DEV Community: Aizaz Khaja

If you're building for 'scale', what would your approach look like?

Aizaz Khaja — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 21:49:56 +0000

Recently, I was overlooked for an opportunity because they wanted someone with production experience of building something out at scale for a user base of 100k or more. While that's good feedback to start with, I had trouble visualizing 'scale'. I mean, I currently work for a company with a user base of approx. 300k but I didn't build its frontend/backend that got it this far.

What does building for scale even mean? What does it look like on the front-end vs back-end?

When I think of scale, I'm thinking DevOps and ensuring your servers can handle 'scale' and setting up distributed databases, using caching (Redis).

So if tomorrow you were to start up a project, full stack work, how would you ensure it's scalable so that it can handle a mass influx of users the next day (extreme example much)?

How did you get better at CSS?

Aizaz Khaja — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 06:09:40 +0000

I've been developing for 2 years now and have been working at my first full-time job as a software developer for 5 months now (not counting my contract work) where I get to spend about 70/30 in backend/frontend respectively.

Whatever frontend work I've done has mostly been focused on placing new components on an Angular app with a sprinkle of CSS and mostly Bootstrap.

Not that my job requires this yet, but I'd like to strengthen my CSS skills so that I can feel confident in my ability to whip up anything I can visually imagine; instead of using a lot of basic CSS to make things look good enough (some position tweaking or color/formatting changes). I want to rely less on Bootstrap.

What resources have you personally used to improve your CSS skill when you were learning? I know there's plenty of tutorials out there (and I've access to a few), but for some reason, I can't seem to get the most out of these tutorials since you need to practice CSS enough to get a good knack of things.

Did you have a certain list of web pages, shapes, etc. that you wanted to replicate and just trial and error your way to the end result? Was there a structured path involved? Are there any practical/online resources available that you found particularly useful?

My motivation/Why: I do mostly backend, but I'd like to be able to whip up mocks for my personal endeavors/side projects more confidently.

I just published my first open source project. Here's what I've learnt.

Aizaz Khaja — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 23:39:49 +0000

That it's one of the best ways to learn a technology you haven't worked with before.

I just published an npm package/tool that allows you to create static candlestick charts for financial data. All you have to do is plug in some JSON data, set some options and call the draw() function on it. Check it out here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/candlestickcharts

In a matter of a week's worth of solid work, I managed to:

Learn how to create an NPM package (after publishing it, this point feels like a cop out since it REALLY is not that difficult. The point is, sometimes we hesitate making progress because of the anticipated workload).
Learn how to work with HTML Canvas. I've never touched this before, but in evaluating my options for this project, I felt like this may be the best way to go about it. "Pfft...it's just HTML, right?!" Wrong. The HTML part of it all was half a line's worth of code. The rest was manipulating pixels using JavaScript.
How to accurately scale and plot a chart using HTML Canvas, from data provided in JSON.

Let's not underestimate the value of getting practice in your favorite JavaScript ES6, object, array and Math/Number methods. Plus the fact that you just created a tool that can potentially make at least one developer's life easier and actually pushed it out into the world. That's always a good feeling. Whether or not someone takes this project and creates something out of it, well...🤷‍♂️.

Now to find out how much maintenance work is involved, maybe I'll make another post then 😉. In the mean time, I'm probably going to look into a new project - because let's face it, it's more fun to work on shiny new ideas than maintaining old ones. (Ha.)

What was your most challenging experience in a project you’ve worked on, and why?

Aizaz Khaja — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 08:40:54 +0000

Yesterday I had a conversation with a tech recruiter and I failed to appropriately demonstrate how I can work on/architect web apps too and am more than just a glorified website builder. (Preparation makes perfect, I suppose 🤷🏽‍♂️).

I failed.

One question in particular that stuck with me was what I’ve posed in the title. I failed to come up with a more interesting experience working on one of my projects in a quick witted manner and choked up something along the lines of “um, authentication. I had to build one from scratch instead of using oAuth or sessions...”

For the record, I’m not a super experienced dev, but I’d like to think I have enough chops to creatively solve problems with code. For example, one “experience” project I developed was a markdown wikis app with authentication, authorization, building features particular to a premium user and then Stripe subscription payments integrated (do I get some points for third party API integration?). Not to mention database design experiences in both SQL and NoSQL.

At this point in my job search, I honestly can’t tell if that’s beginner level stuff or what you’d call intermediate (these terms are so relative it’s nuts. But there’s gotta be an average boundary to determine what’s beginner and what’s intermediate?)

So my dear reader; If you’re still here I’d like to ask you:

What was your most challenging experience in a project you’ve worked on, and why?

P.S. hit me up if you know someone looking for a JavaScript or Node/React developer. Thanks! 🤓