DEV Community: Benjamin Kadel

A Gift for Git-mas

Benjamin Kadel — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 12:12:40 +0000

Merry Git-mas one and all...

Video lower down...

In this video I want to give you 3 wonderful git knowledge gifts, from me to you, for you to indulge on this holiday season. The 3 Git gifts I have for you are under the tree and ready to un-wrap and enjoy...

Without spoiling the surprises for you too much, I discuss 3 git topics in this merry video. I talk about the Git config command, the Git stash command and how to 'undo' in Git. For each topic I explain the concepts so they hopefully make sense and give you lots of juicy commands (most of which can be directly copied and pasted) to help you enhance your git workflow and experience.

This video will hopefully teach you something new, that maybe you didn't know before about these 3 areas of git and the more "lesser-known" additions to these commands. This video showcases many lines of git commands and explains how to construct your own and how to use them AND the best bit of all after the video if you want to somehow keep a copy of everything I have covered in the video then I have created a CHEAT SHEET that you can refer to forever and always that contains absolutely everything that I cover in this video, so there is no need to pause the video and frantically take notes it's all there for you at this link (PDF):

Cheatsheet PDF here

Enjoy!

The Video

Merry Git-mas! Git bless us, everyone!

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Or if you want to see more videos from my channel then here you go:

My Youtube Channel

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

(Video) Android Project Structure - What are the files/folders that make up an Android codebase & how do they tie together?

Benjamin Kadel — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 19:53:12 +0000

The Android Project Structure...

This beast (image below, video further down ;) )...

What does it all mean?
What do all these files do?
How are Android apps "built"? All this and more...

The Android project structure is made up of many files and folders that when combined together in just the right way to create an runnable app for the Android OS. The files within relate to & utilize several different software systems, such as; build systems, version control systems & even obfuscation systems.

In this video I take you through each file and folder that makes up a default "blank" android project once it has been generated as part of a new project in Android Studio. I explain what each file's purpose is and how you (the developer) should interact with it, if at all.

This video is hopefully a comprehensive overview of an Android codebase so that you can understand & more importantly through the code & identify important files. Also this video is split up into chapters (using timestamps) on YouTube so that you can skip ahead to specific files/folders if you are interested in learning about specific elements...

Enjoy!

The Video

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Or if you want to see more videos from my channel then here you go:

My Youtube Channel

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

How to Input Special Characters in Vim (Foreign Letters / Symbols / Emojis) [Video]

Benjamin Kadel — Tue, 19 May 2020 11:39:57 +0000

FYI - Skip to content...

The main content of this post is a video (found lower down...)
If you would like to skip the preamble in the video and get straight to the topic then jump to this timestamp: 01:16

Vim Tips Series

I am creating a (hopefully fun/energetic) YouTube series about Vim Tips. In particular small easily consumable Tips & Tricks in Vim to help you become a better Vim-er. This series is for Beginners & Intermediate Vim users alike and will hopefully expose/highlight some of Vim's massive (maybe even lesser known) functionality with explanations & examples.

The main aim of this series is to help people learn about the POWER that Vim gives you, which more often than not is somewhat difficult to find on your own, so this series is about pointing out that (& more) functionality...

Check out all the currently released episodes here:
Vim Tips Playlist

This Episode

This episode shows you how to input special characters into Vim. Those are the characters that you can't normally type out-right on a traditional keyboard, for example foreign language letters, mathematical symbols, weird & wonderful shapes and even Emojis/Emoticons...

In this video I explain the concept of Character encoding (where in a computer each letter/character has a numerical value associated with it) and how you can actually use those values to enter in any character you like. So I start with a boring letter 'e' to showcase the concept and then move onto the characters you can usually type.

I then show you the incredibly powerful functionality that already exists within vim to help you input a vast array of special characters. This functionality is called Digraphs and removes the need for you to remember strange unicode numbers and to even copy and paste characters from the internet.

I hope you enjoy this video, please let me know if you do and if you would want more of it...

The Video

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Or if you want to see more videos from my channel then here you go:

My Youtube Channel

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Run shell commands from Vim & even get the output of the command back into Vim (Video)

Benjamin Kadel — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 10:19:32 +0000

New Video Series

I am creating a new (hopefully fun/energetic) YouTube series about Vim Tips. In particular small easily consumable Tips & Tricks in Vim to help you become a better Vim-er. This series is for Beginners & Intermediate Vim users alike and will hopefully expose/highlight some of Vim's massive (maybe even lesser known) functionality with explanations & examples.

This Video

This first video is (as the title says) about how to trigger Shell (bash/sh terminal commands) from within the comfort of Vim without having to exit the program or which to a different window or put Vim into the background. This video will even show you the very powerful functionality that lets you run a command and bring the output of the command right back into the Vim editor (for example running the ls command and bringing the results into the file you are editing).

I hope you enjoy this video, please let me know if you do and if you would want more of it...

The Video

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Or if you want to see more videos from my channel then here you go:

My Youtube Channel

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

(Video) Interview with a real Front-End Developer

Benjamin Kadel — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 08:18:58 +0000

Interview With a Front-End Developer

Hey Folks,
So I will try and keep this short as the real content of this post is of course the video itself and the wonderfully wise words that my interviewee delivers.

If you are interested in Front-End development (Front-End Web Development) at all then this interview style video is for you. I basically talk to a professional Front-End developer all about his job, his career and importantly the tools of his trade. I discuss what a day in the life of a front-end developer looks like and some of the big software/tools that are used in the process.

Anyway, I thought I would just post it here to you wonderful people incase anyone had an interest and the cool dude that I interview (Joe) is awesome, he is genuinely one of the nicest people I have ever met and he is also brilliant at what he does! He is intelligent and wise and has been a Front-End (Web) developer for a long time and has many insightful lessons to impart about his experiences. I honestly learnt so much just interviewing him so I am sure you can gather a bunch of useful information (or at least jumping off points) that you can take back to your respective companies or places of work/deving...

This video in total is nearly half an hour long so for your benefit I have included in this post the questions that I asked and timestamps to those questions in the video so that you can jump ahead if you would like to. I have also included links that are discussed in the video so that if you don't even want to watch the video then you can at least gain something from this post in regards to places online where you can learn more about Front-End Development and the tools used in that world! (The actual video is at the bottom)

Links discussed in the video

CSS-tricks
https://css-tricks.com/

Smashing magazine
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Html goodies
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/

MDN (Mozilla Developer Network)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn

Wes Bos Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/wesbos

Kent Dodds Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/kentdoddsfamily

React Js:
https://reactjs.org/

React Native:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

VSCode:
https://code.visualstudio.com/

Webpack:
https://webpack.js.org/

Babel:
https://babeljs.io/

ESlint:
https://eslint.org/

Jest:
https://jestjs.io/

Cypress:
https://www.cypress.io/

Webdriver.io:
https://webdriver.io/

Browserstack:
https://www.browserstack.com/

NodeJS and NPM:
https://nodejs.org/en/
https://www.npmjs.com/

Questions that are asked and their timestamps

01:16 - Who are you? What do you do?
01:33 - What is the difference between a front-end & a web developer
02:30 - How did you get into front-end dev?
04:34 - How did you transition back into tech after studying physics?
06:59 - Any advice you would give to someone wanting to become a front-end dev?
08:18 - Any good online learning resources?
10:02 - Any good front-end dev Youtubers?
10:29 - What is React?
12:29 - What is the difference between React & React Native?
13:10 - Is Angular JS similar to React?
13:33 - What would you warn people about before getting into front-end dev?
15:33 - What is your dev setup?
17:52 - What is the purpose/need for webpack?
19:36 - Any decent VSCode extensions that you use?
20:45 - How do you text your code? Automation/Unit?
21:29 - How do you test for all the different web browsers?
23:22 - What is NodeJS?
25:46 - Any important/useful Node packages?
26:43 - Fun Extra Questions...

The Video

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Or if you want to see more videos from my channel then here you go:

My Youtube Channel

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

[Video] Super Useful (lesser known) Terminal Command

Benjamin Kadel — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 14:09:57 +0000

Any Terminal users out there?

Hey Folks,
So just want to keep this short as the content of this post is really the video and the explanation/tutorial...

To avoid people getting annoyed by the "click-baity" title of the video and post Ill tell you right now the command in question is:

(SPOILERS)
(SPOILERS)
(SPOILERS)

...

fc (fix command)

I found recently that many of the people I know that use the Terminal didn't know about this incredible (often life/time saving) command. Which lets you basically load the last command you entered into an EDITOR in the Terminal and edit it before saving and closing the editor to automatically trigger the "tweaked" command.

I mess up my commands on such a regular basis that this fc command is a life saver and my workflow would heavily suffer without it!

Feel free to watch the video (below) to find out more...

Tutorial starts at...

I thought I would just add this timestamp as there is a little pre-video fluff for my subs before the content, so if you want to skip ahead to the actual tutorial bits then this is the timestamp

01:24 - https://youtu.be/vKQkg7Mt4jg?t=84

The Video

Links discussed in the video

Bash Builtin:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Builtins.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_builtin

fc command:
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1p-fc/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fc_(Unix)
https://www.computerhope.com/unix/uhistory.htm

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

(Video) Interview with a real DevOps Practitioner

Benjamin Kadel — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 21:57:19 +0000

Hey Folks,
So I will try and keep this short as the real content of this post is of course the video itself and the wonderfully wise words that my interviewee delivers.

If you are interested in DevOps at all then this video interview is for you. Basically I ask a real DevOps Practitioner that works and has worked in the DevOps world for many years lots of questions all about DevOps, from the basics, like what it is and how to get involved and learn DevOps techniques all the way to asking questions about DevOps frameworks (CALMS) and even security's involvement in DevOps...

Anyway, I thought I would just post it here to you wonderful people incase anyone had an interest and the gentleman that I interview (Jamal) is incredibly insightful and full of wisdom that he openly shares. I honestly learnt so much just interviewing him so I am sure you can gather a bunch of useful information (or at least jumping off points) that you can take back to your respective companies or places of work/devving...

This video in total is nearly half an hour long so for your benefit I have included in this post the questions that I asked and timestamps to those questions in the video so that you can jump ahead if you would like to. I have also included links that are discussed in the video so that if you don't even want to watch the video then you can at least gain something from this post in regards to places online where you can learn more about DevOps and engage with the DevOps community! (The actual video is at the bottom)

Questions that are asked and their timestamps

01:10 - Who are you? What do you do?
01:40 - Solutions Architect vs. DevOps?
02:31 - What is DevOps?
03:32 - What do you mean "Silos"?
06:50 - How did you get into DevOps?
07:48 - What tools did you use in your previous role?
09:23 - What did you do before DevOps?
11:10 - Whats the difference between a DevOps practitioner & a DevOps Engineer?
13:24 - How would you learn DevOps?
16:45 - Is security included at all within DevOps?
18:43 - What is CALMS?
22:40 - What does a day-in-the-life look like?
24:01 - What do you mean by Infrastructure
24:52 - Do you have any side projects atm?
27:03 - Fun Extra Questions...

Links discussed in the video

The DevOps Institue:
https://devopsinstitute.com/

LinkedIn Group of DevOps:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2825397/

CALMS framework explained:
https://devops.com/using-calms-to-assess-organizations-devops/

Other useful DevOps Learning Links:
https://devopsdays.org/
https://devops.com/
https://www.alldaydevops.com/

25:30 - Jamal's Toolchain Anxiety YT Video:
https://youtu.be/yj-TseEfP4k

The Video

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

(Video) Advent of Code - Introduction to the Advent Calendar for Devs

Benjamin Kadel — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 12:59:30 +0000

Advent Of Code is BACK baby!

Ladies and Gentlemen, its now officially December, which means its time to open your Advent Calendar doors and get a tasty treat every day leading up to Christmas! However I want to tell you that there is an Advent Calendar for Developers...

https://adventofcode.com/

Its a fantastic site where everyday of December a new coding challenge is unlocked for you to try and solve... The challenges are based on fun christmas-y type themes like santa and his elves and also importantly is completely language agnostic, meaning that you can use whatever programming language, development environment, frameworks & IDEs you like... Everyday a logical/mathematical problem is served to you and you can write code to try and solve it then return to the site afterwards to input your answer!

It is great fun and also lets you flex your coding muscles every single day of Advent! Id really recommend every to get involved and give it a go and of course you can sign in with your github account in order to save & track your progress. Let me know in the comments down below if you are up to date with your adventofcode calendar tasks...

Here's a video to explain it and also give you a brief demo into Day 1's problem with a quick Kotlin solution...

Enjoy...(P.S I had far too much fun making this one ;) )

Links from the video ======================

Advent of code website (Link to this year's challenge):
https://adventofcode.com/2019

IntelliJ - The IDE that I used to code in the video:
https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

Kotlin Programming Language - The Language I used in the video:
https://kotlinlang.org/

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please reach out to me in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

(Video) How to start programming - For Beginners

Benjamin Kadel — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 13:31:52 +0000

"How do I start coding? Where do I begin?"

In this video i answer the question that I get asked often by people that are interested in becoming or programmer:
"How do I start coding? Where do I begin?!"

My answer personal belief and answer may surprise you...

I tell people to learn how to make websites, more specifically learn HTML, JS & CSS. In the video i give 5 solid reasons why i have this belief and tell people this answer. In the rest of the video I want to give complete beginners some brief knowledge about programming from a computer science point of view and then immediately empower them to actually code by giving them a very brief coding tutorial in HTML, JS & CSS and give them a large list of links to follow that will enable them to carry on their own learning, now that they have been show the path to start walking on...

"Once you have learnt the skill of coding with HTML, JS & CSS you will have a nice basic understanding of programming overall and have some of the fundamentals and coding concepts down and will be able to pick up other languages or other approaches with much more ease." - Thats the idea anyway...

Below is the video, if you are an experienced dev then I would love to hear your feedback on my approach, things I did well & things that I didn't do so well.
Otherwise if you are a newbie, then enjoy, hopefully it helps you find your path and gets you starting to walk!

Enjoy...

Links from the video ======================

Codepen.io (Live coding in the browser):
https://codepen.io/

VSCode (Plain Text Editors):
https://code.visualstudio.com/download

Sublime (Plain Text Editors):
https://www.sublimetext.com/3

Atom (Plain Text Editors):
https://atom.io/

w3schools (Excellent online resource to learn HTML, JS & CSS):
https://www.w3schools.com/

HTML Tag/Element resource list (w3schools):
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp

CSS properties list (w3schools):
https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/default.asp

Learn JS (Nice, easy & step-by-step online tutorial) (w3schools):
https://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp

CodeAcademy (Online FREE courses for all sorts of programming languages, we are interested in the Javascipt ones):
https://www.codecademy.com/catalog/language/javascript

Arnold C (Crazy Arnold Schwarzenegger oneliners programming language):
http://lhartikk.github.io/ArnoldC

Timestamps to certain sections in the video ======================

03:51 - What is Programming?
08:08 - HTML, JS & CSS
10:10 - Lets do some Code!
12:12 - Coding: HTML
18:09 - Coding: CSS
24:57 - Coding: JS

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback or questions at all please reach out to me in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Android Developer Conference - DroidCon UK 2019 - [VLOG Video]

Benjamin Kadel — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 12:14:12 +0000

My Droidcon UK experiences

Long story very very short myself and a colleague went to London to attend Droidcon UK (Oct 24th-25th, Business Design Centre). Its a amazing convention/conference (whatever they are called) all about android development!

This video is not supposed to be an educational piece, showcasing the talks and their content, but more of a flavour of the experience and the fun that is Droidcon and also a brief summary of each talk that I personally attended during the two days in order to serve as a glimpse into the convention and the wonderful things/talks/activities that were going on there.
Of course this hopefully will also act as a sort of quick positive advert to anyone that is considering attending future Droidcons, if thats you then absolutely do so! It is by far the best dev convention/conference that I have been to...

Enjoy...

video

Link to skill cast videos from Droidcon 2019...
https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts

Link to Droidcon UK...
http://uk.droidcon.com

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

How to browse the web in the terminal - W3M (Instructional Video)

Benjamin Kadel — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 14:02:54 +0000

Turn your Terminal into a web browser

The tool covered in this video is called w3m and it is basically a text based web browser that runs inside of a Terminal. Here is how to use it, so that after you have watched this video, you can immediately get running with it and use it to your advantage!

video

What the hell?! This exists?!

Yes, this incredibly mad and awesome tool does indeed exist... I suppose you are asking the question when/why would you use this instead of a normal browser like chrome/firefox, well the short answer is probably in most cases you wouldn't, but let me paint you a picture, if you will...

Imagine you are SSHing onto a headless server (that would be one without any graphical user interface, so its just CLI) and imagine you needed to very quickly code a fix for something or edit a config file or even just read some news whilst in this environment, well, you need a web browser to find the answers, but you have no GUI so traditional ones wont work, you get the gist...

The video above goes into all the basic keyboard shortcuts you need to command w3m to your whim. although it looks wildly different w3m has most of the features that all other browsers has they are just slightly more tricky to access or hidden away, the video will show you how to access these features so that if you wanted to you could even switch over to a full text based browser...

Onwards

If you have ANY feedback at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Git Branching - Git Tutorial video series [Part 2] (YouTube)

Benjamin Kadel — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:56:52 +0000

NOTE:

This is the second video in a series of videos I am creating, that will hopefully give a nice full explanation of everything to do with git and how to use it to your advantage...
This video is part 2 and continues on from where Part 1 left off.

Part 2

In this video I cover everything to do with BRANCHING. What it is, why we need it, how it is useful and then of course how to do everything from creating a branch, to changing it's name to deleting it all inside the Terminal...

Terminal? Throughout this video and the rest of the series I show you how to do all these git things by using the terminal commands (how git was meant to be used) so that either you can continue on and use the terminal yourself (giving you unlimited power) or you can at least understand fully what a GUI button is doing when you click it...

Onward...

The series can be found here...
Git Series YouTube link

My previous dev.to post about the series and episode 1:

Git Tutorial & Explanation video series [First Episode] (YouTube)

Benjamin Kadel ・ Oct 4 '19 ・ 3 min read

#git #linux #tutorial #beginners

Aside from this being a post to advertise the videos, I am also looking for feedback from other folks here that share my love for git about the videos, how they are, if they are explained well enough and about future videos and topics to go into... So please if you have ANY feedback at all please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter:

My Twitter (@ben_kadel)

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!