Many successful platforms are simply abstractions of more complicated services. Think about how many SaaS products are just layers on top of API’s by Twilio, Spotify, Yahoo Finance, etc. If you can’t think of any offerings to simplify these services whilst providing rich, accurate data then there may be an opportunity.

I built FileFern, a layer on top of existing services, to partially scratch my own itch, which was that:

File management between clients is frustrating. I always hated searching for files in my inbox, only to resend them later on. …

Writing this because I’ve conducted an installation of Flask, Python 3.x, WSGI and Apache2 on an Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial machine so many times that I figured I’d create a step-by-step to codify it at least for my own struggles.

1. Apache:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2

2. Python 3.x:

Python 3.5 is installed on 16.04 by default, verify it by typing:

python3 -V

If you still want to upgrade to > 3.5:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.6

Then we will make your python version default:

alias python=python3.5
source ~/.bashrc

3. Mod_WSGI:

sudo apt-get install…

“Suppression of inflammation is the most important driver of longevity” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4634197/

We’re always pursuing new ways of improving quality of life and I’d love to share with you some of our findings and advice to take advantage of this research.

The latest feature of our research at Meports, is Inflammation.

Inflammation:
It’s widely agreed that most if not all diseases stem from chronic inflammation and if you’re genetically predisposed to some of these diseases you should pay attention.
Inflammation absolutely serves a purpose, by way of your immune system fighting off threats by releasing soldier-like, T cells (a white blood cell). …

It’s 3pm and you just realized you haven’t eaten lunch. You’re so engrossed in whatever you’re doing (be it reading, programming or writing) that you forget about your basic human needs. By the time you realize this, you think: “damn, that was a good session”.

This focus-induced tunnel vision is often referred to as flow state. Flow state can occur periodically throughout the day, but each session can yield completely different results, one thing is consistent however: there are precursors that trigger them and they can be controlled.

The key is to identify these flow state triggers and control when they happen. …

Wait… what? Why would I want to fail?

There are an endless number of quotes, motivational sayings, videos, etc that preach how failure is the path to success, you just have to get back up and learn, yadda yadda yadda.

Most of us are familiar with the phrase “fail fast”, but what does it really mean and how can it be applied to business, hobbies, and even relationships?

Paul Graham of YCombinator has been preaching this mantra since the early stages of Silicon Valley and it’s grown to be the foundation of the fastest growing companies like Facebook.

Zuck said himself that Facebook has thousands of different versions live at any point in time. The goal here is to determine why each versions fail, so the organizer can answer: how do we get slightly closer towards success next time? …

By now I’m sure you’re familiar with Lean Development and how to apply that same iterative process to anything, including your own life. But something I’ve always struggled with is leveraging these lean methodologies to produce tangible, data-driven results.

Lean development preaches early feedback, accelerated learning, and MVP production, but how do they all fit together? This is where a user roadmap comes into play.

What is a user roadmap?

A roadmap is a sequence of event that has two axis: time and context. Time is where the user is in the product’s experience and context is what they’re doing that brought them there. …

I’ve built businesses and failed.

I wanted to build a business to make healthcare more transparent. Two years into development, I figured it was too difficult for two college students to tackle.

I wanted to make it incredibly simple for social media influencers to design and sell their own products, but traction was stagnant.

I wanted to build a digital agency, a SaaS platform, a cryptocurrency recommendation engine, a personal life dashboard and a yoga studio analytics platform.

Being the CEO & Founder of a successful company has always been appealing to me because despite the sweet title of “Chief Executive Officer”, it means my career north star is to bring value to humanity. …

So I’ve been super into self experiments lately and have compiled a list of different things I’d like to try out for two week “trial” periods. Next up in my experiment to do list was daily morning journaling.

Like many of my newly introduced habits, strategies, etc. with life, I drew this experiment from Tim Ferriss, Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism in general.

Some people have structures to their daily journals and others just use it as a therapy tool. I wanted to converge these two approaches.

Structure

Ben Franklin’s daily itinerary was notorious for being incredibly structured and disciplined. Would you expect anything less from one of the greatest inventors in American history? …