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It’s time for another issue of the Teacher Spotlight, where we interview one of the Treehouse Teachers so you can get to know them a little better offscreen, and enjoy a sneak peek into their story, their inspirations and what makes them tick.
This month the spotlight is on Treehouse teacher Pasan Premaratne. In his interview, Pasan talks about his passion for business and entrepreneurship, why “Business Types” should learn to code, his favorite thought leaders in the industry, and the top resources and services he recommends for entrepreneurs.
When did you first become interested in the world of business, finance and entrepreneurship?
I think I’ve always been interested in business and entrepreneurship in general, I can’t really pinpoint a specific time. My parents were entrepreneurs, and so were a lot of my extended family as well, so I guess you could say it’s always been a goal to start something of my own.
How did your career evolve and bring you to Treehouse?
My original career goal was to be an investment banker, but I soon realized that this wasn’t the industry I wanted to be in. I’ve always been interested in technology and after some time trying hard to find a job that I cared about, I decided to take a leap of faith, call it quits on finance and jump into the tech industry. I found a great resource called Think Vitamin Membership, now Treehouse and I started teaching myself the basics – HTML, CSS and all that good stuff. After that I spent around a year freelancing, learning the ropes and getting to know the community.
All throughout school and for some time after, I was also a member of a wonderful organization called SIFE (Students in Free Entreprise), now called Enactus, where I spent a lot of time helping entrepreneurs with things like accounting, incorporation and basic setting up. We worked with some startup incubators and companies directly and I learned a lot from it. The combination of the two skill sets, and the company’s mission, made Treehouse an ideal place to join.
Why do you believe that “Business Types” should learn to code?
Even if you don’t want to end up in the technology industry, as a developer or designer, coding has become a base skill, like math, that everyone should at least understand. Many job roles now require you to know some form of programming, and why shouldn’t it, almost everyone works with computers now.
My motivation to learn to code was having an idea and not being able to execute on it. I’ve been to so many networking events where the usual MBA types are in attendance, trying to get developers or designers to help them with their projects. I decided then I didn’t want to be in that position. If I had an idea sometime in the future, I wanted to be in a position to just start prototyping it immediately.
Everyone should take time, I think, to learn a skill that will soon be ubiquitous. Be ahead of the game, so you’re not playing catch up essentially. The key is finding what motivates you to get started. Look around you, find a problem you would like to solve in your life, and see think about how you could automate that. It doesn’t have to be limited to software either – Andrew is doing a great job applying his knowledge to move into the hardware space.
Who are some of your favorite thought leaders in the industry at the moment?
I have lots different thought leaders I follow because I’m interested in so many aspects of the technology industry. But if I had to pick one person, I’d say it’s Elon Musk. To be involved in creating one great company is amazing – to work on three big things (Tesla, SpaceX and this magical Hyperloop we keep hearing about) is a very impressive feat. He really fights to make his vision come to reality and that’s a quality I want to emulate.
In terms of people who are great to follow for advice and learning my recommendations would be Mark Suster and Jason Fried. This is a shameless plug but I just started a weekly newsletter service called Missing Links where I put together articles from all my favorite thought leaders and more. If you really want to know who I follow, subscribe and I’ll let you know 
What is the most valuable advice you would give Treehouse students who are interested in starting a business?
This is definitely clichéd, but it’s probably the best advice out there – Just start doing things. It’s the best way to learn. Start building a random iPhone or Android app. You will learn lot’s of things about the ecosystem along the way and when you have a real idea, you will be sitting on top of all this knowledge.
What are some of the top new web apps, resources, or services you’d recommend entrepreneurs should check out?
I’m a voracious reader and Pocket has to be my favorite app. It’s so easy to get sidetracked on HackerNews or my twitter feed reading interesting articles but Pocket saves the day by letting me just tuck it away for later.
Other things, off the top of my head – Freshbooks for small business accounting and iA Writer to power through any writing needs. Although anyone who writes in any form should check out Draft – an amazing app.
What are you learning at the moment on Treehouse?
iOS development. It’s always been a goal of mine and I’m finally jumping on board. My aim is to have an app on the app store shortly after iOS 7 is released. It gives me a deadline that I can work towards.
Tell us something about yourself you don’t think anyone would ever assume!
I’ve lived in 5 cities, on 3 continents, in the past 10 years. You definitely learn how to make great friends in a short time and relate to people better. My goal is to live in a total of 10 awesome cities in my life!
The post Teacher Spotlight: Pasan Premaratne appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
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The Web Cryptography Working Group has published a Working Draft of WebCrypto Key Discovery. This specification describes a JavaScript API for discovering named, origin-specific pre-provisioned cryptographic keys for use with the Web Cryptography API. Pre-provisioned keys are keys which have been made available to the user agent by means other than the generation, derivation, importation functions of the Web Cryptography API. Origin-specific keys are keys that are available only to a specified origin. Named keys are identified by a name assumed to be known to the origin in question and provisioned with the key itself. Learn more about the Security Activity.
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Establishing an online presence is absolutely essential in this digital day and age, more so if your profession lies within a creative industry.
However, we’ve all heard of how well-shod cobblers children are; it can be hard to focus on your own site when you’re getting stuck into client work. All too often creating a personal site ends up in the ‘some day’ folder of your to-do app.
Thankfully, there are several web-based tools that can help you set up a site in under 5 minutes, meaning you can concentrate on more pressing issues. Despite their minimal setup time, they are aesthetically pleasing, with an air of professionalism, and are the perfect stop-gap solution for freelancers who need more than an ‘under construction’ page.
There are three main contenders in the personal site field, Zerply; Flavors.me and About.me, here’s how they stack up:
The obscurely named Zerply is a one page site that ‘goes beyond the resume’, cleanly displaying concise information such as work experience, educational background, social media profiles and contact information. Both Twitter and Facebook accounts can be used to quickly sign up, automatically pulling in your profile picture and certain information about your professional background. Unfortunately this data can be quite inaccurate and more often than not will require tweaking.
After signing up you’re prompted to flesh out your profile with basic information such as location, work experience and ‘tags’ (web design, photography etc.) Again, this can be pulled in from your Facebook or LinkedIn profile, with the latter being the more accurate choice. Side projects, non-profit work and other resume worthy information can also be manually added to your profile.
You can then choose one of the five free themes available to display your profile, all of which are well designed and professional. They do feature Zerply images and links in the footer, as well as a link to the designer, but this is acceptable due to the service being completely free.
Although your Zerply public profile is essentially just a one page site, the backend is intuitive and well thought out. You can network with like-minded individuals and follow their latest updates, and endorse people for certain aspects of their work. Likewise, people can endorse your skills and you can connect your GitHub, Behance, Vimeo, and Flickr to show off your latest creations.
Zerply operates on a Freemium payment model. Current premium features include two additional themes for $19 each, and support for a custom domain (instead of zerply.com/johnsmith) for $15 a year.
Best for: freelancers looking for an easy to launch personal site with basic but effective networking features.
Flavors.me is a self-described ‘unified web presence’, allowing you to launch a simple personal portal that aggregates content from your social media updates, photos, videos and more. Flavors adopts a different approach to Zerply, opting for customisable designs, full page images and displaying core information in clean and compact boxes.
The signup process is similar to Zerply, with the ability to register via Facebook, Google and Yahoo. You are then prompted to enter very basic personal information in the form of a short bio and tagline, before deciding which services you want to connect and display on your page. This is the primary purpose of Flavors, with over 30 different services being supported such as Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, Soundcloud, Facebook and WordPress. Essentially all this does is add links to your various profiles, with some services like Twitter automatically pulling in your latest tweets and displaying them on your Flavors page when they are clicked by the user.
Flavors has more of an emphasis on design when compared to Zerply, with 222 fonts and 17 layouts available for you to play around with, as well as basic HTML support. However, additional layouts are only available when you opt for a premium account costing $20 per year. Other premium features include a mobile site, real time stats, contact form and a custom domain name. Design tweaks to your page are done through a simple drop down menu, with changes instantly carried out right in front of you. It can take some time to settle on a layout that suits you, so being able to preview changes on the fly greatly speeds up the process.
Flavors.me lacks the professional feel that Zerply successfully achieves, coupled with the fact that some basic features such as a contact form are frustratingly unavailable to non-premium accounts.
Best for: freelancers looking for a central hub to aggregate social media profiles.
About.me is a completely free alternative to Zerply and Flavors.me, with all features available right off the bat. Unfortunately this means that a custom domain name can’t be used with it, which may put people off slightly. Aesthetically, About.me appears to be very similar to Flavors, utilising full page images and displaying content in a similar way, but their core functionality differs.
Unlike its competitors, About.me doesn’t support sign up through social media profiles such as Twitter or Facebook, instead opting for the more traditional method of signing up through email. Again, the initial steps involve filling in as much personal information as you’re comfortable revealing, such as location, work background, education and contact information. You can then add ‘Apps’ to your page which are essentially links to your social media profiles, and like Flavors, Tweets and status updates can be pulled in.
The design process is similar to Flavors with the option to change fonts, colour schemes and background images on the fly. You can also click and drag the content area and background images to position them exactly where you want, which is effective at preventing About.me pages looking overly similar.
About.me successfully achieves equilibrium between simplicity and style, with a small arsenal of basic yet effective features. Visitors to your page are able to send you emails without your address being publicly revealed; a function which is only available to paying members of Flavors.me. The dashboard also has impressive statistical information, such as visits, clicks on your links and referring search engine terms.
The only real downside to About.me is the lack of custom domain support, which is a nice touch if you wish to include your page on business cards and social media profiles. However, this is a minor drawback when you take into account that the service is completely free to use.
Best for: freelancers who don’t need their own domain name.
Ultimately, the best service to use is down to you and your personal preference. Zerply is well suited to users seeking employment, but is it as effective as linkedIn? One thing’s for sure, with the ever-increasing number of social media accounts we all hold, a central hub is something you’re likely to need in the near future.
Do you have a personal homepage that is hosted by a service? Which service do you use? Let us know in the comments.
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Econophysicists studying the way people accumulate a new form of digital currency say they have observed the famous rich-get-richer effect for the first time.
