Hashnode Weekly 003 by Miki Szeles
I am an enthusiastic developer since my childhood. I have started with Plus 4 and C 16 machines programming in Basic. I still remember when we were jumping on the bed with my brother, and accidentally saw the Commodore 64 computer on the top of the wardrobe, which was planned to be a Christmas gift for us. I don't have to tell you that we couldn't wait till then. :) I will never forget this memory. Of course in the beginning we only played on the computer, but later I became interested in how can I make my own programs. I have to tell when I first faced the binary number system I did not understand it, but I was still able to draw some sprites on the screen. :)
I continued learning software development during grammar school. I got my Masters degree at the Budapest University of Economics and Technology where I learnt many languages and also learnt a lot about general software development theory and practice.
I have started my professional career as a C++/C# developer, but I switched to Java after a few years. I've visited many meetups and Code Retreats during this time and I've learnt and introduced Agile methodologies in our company. During the years I lead the development team in close cooperation with the product management and testing department.
In 2020 I felt I need something new and I turned towards test automation both API and UI. I did not regret my decision. Since then I tried many frameworks like RestArrured, Selenium, Protractor, Appium, Selenide and Karate.
At the moment I am working as a Senior Software Developer in Test using Selenium and Selenide for UI testing and Karate for API testing.
I believe knowledge sharing is very important, so apart from helping my colleagues work I started my technical blog recently: https://mszeles.com Sharing your knowledge provides many ways for your own development. Whenever I write an article many questions come into my mind which might be interesting for the readers, so I try to answer all of them in my posts. Doing this I learn a lot about the subject. In additionally sharing your knowledge gives a good opportunity for feedback based on which you can further improve.
It is Saturday again, so as you might already be got used to it, it is time to post my curated list of Hashnode articles from this week. Ups, it is Sunday. Sorry for the delay but I was writing my summary about my first month on Hashnode and it takes time as it is a little bit longer. According to Hashnode, it is 20 minutes read, but I have not finished yet. In case you do not want to miss it, just follow me, so you will get notified! 😊
This time I brought 42 awesome articles for you on various topics.
🏆 My top pick this week is Project Planet which is an awesome initiative to make Earth a better place. Project Planet is a solution with which you can connect charity organizations with people who would like to participate in making the world a better place. There are so many people who would like to help, but they do not know where and how. This project is the perfect solution for that. Read the introduction article here: Project Planet: An initiative to make the earth a better place for living. 🧡🌍🌎🌏👭👩🏼🤝👩🏼👩🏽🤝👩🏽👩🏾🤝👩🏽👩🏿🤝👩🏼👩🏿🤝👩🏿👩🏻🤝🧑🏼👩🏻🤝🧑🏿👩🏼🤝🧑🏽👩🏻🤝👩🏻👩🏽🤝👩🏻👩🏾🤝👩🏻👩🏾🤝👩🏾👩🏿🤝👩🏽👫👩🏻🤝🧑🏽👩🏼🤝🧑🏻👩🏼🤝🧑🏾👩🏼🤝👩🏻👩🏽🤝👩🏼👩🏾🤝👩🏼👩🏿🤝👩🏻👩🏿🤝👩🏾👩🏻🤝🧑🏻👩🏻🤝🧑🏾👩🏼🤝🧑🏼👩🏼🤝🧑🏿🌍🌎🌏🧡
The other contestants of the week are equally awesome so please continue reading.
Blogging, Writing, Journaling
🏆My top pick from this week is - Alberto Bonacina's How to monetize your blog on Hashnode. I am also trying to monetize my blog. Up till now, I had to unsuccessful trial, but I will never give up.
In the long run, I would like to earn enough money from (technical) writing to not depend on my daily job. Not because I want to give up my current job, as I really love software development, but because I would like to have a better balance between family time, writing and software development.
- Saung Blogger Kampus shared his thoughts about the reasons you could start blogging in his article Writing a blog for fun. Unfortunately, his site is not accessible at the moment, but luckily you can still read his post here on Hashnode. I also wrote an article Start writing now! Seriously! in which I share my advice on why everybody should start blogging.
- Ashish maurya created a very interesting project with which you can crosspost to multiple platforms like Hashnode, dev.to and medium.com and you can even schedule your posts: Introducing Blogtiple - A Cross Blogging Application.
- Victoria LoVictoria Lo wrote an awesome article with the title Creating an About page on your Hashnode Blog. However, I have a quite detailed bio I still think I will follow her advice and create an about page.
Software Development and Technology
🏆 My favourite from this category is Devhouse's What's it like to be a woman working in tech? writing. They are talking about a very important topic:
Women in Tech.
At the company DMG MORI HEITEC Digital Kft. which I work for there are 4 PMs in our room, from which 3 are women, and there are also women in development and IT support and of course HR.
It is quite great compared to the ratio we had at the university 20 years ago. We had 13 girls from 800 students. We even had a joke about that:
How many girls are living in the Schönherz student hostel?
- ???
- 1024
- ???
- Two on the 10th. 😊
Let's see the other contestants of the software development section:
- Ahmed Essam shared his thoughts about why you should not rush learning. I am a little bit on a different viewpoint, so in case you are interested in my thoughts read the comment section too. Ahmed also posted an article about Problem Solving.
- Kent Merrell brought an important topic to the table about which every software developer should know in his article How I use the SDLC to write the WeatherChaser App.
- Sahesh gave his advice on how you should benefit the most from programming tutorials in his writing Stop Watching Programming Tutorials This Way.
- Fakhrul Siddiqei compiled a great checklist about some simple rules which every developer should follow in his article Checklist every developer should follow. I completely agree with every point and I even added my own thoughts about code commenting.
- Mr. Bud really touched my heart with his post Software Developer's Guide to Game Development. I was always fascinated by game development. I also developed games when I was younger for C64, PC and web.
- Suraj Vishwakarma shared 5 APIs which can help you develop your new project. As a newbie data analyst, I find this very exciting.
- Atharva Shirdhankar) wrote an awesome post with the title How I m Learning new Technologies so Quickly and how you can do it too(Open Source Way)?!.
Contributing to the open-source community is a very profitable thing to do. However I did not contribute to any of the existing open-source projects up till now, but I have my own open-source projects.
At the moment I am developing another Chrome extension with which I can speed up writing my weekly newsletter and whenever it will become accepted in the Chrome Web Store I will share it with the Hashnode community. It would be awesome to ready your own unique newsletter. . Follow me in case you do not want to miss it. 😊
Show me your newsletter and I will tell you who you are.😊
- Sarfaraz Khan brought us a list of Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2022.
- Sarvesh Kadam changed his career 8 months ago and now he shares his experiences in his article How I Landed My First Developer Job In 8 Months.
- Abdulrazaq Salihu also wrote about the topic of career change in his writing How to Kickstart a Career in Tech.
- Omar Mohammad wrote a great article in which he shares his advice about goal settings for developers in his article Setting goals for software developers from a self-determination theory approach.
- Ronnie Atuhaire shared his very exciting project about how he collected the 1000 Most Active Blogs On Hashnode!. Based on his writing I can tell 17000 articles has been posted on Hashnode in 2021. This is insane. It is not possible to read them all, so that is why newsletters like this are very useful. 😊
- Bruce Wells share some insights about Comment Best Practices. I also added my thoughts in the comment section.
- Ridwan Kareem wrote a review about the first tech book he read in his article Review Of The First Tech Book I Read (better dev 2021).
- programa mkenya brought a very important topic. In today's world, soft skills are equally important to technical skills. Times when developers were labelled as nerds have gone. Luckily not just tech skills, but soft skills can be developed too. Mkenya lists the 10 most important soft skills in his post (https://hashnode.com/@theashishmaurya) 10 Soft Skills You Need As A Developer.. What would you add to the list? Share it with us in the comment section. 👍
- Romman Sabbir in which he introducing a very important design pattern Design Pattern : Chain of Responsibility. I am in love with fluent API😊s and the chain of responsibility is the exact pattern with which you can achieve it.
- victor umeh introducing the Document Object Model in his post. This is definitely something about which all end to end(E2E) test automation engineer should learn.
- Saurav Pati is introducing a very interesting topic Passwordless Authentication System. I am already using apps which use the passwordless authentication, so it was great to learn a little bit more about this topic.
- Souvik Ghosh [Souvik Ghosh] emphasizing the importance of Writing Clean Code. A must read for every (wanna be) developer. 😊
- SumatoSoft's Advantages of Internet of Things: 10 Benefits You Should Know [2022] article is a great introduction to the topic of IoT. IoT is surrounding us. It is everywhere now, but there are some issues with it. One is security. I heard a good sentence about it:
The S in IoT stands for security. 😊
- Jorge Romero gave some advice on how to present your project in his writing How to present you projects!. He posted another article which was inspired by Chris Bongers, Victoria Lo and myself. 😊
- SnowBit's article It's 2022, don't use the console.log(😎) inspired me to refactor my Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome extension and also my upcoming Hashnode Newsletter Generator. 😊
Data Analysis, Science and Machine Learning
My featured article is Amr Khaled' article in this category. Amr Khaled wrote an excellent introduction to Data Analysis in his article Intro To Data Analysis.
As you might already know I also started my adventure in the field of Data Analysis which I document here on Hashnode. In case you are interested in how I started my journey read my article My Adventures in The Field of Data Science - The backstory.
- Vinayak Bansal wrote a great introduction about machine learning.
I am personally interested in machine learning as I started a course at my alma mater institute Budapest University of Economics and Technology(BME) about the topic.
You can read Vinayak's article here: Introduction to Machine Learning and some basic terminology
Self-improvement, Productivity, Psychology, Mentoring
🏆My top pick from this category is Marcin Wosinek's How to speed up your progress with feedback article. I can highly relate to this. In my opinion, feedback is everything.
Fast feedback is crucial not just for developers but also for anybody who works. Interesting backstory: I have learnt that doctors who analyze x-ray of patients diagnosed with cancer do not really improve in the analysis as there is no feedback loop for them. Only after several months, does it become clear the stadium of the patient and this info is not piped back to the doctors. But let's get back to our original topic. I have feedback loops on multiple levels.
- In my daily work we conduct code reviews and sometimes pair programming. I am working as an SDET so whenever I write a test I try it immediately, so I have immediate feedback.
- I drink coffee daily with my friend who is the test manager and we provide feedback for each other mostly about soft skills.
- I write technical articles and post them, so that is also a great opportunity for getting feedback.
I contribute to the open-source community with multiple test related projects. It can be also a good way for getting feedback, but up till now, I have not received much. You can check my projects at: https://github.com/mszeles
Diego Ballesteros participated in 20 developer coffee chats in a single weekend. I cannot wait to read his upcoming articles in which he will share the most important highlights of these coffee chats. Follow him in case you do not want to miss this valuable series. You can read his article here: My experience after doing 20 Coffee Chats in one weekend
- Adaobi Okonkwo created an excellent project. Quoting his words "A global platform that helps students, young professionals, and career experts make the connections they need to drive professional development, career progression, and leadership skills.". I highly recommend reading his article Welcome to MentorTown!.
- Muhammad Hasnain's article about Burnout is highly recommended.
I was in the same shoes in the last 5 years. I worked with outdated technologies on an outdated project without any pleasure or feeling of achievement. I had zero feedback about my work. However, I was not underpaid but there were serious delays with salaries regularly which kept me under constant stress as I had to take care of my wife and son.
In addition to burnout, I seriously felt I was the worst programmer in the world despite doing programming since my childhood. I not just burnt out but I was the perfect exemplar of the impostor syndrome. It caused me years of depression.
This is the last week of my probation period at my new company. We will continue working together as I really like basically everything about the company. **The team, the product, the tech stack and also the opportunities for improvements. We have weekly one on one sessions with my team manager where we give feedback to each other, and last but not least I can work together with my friend which is invaluable**.
I also wrote a very long story of my own, which is quite similar to yours, but up till now, I was not brave enough to post it. 😊
SEO
🏆My top pick is Jym Cheong article and not just because there is no other post in this category this time, but also because of his writing How to add Google Analytics & submit Hashnode blog for indexing? is great. Luckily Hashnode excels in SEO, but in order to appear in search results as fast as possible, you have to submit your URLs on the different search engines.
Newcomers
Helping newcomers to start building their audience is a topic very close to my heart. This is why I have a dedicated section in the newsletter for them.
- Ranojit Kumar(https://blog.ranojit.com/hello-world). Well, he was a little bit shy, so up till now I do not know what he will be posting about, but I asked him in a comment, so hopefully, he will answer soon. 😊
- Peter Havlena was as shy as Ranojit so I also asked him about which topics he will write about. 😊 Check his introduction after a few days, I am pretty sure he will answer my question. Welcome!
- [redacted] (Sinkidonk) wrote his first blogpost First Post, Beginning. We can expect him posts about Rasbbery Pi, Rust and other topic.
- Nephi Asha also a newcomer. Read her introduction and say some encouraging words to him/her: Welcome to my Blog. He/she is a JavaScript developer from Nigeria and an owner of a YouTube channel.
What was your favourite Hashnode article you read recently? Share it in the comments!👍
Happy reading!😊
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