teleren/devto huggingface dataset:
The true story of how I got my first job
Tags: career, beginners, programming, discuss
Published: 2019-07-14 08:14:15

---
title: The true story of how I got my first job
published: true
description: 
tags: #career #beginner #programming #discuss
cover_image: https://codingmindfully.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ZXSpectrum48k.jpg
---

I was recounting this story to some folks in my office the other day - we were talking about our pathways into programming. 

Even though I've written code for a long time, I didn't know I wanted to be a developer until I had to get my first job. 

(In fact, it took me a while after getting the job to realise that it was something I wanted to do... but I digress). 


Having given up on the idea of doing a Physics PhD (a decision I'm still happy about), I took a Master's in High Performance Computing that finished in 2001. It was kind of the middle of the dot-com crash, but people were still hiring anyone who could program like crazy. 

As the end of my Masters approached, I started Googling around for software companies to approach (Google was maybe, like 3 years old back then? Linkedin was waaaaaay off). 

I found my way on to a site that was kind of like a classified section for the software industry in Ireland. A random selection of ads for products, services and companies. 

There appeared to be a Login button at the top. I clicked it, and was presented with a form.

In my naivete, I tried to log in.

Username: test
Password: test

....

well whatdy'a know! I'm in! 

I was presented with an interface that allowed me to create an ad. So I did! I advertised myself as a graduate programmer available for hire.

Two days later I get a call. It's from the guys who ran the website wondering how I placed the ad...

They were pretty interested to find out! For some reason, they wanted to talk to me about offering me a job. 

Perhaps, knowing what I did about their "security", I shouldn't have accepted. But that's another story...


How about you?
Please take a moment to help.
Tags: help
Published: 2019-07-14 06:50:53

Hello, good people. Please tell me the idea. How can I implement sms-parenting alerts? The idea to set up GPS in school and in the hands of children there is a smart watch and when they enter the GPS zone, messages are sent to parents that the child is in school. And when they leave the zone, then the SMS that they are gone. PS I apologize if there are errors in the text, I am weak in English.
#Should We Move To Flutter From React Native.
Tags: discuss, reactnative, flutter
Published: 2019-07-14 06:29:28

---
title: #Should We Move To Flutter From React Native.
published: true


tags: discuss, react-native, Flutter


--- 
My company tech board is recently talking about flutter. it shows great promises . But Most of the developer are JS based. We are currently working on React Native. React Native Development is always filled with bugs and we struggle heavily sometime.
The Strategic Advantages of Headless Web Design
Published: 2019-10-21 18:52:44

---
title: The Strategic Advantages of Headless Web Design
published: true
date: 2019-07-14 05:00:00 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://stolley.dev/linked/the-strategic-advantages-of-headless-web-design/
---

Gal Shachar is offering the hard sell on headless content management systems:

> A truly headless CMS eliminates the head portion altogether, leaving just the back end. In other words, there’s no dedicated system for front-end presentation. And while you might initially wonder if this type of structure might be to your disadvantage, it’s actually the best way to display content to your site visitors on all devices and interfaces, putting your agency in the best possible position to scale.

A good overview of alternative CMS-oriented web strategies. But headless introduces new problems for content wholly decoupled from the web. HTML has a job to do, and it does it well.
I have HTML templates my team uses, can I build a WYSIWYG over the top? How do I inject content into the body of a HTML template
Tags: help, html, webdev
Published: 2019-07-14 03:39:57

Not exactly webdev, but I've built a HTML/CSS template that my team drops into reporting dashboards we create.

Because I thought HTML was very easy I just built documentation that just said "if you want to change the title, change the H1 on line 46" or if you want to add an extra list do this or extra paragraph do that.

However my users are struggling to get their heads around what they need to change in the HTML template to customize it to there needs.

I was wondering if there is a way to built a WYSIWYG where my users can write the content they need to display  and then it just injects that content into the body of my template allowing them to copy the final code into their dashboards.

If you have any other suggestions short of excel macros (yes that was suggested) let me know.

Thanks in advance
Response: Have you ever felt completely helpless when facing down a coding problem?
Tags: discuss, career, health, help
Published: 2019-07-14 03:28:03

Original Post: https://dev.to/ben/have-you-ever-felt-completely-helpless-when-facing-down-a-coding-problem-5gad

**TL;DR Yes, it still happens on occasion. Especially when I am not in control of the dependency or surrounding issues of the problem at work. Be there for each other along this marathon journey.**

  Helplessness or imposter syndrome tended to happen far more often while I was at the coding Bootcamp. Even surrounded by hundreds of other learners going through the same struggle, even with all those people right next to you in the huge open space; tons of students, mentors, teachers and teacher assistants all around you... Yet I would still at times feel helpless, all the help you could ask for literally physically there for you and you still would feel alone and lost, sometimes convinced you can never do it. 

   Long story short tenacity and overcoming self-doubt with self-motivation (wherever you can get it from) was key to pressing forward. No matter how bad things got, no matter how hard, no matter the imposter syndrome... You Push Through! Let those support systems help you, let those friends and family tell you, you can do it regardless of how tired of hearing you think you are, let those mentors and teachers walk you through thinking models and processes, step by baby step.

   Let's be here for each other, in our toughest moments, even if it's a whiteboarding practice problem or an enterprise level production defect.
Frontend newbie :)
Tags: frontend, css, html, javascript
Published: 2019-07-14 00:04:48

Hi everyone, i'm new to the web development scene and i've currently picked up a thing or two on html and css (just the fundamentals) and making my way to javascript. I'd like to be a frontend developer. I'm open to suggestions, tips or advice generally, on this frontend path and any other relevant info you may have.
Back from useR! 2019
Tags: rstats, r
Published: 2019-07-17 06:36:44

---
title: Back from useR! 2019
published: true
tags: #RStats #r 
canonical_url: https://colinfay.me/back-from-toulouse/
---

I’m back from useR! 2019!, Toulouse, where I gave one talk and aworkshop. Here are the links to the materials.

## 2019-07-08

### Contributing to the R ecosystem

> useR! newbie session

A short talk about things you can do as a beginner to contibute to the Recosystem.

Slides: [https://speakerdeck.com/colinfay/contributing-to-the-r-ecosystem](https://speakerdeck.com/colinfay/contributing-to-the-r-ecosystem)

## 2019-07-09

### Hacking RStudio: Advanced Use of your Favorite IDE

> useR! Workshop session

_Have you ever wanted to become more productive with RStudio? Then thisworkshop is made for you!_

_You’ve been wandering the web for a while now, reading about all thethings the cool kids do with RStudio: building addins, using projecttemplates, managing connections, playing around with the rstudioapipackage… All this seems pretty nifty but so far you have never find thetime to sit down and learn how to master these skills. Then, you’ve cometo the right place — this workshop will teach you how to push theboundaries of your basic RStudio usage, in order to become moreefficient in your day to day usage of RStudio._

Slides: [https://speakerdeck.com/colinfay/hacking-rstudio-advanced-use-of-your-favorite-ide](https://speakerdeck.com/colinfay/hacking-rstudio-advanced-use-of-your-favorite-ide)

Repo [https://github.com/ColinFay/user2019workshop](https://github.com/ColinFay/user2019workshop)

Example of answers to the exercises [https://github.com/ColinFay/user2019workshop/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/ColinFay/user2019workshop/tree/master/examples)
Gatsby Config Plugin Syntax
Tags: beginners, gatsby, config
Published: 2019-07-18 16:39:17

---
title: Gatsby Config Plugin Syntax
published: true
tags: beginner, gatsby, config
canonical_url: https://stephencharlesweiss.com//2019-07-14/gatsby-config-plugin-syntax/
---

I often struggle with the syntax of config files. What are resolvers? How do options work? etc.

As a result, while making my way through Jason Lengstorf’s Introduction to Gatsby on Frontend Masters, I found the following interesting¹:

Within my `gatsby-config.js` file in the root of a Gatsby project, I have two plugins:

```
module.exports = {
	...
  plugins: ['gatsby-plugin-emotion', 'gatsby-plugin-react-helmet']
  ...
}
```

That, however, is functionally equivalent to:

```
module.exports = {
	...
  plugins: [{resolve: 'gatsby-plugin-emotion' }, {resolve: 'gatsby-plugin-react-helmet'}]
  ...
}
```

The former is just shorthand because for those, I didn’t need to add any configuration. What happens if I install a plugin that _does_ require more detail about how it will be used? That’s where the fact that writing just `gatsby-plugin-emotion` is shorthand for an object starts to matter.

Using the `gatsby-mdx` as an example, we can see this in practice:

```
module.exports = {
  ...
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-mdx',
      options: {
        defaultLayouts: {
          default: require.resolve('./src/components/layout.js'),
        },
      },
    },
  ],
  ...
};
```

What this is saying is that for any `mdx` files that I load, the files will be loaded into the layout template I defined in our `src/components/layout.js`.

There’s still the question of what options the `gatsby-mdx` will accept. For that, the docs are quite helpful in specifying the configuration options.²

Resources:

- ¹ [Learn Gatsby with Jason Lengstorf | Frontend Masters](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/gatsby/)
- ² [gatsby-plugin-mdx#configuration | Github](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/tree/master/packages/gatsby-plugin-mdx#configuration)
Where are you from?
Tags: watercooler
Published: 2019-07-13 23:27:07

[Dev.to](http://dev.to) has attracted tech-centric people from all around the world, of that I'm sure.

Share with us (if you're comfortable), where you're currently residing and what the tech scene is like there!

I'll kick it off, I live and work in London. I'm part of the tech scene in multiple ways, and the thing which I love about London is that there's constantly meetups and conferences happening that I can go to, learn new things and meet new people.
What are your best tips for writing technical blog posts?
Tags: writing, productivity, beginners, discuss
Published: 2019-07-13 22:51:53

Especially targeted at those new to writing technical blog posts, but any tips are welcome. Exactly as the title implies:

What are your best tips for writing technical blog posts?

Ranging from just talking about tech, to programming tutorials, to code-heavy posts.

For me, the main tip is to just write. If you are stuck on a part of a post, write a note stating what you may want there and write the next part. The other is to write an outline.

What helps you write well and get them done?
The Passport, Express and Cookie-Session dilemma.
Tags: passport
Published: 2019-07-13 22:10:30

I recently decided to switch halfway into PHP and MariaDB SQL, to NodeJs and MongoDB. Built my first CRUD app already so I've kind of figured out how Node interacts with a DB.

Now, I'm moving onto authentication and I decided to start with oauth2.0, using precisely Google's.

Problem is, I've done everything right I think, but my app is not getting into a state of 'logged in' that's because it is saving cookies in the browser but I think the browser is not returning those cookies to the server so I'm never detected as 'logged in'.

I will leave you a link of the original article. I'm sorry. I'm new to DEV.to and I don't understand its editor yet.

Here is the link: https://hashnode.com/post/the-passport-express-and-cookie-session-dilemma-cjxx77s3u0009w1s1lsi9c6gj
What are your thoughts on the whole 10x engineer viral discussion?
Tags: career, management, discuss
Published: 2019-07-13 22:09:29

There's a meme of sorts heading around Twitter after one regrettable take on "10x engineers" which paints a laughable stereotype.

This is a great post which sums up the complaints and respectfully disagrees:

{% link https://dev.to/turnerj/the-10-points-that-make-up-real-10x-engineers-4mj4 %}

It seems like everyone weighed in on Twitter, but let's have a discussion that allows for more than 280 characters. As per its usual style, the Twitter trend has been mostly about piling on, more so than necessarily evolving the conversation in an overly useful way.

***

To be clear, people aren't necessarily ridiculing the notion that engineers may fall on some sort of power law distribution curve. The issue with the thread was more about the hyper-specific, highly stereotypical notion of what "10x" engineers are like.

e.g.

{% tweet 1149302834619248640 %}

Let's unpack this discussion a bit.
Advanced Objects: Course Comparisons
Tags: objects, objectorientedprogramming, javascript, courses
Published: 2019-07-13 20:18:48

---
title: Advanced Objects: Course Comparisons
published: true
description: 
tags: objects, object oriented programming, JavaScript, courses,
---

It just so happens that I’m at the same place in three of my JavaScript courses from [Udemy](https://www.udemy.com). These are:


- [The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp (2019)]
(https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-javascript/)


- [Advanced JavaScript Concepts]
(https://www.udemy.com/advanced-javascript-concepts/)


- [JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts] 
(https://www.udemy.com/understand-javascript/)



The topic I'll be learning and comparing is advanced objects. I'm going to take my time with the material and I will try to bring you the most objective summary I can. 

I'm thinking this will take a week or three to get through the material and write a post about it. 

Anyone can read the summary, though it's geared to self-learners who would like a sneak peek into the similarities and differences of three different courses on the same topic in JavaScript. 

Maybe you're thinking about taking one or more of these. Keep in mind, I'm a self-learner too. I don't expect you to learn anything necessarily new about objects, though if you did, that'd be awesome! 

My goal is to give you a head's up concerning the teaching styles of these various instructors, and to show you where I have problems understanding the material and what I think about resolving that issue, which usually includes searching the web for more resources. 

These courses aren't the only guides or tutorials about advanced objects in JavaScript. Obiously! There are so many excellent resources out there. I do hope to show you how using more than one resource can enhance your learning experience.

I'll be posting it here when complete, as well as on my blog. In the meantime, I'll occasionally post my progress at [My Web Development Odyssey] (https://mywebdevelopmentodyssey.dev)
Reduce Exposure to What You Can't Control... When You Can
Tags: webdev
Published: 2019-07-13 19:48:32

I just want to ask the question of why what we write can be perfectly performant and still be trash.

There is a concept in system design called high availability. Frequently used to provide an expectation for a level of the system performing as expected is the shorthand "five 9's" or 99.999% uptime, about. Many fields shoot for this goal of system availability or even higher(hospitals, airline equipment, and satellite software).

Wow, what a dream, but what about WebDev. I want to be able to write code and perform at those level, but i'm working in distributed hardware(servers, routers), with distributed software(packages, links, libraries). Let's start with the data center where our site is hosted.

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/2iv602sn7k22jlrhe3pl.png)
<figcaption>https://hostingfacts.com/average-hosting-uptime-study/</figcaption> 

Whoops, the highest average was just four 9's and we haven't even written any code yet.

At least google handles their own hosting and has it figured out.

{% twitter 1140992327290429441 %}

..oh no
{% twitter 1140993457504378881 %}

Looks like G-Cal was down for for a little over three hours, that puts it at three 9's for the year.

We as web devs are used to relying on so many dependancies we can't even properly estimate how many lines of code are running.

One Dev Casey Muratori tried to figure out how much code has to be brought in and used in a typical web stack from a few years ago and stopped at 56 million lines. Granted, one wouldn't use all the functions and methods brought in through this stack, but it does make some issues difficult or impossible to actually test.

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/h20ztmlrsrepi4fa9nap.png)
<figcaption>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk</figcaption>

My point is not that we shouldn't use these technologies. But just be aware of what you are bringing in to your stack, try to limit the code you bring to a project if you don't understand how it runs at a deeper level, because as a web dev you are already at four 9's or worse assuming your code is perfect.

Resources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
- https://hostingfacts.com/average-hosting-uptime-study/
Understand Vue.js via making a CRUD App
Tags: vue, frontend, beginners, javascript
Published: 2019-07-13 19:26:08

---
title: Understand Vue.js via making a CRUD App
published: true
description: 
tags: #vue #frontend #beginners #javascript 
---

A new article just got published on overflowjs.com regarding making a CRUD app using Vue.js

Here is the link of the article  - https://overflowjs.com/posts/Vuejs-Making-CRUD-App-Part-3

The working version of the app is live at - https://unruffled-goldstine-e8478d.netlify.com/login, feel free to check it out.
 
Here is Github repo - https://github.com/overflowjs-com/blog-frontend-auth if you want to check the code.


Thanks!
How to create Javascript variables from PHP variables?
Tags: php, javascript
Published: 2019-07-13 19:06:13

Sometimes, you may need to declare dynamic JS variables using PHP. 

One thing you can do is to manually write the JS code as following.

```php
var x = "<?php echo $name ?>";
```

But, we can create a function to do this easily with a better data types support.

```php
function phpVarsToJs($vars) {
    echo '<script>';
    foreach ($vars as $key => $val) {
        echo "var $key =";
        if (is_int($val)) echo $val;
        else if (is_bool($val)) echo $val ? 'true' : 'false';
        else if (is_string($val)) echo '"' . $val . '"';
        else if (is_array($val)) echo json_encode($val);
        echo ';';
    }
    echo '</script>';
}
```

This function requires an PHP array, which contains key/value pairs which are the Javascript variable name and the value. Also, this function automaically creates Javascript variables according to the data type of the PHP variable. 

PHP Arrays will be converted into JSON format. If you don't need the '&lt;script>' tags, just remove those two echo statements.

## Example



```php
<?php
	require_once 'functions.php'; // assuming this includes our function
?>
<html>
<head>
	<title>My App</title>
</head>
<body>
	This is my app!

	<?php
		phpVarsToJs(array(
			'name' => 'John',
			'age' => 23,
			'meta' => [
				'height' => 168, // cm
				// and more ... 
			]
		));	
	?>

</body>
```

Thanks!

*I previously published this post on [PHP Group](https://groups.hyvor.com/PHP) on my new website, Hyvor Groups.*
MAD: Game DevLog #3
Tags: gamedev, unity3d, csharp
Published: 2019-07-13 18:48:12

---
title: MAD: Game DevLog #3
published: true
description: MAD: Game Devlog number 4: Android and Mobile UI.
tags: gamedev, unity, csharp
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fgn1h9flafeqyk7da0y5.jpg
series: MAD Game DevLog
---

Hello everyone!

I don't have much to tell so I'm going to make it quick.

We've added Android build support and we're working on setting up an internal test app on Google Play.

In order for the game to be playable on Android we've also added mobile controls and I got the chance to make them. 

Here's the button for placing the bomb:

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/wqnog3kiumu5vsge15vu.png)

To simplify our life we've used the CrossPlatformInput module from Unity's standard assets package, this allows us to support PC, consoles and mobile devices with minimal code and configuration.

The current state of the game has some minor bugs with the enemies, explosions and UI, which we hope to fix soon.

---

I would like to thank Jan from [Cosmigo](https://www.cosmigo.com/) for his amazing customer support he has given me while I was purchasing Cosmigo Pro Motion.
How do you compress mp4 videos?
Tags: help, node, video, compress
Published: 2019-07-13 18:37:09

Do you guys have a good online tool, command line tool or a Node.JS library to compress videos? 

I would like to put a video I made today on a customer website, but I filmed it in 4k so for 15 sec. it weights 44MB 😂

The best tool that I am looking for would:

- Trim useless bytes
- Create variants by size (like 600x?, 980x?, 1200x?, 1920x?) with the ability to choose the sizes
- Create a webm counterpart of the video (not necessary, but appreciated)

Anyone?
What's the merge rate of dev.to? my side-project
Tags: showdev, sideprojects
Published: 2019-07-13 18:26:31

Hi all!

Today I want to show you something I've been working on lately, and ask for any feedback and ideas about the next steps :)

I've built a web app that analyzes repositories on GitHub and shows them on a dashboard like [this one of Rails](https://rails.devlytics.io/rails) or the one of [dev.to](https://thepracticaldev.devlytics.io/dev.to).

The initial idea was to give a comfortable view of the team's performance, raise possible issues and present insights.
Since GitHub bought a competitor in that field that offered similar features, I'm pivoting slightly to present [comparison](https://rails.devlytics.io/rails?compare_to=laravel/framework) between different repositories and considering my next steps.

Going forward, I'm thinking the following can be useful to get the most out of what I built thus far and offer value:
- Badges repositories can add to their README page for merge rate, average response times and etc.

- Personal rankings for contributors: average review cycles, how often their pushes fail tests, improve coverage, PR sizes and so on.. things that should encourage a better way of working. 

- Smarter Insights - where are the problematic areas in the codebase based on how quickly PRs of that area are merged, how many review cycles it takes and so on..

- Rankings of open-source projects: I'm on the fence about this one. I don't want to rank open-source projects based on how quickly PRs are addressed or issues are resolved, but I'm trying to figure out a way for making maintainers' life easier and proud of their work.

What do you think? 

Oh yea, did you know that [dev.to](https://thepracticaldev.devlytics.io/dev.to) has a merge rate of 91%?