DEV Community: Akanksha Keshari

The Ultimate Guide to Making Money as a Freelance Software Engineer

Akanksha Keshari — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:11:15 +0000

If you are a software programmer and you are not making money online then you are missing a treasure from your grasp.

What does the word Freelancing mean? And how by doing freelancing you can increase your entire income?

Answering the questions above, “Freelancing” is a term used for person(s) who works independently or self-employed.

Going by the data currently, India has 15 million freelancers who are exponentially increasing growth of startups. Post Covid-19 there was in surge of 46% freelancers in the industry.

Here, top websites that help you earn a passive income as a Freelance Software Programmer:

1.Fiverr

It is Israeli online marketplace for freelancer services. It is a website that allows posting and applying for one-time projects, or gigs, online.
It connects businesses with freelancers offering digital services in 500+ categories.

Features:
a. Multi-currency support
b. Secure Payment gateways
c. Seller Rating & Feedback
d. Multi category jobs
e. Private Communication Platform
f. Freelance Marketplace

2.Upwork

It is a freelancing platform based in the United States that links businesses with freelancers and agencies all around the world.

Benefits:
a. Candidates shortlisting
b. Chat scheduling
c. Proposal Reviewing
d. Feedback sharing
e. Support for global payments

3.Freelancer

It is free agent platform for finding and hiring the best freelancers across the globe.

Benefits:
a. Browsing Portfolios
b. Faster bids
c. Quality upon Quantity
d. Tracking progress report

Final Thoughts

So, listed above are some of the best online platforms for independent software developers to supplement their income.

4 Top Websites To Take Web Design Motivation For New Website

Akanksha Keshari — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:23:18 +0000

In simplest terms web design refers to development of websites that are displayed on the internet. It also cites about the user experience aspect of website development. Further, a graphic artist is responsible for creating, designing the layout and attractive visual appearance of a website.
Web design is important because it influences how the audience assesses the brand.

When the web design is good it would increase the sales of the business and audiences would also want a long term engagement with the company or get them to remain in the brand’s page. If design is not good they would abandon the website and shifting them to the competitor.

According to a popular quote by Trish Parr “If you think math is hard, try web design”. Web design is not straightforward it’s filled with complexity.

Being designer and creating creative designs is very challenging. Whether a person is beginner or experienced a good web design could increase its insights in the current trends of this industry.

Here are 5 of the top websites to take web design motivation and reasons to choose them:-

1.Dribbble:-
It is a social networking platform for graphic artists and creative. It serves as a global design portfolio platform, recruitment and where other artists can share their work.

Why choose Dribbble?
Dribbble is go-to resource for connecting with designers around the globe and sharing work online. This online community puts the best design forward to the companies. The companies then hire the candidate according to their requirement for their teams.

2.Behance
It is a social media, professional focussed platform owned by Adobe. Its only mission is to discover and showcase designs.

Why choose Behance?
It is world’s largest active community. One of the pros of Behance it is extremely easy to use. Anyone can join and post their work online. This gives Behance a better place than Dribbble. Further, we can filter settings to specify timeframes, popularity and location.
Ex: We can search for “most appreciated designs last month in Los Angeles”.

3.CSS Design Awards:
It is award platform for designers and other digital creators.

Why choose CSS Design Awards?
It provides awards based on 2 judging parameters. The 1st is WOTD (Website of the Day) and the scores are received from the judging panel. To be eligible, sites should have an average score of 8. The highest recording sites will then be prized on the next day and also winning a certification for WOTD and will be placed as runner-up for WOTM (Website of the Month).

The 2nd award is for UI, UX and innovation awards. Winners are decided by votes by both public voting and judging panel. To be eligible for winning, sites must receive 20 votes and average score of 6 from the judges.

WOTM (Website of the Month) and selected WOTD (Website of the Day) will then be able to be entered in WOTY (Website of the Year) and winners from that contest receive official certification.

4.Awwwards:
It is professional design and development competition platform. It promotes premium web designs developed by developers and graphic artist.

Why choose Awwwards?
It is active community of digital designers from across the continents they can share portfolio, knowledge, connect with other digital folks, experience and feedback.
It is a year round competition where designers can submit their portfolios. Winners are then rewarded at Awwwards conference and prize giving ceremony held across cities in Europe and United States.

Final thoughts:
A good web design must be user-friendly, engaging, and easy to follow. Effective design can improve the layout, text and online forms to enhance conversion rate and increase sales. Further, branding is like holding that multiples with time. Starting from web design to branding to SEO and further to social media outreach web design plays an important role. Invest in it to ensure, your business blooms in digital era.

5 useful websites for learning front-end development in 2022

Akanksha Keshari — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 15:28:22 +0000

Frontend Development is the art of development of user interfaces of a website mainly through the use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These are considered to be building block of any website application. It helps the end user to view and increase functional interaction with the website.

The lists of website attached below are free and for educational purpose. These are some of the useful websites for learning basics of front end development in text based approach:

1.Developer Mozilla

This is my most favorite piece of learning web technologies. It is documentation repository and learning resources from basics to advanced concept made by developers for developers.

2.Smashing Magazine

It is website and eBook publisher that offers editorial content and professional resources for web developers and web designers.

3.CSS Tricks

It offers daily articles on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) along with HTML and JavaScript and everything related to web design and web development.

4.w3schools.com

It is a free learning resource for learning coding online for students and people who have recently started their coding journey.

5.Freecodecamp

Freecodecamp is a non-profit organization that consists of an interactive learning platform, an online community forum and online publication making coding accessible to anyone and everyone.

Conclusion:
No matter how much expertise someone has in their concepts one can always revise their basics.
These are some of my favourite and top websites which I personally follow to grow in my skill level in day to day basis.

Parkinson’s Law – A thrive for success

Akanksha Keshari — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 09:45:59 +0000

If humans gave themselves 1 week to complete a task of 1 day then it will take 1 week to get it completed. This is where Parkinson’s Law comes into picture.

Parkinson’s Law origin
A British naval historian and scholar named Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote an essay for The Economist in 1955. The first statement of the essay became the Parkinson's Law, which was named after him by accident. In 1958, it was republished in the book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress, which was translated into several languages and became well-known in the fields of public administration and management.

Parkinson’s Law:
Parkinson’s Law is expressed as “work extends so as to fill the time allotted for completion”.

Parkinson’s Law of Procrastination:
Scientists have demonstrated that when people are given more time than they need, they spend it by procrastinating, perusing the internet, skimming through social media, and so on. This is something that everyone has gone through at some point in their lives.

If the work has to be done tomorrow it will be completed by tomorrow.
If the work has to be done in 3 months, it will be completed in 3 months.
If the work has to be done in 1 year, it will be done completed in 1year.

Parkinson’s Law graph:
Below is the Parkinson’s Law graph for further understanding:

This graph illustrates the time taken to complete the work is directly proportional to the time allotted to complete it. In the x-axis, it’s required for completion of the work. In y-axis it is the effort we put in completing it. As a result, the higher the effort, the better the result.

Examples of Parkinson’s law:
When students have 5 day for preparing for an exam, the first 4 days they would spent in doing very inadequate preparation the actual preparation happens only on the last day. This is popularly known as Student Syndrome.

The majority of IT organizations have begun experimenting with a four-day work week. Furthermore, their staff will labor for 8 hours every day, four days a week. Taking more time off, according to their CEO, means being more productive.

Parkinson's Law of time management:
It's best not to have an indeterminate deadline for any activity or project, no matter how minor. Undefined goals result from an undefined deadline. Furthermore, this indicates that we will never know when the goal will be finished.
Time management is a mental process. We set our pace based on the amount of effort we put in.

Parkinson's law of triviality (bike shedding):
It's an observation concerning people's tendency to spend a lot of time on unimportant tasks rather than on important ones.

The word comes from Parkinson's observation of a committee formed to approve nuclear power station blueprints. As C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out, the committee spent an inordinate amount of time on relatively minor matters – such as the materials for the bicycle storage shed – limiting the amount of time available to focus on the nuclear plant's design.

The law of triviality, like Parkinson's law, has ramifications in a variety of business disciplines, including time management, resource allocation, project planning, and Project management.

Parkinson's law in project management:
Along with student syndrome, the behavior related with Parkinson’s law has a considerable influence on project performance. It is one of the primary causes of project inefficiency and delays.

It's critical for project managers to understand Parkinson's law's effects and how they might mitigate them through scheduling.

According to Parkinson’s law in project management, a task is either completed on time or delayed. A task is not completed and delivered before the deadlines. To achieve the most efficient use of resources and time, the time allocated for each task in a project needs to correspond with the time of completion using maximum effect. If the allocated time is too less then work is delayed and if it is too long, unnecessary time and resources are wasted.

How to use Parkinson's law to save time?
• Reduce the time allotted to each tasks.
• Find the perfect proportion of time to finish.
• Always work goal-oriented.
• Be ambitious with the deadlines.
• Don’t be too much of a perfectionist if it takes a lot more time.

The Pareto principle & the Parkinson’s law:
It's crucial to know what to focus on and when to work in order to get the most of your resources and time.

The Pareto principle is a basic notion that states that 80% of positive results are the product of 20% of highly effective activities, while 80% of the difficulties we face are the result of 20% of bad judgments.
The Pareto principle or 80/20 rule explains us what to work on. It also explains what is important and is worth my time to work on?
The Parkinson’s Law guides when to work on? It further states how much time should I spend working on these important tasks?

Parkinson’s Law of Data:
According to Parkinson, data expands to fill the space available for storage.

Parkinson’s Law relevant to the design of the physical architecture layer:
Parkinson's law argues that, regardless of the users' actual demands, the system's capacity will always be filled by fictional needs.

Conclusion:-
As per Parkinson, work should have deadlines. Each and every task should be result oriented in order to increase its productivity and efforts.

Minification of CSS and JavaScript

Akanksha Keshari — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 13:16:13 +0000

Minification is the process of deleting unneeded or redundant data from a resource without altering how the browser processes it.

CSS Minification
It is the process of taking the beautified, well formed CSS code and deleting useless characters from the source code in order to lower the file size and speed up the site's loading time.

What does code minification remove
Comments, unwanted spaces, unused code, line breaks (newline characters) as well as the shortening of variable and function names are removed during minification. While comments and whitespace make the code easier to read, the browser ignores them. As a result, these components can be safely removed prior to deployment.

How CSS minification increases page performance
CSS is a render blocking resource on the web.

The browser must download, parse, and execute CSS files every time it loads a page. Because this occurs on the main thread, the browser is prevented from performing other activities during the first page load.

The larger the CSS files are, the longer it will take for them to download, and the longer the main-thread will be blocked.

The payload of these files can be reduced to improve page speed.

How CSS and JS minification helps in decreasing in page load time
Minification is a technique for lowering file size and thereby improving web performance. When a user requests a webpage, the minified version of a webpage is transmitted instead of the full version resulting in faster response times and lower bandwidth costs. It enhances the site's speed and accessibility while also assisting in the improvement of search engine rankings.

Minified code bases also take up less space on a server's hard drive. Not only does this save storage resources, but it also helps to minimise network congestion.

Code that has been minified, for example, by replacing runs of spaces with a single space, is lighter and takes less time to load in a browser.
In fact, minifying code can cut the size of a file by 30-40%. It can be as much as 50% in some cases.

A Step-by-step description of how js and css files minification works

A web developer develops a JavaScript or CSS file to be utilised in a web application. These files are designed for developer convenience, which means they contain whitespace, comments, lengthy variable names, and other readability techniques.
The developer uses a minification approach to optimise the file while making it more difficult to understand. Removing whitespace, shrinking of variable and function names are all common minification approaches.
When responding to web requests, the web server utilises the minified file, resulting in decreased bandwidth use without losing functionality.

How to minify js and css files using best online tools
There are a lot of free and easy online tools can quickly minify CSS/ JavaScript.
For CSS minification: minifycode, freeformatter
JavaScript Minifier: javascript-minifier.com, https://www.minifier.org/

How CSS And JS Minification works using online tools

To produce the minified JavaScript or CSS file, copy the JavaScript or CSS code from the unminified file and paste it into any JavaScript or CSS minifying online tool of developers’ choice.
Hit Minify JavaScript or CSS button.
Now, copy the minified code and paste it in in place of respective JavaScript or CSS code.
Save the file before deployment.

How does code looks like before CSS minification

How does code looks like after CSS minification

How does code look in JS minification

How to minify CSS and JS File in WordPress
Step 1: To minify CSS and JS File in WordPress we need to install a plugin. As shown below let’s start by going to the left-hand admin panel and clicking on Plugins, then selecting the “Add New” option.

Step2: In the available search box, type “Autoptimize”. This will bring up a list of additional plugins that we might find useful.

Step 3: To use the plugin, click the "Install Now" button and activate it.

Step 4: click on “Settings” tab as shown below.

Step 5: Select Compress JavaScript and Compress CSS from the drop-down menus. To complete the minification process, click the "Save Changes" button as shown below.

How to Minify CSS File in Visual Studio Code
Step 1: Clicking on extensions in left side-bar.

Step 2: On Search button, typing “minify” will bring up a list of additional extensions that we might find useful.

Step 3: Clicking on the first button “minify” and then installing it.

Step 4: Pressing F1 key and typing minify as shown in the image below for style.css

Step 5: As soon as we hit “Enter” from Step 4 style.min.css gets appeared at the bottom of “style.css”

Step 6: To complete the minification process, click the "style.min.css" button to get below output as shown below.

Conclusion: Minification in CSS and JS files is a simple and quick technique to reduce a web application’s resource usage. Minifying a website can result in significant speed improvements without sacrificing the user experience.