DEV Community: Micah Lindley

Four takeaways from my internship

Micah Lindley — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:13:49 +0000

This summer I interned for Speak Creative, a web-first marketing company. I worked on the product team where I helped fix bugs and build features for SiteWrench, Speak's custom content management system. The internship was super productive and extremely informative for me as a young software developer. Here are three things I learned from my first internship in the industry.

Learning is more important than experience

One thing I was worried about coming into the internship was my lack of experience with the tech stack - namely, React. I've used both Vue and Svelte successfully, but all of my previous attempts to work with React had failed. JSX had always seemed completely unintuitive and unnecessary when compared to more standard templating systems like those used in Vue and Svelte.

On the first day, though, there were no expectations that I should know React. The only thing that was asked of me was to be willing to learn. I spent the first day of my internship learning how React is designed, and guess what? Now it makes sense. I still don't prefer React over Vue, but I understand its methodologies and the ways it's meant to be used. My lack of experience with a specific technology wasn't the priority - my willingness to learn is what mattered.

Slow and steady wins the race

There were several times I pushed a commit to the internal Git system only for my supervisor to review it and find a typo, an unnecessary console.log, or something else that I should have caught. I was prioritizing the speed of fixing bugs and adding features over the accuracy and format of my commits, and it was actually slowing down the development process. This taught me that it's better to slow down and review my own code before pushing rather than be too hasty and push something that could bring down production.

Get used to working on older code

Not every project runs on the absolute latest version of all the hottest technologies! Most of the codebases I worked on were React apps bundled with ancient versions of Webpack and Babel. I hadn't worked with either technology in-depth, mostly because the much faster and simpler Vite bundler has existed for much of my time as a developer. I had the opportunity to convert a few of these legacy apps from Webpack to Vite, but that wasn't the case for all of them.

I learned a lot about Webpack, but I also grew to appreciate that older codebases aren't always bad. There can be solid applications that don't run on brand-new technologies and are still maintainable.

Talking to coworkers does help

Interning at Speak brought me a lot of challenging structural and logical problems. At first, I attempted to solve these problems on my own, which I usually do since I'm used to a single-developer environment. However, I eventually learned to use the benefit of being in an office with other devs to my advantage, and my supervisor and I talked out any complex (or simple!) problems I encountered. Even asking questions over the company Slack was way more helpful than pushing myself to figure out the problem on my own.

Conclusion

My time at Speak was extremely useful (not to mention fun) and I'm grateful to have spent my summer there. I will remember the lessons it taught me for years to come.

Finally rebuilding my personal site

Micah Lindley — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 18:56:56 +0000

For the last six years or so, my personal site (micahlindley.com) has been built with pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no compilation or build steps. It's super nice just to push a commit and have it live on GitHub Pages in a matter of seconds. However, after spending a lot of time learning Vue 3 this last year I decided to finally rebuild the site. There are some major changes between versions 1 and 2, so I'll go over them and why I made the decisions.

Original Site	New Site

Design

My original site was very minimal and the layout was cookie-cutter for a portfolio site. It worked well and was responsive on multiple devices, but it didn't speak much to my identity as a graphic designer. I realized that I needed to make a stronger impression with my site. I started by using my accent color significantly more and even splitting the homepage in half with one side being white and the other being red. I was able to retain my minimal style while also bringing more character to the site. The most noticeable design change, however, is the cursor. On non-touch devices (see the pointer media query, the default cursor is hidden and replaced by a circle that uses the difference blend mode, creating some super neat effects.

Animation

There were some minor touches of motion on my original site - notably a large preloader that zoomed and disappeared after the page loaded. However, the new site is filled with several touches of motion that give it an almost organic feel. A circle of text rotates around my logo on the homepage. When links are hovered, the cursor is enlarged. Navigation transitions between pages are smooth. There's a fine line between too much animation and not enough, but I hope I've reached the happy medium.

Pages and performance

Version 1 used a single-page layout that's very common among developer portfolios. However, I was struggling to fit more content on the site while retaining fast load times. I gave in and switched to lazy-loaded routes that Vue Router supports. I was originally concerned about the weight that some frameworks and bundlers can cause, but Vite's intelligent bundling enables my site to load so fast that I don't even use a preloader anymore!

Automatic builds

The main feature of the old site that I didn't want to give up was the ease of pushing and having the site automatically deployed. For some of my projects, I use dedicated hosting tools like Vercel or Netlify, but I wanted to keep my site hosted on GitHub Pages so that other projects already on GitHub could continue to be on the micahlindley.com domain. Thankfully, GitHub Actions provided a great option for me to build the site with Vite in the cloud and host it automagically with Pages. I wrote my own Action to deploy the site and it's worked wonderfully so far.

The results

My analytics show that user retention (aka session length) on the v2 site has gone up by 12% , and the number of visits per month has not been affected. I'm very impressed with how fast it runs, and working with Vite has been a joy - I don't think I'll ever start a project with Webpack again! Vue 3 is a rapidly maturing ecosystem that I'm glad to be a part of. If you have any feedback, feel free to let me know! And of course, the site is open-source: https://github.com/micahlt/micahlt.github.io

Guess What I Found

Micah Lindley — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 02:43:13 +0000

For a long time now, Google has provided the Google Assistant SDK free to use for developers. This SDK runs on almost any platform, which is awesome! However it's headless, which means it doesn't have an actual interface. It's just code. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone built out an actual client for it on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Now it's happened - GitHub user Melvin-Abraham has started a smooth, consistent, and cross-platform interface for the Assistant! Right now you have to sign in as a developer and there's no user friendly way to do it. However, the project is well on its way to being a professional client, and its functionality is mostly complete. I'm not a part of the project (yet!) nor have I contributed to it (also yet!), but I just wanted to share this useful project with you! If you get a chance, definitely check it out and give it a shot.

Melvin-Abraham / Google-Assistant-Unofficial-Desktop-Client

A cross-platform unofficial Google Assistant Client for Desktop (powered by Google Assistant SDK)

Google Assistant Unofficial Desktop Client

Google Assistant Unofficial Desktop Client is a cross-platform desktop client for Google Assistant based on Google Assistant SDK.

Note:

The "Google Assistant Unofficial Desktop Client" is under development. So, if you find any bugs or have any suggestion, feel free to post an issue or a pull request.

Inspiration

The design is inspired by Google Assistant in Chrome OS and comes in both Light Mode (beta) and Dark Mode 😉.

Download

You can build the assistant on your machine if you prefer (see How to Build). If you don't want to build the project for yourself, you can download the Assistant Setup/Installer for the respective platform from here (releases). You can download from other official sources as well.

Windows (using `winget`)

If you are on Windows 11, chances are you have winget pre-installed If you are on older…

View on GitHub

Is there such thing as a truly free cloud database?

Micah Lindley — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 21:45:21 +0000

I'm building a news platform powered by Vercel's Serverless Functions. Posts are to be stored in some kind of database where Vercel's functions can retrieve and return the data. However, as far as I can tell I'll need to use a database outside of Vercel as they don't support long-term data.

So in a word, I'm looking for a free cloud database with a simple API that has:

No request limits
High storage limits, or none

Have any of you found a service like this? If you have, I'd love to take a look and see if it would work for me. Currently I'm using Google's Cloud Firestore which is convenient, but its limits on the free Spark plan are very restrictive.

Watch out for web dev scams!

Micah Lindley — Tue, 19 May 2020 18:51:39 +0000

*You can't trust anyone. *

Okay, well, that's not exactly true. I trust a lot of people day to day, but really: the Internet is a dangerous place, filled with scammers and people who'd just love to con you out of all your hard-earned money. I never thought I'd be scammed as a web developer, though.

Two days ago, I received a message from a person who called themselves Neil Obrien (notice the lack of an apostrophe). This is the contents of the email:

Micah,
I stumbled across your portfolio and I decided to email you, Off course I do have website to be create.
Below are my project details.
Here are the job details I have small scale business which i want to turn into large scale business now it located in Minnesota and the company is based on importing and exporting of Sport wears such as running jacket, jersey,dance wear,socks, boots etc for both adult youth ladies and girls so i need a best of the best layout design for it. Can you handle that for me ? The site would only be informational, so i need you to give me an estimate based on my want below, the estimate should include hosting and i have a private project consultant, he has the text content and the logos for the site.

The email went on to detail exactly what Neil wanted on the website and ended with asking if I would accept credit card payments.

I was wary from the start. I'm no idiot, and I've received several scam emails. I generally consider myself good at sniffing out phishing, but this was my first job offer for web development! I was happy! So after an hour, I put together a PDF that contained an estimate for the job, what I would need to complete it, and the fact that I did not, in fact, accept credit cards. I attached the PDF to an email and shot it off to Neil.

When I woke up the next morning, there was no email in my inbox, so I waited a few hours and finally got a reply from Neil:

The price sounds good to me and I will like to proceed with you. But for the payment I do have issue making payment through PayPal and Venmo but you can set up an account with stripe.com.

I finally came to terms that this was a classic credit card scam. I would build the website, and "Neil" would supposedly pay me through Stripe. His payment would end up being invalid, and I would have built a website for free for someone that would never reply to me nor pay me.

So moral of the story? Watch out for scams, guys. The web isn't always a friendly place. Luckily I ended communication before giving this scammer any of my time. If you've ever experienced a scam like this, let me know in the comments. I'd be really interested to know how many of you this has happened to.

Thanks for reading, and if you liked this post or thought it was useful, be sure to drop a follow if you're viewing on Dev.to or Hashnode, or put my RSS feed through your favorite feed reeder!

I took CS50, and you can too

Micah Lindley — Thu, 07 May 2020 14:49:49 +0000

Well, it's coronavirus chaos where I live in Tennessee. Everyone's freaking out about masks and handwashing and yes, the lack of toilet paper. However, I was slightly relieved to be out of school and the pandemic gave me some time to work on my dev skills. I didn't expect to be taking a Harvard course, though!

CS50 is probably the most famous computer science class in the Ivy League school and maybe the world. It's a beginner's introduction to computer science, but at the same times one of the most challenging courses at the school. It begins with Scratch and basic CS fundamentals, but by the end of the 8-week course you're building full-stack webapps with Python, SQL, and HTML/CSS.

I'm currently finishing up the fourth week, which covers the C language. C isn't one of my favorites (in fact, I downright hate it because of its monolithic, ancient approach), but I've learned a lot about low-level computing and just plain logic. It's more comprehensive and structured than any course I've taken on Codecademy (which is still a great option for beginners).

I highly recommend that anyone with the spare time should take CS50. It's definitely changed my views about programming and how computers really work. The class is huge, so huge that it has communities on just about every social media network - Stack Exchange, Reddit, Gitter, anything you can imagine. So what are you waiting for? Go take CS50!

Thanks for reading, and if you liked this post or thought it was useful, be sure to drop a follow if you're viewing on Dev.to or Hashnode, or put my RSS feed through your favorite feed reeder!

My Journey through the Linuxverse

Micah Lindley — Mon, 04 May 2020 16:29:51 +0000

Cross-posted from my blog.

There’s a TL;DR at the bottom 😉

Until a few years ago, I had only used Windows and Macs. My only experience with development was that of a web-based IDE like Codeacademy or Repl.it, and the occasional Notepad on Windows. Now don’t get me wrong; those are both great tools to use while getting started. But they don’t reflect real-world development tools. I did some research and found the answer: most developers use a variant of Linux.

I knew immediately that I had to start learning how to use Linux if I wanted to be a good web developer. So I found the most stable version of the Ubuntu distribution- at that time 14.04. Following some online guides, I succeeded in creating a bootable CD and setting up Ubuntu on one of my dad’s old computers.

I expected it to be similar to Windows or even MacOS, but when I restarted the laptop to see the unique Unity launcher, I knew I was wrong instantly. I soon learned also that the primary method of installing software was using the command line, which Linux users referred to as the terminal or the shell. Eventually I learned some apt-get commands and how to navigate through directories in the terminal.

So that was about a while ago. Two years ago, that laptop’s screen malfunctioned and I ended up having to throw it away. The time I had with that old Samsung laptop was very stimulating for me- it was my first delve into the vast universe of Linux and non-mainstream operating systems.

My dad tends to keep around his old technology. I soon acquired a new laptop, possibly even older than the first one. It was a Dell Inspiron 8600 with no battery, and I had a love/hate relationship with it. The problem was this: the PC was 8+ years old and ran on an i386 (32-bit) Intel processor. My favorite Linux distribution, Ubuntu, had stopped supporting such 32-bit processors starting with version 17.04. I was forced to try to boot a version of 16.04 on the old machine, but it failed- apparently since the Inspiron did not have PAE support.

Now we’re up to about a year ago. I did some research and learned that there was a lightweight version of Ubuntu called Lubuntu with an alternative desktop besides Unity. It continued to support 32-bit processors, and I thought, “That’s exactly what I need!” So I made myself a live USB with Lubuntu and successfully installed it on the ancient computer. It was very slow, of course, but I enjoyed it. I installed custom icons and edited the startup screen to where it looked like Windows 10, which some of my friends thought was amusing.

Now I’m in high school, and a few weeks ago my dad told me that his previous employer had some old computers to give me (it’s a known fact in my house now that I can restore old technology, and people have started giving me stuff). He drove me to the old office, and I saw it standing there: a Dell Optiplex 890 tower PC- in all of its blocky glory. It had previously run Windows 7, but I took it home and knew what to do. I was going to install Ubuntu 19.10, the latest cutting-edge version of Linux with the new Gnome 3 desktop environment.

I succeeded. It’s currently sitting beside my desk in my room, with the beautiful Ubuntu desktop wallpaper on my monitor. Now I’m also inheriting my grandparents’ old laptop that also ran Windows 7 for school, and guess what’s going on that? 😉

TL;DR

No matter who you are or what device you’re trying to use, there’s a Linux variant for you. Ubuntu is the most common and most supported distribution. If you’re using older devices, I suggest using Lubuntu. For a more unique look, try Ubuntu MATE. Linux is not some side operating system. It’s the free OS that’s taking the world by storm. ⛈😎🖥

Thanks for reading, and if you liked this post or thought it was useful, be sure to drop a follow if you're viewing on Dev.to or Hashnode, or put my RSS feed through your favorite feed reeder!

I built a YouTube Music clone

Micah Lindley — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 13:41:29 +0000

I’ve recently discovered YouTube Music, and it’s currently my favorite audio streaming service. I used it for a while, and then thought it would be cool to be able to upload my own music to the player. Since that’s not an option (and because I’m a nerdy developer), I decided to build my own version of YouTube Music that I could host my own songs on. It uses responsive CSS and HTML to provide a sleek desktop music experience. Currently it doesn’t actually play the music; I’m working on that. However, feel free to check out the interface (the songs are dummy songs; they don’t exist).

https://YouTube-Music-clone--micahlt.repl.co

Once I complete the project, it’ll be moved to GitHub pages, so stay posted! The underlying technologies are:

Google Fonts
FontAwesome
CSS
HTML
JavaScript

Thanks for reading, and if you liked this post or thought it was useful, be sure to drop a follow if you're viewing on Dev.to or Hashnode, or put my RSS feed through your favorite feed reeder!

Debug Challenge Week 1

Micah Lindley — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:16:29 +0000

It’s that time, guys! The Debug Challenge has begun! Keep in mind, mildly skilled devs can probably skip this as this weeks’s challenge is oriented toward beginners. Here we go!

What’s wrong with this code?

Not just what’s broken; also what’s depreciated or just impolite syntax. The language for this week is JavaScript.

<script type="text/javascript">
  function displaymessage {
    var socks = "3"
    alert(join("You have this many socks, plus 6: " + socks + 6))
  }
 </script>
 <input type="button" value="Click me!" onclick="displaymessage" >

Please answer in the comments!

Introducing the Debug Challenge

Micah Lindley — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 22:30:18 +0000

Introducing the Debug Challenge! From now on, every week I’ll be posting a product, code snippet, or GitHub repository that has an issue. Your job? Debug it and get it up-and-running! How does it work?

When I post the challenge, I’ll tell you what’s not working, and you can check it out. You can research (or find code on Stack Overflow) or just use your current knowledge to solve the problem. Before the week is over, comment on the challenge post. The winning solution will need an explanation of what went wrong, how you found the solution, and what the solution is. When the next challenge rolls around, the winner will be announced at the top of the post!

The first Debug Challenge will begin this Sunday, so hone up your skills, devs! Good luck!

Help with Firebase Realtime Database

Micah Lindley — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 15:02:04 +0000

Hi guys,

I’ve been working on my Checkmark project lately. Dabbling with Google’s Firebase, I added Google authentication to let users sync their to-do lists across devices. However, I can’t seem to figure out how to transfer the list items (li) to my Realtime Database, specified by the user’s Google username. I’m using pure Javascript and HTML currently, but if this can be accomplished with JQuery, I’m open to suggestions.

Can anyone help with this? I’m not exactly a Javascript programmer, so I’m making this up as I go. You can check out my current source at https://github.com/micahlt/checkmark.

Checkmark: a beautiful to-do with Materialize

Micah Lindley — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 16:14:20 +0000

For a long time I’ve wanted to do an impressive web app, and this classic to-do list was the perfect chance! Technologies used are HTML5, Javascript, and Materialize CSS. It also uses HTML5 WebStorage to store the to-do’s until you decide to delete them! Check it out at https://micahlt.github.io/checkmark/. The checklist also sends a notification about where to find information if it’s the first time the user loads the website.

UPDATE

I’ve edited the project a little bit, adding an about page and a fixed action button. The preloader position has also been fixed. And new, smooth animations on page load, plus some other minor UI fixes. Next up is turning it into a PWA!

This project is also under development (I’m adding Firebase auth to sync to-do’s across devices), so be aware that there may be features that don’t work while I implement this.

DEV Community: Micah Lindley

Four takeaways from my internship

Learning is more important than experience

Slow and steady wins the race

Get used to working on older code

Talking to coworkers does help

Conclusion

Finally rebuilding my personal site

Design

Animation

Pages and performance

Automatic builds

The results

Guess What I Found

Melvin-Abraham / Google-Assistant-Unofficial-Desktop-Client

A cross-platform unofficial Google Assistant Client for Desktop (powered by Google Assistant SDK)

Google Assistant Unofficial Desktop Client

Note:

Inspiration

Download

Windows (using winget)

Is there such thing as a truly free cloud database?

Watch out for web dev scams!

I took CS50, and you can too

My Journey through the Linuxverse

There’s a TL;DR at the bottom 😉

TL;DR

I built a YouTube Music clone

Debug Challenge Week 1

What’s wrong with this code?

Introducing the Debug Challenge

Help with Firebase Realtime Database

Checkmark: a beautiful to-do with Materialize

Windows (using `winget`)