DEV Community: Naoufal El hassnaoui

Personal branding for engineers: part 1

Naoufal El hassnaoui — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 21:28:02 +0000

Not everyone is talking about the fact that as an engineer you need a personal brand. This is something we can say not only for software engineers or developers, but everyone in the world needs a personal brand. Whatever your job, you need a personal brand, why? To tell you why you need a personal brand, we first need to define personal branding, then we can talk about why you need a personal brand.

What is personal branding?

The Wikipedia answer:

Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.

@GaryVee's answer Gary Vaynerchuk is CEO of @Vaynermedia. @VaynerSports @Empathywines. Investor in Twitter, Uber, FB.

Your personal brand is your reputation. And your reputation in perpetuity is the foundation of your career.

My answer is quite the same as Gary, I think personal branding is working on your reputation to build your career around it. Working on your reputation should be a long-term goal, not a short-term one. Don't expect results in the first weeks/months or even years.

Most people don't get this! They want to convert customers on the first day. This is the short-term thing I was talking about, trying to extract money from your blog viewers or your audience in LinkedIn, this is what we call being impatient.

For example, if I was impatient, I will publish a book next week titled "Personal Branding For Engineers" and I will try to use this blog and my other social media accounts to sell you this book. The problem here is that I wanted to convert you, the reader of my blog posts, to a customer directly from the first interaction.

The right way to do the conversion is to create a great experience, give you a lot of free value, then say that I'm selling a book about personal branding that you may be interested in. My goal in this example was to create a reputation first as someone who can help you build your personal brand, someone who is giving you value every time you read something he wrote.

To explain this a little bit more, I would bring Apple to the table. Apple never tries to sell you an iPhone directly they have built a reputation of a great iPhone experience that will make you buy an iPhone without them trying to sell it to you.

Personal branding for engineers is a bit different, you are not trying to sell a product, but you are trying to sell your profile to get hired (no matter what the contract is, independent, full-time, part-time ... ).

Why I should care about my personal brand?

First, you will need to sit with yourself and think about your long-term goals, you want to get a better job, you want to get a job, you want to sell your services as a consultant for example.

To achieve your goals in the long-term, the best way to do it is to build a personal brand, a good image, a reputation in the world. When you are known in your community as someone kind, honest, and helpful. People will look forward to doing business with you or hire you, because of your reputation.

How can I build a personal brand?

The question you should ask yourself is how can you build a good reputation? in reality and the internet.

In reality, be a good person, helpful, give more than you take. Help your community and people in need. Share your experience with them, they will get value from it for sure.

On the internet, building a good reputation is almost the same as in reality, but through social media platforms. Your presence on these platforms and how you use them is very important to your personal brand.

Here is how you can achieve this:

Document over create

Creating content in social media is a very difficult task. The solution is to document your journey, vlogging is a good example, you share part of what you are doing when you are doing it.

If you are an expert you will be able to create valuable content because you have the expertise in some fields that others don't, which makes you in a good position to create content.

Don't put yourself as an expert if you are not one! You have seen an Instagram profile with "e-commerce expert" in the bio, but when you read their posts, you find that they are just trying to sell you something without giving you "the iPhone experience" we talked about.

If they are experts like they say, they should first put out free, valuable content, they can create real content that will help you in the e-commerce world for free. After they have built a reputation you will go and buy their services without them selling them to you directly.

When you don't have the experience, you should not try to create content the way experts will do, you should instead document your journey to becoming an expert in your field, by sharing about what you are currently learning, what problems you are currently facing, and how you are trying to solve them.

Be yourself, 100% yourself, don't fake it till you make it!

"Fake it till you make it" is a really bad practice for personal branding. Be yourself and show your true self. Show what you really like to do, no need to show a fancy life, show your true life experience, be authentic!

"Fake" people don't last long, our goal is to last (long-term over short-term) that's why we need to be authentic and only show our true selves to the world.

Don't lie to your followers!

This first part was an introduction to personal branding not just for engineers but you can tell that this advice is for everyone who is looking for building a personal brand, a good reputation, and who is focusing on long-term goals.

In the next parts of this series about personal branding, we will go through each platform and how to use it with a focus on engineers, developers, and consultants.

I hope that I provided you today with some free valuable content as part of me building my personal brand and documenting my journey as a software engineer.

What to do when you get stuck on a problem?

Naoufal El hassnaoui — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 13:24:28 +0000

A very useful tip for developers

When you are stuck trying to fix something but you passed many hours working on it but still you don’t know the source of the problem/error … you checked the logs and still nothing, try this:

Go! leave it for a bit of time, I’m not saying take a break, because you should take a break that’s for your health, but what you should try, is leave the issue and work on another thing ;) Use your mind to work on something totally different to the issue for a few minutes or hours, then get back to the original problem and you will just easily find the source of the problem then the solution as simple as that! It’s like when someone needs some “space” to breathe.

I used this technique many times and it really helped me solve some problems. Sometimes we are just tired not physically but our minds are tired from working on the same thing! Give you mind some space let it breathe. When you succeed at doing something else your mind feels that it is better and can solve more problems than before.

Try this technique and see if it works for you :)

A Ruby On Rails Active Storage Cheatsheet

Naoufal El hassnaoui — Tue, 26 May 2020 22:48:48 +0000

Rails Active Storage Cheatsheet

Without an introduction, here is the table of content:

Rails Active Storage Cheatsheet
- Install Active Storage
- Usage
- Model
- Controller
- Views (in ERB)
- Display Image and its variants or Preview (PDF or Video)
  - Install this libraries first
  - Display an image (when document is an image)
  - Generate a variant of an image with variant
  - Generate a preview with preview
  - Don't know the type of document? Use representation
- Content type and size
- Attach a local file
- Validation with activestorage-validator gem
- Select all records with an attachment

Install Active Storage

Only for Rails version 5.2 and up (Rails 5.2.X & Rails 6.X.X).

Install

rails active_storage:install

Run migration

rails db:migrate

Usage

We will use User model with attachment(s) name document(s), this document can be an image or PDF or video or any other type.

Model

One attachment

class User < ApplicationRecord

  has_one_attached :document
end

Many attachments

class User < ApplicationRecord

  has_many_attached :documents
end

Controller

One attachment

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  # your controller methods (index, show ...).
  private

  # Only allow a list of trusted parameters through.
  def user_params
    params.require(:yser).permit(:first_name, :last_name, :document)
  end
end

Many attachments

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  # your controller methods (index, show ...).
  private

  # Only allow a list of trusted parameters through.
  def user_params
    params.require(:user).permit(:first_name, :last_name, documents: [])
  end
end

Views (in ERB)

Form filed:

One attachment

<%= form.file_field :document %>

Many attachments

<%= form.file_field :documents, multiple: true %>

Display Image and its variants or Preview (PDF or Video)

Install this libraries first

First to generate variants and previews of PDFs and videos, you will need to :

Add gem 'image_processing', '~> 1.2' to your Gemfile.
Install MiniMagick for image variants.
To generate previews of PDFs, install Poppler.
To generate previews of Videos, install FFmpeg.

Display an image (when document is an image)

To check if there is an image attached before displaying it use:

if user.documents.attached?

One attachment

<% if user.document.attached? %>
  <%= image_tag user.document %>
<% end %>

Many attachments

At least one document is attached

<% if user.documents.attached? %>
  <% user.documents.each do |document| %>
    <%= image_tag document %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

Generate a variant of an image with `variant`

Don't forget user.document should be an image in this case.

<%= image_tag user.document.variant(resize_to_limit: [75, 75]).processed %>

.processed method will store the variant for performance reasons.

For more variant transformations check image_processing docs.

Generate a preview with `preview`

For PDFs or videos.

<% if user.document.previewable? %>
  <%= image_tag(user.document.preview(resize: '200x200') %>
<% end %>

.previewable? method will check if you can create a preview of the document attached.

Don't know the type of document? Use `representation`

<% if user.document.representable? %>
  <%= image_tag(user.document.representation(resize: '200x200') %>
<% end %>

.representable? method will check if you can create a preview or a variant of the document attached.

Content type and size

Document attachment content type:

user.document.content_type

Video attachment file size:

user.video.byte_size

Attach a local file

In tests for example we want to be able to save/attach local files in Active Storage.

user.picture.attach(io: File.open('/path/to/file'), filename: 'my_picture.png')

Validation with activestorage-validator gem

To install activestorage-validator gem add in your application's Gemfile:

gem 'activestorage-validator'

To use this gem, in your model add:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_one_attached :avatar
  has_many_attached :photos

  validates :avatar, presence: true, blob: { content_type: :image } # supported options: :image, :audio, :video, :text
  validates :photos, presence: true, blob: { content_type: ['image/png', 'image/jpg', 'image/jpeg'], size_range: 1..5.megabytes }
  # validates :photos, presence: true, blob: { content_type: %r{^image/}, size_range: 1..5.megabytes }
end

Select all records with an attachment

From the comment in this issue in Rails repository in Github.

# Assuming a model defined like so:
class Post < ApplicationRecord
  has_one_attached :image
end

# ...you can join against :image_attachment to select posts having attached images:
Post.joins(:image_attachment).where('published_at >= ?', Time.now)

I posted this originally in Github as a Gist: here

Deno 1.0 What ? NodeJS is dead ? are you serious ?

Naoufal El hassnaoui — Mon, 25 May 2020 21:12:00 +0000

Two years ago the creator of NodeJS Ryan Dahl announced Deno a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, in this talk where he talked about the 10 things he regret about NodeJS and in the end of the talk he presented Deno and the motives behind it, why he is building this new JS runtime.

The 13 of May Deno 1.0 was released (here is the official blog post). By the end of the day every tech blog was sharing blog posts about Deno and some developers even started saying NodeJS is dead! like are you serious guys ?!

This is what we always see in the tech community when a new technology come to life the next day every other technology is dead, just take a second and remember how React Native was dead after announcing the first version of Flutter, since that and React Native continue to improve day by day and nothing is dead but the blog post about it :D

The short answer is NO! NodeJS is not dead and won’t be anytime soon, a lot of companies use it in production and the community around NodeJS is really big.
In the other side Deno come with a lot of improvements (which this post is about) so let’s talk about that now.

Here is a quick list of Deno features :

It is based on "modern" JS features.
It has TypeScript at its core, this may help it gain popularity, you don’t have to separately compile TypeScript, it’s automatically done by Deno.
It embraces ES modules.
It has no package manager.
It has a first-class await.
It aims to be browser-compatible as much as it can, for example by providing a built-in fetch and the global window object.

What I find cool about Deno, is the TypeScript support out of the box. As we see nowadays TypeScript is getting more popular than ever which will help Deno gain popularity, of course let’s not forget about the security improvements.

Finaly, I hope to not see an HR agent posting “Hiring! Senior Deno developer with +3 years of exp ONLY”

Feel free to leave your opinion on this in the comments section ;)

I post my thoughts in my LinkedIn profile.

Sources:
https://deno.land
https://deno.land/v1
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-deno-handbook/#will-it-replace-node-js