DEV Community: Clara

Thoughts on The Social Dilemma

Clara — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 02:10:43 +0000

If you ever felt like you're addicted to social media or you're just unhappy with how much time you spend on social media, this documentary is for you:

The Social Dilemma touches upon several topics concerning problems with social media as we know it today reaching from the effects it has on kids and preetens to how it is shaping society at large - think about the influence on elections or the ever growing gap between supporters of opposing political parties. On top of that it also explains why the networks enforce this behaviour - all by interviewing (former) engineers and employees of Google, Facebook & co.

Here are some of my thoughts:

The extend of the problem

Even though I work in the industry, and I know how that the social networks try to keep you on their sites as long as possible (think about why instagram stories are only available 24h), I wasn't aware of the extend of those algorithms. Somehow this was a real eye opener and I cannot get this thought out of my head while scrolling through my feeds.

Effect on kids and teens

Showing the effects of social media use on preteens with a graph that showed that rate of sucides in preteens increased a grueling 150% since 2010 left me in shock. I myself sometimes get sucked into the always beautiful faces on instagram, getting insecure about myself but I know this is not reality. I cannot imagine being their age and their idols are these picture perfect influencer. I am very much in favor of the bill that was just proposed in the UK, which suggests to mark photoshopped images as such (source )

Dividing society

Due to the social media reinforcement bubble, everyone sees there own opinion reinforced in social networks, making opposing views unbelieveable and hence eradicating healthy discussion. It even goes so far that different truths are being created.
When asked what the immediate dangers are resulting from this, one interviewee answered: "civil war". This was another part of the movie that left me shocked, but not surprised after seeing demonstrations all around the world getting more violent.

I am curious to hear what you think:
What are your thoughts on the documentary?
What are your ideas on how to solve these problems?

PS: The movie's website also offers tips and further resources on how to deal with the harms of exploitative tech. My favourite short hack: Remove notifications - I only allow email and a few other apps to directly notify me, and it has increased my productivity immensly.

Do you double check your PR’s?

Clara — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 22:09:14 +0000

Do you ever read your own pull requests? Or are you more of a >that’ll do< uploader?

I received my first code review with a lot, like a lot of annotations, including typos that I could have caught myself - that was embarrassing.
Since then I have established a short checklist that I follow before I submit a pull request for a code review.

1 Double check every file that I submit

I give myself a nice long break before submitting the PR - if possible I come back to my code on the next day, just so I am the most distanced I can be. Since the person that will review my code will have a very different perspective than I do, This will give me the chance of reading my code as the reviewer. Helping catch any error or unclear line of code that I could not have seen before. Since the person reviewing my PR will have a different perspective than I, this gives me a chance of reading my own code from their point of view. This type of distancing will make it easier to catch errors and any unclear lines of code that I may have missed before.
Bonus: It helps with exactly knowing what you did in this PR in order to write a nice summary.

2 Question variable names

While in the zone, I often don’t think a lot about naming my variables, although I’m not as terrible as just naming them x or array. However, Naming variables can be decisive in making your code readable, So therefore the pull request PR is a good opportunity to question my variable names. the choice of names I have given. Same goes for method names - here I take my time and think about if that method might be used in another scope or scenario later and therefore should be named differently.

3 Watch out for typos

Especially if you’re dealing with any kind of text, a transactional email you were drafting, or an automated flash message - double check your spelling.

4 Run a linter

If you haven’t done so, now would also be the time to run a linter checking your style.

Those points might seem obvious, but I am sure following them religiously has spared my reviewers some comments.

Let me know what you are checking before you submit a PR for review.

Resources for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

Clara — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 20:10:02 +0000

After graduating from a coding bootcamp myself in December 2017 I felt lost. I made quite a big shift from a very traditional, very non-technical industry: law. Before learning how to code, I wasn't immersed in the technical world, and had little idea where to find good resources to learn even more.

Now, I am a teacher for coding newbies myself. In order to facilitate the journey into coding I put together a non-exhaustive list of learning resources for my students. You can find the sources on my GitHub as well as down below.

Let me know what you think, and if you have more resources to share, please put those in the comments!

Ruby on Rails

At Le Wagon you learn our beloved Ruby and Rails - and there is a lot more to find out about it, have a look at these tutorials:

https://gorails.com/series - a plethora of tutorials
https://thoughtbot.com/upcase/ (they also have courses on advanced git!)

Code Katas

If you need to prepare for that next interview, have a look at code katas. But don't get frustrated - these challenges are at the verge of coding, problem solving and mathematical skills which is a very specific skill of itself.

Javascript courses

Javascript is one of the coding languages with the furthest reach (according to GitHub survey) and has been in the top ten ever since. Time to master it with these tutorials:

https://javascript.info/ a very extensive course with a lot of small and interesting details covered - more than just the average course!
https://learnjavascript.online/ - made by a long-term teacher for Le Wagon and expert in his field Jad
https://wesbos.com/courses/ - Wes Bos is famous for his video courses (paid courses! - but Wagon alumni have gotten reductions before when they bought in bulks, so shooting him a message might be worth it) if you want to see if you like his teaching style, check out his free course:
https://www.javascript30.com/

Newsletters/Communities

In order to be up to date about the latest changes, newsletters and news pages are really helpful.

Ruby weekly is a good start as it is the offical newsletter and has a nice mixture of news on the Ruby language, tutorials and hints
TurboBreakFast of course I have to mention Dimitris (teacher and developer for Le Wagon Berlin) Turbo Breakfast with curated picks from tech, economics, design and things that make the web beautiful.
Navigating your software development career a newsletter with advice how to create, maintain and push your career in web/software development

Communities

https://dev.to/ (the page is built in Rails)

Twitter accounts

If you enjoy twitter, here are some interesting accounts to follow, but that's just a start, because... honestly, there is tons of devs on twitter. Just find the ones that interest you the most :)

eileencodes - works for Github and is part of the Rails core team
dhh - the creator of Rails and author of bestselling books. If you like strong opinions, check his account
girslwhocode
emmawedekind - content creator and twitter famous
wesbos - author of the above mentioned javascript courses

Open Source Contributions

Open Source is a great way to learn from the community, and see how other experienced developers write code. You may also have to play around with other technologies, which also correlates to a lovely way to learn!

First Time Contributors - To understand how to make an open source contribution:
Open Source Projects - Here is a website that helps navigate open-source projects that welcome first time contributors

Coding Conferences

What better way to network and learn than to attend conferences?

Frontend

You Gotta Love Frontend - Global Frontend event that travels around
Javascript Conferences - A website to find Javascript Conferences

Ruby

Ruby Conferences - Ruby Conferences

All (Conference Searching Websites)

Conference Monkey - Search for miscellaneous conferences
Conference.tech - Search for miscellaneous conferences

Misc

Check out Paris teacher Edwards' repo with a mix of helpful shortcuts, explaination for error messages and recommendations for gems:

https://github.com/Eschults/useful_stuff

If you want to get a more in depth view into computer science, try this Havard Course. The lectures are very interesting, the challenges are hard, but they provide good in depth knowledge of what actually happens when we code.

CS50

IF you are interested in learning an indepth knowledge of JavaScript.. You Don't Know JavaScript is considered by some to be the holy bible of JavaScript

You Don't Know JS - Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know Javascript