DEV Community: Robert Kedzior

Learning things is like meeting a new person

Robert Kedzior — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 14:28:20 +0000

Recently a thought crossed my mind, on how learning new things is like meeting a new person.

For the last couple of days, I've been reading about design patterns in C#. I've red through a couple of articles, listened to a few podcasts and watched some videos.

I really felt like I understood the idea and I knew about them quite a lot, but I came to a conclusion that unless I apply and use those patterns in real life scenarios, I won't really know on when It's best to use and how they will affect the structure and behaviour of my code. Whether they will make the code simpler to understand and edit, or whether they will overcomplicate the code and actually make it harder to work with. I didn't know how these patterns will behave in certain situations.

I thought about this as about meeting a new person or someone that you know a lot about, but have never met them in real life. Sometimes you may read a lot about someone, or read a lot of opinions about a person, which influence on how you think that person will be, behave or act in some situations. But only after you meet the person in real life and spend some time with them, you begin to know them, understand and learn on how they will actually behave and what their strong sides are and how to utilise them.

I feel it's similar with learning new things and I try to get a hands-on exeprience and implement them myself when reading about concepts, patterns or ideas about writing code.

What are your thoughts on this?

Netlify post processing snippets

Robert Kedzior — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 11:34:05 +0000

This is something that I've come across whilst developing my personal blog with Gatsby.

I was thinking about adding Google AdSense to my website, so I had to find a solution to inject <script> tag into my <head> tag. My first thought was to use react-helmet to inject the AdSense script.

So I added the code which looked like this

<Helmet>
      <script
        data-ad-client="ca-pub-5792152581969239"
        async
        src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"
      ></script>
</Helmet>

Unfortunately, the output couldn't be properly verified by google checks, so I had to find an alternative way to do this.

After doing some research I've stumbled across StackOverflow response, which mentioned Netlify post processing html injection.

If you go to Netlify -> Settings -> Build & Deploy -> Post processing, you will see this screen

After clicking on the add snippet button you will see this

In the dropdown you can select where you to inject the script, then you type in the title of you snippet, and then the HTML of you snippet, for example

<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

This will now be injected into the page section that you selected in the dropdown.

This has worked great for me, and I personally really like this feature. Expecially for site generator like Gatsby which doesn't include a default index.html file where you can include your scripts.