Archive

It's been a long time since I've sent one of these. In fact, the last newsletter edition was about WFH Culture back in March at the start of the quarantine.

Did you miss me? I hope so because the feeling is mutual.

Anyway, 2021 has a lot in store for us and I want to loop you in on everything for this year. I will be creating more videos, writing more articles, and improving my current side project applications. Each newsletter edition this year will be an early look at my content or an update on one of my projects.

Sounds good? Awesome. Let's get in to this first early look at an article I will be publishing next week. Enjoy!

With the COVID-19 crisis, remote work is now the default. Using my experience of exclusively working remotely, I share my thoughts on how traditional company culture around working from home should change even after the crisis is over.

Your life no longer revolves around the office

Developers love side projects.

More specifically, we love starting new projects from an idea emerged a minute ago.

Before long, a tech stack is chosen and the first few lines of code are written.

This becomes a problem when you no longer just have Work in Progress (WIP), but multiple incomplete projects. Rarely is work done on all of them, if any. This is what I refer to as Projects in Progress (PIPs).

Adding a new feature to a project typically relies on a repetitive set of steps; create new folders with layouts, components, boilerplates, etc. from existing configurations. Most developers will typically handle these repetitions by copying a previous feature and modifying it to the needs of the new one.

The process of sifting through features to figure out which one is ideal to copy, and then making sure to change all names that reference that exisiting feature and modifying multiple configuration files becomes tedious and inefficient.

Tools exist to help with this process known as scaffolding. You create a generic template that can then be reused to create new features from. Integrating them is usually not trivial, and so even though there’s a long-term productivity benefit most developers choose to keep moving along with the copy-and-paste approach.

👊 A new challenger approaches!

The earliest that I remember writing creatively is the age of 10, but I published an actual blog around the age of 15. It was a small entertainment website and I covered various topics from current events to movie reviews. At the time, I was a huge fan of Yahoo and was essentially trying to replicate their diverse web presence.

Looking through archives, I was able to find this old photo of my computer setup with that same website opened on it:

It’s been four months since the last newsletter. To jog your memory, I used to send emails out every Sunday with a draft of a future article for my blog, valuable resources I find on the web, and updates on my life and projects.

Long story short, the sunny newsletter is back 🎉

Life updates

During my time in Tanzania 🇹🇿, I learned something quite interesting in the way that many people use Uber outside the US.

When requesting an Uber in places like Tanzania or India, payment is usually done outside of the app (e.g. cash). A feature that I thought would be required for Uber to be of value was not being used, but then in a pondering moment I realized that it was still an extremely valuable product for providing a network of available taxis.

That is the minimum value of Uber.

Viability 😕

TLDR; Don’t launch new products or features before a long vacation or break. I’ll be visiting Africa for 2 weeks, with no plans to create content or code during that time. Follow along on Twitter and Instagram.

The Twitter world was at peace. Software engineers were happily deploying code to production on a Friday and sharing their weekend plans. That all changed with this tweet where Shekhar listed the following traits that a rare breed of "10x engineers" posess:

1. They hate meetings.
2. They are irregular about their times in the office.
3. Their wallpapers are black.
4. They know every single line of deployed code.
5. They are full stack engineers, but rarely do UI.
6. They can complete features in a few caffeinated hours.
7. They rarely refer to documentation.
8. They are always learning new frameworks.
9. They are poor mentors and interviewers.
10. They don't write hacks, they have an exact mental model of the code.

He said that these are the types of engineers that founders should be hiring because they will take your startup to success.

He is 10x wrong.

Clean code gets a bad reputation sometimes.

Provide some code improvement tips to a developer, and they might respond with…

But my code works! I like how it looks, go away.

There are two fun acronyms that you can use to describe different ways of writing code:

• WET = Write Everything Twice
• DRY = Don't Repeat Yourself

WET code means that you have duplicate blocks which provide similar or the same functionality, and DRY enforces the opposite. Many developers love to preach for DRY code because in many large codebases, having duplicate code can be really messy to maintain later.

So should you really be striving for DRY code? Well, not from the start.

With experience comes failure. While I can’t say that I always made the right decisions, I can say that I don’t regret any. This is because I was still able to learn valuable lessons from all the various projects that I’ve created in the past, whether they’ve failed or succeeded (mostly failed, though).

🚨 Reminder: I will be going live in less than 2 hours with Sergio Mattei on . You can tune in on at 1PM eastern time. I hope you are able to join and chat! Today’s newsletter issue covers some of the things that I may be talking about.

My friend Sergio Mattei, who you’ve seen me feature on my Annoyance as a marketing strategy episode, has invited me on his own show.

Imposter syndrome is extremely common among developers. Everyone is afraid of not coding "properly".

Here's a secret: no one truly knows what they're doing.

I've been coding and building applications for over 10 years, and so I love to put myself out there and debunk a lot of myths around what experienced developers truly do.

One of those things that I still do is use console.log (aka print debugging) to debug my code. I'm familiar with more advanced methods such as breakpoints, but I always tend to fallback to just sticking console.log statements throughout my code.

I recently launched something new called IDC: I Don't Code. It's a series of short one minute videos, each about a coding-related topic or term. You can watch the first episode about APIs on just about every platform, but the format is definitely optimal for Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The main concept is to teach anyone that doesn't come from a technical background but is curious to learn about some of these terms that are used in the industry.

With social media being the main form of content consumption these days, it is difficult to promote long-form content such as podcasts, articles, or even long videos. My favorite content creator and entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk, does a spectacular job of reposting his long-form content as short valuable clips. This is something that I need to do as well, but I also have been thinking about a content series that would be native to social media. Instead of being limited by the max video length of platforms like Instagram, I would use it to my advantage.

Of course with any idea, execution is key, because otherwise the idea will remain unfinished. Gary recently made a video where he was having a conversation with someone who wanted to grow his brand and business. What advice did he give? To experiment more on social media, especially early on. Go crazy, try new things, see what works and what doesn't. The negative or lack of feedback that you may get on one idea just means that you need to quickly iterate on the next one. The great part about growing a brand is that you have time, whereas growing a business requires you to make decisions based on what will earn you money more quickly.

So a simple nudge is all I needed to start a poll about the IDC series to get an initial reaction of how these videos might do, and then finally I just recorded one in my car after work and edited the footage later that night. The next day, I published to Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I received more organic views and personal feedback than I ever have on anything that I've ever posted in the past.

I consider myself a full stack JavaScript developer, but that wasn’t always the case. PHP used to be my backend programming language of choice and when paired with the Laravel framework, it was an absolute joy to be able to release web apps so quickly.

So, what exactly changed? Why am I all in on JavaScript despite all the time I put in to learning PHP? Well, I never actually felt like a seasoned PHP developer because my concentration was constantly split between frontend (JavaScript) and backend (PHP) code & tools. This is an issue I refer to as context switching – shifting your thinking back and forth thus reducing how productive you are on each task.

Node.js, the technology that allows you to write JavaScript on the backend, was released during a time when I felt like JavaScript was not that elegant of a language. Simple tasks felt so primitive, and it was still just something that I’d sprinkle on top of my already working web app.

I recently tweeted some thoughts on the constant moving pace of technology:

In the past, I've made the mistake of wanting to learn and implement every cool new thing that came out in the world of software development. There's constantly new tools, services, APIs, languages, and patterns that not only did I get excited about, but felt like I would need to know if I was to ever get what I needed in terms of jobs or the mythical "perfect app architecture" in my personal projects.

I'm sure there are many that feel that way right now, and the problem is that a lot of these skills just end up being useless in due time because of the constant cycle of new technologies eventually being old. You will always feel like there is something new to learn and I don't believe doing so is productive use of your time.

You are probably familiar with React, an extremely popular JavaScript library for building websites and web apps in a more productive manner.

However, starting a React project isn’t quite the simple decision you think it is. Are you building a blog or a web app? Do you care about SEO? Do you need a server for complex renders?

Thankfully there are a few tools and frameworks that help you get started easily with React.

In life and especially business, everything is about providing value.

We block and ignore advertisements, commercials, and marketing ploys because they are annoying. To put more specifically, most of the products they're selling don't provide us with any value.

That is why there is a lot to learn not from companies, but from brands. When a product is useful and creates confidence in your expectations of the company, then a special connection is formed. This connection converts a company into a brand.

Suddenly, you're buying products not because they immediately provide you value, but because you believe in the brand and in the value that it has provided you before.

As a small creator myself, I understand the challenges in growing a product. I am currently on a journey to build and expand IronMic and what I've come to realize is that having a supportive community keeps you going. I even talked about this in issue 13 of the newsletter about the value of communities and connections.

What I would like to do in this one is talk about products from other small creators that I've interacted with. Not only do their jouneys inspire me, but they're also making products that I actually use. Hope you enjoy the first of many with this list, and give them your support.

Leave Me Alone

Note: The link above is a direct URL, but you can also help me by using a referral link instead.

Modern web development. We all have a love and hate relationship with it because while it revolutionized web development practices, it also greatly complicated them.

I’d like to go over a few aspects of modern web development and explain the benefits that I’ve been able to appreciate. I will also mention when you would still want to do things the traditional way.

I actually ended up writing this twice because my first draft got lost (autosave failed). I was initially so excited about my first draft that I ended up , which soon after I ended up losing. What you’re about to read is the much better version because writing something a second time from memory actually helps you recall the good parts.

If you know me pretty well, then it may come off as a huge surprise that I am quite introverted (if you actually do know me well, then you’ll detect my sarcasm on the huge surprise part).

In all seriousness, I find it difficult to break awkward situations and turn them into friendly and meaningful ones. I also tend to keep to myself when it comes to working on projects and I also tend to believe that someone will simply discover and appreciate my work on their own.

In the past 1-2 years though, I’ve realized that people don’t just discover you inside of your cave and give you millions of dollars. Robert Herjavec had the same notions early on as well, which I mentioned in the previous newsletter on self investment.

The biggest investment you'll ever make in life, is the one you make in yourself. — Robert Herjavec

This past week, I had the opportunity of seeing Robert Herjavec speak in person. He is well known as one of the investors on the show Shark Tank, as well as running his own technology security company THG in Canada.

I wasn't expecting much from the free event that he was hosting, but his speech had a lot of takeways which I personally found valuable.

1. No one cares about failures 🙈

I’m basically the hype person from that “all the things!” meme when it comes to declarative programming, but that recently got me thinking in how common the declarative/imperative terminology actually is among both junior and senior level developers.

Luckily, I got a few good albeit mixed responses to this question on Twitter.

🎂 My birthday is tomorrow: March 18, 2019. I will be turning 26, which makes me consider a few life milestones.

• 💼 Worked 2 years at my current job.
• 🎓 Graduated college 3 years ago.
• 😧 My 30th birthday will be in 4 years.

I know I know. Those are low numbers and I'm still young.

But I find it important to set macro goals and accommodate changes at these milestones when things don't turn out as expected.

While I don’t consider myself a designer, I see design as an extremely important skill to have whether you’re building an app, creating brand assets, producing content, or even making flyers to support a local event. Here are some of my favorites resources related to design.

🖼 Creating & editing images

I’ve got some developer goodies for you in this newsletter issue, so I hope you enjoy.

💬 Personal automation

As with most weeks, I participated in #DevDiscuss — a discussion on Twitter hosted by the DEV community.

This week’s topic was personal automation, and I chimed in on what is probably my favorite developer tool:

Coding doesn’t matter as much as developers make it seem.

Sure, it’s a skill that allows apps to get built, but there are so many other skills related to successfully doing that.

If you’ve ever had to interview for a job, work with other teams, share your project ideas, or just ever interact with other people then you may reconsider how important a soft skill like communication can be.

You want to be able to convince and negotiate with others. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right because if other people don’t understand you, then they’ll think you’re wrong.

What is code? By definition, it’s a set of instructions for a machine to interpret.

As a developer, I don’t agree with that definition. I don’t write code for machines, I write code for people.

That has been the focus of my content this week. I started off with to this week’s #DevDiscuss topic of common fallacies in the software industry:

There is a common joke in the JavaScript community that a new framework or library gets released every single day. True or not, it’s funny because it definitely seems like that is the case. With so many new things to learn, how can you possibly keep up? Or should you?

A frequent comment I get is that I do a lot ‒ podcasts, videos, articles, and side projects. How do I manage it all?

Well, I create tasks for myself that are easy to accomplish:

In my previous newsletter issue, I talked a lot about personal branding and the importance of being consistent. But I'm sure that some of you might be thinking...

Consistency is great and all Sunny, but I have high expectations. I value quality over quantity.

I believe that those expectations are important, but not in the short term. It takes time to reach perfection, but in that process you will have to get better at your craft. How do you do that? By shipping more.

Just ship it

A newsletter issue like this one is a sneak peek at what will probably turn into a published article on my blog. Let me know if you want more of these or just prefer weekly summaries. Regardless, I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you next Sunday!

For the past few years, I've been trying to figure out my personal brand; what type of content to create, where to post it, and how to manage both personal and professional brands. It also took me a long time to learn why a personal brand was important.

People relate to people 😜🤗

Entering 2019, I want to make sure that you succeed with your goals.

I tweeted a thread of my three goals:

Knowing how I can execute upon these goals is key to my future success, and I wish that you do the same. What will also help me is to learn from my past-year mistakes.