DEV Community: Elijah Logan

what do you need to be a great developer

Elijah Logan — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 14:47:46 +0000

Learn how to be perseverant. No matter how smart you are, there will be problems that you will be stuck on and will spend days working on, banging your head against the wall trying to fix. Learning how to stay focused on problems will keep you moving towards finding a solution. This skill will take you much farther than any one programming language or library ever could.

Learn how to be perseverant.

Learn how to network. Companies get tons of applications when they post jobs, especially for junior developer roles. Learn how to form connections with people online and offline. This skill will grow your career prospects exponentially. When you network with people and get them to put in recommendations for you at their company, your one step ahead of the competition.

This skill will grow your career prospects exponentially

It’s increasingly harder to draw the attention of HR or whoever is looking at job applications. When there are 200 people applying for the same job you’d be lucky if they spent a whopping two minutes looking over your resume AND cover letter. When your application is supplemented by a recommendation from an existing company employee you become more than some words on a page.

You’re the person that jeff from dev ops helps on twitter from time to time work on open source projects. The person that Jess struck up a conversation with on Medium. Networking will open many more doors than just mass applying to jobs.
When there are 200 people applying for the same job you’d be lucky if they spent a whopping two minutes looking over your resume AND cover letter.

The last thing you need. The most important factor in whether you’ll be able to grow and flourish in the tech sector. A growth mindset. Make yourself believe that no matter what new technologies that you are faced with, no matter what library or operating system you are asked to work with. You can know with a reasonable amount of time learning it. You can do it.

It is going to be difficult. A lot of times it may seem impossible. But if you put the time and effort into learning how to build something. Then you can. Your growth is dependent on the effort you put into growing.
So from someone who began teaching themselves how to program their sophomore year in college. Who graduated with a degree in literature and a second job out of college was as a software engineer at an investment firm. Whose first job out of college was as a janitor in front of google. I promise you, if you put in the time and effort you can do it.

It is hard, it is difficult, sometimes things may even seem hopeless. But know that you can do it. if you persevere, network and believe that you can improve with effort and determination then I guarantee you. One day soon, you’ll become a great developer.

Follow me on twitter, lets talk tech.

@eli_izell

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Tech needs regulation

Elijah Logan — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 17:03:14 +0000

The current state of the tech sphere makes it a threat to the American people. Without regulation we all will suffer. I say this amidst another facebook scandal, another large company mishandling peoples data, the government needs to intervene.

For our country to not be exploited and sold out by tech companies, the government needs to establish laws that prohibit and heavily punish companies that mishandle data amongst other things. The amount of regulation that they have to abide by at this current time is insufficient in stopping insecure data-management practices. Putting peoples data at risk.We need regulation.

To do this can not be done internally. It would be foolish and misguided to repeat what we have done in the past, allowing companies to not have a metric raised to them. Because, as was screamed in the past, it’ll hanker technologic and therefore economic growth. Well here we are, living in the biggest economic boon the world has literally ever seen. its time to put away the hunger for ever expanding growth and start prioritizing the security of the data you manage. Peoples lives and the country itself is being put in jeopardy over loose regulation.

Regulation is a tough thing, I wont say that I think It’ll be any easy thing. As a junior programmer my experience with working with data has been centered around sql and mongoldb. The manner in which I go about transforming data is not extremely rigorous. But then the projects that I’ve built have been solely for myself. Were I to build an application that I wanted to have passwords and logins as a feature of, I’d probably use passport.js.

I think that one form of regulation would be to have a government sanctione body that oversaw all the open source code that was build to help companies encrypt peoples data. A body that could then give the country’s developers a list saying, here are the best libraries to use if you are handling customers data.

I think that there should be percentage based sanctions that penalize companies that mishandle peoples data. It is unwise to have a fine of 4 million dollars for a company that is worth billions of dollars, it is unfair to fine a budding company 4 million when they are only worth one hundred thousand. Percentage based functions would encourage companies to maintain better handing of peoples data while also being fair to smaller businesses.

Government regulation on tech companies isn’t about restricting them in their ability to grow, it’s about protecting the American people. Companies have our emails, our passwords, our phone numbers and addresses, our social security numbers and meta data that can easily be used maliciously and exploitatively when data is not properly handed.

It has to be understood also, that this can not be a one and done action. We will need to continually update out laws so that companies that benefit from doing business in America will keep safe the data they are given, and know they will be proportionally fined if they do otherwise

Learning about Modules

Elijah Logan — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 20:32:08 +0000

Modules are reusable pieces of code that can be exported from one program and imported for use in another.
They’re useful because it makes it easier to fix, reuse, protect code. It also helps prevent of the global namespace
We define a module in a file with module.exports equal to the object being imported.
-example

Const self = aggregates.all();
Module.exports = self;

Or
Const plane = {}
Plane.parts = 4

Module.exports = plane;

To make use of the exported module and behavior defined within it you can import the module with the require function.

-example

const christianity  = require(‘self’);

Const airPort = require(‘plane’);

You can also wrap any collection of data and functions into a object and export that having it equal to module.exports.

-example

Module.exports = {
post-modernity:()

=> return skepticism,
romanticism: () => return ‘Hey Emerson,
}

You could do same with export default