DEV Community: Arslan Ali

First Month with Jadu Fellowship Program

Arslan Ali — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 18:25:36 +0000

Hi, it’s been a few weeks since I started writing these blogs. But today’s post is a bit special, as I have completed my first month with Jadu Fellowship program. Although I could write about each and everything covered throughout this journey so far, I want to use this as an opportunity to express my opinion and thoughts on the things that I felt changing about myself.

But first, I would like to give an overview of our project:

My Intro Page hosted on GitHub

Yep, that’s right. We did our very first project, and this is what I built for myself. It was about making a short intro page using HTML and CSS. Everybody went very creative with this and built some cool stuff. It was really fun!

Now, moving on, let’s start discussing the rest of the stuff.

Being a member of a Community

Teamwork

I would like to share my experience of being a member of the Jadu Community. It was the very first experience for me to be a part of a community where we all learn from each other. And I must say, this is the perfect way to learn, and I mean it!

I just get overwhelmed sometimes when it comes to getting connected with other people. So I always thought that maybe learning alone should also be fine for most of my learning activities. But now I realize that this is not how it works in reality. I have learned many things in this short period that I might have not learned the other way.

So if you are someone who thinks the same, then I would suggest that maybe you should give it a shot, you will not regret it, I promise! :)

Writing stuff actually helps

Thoughts inside the brain

The other thing that I want to talk about is writing blogs. I am a techy kind of person and haven’t considered writing content or blogs etc., until now.

Starting with this program we needed to write a weekly reflection blog. It was something new to me. So I thought about it a lot, what should I write in my blogs. The first idea that came to my mind was that maybe I should give a summary of the week, highlight some of the points, and be done with it.

But the thing is that I didn’t want to add every technical detail in these blogs as many amazing people are writing on these topics who have a lot more knowledge on this kind of stuff. I just wanted to add my views and how I feel about it. So I am following this approach right now. And trust me, as Sir Saad Hamid said,

“Writing shapes your ideas and helps you restructure your thoughts.”

I am actually feeling that for myself. When I start preparing my blog, there’s a lot of stuff going on inside my head. All my thoughts and ideas are scattered all over my mind, and then I organize them in a more meaningful manner. I am truly enjoying this. It has helped me better understand a lot of things and have a clear mindset about many subjects.

There are so many things that I also want to add here, but I notice this is getting pretty long! So I don’t want to bore you with all that and would try to touch on them in the upcoming blogs. ;)

Thanks for taking the time and read all this!

My Week-3 with Jadu Fellowship Program

Arslan Ali — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 16:16:37 +0000

Well, as you already know from the title, it was another successful week with the Jadu Fellowship program. Many interesting things have happened since the last week. And despite being busy with the semester’s final exams, I enjoyed my sessions!

Starting with the week’s first session , things have started to get more interesting. We started with some basic stuff like CSS properties and how to include them in your web pages. But then we took a deep into the CSS world. We started discussing the CSS flex-box and how to align items in different ways. We also learned about different kinds of CSS selectors and many cool tricks that we can use in our style-sheet to get some interesting results.

If you have done some web development , then you may know that styling different things with CSS is not so simple. We have to take care of a lot of things to make it look and feel more appealing. And that was something that always bothered me whenever I thought about getting involved with some web projects. It’s not so difficult when you look at it, but it gets very tricky when you try to do some real styling, as there are many ways to get the same results! And that’s something that makes it more confusing for me. But man, I just loved how Arslan Khattak has explained everything so far. I mean, yeah, he knows how to make it work! I enjoyed these technical sessions with him.

We also had our very first web project! For which we have a make a simple portfolio/intro web page using everything we’ve learned so far during our sessions and put the source code of that project on a GitHub repository. Now, that’s something that I am also very excited about!

On the other side, there was another session of one of my favorites Saad Hamid. The topic for the session was Growth Mindset. We saw why it is important and how it compares with the Fixed Mindset by discussing many real-world examples. We discussed how it gives you a more clear vision of looking at things and how it stops you from being lazy and start being productive. It was very enlightening. And man, I just love the way this guy explains these things!

There was a lot that I have to process about this session. Every single word was full of valuable information! I mean, having a fixed mindset is something that I noticed about myself in many situations and maybe some of you might have that feeling as well about yourself. And after that session, I am trying to learn more about myself and how I think in different situations to analyze myself. I am actively trying to get rid of the Fixed mindset behaviors to make myself think out of the box and be productive in my life overall!

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

I am trying to be more active in my overall learning but having some distractions due to my ongoing exams. But still, I must say that I am learning a lot from these sessions and I am thankful to Jadu Team for allowing me to be a part of such an amazing community! ❤

My Second Week with Jadu Fellowship Program

Arslan Ali — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 19:42:10 +0000

Jadu’s Official Website

Well, It’s been two weeks now since I started with the Jadu Fellowship Program. At the start, I was kind of confused about what to expect. But it has been a really exciting experience for me so far! I have learned a lot during my sessions and the overall Jadu community has been very kind and helpful.

Technical Classes:

We have three classes per week. Two of them are technical classes. In these classes, we learned about the basics of web technologies and the introduction to front-end development. We learned about basic HTML tags and some of their attributes that are most commonly used. We learned about div containers and how we can use them to group items, and how we can use forms and different types of input elements for taking input from the user. Our instructor for technical classes, Arslan Khattak, has a very calm and engaging way of teaching and has explained everything very clearly and effectively. I just loved these technical sessions!

Non-technical Class:

The thing that I loved the most about this program, so far, is the other class on soft skills. That’s where we learned about how personal branding works, and what are the things that make your overall social personality , and how you can use it to make yourself a brand! And that is something that I had no or very little idea about! The instructor , Saad Hamid, has such an amazing way of explaining stuff that I just absolutely loved it! It was a very informative and fun session, overall!

Final thoughts:

Well, so far, I am enjoying these sessions a lot! They are very educating and I have learned many new things that would help me a lot in my personal and professional life. And I am very excited about the upcoming sessions! ❤

How to setup Git the proper way! — Part-3: Setting up ssh-agent and public email

Arslan Ali — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 15:57:22 +0000

How to setup Git the proper way! — Part-3: Setting up ssh-agent and public email

Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash

Hi, this is the third and final part of this series. Here we will set up the ssh-agent to start automatically and store our SSH passphrase for the current session. That way, we don’t have to enter our SSH passphrase every time we access our remote repository. Plus, we will also use our public Github email with git so that our private email address is not visible in our commit history.

1: Setup ssh-agent and add your keys

Now that we have successfully set up SSH key with our Github account, here are the steps for starting ssh-agent automatically and let it manage our SSH keys.

Select and copy the following code:

env=~/.ssh/agent.env

agent_load_env () { test -f "$env" && . "$env" >| /dev/null; }

agent_start () {
    (umask 077; ssh-agent >| "$env")
    . "$env" >| /dev/null ; 
}

agent_load_env

# agent_run_state: 0=agent running w/ key; 1=agent w/o key; 2= agent not running

agent_run_state=$(ssh-add -l >| /dev/null 2>&1; echo $?)

if [! "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK"] || [$agent_run_state = 2]; then
    agent_start
    ssh-add
elif ["$SSH_AUTH_SOCK"] && [$agent_run_state = 1]; then
    ssh-add
fi

unset env

Now, we need to edit our .bashrc file. Run the following command, which will open up the .bashrc file in the nano text editor:

$ nano ~/.bashrc

Make sure you are on a blank line , and then right-click and paste the code that you copied from above. If you are on Git Bash , you can paste by pressing the INSERT key (or SHIFT + INSERT , if that doesn’t work).
Once the code is pasted in the file, press CTRL + X from your keyboard and it will ask you if you want to save the changes. Type y, and press Enter. The editor will save the file and then exit.
Now, run the following command to source/apply the code that we added into .bashrc.

$ source ~/.bashrc

It will start the ssh-agent and ask you for an SSH passphrase for your key(s), that you created while generating SSH keys in part-2.

That’s it, that’s all you need to do! The ssh-agent will start automatically when you launch your terminal.

Note: You still have to provide your SSH passphrase , but only when you run your terminal for the first time after a logout or reboot. The prompt may look something like this:

> Initializing new SSH agent...
> succeeded
> Enter passphrase for /c/Users/_you_/.ssh/id_rsa:
> Identity added: /c/Users/_you_/.ssh/id_rsa (/c/Users/_you_/.ssh/id_rsa)
> Welcome to Git (version _1.6.0.2-preview20080923_)
>
> Run 'git help git' to display the help index.
> Run 'git help ' to display help for specific commands.

The ssh-agent process will continue to run until you log out, shut down your computer, or kill the process.

2: Use public Github email for commit identification

Well, at first we specified our private email address with git and if we commit anything and then push it to Github, it will publicly display our private email address. Now, here we will see how we can avoid that, while still being able to identify ourselves with Github. For that, we just need a few things:

Open up your Github account. Click on your profile image icon on the top-right corner and select the Settings option.
In the settings, select the Emails option. There you will see many options related to your email address.
Scroll down to the Keep my email addresses private check-box, and make sure it’s checked if you don’t want your email addresses to be publicly visible.
You will see some text is written below that check-box. There you will find an email address, that looks like this:

some-numbers+username@users.noreply.github.com

For example, in my case this is what it looks like:

76753986+techyArsal@users.noreply.github.com

Just select and copy this email address.
Then open up your terminal and paste the following command to set this email address with the git utility on your system:

$ git config --global user.email "_your\_email@example.com_"

Make sure to replace email@example.com with your no-reply email address that you copied from Github ’ s email section.

Now to make sure everything’s set up properly, run the following command and make sure that user.name and user.email match with your username and no-reply email address. In my case, that would look something like this:

$ git config --list
> user.name=techyArsal
> user.email=[76753986+techyArsal@users.noreply.github.com](mailto:76753986+techyArsal@users.noreply.github.com)
...

If that’s correct, then congratulations! You have successfully configured everything. From here on, all your commits will be recognized by your Github username and profile. And you don’t have to share your email address publicly to do that!

I know that was quite some work, but trust me, it’s absolutely worth it!

Thanks for reading! I would really appreciate your thoughts and views on this. If there’s anything you want to add or share, please leave a comment.

How to setup Git the proper way! — Part 2: Setting up SSH Key

Arslan Ali — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 15:56:25 +0000

How to setup Git the proper way! — Part 2: Setting up SSH Key

Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash

Hi, welcome to the second part of this series. Here will go ahead and setup SSH keys on our system and add our public key to the Github account.

Before we start:

Please make sure that you have Git installed on your system. Open up the terminal, run the following and make sure you get the version of git utility:

$ git --version

If not, then please check part-1 of this series to get it installed on your system. Once that’s done, you are good to go!

Generating SSH Keys

Now, we will start by generating SSH keys on our system. Just open up the Git Bash or whatever terminal program you are using and do the following steps:

Copy and paste the following command in your terminal. Change the your_email@example.com with your email address and press Enter. This will generate a new SSH key-pair.

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "_your\_email@example.com_"

When you’re prompted to Enter a file in which to save the key, just press Enter (without typing anything). This accepts the default file location.

> Enter a file in which to save the key (/c/Users/_you_/.ssh/id_ed25519):_[Press enter]_

After that, type a secure passphrase for your keys. You can technically leave it empty, for not using any passphrase. But I would recommend that you choose a good passphrase to make sure nobody can use your keys, except for you.

> Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): _[Type a passphrase]_
> Enter the same passphrase again: _[Type passphrase again]_

Note: You might not see it getting typed into the terminal, but it is being typed, so make sure you remember what you are typing!

Adding the SSH key to Github

After generating the SSH keys, now it’s time to add your public key to your Github account. For that, just do the following steps:

Open up your terminal (or Git Bash for Windows) and run the following command, to copy your public SSH key to the system clipboard:

For Windows:

$ clip < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

For Mac:

$ pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

For Linux:

$ xclip -selection clipboard < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Then, go to your Github account, click on your profile icon in the upper-right corner and choose the Settings option.
In settings, choose SSH and GPG keys option. It will display the keys that are currently added to your Github account (if any!).
Click on the New SSH key button on the right to add a new SSH key. It will ask you for the Title and the Key itself.
Just fill the Title field with whatever you want (e.g. My SSH key).
In the Key text area, paste the content of the file, that we copied in the first step using the command-line.
Once that’s done, click on the Add SSH key button, to complete the process.

Configuring username and email

Now we will configure our username and email address with git that will be used when we commit or push our code to the remote repository. So, open up your terminal and run the following two commands:

$ git config --global user.name "your_username"

$ git config --global user.email "email@example.com"

Be sure to replace your_username and email@example.com with your actual username and email address.

Note: This email address will be publicly visible with your commit history. If you want to keep it private, then go check part-3 of this series. There we will configure our public no-reply email address with the git utility.

Testing our SSH connection

That’s it! We have successfully added the SSH key to our Github account and configured our username and email in git utility. To make sure that it’s working, just run the following command:

$ ssh -T git@github.com

When you run this command for the first time, it may display a warning and ask for confirmation, like this:

> The authenticity of host 'github.com (IP ADDRESS)' can't be established.
> RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:nThbg6kXUpJWGl7E1IGOCspRomTxdCARLviKw6E5SY8.
> Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Simply type yes and press Enter. You will see a message with your Github username, saying that authentication was successful, like this:

> Hi _username_! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Hooray! Now you can have a secure SSH connection to Github and you can push your code directly into your remote repository.

Now, whenever you need to ** clone a repository** on your system, use SSH address like this:

But:

There two things that you might notice:

You will have to enter your SSH passphrase every time you try to reach your remote repository, where it is git pull or git push_._
Your email address will be visible to everybody who can see your repositories and commits on Github.

I mean, it’s fine if you don’t care about these things. You can use your Git without any problems.

But If you do care, then there’s the next (and final) part of this series, where we will solve these two problems. So if you want to do that, then click on the following link to get to the part-3:

Click Here to go to Part-3 (final part) of this series.

How to setup Git the proper way! — Part 1: Installation

Arslan Ali — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 15:55:28 +0000

How to setup Git the proper way! — Part 1: Installation

Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash

Hello everyone. Today, we will see how you can set up Git on your system and then link it to your Github account using SSH, so that you can push the code directly to your Github remote repository, really easily.

Before we start:

I have divided the overall process into three major parts. This post explains the first part, where we will see process the of installing Git on the system.

Note: This post is only meant for Windows users, as in most cases, Git is not installed on their system. If you are a Linux or Mac user, or if you have it installed already, you can simply skip this part and start with the part-2 of this series.

What is git?

According to their website:

“Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. It outclasses SCM tools like Subversion, CVS, Perforce, and ClearCase with features like cheap local branching, convenient staging areas, and multiple workflows.”

About Github:

Github is the most popular code-sharing platform, used by millions of developers around the world. I will not bore you with a long list of all the features & everything, you can learn about them on Github ’s official website.

From here on, I will assume that you know what Git or Github is, and you are ready to move forward.

Git Installation:

These are the steps to install Git on your Windows machine:

Just go to Git’s Website (https://git-scm.com/) and click on Downloads.
Select the Windows installer. Once you do that, the download should start automatically. If it doesn’t, just click on *click here to start download manually * link.
When the download is complete, simply click on the downloaded file to start the installer.
There are many things that you can configure during the installation process if you want. Feel free to change them according to your needs, or just leave the defaults and click on next a couple of times to get it installed.
When the installation is complete, just open up the Git Bash terminal, which should be installed with Git.
Run the following command and make sure you get the current version number of the git utility:

$ git --version

Finally:

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

If you follow along and get the version of git utility, then Git is successfully installed on your system. Now you are all set to go to the next section, where we link it up with our Github account.

Click here to go to the next post.

Hello Internet!

Arslan Ali — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 10:22:27 +0000

Photo by Vladislav Klapin on Unsplash

This is me, first time writing a blog post. I’ve been reading blogs all my life but never really thought about doing it myself; until now.

Intro:

Hi, I am Arslan Ali and I welcome you to my Medium blog. I am a software engineering student at the Virtual University of Pakistan, which is a Federal Government University. This is currently the end of my fifth semester. I also have the Cisco Networking Essentials certification. Besides that, I am a fellow member of Jadu Fellowship Program for learning Full Stack Web Development using MERN tool-stack. I am also teaching computer science at a local academy, for the last 2 years.

Other than that, I am a tech enthusiast and really like learning about new technologies and how they impact the global community, overall. I always like and promote open-source software, and use them for my personal & professional work. I am Linux user myself, for the last 2–3 years and I really enjoy learning new stuff.

About this blog:

This blog is all about technology. If you’re a tech enthusiast, like me, you would love reading posts and articles about exciting new technologies. I will also share my thoughts on different tech products and maybe some how-to guides on setting up different tech-related tools for your overall workflows.

Bonus: There will also be a weekly post/article sharing all my activities throughout the week.