DEV Community: Kervyn

Levelling up as Developers

Kervyn — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 05:02:29 +0000

Recently I've been speaking to some Senior Developers, Technical Leads and Solution Architects about what I can do to further improve my skillset as a developer.

Besides the commonly brought up (and important) concept of getting out there and acquiring more work experience, another important point that was highlighted was the concept of being certified.

Purpose of certifications

Prior to this, my thoughts of getting certifications was to use them as a means of acquiring a better position, or receiving higher forms of compensation as a result of my newly acquired, vetted knowledge by professionals. However, after speaking more to some highly experienced individuals, it turns out that I was wrong, and in a good way!

Sure, certifications might grant us some form of higher compensation in our current work; it might help us to land a job in a new position, but I was missing the point here. The purpose of a certification, is not so much about the end result of being certified, but instead more so about the journey to being certified.

Along this journey, we are exposed to concepts, tips and tricks that we potentially never came across before. As developers, these can come in very handy when we are solving problems in our day to day tasks. Often, these tips come in handy when we least expect them the most, so pay attention to what you learn along the way when you're doing your courses!

Throughout this learning journey, we are often exposed as well to the nuances of what we're actually doing. Whether it be coding a particular feature, or using features in a particular library, there could be things we've missed out in our original learning process that could serve as important tools in our arsenal!

To help you out, here are some certifications that I was told about for you to explore!

Some of these certifications may seem foreign to you, and that's ok! There are many, many more certifications available out there and I've only listed a handful for you to check out.

No matter the certifications, remember that the journey of learning is most important. Keep that in mind and I believe that you'll have a far more fulfilling journey in your career!

What I learnt from taking charge on a complex backend feature

Kervyn — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 06:56:29 +0000

I have a short story to share with you about my recent journey in leading a complex feature's development for the first time.

Recently, for a project I was attached to, I was tasked with a big backend feature, which involved the construction of a few endpoints in TypeScript for the frontend to query and retrieve data from. That, I thought was the sole scope of the tasks ahead.

Boy was I mistaken.

This was the first time I had to take charge on such a complex feature. I was worried - could I be trusted to complete this task with the accuracy my project manager expected? The stakes were high.

The Story

In the beginning, I felt like the task ahead should be smooth and easy. Just take about an hour to obtain and digest the requirements, jot everything down and plan out the endpoints. Sounds simple.

But the more I delved into this feature, the more complicated it became. More and more requirements, constraints and considerations started to pop up, and what was originally a simple task became a totally different monster. I spent a total of 5 days planning, gathering requirements again, hopping on calls and understanding the user flow more and more.

When the requirements and backend work that needed to be done became quite intense, it felt quite overwhelming for myself. I wasn't sure if I could surmount this challenge alone, as my other teammates were occupied with other tasks at that time.

But slowly, I decided to adopt a different mindset towards this problem. I started to adapt and saw the work as a challenge to myself!

And so I continued planning and designing the APIs for a few more days, and eventually, I managed to segregate everything out into respective components - scheduled cron jobs to update certain fields, cron jobs to update the database based on certain criteria as well as the constructed endpoints all ready for business!

Morale of the story

Overall, yes I struggled quite a bit, but as one of my supervisors once told me, "Sometimes, you have to bring your feet to the fire in order to truly learn something".
This statement has never rang more true and I felt great after surmounting this challenge, even managing to construct quite an extensive piece of documentation along the way.

To progress further in our careers, in life; we cannot be afraid of such challenges! We need to adapt, push through and believe that after all this struggle, we will come out of it stronger! As long as we persevere (which I know can be tough when you are completely lost), we will see the light at the end of the tunnel!

To those who are currently in that position, I want to say, press on! The end is near for your tasks and trust me, the rewards you'll reap from it will pay dividends in your experience and knowledge in the future!

What I learnt at the Web Performance workshop by Cloudinary

Kervyn — Thu, 30 May 2024 09:57:23 +0000

Yesterday, I went down to the Google Developer Space in Singapore for a talk by Tamas Piros on the topic of "Mastering Web Performance" in 2024. First of all, kudos and thanks to Tamas for coming down and giving us these insights into optimizing our sites for performance. I learnt quite a few things from it and am excited to implement them in my future projects.

I'm sure many of you feel this way too, and this is why I am here today to share some of the main takeaways I got from this workshop!

Takeaways:

1. What the Core Web Vitals consist of

Prior to the workshop, I have experience in conducting frequent website maintenances for clients, and one of the tasks included month-to-month improvements in site performance. I was always involved in the steps taken in order to improve the page score given by Google, and to achieve a better score, our site needs to tackle issues that arise with the Core Web Vitals. So, what are these Core Web Vitals?

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Interaction to Next Paint
Largest Contentful Paint

I will briefly cover what these are, focus on the first 2 vitals in this article!

1.1 Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Very briefly, what CLS is, is the measurement of how much content on your page shifts. For instance, if there are ads that are displayed between paragraphs on your page, and they display after a certain condition, this would decrease the CLS score as your paragraphs/text on the page will likely move as these ads load.

Why is CLS important to consider for optimal web performance?
Well, having paragraphs that move a lot significantly affects User Experience (UX)! For instance, if a user is staying still on the page reading the text, I'm sure you can imagine how frustrated the user will be if that text suddenly shifts out of your viewport right? Similarly, if you, as a user is highlighting links on the page, you won't want it to suddenly shift and for you to lose that link right?

1.2 Interaction to Next Paint

This is essentially how long the page takes to load. The name is as such, because it measures how long the site takes to respond after a user has interacted with it. eg. Clicking a button on the page, redirects etc.

This is also another factor to consider for UX. As the web world gets more advanced each day, users and customers expect quicker speeds and smoother website layouts and performances. If your website is slightly slower than your competition, that could be the difference between a potential customer versus someone who is disgusted with the speed of your website.

These are just part 1 of the takeaways I had from the workshop held yesterday. If you guys are interested in learning even more, show some love on this post! If this post gets enough traction, I'll post more of my takeaways that I had from the talk with more in-depth information on the topics as well!

Backend cheatsheet suggestions (Upcoming)

Kervyn — Sun, 26 May 2024 13:26:32 +0000

To the dev.to community,

The title appears to be quite broad, and that is intentional! I was at my desk working away and brainstorming ideas expanding my own, as well as the community's knowledge development, when I thought about the idea of a cheatsheet, something I believe we are quite familiar with from school.

To create these, I would like to ask the awesome community for help! To anyone who sees this post, in particular to my fellow backend developers (love my frontend pals as well), I need a favour from you! Please leave in the comments on some of your answers to the questions below, they'll seriously aid me in helping to create something useful for the community~

What are some struggles you face in your daily lives as programmers?
What are some things that you find yourself constantly having to search/Google up, that you wish you had a quick and reliable reference for?
Aside from a cheatsheet, what other mediums/bits of information do you feel will help yourself, or a programmer of a similar/junior level to you?

I appreciate all the feedback from the community, whether you're a frontend/backend developer! If you have any insights/inputs at all, please drop a comment and let's get this conversation going!

A new, but old way of backend development

Kervyn — Tue, 21 May 2024 00:33:51 +0000

Recently, I got exposed to creating backend APIs and services using Java, more specifically, Springboot. This was something I didn't think I would enjoy, as it felt somewhat archaic in a way. Part of this was probably because of the stigma that Java has in my region, where it's considered old and redundant similar to C#.

However, after just browsing the guides and building a microservice with Springboot over the past week, I can confidently say that it has been a great experience, with very functional libraries included that make the lives of us developers so much easier. The guides have been nothing short of informative, instructional and easy to follow, especially coming from a beginner's perspective to Java programming.

C# users, brace yourself for a formidable, EntityFramework-esque rival.

Pros

1.Much like EntityFramework, interacting with a SQL database has never been easier.

Simply make use of either the CrudRepository or JpaRepository (based on your required specifications) and create your own repository, which serves as Entities (not to be confused with Models, which layout the schema/fields of your tables)
From here, you're able to add your SQL queries in order to retrieve specific information, and even join tables using the models you defined!

2.Writing to the database has also been made easy!

Simply pass the record that you want to save to the table in the entityName.save(recordHere) method!
If you need to do bulk inserts, use a data structure such as a ArrayList to store all of your records first, before passing it to the saveAll() method instead!

These are just scratching the tip of the surface of understanding the world of Springboot, Java programming and Microservice architecture.

I hope to share even more tips and insights like this in the upcoming weeks and months, and stay tuned for more articles & leave comments regarding these topics so we can all learn together as a community!

Temporary hiatus from the 30-day learning challenge

Kervyn — Mon, 20 May 2024 15:00:38 +0000

While it is important to be consistent, sometimes, we must remember to acknowledge our limitations and as such, I'll be temporarily taking a hiatus from the 30-day straight learning challenge!

That's not to say that I won't still be continuing to learn something new each day, but what this challenge has taught me so far, is that learning something every single day, makes learning feel very diluted. Let me explain.

From what used to be learning for the fun of it, slowly became something too intense, and tough to balance amidst my busy schedule. I've taken a step back and understood from this challenge that learning something everyday is possible, but learning something in detail, in-depth is extremely tough and infeasible!

To learn something deeply, we should spend more than just a day on it, and when we touch and go on topics that we find interesting, we might feel like a lot of things are piled up at once and slowly, we might experience the exact opposite - feeling tired and drained from pursuing what we wished to learn!

In short, I'm taking a break from this 30-day straight of documenting my learning. I'm still reading the awesome books I introduced, still learning so much about code and how to be a better software engineer every single day, but documenting everyday for you, the readers, is not an easy task. I'd much rather put out a solid, well-written article on what my consolidated learnings over each month, than force myself to produce an article just for the sake of it! In fact, that is something I'm considering doing, so stay tuned for more stories and have a great day ahead!

Thanks again for stopping by my personal page!

Career-minded individuals: Importance of taking breaks

Kervyn — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:53:51 +0000

Every once in a while, we get caught up with so much work bearing on us that we are just head down and focused, not knowing how much energy and time we have poured into mastering our craft.

In these times, even though you’re doing something you’re passionate about, you often feel demotivated, unsure of the direction you’re headed and of the rewards you reap from working on yourself. This is the feeling of burnout.

The Feeling of Burnout

While we may be really passionate about coding, programming or other work-related skills, it’s important to understand that we should immerse ourselves in activities other than our passions. But that sounds counter-intuitive, why would I want to do less of what I love doing?

Well, it turns out that when you do too much of what you love, it starts to feel more and more mundane, and the more you enter this cycle, the more easily drained you begin to feel when doing what you love most. Eventually, it comes a point where you begin to see your passions as chores, and it is at this point where you start to feel demotivated about what you do and where you’re headed.

Avoiding Burnout

Personally, I have gone through a few cycles of being overwhelmed by coding, and learning about programming. The old saying that “Too much of one thing is not a good thing”, rings true time and time again.

It is important, and OK to take breaks in our lives! It is not a waste of time, and in fact, taking rests or breaks in between periods of self-improvement can strengthen our mindsets and allows us to capture more of what we learnt! This is something I’ve experienced within the few days of beginning my learning challenge, and is the fact that pacing is extremely important!

So next time you feel bored, demotivated from doing what you’re passionate about, don’t fret it! Go take a break, go for a walk, play some video games, chat with a friend or simply pick up another unrelated interest of yours. Taking a break helps you to step back from all the work you’ve done, and give yourself a pat on the back for the effort you’ve been putting in over the days/weeks/months!

30-day Learning Challenge: Day 4— In and out of tech

Kervyn — Thu, 09 May 2024 14:21:22 +0000

Welcome back to the learning challenge that I’ve set out for myself, where I aim to document something new that I’ve learnt every single day for 30 days!

For today, I continued reading the nutrition-related book featured in Day 3’s article! The insights gleaned have been incredibly interesting, and are concepts that I have not come across before!

Learnings (Nutrition)

For instance, one of the concepts mentioned at the beginning of the book was explaining why humans, like you and I fail so consistently when it comes to following a diet. In a nutshell, according to the author, it relates to how we are biologically programmed to act and seek out food when we are starved, leading to us spiralling out of control of our diet the moment we eventually succumb to the deprivation of our “sinful”, favourite foods.

It has been an amazing read so far, and I can’t wait to continue with the book to see what else I can learn in the upcoming pages.

Transitioning to the software engineer in me, I learnt even more today about how to write higher quality and sustainable code.

Learnings (SWE)

From planning your architecture in advance, to understanding how to segment and compartmentalize large amounts of code into isolated containers/Lambdas (in AWS context), these are skills that will be continuously sharpened throughout my journey as a software engineer and I am no doubt excited to learn more!

A famous line I’ve heard from my previous tech leads, as well as from other senior software engineers, is that “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”!

And I can’t tell you how much I agree with this.

Spending time to plan your code ahead of time, instead of straight deep-diving into writing code for your task/feature will save you immense of time down the line, as well as adjust your mindset to fit business requirements suited for that feature. Who knows, through this thought process and careful planning, you might even discover feature flaws/gaps in the requirements that you can highlight/discuss with your colleagues/peers!

As usual, do join me on this journey as well, and begin documenting your daily attempts at learning something new everyday. Trust me, you’ll shock yourself when you look back at how far you’ve come!

Do leave a comment down below or simply get in touch with me through my email if you wish to discuss about anything related to any of my previous articles!

30-day Learning Challenge: Day 3— Stepping outside of tech

Kervyn — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:06:36 +0000

Welcome back to the learning challenge that I’ve set out for myself, where I aim to document something new that I’ve learnt every single day for 30 days!

Being a software engineer, particularly a good one, requires one to also be proficient in other parts of our lives, not just coding alone. This goes for other jobs as well.

What we should COPY from the best in the field(s)

I once heard in a podcast (can’t quite remember which exact one, there’s so many!) that the best, most capable people in their respective fields, all do one thing in common — they aim to take care of their health as best they can! On top of that, they tend to place significant emphasis on the concept of learning, and the knowledge is not limited to the field they are in.

My Current Topics of Interest

Gearing myself for the future, I thought of some knowledge and skills that I personally would find myself interested in. After reflecting, I decided to pick up a new read on nutrition, as it’s something that I’ve always wanted to know more about. On top of that, one skill I’ve always wanted to better is my ability to sell and influence. These 2 things have no direct relation to my prowess as a software engineer, but at least for the nutrition side, bettering my knowledge on that front will increase my longevity as a proficient developer!

Book Recommendations

Here are the 2 books I’m currently on for these topics:

The Science of Selling: Proven Strategies to Make Your Pitch, Influence Decisions, and Close the Deal, by David Hoffeld
Gentle Nutrition — A Non-Diet Approach to Healthy Eating, by Rachael Hartley

Remember, no matter what field we are in, we must always remember to put our health before anything. Without being healthy, how can we expect to give our all, and function at our 100% every day? Without being healthy, how can we expect to live our lives to the fullest and enjoy our breaks and holidays? Selling and influencing is another topic that I’m incredibly stoked about exploring, and I hope to share more of these and what I’ve started learning from these books and more in the upcoming articles!

If anyone has any recommendations for other books regarding these topics, or just any interesting books in particular, do leave a comment down below or simply get in touch with me through my email!

30-day Learning Challenge: Day 2— Learning AWS S3

Kervyn — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:04:47 +0000

Welcome back to the learning challenge that I’ve set out for myself, where I aim to document something new that I’ve learnt every single day for 30 days!

Today, I decided to take a short break from learning Figma from my day 1 adventures, and have engaged in some work on AWS.

For my tasks today:

Work with uploaded files in an S3 bucket that would then be utilised in a script that I had written on my local machine few weeks prior.
Learn how to implement S3 bucket object creation triggers for my Lambda functions. Overall, an exciting day!

This was my first time experimenting with accessing S3 via Javascript, and I had quite a bit of looking up to do. After searching online, and going down the dreaded rabbit hole of AWS documentation, I finally got it to work through the use of the AWS SDK, and the folks over on StackOverflow (thanks guys).

Learning links

Here are some of the links that helped me get this done, in case you happen to be on the same stumbling block!

Accessing S3 buckets in Javascript (JS)

Creating specific S3 bucket event triggers for Lambda functions

1.https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/object-keys.html#:%7E:text=and%20other%20APIs.-,Safe%20characters,-The%20following%20character

In the upcoming days, weeks and months, I hope to get even more comfortable with AWS and the different services it provides. Personally, after experimenting with different learning methods, I find that knowledge still sticks the best through trying our hand and attempting a practical. Nothing beats practicing the skill by actually utilising it for your code, work or internship, as there’s only so much know-how you can gain from purely reading about what AWS provides.

Drop a comment if you’d like to hop on a similar journey, and feel free to share with me what your goals are and who knows, we could get started on something together in the foreseeable future!

Have a great day ahead!

30-day Learning Challenge: Day 1 — Learning Figma

Kervyn — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:01:14 +0000

School’s out, and summer’s begun! As a software engineer who’s constantly looking for ways to improve, I started feeling a little empty after my finals ended last week. After spending some time reflecting, it boiled down to 2 things that seem to contradict each other:

Having many things that I want to learn over the summer break
Yet feeling a burnout just from looking at the list!

Tackling burnout!

We’ve all had that moment in life, where we’re so excited to do things we’re interested in, but at the same time, lack the motivation all of a sudden! Through trial and error, I have discovered that personally, what works best for me is to force myself to TAKE ACTION. A lot of times, we fail to take action, and end up wasting quite a bit of time that could’ve gone to doing the things we wanted to do. Whether it is burnout, being overwhelmed by the amount of things to do, jotting down these commitments and starting to tackle them one by one seems to work best for myself, try it out the next time you’re feeling this way!

Start of learning journey: Day 1 — Figma!

Today marks the first day of my journey, and for today, I started to peer into using Figma, something that I had been putting off since last year!

I started to look online for basic crash courses on Figma, as well as the certain uses of it that are more fine tuned for my use case as a developer!

(Shh, I could somehow never figure out how to use Figma intuitively, I think it’s a me problem)

After looking around, I went with one of my favourite coding YouTubers out there — Net Ninja! (Here is a link to his course, shout out to Shawn!)

I’ve been following Shawn for close to 3 years, since the beginning of my development journey, have really enjoyed his videos, and this one is actually a collaboration with Chris Pennington, another great teacher in the YouTube coding space.

For today, as it was the first day in the journey, I took it slow and just learnt some of the basics of:

Installing and using Figma on the desktop
Implementing a basic design system in Figma
Using Frames, creating custom styles that can be reused throughout the different parts of the design file
Using a Type Scale to better visualize our font sizes while designing! https://typescale.com/

These were nice eye-openers to myself as a fledging developer and it has been a great experience so far. Design has been a field that I haven’t taken to naturally, and I am excited to learn more about Figma and contribute to my future team, job and clients with it! To the start of the journey of learning new skills/quirks for the next 30 days!

Drop a comment if you’d like to hop on a similar journey, and feel free to share with me what your goals are and who knows, we could get started on something together in the foreseeable future!

Have a great day ahead!

What I do when learning a new framework/language

Kervyn — Wed, 08 May 2024 12:56:08 +0000

For software engineers who have been employed for a while, learning a new language or framework may seem like something not too worthwhile pursuing, especially if your current job doesn’t require this new set of knowledge or there’s not much immediate use for it.

On the contrary, for others who are in between jobs, at a new work environment, or just simply out of curiosity or interest for a new language or framework, however, this topic on “getting started” seems to come up quite frequently. How, and where should I begin?

I struggled with this question at the start, and often ended up in “tutorial hell”, where there was less initiative taken on my part whilst just simply following tutorials online for the specific topic I was interested in. Over the years, I’ve experimented with different ways of learning and found some things that have helped to improve the overall experience.

While this is in no way a model to follow, here are some steps I personally take in order to boost my learning and make it enjoyable in the process:

1. Ask yourself WHY you are keen in learning this language/framework

Is it to build a backend using this new framework, to experiment building a project using OOP concepts that this language specialises in? Was it a flashy YouTube tutorial regarding this new tech, or simply an interest sparked out of curiosity to learn a new skill to add to your arsenal? The list of motivations is endless, but try to discover what caught your eye in the first place. From there, it helps to tie into step 2 of my learning model.

2. What are you interested to build with this newfound knowledge?

If you already had a strong motivation in step 1, you can jump right ahead to step 3. If not, look around! Google around and scour the Internet for what others have done with this language/framework; if those projects seem too daunting, is there something in your existing list of repositories that you could possibly replicate and enhance?

There’s no shame in building any type or size of project, as long as you personally feel that it can benefit you in some way! I remember my first time wanting to dive into NodeJS and Express, my motivation was just to build a single endpoint and call it a day!

3. I got my motivation, how do I get started?

With your goal in mind, it becomes a lot easier to motivate yourself to spend free time to pursue this new knowledge. Upon completion of your project, fulfilment will feel even stronger as well! But where do we start..?

Personally, veterans in the field that I’ve spoken to always recommend reading documentation. Over the years, I found this piece of advice to be very useful, but to add to that, I would incorporate additional practice on top of this.

Don’t just simply follow the documentation; build something similar (or different if you are adventurous) from what’s given in the tutorial. Don’t just take the code off the tutorial and play around with it, really code out something that uses the same concepts but put your own little twist on it. This way, you’ll get a sensing of how the different pieces of the puzzle come together to deliver the effect of the language/framework.

For eg. when I started out learning Vue, I deep dove into the documentation, but experimented on key concepts such as watchers, lifecycle hooks as well as two-way dynamic bindings, in order to get a feel of the enhancements Vue was doing behind the scenes to make the magic happen. This increased my appreciation of the framework and further motivated me to try out other more obscure parts of the framework to incorporate into my future projects.

4. Tie other libraries and packages together

When you’re more confident with what you’ve experimented with, and have tried your hand at a few projects of your own, you can begin to search online for libraries that complement your desired framework/language.

See if there any quality of life changes you can make through the use of specific libraries or packages created by other awesome developers online! This way, you get to learn how to integrate these tech into your already growing projects, further enhancing your own learning in many facets, as well as making the project even more exciting than before!

Brainstorm new features or enhancements you can make to your current project, and see if they are doable via packages/existing libraries. Who knows, you may be the one who creates that new package!

5. Don’t forget to enjoy the process

Last but most importantly, enjoy the process. Being a developer is awesome, and it opens up many possibilities that we sometimes take for granted.

It’s easy to get caught up in the struggle of learning a new technology to apply, and forget about the whole point of learning these in the first place — to create beautiful products for ourselves/our clients! Cherish the learning process and when in doubt, ask away on forums and help those that have encountered similar problems that you may have squashed in the past.

When you feel exhausted from learning and absorbing new content, take a break; there’s no shame in that! Come back stronger and tackle the problems head on on another day, cheers to learning whatever new comes your way!

If you have any tips for someone learning a new language/framework/technology, feel free to post in the comments and get a discussion going, catch you in the next article!