Asaf Zamir – Chief Technology Officer & AI/Cloud Consultant. Founder of CloudExpat, AZdev. Author of Coder to CTO.

I have been using Chrome for many years now, mostly not really thinking of it as a browser but rather just a thin layer between me and the WWW.
Today I realized something pretty interesting - you can select multiple tabs by holding down the CTRL key and clicking with your mouse!
The selected tabs can be moved to another window, or moved around other existing tabs. Until now I have been moving them one-by-one like some animal!

I decided to make a list of 5 lesser known Chrome tricks (ok except CTRL + SHIFT + T).

Create App shortcuts

Apparently there's a mode on Chrome called "App mode", which is just a very light window without any extra toolbars, designed to only display a web-app's content. On Menu -> Tools / More tools -> Create application shortcuts... / Create shortcut... you will find an option to create shortcuts for such web-apps. Now on Windows the icon will show up on your Desktop, and on Linux it'll be under your main application menu -> Chrome Apps (not sure about Mac, likely to be either or).
In case you want to use the command line, there's an options for that too:

Play the Dinosaur T-Rex game, even when you're online!

By going to chrome://dino/ you can play the T-Rex Game. No longer do you have to wait for your provider to have a technical issue to enjoy this game :)

Understand how Omnibox works

By going to chrome://omnibox/ , you can see exactly the results that Omnibox generates and how they were arrived at. This is super cool when Omnibox sometimes gives you odd results, like when you're typing "Cale" (for Google Calendar) and it gives you a Google search for "Cale" instead of "calendar.google.com".

Select multiple tabs

As mentioned before you can use CTRL + click to select multiple tabs on Chrome. Multi-tabs selection gives you a quick way to send them to another window, or move them between your existing tabs.
Bonus tip: You can select entire ranges of tabs with SHIFT + click, just like in a file browser!

Reopen closed tab

By now I imagine most of you know about CTRL + SHIFT + T. Just in case some of you don't, it's a magical combination of keys that lets you reopen a tab you just accidentally closed.
It's a lifesaver, and I admit to use it at least once a day.

This is a story of 3 startups, starting in 3 different ecosystems, with similar solutions for Invoice Financing.
Here we will be looking into their funding rounds to learn about the differences between the startup ecosystems of Zurich, London, and San Francisco.
First of all:

What's Invoice Financing?

Scenario: You're a web developer, and you get paid 30 days after the invoice was sent. Until then, you need to pay your rent/business expenses, what do you do? A bank loan is the traditional solution (but it takes time). Invoice financing is a modern solution to this, providers give you the money in return of some interest, and you pay them back within several weeks/months.

The companies we're looking into

• Advanon - A Zurich based startup. Total Funding: 13.92M USD (13.6M CHF)
• MarketInvoice - A London based startup. Total Funding: 58.26M USD (45.8M GBP)
• Fundbox - A San Francisco based startup. Total Funding: 107.5 USD

When looking at the numbers, this comparison symbolizes the stark difference between the ecosystems.

Advanon, being a Swiss startup, has only gone through 2 rounds in the last 4 years. Noticebly, having a pretty large Series A round of 13.5M CHF. This is a very solid indication of the Swiss tech market as a whole, funding rounds aren't as quick, but they are definitely enough for a lean burn rate (keeping in mind the local salary ranges) and steady growth.

Too many NPM libraries are demanding to be globally installed, to name a few:
While it's sometimes very useful to have some of these components globally available,
in many cases you only need them for 1-2 projects.
In some cases, you might not have permissions to install packages globally.

The reality is, you don't need to install them globally at all!

Installing a global NPM package locally

Let's take Serverless as an example. Let's say we want to deploy an existing project, but we don't have Serverless installed on our system.
First we install the package locally:Then, on our node_modules/ directory, there's a hidden .bin/ directory, where the serverless binary is located.
So from the main project directory, we simply run:Now if you want to make it a bit more snappy, you could add a shortcut (i.e. symbolic link) to the binary:And from now on simply run any serverless command like so:On rare occasions, some packages' binaries are not under node_modules/.bin/ but somewhere inside the package's directory, such as node_modules/serverless/bin/.

So far I've been using locally installed packages for Serverless, SailsJS, Mocha, Terraform, and a few others as well.

On the next post, we'll try playing around with Serverless and S3, stay tuned!

Yesterday I had a chance to see a presentation by Mance Harmon & Tom Trowbridge, the Founders of Hedera Hashgraph. Hashgraph presents a potential for a next generation ledger solution, or in simple terms - The next evolution of Blockchain technology.

The actual Hashgraph algorithm was written by Leemon Baird, a highly gifted individual with a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Baird has a long history of Math & Algorithms, specifically around machine learnnig and more recently distributed consensus.

Hasgraph promises to tackle some of the biggest issues with Blockchain: Performance, Security & Governance.

Hashgraph Performance

The most critical performance metric for any Blockchain/Ledger is TPS - Transactions Per Second.
Here are some TPS numbers for the most popular Cryptocurrencies and traditional payment processors:

• Bitcoin 2.5 TPS
• Ethereum 15 TPS
• Visa 1700 TPS (avg) to 4000 TPS (peak)
• PayPal 115 TPS

And Hashgraph's promise?

• Hashgraph 50,000 TPS - 250,000 TPS

If these numbers can be replicated on a public ledger, we're looking at a potential mass-market solution without any of the familiar growing pains for the foreseeable future.
Hashgraph also promises to integrate Sharding to allow for even larger distributed applications on top of the platform.

Hashgraph Security

Hashgraph claims to have achieved the highest theoretical level of security in the crypto industry, the coveted "asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance" or aBFT for short.
Without going too much into the details of aBFT, they present an elegant and efficient way to replace Proof-of-Work, which thus far has been the dominant BFT solution.
This potentially gets rid of the obvious energy-consumption and hardcoded slowdown issues of the system.

Hashgraph Governance - the council of 39

In order to avoid the immediate 1/3 dishonest nodes problem, two thirds of the initial tokens will be given to a council of 39 Major Corporations & Organizations from different industries and locations. Those entities will not technically hold the actual tokens, but they will have committees to eventually decide when to release those tokens to the public. All revenues from sale will go back to Hedera.
This event will occur when the token is of high enough value, such as that a 1/3 dishonest node attack will no longer be financially feasible.
It remains to be seen whether it's possible to determine when this will happen, as well as preventing a single actor from gaining too much power over the economy as a whole.
Hedera Hashgraph is definitely trying something unique here, and it's mostly a matter of time to see how it works in a live public setting.

A distributed Ledger that is fault-tolerant AND can do over 250K TPS can truly usher an era of a decentralized, user owned internet.