DEV Community: Vaidehi Joshi

I’m Vaidehi Joshi, Senior Software Engineer at DEV/Forem- AMA

Vaidehi Joshi — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 16:20:18 +0000

Hi! I’m Vaidehi Joshi, Senior Software Engineer at Forem.

I’ll be joining Nick Taylor and Christina Gorton on Wednesday, October 21st on thePracticalDev Twitch stream to talk about what I do as a senior software engineer at Forem, working with the Forem backend, and answering any of your questions!

I would love to answer any questions you have about working as a software engineer, my past projects, open source, and more.

Feel free to ask any questions you have in the discussion thread below!

This listing has expired.

Follow ThePracticalDev Twitch channel to watch this stream and more.

DevNews S1E8 (Season Finale!) Twitter’s Algorithmic Bias, Coalition for App Fairness, Strava’s Data Share, & more 🤖

Vaidehi Joshi — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 15:02:15 +0000

Don’t miss the final episode of DevNews season one! 😭

S1:E8 - Twitter’s Algorithmic Bias, Coalition for App Fairness, React 17 JSX Transform, and Strava's Data Share

DevNews

**In the season finale, my co-host Saron and I checked back in on several stories we covered over the course of our first season of DevNews, and also covered some developing stories**:

Ruby 3.0.0 Preview, released! In episode 2, we covered Ruby 3's new language for type signatures called RBS. A preview is now available for you to play with. Have fun!
React 17 developments. We also talked about React 17 in episode 2 and the surprising revelation that this release wouldn't include any new features. In this episode, we discuss the recent announcement that React 17 will provide support for a new version of the JSX transform.
Microsoft and OpenAI In our premiere episode, we covered GPT-3: OpenAI's autocomplete program. In today's episode, we talk about Microsoft's announcement that it will exclusively license GPT-3.
Strava's massive data-sharing plans In an email to its users, Strava recently disclosed that they actively share activity data. We explore the basis and implications of this.

Saron and I also chatted with two guests in this episode.

Alex Hanna, research scientist working on machine learning fairness and ethical AI at Google. Alex spoke with us about reports of photo algorithmic bias on Twitter.
Sarah Maxwell, Spokesperson for the Coalition for App Fairness. Sarah filled us in on the Coalition for App Fairness and its efforts to make the app marketplace a more even playing field for developers.

Quick Listening Links

Note: If you follow the podcast on DEV, new episodes will show up directly in your feed 😉

I hope you tune in to the DevNews podcast, where we cut through the impossibly noisy news cycle to surface developer stories that impact many of us in this space. 🗞️🗞️🗞️

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

Thanks to @levisharpe for producing & mixing the show, my co-hosts, @joshpuetz and @saronyitbarek.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Heroku and Vonage ✨

DevNews S1E6 — Chrome 86’s Focus Features, Microsoft’s Deepfake Verifier Tool, and Google’s Business Application Platform 💼

Vaidehi Joshi — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:42:20 +0000

Don't miss the latest episode of the DevNews podcast!

S1:E6 - Chrome 86’s Focus Features, Microsoft’s Deepfake Verifier Tool, and Google’s Business Application Platform

DevNews

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This week, Saron and I talk about several news stories that we think are relevant to developers:

Microsoft's new video authenticator — a Deepfake-identification technology
Google's no-code development platform, which will allow users to automate their processes and create applications without writing any code, relying instead on APIs.
Chrome 86's new features

Saron and I were lucky enough to be joined by Fen Slattery, Accessibility Lead at Clique Studios to chat about Chrome 86 and focus features. As you'll hear in the episode, @sublimemarch walks us through the :focus-visible pseudoclass and the Quick Focus Highlight feature in Chrome 86. We also talked about the biggest things that developers often forget about when it comes to accessibility.

Quick Listening Links

Note: If you follow the podcast on DEV, new episodes will show up directly in your feed 😉

I hope you enjoy this episode of the DevNews podcast and that it helps you navigate through the always-busy software news cycle!

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

Thanks to @levisharpe for producing & mixing the show, my co-host in this episode, @saronyitbarek, and @joshpuetz for editorial oversight. Catch Josh hosting with Saron in last week's episode.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Heroku and Vonage ✨

DevNews S1E4 — TypeScript 4.0, Gitee, Chromium, and Apple Drama! 🤺

Vaidehi Joshi — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 16:13:21 +0000

Don’t miss the latest episode of the DevNews podcast! 👀

S1:E4 - TypeScript 4.0, Gitee, Chromium, and Apple Drama

DevNews

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In this episode, my co-host Josh and I chatted about several news stories in the world of software development:

More developments on the Apple vs Epic Games spat! Epic garnered support from Microsoft, which publicly put out a statement in support of the gaming giant. Epic was also granted a temporary_restraining order_ against Apple. Apple has also gotten into a similar in-app purchase battle with WordPress. 😱
An announcement from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that Gitee had won a bid to work on the “2020 Open Source Hosting Platform Project”. What does this GitHub competitor mean for open source in China?
The Google Chromium team’s announcement that they are planning to add native browser support for directly accessing TCP and UDP ports. What does this spell for security on Twitter?

Josh and I also talked to two guests this week

Nathan Shively-Sanders has been at Microsoft working on compilers for about 10 years — and five of them have been dedicated to TypeScript. One of Nathan’s areas of TypeScript expertise is the language’s JavaScript-editing support within VS Code and other editors.

Orta Therox has been at Microsoft for about a year and has worked on TypeScript for their entire tenure there. Orta came to the team with a focus on how TypeScript and the wider ecosystem interact — and played a major part in launching TypeScript’s new website.

Nathan and Orta joined us to talk about the new version of TypeScript, version 4.0! Josh and I learned more about TypeScript and its purposes, what TypeScript offers devs over other open source programming languages, and much more!

Quick Listening Links

Note: If you follow the podcast on DEV, new episodes will show up directly in your feed 😉

I hope you tune in to the DevNews podcast, where we cut through the impossibly noisy news cycle to surface developer stories that impact many of us in this space. 🗞️🗞️🗞️

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

Thanks to @levisharpe for producing & mixing the show, my co-host in this episode, @joshpuetz and @saronyitbarek for editorial oversight.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Heroku and Vonage ✨

DevNews S1E2: Ruby, Chrome DevTools, Mozilla Layoffs, Hello Weather, and React 17

Vaidehi Joshi — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 19:03:35 +0000

There's a brand new episode of DevNews out today 👀

S1:E2 - Ruby, Chrome DevTools, Mozilla Layoffs, Hello Weather, and React 17

DevNews

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In this installment, Saron and I cover several recent news stories that are relevant in the developer community right now:

The upcoming release of RBS, a new Ruby 3 language for type signatures—you won't have to change Ruby code to type check now!
GitHub's announcement that it's running Ruby 2.7 in production.
Chrome DevTools' new CSS Overview (you'll now be able to see things like colors, fonts, media queries, and unused declarations directly from within DevTools! 🎉).
The recent round of layoffs at Mozilla, which means a reduced investment in developer tooling and many talented folks out of work—for now.

Saron and I also chatted with two guests on this episode:

Jonas Downey (Design Lead at Basecamp, and co-creator of the Hello Weather app) about what it’s like to be an indie iOS developer "working under Apple's 800-pound gorilla rule".
Dan Abramov (Software Engineer at Facebook, creator of Redux, and co-author of the Create React App) about the newest version of React and how the core team thinks about major version releases.

Quick Listening Links

Note: If you follow the podcast on DEV, new episodes will show up directly in your feed 😉

I hope you tune in to the DevNews podcast, where we cut through the impossibly noisy news cycle to surface developer stories that impact many of us in this space. 🗞️🗞️🗞️

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

Thanks to @levisharpe for producing & mixing the show, my co-host in this episode, @saronyitbarek, and @joshpuetz for editorial oversight. Catch Josh hosting in the series premiere from last week!

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Heroku and Vonage ✨

The Cost of Data with Vaidehi Joshi

Vaidehi Joshi — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:57:29 +0000

To find all of the resources listed in this talk, as well as the full transcript of this talk, check out costofdata.dev.

Vaidehi is a senior engineer at DEV, where she builds community and helps improve the software careers of millions. She enjoys building and breaking code, but loves creating empathetic engineering teams a whole lot more. She is the creator of basecs and baseds, two writing series exploring the fundamentals of computer science and distributed systems. She also co-hosts the Base.cs Podcast, and is a producer of the BaseCS and Byte Sized video series.

A super brief outline of this talk is as follows:

[Introduction]: The what + why of data centers
[Middle]: Investigating the environmental impact of cloud providers
[Middle]: Exploring how the impact of running data centers will scale over time
[Middle]: Highlighting some advancements made in this sector
[Conclusion]: Providing actionable items for developers

Here is a much more detailed outline, which goes into greater depth:

[Introduction]: The what + why of data centers
Everything that we do on the web has to be stored somewhere. Many of us work with databases every day, and some of us even do impromptu ops work, focusing on making sure our servers stay alive in an effort to keep our apps up and running. But even though we all know this theoretically, most of us never have to think beyond our own databases or servers.

This talk takes a macroscopic view of what all of this data actually looks like in reality. All of our app's data lives in a data center, somewhere in the world. Whether we build our own, or use a cloud provider, we're relying on that infrastructure to maintain our app's uptime and store our users' content. These physical buildings are often out-of-sight—but that doesn't mean that they should be out of mind!

[Middle]: Investigating their environmental impact
Data centers require large footprints: they are physically huge buildings, but they also require a large amount of energy to provide constant, uninterrupted service. Current research estimates that data centers worldwide use ~200 terawatt hours (TWh) a year and demand somewhere between 1-3% of the world’s global electricity (I’ve found conflicting reports on the exact number). In terms of consuming energy, this puts data centers in the same bucket as the aviation industry!

Data centers require so much energy because servers create heat, so they need to be cooled down; unfortunately, many data centers are built in warm climates, which makes them pretty inefficient. Another harsh reality is where these data centers get their energy from. While some cloud providers have shifted to using 100% renewable energy, not all of them have yet. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, has committed to a long-term goal of using 100% renewable energy, one of its most popular regions, US East, is still fueled by coal and natural gas. And, to make matters more complicated, cloud providers don’t exactly make it easy for consumers to know whether or not their data is being stored in a green facility or not, and many of them are simply not transparent, and do not release information on their data centers.

[Middle]: Exploring how the impact of running data centers will scale over time
When we stop to think about how this will scale over time, this problem can seem overwhelming and daunting. Researchers estimate that 28 billion devices will be connected to the internet in 2020, and the amount of data we create is ever-growing.

As our climate changes, there are other threats to the infrastructure that is going to be needed to power all of those devices that are connected to the internet. Researchers at the University of Oregon have predicted that, by 2030, approximately 235 data centers will be impacted by a predicted 1 foot rise in sea levels.

The data center problem is multifaceted: they take energy to power, to cool and their number are growing. They are impacting the physical environment, and they are also at a high risk of being impacted by climate change, too.

[Middle]: Highlighting some advancements made in this sector
But, there’s hope yet. Data centers also happen to be the home of some of the most interesting technological advancements in our industry! More and more data centers are being moved to cooler climates, and scientists are coming up with better, more effective cooling solutions. In Stockholm, researchers have found a way to recover data center heat waste and are now reusing that same energy to heat homes in the city!

[Conclusion]: Providing actionable items for developers
So, knowing all of this, what can we do, as developers? Here are some actionable items that each of us can do today:
• Figure out where your data lives!
• Figure out if it’s green! (Check out thegreenwebfoundation.org is a great resource for this)
• If your data doesn’t live in a green zone, consider migrating your data to a different location or provider. (Admittedly, I know that this is not easy!)
• When provisioning a new server/database, don’t provision it in a zone that is not green.
• Build things that make this knowledge easily accessible! (I love the cloud sustainability console chrome extension, built by Paul Johnston, which highlights AWS zones that are green in the console). He also imagined a CLI tool that would allow us to see how much energy usage, renewable energy, and carbon released for every new instance on a cloud vendor! This doesn’t exist yet, but other tools like this would be great to build for the community.
• If you work at a small company, draw attention to this issue internally! At my previous company, I brought this up and we started the discussion of what it would take to migrate away from the AWS US East zone.
• If you are part of a large company, especially one that has a large enterprise account, pressure your cloud provider to be transparent about where their energy comes from for powering their data centers.
• If you work for a cloud provider, push them to use clean energy in their data centers (lots of employees have already done great work on this!)"

Here is a download link to the talk slides (PDF)

This talk will be presented as part of CodeLand:Distributed on July 23. After the talk is streamed as part of the conference, it will be added to this post as a recorded video.

Changelog: Delightful New User Features!

Vaidehi Joshi — Thu, 14 May 2020 20:46:59 +0000

The first few pages that a user sees when signing up for DEV are some of the most significant: they make a first impression and tell the user what the platform is like, and what its values are.

Veteran DEV users might remember what it was like to first sign up for an account on the platform (I signed up for an account over three years ago, and DEV looked quite different back then!). We’ve always been trying to steadily improve the experience for our new users. Over the past few weeks, we’ve shipped significant changes to the new user flow, and we’re excited to finally share them with you!

Revamped Onboarding

When a new user joins DEV, they are first introduced to the platform through our onboarding flow. Our previous onboarding experience was in desperate need of some design love and standardization. To that end, we have completely revamped our Onboarding feature with user empowerment and accessibility in mind! You’ll notice that, in our new implementation, we’ve given the user more choice in what they need to do to complete the onboarding process.

Once a new user completes the onboarding flow, they’re introduced to the feed, and provided some potential next steps to help them engage with the community.

Welcome Notifications

When a new user joins a platform, it can often be overwhelming to try to navigate through it. To help mitigate this, we’ve introduced the Welcome Notifications feature, which informs users of what they can do on the platform and empowers them to connect with others.

After a user completes the onboarding process, they are greeted with a new notification from Sloan, our community mascot.

In the first week after joining DEV, Sloan will introduce new users to DEV and all of the features on the platform. She will periodically drop helpful tips and tricks to new users to point them to features and settings that they can use to tailor their DEV experience.

By engaging with our users early on, we hope that they will be encouraged to explore the platform, customize their feed and experience, and engage in discussions. Both the new onboarding flow and welcome notification feature are just one more step forward in our ultimate goal of empowering users to make the most of their community.

A special thank you to everyone on my team who brought these features to life: @lisasy, @maestromac, and @juliannatetreault. If you have feedback on these features, we’d love to hear from you!

BaseCS: Graph Theory Part 2

Vaidehi Joshi — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 16:49:14 +0000

Today's episode of BaseCS continues our investigation into graph theory!

We’ll start by learning how to apply the theory of graphs into practice, and see how to define a path through a graph in mathematical terms as an ordered list of directed edges. Then, we’ll shift into Leonard Euler’s mathematical proof, and learn about two new concepts: Eulerian cycles and Eulerian paths. Finally, we’ll investigate what conditions must be true in order for us to find an Eulerian cycle through a graph versus an Eulerian path!

This whole series is sponsored by Heroku. A special thank you to Heroku for their ongoing support!

Heroku Follow

Heroku is a container-based cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers use Heroku to deploy, manage, and scale modern apps. Our platform is elegant, flexible, and easy to use, offering developers the simplest path to getting their apps to market.

To learn more about the history of graph theory and Leonard Euler, check out this quick and fun lesson: Byte Sized.

BaseCS: Graph Theory Part 1

Vaidehi Joshi — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 17:46:13 +0000

Today's episode of BaseCS dives into the origins and basics of graph theory!

We’ll learn a little bit about Leonard Euler, a mathematician who attempted to solve the seven bridge problem. From there, we’ll jump right into the building blocks of graph theory, and discover how we can identify a graph by its different kinds of edges. We’ll investigate the different ways to classify a graph, from the degrees of its nodes, to the different kinds of paths and cycles that we can find within it.

This whole series is sponsored by Heroku. A special thank you to Heroku for their ongoing support!

Heroku Follow

PS - To learn more about the history of graph theory and Leonard Euler, check out this quick and fun lesson of Byte Sized.

06:04

Byte Sized Episode 2: The Creation of Graph Theory

Vaidehi Joshi for Byte Sized ・ Aug 1 '19

#computerscience #graphtheory #bytesized #history

Happy coding!

BaseCS: Depth First Search Implementing

Vaidehi Joshi — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 17:00:32 +0000

Today's episode of BaseCS explores the logic behind implementing the depth-first algorithm!

We'll start by learning about recursion, the strategy for implementing DFS, and investigate the time complexity of the algorithm. We'll also see how to implement a single node in code and try our hand at implementing a preOrderSearch function! Finally, we'll look at the space complexity of DFS, and investigate how running this algorithm impacts the call stack.

This whole series is sponsored by Heroku. A special thank you to Heroku for their ongoing support!

Heroku Follow

Base CS: Depth First Search Writing

Vaidehi Joshi — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 17:02:40 +0000

Today's episode of BaseCS explores depth-first tree traversal on trees!

We'll learn the basics of the DFS algorithm, and see how to interact with a single node when traversing through a tree. Next, we'll investigate the different common strategies used to implement this algorithm: Preorder, Inorder, and Postorder search. Finally, we'll learn about the benefits and downsides of these different strategies and determine when to use one strategy over the other!

This whole series is sponsored by Heroku. A special thank you to Heroku for their ongoing support!

Heroku Follow

BaseCS: Tree Traversal

Vaidehi Joshi — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 17:25:43 +0000

Today's episode of BaseCS explores tree traversal!

We'll learn about what it means to search through a tree, and see how the order of traversal through a tree can change the way that we visit every node in the data structure. Finally, we'll investigate the two strategies for visiting all the nodes in a tree structure: breadth-first search and depth-first search.

This whole series is sponsored by Heroku. A special thank you to Heroku for their ongoing support!

DEV Community: Vaidehi Joshi

I’m Vaidehi Joshi, Senior Software Engineer at DEV/Forem- AMA

I would love to answer any questions you have about working as a software engineer, my past projects, open source, and more.

This listing has expired.

DevNews S1E8 (Season Finale!) Twitter’s Algorithmic Bias, Coalition for App Fairness, Strava’s Data Share, & more 🤖

Don’t miss the final episode of DevNews season one! 😭

S1:E8 - Twitter’s Algorithmic Bias, Coalition for App Fairness, React 17 JSX Transform, and Strava's Data Share

DevNews

In the season finale, my co-host Saron and I checked back in on several stories we covered over the course of our first season of DevNews, and also covered some developing stories:

Saron and I also chatted with two guests in this episode.

Quick Listening Links

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

DevNews S1E6 — Chrome 86’s Focus Features, Microsoft’s Deepfake Verifier Tool, and Google’s Business Application Platform 💼

Don't miss the latest episode of the DevNews podcast!

S1:E6 - Chrome 86’s Focus Features, Microsoft’s Deepfake Verifier Tool, and Google’s Business Application Platform

DevNews

Quick Listening Links

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

DevNews S1E4 — TypeScript 4.0, Gitee, Chromium, and Apple Drama! 🤺

Don’t miss the latest episode of the DevNews podcast! 👀

S1:E4 - TypeScript 4.0, Gitee, Chromium, and Apple Drama

DevNews

In this episode, my co-host Josh and I chatted about several news stories in the world of software development:

Josh and I also talked to two guests this week

Quick Listening Links

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

DevNews S1E2: Ruby, Chrome DevTools, Mozilla Layoffs, Hello Weather, and React 17

There's a brand new episode of DevNews out today 👀

S1:E2 - Ruby, Chrome DevTools, Mozilla Layoffs, Hello Weather, and React 17

DevNews

In this installment, Saron and I cover several recent news stories that are relevant in the developer community right now:

Saron and I also chatted with two guests on this episode:

Quick Listening Links

Love stickers? What about free stickers? If you review DevNews OR DevDiscuss, we’ll send you a free pack of DEV stickers to show our appreciation. Details here

The Cost of Data with Vaidehi Joshi

Changelog: Delightful New User Features!

Revamped Onboarding

Welcome Notifications

BaseCS: Graph Theory Part 2

Heroku Follow

BaseCS: Graph Theory Part 1

Heroku Follow

Byte Sized Episode 2: The Creation of Graph Theory

Vaidehi Joshi for Byte Sized ・ Aug 1 '19

BaseCS: Depth First Search Implementing

Heroku Follow

Base CS: Depth First Search Writing

Heroku Follow

BaseCS: Tree Traversal

Heroku Follow

**In the season finale, my co-host Saron and I checked back in on several stories we covered over the course of our first season of DevNews, and also covered some developing stories**: