DEV Community: Aseem Bansal

What is the algorithm for dev.to's feed?

Aseem Bansal — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 15:51:55 +0000

My feed is full of people who I do not follow and tags I do not follow. I have checked various posts. It seems all of dev is being shown to me. What is happening here?

e.g. I am seeing this post
https://dev.to/koddr/how-to-create-a-native-macos-app-on-go-golang-and-react-js-with-full-code-protection-part-1-463k

I do not follow the person and do not follow any of tags in it so why am I seeing this post in my feed?

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Do this when confused about what to spend your time on

Aseem Bansal — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 17:21:53 +0000

There are days when we get confused by having too many choices. Confused about what we should learn. Because there are so many choices.

I recently came across a story which helped me clear my thoughts on this topic.

There once was a donkey. The donkey was hungry as well as thirsty. On one side there was water and on the other side there was food. The donkey kept on thinking which side to go first. At the end the donkey did not move and died.

What's the moral of the story?

Do not fall in the trap of short-term thinking. Think long term and plan long term.

I am currently 27 years old. There is a lot left to live. I like this website https://www.failflow.com/die/1450. It shows me exactly how much assuming average life expectancy.

I am on week 1,451 of 4,732 of my life.
If it takes 50 weeks to become advanced at any skill, I can learn about 44 new skills during my career. 64 if I include retirement.

We live in the age of instant gratifications and our attention spans have shortened. This has led to us thinking short term. Instead of planning for a few years we plan as we are going to die next week.

There would always be a need to balance short term and long term efforts. But we should not get confused between what is for short term and what is for long term.

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What is an engineer's worth?

Aseem Bansal — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 13:45:04 +0000

An engineer's worth can be seen from the number of different perspectives they can look a problem from. As a software engineer I may think about getting things across the finish line. But I have found that if I start thinking it from someone else's perspective it makes my work better. Different people in different professions may look at things differently. e.g.

Someone who is doing software testing might think "How do I break this", "What do developers usually not test"?
Someone who manages Infrastructure might think "In what sequence would this get deployed" or "How many servers would this change require"?
Someone who does ETL might think where is data coming from, where is it going?
Someone who does BI might be more interested in what each column in a table means and how does it relate to business?
Someone in customer success might be more interested in how will this be rolled out to customers? If something happens would there be workarounds for the customer? How would the team find out before the customer has to report the problem?
Someone who has to increase sales for a product might be more interested in reducing the number of steps customer has to take to buy something to increase the likelihood of sales.
Someone who has been working more as a SQL dev might tend to solve problems one tabular operation at a time, someone who has been working in general purpose programming languages might tend to solve problems one row at a time.

I recently started thinking much more about how to grow more as an engineer. This is the answer that I came up with. Try and put more hats when looking at a problem to make the solutions better.

What's your take on this?

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