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Showing posts from 2020

Valen Smith, the English teacher videos are missing!

I vaguely remembered that sometimes around 2009, engVid on YouTube was very popular. I especially liked a teacher by name Valen Smith's videos. She was not only beautiful but also very good at explaining the English usage. I also vaguely remembered to check her channel ValenESL around 2015. But, not sure what happened to her or engVid, all her videos are sadly gone. I have also noted that many people on Twitter were asking the same. Not sure what happened. Some people seem to have reuploaded her videos and YouTube continuously removing them with a note "This video contains content from LearnVid, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Strangely though, on Facebook, some people have managed to create a fake account using her old channel name ValenESL.

RIP: MOOC materials; the coronavirus effect

Coronavirus (Covid 19 caused by SARS-CoV-2) pandemic and lockdown disrupted lives and market in a completely unexpected manner. One market that seen a spike during lockdown is MOOC and online education. What I realized of late is that many of these MOOC materials are not suitable for remote viewing. I have taken a couple of courses in random pseudonyms in Coursera and also another one in my real name in PadhAI conducted by IIT faculties. Most of these materials were recorded in a way as if they teach in physical classrooms. Because of that reason, they're very tiring to watch; they lack some basic video editing. Compare that to animated education videos posted to YouTube. One exception to this MOOC material is MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning (I'm yet to watch them all though) Classical teaching jobs are in danger These days schools are starting up online classes that follow materials similar to these MOOCs. Students are finding hard to follow them as they're

NDAs and contributor-restrictions crippled Indian IT

NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) is a common requirement in the Indian IT sector. So outsourcing clients indirectly forced the companies not to disclose the projects and other specifics. This in turn restricted many developers from contributing to the open-source and other community efforts. New age developers and NDAs I recently stumbled upon a resume of a fresher based in Chennai whose resume filled with speaker portfolios. Though the experience and meetup topics didn't look attractive, the overall presentation of the profile was great. In fact, that seems to have helped them to get a new attractive offer. In the Indian IT scene, the new fad is Product Management. Most of the young wannabe product managers are now speaking and presenting in many meetups. So nowadays it looks like these folks are not following NDAs or the clients have become lenient. International scenario I also stumbled upon highly talented Nadieh Bremer and Sara Soueidan websites. In fact, Nadieh Bremer h

Hardening WordPress at WordPress Community Meetup - Mar 2020

Today spoke about hardening WordPress at the WordPress meetup . It's a nice experience as the audience were from mixed backgrounds (developing, marketing, product management, etc). My slides and links are available in the Pinboard . I have also shared an actionable checklist to harden a WordPress instance, that anyone can use in the form of the Restyaboard app (Restyaboard similar to Trello but open source and can self-host).