DEV Community: Iqrah Nadeem

Bitcoin vs Ethereum: Understanding the difference through a simple analogy.

Iqrah Nadeem — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 11:32:24 +0000

With the recent rise and popularity of web3, you might have heard of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dodgecoin etc etc on your Twitter feed, news or normal day conversations.

Cryptocurrencies are often referred to as digital gold coins or assets.

Now, depending on when you are reading this post, it could be that you don’t even know what gold is.

So think of gold as this shiny and valuable asset usually in the form of coins.

And believe it or not, in the real world, people could/can actually go and buy gold coins in exchange for money, or some other valuable goods.

So now that we know what a gold coin is, Bitcoin is basically the digital version of it for the online world, made possible using cryptographic and blockchain technologies.

And just like gold, you can actually buy Bitcoin in exchange for money, other cryptocurrencies and valuable goods.

The logo even looks like a gold coin but has a B in the middle.

So Bitcoin = Digital Gold Coin/Asset.

Now Ethereum, I like to think of it more as Digital Liquid Gold instead of a Digital Gold Coin.

So instead of getting a standardised solid gold coin, you get liquid gold, which you can then use to create other valuable stuff that is important to you.

Say you want to turn the liquid gold into a gold watch, so it is valuable but also tells you the time, you can! Or a gold car, so again it is valuable but lets you drive around? You can!

You could also just turn the digital liquid gold into coins or custom cryptocurrencies, but instead of writing a B in the middle, you either write an E or a D or any other letter on it and call the token whatever you like as the creator. That is exactly what Ethers are: cryptocurrency but for Ethereum.

This is why Ethereum or liquid digital gold, becomes not just an asset but a utility as well.

So Ether, Link, Matic = Digital Gold Coin.
And Ethereum, Chainlink, Polygon = Digital Liquid Gold.

I came up with this analogy from my limited knowledge about the subject. I plan to deep dive into the technical differences between the two as well. If you have another analogy to explain the difference between the two, let me know in the comments below!

Essentially, if you have access to a digital liquid gold like Ethereum, you can make your own applications with it by deploying smart contracts (watch out for a future post explaining what smart contracts are) or if you are interested to just go buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether, Link, you would then need a crypto wallet like Metamask to store them (will be writing a post about that too).

Follow to get updates on when my other crypto, blockchain, web3 related posts come out.

Feel free to connect on LinkedIn or Twitter.

That's all for this post.
K Bye.

I am too afraid to admit "Maybe I don't want to be a software developer"

Iqrah Nadeem — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 06:53:35 +0000

I say "maybe" because the professional world is still very new to me, I've only had one proper job as a software developer and I did not like my time there as much as I thought I would.

I love coding. I love finding solutions through the power of technology, be able to debug my code and learn new tools and languages, but all of that, only for fun, for projects that I am truly passionate about and care for, in my own sweet time.

The experience was completely different while working as a software developer in my first and only company. The job felt extremely isolating and monotonous. Waking-up and dressing to go to work, sitting all alone at my desk and waiting for the clock to announce my time to go back home, to only repeat it all over again was extremely sad and joyless. Some days it was so sad that I would cry on the bus to work and at my desk without anyone noticing.

I don't think there was anything particularly wrong with the company or the people working in my team, specially my line manager. They all seem to be really good people that love their job and tried to create a pleasant environment for me but I just could not fit in, no matter how much I tried, and after a point I gave up, prioritised my mental health and happiness by resigning on month 9.

Since then, I have physically been too scared to apply for technical jobs. It is going to be a few months since I graduated but the fear of getting stuck in a job that I will hate again has prevented me from applying to any graduate schemes or software developer roles.

I've thought about pivoting to an entirely different field but my love for technology and the lack of knowledge of anything else holds me back. I constantly feel inferior to everyone around me because I am unemployed and don't have a source of income yet.

iOS development is something that I am enjoying a lot lately, but again there is this fear that if I were to get an offer as a junior iOS dev, I would have to work on projects that are decided by someone else, maybe all by myself and find myself back at hating my job.

Community building on the other hand has been extremely fun. It is something that I was introduced to at University.

After attending a few really fun hackathons in my first year, it bothered me that a lot of my peers were unaware of hackathons and a society did not exist to cater to this need.

So, I decided to change that and founded helloHackers, the hackathon society at my University. Joining the GitHub Campus Expert program around this was very fulfilling and I have enjoyed doing all sorts of community work as a Campus Expert, specially organising hackathons, teaching code to beginners and content creation in the form of livestreams and recorded videos.

A huge part of me loves the tech field too much to let go but I also know that "maybe I don't want to be a software developer" which is why when I got the opportunity to host a livestream show on GitHub Education Twitch channel, my show, "What in the tech do I do?" was about interviewing people that have job roles in the tech field that are not software developers.

One area of the tech field that stood out to me the most was devrel/developer community related but the guilt that I will not be utilising my Computer Science degree to the fullest in such roles is holding me back from applying.

But I truly think working with the developer community instead of being a developer myself is better suited with my goals and aspirations.

This post is a way for me to solidify for myself that it is okay to feel this way. Maybe I don't have to take a clear cut call right away. I am still very new and at the start of my professional journey, so it shouldn't necessarily be one or the other. I can apply to both kinds of jobs and experiment to see what suits me the best.

Shout-out to @alexandrammr by the way, for introducing me to the world of cmx, community and product management. Looking forward to exploring more job roles in non-developer roles.

Wish me luck and stay tuned to see where I land up I guess 😅

Graduating soon .. my past, present and future plans 👀

Iqrah Nadeem — Wed, 12 May 2021 11:35:28 +0000

Hi 👋

My name is Iqrah and I am about to graduate with a BSc. (Hons) Computer Science degree soon 👩‍🎓

Back in high school, I made the decision to pursue one of the coolest subjects I had ever come across.

I still vaguely remember one of the very first CS labs in school where I was introduced to Python and wrote a simple script with variables, operators and print statements. It got me extremely excited ✨

Until then I was only a user, following instructions given by the computer to use various apps. But that day for the first time ever I sensed the power of writing code to make a computer do what I want, communicating in this half-English, half-gibberish language.

In my first year of university, I was ecstatic to come across this thing called hackathons 💖. I attended my very first, and many more, on my own, fell in love with the format and went on to form a hackathon society, helloHackers, and host local hacks days and an annual hackathon, ManMetHacks, at my university.

I wanted everyone at my university to experience a hackathon at least once in their student lives but it clashed with the feelings of being ashamed at not really winning many hackathons or any at the start, so I truly felt like I don't deserve to be the one advocating for it because I must be not smart enough, even though I know hackathons are more than just winning.

I have always struggled with feeling proud of any achievements. I always have the mindset that if I can do it, anyone else can, it's nothing special. But if someone else achieves anything, they must be extremely talented and special.

Attending tons of hackathons, meetups, conferences and tech events has made me acquainted with a whole lot of people, but again, I don't know why but I feel like I'm causing too much of an inconvenience if I reach out to them, so I avoid that until extremely necessary.

Anyway, in my first year, I learnt about spring internships, applied and got accepted for one. It was a week-long internship with all expense paid for staying at a fancy hotel, travel, food and stipend. The experience was fun in terms of enjoying the materialistic perks but the "work" experience itself was pretty dull.

I didn't enjoy sitting hours on end listening to presentations about how the company functioned. It felt more like a week-long marketing campaign than an internship and the only project we were required to do was a group presentation on Cryptocurrency.

Regardless, I brushed off the experience thinking it was a one-week thing and carried on with my uni life but never applied for short internships again.

Second-year of uni I learnt about this organisation called Code First: Girls, worked extremely hard on advertising it to the students and was successfully able to set up a chapter and run multiple cohorts of the Python and web development course.

This was my first time teaching code and I loved every second of it. The feeling of introducing coding to people brings me a lot of joy, it's one of the most fulfilling things I have experienced ✨.

Uni life, for the most part, brought me joy because a lot of our assignments are hands-on project-based and the hackathon duties were always fun to do, except trying to find sponsors, that is my least favourite part about planning hackathons. It was not all sunshine and rainbows but receiving support from my lecturers to start things like the society and CF:G chapter is something I'll always be grateful for.

During my second year, I also came across the concept of placement years. Prior to this, I was under the impression that I'll have to finish my degree first before I can apply for a full-time role but placement years are essentially a year off from studies right before your final year where you complete a year-long work experience in the industry.

This seemed intriguing because I had never had a full-time role before and I would get to experience what it is to work in the industry before graduating.

The sad part about this was the application process. Time-consuming forms, annoying aptitude tests, timed coding interviews, cold rejection e-mails and a whole lot of stress and feeling of worthlessness.

Managing studies, extracurricular and job applications, all at the same time, really took a toll on me but I REALLY wanted to try out the placement year so I applied to any and all opportunities I could find, accepted the very first offer I received and called it a day.

But from the very moment I accepted the offer, I wasn't too excited about the role, so in hindsight, I didn't only do a disservice to the company but also myself by accepting the offer without much thought, but I didn't know any better then.

Again, the pay was good, I got to experience living in a flat that was not a student accommodation, learn adult stuff like setting up bills, pay rent, think about credit score etc but the actual job itself was draining and not fulfilling at all.

I would cry to and fro from work, delay sleeping because it would mean when I wake up I would have to go to work again and try to leave from work as early as possible. My line manager and everyone except one person in the team seemed very nice but the work just didn't align with my goals and I felt like my work was not having any significant positive impact on the world. I was getting paid to spend time on working something that the world will totally be okay without.

To bring back a bit of joy, I continued to travel back to Manchester every week right after work to teach CF:G, attend hackathons some weekends and also started a YouTube channel to let out my creativity.

All this helped to an extent but I had reached a dark place and I could not continue any longer. I contacted a counsellor at my University and reached out to my parents for help.

There's only been one other time when I have felt this extent of sadness and distress, so eventually, I had to make a call for my own happiness and sanity, and discuss the resignation process with my line manager.

I am not a confrontational person, so this was extremely awkward to do but it had to be done.

I had to stay at least 9 months on placement for my student visa to not be revoked, I had reached a place where I was ready to even drop out if it meant resigning earlier but the winter holidays and paid leaves helped me get through the duration.

I had maxed out on my paid leaves so it meant either continuing for a couple of extra weeks than 9 months or get paid less for my last month, I chose the latter.

I am fully aware that I am extremely privileged to be able to do this, but it was necessary.

After this experience, I was exceptionally unmotivated to do anything really, especially completing my degree. This is also the time the pandemic hit, so in-person hackathons and events stopped, I haven't been the biggest fan of online events but I am getting used to it now, especially YouTube and live-streaming.

The original plan was to find a full-time developer job after graduation but that doesn't seem that appealing anymore.

A few months ago, I was trying to convince myself to suck it all up and just go with the traditional graduate route of applying for grad jobs, be a little more mindful of accepting an offer and hope for the best.

And I am aware that this placement was a one-off work experience and I see a lot of people loving their job so it's not that I won't ever want to find a full-time role again but I need some time to process and understand before I commit to something of this sort.

I'll be graduating soon and haven't applied for a single job yet.

I have been ignoring emails from all the recruitment agencies I signed up for and don't really have an offer that I can brag about to my circle.

And this again, I know, comes from a place of privilege that I am super grateful to have but it kind of makes me feel guilty too.

I had a talk with my parents and asked for one more year of their support after graduation.

In this one year, I want to only work on things that I want to work on and not because someone else is telling me to.

I want to concentrate on my health, my content creation skills, do a bit of coding too so that I don't get too rusty and overall just do what I want to do, within reason.

There is no surety that I'll figure everything out in this one year but I won't be able to live with myself if I don't take this one year off for myself 🤷‍♀️

If things don't work out, I'll resort to doing things that I am supposed to do as opposed to things that I want to do.

It would be ideal if both of those aligned but as of now they don't, and having the privilege to make a choice, I am choosing to prioritise myself.

It does come with a bit of baggage of feeling like a failure for not applying and finding any jobs and having to leech off of my parents for another year, considering they've already done so much for me already but I need to make peace with that.

Anyway, that's all that I want to pour out for now 😅

The official one year starts when my results are out in June or July so I still have a few weeks to plan a few things for my year off.

There's excitement mixed with fear of the unknown but wish me luck I guess 🤞🏼

K bye.

GitHub Satellite 2020 - My thoughts

Iqrah Nadeem — Thu, 07 May 2020 16:41:47 +0000

Initial Thoughts

Due to the current pandemic, all in-person conferences were either getting cancelled, postponed, or turning virtual.

GitHub Satellite 2020 was no exception.

This year, on May 6th 2020, for the first time ever, GitHub Satellite was hosted virtually and free to attend for everyone.

As a GitHub Campus Expert, I had the opportunity to attend the live stream watch-party with my fellow CEs. The watch-party got a shoutout from the COO of GitHub, Erica Brescia, during closing remarks!

The event started off with an improvised DJ session live coded with Sonic Pi by Sam Aaron. I love when people mix other forms of art with code and this was a perfect example of it.

Keynote Summary

Soon the countdown for the keynote by the CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, began. A fun little skit of Nat pretending to be late for the conference and eating cheerios was fun to watch. I was in awe of the shelf that he had in the background. It was so well organized and the random GitHub swag made it even cooler.

The keynote started off with a recap of the announcements and work that had been done since last year's conference in Berlin, such as GitHub actions, GitHub for mobile, GitHub sponsors, and the acquisition of npm.

Another big milestone for GitHub was reaching 50 million sign-ups to the platform on Sunday, April 6th, 2020 at 4:06 pm PDT. The person turned out to be from Great Britain unless of course, they were using a VPN.

Some data regarding the increased usage of the platform since January was also shared. This is where Nat said, "In this age of social distancing, people are turning to social coding" which truly struck a chord with me.

It was then time to hear some exciting announcements for this year in four key areas; community, code, enterprise, and security.

On a less technical note, I was very much fond of the icon designs throughout this presentation. They were intuitive but also had a fun cartoony style to it.

I dabbled a bit into icon design using Adobe Illustrator myself earlier last month and found it challenging to wrap my head around all the different tools that need to be used to create vector icons. Since then I have a lot more appreciation towards logos and icon design than I did before.

Personally, if I am being completely honest, as a student developer, I did not care much about enterprise and security announcements. But the new features for community and code got me super excited!

GitHub Discussions

With the community announcement, GitHub showed that it listens to its developers' needs and implement changes accordingly.

GitHub Issues was added to help developers track work and co-ordinate with each other, GitHub PRs were implemented to help developers collaborate and review code, so this year hearing that the community needed a space to connect, ask open-ended questions and celebrate accomplishments, GitHub Discussions was introduced.

I like to think of it as a Reddit thread for your repo.

It has features to spotlight and upvote discussions, create dedicated links for CoC and have subcategories to better organize the discussion topics.

This seems like a great way to de-clutter all the non-immediate-work related but still very important Issues that were probably open in your repo by enthusiastic contributors and users of the project.

It is due to arrive at a repository near you this summer but you could have a go at it here in the GitHub Satellite 2020 repo.

GitHub Codespace

Coming to the next and most exciting announcement of all, Codespaces!

I want to commend Nat on the way he introduced the concept of Codespace to the audience.

He began with addressing the questions he's been asked many times before, "How do I become an open-source contributor?"

The answer to that is first finding a project that you want to contribute to, and then getting it built and run on your local computer.

Unfortunately, oftentimes than not, this first step is not as easy as it seems. Most of the time there are pre-requisites to be installed, paths to be configured and some of these could conflict with your existing configurations that could take a lot of time and energy to troubleshoot.

I have first-hand experience with this when I tried to become a coala contributor, a couple of years back for Hacktoberfest, and even though the community was responsive and ready to help me with my questions, it was super intimidating to set-up and run the project locally as a newbie developer, so I just gave up midway, feeling defeated and disheartened.

Since then I have always hoped for a simpler set-up process, perhaps one that could be done simply with a click of a button, and that is exactly what Codespaces is!

I shrieked at this announcement because it hits too close to home.

But what is even better is that it is powered with Visual Studio Code, so it supports every VS Code extension right from the get-go.

Considering it is a cloud-hosted dev environment, it is justified that it is not free to use (for now) and will be offered as a pay-as-you-go service.

You can sign-up for the private-beta waitlist here

I would also like to say as a self-taught iOS developer that dislikes the fact that owning a MacBook is a prerequisite to starting your iOS coding journey, I hope the ideology behind Codespaces is adopted for XCode too that would lower the barrier to entry and empower developers that are not able to take part in iOS development just because they don't own a Macbook.

I guess if I am dreaming big with hoping for a cloud-based XCode editor, I might as well put another wish out there that I thought of while watching the keynote.

The best way I can think of describing it is, similar to how Discussions is the GitHub version of Reddit, it would be so cool if we have the GitHub version for YouTube/Twitch.

The tech community is slowly growing on these social video streaming platforms but it is really hard to find them as they are still relatively small compared to other types of niches.

So if there was a way for GitHub to provide a platform to upload videos in relation to specific repos and organisations that already exist in GitHub, I think it would be really helpful for developers and the tech video content creators to find each other.

Moreover, if this could then be monetized the way YouTube and Twitch are, I consider that to truly be a win-win for the tech community.

Last Thoughts

Anyway back to my last thoughts on GitHub Satellite 2020 keynote because I have already spent 3+ hours writing this first blog post.

The keynote ended with another fun little act by Nat.

In honour of the GitHub and VSCode team that worked so hard to make these announcements a reality, Nat proceeded to blow a ceremonial kazoo and executed a balloon drop that he set it up himself in his living room.

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If you would like to watch the keynote yourself or find out more information about the speakers, schedule and workshops, head over to the official website.

All in all, I am glad I was able to watch the keynote live with fellow GitHub Campus Experts, especially because I met quite a few of them in-person last year in Berlin during Satellite 2019, so it was really nice to see and hear them during the watch-party.

I guess I'll end this post by attaching a group picture from last year's event:

Other than that, stay safe, wash your hands, and I hope we all get through this pandemic soon.