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On sophists and sophisms

/ Journal

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — (attributed to) Mark Twain I’ve met people, both online and IRL, who believe that if they’re schooled they must also be educated. People who believe that the educational funnel they went through must have made them better than the rest. Although the last statement might be true, in some regards, they tend to extend its meaning to being better than others with a number of years of practical experience equivalent to their years of study.

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What's your financial freedom goal?

/ Journal

I’ve been thinking about an answer to this question since I started migrating everything from www.weremote.ro to www.weremote.eu. I thought long and hard about an answer, since all the effort I’m putting into this remote jobs platform is personal, self-funded and self-everything-else. I finally found it, today: I want to reach the level of financial freedom that would allow me to use my phone without a protective case. Now I’m going to pass it on to you:

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Stop storing JWT in LocalStorage! And stop using JWT.

I’ve been developing single-page web-apps for a while now, and it’s gotten into my habit to use LocalStorage to store JWTs. The reason I used JWT was to embed data about the user, and keep it on the client-side, to authenticate (identify) requests/users. Figured out a while ago that it was wrong. On many levels! TL;DR — don’t use JWT and don’t store sensitive data in LocalStorage For starters, it’s not okay to store auth data in LocalStorage.

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Be yourself all the time so you don't have to be someone else

/ Entrepreneurship / Opinion

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything!” “Act natural and you’ll never have to pretend to be someone else.” The first quote is from Mark Twain (supposedly). The second is my interpretation, applied to communication, both online and offline. I replied to a comment earlier and Twain’s quote came to mind. The discussion was around my blunt communication methods, and lack of staging and scripts. ⬇️ Below is a link to the video the comment was about.

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I launched a remote jobs platform — let's talk about the numbers

/ Entrepreneurship / Videos

About a month ago I started working on a remote jobs platform, for Romania titled weremote.ro. One or two weeks into the project, I launched an initial version to collect feedback from people. After a couple of feedback rounds and amazing people giving very useful advice, I officially launched it “to the public” on the 24th of April. All along I was looking to rent an office space so I could restart my videos and my podcast, and I made a promise that the first video I would publish would be about “the numbers” the platform got since I launched it.

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I removed some apps from my phone...

/ Opinion

I keep seeing a lot of posts from people complaining about how social media is destroying their life and attention. Some of them have started disabling notifications, others quit cold turkey and delete their accounts, while others more just uninstall their apps. In the past, I also did it. I disabled notifications or uninstalled apps. Actually, in the past year I never allowed any app to send notifications, just because “it said so”.

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On the importance of visualization

/ Opinion

I’m thinking of blogging like in the old days. Back when people used to blog whenever something happened. This is what made it so unique, because it was like online journaling. And I love journaling! So today I’m going to write about something that helps me a lot in my day to day life. That’s visualization! Not the kind you find in self-help books. I don’t imagine myself to be a millionaire, then tell myself that I deserve all the riches of the world to come to me and then they come.

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How to check if a JavaScript object is empty

/ JavaScript / Software Development

I had the following snippet of code and wanted to log an error only if whatever the catch block receives is an actual object with actual values. Needed a solution. try { const attr = await this.contract.methods.attributes(index) .call(this.defaultConfig); const identifierText = Web3.utils.hexToUtf8(attr); return identifierText; } catch (attributeNotFoundError) { logger.error(`Attribute not found`, attributeNotFoundError); return null; } The code calls a smart contract getter, using Web3.js, retrieves whatever the return value is, and returns its plain text representation.

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12 things about JavaScript business owners and recruiters MUST know

/ Opinion / Business advice

Don’t you just hate it when you’re totally outside the loop when you need to hire a JavaScript developer?! Here’s a short list of concepts and keywords and the simplest explanation I could muster for each. Know these things and you will be able to make far more informed decisions (and you won’t piss your candidates off, in the process). 1. It’s JavaScript, not Java Script TL;DR Java is to JavaScript what car is to carpet.

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Does reading in a foreign language affect learning?

/ Quora / Opinion

This is not the usual type of article you’d expect from me. It’s a more detailed description for a question I asked on Quora — Does reading in a foreign language affect learning?. The point is that I’m not sure if and how does reading in a foreign language affect learning. How does it affect what you recall from what you read? I’m asking the question because I’ve been monitoring my progress on various books and it always seemed that I’m better at remembering details from the ones written in Romanian rather than English or French.

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