How to install global NPM packages locally
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,npm install -g serverless npm install -g terraform npm install -g mocha
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.npm install serverless
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:./node_modules/.bin/serverless deploy -vAnd from now on simply run any serverless command like so:ln -s node_modules/.bin/serverless serverlessOn rare occasions, some packages' binaries are not under node_modules/.bin/ but somewhere inside the package's directory, such as node_modules/serverless/bin/../serverless deploy -v
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!Posted in TechnologyHedera Hashgraph - the future of Blockchain?

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
- Hashgraph 50,000 TPS - 250,000 TPS
Hashgraph also promises to integrate Sharding to allow for even larger distributed applications on top of the platform.
Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph 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.Posted in Crypto, TechnologyMoving to Crypto Valley

Not many know this, but I've had my eyes set on Zug long before Ethereum registered its foundation there. The quiet town that is close enough to Zurich for a potential daily commute, yet still small enough to give you a genuine Swiss experience, was in my top 3 relocation candidates list since 2013.
So together with the growing Crypto scene there, it was the perfect storm of events that gave me the final push to move to Zug.Between Cloud and Crypto
In the summer of 2017, we at Cloudwith.me have introduced a new token to usher a new age of Cloud.
The plan is multi-faceted, and quite complex, but to focus on the current stage - The new Cloud Token is made to be the de facto currency to purchase Cloud Services.
Whether those are servers at Cloudwith.me (currently supporting Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure), or Cloud products at other Cloud providers & merchants that will soon adopt the Cloud Token.
Due to this exciting turn of events, it has become more and more critical to keep up with the fastest changing tech landscape in the world - Crypto/Blockchain technology.Why Crypto Valley?

"If Satoshi Nakamoto were a trustee, we would've found him for you." - street advertisement in Zug
I often hear that a decentralized technology should have a decentralized ecosystem, I guess the physical world doesn't work that way.
For Crypto, there seem to be 3 main hubs: Zug, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
As I'm already living in Europe, speak German, and am not a Megacity person (HK & SG aren't technically Megacities, but they sure feel like ones), Zug seemed like the obvious choice.
Zug is also the home of The Ethereum Foundation, Crypto Valley Association, ShapeShift, Lisk, and thousands of other Crypto companies.
With a direct flight to every major city in Western Europe within 1-3 hours (not to mention the train connections), it's a prime location both from and to conferences/meetings.What's Next?
This move has been the slowest settling period I've had, perhaps with the exception of my initial move to Berlin. I keep trying to find a reason for this, and I think it has to do with the suburban lifestyle of Switzerland. I'm used to getting all my answers online. In fact, with enough research, one can have almost the same knowledge as a local, before moving to a capital city. This all falls apart when one moves to a smaller town. Local knowledge is just not out there in the Googleverse. The simplest questions such as "Who's the best Internet Provider?", or "How does waste disposal work?" change drastically even between communities.
The best solution for this is - joining local groups (some are even on Facebook), and be patient - you'll figure it out sooner or later.
After finally settling in, I feel like it's time to get to work!
I'm working on 2 key directions at the moment, as well as a potential 3rd one.Business Partnerships
The goal is to finalize an agreement with at least 2-3 cloud providers/merchants to accept Cloud Tokens.
We have had several talks with several niche cloud providers, but the complexity of Token transactions has been the biggest blocker here. Since we rely on the Ethereum blockchain, we are limited with the amount of simplification we can do on our end.
However, recent developments on MetaMask are inching closer and closer towards a sane way to pay with Ether & Tokens (almost PayPal-like). Seamless integration is a matter of months, if not weeks, so it's definitely a reason to stay positive.Technological Partnerships
As mentioned above, promoting seamless token transactions right from the browser is not only beneficial to our Cloud Token, it's beneficial to the entire Ethereum community.
In fact I would go so far and say that MetaMask has the potential to lead to mass adoption of the Ethereum blockchain.
The priority here is contributing directly to MetaMask, as well building integrations/plugins for the extension.Bridging the gap
The 3rd potential direction is more of a trend that has been bothering me as of late.
I see a huge gap between potential contributors/investors and actual developers.
There are a lot of campaigns out there, talking about incredible ideas, but without technical knowledge investors are left guessing in the dark. I believe there is plenty of work to do on this front,
both on the technical side, as well as on the human side.
One last thing - I've made a few design changes, time for a refresh :)Posted in Crypto, TechnologyAdding Serverless to your Web Application

As you've probably heard, Serverless is the next big thing in the cloud industry.
Here's I'll go over some of the ways you can integrate Serverless technology in your existing web apps!
Serverless is essentially a system of Function-as-a-Service, where you have certain functions in the cloud, and you get billed by their usage & required computation.
This is a further abstraction from the actual Virtual Machines in common use today, and goes hand-in-hand with a Microservices approach to web development.
But enough about dictionary definitions, let's go to the good stuff:Examples of integrating Serverless with your existing Web App
Reports
Database reports are a pretty common request, often by marketing/business departments to get a better understanding of your users.
This is more common in early-stage applications, before you connect them to proper analytics tools.
Using Serverless, it's quite simple to have a function that runs a report on the database.
We'll use AWS Lambda in this example:- Go to Lambda on your AWS Dashboard:

- Choose "Author from scratch":

- In your Lambda function, add the following code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28'use strict'; module.exports.runReport = (event, context, callback) => { const response = { statusCode: 200, body: { message: 'Result: ', input: event, }, }; const mysql = require('mysql'); const connection = mysql.createConnection({ host: 'localhost', user: 'user', password: 'password', database: 'database', port: 'port' //if you remove this line port defaults to 3306 }); connection.connect(); connection.query('SELECT * FROM users', function(err, results) { if (err) throw err; response.body.message += JSON.stringify(results); response.body = JSON.stringify(response.body); callback(null, response); }) connection.end(); }; - As an easier alternative, get the entire Serverless Boilerplate here
Admin Panel
In most web applications there's some sort of an Admin Panel.
Ideally, the admin panel should be a separate application, to limit potential systemic weaknesses.
Using Serverless, we're able to take advantage of some of the most secure systems available - IAM permissions.
Examples of cool things you could do to further secure your Admin Panel:- Restrict Admin functions permissions - Since Lambda functions have their own IAM roles, you can have very fine-grained permission settings. A great example of this is with DynamoDB.
You can literally give your function access to specific tables with a custom IAM policy:Or another great example where a function can only write items to the table without reading any:1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Sid": "Stmt1509470869566", "Action": [ "dynamodb:BatchGetItem", "dynamodb:DescribeTable", "dynamodb:GetItem", "dynamodb:GetRecords", "dynamodb:ListTables", "dynamodb:Query", "dynamodb:Scan" ], "Effect": "Allow", "Resource": "arn:aws:dynamodb:YOUR-REGION:YOUR-AWS-ID:table/TABLE-NAME" } ] }1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Sid": "Stmt1509470869566", "Action": [ "dynamodb:PutItem" ], "Effect": "Allow", "Resource": "arn:aws:dynamodb:YOUR-REGION:YOUR-AWS-ID:table/TABLE-NAME" } ] } - Combine API Gateway with Cognito User Pools for authentication - This is quite complex, but this guide has a pretty good walkthrough. In the following days (probably weeks) I'll try to add this to the boilerplates repository.
- Write the entire Admin Panel on Serverless - If your app doesn't have a fully fledged Admin Panel yet (and you understood the last 2 items on the list), This could offer both a high level of security as well as a great way to integrate Serverless into an important but not-yet-customer-ready parts of your system.
Cron Jobs
Most applications have some form of Cron Jobs, but more often than not,
there's a good chance that you don't have a lot of logging/analytics for your Cron Jobs.
With CloudWatch you can schedule functions to run every minute/hour/day/week, just like a normal Cron Job.
Combine that with CloudWatch Alarms, and you have both a logging system and an alarm system in case something goes wrong.
These were just a few examples of how you could integrate Serverless into your web app right away.
In the future, I'll try to work on the boilerplate repository, to add more cases.Posted in Technology- Go to Lambda on your AWS Dashboard:
View-specific JS Files in Sails.js

One thing I really loved about Meteor, is that you can fine-tune which files are included (and the order of inclusion).
This is especially useful when structuring everything in small Meteor packages.
So for example, if you simply want to add relevant client JS files (on package.js):page-login.html:1 2 3 4api.addFiles([ 'client/page-login.html', 'client/page-login.js', ], 'client');page-login.js:1 2 3 4 5 6 7<template name="PageLogin"> <form id="login-form"> <input name="username" type="text" /> <input name="password" type="password" /> <input id="submit-login" type="submit" /> </form> </template>Together with specific Template namespaces, it allows you to have template-specific JS code that doesn't interfere with other templates. I looked for a way to have that feature in Sails.js.1 2 3 4 5 6Template.PageNewDomain.events({ 'submit #login-form': function (event, template) { event.preventDefault(); //handle form submission.. } });
Instead of trying to implement the entire complicated Template rendering engine, I figured it should be enough if every view gets a corresponding JavaScript file that is optionally loaded with said view.How it should work
- Each View in the views/ folder has a name, let's create a corresponding JS file with the same name
- On Sails.js, JavaScript files are stored separately in the js/ folder, let's store all view-specific JS files under js/views/
- JS filenames should be the same as view filenames. views/dashboard/login.ejs will have a JS file named js/views/dashboard/login.js

How to implement
- add this to config/views.js:This is so that we're able to check if a JS file exists.
1 2 3 4locals: { existsSync: require('fs').existsSync, jsPath: __dirname + '/../assets/js/views/' } - on the bottom of views/layout.ejs, under blocks.localScripts
1 2 3<% if (existsSync(jsPath + req.options.controller + '/' + req.options.action + '.js')) { %> <script src="/js/views/<%= req.options.controller + '/' + req.options.action %>.js"></script> <% } %> - In tasks/pipeline.js in the jsFilesToInject array, we need to remove
js/**/*.js
This is Critical. Otherwise, all JS files under js/views will be automatically included in ALL views.
Instead, to automatically inject other views we can have the following line:js/dependencies/**/*.js
Posted in Technology





As mentioned above, promoting seamless token transactions right from the browser is not only beneficial to our Cloud Token, it's beneficial to the entire Ethereum community.
In fact I would go so far and say that MetaMask has the potential to lead to mass adoption of the Ethereum blockchain.



