“Papa . . . What do you do for a living?” It’s a question that comes out of nowhere and makes every parent proud. It’s one of the first signs that your child sees you as a person and not just a caretaker. “I’m a web developer.” “What’s that?” Let’s go back in time three years . . . My son was seven years old and the movement was . coding for kids gaining momentum I thought. “I’ll teach him how to code!” Parents like teaching their kids — it’s instinctual. We teach them language, values, skills, how to throw and kick a ball and many important life lessons as they grow up. What about computer programming? It’s not as glamorous as building a house. It’s not as instantly fun as assembling a LEGO car, opening a fresh pack of , or experimenting with a classic . However, it a form of creativity and expression — I use computer programming to make something that wasn’t there before, using a set of tools. Play-Doh Erector set is can Starting from Scratch He started with from MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group. For those unfamiliar, Scratch is a community for kids. It’s very fun and intuitive — like connecting LEGO bricks. Kids can quickly get started making games, stories, and animations then share their creations within the Scratch community (over 18 million projects have been shared on scratch.mit.edu). for providing such an excellent platform! He spent at least two years — and still does today. Scratch block-based, visual programming A big thank you to the Scratch Team “Scratching” I also hosted a at his school a few years ago, posted a for teachers and mentored at . Scratch coding club getting started lesson CoderDojo What about “real” coding? Ah . . . The big moment! Moving from the warm and cozy world of Scratch visual programming to the stark, cold and unforgiving world of typing plain text, the command line and cryptic error messages. Where, in the time it used to take to build a something interactive in Scratch , you can output to the console. (complete with fart sounds) “Hello World” Moving from Scratch to Text. It’s a big change! His first programming language: A “milestone” to remember I’ll never forget his first steps . . . or his first programming language. I read the and selected Python. recommendations I ordered from no starch press. I had no prior experience with Python (I work primarily with HTML/Javascript, PHP/Laravel, Node/Express), but it was great! Python is a very readable and elegant language. It’s a nice fit for kids — and a lot less typing compared to . Python for Kids C-family languages My first programming language was on an . I remember spending hours typing pages of code from magazines and books — and debugging all the typos — just to play simple dungeon games. The games weren’t even that fun and always seemed to crash with syntax errors, but it was the closest we had to actual computer games and that made it worth the effort! BASIC Apple IIe I re-purposed an old laptop and installed Python and Sublime. (I actually took his mother’s laptop and gave her the old one. She only uses the web browser and Office anyway.) His Scratch skills transferred well — control flow, variables, conditionals, loops and lists. It’s amazing how much he learned in Scratch, while having fun. All was going well — until he stopped. The Python slithered away . . . He just lost motivation. I guess command line output only motivates a kid so much these days. The games in Part II of the book just couldn’t compete with Scratch — let alone Xbox! Looking back, , since it was a great experience for both of us and I’m sure he will pick it up again in the future — Python has so many uses. I would still start with Python and the same book But I was determined . . . Javascript to the rescue! I remember showing him how to “View Source” on his favorite websites. He seemed most excited after learning how to change content on web pages with Chrome DevTools . Adding “poop” to the headings of actual web pages is very compelling for kids! I decided to give HTML and Javascript a try and ordered the book from no starch press. The book covers the basics of Javascript (ES5), HTML and basic jQuery (even if it’s ). Little by little, he worked through the book — an hour or so on weekends. There were plenty of gaps, but he made solid progress. JavaScript for Kids not cool anymore Great book! CodeSchool saves the day! After a few months, his momentum really slowed. Web development is a pretty broad topic and I needed some help. I signed up for and hoped for the best. It turns out their mix of original music/jingles, slow-paced video training and in-line exercises works really well for my son. Although, there are times when he just plays the jingles over and over again and searches the site for new ones — CodeSchool CodeSchool jingles are good! He worked through and then moved on to . Front-end Foundations Front-end Formations Javascript Road Trip Part 1 We’re currently up to and the exercises are very challenging — for both of us. I’m definitely learning a lot myself along the way — looking at you . JavaScript Road Trip Part 3 Closures Explaining programming concepts to kids Kids relate well to things in the real world. As we worked through the books and exercises, I found myself translating various abstract computer programming concepts into familiar scenarios. Below are some of the explanations that worked for my son — hopefully, I didn’t mess him up too much. Nothing too exciting here. The “variable is a container” analogy worked very well. Variables “Variables in Javascript are like boxes that hold things. You give them names, just like labeling a box of Pokémon cards, so you can find it quickly. Use good names, so you know exactly what’s inside — like ‘Ultimate Pokémon Deck’.” Arrays “A Javascript array is like your bookshelf (see header photo). It holds many different things in one place and makes them easy to access and find later. Your bookshelf has books, toys, drawings, photos, pencils, cards and more. If you ask me to find your Harry Potter book at the end of the bottom shelf, it would be easy.” Objects “Most things around you are objects — people, cars, planes, trains. Objects have certain things that define who/what they are and things they can do. In Javascript, the things that give an object its identity are called ‘properties’ and the things they can do are called ‘methods’. Think about your class made up of Student objects: some properties of a Student are: name, age, school, class. Some methods of a Student are: talk, run, and jump.” “Arrays can also hold objects. You can make an Array of your entire class that contains 30 Student objects then use a loop to print out all of the students in your class.” Functions “Functions are like cooking recipes or the instructions that come with a LEGO set. Running a function goes through each of the steps until it reaches the end or is told to stop — like when we call you down for dinner! A ‘bake-a-chocolate-chip-cookie()’ function includes all the steps required to bake a chocolate chip cookie — gathering and preparing ingredients, mixing, placing on baking tray, preheating oven and baking.” Parameters “Parameters are like bits of information you share with your functions — giving them extra powers. Instead of having to write a separate ‘bake’ function for every type of cookie, you can write one ‘bake()’ function and tell it which type of cookie to bake as a parameter — bake(‘chocolate_chip_cookie’).” *Don’t get too bogged down in the difference between parameters and arguments; it’s not worth it at this point. This was fun! CodeSchool did a great job in , but it just didn’t click for my son right away. Closures Javascript Road Trip Part 3 Closures still trip me up to this day. My first explanation attempt: “A closure is like a dinosaur fossil — a snapshot from a moment in time preserved for millions of years. You can get still get information about the dinosaur from the fossil, even though the dinosaur itself has been gone for millions of years.” Closures were starting to make sense, so I tried using again . . . cookies “Let’s say I go to the same bakery every day and ask the baker for a cookie. The first thing he/she asks is, ‘What kind of cookie do you want?’ After a few days, the baker might already know what cookie I like and simply ask, ‘The usual?’. By saving my cookie choice in memory, he/she is able to reuse the same function from the previous day to get me the proper cookie without having to ask again.” Eh… It was still a bit fuzzy, until my son asked me… “So, it’s like when we go to the barber and he just cuts our hair without asking what we want? He always asks new customers how they want him to cut, but never asks us anymore.” Ding, ding, ding! He got it!!! After finishing the remaining CodeSchool exercises, it all started coming together — for both of us. It’s a Long Journey Learning computer programming takes time — not something accomplished in an (BTW: the is a great initiative and Code.org is an amazing organization — if you can). hour of code Hour of Code help them Coding is a craft. Like any activity you sign your kid up for, it takes practice, patience and commitment—not always the easiest things for kids. We’re still at the beginning of the journey, but moving along. We attended an recently and he was inspired to make games. He starting watching some Unity videos, but that dropped off rather quickly. indie game event I try to not to limit his propensity to pivot and experiment with new things. I recently introduced him to , which is a great Javascript 2D game framework I’m also trying to learn myself — we’ll see how it goes. PhaserJS What Next? The next big step for him is to build a real application. His first shipped — another milestone! Who knows when or if that will ever happen or what it will be, but I’ll hope for the best and support him along the way. MVP Now it’s time to start the journey with his younger sisters!

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How I Got My Job Alumni Panel at Hackbright Academy, December 2016. Credit: Diane Phillips. This week I served on a panel at entitled “How I Got My Job Alumni Panel.” Before the event, I prepared a list of things I did throughout my job search that ultimately lead to me getting a job as a Site Reliability Engineer at Dropbox soon after Hackbright ended. Hackbright Academy One thing that I have learned in the last six weeks as an SRE, is the importance of thinking about scaling. After the panel was over, I thought to myself, how can I share and scale my knowledge to reach more people? I decided to write an article about my strategies that can be shared with bootcamp grads like me, as well as others looking to make a career change into tech. Many of the strategies that I have included here can be applied at any point during your career change. I began developing and using many of these frameworks about halfway through my bootcamp experience. It is never too early to start planning for your job search! 1. Solidify your story As you begin networking and interviewing, people are going to ask you to tell your story. Create a story that you can easily say in 3–5 five sentence (<30 seconds) and write it down. Practice with your friends and family. Since you are making a career change, take the time to think critically about your transferrable skills and be able to articulate them. Remember to never downplay your learnings and experience from your previous career, use them to demonstrate your uniqueness. Check out on telling your story. this article Hackbright Career Day where I shared my story with several companies, September 2016 2. Create your Road Map Some career advisors will advise you to apply to as many jobs as you can. I am more of an advocate for creating focus around your job search by identifying your interests and the characteristics of a company that will provide you the best opportunity to thrive. I have provided a framework below to guide you through this: Target Company Profile Your company profile is more of a summary of the type of company you are looking for. Don’t start thinking about specific companies yet. I found that doing this ahead of time can really help you target your search to companies that align with your needs and interests. What mission are you looking for in a company? Do you want to start with a specific mission and work towards another? Specify here. (e.g. education, productivity, social, finance, etc). What values are you looking for in a company? (e.g. diversity, collaboration, supporting bootcamp grads, etc). Size of company? (e.g. building or maintaining? Are you okay with a startup? Big company more appealing?). Are there specific microlevel features in a company you are looking for? (e.g. pair programming, mentorship, specific benefits, etc). What languages or frameworks are you interested in working with? Location, location, location. Target Company List Now use your company profile to start selecting companies. Create a table or list of the companies you are interested in. Have a reason on why you listed each company. If possible, group them into categories/themes (e.g. education, productivity, social, finance, diversity-focused, start-up, etc). I found by creating themes around what I was interested in (Education and Productivity Tools), it was very easy for me to answer the famous question “Why do you want to work here?” because I pre-aligned them with my interests. Identify Roles to Focus on There are many types of engineering positions out there. There was a time that I knew only of full-stack, front-end, back-end engineering roles. As I started researching I realized there is much more variety, coming across titles like Site Reliability Engineer, UX Engineer, Customer Support Engineer, Product Management and more. Read the job posts in detail and find what interests you. If you are interested in learning about what it means to be an SRE, checkout that , SRE Manager at Dropbox, and I put together. this list of resources Tammy Bütow 3. Fine tune your GitHub & LinkedIn profiles GitHub This is a good time to go back and reorganize your repos. Make sure that you have standard naming conventions that make your project(s) easily recognizable from exercises and assessments. Remember to so that they are clearly if someone goes to your github. See how I organized my repos . Clean up your repos. pin your project repos visible here Employers will look at your code, go back and make sure you remove print statements and unneeded comments from your projects. If you are feeling really ambitious, do some refactoring and add some tests! Clean up your code. Spend the time to write a ReadMe for any dynamic projects you have worked on, even group projects. Include screenshots or gifs ( is a great tool). It’s great to include contextual information such as your data model choices, design choices, test coverage, and an about the author section. If you deploy, include the link to your website in your ReadMe! Create ReadMes. giphy capture If you cannot deploy your projects, create a video about your project. Your video should demonstrate key features, technologies used, as well as context on the decisions you made throughout your development process. Don’t forget to link to this on your LinkedIn profile! Create Videos. Remember, employers not only want to see what you can do, but also want to understand your thinking behind your decisions. LinkedIn Remember that story you’ve been working on? It should be consistent to what you say in your summary. Clearly state what type of roles you are looking for as well as the qualifications you hold, list those transferable skills, preferably with data to quantify those skills. Perfect your summary. Ideally you want to have at least 3 projects on your LinkedIn profile. If you have never worked in tech before, these should be higher on your profile than your work experience. Hackathons are a great way to get more projects as well as great team experience to talk about in your interviews. Make sure your profile contains links to your project website, videos, and/or github repos. Display your projects. Do not assume that recruiters and employers are going to know your skills based on your job titles, be very clear. Create descriptions for your roles that have quantifiers and strong . Describe your previous roles. verbs 4. Create a Job Tracker Create a framework to help you track your process. I use LinkedIn to look for connections in my network to companies on my interest list. I looked into my college alumni networks as well as the Hackbright Alumni network. I wanted a place to organize all of this information so I created a detailed spreadsheet, which later turned into a Trello Board (when I found this awesome .) article Spreadsheet If you chose to create a spreadsheet, here is one way you can organize your data. Below I provide context for each of the columns shown in this image. Example of a Job Tracker Spreadsheet Company Name — I organized my search into themes and used abbreviations like EDU and PROD. Category/Theme — I only filled this in if I knew someone who currently worked at the company. I also linked to their LinkedIn profile. Internal Contact — Used to state how I knew the internal contact. Connection to the Internal Contact — For each company I searched LinkedIn to find someone with the title “Technical Recruiter” or “Recruiter.” I included their name and linked to their profile. Recruiter Contact — This column was mostly left empty, used just in case I had a direct connection to the recruiter. Connection to Recruiter — In this column I wrote the job title and made it link to the job post. Link to Job Post — I used this column to indicate the status of my application including entries such as “Applied,” “Rejected,” “Phone Screen Scheduled on 9/18,” etc. Status — I used this column to fill in context about the job and/or recruiter. Notes Another great spreadsheet tip is to color code your rows along themes, types of positions, or status. Trello After I had created a spreadsheet, I came across this amazing on how to use Trello for organizing your job search. I decided to transfer everything from my spreadsheet to a Trello board. article Snapshot of my Job Tracker Trello Board I had 7 lists on my “Job Search” Board with the following titles: Here I included any resources that I wanted to repeatedly consult during my job search. I had cards for “Negotiating your salary,” “Equity and Stock,” “Interview Resources,” and “Networking.” Within each card, I included links to resources as well as comments about anything I learned along the way. Interview Resources — Here I included cards for any company that I knew someone working there. Inside the card I linked to that person’s profile and wrote any notes as to how I knew that person. I also kept an account of our interactions. Connections — Here I included cards for any companies that had positions I was interested in. Inside the card I linked to the position as well as any context around the position. Once a card get entered here, I spent every day trying to move it to one of the following lists. Interested Positions — Applied Current Opportunities Offers Cold Opportunities Trello also allows you to create labels for your cards. I created labels around my themes (EDU and PROD) as well as position types (Full-Stack, Front-End, Back-End, UX Engineer, SRE/Infrastructure, etc). Trello is also a great way to organize the resources that you are using to help you study. I created a “Study Resources” board that helped me organize links to coding challenges, great videos, job search articles, etc. 5. Build & Use Your Network Hackbright Career Day, September 2016. Remember all of the connections you identified in your Job Tracker? It is important to be very mindful about how you interact with these connections. Here are some tips for reaching out to these connections: If you want to know something, just ask. Most people naturally want to help others, but also must be protective of their time. The CEO of Y-Combinator, , said e-mails that contain direct questions get answered the quickest. Ask a direct question. Michael Seibel Have purpose and focus when reaching out and build rapport with people before asking them for coffee. Asking a total stranger to grab coffee will not reinforce your chances of getting a job. Start by asking specific questions and respect their answer. If your relationship leads to a call or coffee, be specific about what you want to discuss. Make sure that this person is the best person for you to talk to about this topic, you don’t want to waste their time. Don’t ask strangers for a call/coffee. Asking a total stranger to grab coffee will not reinforce your chances of getting a job. If you have a friend who knows someone that you would like to know, write an email that your friend can forward to introduce you. Make it easy for them! In your email, state exactly why you want to connect with this person. When they respond, be direct and ask for what you want to know. Ask for intros. And whatever you do, do not send an essay! Remember that the people you are reaching out to are likely very busy, so get to the point! 6. Create an Interview Packet Photo in my ‘Personal Reminder’ section Since college, I realized I did well when I took the time to create a study guide or in this case an “Interview Packet” for myself. This is something you can start doing as soon as your program finishes and can be tweaked for each interview you go into. is a really great tool to build your packet in as it allows you to paste in various types of media. Here is how I structured my Interview Packet: Dropbox paper Include anything that you need to remind yourself of before going into an interview. The photo above is one example of things I include in my personal reminders section. Personal Reminders — _—_Include a link to the position that you are interviewing for. Copy and paste important chunks of the position into this section. Go through and make sure you clarify any vocabulary or technology that you are unclear about. Make notes in this section. The Role* _—_Make notes about the product, the company’s values, and any latest news about the company. Think critically about how this connects to your interests and make notes here. The Company* _*—_You should be prepared to discuss any projects that are listed on your resume/LinkedIn profile. Think about which projects/skills best show that you are prepared for this role, make a note of what you want to highlight here. Projects to Highlight Interviewing is all about telling a good story, make sure you can tell yours. Also think about different experiences in your life (work, school or personal) that demonstrate how you work with others, manage conflict, complete tasks, deal with setbacks/curve balls, deal with failure, execute on long term goals, etc. Write these experiences down along with Doing this reflection ahead of time will save you when you are in the hot seat. Behavioral Interview Questions to Answer — what you learned from your experience, even the bad ones. Use this section for making notes about any technical questions that you have to speak through. If your bootcamp is anything like Hackbright, you should have a list of these. is a great resource for this as well. Anytime you come across a new question, add it to this section. Some examples of questions that might go here are “What are the benefits of Object Oriented Programming” or “What is the difference between a request and a request?” Technical Interview Questions to Answer — Cracking the Coding Interview get post Snapshot of one section in My Interview Packet This section may or may not be useful to you, but I used it to include information on every type of data structure and algorithm that I learned about in my bootcamp. The data structures I included were strings, lists, tuples, sets, dictionaries, linked lists, queues, stacks, trees, graphs, and classes. Under each data structure, I included whether it is mutable, iterable, ordered and can be indexed, as well as any methods I wanted to remember, notes about memory and runtime, examples, etc. I also included notes about sorting algorithms (bubble sort, insertion sort, quick sort, merge sort, etc) where I made sure I understood how they work and their runtime. Detailed Technical Knowledge — _—_It is always a good idea to think about the questions you want to ask ahead of time. Some good topics to consider include: culture, position, manager/mentors, team/processes, and general questions about the company. Questions to Ask Employers *Sections that will change with each interview. As you come across resources for any of these topics, link them in your packet. This is living document that you can continue to add to throughout your job search experience. As you move into full time study mode, combine reviewing this packet with doing coding challenges and whiteboarding challenges. The day before the interview, print your packet and spend some time going through it. I really like to speak aloud as I practice answering questions and explaining the topics in my packet. On the day of your interview, to get mentally prepared for your big day, read through your packet. 7. Manage your Media Download , it is an amazing app that allows you to easily manage your social media. You can set up a queue of posts that can be scheduled to post on your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest accounts. While you are studying, create posts about awesome resources, something new you learned, when read an interesting article, and when you attended a noteworthy event. Add them to your Buffer queue to spread out when your posts go out! Buffer 8. Create a Study Schedule Creating a study schedule is key. I find it best to do a little bit of everything each day, making adjustments when you have interviews. I recommend creating your schedule based on the times of day that you perform best in certain activities. For example, if you think best about technical things in the morning, schedule coding in the morning with job search tasks in the afternoon. Know how you learn and make your schedule based on your learning needs. Here is a sample schedule that I created using Google Calendar. Please notice these key elements: I found that setting a workout in the morning helped me start my day on time. I included my commutes to help me stay on track. Build in your commute and self care activities. Google Calendar allows you to change the color of events. In this example you see that commutes are orange, self care is purple, job search is yellow and coding is turquoise. Color coding. Sample Study Schedule Just like in school, you can only truly focus on one task for a short amount of time. Allocate small bits of time for tasks and stick to your schedule. If there is something you did not get to, make a note and return to it tomorrow. Remember, this is a marathon not a sprint and all of your hard work will compound over time. Allocated time. . Speaking as a former educator, the act of getting in front of a whiteboard and speaking through a problem is very different than doing it on a computer. Find a place to study that has a whiteboard, buy one for your home or make use of your bathroom mirror. Even if you are by yourself, make sure you are speaking aloud as you go through the problem. If you are whiteboarding in a group, be eager to volunteer. This is not something you can fake, it takes practice! Whiteboarding is separate from Coding Challenges Thank you for reading! I hope you found these strategies useful and wish you the best of luck on this journey! Krishelle Found this post useful? Kindly tap the ❤ button below and share with friends going through a job search! Want more tips? Check out this awesome by , a graduate of , now Software Engineer at Radius Intelligence. article Felix Feng Hack Reactor About the author Krishelle is a former High School Math and Spanish Teacher turned Site Reliability Engineer at . about her journey from education to tech and connect with her on and . Dropbox Read Twitter LinkedIn

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8 Tools for Organizing your Post-Bootcamp Job Search

For many Startups, a major challenge is to attract investors and raise funding. Investors would rather like to invest into an established startup that has some proven track record than to invest in a potentially high-risk startup where the payback is also grim. Here comes the lean startup methodology that can help you reduce the risk of losing money and attract investors with a better chance of getting attention. There are times when you are convinced that your idea has huge potential, is solving an existing problem and is a potential success soon. Investors on the other hand would typically juggle between potential risk v/s upside! If the potential earning is low or the risk is high they would rather invest their monies elsewhere. Let’s understand how a Lean Startup model and actually reduce the potential risk involved and what possible questions an investor might ask. The Lean Startup Lean Startup isn’t about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful & still doing things that are big. The model has gained great attention over few years. It favours experimentation over planning, mitigates the risk of guessing and iterates development rather than the traditional large scale water-fall projects. It’s about encouraging to create a “Minimum Viable Product”, testing it with the real-world customers and then basis the learnings — developing the business model, products and services. Investors love these kinds of Startups. What do you want from an investor? From fresh infusion of capital to experience, contacts, customers and collective knowledge — Investor brings everything to the table that can help you take that big leap. Startup Entrepreneur may resolve if you want an active or passive investor, stake and exit strategy that you may want to suggest the investor. Pitching for Investors Identify the potential investors you would like to approach. Understand the spaces they invest in before reaching out. Research them on the internet and scan their social media for clues. Look at their past investments. Try and find out if there is there a commonality that you can use to your advantage? When you are ready to ready — You can start by pitching your ideas and plans to the ones at the bottommost and study what’s expected of you and take interest in what kinds of questions they ask. Trust me your initial meetings will blow you off. You will have all the possible elements of surprises and an opportunity to improvise on your pitch presentation before you are ready to invite the most appropriate investor that’s ready for the nuptial. Prove your Potential The Lean Startup methodology advocates you to build your business model by testing a set of hypotheses. You build authenticated erudition a step by step by documentation of your experiments, which you can then build into your business model. But then it’s all about numbers and the potential investor would be keen to understand the following: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much does it cost to acquire a new customer. This can be documented through the initial product/market fit analysis. You need to apprise how big your average marketing and sales spending is per customer. Also you should be able to envisage development in CAC going forward with a target CAC. Lifetime Customer Value (LCV): The estimated earning you will make from one customer during the whole duration of your relationship. Research churn data from your sector & prove the average revenue & cost for your delivery. Your ability to scale: If you can prove that the LCV is considerably higher than the CAC the next question will be if you can scale your business. If yes, numbers to explain the same. And the rest of questions: I’m sure you will have to handle a whole lot of objections the potential investors may have. You tell to have that convincing story behind your startup. Be ready with questions like why you started, what problem you are trying to solve, how are you making money, what’s your unique competitive advantage to who’s your competition and who all are part of the team. Be ready to explain why you will be successful. Reduce risk The Lean Startup Model allows your business model to be tested and proven with a significantly small investments and reduced risks. Largely investors don’t like to take a lot of risk and that’s one reason why they love the Lead Startup Methodology. Bootstrapping helps! and provide evidence on your CAC, LCV and stability. By doing so you have not only reduced the risk of failure but also inspire investors to invest in your startup and help you scale your . Self-finance your startup business model Don’t Miss. Buy The Lean Startup Book today! The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Ries describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies. If you liked this and want more: Do me a solid ❤ Heart it, 💬 comment on it, and/or follow me 😀 Also, if you would like to read more captivating stuff on the topics of entrepreneurship, , social media, leadership, , innovation and venture capital via my regular posts then please click ‘Follow’ and feel free to connect via , , and . marketing technology SlideShare Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Time to ThugStart P.S. here are my other . Articles on Medium

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A gift idea for parents and grandparents. Don’t worry. They might even enjoy it! The computers that we have in our lives are immensely powerful. At any other time in human history, the computational power of a simple smartphone would have been enough to start a worldwide revolution in science. But now they mostly just sit in our pockets, and occasionally simulate the sound of a fart. One way to make our computers more useful is by taking part in a . These take big problems that need a lot of power, split them up into little chunks and send these off to be processed by the idle home computers of anyone who signs up. distributed computing project computing Another awesome computational device we have is our brain. We can do a lot with the mushy mess of neurons between our ears. But sometimes we just need to keep it busy not thinking about stressful stuff. And so we fill it with TV. Or playing sport. Or Super Mario Run. Or Sudoku. It’s always nice when these activities do something useful. It’s not clear exactly what useful stuff Super Mario Run does, but Sudoku seems like it should be doing something. It’s a puzzle based on a grid of numbers. It’s maths. And maths is useful, despite what your experience at school might tell you. The trouble is that the in Sudoku doesn’t actually correspond to any useful problem in the world. Doing Sudoku won’t magically get your finances in order, or help cure cancer. It keeps you busy, and might keep you clever. But not much else. puzzle This is a bit of a shame. Imagine how many hours of human effort every day go into solving the Sudoku problems in the newspapers. And the crosswords. And all the other useful seeming and yet ultimately useless teasers of brains. What if we could change this? What we could make a distributed computing project for brains? So when we want to keep ourselves from reflecting upon the absurdity of existence, we could give them a fun task that actually helps science. This has actually been done! Starting with and moving on to you can use your brain to classify images of galaxies, penguins and even aardwolves (whatever they are). Galaxy Zoo Zooniverse But classifying pictures, as fun as it may be, does not appeal to all. What about the many people obsessed with puzzles like Sudoku? The people who obsessively do the ones in newspapers, and then go and buy big books full of them? Can we harness their brains for science? That’s what I’m trying to do with a project I call . We take an actual problem from quantum mechanics, namely the design of decoding algorithms for quantum error correction. We then strip out all the complicated seeming stuff until we’re left with a straightforward puzzle based on a grid of numbers. Just like Sudoku. Decodoku The numbers come in groups that add up to a multiple of 10. Work out what’s in the ? squares. That’s all there is too it! So if you want to give your puzzle loving relatives a new challenge for Christmas, give them the free book I made. You can download it (did I mention it was free?), and then turn it into a pile of paper and ink using the usual methods (not free). here To help science, those who solve the puzzles just need to give us a few tips on how it should be done. If they help out before the end of the year, they could even win a prize in our . competition So there you go. A present for some of your relatives. It’ll only cost you a bit of printer toner, and it’ll help science. Merry Christmas!

Super

Don’t know what to do with your grandparents this Christmas? Let me use their brain for science!

Here is the Part 1 of making a simple Facebook bot that harnesses the power of Google Maps Geocoding API . In Part 2 we will add more features, refactor the code, and make everything DRYer . In Part 3 we will deploy our bot to Heroku and enhance its interface. An obscure cultural reference for Soviet-born readers This tutorial assumes you already have a usual Ruby environment installed on your machine and you are aware of the brave new world Ruby gems give us. Here’s a preview of what we are going to build by the end of the second part: Cool, huh? Preface Let’s face the inconvenient truth. Bots are overhyped, mainly because . The majority of them. I am 32 years old, excited about all things digital since the age of 15, and I learned my speed typing on . It is the chat service that first appeared in 1988 and anticipated the by a good year or two. By the time web chatrooms became a thing, IRC already had a global community of hackers. I met at least two of my current best friends there, when I had my own channel on DALnet named #402. Yes, it had channels that started with the hash sign (I look at you, Slack, kudos for reviving a tech). It also had . they are still dumb IRC World Wide Web 25 years old bots Old is the new young, as seen by Google Trends So no wonder when bots became a household word again in 2016, my friends and I just shrugged. Of course, when you add some serious AI voodoo, bots can achieve . But, seriously, let’s be honest with each other, my fellow developers: your average hyped-up bot is not much smarter than a Perl script that on IRC server in 2002. amazing feats ran A bot-related prehistoric meme circa 1995 All that considered, . Even if they never smarten up. Why so? Bots can take a lot of heat off the front end and reduce developing cost for the apps as developers can focus on business logic, not looks. JavaScript community , new front-end framework appears every other week, and any more or less decent modern interface would require a rock-star programmer, who happens to also be a designer an UX-engineer. While it’s good news for smart guys, it’s bad news for those who have to hire more of them just to look well. I still believe bots are great and they are going to be big is a mess now and Meet bots. As you will see shortly, you just need a micro-framework and a back end language of choice (surely, it can be JS as in ) to quickly build an interactive app. And it may actually engage users, if you do something useful with it. NodeJS Enough talk, let’s build one Frank Sinatra after a certain Ruby framework stole his name and his hat As much as I want to use some more Rails (I started it less than three months ago at bootcamp in Paris and have only made two student projects with it), our weapon of choice will be — and the following screenshot is the reason why. learning Le Wagon Sinatra Folder structure of a Rails app (right) vs. the structure of a Sinatra app (left) Sinatra allows you to create a functioning web app in just few lines of code, without any boilerplate. In our example, we will only need Sinatra to do one specific thing, the rest will be handled by the incredible , created by some genius guys in . facebook-messenger gem Oslo Go to your console and type: gem install facebook-messenger The bot runs on , same as Sinatra (and , for that matter). So, in order to start, we will need a . Create a folder for your project (mine is named coordinator-bot) and named in it. stands for rack-up (and a top-level internet domain for Russian Federation). Put this inside: Rack Rails rackup file place a file config.ru .ru Next, named in the same folder and put in the following: create a file app.rb Next, create , called , with this content: another file Gemfile Now go to your command line and run: bundle install OK, time to create our app on Facebook Up until now, you were a user, now it’s time to become a Facebook developer. Go to , login with your usual Facebook account and in the top right corner of the screen pick . Facebook https://developers.facebook.com/ “Add a new app” Enter your app name (use your fantasy!) and don’t forget to set a category as . “Apps for Messenger” Facebook then will make sure you are not a robot, which is ironic, but avoids . Then, under pick and pick a category. Mine was “Brand or Product”. Skynet scenario “Token generation” “Create new page” Skip everything in a wizard menu (of course, if you want to make your test page look nice, be my guest!), go back to your developer’s dashboard and generate a token for the new page. Save it somewhere on your computer (but !), you will need it in a moment. don’t give to anyone or post publicly You will have two things from your Facebook dashboard that you are supposed to keep secret. Your (we’ll call it ) and the token for webhook verification ( ). Page token was just generated and the verification token can be anything you want, just make sure to remember it later. Next, open another tab in your Terminal and type and while using your own values after the “=“ sign (also, note there are no quotes around tokens). That is called . page token ACCESS_TOKEN VERIFY_TOKEN export ACCESS_TOKEN= export VERIFY_TOKEN=, setting environment variables With Rails this sort of thing would be handled by , but I couldn’t make it work under Sinatra, my best guess: it’s not supported (feel free to correct me in comments) Figaro gem NB! Comment out _require_relative 'bot'_ from your _config.ru_ file before you proceed. You will need to put this line back when we actually create a bot file, but for now, just to test that _rackup_ is working, we will need to temporarily disable it. Go back to the command line from inside your project folder ( it should be you just typed your environment variables in) and type this: It’s time to start our servers. Note! the same Terminal tab rackup -p 5000 You should see this: You can pick another port number ( , anyone?), but it should be the same as the one we will pipe through . Go to website, download it and put the executable inside your project folder or one of its parents. Then you can run it like so (in a new tab). 1337 Ngrok Ngrok’s ./ngrok http 5000 With this effect: Now your whatever happens on the port 5000 on your will be seen broadcasted on The Internet under a domain name that will be generated uniquely for you and will resemble something like this: localhost . http://982bd57f8.ngrok.io Go to this address in your browser: you should see the text . That’s right, that’s what these lines in our were about: “Nothing to see here” app.rb In your Facebook dashboard, where you just generated the access token for your Facebook page, scroll a bit down and under click Switch to your terminal (you ran that command in a new tab, right?), copy the URL under “Forwarding” (make sure you copy the one that starts with and attach to it. This is how we named a path under which our server will communicate with Facebook. We could call it — it’s up to you. Under put the same string you came up with earlier while setting your environment variables. Tick the “messages” mark. “Webhooks” “Setup Webhooks ”. ./ngrok ) https:// /webhook /bot “Verify Token” Now you can . If you set up your server correctly, Facebook will call /webhook path on your ngrok URL, send you a ‘challenge’ (which is just a random string of digits) and wait for it to be echoed back. These lines in do it: click “Verify and Save” app.rb That was actually all we needed Sinatra for. Moving on. Bot, meet your maker All further programming will be done inside our file. Go ahead and create one in your project folder. Your first bot will just say “Hello!” to whatever humans send him. bot.rb Remember, in any of your files you have to go back to the terminal tab where your rack server is running (you can leave ngrok alone), hit Ctrl-C and restart it. Also, now you will need to in your every time you change something require_relative ‘bot’ config.ru Now open your Facebook Messenger (whether desktop or mobile), find your bot by using your recently created page name under “Search Messenger” and type anything. He will respond “Hello!”. Congratulations, you’ve just had a first conversation with your own bot! In your server tab you should see something like: "POST /webhook HTTP/1.1" 200 - 0.0011 That means bot had sent an request to your server on its /webhook path and the server (facebook-messenger gem) replied accordingly. You can add this line at the beginning of the block. HTTP POST Bot.on Bot.on :message do |message|puts "Received '#{message.inspect}' from #{message.sender}"(…rest of the code in bot.rb) It will let you learn more about the conversation your bot is having, your server tab will log something like this: Okay, your bot is not particularly smart at this point. Let’s add some real world functionality. How about bot giving you GPS coordinates for any address in the world when you type it it? We’ll use All you need is to send a GET request (you should also put your private API key at the end of the URL, but for testing we can get away without one, check Google’s doc for more info on API keys): Google Maps Geocoding API . https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=ANY_STRING_THAT_LOOKS_LIKE_ADDRESS Google will do its magic (for example, it will figure out that you want Moscow, Russia, not Moscow, Texas, if you connect with a Russian provider) and it will send back a that contains all sort of useful data, namely the latitude and the longitude. JSON We will use an amazing gem to make our requests. We already installed it in our project during the initial . Add this method to your HTTParty bundle install bot.rb We use Ruby’s standard JSON parsing functionality to turn response from API into a regular Hash object. Make sure your has the line at the top. bot.rb require ‘json’ Now dig inside the hash to find our coordinates. Add this method to . bot.rb Update your Bot block to send back the data you got from the API. Replace your method with this: Bot.on In the end your should look like this: bot.rb Great! Go ahead and test your bot! It should do this. YAY! Our first bot that makes sense! Right now our bot is still very stupid. It only can spit back coordinates to you when you enter a valid address. No hellos, no good-byes. If you type something Google can’t find, it will just hang and you will have to restart your Rack. In the of this tutorial we will make our bot smarter and it will be able to keep up with a simple conversation. We will also handle the case where API does not return any results, and we will teach it to to look up the full postal address lookup for any location. Part 2 That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed it! Go check out Part 2! All the code for our bot at this stage of its development can be found on . my Github You can find the code for a final project (still WIP on the time of this writing) in the same repo, but in the . main branch Feel free to fork it, clone it and play with it. : Disclaimer I’m a beginner web developer, ex senior international TV correspondent, and young father with zero (nil, null, zilch) experience in IT. Aside from obsessing about coding style and trying to pump my head full of technical literature while looking for my first serious dev gig, I recently graduated top of the class from an excellent Le Wagon coding bootcamp in Paris and co-authored Halfway.ninja as a graduate project there. It’s an airfare comparator for couples. Go check it out! You can find me on Github , Twitter and Instagram . I also own this domain . I am also available for hire, be it an inspiring internship, freelance or even full-time work. I speak English, Russian, French, Ruby, JavaScript, Python and Swift and I am currently based in Moscow, Russian Federation. Feel free to write me directly with any offers (or death threats).

Maker

Heroku

Slack

Build your first Facebook Messenger bot in Ruby with Sinatra and “facebook-messenger” gem (Part…

In this blog I will show you how to pick up an existing codebase example and curtail it into your own, beautiful built using React, MobX and the to create and remove posts from your bucket. MobX Example App Cosmic JS API I’ll be using for this example blog. Cosmic JS is an that makes managing and building websites and applications faster and more intuitive. By decoupling content from code, Cosmic JS empowers developer flexibility while ensuring content editors can plan and deploy content as it best suits them. We’ll be using Cosmic JS to install our example app, edit post content, deploy and make content updates moving forward from the . Cosmic JS API-first CMS cloud-based Content Management Platform If you haven’t already, get started by for . Helpful resources are provided below to streamline your development operations. Signing Up Cosmic JS MobX Example App Page MobX Example App Demo MobX Example App Codebase on GitHub Build a Voting App Using React | MobX | Bootstrap 1. Create a New Bucket Your bucket’s name is the name of your website, project, client or web application that you are building. I named mine “MobX Example App” to remain concise for our example blog. 2. Install the Cosmic JS MobX Example App Once you’ve signed up and named your bucket, you’ll be prompted to start from scratch or “see some apps”. For this blog I simply clicked the right button to “see some apps” so that I could begin the installation process for the MobX Example App . App Installation Options gives you the ability to filter between programming languages such as and more. Simply click “Install” underneath the icon to get started, or visit the . Cosmic JS Node.js, PHP, React, AngularJS MobX Example App Cosmic JS Apps Page 3. Deploy to Web I clicked “Deploy to Web”. I can then start editing any Global Objects and / or posts while my web application is deploying. You will receive an email confirming the deployment of your web application. If you encounter any issues during deployment, you may be routed to the . Cosmic JS Troubleshooting Page Confirm Deploy Location and Branch Deploy Branch Confirmation Modal I’m drawing from a repo, my branch is clarified and I have a deployed location that matches my slug / bucket name that I made in Step 1. Deploy, Deploy Away A little reassurance that you’ll soon be up, alive and well on the web. :) 4. Edit Global Objects / Posts Editing is a dream come true in the Cosmic JS Dashboard. To read more about how was built with editing content in mind, read Cosmic JS Building With the Content Editor in Mind. App Deployment Confirmation It’s as easy as signing up, creating a new bucket, installing the web application(s), edit content and deploy! I get my confirmation email to access my web application and also see my options for bucket upgrades like custom domains, one-click SSL, webhooks and localization. is an that makes it easy to manage applications and content. If you have questions about the Cosmic JS API, please reach out to the founders on or . Cosmic JS API-first cloud-based content management platform Twitter Slack Carson Gibbons is the Co-Founder & CMO of , an API-first Cloud-based that decouples content from code, allowing devs to build slick apps and websites in any programming language they want. Cosmic JS Content Management Platform

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These two pilots didn’t read this article. Look where it got them. Yes, I’m talking to you, developer I’ve written this article for you, solo app developer with no designer to help you out. You remind me of myself when I was younger. You and I aren’t so different after all. Hopefully, the title of this article makes it clear that this five-minute read won’t make you an expert designer. However, I hope that it’ll help you avoid the most frequently commited design-related crimes and put you on the road to making your apps look . damn fine Because, let’s face it: if you’re a coder trying to make an app, at first you’ll get it wrong. wrong. Why repeat my mistakes when you can simply read this article and, I don’t know, bleach your anus with the time you’ll save? Really And with the compulsory ass-related sentence out of the way, let’s move forward. Item 1: Use icons from the same damn iconset Come on. This isn’t so hard. Just pick an icon pack and use that. Don’t try to use elements from two or more icon packs in a single app, unless they are by the same designer and use the same style. Of course, to be able to do that, you have to choose an icon pack that contains a lot of icons. An easy way to do that and save some money is to use . Those icons use a consistent style and look pretty good. Google’s icon pack at material.io If you’re willing to spend some money, my personal favorite (disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the designers in any way. In fact, just based on statistical probability, I’m pretty sure that they think I’m an asshole) is the icon set over at creativemarket.com. It has a lot of icons, they look great and you get a variety of formats to use. The fact that you get icons in the .svg (scalable vector graphics) format means that you can also export them at the resolution you want. Sharpicons : You’re a developer, so you probably don’t have Photoshop or Illustrator handy (that’s alright, I don’t either), which means that, after googling for a bit you’ll probably settle on using either or for .svg import and export. I prefer Gimp, even though it’s not a vector drawing program like Inkscape. The quality of the exported assets just seems better to me. BONUS TIP Gimp Inkscape Simply drag the .svg file into the Gimp window, select the resolution that you’d like the icon to be rendered at and export the icon as a .png. : Use Roman Nurik’s to scale your icons for various screen densities. BONUS TIP BONUS Android Asset Studio I have already mentioned creativemarket.com as a place for you to shop for icons, but there are a lot of places to get iconsets. Lately, I’ve been loving . Another favorite is . Iconscout PixelBuddha Item 2: Use the Material Design-designated keylines Maybe you’ve never given it much thought but using a grid will instantly make your apps look more professional — more like a unified whole and less like a scattered mess of text and images. I know that the sound of the word “grid” probably strikes fear into your heart because of its overt (new word alert!) but it’s really simple: try to make your assets fit nicely into an 8dp grid (4dp for text). Easier said than done, since sometimes you don’t control the height or width of the content (eg. in a TextView that wraps its content, you won’t be able to control the height) but at least make your padding and margins a multiple of 8dp. designyness Want an easy way to see if your app respects the grid? Download ’s amazing app from the Play Store and activate one of the various grids it offers. I usually use the Standard Grid. Here’s how its overlay looks over the main screen of my app, Paul Danyliuk Material Cue Looxie Not too shabby, if I may say so myself Item 3: Be careful with your use of color Look, everybody loves colors. I like colors, you like colors and it’s possible that even Hitler liked colors, though most probably their lighter, more Aryan shades. You know what else everybody likes? Food. But just like you’re not supposed to have chicken soup with chocolate cake croutons (or are you?), some colors are simply best left separate. Now, I’m not going to lie to you: color theory and its practice is a huge subject but here are some of the shortcuts you can take to make your life easier, especially if you don’t have a prefined brand color / identity to follow Sites like and will show you ready-made palettes and even sort them by mood, season etc. Choose one you like and use that. coolors.co http://www.colourlovers.com/ Alternatively, you know who creates amazing color palettes? That’s right, Mother Nature! Take a photo of something that inspires you and from that. If you’re making an app for surfers, why not take a photo of the beach and extract colors from ? extract a palette that Last but not least, visit the and choose a color combination you like. will even show you your selected colors in context! Material Design color palette page This site _I'm an Android developer and designer with a love for beautiful UIs!_www.buymeacoffee.com Buy Antonis Tsagaris a Coffee - BuyMeACoffee.com Item 4: Make wise font choices Ah, typography. Love it or hate it, you gotta love it. What? Anyway. There are A LOT of typography-related sites out there but there’s one that’s very helpful for a couple of things: font recommendations and, even more importantly, font . So go visit and take a look around. . pairings Typewolf What you should keep in mind when choosing fonts for your app: Make sure that you don’t pick Comic Sans or Papyrus, unless you’re creating the official Geocities Lovers client. Even then, it’s a stretch. OK, you use Comic Sans or Papyrus if you’re making an app for Stevie Wonder. can Don’t rely on the system displaying tasteful fonts to your users (because some devilspawn may choose Comic Sans or Papyrus as a system font on Samsung devices just to mess with you). Instead, always load your own fonts: place your .otf or .ttf files into your app’s folder (preferably into a subfolder to keep things clean) and load them using this wonderful static method assets/ fonts/ Typeface notComicSans = Typeface. (getAssets(), “fonts/notComicSans.otf”); createFromAsset textView.setTypeface(notComicSans); OK, you use Comic Sans or Papyrus if you’re making an app for Stevie Wonder can Another thing to keep in mind: before commiting to a font, be sure to check if you may want to localize your app into. I had trouble finding nice fonts that support Greek, for example, although I ended up finding (again, no affiliation). it supports all the languages a fantastic one Google’s own Roboto family of fonts (Roboto Condensed and Roboto Slab are my personal favorites) also support many languages and look great. Finally, check to see if the fonts you have chosen have a wide variety of weights available (like thin, light, bold, black etc). Free fonts usually don’t have a lot of weights available, but again, the Roboto family does. If a font you like does not have a lot of weights available but you still want to use it, I have found that you can emulate (but not completely recreate) the effect of having various weights available by using different shades and sizes of text for various sections of your app (for example, use a completely black font for a title and a lighter gray font, maybe in a smaller size too, for a subtitle). That’s all folks! Go prettify your apps! I’ll be here all week! Am I credible? Maybe my own apps look like shit! Maybe I’m a charlatan of the highest order! You can find my apps in the Play Store so go and make up your own mind! Looxie Karkoona Kairoskopion Veterondo YourBook : Very Beta Edition

Samsung

Make your Android app look less shitty.

Apple still has the best industrial design on the market, but they’re not much fun anymore Right now I’m sitting in front of a 27″ iMac. It’s the best computer I’ve ever owned, with a 5K display, high color gamut, 24 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of SSD storage. It’s beautiful and minimalist, just like every iMac they’ve released since they switched to aluminum in 2007. It’s also the least modifiable desktop computer I’ve ever owned. This trend also goes back to that aluminum iMac, in which — like today’s — only the RAM is user-upgradeable. (Since 2012, even that’s no longer true of the smaller 21″ iMac.) It’s hard not to ask: why is thinness the priority in all of Apple’s designs? You know the answer: Jony Ive. It’s clear by now that he would like everything Apple produces to look as close to a pure pane of glass as he can make it, with minimal, unadorned metallic frames, as close to unbroken and symmetrical as functionality allows. And Ive’s team is perfectly willing to sacrifice functionality in pursuit of this goal. A female Lightning port is fractionally thinner than a female USB-C port, and now you know why the iPhone will never get USB-C ports. Sorry. You’re lucky the one-port MacBook’s one port isn’t a Lightning port. (I have it on good authority that was under consideration.) This often gets portrayed as a choice between staying chained to legacy hardware and forging ahead to the future. But if you were using Macs a decade ago, do you remember the way the power indicator light on a Mac, both desktop and laptop, used to slowly pulse when it was asleep, as if it were slowly breathing? Or the way batteries on laptops, both replaceable and permanent, used to let you check charge levels without turning on or waking up the machine. Or, as recently as last year, the way power plugs changed color to show charging state. All of that — along with the illuminated logo and, now, the cheerful chime — has gone away. Apple startup All the price of progress, right? A couple years ago, Shawn Blanc published a book about “how to make good things great” called That phrase captures an essential paradox: we want our products to stay out of our way in everyday use, yet products that convert us from merely satisfied customers to have little touches that call attention to themselves in just the right way. When I start my Mazda, its display lights up with the words “Zoom Zoom” for just a few seconds. It’s stupid, but after six years it still makes me smile. Delight is in the Details . fans “Little touches that call attention to themselves” are the opposite of Ive’s guiding aesthetic. He creates beautiful objects you can appreciate as works of art. You can’t help but marvel at the lengths to which his team will go to make a perfect fusion of glass and metal, to craft UIs that appear to directly manipulate data, to make the hardware disappear while you’re using it. Under Ive’s direction, Apple delivers works which are closer to the science fiction future than any other major consumer electronics company. And yet his designs are relentlessly whimsy-free. There won’t be a moment that catches you off-guard and makes you smile. Ive’s work never aspires to make you giggle with delight. Software doesn’t escape his penchant for austerity, either. The Ive era of software UX has been about flattening, removing, relentlessly stamping out skeuomorphism. The “traffic light” window controls are just circles now; the swirling barber pole progress bars are simple blue, with a subtle pulse; we don’t even get the little puff of smoke when we pull icons off the dock. I’m surprised the iOS icons still jiggle-dance when they’re in rearrangement mode. I’m not sure that it’s fair to say that we’re seeing a software analog to Apple’s quest for thinness, but I’m not sure it isn’t, either. I’d hardly be the first one to complain about a perceived drop in software and UX quality, or to question whether Apple’s being a little aggressive in dropping legacy ports. Yet it feels like that’s always been part of the deal, right? We’re taking away the floppy drive, or only giving you these weird USB ports, or sealing the battery in, but look at how we can make this thing now! It’s not like anything else on the market. It’s too cool fun. This iMac is the computer I’ve ever owned, but nothing about it screams The quirkiest thing about it is my , something Apple would never dream of making on their own these days. ( gauche.) best fun. mechanical keyboard So Despite revealing myself in past posts as a Mac partisan, I think this is not only true but, overall, good. I’m a fan of that science fiction future, and it’s not one in which I see many people sitting down in front of 27″ monitors and keyboards for their computing needs — even if the monitors are holographic and the keyboards aren’t physical. Yes, but you keep talking about the Mac line. The future is in iOS! But man, talk about the “pure pane of glass” ideal, right? The argument Apple is implicitly making is that computers — especially the computers of the future that the iPad typifies — are Appliances can be beautiful, but they shouldn’t exhibit frippery. They should be focused. We should prefer the Kitchen-Aid stand mixer to the plastic knockoff that does twice as much at half the price, because it won’t do any of those things and it’ll fall apart in a year. (Besides, you can do all those things with the Kitchen-Aid, anyway; you’ll just need to buy some dongles.) appliances. well That’s all true. Maybe Ive knows best. But if you showed me a table with an iPad Pro, a Surface Pro, and a Surface Book on it and asked me to rank them in order of Cool Factor, I’d be hard-pressed to put the iPad at the head of the line. Microsoft isn’t trying for tiny-quirk delight, which is just as well (“It looks like you’re trying to add personality to your UX! Can I help?”), but they’re sweating small, thoughtful details. Apple sweats the details of manufacturing processes. That’s great, but it’s not the same thing. Maybe — just maybe — a little frippery is okay, even if it adds a half-millimeter in depth to a product, or adds a touch of (gasp) skeuomorphism to the UI here and there, or allows a slightly less restrained, tasteful pigment on the anodized aluminum case. Injecting a bit of fun, even weirdness, to their computers in the late ’90s helped pull Apple back from the brink. It may be time for another injection. Being Kitchen-Aid is a fine goal, but you know what? They sell that stand mixer in nearly three dozen colors. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

Microsoft

Form over frolic: Jony Ive’s quest for boring perfection

. Source of the image unknown. Hexagonal Architecture How to clean up a 3+ years old project and live happily ever after. We’ve all been there: a software project was lucky enough to live on for years after the initial development, however, somewhere along the line it started to get crippled by patches and workarounds that were only meant to be temporary, but nobody ever got to clean up. As a contractor, every few months I move to a different company. I’ve worked with start-ups and well-established companies alike. I’ve once joined a project early in the development process, left the team after shipping the app, and found myself working on that same project almost three years later. That was quite an experience! The only code I wrote left in it was a bunch of blank lines scattered across a few files. I’ve worked on projects at all stages of their lifetime. Nevertheless, I often find the same problems. Luckily, the solution also stays the same. The problem I find most often is that, as projects grow in complexity and feature set, they also become harder to change. The time required for developing new features keeps increasing and breaking stuff becomes easier and easier. Knowledge of distinct areas of the codebase tends to stay in the head of one person or of a small group. Other developers on the team usually don’t bother learning how something works until they have to, and as the people leave, that knowledge gets lost forever. The number one enemy of good code is code itself. It’s the growing net of dependencies, the lack of isolation, the lack of documentation. It’s also the tempting voice inside your head saying that’s OK if you just add one more method to an already fat class. Because if you do it, you’ll be done already, your feature or bug fix will be complete, your manager happy and everybody will cheer at your ability to move fast (and break things that will come chasing you back in a day or so, just for you to patch some more). Perhaps you promise yourself you’ll go back and do things properly. However, before you know it, the whole project looks like an indecent mess and doing the simplest things turns into the most difficult job ever. Disclaimer: what I’m saying is nothing new. People have written hundreds of pages about Working with Legacy Code , Clean Code or Refactoring . However, it never seems to be enough. The same problems keep resurfacing. Therefore, I’m just making my part in trying to get some principles burned in people’s mind, as well as in my own. Software programming is more like gardening than engineering Would you do the same if you were working on a building, a bridge, or trying to launch a rocket into space with people on it? I hope not! I know some do, though. Just ! Or look at ! look at what happened in Italy a few months ago the poor quality of homes in the UK For a long time, programming software has been compared to constructing a building. Perhaps it’s a good comparison, or maybe not. Some elements make programming look like engineering: you have to analyze a problem, come up with a good solution, make sure you take the right measures, build it, test it and . However, it’s so cheap to change things in software and so unpredictable sometimes that it’s going to happen. As Andy Hunt, author of , puts it: hope it won’t fall on itself you know The Pragmatic Programmer There is a persistent notion in a lot of literature that software development should be like engineering. […] It doesn’t work that way with software. […] Software is much more like gardening. You do plan. You plan you’re going to make a plot this big. You’re going to prepare the soil. You bring in a landscape person who says to put the big plants in the back and short ones in the front. You’ve got a great plan, a whole design. But when you plant the bulbs and the seeds, what happens? The garden doesn’t quite come up the way you drew the picture. This plant gets a lot bigger than you thought it would. You’ve got to prune it. You’ve got to split it. You’ve got to move it around the garden. This big plant in the back died. You’ve got to dig it up and throw it into the compost pile. These colors ended up not looking like they did on the package. They don’t look good next to each other. You’ve got to transplant this one over to the other side of the garden. The Pragmatic Programmer. - Andy Hunt, author of Fixing rotten codebases What can we do when we find ourselves working on a nasty codebase? Perhaps we’ve just joined a team in need of help, or maybe we lost control of the ship, and we’re struggling to get it on track. The only solution for that problem I’ve found is to altogether. What that means is that we have to make an effort to isolate parts of the codebase in little black boxes that each serve one, and only one, purpose. Small, contained blocks of code are easier to understand and to change. We can test them independently from the rest of the application and refactor them as needed. In short, we have to: push the crap to the edges first, then remove it Isolate Test Refactor Divide and conquer The first step is to identify small, contained pieces of functionality and extract them into their own containers. I’ll call them . modules The goal is to create boundaries of interaction between the main app and the self-contained features. By doing so, we’ll have code that’s easier to understand and maintain. Or at least, we can take a piece of code nobody understands anymore and minimize and redefine how the main app interacts with it. Taking those infected areas of the codebase and isolate them also avoids spreading the disease even more. When separating a module, it’s best to create a new package/framework to contain it so that the old code cannot access any of it anymore. Once confined to its own universe, we can define an through which the rest of the world will interact with the module. That interface will be part of the package, and we’ll do the necessary conversions within the module. This way, when we go change the implementation of the module for any reason — e.g. to clean it up — no other code will be affected. interface Initially, you’ll have to face the wall of dependencies, but that is the problem you’re solving in fact! Those dependencies have to either be injected into the module or the module has to depend on some other module to get them. A perfect way to achieve that is avoiding passing the same of data around. Use and as much as possible, instead. Doing so will make your code even easier to understand and maintain. A small drawback is that you may need to write a bit of code to conform to those protocols or to convert your data models into (and from) this intermediate objects. It’s OK to repeat yourself a little here. The advantage is just too big to ignore. type protocols DTOs For example, modules won’t have to depend on others to know about the types they need. They can just what they need. In your main app, you can extend types to conform to a protocol or convert them to other types. Your module’s code will also be way easier to test, as defining stub and mock objects for your tests won’t require a burden of dependencies and state maintenance. define Push the crap to the edges first, then remove it! As a final note, what you extract doesn’t necessarily have to be something poorly written or incomprehensible, although the greatest benefit comes from isolating those parts of the code. Pulling out well-written pieces will help over the long run too. Test With an interface for the module in place, we’re able to test it in isolation. Hence, we’ll be able to ensure a consistent, functional behavior, and automate the process using a . Continuous Integration system Tests will serve both as a way to clarify the scope of the module and prevent regression. They’ll also be a nice documentation of the expected behavior when someone new has to use that code. With the revitalized understanding of what the extracted segment has to do, we’re able to identify more areas that we can move out of the module or prune altogether. Testing is an essential part of the process and shouldn’t be ignored. It’s the base upon which we can stand when refactoring the module. With tests, we can be confident that we’ll catch regressions. Dependencies and weak spots will surface as you’ll find places that aren’t easily tested. Life will be good. Confidence is key. As programmers, we’re afraid of change when we lack confidence in our ability to catch regressions. We’re scared of breaking things, and we should be. Having a set of automated tests running across the entire codebase at each commit can free us from the burden of fear. Refactor The final step is refactoring. Once everything is isolated and tested, you’ll find that the codebase will already be in a way better shape than it was before. To isolate the code something had to change. Blocks had to be rearranged, and communication cleaned up behind a new interface. To test the module other parts had to become more testable. At this point, you’ll have to take a significant decision: to refactor or not to refactor. Some of the modules will be in perfect shape. Some will still be black boxes you didn’t dare touching. I know. It’s OK. You didn’t test all of it because you were afraid of changing and breaking things. It’s not ideal, but we can live with it. Isolating that component was already a great achievement. Other requirements were piling up in your backlog, and you were getting nervous. You didn’t want to disappoint your manager. Here’s the thing, though. You’ve come a long way, and the light is just around the corner. You can see it already. If you’re going to get to , you’ll have to endure. It will take time; you’ll have to balance the refactoring work with the time your company requires you to devote to new features and enhancements. You’re in a position that allows for that. However, the devil is in the detail. make your codebase great again To prevent the codebase to get crippled again, you’ll have to keep nurturing it. There’s no way around this. Trust me. I’ve been there. Time and time again I’ve avoided testing or refactoring because of time, pressure, overconfidence, boredom. It never paid off. I’ve always been bitten by my lack of endurance. It’s not fun. Never again. Wouldn’t you like to keep working on a healthy codebase, where everything works as expected and very few bugs are ever introduced? If your answer is ‘yes,’ then you know what you have to do. You’ll have to test and refactor those crappy parts of the codebase that are still left. Maintaining a healthy garden Even once you’ve isolated the best and worst part of your codebase, wrapped them in a reasonable suite of automated tests, and refactored everything, you’ll still be in danger. There’s no stopping. The job isn’t finished. Sure, your app will be in its best shape ever. However, it’s not going to last long if you don’t keep caring. As I mentioned in , according to Michael Feathers, author of “ is simply code without tests.” an old article Working Effectively with Legacy Code , legacy code Legacy code is simply code without tests Test Driven Development, the practice of writing automated tests and code in short cycles — we’re talking short — with the tests being written before the “actual code,” comes very handy to maintain our in a healthy state. seconds garden An important note is that you should . Again, use protocols and DTOs to avoid spreading dependencies! Those constructs are invaluable friends. try to avoid as much as possible to have modules depend on one another Where to go from here Congratulations for making it this far! I know this mustn’t be the easiest or funniest piece to digest. As I mentioned towards the start of this article, what I’m saying is nothing new. It’s all pretty old stuff. I stand on the shoulders of giants. We all do. Therefore, I highly encourage you to take some time to read through the original article describing the concept known as , which emphasizes the importance of isolating the core domain of your app from external dependencies and interact with them using and When I mentioned that you should define clear interface layers through which the main app and the tests communicate with a module, I was referring exactly to that type of architecture. You may also want to have a look at a similar concept known as . Good luck with your refactoring! The Hexagonal Architecture ports adapters. Self-Contained Systems Architecture If you’re interested in developing web applications using , Apple’s new super cool and efficient programming language, you may want to subscribe to , a weekly newsletter I’m curating with the best links on the Internet on the topic and anything related. Swift Swift Web Weekly

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