Forem: Navin Mani

Innovations in Neuroscience Coming to a PCP Near You

Navin Mani — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 15:33:06 +0000

The brain is the most complex organ in the body. We are able to relate to the world only through the sensations and thoughts that arise in the brain. The brain tells us, or rather decides, when good things are happening and when bad things are happening. Everything from subconscious decision making to rational thought to basal desires, everything that we do ever, is directly associated with the brain. This complexity elevates the importance of neuroscience; the brain is one of the most important things humans should be aiming to gain mastery of right now. This complexity also means that it is super f***ing hard to understand the brain. Millennia of curiosity about the brain has taken us far, but not far enough. Modern science still lacks a complete understanding of how one’s neurology impacts one’s experience for the better or worse. Yes, we have a really good understanding, but not good enough to solve many neurocognitive and neurodegenerative diseases. Diseases such as Major Depressive Disorder, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Huntington’s Disease are just three of the dozens of ailments that are considered the most horrendous and harmful of all disorders and they plague millions and kill hundreds of thousands annually. We still have a lot of work to do. But, as you know, technology moves FAST. Painting a cohesive, exhaustive, and detailed mosaic of neurology has been extremely difficult, but now we are more capable than ever to do so. Innovations in psychology, software, and hardware are making neuroscientific breakthroughs easier to discover and create. Sometime soon, these innovations can help you understand your brain and live a better, more beautiful life.
Psychological advancements are fundamental to the understanding of neurological diseases. In 2008, the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) began the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, wherein they “attempt to create a new kind of taxonomy for mental disorders by bringing the power of modern research approaches in genetics, neuroscience, and behavioral science to the problem of mental illness.” This is a huge development for a field that has historically relied on a doctrine, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), that is based in consensual opinion rather than objective measures. This doctrine, while widely used, limited the rate of innovation within the field; it was a weak cornerstone on which much of today’s psychological practice was built. This important step taken by the NIMH is helping pull the study of psychology from largely theoretical to largely scientific, a step that directly destigmatizes our cultural view of mental illnesses. In effect, this project is remixing the mortar and relaying the brick on which informed, accurate, and impactful psychological innovations can be made.
The advent of new machine learning methods and the availability of computer power has expanded the breadth of situations for which machine learning can be used effectively. In essence, where there are ample data, there is the opportunity for data analysis. The use of neuroimaging dates back to 1927, and today we are using methods that were introduced in the 1970’s and 1980’s such as CT and MRI. So in our neuroscientific context, there are ample neuroimaging data, and machine learning can find patterns in these images very well. With decades of data, we can do amazing things like train machine learning models on PET scan images to predict Alzheimer’s Disease over 6 years before a final diagnosis. This is also why this Fall 2020, I am beginning a project wherein I am training machine learning models to analyze EEG and PET scans of Major Depressive Disorder patients (reach out if you want to contribute!). When the right machine learning models are trained over good data, doctors will be able to diagnose and treat many neurological disorders with higher accuracy and care. As we gather more and more neuroimages, and create new tools to gather novel data or do something traditional more accurately, our models will enable us to understand the complexities that are inherent in the brain.
Finally, I want to highlight the emerging field of clinical network neuroscience, or connectomics. This field is home to a number of neuroscientists who share the goal of fully mapping out the insanely complex molecular network structure of the brain. Building a network of this caliber requires huge amounts of compute power and novel technologies that allow us to see the brain at a high resolution, two things that could very well be available within the next 5 years. By building a molecular mapping of the brain we can deeply understand neurobiological structure and how it relates to neurological function. From there, we could virtually simulate any number of events on a particular brain, meaning we could literally conduct neurological experiments without requiring an actual brain. This would remove the mammoth obstacle of needing live human brains to conduct these experiments and accelerate the rate at which we discover innovations in the field.
Technology moves really fast, which means that these approaching neuroscientific innovations will certainly have a big impact on your life. Right now, scientists all over the world are focusing their efforts in building brain-machine interfaces that allow us to communicate with our brains. Neuralink is perhaps the closest to getting one of these in your hands, or rather in your brain, tomorrow. Last week they demoed their chip in healthy pigs, and proved that their 23mm by 8mm device can accurately transmit brain signals outwardly, and that the implant has essentially no negative side effects. Their goal is to make these chips affordable and safe, such that “anyone who wants one can have one.” First, they plan to use the chip to help solve neurological disorders such as paraplegia and memory loss. Over time, this chip will be available for consumer purchase, and can be implanted in under an hour without the need for general anesthesia. I am impartial whether you should go sign up to get a Neuralink implant whenever they are released to the public. I bring this example up because I want to shed light on the possibilities that exist around neuroscientific innovations, and how the field is getting increasingly closer to comprehensively understanding everything the brain does and how it does it. This understanding will be a feat for the history books, and will be looked back as a turning point that changed the course of technological progression and human potential forever. Soon, we will be able to solve some of humanity’s most devastating neurological diseases. Soon, we will be able to communicate with our brain to fundamentally change our experience of the world.

JAMstack Roundup for December 17th 2019

Navin Mani — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 22:11:25 +0000

Here are 5 great articles we read this week!

Deploying a static NuxtJS site to Cloudflare Workers

Recently Cloudflare announced Workers support for static sites. This opens up a whole new era of static website deployment. 🔓
Six Web Performance Technologies to Watch in 2020

Don't bet on 5G and HTTP/3 to make things faster 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♂️, there are six technologies that I believe will have a bigger impact on web performance in 2020.
How to Add Search Functionality to a Gatsby Blog

This tutorial will is based off of how I implemented a basic search on this site and will cover how to create a search filter on a site built with GatsbyJS. 🔍
Adding Google Calendar to your JAMstack

I’m a huge Google Calendar user and I know many other people are as well. I thought it might be interesting to see if you could add upcoming events, driven by a Google Calendar, to a static website. 📅
Creating a Markdown Blog with Next.js

Next.js is simple and flexible. Compared to a full-fledged static site generator, there are less prescriptive guiderails placed on developers in the implementation of an app or site. Due to this flexibility, this article shares just one perspective to approach building a simple, markdown-based blog. 🤗

JAMstack Roundup for December 11th 2019

Navin Mani — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 01:14:20 +0000

Here are 5 articles that taught us a lot, from SEO to React Testing!

How JAMstack Impacts Your SEO
Nowadays, if you want to do search engine optimization (SEO) properly you have to think beyond the desired keyword, title, and other tags. 🏷 You also have to take branding, audience behavior, search intent, user experience, analytics, website performance and competition into consideration as well. 👩‍🔬
The Rising Complexity of JAMstack Sites and How to Manage Them
When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. 🐘 How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services? 🤔
Get Started With ExpressJS
ExpressJS is probably the most popular framework for creating server-side web applications in Node.js. In this blog series I want to show you how to get started and how to do it The Right Way™. 😎
Forget Mobile First, Progressive Web App First is the Future
The days of “build it and they will come” 🛠 are long gone, and now the name of the game in mobile is “pay to play.” 💵 It doesn’t have to be this way. Companies that have historically been web-first have employed a very different strategy to acquire users. 🕸
UI Testing Best Practices
I've been writing a decent amount of UI tests these past few weeks and thought I'd share a handful of patterns I've been adhering to. 🤝 Hopefully this can help guide good decision making when writing tests and make it easy to write more maintainable code.

JAMstack Roundup for November 26th 2019

Navin Mani — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 19:05:43 +0000

Here are some great resources and articles we've found to prepare us for a great Thanksgiving!

Writing end-to-end tests for GraphQL servers using Jest

Writing end-to-end tests for applications helps to ensure applications behave as expected. 👌
JavaScript Visualized: Event Loop ✨♻️

Oh boi the event loop. It’s one of those things that every JavaScript developer has to deal with in one way or another, but it can be a bit confusing to understand at first. 🤷‍♀️
Apps prototyped in JAMstack pattern

Code your next web application on top of boilerplate apps built in JAMstack pattern. All apps (open-source or paid) includes tools, documentation and free Email support. 🤩
Angular: Allow Users Retry Failed Requests With A Twitter-Like Try Again Button

While using the Twitter web app, I noticed it displays a Try Again button for failed requests in different sections of the user interface. This allows the user to retry each failed request without affecting the rest of the application, quite neat. 🔁
Checking a Web Page for Dead Links

There is no content on the web that is immune to rotting and growing moss. Blog posts start festering with old dead links pointing to nowhere, and images blank out when a server hosting them goes away. The cure is to periodically check for any dead content. 🔗

JAMstack Roundup for November 13th 2019

Navin Mani — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:13:14 +0000

Here are some great articles, videos, and podcasts that educated us this week!

Why and When to Use GraphQL

To overcome the downsides of using the great REST API, Facebook developed GraphQL, an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs. 📊
How to create a simple Vue.js app in 5 minutes

Vue.js is getting more and more popular, becoming a meaningful competitor to frameworks like Angular or React.js. As a beginner-friendly front-end framework, it successfully conquers the hearts of junior front-end developers and people who just started to learn front-end programming. 🚀
JAMstack & Serverless with Netlify

On this episode, we talk to Shawn “swyx” Wang from Netlify about the JAMstack & Serverless revolution in frontend development. ✊
React Hooks vs. Svelte

I get asked a lot on my Twitch channel to show a comparison of React and Svelte. I thought I'd record a short video to show everyone how to take a basic React example and rewrite it using Svelte. 📹
How the JAMstack inspired me to start blogging

This is the story about how discovering and exploring the JAMstack has inspired me to finally kick off my blogging ventures. 📝

JAMstack Roundup for October 29th 2019

Navin Mani — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 22:45:35 +0000

Here are 5 great articles we've enjoyed this week!

Adding Search to your Eleventy Static Site with Lunr

Lunr is a completely client-side search solution. 🌚 Working with an index of your creation, Lunr will take in search input and attempt to find the best match it can. You are then free to create your search UI/UX any way you choose. 😲
JAMstack: Progressive Mailchimp sign-up form with Netlify

This article will help you build a solid "works-at-all-times" sign-up form with a custom serverless function on the JAMstack. ✅
How We Built a Serverless Progressive Web App with Cloudflare Workers

A few days ago, we launched our new Progressive Web App (krayx.com). We did this without setting up any servers. We didn’t have to worry about regions or uptime. 💃🕺 Instead, we could focus on delivering the best experience to our users.
Play with React Concurrent Mode with Your Gatsby Site

The React team released curious cat version for concurrent mode 😸, and I want to try that with my personal sites and side projects.
Using Storybook as a Visual Testing Platform

This is my experience with Visual Testing and how you can implement it in your projects. 📖

JAMstack Roundup for October 23rd 2019

Navin Mani — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 22:15:19 +0000

Here are 5 great videos and articles we're bringing you this week!

Static First: Pre-Generated JAMstack Sites with Serverless Rendering as a Fallback
One of the principles of JAMstack is that of pre-rendering. If we are going to pre-generate our sites ahead of time, how do we make them feel dynamic? How do we work with things like user generated content? 🤔
5 Frontend Podcasts - here's what I listen to to stay up to date
I love listening to podcasts. Whenever I've got a moment, while commuting, going to work or cooking, I'm just putting on my headphones. I would like to share with you my favorite ones. 🎧
I created the exact same app in React and Vue. Here are the differences.
Having used Vue at work, I had a fairly solid understanding of it. I was, however, curious to know what the grass was like on the other side of the fence — the grass in this scenario being React. 🍂
Building a serverless SMS sender in 10 minutes
A web based SMS sender can be a very handy tool any developer out there, which can be used for a wide range of use cases. In this article, we will build one. 📲
Learn GraphQL using JavaScript and Apollo
This video tutorial teaches why you should use GraphQL and explains concepts such as schema and resolvers. We will construct a simple API that supports hello world but we will also show how we can integrate with an external API. 📽

The Mesh is Here!

Navin Mani — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 21:44:07 +0000

We are very excited to announce the opening up of the TakeShape Mesh service!

Those of you who signed up for the Mesh Beta are first in line as we start to onboard people! Today at the San Francisco JAMstack Conference, TakeShape’s CTO Andrew Sprouse dropped this news. For those of you who weren’t able to make it, or haven’t signed up yet, this article is for you. 🤗

Over the last year, we’ve been working heads down to make sure the Mesh is plenty robust for your powerful web application. The Mesh unites all of your services into a single backend GraphQL API. Now you can compose, sync, and fetch content and data across your multiple APIs with ease. We’re starting with two service TakeShape CMS and Shopify with more to quickly follow as we hear from the community what APIs are most needed.

All you need to do is login, and toggle to the Mesh tab! If you don’t see the Mesh button here yet, don’t worry. It’ll be rolling out to each of you slowly yet surely. And we want this beta to be meaningful, so give us your feedback. From your nicest words to your harshest criticisms, our ears and eyes are open.

Take TakeShape for a spin!

The JAMstack Glossary

Navin Mani — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 23:18:21 +0000

The JAMstack, and everything else, defined. 😎

JAMstack: JavaScript, APIs, and Markup - A new way of building websites and apps that delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience.

CMS: Content Management System - An application that supports the modeling, creation, and service of content.

JavaScript: An object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers.

API: Application Programming Interface - A software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.

REST: Representational State Transfer - A set of rules that developers follow when they create their API.

GraphQL: A syntax that describes how to ask for data, and is generally used to load data from a server to a client.

Static Site: A website built with HTML that has fixed content on each page.

SSG: Static Site Generator - An application that takes your site content, applies it to templates, and generates a structure of purely static HTML files ready to be delivered to visitors.

Serverless: A serverless solution is one where developers are freed up to focus more on application development without needing to worry about provisioning, scaling or maintaining servers (or containers), and whose running costs are proportional to the system's usage levels.

CDN: Content Delivery Network - A geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.

E-Commerce: Electronic Commerce - The buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions.

Web Form: An HTML form on a web page that lets visitors enter their information.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language - The standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser.

Markup: A system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets - A style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML.

JAMstack Roundup for September 30th 2019

Navin Mani — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 00:36:07 +0000

Building a Component Library with React and Storybook
Learn how to build a component library 📚 with React and Storybook to create modular and reusable components that can be shared across projects.
How I’ve built 100+ open-source apps with automation tool
See how Sm0ke has generated more than 💯 apps in different languages and architectures, including the JAMstack, using automation tools and boilerplate code.
From WordPress to JAMstack
Away from WordPress, towards JAMstack. Multilingualism, a domain move 🚀.
The Best React And Vue Static Websites Generators For JAMstack Websites
From pricing 💵 to performance 🎟, which static site generators are best for React and Vue.
What is Serverless all about?
In an agile world, shipping 🚢 scalable software with budget constraints has become a big puzzle: one that Serverless may solve.

JAMstack Roundup for September 23rd 2019

Navin Mani — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:04:47 +0000

Here are 5 great articles and videos we're bringing to you this week!

Auto-publish future posts with JAMstack on Netlify and CircleCI 2.0 scheduled jobs

One of the earliest and possibly most painful issues you may come across is “How do I schedule content to publish for later?” 🧐. Enter the JAMstack. 💪
Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

Airbnb’s frontend engineers wanted rapid iteration ♽ and flexibility from GraphQL, while their backend engineers wanted stability and specificity from Thrift. This is the story of how they got the two groups talking and built something that works for everyone. 🤝
Jekyll Tutorial: Static Site Generator & JAMstack Intro

Here's an in-depth introduction to static websites and static site generators with Jekyll. 🧠
Crafting a Webpack-Powered Static Site with Spike

In Snipcart’s research for a new static site generator, they stumbled upon Spike. The fact that Spike is powered by webpack caught their attention. 😯
Why Mobile Performance Is Crucial

Mobile traffic 📲 now makes up over half of all site visits, and more than half of mobile site visits are abandoned if a page takes over 3 seconds to load.

JAMstack Roundup for September 16th 2019

Navin Mani — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:17:00 +0000

Here are 5 great articles we're bringing to you this week!

How to Build Authenticated Serverless JAMstack Apps with Gatsby and Netlify

When interacting with a backend, a JAMstack app can do everything ☑ a mobile app can do, without the tyranny 🎛 of the app store. This is a fundamental insight 🧠 that goes as deep as the fight for a more open, secure, decoupled, faster web.
Markdown is Markup and Other Confusions Around JAMstack

The M in JAMStack goes beyond 💫 just the Markdown, HTML, YAML and Liquid you may use. It includes the build process to put these together.
The Beginner’s Guide to Static Site Generators

World 🌎 of static sites has grown beyond HTML, CSS and occasional JS and much of it is owed to static site generators.
Why your next site should be built with JAM in mind

There’s no reason to have a massive, unwieldy CMS with a database or a fancy 💎 isomorphic monolith when you could have a fast 💨, secure and beautiful static site.
Traditional vs Modern Web Development ⚔️

Modern web development - we have a love ❤ and hate 💔 relationship with it because while it revolutionized web development practices, it also greatly complicated them.