DEV Community: Marcelo Gonçalves

How do you choose a subject to stick to on your blog?

Marcelo Gonçalves — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 23:06:27 +0000

I am interested in so many subjects that it makes it difficult for me to choose one to blog about.

If you take the dev world alone, I love talking and reading about containers, microservices, API gateways, data structures, algorithms, Java, Spring, Flutter, Go, Rust, React, Next.js, Jamstack, NoSQL, Kafka... Yes, I am a generalist. That's what 25 years of CompSci do to you.

It doesn't stop there. I love Game Dev! Shaders, procedural generation, 3D modeling, sound design... speaking of which remembers me of my recent passion for samplers and synthesizers, musical production, piano, music theory, drums... And a bazillion other random things like cars and motorsports, knowledge organization techniques like Zettelkasten, personal finance and investments, well... you get the idea.

How do you guys stick to a narrow range of subjects to blog about? Am I getting crazy, a kind of knowledge addicted junkie? Should I create N blogs to spread the word about whichever comes into my radar?

Translations can boost your learning process

Marcelo Gonçalves — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 02:07:29 +0000

For one of my PRs that will take part in Hacktoberfest 2019 I've chosen the task of translating a book. My native (spoken) language is Brazilian Portuguese. My first goal was to ease Portuguese speaking beginner programmers learning process. But what I found was a totally different result!

Actually, translating this Nu Shell book is helping me to learn more! It is fantastic because my original goal is still being achieved while giving myself an unexpected reward. (Haven't heard of Nu Shell yet?)

But how does this learning improvement happen?

Sometimes, when in a rush looking for a quick answer, one just goes straight to a book chapter or documentation section, skipping many important parts. When you are translating you force yourself to read through the whole text, start to finish.
Before you can assume the job as finished you must revise it. Many times. So you end up repeating the above more than once. You do it twice or even more.
When you have no specific purpose while reading maybe you make some diagonal reading, just a skimming to get a taste of what the subject is. When translating you must read the original text with much more attention, dive in to get much more detail. Bam! The more attention you pay to that subject, the more you learn.

And everything I said above is equally valid to transcription jobs too! If you find any podcasts, youtube channels etc that accept transcription contributions, go for it!

I have not submitted this PR yet but if you're curious and want to see my ongoing translation work, it is in a forked Github repo.

Happy hacking!

Hacktoberfest for beginners - Low hanging contribution opportunities

Marcelo Gonçalves — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 18:45:06 +0000

Hey, there!

Do you know of any repo with easy, simple but valuable contributions that can be made by open source beginners?

Let's make a list! Please refer these repos/gh issues in the comments and I'll update the post with the recommendations in order to ease finding them.

I've gathered a few to start. Let's go help all beginners!

Nu Shell
Creative Commons Search Browser Extension
DSC ATC Web App
Terminal Faker
UVic Aero's Onboard Computer
Server for Ara Voice Assistant
Emojiscreen (no programming skills needed)
Learn how to contribute to open source (no programming skills needed)
Cutter

Who is your programming hero?

Marcelo Gonçalves — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 19:59:05 +0000

The good guys at The Changelog podcast (Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo) used to ask this question to people the interview on the show.

It's nice to see who are the heroes of people you really think are great programmers themselves. So, it would be nice to see who are this community's heroes. I'll start.

My programming hero is Dennis Ritchie. Not only for his technical skills but mainly for the huge contributions he made to the evolution of computer systems, software development and programming teaching and learning.

Let's go. Who is your programming hero?

Why I quit WhatsApp

Marcelo Gonçalves — Wed, 11 May 2016 20:21:00 +0000

Why I quit WhatsApp in favor of productivity (and sanity)

Photo by Jesper onÂ Flickr

WhatsApp is indeed a great communication tool. It provides fast talking, immediate responses, relatively large group conversations, (almost) free voice chatting and more. It’s a great way of sharing instant shots, selfies, short videos and voice messages. All these things in near real time. You send a message and the recipient gets it in a matter of a sub-second.

But all these features turned WhatsApp into a problem for me. Every conversation call for immediate attention. This mean interruption. And the immediateness of instant messaging turns it all into a bigger problem: anxiety! I’ll expand on that.

Interruption loop

The very nature of WhatsApp (and other apps alike) communication is the instant conversation. It’s not meant to be left to for follow up or later answering. When one sends a direct message via an instant messaging app, the expected behavior is that the recipient responds to it right away.

But at least for me this is not always possible. In fact, it’s almost never the case. Most of the time I want to concentrate on some task that needs to be completed, work related or not. Every instant messaging app uses notification popups and sounds in order to achieve its goal of being instant.

Here comes the first problem. These notifications cause an urge to check for the messages, not to speak of curiosity. And there you go interrupt what you are doing. You see a notification, open the app, check the messages, respond to some, smile at others, watch a video and go back to work. And in no time that notification pops up again. Repeat that all day long. Bye bye productivity.

Induced Anxiety

Ok, someone could say you can simply let it there. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing to answer your WhatsApp messages. Fine, but even if you don’t go read or respond to the incoming messages you know they are still there waiting.

Here comes the second problem. This situation causes anxiety. As soon as the notification arrives you already know there is an action required from you. There is something pending. It starts a background job on your brain that tells you someone could be trying to talk to you.

Come on, there is no way to really focus on a task when you are unconsciously wanting or thinking of other pending stuff (have you heard of Getting Things Done?). Furthermore, what’s the point in using an instant messaging app if you’re not using it’s instant messaging feature? There are better tools to help you handle this scenario.

Freedom

Leaving WhatsApp apart has been one of the most beneficial things I’ve done to myself recently. Small talk overload, useless media flood, tons of porn, flamed discussions about soccer and politics. Of course these things are not application’s fault. People who make bad use of these tech resources make me run away. Although I have nothing against WhatsApp or any other instant messaging app, I’m now free from all that bullshit.

Now I’m back to e-mail and phone based communication. It’s way better suited for the asynchronous communication I need to maintain focus. You have something to ask me or show me? Send me an e-mail. You need instant, online confirmation from me? Call me by phone.

It’s only one week since I uninstalled WhatsApp from my phone and the results have been impressively good. Not only my concentration power has recovered a lot but also now I can dedicate more time to get up to date with my Pocket reading queue, finish some Udemy game dev courses and even work on my photography post production.

Don’t worry I still use Slack, Twitter, Trello, Freenode for professional and educational communication.

This post was originally published on medium.com