How to learn a web framework (time-efficiently)

Yasien Dwieb — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 23:07:38 +0000

Nowadays, learning has become a continuous activity that you should keep doing all the time (You really die once you stop)

However it's important to keep learning, doing that in the wrong way could be very disappointing as, because we are human-beings, we tend quickly lose the enthusiasm if no quick profits are gained.

And like any other subject, learning is a technique which when done correctly, quick gains are guaranteed.

The following topic will list 10 points which will help to do the learning process quickly and in a controllable and time and effort efficient manner.

The use case here is about learning Nest.js but the steps should apply on any other topic. The steps themselves are mentioned in details in the book (Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual, By John Sonmez) so you can go for more depth

The format for each point will be like

Point title
Brief about it
Sample answer for it

Let's start ...

1. What and how big is it?
This is the first step, to know about what are you going to learn and how big is it. So you can know that it matches your hearings or not and also to be aware of the time and cost to be dedicated for this learning process

It’s just another web framework, built over Node.js, also it provides a good structure compared to other frameworks like Express.js. Currently, it's considered one of the most famous Back-end framework for Node.js out there.

How big:
Nest.js can be used to build various types of APIs like REST and Graphql. Also with database connections to SQL and NoSQL databases

2- Specific domain to focus on
Here you will be trying to set limits of the topic you are learning about, just the important parts for your case

How to build a REST API and persist data into Postgresql database

3- Define success
Here you are setting the success criteria, this should keep you focused and also helps with measuring your progress

I would consider that I have been successful at learning Nest.js when I have:

Built a REST API
While following the convention and best practices around
- Project structure
- Code cleanliness
Connected to database for data persistence
Secured the API
Used caching layer
Wrote some test cases

4- The plan
Here I should be adding something like book index for steps and how I should go to reach the success criteria as defined above

I think it should be like:

Get started with example project
Use services
Connect postgresql
Set up Migrations
Understand Requests
Understand Dependency injection
Validate request data
Paginate response data
Protect routes using Guards
(Optional): Do request Logging
Understand Binding Techniques
Catch Exceptions with Filters

5- Resources
Here should come most of the resources that you think could be helpful at some points or having a specific advantage like good organization or the publisher is known to be creating good content

Resources list:

6- Filter resources
Here you should keep only the ones that you think should be sufficient as they should achieve your target

Filtered resources:

7-10 steps are known as LDLT (Learn - DO - Learn - Teach)
7- Start learning
Up to this point, no learning action has been done yet, just planning for the learning. The Learn step is where you start to learn about the topics from the resources you have collected

For me, I would go with some reading before diving into the freecodecamp video (it’s a 4 hours 😀 one) but looks like a good one

8- Do (Like learning by playing, try it yourself)
Here, you are attempting to try various scenarios which are not very related to the tutorials that you have read, and honestly, you will learn much much from this step.
Also mostly you would come with unanswered questions, write them down for the next step

I will start to prepare the environment and check the example project structure to check if all good and understandable
Then, I will try to add a new controller with some other routes which have dynamic parameters and try to validate them.

9- Learn (Fill the gaps)
To answer the questions for the parts that are found to be not very clear, I should be doing more learning and checking further resources

Example, What should be the best way to validate data

10- Teach
Once a single section has been grasped, I should be trying to make a good explanation of what I have learned in the form of a tutorial, video or explain it to a colleague. This highly helps to keep the information organized in your head and it deeply shows you some gaps in your knowledge

This is like what I have done into this Post about the learning 10 steps process 😀

Steps from 7 - 10 should be repeated for each section or topic in your learning plan, so let's assume you have many sections to learn, then each section should have its own 7 - 10 process.

I hope that was helpful
Thanks and Happy Learning

[TIL] Cloudflare origin certificate limitation

Yasien Dwieb — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:30:18 +0000

This will be a series of issues that I faced and found a solution for, which could help someone or my future self

Cloudflare provides SSL out of the box and also you can generate origin certificate that you can use to add HTTPS to your website and its subdomains via the usage of wildcards

But unfortunately, this had some limitation so it only applies for first level subdomains.

Issues Related:

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH
ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert handshake failure

References:

[TIL] Fix: TOO_MANY_REQUESTS/12/disk usage exceeded flood-stage watermark, index has read-only-allow-delete block

Yasien Dwieb — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 21:20:20 +0000

This will be a series of issues that I faced and found a solution for, which could help someone or my future self

I have been facing this issue when I was trying to index data on ElasticSearch 7.* on Docker

Env:
Laravel + laravel scout + El

The error was:
{"error":{"root_cause":[{"type":"cluster_block_exception","reason":"index [{tableName}] blocked by: [TOO_MANY_REQUESTS/12/disk usage exceeded flood-stage watermark, index has read-only-allow-delete block];"}],"type":"cluster_block_exception","reason":"index [{tableName}] blocked by: [TOO_MANY_REQUESTS/12/disk usage exceeded flood-stage watermark, index has read-only-allow-delete block];"},"status":429}

Solution that worked for me:
curl -XPUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:9200/_cluster/settings -d '{ "transient": { "cluster.routing.allocation.disk.threshold_enabled": false } }' curl -XPUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:9200/_all/_settings -d '{"index.blocks.read_only_allow_delete": null}'

Reference:
https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-docker-flood-stage-disk-watermark-95-exceeded/248479

DEV Community: Yasien Dwieb

How to learn a web framework (time-efficiently)

[TIL] Cloudflare origin certificate limitation

[TIL] Fix: TOO_MANY_REQUESTS/12/disk usage exceeded flood-stage watermark, index has read-only-allow-delete block