#App Development Service Nikol

[weprotechs]

Streamline Website Maintenance: A Comprehensive Guide to Automating Visual Regression Testing in WordPress

Introduction :

Maintaining an attractive and user-friendly website is crucial for a positive user experience. With visual regression testing, you can ensure that updates to your WordPress website do not adversely affect its appearance or functionality. Fortunately, there are plugins available that can automate this testing process, allowing you to manage tests directly from your WordPress dashboard and receive timely notifications about any issues. In this article, we will delve into the importance of visual regression testing for your WordPress website and provide a step-by-step guide on automating the process using the VRTs (Visual Regression Tests) plugin. Let's get started!

Why Visual Regression Testing Matters for Your WordPress Website:

As a website owner or developer, making changes to your site's code to enhance the user experience, modify the design, or introduce new features can inadvertently introduce bugs and glitches. Visual regression testing helps you identify any adverse changes that impact your website's appearance and functionality. It plays a crucial role in detecting discrepancies caused by plugin or software updates, manual code modifications, external software integrations, server issues, or malicious code. By conducting visual regression tests, you can proactively address these issues, avoid inconveniencing your visitors, and maintain a professional-looking website.

Automating Visual Regression Testing in WordPress :

While many visual regression testing services are available as third-party platforms, which require managing the process outside of WordPress, the Visual Regression Tests (VRTs) plugin offers an all-in one solution for automating visual regression testing directly from your WordPress dashboard. Here's how you can set it up:

Step 1: Install and Activate the Visual Regression Tests Plugin:

Begin by installing and activating the Visual Regression Tests plugin. The free version allows you to run three simultaneous tests on three WordPress pages. To install, navigate to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard and search for "Visual Regression Tests." Once found, click "Install Now" and then "Activate" to complete the installation process. If you need to run more tests, you can upgrade to the Pro version of VRTs.

Step 2: Configure the Plugin's Settings:

After activating the plugin, you can configure its settings to customize your visual regression testing. Go to VRTs > Settings in your WordPress dashboard. Here, you can exclude specific class selectors from your tests, such as elements that load automatically (e.g., cookie banners). Save your changes after configuring the settings.

Step 3: Enable Visual Regression Testing for WordPress Posts and Pages:

To run a visual regression test for a specific post or page, open it in the editing mode and click on the Visual Regression Tests icon located at the top right corner. Activate the toggle switch next to "Run Tests," and make sure to update or publish the page to save the test. The plugin will capture a screenshot of the page and continue to take screenshots whenever content changes occur.

Step 4: Monitor Visual Regression Testing Alerts:

The plugin will send you alerts if any issues are detected during the testing process. To view these alerts, go to VRTs > Alerts in your WordPress dashboard. The alerts provide details about the affected post or page, the date and time of the issue, and a summary of the visual difference. Clicking on "View" under an alert opens a visual interface where you can compare the screenshots and identify the differences. Once you resolve an issue, mark it as "Resolved" to remove it from the main alerts page.

Conclusion :

Automating visual regression testing in WordPress streamlines the process of identifying visual bugs and ensures a seamless user experience on your website. By following the steps outlined above, you can leverage the power of the Visual Regression Tests plugin to automate the testing process, receive timely alerts, and promptly address any issues. Take advantage of this automation to maintain the quality and professionalism of your WordPress website, providing an excellent user experience to your visitors. If you have any further questions about automating visual regression testing in WordPress, feel free to reach out.

[cmudesignleague]

Sophia@Capital

Hi! My name is Sophia Kim, and I am a rising junior majoring in Communication Design and minoring in Sound Design (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:·ﾟ✧ During the summer, I interned at Capitol Music Group under the Hollywood & Vine Intern Program. I got the opportunity to be part of the Creative Services department during my 9 weeks there.

First: Why I Chose the Music Industry

Coming from Atlanta where it is filled with various music genres and fashion styles, I have always been interested in art and music, especially the history and culture behind hip hop. Once I entered CMU, I noticed the many similarities design and music has. Through the various ways of communicating emotions, design and music gave me the opportunity to fuse those two passions with fashion, art, and culture.

Getting the call from Capitol Music Group, I was very excited to work at an iconic record label that has produced many of my favorite artists’ works (i.e. The Temptations, Banks, BJ the Chicago Kid).

Internship

The Hollywood & Vine Intern Program is not solely focused on design. There are various types of departments: Brand Partnerships & Sync, A&R, Sync, Video, Creative Services, etc. Each department had two interns. I was in the Creative Services department with one other intern, Rachel, who studies neuroscience and advertising.

The Creative Services department helps to shape the visual identity of Capitol’s artists from styling and logos to album packaging and visual campaigns. Through various channels including peer recommendations, preexisting relationships, Instagram, and Behance, the Creative Services department finds and contacts creatives for Capitol’s artists to work with.

To streamline and diversify this process of finding creatives, Rachel and I were tasked with creating a platform that makes connecting these creatives and the Creative Services department within CMG easier. With the help of our mentor, Nicole Frantz who is the head of the Creative Services department, we were able to meet various types of creatives (makeup artists, graphic designers, stylists) and gather research.

With this research, we created an initiative that consists of three parts: generating buzz online through Capitol’s social media platforms, developing a proprietary database, and cultivating relationships through community engagement (conferences and events).

Apart from the main project, I created a zine that focuses on the interns, their projects, the departments they worked in, and why they want to work in the music industry. Also, I designed t-shirts for the 2019 Hollywood & Vine Intern Program.

At the end of the internship, Rachel and I had to present our project in front of the entire company. This required a great amount of practice and prepping for the big day.

My work with Capitol Music Group is under NDA, so I cannot go into detail or show any visuals of the projects (if you want to know more, please don’t hesitate to contact me: sophiaki@andrew.cmu.edu).

Working at Capitol Music Group

I got to work at the historic round building Capitol Music Group calls its headquarters. Everyone in the building has great amounts of respect and excitement for the rich history Capitol has to offer.

Throughout the internship, we had speaker series with various executives and department heads. It was interesting to listen to each of the speakers’ life stories and the different tasks each department takes on.

At the end of the internship, there was this week long event called Capitol Congress. The first day was the interns presentations, which took place in Studio A and B (these studios are places where Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole recorded). The second day was an all day event at Hollywood’s ArcLight Theater where Capitol recognizes the various sub-labels’ and artists’ accomplishments. Many guests came to the event and spoke, such as the founder of the Motown record label Berry Gordy, the founders of Quality Control Music Pee and Coach K, and the founder of S.M. Entertainment Lee Soo-Man. For me, I was in complete shock to see these people in person, especially the founders of the record labels/entertainment companies that I have known throughout my life.

The third and fourth days were team bonding days, which helped me meet people in various types of departments and locations.

Reflection

Overall, this internship has taught me a lot, starting from teamwork to getting myself out of my comfort zone. In the beginning of the internship, I was somewhat nervous by the fact that I was the only intern who studies design and that I wouldn’t have a design community to rely on. However, I became friends with one other intern Nikol who studies business and design. We were able to help each other although we were in different departments. I realized that a design community wasn’t the only community I needed, but I found people who I could rely on and learn from throughout my time at Capitol, such as the Innovation department interns Rachel G and Jakeob who built an app using code, the CFO of Capitol Music Group Geoffrey Harris who I talked to about design thinking.

This internship was a great introduction to what industry life is like and how I can apply my knowledge to this type of industry. I am so grateful that I got this opportunity to apply what I have learned at school to conversations in the office and out of the office. Also, I am glad that I got to meet all the people I have met, and through that, I got to build unforgettable friendships.

o(╥﹏╥)o

[party-hard-or-die]

Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector

YEREVAN, Armenia — At 26, Lilit Petrosyan had a lot going for her, with a combined master’s degree in sociology and pedagogy and a job she liked developing features for PicsArt, a globally successful app used to manipulate photographs on social media.

Her parents nevertheless urged her to follow the path taken by young Armenians for decades: leverage her success into a Green Card or some other immigration visa and leave.

“I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to live in another country,’ ” said Ms. Petrosyan, sitting in the company’s open-plan office in Yerevan, the capital. “I am more about changing this country for the better.”

This past month her chance arrived, as she joined hundreds of thousands of other protesters in capsizing the ruling party.

Armenians under the age of 30, known as the Independence Generation because most were born after the country decoupled from the Soviet Union in 1991, formed the backbone of the protests. Within that broader group, tech-sector employees proved particularly effective in sustaining the demonstrations.

They used messaging apps like Telegram to coordinate protests. They snarled traffic by organizing infinite loops of pedestrians at street crossings not controlled by traffic lights. They donated money for simple things like a sound system and water at Republic Square, the center of the protests.

Tech workers described a kind of collective mental shifting of gears as they joined the demonstrations. They realized that by acting in unison, they might finally jettison the stifling one-party control over the government and the economy that their country had inherited from the Soviet Union.

“The new generation had never seen communism; they did not grow up with pictures of Lenin or Stalin or Brezhnev,” said Arsen Gevorgyan, 44, a co-founder of a software company, SFL. “The new generation is more active. They saw the internet, they saw Europe, they saw democracy.”

The countries of the former Soviet Union have seen many such “revolutions” over the years since the bloc collapsed. Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, have thrown out the old guard on more than one occasion, only to find themselves drifting back, often with the Kremlin’s encouragement.

Just a few years ago, there would not have been enough tech workers in Armenia to make a difference. Now, with at least 10,000 mostly well-paid employees in a booming sector of an otherwise stagnant economy, they believe they have the clout to press their demands for democracy, transparency and accountability.

“It helped to boost other people, who said, ‘If the tech guys are going out, why are we sitting on the fence?’ ” said Maria Titizian, the editor in chief of EVN Report, an online magazine.

Census figures are somewhat inexact in Armenia, a small country in the south Caucasus, but they show that at least 370,000 people emigrated in the last decade. The last census, in 2011, when the population was somewhat higher than the estimated 2.8 million today, indicated that some 45 percent of the population was under age 30.

The anti-government zeal among young tech workers was unexpected given their reputation for focusing more on the virtual world than the real one.

Plus, abandoning work to protest was not easy to explain to companies overseas that had commissioned projects. “It is kind of hard to tell them, ‘You know there is a revolution here, we cannot work this week,’ ” said Vahe Evoyan, 30, a physicist and computer programmer.

But as the demonstrations swelled, many tech workers recognized that his was a now-or-never moment.

Armine Hakobyan, 26, a digital marketing specialist at SFL, said she began thinking about what kind of life her 18-month-old son would have if Armenia remained the same. “It did not start on the street; it was something that happened in your mind,” she said. “You realized that you have to take care of your future.”

It helped that the tech sector is relatively oligarch-free. Armenia is a land of monopolies, with the government doling out exclusive control over various businesses. But the traditional powers had few means to pressure the tech sector.

Moreover, anger and discontent among the young had been building for years.

Many protesters mentioned a watershed moment from two years ago, after a four-day war started by neighboring Azerbaijan, the latest chapter in the nagging dispute over the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The oligarchs had sold the population on the idea that poverty and poor roads were among the sacrifices necessary to build a strong army. Then Armenia lost territory in the 2016 war, and there were reports that soldiers lacked basic items like bullets and medical kits.

“The government ate everything that was supposed to be used to supply the army,” said Samvel Mkrtchyan, 24, a quality-control engineer at Inomma, a small start-up company.

As the young people evaluated the leadership more critically, they realized how the ruling Republican Party mirrored the old Communist Party. It controlled the courts and the education system, and you had to be a member to get anywhere in government.

The tech sector also rallied this spring because Nikol Pashinyan, the protest leader, emphasized nonviolence and broke with what had become stale protest choreography:a few standard speeches at the opera house in Freedom Square and a march on Parliament.

Mr. Pashinyan urged a campaign of civil disobedience everywhere, and the tech workers translated the idea into the language of the internet. They compared their strategy to a blockchain, the widely diffused technology behind online currencies that aim to stay outside government control, or to a denial of service attack that crashes a website because too many users try to access it at once.

“We would go out for lunch and never come back, we just stayed on the street,” said Mr. Mkrtchyan.

The government helped with a series of ham-handed responses to the protests, which started in earnest on April 17. That is when Serzh Sargsyan, the president since 2008, tried to bypass term limits by becoming prime minister under a new Constitution that transferred most political power to that office — after having promised not to take the job.

As the protests grew, he warned darkly of a repeat of the events of March 1, 2008, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators after what many considered a tainted election win for Mr. Sargsyan, killing 10.

Like many of her peers, who had been traumatized by the bloodshed a decade ago, Ms. Petrosyan was enraged by the threat, making her eager to protest even more.

“From the first day that I went out onto the street I understood that something powerful was happening,” said Ms. Petrosyan. “We all understood that it is not just a question of planting a tree or keeping up a street, but knowing that our government is outdated and that we needed to change it.”

Her employer, PicsArt — where the average age of the 350 employees is 24, and about half are women — had always considered itself a good corporate citizen, subsidizing education for the disadvantaged, among other things. Management there, and at various companies big and small, looking around at all the empty desks, bowed to the inevitable.

On April 19, SFL helped to establish a private chat room on Telegram to discuss shared tactics. By the end of the night it had 800 members representing some 20 tech companies, and a plan to block streets simultaneously at 11 a.m. the next day.

Companies with hundreds of employees like Synopsys and PicsArt gave their workers leave to go out, as did smaller firms. Managers made it clear that it was an individual choice, and that those who did not participate would not be ostracized.

Nobody was sure the protests would succeed. “At first we did not really understand the demands of the process or where it was leading,” said Mher Sargsyan, 28, the lead software engineer at SFL. “But I really want to stay here and to do my best to change everything around me.”

That sentiment was not limited to the tech sector, with countless others blocking streets across the city. The younger generation, especially the high percentage of women who participated, are ecstatic that the protests succeeded, with many saying they want to maintain that effervescent feeling of potential change by doing volunteer work.

Most of all, they are staying put.

When the demonstrations first began, Vigen Sargsyan, 37, a developer at Inomma, the start-up, was halfway through submitting the paperwork needed to move to Canada.

Then he joined the protests, including blocking a street with his 1994 black Zhiguli, a small Russian sedan.

He has since abandoned his effort to emigrate. “Now, everything has changed,” he said. “I wanted my country to be someplace where I wanted to live. Basically, we reached that goal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Revolt In Armenia, A Young Army Of App Users. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2LeKDAw via Breaking News

[dragnews]

Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector

YEREVAN, Armenia — At 26, Lilit Petrosyan had a lot going for her, with a combined master’s degree in sociology and pedagogy and a job she liked developing features for PicsArt, a globally successful app used to manipulate photographs on social media.

Her parents nevertheless urged her to follow the path taken by young Armenians for decades: leverage her success into a Green Card or some other immigration visa and leave.

“I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to live in another country,’ ” said Ms. Petrosyan, sitting in the company’s open-plan office in Yerevan, the capital. “I am more about changing this country for the better.”

This past month her chance arrived, as she joined hundreds of thousands of other protesters in capsizing the ruling party.

Armenians under the age of 30, known as the Independence Generation because most were born after the country decoupled from the Soviet Union in 1991, formed the backbone of the protests. Within that broader group, tech-sector employees proved particularly effective in sustaining the demonstrations.

They used messaging apps like Telegram to coordinate protests. They snarled traffic by organizing infinite loops of pedestrians at street crossings not controlled by traffic lights. They donated money for simple things like a sound system and water at Republic Square, the center of the protests.

Tech workers described a kind of collective mental shifting of gears as they joined the demonstrations. They realized that by acting in unison, they might finally jettison the stifling one-party control over the government and the economy that their country had inherited from the Soviet Union.

“The new generation had never seen communism; they did not grow up with pictures of Lenin or Stalin or Brezhnev,” said Arsen Gevorgyan, 44, a co-founder of a software company, SFL. “The new generation is more active. They saw the internet, they saw Europe, they saw democracy.”

The countries of the former Soviet Union have seen many such “revolutions” over the years since the bloc collapsed. Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, have thrown out the old guard on more than one occasion, only to find themselves drifting back, often with the Kremlin’s encouragement.

Just a few years ago, there would not have been enough tech workers in Armenia to make a difference. Now, with at least 10,000 mostly well-paid employees in a booming sector of an otherwise stagnant economy, they believe they have the clout to press their demands for democracy, transparency and accountability.

“It helped to boost other people, who said, ‘If the tech guys are going out, why are we sitting on the fence?’ ” said Maria Titizian, the editor in chief of EVN Report, an online magazine.

Census figures are somewhat inexact in Armenia, a small country in the south Caucasus, but they show that at least 370,000 people emigrated in the last decade. The last census, in 2011, when the population was somewhat higher than the estimated 2.8 million today, indicated that some 45 percent of the population was under age 30.

The anti-government zeal among young tech workers was unexpected given their reputation for focusing more on the virtual world than the real one.

Plus, abandoning work to protest was not easy to explain to companies overseas that had commissioned projects. “It is kind of hard to tell them, ‘You know there is a revolution here, we cannot work this week,’ ” said Vahe Evoyan, 30, a physicist and computer programmer.

But as the demonstrations swelled, many tech workers recognized that his was a now-or-never moment.

Armine Hakobyan, 26, a digital marketing specialist at SFL, said she began thinking about what kind of life her 18-month-old son would have if Armenia remained the same. “It did not start on the street; it was something that happened in your mind,” she said. “You realized that you have to take care of your future.”

It helped that the tech sector is relatively oligarch-free. Armenia is a land of monopolies, with the government doling out exclusive control over various businesses. But the traditional powers had few means to pressure the tech sector.

Moreover, anger and discontent among the young had been building for years.

Many protesters mentioned a watershed moment from two years ago, after a four-day war started by neighboring Azerbaijan, the latest chapter in the nagging dispute over the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The oligarchs had sold the population on the idea that poverty and poor roads were among the sacrifices necessary to build a strong army. Then Armenia lost territory in the 2016 war, and there were reports that soldiers lacked basic items like bullets and medical kits.

“The government ate everything that was supposed to be used to supply the army,” said Samvel Mkrtchyan, 24, a quality-control engineer at Inomma, a small start-up company.

As the young people evaluated the leadership more critically, they realized how the ruling Republican Party mirrored the old Communist Party. It controlled the courts and the education system, and you had to be a member to get anywhere in government.

The tech sector also rallied this spring because Nikol Pashinyan, the protest leader, emphasized nonviolence and broke with what had become stale protest choreography:a few standard speeches at the opera house in Freedom Square and a march on Parliament.

Mr. Pashinyan urged a campaign of civil disobedience everywhere, and the tech workers translated the idea into the language of the internet. They compared their strategy to a blockchain, the widely diffused technology behind online currencies that aim to stay outside government control, or to a denial of service attack that crashes a website because too many users try to access it at once.

“We would go out for lunch and never come back, we just stayed on the street,” said Mr. Mkrtchyan.

The government helped with a series of ham-handed responses to the protests, which started in earnest on April 17. That is when Serzh Sargsyan, the president since 2008, tried to bypass term limits by becoming prime minister under a new Constitution that transferred most political power to that office — after having promised not to take the job.

As the protests grew, he warned darkly of a repeat of the events of March 1, 2008, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators after what many considered a tainted election win for Mr. Sargsyan, killing 10.

Like many of her peers, who had been traumatized by the bloodshed a decade ago, Ms. Petrosyan was enraged by the threat, making her eager to protest even more.

“From the first day that I went out onto the street I understood that something powerful was happening,” said Ms. Petrosyan. “We all understood that it is not just a question of planting a tree or keeping up a street, but knowing that our government is outdated and that we needed to change it.”

Her employer, PicsArt — where the average age of the 350 employees is 24, and about half are women — had always considered itself a good corporate citizen, subsidizing education for the disadvantaged, among other things. Management there, and at various companies big and small, looking around at all the empty desks, bowed to the inevitable.

On April 19, SFL helped to establish a private chat room on Telegram to discuss shared tactics. By the end of the night it had 800 members representing some 20 tech companies, and a plan to block streets simultaneously at 11 a.m. the next day.

Companies with hundreds of employees like Synopsys and PicsArt gave their workers leave to go out, as did smaller firms. Managers made it clear that it was an individual choice, and that those who did not participate would not be ostracized.

Nobody was sure the protests would succeed. “At first we did not really understand the demands of the process or where it was leading,” said Mher Sargsyan, 28, the lead software engineer at SFL. “But I really want to stay here and to do my best to change everything around me.”

That sentiment was not limited to the tech sector, with countless others blocking streets across the city. The younger generation, especially the high percentage of women who participated, are ecstatic that the protests succeeded, with many saying they want to maintain that effervescent feeling of potential change by doing volunteer work.

Most of all, they are staying put.

When the demonstrations first began, Vigen Sargsyan, 37, a developer at Inomma, the start-up, was halfway through submitting the paperwork needed to move to Canada.

Then he joined the protests, including blocking a street with his 1994 black Zhiguli, a small Russian sedan.

He has since abandoned his effort to emigrate. “Now, everything has changed,” he said. “I wanted my country to be someplace where I wanted to live. Basically, we reached that goal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Revolt In Armenia, A Young Army Of App Users. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2LeKDAw via Today News

[dani-qrt]

Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector

YEREVAN, Armenia — At 26, Lilit Petrosyan had a lot going for her, with a combined master’s degree in sociology and pedagogy and a job she liked developing features for PicsArt, a globally successful app used to manipulate photographs on social media.

Her parents nevertheless urged her to follow the path taken by young Armenians for decades: leverage her success into a Green Card or some other immigration visa and leave.

“I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to live in another country,’ ” said Ms. Petrosyan, sitting in the company’s open-plan office in Yerevan, the capital. “I am more about changing this country for the better.”

This past month her chance arrived, as she joined hundreds of thousands of other protesters in capsizing the ruling party.

Armenians under the age of 30, known as the Independence Generation because most were born after the country decoupled from the Soviet Union in 1991, formed the backbone of the protests. Within that broader group, tech-sector employees proved particularly effective in sustaining the demonstrations.

They used messaging apps like Telegram to coordinate protests. They snarled traffic by organizing infinite loops of pedestrians at street crossings not controlled by traffic lights. They donated money for simple things like a sound system and water at Republic Square, the center of the protests.

Tech workers described a kind of collective mental shifting of gears as they joined the demonstrations. They realized that by acting in unison, they might finally jettison the stifling one-party control over the government and the economy that their country had inherited from the Soviet Union.

“The new generation had never seen communism; they did not grow up with pictures of Lenin or Stalin or Brezhnev,” said Arsen Gevorgyan, 44, a co-founder of a software company, SFL. “The new generation is more active. They saw the internet, they saw Europe, they saw democracy.”

The countries of the former Soviet Union have seen many such “revolutions” over the years since the bloc collapsed. Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, have thrown out the old guard on more than one occasion, only to find themselves drifting back, often with the Kremlin’s encouragement.

Just a few years ago, there would not have been enough tech workers in Armenia to make a difference. Now, with at least 10,000 mostly well-paid employees in a booming sector of an otherwise stagnant economy, they believe they have the clout to press their demands for democracy, transparency and accountability.

“It helped to boost other people, who said, ‘If the tech guys are going out, why are we sitting on the fence?’ ” said Maria Titizian, the editor in chief of EVN Report, an online magazine.

Census figures are somewhat inexact in Armenia, a small country in the south Caucasus, but they show that at least 370,000 people emigrated in the last decade. The last census, in 2011, when the population was somewhat higher than the estimated 2.8 million today, indicated that some 45 percent of the population was under age 30.

The anti-government zeal among young tech workers was unexpected given their reputation for focusing more on the virtual world than the real one.

Plus, abandoning work to protest was not easy to explain to companies overseas that had commissioned projects. “It is kind of hard to tell them, ‘You know there is a revolution here, we cannot work this week,’ ” said Vahe Evoyan, 30, a physicist and computer programmer.

But as the demonstrations swelled, many tech workers recognized that his was a now-or-never moment.

Armine Hakobyan, 26, a digital marketing specialist at SFL, said she began thinking about what kind of life her 18-month-old son would have if Armenia remained the same. “It did not start on the street; it was something that happened in your mind,” she said. “You realized that you have to take care of your future.”

It helped that the tech sector is relatively oligarch-free. Armenia is a land of monopolies, with the government doling out exclusive control over various businesses. But the traditional powers had few means to pressure the tech sector.

Moreover, anger and discontent among the young had been building for years.

Many protesters mentioned a watershed moment from two years ago, after a four-day war started by neighboring Azerbaijan, the latest chapter in the nagging dispute over the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The oligarchs had sold the population on the idea that poverty and poor roads were among the sacrifices necessary to build a strong army. Then Armenia lost territory in the 2016 war, and there were reports that soldiers lacked basic items like bullets and medical kits.

“The government ate everything that was supposed to be used to supply the army,” said Samvel Mkrtchyan, 24, a quality-control engineer at Inomma, a small start-up company.

As the young people evaluated the leadership more critically, they realized how the ruling Republican Party mirrored the old Communist Party. It controlled the courts and the education system, and you had to be a member to get anywhere in government.

The tech sector also rallied this spring because Nikol Pashinyan, the protest leader, emphasized nonviolence and broke with what had become stale protest choreography:a few standard speeches at the opera house in Freedom Square and a march on Parliament.

Mr. Pashinyan urged a campaign of civil disobedience everywhere, and the tech workers translated the idea into the language of the internet. They compared their strategy to a blockchain, the widely diffused technology behind online currencies that aim to stay outside government control, or to a denial of service attack that crashes a website because too many users try to access it at once.

“We would go out for lunch and never come back, we just stayed on the street,” said Mr. Mkrtchyan.

The government helped with a series of ham-handed responses to the protests, which started in earnest on April 17. That is when Serzh Sargsyan, the president since 2008, tried to bypass term limits by becoming prime minister under a new Constitution that transferred most political power to that office — after having promised not to take the job.

As the protests grew, he warned darkly of a repeat of the events of March 1, 2008, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators after what many considered a tainted election win for Mr. Sargsyan, killing 10.

Like many of her peers, who had been traumatized by the bloodshed a decade ago, Ms. Petrosyan was enraged by the threat, making her eager to protest even more.

“From the first day that I went out onto the street I understood that something powerful was happening,” said Ms. Petrosyan. “We all understood that it is not just a question of planting a tree or keeping up a street, but knowing that our government is outdated and that we needed to change it.”

Her employer, PicsArt — where the average age of the 350 employees is 24, and about half are women — had always considered itself a good corporate citizen, subsidizing education for the disadvantaged, among other things. Management there, and at various companies big and small, looking around at all the empty desks, bowed to the inevitable.

On April 19, SFL helped to establish a private chat room on Telegram to discuss shared tactics. By the end of the night it had 800 members representing some 20 tech companies, and a plan to block streets simultaneously at 11 a.m. the next day.

Companies with hundreds of employees like Synopsys and PicsArt gave their workers leave to go out, as did smaller firms. Managers made it clear that it was an individual choice, and that those who did not participate would not be ostracized.

Nobody was sure the protests would succeed. “At first we did not really understand the demands of the process or where it was leading,” said Mher Sargsyan, 28, the lead software engineer at SFL. “But I really want to stay here and to do my best to change everything around me.”

That sentiment was not limited to the tech sector, with countless others blocking streets across the city. The younger generation, especially the high percentage of women who participated, are ecstatic that the protests succeeded, with many saying they want to maintain that effervescent feeling of potential change by doing volunteer work.

Most of all, they are staying put.

When the demonstrations first began, Vigen Sargsyan, 37, a developer at Inomma, the start-up, was halfway through submitting the paperwork needed to move to Canada.

Then he joined the protests, including blocking a street with his 1994 black Zhiguli, a small Russian sedan.

He has since abandoned his effort to emigrate. “Now, everything has changed,” he said. “I wanted my country to be someplace where I wanted to live. Basically, we reached that goal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Revolt In Armenia, A Young Army Of App Users. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector appeared first on World The News.

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[newestbalance]

Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector

YEREVAN, Armenia — At 26, Lilit Petrosyan had a lot going for her, with a combined master’s degree in sociology and pedagogy and a job she liked developing features for PicsArt, a globally successful app used to manipulate photographs on social media.

Her parents nevertheless urged her to follow the path taken by young Armenians for decades: leverage her success into a Green Card or some other immigration visa and leave.

“I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to live in another country,’ ” said Ms. Petrosyan, sitting in the company’s open-plan office in Yerevan, the capital. “I am more about changing this country for the better.”

This past month her chance arrived, as she joined hundreds of thousands of other protesters in capsizing the ruling party.

Armenians under the age of 30, known as the Independence Generation because most were born after the country decoupled from the Soviet Union in 1991, formed the backbone of the protests. Within that broader group, tech-sector employees proved particularly effective in sustaining the demonstrations.

They used messaging apps like Telegram to coordinate protests. They snarled traffic by organizing infinite loops of pedestrians at street crossings not controlled by traffic lights. They donated money for simple things like a sound system and water at Republic Square, the center of the protests.

Tech workers described a kind of collective mental shifting of gears as they joined the demonstrations. They realized that by acting in unison, they might finally jettison the stifling one-party control over the government and the economy that their country had inherited from the Soviet Union.

“The new generation had never seen communism; they did not grow up with pictures of Lenin or Stalin or Brezhnev,” said Arsen Gevorgyan, 44, a co-founder of a software company, SFL. “The new generation is more active. They saw the internet, they saw Europe, they saw democracy.”

The countries of the former Soviet Union have seen many such “revolutions” over the years since the bloc collapsed. Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, have thrown out the old guard on more than one occasion, only to find themselves drifting back, often with the Kremlin’s encouragement.

Just a few years ago, there would not have been enough tech workers in Armenia to make a difference. Now, with at least 10,000 mostly well-paid employees in a booming sector of an otherwise stagnant economy, they believe they have the clout to press their demands for democracy, transparency and accountability.

“It helped to boost other people, who said, ‘If the tech guys are going out, why are we sitting on the fence?’ ” said Maria Titizian, the editor in chief of EVN Report, an online magazine.

Census figures are somewhat inexact in Armenia, a small country in the south Caucasus, but they show that at least 370,000 people emigrated in the last decade. The last census, in 2011, when the population was somewhat higher than the estimated 2.8 million today, indicated that some 45 percent of the population was under age 30.

The anti-government zeal among young tech workers was unexpected given their reputation for focusing more on the virtual world than the real one.

Plus, abandoning work to protest was not easy to explain to companies overseas that had commissioned projects. “It is kind of hard to tell them, ‘You know there is a revolution here, we cannot work this week,’ ” said Vahe Evoyan, 30, a physicist and computer programmer.

But as the demonstrations swelled, many tech workers recognized that his was a now-or-never moment.

Armine Hakobyan, 26, a digital marketing specialist at SFL, said she began thinking about what kind of life her 18-month-old son would have if Armenia remained the same. “It did not start on the street; it was something that happened in your mind,” she said. “You realized that you have to take care of your future.”

It helped that the tech sector is relatively oligarch-free. Armenia is a land of monopolies, with the government doling out exclusive control over various businesses. But the traditional powers had few means to pressure the tech sector.

Moreover, anger and discontent among the young had been building for years.

Many protesters mentioned a watershed moment from two years ago, after a four-day war started by neighboring Azerbaijan, the latest chapter in the nagging dispute over the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The oligarchs had sold the population on the idea that poverty and poor roads were among the sacrifices necessary to build a strong army. Then Armenia lost territory in the 2016 war, and there were reports that soldiers lacked basic items like bullets and medical kits.

“The government ate everything that was supposed to be used to supply the army,” said Samvel Mkrtchyan, 24, a quality-control engineer at Inomma, a small start-up company.

As the young people evaluated the leadership more critically, they realized how the ruling Republican Party mirrored the old Communist Party. It controlled the courts and the education system, and you had to be a member to get anywhere in government.

The tech sector also rallied this spring because Nikol Pashinyan, the protest leader, emphasized nonviolence and broke with what had become stale protest choreography:a few standard speeches at the opera house in Freedom Square and a march on Parliament.

Mr. Pashinyan urged a campaign of civil disobedience everywhere, and the tech workers translated the idea into the language of the internet. They compared their strategy to a blockchain, the widely diffused technology behind online currencies that aim to stay outside government control, or to a denial of service attack that crashes a website because too many users try to access it at once.

“We would go out for lunch and never come back, we just stayed on the street,” said Mr. Mkrtchyan.

The government helped with a series of ham-handed responses to the protests, which started in earnest on April 17. That is when Serzh Sargsyan, the president since 2008, tried to bypass term limits by becoming prime minister under a new Constitution that transferred most political power to that office — after having promised not to take the job.

As the protests grew, he warned darkly of a repeat of the events of March 1, 2008, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators after what many considered a tainted election win for Mr. Sargsyan, killing 10.

Like many of her peers, who had been traumatized by the bloodshed a decade ago, Ms. Petrosyan was enraged by the threat, making her eager to protest even more.

“From the first day that I went out onto the street I understood that something powerful was happening,” said Ms. Petrosyan. “We all understood that it is not just a question of planting a tree or keeping up a street, but knowing that our government is outdated and that we needed to change it.”

Her employer, PicsArt — where the average age of the 350 employees is 24, and about half are women — had always considered itself a good corporate citizen, subsidizing education for the disadvantaged, among other things. Management there, and at various companies big and small, looking around at all the empty desks, bowed to the inevitable.

On April 19, SFL helped to establish a private chat room on Telegram to discuss shared tactics. By the end of the night it had 800 members representing some 20 tech companies, and a plan to block streets simultaneously at 11 a.m. the next day.

Companies with hundreds of employees like Synopsys and PicsArt gave their workers leave to go out, as did smaller firms. Managers made it clear that it was an individual choice, and that those who did not participate would not be ostracized.

Nobody was sure the protests would succeed. “At first we did not really understand the demands of the process or where it was leading,” said Mher Sargsyan, 28, the lead software engineer at SFL. “But I really want to stay here and to do my best to change everything around me.”

That sentiment was not limited to the tech sector, with countless others blocking streets across the city. The younger generation, especially the high percentage of women who participated, are ecstatic that the protests succeeded, with many saying they want to maintain that effervescent feeling of potential change by doing volunteer work.

Most of all, they are staying put.

When the demonstrations first began, Vigen Sargsyan, 37, a developer at Inomma, the start-up, was halfway through submitting the paperwork needed to move to Canada.

Then he joined the protests, including blocking a street with his 1994 black Zhiguli, a small Russian sedan.

He has since abandoned his effort to emigrate. “Now, everything has changed,” he said. “I wanted my country to be someplace where I wanted to live. Basically, we reached that goal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Revolt In Armenia, A Young Army Of App Users. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector appeared first on World The News.

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[cleopatrarps]

Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector

YEREVAN, Armenia — At 26, Lilit Petrosyan had a lot going for her, with a combined master’s degree in sociology and pedagogy and a job she liked developing features for PicsArt, a globally successful app used to manipulate photographs on social media.

Her parents nevertheless urged her to follow the path taken by young Armenians for decades: leverage her success into a Green Card or some other immigration visa and leave.

“I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to live in another country,’ ” said Ms. Petrosyan, sitting in the company’s open-plan office in Yerevan, the capital. “I am more about changing this country for the better.”

This past month her chance arrived, as she joined hundreds of thousands of other protesters in capsizing the ruling party.

Armenians under the age of 30, known as the Independence Generation because most were born after the country decoupled from the Soviet Union in 1991, formed the backbone of the protests. Within that broader group, tech-sector employees proved particularly effective in sustaining the demonstrations.

They used messaging apps like Telegram to coordinate protests. They snarled traffic by organizing infinite loops of pedestrians at street crossings not controlled by traffic lights. They donated money for simple things like a sound system and water at Republic Square, the center of the protests.

Tech workers described a kind of collective mental shifting of gears as they joined the demonstrations. They realized that by acting in unison, they might finally jettison the stifling one-party control over the government and the economy that their country had inherited from the Soviet Union.

“The new generation had never seen communism; they did not grow up with pictures of Lenin or Stalin or Brezhnev,” said Arsen Gevorgyan, 44, a co-founder of a software company, SFL. “The new generation is more active. They saw the internet, they saw Europe, they saw democracy.”

The countries of the former Soviet Union have seen many such “revolutions” over the years since the bloc collapsed. Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, have thrown out the old guard on more than one occasion, only to find themselves drifting back, often with the Kremlin’s encouragement.

Just a few years ago, there would not have been enough tech workers in Armenia to make a difference. Now, with at least 10,000 mostly well-paid employees in a booming sector of an otherwise stagnant economy, they believe they have the clout to press their demands for democracy, transparency and accountability.

“It helped to boost other people, who said, ‘If the tech guys are going out, why are we sitting on the fence?’ ” said Maria Titizian, the editor in chief of EVN Report, an online magazine.

Census figures are somewhat inexact in Armenia, a small country in the south Caucasus, but they show that at least 370,000 people emigrated in the last decade. The last census, in 2011, when the population was somewhat higher than the estimated 2.8 million today, indicated that some 45 percent of the population was under age 30.

The anti-government zeal among young tech workers was unexpected given their reputation for focusing more on the virtual world than the real one.

Plus, abandoning work to protest was not easy to explain to companies overseas that had commissioned projects. “It is kind of hard to tell them, ‘You know there is a revolution here, we cannot work this week,’ ” said Vahe Evoyan, 30, a physicist and computer programmer.

But as the demonstrations swelled, many tech workers recognized that his was a now-or-never moment.

Armine Hakobyan, 26, a digital marketing specialist at SFL, said she began thinking about what kind of life her 18-month-old son would have if Armenia remained the same. “It did not start on the street; it was something that happened in your mind,” she said. “You realized that you have to take care of your future.”

It helped that the tech sector is relatively oligarch-free. Armenia is a land of monopolies, with the government doling out exclusive control over various businesses. But the traditional powers had few means to pressure the tech sector.

Moreover, anger and discontent among the young had been building for years.

Many protesters mentioned a watershed moment from two years ago, after a four-day war started by neighboring Azerbaijan, the latest chapter in the nagging dispute over the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The oligarchs had sold the population on the idea that poverty and poor roads were among the sacrifices necessary to build a strong army. Then Armenia lost territory in the 2016 war, and there were reports that soldiers lacked basic items like bullets and medical kits.

“The government ate everything that was supposed to be used to supply the army,” said Samvel Mkrtchyan, 24, a quality-control engineer at Inomma, a small start-up company.

As the young people evaluated the leadership more critically, they realized how the ruling Republican Party mirrored the old Communist Party. It controlled the courts and the education system, and you had to be a member to get anywhere in government.

The tech sector also rallied this spring because Nikol Pashinyan, the protest leader, emphasized nonviolence and broke with what had become stale protest choreography:a few standard speeches at the opera house in Freedom Square and a march on Parliament.

Mr. Pashinyan urged a campaign of civil disobedience everywhere, and the tech workers translated the idea into the language of the internet. They compared their strategy to a blockchain, the widely diffused technology behind online currencies that aim to stay outside government control, or to a denial of service attack that crashes a website because too many users try to access it at once.

“We would go out for lunch and never come back, we just stayed on the street,” said Mr. Mkrtchyan.

The government helped with a series of ham-handed responses to the protests, which started in earnest on April 17. That is when Serzh Sargsyan, the president since 2008, tried to bypass term limits by becoming prime minister under a new Constitution that transferred most political power to that office — after having promised not to take the job.

As the protests grew, he warned darkly of a repeat of the events of March 1, 2008, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators after what many considered a tainted election win for Mr. Sargsyan, killing 10.

Like many of her peers, who had been traumatized by the bloodshed a decade ago, Ms. Petrosyan was enraged by the threat, making her eager to protest even more.

“From the first day that I went out onto the street I understood that something powerful was happening,” said Ms. Petrosyan. “We all understood that it is not just a question of planting a tree or keeping up a street, but knowing that our government is outdated and that we needed to change it.”

Her employer, PicsArt — where the average age of the 350 employees is 24, and about half are women — had always considered itself a good corporate citizen, subsidizing education for the disadvantaged, among other things. Management there, and at various companies big and small, looking around at all the empty desks, bowed to the inevitable.

On April 19, SFL helped to establish a private chat room on Telegram to discuss shared tactics. By the end of the night it had 800 members representing some 20 tech companies, and a plan to block streets simultaneously at 11 a.m. the next day.

Companies with hundreds of employees like Synopsys and PicsArt gave their workers leave to go out, as did smaller firms. Managers made it clear that it was an individual choice, and that those who did not participate would not be ostracized.

Nobody was sure the protests would succeed. “At first we did not really understand the demands of the process or where it was leading,” said Mher Sargsyan, 28, the lead software engineer at SFL. “But I really want to stay here and to do my best to change everything around me.”

That sentiment was not limited to the tech sector, with countless others blocking streets across the city. The younger generation, especially the high percentage of women who participated, are ecstatic that the protests succeeded, with many saying they want to maintain that effervescent feeling of potential change by doing volunteer work.

Most of all, they are staying put.

When the demonstrations first began, Vigen Sargsyan, 37, a developer at Inomma, the start-up, was halfway through submitting the paperwork needed to move to Canada.

Then he joined the protests, including blocking a street with his 1994 black Zhiguli, a small Russian sedan.

He has since abandoned his effort to emigrate. “Now, everything has changed,” he said. “I wanted my country to be someplace where I wanted to live. Basically, we reached that goal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Revolt In Armenia, A Young Army Of App Users. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post Behind Armenia’s Revolt, Young Shock Troops From the Tech Sector appeared first on World The News.

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