DEV Community: Dmitrii Pashutskii

How I became a developer: kinda success story

Dmitrii Pashutskii — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 11:42:09 +0000

It was originally posted on my blog.

Recently I started feeling a bit nostalgic and decided to put my feelings in words. This is my story about becoming a self-taught software engineer but also about finding myself in life.

I know there are a lot of developer's stories like this, so it's my turn to write one 😃. I hope my story could inspire or push someone in the right direction. And throw off some prejudices about starting to learn code when you're 30 or without a tech degree.

In addition at the end of the post, I added my advice to the beginners.

Starting my career

Somewhere in 2015-2016, I was working as a System administrator in one of the biggest telecom companies in Russia and my manager asked me to do some automation tasks. I wasn't a good SysAdmin because it was the first time I need to do this. He gave me the huge book on Unix and asked me to figure this out.

This was a turning point for me. It was an ordinary day but something clicked inside.

All my jobs before were weird. It's a funny thing to say now but I've been worrying a lot about this in the past. I always loved computers since I was a kid and there wasn't a question which industry I ended up in. But what I'm going to do within the industry was a very big question.

I spent some time in college but very fast I got bored with it (it wasn't a good school) and I dropped it in the second year

So I found myself in a situation where I had to get a job. I started with the easiest possible way of going into the IT industry - technical support. You know these guys who answer the phone when your Internet broke down. That was me. The job was very dumb and I clearly wasn't learning anything. But I didn't know what else I can do and continue to go to work every day. I tried to educate myself some related stuff of the telecom industry: networks, routing, bla bla. It was so boring and the knowledge was too theoretical. I didn't like it but kept pushing myself and felt bad when I didn't learn anything useful.

Please never do that. If you don't like the topic you're learning maybe it's not for you? Later I finally realized that and stopped torture myself with networks.

Then I tried to pivot to the system administrator. Or I thought so. Since I didn't have good knowledge about the servers most of my administration career I have been one platform specialist. I worked as a specialist of "SMS Router" in two companies. I'm sure you have no idea that these routers even exist. Neither did I. Most of my job was to check logs, change some settings, check logs again.

As you can imagine this knowledge has never come in handy in my life again.

Here I learned my second lesson - try to be more generalist than narrow specific. Especially if it's so narrow that nobody in the world knows about this.

All these jobs felt like I'm a crazy train driver pulling random levers. I never felt satisfaction on any of them and almost all the time I was frustrated and didn't know what to do next. That took me 6 years and a lot of courage to finally found that moment when I said "that's enough".

Finding the way

On the day I mentioned above I got the first time experience of some programming and I loved it! I wrote a small automation tool in bash and it worked and did something helpful.

I didn't have any programming background. I did some coding when I was a kid but it was either too hard for me to understand either too easy and unsatisfactory. It seems it should have passed 28 years before I started to appreciate the beauty of coding 😃

After that day I lit up with the idea to become a programmer. I was madly drawn to this idea. I started reading forums, websites. I discovered the thing called podcasts (they were not so popular in Russia) and started listening to everything related to programming. I understand only about 30% of everything the hosts were saying but it was so exciting!

I loved everything - community, IT area itself, coding approaches, languages. And I still love that to this day to be honest 🙃.

So the goal has been set but where do I start?

I started trying all the different code learning websites I could found. I didn't know much English back in a day so I've been researching runet. Unfortunately, most of the resources in Russian are not good. I even wanted to buy some school subscription for around 800 euro. Later I figured out they are more marketers then real programmers, thank god I didn't buy it. All the resources I tried were either confusing or tried to teach me anything but programming. How to set up a Wordpress website or something like this. I still worked full-time so there wasn't much time for learning and it has been giving me a lot of frustration.

But finally, I found one website which I still think one of the best programming courses ever - hexlet.io. Unfortunately, they still don't have much in English. They had everything you should see in the great learning courses - good quality lessons, great community and one respected hero-programmer who stands behind the project.

Back in a day, they didn't have any marketing and I have no idea how I found it in the first place. But this website changed everything. I started with their YouTube webinars where some smart guy was talking about serious and hard things. I didn't understand much but his talks were so interesting so I wanted to learn all that.

I started with PHP courses and joined the community on Slack (nowadays It's the biggest Russian-speaking code learning community). I was a lurker at first but then I started to chat more and more.

Eventually, I attended a few hexlet meetups and even was added to "chosen ones" Slack channel 😃. There were mostly the old core members of the community. I was so excited about all that! The first time I felt like I'm a part of something cool. The hexlet project had a huge impact on my progress as a programmer.

Per aspera ad astra

The world of software engineering has been dragging me on more and more but I still wasn't a programmer. I made a pretty big decision to quit my job and start full time learning to code with the goal of finding the junior position.

I still don't know if it was the right decision or not. I ended up as a programmer and everything is great in my life today but what if I'd fail? I don't know what would have happened then. So if you're thinking about doing the same, please consider all pros and cons.

Another reason why I deiced to quit my job was that my girlfriend (She is a wife now 😍) got the exchange semester in Portugal for three months. I haven't travel much back then so I decided why not to go with her and spend these 3 months of learning code.

It sounded like a great idea and we went to Lisbon for 90 days. Oh boy, how wrong I was with expectations that I'm gonna be studying. When you for the first time living abroad everything is so exciting. You are having new foreign friends among students and all students like to party and drink so much! 🥳. All that was no good for my learning plan 🤦‍♂️ The days under the hot Portugal sun have been passing very fast but I was slow in achieving my goals.

But even slow learning is still learning. I didn't understand it back then but now I know it well. Always try to compare today's yourself with yesterday's yourself and nobody else. But back then I was a bit frustrated with my progress.

Besides, Hexlet is really, really hard course. The basic idea behind it was taken from a very famous book among software engineers - SICP. With the only difference, the courses use JS/PHP as more modern languages instead of LISP. But all the concepts are still there: functional programming, immutability, recursions, data structures, abstractions. A lot of great but hard stuff for a newbie. I'm quite happy that I took that course, it affected my programming style in a lot of good ways. But I am not sure if I can recommend it to the new people at coding.

Luckily at the same time, they also created a new feature in addition to the courses, called "Projects". I was in the first stream of the students to try it out. And since it was a new feature the creator of courses himself curated it. Basically, it was 3 projects with real-world tasks and in real-world environments. We were writing the tests, setting up a dev environment, used git, etc. It gave me a huge boost in the understanding of how real development works.

I still remember how I've been writing the last project sitting in the Lisbon airport where my flight was delayed before going back to Moscow. ✈️

Real-world

My first idea after learning to code was to become a freelance developer. This year I already started to fall in love with traveling and dreamed about "digital nomad" (I didn't know the term yet) lifestyle.

But the courses brought me back to Earth and I decided I'm not ready for that. I thought I could only be a freelancer once I was a master. Now I realize it's the wrong mindset. If you want to go to freelance it's fine to go even when you're junior. But questioning yourself is the part of becoming a programmer. Impostor syndrome is a real thing and it pervasive among our community.

So I started to look for an office job. I was part of the Hexlet community and I got a huge help with CV and preparation for the interviews. I like the way how the interviews were going on the coding positions. Most of them were online tests or some coding exercises. I'm a fan of digital asynchronous communication where you have time to think and I hate phone talks where you need to answer within a few seconds.

Once again, the Hexlet community helped me here as well. The founder of the courses knew some guy from the previous job and heard they are looking for a junior developer in their company. I got the interview: live coding, coding exercise for a couple of days, and BOOM! 💣

I landed my first programming job.

I was a PHP junior developer. The salary was negligible, around €300 per month.

Anyway, I was happy. I haven't been looking at the watch, waiting when the working day is over for the first time in my life. I had a pretty good team-lead who educate me on a lot of stuff with patience.

Unfortunately, the management of the company wasn't great and we had a lot of problems with them. Eventually, most of the team quit their positions including me. That was my first and the only office job as a programmer and it lasted for a year.

After I quit even more interesting part of my story began. But I move it to the next post.

Beginner's note

I'd like to give some advice to people who only starting their career and journey. And also to think about what I would have done differently.

Don't research too much. It's good to do some research on the paths of the career or where you need to start with your current knowledge. But don't put too much pressure on yourself. When you over-research you will start to listen to everyone and compare yourself to others. "This language is the best", "I'm working in Google", "I learned how to code for 2 months and I'm making a bunch load of money". All this has to be ignored. Every situation is different, every person has their own path. Take your time and comfortable pace.
The best way to start thinking and learning to code is to focus on basics. Languages and technologies are great but they are constantly changing whereas the basics are not. Try to learn the core basics at first and move to the specifics after.
Don't wait too long before you start looking for your first job. You'll never be the ideal hacker you're imagining in your head. The job requirements also could look very scary at first but then you will learn they are not mandatory. The companies are often overstating the requirements in the job listings.
When you start to go deeper in learning specific technologies try to cover the related fields. If you're back-end developer learn DB, Servers, Operation Systems. If you chose the front-end development learn HTML/CSS, how browsers work, design basic. It will T-shape you and make you a better specialist.
Make sure you're also paying attention to the environment you work in. It's related to the things which make developer's lives easier. Things like version control systems, Continuous Integration/Delivery, monitoring tools, even editors or IDEs.
Soft skills are very important for programmers. Learn to talk/write/communicate.
Find the community where you feel comfortable and learn together with others. It helped me a lot on my path. Without community, you sometimes can feel you're drawing in all this information. With the community, your peers always have your back.
Code, code, code, especially at the beginning. Nothing makes you a better programmer then solving the real issues.

And the most important thing that has nothing to do with programming - never stop looking for yourself, believe me, it is worth finding.

If you want to discuss my article or share your challenges as a junior developer tweet me at @guar47

How I launched my first side project

Dmitrii Pashutskii — Mon, 04 May 2020 04:38:06 +0000

The post was originally published on my blog.

As a developer, I always could create things, but I didn't. Not sure about the reasons though, I probably was short on time, or don't have a good enough idea or just was too lazy.

But I decided it should change this year. I set the goal at the beginning of the year to develop and launch at least 2 projects. And here it goes. After 3 months I launch my first project Arcade Hub.

I hope my story encourages some of you who also want to have a side project but continuously postponing the first step.

💡 Idea

I decided not to think too much about the idea because it's probably one of the reasons I haven't done it in the past. So I just started to notifying the problems I experienced and the moments "I wish I had this..." and write it down to the Notion.

At the moment of the start, I just looked at my notes and picked the easiest and fun. In my case, it was a service that supports Apple Arcade users.

Apple Arcade is the service by Apple which costs around 5$ per month and you get access to 100+ library of games (mostly arcades) without ads or any internal monetization. So it's game subscription service for all Apple devices.

After the launch, I tried the service and I liked it. But there was one problem, I didn't know how to pick a good game. They have reviews and scores as any app in AppStore, but it's inconvenient to check every game. That's what I decided to fix.

👨‍💻 Implementation

I love to learn new stuff so I decided to pick technologies that I never used or used not much before. It was Node.js, React.js, GraphQL powered by Apollo client and server, MongoDB.

I think here I made a mistake. The one thing is to do the project for learning and completely another doing project with goals to launch it for the public and have real users. The most important goal was finishing the project, get this closure feeling. But with learning new technologies, it could never happen.

It was a mistake, but that's what the first projects are for. To learn on our mistakes. Eventually, I stuck with a couple of problems because of the lack of experience, but with the Internet, everything could be solved, right? However, I decided my next project going to be on the familiar stack.

Especially if this is your first side project which you want to finish and maintain further I recommend you to chose your working stack.

👩‍🎨 Design

On that topic, I was just lucky that my wife is starting to learn design. So we decided this project going to be an experiment for her as well and she can practice web design.

If you don't know any designers I'd recommend using Figma and/or design systems. Even that I had designs, out of the box components allowed me to go much faster with elements. Otherwise, I need to implement a lot of CSS for that. And I'm not a big fan of CSS, to be honest.

Depending on your stack but TailwindCSS is a very good solution especially with the amount of ready components on the web. Design systems could be also very helpful. I used https://ant.design/ for React, but it could be anything. I heard a lot of good stuff about material design and you can find the components for any framework.

🚀 Launch

I finally finished and launched it, what's now?

Since it was a test project and I wanted to learn on my mistakes so I decided to try marketing as well. I know nothing on that topic, so I went through the pretty standard process that I've seen in makers communities: Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, and a little bit on IndieHackers and Makerlog. My hopes were on PH and Reddit, gaming projects seem not so popular on PH, but Reddit fits perfectly.

I found the niche community for the project (/r/AppleArcade) and post about my project. For such a small community I got around 75 votes which were one of the most popular topics on this subreddit. And most importantly I got my first traffic and amazing feedback. People find my project very simple and I thought it's going to be a downside of it but everyone prises how simple it is. Probably people tired of complex web-apps doing everything and my one-purpose app turns out very refreshing. That was insightful. I also got a lot of ideas on how to expand the project further.

I got around 1000 unique visitors during the two days of launch according to SimpleAnalytics and it's no big numbers overall but for me it was amazing. The feeling that you've done something helpful even for a few people is very inspiring!

Also, one of the Hungarian online magazines (they write about Apple stuff) found my post on Reddit and published the article about the project. It was beyond my expectations.

⚙️ Maintaining

From the start, I planned this project should be completely free and the main purpose is to have fun and learn something about launching products. But just in case I've created the buymeacoffee page and put it to the "About" section of the app.

I was really surprised when after a few weeks I got my first €5 subscriber. I didn't expect it at all. It turns out it was one of the developers of Apple Arcade games and he finds my site very helpful and he used it for some internal analytics. I suggested implementing API to easier get the data from my website and he was really happy.
That's another cool thing about publishing your projects - you never expect how it turns out. A lot of successful startups did several pivots before they found their purpose.

A bit later I got positive feedback from one more developer of Apple Arcade games.

In terms of maintaining I'm having fun as well. I finally have the place where I can experiment and apply something I recently learned in the area of programming or something else.

✅ Summary

I think every developer should at least once try to build the side project. It's very fun, encouraging, and inspiring to do so.

You shouldn't try to build a multimillion startup or trying to create the best product ever. In the beginning, you should just try to satisfy one user - yourself. And don't worry about all these successful projects people launching. Behind each successful project a lot of work and sweat. First off try to have fun and then you decide if you want to tie yourself out with making.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm always willing to help!

PS. I'm now building my second project and it's about learning in public. I'm starting MVP with the purpose of learning programming. I want to expand the ideas of 100DaysOfCode and similar ones and present a good platform for learning in public and build a good community.

Very excited to present it in the future!

Maker community

Dmitrii Pashutskii — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 02:38:12 +0000

This post was originally published in my blog

Hello everyone!

It's my very first post and I decided to start small.

Right now I'm an expat in Bali, Indonesia, in a small area called Canggu. This village/district of Bali is very famous for the nomad community - creative people who live here for the long term. You can find here all kinds of people. They are programmers/designers/bloggers/writers/coaches and other modern professionals.

But also here a lot of entrepreneurs. Most of them are starting small businesses (1-3 persons) and trying to become successful. Recently I started curios about this more so I decided to create a post.

For the last decade, our approach to work is changed. Everybody is talking about how remote work conquers the world. But how we do business is changing as well. If you have coding/designing skill it's becoming even easier. A big chunk of the products I've seen here is web/mobile services because they are faster to bootstrap and the potential audience is enormous.

To start your own project these are only requirements you have: idea, time, hosting/server costs, online marketing costs. That's it. Compared to offline businesses it sounds like a dream doesn't it? There is even a term for it - Indie making. You are completely independent of any of the big business ties. And it gives you flexibility and enjoyment.

Here in Bali, people have a very different starting point. Someone saved the money beforehand and move in cheap South-Eastern Asia, someone is still working part-time (like me) and trying to work it out in free time.

A lot of these new wave startups also trying to spread the word about very important ideas: sustainability, open startup movement, data privacy, transparency. Which is amazing.

Since this "making" thing is becoming more popular there are a lot of great communities to help you on the way to achieve your goals.

If you want to give it a shot here are a couple of links:

https://www.indiehackers.com - one of the most popular communities. You can find amazing people to communicate with and any help you need. In addition, they have a great feature to add your products and share the milestones with others.
https://getmakerlog.com - a very cool community with the main idea of public making. You have public to-do's with streaks which helps to maintain your stability of making. I discovered it recently and love the idea! And they have a very supportive telegram chat.
https://wip.chat/ - similar to the previous one but with the subscription.
https://www.producthunt.com/ - one of the most popular websites about new products on the market. And not necessarily the indie ones.
https://womenmake.com/ - community for women makers. As I heard it's very supportive and you can find fellow entrepreneurs to share your goals with.

And for sure Twitter. Many great and creative people to follow there. Some of them did a good job of promoting the whole movement:

Pieter Levels - creator of nomadlist.com. You should just check the profit of his product to understand the influence.
John O'Nolan - creator of the Ghost publishing platform and very experienced nomad.
Ryan Hoover - creator of producthunt.com and recently published in beta amazing https://yourstack.com.
Fajar Siddiq - serial creator, nomad, influencer, etc, etc. A great example of how much one person can achieve.
Marc Köhlbrugge - creator of https://wip.chat/ and other great products.

And many many more!

Recently I also started working on a very small project which I use to learn and make mistakes. I don't have plans to earn money on it. After finishing it I have another idea which I want to implement to create a monetized product.

If you're into coding/design and you like to create new stuff or maybe you always wanted to try I would like to encourage you to start today.

For picking up the idea you can think about the problems you faced recently. And then try to solve it. The best client you can have at the beginning is yourself.

If you want to chat with me about nomading, making, coding and any other stuff feel free to reach me on twitter.

Let's make! 🎉

What are the good practices to Node.js web app authentication and authorization?

Dmitrii Pashutskii — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 04:55:23 +0000

Hey everyone!

I'm doing a small project to learn myself a new technologies and I started to implementing the app auth stuff and I wonder if you can share the best practices for that.

To narrow down what I'm doing is the simple web app with Node.js + GraphQL with Apollo Client + Mongo as database + React as a client. Also, I'm thinking about JWT tokens and email + password for Sign_up and Sign_in.

What I'm looking is how better to store the tokens, in browser in database? When to check them? What process of generating token and expiration practices? etc.

Would love to hear anything you have!