Today we learn how to format the output of println, and a new type char
what is formatting?
formatting is converting values into strings according to a specified format
we introduce 2 ways to format
String interpolation: one way to combine variables and text is to use something called interpolation
actually we used it yesterday

let name = "Lucy"
let age = 14
printfn $"my name is {name}, I'm {age} years old"

$ tell the compiler: please use the variable we defined before in this string
{} indicate what exactly the variables we need, here in this example is {name} and {age}
so it will replace the value of variables at the location of brace
like type of age is int, it’s converted to string ’14’ in the final output, we didn’t transfer it explicitly

Specifiers: You can also use format specifiers as part of what you’re trying to print. Using specifiers is the most commonly used way to format in F#
Let’s use specifier to format in our example:

let name = "Lucy"
let age = 14
printfn "my name is %s, I'm %i years old" name age

you can see the output is the same
%s is for name, it’s for string type
%i is for age, it’s for int type
we introduce 4 of them today:

%b for bool

let is_this_apple = true
let is_this_orange = false

printfn "Is this an apple? %b" is_this_apple
printfn "Is this an orange? %b" is_this_orange

%c for char
we have learned string type to describe a text, it represents a sequence of characters
while char represents a single character, like ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’ or ‘!’, ‘@’, ‘#’, ‘$’
string and char are different types, not just the length, you can not concat them like this:

let str = "Hello"
let ch = '!'
let result = str + ch

printfn "%s" result  // Output: Hello!

will get error: The type ‘char’ does not match the type ‘string’

we can transfer a char to string like this, then can concat them properly

let str = "Hello"
let ch = '!'
let result = str + (string)ch

printfn "%s" result  // Output: Hello!

the full specifiers for other types are here

The post F# For Dummys – Day 6 appeared first on ProdSens.live.

The background-blend-mode CSS property is used to specify how the background images of an element should blend with each other and with the element’s background colour.
It allows you to create interesting visual effects by controlling the blending mode of the background layers.

The background-blend-mode property takes a blending mode value, which determines how the colours of the background layers are combined. The blending modes available include standard modes such as normal, multiply, screen, overlay, and more. These modes affect how the colours of the background layers interact, creating different visual effects.

Here’s an example of how the background-blend-mode property can be used in CSS:

.element {
  background-image: url('background-image.jpg'), linear-gradient(to right, red, yellow);
  background-color: #fff; /* Fallback background color */
  background-blend-mode: multiply;
}

In this example, the element has a background composed of an image (background-image.jpg) and a linear gradient. The background-blend-mode: multiply; is applied, which means the colours from the image and gradient will be multiplied together, creating a blended effect.

Here’s another example

Remember that browser support may vary for this property, so it’s a good practice to check compatibility if you plan to use it in production.

The post Blend background images and colours with CSS. appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Dive into this Whiteboard Friday episode with Chris Long as he reveals five ingenious ways SEOs can leverage ChatGPT.

The post 5 Ways SEOs Can Use ChatGPT – Whiteboard Friday appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Hey, hey, it’s the Daily Byte! Over the next several days, we’ll be talking about developer roles, success taits, and the future ahead. Today we want to know:”

What is the single most pressing issue currently confronting the software industry?

Follow the DEVteam for more discussions and online camaraderie!

The DEV Team
Follow

The team behind this very platform.

The post What’s the Main Issue in Software Today? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Hey Folks!. Welcome to day 89 of 100DaysOfCode Challenge. We shall be covering the kadane’s algorithm today.

Question: Maximum Subarray

Given an integer array nums, find the subarray with the largest sum, and return its sum.

Examples:

Example 1:

Input: nums = [-2,1,-3,4,-1,2,1,-5,4] Output: 6
Explanation: The subarray [4,-1,2,1] has the largest sum 6.

Example 2:

Input: nums = [1] Output: 1
Explanation: The subarray [1] has the largest sum 1.

Example 3:

Input: nums = [5,4,-1,7,8] Output: 23
Explanation: The subarray [5,4,-1,7,8] has the largest sum 23.

Constraints:

1 <= nums.length <= 10⁵

-10⁴ <= nums[i] <= 10⁴

Follow up: If you have figured out the O(n) solution, try coding another solution using the divide and conquer approach, which is more subtle.

Question Breakdown:

The question is pretty simple. Let’s define what it wants:-

• Subarray

A subarray is a contiguous non-empty sequence of elements within an array.

• We need to find the largest sum of all the subarrays.

Intuition:

Brute Force Approach:

• In a brute force approach or naïve approach, we can run three loops to find it out.
• We will use the first two for loops to form the subarray and another for loop using a third pointer to find the sum inside that subarray.
• We will then update the maximum sum found accordingly.

Code: Brute Force Approach:

class Solution {
public:
    int maxSubArray(vector<int>& nums) {
        int maxi = INT_MIN; //to store our max sum
        int n = nums.size();
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
        for (int j = i; j < n; j++) {
            // subarray = arr[i.....j]
            int sum = 0;

            //adding up the sum
            for (int k = i; k <= j; k++) {
                sum += nums[k];
            }

            maxi = max(maxi, sum);
        }
    }

    return maxi;
    }
};

This gives us a time limit exceeded error as it is a solution of third-order (cubic) time complexity.

Better Approach:

• If we check our previous approach carefully, we are adding the next element to the previously calculated sum.
• At a moment we don’t need all the elements but the previously calculated sum and the next element to add.
• So if we try to optimize it, we can remove our third for loop and calculate the sum while our j pointer is traversing as it can also accumulate the sum for that subarray.

Code:

class Solution {
public:
    int maxSubArray(vector<int>& nums) {
        int maxi = INT_MIN; // maximum sum
        int n = nums.size();
    for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
        int sum = 0;
        for (int j = i; j < n; j++) {

            sum += nums[j];

            maxi = max(maxi, sum); // getting the maximum
        }
    }

    return maxi;
}
};

Time Complexity: O(N²), where N = size of the array.
Reason: We are using two nested loops, each running approximately N times.

This also gives us a TLE, so we need to find a better approach.

Optimal Approach Intuition:

• The intuition of Kadane’s Algorithm says that if a subarray is contributing a negative sum, it should not be considered further.
• Instead of calculating the actual subarray Kadane’s algorithm asks us to move further than negative contributions and count only when the sum is not negative.
• Here, we will traverse the given array with a single loop and while iterating we will add the elements to our sum. If at any point the sum becomes less than 0, we will set the sum as 0 as we are not going to consider any subarray with a negative sum.

Approach:

• Initialize two variables sum and maxi to calculate the temporary sum and our final result.
• Traverse the array using a for loop with iterator i to the last index and keep adding our sum to the sum variable.
• If at any point our sum is negative means we should not consider this subarray as a part of our answer otherwise update the maximum
• Return our final result as maxi.

Code:

class Solution {
public:
    int maxSubArray(vector<int>& nums) {
        long long sum = 0;
        long long maxi = LONG_MIN;
        for(int i = 0; i < nums.size(); i++){
            sum += nums[i];

            if(sum > maxi){
                  maxi = sum;
            }

            if(sum < 0){
                sum = 0;
            }
        }
        return maxi;
    }
};

BONUS: Printing the subarray:
If we want to print the subarray we use the following approach in addition to our optimal approach.

class Solution {
public:
    int maxSubArray(vector<int>& nums) {
        long long sum = 0;
        long long maxi = LONG_MIN;
        int ansStart = -1;
        int ansEnd = -1;
        int tempStart = 0;
        for(int i = 0; i < nums.size(); i++){

            if(sum == 0) tempStart = i; //means our last subarray contributed negative and we have to start new.

            sum += nums[i];

            if(sum > maxi){
                  maxi = sum;
                  ansStart = tempStart;
                  ansEnd = i;
            }

            if(sum < 0){
                sum = 0;
            }
        }

        for(int i = ansStart; i<=ansEnd; i++){
            cout << nums[i] << " ";
        }

        return maxi;
    }
};

Complexity Analysis:

The post DAY 89 – Kadane’s Algorithm appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Recently, I’ve been consumed by the task of job hunting, yet I have not lost sight of my passion for writing. This week, I am determined to contribute something unique and creative despite the demanding nature of my current pursuit. My goal is to diversify my creative exploration and invite fresh insights into my process.

As a part of this endeavor, I am eager to see the work you’ve accomplished. If you have any projects written in Rust, I would love to see them. If you have any repositories on GitHub that showcase your Rust coding capabilities, do share those as well. Anything that you’ve created and is currently live, I would love to see. Honestly, any work you’ve done and are proud of, I invite you to share. The aim is to seek inspiration from your work and to foster an environment of mutual creative growth.

The post Rust Me Baby All Night Long appeared first on ProdSens.live.

It’s no question that the AI conversation has dominated the SEO community during the last year. The implications of this new technology are both extremely exciting and a little scary at the same time. At Go Fish Digital, we’ve been following these trends closely and refining our processes around the possibilities that AI brings.

Within both the SEO and larger technology communities, there is a huge discrepancy of opinions.

Many are weary of the implications and skeptical on the long-term benefits for marketers.

Some believe that this is a passing trend similar to voice search.

Others believe that this is a revolutionary technology that will impact every aspect of search in the future.

Out of curiosity, I performed a poll on my Linkedin page. I asked if SEOs thought that ChatGPT was going to disrupt SEO:

Nearly two-thirds of respondents said that ChatGPT is going to change our industry. I tend to agree with them. As a community, we need to be getting prepared for the imminent changes that AI is going to bring.

SEOs need to embrace AI

I believe that as a community, we need to be paying attention to this generational technology. While the tools certainly have their shortcomings, the outputs they’re producing already are nothing short of impressive. These tools will allow us to become more educated, more efficient and more technical.

It’s important that we not only keep in mind where these technologies are today. We must understand and expect that these tools will get exponentially better over time. The performance of GPT-4 is already significantly improved from GPT-3.5

GPT-3.5 feels unusable compared to GPT-4

— Paul Shapiro (@fighto) May 9, 2023

Thinking about a 5-year time horizon, these tools will advance far beyond what we’re seeing in today’s versions. This is why SEOs need to be adopting these technologies right now. The ones that do, will be well-positioned for the future of marketing.

Improving our SEO efficiencies

Back in March, I was curious as to how many SEOs were utilizing ChatGPT in their day-to-day workflows. Despite the fact that it was relatively new, I wondered how quick SEOs were to adopt using it:

To my surprise, 52% of respondents already claimed to be using ChatGPT to help with regular SEO tasks. This poll was conducted just 3 months after it’s initial release.

This makes sense as there are a lot of really great use cases for SEO tasks that we do on a daily basis. By using AI technology like ChatGPT, you can significantly improve the efficiency at which you’re able to work on some of these tasks.

A simple example is keyword research. With ChatGPT, you can immediately create large seed lists of potential keywords that have semantic relationships to the core topics that your website is trying to compete for.

Tom Demers recently wrote a great guide on Search Engine Land where he walks through his process of using AI for keyword research. In the guide he shows multiple examples of how he was able to use different types of prompts to directly identify keywords or find sources to mine for query opportunities.

He even showcased how he was able to export data from third-party SEO tools and bring it into a table format within the ChatGPT interface:

Content ideation is another great example of a tactical task that ChatGPT can leverage. Here I prompted ChatGPT to give me 30 different topic ideas about “The Metaverse”. It delivered them in about 30 seconds:

If I ran a technology blog, I could vet that against existing content on the site and find gaps where search opportunities might exist. Even if there was no direct SEO value, these topics still help position us as a topical authority in a particular content area.

You could even use ChatGPT to optimize your site’s content at scale. Tools such as GPT For Work allow you to connect to Google Sheets to the ChatGPT API. This allows you to feed in dynamic prompts and get the output back in Google Sheets.

As a result, you could create thousands of title tags and meta descriptions. You could give a site a baseline level of optimization with about 30 minutes of setup:

From a tactical perspective, there are so many use cases for ChatGPT to help with SEO.

1. Keyword research

2. Content ideation

3. Content evaluation

4. Schema generation

5. Featured snippet creation

6. Title tags and meta descriptions

7. Ideas for new content sections

8. Readability improvements

While there are many resources available, Alyeda Solis wrote a fantastic guide on the different use cases for SEO.

If you’re performing SEO in any capacity, it’s very likely that you can find a use case where your day-to-day efficiencies can be improved by utilizing some of these processes. This will allow us to produce a more efficient output and spend time working on initiatives that are less prone to automation.

Enhancing our knowledge base

I believe that only looking at strictly tactical implementations would be using AI far within its limits. There are many other great applications for the SEO community beyond that.

One of the best use cases that we see many industries using ChatGPT for is to enhance their knowledge base. AI can be an excellent teacher when prompted correctly. It can summarize information exceptionally quickly and give it to us in an output that’s completely customized to our learning style.

For example, the late-great Bill Slawski used to analyze patents that Google filed for. These patents are more technical and Bill used a long-form writing style.

We started testing running Bill’s patents through ChatGPT and prompted it to summarize core points. A successful prompt was “Summarize the whole article in 5 bullet points. Explain like I’m in high school”:

For my learning style, this allowed me to get enough detail to understand the patent and its implications without having the output oversimplify Bill’s ideas. If I was curious about any given idea, I could simply prompt ChatGPT to elaborate more and it would allow me to go deeper.

You could also get summaries from Google’s documentation. Here I fed it text from Google’s page on canonical tags and asked it to give me best practices.

How many of us struggle with technical SEO, web technology or understanding how search engines work?

With ChatGPT the work of great technical minds like Bill and Google’s documentation essentially becomes democratized. Now when you encounter an SEO topic that you don’t understand, you can use AI as a teacher.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this. These types of summaries might not fully represent an author’s work as content must be left out and elements such as tone of voice aren’t taken in to consideration.

However, as a whole, this is a very powerful thing. Now the knowledge base that exists around SEO is more accessible to the entire community.

Empowering a community of creators

Personally, I think the most exciting aspect of the implications of AI for the SEO community are the technical possibilities that it opens up. While many of us are technically minded, not everyone has a background in development.

ChatGPT is going to enable the SEO community to become creators.

With the right prompting, you’ll now be able to create code that you weren’t able to before. That’s going to significantly impact your effectiveness as a search marketer.

For example, Screaming Frog is now opened up so much more for SEOs. I recently needed to scrape the BreadcrumbList structured data of REI’s site. When doing similar tasks before, it’s taken hours of debugging, re-running crawls and even meetings with other members of our team.

I asked ChatGPT to create a Screaming Frog extract and fed it sample HTML. Within 5 minutes, I was able to get a working XPath that allowed me to extract exactly what I needed:

The process could be applied to many other tools. ChatGPT could help you create API calls, SQL queries, Python scripts and many other things. This will empower the community to create new things that might not have been possible for many people.

On top of one-off pieces of code, you’ll now be able to create tools that are fully customized to your exact needs.

I’ve never created a Chrome extension before. However, ChatGPT has the power to take the prompts you give it and turn it into a fully functioning extension.

With about 30 minutes of prompting and debugging, it was able to create a custom SEO extension that pulls data such as title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, URL and more:

While there are great tools like this available, I could customize this extension to the exact specifications that I want.

You can even create tools that help improve your SEO efficiencies. My colleague Dan Hinckley was able to further iterate on this extension.

By connecting it to the ChatGPT API, he was able to create an SEO extension for our team that provides recommendations for title tags, H1, new content sections, and more:

Now this gives the entire team at Go Fish Digital a new tool to use as part of their process. We can quickly find page-level SEO opportunities and can decide which ones are worth actioning on for a given recommendation.

I suspect that ChatGPT will produce other solutions similar to this in the community. By embracing the power of AI, SEO teams will be able to identify the needs that they have and create a solution that perfectly fits their internal processes.

Conclusion

To us, it’s clear that AI is going to have a significant impact on the SEO community. The data already shows that SEOs see these technologies as having the power to significantly disrupt the industry and are already incorporating tools like ChatGPT into their day-to-day processes. I believe the SEOs that adapt to these changes will be the ones that see the most success.

Marketers that are able to leverage AI to improve efficiencies, grow their knowledge base and build customized solutions to improve their processes will be well-positioned for whatever the future of search holds.

Chris will be speaking at MozCon 2023 this August in Seattle! Join us for inspiring sessions with our incredible lineup of speakers. 

We hope you’re as excited as we are for August 7th and 8th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet and need help making a case we have a handy template to convince your boss!

Register for MozCon

The post Why SEOs Need to Embrace AI appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Looking for the right customer success tools for your SaaS?

More and more SaaS companies are starting to realize how important user retention is. So if you’re looking to get started in improving those metrics, let’s take a look at the best customer success tools out there today, and address all their pros and cons.

Let’s start with a quick overview:

What Are Customer Success Tools?

In essence, customer success tools (SaaS) offer a full 360-degree view of your customers. They enable your CS team to identify which customers require more assistance for adopting your product, or where there may be potential points of friction across the customer journey.

In practice, that means that most customer success software has to offer a range of different features.

Some of the features that customer success tools will provide are:

• Customer engagement analytics
• Product usage tracking
• Customer lifecycle analytics
• Health scoring customer data
• Customer experience insights
• Customer feedback collection
• User profiling
• Real-time insights of customer engagement

The Best Early-Stage Customer Success Tools:

• Userpilot
• Vitally
• Helpscout
• eWebinar
• Wootric
• Custify
• eWebinar

The Best Growth-Stage Customer Success Tools:

• Gainsight
• Totango
• Natero
• Akita
• CustomerSuccessBox
• Salesmachine
• SmartKarrot
• Brightback
• Profitwell Retain
• Sherlock
• Churnbuster
• Churnzero

Let’s dive in!

Customer Success Tools for Companies in the Early-stage:

In the early stage, you should be focusing on improving your customer experience and your product through continuous customer feedback collection, making sure your customer success teams are focused on customer satisfaction.

1. Customer Success Tools For Driving Customer Engagement & Collecting Feedback: Userpilot

While Userpilot is primarily for onboarding customers, it also helps CS teams monitor user behaviour, collect user feedback (like NPS surveys) and deploy in-app experiences with ease.

With a variety of survey templates organized by role and use case, CS teams can customize, deploy surveys and gather user feedback quickly and easily. They can be customized with different types of questions, conditional logic, and our platform can trigger surveys in real-time based on in-app behavior and user attributes. This allows businesses to ask the right questions to the right users at the right time.

Also, Userpilot’s analytics feature enables you to drill down into different user segments with advanced customer segmentation capabilities. You can see how different groups engage with your product, enabling CS teams to onboarding customers according to their JTBDs.

The best part, however, is that your CS team can then be empowered to improve your in-app messaging and experiences with our WYSIWYG builder (no coding required!). This helps to drive engagement and ultimately boost retention.

Our Review

Userpilot’s ease-of-use and efficient UI means that your CS team can start making improvements across onboarding, engagement and retention in no time at all. It’s a comprehensive tool (we didn’t even mention Resource Centers and our new AI features here!).

We definitely want you to learn more about Userpilot! Book your free demo today.

2. Customer Success Tools For Empowering CS Teams: Vitally

Used by SaaS businesses like Segment, Calendly, or Zapier, no wonder Vitally had to make it on our list of the best customer success tools.

Vitally empowers your customer success team to create better customer experiences with analytics, automation, and project management capabilities. All in one tool.

It’s designed for customer success teams to be able to keep track of customer engagement interactions across the entire customer lifecycle while keeping an eye on the most important metrics.

You’ll find their Customer Health Score to be useful when you need to identify when a user is at risk of churning and might need help from your success team. Using Vitally you can see your live customer happiness score from different equations with custom metrics and weights for different segments of users, and get automated alerts when a customer is a risk or an opportunity, based on their score.

Vitally integrates with most used tools in the industry like Segment, Mixpanel, Slack, Intercom, and Zendesk so you don’t need to worry about syncing customers’ data from tools you are already using.

Our Review

Vitally was clearly build with the needs of customer success teams in mind and not only facilitates collecting customer feedback, but it also lets you track customer success and empowers true customer lifecycle management for your teams.

3. Customer Success Tools For Educating Your Customers: Helpscout

Customer education is a huge part of customer success. Helpscout is an affordable approach to it.

You can set up a self-serve knowledge base, providing the entire customer base with all the help and support they need to use your product successfully.

If your customers need extra support, they can use Helpscout’s live chat and messaging feature to chat to your Support or CS team.

Another neat feature of the Helpscout customer success platform is the ability to send targeted messages to customers as they use your product. This means you can nudge them in the right direction improving customer retention.

You can connect Helpscout to all your favorite tools. There are over 50 integrations, including Slack, Hubspot, and Salesforce.

Our Review

Helpscout is a great customer success software that helps educate your customers, improve customer engagement, and ensure users make the most out of your product.

4. eWebinar — The Webinar Tool For Engaging Customers

It’s essential that your customer engagement strategies feel human and that’s what eWebinar brings to the table.

Their automated webinars bring the same welcoming atmosphere to your customers but without all the hassle of hosting live events and hoping you don’t run into any technical issues mid-presentation.

eWebinar gives you the best of both worlds by displaying key metrics right on the dashboard while also letting you dig deeper into its analytics when needed. This gives you both an eagle-eye and granular view of the customer sentiment, i.e., how customers are reacting to your webinars.

You can see how many sessions have been streamed, the attendance rate from registrants, the average watch time, and what percentage of people watch until the end among other useful metrics.

Our Review

With third-party application integrations to ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Keap, Slack, Zoom, Zapier, and more there’s a lot to like about eWebinar.

5. Wootric — For In-Depth Customer Feedback

One of the most important things that a customer success tool helps with is – good quality customer feedback. This means happy customers..Wootric gives you exactly that.

It offers a wide range of customer sentiment surveys, including NPS, CSAT, and customer effort scores.

A customer success manager can access qualitative customer feedback data with micro-surveys, and have a direct influence on the product roadmap using that data. This means you can focus on building what your users actually need, improve product usage, and reduce customer churn.

Finally, Wootric helps your CS team to close the loop. You can use the customer success software of your choice to reach out to customers and update them about their feedback.

Our Review

Customer feedback is crucial to any SaaS company, and Wootric is the tool for the job.

6. Custify — The Customer Success Tool For Growth and Upselling

Customer success strategies aren’t just about retention, it’s also about spotting opportunities to upsell to your customers. That’s where Custify comes in.

Custify offers a range of different features. You can see a full 360 view of your customer’s behavior and health data, product usage, and journey.

You can also set up automation flows for common tasks, meaning your CS team can avoid the day-to-day and focus on improving the customer experience.

But where Custify sets itself apart from other customer success software is with its growth feature. Custify will notify you about customers who are reaching the end of their trial so you can reach out to them. It also highlights customers who are likely to upsell so you can focus your efforts accordingly and increase customer lifetime value. This is where the power of customer segmentation comes into play.

Our Review

For a simple approach to upselling, Custify is the right customer success software.

Customer Success Tools For The Growth Stage

7. Gainsight — For The Heavy Lifters

Gainsight is one of the heavyweights when it comes to customer success software. It’s safe to say it’s been around for a while and has become one of the biggest names.

The product itself is extremely robust, offering a wealth of different features. As a result, it can cater to any kind of CS team.

It offers strategic planning, for higher-level customer success managers, as well as lower-level account management for that customer success manager doing the day-to-day work. You can see overall trends, but then drill down into more specific data.

One of Gainsight’s most useful features is its employee onboarding. As you scale your CS team, new CSMs are able to learn your processes on the job. Gainsight will show them walkthroughs and video tutorials, providing contextual guidance. Everyone is quickly brought up to speed.

Our Review

For large companies that are scaling fast, Gainsight is a no-brainer.

8. Totango — Customer Success Software For Enterprise Companies

Totango is a giant in the customer success space. It’s aimed at Enterprise companies that have a large CS team and lots of customer relationships to manage.

Totango Spark, the primary product, is a robust customer success software. It allows you to do customer health scoring, view product usage analytics, and get up and running with templates of best practices and customer health scorecards.

While Totango Spark is aimed at your CS team, Totango Zoe is a product for your whole organization. It’s a conversational interface that allows any employee to access customer health data and volunteer for customer-centric activities.

Our Review

Totango provides everything you need to run an Enterprise CS team efficiently and effectively.

If you’re a large enterprise company that wants to be as customer-centric as possible and measure customer satisfaction effectively, then Totango might be the right choice.

9. Natero — Customer Success Software For Scale

Natero by Freshworks is another customer success tool that enables B2B SaaS companies to scale up CS operations.

You can do this by standardizing your process with Natero’s built-in templating. This helps you to automate certain processes.

You can also schedule personalized campaigns, triggering them based on customer behavior. Natero includes tools to help you manage your CS team as well.

Our Review

If you’re looking to scale up your CS efforts and automate key tasks, then Natero is a good choice.

10. Akita — For a Variety of Integrations

Akita offers lots of useful features for customer success. You can see how your customers are using your product with its usage tracking. You can also see how customers progress through your onboarding flows. This provides useful insights into such a crucial part of the customer lifecycle.

But where Akita truly shines is with its huge variety of integrations on offer. It connects with practically every other SaaS tool in your stack. Mailchimp, G Suite, Stripe, Typeform, Zendesk, Slack, and Intercom are all supported, along with hundreds of others.

These integrations enable your CS team to connect Akita to their existing workflow. It’s far more efficient this way.

Akita also offers automation, enabling you to set up automatic workflows.

Our Review

Akita is a great choice if you want to connect your customer success software to all of your existing tools.

11. CustomerSuccessBox — For Achieving Your Business Goals

Customer success is important, but even more so when you consider the impact of it on the goals of your business.

CustomerSuccessBox focuses on helping B2B SaaS companies to scale up their customer success efforts while focusing on business goals.

You can combine customer data from your CRM and billing software so that you have a full view of overall customer satisfaction. You can also combine your communication tools so that all your customer conversations are in one place.

This helps you to scale up efficiently as you acquire more customers and expand your CS team.

CustomerSuccessBox also focuses on upselling. It highlights customers who are ready to upgrade so your CS team can reach out and try to close the sale.

Our Review

Ready to scale up your customer success? CustomerSuccessBox is amongst the best customer success software targeted towards B2B SaaS companies.

12. Salesmachine — For Automating Your CS Processes

Salesmachine is a great customer success tool that aims to automate most of your CS team’s workload so they can focus on delivering value to customers who need a little more support.

Instead of having to manually calculate and update customer health scores, Salesmachine will handle it for you. Your CS team can then proactively reach out to customers with low scores before they churn.

Salesmachine also integrates with communication tools like email and Slack. This means your CSMs are notified when customers are in need of extra support.

You can also integrate Salesmachine with other tools like Hubspot or Salesforce. You can then generate certain actions to be triggered by customer health data.

Our Review

If you’re looking to automate your customer success efforts as much as possible and increase customer retention, then Salesmachine can help you get there.

13. SmartKarrot — For Achieving Customer Success

SmartKarrot is a fast-growing customer success platform empowered with an account intelligence engine that prevents customer churn & drives revenue expansion.

The product is robust, stable & loaded with features such as account intelligence, early warning system, customer health score, product adoption analytics, touchpoints, automated playbooks, onboarding, feedback, and many more.

It enables the CSM teams to automate and scale product adoption and success operations at ease. It caters to the executives with real-time truthful data to make informed decisions for the adoption strategy and revenue management.

Their dashboard is simple, flexible & requires less or no learning curve. It is suitable for companies of any size.

Our Review

SmartKarrot is one of the most suitable customer success platforms for companies that want to scale up customer success and product adoption in a customer-centric way.

14. Brightback — For Understanding Your Churn

One of the best ways of avoiding future customer churn is to understand the reasons for your current churn. Brightback aims to help you do exactly that.

Brightback segments your customers based on their pricing plan or billing term. When they show signs of churning, Brightback will flag them up.

It then provides churning customers with a tailored cancel page. This page will include personalized offers based on customer segmentation. It’ll also gather customer feedback about why they canceled.

This helps to reduce churn for on-the-fence customers, and provides your CS team with valuable customer feedback about the customer’s behaviour

Your CS team will also get real-time alerts so they can reach out to customers and prevent churn.

Our Review

If you want to understand why customers churn, Brightback is a great customer success software to have.

15. Profitwell Retain — For Winning Back Your Customers

Retain is one of Profitwell’s products. It’s designed as a last-minute attempt to improve retention.

Retain uses algorithms to determine the best way to win back churned customers. This means you can sit back and relax, confident that Retain is helping you behind the scenes.

It’s also completely white-labeled, so your customers have a consistent experience. This is vital at such a delicate stage in the customer lifecycle.

Their pricing is also fair. It’s free up to your current recovery rate, and then you start paying based on any performance beyond that.

Our Review

If you’re looking for a dunning tool that learns as it goes along, then Profitwell’s Retain is a good one to try.

16. Sherlock — Customer Success Tool For Actionable Insights

Sherlock aims to take the pain out of analytics. It does this by combing through your wealth of customer data and pulling out the key insights.

This can save your CS team a lot of time and effort and makes it easier to start making improvements right away.

Sherlock also claims to have the only product engagement scoring system. This system combines various metrics of engagement, including signing up and viewing a certain page. It then combines these customer health scores to give each customer an overall product engagement score.

This is a really useful metric for any customer success team, as engagement is a strong indicator of customer satisfaction and future customer retention.

Sherlock also recently launched a new AI feature. The AI will look at your data and give you conversational insights. It’s like having a data scientist constantly analyzing your data and reporting back to you to improve customer satisfaction.

Our Review

If you’re looking to pull out actionable insights based on customer behavior, then Sherlock will make life much easier for your CS team.

17. Churnbuster — For Combatting Churn

Churnbuster isn’t like the other tools on this list – it’s a customer success platform designed to focus on a specific aspect of churn.

According to the team at Churnbuster, failing payments account for 40% of churn. With that in mind, Churnbuster aims to help stop those failed payments.

It will automatically try to retrieve failed payments on your behalf. It’ll also back-charge customers when they finally update their card details.

Churnbuster also provides you with real-time Slack alerts. You can take matters into your own hands and reduce churn if a high-value account is at risk of churning.

Our Review

While Churnbuster is more reactive, and a last-ditch attempt to reducing churn, it’s a useful tool for customer success teams to have at their disposal.

18. ChurnZero — For a Comprehensive Overview

ChurnZero offers all the main functionality that other customer success software also provide.

You can monitor customer health scores, gather NPS data, segment customers, track the customer journey, and communicate with them.

ChurnZero’s main draw is that it provides a command center that enables your customer success team to know exactly what they need to do each day. This ensures no tasks fall through the gaps.

It also offers a useful communication feature. You can communicate with your customers in real-time, from inside your product. This improves your customers’ experience and ensures your messaging won’t go ignored.

Our Review

If you need a comprehensive customer success software that helps organize your CS team’s efforts, then look no further than ChurnZero.

Which Customer Success Software is Right For You?

Choosing from all of these customer success tools can be tough.

Hopefully, you now have a better idea of what each has to offer and which one you need to achieve your customer success strategy.

We’ve condensed all customer success software into a feature matrix, so you can easily compare them. (Credit goes to Rachel from Recurly who first created her own feature matrix.)

Feature matrix for early-stage products:

Feature matrix for growth-stage products:

Conclusion

That was a lot, right?

Customer success is not a set it up and forget about it type of activity. It requires continuous improvement and communication with your customer.

It’s ok to feel overwhelmed by the number of customer success tools available, but what’s important is to start from somewhere.

If you want to have better insights into how your users behave inside the app, collect feedback in a contextual way and reach out to your customers to improve engagement, then get a Userpilot Demo and get started right away.

The post 18 Best Customer Success Tools of All Time [In-Depth] appeared first on Thoughts about Product Adoption, User Onboarding and Good UX | Userpilot Blog.

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Ethical hacking, also known as penetration testing or white-hat hacking, is a crucial practice in ensuring the security of computer systems and networks.

Having the right tools at your disposal is essential for effective, ethical hacking.

This article will explore a comprehensive list of must-have tools that every ethical hacker should consider using. These tools enable professionals to identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and strengthen the security of their target systems.

Network Scanning and Enumeration Tools

Network scanning and enumeration are fundamental steps in ethical hacking, allowing hackers to gather information about the target network and its devices.

• Nmap

Nmap is a versatile and powerful network scanning tool. It can scan for open ports, detect operating systems, and perform service version detection. Ethical hackers use Nmap to identify potential entry points and assess the security posture of a network.

• Nessus

Nessus is a widely-used vulnerability scanning tool. It helps ethical hackers identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in systems and networks. By leveraging Nessus, hackers can provide comprehensive vulnerability assessments and recommendations for remediation.

• OpenVAS

OpenVAS, short for Open Vulnerability Assessment System, is another excellent tool for vulnerability scanning. It offers a comprehensive and up-to-date vulnerability database, enabling ethical hackers to detect potential security weaknesses in target systems.

Vulnerability Assessment Tools

After scanning a network, ethical hackers need tools to exploit vulnerabilities and assess the impact of potential attacks.

• Metasploit Framework

The Metasploit Framework is a powerful exploitation tool that simplifies identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities. It provides a wide range of modules, making it easier to conduct penetration testing and simulate real-world attacks.

• Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a popular web application security testing tool. It enables ethical hackers to intercept and manipulate HTTP/S requests, analyze web application vulnerabilities, and identify potential security weaknesses.

• Acunetix

Acunetix is an automated web vulnerability scanner designed to identify common security flaws in web applications. It helps ethical hackers perform comprehensive assessments and generate detailed reports for clients or organizations.

Password Cracking and Brute-Force Tools

Password cracking is critical to ethical hacking when attempting to gain unauthorized access to systems or accounts.

• John the Ripper

John the Ripper is a widely-used password cracking tool that utilizes various cracking techniques, including dictionary attacks and brute-force methods. It assists ethical hackers in testing the strength of passwords and determining potential weak points.

• Hydra

Hydra is a versatile network login cracker that supports multiple protocols, including FTP, SSH, and HTTP. It automates the process of attempting different username and password combinations, allowing ethical hackers to identify weak credentials.

• Hashcat

Hashcat is a powerful password recovery tool capable of cracking numerous hash types. It utilizes the power of GPUs to accelerate the cracking process, making it an invaluable tool for ethical hackers dealing with password hashes.

Exploitation Frameworks

Exploitation frameworks provide tools and techniques for carrying out targeted attacks and compromising systems.

• Metasploit Framework (mentioned earlier)

Metasploit Framework, in addition to vulnerability assessment, offers a vast array of exploits and payloads that ethical hackers can leverage for targeted attacks.

• Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET)

The Social-Engineer Toolkit is designed specifically for social engineering attacks. It includes features like phishing campaigns, website cloning, and payload delivery, assisting ethical hackers in testing the human element of security.

• Canvas

Canvas is a commercial exploitation framework that provides numerous exploits and advanced payloads.

It enables ethical hackers to launch sophisticated attacks and assess the impact of these exploits on target systems, helping organizations understand their vulnerabilities and implement necessary security measures.

Forensic Tools

Forensic tools are essential for ethical hackers to investigate and analyze digital evidence during and after an attack.

• Wireshark

Wireshark is a widely-used network protocol analyzer. It allows ethical hackers to capture and analyze network traffic, helping them identify potential security breaches, detect suspicious activities, and gather evidence for further analysis.

• Autopsy

Autopsy is an open-source digital forensics platform. It assists ethical hackers in conducting in-depth investigations, examining disk images, and recovering deleted files. It also provides powerful keyword searching and timeline analysis capabilities.

• Volatility

Volatility is a memory forensics framework that enables ethical hackers to analyze system memory dumps. It helps detect rootkits, analyse malware behaviour, and extract valuable information for forensic investigations.

Wireless Hacking Tools

Wireless networks pose unique security challenges, and ethical hackers need specialized tools to assess their vulnerabilities.

• Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a popular suite of tools for wireless network auditing. It allows ethical hackers to capture packets, crack WEP and WPA/WPA2 keys, and perform other essential tasks related to wireless network security.

• Reaver

Reaver is a tool specifically designed for testing the security of WPS-enabled wireless networks. It automates brute-forcing the WPS PIN, helping ethical hackers identify weak access points.

• Kismet

Kismet is a wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. It enables ethical hackers to monitor wireless network traffic, detect unauthorized access points, and analyze the security of wireless networks.

Conclusion

In the world of ethical hacking, having the right tools is essential for successful and effective penetration testing.

The tools outlined in this article provide ethical hackers with the capabilities to scan, assess, exploit, and analyze systems and networks.

However, it’s crucial to emphasize that ethical hacking should always be performed with proper authorization and legal compliance.

Continuous learning and staying updated with new tools and techniques are essential to become a proficient ethical hacker.

As technology evolves, so do the methods and tools used by malicious actors. By equipping themselves with these must-have tools and a commitment to responsible and ethical hacking practices, professionals can better protect organizations, identify vulnerabilities, and contribute to a safer digital environment.

If you find this post exciting, find more exciting posts like this on Learnhub Blog; we write everything tech from Cloud computing to Frontend Dev, Cybersecurity, AI and Blockchain. Check out How to Build Offline Web Applications. 

Resource

• Zero-Click Hack
• Preventing Privilege Escalation: Best Practices for Cybersecurity Professionals
• Protect Your Website from Blind Cross-Site Scripting

The post Hackers Tools: Must-Have Tools for Every Ethical Hacker appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Introduction

If There’s one thing I would like to know previously, it is the entire way Authentication works, session authentication and cookie authentication are both types of token-based authentication. So we will be talking about Cookie-Based and Session-Based Authentication. As a developer, there will come a time when you will see the need of using authentication in your web application.

What images do you have in mind when you hear the terms sessions and cookies? Cookies are kept on the client directly (Browser). Whereas sessions make use of a cookie as a kind of key to link with the information kept on the server side. Because the actual values are concealed from the client and the developer has control over when the data expires, sessions are preferred by the majority of developers.

Without wasting your time let’s jump straight into this guide.

What Is Authentication

Verifying a user or entity’s identity to access a system, network, or application is known as authentication. It entails confirming that the user’s or an entity’s identity credentials, such as a username and password, a security token, biometric information, or a digital certificate, are accurate.

To ensure that only authorized parties or individuals are given access to sensitive data and resources, authentication is a crucial component of security. To offer a secure and dependable access control system, it is frequently used in conjunction with other security measures including authorization, encryption, and multi-factor authentication.

What Is Session Authentication

When a user logs into an application or website, session authentication, a sort of token-based authentication, creates a special session ID for them. The server-side storage of this session ID is used to verify user requests made after that point.

The server generates a fresh session ID and links it to the user’s account each time they log in. The user’s browser then receives this session ID as a cookie, which is saved on the user’s device. With each successive request, the user’s browser subsequently sends the session ID back to the server, enabling it to confirm the user’s identity and grant access to secured resources.

Web apps and websites frequently utilize session authentication to provide users access to their accounts without requiring them to enter their passwords again each time they change pages or do other actions. It frequently works in tandem with other security measures like multi-factor authentication and encryption to offer a strong and dependable access control solution.

Pron Of Session-Based Authentication

Session-based authentication has advantages, below are the advantages while using Session-Based authentication.

1. Security: By asking the user to enter login information for each session, session-based authentication aids in preventing unwanted access to a user’s account. As a result, it becomes more challenging for attackers to access a user’s account because they would need to be aware of the login information for each session.

2. User Experience: Since a user only needs to log in once and their session is kept active for a while, session-based authentication can make using the system easier (e.g. 30 minutes or an hour). This indicates that the user can go between pages of the website or application without repeatedly entering their login information.

3. Scalability: As the server just needs to keep track of active sessions rather than keeping login information for each user, session-based authentication can be readily scaled up to handle huge numbers of users.

Cons Of Session-Based Authentication

Session-Based Authentication’s drawbacks.

1. One of the largest threats to session-based authentication is session hijacking, in which an attacker takes control of a user’s session and assumes their identity. Using safeguards like SSL encryption, secure session cookies, and session timeouts can help to mitigate this.
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2. Session Fixation: This potential flaw in session-based authentication occurs when a user’s session ID is established by an attacker before the user logs in, giving the attacker control of the user’s session after the user logs in. By creating a fresh session ID after the user logs in, this can be avoided.
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3. Resource Consumption: Because the server must keep track of all active sessions, session-based authentication can be very resource-intensive. This is because this procedure uses a lot of memory and processing power. By putting in place restrictions like session timeouts and a cap on the number of active sessions per user, this can be lessened.

What Are Cookies Authentication

Websites and web apps employ cookies authentication as a user authentication technique. After a person logs in to a website, little text files known as cookies are used and kept on their device.

A cookie with a special identifier linked to the user’s account is created by the website when a user checks in. The user’s device then receives and stores this cookie in their browser. The website may recognize the user and authenticate them without them having to log in again by sending the cookie back to the website on subsequent visits.

As users do not need to log in repeatedly to access their accounts, cookies authentication can be used to offer a simple and seamless user experience. To avoid jeopardizing the security of the user’s account, it is crucial to make sure that the cookies used for authentication are safe and difficult to manipulate. Also, because it could not always offer enough security, cookie authentication might not be appropriate for all websites or applications.

Pron Of Cookies-Based Authentication

Cookies-Based Authentication’s Advantages

1. Convenience: Cookies-based authentication makes it easier for users to access the website or application since they don’t need to continuously enter their login information after closing their browser or powering off their device.

2. Scalability: Because the server only needs to keep track of each user’s active sessions, cookies-based authentication may be scaled up to handle enormous numbers of users.

3. Personalization: By collecting users’ preferences and behavior on the website or app, cookies-based authentication enables websites or applications to tailor the user experience.

Cons Of Cookies-Based Authentication

Negative aspects of cookies-based authentication

1. Security Risks: Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and session hijacking are two security vulnerabilities that cookies-based authentication may be subject to. Session timeouts, SSL encryption, and the use of secure cookies are among the countermeasures that can be used to lessen this risk.

2. Cookies-based authentication can present privacy issues because the website or application may be gathering and storing personal information about the user. By putting policies in place like making clear privacy policies and receiving explicit user agreements for data collecting, this can be lessened.

3. Users who share devices or use public computers might not have the optimal user experience using cookies-based authentication because other users may be able to access their login information if it is kept on the device. Using safeguards like giving users the choice to log out of the session and erasing the cookies when a user signs out can help to mitigate this.

Difference Between Cookies-Based Authentication And Session-Based Authentication

Common methods for preserving user authentication over numerous requests in web applications include cookies-based authentication and session-based authentication.

Cookies-based authentication involves putting authentication data in a cookie that is saved on the user’s browser, including their login credentials. To identify the user and preserve their authorized state, the server sends this cookie along with every subsequent request the user makes to the web application.

On the other hand, session-based authentication includes saving the authentication data on the server side. An exclusive session ID is generated and linked to an account when a user checks in. This session ID is then provided to the server with each subsequent request and saved on the user’s browser as a cookie. The user’s authentication details can then be looked up by the server using the session ID, which helps to keep the user in an authenticated state.

The location of the authentication data storage is the primary distinction between cookies-based authentication and session-based authentication. Although session-based authentication stores the authentication data on the server, cookies-based authentication stores it on the user’s browser.

In general, cookies-based authentication is simpler to implement because the server doesn’t need to keep track of any session data, which is a benefit. Cookies-based authentication is more susceptible to security threats, like cookie theft and session hijacking, though.

As the authentication data is retained on the server and inaccessible to the user, session-based authentication is typically thought to be more secure. Nevertheless, because the server must manage session timeouts and expiration as well as session information, session-based authentication might be trickier to implement.

In the end, the web application’s demands and requirements will determine whether to use cookies-based authentication or session-based authentication.

Which one should I use?

Every developer is entitled to His/Her opinion on which authentication to use. But my advice is to use session-based authentication because it’s safer. While building your site or application, you may need to go for any of them. Below are the use cases for Session and Cookies authentication.

Use case for Cookies Authentication
When a person registers to a website, cookies authentication is frequently used. The server creates a distinct session ID after verifying the user’s credentials once they submit their username and password. The user’s browser’s cookie then contains the session ID. Each time the user makes a new request to the server, the cookie is sent along with it, enabling the server to recognize the user and deliver customized information. Because it is reasonably simple to implement and is widely supported by web browsers, cookies authentication is a popular option.

Use case for Session Authentication
When a user interacts with a web application that necessitates repeated requests to complete a job, session authentication is frequently used. To place an order on an e-commerce website, for instance, a user may need to add items to their cart, enter shipping details, and enter payment information. The server constructs a session object linked to the user’s login credentials to preserve the state of the order across multiple requests. An individual session ID is delivered in a cookie to the user’s browser along with this session object, which is saved on the server. The server can obtain the session object and keep track of the order’s status because each future request from the user includes the session ID. To enable safe, stateful interactions between the user and the web application, session authentication is frequently combined with cookie authentication.

Best Practices for Cookies-Based Authentication

Authentication Using Cookies: Best Practices:

1. With the HttpOnly and Secure flags set, use secure cookies.
2. Consider the sensitivity of the data and the user’s behavior when setting the cookie expiration time.
3. To prevent tampering, encrypt the cookie contents using powerful encryption methods.
4. To stop replay attacks, give each cookie a special identification number.
5. In stateless apps or other situations where cookies are inappropriate, take into account utilizing a token-based strategy as an alternative to cookies for authentication.

Best Practices for Session-Based Authentication

Session-based authentication best practices

1. Use a private, random session identification and save it on the server.
2. To lessen the chance of a session being hijacked, limit the session’s lifespan.
3. Use secure session archiving techniques, such as an encrypted file or database system.
4. To protect the session data while it is in transit, use SSL/TLS encryption.
5. When logging out or after a predetermined amount of inactivity, invalidate the session.

In both situations, it is crucial to routinely evaluate and audit the authentication procedures to spot and fix any potential security flaws. Users must also be instructed about best practices, such as not disclosing their login information to others and staying away from public computers when conducting sensitive business.

Conclusion

Finally, we’re done with this guide, hope you’ve gained a ton of value! Going through this guide entirely you will learn the basics of Cookies and Sessions authentication, and learn more about authentication itself.

We also saw a lot of differences between them, you’ll bet me that going through this guide was a waste. Feel free to drop a comment in the comment section, like this guide, and follow me for More.

Thanks, till next time!!!

About The Author

Full-stack Laravel developer Emmanuel Okolie has 2+ years of experience working in the software development sector. By combining software development, writing, and instructing others in what he does, he has developed full-fledged skills.
His stacks include ReactJs, Laravel, PHP, JavaScript, and other languages and frameworks.

He creates websites for clients as a freelancer and writes technical guides to show people how to do his work.

If given the chance, Emmanuel Okolie would enjoy speaking with you. Please go to and follow him on his website, Facebook, Github, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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