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The global NFT market relies on designers to support artists, Web3 platforms and marketplaces, and major global brands. Toptal designer Gabor Molnar offers insights from his experience breaking into this emerging field. By Gabor Molnar @toptal.com.

In 2021, non-fungible token sales surged to more than $17 billion. The opportunities created by this rapidly growing sector aren’t only for artists and collectors: The market for NFTs also opens new doors for UX and UI designers.

The main parts of the article:

• A brief introduction to NFTs
• Major players in the NFT world
• NFT opportunities for designers
• Design challenges
• The novelty of cryptocurrency use
• Transaction processing time
• Gas fees
• Security

NFTs have a great deal of cachet due to novelty and media attention, not to mention the sheer amount of money focused on their creation and sale. Even though NFT sales experience volatility, the pioneer technology won’t go away anytime soon. As a vital part of Web3, the next evolution of the internet, NFTs will likely play a significant role in the future metaverse and yield numerous use cases that have yet to be discovered. Nice one!

I am going to setup a mobile lab on my MacBook Pro with the help of VMware Fusion 12 so I can run some ESXi servers with nested virtualization. This way I will have a lab I can carry around with me on my travels around the world. By Edwin Weijdema.

The article then covers following steps:

• Planning of the mobile lab
• Getting started
• Installing VMware ESXi in VMware Fusion Pro
• Deploying a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) on top of the ESXi
• Configuring vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)
• Post-Configuration changes

The mobile lab is running smooth now on author’s MacBook Pro with better than expected performance. He is now deploying Microsoft Windows 2022 Servers and running security tests with Veeam Backup & Replication v12 Beta 2 in combination with gMSA, Kerberos, NTLM, Hardening and Active Directory management domains. Well done!

This article explains how SQLite can be extended with Rust. In particular, it will outline SQLite’s mechanism called virtual tables and showcase how we can use it from Rust programming language. By Sergey Khabibullin.

We will be dealing with some amount of unsafe Rust code. There are frameworks that can be used to abstract away some unsafe code, but we’ll not use them because rust-bindgen will take care of generating the bindings for us, and we will only use unsafe in the relatively thin layer of code that connects SQLite and Rust.

The article main points are:

• Objectives
• Project structure
• Entry point and modules
• Virtual table
• Cursor

Needless to say, this article is not a complete guide on extending SQLite. I tried to cover parts that appeared essential and interesting. It’s always a trade-off when you write technical articles: you want to cover more and in more detail but you have to set some boundaries otherwise the article will be infinite in size and complexity. Good read!

SVG Symbol is an unvisited technique for reusing inlined SVGs elements. They seem redundant while using popular component-based frameworks/libraries like React, Vue, Svelte, hence you don’t see it a lot on the web. By @Bart.

The whole idea builds around declaring your SVG element ONCE (per page), and reusing it as many times as you want without losing any performance. Every website has some kind of SVGs, some of them are most likely inlined (to prevent flicking) and some are not. But the point is, you will find a lot of occurrences that are repeatable, once, twice, three times, or even one hundred times.

When it comes to repeatable SVGs, most people would create a component and reuse it anywhere they want. It is a valid solution. But there’s a high chance, that you would be missing some performance freebies. If you’re striving for that bang-for-the-buck kind of performance, this article might be interesting for you.

The more fancy looking, the more complex your SVG is. And so, it increases the size of your HTML document and the number of elements the browser will have to parse and put in DOM. What we can observe is the fact that the bigger the document, the more benefits we get from using symbols. In this case, we improved our FCP score by approximately 60ms. Interesting read!

Firebase is a solution to enable developers to focus more on building the applications without the need of worrying about managing the backend. Features like user authentication, database, file storage, notifications, and more can be handled by Firebase. By Atanda Oluchi Aminat.

In this post, we’ll focus on learning how to implement user authentication using Firebase Email and the password sign-in method in Kotlin. In addition to that, we’ll take a look at some potential errors developers encounter during this process and how to resolve them.

The article then explains following steps:

• Creating an Android project
• Create a Firebase project
• Adding user authentication screens to app

In the article we’ve learned some of the features that Firebase has to offer. We dived deep into user authentication using email and password. We also learnt how to handle or prevent some major errors while doing this process. Good read!

Design patterns are reusable, advanced, object-oriented solutions that we can use to address similar instances of everyday problems in software design. They are like blueprints for solving certain kinds of problems. By Nishani Dissanayake.

This article will discuss the benefits of using design patterns and introduce some of the most-used design patterns in JavaScript:

• Benefits of using design patterns
• Design patterns in JavaScript
• Constructor pattern
• Factory pattern
• Module pattern
• Singleton pattern
• Prototype pattern

Although these design patterns help developers in many ways, we must only use them after going through the specs of an applications and making sure the design pattern suits those. Good read!

Swift is a great language for creating Spin applications. This tutorial walks through the process of installing SwiftWasm, building a simple Wagi app, and then running it in Spin. Spin is a framework for building and running event-driven microservice applications with WebAssembly (Wasm) components. With Spin, we’re trying to make it easier to get started with using WebAssembly on the server so that we can all take advantage of the security, portability, and speed WebAssembly provides when it comes to running microservices. By Matt Butcher.

The article then describes in some detail:

• Setting up Swift for WebAssembly
• Creating a new Swift program
• The getEnvVar function
• The top-level code
• Running the code
• The getName function
• Calling our functions
• Compiling and running our code

… and more. Thanks to the hard work of the SwiftWasm community, Swift is turning out to be an excellent language for WebAssembly development. In this article, we’ve created a simple Spin application in Swift, compiled it to WebAssembly with WASI, and then executed it as a Swift Wagi application. Nice one!

It seems like a counterintuitive question: how can employees get more done in less time? Surely, if we want employees to be productive, we need to give them more time to work, not less? But recent studies have shown that shorter working hours can lead to increased productivity. By @quire.io.

In one study, Microsoft found that when they reduced their employees’ working week from five days to four, they saw a 40% increase in productivity.

The article then focuses on the following:

• Why working fewer hours makes employees more productive
• The UK trialing a 4-day work week
• How to be more productive with fewer working hours
• Tips to help employees successfully work fewer hours and be more productive
• Fewer working hours, more productive

… and more. When you take a break, it gives your mind a chance to rest and rejuvenate. This can help you come back to your work with fresh energy and new ideas. Try to take a break at least once every hour, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Get up and stretch, take a walk, or grab a quick snack. Good read!

Want to keep people awake at data presentations? Try sharing your findings backwards. You’ve worked it. Now put your chart down, flip it and reverse it. By Ryan Estrellado.

The article main sections:

• Sequence well or risk slumber
• The analysis: Start with the data points
• Look at all the data points
• Note interesting details
• Categorize details into interesting themes
• The presentation: start with the story
• Point out interesting themes

… and more. Starting with the data points and ending with the story doesn’t set the tone for a compelling discussion. It’s like inviting your friends over for dinner, then showing them your timeshare presentation before bringing out the food. They were there for the shrimp cocktail and gossip. That needs to come first if you want to keep them happy. Good reading!

PostgreSQL’s speed, robustness and security makes it suitable for 99% of the new-age applications. Today, let’s deep dive into how you can enable scalability and load balancing of your PostgreSQL cluster using Pgpool-II. By Azman Agung Nugraha.

Pgpool-II is a middleware that works between PostgreSQL servers and a PostgreSQL database client. It is distributed under a license similar to BSD and MIT. Let’s take a look at the main features of the article:

• What is PGPOOL-II?
• How load balancing works within the PGPOOL-II
• Load balancing mode in Pgpool-II
• Best architecture to deploy Pgpool-II
• Pgpool-II parameter that you should looking out

Generally, you would not install Pgpool-II on the backend servers. What you see in recent picture is the most common configuration. Pgpool-II is a standalone server which essentially sits in front of the databases. The two Postgres servers are often configured with streaming replication with one being the Primary DB and the other the Standby DB. Good read!