Dendory Capital - Blog

  NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens , have become the hottest thing in crypto this year. You may have heard in the news about a digital art piece from the artist Beeple selling as an NFT for $69 million, or how the NBA has partnered with a company called Top Shot to sell digital card packs to people. The short definition is that an NFT is a special crypto token that proves ownership of a digital asset. It usually lives on the Ethereum blockchain, although other blockchains also support NFTs, and unlike a traditional real world item, ownership can be proven with complete certainty since the entire transaction is public and stored on the blockchain ledger. So whoever paid those crazy prices for these early releases can be safe to know that their investment will live for as long as the blockchain does, even though it's debatable whether they would ever find a buyer to pay more than they did. But one question that many people aren't taking into account is where these files actually li

Repetition is the key to success in life, whether we're talking about exercising, doing crossword puzzles or other types of professional work, doing the same thing multiple times builds muscle memory. There certainly is a benefit to repeating the same task, whether you're trying to actually build muscles, or in the case of intellectual challenges, if you're trying to learn or improve your mental capacity. But there are tasks that don't really bring any benefit, they just take time. Those are mostly when you spend a lot of time to do menial tasks, things that don't really bring you any benefit. Whether you're doing IT tasks by clicking through UIs, typing commands in your computer, filling numbers in a spreadsheet, writing a report, or classifying papers, these tasks don't tend to bring you any benefit. This is when you should think about automating your work. As someone with a tech background, automation is something I default to very quickly. The good thing

For most people, crypto is just a way to invest in a highly speculative asset. Bitcoin is seen as digital gold, as something you can buy, hold and sell at a higher price. But crypto currencies and blockchain technologies are used in many more applications, and creating innovative products on top of these networks starts with connecting to the network. Whether you're trying to create a digital wallet, interact with smart contracts, or build a completely new application, you need to use code and connect to the blockchain of your choice. In this post, we'll use Python and connect to the Binance Smart Chain. While there is a lot of crypto documentation out there for JavaScript, the amount is smaller for Python, so hopefully this post will give you a good place to start. Connecting to the chain First, you'll need to download the web3 library. You can use pip to install it on your system: pip install web3 Once installed, open up a Python interpreter and let's initialize the

Jenkins is a well known tool used in the DevOps world to automate processes. Typically, it's mostly used to build and deploy software as part of a CI/CD process, including cloning code from git, running a build job, running tests and deploying the resulting artifacts. However, Jenkins pipelines can be used to automate anything at all. Because of its built-in credentials manager, multi-node architecture and multitude of plugins, it can be worth it to centralize a lot of the repeated tasks you may have inside of Jenkins, rather than having scripts resting on a server somewhere. In this post we'll see how to use a Jenkins pipeline to connect to AWS and retrieve a list of S3 buckets available. Storing credentials The first thing you should do is securely store your credentials. One of the oldest security issue that IT people have had to deal with is the management of credentials. If you use a shell script to run your command, then you need credentials to be stored inside the script

  As part of our technology services here at Dendory Capital, we touch a lot of exciting new industries. One of them is Cryptocurrencies. By now most people know about Bitcoin and how it's been going on a massive growth in the past year, but Bitcoin is just one of many different crypto coins. The landscape is much more vast than it used to be when Bitcoin was the only coin in town, and perhaps the most interesting part of crypto isn't so much the price action but instead all of the technologies behind these coins. In this post I will describe some of the basic fundamentals that drive crypto including blockchain networks, smart contracts and gas fees. The basics of blockchain All crypto currencies work on top of something called the blockchain. In simplified terms, a blockchain is a chain of blocks, linked together in a secure manner, and published on a ledger. This is how crypto coins are created, and how transactions are recorded. For example, let's say you have one Bitcoi

Over the last few years, we've deployed a lot of environments into the AWS cloud. Provisioning a brand new IT environment requires a well planned out design, and each design is going to be different based on your business needs. But one aspect that has to always be present, from the original concept all the way to the execution, is security. These days security cannot be an afterthought. There's too much data, money and power riding on our modern IT systems, where getting a virus or having a hacker breach those systems is no longer an incoveniance, it can be a career ending event. This is why we always make sure to follow industry best practices when it comes to security. A lot of people believe security is a digital, black and white concept. Either you're secure or you're not. But in reality, you can never be truly fool proof. Security comes in layers, and the more layers you put in place, the more secure your environment is. In this post, I'll describe some of the