DEV Community: Margarita

April Favourites. The Tech edition. 2020

Margarita — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 15:51:30 +0000

Linear Algebra

This month has been very minimal. I mainly worked and studied a course on Linear Algebra remotely. I have to say, I have forgotten lots of the mathematics since high school.

It does feel very much like high school though: I use a paper notebook to make notes (possibly, not the best idea).
The course I am studying now is called Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra by Imperial College London. You can find a link from here.

This course was a bit "out there", so I needed to complement it with some courses from KhanAcademy and Udemy.

I did it in the morning, since this was the most complicated thing I have been doing throughout the day, I felt quite accomplished. Let`s see how long I last.

This felt very empowering in a way: realising that something seemingly incredibly complex such as PCA (see this) can be mastered with some perseverance and a very long road to understand vector base transformations.

March Favourites. The Tech Edition. 2020

Margarita — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 14:42:06 +0000

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Book I Revisited

This is very subjective, but what I have learned through my work as a consultant is that projects are either done fast and well or slowly and badly.

At the end of the day, SCRUM is one of the most popular approaches to organise software project and a book that describes this philosophy greatly is "Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application" by 37signals.

I truly believe this is the book every programmer should read to understand how projects are created. The good news, it is free, you can grab the PDF here.

Book I started reading

Going down the rabbit hole of Lisp one of the books that is considered a classic is "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman, also free, available at this link.

It is the most in-depth guide into how computer code is running.

An Interesting technology: CRDT

CRDT stands for Conflict-free Replicated Data Type.
Think about it this way: imagine you have a product that has a web app, an iOS app, an Android app, all of them could be used offline or with bad internet connection. CRDT makes sure that content is "resolved" to the latest modified version "in order of the modifications".

A very good intro by James Long:

Alternatively you can read this one here.

Something new in the world of ReactJS

Clustering is a really cool map feature, Mapbox has it here: https://www.leighhalliday.com/mapbox-clustering

PS: as you probably noticed, the article came out in September. This is what happens when procrastination meets COVID-19 and stress. I figured I should do it anyways to track my progress.

February Favourites. The Tech edition. 2020

Margarita — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 22:32:41 +0000

Photo by Z S on Unsplash

Following a tradition writing about my latest and greatest discoveries of the month. I have no idea, if anyone even needs it, but I though it would be fun to keep it a a diary of sorts, hope somebody might find it useful.

My Work with Design systems

I have been working on a Helsinki City Design System (with relative success) and I have been trying to introduce a lot of cool optimisation features to the process.

A lot of people actually do not realise that design systems are distributed systems. They need planning, and architecture happens regardless of wether it's been planned or not.

In that regard I have managed to find an optimal solutions in the way you can tie the functionality together (sadly not all of it can be implemented due to processes, but this is what you have in a project sometimes):

1. Use Styles Directly from Figma

A great article that describes the process can be found here: 'Design tokens with Figma' by Pavel Laptev.

2. Style Dictionary for Design Tokens

Despite being a meme in the design world now, it is actually a great tool for managing complexity, I truly recommend reading 'How to manage your Design Tokens with Style Dictionary' by Cristiano Rastelli and a follow-up 'Design Tokens beyond colors, typography, and spacing.'

3. Organize your sass/css-in-js/pure CSS libararies through design tokens

Design work as a Hobby

As an ode to my 'you are a front-end developer, cool, design us a website' past, I am still following the latest design trends (I find it interesting) and recently stumbled upon a few really cool (and FREE) fonts.

1. Coachella

A fun-looking alternative to Avenir Sans.

2. Space Grotesk

3. Wremena

4. Misto

Misto literally means 'city; in Ukrainian. It sprakled nostlgic feelings since it was heavily inspired by the textbook fonts used in Ukraine.
I like how they managed to make it look modern.

React Libraries

A few libraries I would use on React.js project:

To show loading images while your content is loading: https://github.com/danilowoz/react-content-loader
Nicely implemented Burger menu: https://github.com/negomi/react-burger-menu
Component that implement easy swiping on mobile specifically: https://github.com/oliviertassinari/react-swipeable-views

New Fun Technology

I really cannot wait to write some useful tool using yarn plugin system:
https://yarnpkg.com/features/plugins But, let's be honest, it will probably be more on the fun side :)

Productivity Hack I Used

Listening to classic music on Youtube. That might come across as pretentious, but this type of music has actually been better for my concentration lately (partially because I am not trying to sing along, haha).

My taste has really evolved as in I used to listen to pop hits and switched to jazz playlists (there are tons of them live on youtube).
Not sure, but it does something to my productivity.

Article You Should Read

If you want one article on functional programming, 'How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language' is one of the most fun things I have found lately.

Blog You Should Follow

Do not type Sarah Sunday into Google search (you might end us looking at a wrong Sarah Sunday), but rather read her blogposts and follow her on Twitter afterwards. She has quite cool notes on functional programming, AWS and Clojure: https://8thlight.com/blog/sarah-sunday/

Video You Should Watch

I am sorry to the other readers, but in case you speak Russian, you should watch a talk by my fellow Ukrainian programmer Aleksandr Solovyov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4sTvHXkToQ

this is one of the best (I'd say legendary) tech talks.

January Favourites. The Tech edition. 2020

Margarita — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 17:56:57 +0000

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

As I decided to make it a monthly tradition to share something I found interesting for the last month, here is my (a bit late) January summary.

An Algorithm: Simplex Noise

My initial idea was to create an 'Aurora effect' with WebGL and I stumbled upon an interesting implementation on Coderops using simplex-noise npm package. It sparkled my interest in the algorithm.

Ken Perlin developed the noise function while working on the original Tron movie in the early 1980s. He used it to create procedural textures for computer-generated effects. In 1997, Perlin won an Academy Award in technical achievement for this work.
Perlin noise can be used to generate various effects with natural qualities, such as clouds, landscapes, and patterned textures like marble.

In 2001 Ken Perlin designed the algorithm called Simplex Noise to address the limitations of his classic noise function, especially in higher dimensions.

As it turned out, simplex noise has many use cases, such as signal processing, generating random values, etc. I really recommend you reading about it, since that will definitely make you understand certain parts of CS better!

YouTube Channels I Discovered

I have been very much into video-tutorials lately. I guess it's a phase. A few channels I have discovered (for myself) were a pleasant surprise to me! One that entertained the most, was Fireship.

Fireship

YouTube Channel called Fireship, talking about JS. I stumbled upon the channel as I was researching the history of JavaScript for my next article, really worth subscribing to if you are a Web or Node.js developer.

Books Worth Reading

Lately I have been way pickier about the books I am reading, I find a lot of literature has a lot of water. That is why I created a rule: can I read this book on a short flight?

I personally am very skeptical about reading large multi-volume books, I find it hard to absorb that amount of information in a few days. The Design Driven Development paradigm is something that we are now using on my current project and I wanted to find I quicker way to refresh my memory and share the concepts with my team, therefore Domain Driven Design Distilled by Vaughn Vernon.

It was a life saver, and, to be honest, if you are not familiar yet with a paradigm and you want to start building better software in a true DDD way, this book has all you need, really.

A more concise version of DDD by Evans, something you can read on a short flight.

New Programming Language

Rust was something I have been wanting to try for a long time. After doing a mini research I found out that Rust incorporates a lot of functional paradigms.
One of the best tutorial I found on YouTube: Rust Crash Course | Rustlang by Traversy Media.

I recommend checking it out!

New CS paradigm: State Machines

Was introduced to me by an interesting talk by my former colleague Farzad at a local meet-up. Here are the slides

I decided to dig deeper and found an interesting Udemy course 'State machines and Automata: building a RegExp machine' by Dmitry Soshnikov,
Software engineer at Facebook. I am now trying to pass it (which is hard, a lot of novel concepts).

Something I Started

I have written on my Instagram micro-blog that reading other people`s stories is something that can help you become a better software engineer yourself. I created an "awesome-" repository where I am planning to include stories of people becoming software engineers: https://github.com/marharyta/awesome-software-engineers

PS: any contributions are welcome!

This is it for January! Post something you found interesting recently!

Thanks for reading! Like and subscribe!

December Favourites. The Tech edition. 2019

Margarita — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 09:31:57 +0000

Following the infamous YouTube trend in the beauty community to post about your favorite things at the end of each month, I decided to go the same route and share what I have managed to for the last 30 days, all completely programming related.

Best of Tech Articles

One of the best explanations of an alternative usage when it comes to the web worker API: https://macarthur.me/posts/use-web-workers-for-your-event-listeners#where-things-onclicked-for-me

REST API design guidelines: something small and simple you can read on a bus to work and use it as a reference later:

In a way an eye-opening article on a popular myth I have always believed in about color contrast in the web: https://www.creativejuiz.fr/blog/en/user-experience/there-is-no-myths-of-color-contrast-accessibility

Security on the web (from cookies in your browser to backend authentification strategy), I love a good practical-tip type of articles:

Something on Performance, image optimisation was a really interesting topic: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2019/the-ugly-truth-about-optimising-beautiful-images/

JavaScript patterns: this time I needed a little reminder on how JS decorators work. A really good article that explains partially how decorators can be used for the current web apps: https://www.simplethread.com/understanding-js-decorators/

Blogs You Should Follow:

A non-trivial, quirky way to blog about tech, recommended to me by one of my new colleagues: https://www.codemopolitan.com/
One of the best and most consistent tech bloggers I discovered this month on Medium: https://medium.com/@vickieli

Tech Publication I Discovered

A website with one article every day, like a calendar:
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/
A good publication with quality articles on front-end: https://ponyfoo.com/

Started Reading

Purchased and started reading a very hands-on practical book on web security, totally worth your money: https://leanpub.com/wasec
A free book for people beginning their career in coding: https://leanpub.com/firstyearincode

Libraries I Discovered

A library that solves the problem of pre-fetching the input options, something small and handy, I definitely will use it more in the future: https://github.com/niksy/x-autosuggest

Something about Functional Programming

An article I did not fully understand (but I am striving to):
https://chrispenner.ca/posts/algebraic about the usage of lenses in functional programming to perform data mutations.

An Alternative Library

For people who are tired of tweaking bootstrap, https://getbuttercake.com/ offers a modular, more modern approach, using CSS Grid.

So I guess that is it for December!

Share your recent discoveries down in the comments and like my post :) Thank you for your support!