DEV Community: Alexander Sulim

Becoming a software engineer

Alexander Sulim — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 04:34:07 +0000

Recently I realized that a professional career started for me twenty years ago. However the journey of becoming a software engineer begins much earlier, and the first sparkle of interest wasn't created by a computer itself.

The story starts for me with a book.

When I was about 9 years old, my parents bought me a book¹ about a boy who got inside of a computer. The boy helped people living there to catch a computer virus and found many friends there. It was an amazing adventure for the little boy and me. The book wasn't an ordinary one. It had two parts: one is the story itself, and another one is a glossary with all "computer terms" mentioned in the story. The glossary wasn't that boring list of terms with explanations either. It was a comic! Every term there was a short story in a comic style.

The book became something special for me. I was going through the glossary part over and over again, enjoying every detail. Seeing that, my parents got me an extension to the book. It was a computer encyclopedia for kids. Basically, it was the glossary part extended with other terms (comics!), math puzzles, and little games.

The encyclopedia contained also instructions on how to build a computer model using paper and clues ². After a couple days of deliberate work, my first computer was ready! I was playing video games on it using one of the best tools ever - imagination 😄

Like every kid, I was thinking to become an astronaut who explores space, or a doctor who helps people, or an adventurer who travels around the world, or lots of other things, but that was before the book. The book showed me an amazing world, and I decided to become a part of it. That was 30 years ago and I never regretted that choice. Every single day I truly enjoy being a software engineer who creates things, helps people, uses his imagination to solve problems, and explores the world he discovered many years ago.

Hello Ruby

Of course, these books that inspired me aren't published anymore. However if you know a kid who is looking for ways to explore the world of computers, I can highly recommend "Hello Ruby" created by amazing Linda Liukas. Together with my son Tim we read two of them already, and that reminded me a lot of my childhood experience with the books that changed my life years ago.

Have a wonderful day! 😉

The book is written in Russian, and unfortunately I cannot find a link on its description in English. ↩
The first time when I got a chance to touch and work with a real the computer was six years after my parents gave me the book. But that's another story already. Stay tuned to listen to it soon. ↩

A hacker mindset

Alexander Sulim — Fri, 21 May 2021 12:27:59 +0000

Wikipedia defines the term “hacker” as “a computer expert who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.".

So it’s about that mindset.

As a software engineer, I know about patterns, frameworks, idiomatic code, and so on. Years of experience help to break down almost every problem into small pieces and chart a path to the final solution. Of course, there is a favorite programming language, a database, and a set of useful tools that help to solve problems. All of that creates a productive work environment and a mindset, but at the same time leads to some sort of isolation.

Because of this isolation, the favorite programming language is used for every task, the framework of choice is the ultimate answer for every project. Even if better results could be achieved with another language, and the project might not even require any framework at all.

Some time ago I caught myself on these habits and decided to change them to be even more productive and achieve even better results. These are the lessons I've learned and the discoveries I've made.

Question initial ideas

To break the bubble of standard solutions I started questioning initial ideas and challenge myself to find alternative solutions. Any alternative has to comply with only one rule: it must be simpler. Sometimes it's hard, but that's a lot of fun.

For example, try to ask:

Could a plain text file be used instead of a database in this project?
Wouldn't be Docker too much for this task?
Does that make sense to use Node.js to make this tool just because I know how to use Node.js?
Wouldn't be a plain HTML file better than a single page app?

Of course, time is required to develop skills that help to find the right questions or sometimes accept the initial idea as the right one.

Explore

Staying open to new things is extremely beneficial. It isn't just fun to "play with new toys" or a good chance to find the right tool for a job, but it's a deep source of inspiration.

A discovery could reveal that a plain text file could replace Twitter or a productivity app. Of course, it isn't necessary to use every discovery, but that helps to learn what's possible.

Trust yourself

All that being said, it doesn't mean that any initial idea is right away wrong and must be challenged, or the favorite programming language doesn't fit the task. Not at all. It's important to trust your gut feeling and experience.

Hack the planet

All of that helps to develop what I call "a hacker mindset". Something that helps to go beyond the circle of standard solutions, discover new ideas and interesting people, and grow.

Guess what? This mindset works great not just for overcoming obstacles within a computerized system. It's applicable in everyday life 😄

Happy hacking!

Welcome to Vim... again

Alexander Sulim — Sat, 15 May 2021 22:00:00 +0000

This post is written in Vim. I use this editor for the last five months, but it’s my sixth attempt to tame it. Let me share a few lessons learned and reflect on the experience.

For those who don't know, Vim is a text editor. Unlike many other editors, it has a special aura around it. Lots of people have "love or hate" relationships with this editor. Why is it so? It's because Vim allows you to be incredibly productive with text, but it asks something in return. Vim asks you to invest time to learn and understand its philosophy.

One of the first and classic challenges that many people (everyone?..) have to solve on the way of mastering Vim is "How do I exit the Vim editor?". As of today, this question on StackOverflow has 4252 upvotes and the answer is upvoted 5397 times!

Does that mean Vim is hard to master? Yes, if you used any other editor before and try to apply the same approaches in Vim. No, if you open to discover something different from what you are used to.

Why I wanted to use Vim

Like many software engineers, I was excited to try Vim after seeing colleagues and other people on the internet being insanely productive with it. They were able to write and navigate code with the speed and efficiency I've never had in any GUI editor and even powerful IDEs. However the most intriguing was to see how proud and enthusiastic those people were. Of course, I wanted to be like that as well!

So I went through lots of tutorials, asked many questions to colleagues... and failed to use Vim as my work tool. Five times.

Why my previous attempts failed

The internet is full of Vim tutorials. There are countless videos on YouTube, blog posts, online classes, newsletters, Vim's built-in help, and still, I was consistently failing to work with text in Vim. Of course, it wasn't terribly bad, but I wasn't even close to what all those people were able to do.

There was only one reason for all those failures. I was trying to follow tutorials and do exactly what they suggest. That was the main mistake.

For example, navigation. The majority of Vim learning resources teach you how to navigate using k, j, l, h keys and suggest keystrokes like 10j. For someone who was using a GUI editor for years, it's hard to understand and remember all of that. Many tutorials suggest avoiding using a mouse to be faster and more productive with just a keyboard. I wanted to be more productive, but it was almost impossible to stop using the mouse.

All that led to frustration, and I could understand why many people have "hate" relationships with Vim.

What changed last time

After many years of using VSCode, I've noticed a need to disable some of its functionality that's enabled by default. Also, it's never felt right that a text editor consumes more than a gigabyte of memory. Vim, on the other hand, doesn't have much enabled by default besides core editing and navigation. That gives a chance to gradually enable only what's necessary. Speaking memory consumption, at the moment writing nvim process¹ uses 11.5 MB of RAM!

This time I knew exactly what a text editor for my daily work should have:

core text editing and navigation functionality,
ability to be extended with plug-ins,
no smart features, but full-control instead,
speed and low memory footprint.

Vim fit these requirements, so it felt right to try it for the sixth time. However, I set few rules for myself:

Don't care about "recommended" ways, if ways you use for years work fine. That means, I'm fine with using arrow keys instead of k, j, l, h and not knowing many of fast navigation keystrokes.
Learn and practice 1--2 new keystrokes at a time and only when you need them. So it's impossible to be overwhelmed with exotic (for a GUI user) keystrokes and to feel embarrassed due to the inability to remember many of them at once.
Prefer single-purpose plug-ins over swiss-army knives ones. That helps to stay flexible, find your workflow, and use plug-ins 100%.
Keep slowly understanding Vim.

Lessons learned

When it's about a text editor, the list of possible options to choose from is huge (VSCode, Atom, Sublime Text, Vim and NeoVim, Emacs, Chocolat, micro and many others). To pick one, it's better to know what you need from it. That's a good exercise because it helps to reflect on your daily workflow. Once the choice is made, it makes sense to understand the tool. Yes, that requires time, but take small steps.

There is no wrong choice. Be inspired by other people, but pick an editor that works for you.

Happy writing!

:wq

I use NeoVim. ↩

The excitement of making things real

Alexander Sulim — Fri, 07 May 2021 15:17:38 +0000

A software engineer career started for me in 2001 when I joined a tiny start-up company as a junior developer. Since then I was working in different companies and different roles. There is one thing that is still every time magical and makes me feel like a kid.

It didn't change over all these years and it's a feeling of excitement of making things real. Those things that you sketch on a whiteboard, discuss with colleagues or friends, implement and re-implement in the code, and then finally see them happening.

Let me share a story that happened recently.

This time I was working together with @driv3r on a project that connects multiple apps (including a third-party one). After a couple of weeks of planning, collecting requirements, communicating with other teams involved, changing existing code, and creating a new app, everything was ready for the first test run. Of course, all components of the project were tested individually, but it isn't the same as to turn on the whole thing and see if it works as expected.

The third-party app was supposed to make the initial request to one of our API endpoints and that should be triggering a few interactions between other apps, and at some point, the third party should be getting a request back from our system.

Everything is deployed and waiting for that initial request. Click a button in the third-party app. A couple of messages between our internal apps. And 2-3 seconds later the third party receives a call back from our system. EVERYTHING WORKS!

It's exciting to see how everything works exactly as planned! It doesn't matter if you are 99% sure that everything should just work anyway (because you've spent time checking every component and connection). It doesn't matter if the project is big or small.

It's always exciting to see how the results of your work become alive!

From the outside it looks like this:

That's the moment when you feel yourself as a kid, and it's amazing. Keep making things and be excited about them becoming real! 😄

Teaching kids responsibility

Alexander Sulim — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Not being able to leave an apartment for a couple of weeks due to a COVID-19 quarantine is hard. Going through that with a six years old kid is a real challenge.

To keep being happy we were trying different activities (reading, drawing, doing crazy indoor sports challenges, and so on). One of these activities was video games. That's how my son Tim and I discovered an amazing game - "Alba: a wildlife adventure" from ustwo games.

Tim loves animals and anything related to them. That's why Alba got our attention. It's a story about a little girl who sets out to save wildlife on a little island. The game isn't just a cute adventure where you need to run around and do some tasks. It's much more!

The game teaches young people how to be responsible and how important to care about everything and everyone around you. It gives examples of how our actions could have a negative and positive effects. The game shows that "even the smallest person can make a big difference"!

Tim and I were playing the game together. I was doing only narration because he cannot read yet. It was an amazing experience to see my kid living the story of the game, how he was proud of saving the wildlife on the little island. But the biggest surprise came later!

When the game was over, Tim went outside on the terrace and collected all the garbage he could find there (little pieces of paper and plastic packaging, and whatever else the wind could bring). "I'm doing that like Alba", he said.

ustwo games created not just a beautiful video game. It's much more. The game experience goes beyond the virtual world. It creates positive emotions and shows that a little kid can change the real world. Thank you ustwo games!

The official website of the game: https://www.albawildlife.com/