It’s been a minute since I’ve written code. So, I figured that now might be a good time to start learning how to use the Blueprint system in #UnrealEngine. I felt that it’d be interesting to share my progress and mistakes. So here goes!
🧵

1.
Firstly, I made use of the auto-rigging feature in Mixamo to give my character a skeleton. This allows you to use the Mixamo animations for the character in Unreal Engine.

2.
In the Animation Blueprint, I tried to add a punching state to the character. The problem I faced initially was that the character glides while punching. This occurs because multiple states of the animation are active (as their transition conditions are satisfied).

3.
There are a couple of solutions for this:

👉Blending the punch and idle states (character can punch while running) by using the Layered Blend Per Bone node.

👉Disabling input while the punch occurs.

4.
I didn’t like the outcome when I blended the animations. as the hip rotates more than we’d like it to. This leads to the character punching upwards and to the left. This isn’t favorable as the enemy is usually straight ahead. Disabling the input worked way better!

I've gotten a few questions about Aurora Serverless v2 preview, so here's what I've learnt so far. Please feel free to chime in if I've missed anything important or got any of the facts wrong.

Alright, here goes the 🧵...

Q: does it replace the existing Aurora Serverless offering?
A: no, it lives side-by-side with the existing Aurora Serverless, which will still be available to you as "v1".

Q: Aurora Serverless v1 takes a few seconds to scale up, that's too much for our use case where we get a lot of spikes. Is that the same with v2?
A: no, v2 scales up in milliseconds, during preview the max ACU is only 32 though

Q: is the cold start for Aurora Serverless v2 still a few seconds?
A: yes, unfortunately...
Q: so if you want to avoid cold starts, what's the minimum ACU you have to run?
A: minimum ACU with v2 is 0.5

Q: does v2 still scale up in double increments, e.g. 4 ACU -> 8 ACU?
A: no, it scales up in increments of 0.5 ACUs, so it's a much tighter fit for your workload, so you'll waste less money on over-provisioned ACUs

Here are some resources you need as a designer/developer to work on your level of productivity.👨‍💻🍀

(Thread) 🧵👇

1. Focusmate: Focusmate changes the way you work by connecting you to other professionals who have committed to being accountable for finishing their most important

2. Habitica: Habitica is a free habit and productivity app that treats your real life like a game. Habitica can help you achieve your goals to become healthy and

3. BitBucket: Bitbucket is a web-based version control repository hosting service owned by Atlassian, for source code and development projects that use either Mercurial or Git revision control systems.

4. Clickup: ClickUp is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries. Features include communication and collaboration tools, task assignments and statuses, alerts, and a task

@mattblaze AFAIK the only group to discover Ken’s hack was us in PWB/UNIX. One of the other guys noticed C prepreprocessor had gotten bigger, looked at binary namelist, found symbol not in source code. I got onto Ken’s system, found the code, very clever.

A bit latet, I was in Lab 127’s terminal room, talking to dmr or bwk, and overheard amusing conversation between ken and Robert Morris Sr, who sometimes consulted for NSA.
(RM Jr of worm fame was just a kid then.)

They were chortling away over cleverness of exploit. Then one (must have been ken) said “think we could put this over on NSA?” (which already had UNIX systems... we did favors now and then).
More chortling, then (must have been Bob): uhh, NSA really doesn’t have sense of humor.

PWB crew ran 1st real UNIX computer center & we were hyper-sensitive, partly because someone had called at night, told operator he was Ken Thompson & needed root password ... and got it. Turned out to be high schooler ... proving that social engineering tactics have been eternal.

Years later, as many BTL Directors were buying PDP11-70s for labs as general service systems, some PWB crew were asked to do security audits, given experience running biggest UNIX site. One lab was very proud of enhanced password software.
We did audit, agreed with that, BUT:

[[Knowledge Management]], [[Reproducible [[Social [[Science]]]]]], and [[Academic Workflow]]s – 100 Tweets for @threadapalooza 2020, let's go
#roamcult #𐃏
1/100

Pandoc is a magical piece of software, and if you're not using it for your academic writing you're missing out. Compile (basically) any document format to (basically) any other document format.
2/100

While Pandoc is fantastic, it's a bit like ffmpeg: extremely powerful, but without GUI apps too few people will use it. ffmpeg has a ton of GUI apps that basically just wrap the CLI, Pandoc doesn't have enough of them.
3/100

Citekeys + CSL files + Pandoc can easily cut ~10+ hours from your writing workflow. Citekeys come from LaTeX-Land, you can use them through Pandoc with anything. And CSL files make it super easy to switch citation styles.
4/100

Since many journals have their own version of popular formats, every journal should be required to publish a CSL file, LaTeX and Word Pandoc template ready for submission. I don't want to think about the collective hours wasted formatting stuff for submission.
5/100

How to join a developer community?
or
How to find mentors/developer friends?

A detailed thread 🧵👇

For context I have been a part of various developer communities for ~3 Years. I have found that learning with people is the best and most effective way to learn.

So here are the ways you can join a developer community:

💻 If you are a student

Many companies have their campus ambassadors/ Hack clubs / Developer club program that you can join or lead in your campus.

Some of my favorites:

⚡️Student Ambassador program @Microsoft (I am a part of this for 2 years now)

Infrastructure review #rc3

There were only 18 heralds for all the talks. It was really hard to pull off, this conference also started a news show. #rc3

Next is the heaven team. 1487 total angels volunteered of which 710 arrived. 76 weeks worth of work hours were done by the angels. They prepared a few goodies for the RC3 world. Badges were given to show angels. Tried to keep traditions from the conference on RC3 world. #rc3

Huge thanks to all the angels who volunteered. This conference would not be possible with the help of everyone. #rc3

Next team is the signal angels, this is the first time that people had to do remote Q&A. The procedure was quite different to the in person event. There were 157 shifts filled by 61 angels. There were 5 unfilled shifts. #rc3

There is real opportunity to:

- scale a HoldCo
- focused on a portfolio of software & digital-forward assets
- serving niche and/or traditionally sleepy verticals

A playbook to follow...

But first... why is there opportunity?

- software is eating the world (& APIs are eating software)
- there are great product opp's for those who know where to look
- theres no real competition
- SaaS/subscription is the best delivery model out there (build once, sell twice+)

And why now?

We’re entering what I call the ‘Deployment Era’ ... where more traditional (sleepy) businesses will increasingly leverage software/tech to improve their model

And the best part is... we're on the front-end of riding this longer-term wave

So what does this mean?

Software (& other digital-first products) will eat more of the ‘traditional SMB’ stack

But most aren’t focused here bc it isn’t sexy or cool…

Which is where the opp is for those who have the right deal nose & know what to build & for who

There is big opportunity to build/scale in overlooked places...

Where you can build/acquire assets that have the best econ delivery model (SaaS/sub), w/ low competition, where you have an inside edge/know everyone in industry, & can do it when no one is looking