DEV Community: Connor Leech

Top Tech Companies and Startups in Silicon Valley 2022

Connor Leech — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 18:41:47 +0000

In this blog post we're going to look at the top tech companies and startups in Silicon Valley by amount of money raised. We'll then slice and dice to see the top startups for each funding round stage like Series A, Series B etc. We're not going to include companies that have been acquired by other companies or companies that have satellite offices in the Silicon Valley area. The companies on these lists all have their headquarters in Silicon Valley.

It's worth noting that "Silicon Valley" isn't a real geographic place. Despite literally the most heavily traffic'd post on Employbl being "map of silicon valley companies" Silicon Valley is only a geographic term in the loosest sense. The term originates from the microchip days when defense spending poured into the area to make many in San Francisco very wealthy. This term originated before the internet but especially took off in the 90s. For the purposes of this post we're going to define Silicon Valley as existing in the following cities: Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Jose, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. Please note this completely excludes San Francisco. If you're interested in learning about the history of Silicon Valley, both the place and the term I recommend reading Margaret O'Mara's book called The Code. Without further ado let's look at the full list of top startups headquartered in Silicon Valley..

Largest Tech Companies in Silicon Valley

To start off let's look at the largest companies that are headquartered in Silicon Valley by estimated number of employees. To learn more about a company you can click on their name to navigate through to their Employbl profile where we'll showcase more info about the business like the founders, funding round and in some cases active job listings. Shout out to Diffbot for scraping the whole public internet to find data about these organizations, including employee count, funding info and even data about the technologies these companies use.

There are 753 companies based in Silicon Valley that are stored in the Employbl database. Log in to explore all the data.

Company Name	Estimated # of Employees	HQ City	Year Founded	Company Description
Google	83,995	Mountain View	1998	Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that focuses on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Apple	55,036	Cupertino	1977	Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories and entertainment.
Facebook	28,686	Menlo Park	2004	Create an account or log into Facebook. Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates.
Intel	18,678	Santa Clara	1968	Intel's innovation in cloud computing, data center, Internet of Things, and PC solutions is powering the smart and connected digital world we live in.
Adobe	12,632	San Jose	1982	Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications.
NVIDIA	8,191	Santa Clara	1993	Nvidia is an American technology company that designs graphics processing units for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on a chip units for the mobile computing and automotive market.
eBay	8,084	San Jose	1995	When it's on your mind, it's on eBay
Intuit	7,194	Mountain View	1983	We exist to help all businesses & freelancers succeed
Electronic Arts	5,792	Redwood City	1982	Inspire the World to Play
Nutanix	4,319	San Jose	2009	The leader in hyperconverged infrastructure.
Udacity	2,900	Mountain View	2011	Advance your career with online courses in programming, data science, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, and more. Built with industry leaders.
Chegg	2,385	Santa Clara	2005	A Smarter Way to Student!
Coursera	1,982	Mountain View	2012	World-Wide Online Learning Platform
[24]7.ai	1,633	San Jose	2000	We make it simple for consumers to connect with companies to get things done.
Mozilla	1,488	Mountain View	2003	Feel good about your work again.
Elastic	1,426	Mountain View	2012	We're the creators of the Elastic (ELK) Stack -- Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash.
Zscaler	1,389	San Jose	2008	Secure your cloud transformation. Get fast, secure, and direct access to your apps-without appliances.
Box	1,270	Redwood City	2005	Box is changing how you manage content across your business from simple file sharing to building custom apps.
Robinhood	1,225	Menlo Park	2013	Robinhood, a pioneer of commission-free investing, gives you more ways to make your money work harder.
Xoriant	1,212	Sunnyvale	1990	Innovation Engineered through Technology Solutions & Services powered by people, processes & practices
Arista	1,128	Santa Clara	2004	Arista Networks was founded to pioneer and deliver software-driven cloud networking solutions for large data center storage and computing environments.
Roku	1,070	San Jose	2002	Happy Streaming!

These are some of the biggest "can't miss" companies that are headquartered in Silicon Valley. In many ways they're the companies the valley is most known for, especially the top ten. Let's move on to look at top startups in Silicon Valley.

Series A startups in Silicon Valley

These companies most recently raised a "Series A" investment round from Venture Capitalists and wealthy individuals. The average Series A round size in 2022 is about $23 million. To learn what firms or individuals participated in the company's Seed, Pre Seed or Series A rounds click through to each startup's Employbl profile. For this list we're going to order by companies that have raised the most money at the top.

There are 141 Series A companies based in Silicon Valley that are stored in the Employbl database. Log in to explore all the data.

Company Name	HQ City	Year Founded	Latest Funding Round	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
Aptos	Palo Alto	2021	Series A	$350,000,000	Aptos is a new, independent project focused on delivering the safest and most production-ready Layer 1 blockchain in the world. The team is comprised of the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the blockchain that was first built to serve this purpose. For more information on Aptos, please visit https://aptoslabs.com
Luminous Computing	Mountain View	2018	Series A	$115,000,000	Build Miracles
Observe	San Mateo	2017	Series A	$112,000,000	SaaS Observability means fewer incidents, more features & happy customers.
DoiT International	Santa Clara	2011	Series A	$100,000,000	DoiT International, the strategic partner of Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, provides cloud expertise, proprietary cloud optimization, and governance software. The company tackles complex problems of scale for customers, using expertise in machine learning, algorithms, complexity analysis, and system design.
Inworld AI	Mountain View	2021	Series A	$69,700,000	Inworld AI is an AI developer platform for immersive realities/metaverse spaces. Its platform creates AI-powered virtual characters to populate immersive realities including the metaverse, VR/AR, games, and virtual worlds.
Exai Bio	Palo Alto	2021	Series A	$67,500,000	Exai Bio is a next-generation liquid biospy company. Exai bio proprietary RNA and artificial intelligence-based liquid biopsy platform deliver clinical insights into cancer biology to enable the earliest, most accurate diagnosis of cancer.
Inorganic Intelligence	San Jose	2020	Series A	$63,874,996	Inorganic Intelligence is a Neuromorphic Photonic AI Computing solution that serves as deep learning and machine learning applications.
Dazz	Palo Alto	2021	Series A	$60,000,000	Dazz is a cloud security repair service that takes a unique approach to cybersecurity.
cognoa	Palo Alto	2013	Series A	$53,900,000	Cognoa, Inc. provides health care software solutions. The Company offers online application that enables parents, guardians, and other legal caregivers to assess and support children development.
EdgeQ	Santa Clara	2018	Series A	$51,000,000	EdgeQ is an information technology company that specializes in the fields of 5G chip systems. The company is pioneering converged connectivity and AI that is fully software-customizable and programmable.
Engageli	San Mateo	2020	Series A	$47,500,000	Engageli is a digital learning platform for higher education. We believe that human connection, interaction and inclusion are critical ingredients for transformative learning in any classroom. This is why Engageli is built from scratch on the fundamentals of inclusivity, accessibility and active engagement.
D-Matrix	Santa Clara	2019	Series A	$44,000,000	d-Matrix is a computing platform designed to target artificial intelligence inferencing workloads in the data center. Its mission is to build and deploy the world’s first brain-inspired AI compute engine for a broad class of inferencing workloads in the multi-billion dollar cloud and infrastructure edge markets.
Tachyum	San Jose	2016	Series A	$42,000,000	Committed to transforming the landscape of intelligent data processing.
RIOS	Palo Alto	2018	Series A	$38,500,000	RIOS provides factory automation-as-a-service, and deploys AI-powered and dexterous robots on factory assembly lines.
Pinecone	San Mateo	2019	Series A	$38,000,000	Pinecone provides a similarity search as a service. It lets developers search through billions of items for similar matches to any object, in milliseconds. It’s the next generation of search, an API call away.
SetSail	San Mateo	2018	Series A	$37,000,000	Our Sales Behavior Management platform combines data and behavioral science to motivate team focus on what matters most
Fable	Palo Alto	2019	Series A	$36,047,572	Stories for everyone.
Superside	Palo Alto	2015	Series A	$35,120,000	Superside does hassle-free design at scale. Fast turnarounds. Reliable and price-predictable. Top design talent.
Hourly	Palo Alto	2018	Series A	$34,150,000	Welcome to Hourly! We make payroll and workers comp super-duper simple.
Openprise	San Mateo	2014	Series A	$33,272,502	Data Orchestration Platform

I look at this data a lot but still some interesting names on there I hadn't heard of. That Aptos raised $150 million then went back and raised $200 million more six months later still blows my mind. They're building a blockchain. After a series a comes a series...

Series B companies headquartered in Silicon Valley

I feel like "Series B" stage companies aren't really startups anymore. The institutional finance is in. There will be leadership changes. Things will get "more legit". It still can definitely be a tech company but personally I think of startups as Series A companies and before. It's all semantics but whatever that's my unsolicited two cents. The average Series B round size in 2022 is about $54 million.

There are 162 Series B companies based in Silicon Valley that are stored in the Employbl database. Log in to explore all the data.

Company Name	HQ City	Year Founded	Latest Funding Round	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
Reali	San Mateo	2016	Series B	$292,376,000	Reali is real estate that works for you.
Firework	San Mateo	2017	Series B	$269,250,752	The Future of Short Video Storytelling \
Karius	Menlo Park	2014	Series B	$254,000,000	Transforming infectious disease diagnostics with genomics
Vianai Systems	Palo Alto	2019	Series B	$190,000,000	Building a World Full of Life & Intelligence
Synthekine	Menlo Park	2018	Series B	$189,500,000	Synthekine is an engineered cytokine therapeutics company developing disease-optimized treatments. The company uses immunological insights to guide targeted protein engineering to generate transformative medicines for cancer and autoimmune disorders. Using the principles of cytokine partial agonism and immunological specificity, Synthekine designs differentiated therapeutics to be both safe and efficacious. Its lead programs have shown promising efficacy and tolerability in preclinical studies, and it is developing additional cytokine partial agonists that selectively modulate key pathways of the immune system.
NAUTO	Palo Alto	2015	Series B	$173,850,000	NautoⓇ is the only AI-powered Driver and Fleet Safety Platform that predicts, prevents and ends distracted driving.
Kodiak Robotics	Mountain View	2018	Series B	$165,000,000	Thoughtfully engineering the way your things move.
HashCash Consultants	Palo Alto	2015	Series B	$150,000,000	HashCash enables enterprises to move assets and settle payments across borders in real-time using Blockchain technology. HashCash has 100+ enterprises using its products in 26 countries.
Zscaler	San Jose	2008	Series B	$148,000,000	Secure your cloud transformation. Get fast, secure, and direct access to your apps-without appliances.
Adicet Bio	Redwood City	2016	Series B	$145,624,992	Adicet Bio, Inc. operates as a clinical-stage bio-pharmaceutical company. The Company designs and develops of off-the-shelf allogeneic gamma delta T cell therapies for cancer and other diseases. Adicet Bio serves customers worldwide.
SiMa.ai	San Jose	2018	Series B	$140,000,000	SiMa.ai is a machine learning company enabling high performance compute at the lowest power. Initially focused on solutions for computer vision applications at the embedded edge, the company is led by a team of technology experts committed to delivering the industry’s highest frames per second per watt solution to its customers.
Quanergy	Sunnyvale	2012	Series B	$135,308,960	Pioneering Smart Awareness
Avail Medsystems	Palo Alto	2018	Series B	$127,932,672	Avail Medsystems is a medical technology company that develops software intended to digitize physical presence in operating rooms. The company specializes in designing and manufacturing medical devices that can be utilized during procedures for video conferencing with other medical professionals. It aims on democratizing access to clinical and procedural expertise by removing physical, economic, and logistical barriers. Avail Medsystems' Procedural Telemedicine solution addresses these challenges by enabling on-the-go collaboration with any remote healthcare professional.
Minio Inc	Palo Alto	2014	Series B	$126,300,000	High Performance, Kubernetes Native Object Storage
Notable	San Mateo	2017	Series B	$119,200,000	Notable uses AI, RPA, and beautifully designed user interfaces to put healthcare administration on auto-pilot.
Sandbox VR	San Mateo	2016	Series B	$119,000,000	Sandbox VR is a virtual reality startup that offers a premium, fully-immersive virtual reality experience. The company combines motion capture in real time with virtual reality technology to create a new medium that is the closest thing to the Star Trek holodeck that exists. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in San Mateo, California.
Hexagon Bio	Menlo Park	2016	Series B	$116,300,000	Hexagon Bio is a data-driven biotech developing targeted small molecule therapeutics. Our proprietary platform combines data science and synthetic biology to discover and engineer drugs from DNA sequences. We are mining fungal genomes for inspiration for the next generation of targeted therapies for diseases with unmet needs.
Skylo Technologies	Palo Alto	2017	Series B	$116,000,000	Skylo Technologies is building the most affordable and accessible wireless network to mobilize the world's machine data.
Skylo Technologies	Palo Alto	2017	Series B	$116,000,000	Skylo Technologies is building the most affordable and accessible wireless network to mobilize the world's machine data.
Bear Robotics.	Redwood City	2017	Series B	$115,750,000	The world's most advanced serving robots for the restaurant and hospitality sector.

Finally let's round it out with...

Series C companies in Silicon Valley

Fun fact according to our data the largest Series C of 2022 so far has been for The Boring Company at $675 million. They're based in Texas but Craft Ventures was in on that. The average Series C round size in 2022 is about $97 million.

There are 90 Series C companies based in Silicon Valley that are stored in the Employbl database. Log in to explore all the data.

Company Name	HQ City	Year Founded	Latest Funding Round	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
Course Hero	Redwood City	2006	Series C	$477,392,992	Master Your Classes™
Docker	Palo Alto	2013	Series C	$435,855,424	Docker is the company driving the container movement and the only container platform provider to address every application across the hybrid cloud.
Helix	San Mateo	2015	Series C	$403,000,000	Helix is the leading population genomics company working at the intersection of clinical care, research, and genomics.
Drip Capital	Palo Alto	2015	Series C	$375,120,000	Trade Finance Simplified
Groq	Mountain View	2016	Series C	$362,550,560	Machine Learning with Push-button Performance
Fungible Inc	Santa Clara	2015	Series C	$310,929,984	Fungible, Inc. provides software solutions. The Company offers infrastructure software application which secures cloud data centers and focuses on micro architecture, verification, logic synthesis, and timing analysis.
Exo	Redwood City	2015	Series C	$307,595,328	Ultrasound Unconstrained
Moveworks	Mountain View	2016	Series C	$305,000,000	Advanced AI Built for the Enterprise
Yugabyte	Sunnyvale	2016	Series C	$291,000,000	The high-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale apps.
InDriver	Mountain View	2013	Series C	$237,000,000	inDriver International Inc provides Internet based transportation support services. The Company offers passenger transportation, freight management, hauling, and other related services. inDriver International serves customers worldwide.
Sendbird	San Mateo	2013	Series C	$220,720,000	The No.1 Chat API for Mobile Apps and Websites
Noname Security	Palo Alto	2020	Series C	$220,000,000	Noname Security is a holistic security platform that allows enterprises to see and to secure managed and unmanaged APIs.
BillionToOne	Menlo Park	2016	Series C	$212,400,000	BillionToOne, Inc. operates as a diagnostics company. The Company detects genetic disorders in the developing baby from maternal blood, as well as invents the patent-pending molecular counter platform, which increases the resolution of cell-free DNA detection by over a thousandfold.
Twin	Mountain View	2018	Series C	$198,500,000	Twin is the pioneer of precision health platform, used by doctors to safely reverse diabetes and chronic diseases. The Twin platform uses Artificial Intelligence and Internet-of-Things technologies to holistically and precisely measure and repair the damaged metabolism, which is the root cause of diabetes and chronic diseases.
Moloco	Palo Alto	2013	Series C	$191,568,752	Your Technology Partner for Sustainable Supergrowth
Step	Palo Alto	2018	Series C	$191,300,000	Step is the next generation financial services company building the best banking experience to help teens and young adults achieve financial independence and knowledge at an earlier age.
Clumio	Santa Clara	2017	Series C	$186,000,000	About SaaS Data Protection for an All Cloud World. Clumio unleashes the full power of cloud to deliver secure backup and recovery for your data - wherever it needs to be.
TigerGraph	Redwood City	2012	Series C	$171,696,272	The World's Fastest Graph Database
Level Home	Redwood City	2016	Series C	$171,000,000	Welcome Home
BrightInsight	San Jose	2017	Series C	$166,000,000	BrightInsight provides a digital health platform for bio-pharma and med-tech. Its IoT platform is built under a quality management system to support and optimize regulated drugs, devices, and software through integrated data and actionable insights to enable customers to drive increased patient adherence and engagement.

That's all for now! Go sign in to the Employbl dashboard to explore all the data or check out some of our other blog posts about tech companies and startups in the Bay Area.

54 web3 companies hiring right now (web3 jobs)

Connor Leech — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 21:01:11 +0000

I recently published a breakdown of where web3 came from and web3 companies to look out for in 2022. In this post I'd like to cover the web3 companies that are hiring the most, the most in demand web3 jobs and what web3 jobs entail.

About the web3 jobs data

For the Employbl project we harvest data about thousands of tech companies and startups, primarily focusing on ones headquartered in the United States. We pull in information about funding rounds, founders, job listings and other corporate information like founded year and approximate number of employees.

Our current list of web3 companies currently has 356 companies on it ranging from big public companies like Coinbase down to new Pre Seed and Seed stage web3 startups. We're only pulling in job listings for about fifty four companies though. In the future we hope to pull in hiring data for more companies and provide a path for employers to promote their job listings. Without further ado let's get into the data.

Web3 companies hiring the most

Here is our full list of web3 companies that are hiring right now, including the amount of open jobs they are advertising, how much they've raised from investors, where their corporate headquarters is and when they were founded. I've also linked to each company's Employbl profile where you can learn more about the job listings, funding rounds and the founders of these web3 companies.

Company Name	# Open Jobs	HQ City	Year Founded	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
Braintrust	164	San Francisco, CA	2018	$123,500,000	Braintrust is the first user-controlled talent network which aligns the interests of both talent and enterprises.
Ripple	109	San Francisco, CA	2012	$293,800,000	Ripple Labs, Inc. is an American technology company which develops the Ripple payment protocol and exchange network. Originally named Opencoin and renamed Ripple Labs in 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.
OKCoin	83	San Francisco, CA	2013	$10,000,000	Making digital assets and virtual currencies accessible to the world
Circle	78	Boston, MA	2013	$1,111,000,064	Circle helps businesses and developers harness the power of stablecoins for payments and internet commerce worldwide.
Chainalysis	74	New York, NY	2014	$536,600,000	the blockchain analysis company
Coinbase	60	San Francisco, CA	2012	$552,284,800	Coinbase is the easiest and most trusted place to buy, sell, and manage your digital currency.
ConsenSys	57	New York, NY	2014	$725,000,000	ConsenSys is a blockchain software technology company founded by Joseph Lubin with headquarters in Brooklyn, New York and additional United States offices in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.
Ramp	46	London, England	2017		We're Ramp Network and we're bridging the gap between banking and blockchains. Excited about blockchain, fintech and crypto? Join us and look out for the newest scoop in the field!
Prime Trust	44	Las Vegas, NV	2016	$176,000,000	Rails for the new digital economy.
TRM Labs	40	San Francisco, CA	2017	$79,900,000	TRM helps financial institutions fight money laundering and terrorism financing, prevent fraud, and stay in compliance.
Aptos	38	Palo Alto, CA	2021	$350,000,000	Aptos is a new, independent project focused on delivering the safest and most production-ready Layer 1 blockchain in the world. The team is comprised of the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the blockchain that was first built to serve this purpose. For more information on Aptos, please visit https://aptoslabs.com
ICapital Network	36	New York, NY	2013	$729,210,880	iCapital is the leading global fintech company powering the world’s alternative investment marketplace.
AVA Labs	35	Brooklyn, NY	2018	$290,049,984	Building Avalanche. We are empowering people to build an open, simple, and democratic internet of finance.
Gemini	23	New York, NY	2014	$423,903,072	Gemini is a next generation cryptocurrency exchange and custodian that allows customers to buy, sell, and store crypto.
MoonPay	23	Miami, FL	2018	$642,000,000	MoonPay is a financial technology company that builds payments infrastructure for crypto. Our on-and-off-ramp suite of products provides a seamless experience for converting between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies using all major payment methods including debit and credit card, local bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.
TaxBit	22	Draper, UT	2018	$235,750,000	TaxBit is a cryptocurrency tax and accounting software that automates tax calculations and reporting on cryptocurrency transactions. With TaxBit, users can link their exchanges and wallets to seamlessly pull their transactions through their tax engine and auto-generate tax forms.
Recur	21	Miami, FL	2021	$55,000,000	Recur design & develop on-chain branded experiences for fans to buy, collect, and re-sell NFTs. RECUR is chain agnostic and is fundamentally changing the NFT market by creating and setting the standard for a decentralized recurring royalty, creating the widest distribution and reach for NFTs minted on their platform. It was founded in 2021 and headquartered in Miami, Florida.
BlockFi	19	Jersey City, NJ	2017	$1,256,181,632	BlockFi provides the wealth management products crypto investors need, all powered by blockchain technology.
Bitcoin Depot	18	Atlanta, GA	2016		Bitcoin Depot is an INC 5000 company and is the largest cryptocurrency ATM Network offering users the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin and over 30 other cryptocurrencies instantly at thousands of locations across the United States.
Uniswap Labs	18	New York, NY	2018	$11,000,000	Uniswap is a fully decentralized protocol for automated liquidity provision on Ethereum.
0x	16	San Francisco, CA	2016	$108,999,960	0x is an open protocol that facilitates low friction peer-to-peer exchange of tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Autograph	16	Santa Monica, CA	2021	$205,000,000	Autograph is an NFT platform that brings together the most iconic brands and legendary names in sports, entertainment and culture to create unique digital collections and experiences.
FalconX	16	San Mateo, CA	2018	$476,999,936	FalconX is a cryptocurrency brokerage and digital asset trading platform. It specializes in the fields of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and fintech. Its platform provides reliable execution using data science to eliminate slippage and hidden fees. It was founded in 2018 and is based in San Mateo, California.
Unstoppable Domains	14	Las Vegas, NV	2018	$71,956,000	Building the new internet with blockchain domain names.
Coin Metrics	14	Boston, MA	2017	$59,400,000	Coin Metrics is an all-in-one crypto financial data provider for institutions. We deliver transparent and actionable data and analytics to industry stakeholders including crypto and traditional funds, asset managers, research desks, exchanges, and global investment banks.
DYDX	13	San Francisco, CA	2017	$87,000,000	dYdX is the most powerful open trading platform for crypto assets. dYdX offers decentralized derivatives, margin, and spot trading. Our mission is simple: To build open, secure, and powerful financial products that are equally available to everyone, everywhere.
RADAR	13	Denver, CO	2017	$13,400,000	Building products for our next financial system.
Blockstream	12	San Francisco, CA	2014		Blockstream Corporation designs and develops software solutions. The Company creates world encompassing systems of value exchange that make it possible to trust anyone.
Veem	11	San Francisco, CA	2014	$100,250,000	The easiest way for businesses to pay and get paid. Over 150,000 businesses in over 100 countries use Veem’s relationship-based global payment network.
Yuga Labs	11	Miami, FL	2021	$450,000,000	Yuga Labs is a blockchain technology company that develops NFTs and digital collectibles. It specializes in the fields of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and digital media. Yuga Labs was founded in 2021 by Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano and headquartered in Miami, Florida.
Tonic	10	Miami, FL	2022	$5,000,000	Tonic is building a permissionless decentralized protocol for fast and seamless trading of any asset on NEAR and Aurora. The platform will enable developers building on NEAR’s Layer 1 solution to integrate trading functionality into their applications.
Blockdaemon	10	Los Angeles, CA	2017	$431,300,800	Blockdaemon Inc. provides solutions. The Company offers multi-chain multi-cloud network management tool for public and private organization, mining algorithm, and contract customization. Blockdaemon serves customers in the United States.
Trust Wallet	10	Mountain View, CA	2017		About Trust - Secure Multi Cryptocurrency Wallet for All your Crypto Assets Products Crypto Wallet
Phantom	10	San Francisco, CA	2021	$118,000,000	Phantom is a digital wallet reimagined for DeFi and NFTs. Phantom makes it safe & easy for you to store, send, receive, stake, and swap tokens on the Solana blockchain. It was founded in 2021 and is based in San Francisco, California.
SFOX	9	Los Angeles, CA	2014	$23,120,000	SFOX Inc. operates as a cryptocurrency prime dealer. The Company offers a cryptocurrency trading platform, which aims to centralize prices from different exchanges into one application. SFOX serves large-scale investors such as funds, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals.
Uphold	9	New York, NY	2013	$74,900,000	The easy and cost-effective way to trade cryptos, local currencies, metals & more, plus send funds to friends & family.
Nomad	7	San Francisco, CA		$22,400,000	Nomad is a novel approach to blockchain interoperability that leverages an optimistic mechanism to increase the security of cross-chain communication.
Snickerdoodle Labs	7	San Jose, CA	2021	$2,500,000	Snickerdoodle is using blockchain technology to build a data economy that protects user privacy and distributes value to all stakeholders, including the data owners. We are building the infrastructure to allow people to own their data and monetize it in a secure way.
Nft42	6	Cheyenne, WY	2021	$3,660,000	Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) should live and entertain forever. That’s where nft42 comes in.
XMTP	6	Austin, TX	2021	$25,000,000	XMTP is an open, crypto-native communication protocol that connects communities, applications, and users. It was founded in 2021 and is based in Austin, Texas.
Abra	5	Mountain View, CA	2014	$106,577,112	Investing. Simplified. Invest in cryptocurrencies and fiat - stocks and ETFs coming soon.
Coinme	5	Seattle, WA	2014	$19,080,000	We believe in making digital currency accessible for everyone.
Harbor	4	San Francisco, CA	2017	$76,000,000	Harbor is a digital platform for alternative assets. We're hiring: https://harbor.com/careers
Symbiont	4	New York, NY	2013	$36,610,000	Symbiont Inc of New York offers internet based financial services. The Company operates an online trading platform for issuing and trading smart securities. Symbiont serves customers in the State of New York.
CoinList	4	San Francisco, CA	2017	$119,200,000	Where early adopters invest in and trade the best digital assets
Mojito	3	Boston, MA	2021	$20,000,000	Mojito is an NFT studio and tech platform company that designs, powers, and operates NFT marketplaces for industry leading brands and IP holders.
Paradigm	3	New York, NY	2016	$36,650,000	Paradigm automates bilateral price negotiation and settlement workflows for institutional digital asset traders.
Paradigm	3	San Francisco, CA	2018		Paradigm is a crypto-focused investment firm based in San Francisco.
SZNS	2	New York, NY	2021	$10,000,000	SZNS is the NFT fragmentation service platform for collectors, curators, and creators. The artists and curators can allow for democratic access to their NFTs, and collectors can begin to own high-value NFTs they could otherwise not afford. SZNS was founded in 2021 and is based in New York, USA.
MobileCoin	2	San Francisco, CA	2018	$107,350,000	MobileCoin is the first carbon-negative cryptocurrency. It's designed to be used as digital cash on your phone. Our secure payment system is easy to use with near-instantaneous transactions. Our team holds a wealth of expertise in cryptography, mobile, and telecom, with the founder of Signal as an advisor. To learn more about us and our tech, check out this FAQ: https://mobilecoin.com/faq Find all our jobs here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/mobilecoin We recently raised our Series B: http://ow.ly/nzux50GFmVp
ITrustCapital	2	Los Angeles, CA	2018	$128,000,000	Helping investors access their favorite Crypto Assets within their IRA
Digital Currency Group	2	Stamford, CT	2015	$1,300,000,000	Digital Currency Group builds and supports bitcoin and blockchain companies by leveraging insights, network, and access to capital. Based in Stamford, Connecticut, DCG has been an active seed investor in the digital currency industry with 150+ investments in over 30 countries. In addition, DCG owns and operates CoinDesk, the top media and events platform in the blockchain space, Genesis Trading, the industry's leading bitcoin brokerage firm, and Grayscale Investments, the largest digital currency asset management firm.
Apto Payments	1	San Francisco, CA	2014	$7,800,000	Apto is a leading-edge card issuance platform. We help companies issue new kinds of cards in new ways.
Rally	1	San Francisco, CA	2018	$57,000,000	Supercharging creator communities through the power of blockchain

I hope this provides a guide on which companies are still actively hiring in this "crypto winter" and bear market. All of these companies have over twelve hundred jobs they're hiring for right now. Next up let's look at what these tech companies are actually hiring for.

What web3 companies are hiring for

Examining all of these jobs next up we're going to sort them out by job title. The first approach I did was to group and sort by job title. This isn't perfect though because only does an exact match on job title. A Senior Software Engineer and Sr. Software Engineer, Platform Team are both basically the same job title but aren't an exact match. Anyway using this naive approach we still get some interesting results. These are the most in demand job titles web3 companies are hiring for now:

Job Title	# of open jobs
Senior Software Engineer	7
Senior Product Manager	7
DevOps Engineer	6
Senior Product Designer	6
Principal Software Engineer	5
Data Scientist	5
Product Marketing Manager	4
Senior Software Engineer - Backend	4
Account Manager	4
Software Engineer	4
Product Manager	3
Data Engineer	3
Engineering Manager	3
Sales Development Representative	3
Full Stack Engineer	3
Staff Software Engineer	3
Executive Assistant	3

Next we're going to group similar jobs to see if we can get more signal as to what web3 companies are hiring for these days. I broke these jobs into their categories to get some counts. Overall there are:

467 jobs with the word "Engineer" in the tile at web3 companies.
154 Software Engineer jobs at web3 companies. This includes senior level software engineering roles.
69 Product Manager jobs at web3 companies, including senior level roles.
54 Design jobs at web3 companies, including senior level roles.
48 Marketing jobs at web3 companies, including senior level and director roles.
45 Sales jobs at web3 companies, including senior level and director roles.
25 Data Engineer jobs at web3 companies.
24 Engineering Manager jobs at web3 companies.
22 DevOps jobs at web3 companies.
9 Data Scientist jobs at web3 companies.

To explore the full dataset feel free to head over to the Employbl job search page where you can see all the data for yourself.

I hope this post gives direction to people looking for jobs in web3 about what companies are hiring now and the types of jobs web3 companies are hiring for!

This post originally appeared on the Employbl blog

63 Top SaaS Startups in the United States - 2022

Connor Leech — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 17:10:36 +0000

Within the Employbl database we have over one thousand SaaS companies. In this post we're going to feature some of the most prominent startups by company stage. To explore all the data on your own login to the Employbl dashboard and navigate to the "Companies" page. It's entirely free.

Fun fact: according to a bunch of AI generated articles about SaaS I learned Salesforce invented SaaS. If you've been around the earth a few times you might remember this logo.. which never really made sense to me but it sure got the job done for them.

Done with that tangent. Without further ado, Employbl presents 63 software as a service (SaaS) startups broken out by the stage of investment the companies are currently in according to our latest data.

Series A SaaS Startups

These are startups headquartered in the United States whose most recent financing round from Venture Capital investors was a Series A round. This round normally comes after a Seed or Pre Seed round and is generally in the millions of dollars.

Company Name	HQ City	Year Founded	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
NS8	Las Vegas, NV	2016	$157,875,008	NS8 Inc. provides software solutions. The Company designs and develops security platform used by e-commerce merchants to defend their online stores against transaction fraud, advertising fraud, and site reliability issues. NS8 serves customers worldwide.
Observe	San Mateo, CA	2017	$112,000,000	SaaS Observability means fewer incidents, more features & happy customers.
R3	New York, NY	2014	$112,000,000	Launch digital industry transformation with R3's Corda blockchain platform.
LoanPro	Farmington, UT	2016	$100,000,000	The LoanPro platform was started through necessity-driven innovation. In our early days as lenders ourselves, we found some frustrations of inadequate software to service loans. As serial entrepreneurs with a love of lending, we decided to build the loan-servicing operating system ourselves.
Fauna	San Francisco, CA	2015	$84,609,992	Fauna is a flexible, developer-friendly, transactional database delivered as a secure, scalable, web-native API.
Litify	New York, NY	2016	$58,719,960	Litify LLC develops software platform for managing law firms. The Company offers platform with marketing, intake, referrals, client interaction, matter management, document storage, finance, enterprise collaboration, customizable layouts, and interactive tools. Litify serves customers in the State of New York.
Slim.AI	Boxborough, MA	2020	$58,600,000	Slim.AI helps application developers create, build, deploy, and run their cloud-native apps with zero friction, complexity, and waste. The company's solutions automatically optimize the composition and construction of containerized applications, improve build and deploy cycles, and provide deep insight into application behavior and performance.
BuildOps	Santa Monica, CA	2018	$48,800,000	Industry leading all-in-one software solution for subcontractors driving profitability through best-in-class technology
Joy	San Francisco, CA	2016	$47,107,496	Joy is the free wedding website and app that does more.
Oasis Labs	San Francisco, CA	2018	$45,000,000	Oasis Labs is delivering a cloud computing platform on blockchain built for superior privacy, security and performance. Oasis’s integrated hardware-software technologies aim to enable computationally-intensive processes, like artificial intelligence, for the first time on a blockchain. Oasis Labs is led by a team of academic and entrepreneurial leaders.
R-STOR INC	Saratoga, CA	2016	$45,000,000	RSTOR empowers customers with a true ‘software defined cloud’ built for the secure, performant edge.
Flatfile	Denver, CO	2018	$44,665,000	Flatfile provides software products that focus specifically on solving the problem of data onboarding, the process businesses use to accept data from other organizations. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data should be structured and cleaned, enabling customers and teams to spend more time using their data instead of fixing it.
Ketch	San Francisco, CA	2020	$43,000,000	Ketch is a new way for businesses to automate data privacy and security helps businesses build trust with consumers while controlling and harnessing data to fuel core operations and top-line growth.
Oqton	San Francisco, CA	2017	$40,000,000	The operating system for intelligent factories
FileCloud	Austin, TX	2016	$40,000,000	#1 Enterprise File Sharing, Sync and Backup
Goldcast	Cambridge, MA	2019	$38,000,000	Online events platform for enterprises to host interactive customer summits, marketing events, workshops & many more
Xata.io	Delaware, OH	2021	$35,000,000	Xata offers a serverless database service that offers the power of a traditional database with the usability of a SaaS spreadsheet app.
Bumped	Portland, OR	2017	$35,000,000	Powering loyal customer relationships through stock ownership.
Netdata	San Francisco, CA	2018	$34,700,000	Monitor everything in real time for free
Atrium	San Francisco, CA	2016	$33,500,000	Atrium helps sales leaders manage their teams with modern, always-on analytics to drive positive behavior change & win.

Series B SaaS Startups

These are Series B startups headquartered in the United States that sell a software as a service product to customers. It's ordered by tech companies that have raised the most money. All of these companies most recent funding round was a Series B, according to our data that's harvested from one of the world's largest Knowledge Graphs, provided by Diffbot.

Company Name	HQ City	Year Founded	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
StackPath	Dallas, TX	2015	$396,000,000	StackPath, LLC provides cyber security solution. The Company offers security platform services to protect systems from cyber threats, viruses, and other threats. StackPath serves customers worldwide.
Quantum Metric	Monument, CO	2015	$251,000,000	Digital products have to change faster than ever. But many companies aren’t built to move that fast. Data is siloed, teams take too long to prioritize, and impact is hard to quantify.
Emerge	Scottsdale, AZ	2017	$172,500,000	EmergeTech, LLC provides software solutions. The Company offers cloud-based platform for connecting shippers and carriers to accelerate productivity, real-time visibility, and access to all available capacity when companies move products. EmergeTech serves customers in the United States.
NewStore	Boston, MA	2015	$155,400,000	Let's bring the joy back to retail.
Grin	Sacramento, CA	2014	$145,260,000	The best all-in-one Influencer Marketing Software for ecommerce brands
Instabase	San Francisco, CA	2015	$131,970,000	Instabase provides powerful building blocks to develop applications for understanding data trapped in documents.
Minio Inc	Palo Alto, CA	2014	$126,300,000	High Performance, Kubernetes Native Object Storage
Ripcord	Hayward, CA	2015	$117,400,000	Ripcord Inc. operates as a robotics digitization company. The Company offers platform that combines hardware and software robotics to process and digitize paper-based records via an integrated SaaS. Ripcord serves clients in the United States.
Persefoni	Tempe, AZ	2020	$114,200,000	The Persefoni Platform enables organizations and institutional investors to measure their carbon footprint.
AgentSync	Denver, CO	2018	$111,100,000	AgentSync is where Producer Management and Compliance meet smart technology and automation. AgentSync is a powerful, easy-to-use Compliance as a Service solution. It directly integrates regulatory database sources of truth (i.e. NIPR, FINRA) with core business systems (i.e. Salesforce) so they can automate the critical business processes associated with these compliance requirements.
Ermetic	Boston, MA	2019	$97,250,000	Ermetic enables enterprises to protect cloud infrastructures (IaaS/PaaS) from access-related risks and misconfigurations by maintaining continuous visibility into identities, their entitlements and data usage. By combining analytics with granular, full stack insight, Ermetic makes it possible to enforce least privilege access at scale even in the most complex cloud environments.
SamCart	Austin, TX	2014	$95,000,000	SamCart An e-commerce platform for creators. You can create beautiful sites that showcase your products, convert more visitors into customers, and increase the value of each purchase. Their mission is to empower entrepreneurs with the tools they need to succeed.
Contentstack	San Francisco, CA	2018	$89,000,000	Enabling marketers and developers to manage and deliver omnichannel content with ease.
Tive	Boston, MA	2015	$81,929,984	Take surprises out of your supply chain
Census	San Francisco, CA	2018	$80,300,000	Census is a data automation platform that synchronizes customer's data warehouses with business systems and tools such as Salesforce and Marketo. The solution syncs the data warehouse with CRM and go-to-market tools and puts customer success, sales, and marketing teams on the same page by sharing the same customer data, enabling client companies to leverage and distribute product data to where it's needed.
Secureframe	San Francisco, CA	2020	$78,500,000	Secureframe is a provider of SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance automation software used for compliant security. It provides automated compliance audits and ongoing compliance monitoring that ensures the service providers securely manage the data to protect the interests of an organization and the privacy of its clients and enables companies globally to obtain and maintain SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification.
Middesk	San Francisco, CA	2018	$77,000,000	Middesk helps businesses conduct background checks on other businesses. It centralizes the information necessary to conduct risk and compliance assessments on each of your customers. Companies that manage regulatory requirements use Middesk for verifying and screening their customers. B2B companies use its data to set and manage credit limits and define payment terms for new and existing customers.
StrongDM Inc	Burlingame, CA	2015	$76,050,000	StrongDM, Inc. designs and develops database software. The Company offers a platform to simplify and centralize access to critical data across the enterprise. StrongDM serves customers in the United States.
Slync.io	Dallas, TX	2017	$75,925,000	Intelligent Process Automation for Global Logistics.
Cherre	New York, NY	2016	$75,000,000	Follow Your Data
Stedi	Boulder, CO	2017	$74,977,504	The structured messaging platform for B2B trade.
SaaS Labs	Palo Alto, CA	2014	$73,249,992	Saas Labs develops software products that revolve around productivity and business process automation.
Databook	Palo Alto, CA	2016	$71,000,000	Enterprise Customer Intelligence Platform

Series C SaaS Startups

Some people would say after a company raises a Series C they're no longer a startup. Heck, even some people say after a Series A a company isn't a startup anymore. We can call these organizations simply "tech companies" or saas companies or software companies but whatever they are here's the list you were looking for: Series C companies that provide software, as a service, to their customers.

Company Name	HQ City	Year Founded	Total Investment Amount	Company Description
Ribbon	New York, NY	2015	$905,000,000	We give home buyers the freedom to buy before they sell. Designed with realtors in mind - sign up for your free account
Orca Security	Portland, OR	2019	$632,000,000	Orca Security provides cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance for AWS, Azure, and GCP - without agents!
ClickUp	San Diego, CA	2016	$537,500,032	A fundamentally new way to work.
Leaflink	New York, NY	2015	$379,000,000	LeafLink connects 5,500+ retailers with 1,700+ brands and distributors for streamlined cannabis commerce.
Pensando	Milpitas, CA	2017	$313,000,000	Pensando Systems is advancing distributed computing designed for the New Edge, powering software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services to transform existing architectures into secure, ultra-fast environments demanded by next-generation applications.
Fabric	Seattle, WA	2017	$293,500,000	Fabric is the headless commerce platform purpose-built for growth. Customers like BuildDirect, ABC Carpet & Home, and Universal Lacrosse trust Fabric for its open and modular design, allowing them to be live in weeks without having to replatform.
ZenBusiness	Austin, TX	2015	$274,500,000	ZenBusiness Inc. designs and develops software. The Company offers a software platform that handles incorporation and entity management solutions. ZenBusiness serves customers in the State of Texas.
Chronosphere	New York, NY	2019	$254,400,000	Cloud Native monitoring platform, powered by M3, for today’s most demanding environments.
Paradox	Scottsdale, AZ	2016	$253,340,000	Paradox, Inc. provides software solutions. The Company designs and develops recruiting assistive intelligence platform. Paradox serves customers worldwide.
Oyster	Charlotte, NC	2020	$224,200,000	Oyster mission is to remove the barriers between talented people and great full-time jobs at a global scale. We believe it should be easy for any company to hire any person, no matter where either is located in the world.
Persona	San Francisco, CA	2018	$217,500,000	Persona is the first all-in-one identity platform securely built to help you serve the real people of your business.
Clumio	Santa Clara, CA	2017	$186,000,000	About SaaS Data Protection for an All Cloud World. Clumio unleashes the full power of cloud to deliver secure backup and recovery for your data - wherever it needs to be.
NexHealth	San Francisco, CA	2015	$177,151,984	NexHealth, Inc. provides health care software. The Company offers patient communication, retention, and accessibility solutions. NexHealth serves customers in the United States.
Odeko	New York, NY	2018	$173,000,000	Mobile ordering and supply chain software for cafés, bakeries and coffee shops.
Solo.io	Cambridge, MA	2017	$171,500,000	Solo.io connects the world's applications with APIs and service mesh across any infrastructure.
Karat	Seattle, WA	2014	$169,100,000	Karat established the category of Interview Engineering to make every interview predictive, fair, and enjoyable. Karat’s solution combines 24/7 live technical interviews, rigorously tested interview formats, enterprise-grade Interview Infrastructure, and unmatched data visibility and insights.
CaptivateIQ	San Francisco, CA	2017	$164,600,000	CaptivateIQ makes commissions clear and accurate with a flexible, automated solution designed to save teams countless hours and costly errors.
VLOCITY, INC.	San Francisco, CA	2014	$162,800,000	Transform your Business with the Industry Cloud.
LinkSquares Inc	Boston, MA	2015	$161,469,792	LinkSquares, Inc. provides artificial intelligence solutions. The Company focuses on powered contract and legal document analytics. LinkSquares serves customers in the State of Massachusetts.
Gtmhub	Denver, CO	2015	$160,550,000	Helping people who believe that results and determination are connected.

This post originally appeared on the Employbl blog

Hiring a DevOps engineer at Phone2Action

Connor Leech — Sun, 09 Aug 2020 03:43:35 +0000

We are seeking a talented DevOps Engineer to work collaboratively with our software engineering team to build the next generation of our SaaS product. Our product has driven more than 18 million connections with elected officials since our founding in 2012 and we're just getting started. If you have great problem solving, analysis and design skills, and a true passion for quality, you will be a great fit for the Phone2Action team.

The Role

Develop and manage infrastructure in AWS (CloudFormation, Terraform, etc)
Monitor and maintain existing infrastructure (CloudWatch, New Relic, Lacework, etc)
Manage automation and CI/CD pipeline
Manage configuration and patching of servers
Strategizes for scalability and performance
Implement best practices in regard to security posture
Support the software engineering team

What Were Looking For

3+ years of DevOps experience.
Strong background in Linux/Unix Administration.
Expertise in managing and monitoring AWS.
Expertise in Infrastructure as Code.
Experience with Continuous Integration and Delivery toolchains (Jenkins, Sonarqube).
Strong experience with SQL and MySQL.
Strong experience with Queueing.
Demonstrated experience with web application security.

Other Preferred Qualifications and Skills

Experience with automation/configuration management using Ansible or Saltstack or an equivalent.
Experience working in an agile development process.
Programming skills in one or more of the following: PHP, JavaScript, Ruby.
Strong OOP skills and application architecture experience.

If interested please forward your resume with subject "DevTo - AWS" to cleech@phone2action.com.

11 courses to help you become a better developer

Connor Leech — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:40:56 +0000

Part of being a great developer or tech professional is learning new skills. I’m a pretty firm believer that the best way to learn new things or technologies is by trying them out yourself. The best way to learn is to build things. That said, learning through more structured processes like books, courses and video tutorials can be super helpful, give you new ideas and ultimately save a developer time. It’s great to build things but not so great to be stuck in a rut or banging your head against the wall. Just like building muscle takes varying your workouts, becoming a better developer can require you to vary the things you do and the ways you learn.

It’s important to strike a balance between building new things yourself and structured learning. Ultimately there’s no right way or definitive answer about what you should do to become a better developer. It’s a personal journey and everyone, whether they realize it or not has different goals and visions for what they want out of life. There’s no real shortcut to getting what you want apart from putting in the work. That means different things to different people. Some people learn better from video courses while others spend all their time building and that makes them feel happy and successful. Below is a list of online courses and resources I’ve either utilized myself to become a better developer or have my eye on because I want to take them and improve my skillset in that area. There are millions of online courses and tutorials out there. I suggest you find one right for you but I hope this list is helpful as a starting point :)

A note about certifications and resumes: Some online courses offer certifications that you can put on your resume or LinkedIn profile. When I was first learning to code I’d scoff at these validations as not important. What counted was what I knew, what I could build and what taught me the most. There’s even a TED talk - highlight your ability not your experience. I didn’t think certifications or actually watching all the videos in a video course mattered..

Then I worked as a Technical Recruiter hiring engineers and digital marketers for tech companies and startups in the Bay Area. Certifications on candidate’s resumes could be really helpful and give strng signal into a candidate’s drive, attitude and ability. I know it’s pretty shallow and there are all sorts of problems with resumes, but when a candidate listed online courses and certifications on their resume I took it to mean that the candidate was genuinely interested in their field and eager to improve. Often that’s a very desirable quality in employees and helped some candidates stand out from the pack.

Online courses on your resume offer the added benefit of adding new search terms to your resume or online presence too. For example, if a candidate had no professional experience with SQL but completed a SQL training course they can list that on their resume even if they have no professional experience with the tool. That means they’ll appear in search results where recruiters are looking for SQL as a required or “nice to have” skill. There are exceptions to every rule, but in the Bay Area’s competitive talent market I’d say the first most important thing hiring managers and recruiters look for is relevant professional experience, followed by side projects, certifications and online courses. These are the initial things recruiters and hiring managers initially judge against when reading a resume.

Online courses can teach you new skills, beef up your resume and build common ground on which to share information with other professionals. Without further ado, this is my list of online courses I’ve taken or am interested in taking over the next few months or years. I hope you find some value in this list and can use it to improve your own skillset and career!

🎨 Learn front end design and development…

Designing with Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS is a “utility first” CSS framework for styling websites and apps. Up until now Bootstrap has been the CSS framework I’m most familiar with but I think it’s time for an upgrade. It seems Tailwind CSS makes it easier to build beautiful sites. Tailwind CSS looks more complicated than Bootstrap but also like you can achieve more. This free course and their book Refactoring UI are great resources for anyone looking to beef up on their front end design and development chops. You can search for CSS and design related jobs here.

Webflow University: A core part of the “no code” movement, Webflow is a company that builds products that makes it easy to build websites and apps without writing any code. The focus is on using their tools to design sites and exporting or even hosting the sites that users build. Being an expert in Webflow can allow you to build beautiful sites quickly without coding anything on the frontend. This can be a relief for designers, non-coders and even expert developers that are looking to ship product. Webflow University is a collection of free online resources the company offers to people that want to learn how to use their product. If you really want to get involved you can apply to Webflow jobs and work out of their SF office or remote :) 📈

☁️ Learn to cloud…

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate: Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a series of professional certifications that you can obtain by passing written exams. One of the most accessible is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate level certification. A Cloud Guru is an awesome website packed full of AWS and cloud computing lessons. The linked course above is a study guide and series of video lectures designed to help you pass the AWS certification exam. This is a great resource to learn more about a wide array of AWS services and pick up a professional certification while you’re at it.

AWS Lambda: This is a short course that introduces learners to running AWS Lambda “serverless” functions. Serverless functions are a new(ish) infrastructure paradigm where you can do server tasks without maintaining your own web server, all while potentially saving money. There are a few different courses designed to teach you serverless on A Cloud Guru in addition to this one. There’s the complete serverless course, serverless for beginners and Serverless Framework with GraphQL. One good thing is that all these courses are available via one A Cloud Guru subscription instead of having to buy each course individually.

💽 Learn about databases…

The Ultimate MySQL Bootcamp: Go from SQL Beginner to Expert: This course is targeted at those that are new to coding or have never worked with SQL before. I took (most of) this course before starting my current job and felt a lot more comfortable with MySQL fundamentals.

AWS DynamoDB - From Beginner to Pro: This is another A Cloud Guru courses that goes through how to work with AWS’s NoSQL offering called DynamoDB. DynamoDB pairs well with serverless functions and many technology companies and startups use this database.

Introduction to Amazon RDS: Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is a host for structured databases in the cloud. This course on A Cloud Guru handles setting up a new database, configuring the networks, provisioning backups, access control and Amazon Aurora -- Amazon’s database built for the cloud.

Mastery with SQL: I’ve had my eye on this course for some time to level up my SQL query game. Especially exciting about this course is all of the practice exercises that you can use to check for understanding :)

🔬 Learn data structures, algorithms and computer science…

If you’re primarily interested in passing technical coding interviews and mastering data structures and algorithms I’ve compiled a GitHub repo of computer science fundamentals to get you started. Feel free to check it out!

💡 Other interesting online courses for programmers…

Data Analysis with Python: This is a Coursera course offered in conjunction with IBM covering importing datasets, data wrangling, data analysis and model development.

Laracasts: If you’ve worked with Laravel or Vue.js at all it’s likely you already know about Laracasts. I highly recommend this site for anyone that’s starting out in their programming career. If you’re a Laravel developer it’s a must have :)

Creating Laravel SaaS with Cashier/Stripe: This course goes over the fundamentals of building a Software As A Service (SaaS) application with Laravel and Stripe for payment processing. For those looking to build a viable software business this could be a good starting point!

Originally posted on the Employbl blog

7 ways to improve as a software developer

Connor Leech — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:36:41 +0000

There are tons of ways to learn to code. If you were starting from scratch you could do a coding bootcamp or a four year academic Computer Science program. Some people completely teach themselves or learn from friends and family. There are millions of blog posts, articles, videos and online courses out there to help developers learn code and improve their skills. With so many resources out there it can be hard to discern what’s a good next move to up your skills to the next level.

I find myself torn between different paths in my professional development periodically. I’ll find myself wondering, is it better to take this course or that one? Should I build something or learn new tools by following tutorials? Do I need to write tests or is it better to focus on feature development? Is it worth it to learn a new language or technology? What else could I focus on? There are no right answers here. Picking how to move forward requires reflecting on why you wanted to learn to code in the first place and defining goals and where you want to go. Whenever I feel stuck in how to advance professionally I try to focus on a few of these areas.

1. Get Healthy

There isn’t a mind and body connection; they’re the same thing. Whenever I’m in a rut my physical health is one of the first things I know I need to focus on. If you feel stuck in your career progression or not getting the external results you want be sure to turn your focus inward. Your diet and exercise is something that you can control. Working out feels good, calms your mind and can give you more energy to accomplish your goals. Michael Jackson said it best, start with the man (or woman) in the mirror..

Try cardio, weights, strength training, conscious eating and eating less processed foods. Stretch. Brush and floss your teeth. Invest in healthy relationships. Get enough sleep. Don’t drink or party too much.

2. Fix bugs

This isn’t particularly glamorous but it is effective. If you currently work at a company with a codebase find and document bugs and issue pull requests to fix them. At most companies you can lookup existing bugs and issue pull requests to the codebase assuming you have the proper access permissions. If you’re not in a technical role right now you could issue pull requests to existing open source projects to improve them. Fixing bugs is a great way to learn the ins and outs of a particular feature, track down the root cause and issue a fix that does not cause any regressions or new issues. Fixing bugs is a great way to contribute to a codebase and understand a product’s features. Fix things or improve things that are sub optimal.

3. Build new features or products

Launch a product, build an open source project. Write a new feature or product where you work. One great way to become a better software engineer is to ship code. There was a study at a university photography class. The professor told half the students they only needed to take three great pictures. The rest of the students he told he’d grade them on the amount of pictures they took. The ones that shot more pictures produced better results at the end. Not all of your code is going to be perfect but it’s better to keep on going writing code and shipping features than studying forever and not shipping product.

4. Write tests or test automation coverage

Apart from writing new features or fixing bugs there’s always tests. You could write unit or integration tests for product features or build test automation systems for a product. QA automation is a large field of software development. Many software engineers are required to write tests. Shipping code with test coverage in place can give you peace of mind that functionality will work as expected. Writing tests for code or features is a great way to improve as a software engineer.

5. Learn from others: read and watch code

There are thousands of great programming blogs, online courses and videos out there to learn from. Watching videos or online courses is a great way to learn new topics. Reading code or books about code can help you write better code and understand code more thoroughly. There’s open source projects on GitHub as well as hundreds of great books out there. I recently wrote an article about online courses for learning programming that I recommend or would like to take myself :) One word of caution here is that you find yourself copying lots of tutorials or watching videos all the time it might be time to put what you’ve learned into practice by building things or fixing bugs. The best way to learn is by doing but we all need to take a step back and learn from others now and again.

6. Do practice problems

Solving coding practice problems is one other way to improve as a software engineer. You can find practice problems on HackerRank or Leetcode. I’ve put together a GitHub repo of websites to visit and concepts to learn for practicing data structures and algorithm type problems. Though you may never actually use some of the knowledge required to complete practice problems they’re part of the software development industry and they’re good practice. These problems often require that you think carefully and critically, about how to solve a challenge and that can be a great skill to hone and develop. Honestly, practicing coding problems has helped me write better code in the past. It’s not something I particularly enjoy doing and not an area I’m particularly strong in but it is one practice or routine that can help you learn new things, write better code and become a more effective engineer.

7. Share what you know

I really enjoy this part. I hardly know if it makes me a better developer but I think at the least it helps me become a better communicator, which sometimes is just as important! Write blog posts or record videos of what code you’ve learned or what you’re learning. Share with your network what’s going down, what you’re struggling with and what your wins and loses have been. Blogging on the internet doesn’t have to be about pageviews and marketing. Writing and sharing what you know can be a way to build your social circle and your confidence as a developer. Give back to and share with the community. Teaching is a great way to learn and improve! This could be writing blog posts, speaking at conferences, recording videos, doing live streams, writing books or shipping online courses.

Originally published on employbl.com

Tech interview prep resources for software engineers

Connor Leech — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:07:33 +0000

In a previous article I wrote about the 2 types of software engineering interviews. My point there was to distinguish between the two primary types of interviews you can expect from software engineer hiring managers. There’s the data structures and algorithms approach and there’s the build something or talk about what you’ve built approach. It’s not completely binary and in some interviews you may be asked to do both. There are also system design and behavioral questions to account for.

Technical interviews are hard. Investing in software engineers can be trying. Hiring, employee retention and business costs all factor in to who gets picked. As software engineers we need to know what to expect. Each person is taking their own path to career growth. My intention with listing out these resources is to provide for those navigating the job market terrain and to hold these resources up as a reflection for the industry. These are some study resources that you many find helpful in your journey.

This post is based on an open source GitHub repo maintained here.

Side Projects

Side projects are a great way to test out your skills and try new things in a low to no pressure environment. Sometimes interviewers will be even more interested in your side projects than the work you did at your 9-5 job! If you don’t have any traditional work experience in the tech industry making a web project from scratch is a great way to demonstrate what you’re capable of. Below are a few sites and articles to reference when building a side project:

Indie Hackers: is a community for people looking to build online projects that generate revenue. It’s a vibrant, supportive community where you can share your projects and progress.

In the article How to build a startup — without quitting your day job Aytekin Tank, founder of JotForm outlines a few tenants to live by with side projects:

Side projects increase creativity
Find the time
Finding the need: deliver extreme value
Make it fun
Relax with imperfection

In this post Tanner Christensen outlines How to Talk About Your Side Projects. Snippet from the article: “Talk about your side projects whenever you get a chance”.

Start with the problem
Define your approach
Share the challenges you faced
End with the results
Follow-up with what you would do differently

If you’d like to dive more into storytelling and strategic narrative I highly recommend following Andy Raskin for tips :)

Data Structures and Algorithms questions

There doesn’t seem to be any shortcut for learning data structures and algorithms besides grinding it out. The problems are not always easy but the solutions generally do follow defined patterns. Learning the patterns takes a lot of work and practice. My favorite blog posts about the tech interview prep process come from Ali Mir, Software Engineer at Facebook. They’re not long articles; they’re straight to the point without a lot of fluff.

These are some commonly agreed data structures it’s helpful to know going into technical interviews:

Dynamic Array
Linked List
Stack & Queue
Hash Tables
Binary Search Tree
Binary Heaps & Priority Queue
Graphs
Trie

This itsy-bitsy-data-structures repo contains a guided code walkthrough of many of these data structures types implemented in Javascript.

Searching and Sorting

These are searching and sorting processes to be aware of in technical software engineering interviews..

Binary Search
Breadth First Search (BFS)
Depth First Search (DFS)
Counting Sort
Quicksort
Merge Sort

Programming Paradigms and Concepts

Recursion: JS interview prep: Recursion (has runnable code examples)
Dynamic Programming: Dynamic Programming - Rithm School, video
Greedy Algorithm
Sliding Window
Divide and Conquer
Big-O Analysis (time complexity, space complexity): Khan Academy, video, MIT

Learning Guides

Grokking Algorithms - Free book designed to be easy to follow explaining common computer science algorithms.
HackerRank Interview Prep Kit - Curated list of exercises from the HackerRank team organized around key concepts you'll need to know.
Rithm School Computer Science Fundamentals with JavaScript - I've been following along with some of this as I don't have a comp sci degree. They explain the concepts and then point you to additional resources for learning the material (like youtube videos and specific codewars problems) Very helpful.
Pathrise - Compiled list of guides to help you find a software engineering job.
Coderbyte - Lots of programming challenges, access 10 for free otherwise $30 per month
yangshun/tech-interview-handbook - GitHub repo with helpful non-technical tips. Additionally has section covering Algorithm, Front End and System Design questions
mr-mig/every-programmer-should-know - Don't let the title scare you. This repo covers at a high level things ranging from Career Tips to Data Structures, Security, Architecture and Algorithms. It's a lot but can be helpful to overview concepts and find new things to learn
jwasham/google-interview-university - One man's somewhat crazy task to become a google software engineer. 48k+ stars. I believe he ended up working at Amazon. go figure
30 second interview questions - A list and website of common interview questions you're bound to encounter during tricky JS interviews.

Services

These are some free and paid services dedicated to helping you improve at interviews and in your tech career.

Interview Cake - Interview Cake is a thoroughly documented site on programming interviews and concepts. It can be expensive for the year membership but if you're serious about buckling down to learn the fundamentals can be worth it. They also offer a money-back gaurantee.
Daily Coding Questions - Coding question emailed to you everyday for free. If you want the answer emailed to you the following day it's $8/month.
exercism - Level up your programming skills with 2,629 exercises across 48 languages, and insightful discussion with our dedicated team of welcoming mentors. Exercism is 100% free forever.
codewars - Codewars has thousands of questions generated by the community. You'll never run out of practice problems. They're organized by difficulty, concept and programming language.
codesignal - Really great user interface and user experience. I like the gamification and points system they have going on.
Irfan Baqui: ace coding interviews - get one free problem to practice each week and get the solution next week
interviewing.io - Anonymously practice coding interviews with engineers from prominent tech companies.
Pramp - Real practice with actual engineers. Book a time and practice interviewing with real human beings
LeetCode - Pick from an expanding library of more than 190 questions, code and submit your solution to see if you have solved it correctly.
Coderbyte - Lots of programming challenges, access 10 for free otherwise $30 per month
HackerRank - Very popular platform for practicing coding questions. HackerRank is used by companies to evaluate candidates also
InterviewBit - Practice Coding Interview Questions. Give us time and we get you the job you deserve.
Codility - Become a better programmer. Develop your coding skills with our lessons. Take part in our challenges.
Codility Solutions - One engineer's solutions to the codility.com problem sets.
Testdome - Get certified and prove your knowledge
to potential employers. Score well on one of our public tests, and you will get a free certificate of achievement.
CodeEval - Find out how you rate against top coders. Unlock awesome startup jobs and hacker deals.
Outco.io - 1 month interview prep bootcamp in San Francisco

Javascript

amilajack/js-algorithms - A collection of algorithms written in javascript
benoitvallon/computer-science-in-javascript - Computer science reimplemented in JavaScript
lukehoban/es6features - Overview of ECMAScript 6 features (21k+ stars)
Khan Academy Algorithm Course
romyilano/Learning-JavaScript-Data-Structures-and-Algorithms - Solutions to Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms by Loiane Groner (book pdf)
nzakas/computer-science-in-javascript - Collection of classic computer science paradigms, algorithms, and approaches written in JavaScript.
JacopoDaeli/algorithmic-challenges - Solutions to algorithmic challenges written in C, Python, Java and JavaScript.
Hack Reactor Prep - free course and practice problems from Hack Reactor
JS: Interview Algorithm - JS: Interview Algorithms questions and solutions

PHP

Efficient data structures for PHP 7 - Medium article about implementing data structures with modern PHP
30-seconds-of-php-code - A curated collection of useful PHP snippets that you can understand in 30 seconds or less.
SOLID Principles in PHP - SOLID represents a series of guidelines that developers can use to, if done well, simplify and clarify their code.
Object Oriented Bootcamp in PHP - covers fundamentals of OOP in PHP, including tricky concepts like difference between Interfaces and Abstract Classes

SQL

Khan Academy SQL course - Great course covering SQL principles. Highly recommended.
Udemy MySQL Bootcamp - Course by ex-Galvanize instructor. beginner to expert.

Laravel

Eloquent Performance Patterns - Learn how to drastically improve the performance of your Laravel applications by pushing more work to the database, all while still using the Eloquent ORM.

Diving Laravel - A deep dive into laravel core, packages, and technologies by @themsaid
Advanced Eloquent - Sure, you've learned the essentials of using Eloquent in your applications, but do you really understand what's going on under the hood?
unicodeveloper/laravel-exam - A Laravel exam with questions from beginner to expert curated by @unicodeveloper

Git

Git flow - a git workflow that some companies follow to manage their deployments.
Git Game - The git-game is a terminal based game that teaches both new and advances users some pretty cool features of the git scm (source control management) system.

Webpack

webpack: The Core Concepts - less than an hour long course on webpack fundamentals from core team member

Python

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python from EdX.

Algosaurus

Ruby

Haseeb-Qureshi/Algorithms-Study-Group - Study group for algorithms in Ruby, hosted at App Academy

Books

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms
Cracking the Coding Interview (pdf, pdf alt)
amilajack/reading - list of computer science readings with book pdfs

Algorithm visualization

Visualgo

Articles

Technical blogs

This is tangentially related to interviews. Below is a list of companies that feature blog posts from guest authors. Blogging and teaching others can be a powerful way to comprehend new material, fine tune your writing skills, gain exposure and potentially even make money! If you have a technical blog open to new contributors please submit a PR

Scotch.io - this has been my go to source for web development tutorials for years. Code on the rocks
Snipcart - company interested in Vue.js, eCommerce, Javascript and the JAMstack. There is some really great writing and code samples on here
JScrambler - company interested in Javascript tutorials. I wrote a post for them on using Vue.js and Vuelog to make a static blogging app. Check out the full article here

Words of wisdom

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner, has three rules for a career:

1) Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself
2) Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire
3) Work only with people you enjoy

We've also written about 3 ways to get better at interviews:

Practice your story.
Speak to your experience and strengths.
Do your research.

Finding companies to apply to

The job market can move pretty fast. Companies expand and contract at rapid pace. The hot startup today could be laying everyone off tomorrow. The below links can help you discover companies and places to apply to. There's a whole world out there. Sometimes it takes work to find your place in it :)

https://employbl.com/companies - Employbl is a directory of tech companies and startups in the Bay Area. Find companies by type or location, upload your resume and find a company right for you :)
https://whoishiring.io/ - Most impressive job site aggregator I've ever seen in my life. Scrapes all the boards and has a map of where every company is located.
https://huntr.co/ - Tool for keeping your applications and search organized on a Trello-style board. they also have a chrome extension for quickly adding jobs from various sources.
https://breezy.hr - I used this one as a recruiter. It is actually built for HR departments but has a chrome extension and can be helpful for adding people and specific individuals you're reaching out to. This way you remember to follow up and can find like-minded people. One catch is that you need a custom email address like @your-domain.com. Signing up with your gmail account won't work.
https://betalist.com/jobs/collections - companies and jobs grouped by category like female led startup or decentralize all the things for blockchain related jobs.
https://github.com/connor11528/tech-companies-and-startups - shameless plug here. I've got another repo going with companies located in downtown San Francisco. The data is available as a CSV file and includes company addresses.

Tech Internships

We've shared some notes about how to land a technical internship in the Bay Area. Tbh though I've never done an internship and the competition seems fierce. I think a lot of the same rules apply to finding internships as finding jobs, though more focus on deadlines and internship-focused positions. Looking forward to learning and sharing more about the tech internship process in the Bay Area. 📈

Originally published on employbl.com

Top Venture Capital firms in the Bay Area

Connor Leech — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 05:36:52 +0000

With Employbl we’ve been collecting and collating information about companies in the Bay Area. Slowly we’ve been expanding to other regions throughout the US and adding more companies, but the core of our data right now is about Bay Area tech companies and startups. You can think of us like Crunchbase but free and open source ;)

Tl;dr - CSV data of Venture Capital firms in the Bay Area.

Here’s the list with links to the Venture Capital’s company profiles on Employbl. In the future I’d like to build up these profiles to have more information. Currently the company profiles have the office location, website and some meta tags. No particular order for the listings here.. ->inRandomOrder().

If you’re looking for a more financial analysis of venture capital firms I’d suggest looking at the Forbes Midas List, Top 20 Venture Capitalists by the NY Times or this article from the Founder Institute.

Top VC Firms Bay Area

Here’s some more info and links to some of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley’s top VC firms:

a16z: Marc Andreesen was CTO at Netscape Navigator, one of the pioneers of the internet. This is his fund with Ben Horowitz, author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things. The VC company has funded Facebook, GitHub, Okta, Optimizely, Slack and many more. You can view a partial list of a16z portfolio companies here.
Sequoia Capital has been around since 1972. According to Wikipedia they’ve invested in over 1,000 companies including Google, Apple, Oracle and PayPal. Sequoia Capital portfolio
Khosla Ventures founded in 2004. You can follow Vinod Khosla on twitter. Khosla-Ventures portfolio. Investments include Affirm, Checkr, Coda, GitLab and HackerRank.
Accel Partners has made investments in Spotify, Bonobos, Venmo and CrowdStrike. They were founded in the early 1980s.
Kleiner Perkins aka KPCB was founded in the early 70s and is one of the founding firms of Silicon Valley venture capital.
Y Combinator is an early stage venture capital fund and accelerator program that many wildly successful and lucrative companies have gone through. You can see Y Combinator companies by valuation here.
First Round Capital runs a well written industry blog. The full portfolio is on their website. Working on getting the full portfolio tagged on Employbl here.
Founders Fund has made investments in Airbnb, Lyft, Stripe and was one of the first institutional investments in SpaceX and Facebook. The fund was started by Peter Theil, cofounder of PayPal, author of Zero To One and leading member of the “PayPal Mafia”.
Benchmark Capital founded in 1995, Benchmark focuses on early-stage venture investing in mobile, marketplaces, social, and infrastructure and enterprise software.
Social Capital was founded by Chamath Palihapitiya the current owner of the Golden State Warriors. They investor in Yammer and were one of the lead investors in Slack.
Lightspeed Venture Partners was founded in 2000 and have backed Stitch Fix, Cheddar and hundreds of other startups.
Spark Capital has invested in Cruise Automation, Wayfair, Twitter, Tumblr, Plaid and Oculus.
GV was formerly known as Google Ventures. They invested in Uber, Lime, Blue Bottle Coffee and Nest among many others. It was founded in 2009.
500 Startups runs an early stage startup accelerator and invests in companies from all around the world.
Menlo Ventures has been venture capitaling in Silicon Valley since 1976.
Greylock is one of the earliest venture capital firms still standing in Silicon Valley. They were founded in 1965 and have backed companies like LinkedIn, Nextdoor, workday and Dropbox. You can view the Greylock portfolio here.
GSR Ventures is a premier global investment firm with $3 billion under management and consists of independently managed funds in China, US, and globally.

This list is based mostly on my perception of venture capital working remotely in the Bay Area as a full stack developer. Picking the “top” VC firms is a bit like picking the most popular kid in high school. It’s subjective, depends on who you ask and is completely subjective. My motivation in compiling this list is to have a reference sheet for top venture capital firms in the Bay Area. These funds control billions of dollars in assets and heavily influence the tech and startup ecosystem in the Bay Area and throughout the world.

This post originally appeared on the Employbl blog.

Build a task app with Hapi, MongoDB and Vue.js

Connor Leech — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 22:26:14 +0000

Post originally published on Medium

The idea for this tutorial is we’re going to build a task app with Node.js, MongoDB and Vue.js. Users will be able to read, create and delete tasks from their web browser. All of the tasks will be stored in the database and updates will happen asynchronously from the web browser. That means users won’t have to refresh the page in order to see the changes take effect. This application is straightforward and should provide a clear introduction to how build with these technologies.

The final product will look something like this:

Example todo app using Node.js server, Mongo database and Vue client side app.
🐙 The server side code is open source on GitHub.

🐱 The client side code is open source on GitHub.

To begin with, we’re going to start by building the server. Therefore we’ll have to introduce…

Hapijs
Hapi is a Node.js server framework that’s used by great companies such as Lob, Stitch Labs and Auth0. To get started generate a project with npm init and use this as your main server file:

const Hapi     = require('hapi');
const routes   = require('./routes');
require('./utils/database');
const server = Hapi.server({
  port: 3000,
  host: 'localhost',
  routes: { cors: true }
});
const startServer = async () => {
  try {
    routes.forEach((route)=>{
      server.route(route);
    });
await server.start();
    console.log(`Server running at: ${server.info.uri}`);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error(err);
  }
};
startServer();
module.exports = server;

If you’re familiar with express this looks pretty similar to an express app. We can see clearly though we’re using async / await functions. This is a new feature of recent Node.js version and a great addition to the Javascript language. Essentially the function, prefixed with “async” can hold execution until the await promise call is returned. Async functions return promises.

We’re configuring cors here with a default Hapi option and connecting to the database through a require statement.

MongoDB and Mongoose
To connect an d query MongoDB we’re going to use an ORM called Mongoose that’s for querying and writing to Mongo.

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
require('../models');
mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/task-app-backend', {
  useNewUrlParser: true
}, (err) => {
  if (err) throw err;
});

That connects to the MongoDB database (you might need to have mongod running in a separate tab on your local machine).

With MongoDB there are no database migrations. The ORM wrapper has a concept of models that we can take advantage. Since this is a task app we’ll create a Task model.

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
const taskModel = mongoose.Schema({
  name: {type: String, required: '{PATH} is required!'},
  description: {type: String},
}, {
  timestamps: true
});
module.exports = mongoose.model('Task', taskModel);

This sets up a MongoDB collection for us, which is basically a table shaped like a big old Javascript object. They use something called BSON that they wrote a white paper about at MongoDB.

MongoDB stock price.

In contrast, Mongoose is an open source npm package.

We can define our routes as a Javascript array of objects that each have “method”, “path” and “handler” properties. There’s an optional “options” property you can also include that we’ll tie to the api/index.js file.

Hapi routing docs

const api = require('./api');
const routes = [
  {
    method: 'GET',
    path: '/',
    handler: (request, h) => {
      return {success: true};
    }
  },
  {
    method: 'GET',
    path: '/api',
    handler: (request, h) => {
      return {success: true};
    }
  },
  {
    method: 'GET',
    path: '/api/task',
    options: api.task.all
  },
  {
    method: 'POST',
    path: '/api/task',
    options: api.task.create
  },
  {
    method: 'GET',
    path: '/api/task/{task}',
    options: api.task.get
  },
  {
    method: 'PUT',
    path: '/api/task/{task}',
    options: api.task.update
  },
  {
    method: 'DELETE',
    path: '/api/task/{task}',
    options: api.task.remove
  },
];
module.exports = routes;

Finally for the CRUD endpoints this is what I have:

const {Task} = require('./../models');
const Boom = require('boom');
const taskApi = {
  all: {
    async handler(request, h) {
      try {
        return await Task.find({}).sort({ createdAt: 'desc' });
      } catch (err) {
        Boom.badImplementation(err);
      }
    }
  },
  create: {
    async handler(request, h) {
      try {
        const task = await new Task({
          name: request.payload.name,
          description: request.payload.description
        });
        task.save();
        return { message: "Task created successfully", task };
      } catch (err) {
        Boom.badImplementation(err);
      }
    }
  },
  get: {
    async handler(request, h) {
      try {
        const task = request.params.task;
        return await Task.findOne({
            _id: task.id
        });
      } catch (err) {
          Boom.badImplementation(err);
      }
    }
  },
  update: {
    async handler(request, h) {
      try {
        const task = request.params.task;
        const updates = request.payload;
        // todo: submit a pull request

      } catch (err) {
          Boom.badImplementation(err);
      }
    }
  },
  remove: {
    async handler(request, h){
        try {
            const task = await  Task.findById(request.params.task).remove();
            return { success: true, message: 'Successfully removed task!' };
        } catch (err) {
            Boom.badImplementation(err);
        }
    }
  }
};
module.exports = taskApi;

This file uses Mongoose to fetch our records from the database. The await calls resolve promises and block execution while the promise resolves. The request object comes from our Vue.js application, which will be housed in a separate repo.

Vue.js
This is a framework comparison of Vue, React, Lindsay Lohan and Taylor Swift.

It looks like Google is predicting big things from Taylor in the coming weeks.

Taylor swift is clear winner of the framework comparison from the graph above. Sorry React.
Anyways, the front end source code is here. It uses a handy app generator called vue-webpack-simple that’s maintained by the Vue.js core team.

One funky bit I learned about while building this is there’s a transition and transition-group component that you can use to queue up animations with CSS. The HTML for the component be like:

<transition-group name="task-list">    
  <div class="row mb-2" v-for="(task, index) in tasks" :key="task._id">       
    <div class="col-sm-4">          
      {{ task.name }}       
    </div>       
    <div class="col-sm-2">          
      <span @click='updateTask(task._id, index)' class="task-action"><i class="fas fa-pencil-alt"></i>
      </span>          
      <span @click='deleteTask(task._id, index)' class="task-action badge badge-danger badge-pill">X</span>
    </div>    
  </div> 
</transition-group>

There’s great starter sample code for a lot of different use cases on the Vue.js homepage for documentation: Enter/Leave & List Transitions.

Vue.js applies special classes when enter and leave transitions happen. By giving the TransitionGroup a name of “task-list” task-list gets appended to the special Vue.js event class names:

.task-list-item {
   display: inline-block;
   margin-right: 10px;
}
.task-list-enter-active, .task-list-leave-active {
   transition: opacity .5s;
}
.task-list-enter, .task-list-leave-to {
   opacity: 0;
}

The Vue.js events in conjunction with the transition CSS property are responsible for the fades when we add and delete tasks. (Video at the top.)

That’s about it! The open source code links are below:

🐙 The server side code is open source on GitHub.

🐱 The client side code is open source on GitHub.

If you’re on the job market in the Bay Area please consider creating a Job Seeker profile on Employbl.com.

Deploy a Laravel 5 app to Heroku

Connor Leech — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 18:47:13 +0000

Heroku is an awesome platform originally built on top of AWS and currently owned by Salesforce. Laravel is a powerful PHP web framework for building applications.

In this short tutorial we're going to generate an app from laravel-5-boilerplate and deploy it to Heroku.

By the end of the tutorial we will have a user management and permission system built with Laravel, Bootstrap and live to the internets powered by Heroku.

If you prefer to have a generic Laravel 5 app instead of a massive boilerplate follow this gist. Besides step 1 everything else will be the same.

Without further ado, let's get started.

Steps:

Download Laravel 5 Boilerplate according to the Quick Start Documentation. Also git init for the project.
Create a local MySQL database for development:

$ mysql -uroot -p
> create database MY_DATABASE_NAME;
Ctrl-C to exit

Create a Procfile to teach Heroku how to boot up our app:

$ echo web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 public/ > Procfile

Create a Heroku app. You will need the Heroku CLI installed.

$ heroku create YOUR_APP_NAME

Add a PHP buildpack:

$ heroku buildpacks:set https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php

Add MySQL to our Heroku project:

$ heroku addons:add cleardb

This creates a config variable called CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL which you can view using the following command. Add CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL to our .env file.

$ heroku config | grep CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL

Modify config/database.php so that we connect to our Heroku database.

<?php

$url = parse_url(getenv("CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL"));

$host = $url["host"];
$username = $url["user"];
$password = $url["pass"];
$database = substr($url["path"], 1);

return [
    ...
    'connections' => [
        'mysql' => [
            'driver' => 'mysql',
            'host' => env('DB_HOST', $host),
            'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
            'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', $database),
            'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', $username),
            'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', $password),
            'unix_socket' => env('DB_SOCKET', ''),
            'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
            'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
            'prefix' => '',
            'strict' => true,
            'engine' => null,
        ],

Set an heroku config variables. Remember, your .env file is not checked into version control so we need to let heroku know about our specific config.:

$ php artisan key:generate --show
$ heroku config:set APP_KEY=app_key_goes_here
$ heroku config:set APP_URL=your_app_name.herokuapp.com

Push to Heroku.

When we created the heroku app through the CLI it automatically added a git remote called "heroku". We can push our code to a Heroku server using this git remote.

$ git remote -v 
$ git add -A
$ git commit -m 'heroku deployment stuff'
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku open

The first command displays the git remotes available to you. The next command adds everything into git including new or deleted files. Then we commit and push. The final command will open your new Laravel heroku app in the browser.

Database stuff

We added a ClearDB database but we have not run our migrations to create our tables. To do this we can run

$ heroku run php artisan migrate

There is a common error many people experience (outlined above)
Now that SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1071 Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes. Fortunately, Eric Barnes has a solution outlined in this post.

Head into app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php and add a default string length to the boot method:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

...

public function boot()
{
   Schema::defaultStringLength(191);
}

Commit this change and push to heroku. In order to get our database set up without issue try this command:

$ heroku run php artisan migrate:reset

If you run a plain old php artisan migrate first the terminal will sqwuak that SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists. Running reset successfully runs our migrations.

SSL/HTTPS stuff

I wrote a more thorough guide on setting up HTTPS through SSL certificates for a custom domain on Medium. For some reason Laravel apps will display HTTP urls which the browser will mark as "Not Secure". Heroku uses https:// by default for deployments. Loading pages over http:// could give us a Mixed Content, insecure stylesheet or insecure script error.

One fix for this is to configure Laravel to load assets over HTTPS in production. To do this, head into App/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php and configure to load everything over HTTPS in production:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\URL;

...

// Force SSL in production
if ($this->app->environment() == 'production') {
    URL::forceScheme('https');
}

Fin

Congrats! You've deployed your Laravel 5 application to the internet using Heroku.

If you have questions hit me up on twitter. Also, I've got a mailing list going that I send out twice a week with legit tutorials covering Laravel, Vue, Heroku and other fun stuff in addition to open source projects and jobs

Update:

You can make a database using the ClearDB plugin. Then from Sequel Pro or a similar tool you can connect to the production db using this info from the URL: CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL => mysql://[username]:[password]@[host]/[database name]?reconnect=true. Set the config variables for the heroku app with the heroku config command.

Tutorial for building a Web Application with Amazon S3, Lambda, DynamoDB and API Gateway

Connor Leech — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 16:01:31 +0000

I recently attended Serverless Day at the AWS Loft in downtown San Francisco. During the workshop section we built a serverless web application for requesting Unicorns to come pick us up. The AWS team provided excellent documentation on Github and Rahul Sareen gave a one of the best presentations I have heard at a tech event overviewing Serverless application architecture. (Slides for that presentation are available here).

In the workshop portion we created and deployed a website that utilized S3 for hosting, DynamoDB for a database, API Gateway for RESTful endpoints and Lambda functions as our backend server processing.

This tutorial covers my notes from building out the application and using some of these services for the first time on Serverless Day 2017. More detailed notes for following along are available on the github and the Wild Rydes demo application is live at http://www.wildrydes.com/.

Step 0: About WildRydes

The application we are going to create in this tutorial is called Wild Rydes. The application is a fictional service for ordering unicorns to come pick us up. Users can login to the application and request unicorns from their current location. The application then dispatches a unicorn to pick up the user.

Without further ado, let's get started.

Step 1: Identity Access Management

As with most AWS tutorials, the first step is to create an IAM user that will create and provision our AWS resources. I have a user set up that has AdminAccess. It is considered best practice to login using such an user rather than logging into and managing your AWS resources using your root account credentials. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I suggest checking out the A Cloud Guru course for passing the AWS Certified Developer - Associate exam. Chapter 3 provides easy to follow video instructions on setting up users for your AWS account.

If you are not so inclined, the AWS team also provides detailed instructions for creating an IAM user with the specific permissions (AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole) to write to DynamoDB and CloudWatch. If you associate your Lambda function with a user that has admin access your Lambda function will be able to access any service.

You also want to make sure that when you install the AWS CLI it is associated with the user you created. When creating a new IAM user you get one chance to download the key-value pair for that user. In the command line type aws configure and you can set your public and secret API keys for the CLI.

Managing user access is important for account security and provisioning access to our AWS resources. We ran into some errors getting things set up and all of the errors were related to IAM so make sure you have permissions to do what you are trying to do! (pro tip: aws configure helps)

Step 2: Static Website on Simple Storage Service (S3)

In this section of the tutorial we are going to create an S3 bucket to host the static portion of our Wild Rydes application. Static Website means HTML, CSS, Javascript and Image files. S3 provides object storage meaning we cannot run an operating system on it but we can host a website.

The first step is to create an S3 bucket and enable the static web hosting option for that bucket. The AWS team provides details instructions on how to do this here.

When static website hosting is enabled for an S3 bucket, the contents of the index.html file within that bucket will be publicly accessible to the internet following this URL structure: http://BUCKET_NAME.s3-website-REGION.amazonaws.com/ where BUCKET_NAME is the globally unique name you gave your bucket and REGION is the region you created the bucket in (such as us-east-1 for Virginia or us-west-2 for Oregon).

Since this tutorial focuses on AWS infrastructure instead of static website coding, we copy the files for Wild Rydes from the AWS team. This code is open source and available here

The command to copy the contents of their bucket into our bucket is as follows:

aws s3 sync s3://wildrydes-us-east-1/WebApplication/1_StaticWebHosting/website s3://YOUR_BUCKET_NAME --region YOUR_BUCKET_REGION

After running this command all of our static files should appear in our S3 bucket when we refresh the page showing our bucket contents. If you are having issues syncing the files across buckets using the command line make sure you are logged in as the same IAM user that created the bucket or that the keys/permissions line up.

Of the new contents of our bucket, the main file to take note of is js/config.js. We'll be editing this file with values from Cognito and API Gateway.

Finally, we want to make sure that our bucket is publicly accessible to the internet. For this we add a bucket policy as outlined below:

JSON schema for our S3 bucket policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": "*",
            "Action": "s3:GetObject",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME/*"
        }
    ]
}

My bucket is called wildrydes-082317 and created within us-west-2 (Oregon) so my static website files are publicly accessible here: http://wildrydes-082317.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

Step 3: User Management with Cognito

In the next step we will configure a Cognito user pool to manage users. This hooks up the functionality for users to create
accounts, verify their email addresses and sign in to the Wild Rydes site.

Following the above instructions, the first step is to create a Cognito user pool using the AWS console. Cognito user pools provide out of the box functionality for federated identity providers (such as Google and Facebook login), password recovery and user authorization security in the cloud. You can learn more about user pools here.

When we create our Cognito user pool and create an app client. App clients have permission to call unauthenticated APIs (such as register, login and forgot passowrd). Take note of your Pool Id and the App client id (featured below) as we will insert these values into js/config.js

Head into your S3 bucket, download and modify js/config.js with your appropriate values from Cognito. Reupload the file back to your S3 bucket. We will have to do this one more time to populate the invokeUrl with a value from API gateway. Populating the cognito javascript object in that file connects our static web application to Amazon's cloud authentication services. For a detailed jQuery implementation of user management on the client side, view the files here.

Once we have updated our Cognito object within the config file, head over to the register page at YOUR_S3_URL/register.html. In my case the full url is: http://wildrydes-082317.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/register.html.

Sign up and create an account. Use your real email address! Cognito sends a test email with a link to verify your account. When you check your email after creating your account you will have a verification code, such as: 211658.

Go to YOUR_S3_URL/verify.html and enter your email address and confirmation code.

Go to signin page and signin with your new account: /signin.html

This flow could definitely be optimized. There is no client side routing implemented and we still have .html appended to all of our routes. Nevertheless, you can update this code with The Javascript Framework Of Your Choice. The backend process for registering users to Cognito will stay the same as we are using the Cognito client side JS SDK. The email verification is an option enabled by default that can easily be switched off.

You can customize the verification message by navigating to your Cognito User Pool by clicking Message Customizations on the left navigation panel.

It is worth noting here that we could use other authentication services such as Auth0 (they have an awesome developer blog). This is an Amazon provided tutorial though so we are using all AWS functionality.

When we successfully create a user, verify and sign in we will get to this screen:

Step 4: Set up Serverless Backend

In this step we'll implement a Lambda function that will be invoked each time a signed in user requests a unicorn. Lambda functions are the core functionality qualifying apps as Serverless. Lambda functions are a managed service provided by Amazon. We provide the code for the Lambda function and only pay for the time it takes that function to execute. We do not have to deal with provisioning EC2 instances or Elastic Load Balancing (typical operations functions for cloud applications). The primary advantage of this approach is that is is far cheaper than dedicated cloud hosting. It can also allow us to focus more on writing code and less on operations. Serverless and Lambda functions are a new Amazon service and new paradigm for web applications so there will be a learning curve but have the potential to save us massive time and money down the road.

The full steps for setting up the serverless backend are available here.

Before we even get to setting up Lambda functions and a serverless application we are going to create a DynamoDB database. DynamoDB is Amazon's managed NoSQL database. We are going to use DynamoDB to store information about the ride request when a user requests a Unicorn.

When we create the database note the ARN. It will look something like this:

Amazon Resource Name (ARN)  arn:aws:dynamodb:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:table/Rides

Now that the database is created we're going to an IAM role for the Lambda function. Every Lambda function must have an IAM role associated with it. The IAM role defines what AWS services the Lambda function is permitted to interact with. In this case we are going to go with the AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole. This basic role covers the functionality we need for the Wild Rydes application -- writing logs to Amazon CloudWatch and writing items to a DynamoDB table.

Detailed steps are available here for creating the IAM role.

Now that we have the DynamoDB database created and a role ready to associate with our Lambda function we can create the function itself!

Create a Lambda function called RequestUnicorn. The Amazon Web Services team provided the Node.js script for the Lambda function here. The full code for our Lambda function is below:

const randomBytes = require('crypto').randomBytes;

const AWS = require('aws-sdk');

const ddb = new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient();

const fleet = [
    {
        Name: 'Bucephalus',
        Color: 'Golden',
        Gender: 'Male',
    },
    {
        Name: 'Shadowfax',
        Color: 'White',
        Gender: 'Male',
    },
    {
        Name: 'Rocinante',
        Color: 'Yellow',
        Gender: 'Female',
    },
];

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
    if (!event.requestContext.authorizer) {
      errorResponse('Authorization not configured', context.awsRequestId, callback);
      return;
    }

    const rideId = toUrlString(randomBytes(16));
    console.log('Received event (', rideId, '): ', event);

    // Because we're using a Cognito User Pools authorizer, all of the claims
    // included in the authentication token are provided in the request context.
    // This includes the username as well as other attributes.
    const username = event.requestContext.authorizer.claims['cognito:username'];

    // The body field of the event in a proxy integration is a raw string.
    // In order to extract meaningful values, we need to first parse this string
    // into an object. A more robust implementation might inspect the Content-Type
    // header first and use a different parsing strategy based on that value.
    const requestBody = JSON.parse(event.body);

    const pickupLocation = requestBody.PickupLocation;

    const unicorn = findUnicorn(pickupLocation);

    recordRide(rideId, username, unicorn).then(() => {
        // You can use the callback function to provide a return value from your Node.js
        // Lambda functions. The first parameter is used for failed invocations. The
        // second parameter specifies the result data of the invocation.

        // Because this Lambda function is called by an API Gateway proxy integration
        // the result object must use the following structure.
        callback(null, {
            statusCode: 201,
            body: JSON.stringify({
                RideId: rideId,
                Unicorn: unicorn,
                Eta: '30 seconds',
                Rider: username,
            }),
            headers: {
                'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*',
            },
        });
    }).catch((err) => {
        console.error(err);

        // If there is an error during processing, catch it and return
        // from the Lambda function successfully. Specify a 500 HTTP status
        // code and provide an error message in the body. This will provide a
        // more meaningful error response to the end client.
        errorResponse(err.message, context.awsRequestId, callback)
    });
};

// This is where you would implement logic to find the optimal unicorn for
// this ride (possibly invoking another Lambda function as a microservice.)
// For simplicity, we'll just pick a unicorn at random.
function findUnicorn(pickupLocation) {
    console.log('Finding unicorn for ', pickupLocation.Latitude, ', ', pickupLocation.Longitude);
    return fleet[Math.floor(Math.random() * fleet.length)];
}

function recordRide(rideId, username, unicorn) {
    return ddb.put({
        TableName: 'Rides',
        Item: {
            RideId: rideId,
            User: username,
            Unicorn: unicorn,
            RequestTime: new Date().toISOString(),
        },
    }).promise();
}

function toUrlString(buffer) {
    return buffer.toString('base64')
        .replace(/\+/g, '-')
        .replace(/\//g, '_')
        .replace(/=/g, '');
}

function errorResponse(errorMessage, awsRequestId, callback) {
  callback(null, {
    statusCode: 500,
    body: JSON.stringify({
      Error: errorMessage,
      Reference: awsRequestId,
    }),
    headers: {
      'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*',
    },
  });
}

Currently we can write Lambda functions in Node.js, Python, Java or C#. The above code is a Node.js function that checks the user is authorized, writes to DynamoDB within the recordRide function and sends a random Unicorn back to the user. After reviewing the code, paste in the Lambda function and create it, leaving the default index.handler.

We can also configure a test event to make sure our Lambda function is envoked properly. If you would like to test your Lambda function, paste in the sample event code and verify that the execute succeeds.

Step 5: Setup API Gateway

We have set everything up for our Lambda function and static website. Now we need to set up API Gateway so that our static website can trigger the Lambda function. Amazon's API Gateway allows us to create RESTful APIs that expose HTTP endpoints. These endpoints can be invoked from the browser.

The final step is to create an API Gateway that will be our REST API. We could use tools like Swagger or stoplight.io at this point. Since we are only creating one HTTP endpoint we will create it manually.

After creating the API Gateway, we hook up Cognito to our endpoints. Doing this allows API Gateway to use and test the JWT tokens returned by Cognito. If you are not familiar with JWT, you can check out a sample applications here and here utilizing client side Javascript.

In order to hook up Cognito to API Gateway and protect our endpoints create a Cognito User pool authorizer:

Select Authorizers. Create -> Cognito user pool.

Now that that is configured we create a new resource method for the POST /ride endpoint.

More detailed instructions are available here but the gist is that we select the option for Proxy Integration and add the WildRydesLambda function tat we created in the last step. Select method request card and under authorization select our Cognito user pool.

We also have to enable CORS for our endpoint. In the API Gateway console, under Actions and replace default values and select Enable CORS. Everything can be left as the defaults.

Deploy the API Gateway by selecting Actions -> Deploy. This generates an Invoke URL that we must include in js/cofig.js. In my case the value is https://tfyxh265h2.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod. This endpoint is what our website requests via AJAX that invokes the Lambda function.

Everything should work now. The demo application is available here. If you have any questions about Node.js or serverless I'm available on twitter and the full source code from the AWS team is here

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed please share/upvote so that more people can hop on the serverless bandwagon and drink the Kool Aid.

This post also featured on my blog

Open Source List of Companies in San Francisco

Connor Leech — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 16:45:39 +0000

Open Source list of technology companies and startups in San Francisco, addresses included. This project is for job seekers and salespeople to discover companies within the SF metro

https://github.com/connor11528/sf-companies