DEV Community: Leonora Der

Is it ethical to develop this?

Leonora Der — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 19:55:14 +0000

I am preparing a talk that focuses on the ethical dilemmas software developers face and I am looking for some help.

In today's interconnected world, developers hold great power in shaping the technologies and systems that influence our daily lives. With this power comes the responsibility to navigate ethical challenges and make the right choices.

I would like to focus on exploring and discussing real-world examples and as a part of that, I would love to ask for your opinions on a few questions to back my thoughts.

So without further ado, would you say no to these business requirements if you look at them solely from an ethical point of view? (Please state your answer one by one, without reading the next one)

Develop a platform where people can upload and host their files.
Develop a platform where people can upload and host their files and make them available to any subscriber to download.
Develop a platform where people can buy tickets to participate in a monthly raffle to win cars or even houses.
Develop a platform where people can buy tickets to participate in a state-backed monthly raffle to win cars or even houses.
Develop a webshop engine.
Develop a webshop engine for a webshop that sells counterfeit products.
Change the default sort order to prefer the most recommended options on the booking platform.
Change the default sort order to prefer the most recommended options on the booking platform if you know that most recommendations are fake and generated reviews.

I would also love to know your whys in each case. What examples came to your mind when you read these?

Thanks a lot! :)

Cover image by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

Adventures of a developer team - a short excerpt

Leonora Der — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 15:44:27 +0000

So you know I have started a book, and I have announced it on dev.to:

Adventures of a developer team

Leonora Der ・ Jan 3 '20

#book

Check the book page here: https://leanpub.com/adventuresofadeveloperteam/

Now I have decided that I would post the very beginning of this story, just to ask you opinions, that you like the characters, or not, etc. Any remark is welcome. It is a nonlinear story, but there are no other possible storylines until the meeting. So... here you are:

#0 introduction

There is a company called UtopiaLabs based in Zürich, Switzerland. Is a startup founded about three years ago by two entrepreneurs and currently they employ about 50 people, so they are growing very fast!

They aim to build solutions to make the world a better place :) They have ongoing projects on making factories greener, building infrastructure to prevent polluting the oceans, research new methods to use more recycled materials with new buildings, etc.

They also believe in the power of great design and communication. By the way, this is their logo:

One of their projects is a platform that they hope to solve the problem of food waste in Zürich with.

#1 meet the developer team

The team is currently working on one of the main projects that will help solve the problem of food waste by connecting local companies and customers.

They collect and analyse data by quantifying food loss and waste, overproduction, out-of-date food, and uneaten meals by customers. Using the data, they recommend actions like use more semi-prepared food, improve meal forecasting, train staff, engage consumers, and how to achieve these.

Last month they released the MVP version, and since then a few users started using it. Users are pleased with the platform, but new requirements and a few minor bugs came up. They are planning to release the next version in 2 months. They are having a meeting today where they discuss the schedule, the deadlines, and so on.

There are six young professionals on the team: a lead developer, two senior developers, a junior developer, a manual tester and a manager. First, let's meet each member of the team!

#2 meet Chris, the lead developer

So to tell the truth, everyone loves Chris. Team members love him because he helps them with anything they need help with. Managers love him because he makes excellent decisions and knows very well how to bring out the best in people. People love him because he is a nice person. :)

He has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and has been working in the industry for ten years now, and he has been with UtopiaLabs since its beginning. Previously he has been working in the financial sector at various multinational enterprises, so working with a startup is a bit new for him, but he loves it.

#3 meet Anna, a senior developer

Anna is a senior backend developer, and she has been coding for 5-6 years. She learned the basics of programming in Java, and since then she became the master of a few other languages, too, but she loves JVM languages the most. She has some phobias of frontend development, because as she says "I don't have the patience to spend many hours pushing some pixels around to get the right ratios, spacing, contrasts and stuff..."

Anyway, she is a real hipster: she prefers to (always) bicycle or walk to work, drinks a lot of coffee, usually speciality coffee, she is a vegan and buys clothes from thrift shops!

#4 meet Luke, a senior developer

Luke is also a senior developer, but he is the one usually "pushing pixels around". He is a very skilled frontend developer and aspiring UX/UI designer. He spent weeks to find and implement the best design for the platform because it is a crucial aspect. We all know that "great design can make your audience believe and invest in your business".

He is a bizarre guy, having a strict daily routine, working out at least five times a week, counting calories and eating strange meals, like porridge with two raw eggs for breakfast. Yuk! :P

#5 meet Adam, the junior developer

Let me introduce the junior dev of the team: Adam. He is the youngest of all as he is a university student pursuing his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science. Adam is smart and curious, enjoys learning new languages and technologies.

He is usually in a hurry because sometimes he has classes in the morning and also in the afternoon so he can spend time at work only between them. He started a few weeks ago as an intern, and he is usually fixing bugs while wearing the same outfit: jeans and T-shirts...

#6 meet Amber, the manual tester

Everything the developers do will go to Amber. She is a manual tester, so her job is to find all the bugs. She wants to broaden her knowledge, so she wants to start an automation testing course soon.

Amber has one cat and three plants. Loves hiking and dancing :) He started working at UtopiaLabs a year ago. At the same time she is pursuing his Master's Degree in Mathematics, so she is precise and usually finds all the bugs... :) No bug can go through Amber!

#7 meet Kelly, the manager

Kelly, the manager, comes from a very different background. She has a Bachelor's Degree in Business Management, and she has been working as a project manager for a few years now.

She loves rock music and goes to concerts whenever she can, mainly in the summer. Her favourite bands are AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. When she finished university, she started learning how to play the guitar. It's something she wanted to do since she was a small child.

So now that you know the team you should get to today's meeting I mentioned earlier. Hurry, it starts soon! :)

#8 the meeting

Oh, you got here in time, as well as Amber, Kelly and Luke, but it seems that others are gonna be a few minutes late... as usual.

"So we have a short agenda for today: clarify the requirements and talk about the deadlines." - starts Kelly a few minutes later.

After getting to know the details of the requirements and estimating how many days each would take to develop and test, they realised that they would be ready three weeks earlier than the final deadline of the next release. It means that they need to decide what to do in those three weeks.

Chris takes advantage of the opportunity and recommends to spend the time learning about and trying out new technologies and methodologies, doing some experiments, etc. He thinks this knowledge would come handy when the platform receives more traffic, and the application will have to handle a lot of users and data.

However, Kelly recommends to instead go to courses paid by the company and so that every team member can learn whatever he or she wants. Anna would love to learn about Clojure, Adam would be happy for any course, but Amber really wants to start that automation testing course.

So here comes the very first decision: what will the team do?
-> go with Chris's idea and experiment with new technologies
-> go with Kelly's plan and attend courses

We started a new open source project: markdown2document

Leonora Der — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 21:55:39 +0000

So it was the second time when we had to turn markdown content to pdf in a project... so I simply extracted the relevant code, then I only had to put it into a shape so that it can be used in many ways.

Currently you can:

add markdown content/files (even as a link)
add style (css as link or text)
generate pdf
generate html

Please check it here:

floppylab / markdown2document

turn markdown files to a PDF or HTML document

Upcoming stuff:

use as a command line tool
publish in maven central

All contributions are welcome :)

Adventures of a developer team

Leonora Der — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 07:41:43 +0000

So after the big success of Your First Year in Code with Isaac Lyman (@isaacdlyman) and the other co-authors, I just thought that I want to write a book, too :)

I guess this is a journey, and I want to experience it from the beginning to the very end.

So I went to Leanpub and created a book.

I already have a plot outline, and the first 20-30 pages written. It is an interactive story, so while reading it, you will have to make a few decisions on how the story should go on.

Please check it here:

https://leanpub.com/adventuresofadeveloperteam/

paperie - looking for beta testers

Leonora Der — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 17:59:53 +0000

So I made a very simple documentation tool during the summer, and I think it is time to go live soon, but have a beta test phase first!

Check that nice logo! Do you like that? ;)

These are the main features of the application:

Manage your organisations, projects and documents

Add your custom CSS

Publish your documents (you can add a password, too)

Download your documents in PDF format

Looking for beta testers

If you think this application could help you or your company/organisation, and you want to have a forever free plan with all the features included then connect me here or send a letter to leonora.der@floppylab.com and I will send you all the details.

Looking forward to working with you! :)

Here is a longer list of features:

manage people
- registration
- login / logout
manage organisations
- users can create organisations
- an organisation has a name and can have a logo and custom CSS
- manage people’s access
manage projects
- users can create projects in a selected organisation
- a project has a title and a description
- can be archived/restored
- manage people’s access
manage documents
- users can create documents in a selected project
- a document has a title, version and a description
- view the rendered document
- publish document
- view the published document
- download document in pdf format
- manage people’s access
manage files
- users can create markdown files or upload markdown files, images or other resources to a selected document
- manage the order of files within the document
- edit markdown files

molecules

Leonora Der — Sun, 26 May 2019 11:48:30 +0000

So recently I've started a project. It is a library of useful Java classes with built-in validations.

Sorry, what?

Think about a person. Now try to make a Person class. I guess you would craft something like this:

public class Person {
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private Date birthDate;
    private String email;    
}

Can you see that we have these properties: name and email address, but we have to map them to types like String, Date, etc. And do not forget about validating this data in the service or controller layer...

So instead of these, why can't we have Name or Email types? And these types should know what is a valid email address or what is the maximum length of a name.

By using molecules, your Person class could look something like this:

public class Person {
    private Name firstName;
    private Name lastName;
    private BirthDate birthDate;
    private Email email;
}

I see. What now?

Do you like the idea? Check out all the molecules or help! :)

At the moment I am at the early stages, so any help and/or advice is appreciated! :)

Check it here: https://github.com/floppylab/molecules

Practice refactoring legacy code with hangman

Leonora Der — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 07:20:10 +0000

Have you ever been to a code retreat?

No? Go and attend one!
Yes? Nice! :) I have been to several events and I loved the legacy code retreat the most. On that event, we worked on the trivia game and I wanted to find a similar repository.

A few months ago I asked if you know some pieces of code one can practice refactoring on. Thanks again for all your answers! :)

I checked those and finally, I decided to make another one.

The original codebase came from yegor256 and I added some new "features" to it. And I admit that I loved adding spaghetti code on purpose... :P Somehow it was a challenge to make the code worse! :P Have you ever felt that? :P

So now I have a Java version, but I would like to ask you to help me and make the code in JavaScript, Python, C#.... or any other language you love! :)

I guess it is a nice project for Hacktoberfest as well... :)

You can find the repository here: floppylab/clean-code

I am planning to add new games, topics to this codebase, so ideas and links to old codebases are appreciated, too! :)

Make the most out of side projects - HackConf 2018

Leonora Der — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 15:06:31 +0000

You can check my slides here and the stream here.

This is a transcript of what I was planning to say in that 30 minutes... :)

Hi there, so I am Nóri and as you might already know I'd like to talk about side projects and convincing all of you that they are great!

But before I start, I would like to mention that this is my very first time in Bulgaria and I am more than happy to visit this country, to get to know the culture, see the beautiful sights and make some new friends here. This is a photo made from our hotel room:

First things first I have a few questions for you:

How many of you have ongoing active(!) side projects at this holy moment? Please just put your hands up! :)
And how many of you are planning to start one in no time? Hands up again! :)

All right. So what comes to your mind when I say side projects? To me, it is something like this.

Maybe you know CommitStrip, it's a blog about the daily life of developers and I just love reading their stuff, but one of my favourite strip from them is this one. I mean this is only a part of a strip but I think this is the most meaningful part. It shows a very typical situation.... like having millions of unfinished never-going-to-end projects? How many of you have ever felt like this?

So in some way I am here to motivate you do this. To start new side projects, of course also to finish them, but to be able to finish one first you have to start them! But why would anyone wants to do them?

Famous examples

To get the idea of what side projects are really are, first check out a few famous ones. I guess I have to start with the most famous side projects, Gmail and AdSense. Both were created by enthusiastic Googlers in their 20 percents. But I will talk about that a bit later.

Twitter, ProductHunt even GitHub were once a side project. And the list of side projects that became million-dollar startups goes on...

My projects

But don't rush forward! You might think that I must be crazy about side projects and the thruth is, I am. And so now I would like to show a few of my side projects that I am really proud of...

The very first one I'm telling you about is only slightly related to development as it is a programming competition for high school students. A few years back I was a participant myself, but then they asked me to help. The other one is a week-long camp for smaller kids where they can learn the basics of programming or build some nice Bluetooth controlled robots and we usually keep it in the summer.

The next one is called vocable. The story is not so interesting, as I remember, I really wanted to make an app but I not to learn Android and iOs. So I looked for another option and that was the world of cross-platform applications. And for that, you need only HTML, CSS and JavaScript knowledge. So I had this idea of a funny word-game, and I made it. This was the very first app I published to an app store, so you can even download it from the Play Store and try it out! :)

Going on this is something I am currently working on, Karancs-Medves Kalauz. It is a tourist guide I am planning to help my local community with. Around my hometown, there are a lot of beautiful sights but we have quite a few tourists, and the ones we have are not really aware of the sights, either. This is the problem I would like to solve with this website. It is, in fact, a Spring Boot application with Vue.js frontend and I am planning a mobile app, too. You can also check its Instagram feed.

And one that might even be your very first side project is solving my very first coding-challenge, the Cretan Maze. You're trapped in a maze and have to get out in under 1 hour. First, you have to collect 3 gold coins and you control the game through a REST API. I am hosting this on Heroku and if we check the site you can see here all the people successfully finished the challenge, so no, it is not impossible to win this!

(I wrote about it on DEV.to earlier, see here)

Cons

Now that we have an idea of what a side project can be, let's ask a question: Why would anyone want to spend time on a side project?

I mean... you might say that you don't have time. I guess most of you are full-time developers. You could say that after working 8 hours in the office you are tired and you don't care at all or you have a family you would like to spend more time with. And at the weekends you want to be far away from the keyboard, hiking in the mountains or playing in the local football team.

But remember, people say that you have time for what you make time for. I know it is an overused saying, but it is very true. Once I read a post about a dad who learnt how to program in the evening hours and he could not even sleep a lot as he had a new-born daughter to look after but a few months later he got his very first developer job.

But think about it for a second. He put this time into it and he got a reward. A job offer. Sounds great, isn't it?

You might say that it is something that no one would pay for, and no one would praise you for your effort and time you put into a side project if you fail or abandon it. The bitter truth is, undoubtedly, most side projects will fail. We all know this. The majority of them will not even reach the first release, and those which do, often will become abandonware, no longer supported by the developer. And GitHub is a graveyard for them.

You could also say that it is useless. Spending time on dummy stuff. Creating another note taking app or an alternative to one used by millions, even billions of people, what for?

Pros

Let me show you all the advantages!

The very first advantage I would like to enphasize is about learning new technologies, new dev skills.

For example if you are a Java coder, why not try Python with a data science project? Or if you are a backend developer, why don't you try some new shiny frontend framework out? Or let's say you usually do the coding stuff, but deploying your own app to Heroku maybe and setting up a database, Jenkins jobs or SonarQube to analyze your code could be a challenge for you!

We live in a world where we have nothing else but contantly changing technologies. So all you can and all you should do is keeping up with the new trends I think. And the best tool for this is side projects by making some dummy or not so dummy projects trying out a new library, framework or tool.

Instead of staying updated on the latest front-end frameworks in the JavaScript universe for example you could also have a project to learn how to write clean code, how to refactor legacy code or how to do Test Driven Development because we all know that these things take a lot of time to master. You can try reading a must-read book on the topic and implementing the knowledge at the same time.

Another great benefit of side projects is that you are practising a lot outside of your office hours. Maybe if you use the same technologies at work and for your hobby projects, then you might meet the typical bugs, pitfalls beforehand, so that you can feel more confident at work. You will get to know the best practices, so you might be able to help others to make the right decisions, to give advice on using library A rather than library B, and save time for you and even money for your company.

The next advantage I would like to mention here is simply the joy of building something. It’s nice and fulfilling when you can show your product to others, or take a look at something and know you’re the one that created it. You should be really proud of yourself if you have completed a project that others can use or download. The feeling when other people are happily using your product is quite satisfying. I hope that many of you have already felt it. If not, I hope at least once you will.

If you have a big bunch of abandoned git repositories than you must know what I was talking about when I showed you the comic strip earlier. It is funny to find a long-forgotten folder on your computer filled with code written by your 17-year-old self. I even have a text file to collect the funny pieces of code names 'funny-codes'.

A friend of mine once told me that it is normal to see yourself grow as a developer. Be glad if you can laugh at your old code because if you can’t then you are definitely not improving your skillset.

And it is another skill that could be simply improved by these old pieces of codes: refactoring. Think about it as working on legacy code that you have to make work, to do what it needs to do, by turning buggy, vulnerable codelines into something beautiful, making changes line by line, small, but powerful improvements on the long run.

Side project are also great because they look great on your CV and during the interview when they ask about your projects you will be happily saying that you had this, that and even some other stuff too. It helps building online presence and that certainly won’t do any harm to your CV, career, network and professional evolution.

You should always have a side project as it is one of the best ways to advance your career as a software developer, bar none, is through side projects. In my opinion it is even more important in the very first years of your career. Especially, when you are a newly-graduated student I expect that interviewers will be more than happy to hear about all your apps, websites, etc... even the unfinished ones.

And I mean that not only a long list of successful products will take you there. One of my friends told his storiy of how a little Android app made all the difference in his life and career.

If one of your projects will get serious, then you can even quit your workplace, start a business, and become an entrepreneur.
Although am not encouraging you here to quit your workplaces now, but it might happen...

Building up a company from scratch has other advantages, too. First if you are on your own or with a friend, then you will have to make almost everything... I mean like marketing, sales, support and system operations as well. These are again I think are great things to know about even a little bit.

There is another saying of a friend of mine that a good side project makes you money while you sleep... But sometimes it might do some harm, as some people go crazy when their projects starts to make even a very little money, also generally the primary goal is not making money, but to learn, to advance, to grow.

I have a few more advantages of side projects for you. For example if you collaborate on an open source project or build something for a community, then you will be able to connect with other developers from all around the world, make some new friends and connections. That sounds really good, isn't it?

Also, it is refreshing. It’s a great way to get out of your comfort zone and do something different from your day job.

Last but not least, I would say that it's FUN! Think about it! You have the freedom to do whatever you want, there is no boss, or a client to tell you what to do and how to do it! You don’t have to spend hours in useless meetings. You don’t have to convince anybody of your own point of view. Your code will be super consistent and strictly follow all the code conventions: Yours.

How

Now that we know all the disadvantages and the advantages, I would like to give you some advice on how you can get the most out of the time you are willing to spend on working with your them.

Step one. 1. Find a topic.

Usually, when I want to learn new technologies, I build something real because getting your hands dirty is the only way of actually making sure that you got it right. You need those “aha!” moments you won’t have that just by reading / watching tutorials. Most people build To Do List apps. Please just do not make another To Do app! If you’re going to spend your super precious time on something, make sure to at least spend it on something that has the least chance of adding value to other people. Make something useful.

Another suggestion: use some note-taking app as ideas can come anytime, so be prepared! Otherwise you will forget them.... :(

If you are clueless what you could do, I have a list on my website filled with project ideas and it is growing. I put the link there. But of course you can find millions of other ideas on the internet, too.

Step 2. If you have decided on the idea the first goal is a plan

Don't worry I'm not saying that you should start by writing a 100 pages long detailed document I guess you are usually used to because of your day jobs. I say that it could even be a random text file, a few lines, with the core features, your goals and milestones. It is usually useful to seperate the file for the MVP level and for your the changes, new features, etc. And do not forget to limit the scope and set a deadline!

Step 3. Find a community

You can find online forums, groups, too that are for sharing and receiving constructive feedback on side projects. One of my favourite is the Side Project subreddit. It is very active, well-moderated and you can even get some new ideas from here, when using it for brainstorming or if you are out of ideas.

Step 4. Build something minimalist. I mean, really.

Believe me: If you are an experienced developer, chances are that you are going to overestimate your own capacity. It’s common to feel like you’re more productive alone than you are inside your organization, and this is true to a certain extent.
Also if you don't make your feature list short enough, chances are more likely that you will never finish the project as you will lose your motivation and interest in a short time.

Step 5. Become a finisher!

Despite all the effort you put into a project, things can happen so you will always have a good reason not to finish a project. Like going on holiday, taking German lessons or just simply reading funny stuff on the internet. But sometimes you have to say yourself, “Hey, you are going to finish this app and put it into the Android app store. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, but you are going to work on this app at least an hour each day, until it’s done.”

Step 6. Go live!

Going live is not just about publishing your app to the app store or deploying your website to the web. It can be publishing a library to npm or even just open sourcing the code so people can see it, use it and learn from it.
Also spread the world! Post about it on your blog, subreddits, HackerNews, dev communities even ProductHunt. You will love receiving feedback from people who are your actual users / contributors.

+1. One more tip for you: Go to hackathons!

Hackathons are getting more popular and more frequently organized as it is a great way to get people work on something. You are usually closed up with a few people to work on a project for a few day up to even 3 or 4 days. At the end you will have a team, a detailed concept or even a demo version of the product. Sounds too good, isn't it?

+2. Last but not least try to Change your workplace

At the company another friend of mine works for, they have an ‘Experiment Day’ every month. This is great for trying out some interesting technologies. Similar ideas are found across a lot of tech companies - and it’s easy to see why. You could even be a person who organizes these events, right?

Also, I heard that at some places they have Demo days where anyone from the company can show what he or she is working on in their free time.

There is also Google’s famous "20% policy", which means that you can work on anything for up to 20% of your work time. Why would a company do that? Because they recognized that it is benefitial for the eployee and the employer too.

So why not start one?

As you can see your precious time spent working with side projects can be beneficial and your small ideas can even grow into big companies.
I hope that you are all motivated now to start one and to finish one! In the end, the most important thing to do is to keep going and gain experience.

Thank you very much for your attention I hope you found it useful! :)

Hiring process of your dreams

Leonora Der — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 20:30:51 +0000

So... imagine you are starting your dream company with the smartest guys in the coolest office ever.... :) And you are looking for a software developer.

What would be a hiring process you would love to participate? One that you think that really shows a candidate's skills, gives a real result so that you can see that he or she would be a good fit.

My initial idea would be like:

short and simple interview: talking about previous projects and goals in the long run
start off with one very basic challenge like Game of Life to check code style, ability to refactor, clean code stuff
continue with a simple project from database level to frontend like an URL shortener service or something
last but not least adding a new feature to a complex (preferably legacy) system
team decides if candidate should be hired

It could be conducted in the office, candidates together with the other developers, so they would be able to ask whenever they want and feel like a member of the team!

What do you think? :)

Rethinking CSS

Leonora Der — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 11:15:34 +0000

I love front-end and back-end. Both the slowly changing, robust back-end technologies and the always-changing front-end frameworks.

But when I say always-changing I make a mistake. As like no one would use VanillaJS nowadays except for beginners, millions of people use pure CSS. And I was thinking... why is it happening? CSS is like a stable technology that is evolving but not in the way that the JavaScript universe does.

So... I have a question for you: Would you change CSS into something else? If yes, how? If no, why?
Before going on, please think about it for a few seconds...

I googled 'Rethinking CSS' looking for ideas of other developers, and the very first thing I found was John Polacek's thoughts. I guess a lot of you have read it previously. It is about atomic or functional CSS, so this will be the first thing I would like to comment on.

0. Atomic CSS

The idea is simple. Make CSS classes for commonly used lines and you will have millions of classes and your HTML markup will be a bit longer. To show you an example:

<p class="padding-small margin-big color-red">I am a p tag! How cool is that? :)</p>

.padding-small { padding: 10px; }
.margin-big { margin: 20px; }
.color-red { color: red }

It looks different to what people are usually used to but I think it is not really 'rethinking' it is just another way of using the elements of the language. So I was thinking of other ways...

1. Object-Oriented CSS

Being a Java developer this is the first thing that came to my mind, so again I googled it up and I found a tutorial on Envato. If you check the article it is again another structure, trying to look like object-oriented.

I guess I would say that it would look much more like OOCSS. I know modern day tools like SASS and LESS give us an easy way to do the same.
(Sorry I could not use highlighting as it showed errors obviously)

.card {

  {
    color: #333;
    padding: 20px;
    background-color: white;
  }

  .title {
    font-size: 24px;
    margin: 10px;
  }

  .body {
    ...
  }

}

2. OOCSS + Atomic

If we want to make it more OO and we want to get the advantages of the atomic thinking, then consider this:

.padding-big { padding: 20px; }
.margin-small { margin: 10px; }

.card {

  {
    padding-big;
    color: #333;
    background-color: white;
  }

  .title {
    margin-small;
    font-size: 24px;
  }

  .body {
    ...
  }

}

3. Web components + CSS

What if we could do something like this? (I really don't like CSS classes)

<card>
  <title>I am an awesome CARD! :)</title>
  <body>...</body>
</card>

card {

  {
    color: #333;
    padding: 20px;
    background-color: white;
  }

  title {
    font-size: 24px;
    margin: 10px;
  }

  body {
    ...
  }

}

Throughout these examples I tried to make them resemble the original syntax, but what if I could change that, too?

4. Other structures

Again I googled it up and I found YAML CSS which is another modular framework, nothing like I was looking for.

I have something else on my mind: CSS has its simple syntax, but what if I could use some other structures, too? Like YAML, which is a lot more readable in my opinion:


card:
  color: #333
  background:
    color: white
  title: 
    margin: 
      bottom: 10px
  body: 
    font:
      weight: normal
    padding: 20px

+1. Small bits of CSS

In the latest JS frameworks we have scoped CSS, so somehow it means that we can have CSS in every file. But some people don't like it, including me, because we are used to having 1 big static CSS file. Unfortunately, over time it can grow very long.

What if we had them in smaller CSS files, but still at the same place?
I could imagine having a global one containing utility classes and the others could be by components.

css
  -- global.css
  -- card.css
  -- slider.css
  -- navigation-bar.css
  -- ...

This way CSS would also be a lot more easily reusable, I think. Of course, you can organize your rules this way even now, and it is an improvement to what we usually have in our projects, but it is again something that could be game-changing.

Summary

I know that many people are working on how to be able use CSS easier and smarter but maybe as a community we can share the knowledge to make a 'new CSS'.
I had a few ideas on my mind and I am just simply interested in your opinions, so please share it! :)

Wannabe a certified Rockstar developer?

Leonora Der — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 15:01:15 +0000

I was on my commute, listening to the latest podcasts, and 86. Lightning Talks starts by CodingBlocks. Suddenly I can hear them singing lines of code.

What? Yes, there is actually a new programming language called Rockstar created by @dylanbeattie. The programs you write are song lyrics, too. How cool is that? :)

I am simply amazed. And here comes the question: why would anyone do something like this? The aswer:

Mainly because if we make Rockstar a real (and completely pointless) programming language, then recruiters and hiring managers won't be able to talk about 'rockstar developers' any more.

OMG! Hilarious. I want to be a Rockstar developer!

The specification of the language was uploaded to GitHub, check it out here.

It is changing very often, however there is a sample FizzBuzz written in Rockstar:

Midnight takes your heart and your soul
While your heart is as high as your soul
Put your heart without your soul into your heart

Give back your heart


Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller
My world is nothing 
Fire is ice
Hate is water
Until my world is Desire,
Build my world up
If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing
Shout "FizzBuzz!"
Take it to the top

If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing
Shout "Fizz!"
Take it to the top

If Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing
Say "Buzz!"
Take it to the top

Whisper my world

This is pure genious! My favourite part is how you can compose poetic number literals: Here is the first few digits of π:

My dreams were ice. A life unfulfilled; wakin' everybody up, taking booze and pills

Here is my very first program:

Leah is in it 
Young is too optimistic

If Leah is greater than Young
Whisper "you're a bit old"
Else 
Shout "you are still very young"

What will be the very first line of Rockstar code you write?

But here is the topping. In the ideas section, it is mentioned, that we should create 'Certified Rockstar Developer' stickers and give them out to anybody who can write even one line of Rockstar. What do you think?

On esoteric languages

Leonora Der — Sat, 14 Jul 2018 10:10:23 +0000

I've got a new laptop so I had to arrange the files and folders I wanted to transfer from my old computer to the new one. I guess you know that it can be a time-consuming process, but it worth the time because you might find some interesting stuff you have already forgotten about.

And this is how I've found a folder where I kept all the things (code, books, etc) on esoteric languages like Brainf*ck, Shakespeare or Befunge.

I have a few source files and as I remember I even answered a question on Stackoverflow. I also made a BF interpreter running in the browser, but the code is awful as I made it 3 years ago. (the cover image is a screenshot of it)

I checked the list of esoteric languages on the Esolangs portal and as I remember it was a lot shorter a few years back, so I guess people still love the idea of doing something fun! :)

So what is the most complex program you have written in an esoteric language?
Have you ever taken part in a competition?
Do you like esoteric languages? Why? Why not?
Have you made an esoteric language?

And the most interesting to me:

Do you think writing code in esoteric languages can help to be a better developer? Why? How?