop and will send voicemails as emails for out of hours calls.

Help Scout – Email Help Desk

https://www.helpscout.com/

We’ve integrated Help Scout in to both Amazon and our WooCommerce platforms, allowing us to handle help desk customer service as a team. Having a decentralised customer service team, working together across timezones, is probably the biggest thing that’s let us scale as a business. No more missed support tickets, just happy customers.

Slack – Real Time Collaboration

https://slack.com

All of our team uses Slack for real time collaboration (posh for chat) allowing us to communicate, share resources, discuss work and get things done. It’s responsive, easy to create secure channels, the design team don’t need to be involved in inventory discussions, and a searchable chat and asset history has proven itself time and time again.

Standuply – Scrum Manager

https://standuply.com

We’ve integrated Standuply with Slack for Scrum management. This is as much for the good of the team as it is for me to keep track of what I’m doing. Standuply is triggered to ask each of us 3 simple questions each morning as we start work:

  1. What did you do yesterday?
  2. What are you doing today?
  3. Are there any obstacles?

This makes it easy for all of us to keep track of what we’re doing and what everyone else is doing.

WorldFirst – International Banking

https://www.worldfirst.com

We buy and sell products and services all over the world in 4 different currencies. Working with WorldFirst gives us much more competitive ForEx rates and much lower fees for currency conversions and international wire transfers, this has substantially improved our profit margin compared to our normal business banking solution.

Amazon & Logistics

DHL – International Shipping

https://www.dhl.com

We ship, a lot, globally. You’ve probably heard of DHL, they are the one with out the arrow in their name 😉 Samples from China, signed letters to our bank, inventory from factories to warehouse, we do a lot of it with DHL.

SentryKit – Amazon Listings Health Check

https://www.sentrykit.com/

With so many products across so many marketplaces, keeping track of their health means checking the Amazon listings daily, the perfect task for a SaaS! SentryKit scans all our listings across all marketplaces and produces a daily report of any issues that need to be tackled. Experienced sellers will know that even if you do everything right the Amazon systems aren’t perfect and SentryKit gives us the piece of mind that we’ll know when an incident does happen to one of our listings!

Deliver Plus – International Delivery

https://www.deliverplus.co.uk

We use Deliver Plus to get better rates for international shipments to the UK. They have large accounts with DHL and UPS which gets them bigger savings than are available to us by ourselves.

Feedback Genius

https://www.sellerlabs.com/feedback-genius/

Seller Labs’ Feedback Genius is an enterprise level auto-responder allowing us to reach out to our Amazon customers to provide automated, after sales care. This after sales support helps our customers love our products and our brand just a little bit more and if our customers are happy, I’m happy!

Marketing

Shutterstock

https://www.shutterstock.com

We do a lot of content marketing, blog posts, banners, adverts, etc. and need to find licensable, quality images that are fit for purpose. Shutterstock has a MASSIVE online database of licensable images so we simply have a subscription with them that covers our needs

WP Engine

https://wpengine.com

We used to run our e-commerce and marketing platform on Shopify, but after spiralling development costs and no SEO footprint we switched to WordPress and WooCommerce and quadrupled our traffic and sales overnight. Whilst I love hosting infrastructure I wanted to work more ON the business rather than IN the business so moved our platform to WP Engine. Due to the way I architected the platform we have a contracted WordPress administrator who does about 2-3 hours of work a month across 7 different sites. It’s a really elegant solution for building any sales and marketing platform.

Mailchimp – Email Marketing

https://mailchimp.com

Mailchimp is my favourite email marketing platform. As we have so many products selling in so many different countries and languages it’s important to have a simple solution that lets us collect email addresses across all our platforms, tag them appropriately and let us automate mail outs to our different customer segments. Mailchimp does it perfectly and with a really beautiful user interface that keeps things simple (stupid)!

Accounting

Xero – Online Accounting Software

https://www.xero.com

We used to use an accountant that had their own bespoke online accountancy platform but switched to a different accountant as our bank accounts and number of currencies we handled increased to a point their system couldn’t handle. Now we use Xero I can’t recommend it enough. Our first accountant’s bespoke platform seemed an easy option to start with but we suffered from vendor lock-in and high priced, specialist, book-keepers. Xero is familiar to all good accountants and book-keepers so you can change service providers with out changing accountancy software.

A2X – Amazon Marketplace Accounting

https://www.a2xaccounting.com

A2X exports all our Amazon transactions in to Xero, simplifying the work our book-keeper needs to do and helping make sure that everything is accounted for. It saves a lot of time and money and is extremely reliable.

Avask – European VAT

https://ukvat.uk.com

Because we sell so much in so many European countries, we need to be VAT registered due to EU law. Avask Accounting & Business Consultants have helped us get VAT registered across the EU as well as handle all our accounting and help us to make the VAT payments.

Compliance

Ashbury Labeling – Product And Labelling Regulations

https://www.ashburylabelling.co.uk

One of my brands is a vitamin supplement brand which is heavily regulated in the EU. Working with Ashbury gives us peace of mind, knowing that all our product ingredients and formula are legally approved for sale in the EU and that our labelling and marketing practices are also compliant with no misleading health claims. In the USA we sell Probiotics, in Europe it’s Live Cultures!

Di Renzo – Italian Regulatory Affairs

https://www.direnzo.biz

All supplements warehoused and sold in Italy need registration with the Italian Ministry of Health and we’ve been working with Di Renzo to communicate with the Italian government and get all our products approved as Italy is one of our largest markets. The business has grown from an Amazon business to one of legalise and compliance!

Natural Products Consulting Corp – Canadian Regulatory Affairs

https://www.npc-corp.ca

Canada also require all supplements to be registered with the Canada Health organisation and assigned a Natural Product Number (NPN). NPC Corp handled all the hard work for us, helping us register our products and sell them in Canada.

Podcasts

The Amazing Seller

https://theamazingseller.com

I’ve been listening to Scott Voelker’s The Amazing Seller podcast from the start, when it was just Scott and his dog! He helps keep me in the loop with what’s going on in the Amazon ecosystem and is another tool in my toolbox to help me keep current and on top of things.

I was inspired to create this post after paying my corporation tax and going over the accounts of the last 12 months and seeing all the services we’ve leveraged to build the business and get to where we are today.

We’ve dabbled with lots of tools not mentioned over the years which have fallen by the wayside but this is a pretty concise list of all the products and services we are using at the moment as the platform for our business.

I’m curious to hear from others.

What’s in your Amazon seller stack?

Over the course of the last 12 months, what has been your most consistent present problem?

Where Do You Get Your Information From?

by rus

Whilst working along side CEO and designer Jon Myers a common conversation thread that would emerge was “Where do you get your information from?”.

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said that we are “The average of the five people we spend the most time with”. A similar philosophy can be applied to the information we absorb.

Limiting the scope of information we gather will in turn limit our horizons. If we live in a bubble we will isolate ourselves from incite and experiences of people outside that bubble.

Taking on board information from incongruent sources can also be dangerous. Always take a good look at people offering advice. If they are living the life they talk only then should you listen.

Here are some of the blogs I read to get genuine information which has been helping me grow my career over the years.

Slashdot

Slashdot is why I got in to Bitcoin in 2010. It is a tech news aggregator aimed at nerds and is often the first news site to report on tech news sourced directly from specialist mailing lists and newsgroups.

Joel On Software

Joel Spolsky is the founder of Fog Creek Software and co-founded Stack Overflow and Trello. Joel has been blogging about his approach to software and business on Joel On Software since 2000.

OnStartups.com

Dharmesh Shah is co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. Dharmesh loves what he does and has shipped “about ten” commercial products across different startups. Whilst Dharmesh has slowed down blogging on OnStartups.com he can be found on Medium.

Signal v. Noise

Signal v. Noise is written by David Heinemeier Hansson and the team at Basecamp. David created Ruby on Rails and founded Basecamp in 1999. Basecamp are now a company of 50 people working remotely across 32 different cities.

High Scalability

Todd Hoff has been blogging about High Scalability issues since 2004. Todd worked at Yahoo from 2005 and helped them scale to serve hundreds of millions of users. He’s also built HA platforms with five 9s of availability. 

A16z

Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley with a focus on technology. Their founders and team regularly write for their blog covering all aspects of the industry.

Philosophy Of Logging

by rus

Application logs are one of the most useful diagnostic aids in platform support and it pains me that many developers often ignore such a critical aspect of their system.

When To Not Log

There is only one reason for an application to not generate any logs, and that is for performance reasons, e.g. constrained telecoms or web servers running at maximum IO capacity where even writing to disk will have an impact on application performance.

And even then, you can bet those applications catch and log exceptions at an ‘error’ level for diagnostic purposes.

Really, there are no reasons for an application to not generate any logs ever, which is something I see all too frequently.

Logs Are Important

The developer might know what the application is doing already, they wrote it, but logging also tells other people what the application is doing. The QA team, the systems team responsible for deployment, the on-call sys admin who is responding to alerts generated by a failing system, running the code, at 2am. All these people need to understand what the code is doing, the developer is part of a team and the code is part of a system. Everyone and everything has to work together for the solution to function.

It’s Hard To Log Too Much

Most languages have third party libraries to help with logging, e.g. log4j, WinstonJS, etc.

These libraries let you configure a log level, e.g. debug, info, warn, error, none, depending on the severity of what you are logging, so you can filter what the application actually spits out.

e.g. if you consider the following code

logger.debug('User not authenticated', email);
logger.error('Exception', err.message);

an application configured to log at debug level would log both lines, but an application configured for just error logging will only log the on error line. This way you can run the application at a log level suitable for your needs.

router.post('/signin', async (req, res, next) => {
  logger.debug('router.post /signin');
  try {
  }
}

It’s even reasonable to add logging at the top of each function call, so you can trace through the application as it runs confirming the correct parts get called. In the worst case it’s comfort noise, in the best case it will help someone solve a bug as they step through the logs later.

Catch And Log Your Exceptions

When your application generates an exception that means it’s doing something you didn’t predict. Probably triggered by an error.

It takes reading documentation to know what libraries and functions will and will not throw exceptions. A good rule of thumb is if the libraries’ example code catches exceptions, production code should also catch those same exceptions.

A responsible developer will catch and log these errors every time and these errors should be logged at the appropriate error level.

Log To Console/Disk

Depending on your application and it’s environment it is not enough to just return an error as the result of a request, e.g. in the case of a web server.

Creating a web service that returns an HTTP 500 status code and some JSON containing the error to the client seems a reasonable way of handling errors but it offers no paper trail. If your application can’t log people in because a disk is full, with out proper logging how are you going to know when the incident started? How are you even going to know it’s because the disk is full if you aren’t catching, throwing and logging exceptions around that code? How is the systems administrator supposed to diagnose that issue at 2am when text messages get them out of bed?

Logging to disk gives you the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. With correct use of timestamps you can see when issues occurred and from that come up with holistic solutions to stop them from happening again.

Logging to console gives you something to look at if the disk fills up.

Use A Log Aggregator

Logging isn’t just for developers and systems administrators, it also a useful information source for first tier customer support when the logs are pumped in to an aggregator.

With Importist we are using Sentry, it has an open source solution if you want to host your own or a hosted option with a usable free tier, other options include Splunk or Kibana.

To a certain extent, anyone that can read should be able to understand some error messages. e.g. Cannot connect to database. Allowing first tier support read access to a good log aggregator will reduce the cost and time to fix of incidents by helping them diagnose customer service issues themselves and improve the quality of bug reporting, removing any guess work from second tier support and beyong allowing them to get to the heart of the issue quicker.

A good log aggregator will also integrate with Slack and email for reporting and notification, possibly alerting you to issues before your customers even realise there’s a problem if configured correctly.

You Can Graph Logs

Logs can be used to create graphs. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and statistics can be monitored by analysing logs with a tool like Munin. A great example is the Apache web server. Apache will log every HTTP request to an access file with a timestamp. Analytics tools like Munin can then scan that log file to calculate statistics like accesses per second.

I’m currently investigating Logz.io for visualising our system logs. Logz.io makes logging cool again as you can run pattern matching against the log output of every component in your system, the application servers, the databases, the web servers, email servers, everything. Properly configured tools like Logz.io or ELK will even generate access maps if the user’s IP is available.

The Dangers Of Courses

I’ve seen a lot of people wanting to get started in software development take courses or bootcamps thinking that is enough and then they will know it all.

I’m a big fan of self education and am slowly going through a series of courses on Udemy for fun. I also love what the freeCodeCamp guys are doing. But all these courses seem to have one thing in common so far.

None of them discuss logging.

Well, that’s not entirely fair, freeCodeCamp uses logging as an example of writing Express middleware. But so far that’s it and that’s really not good enough.

Not All Of This Is Gospel

How and the amount you log obviously depends on what you are doing and who you are working with.

If you’re writing a quick script to parse a CSV you will require a different level of logging than if you’re dealing with a distributed application spanning many processes and servers.

If you’re part of a company then you will need to log appropriately for the rest of the company to function.

Conclusion

Depending on your point of view logging

  • makes the terminal messy
  • helps diagnose system and performance failures
  • can be used to monitor system performance
  • can be used to create system KPIs

Building Your First VR Experience In Decentraland

by rus

This is a brief video and tutorial on building your first VR experience in the Decentraland VR platform and getting you started with the tools, a-minus syntax. By the end of this tutorial you will have an area of land with a Lambo on it you can walk around. Publishing the land to the Ethereum blockchain will come in a later video.

Sorry for the fan noise, the client seemed to have killed my CPU 🙂

First you need to install node from either:

I am currently using version 8.9.1

Then you need to install the Decentraland CLI tool. The tool is documented at https://cli.decentraland.org/ but is installed with the command

npm install -g decentraland

 

I ran in to a bug where the first time I ran the install command it failed to install. When I ran it for a second time it installed fine.

Now create your decentraland directory, I’m calling mine rus-demo

cool-2:Code rus$ mkdir rus-demo
cool-2:Code rus$ cd rus-demo

 

Now run dcl init inside the directory you just made

cool-2:rus-demo rus$ dcl init

? Scene title: rus_demo
? Your ethereum address: (recommended — used to check ownership of parcels when deploying
your scene) 0x818118181888
? Your name: (optional — shown to other users so that they can contact you) rus
? Your email: (optional — shown to other users so that they can contact you) [email protected]
? Parcels comprising the scene (recommended — used to show the limts of your scene and upl
oad to these coordinates)
Please use this format: ‘x,y; x,y; x,y …’
1,1; 1,2; 2,1; 2,2
? Do you want to continue? Yes
New project created in ‘/Users/rus/Documents/Code/rus-demo’ directory.
? Which type of project would you like to generate? Static a-minus scene project
cool-2:rus-demo rus$ ls -al
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 9 rus staff 306 22 Mar 09:24 .
[email protected] 79 rus staff 2686 22 Mar 09:22 ..
-rw-r — r — 1 rus staff 116 22 Mar 09:24 .dclignore
drwxr-xr-x 3 rus staff 102 22 Mar 09:24 .decentraland
drwxr-xr-x 2 rus staff 68 22 Mar 09:24 audio
drwxr-xr-x 2 rus staff 68 22 Mar 09:24 models
-rw-r — r — 1 rus staff 495 22 Mar 09:24 scene.json
-rw-r — r — 1 rus staff 358 22 Mar 09:21 scene.xml
drwxr-xr-x 2 rus staff 68 22 Mar 09:24 textures

 

Download the lambo files from

https://nofile.io/f/TZr8JXFfHCc/avent.zip

Extract the models and put them in the models folder

Open the scene.xml in your favourite text editor, replace the contents with the following a-minus code to display an object.

<a-scene>
      <a-obj-model obj-model="obj: models/Avent.obj; mtl: models/Avent.mtl" position="0 0 0" rotation="0 0 0" scale="1 1 1"/>
</a-scene>

 

Save the scene.

Run dcl start.

dcl start

 

Drive your lambo to the moon.

The Decentraland marketplace has now been launched at https://market.decentraland.org/