🥊 Apple vs Facebook
Americans alone consume 2 billion chicken nuggets per year 🤯 plus, Canva is ranked as one of the world's most valuable startups 🔥
Hey 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of our newsletter.
Check out the second episode of🎙 Haystack: Tech Uncovered, featuring Andy McFetrich - Global Recruitment Marketing Manager at Sage. Listen to the full episode and discover the ongoing series, where we cover all things tech, software development, design, tech hiring and tech culture. 🚀
📱 Big Tech & Startups
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Apple has reportedly threatened to kick Facebook off the App Store 👋. In 2019, there was a BBC report on how human traffickers were utilising the social media platform in order to sell victims. An internal memo found that Facebook was actually very aware of the practice, even before then, throughout 2018 and 2019.
There are criminal organisations that utilise the platform in order to carry out their business. The reason they can do so is that Facebook’s AI content moderators can’t detect most of the languages on the platform, and human moderators aren’t able to speak the languages in those markets. This essentially leads to a blind spot for lots of criminal organisations to carry out their activities online.
🧪 Science & Futuristic Tech
Image source: The Guardian
There are plenty of stories out there at the minute about the future of lab-grown meat. Americans alone will eat around 2 billion chicken nuggets a year 🤯, and it’s no secret that intensive farming and animal agriculture is impacting our environment negatively. The world of startups is working overtime to disrupt farming with synthetic biology, backed by billionaires like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, to name just a few, that are investing in this technology.
The cost of lab-grown meat is becoming increasingly affordable. In 2013 the cost of the first dish-grown beef burger was £240,000 but later this year it’s expected to fall to around £7.50!
Climate change has lead to us searching for other, less environmentally impactful alternatives. One of the knock-on effects of climate change is that it's making it more difficult to grow good coffee! ☕️ Coffee plantations are shrinking. The techniques used to grow lab-grown meat are being used to try and mitigate this issue by growing coffee in labs. Naturally, it’s much easier to grow coffee than something like beef - a little less complex, so we can expect these to be on our supermarket shelves pretty soon.
💻 Programming, Data & Design
Image source: Canva
Canva has without a doubt come to the rescue when we needed our Instagram feeds to ‘pop’. The Australian graphic design company has recently been valued at $40bn, following a recent roundup of $200m, and is now ranked as one of the world’s most valuable startups! 🔥
The global pandemic has evidently given the privately-owned business a helping hand since the majority of its customers began working from home. It’s now reported that Canva will use the new funding to double its 2,000 staff over the next year and will expand into web design and video editing tools. 👏
Some of our favourite companies hiring for design roles include:
EPAM - hiring for UX and UI Designer
Gear4music - hiring for a UI Designer
Opencast - hiring for an Interaction Designer
⚙️ Miscellaneous
Image source: Total Processing
A Unicorn is a privately-held startup with a valuation of $1bn (equivalent to around £720m). Each year, we’re seeing the number of unicorns in the UK, and globally, increase.
Here are some of the UK based companies that have joined the unicorn club this year:
Lendable - a peer-to-peer lending platform designed for personal loans 💰
PPRO Group - an integrated payments platform enabling merchants to offer customers a range of payment types
Starling Bank - a female-led fintech startup marketing itself as a fairer, smarter alternative to banking
Zego - the UK’s first insurance tech firm pay-as-you-go courier and food delivery insurance 🛒
SaltPay - an e-commerce firm supporting small businesses by creating a payment processing and point-of-sale technology
Bought By Many - Insurtech company designed specifically for pet insurance 🐶
OnlyFans - content creation platform and is one of the UK’s newest unicorns
💣 Highlighted Opportunities
Graduate
Sage: Graduate Developer 📌 London
Inspired: Web/Software Developer 📌 Newcastle upon Tyne
EPAM: Javascript Developers 📌 Newcastle upon Tyne
Junior/Mid
BYP Network: Software Developer 📌 London/Open to remote
LeoVegas: Frontend Engineer 📌 Newcastle upon Tyne
Cronofy: Software Engineer 📌 London Bridge/Open to remote
Senior/Lead
Lloyds: Senior Software Engineer 📌 Halifax
accuRx: Senior Full Stack Engineer 📌 London
Street: Senior PHP Developer 📌 Manchester/Open to remote
✍️ Developer Stories
Meet Dave, Principal Consultant with 20+ years experience in software development. 🧑💻
Hi Dave! 😊 How are you today? Fancy kicking us off by introducing yourself and a bit more about your background?
I’m a Software Engineering Lead, and have been coding professionally for almost 20 years now. For at least half of those, I’ve had varying management roles as well, throughout which I’ve tried to remain as hands-on as possible, because at heart I’m a techie and it’s what I love doing.
I’m also very interested in cloud architecture, and have spent a number of years working with both AWS and GCP to build scalable, resilient, cost-effective hosting solutions.
How did you first get into engineering and find your passion for software development?
My route into engineering is an unusual one. I’d always been interested in coding, and started out writing small games for the Commodore 64 using Commodore Basic when I was 8 years old, that I would then record to cassette and my little brother would play on them.
I ended up doing Economics at university but didn’t enjoy it and left after the first term. I worked for a couple of years in a call centre, and while I did that I learnt about this new Microsoft framework called .NET, and it’s accompanying new language C#, which turned out to be a very smart (and lucky) career move.
I passed my MCP in WinForms development, then got my first job as a Junior Developer, and the rest is history.
What advice would you give software engineers looking to advance in their careers? How did you get to where you are today?
I’ve got to where I am today by surrounding myself with brilliant people and learning everything I can from them, as well as making a big effort to constantly update my skills. I think the most important thing to remember when it comes to advancing your career is that its *your* responsibility to do it, not someone else’s to make it happen for you. So be brave and try new things, and be kind to yourself when they go wrong (which they inevitably will from time to time).
📚 Blog Round-up
10+ Projects You Can Do to Become a Frontend Master
Learning to code can be challenging and perplexing, especially if you don't know where to begin. The greatest approach to improve your programming skills is to use your abilities to create coding projects. Read more.
Writing Clean JavaScript — ES6 Edition
Clean code is not just code that works, but rather code that can be easily read, reused and refactored by others. Writing clean code is important because, in a typical work environment, you are not writing for yourself or for the machine. In reality, you are writing for a group of developers who will need to understand, edit and build over your work. Read more.
100 Things You Should Know as a Software Engineer
There are a multitude of skills required to become a Software Engineer, and each developer will no doubt have a different way of learning and enhancing their knowledge, as they progress within their career. From building software to utilising design systems and maintaining productivity, here are 100 tips to help you within your developer journey. Read more.