DEV Community: Prasham Ashesh

Things I want to read and review

Prasham Ashesh — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 19:09:02 +0000

React

react docs
https://egghead.io/q/react
blogs by Dan https://overreacted.io/
Book notes by DanAbromov sent over mail

Redux

redux course by Dan Abromov on egghead.io

Webdev

Already going through MDN guide
Zero to Mastery tutorial

PHP

PHP
Laravel
udemy course for both

Dev.to ideas

github repos followed by Dan and other popular devs

Connect your personal and work calendar

Prasham Ashesh — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 05:47:33 +0000

I had been managing my work and personal calendars separately. For a very long time, I have been looking to merge my two worlds and bring them together. But I would always end up reasoning out of it, thinking that I would end up revealing my personal schedules to my colleagues, leading me to an awkward oops moment.

Turns out the calendars we use in general are pretty mature and a lot of thought and work has already been put into it, I couldn't think of a scenario where I would feel stuck or regret merging my calendars.

Thankfully, since I use Google Calendar for managing both my work and personal calendar it was super simple for me.

Step 1: Open your Google calendar (personal), on the left navigation pane, under "My Calendars" hover over the calendar marked as (personal), to expose the kebab icon for more options.

Step 2: Proceed to click the kebab menu to open a menu list.

Step 3: Select Settings and Sharing, this would open up the calendar's settings page.

Step 4: On the left navigation menu click "Share with Specific People" this will take you directly to the section through which you'd be able to share your calendar by simply providing the mail address of the account you want to share your personal calendar with.

Step 5: Simply add your work email or any other account's email you want to share it with. Select appropriate Permissions.

Et' Voila! Now you should start seeing your personal calendar events in your Work calendar.

Note:- Calendar is a powerful tool, they can be devastating in the wrong hands. Please read more about, and take extra care while sharing your calendars. It has a direct impact on your Privacy. *If you are sharing your work calendar instead, I would recommend you to refer to your company's policy before sharing/connecting it with your personal account."

For more details on sharing calendar: Visit Here

Helpful links:

Day 4 - "dayofcovid" Sad and Crazy Covid situation :(

Prasham Ashesh — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 13:16:32 +0000

I am a resident of India, and the covid situation is crazy here, as it is around the world. Hospitals are out of bed, crematoriums are outmanned and running low on resources.

My family too was hit we had our first symptoms around 6th or 7th April, even though it was just my RT-PCR test that turned out to be positive, out of the four of us. I had to wait for ~5hours just to get my sample collected on 10th April. I knew then the situation is grim and the situation had just started to get worse.

Check out :- https://news.google.com/covid19/map

I was lucky to have endured through it without loss of taste or smell, which made it slightly bearable for us, and thankfully we didn't have to get anyone of us hospitalized.
But other families around us, and across India were not as lucky.
Hospitals have run out of bed People are travelling hundreds of kilometres just to get their loved ones adequate medical attention. Worst hit are those who have had to helplessly watch their loved ones die in front of them.

As of writing this article, the death toll stands at 180,550 and covid cases 15,321,089. Source

I personally know ~10+ families that are going through these difficult times. In the last 2 weeks, I have heard of 5 deaths, of family friends and relatives. These are not normal times, the second wave has had a serious impact. If you have not been monitoring the situation, I urge you to do so.

Yesterday, my 100daysofcode challenge was abrupted because I spent my whole day connecting with friends and family members worried it might be the last I hear of them or from them 😟

As developers, most of us are blessed to have the ability to work in the safety of our homes and keep our families safe. I appeal to you all to make the best out of it. Whatever your stand on remote work might be understand that these are troubled times and that working from home is a necessity, and I mean work from "home" not work from "beach" etc.

I don't know how the future of remote work, crypto, pharma or travel industry might turn up to be, but I know one thing for sure none of us would enjoy a future without our closed ones, or would want to be part of the future where we were directly or indirectly responsible for the death/suffering of our loved ones.

Consider yourself lucky to be reading this, thousands are dead, other thousand are in shock. You don't want to be +1. Covid is a shitty disease it screws up in unimaginable ways.

Stay indoors, be responsible. 🙏
Wear your mask as if they were the oxygen masks because there are none available at the hospitals. Wear it as if your life depends on it. 😷

Please share your experiences of these horrid times, so that if my appeal fails to convince. Hopefully, some of your experiences or comments might make people realize the depth of the situation at hand. 🙏

Day 3 - 100daysofcode JS begins

Prasham Ashesh — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 17:39:33 +0000

I took a slightly different route today instead of reading and writing about it the same day, I thought how would it be if I read one day and wrote about it the other day. I wondered if this would help me recall and remember stuff for a longer duration.

Articles Covered:-

Javascript Basics

It was amazing to see how such a vast topic was punched into such a concise and well-done article. Kudos MDN, and all the Open Source contributors.

Notes

It was invented by Brendan Eich (co-founder of the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation). If guys want to know more about JS history watch this

The reason the instructions (above) place the <script> element near the bottom of the HTML file is that the browser reads code in the order it appears in the file.

If the JavaScript loads first and it is supposed to affect the HTML that hasn't loaded yet, there could be problems. Placing JavaScript near the bottom of an HTML page is one way to accommodate this dependency.

The return statement tells the browser to return the result variable out of the function so it is available to use. This is necessary because variables defined inside functions are only available inside those functions.
Variables are the fundamental block behind dynamic web pages, or anything dynamic I'd say.
Most modern programming languages, like JavaScript, don't start counting at 1 like humans do. They start at 0. This is referred to as Zero-based indexing.
Mixing data types can lead to some strange results when performing calculations. Be careful that you are referring to your variables correctly, and getting the results you expect. For example, enter '35' + '25' into your console. Why don't you get the result you expected? Because the quote marks turn the numbers into strings, so you've ended up concatenating strings rather than adding numbers. If you enter 35 + 25 you'll get the total of the two numbers.

I liked the fact that they actually used prompt to take input than introducing input field. I have seen more and more modern interfaces starting to use prompts to take small inputs than going through the hassle of creating forms and stuff for small inputs.
And through Propmpts they slowly introduce the readers to the concept of null.

When you run the example and get the dialog box that prompts you to enter your user name, try pressing the Cancel button. You should end up with a title that reads Mozilla is cool, null. This happens because—when you cancel the prompt—the value is set as null. Null is a special value in JavaScript that refers to the absence of a value.
They also recommend learnjavascript.online for people who want an interactive environment. I am doing it via Freecodecamp but this one looks promising too.

Publishing your website

This is an article that I wish I had read when I was trying to figure what cpanel godaddy etc. is and whatnot. It doesn't really answer all of the cpanel or godaddy related doubts but definitely gets one going.

They mentioned a variety of hosts for hosting like Github Pages, Google App Engine, Neocities, Google Sites, Blogger, and WordPress. And some web-based IDEs as well like JSFiddle, Glitch, JS Bin and CodePen. I really like Codesandbox as well.

But they went with deploying through Github Pages in full detail.

I really love Netlify as well. The tools and plugins can make the life of any Jamstack developer a breeze.

Somewhere in the article, it all says

GitHub is a "social coding" site.

which was interesting because all this time I had been using it and never thought of it this way. I always thought of it as a free hard disk space to store code 😅. But this changes some perspectives in my mind.

How the Web works

It truly is a simplified version of web explained with the analogy of road, shops, home and you. It's a small sweet read.

Though while reading it I did ask myself why is it so that we doesn't the server send in the CSS and JS all other such resources along with the index.html file, when it clearly knows that these are the resources that'd be requested by the browser. 😅

Found the answer to it on Stack exchange here When webservers send a page, why don't they send all required CSS, JS, and images without being asked?
TLDR; HTTP limitations, it wasn't designed for this. but Google designed a protocol that can push all its resources to the client, it's called SPDY.

Notes on FCC JS DS Algo course

from strings and variables I touched arrays so loved that.
Arrays can have values of different and unrelated data types as well.

var myJsArray = ["dev.to", 9 , 1.2, {"name":"prasham"}, ["inner","array"]]; // valid Array

Psst, I'll let you in on another trick as well. You can provide values to the keys of an array directly in JS because ultimately everything in JS is an Object. An array is just an object with extra abilities. 😉

var normalArray = [1,2,3,4,5];
console.log(normalArray.length); // 5
console.log(normalArray);        // [1,2,3,4,5]
normalArray.name = "prasham";
console.log(normalArray.length); // 5
console.log(normalArray);        // [1,2,3,4,5,name: "prasham"]

Like strings, arrays use zero-based indexing, so the first element in an array has an index of 0.
Unlike strings, the entries of arrays are mutable and can be changed freely.
Tip: There shouldn't be any spaces between the array name and the square brackets, like array [0]. Although JavaScript is able to process this correctly, this may confuse other programmers reading your code.
push() and pop() work on the last element of the array.
unshift() and shift() work on the first element of the array.
Remember all of these functions mutate the array that's been operated upon.

I really don't like how confusing their names are and how much difficult it is still for me to remember what the distinction is between them. I wrote an article on this not a big fan of medium but back then I thought all the devs use medium only 😅
The Mysterious .shift() & .unshift()

Just a slight distinction between Parameters and Arguments, I have been guilty of using them interchangeably 😅
Parameters are variables that act as placeholders for the values that are to be input to a function when it is called. When a function is defined, it is typically defined along with one or more parameters. The actual values that are input (or "passed") into a function when it is called are known as arguments.
In JavaScript, scope refers to the visibility of variables. Variables which are defined outside of a function block have Global scope. This means, they can be seen everywhere in your JavaScript code.
Variables which are used without the var keyword are automatically created in the global scope. This can create unintended consequences elsewhere in your code or when running a function again. You should always declare your variables with var.

Generally let or const is a much safer bet.

My Tip: It's great to create reusable Functions, but sometimes I create functions just to make them more readable, even when I know I won't be reusing them anywhere. Devs usually spend most of their time reading code and not writing it, make sure your code is not a pain to read for them, or you a year later 😄 😅

Booleans may only be one of two values: true or false. They are basically little on-off switches, where true is on and false is off. These two states are mutually exclusive.

Note: Boolean values are never written with quotes. The strings "true" and "false" are not Boolean and have no special meaning in JavaScript.

And that's a pack up!

Comments and Conclusion

I find myself almost always ending up to work on it at 9:00 pm around night time which I don't feel is the right time, because during workdays I am gonna be exhausted. But I will stick to it for some time so that I can build a habit of it and later I could maybe play around with timings.

A little baby dance for my day 3 It's a Hatrick!!

Love you folks thanks for the motivation!

Day 2 - 100daysofcode Webserver basics

Prasham Ashesh — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 09:49:28 +0000

I have covid and Day 2 was the day when my body begged me to get some rest and I had to give into it. Reminded me of a quote.

Since it's been ~12 days since my first symptom and I am on a road to recovery, I think besides the coronavirus it might have to do something with the new syrup I had yesterday 😅

But, any way I am glad that I did at least a part of what I promised, I read a few articles from MDN frontend guide and did 4-5 questions from FCC JS DS Algo course
I couldn't however post an article, unlike reading tech and coding for years now, writing is something that I am relatively new with. I still occasionally have to run a compiler inside my brain converting Hindi (my first language) to English. 😄 And who knows what all I'd have ended up publishing in my sleepy state.
I'd say it was a good decision because now as I am writing this article I have the opportunity to recall all that I had read in my sleepy state plus some extra time to reflect on what happened and how it could be avoided in future.

Also, I thought maybe I could start my articles in a 3-2-1 format that James Clear's newsletters come in. His are 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question. I was thinking of 3 discoveries that day, 2 realizations/quotes, and 1 question.

Articles Covered

What is a web server?

I really like how they explicitly mentioned and differentiated between the hardware web server and the software web server. And the roles each play while serving a request.
A good point - The web server must answer every HTTP request, at least with an error message. (This very line sets up the foundation for HTTP response codes and why)

What is the difference between webpage, website, web server, and search engine?

This article certainly clears out the confusion I once had in my early days of the internet, I thought the browser and search engines were one and the same, and that when we type something into the browser it would be the browser that would scout the net and provide me with the results, I was so wrong 😅 With these articles, I certainly am getting nostalgic. 😄
This also addresses some of the terminologies that is often use by clients or non-technical people. e.g. I have often heard some of my clients addressing the pdf they received via mail as web docs, Web Documents or Web pages. But the above article clarifies it well.

Browsers can also display other documents such as PDF files or images, but the term web page specifically refers to HTML documents. Otherwise, we only use the term document.

Another such confusion that's addressed is between a website and web server.

Don't confuse websites and web servers. For example, if you hear someone say, "My website is not responding", it actually means that the web server is not responding and therefore the website is not available. More importantly, since a web server can host multiple websites, the term web server is never used to designate a website, as it could cause great confusion. In our previous example, if we said, "My web server is not responding", it means that multiple websites on that web server are not available.

Stumbled upon a gold mine of internet terms. See them here
MDN Web Docs Glossary: Definitions of Web-related terms

CSS Basics

This article covered the very basics of CSS and I was glad they were able to showcase CSS with such simplicity.

CSS is a stylesheet language
Anatomy of CSS Ruleset
Box model

All in all, it was not much but fits very well in the Two-Minute Rule which states

“When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

From the FCC JS DS Algo course I attempted just 5 questions there wasn't much new to learn except one.

Most modern programming languages, like JavaScript, don't start counting at 1 like humans do. They start at 0. This is referred to as Zero-based indexing.

Comments and Conclusion

Well, day-2 was pretty close to being a failure, but the least we can do right now is to make sure it is not repeated again. And that the 2-minute rule is just a worst case scenario and should not become an everyday reality.

On Day-1 I wrote "I will continue with the 100daysofcode challenge, at 2:00pm in the morning right after my lunch every day without fail"
I think I didn't give enough thought to the 2pm I thought I'd be simply able to stack it to after my lunch, while totally forgetting about the After Lunch Fatigue which was only enhanced by my medicines.

Hence I think a better time would be 7pm, I am done with all my fatigues and would be able to close the deal before dinner.

Hence the new statement is
"I will continue ith the 100daysofcode challenge, at 7 pm every day in the evening after gym, every day"

I'll leave you with a song I find motivational and energizing at times, and pretty sure would be an all-time favourite for many Imagine Dragons - Radioactive 🥂😄

Day 1 - 100daysofcode

Prasham Ashesh — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 20:43:47 +0000

Here it is the Day 1, inception day. It is beautiful!

I will just blurt out my learnings and notes of this day, an improvement suggestion to whosoever might read it next. would most probably be just me 😄

As promised on Day 1 we were to begin with MDN's Front end Web dev guide
We took off to stick to the very basics to keep things enjoyable and as Gary Vee puts it "fall in love with the process".

Hence we started with Getting started with the web I was kind of feeling ashamed to even start it, I mean years spent browsing web and what not, and I was about to read "Getting started with the web" 😏 I didn't know if it made me laugh or cry. 😅

Installing Basic Software

This section listed very basic Webdev stuff, and I was pretty glad that it was made with a complete beginner mindset, its for a kid who just got a new laptop. And I am glad it is structured this way.

It lists down an amazing bunch of tools used by professionals now, with links for most of them. ( I hope new guys don't get overwhelmed by it) It's an exhaustive set, and to be honest many were new to my eyes as well. So if you are a newbie reading that list, its just there to scare the weaklings. 😄
The only tools one needs to get started are Text Editor, and a Web Browser. (I'd pick VS code and Google Chrome)
Interesting Tip by MDN peeps : " You usually don't need to worry about making your web projects compatible with it, as very few people still use it — certainly don't worry too much about it while you are learning. You might sometimes run into a project that requires support for it."
It's true unless you are working on a project where your end users are Librarians, or a government project one would most likely not care to support the Internet Explorer, but its a good thing to keep in mind which feature of the web has limited support and compatibility. Web is an evergrowing space one has to be mindful of many things.
How do you set up a local testing server?
I like the depth that they covered here tbh I would have simply recommended a VS code plugin like: VSCode live Server
but the real gold in this article were its pre-requisites
Found this video in there it was a good quality watch.How the internet Works in 5 minutes: A 5 minute video to understand the very basics of Internet by Aaron Titus.
And this Article on setting project goals literally walks you through the mindset and the thought process one should have while building one's website.
It has this real lit 🔥 line in it

How can a website help me reach my goals? By answering that, you'll find the best way to reach your goals and save yourself from wasted effort.

It's a basic thing many engineers and developers forget, what's the end goal, what and why are you building this website. And without that Why the how gets lost pretty quickly.

What will your website look like?
I loved the smallest and benign of details covered in here.
Dealing with files
This part clears out an early confusion that I had while starting with web dev, Where should I be keeping my files and how should I be structuring my project. Plus this artcile/section does a great job in just getting a newbie to familiarize itself with the foreign language HTML 😄
HTML basics
This section barely scratches the HTML and stands true to its name HTML basics and introduces us to the commonly used tags.

Next up for Day-2 from MDN's Frontend Guide: CSS Basics

The relief one gets after coming so far is phenomenal

After a theory run, it was time to get real with FCC's JS DS and Algo course
And since it started of with real basics and I was able to complete 25% of the Basics part of it I'll just mark a few notes for the future me, to remember.

It was quite a Fun fact to me

The remainder operator is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the modulus operator. It is very similar to modulus, but does not work properly with negative numbers.

Remember that everything to the right of the equals sign is evaluated first
I like how FCC peeps take a jab at PHP 😏

Unlike some other programming languages, single and double quotes work the same in JavaScript.

The backslash \ should not be confused with the forward-slash /. They do not do the same thing.
A good list of escape characters

Code    Output
\'  single quote
\"  double quote
\\  backslash
\n  newline
\r  carriage return (A reminiscent of typewriter days, is a control character or mechanism used to reset a device's position to the beginning of a line of text. its the CR in `CRLF`)
\t  tab
\b  word boundary (Word's beginning and end e.g *word* the astericks here represent the word boundary not sure when it'd be used though)
\f  form feed (Page Seprator, indicating next page)

Another fun fact "My name is " + mName + ". And I am awesome!" is "Mad Libs" style. I would have called it the Fill in the Blanks style. :laugh:

My Comments and conclusion:-

All in all, it was a good start but I almost derailed it by not starting on pre-decided time and by procrastinating on it till I almost ran out of time.

And for it I have a little Atomic Habit hack
" I will continue with the 100daysofcode challenge, at 2:00pm in the morning right after my lunch every day without fail" :fingers_crossed:

100 days of code it is

Prasham Ashesh — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 21:34:56 +0000

Why 100daysofcode ?

I have been coding for years now, I started coding during my school in my 6th or 7th grade days and quickly started liking it, I found it intriguing and engaging. By the time I hit my 10th grade I had exhausted my teachers and was scoring pretty well in my Computer papers. I had internet at home but I hadn't discovered the good part of it. Except for miniclip.com which was where I spent most of my time as a kid. Huh!

Computer Science in 11th and 12th grade was for the most part a re-iteration of what I have learned so far. This is where my puny mind decided I had already reached God level of programming, and I thought to myself, people might beat me in speed but I'd always be able to produce a solution even if I'd be a few hours late. Haha the shit, your brain can serve itself is mind-numbing!!

Long story short, Beers, Games, Porn, COD, Dota 2, occasional academic stints to justify my skills, lots of Dota 2, shitty fast food, low-paying first job, Udacity Course, Girls, Fuck loads of Dota 2, First-girlfriend, Second-girlfriend, Crushing Bootcamp, Overwhelming realization, girlfriend troubles, and ok paying job later, here I am a 25-year old person who has allegedly been coding for 12 years, Half my freaking life now, realizing I know shit! craploads of it! Because I have been serving the crap that "I know stuff" to myself for years. And today is the day I draw a line and say this is it no escapes, no shortcuts, no youtube binge nothing can replace the real blood and sweat that I have been avoiding to put in all these years.

100 days of code is my way of putting in the real hours, and falling back in love with coding.

What would be achieved at end of #100daysofcode?

My goal is to get my hands dirty with real code, write code that my brain thinks it already knows. All the while creating notes and piecing together the knowledge of web dev I have acquired over the years in a structured format.

How #100daysofcode?

My plan is sweet and simple

Read from Mozilla Front end Development Guide (~1 hour)
Practice DS Algo in JS from FCC's JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures (~1 hour)
Write about it every day here at dev.to (to keep myself accountable and track my progress) (~ 1 hour, I am a slow writer, for now)

When?

Time to stop hiding behind games and the life stupidities, and clear the rust gathered on my programming skills.
Let the games begin, now!
Wish me strength and luck!

Weird Javascript?

Prasham Ashesh — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:17:25 +0000

const a = [1]
a[3] = 3
console.log(a.length);

//What do you expect the output to be?