Hashnode Weekly 004 by Miki Szeles

Smeee again. Miki Szeles. It is Saturday which only means one thing:

Hashnode Weekly Newsletter

Ok. You got me. I know I f..kd up again. It is Sunday. But I have a very good excuse for why I was late in both cases. 😊

Apologize

Last week I was working hard on writing My First Month on Hashnode - A Retrospection About Blogging on Hashnode Developer Journaling Platform by Miki Szeles which took me approximately a dozen hours. No matter whether you are blogging on Hashnode or not, I highly recommend reading it. 😊

This time I was writing The Mistery Of The Supposedly Red ❤ Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet which took me around 10 hours , and as I also played a lot with my son I had no time starting writing Hashnode weekly, especially as I still had ~30 articles on my reading list. But to convince you to forgive me, I brought 67 amazing Hashnode articles this week. 😊

In case you would like to know how I see the world as a software developer and tester, and in case you would like to have an intro to my humour, I really recommend reading it.

As you might already notice I really enjoy reading and writing very long high-quality articles. The above mentioned 2 article has a reading time of 34 minutes and 15 minutes.

That is a lot and I know most people usually like to read much shorter posts. But in order to make my content digestible, I help my readers (you) in multiple ways:

1. I include a table of contents at the top of the article, so you can quickly understand what you can expect
2. I always highlight the most relevant information in bold, so you can run through the article quickly, decide if it is interesting to you or not.
3. I split up my articles into bite-sized chunks , each of the paragraphs talking about one topic and I also make sure you can understand what is the main thought in the first 1-2 sentences so you can quickly skip the paragraph in case you are not interested.
4. I include tons of links to related material so you can learn much more about the subject than you can get from my article.
5. I use a catchy but descriptive and relevant title , so you won't be disappointed after opening my post.

So as you can see it is completely up to you whether you would like to spend 1 minute, 34 minutes our hours by following the links in my articles.

That's enough for an intro, so let's back to Hashnode Weekly.

Hashnode Weekly

I have started Hashnode weekly 3 weeks ago in order to collect the hidden gems of Hashnode without which those articles wouldn't get too much attention as luckily there are a huge amount of great posts coming out daily.

I also dedicate a session to the new bloggers, so I can help them to connect with their audience, and they can also get some motivating nice words from the Hashnode community. Up till now, I have posted 4 Hashnode Weekly :

1. Hashnode Weekly 001 by Miki Szeles
2. Hashnode Weekly 002 by Miki Szeles
3. Hashnode Weekly 003 by Miki Szeles
4. Hashnode Weekly 004 by Miki Szeles (Be careful this one to make sure you do not get into an infinite loop, as this is a recursive reference 😊)

Here are the stats :

1. Hashnode Weekly 001 - 226 views, 8 comments and 27 interactions.
2. Hashnode Weekly 002 - 291 views, 13 comments and 45 interactions.
3. Hashnode Weekly 003 - 281 views, 15 comments and 72 interactions.
4. Hashnode Weekly 004 - This is up to you, so I kindly ask you to comment, interact, share so we can beat the record. 😊

I am pretty happy about this result which we achieved together in this short period of time.

Before we get to the other topics, let me tell you a few words about Medium Weekly.

Medium Weekly

As I am reading Medium also and reposting my Hashnode article there, I also started Medium Weekly from which I have two:

1. Medium.com Weekly 001 by Miki Szeles
2. Medium Weekly 002 by Miki Szeles

But I decided to stop writing Medium Weekly, as I prefer to focus my time on the Hashnode community which is much better according to my experience.

That's enough about the Weekly Newsletters, let's continue

Featured Topic - Women In Tech

As you might slowly get used to it I always highlight one article/topic in my newsletters.

🏆 International Women's Day was 5 days ago on the 8th of March. It is a special day for every woman but is even more special to the tech community as we are celebrating Women in Tech. 😊

I even wrote my own article to support the Women In Tech movement : Happy International Women's Day - Miki Szeles's words about Women in Tech 💝.

But something happened yesterday, which radically changed how I think about the topic of Women In tech.

This event was reading this tweet on Twitter. It is in Hungarian, but you will get the main points of it in case you keep on reading.

In my opinion, there are 2 main goals of the Women In Tech movement:

1. Inspire more women to join the tech world. The movement is highly efficient doing this and it really helps.
2. To achieve gender equality. Unfortunately, I think the current approach does more harm than good.

Let me explain why.

By talking about women in tech we split people into 2 separate groups women and non-women and with this, we draw more focus on whether somebody woman or not , which is exactly the opposite of what we would like to achieve.

So instead of promoting women in tech, we should promote :

• Great leadership
• Delivering great and valuable work
• Communicating real results
• Focusing on fulfilling the requirements of clients and customers
• Promote employing and adequately paying appropriate professionals
• Promote helping each other

In case you look at the list you can see there is one common thing in all of them:

It does not mention either women or men. Why?

Because it is irrelevant, that is not what we should focus on.

So this is how my view changed recently about the topic of Women in Technology.

As I am continuously learning about the world my worldview is constantly changing, so I kindly ask you to share your (opposing) thoughts in the comment section, so I can further form my views.

Before we move on to the other articles, let's provide the list of articles on the subject of Women in Tech from this week:

• Eleftheria Batsou Why We Need More Women In Tech
• Nic Women in Tech
• Swati Sarangi Women In Tech
• Devhouse Women In Tech: Interview with QA team lead Natalia Demianenko
• Susmita Dey My Journey of Being #WomenInTech
• Roshaan From not being able to format a USB to landing my first internship as a high school junior ; here is my story
• Abbey Perini We've Been Here Since the Beginning

Blogging, Writing, Journaling, SEO

🏆 My top pic is Sandro Volpicella's post in which he shared some cool tips regarding SEO for Technical Content Writers. I also added my thoughts :

For SEO I am using Scrapy at the moment which has a quite good price-value ratio.

In the past, I have used Semrush (which is still much cheaper than Ahrefs the tool mentioned by Sandro) but in terms of functionality, it is unbeatable. I am pretty sure I will use it in the future too.

At the moment I am focusing on writing lots of great quality content using the techniques I have learnt in the past, making sure to achieve as little bounce rate as possible.

Later whenever I will use Semrush again, I will tweak my articles to have an even better SEO result. 😊

There is another great article in this category:

• Karthikeyan developed a very interesting project for the Hashura Hackathon with which you can cross-post your articles to multiple platforms. Learn more about it here: Introducing Kross post - Cross posting made easy

Software Development, Testing, Technology

🏆 This week I am featuring Parvin Eyvazov's freakin cool project called JSON Translator.

With his solution, you can automatically translate your JSON language files with the aid of Google Translate.

What a great solution to add support for all the languages in the world in your product.

I have already sent the link to my teammates , I am pretty curious what will they say. I suppose they will be amazed just like me. 😊

Read more here: FREE! Translate your language JSON file to any languages.

Here are the other also great articles:

• Rajat Thakur introduces the different techniques of web scraping in his article: What Are The Different Types Of Web Scraping Approaches?.
• Maddy gives 4 tips to easily get coding experience
• Diseyi Philomena compiled a list of non-coder and coder career options in her writing Your First Introduction to Tech. I only disagreed with one point, in case you are interested in which one, just check the comments. 😊
• Vidhi Jain brought as Spring Boot Interview Questions and she even provided answers for them.
• Kusumita Ghose gave some advice on How to get started with Competitive Programming?. This is a great post for those who like competitive programming but I am not one of those and I have a quite firm opinion about the topic , let me share it with you.

Personally, I do not really value competitive programming too much. Learning complex algorithms and the overoptimization of them has very little value in real life. Only a few per cent of the jobs really need it. Of course, it can form your thinking but there are other ways for that too, like solving real-world problems , which won't get as repetitive as doing the 100th of HackerRank challenge.

Also, programming at a very fast pace can do more harm than good. It is much better in case you take the time to think through and design your solution , which will be much more profitable in the long run.

Believe me, I had to solve many of those challenges at university, but haven't seen them in my 15 years of software development career. In my opinion, those challenges are only good for one thing, to get into companies who think that you can measure a developer by how much he/she practised the coding challenges for interviews, instead of checking whether he/she can solve a real-world problem.

• Pacifer York shares the list of The Coding Skills You Need For A Career In IT/CSE which can be very useful for people just starting their career as a software developer.
• parveen yadav has a strong C++ background but as the world was looking for Java developers mostly he changed his mind. Read more in his post: A Second chance as Software Engineer
• Yoshi shared an excellent diagram about the Architecture of Chrome Extension. This post is highly relevant to me as you might already know I got addicted to developing Chrome extensions. I have already released Selenideium Element Inspector in the Chrome Web Store about you can read more in my writing Save dozens of minutes daily during writing Selenide and Selenium E2E automated tests using the Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension! and at the moment I am developing Hashnode Newsletter Generator with which Hashnode bloggers can easily create their own unique newsletter. My motto is: "Show me your newsletter and I will tell you who you are". 😊
• Zaheer khan also wrote on the topic of Chrome extensions in which he leads us through step by step on how to create a Chrome extension in his post Chrome Extension Tutorial.
• Paloma gives her advice on How to Get out of Tutorial Hell. I can highly relate to this as my Udemy library looks like just my Steam library, full of never touched content which I bought whenever there was a sale. 😊
• Deepa Goyal introduced the evolution of APIs in her writing A Visual History of APIs with an excellent infographic.
• Rafael Câmara explained the SOLID principles about which every software developer should know. He also posted about REST API Maturity Levels and he happily shared his thoughts when I asked him whether implementing HATEOAS would be useful for us or not. 👍
• Aashish Panthi shared a list of Free Resources for Developers and Designers.
• Salman Shaikh developed a very interesting project with which women can alert their friends in case of emergency. Read more about it in his post: Women's Safety Device Using Arduino, GSM and GPS Module
• Ahmed Ramy wrote an article with the title Test-Driven Development: #6 Testing Alerts, Popups, and Messages and he even got featured here on Hashnode.
• Ifeoma Lydia Amaranjo wrote a cool post with the title My Understanding on UI and Ux Design
• Opemipo Disu is a 16 years old developer from Nigeria. His story about cyberbullying really touched my heart. He even created a very valuable project called Aurora to stand up against cyberbullying. I warmly recommend reading his post: Aurora: An application that helps fight cyberbullying.. 🧡😊
• mahmoud elaraby bought 80+ hours of tutorials for java from which he only finished 15+ hours and he has serious doubts whether he is on the right track or not. I gave my advice to him and I suggest you do the same.
• Marco Gancitano shared his thoughts regarding What makes a senior developer?. I also added 2 more points:
• According to my Team Manager a Senior Developer can deal with a multiweek long task, he/she can split it up, delegate, monitor and deliver on time.
• Being a senior developer is not just about technical knowledge. Soft skills are equally important. I highly recommend reading this post (especially to you Bence Hornyák😊).
• Lucy Karimi shared her experience of being a first-time contributor to open source..
• Dipanshu Torawane explained to us What is DevOps?🤔
• Wdzz created his own API called AnimaliAPI with which you can query for animal classification and their scientific names. Learn more about it in his post: My first API is available to over three million developers.

Productivity, Psychology, Self-improvement, Life, Creativity, Learning, Jobs, Leadership, Motivation (Sorry but I did not want to call this section Other topics😊)

🏆 My top pick from this category is Ayyash's article in which he shared 5 lessons he learnt during 20 years. I found the post very insightful with which I can highly relate, so I would also like to share my thoughts related to the article.

Ayyash mentioned Notepad as the one to go note-taking app. I almost completely agree with him as I have tried so many solutions for notetaking like Word, GoogleDocs and products like EverNote.

Recently I started to use Notepad++ and nothing is compared to it. It is blazingly fast. One downside is that I cannot use an image , but I usually have a belonging Google Doc where I save them.

The physical notebook was never an alternative for me as I am way too slow with it compared to Notepad++ and I need my notes to be easily arrangeable and quickly searchable. I back up my notes via GitHub , so I even have the whole history of my docs.

He also a dvised organizing your email inbox based on what you would like to do with the email. Regarding this topic, I highly advise checking David Allen's GTD method.

David suggests the term zero inbox es, which simply mean you should have no mail in your inbox. Well, I have to admit I am not good at it, I have 25960 emails in my Gmail inbox. 😊

He suggests the following structure :

• Delete: get rid of (or archive) emails that serve no further purpose.
• Delegate: if someone else can answer the email better, forward it to them.
• Respond: respond immediately to emails and not keep them open.
• Defer: move the messages that will take some time to respond to a separate category.
• Do: make sure you stay on top of emails that require a timely response. Ayyash describes a scoring system that you should use whenever you have to select from multiple options.

I also have my own scoring system. Despite being binary it works quite well. I compare the aspect of 2 things , and the one which is better gets 1 point. I used this system whenever I have chosen testing frameworks.Selecting a Load And Performance Testing Framework - Gatling vs. Grafana k6Selecting an End to End Testing Framework - Selenium or Selenide?

Let's see the other great articles about these topics.

• Mridu Bhatnagar shares 22 questions that can help whether you should quit your job or not in her writing How to decide when to quit your day's job?.

I just recently read Seth Godin's The Dip book which also gives some great advice on quitting but not just quitting your job but quitting basically anything. I was amazed how Seth can write an almost 200 pages long book about a message which can be articulated in 3 sentences. Despite this, I still recommend reading it, even if you finish it in 15 minutes. 😊

• Jorge Romero is a very productive writer, at the moment he is posting every day, which might or might not change when he will start participating in his first Hackathon. He always amazes me as he is drawing his own cover images which I am pretty sure you will quickly recognize whenever you open the linked pages. In addition to this, he knows just about everything. 😊 Here are 5 articles from him: How to make a cover image, Networking for Success!, Developer Dialectics, Plans for my blog and I'm participating in a Hackathon!!!!. Enjoy 😊
• Carlos Balbuena shares 3 tips with which a programmer can boost its productivity in his article Productivity for Programmers.
• Jewel Keith compares different learning models in her writing Mastery-Based Learning vs. Factory-Based Education Model: A Review of Launch School’s Documentation. We had a great discussion in the comments section. Just read it if you are interested. 😊
• Frank Elda posted about a very interesting topic, the aspiration list (which is a list of values, attitudes, directions that you want to follow in your life) with the title I stole a secret from a $100M company CEO: the Aspiration List.
• Conor Bronsdon posted Kathryn Koehler's article with the title Creating a Culture of Engineering Productivity at Netflix. Kathryn is the lead of the Productivity Engineering team at Netflix. The purpose of the team's existence is to boost the productivity of other teams. Pure awesomeness.

In case you would like to know more about what she is doing, then register for the free Interact conference which will be held on 7th of April. 😊

• Shiju Nambiar brought a very important topic with his writing Fixing my Imposter Syndrome. I can highly relate to this topic as my last 5+ years was the worst period of my life both personally and professionally. I even wrote my story which includes impostor syndrome, burnout, years of depression and more, but I was not brave enough to share it with the community.
• Oni Ebunoluwa Mercy also shared his thoughts on [The Myths about Imposter Syndrome and Its symptoms].(https://ebuntoday.hashnode.dev/the-myths-about-imposter-syndrome-and-its-symptoms-cl0mn5ffv0150xlnv33jq8eo2).
• Mridu Bhatnagar wrote a book review about The Practice by Seth Godin (Book Gist). It is again a book from Seth Godin and based on the article it has a little bit longer message than The Dip book. 😊
• Antonio Dinkins shared his thoughts on why it is better to do things with others in his post Don't Struggle Alone.
• Srinivasan Rangarajan lists 5 Types of Bad Managers.

I recently moved to an international company from a very small one and in order to be prepared I watched The Office and the IT crowd. Luckily the situation is much better than I expected I haven't met with the above-mentioned managers (yet). 😊

• Shawn Axsom gives some time management tips in his article Survival, Time Management, and Mattering as a Director of Engineering.

One of them is to only start a newsletter in case you have a vision and concrete goals.

Luckily(intentionally) I do have a vision and goals for my Hashnode Weekly Newsletter. Here they are:

• Draw attention to the hidden gems of Hashnode
• Have a reference for myself
• Help people from the community to find the best writers in the topics they are interested in
• Broaden my audience
• Got featured on Hashnode, to let more people know that dozens of great articles are being born on Hashnode weekly.
• Joaquim Da Costa: The title says it all: Corporate VS Startup Jobs:
• Alagbala Damilola shared his thoughts about productivity in his writing 🦋 On the Subject of Creativity. He also provided a great list of resources on the subject. Check it out! 😊
• Mridu Bhatnagar gave some advice with the title Things to do when you join a new organization?.
• Kalima Quotes wrote about the Benefits of Reading Motivational Quotes.

Luckily, at the moment, I do not need any quote to get motivated as my motivation level is higher than ever before thanks to the constant positive feedback of the Hashnode community and my colleagues. But I won't be mad at you in case you leave some nice words in the comment section, to make sure I keep this level of motivation. 😊

In the past, I really got a huge motivation boost from watching motivational videos. My favourite motivational video creator is Mateus M. Let me share the video I like the most :

Data Analysis, Data Science, Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robots

🏆My top pick is Syed Jafer's article in which he wrote about ML pipelines in quite a detailed way: Machine Learning Pipeline and Feature Engineering.

• Amr Khaled shares many code examples about How to - Data Analysis With SQL. At the moment we are only using CSV and XLS files, but I saved it for reference for the future. 😊
• Adam recently went through a lot of interviews and he shares his tips on How to Prepare for a Technical Data Engineer Interview.
• The TomTom Developers brought a very interesting topic: Data Visualization in their writing: Visualizing TomTom Traffic Data with Data Science Tools.
• Kim Minori wrote a very interesting story with the title A quick story about robots, from Turing and Asimov dreams to modern robotics institute
• Adarsh Singh explained How does ML Model work?.

Cybersecurity

🏆My top pick (and not just because there are no more articles) is Precious Eyoh's post in which he explained 7 Cybersecurity Threats You Must Know as a Web Developer. I also gave the advice to use the free OWASP ZAP tool with which you can test for the 10 most "popular" security issues.

Blockchain, Crypto

In case you read my article The Mistery Of The Supposedly Red ❤ Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet then you already know at the moment I am interested in a lot of topics except blockchain and frontend development. In spite of this, there were 2 articles that raised my curiosity so I read them and I am sharing them now with you. 😊

🏆My top pick is Abhishek Tiwari's Is Physical Art Getting Obsolete? Understanding NFT Digital Art. post in which he introduces us to the world of NFTs.

Another great article from this category is the writing of xuanling11 in which he talks about a very interesting term in the crypto world: Crypto Comics - What is Aping. In case you would like to know what is aping, just read the post. 😊

Hashnode newbies

• Randy Knight is a former Sysadmin who is studying to be a Web Developer and he also has a cybersecurity background. In addition to this, he is a disabled military veteran and life member of the DAV. He introduced himself in his In the beginning... writing.
• AliciaBytes is a German pansexual polyamorous trans woman, software developer and giant dorky nerd. She had a blog before but deleted everything with her transition. Now she started blogging again here on Hashnode. Here is her first post: Hello, Web 👋 I'm Alicia and this is my new website.
• Designegy Creatives who is a data analyst wrote 2 posts in the first he introduced himself Introducing Myself and in the second he wrote a very exciting project related to Jupyter notebooks. I fell in love with Jupyter notebooks recently since we started to use them in the Data Analysis class at the university. With Jupyter notebook, you can write code and document it using markdown parallelly which makes it very easy to share your projects with other data scientists (and with any python developer).

Unfortunately at the moment, his website is not accessible, but hopefully, he will realize it after he got notified cause of the mention.

And that's it. I hope you found something which is interesting to you. If that is the case, please share your feedback in the comment section.

To close the Hashnode Weekly Newsletter I leave a question here :

What was your favourite article you read during the last week? Share it with us in the comment section to make sure great content gets more attention. 😊

Share this post on social media so we can make sure great content reaches their great audience. ❤😊👍

In case you missed the previous Hashnode Weekly Newsletters , you can find them here:

1. Hashnode Weekly 001 by Miki Szeles
2. Hashnode Weekly 002 by Miki Szeles
3. Hashnode Weekly 003 by Miki Szeles

In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to and even on Instagram. 😊