DEV Community: Mykolas Krupauskas

A Year of Studying Computer Science 🏫

Mykolas Krupauskas — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 09:56:52 +0000

It has been a full year since I started my computer science and engineering studies at university. I study abroad, in the Netherlands. It was an eventful year, to say the least, and I feel it is time to reflect on the experience as a whole. If you're interested in what university and studying computer science is like, this should answer some of your questions.

Motivation for university 🐵

Technology is definitely an industry where obtaining a degree before you start working is optional. There are so many great online resources that can help you become a valuable contributor without any formal education. Many people choose this path and break into tech without ever going to university.

I also had the opportunity to skip the formal education machine as I started working in tech before university (you can read a related blog post on how I started working in tech while studying in high school). But why did I decide to go the traditional route anyways? It came down to a couple of simple reasons that mattered to me.

I thought that university would allow me to:

Meet great, like-minded people to collaborate with. 👏
Gain knowledge about complex subjects, experience academia. 🎓
Commit to a challenge and step out of my comfort zone. 🌠

All of these can be achieved by working, but I felt that university abroad would be a bigger challenge.

What university is like 👨‍🎓

I enjoy tertiary education much more than the early years of education. It may be recency bias or it may be because the subjects that are taught just interest me more. The subjects dig deeper, require more focus, and previous knowledge.

Computer science is a hands-on program compared to other, more theoretical studying options. It incorporates theoretical lectures and reading with practical assignments, projects, and coding exams 👩‍💻. I definitely prefer having an infinite amount of options to solve a coding problem compared to a single correct answer (though there are traditional theory exams too).

The 1st year was organized in 4 quarters where each of them had 3 different courses. The courses require a lot of work and focus, the pace is fast and it's easy to fall behind so you have to work on assignments, exam preparation, and projects pretty much constantly.

What I really enjoyed was the different extracurricular activities like meetups, talks, and lunch lectures. The lunch lectures were by far my favorite 😋. It's a short event where a company or organization comes to present a topic of their choosing, the catch being that the company buys the students that come by lunch 🍔🌭🍕. It's a win-win situation for both parties. Notable guests during the year were Facebook, Google, ING (a dutch bank), and more.

What they taught us ✍

The courses were split into categories and were:

Software 👨‍💻
- Object Oriented Programming
- OOP Project
- Software Quality and Testing
Models 🔺
- Reasoning and Logic
- Algorithms and Data Structures
Mathematics ➕
- Calculus
- Linear Algebra
- Probability Theory and Statistics
Systems 🕍
- Computer Organization
- Computer Networks
Data 💾
- Web and Database Technology
- Information and Data Management

If I had to choose a favorite course it would probably be Algorithms and Data Structures, because it was extremely challenging but it was taught well and it was rewarding to finish it.

This doesn't mean that I didn't like the other courses - quite the opposite. I thought all of them were pretty great and taught me things that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise learned.

Now a quick note and thoughts about all of the courses in general.

Software 👨‍💻

The courses in this block are taught in Java and I'm not a huge fan of the programming language 😅. But the concepts are general and transfer well to other languages. The Object Oriented Programming course was meant to bring everyone up to speed and was pretty basic.

The OOP Project course was fun because we worked in groups of 7 people building a full application. I enjoyed the social aspect of it.

Software Quality and Testing was my favorite of the group because of the awesome guest lectures with people working in the industry and the great professor. The testing principles discussed were also extremely useful 🧪.

Models 🔺

The courses in this group were by nature pretty theoretical, especially Reasoning and Logic.

Algorithms and Data Structures mixed in a ton of theory with implementation exercises. I've always enjoyed solving algorithmic problems and this course was just doing that over and over again. It's super rewarding to implement a complex structure or algorithm that helps you efficiently solve a tough problem, that's why I liked it so much.

Mathematics ➕

Mathematics is pretty self-explanatory. If you want to work in tech you don't need to know or even like math, but if you want to study computer science be prepared to have a little math sprinkled in your studies.

Besides, Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Probability Theory and Statistics are useful in fields like computer graphics and data science.

Systems 🕍

Computer Organization was a fun systems course. We were taught how the hardware in computers works, the history of how we arrived at the technology we have today. We had assignments to create different applications and even games using assembly. Assembly is a programming language that is extremely close to the actual operations the CPU executes when running programs. Writing programs with this language rarely a practical choice today, extremely tedious, but it was fun as an exercise.

This is what a part of a simple assembly program looks like:

Computer Networks taught us about the innovations and technology that gave us the internet 🌎! It was all about how we built amazing things just by piling layers of abstraction on top of each other. At the lowest layers, it's just electrical signals or radio waves, but we rarely think about how a high definition movie comes from a Netflix server to your phone screen. It turns out that a ton of brilliant people had to solve countless issues and problems to make that magic happen.

Data 💾

The Data group was all about how we store data in databases. The technology around storing ones and zeroes is quite fascinating when you start looking into it.

Web and Database Technology gave us an introduction to how databases and the web works. I didn't enjoy how the web part was taught, I felt that the technology they taught us was pretty outdated. But it's understandable because the web and JavaScript evolve extremely fast and it's hard to keep up.

In Information and Data Management we dug deeper into database technology. It turns out that making sure your bank transactions and tweets get saved and safely stored is a pretty tough problem. Especially when you have millions or even billions of users using your applications.

The Black Swan of 2020 😷

Obviously the global lockdowns changed the studying experience quite a lot. All of the lectures were immediately moved online and we finished the year remotely. I missed the social aspect most, but the transition was quite smooth considering the circumstances.

Verdict 🦆

I really enjoyed my first year studying computer science. I definitely learned a ton of things that I wouldn't have otherwise, I met a lot of bright and great people, and in general improved myself and my skills.

I'm looking forward to what the rest of my studies have in store. For now, I'll be learning Machine Learning and Computer Graphics 👀 Super excited about what's next.

Thanks for reading! I hope it satisfied your curiosity.

Be sure to follow me on twitter to get updated about new content! 🐦

This post was originally posted on my personal blog.

Intro to Serverless 🚀

Mykolas Krupauskas — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 12:42:53 +0000

Recently I had an opportunity to share a small presentation in a meetup about backend development. I prepared a quick intro and demo to a technology I am really passionate about. The technology is called serverless and I believe it has some great use cases. Especially for solo developers or small companies and startups.

Firstly, I just want to say that programming is the next closest thing to having superpowers in the digital age. 🦸‍♂️ === 👨‍💻 The ability to create something useful, something that creates value to other people is pretty unmatched in my opinion.

But just coding some application up is just part of the whole process. You must also somehow share your application with the rest of the world. Hosting your product is not a trivial task at all. There are many things you must think about if you want to provide a great experience for your customers.

So how does a developer, small team, or startup get their product out to the masses? Well, let's look at some history of hosting applications on the public web.

History of hosting 📚

Owning a physical server

For a while, the way to share your web applications with the world was having to own a physical machine yourself. That obviously came with a ton of drawbacks.

Expensive 💰

Firstly buying the hardware itself is really going to leave a dent in your pockets. Not only do you have to think about the physical components you also have to worry about powering and cooling the thing. Everything adds up.

Scales poorly

Image your poor server getting hit by many more users at once than it can comfortably handle. How are you going to deal with so much instant traffic? Well, your little server is probably not enough at this point. You either have to order and get better components or buy another machine. Both choices are slow and expensive, and your users are going to pay for it.

Managing headache 🤕

You really have to spend a lot of time managing the server itself. You're almost supposed to have another full-time person dedicated to maintaining the physical machine. And when you're a small startup or a lone developer you should be spending your time improving your product and not managing the underlying infrastructure.

Hosting in the cloud

A pretty obvious evolution from having to maintain your own servers was to outsource that to cloud providers that own and manage huge, highly optimized data centers.

All you have to worry about now is your virtual machine where you host your application. However, there are still some drawbacks to this approach.

Still pretty expensive

The cost calculation for your virtual machine instance is the computing resources at your disposal times the time your instance is running.

cost = time * resources

This means that even if nobody is using your app you still have to pay up because your instance has to be running continuously. This is just a passive money burner.

The issue with scaling ⏳

Dynamic scaling is still not perfect with this approach. There are tools and integrations that help you solve some of the issues but there is a learning curve associated with those tools.

You can try scaling vertically by throwing more resources like memory and CPU power at the problem. Another way to scale is to add multiple smaller servers. This adds more managing problems. Now you have to think about tools that help you manage your containers like Docker and Kubernetes.

Serverless to the rescue 🚀

Serverless - let's tackle the confusing buzzword first. We are definitely not getting rid of servers as the name might suggest. We are simply offloading the server management and scaling issues to someone else. This allows us to focus our precious time on what matters most - making our product as amazing as it can possibly be.

The benefits of serverless

Massive savings 💸

You are only charged for the resources you use. If you write a function that runs for 500 milliseconds you are only charged for that time.

Automatic scaling 🚀

Never worry about not meeting the demand and having your servers be overloaded. Serverless is perfectly set up to meet demand. You are allocated more resources whenever you need them.

The same benefit goes both ways. Your serverless app automatically scales down whenever there is no one using your product. This means you never have to pay for idle time. ⌚

Focus on your app 🤖

You basically have no infrastructure to manage. Don't worry about the servers, all you need to do is just write the code. This really enables you to fully focus on your product.

Let the companies that have huge cloud farms, tons of experience and great engineering minds working 24/7 handle the infrastructure for you.

High availability ✨

This is just an added benefit of using serverless. Especially useful for solo developers or smaller companies that can't afford to have a dedicated responsible infrastructure engineer. You can rest assured that your cloud provider has your back.

Example

Serverless can also be explained as a service that lets you run functions in response to some event. The general structure of a cloud function (written in Node.js) looks like this.

exports.myCloudFunction = function(event, context, callback) {
  // computation happens here

  callback('error', result)
}

The event parameter has all the information about why this function was called. What event caused it to be run. It's common for the event to be an HTTP request.

The context object contains details about the runtime the function is running in.

The callback is just a callback function we invoke after we did our computation and want to respond to that event or throw an error.

Now you can imagine that in a real app you might have many of these functions responsible for different parts or features of the product. It's astonishing how simple it really is, it's just a bunch of functions that are by design clearly separate in the functionality they implement.

Serverless providers

Basically, every major cloud provider offers a serverless platform. The list of supported programming is virtually infinite. However, some of the more popular languages have better out-of-the-box support.

AWS, Azure, OpenWhisk, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud and many many more.

Takeaway

If there is one thing I hope you understood about the serverless ecosystem is that it most definitely is the easiest, simplest, and most cost-efficient way to deploy backend code that scales amazingly well. 🔥

The slides I presented at the meetup.

This post was originally published on my personal blog.

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Becoming an 18 Year Old Software Developer

Mykolas Krupauskas — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 12:35:21 +0000

Hi, I'm Mykolas, a passionate developer from Vilnius, Lithuania. I mostly work with JavaScript and React 👩‍💻⚛️. Although I don't limit myself to any single technology, I'm just in general extremely interested in software development.

I wanted to share my journey so far in the world of software development and how I started working as a developer while still studying in high-school.

How the journey started

I've always been interested in anything and everything technical. Computers, logic puzzles and games are the things that drew me to programming from quite an early age.

When I was around 14 I started getting into the basics of coding and JavaScript. The resources I started learning from were engaging, fun and helpful. I started from code.org, later I moved on to a course on JavaScript on khanacademy.org.

The beginner courses were great, but after a while, they weren't challenging enough and I lost interest for a little bit. I had to find something more real and useful.

After coming back to coding after a short break and remembering how fun and rewarding it actually is I got the sudden urge to pursue software development as a career. A lot of work and learning was ahead of me 👨‍🎓💻.

Programming has always been a social activity for me. Me on the left with friends participating in a hackathon.

Starting to take it more seriously

Looking back, I see that I did a couple of things quite right to get ready for working as a software developer.

Online courses

I was around 15 when I received a membership for an online learning platform called lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) as a gift. The \$40 or so that were invested in my learning have brought amazing returns. 📖🦄 Probably the best investment in my life.

I learned the very fundamental basics of how web software was built. Got introduced to HTML, CSS, and dove deeper into JavaScript, which was quickly becoming my favorite programming tool.

Not only were the courses of higher quality, but the fact that money was spent on getting the courses motivated me to complete them. This is why I'd recommend buying your courses. There are tons of great and free resources, but you're more likely to finish courses if you've actually 💸 invested 💸 monetarily in them.

In terms of web development, I'd really like to recommend the courses of @wesbos. They are really fun and extremely informative. They were quite transformational in my career and programming journey. The courses related to JavaScript and that ecosystem have helped me especially. From small tips and tricks to project-based hands-on experience, those courses gave me a ton.

Online courses have always been a pretty big part of my learning process. Even today I try to allocate time to courses, they allow me to learn new things in a condensed and effective way. Improving, learning and picking up new skills is essential as a software developer.

Attending events

Meetups, hackathons and in general any development related events were and still are something that is crucial in my learning process and career development.

Meetups

Generally, very informal and friendly events where you not only learn stuff but more importantly where you can meet other people from the industry.

There are plenty of platforms to find meetups in your city, meetup.com is a great one. Events are often dedicated to a technology or a programming language, so choose the ones that interest you most.

Mostly JavaScript, React oriented meetups have helped me keep up to what's new out there, meeting new like-minded people was also great.

But most importantly most meetups have free snacks and drinks 🌮🍩🥤.

There are no downsides to attending them, that's why you should.

Hackathons

Hackathons are awesome! 🌞

They force you (in a very positive way) to sit down and build something from scratch. And building stuff is ultimately how you learn in software development.

It doesn't matter if you are an expert or a beginner in any technology. When there's excitement and accountability in a project you figure out a way to make it work 🐱‍💻. That's just human nature, we adapt, learn and adjust.

It might not be very comfortable in the begging, new people, new tasks, a strict deadline to get your work done as most hackathons take place during a single weekend. But coming out of your comfort zone is a great way to improve and learn.

Hackathons have taught me a lot of technical skills and I got to know some great friends through them. I also have even been fortunate enough to win a couple of them. Although the essence of the event is not to win, it's to create daring projects and to meet new people.

Me on the left, very sleep deprived, but ultimately happy after winning with an amazing team.

These various events, hackathons, and meetups have been so transformational in my life. If I would have been sitting at home, not participating in any social events, I would not have gotten the opportunities I got, I would not know the great people I got to know 😎🤜🤛🤓.

Even my career got kickstarted after I attended a hackathon, as I got my first internship in a tech company after participating in a hackathon organized by the company.

Internship and work

I'm super thankful for the people who accepted me as an intern into their team. It was great to grow in a supportive environment. Having people believe in me when I barely knew anything about development meant everything to me as a young developer 🐣🐣.

There is no doubt in my mind that if the people around me weren't as supportive as they were I would've dropped this whole thing and never pursued it any further.

As an intern I wasn't making coffee or anything like that, I was doing the same things the other developers were doing. And I have to say that I have learned the most in terms of software development in the workplace.

I have been extremely fortunate in my programming journey to work and to learn from great people and professionals. Learning from more senior developers and mentors is something that is extremely useful for a younger programmer 👨💻 😄💻.

It's important to ask questions, share ideas, discuss code and different solutions. That's how you learn and improve, there is no better way than just doing, creating, and developing.

Having other people by your side that already went through the things you're going through in your programming journey is super helpful. These people can definitely assist you if you're feeling isolated or lost in this vast world.

I went from intern to junior developer, to mid developer in the same company, same supportive environment. And I've grown a ton in the many facets of a being a software developer.

Next steps in my journey

I can see I've improved a whole lot over these last couple of years, but I hope that I never stop growing my knowledge base. Even though I've already started my career in software development, my next step is getting a traditional degree in computer science 🎓📚.

I feel that traditional academia will help me tremendously, not just in terms of knowledge but also in getting to know the world of technology more intimately and from a more theoretical level.

In the end, I hope the practical experience I've already gained and the more theory focused approach of traditional academia will help me create much better and more useful software.

Thanks for reading! If you found it interesting or useful be sure to share 😉.

The inspiration for this post was a blog post written by the amazing Lydia Hallie, @theavocoder.

Advice From A 19 Year Old Girl & Software Developer.

Originally published on my personal blog.

Recap of YGLF 2019

Mykolas Krupauskas — Sun, 19 May 2019 18:06:34 +0000

Recently I attended the first frontend conference in Vilnius.

You Gotta Love Frontend was an action-packed and an extremely informative conference overall. The speakers were awesome, it was well organized and there were way too many snacks for us to eat in between the presentations. 😋🍩

So I just wanted to share some of the highlights and the interesting bits of knowledge I acquired during the event. Just a couple fragmented and likely oversimplified ideas that stuck with me.

I've split the ideas into three main areas:

Accessibility
Performance
Miscellaneous development bits

Accessibility

The event was kicked off by @hj_chen and the talk was about the difficult problem of languages and fonts. 🌐🔠

We were reminded that we develop for the world wide web and not the wealthy western web.

To recap just make sure you use the lang attribute, specify the exact language of the content and that your font families have the glyphs of the characters you are using on your site.

@aardrian spoke about a concept called selfish accesibility. 😈

It's in your best interest to make your site usable in various disabling circumstances. A broken arm, a loud cafe or bright sunlight shouldn't make your site completely unusable and if you think about these factors you'll make your site accessible.

Also, accessibility is not a checklist, it's an ongoing process.

Liv

@misslivirose

Not going to lie, @aardrian's #a11y talk at #YGLF19 has already made me tear up. Accessibility and inclusion for tech is SO important and SO necessary and we in the XR space need to be way more aware of our responsibilities here.

11:21 AM - 16 May 2019

2 11

Performance

@DanShappir showed that server-side rendering brought a huge time to visible decrease. Not without technical challenges though, testing helped a lot in the development process.

Images make up the majority of web traffic. Therefore, it makes sense to optimize them, we have no excuse to not do so. @dougsillars showed that we have modern tools like webp, <picture> tags and lazyloading solutions to do so. 👨‍💻

Also, use .mp4 instead of .gif for animations on the web.

Dan Shappir

@danshappir

.@dougsillars shows that slow loading websites are more stressful than standing at the edge of a cliff at @yglf_lt #yglf19 #webperf

12:20 PM - 16 May 2019

2 8

Miscellaneous development bits

You just had to see the keynote of @smashingmag. We witnessed what's great and what's quite terrible in the vast world of website design. 🧙‍😲

Tomas Miliauskas

@typeoftomas

@smashingmag talking about the website of the worst hotel in the world at @yglf_lt, #YGLF

07:25 AM - 17 May 2019

3 8

@giltayar proved that testing your CSS is possible with visual regression testing.

He also coined the term egoprogrammophobia. It is the fear of your own code, but if you're suffering from it writing great tests for your code definitely helps.

Running, training and retraining machine learning prediction algorithms is possible in the browser. Are there any practical applications? Definitely! @devdevcharlie showed that you can totally detect willies with JavaScript. 😁

JavaScript classes have some weird behavior. You can just use functions to make your life a little easier. @soyguijarro

There are so many different things you can do with the browser like connect and use midi controllers, talk with microcontrollers (that run JavaScript) over the web Bluetooth API or even have interactive and social VR experiences. @dashersw @html5test @misslivirose

@sgrove did some fast-paced development with GraqhQL and ReasonML. This technology combo seems really powerful.

ᴡᴇɪ 👩🏻‍🌾 @ YGLF Vilnius 🇱🇹

@wgao19

I am hearing a brilliant talk on GraqhQL and ReasonML by @sgrove, so genius my brain is stormed

#yglf19

09:52 AM - 17 May 2019

4 21

@rebekaka shared some awesome tips about debugging. 🕵️‍

If you use console.log(value) to log variables you can improve the readability of that log simply by forming and logging an object instead of just the value console.log({ value }). This is especially useful when logging multiple variables.

Also, create a snippet for it if you already haven't to make your life easier.

Both chrome and firefox development tools have some great features like the accessibility and performance tabs, debugger breakpoints, local overrides, audits, and source map support. We have amazing tools and it's worth learning to use them.

@getify spoke about how we are actually developing for people and not just users or customers. He proposed a web fidelity slider because ultimately people know what's best for them. 🤔

HJ Chen @ YGLF Vilnius 🇱🇹

@hj_chen

Users know better.
#YGLF19

15:24 PM - 17 May 2019

3 9

I also wanted to thank the organizers for the opportunity to attend and the scholarship ticket.

YGLF 2019 was an absolute blast and I can't wait for YGLF 2020! 🎉🎉

This post is from my personal blog. Check it out!

Credit for the cover image goes to YGLF Lithuania.