DEV Community: Warner Onstine

Choose Your Side Project

Warner Onstine — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

I've heard this request in my job as a manager as well as in several of the groups I'm a part of. And I've given the same advice over the years in slightly different formats (depending on what the person's goals were), so I thought I would try and codify it a bit and make it an easy flow-chart for anyone to use.

I'm teaching other developers how to level up their craft using side projects in my course 30-Minute Project which will be launching soon! Visit my landing page to find out more information and signup to be notified when it launches.

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Feedback wanted on book ideas

Warner Onstine — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 03:07:23 +0000

Hi all, I'm a software engineer of over 20 years and I love sharing my knowledge with other developers. I've run several user groups over the years and been blogging for quite a while (and lost a few of those blogs over the years). I've been contemplating doing some deeper work but I'm having trouble picking which area to focus on that would be the most valuable to people and I was hoping I might be able to get some feedback from this community. I'll include each one as a comment below, feel free to like it, comment etc on whichever one(s) you think you would personally find value in.

Thank you in advance, I really do appreciate it!

Refactoring JavaScript (ES5 → ES2019)

Level up your JavaScript code (and skills) in no time!

Is this you?

You want to take advantage of some of the new ES features but don’t know where to start?
Your existing code works, and you don’t know what are the advantages are to the new code?
You don’t want to rip out your old code and just replace it, how can it be done safely?

What will you learn?

Benefits of each of the new language features
The different paths to refactoring your existing code for each feature
How to deploy new code to Node.js or browsers that may not be ready for it
How to ensure your new code behaves the same as the old code (backwards compatibility)

What will you get after finishing?

A solid understand of each new feature
Path for refactoring your old code to the new code

The Course/Book

This course will help each participant not only understand the new features of ES2019 (and ESNext) but also the benefits of each feature and how it may apply to their existing codebase.

At the end of the course you will have gained the insight needed to apply each refactoring to any existing project as well as the best places to use the new features in greenfield projects.

Testing Node.js applications

Become a Node.js testing master!

Is this you?

You test your code in production (or better yet, your users do)
You have no idea how much of the code you have written is tested (code coverage)
You wrote some tests at the beginning of your project but you don’t even know if they’ll run anymore
You’d like to write better tests but it just seems to take too much time to figure out

What will you learn?

How to easily setup a test framework for any Node.js application
Understand what the different tests are and how they integrate together to provide holistic testing to your application
How to write effective code that is inherently easier to test
How to find the right libraries that make writing tests easy
How to write effective unit and integration tests
How to use mock libraries to write tests that cross multiple services

What will you get after finishing?

A framework that you can customize for any kind of back-end JavaScript project
A framework for evaluating testing libraries and how to incorporate them into your test methodology
How to integrate testing into your day-to-day habits and project checkins
Peace of mind knowing that the code you’re pushing to live has been more thoroughly tested than it was before
How to approach older applications that don’t have tests, identifying the key areas that need testing first and how to implement a plan for doing so

The Course/Book

This course will help each participant not only understand the role of testing but also how they can integrate testing into their day-to-day routine, making it second nature.

At the end of the course you will have a testing framework that can be easily modified for any project, new or old, as well as confidence in your code quality.

30 Minute Project

Accelerate your software development career in just 30 minutes a day

Is this you?

Have you ever felt like you’re falling behind your peers?
You know what you should be learning but aren’t sure where to even start?
Do you not know what to do with newfound skills you got from that new tech book you just read?
Figure out how to take an idea to full-blown side hustle or main project?
Been receiving less than stellar notes on your performance reviews?

What will you learn?

By using the techniques I’ll teach in 30 Minute Project you can not only learn new skills but setup a foundation for continuous learning for the rest of your career. I’ll walk you through how to:

Identify the goals you want to achieve with your self-education
Improve your focus so you can achieve more with less time
Pick appropriate projects based on your goals
How to build up your resume and code portfolio (which is becoming more and more important now!)

Additionally you’ll learn

What deliberate practice is and how to leverage it to improve your skills and learning abilities
How to stretch your brain into new areas and what that does for improving yours and others code
Understanding little bets and how to incorporate them into your own projects

The Course

This course would help each participant create a plan for what their side project will be and what goal(s) they want to achieve with the side project. Additionally the group can help each other stay motivated through daily check-ins as well as bouncing ideas off of each other.

At the end of the course you should have a solid framework for doing new side projects as well as made some solid progress on an existing side project. Additionally each participant will have gained some amount of discipline and understanding of what it takes to finish a side project.

Launch your SaaS Project Quickly

Get the skills you need to quickly launch your SaaS idea using Node.js

Is this you?

You have an idea for a product but you don’t know what steps you need to go through to launch it
You’ve tested your idea and are ready to launch it but you have limited development skills
You’ve started building your product but feel stuck with all the different moving pieces

What will you learn?

How to continue to build and validate your product idea
How to quickly launch a piece at a time using Node.js and microservices
How to choose between build it or buy it
When to abandon features
How to narrow down your list of features to the just the key features needed to launch with

What will you get after finishing?

A launched product!
A solid codebase that you can continue to build on as you move forward
A decision framework for helping you continue to improve your product and your codebase
A decision framework for deciding what features to launch with and continue to build ## The Course/Book

This course will help you not only launch the first version of your product but help you continue to build each new feature and test it with your users.

At the end of the course you will have gained the insight needed to apply the included decision frameworks as well as the coding skills needed to build your product.

Write your own OAuth2 server in Node.js

Design and build a full-fledged OAuth2 server complete with JWT tokens and the latest Node techniques

Is this you?

You have multiple applications that use OAuth and want to have something more ‘off-the-shelf’ that you can use when you start working
You’ve always wondered how the OAuth2 spec worked and how to implement it in Node
You want to learn how to write a larger-scale Node application

What will you learn?

How to code a medium-size Node.js application from beginning to end including:
- Unit tests
- Integration tests
- Mock tests
How to structure your application so that it’s easily extensible for the future
How to integrate an OAuth2 server into your existing applications
How to integrate an OAuth2 server with API Gateways

What will you get after finishing?

A working OAuth 2 server based on the latest recommendations and technologies
In depth knowledge of how to structure a medium-sized Node.js application
How to integrate an OAuth2 server into your existing applications and other API Gateways
Invitation to join a group of developers to continue building and improving this Open Source OAuth2 server

The Course/Book

This course will help you not only build and launch an OAuth2 server it will help you integrate it with your existing applications.

At the end of the course you will have gained the insight needed to implement the OAuth2 specification as well as how to integrate your existing Authorization and Authentication workflows into it.

How to write microservices using Node.js

Learn how to utilize the Node.js platform with the microservice paradigm

Is this you?

You’ve heard a lot about microservices but you aren’t sure where to start
You’ve done some research but aren’t sure which is the best solution for your requirements
You’ve implemented microservices in other languages but you haven’t done it in Node.js

What will you learn?

The different methods of implementing microservices in Node.js
- Including which method is the best for your requirements
How to implement microservices in Node.js using multiple approaches
How to deploy your microservices to Docker containers
How to deploy your microservices using Kubernetes

What will you get after finishing?

A working shopping cart application with 3 microservices
A blueprint for how to use the microservice patterns in your application ## The Course/Book

This course will help you not only build and launch an e-commerce shopping cart but give you teh ability to implement microservices in your own application.

At the end of the course you will have gained the insight needed to implement and evaluate various microservice patterns in your own application.

What I really liked about "So Good They Can't Ignore You" and other ramblings

Warner Onstine — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 06:00:00 +0000

So, it's been about 2 years since I picked this book up and read it cover to cover (so to speak, I had the ebook which I devoured) in about a week.

First, I want to explain a bit about where I was in my career, in my life. I was unhappy. Not the life part but in my purpose. Throughout my career I had always had in the back of my mind that in order for me to be happy I needed to "follow my passion". I had finally buckled down and done just that. I was doing a day job, after hours I was working on my own startup with a few friends.

After doing this for 2+ years and more challenges and at least one pivot in what we were building I was tired. My friends were no longer helping me. I was doing all the heavy lifting and for what? We weren't going anywhere. Our user base was in the low double digits. I was tired. I pulled the plug. Leading up to my holiday vacation I was listless. I wasn't sure what I should be doing or even wanted to be doing. I can't remember how I heard about "So Good They Can't Ignore You", whether it was a friend who had read it or a review I read somewhere but I was immediately intrigued.

From what I read it had gems like "Don't follow your passion", "Become good, I mean, really, really good at something and you'll find your passion".

Before I sat down that holiday break I was filled with questions for myself. What was I doing? Was I doing something that "I love"? Was I working on my own thing? Why wasn't I ever happy in my professional career? What was missing?

Yes, startups are hard. Especially trying to bootstrap something from the ground up. It was definitely something I stuck with, for more than 2 years, trying to get to work. Sometimes I was happy while building it, but something was still missing.

All these thoughts, questions, and ideas in my head I sat down to read this book.

I was immediately struck by how true many of the statements and accounts of different people that the author Cal Newport interviewed, both successful and unsuccessful in pursuing their dreams. One part that struck me was this one - "If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice." This was in the intro section and kind of blew me away. I love Steve Jobs, his passion for creating some of the most iconic and world-changing devices has been an inspiration for me. I was definitely hooked after this.

Roughly the book is broken into 3 sections:

Forget all about "Follow Your Passion" - that's bullshit
Be So Good They Can't Ignore You - build your skills
Turn Down A Promotion - be in control of where you want to go
Think Small, Act Big - have a mission

One of the areas I focus on specifically is in the skills part of things. He had some interesting advice which I chose to implement to a certain degree and am still playing around with in terms of structure. He talks a lot about the Craftsman Mindset in this section, which I've come to value a lot more late in my career. Rather than getting to work on the new shiny bits of technology really learn to hone your craft and become as good as you can get, then go further.

I do this through projects. I have several that I move on and off the back burner depending on what I want to learn about. Whenever I work on a project I have a set of things that I'm trying to accomplish with them, whether it's investigating a new technique, trying out a new piece of technology, trying a different language or just generally trying to get better at something (testing).

Originally I tried to cram a bit too much in, I tried following his approach which roughly consists of:

Deliberate practice - choosing areas that you are weak in and want to improve and work on improving those
Stretch - force yourself to tackle something that is too big for you to force yourself to learn
Little Bets - research in a lot of little areas to find something big to go after

Deliberate practice. For coders this can take the form of Coding Katas, exercises which force you to think through not just one solution to a problem but several. You can typically find Code Katas for just about any language and are a great way to learn a new language. You can also take a problem that you have a perfect solution to, have coded several times on your own and force yourself to come up with a completely new solution to this problem.

Stretch. For coders this means deeply examining an area of computer science you are unfamiliar with or an area you have some familiarity with but want to learn a lot more about. For web developers this is a big area. One area for me is machine learning. This area fascinates me. I've only scratched the surface on this and hope to dive deeper into in the near future.

Little Bets. The idea here is that you have an overall mission that you're going for, but you aren't quite sure how to get there. So, you come up with a bunch of small ideas that you can tackle in span of a month or so and either see if you make some real progress, or not. If you don't then table it and try one of your other ideas.

Where did I take all of these ideas? What am I doing with them now?

I tried blending it all together, code katas one night, then project stuff, little bet stuff, etc. but I just didn't have the time to do all of it. Instead I decided on specific areas that I wanted to get better at and actually dove in to those areas. I picked specific things that would help me with my day job, things that would make my day job easier once I learned them. I still follow this philosophy to a certain degree. But I also work on personal projects, projects that will, in the long term, help me get better and help me achieve the goals I want over time.

Overall though, where did this new mindset take me?

I realized that what I really wanted to do was to help build a team and a company from the ground up
I found such a company in a field that I had no real passion for, but I did have a passion for building a solution and a company with those people and it's been filled with fun challenges that have helped stretch me as a developer and a person
I continue to focus on learning more, challenging myself and figuring out what the next thing is that I want to tackle
Realize that I am nowhere near the craftsman that I want to be yet but continue to strive towards that goal and also realize that there are other things that may be more important for me to focus on at any given time

Here are a few ideas if you're interested in adopting this kind of mindset:

Do some Coding Katas
Read the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You"
Figure out what your mission in life is and go for it

Ultimately it's a lot about figuring out what you're good at, where you have capital, and getting as good as you possibly can be at it. Only through doing this will you find out what your true passion is. Here is just a small sample of my answers to this question - what am I good at? What have I built up capital in that I can continue to build on?

I'm a good developer, and I'm getting better :)
I'm also a fairly decent writer

After a long hiatus I'm bringing this blog back to life again and will continue to share my journey of becoming a software craftsman.

I have two personal projects I'm working on, one focused on goals using the Objectives and Key Results(OKR) and another to help us deploy our suite of applications in a continuous delivery environment (more on this later).

Some of the fun things I'm getting to learn and become better at:

Docker
Angular
Node/Express
Go
Build and deployment systems

I'm actually doing this by trying to do at least 30 min each day on one of my projects. By doing this I'm able to keep my next set of goals fresh in mind and making sure that when I get back to working on it it is fresh in my mind. I got the idea for this from John Resig Write Code Everyday.