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Software Bastards

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Why AI Will Bring an Explosion of New Jobs

iron-mitten.blogspot.co.uk Recently I’ve switched from a developer role to hands-on team lead and decided to share my experience while it is still fresh in memory. “Hands-on” simply means that I still write code ⌨️ 🎭Roles This is how I prefer to match roles and responsibilities: 🗡🗡 — a person who is responsible for setting tech agenda for the team, has no direct reports, full-time coding. [Tactical hire] Tech Lead 🗡🛡 — a person who is responsible for tech agenda and long-term team success, has direct reports, part-time coding. [Strategic hire] Team Lead 🛡🛡 — a person who is responsible for long-term team success, manages direct reports, almost no coding. [Strategic hire] Engineering Manager 🎯 Tactical vs Strategic 🗺 A tactical hire is a person who , preferably in silence, networks with others only when its needed. Happy as long as work is relevant and stable. gets work done A strategic hire and agenda. Engaged in work, with others who do it and tells everyone a preferred way of doing it. People around are pissed off by the annoying intensity of the agenda. pushes their own opinion networks Both tactical and strategic hires are required in any company. Reasons to become a Team Lead 👍 Good reasons 🛡Ready to shield people You want and are ready to protect your reports. Your main responsibility would be to work as a , rules are simple: all negative communication and process changes go to you first, then you filter them and take actions accordingly. shit umbrella You won’t be able to simply cascade shit directly to your reports. Your job is to , feedback and growth directions which don’t look like an offence to your reports. transform the shit into constructive actions 🌱 Enjoy growing people You enjoy helping people to study and reflect on their work. You will have to identify the of your reports and . personal agenda help them achieve it by crushing obstacles 🤝 Interested in developing soft skills You realise how soft skills are important in achieving big goals and want to get better at . organising people to achieve big goals together 👎 Bad reasons 💰 Getting more money Typically a team lead role is better paid than a developer role in the same company, but if you need more money a . If this is your only motivation it will be hard to succeed in the role. 10–20% raise won’t be a life-changing difference 🤓Becoming a better programmer If your passion is solving hard programming challenges but you hit a ceiling and your company expects you to become a Team Lead, just change the company. , stick to your passion if you prefer computers to people. The more you do the more you are ⚔Seizing interesting work Since you will be a person in charge you can organise work in a way that all interesting coding lands on your desk. This superpower should not be abused, the only excuse for this is that you are both for the job and for this in your schedule. Otherwise, give it to your reports. the best person you have a capacity 👾 Ugly reasons 😈 Becoming a boss If you get a job, you become a boss, but it is not a permanent position, remember this. You . Luckily in our industry, if you are a bad boss your very fast, they have plenty of options even if they are mediocre. merely borrowed the title reports will abandon you 🕷Controlling everything If you have lack of control as a developer, then don’t think that with your team is going to help you. , you must . taking over communication Micromanagement stalls work promote ownership and autonomy Our solar system flying through space Perfect Team Lead is like the Sun. It has huge gravity to pull everyone in the same direction, often giving peers momentum to overtake itself. Prerequisites 🎖Seniority Seniority is for starting a Team Lead path. To understand what it is, you can read this very good explanation of . an absolute blocker Seniority from Krzysztof Zabłocki You must developer and should have of this: popular blog, open-source project, mentoring practice. External evidence is not required, but it is rather strange that a Senior person has no contributions to a relevant community. believe that you are a “senior” external evidence Preparation There are two main areas which will be assessed in an interview for a hands-on Team Lead position. 🐝 Hard skills These are your engineering skills, they are useful for getting the job done, but their of your reports. primary value is in mentoring, assessing and earning authority Do a self-assessment using : Skills Matrix _Note that the knowledge for each level is cumulative; being at level n implies that you also know everything from the…_sijinjoseph.com Programmer Competency Matrix And roadmaps for relevant platfroms: : Web Developer Roadmap _developer-roadmap - Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2018_github.com kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap : iOS Developer Roadmap _iOS-Developer-Roadmap - Roadmap to becoming an iOS developer in 2018._github.com BohdanOrlov/iOS-Developer-Roadmap : Learning Android Development in 2018 _Before writing a single word, I wish you all a very Happy New Year!!!_android.jlelse.eu Learning Android Development in 2018 — Part 1 🦋 Soft skills These are your organisation and communication skills. They are required to be so the following areas will be : successful in the role, assessed in an interview Self-management Strategy Working with people Resource management Analysis & Decision Making 📚 Books Read this your interviews ;) before Mentors recommend: _Peopleware has 6,383 ratings and 351 reviews. Ben said: Peopleware is something of a classic in the world of…_www.goodreads.com Peopleware _The Deadline has 1,343 ratings and 116 reviews. TarasProkopyuk said: Книга обязательна к прочтению для начинающих и…_www.goodreads.com The Deadline I recommend: A guide for supervising and leading “cats”: _Herding Cats has 212 ratings and 12 reviews. Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers is a…_www.goodreads.com Herding Cats “Cookbook” style answers to questions about leadership and management: _Leading a Software Development Team has 43 ratings and 4 reviews. Nathaniel said: I got this book because I had…_www.goodreads.com Leading a Software Development Team True stories about software development and management of humans: _Managing Humans has 2,011 ratings and 177 reviews. Keith said: I bought this book because I love the author's blog…_www.goodreads.com Managing Humans Not about meditations ;) Helps with self-discipline and a healthy attitude to life and people: _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has 25 ratings and 1 review. Deedra said: Not the exact book: Audible:The meditations of…_www.goodreads.com Meditations of Marcus Aurelius This is a must-read If you happen to know Russian: _45 Татуировок менеджера has 438 ratings and 54 reviews. ☘Misericordia☘ said: Q: I'd rather be judged by 12, than…_www.goodreads.com 45 Татуировок менеджера 💕 Winning hearts aka Interview process 🏟Understand your audience Answering direct questions is not enough, you have to understand who you are you talking to and their personal aspirations for the person trying to fulfil the role. There are three main groups: 🔼 Direct reports These are developers and potentially QA. These people are so you have to (I’m one of you guys) and give them an idea about your management style and agenda (I’m your shield). choosing their future boss sell your Hard Skills ◀️ Peers ▶️ These are leads of other teams including product managers and UI designers. These people are they will work with. At this stage, you have to equally sell your Soft Skills (My team will help you achieve your goals) and Hard Skills (I can assess the team and code if needed). choosing the facade of the team 🔽 Line manager Your boss is looking for a , your task is to understand who this person is and . by asking about in the team, the more info you can get the better chances of securing the position. very specific person if you are that person Reverse engineer this current challenges and problems 💌 Offer If you get an offer, it contains boring info about compensation and benefits, which is not what I want to talk about. The important bit is that unlike most of the coding positions you interviewed for, a management role implies that you are offered a certain , such knowledge rarely included in offers for developers since they are not expected to take strategic decisions. set of long-term challenges and problems before you joined 📈 Understanding expectations You will be in achieving these goals and fixing those problems, so if you are , it would be wise to . For example: if your management are performance freaks and don’t care about quality (or the other way around) then it’s a waste of time to join such a company. You have to . assessed by your progress indifferent to them pass on the offer be eager to fulfil a role 🎬 Action! Start from growing a leader within yourself and the title will follow up. Ray Kroc The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves - 🌟 Gratitudes Thank you to all the managers I had! Same gratitude goes to the ones too, because those bastards taught me what to do! good bad not Special thanks go to the most humble, helpful and inspiring manager I had — . Rafael López Diez And thank you for reading 👋

How to get a Team Lead job

My first software developer desk layout. I like cacti, and the scary dude is Attila the Hun! Hi! My name is Attila and I am a . I have intended to write this article purely about my coding journey, as the title may suggest. But then I changed my mind. While I identify professionally as a programmer, programming has given me much more than a job and a title. Programming has given me something much more than money, the respect of my peers and free drinks vouchers at the company party. Programming has given me something far more valuable. life-o-holic This — ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, aliens and superheroes — is the real story of reclaiming one’s life and it all starts with a dude, just off the boat — alone in Belfast with a suitcase and just enough money in his pocket to rent a room — yet full of hope and an almost naive conviction that few things are truly impossible. 16th of September 2012, Belfast. Truly alone. Not a single person in sight. This December I am 32 and 5 years ago things looked a whole lot different. I have no college degree. My parents couldn’t afford it, I couldn’t afford it, and 15 years ago in Eastern Europe student loans were not a thing yet. They are now, though I am not sure how many take advantage of it. Or whether they should or not. Suffice to say, if I had the opportunity to do so, I probably would have, and this would be a very different story, or none at all. Who knows? The only post-high-school education I received was a Cisco CCNA certification which I did in my home-town, , for the most part of 2011 and 2012. It was the first time I actually studied something I was interested in. I generally didn’t care much about school before. I was a good enough student, never failed at anything, but it always felt like a chore. And this is the first detour in my story … Arad Education sucks. Bigtime! Yup. I said it. Sue me for it. Never have I learned in school anything I wanted to. Schools back then and even today are often these institutions that force-feed useless shite to kids who either have no power to say no, or are too scared of saying no. Schools are an archaic data-pumping system into young minds that have no choice but to absorb it, and they do so not because they want to, or because they realise how useful it is, but because the human brain is instinctively absorbant and willing — craving to learn. And I wanted to learn. I was always a curious kid. Not about what other people did. Nah, I never gave a flying fudge about what other people were up to. Not enough to be curios about it anyway. But I was and still am curious about everything else from why a bicycle doesn’t fall over to why we poop after coffee, from programming languages to typography, from electronics to building materials and 3D printing, everything. There’s very few things I am not curious about, and that curiosity is what my educators never tapped into. “Your attitude towards maths is abominable… you’ll have to learn this stuff, or else you’ll fail!” Were the words of my maths teacher. Well, first of all, I had no attitude. She just wasn’t very good at explaining maths, so my staring at the black-board like I’ve never seen one before had nothing to do with attitude, but rather an incompatibility between my interests and her teaching style. To this day, I am not good at maths, but I am 100% certain, I could be if I sat down on my own and went through it all again. Secondly, fail at what? At maths? In high-school? And that’s going to have repercussions on the rest of my life how? Fail at life? Well, that’s rich coming from an underpaid maths teacher who today makes (Irish to Irish salary comparison) a little over just half of what I make a year. You could of course say — and I would agree — success is not measured in dollars or any other currency, but teachers never talk about that. Traditional education still correlates the amount you study with the amount of money you’re going to make, almost setting you up for failure because first of all, that’s a load of horse-manure, and secondly, once you realise how little you make, you’ll feel like a failure and humans are notoriously bad at dealing with failure in a constructive manner. And I can prove it, because I almost failed at life, and let me tell you how … You’re an uneducated, penniless, ugly bastard. That used to be my recurring mantra. The more often I thought of myself like that, the more I believed it. Jobs were scarce. I worked in a couple of factories after high-school, worked as a computer sales and repairs guy, worked in construction, publishing, as a teenager, did electrical wiring, cleaned butcher shops, packed frozen foods, did QA, worked as translator, children’s supervisor, editor, journalist, music critique, site and forum admin, you gotta admit, I’ve done a lot of things to keep myself afloat. I have never been unemployed, I always had the right attitude towards work and earning the money I wanted to spend. From the age of 12. Yet, I saw myself going nowhere, saving next to nothing because frankly none of these jobs paid well enough or provided a clear career-path back at home. Now, there’s plenty of you out there who’d probably tell others not to call themselves and in my humble opinion you’d be wrong to do so, because that’s exactly what got me thinking. My looks were not getting me anywhere and while Hungarian men — which I am — are famous as male porn actors, that’s definitely not a career I was planning to pursue, but realising that there’s very little going for me other than my own brain is an enlightening moment. With no money and arguably mediocre education, I realised if I am to change my future, it has to come from within. There is no one I can truly rely on, but myself, and well … as a Christian, on God, but the latter is neither Aladdin or some poor stranded magical gold-fish. It’s ultimately my decision to make something of what I have. “uneducated, penniless, ugly bastards” Become a life-long learner. Traditional education is finite, or at least that’s how most people advertise or perceive it. When I discovered , I quickly understood my potential to learn. I wasn’t yet sure where I was going, but it felt like the most amazing thing in the world to be able to learn something, retain that information and use it to create something that previously only existed in my imagination. I was writing C and PHP in NotePad. I made mistakes upon mistakes, and syntax that today seems so bloody obvious, back then looked only slightly more decipherable than Chinese. Harvard’s CS50 course freely available online But besides coding, I’ve also learned an important lesson. Learning is — at the end of the day — nothing more than satisfying one’s curiosity, therefore one should never really stop learning. Once I accepted the fact that I can be proud of my small successes, and feel competent about everything I already know, and focus on that instead of all the things I have yet to learn, I understood that my value as a human being and professional is only really relative to myself, to my yesterday’s self, and everything I did not yet know, was not to be perceived as incompetence but a challenge that I must tackle by tomorrow’s lessons. The moment I would decide I have studied enough, not only would I be shooting myself in the foot career-wise, but also as a human being. It is ludicrous to think that one’s education can ever end. Downright depressive. If we’re not continuously curious — be that about our surroundings, professional interests or anything else that would make us a better human being — then what’s the point of it all really? This is me. Take it or leave it. In Belfast I worked almost two years as a Nissan Brand Ambassador for Hungary. That’s code for customer service, but it never bothered me. I was one of the 3 Hungarian agents and whenever a Hungarian Nissan owner picked up the phone, they had a very good change they’d be greeted by my lovely personality on the other end. And to me, that was something. That was someone. Throughout my teenage life and early twenties I always found hard to identify with myself, so I’ve acted as someone I wanted to be, though without any real reasoning behind it. But by my mid-twenties I realised there’s one way and one way only to hack being good at life — to just be myself, and put that on the table, hence the philosophy. That can at times mean I am blunt, abrasive or inappropriately humorous, but I’ve always managed to find the people who either liked me the way I am, or managed to put up with it. “this is me, take it or leave it” Writer of codes, blogs and things that live on the web. Programming polyglot, pragmatic doer, member of the “taking care of business” crowd, with a no nonsense attitude. An easily inspired inspirational individual with a strong predilection towards most things nerdy, good, carnivorous food, and Lego. author. Uses a Mac. Runs at 6 a.m. HackerNoon That’s the description of myself on Quora, and I very much identify with it. One you manage to identify yourself the crowd, your life gets inevitably better, because you’ll just be happy with who that person is, or you’ll identify elements of your personality that might need improving. Not changing. Improving. The immigrant’s tragedy. My story started — more or less — in Belfast, Northern Ireland. From some people’s perspective I was a threat. I was there — apparently — to . I guess we could say that trying my luck abroad was instrumental in my success so far, but whether you believe it or not, having a good job somewhere doesn’t make it home and my leaving home at 25 was not fuelled so much by money than the need of finding myself, my home. “take our jobs and women” Often the assumption is made that the place you were born in should feel like home, and it is your home by default, but I would like to challenge that assumption as I never felt at home back in Romania. I love Romania, I love Hungary, but I didn’t necessarily feel like I belonged there. The downside to this is that inevitably throughout the years you make friends and you form connections that you know eventually die out in one way or another once you leave and find your own home, and your own place in the world. I am both a Romanian and Hungarian citizen This is something that so many people who never live in another country find difficult to understand — that immigration for some people is an existential need. My ability to grow as a professional and as a person was enhanced by the fact that I ended feeling at home in Ireland, and whether the Emerald Isle was prepared to adopt me or not, I don’t care, I’m stayin’ (in Dublin)! Have I lost anything along the way? Sure. All magic comes with a price. I lost a good portion of my friends, and some to this day refuse to understand my need to leave home. Distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, distance makes you look for company elsewhere, and while technology can help in sustaining friendships and relationships from afar, very few stand the test of time. Don’t ever give up on your dreams. While slowly loosing friends one by one from back home, and in between the pipe-bomb alerts and riots of Belfast, the dream to become a programmer — someone who creates things out of thin air — never faded. That attitude that I can achieve nearly anything if I really want to, stayed with me while I went through tons of , , , and courses. CodeSchool Treehouse Udacity Coursera Codecademy While I looked like a complete antisocial from the outside and have not seen the insides of a pub for two years, or dated anyone for three, I kept truckin’ with my studies and I kept feeling happier and happier. It suddenly didn’t matter how much money I had, or how I looked, inside I kept getting more and more confident about myself and life, so in 2014 I landed my first official web developer job. Full-stack no less… Looking back now, I was anything but full-stack except for the fact that I was interested and willing to stick my toes into anything web development related, be that on the front or back-end. I knew a little bit of everything, even languages like that to this day I’ve never had to use, but it was on the list and when you work for a startup, curious people tend to be appreciated. Chuck Working at a startup is an interesting and invaluable experience. Shoutout to for giving me the opportunity. In an type of startup you learn a lot. You learn a lot more than you thought yourself capable of. From coding, coding practices, agile methodologies, project management, ownership to and , everything! Andrew Gribben “anything goes” botanically brewed beverages great coffee In an environment like that you inevitably realise that dreams are not dreams. Dreams are dreams only as long as you never act upon them. Once you decide that your dream must become reality, there’s a very high chance it will become so. From (ex PurpleGuerrilla) to and now to it has been one heck of a journey. From the junior who got excited by jQuery’s event to the senior engineer pioneering web accessibility, progressive web apps and working with frameworks such as and , it has all been the most amazing time of my life and knowing myself, it can only get better! Geiger.io Synergy-Learning Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on(‘click’) Ionic Angular Have I hacked life? I’ve never really looked at it like this until I started writing this story, but I guess I did. Reading up on Myers Briggs personality types, finding that first free computer science course made available by Harvard and deciding that all my previous failed attempts at life are my fault and my fault only did open up the possibilities of attempting success from an entirely different angle. I’m no Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. I lack the former’s photographic memory and the latter’s predilection towards LSD, but on my stage I am the hero telling my TED story, and it’s a story that keeps getting better. The funny bit is, none of this is a secret to anyone. I am sharing with everyone I can, every time I meet someone who doesn’t quite know how to get from A to B, yet I still see so few people who go ahead do exactly that — follow their dreams, and it’s sad because the world would be a much better place if people would trade survival for living, the mundane for the exciting. And it all starts with one thought… “the recipe” Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! — Attila Vago writer of codes, blogs and things that live on the web. Programming polyglot, pragmatic doer, member of the “taking care of business” crowd, with a no nonsense attitude. An easily inspired inspirational individual with a strong predilection towards most things nerdy, good, carnivorous food, and Lego. Uses a Mac. Runs at 6 a.m. HackerNoon and Quora author.

A Programmer’s Journey — From Zero to Hero

Hint: It’s not in America or Europe. Earlier this week I watched an by about the rise of Asia’s silicon valley hotspot in in . amazing documentary Wired Shenzhen China This one small city, which came into prominence just two decades ago and doesn’t have a lot of history or culture of its own, is now the breeding ground for technology innovation in the East. Shenzhen is the crystal ball in which you can gaze at the future, even more than Silicon Valley. And the most fascinating thing about it is that this city breeds , not just software innovation. Any tech founder will tell you that hardware startups are 10x harder. Well guess what, Shenzhen sucker-punches that equation out of the ring altogether, and a very different equation plays out here — one that is not seen anywhere else on the planet. hardware innovation This article is about three things: What makes Shenzhen’s tech landscape formidable What makes it so damn brutal Why you should even if you don’t have anything to do with the place beware of Shenzhen Nitbit (in case you didn’t know): Over the last 25 years, Shenzhen has evolved from THIS: A bunch of fishing villages neglected by the world To : this The most modern city in Asia at the moment First the ‘formidable’ part Shenzhen is the colosseum where the strong find glory and success, while the weak find pain, blood and death. The competition is cruel and if you’re not quick and strong enough, you will be quickly forgotten after dying a plain, unceremonious death. But there’s also no better place to flex your muscles and level-up your game than Shenzhen. Shenzhen is formidable because of the insane opportunities it gives you for development, and how it makes you tougher. If you want to start a hardware company with a new product idea, Shenzhen shows three incredible traits which would make it irresistible for you: Speed Scale Help from clever people What do I mean by speed? Well, for starters you can find almost *any* hardware component you want, and build *any* product you can imagine, in a fraction of the time it would take you elsewhere. There’s an entire industry dedicated to make sure that if something takes you over a month to prototype in the USA or anywhere else, you can probably get it done in Shenzhen within a . week As for scale, it is obvious — the manufacturing hub of the East, man! For a medium- to high-tech product, Shenzhen (and nearby) is probably the first and last place in the world you would look to find a manufacturer. Thirdly, Shenzhen is a city full of tinkerers and hackers who love building things to solve problems. It is also actively working towards nailing the two remaining big factors that make it a hotbed for innovation — , and . You know, most of the common Chinese youth are not fond of taking big risks in their career. Being a young founder here is obviously considered more adventurous than opening a shop which fixes broken iPhones. courage to pursue original ideas empathy for the consumer startup And you know the stereotype of how Chinese products don’t last long and often have faults in their design, right? That’s what I mean when I say ‘empathy for the consumer’. If you care more about the customer’s delight than building something cheap which just , you can then start to create a lasting brand that people stick to (something championed by emerging companies like Xiaomi). works I’m sure you can see how Shenzhen is so . formidable Now, what makes the place is the crucial piece I haven’t mentioned yet — Robin Hood. brutal The Robin Hood Culture When the first big manufacturers came to Shenzhen, people who worked in those companies for years figured out that they could ‘borrow’ the technology and lessons, leave their company and start one of their own to compete with their employer. China doesn’t really enforce IP regulations —I suspect the reason is because they are anyways hard to enforce, and they prevent the mushrooming of clone companies that bring prices down and employ many more people than one monopolistic company ever can. THAT is the “new socialism” which I believe is prevalent in China. China isn’t a socialist country in the typical sense — heck, it has one of the most intense consumerist cultures I’ve ever seen. Instead, socialism takes shape in the idea of “only the government has the right to hold a monopoly on anything”. These companies helped add to the economic growth that China needed. Of course having strong IP rules help foster innovation — but in a culture where being too innovative/risk-taking has anyway been a taboo for many years, they don’t have to worry too much about discouraging innovators. So , it has been a level playing field between innovator and follower. legally speaking This ‘just borrowing the tech’ movement has been given the name of ‘ ’, originally synonymous with the phenomenon of imitating and producing counterfeit products. shanzhai Today, local people are instead calling it — saying that sharing is caring, and that when you release your knowledge and share it with everyone else, you are moving the whole plane forward. Some people in fact say they’re proud of having the ‘spirit’ of shanzhai, and consider tech companies like Apple as villainous corporations that gain monopolies on technology simply by being the first to file a patent. open source activism Now combine this with the previous factors. This means, while you can implement your ideas faster than anywhere else on Earth — so can your copycats. It is not uncommon for a hardware startup in Shenzhen to have a copycat in the city within just weeks of unveiling your product to the public — and it’s possible that both of you release the product to the market at the same time — and it’s even possible that the locals beat you to launch. Those clever bastards can look at your product in a , reverse-engineer your idea and produce their own version of it, maybe even at a cheaper price. video Don’t believe me? Take a look at this link: This is just one small example of things that HAPPEN. Furthermore, there’s no shortage of venture money in China, so if your idea is really worth a dime, your copycats won’t have any problems raising money either. Ha! So, how do you even survive in such an environment where you can’t differentiate your hardware product? Well, back to the basics of SOFTWARE startups! The battle here is not about who came up with the best ideas, it’s about execution. Agility, marketing and customer loyalty. Startups in Shenzhen have to innovate faster, target the right customers at the right price, and really double down on a great customer experience. Unless you build a brand, at least in Shenzhen your product will end up in a basket of 5 other imitations. And your little company could die a quick, sudden death. You can see examples of this excellent strategy at work all over the place. Consider Apple — considered a leader in branding. You know that you can buy an iPhone copycat, down to the last detail, for a fraction of the price? HOWEVER, Apple is still the most aspirational brand in China. People love their products, and they look down upon fake iPhones. Some folks have to buy the latest iPhone/iPad. literally sold kidneys This hardware philosophy is not limited to success in China You can see this happen in market. When you can’t compete based on the novelty or price or specs of your product, you just to build a brand. , arguably the most popular maker of headphones in the USA, can successfully sell its headphones for $199. Do you think that the headphones are somewhat super special? I don’t know for sure. But a reveals that its cost of production and shipping can easily be estimated to be less than $40. The reason is that the founders have used their personal connections and design philosophy to create a lasting brand in the same way as Apple has. any have Beats by Dr Dre comprehensive teardown of the headphones

The Gladiator Pit of Hardware Startups

About a year or so ago , namely how it has become pop culture over the years and then just a few weeks ago and how learning it or any JavaScript library or framework for that matter, should not be taken too lightly. Between then and now and that all tended to blast ice , I realised that being the funny “John Oliver” of the software industry while fun(ny) and therapeutic for both myself — the author — and you — the readers, it doesn’t exactly solve much, so this time I am going to attempt to still keep the humour but amp the helpfulness a couple notches. I released an article about coding another honest write-up about React a few other articles on software development trends Now, before I become all helpful and empathetic, let me make something very very clear. I am by no means a rockstar coder, or the next Chuck Norris of software development. The only time I resemble a rockstar is in the mornings with the shower-head in my hand singing along to Robbie Williams’ , while Chuck Norris… well, let’s just say there’s virtually nothing that I could do that he would be proud of. I just wanna feel real love I can barely keep myself on a treadmill… I’ve written my fair share of bugs… (ehm)… I mean software, and felt like banging my head against the wall occasionally on a daily basis. On that note: Dear parents, do not drop your children on their heads. Raise them to be software engineers and they’ll bang their heads against solid objects voluntarily. The way I see it, and this is purely based on first and second-hand experience, learning software development has a few basic rules. Similar to dating, you need to be in the right mindset, you must give it your best shot, but always keep an eye open for something better out there ( ), while never forgetting that safety comes first! Having said that, you must always show respect and dedication to the one you’re currently dating, and threesomes are generally discouraged — trust me, I know where I’m going with this! 😂 not saying there is, but there might be That’s more or less what my father taught me during the ten excruciatingly long and embarrassing minutes of relationship advice he ever gave me, and believe it or not, it applies perfectly to learning code and software development in general! And yes, it applies to hipsters, lumbersexuals (bearded, looks like a lumberjack, hard on the outside, soft on the inside) and millennials as well. Now, before I share the actual resources that I found to be both honest and valuable to you learning path, I think it’s worth mentioning a few tips. I should also mention that this article comes to be thanks to a request for help by . Thabo Pali Thanks, mate; hope you’ll find this useful. So, tips. Bear with me, I’ll try to be brief. If you’ve got itchy fingers I suggest you purchase some E45 cream 😜 or, alternatively, scroll to the penultimate section of this article and see if that helps. Disclaimer: if you genuinely have itchy fingers, scrolling won’t help. See a doctor. Avoid Information Overload I get it. You want to learn a lot in the space of as little time as possible, and everyone out there seems to want to tap into the unrealistic expectation that one can learn a lot in next to no time. That’s a lie and it will only set you up for failure, and not the good kind. Learn as much as you can, and take as much time as you need. The moment you feel your brain stops , you need to distract yourself and do something else. Funnily enough, that doesn’t necessarily mean, you need to stop learning. You can try learning something that has nothing to do with what you were studying previously, and activate other neural networks in your brain. Picking up those guitar lessons where you left them off five years ago, might be just the thing you need! “getting it” Failure is Achievement in Disguise Speaking of failure, one must understand that failure in programming can be intricate path to success. While calling programming computer science is maybe a bit pretentious, for argument’s sake humour me and think of it as science and remind yourself of all the scientists who have solved major hurdles throughout history. Sometimes there is a , but often it comes down to trial and error, see what works and see what doesn’t. So your code fails to compile or WebPack is throwing yet another error? It’s fine. You’ll debug it, you’ll fix it, someone else might help you, and voila — you’ve learnt something. If I’d be hiring someone for a software development job, I would spend half the time talking about errors they’ve encountered and mistakes they’ve made in the past. I wouldn’t trust an engineer who never had to fix their mistakes. “quick win” Have a Goal, a Vision Nothing creates more passion and dedication than having a goal or a vision. Why are you even reading this article? Why is it that you’re interested in honest, well developed learning materials? If you cannot answer that, maybe you shouldn’t even bother getting into it all. I always wanted to build, create. Something out of thin air. It’s the God complex within me that I fulfil every day by writing code. What’s your goal? Avoid the Hype The internet is a great place. In fact, thanks to the internet I can fulfil my passion, I was able to learn on my own, overcome the financial barriers of higher education, but the internet is also an extremely crowded space of freely available information. Because there is so much of it freely available, it’s also poorly curated which will lead you to stumble upon various personal views on software development all the time. Language, library and framework evangelists are popping out of the woodworks like mushrooms after a rain. Today it’s React, tomorrow it’s Riot and the day after tomorrow they’re maybe back to Vue and Laravel and it goes on and on. It’s mostly noise. I am not saying ignore it all completely. Sure, take note of what’s happening around you, but there’s a time for learning, and there’s a time for discovery and dabbling, and they tend not to coincide. Itchy Fingers, Stop Here! So, this is it. This is where I provide you with a few resources that I have tried, enjoyed and learned a lot from. I am absolutely certain there’s more out there, and you’re welcome to comment with a link, and I’ll add them as recommendations from you. The basics done well Before you dive into any of the below courses, I would like to recommend you to take a step back and understand what you’re actually trying to attempt: build web applications — in this particular case with JavaScript. Not sure how to put this in any other way than first. “Learn the f%$*ing language!” Be that React, Angular, PWA, build tools, Node or whatever else, at the end of the day you are writing JavaScript and that’s what you should really learn, but it turns out that JavaScript just like the Tardis, it’s and there’s heck of a lot more to it than variables and if statements. So much more that I started putting together a Medium Series called because the best way to learn is by doing and sharing. “bigger on the inside” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Modern Javascript Disclaimer: most of the links below will take you to premium Udemy courses. I do not get anything out of you clicking or potentially purchasing them. This is not a promotion or marketing piece, I do NOT get paid to recommend these courses , and I only recommend those I’ve taken myself and found genuinely useful and good value for money. On that note, here’s two very good JavaScript courses, both meant to get you started and up there with the best of the best: The Complete JavaScript Course JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts Library: By far the best React course While I am a huge Udemy fan, this course is actually not offered by the platform as it’s a privately owned set of learning materials. is by far the best online course I have ever taken. It simply gets the message through in such an efficient way that by the end of it you’ll actually feel confident enough to build your own React app, and that, after less than a week of learning. It won’t make you a react guru or expert, but it gets you very far, and certainly far enough to not have an impostor syndrome after putting React on your CV. React For Beginners Testing: An absolutely jaw-dropping testing course Feminists will love the fact that this course was done by a lady, but feminism or not aside, she really does a good job at explaining . It’s also modular, you can learn sections that you need when you need. There’s also other bits you’ll pick up like writing in-the-code documentation and a neat trick to your tests using the attribute, enforcing the philosophy of testing the behaviour rather than the implementation. React Testing with Jest and Enzyme data-test Building: WebPack v4 in all its glory I took this course because I had a grunt / gulp background and I found myself having to poke around WebPack without having too much of a clue what its potential was and how to properly use it. Turns out, it’s an amazing tool and knowing how to use it, is a skill most definitely worth picking up. Build automation has never looked sexier and the course does justice to it. Cutting Edge: The most comprehensive PWA course out there Max — the instructor — is by far my favourite. I’ve part done an Ionic course from him in the past, but it’s only when I plowed myself through this massive that I understood the true genius of his teaching methods. PWAs are amazing, but in many ways they bring stuff to the web development world that simply wasn’t there at all before, and therefore it’s hard to compare or build on previous iterations of knowing something. This course is enlightening to say the least, and also incredibly empowering and inspiring. It takes a real teacher to make you believe in something you learn, and this course does that. PWAs are definitely the future! Progressive Web App course Before You GoGo… My father needed ten, I only need a couple minutes with you to talk about relationships. Yup, we’re back to that uncomfortable bit about threesomes, using protection and how it all relates to software development. Because it really does. When picking up something new you’re ready to learn, you must . It might work out, it might not, but do put in the effort while not being completely oblivious to what else is out there. Say you’re great at Angular, which is fantastic because you’ve put a lot of effort into it, but honest to God, sometimes it’s just not the right tool for the job, so it’s good to know what else is out there so that you can pick up the appropriate skillset for the right task. give it your best shot While you’re in awe of one library and another framework, do keep in mind that eventually that code goes live, to production and testing is important to and keeping your users safe while using your application. Brittle tests, shoddy security measures, poor file versioning can all land you into a hell you’ll find very difficult to climb out of. keep your app running safely If you’re working with an opinionated framework or library, try and respect its boundaries and rules. Yes, there’s an Angular way of doing things, and it’s there for a reason, and yes you must use a stateless React component if you’ve no state in it, because it’s better for your app and fellow developers. Show respect to the tool you are working with, and stop bastardising it into something else. Finally… threesomes. Not everything works with everything else. Sure, a lot of things work with a lot of other things. is an example of something that technically can be done and works, but most often shouldn’t. We have technology stacks and they’re there for a reason. NgReact And NOW you GoGo — Attila Vago writer of codes, blogs and things that live on the web. Programming polyglot, pragmatic doer, member of the “taking care of business” crowd, with a no nonsense attitude. An easily inspired inspirational individual with a strong predilection towards most things nerdy, good, carnivorous food, and Lego. Uses a Mac. Exercises at 6 a.m. HackerNoon and Quora author.

The Millennial’s Guide to Software Development

Sometimes, it’s kind of interesting to know the origins of the products/projects we love. I made a collection of such products/projects and the stories of how they got their name. JavaScript (Programming language) From an made to its creator : interview Brendan Eich InfoWorld: As I understand it, JavaScript started out as Mocha, then became LiveScript and then became JavaScript when Netscape and Sun got together. But it actually has nothing to do with Java or not much to do with it, correct? Eich: That’s right. It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language. MySQL (Database management system) is one of the founder of MySQL and one of his daughter's name is My(after whom MySQL was named). Michael "Monty" Widenius Git (Version control system) Linus Torvalds (Developer of Git) has quipped about the name git, which is British English slang for a stupid or unpleasant person. Torvalds said: "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'.The man page describes git as "the stupid content tracker". Ubuntu (Operation system) The OS was named after the Southern African philosophy of (literally, 'human-ness'), which Canonical Ltd. suggests can be loosely translated as "humanity to others" or "I am what I am because of who we all are". ubuntu Java (Programming language) The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside James Gosling(Developer of Java)'s office. Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from . Java coffee Python (Programming language) In (Developer of Python)'s own words: Van Rossum " " In December 1989, I was looking for a "hobby" programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas. My office ... would be closed, but I had a home computer, and not much else on my hands. I decided to write an interpreter for the new scripting language I had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix/C hackers. I chose Python as a working title for the project, being in a slightly irreverent mood (and a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus). Ruby (Programming language) The name "Ruby" originated during an online chat session between Yukihiro Matsumoto (Developer of Ruby) and Keiju Ishitsuka on February 24, 1993, before any code had been written for the language. Initially two names were proposed: "Coral" and "Ruby". Matsumoto chose the latter in a later e-mail to Ishitsuka. Matsumoto later noted a factor in choosing the name "Ruby" – it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues. when name was decided and email they've shared. The original conversation was in Japanese. Translated chat Scala (Programming language) The name Scala is a portmanteau of scalable and language, signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users. Django (Python frmaework) The framework was named after guitarist . Django Reinhardt Chrome (Browser) An answer from Glen Murphy, Design Lead, Google Chrome on asking "How Chrome gets its name?". In his words, " " We had a ‘pick a codename’ vote early in the development cycle – the names that came of that competition were so terrible that we were all pretty happy when one of the leads overrode it and declared that the codename would be ‘Chrome’, presumably because he likes fast cars. Mozilla (Company) The history of the name Mozilla goes all the way back to the internal codename for the original 1994 Netscape Navigator browser, with the name meaning "Mosaic killer" and aiming to some similarity with the building-crushing , as the company's goal was to displace as the world's number one web browser. The name Mozilla was revived as the 1998 open sourcing spinoff organization from Netscape. Godzilla NCSA Mosaic Firefox (Browser) The name "Firefox" (a reference to the ) was chosen by Mozilla for its similarity to "Firebird" (which was the former name of Firefox), but also for its uniqueness in the computing industry. red panda Laravel (PHP Framework) " " — (Creator of Laravel) When trying to think of names, I thought about the geography of Tolkien's Middle Earth and C.S. Lewis' Narnia. In Narnia, Cair Paravel is the name of the castle where the kings and queens of Narnia live. Laravel rhymes with Paravel. I thought the name had a classy and sophisticated ring to it. Taylor Otwell Hadoop (Open source big data software) The name Hadoop is not an acronym; it’s a made-up name. The project’s creator, , explains how the name came about: Doug Cutting “ ” The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria. Kids are good at generating such. Googol is a kid’s term. Skype (Instant messaging app) The name for the is derived from "Sky peer-to-peer", which was then abbreviated to "Skyper". However, some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken. Dropping the final "r" left the current title "Skype", for which domain names were available. software Adobe (Company) The name Adobe was derived from Adobe Creek, a river or creek that ran behind the house of John Warnock, one of the founders. But where is Adobe Creek? It's located in Los Altos, California. Apache (Software foundation) According to the FAQ in the Apache project website, the name Apache was chosen out of respect to the Native American tribe and their superior skills in warfare and strategy. The name was widely believed to be a pun on 'A Patchy Server' (since it was a set of software patches). Apache Leave such stories in the comment section if you know about one.

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