DEV Community: Emmanuel Osuolale

Getting Started in Tech: 8 Mistakes I Made

Emmanuel Osuolale — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 13:49:45 +0000

At the beginning of my tech career, I made a few mistakes that cost me countless hours and months. I wanted to share some mistakes I made when I started applying for jobs and offer guidance on how to avoid them. I hope this helps someone who is just getting started in tech.

1. No projects or not having a portfolio.

To attract recruiters, you must show them you have what they are looking for. You can share your portfolio projects on LinkedIn, Twitter, Dribble, or other social media.

Make sure they are easily accessible and have a good description of your tasks and the technology you used.

Don't just work on projects; showcase them, build your personal brand, and get your dream job.

2. Applying for mid-level roles.

I believed since I performed better in several machine learning and software development programs than most of my peers, I could skip a step.

No matter how talented you are, you must start somewhere, such as in a junior role or internship, and work your way up. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule.

3. Not having a mentor

It's important to find a mentor. Ask them for advice on how to personalize your path.

Make sure they're in a position you want to be in the future. Then, learn from them, follow their path, and follow their advice.

4. Being too specific about what I wanted.

I had the impression that since I had put in the time and effort to work on numerous projects while seeking a data science job, Someone would see my GitHub and maybe send me a mail for a job.

I saw a lot of data analyst roles but thought I could do better than that and I didn’t like creating visualizations too. If you're just starting out in technology, don't be too rigid; consider other possibilities and develop a strategy for getting to your ideal position.

5. I thought some roles were too big for me.

I was looking at job descriptions, and if there was a skill I was not good with, I would just leave the role and not apply. But then, I realized that most job descriptions are written by individuals who do not have a very good idea about the role and probably just did a quick google search on what skills a data scientist should have.

So, if you are confident about what you know and sure you will be able to add value to the organization, please do not hesitate to apply.

In your cover letter, explain your skills, what makes you stand out, and why you are interested in that opportunity.

6. Not preparing for interviews

When I started, I didn't prepare for interviews. I thought, as I didn't know where the questions could come from, why should I prepare?

Well, that was a mistake, and it cost me. I would continue to learn and upskill myself. However, this was wrong, It is important to prepare.

You must learn to introduce yourself (you can practice with friends), look up the company online, and try searching for common interview questions related to your role. You might be lucky and see some past questions from people who have been interviewed previously. A quick and comprehensive Google search can help.

7. Not spending time applying for jobs.

Remember, there are a lot of people applying for that job. To stand out, make sure your CV is tailored for that position, including relevant experience, projects, and certificates you have.

Always apply with a cover letter. This would help the recruiter understand that you put in time for this application and you are very serious about getting the job.

The quantity of applications you send does not matter at all. It's the quality of your applications.

In your cover letter, explain why you are applying, what skills you have, and what makes you stand out from other applicants. Someone who can review your cover letters, such as a mentor, friend, or sibling, would be an excellent person to ask.

8. Running away from the hard stuff.

It is important to not run away from job applications because they are very long, especially if you think you are a good fit. You can decide to start applying and continue on another day.

Do not run away from them. They designed it so unserious people would probably ignore the application. Do not be one of them. Nobody likes applying for jobs, but that step is important in order to get the jobs we want.

While getting started can be incredibly difficult and discouraging, it's important that you never lose motivation. It's about consistency and hard work.

Keep on learning and pushing! I am rooting for you!

Thank you for reading this, I hope you found some helpful tips.
Finally I wanted to thank my good friend Benny for helping me review this article.

How to debug errors in Javascript as a newbie

Emmanuel Osuolale — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 05:35:11 +0000

I spent hours debugging my javascript code yesterday and I wanted to share with you what to do so you do not spend the same amount of time for a very simple problem.

Using your browser - When debugging for frontend app use the console tab on your browser inspect option, to get here you can right click on an open page in your browser, click on inspect and then look for console, then refresh the tab open and see what errors it drops.
Look for the red line - Don't take the error exactly for what it says or the line it tells you the error is coming from, read the code and look for the line where the error is coming from. Sometimes error messages are misleading and would lead you to going to google and trying what might not be the solution to your error, Make sure you know the line of code the error is coming from.

I hope this guide can help when you are trying to find bugs in your Javascript code next time, Thank you for reading this.

How to fix MongoCompatibility Error when connecting to Azure Cosmos DB

Emmanuel Osuolale — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 11:32:27 +0000

Introduction

Last week I was trying to connect my Nodejs Application with Cosmos DB, I had already been using mongo DB and I saw that Azure had Mongo DB API connector for Cosmos DB and i decided to use this because I love Azure.
I was able to create it using the azure portal.
Next was to connect this on my node JS web app.

Creating the first connection

I googled how to do this and came across some repository on microsoft sample on how to do this and I tried to follow how they created the connection, it was like this

const mongoUri = `mongodb://${env.accountName}:${env.key}@${env.accountName}
.documents.azure.com:${env.port}/
${env.databaseName}
?ssl=true`;

I went to my azure portal, clicked on setting then opened connection string and copied all the details requested from me only to see this in the terminal when i ran this.

error: MongoCompatibilityError: Server at XXXXX- 
 XXXX.documents.azure.com:10255 reports maximum   
wire version 2, but this version of the Node.js Driver  
  requires at least 6 (MongoDB 3.6)

Troubleshooting

I googled and google and did not find a solution to this it was like this error did not exist anywhere.

Solution

My solution to this was to change the code for mongoUri to exactly what is in azure microsoft primary connection string.

Thought i would share this for someone who might encounter this challenge when connecting their Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB.

Thank you for reading this.

How to deploy your first web App on Azure

Emmanuel Osuolale — Wed, 25 May 2022 06:13:08 +0000

What is Azure App Service (Part 1)

Azure app service is a Platform As A Service (PAAS) offered by Azure that help you deploy applications on the cloud without worrying about setting up the environment you would use or updating the virtual machine or the operating system. You are only required to come with your code and then tell azure what you want.

In this article I would be showing you how to create an azure App Service and in the next post we would learn how to setup different amazing functions Azure App Service offers.

First thing we need to do is create an azure subscription if we do not already, this link help you create a free one month subscription that comes with 200 dollar azure credit. If you already have a subscription please skip this step.

Next we would be creating our App Service.

Step 1

In this step we would open the azure portal, when you open the azure portal, search for resource group then create a new one following the image step.

Then

Click create a resource group, in the basic tab select the subscription you want to use and the name of the resource group, you can decide not to make any change to the region.

After this you click review and create, then create

Step 2

Next we would search for app service and try to create a new one,
1. Go to the search bar and type *App Service *

2. Click on Azure App Service and open it

3. Click on create, this would open the basic windows.

4. Select the subscription you want to use.

5. Choose the resource group we created earlier, you can create a new one here too.

6. Give your web app a unique name as this is unique through out azure something like { Your name } + WEBAPP should do.

7. Choose code for Publish since we wouldn't be creating a container.

8. For Runtime stack choose Python 3.7.

9. If you choose Python 3.9 the Operating system by default is Linux and cannot be changed.

10. Region is where you decide where you app should be hosted, I chose Central US

App Service Plan

1. Depending on the Operating system you choose earlier, you would be asked to create a Linux or windows Plan, this helps you save the app service plan you choose for future Apps you want to create, you can leave this as it is.

2. For Sku and Size we click change size. This would open a Spec Picker which has three section depending on the kind of Web App you want to deploy, this determines the Memory and compute assigned to you App, and some additional features too. I choose S1 in the Production tier so that I would be able to access, deployment slot features, then apply.

Ignore Zone redundancy since our service plan does not allow us to change this.

4. Click Review and Create as there is nothing we need to configure again.

5. Finally click create and wait for your App to be created

Step 3

Deploying your App

After your app has been created successfully click on go to resources.

This would take you to your Web Application.

In the Deployment Section click on Deployment Center, and waiting for it to load deployment settings, there are different columns of options, you can see Logs and FTPS credentials

On Source in the settings Column, click on Select code source and you would see a drop down menu, In this tutorial we would be using External Git from Manual Deployment Section as it is the most straightforward and fastest way to deploy, this is not best practice. For best practice using an Option in Continuous deployment would be best.

In the new external git section for repository use this link, I create a Github repository for this purpose.
For Branch choose main and Choose Public for repository type.
On

Introduction to Blob Storage in Azure

Emmanuel Osuolale — Tue, 17 May 2022 07:10:39 +0000

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

What is Blob Storage?

Blob storage helps us stop unstructured data in Azure, we can determine the level of access (Read Only, Read Write) or the way of accessing it.
The type of data you want to store, the size of the data and the frequency at which you want to access your data determines the storage type you use.
When creating a storage there are two options for the type of storage account

The General Purpose V2 account – This is a storage type used when you have multiple scenario you want to use your storage for and do not require low latency i.e. It is not too important fast the user accesses the file. Used for the typical storage scenario for storing images, videos, documents etc.
General Purpose gives you access to the different type of storage too, file share, Container, Queues and Tables
The Premium Storage Account – If you are looking for very low latency and you know exactly what you want to do with your storage account, then premium storage is your best bet, here you have to select how you want to use your storage account. There is an option when creating that asks you to specify the type of storage you want to use. I would explain this now.

Depending on your use case there are different type of storage

Block Blobs – This is used for storing files (Text or Binary). It is use where is no frequent changes made to the files stored, it is used to uploading and downloading large files efficiently too.
Append Blob – This is used for storing files that require changes to be made, an example is log files. Append here means add to a file, and this storage type is optimized for this, makes it easy and very fast.
Page Blob – This is used in a scenario where there is a lot of read / write operation, it is used in Azure as the disk for Virtual Machine, it helps with reading and writing to disk quickly and efficiently.

Another case to consider when creating your Azure storage account is how frequently this files would be accessed, when creating your storage you have only two options – Hot or Cold Storage and this option appears only when creating a General-purpose v2 Storage account.

Here are the different storage tiers

Hot Storage – this is used when the files are going to be access frequently and/or modified frequently too, this is a more expensive alternative
Cold Storage – If you rarely access your data stored, then this would be your better alternative because it is cheaper to buy but expensive to access.
Archive Storage – This is used for file you do not need access to at all but want to save them, nobody can access them until they are unarchived.

I hope from this article you have learned about the options you have in azure and have useful information when creating your next storage account

Thank you for reading my article.

References

Introduction to App Service in Azure

Emmanuel Osuolale — Mon, 16 May 2022 06:32:00 +0000

In this post would be explaining some term learned from working with app service that beginner would find useful when navigating or creating an app Service.

Platform as a Service

Platform as a Service is an Azure offering that helps you deploy application on the web without worrying about licensing, Windows or Linux version or Updating your Operating System. It helps you manage the underlying infrastructure and allows you to focus on deploying application.

Azure App Service

This is a Platform as a Service (PAAS) from azure that allows you to deploy your code on azure using GitHub or other Code hosting platform, it comes with a lot of pre built functions that makes deploying your app easy, examples are Authentication, API management, CI/CD etc.

Resource Group

Resource group is a logical container used to store resources like Storage, App Service, Virtual Network etc. on Azure.
Resource group allows you to manage all resources, manage Permission and Monitor Cost.

Zone Redundancy

To make your app available if there is a downtime in a particular location where your app has been deployed, you use Zone Redundancy, this is done when creating your app and it is used to deploy a copy of your app in 3 different azure zone, so that in case of a failure in a a zone another app instance continue to serve the application.

Deployment Slot

If you are trying to test changes you made you previously built or you want some changes to be available to some people who visit your web app, then deployment slot is what you need. It helps you preview changes made to your app, and also share this changes with some of your website visitors to get feedback on your app.
You do this by increase the traffic sent to the new slot created, the default number is 0 percent.

Working with imbalanced dataset using Neural Network and Imblearn Library SMOTE function.

Emmanuel Osuolale — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 17:34:34 +0000

Working with imbalance dataset using Neural Network and Imblearn Library SMOTE function.

The goal of this analysis I did was to help the bank of Portugal predict people who are more likely to purchase a Bank term Deposit, it is common in marketing data set that the percentage of people who actually buy are maybe 8% percent and in this case it would be disastrous as our model would only predict very accurately for the class we are not interested in
Today I would show you exactly how to worked with imbalance dataset and my result from this analysis would be proof of how important it is to do this. Let's get right into the analysis now.
This would start with importing the library that we would us for the analysis and also the dataset here, the dataset set used here was gotten from this link and it is available for download anywhere.

After importing the library and dataset we would quickly fit our model and test it to see how it performs without using Imblearn to fit the data,
This is really clear now that we are not going to get any real value from our analysis if we do not do anything about this.

Dealing with Imbalanced Dataset.
There are two basic way of dealing with imbalanced data set which in this case is a mixture of numbers and strings.
The Up sampling method
The Under sampling method

The up sampling method is used when you have a dataset where one class is pretty low and you do not have a very large data, in this case the best thing to do is generate more samples as we call it here, this samples would be as similar as possible to the Original Data, there are different method used here like K-nearest neighbor, Random sampling and SMOTE.
An important thing to note here is to understand that this is done to enable us to have a balanced model and it is important to split the data into Train and Test before performing any Sampling on your data, this would allow you to do correct prediction for your test data. As I did here.
Here is the result of my analysis the classification report, the ROC curve

In under sampling is quite the opposite and is used when you have a very large data set and dividing it would not take important information on the dataset, it is advised to always use Oversampling method so as to get all the insights you can get.
More about Imblearn Library and the different method can be found here.

Thank you so much for reading this till the end you did really well, here is a link to my GitHub repository where the code is hosted I am working on something like a library where it would be really easy to work with Imbalanced data.