Book author Azat Mardan writes about apps, startups and technology
This is a continuation of 10 Habits of Highly Effective Programmers which I wrote a few weeks ago. Here are 10 more habits. They are not set in stone but that’s what I saw work really well if you want to become a great developer and enjoy your work and career (be great first to get a great job).
Continue reading “10 Habits of Highly Effective Programmers—Part II”
My musings on why it might be the time to start looking for a new profession if you are a software engineer?
You know how in the early 20th century pilots were like heroes? It was extremely dangerous to fly planes which were highly unreliable. Most of the time, only true adventures would learn how to fly a plane and become a pilot.
Then, fast forward 50 years and during 1950s, we started to have first commercial flights. It was still prestigious to become a pilot. If you remember, Catch Me If You Can, the villain played by Leo DiCaprio used pilot’s uniform to instill more trust in other people so he can cash fake checks.
In the 21th century, most airlines don’t make much money and they operate on a slim margin. The pilot’s job has become a commodity: there are a lot of schools and you need to study many years to become a pilot, but you get paid not that much more money than a bus driver. Autopilot is doing most of the flying except for landing and take offs. Airlines constantly merge and layoff their staff. Most of the times the attire is not as sharp as we see on pilots in movies, old newspapers and posters.
I believe almost every profession or trade undergoes a few cycles not dissimilar to the famous adoption curve. There are five steps, but I’ll simplify it to just three:
After the third phase, the profession become a commodity. It’s not necessarily a disaster for people in this trade, but it’s certainly not a rarity. Then, the profession can event disappear completely! I’m sure you can come up with some examples that disprove my little theory, but before you do so, let’s take a look at programming.
Today is exactly one year and ten days since I started my work as a Technology Fellow at fintech startup Capital One. Yes, I wrote before while you shouldn’t work in a startup, and I still believe in it, because Capital One is not a startup in a traditional sense. On the contrary, it’s in the top 10 US banks list as of 2016. Let me explain myself.
Continue reading “One Year with Capital One: Lessons Learned”
Typing is everywhere right now. We type for work in emails and on IM clients, we type for personal relationships on Facebook (when was the last time you spoke with a friend on a phone?), and we type to have fun in Whatsapp or iMessages. Then of course, we code in editors and IDEs, and type commands in shells.
Imagine that you woke up tomorrow and weren’t able to use your keyboard. Maybe you would have broken both of your wrists skiing… Terrible, right? Even if you don’t write books or blog posts like I do, typing on a keyboard is how most of us live. And touch screen typing and voice dictation take only small roles. Let me tell you why you might be in danger of losing your ability to type and maybe even close to losing your job, career and relationships.
React is a fun little library for User Interfaces. You can use it for web, or mobile development. It’s fun because it’s very developer-friendly. You write your code in the same place without having to switch between HTML and JavaScript files.
I’ve heard many times people complaining about React’s favorite syntax JSX. I found it great, after I spent a few hours learning and coding with it. Contrary to what people unfamiliar with React think, JSX is not HTML in JavaScript. JSX is just an XML-like syntax which produces JavaScript. There’s not HTML involved at this step. When you develop with React, you write JavaScript objects. Later React automagically transforms those object into rendered HTML.
Also, React is very fast due to its virtual DOM and smart diffing algorithm. And React’s component approach to architecture allows for great development scalability. Just ask Facebook, Twitter, Slack and other companies with large web apps.
Furthermore, you can use React with React Native to create native iOS and Android apps. These apps can share the same code. It’s not the same as the so called hybrid or HTML5 apps. The latter are websites trapped into a headless browser in a mobile app. The former is a real native app which uses JavaScript interface for it’s UIs and logic.
Hey, you can even use live reloading when developing apps with React Native. Pure joy! The feature native mobile developers can only dream of! “React is fun, but show me the money”— you can yell. Fair enough.
Nathan made tons of money on apps and books. I had the privilege to meet with Nathan at Gumroad events and at the Pioneer Nation conference. He’s cool.
I’m about to give you, my fellow knowledge worker, some amazing advice that can greatly improve your enjoyment of the work week, make you more productive, get you a promotion or a date (if you’re single)! Yeah, that’s right! All those things, and all you need is spend two minutes glancing over this article. :-)
Here are my ten predictions for 2015. Most of them probably will be incorrect. Yes. I’m seldom right, but I’m never without an opinion.
What are your thoughts about my predictions? What are you predictions for 2015?
Guest blogging is writing a post on someone else’s blog. It’s a good way to get new readers and engage in a new community. For new bloggers, it’s a good way to get attention to your own blog.
Michael Hyatt, whose book Platform I’m reading now, emphases this point. Other prominent bloggers, such as Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki, state it as well. Moreover, for readers it provide a new perspective and variety.
I decided to offer other people to write on Webapplog.com. Send me your ideas to my email hi (at) azat (dot) co.
If you need a simple website for your project, then use GitHub pages. It’s free and better than cheap $4.99/mo hosting, which can be easily hacked, is slow and requires you to use cPanel.
Here’s what you’ll need to get your website up and running:
I use this technique for my 10+ websites, some of them quite fancy:
There’s no need for WordPress or PHP. GitHub Pages is free and it is faster than BlueHost.
The site must be static only without any PHP, Node.js or any other server-side logic. You can use foxyform or EmailMeForm for contact forms, and Gumroad for sales. For blogs, you can use Wintersmith or Jekyll.
How do you log you Node.js server port number?
One of The Foundation members asked in forum, “How do I find a good developer?”. I was glad to help, but then I thought that others might benefit from this advice so I answered it via a post.
The best thing is to work on something small first. This way you’ll test the waters before putting a major project under risk. This might include a test or a real, but small task, (preferably outside of the main project) like writing a bookmarklet or a scrapper.
Continue reading “Guide to Hiring Your First Developer for Non-Techies”
There is no such thing as a job security. You can trust my word on this, because I worked for one of the most stable employers in the world, the U.S. federal government, during 2007–2008, and had seen a lot of bright software engineers, analysts, technical writers, quality assurance engineers, and project managers let go due to the market downturn and budget cuts. Startups and private corporations are even more brutal. They won’t even give you a two-week notice! I know of a company that fired its lead software engineer with just ONE hour of notice… poor fellow didn’t expect it at all when he was coming to work in the morning just to go back home for the rest of the day right away!
If you do something for a living every day (i.e., you have a job) you have two choices:
So everything is better if we automatically make progress, right? Not quite, because when we make progress, other people (including bosses) start to notice, and they then give/bring/order more of the same work—not a new type of work. Usually it’s the same stuff you’ve been doing already (and for the same money), because management doesn’t want to lose a good producer. I call this punishment for becoming better.
It’s not a secret that the topic of CoffeeScript is controversial to say the least. Many reputable JavaScript and Node.js developers just hate CoffeeScript, but there are lessons we can all learn from its good parts! However, many developers just won’t go back to plain JavaScript after building something relatively serious with CoffeeScript.
The much-needed Introduction to OAuth with Node.js mini-book is released!
Get your PDF, EPUB, MOBI copy here –> gum.co/hRyc…
or sign up for Node.js and JavaScript Mastery Online here.
The online bundle has five (5!) books. Here’s the list of available books. It’s a $50+ value for only $4.87/mo.
If you read all the books in less than a month—great! Just cancel the subscription. But most readers prefer to keep it just so they have a handy reference when they need it.
The Introduction to OAuth book includes:
A typical modern web applications has to communicate with other services. Even if it’s your own service or application. This is usually done via an open standard for authorization or OAuth. Therefore, the ability to use OAuth in your work is paramount!
There are standards, specifications and fancy diagrams, and it’s useful to read them as the first step. However, developers often need hands-on experience to acquire the full understanding and confidence.
Introduction to OAuth in Node.js is a concise practical book that will help you to get started with OAuth 1.0, 2.0, Echo and implement a Sign in with Node.js using Twitter API (and hopefully any other) authentication.
We’ll go through the three main authentication methods utilizing minimalistic oauth module to explain basics, then use extensive everyauth with an Express.js app.
Get your PDF, EPUB, MOBI copy here –> gum.co/hRyc…
or sign up for Node.js and JavaScript Mastery Online here.
A quick update about ProgWriter: the manuscript is about 71% done!
Inspired by 5 Things You Should Stop Doing With jQuery by Burke Holland, I decided to open a discussion and highlight seven things you should immediately stop doing with Node.js:
* for versionsconsole.log for debuggingGET and POST for everythingmaxSockets valueContinue reading “Seven Things You Should Stop Doing with Node.js”
CoffeeScript is a solution without the problem.
— Unknown ironic source.
CoffeeScript is awesome, until it’s totally confusing, and it’s illogical, which can lead to unexpected and subtle bugs. If you’re one of the CoffeeScript haters please skip this post; for others, I’ll share a few notes on the CS quirks that I’ve observed.
For example, let’s say we have a counter and need to assign a value of index subtracted by one to it:
numberOfRadios = index -1
But the line above is not the same as:
numberOfRadios = index - 1
Did you notice that there’s a space after the minus sign in the second example? It took me awhile to track down this type of bug. The reason for this behavior is that the first line will be converted by the compiler to the function invocation and that is probably not what you wanted.
Try the minus one snippet on CoffeeScript.org. It outputs the following JavaScript code:
var numberOfRadios;
numberOfRadios = index(-1);
numberOfRadios = index - 1;
Another pitfall, that leads to writing despondently inconsistent code (by us developers), is caused by the fact that parentheses are optional for function calls.
This example involves if conditions in which we want to compare the value of the expression model.get() or the operand typeof to some strings:
a() if @model.get 'groupType' is 'radioGroupTabs'
a() if typeof @model.get 'condition' is 'function'
CoffeeScript is treating the entire thing as an argument and the results are pathetic. Duh. ;-( Here is the native JavaScript code:
if (this.model.get('groupType' === 'radioGroupTabs')) {
a();
}
if (typeof this.model.get('condition' === 'function')) {
a();
}
Placing parens over the function still does us no good. Look at this CoffeeScript code:
a() if @model.get ('groupType') is 'radioGroupTabs'
And its JavaScript output:
if (this.model.get('groupType' === 'radioGroupTabs')) {
a();
}
The workaround involves using () around function calls, or flipping the order in the if statement so that the function invocation is the last bit of code in the if statement:
a() if (typeof @model.get 'condition') is 'function'
a() if 'function' is typeof @model.get 'condition'
a() if (@model.get 'groupType') is 'radioGroupTabs'
a() if 'radioGroupTabs' is @model.get ('groupType')
The code above compiles to what we wanted originally:
if ((typeof this.model.get('condition')) === 'function') {
a();
}
if ('function' === typeof this.model.get('condition')) {
a();
}
if ((this.model.get('groupType')) === 'radioGroupTabs') {
a();
}
if ('radioGroupTabs' === this.model.get('groupType')) {
a();
Is it all good now? Not really, because I personally think this approach leads to inconsistencies: parts of CoffeeScript code that must have parentheses, while in other places they are optional.
Try these if conditon snippets yourself on CoffeeScript.org.
The next note explains the most common beginner’s mistake in CoffeeScript; that is to use an a instead of an a() for function calls. However, super inside of a class, must be called without parentheses in order to pass the arguments to it.
Moving on to the single hash (#) comments which are just skipped over by CoffeeScript. Again, this can lead to unexpected consequences.
For example, a straightforward if statement has a few lines of code:
unless A
b()
blah blah
But if we comment out all of the lines inside of if, the whole thing will fail miserably at the compilation step (at least thank you for that, CoffeeScript!):
unless A
# b()
# blah blah
Just by adding an empty else we can mitigate the failure:
unless A
# b()
# blah blah
else
c() # the code continues here
Try this snippet yourself on CoffeeScript.org
Last but not least, there is another CoffeeScript pitfall related to jQuery events that don’t propagate when the event handler returns false. Of course, CoffeeScript philosophy makes every function an expression (the last statement is evaluated if there is no return statement present).
b = ()->
false # usually this result is less obvious and buried deep down in code
$a = $ 'input'
$a.click ()->
console.log 'this happens all right'
b()
$a.parent().click ()->
console.log('this never happened')
Of course, in real life the b() function is not so obvious and it’s buried somewhere deep within Backbone and Angular model methods. And the event isn’t propagating up the DOM tree (return false). Therefore, we’ve lost the second event handler without even realizing t. Buyers beware of this elusiveness! :-)
Try the event propagation bug yourself on CoffeeScript.org
This is the end of my list. If you know of any additional CoffeeScript idiosyncrasies, please send them my way. :-)
Further CoffeeScript reading:
This is the story about how I got my first publishing deal, what this book is about, and what problems I encountered along the way.
TL;DR: This is the story about how I got my first publishing deal, what this book is about, and what problems I encountered along the way.
I spent last weekend sitting in an awesome new coffee shop in Oakland, typing up the last two chapters of my Practical Node.js manuscript. The book is scheduled for release by the UK-based technical publisher Apress in the late spring.
I started writing the manuscript in October 2013. I devoted my weekends and holidays to it (as so many entrepreneurs and writers do). The fact that I smartly had a few example apps and some drafts written — some of them for my blog, others for proposals to Pragmatic (declined!) — helped to speed things up. (Needless to say, in publishing rejection is a common thing and often an opportunity to get better.) However, the writing itself wasn’t the hardest part. Here’s the short story why.
Continue reading “Getting Published as a Programmer: The Practical Node.js Story”
