DEV Community: Zachary Stone

It's been a while...

Zachary Stone — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 22:04:40 +0000

Hey there, fellow Devs!

Long time no see, right? I know, I know – I'm the worst at keeping up with my blog. But I've got some updates to share, and maybe even a little bit of encouragement.

First things first: life is good! No, seriously. I mean, sure, I've been super busy at work (my company is diving into some cool new tech like VR, AR, and XR) and at home (my kids keep me on my toes – my oldest will be 6 in 2023, my middle child is 4, and the little one will be 2 by the end of the year). But overall, things are going great.

And as I look back on my nearly 7 years in software development, I've learned a few things. Like, for example, senior developers are usually right (who knew?). They told me not to worry about certain things, and I worried about them anyways. And they told me to focus on other things, but I was too busy worrying about memorizing syntax. But it turns out they were right all along. Go figure.

But something that's been surprising to me is that I actually enjoy leadership roles, mentorship, and all that jazz. I mean, who would have thought I'd get excited about project management and code cleanup? And don't even get me started on meetings with clients – I love discussing business needs and advocating for my professional opinions. It's like, who am I even?

Anyways, I'm looking forward to the future and all the twists and turns it brings. I know there will be projects I love and projects I loathe, but that's all part of the journey. And who knows, maybe I'll discover even more things I never thought I'd enjoy as a software engineer. I mean, I've already taught middle school classes and mentored junior developers, and those were pretty great. So bring on the surprises!

Revised and Edited by an AI! (https://chat.openai.com)

The time I spoke up for myself and it backfired

Zachary Stone — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:14:04 +0000

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times

Making headway into a new career is very difficult.

Doing that in a career that constantly changes is even harder!

Doing both of those in a career that has a massive amount of information you can learn, and there isn't a "right path" to take makes it extremely difficult to know what to do.

It's funny, the difficult part of being a Jr Dev isn't struggling with what you know but grappling with the idea that you don't know everything.

You can't google all the answers, and some mountains you can't climb, yet.

This one truth that many have a hard time grappling, saves you from falling backward on your own butt. It saves you from over-estimating, and over-promising. It saves you from accepting an offer from a company that you are unsure of. And this one truth would have kept me from the most difficult situation I have ever been in.

Side Note: It's been a while since it all happened, and it took me this long to process this life lesson, and for my ass to heal from falling on it when I lost my grip climbing a mountain I had no business climbing in the first place.

The Beginning

I graduated from a local Bootcamp after doing the online program back in 2017 in the .NET/C# program. I was working at a call center at the time, and after being there nearly 3 years, I wanted a job that would be more like a career, and a career that would challenge me, where I could problem-solve daily. I found that in software development, and was sticking around at my job hoping to be hired onto the Dev team. This is when I got the first taste of wanting to prove myself as a young dev in the field. I pitched a project with my friend that got approved, but I offered to do it for free. Undervaluing myself and not giving me any headway to be on the Dev team. I ended up working at another company that got bought out in the 9 months of me working there, and all the dev's were laid off. That's when I found myself working at my second job, where this story truly begins.

Don't ignore the red flags!

The interview process was strange, it wasn't designed to check my skill set, but only had questions to see what I was exposed to in terms of tech and programming languages, and they seemed overly eager to hire me.

When asked what I expected to get paid I responded with "well, I got paid ##,#### at my last job, so that would be nice." The hiring manager said "DONE!" and I was no longer unemployed.

There were multiple times where I was pumping the breaks and telling the higher up who was our team manager, that I was just a JR Dev, and I hope they understand that. He assured me that they hired me, not ultimately for my skill set, but my overall demeanor. I was settled with that answer and started working.

At first, things were slow, in fact, onboarding was almost nonexistent, I mainly took my time doing training. The team I worked with was exceptional, and we just clicked right away. In fact, I talk to 4 of my old Devs regularly.

Then, I started being put on projects and having the rug pulled under me. At first, it was small but strange. Our manager asked if anyone has heard about PowerBI, and I said I knew of it and started going through a training course at my previous job, and that I thought our team could go through training and utilize it for a client. No response, then a week later... SURPRISE! I was on a call with a client and was introduced as the "PowerBI expert".

I then was placed on call with a client I had no idea who they were or what they needed, and they asked me questions about integrating with Office 365 that I knew nothing about. I tried to remain positive, offered to reach out to our Microsoft representative and I got the info back to them at the end of the day. The next day I was removed from the client without any explanation.

Then, I was asked to lead a team to come up with a cloud solution so we could host all of our client's websites on the cloud, and move away from our servers so we could save 60k in licensing fees. I researched for weeks in a panic, I knew very little about hosting, let alone hosting on a cloud. I tried my best, came back with pricing, and was shot down. They wanted to use Azure because of the Microsoft Credits they had, but I showed them that the package they had would introduce major latency issues, and all the client's websites would loud 3xs slower. I was taken off the project.

The straw that broke the camels back

The worst situation I have ever been in. This one was a project where I was way over my head. But a project that started as 3 Devs and a Project manager, ended up being me and one senior and no project manager, and we had no work items. I had no idea what I was supposed to be working on, and my Senior had meetings every day gathering details on what the project even was. It was a nightmare; I was developing along and was not a part of any of the meetings. I did have a part in the initial meetings at first, but the meetings that mattered I wasn't in. The Senior Dev knew what to do but didn't have time to play the role of Project Manager and Senior Dev, and our Project Manager was nowhere on site. On top of that, the client was losing money every month.

The amount of stress I was under was overwhelming. I lost weight, almost stopped eating completely, and didn't sleep well. I was in WAY over my head, and I was partly to blame. I was partly to blame because I had been so focused on saying yes to anything that made me look good. And, I would say yes in fear that I would lose my job. It's strange when you have a skill set, and some say in what you will work on, oftentimes you don't speak up for yourself until it's too late.

I was miserable and I knew I had to do something about it. I met with my Senior Dev, told him everything. And we came up with a plan for me to move onto the Web Development team, instead of working on applications, then pull someone with more experience (the third dev who was supposed to work on the project with us in the first place.) My whole team came around me and understood, they supported me. It was all perfect, and I was relieved. Then, I met my Project Manager who recently became our team lead... and everything came crashing around me. She had printed out my resume and had it face down on her desk, and the whole time she accused me of "jumping ship" and kept reading the experience I had listed on my resume. (which, had nothing to do with the technology we were working with...) I tried not to come off defensive, but I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. I told her the whole team supported this and didn't see this as jumping ship, and that this change would benefit everyone. She said she would get back to me.

Two days later, they fired me.

I would like to say that I didn't find myself angry. I would like to say that, but it wouldn't be true. Anger wasn't the first thing I felt, but it came later. Only I wasn't angry at my job, I was angry at myself. I blamed myself for months. Was it merited? Sort of.

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda.

Those are the thoughts that keep you up at night. The "What if I did that differently?" They are the real moments you would use a time machine to recorrect. But you can't. All you can do is learn from those moments and grow from them. To let go of anger and bitterness and heal.

The takeaway

As a Jr Dev, you will be tempted to ignore red flags, to take whatever job you can get, to say yes to any opportunity that makes you look willing, and to hide your insecurities and say you understand, when you really don't. Don't do that! Seriously, don't! It will only hurt you in the end and will make your team weaker for it. Strive to see red flags and react responsibly. If you need to take a day to think about a decision, do it! Don't be afraid to ask for time to give an answer, or when asked if you understand to respond with "could you explain that to be a bit more?" People respect someone who is truly trying to fully understand.

I can say, without a doubt. I have grown in this situation. I didn't grow much as a programmer in my skills, but I learned a skill that has freed me up to grow a ton in my new job, and that is transparency. I have learned what ledges I won't climb alone, or not at all yet. But I am always willing to examine and see if it's possible, and many times I am surprised at what I can accomplish!

This work is hard, but it's wonderful and beautiful. Keep pushing forward!

If you could turn back time... if you could find a way!

Zachary Stone — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 13:30:35 +0000

If you could go back to when you first were learning software development, what advice or warnings would you give yourself?

I would tell myself the following:

Don't get caught up in new technologies or buzzwords.
I would encourage myself to learn JavaScript really well, and HTML and CSS.
I would encourage myself to build the sites and projects I wanted to do, but made up excuses for.
I would tell myself not to measure my value based on others who had more experience than me.
I would remind myself that although it's not about the money I need to press for being paid what I am worth and not under sell myself.
I would be more picky at what jobs I took.
I would assure myself that I was a fake, and if I continue to work hard I will be a valuable asset.

What about you?

Which programming language has the best documentation and why?

Zachary Stone — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 02:24:39 +0000

The cleanest and best formatted that I have seen is Elm.JS

Python Teach & Learn Part 1: Variables

Zachary Stone — Sat, 23 May 2020 19:45:49 +0000

We are going to start where all programmers start. Staring forward into the vast expanse of the new shiny language we are embarking to learn and learn how to say "Hello, World!". Why?

hmmm... I don't know why. It's just that's the first thing we do.

To say "Hello, World!" we need to tell the computer the right syntax so it can understand what we want. And by "say" I don't mean the computer will verbally say it, although there are ways to do that... I mean that the text "Hello, World" will be printed out in the console window. What is the console window? WELL LET ME JUST BLOW YOUR MIND!

If you are on a windows PC hit the F12 button while you are in a web browser.. yes, go ahead and do it! If you are on Mac google how to open up the developer tools in your browser. I don't feel like googling it myself, and you need to get used to googling because you will google more than you ever googled before with programming. There is a TON to learn, and you won't remember everything. You won't even know what tools are all available for you at once.

Well, is your mind blown? No.....? Oh.. you don't know what you are looking at... Let me explain. What you are seeing is something you will use a lot as a programmer. Right now it may be confusing, but you will get familiar with the developer tools the more programming you get under your belt, but for the sake of staying on topic, we are going to focus on the console. The console is used by developers to debug, see errors, and write haikus to each other (maybe not the last part). You can also print out the text to this console. And this will be the first thing we learn.

Now if you are unsure how to download, set up Python, or run the code, you can look at the first post I wrote introducing this new series for a link to a non-programmers guide. If you don't want to download a text editor, python, and go through that mess...you can use Pyfiddle

Now we are cooking with fire!

The first thing we will learn is not a variable, but a function. That function is called print. Think of a function as a verb, it's a doing element. Functions can take in inputs called parameters, and inside the function something happens. In this case print takes in a value and writes it to the console.

There are different kinds of values. But right now we are going to start simple and pass a string to the print function. One of my favorite analogies of a string, other than the simple it's just text... is thinking of the Happy Birthday banners you see sometimes at parties.

These banners have a literal string that is attached to a bunch of letters that are arranged in a certain way that whoever sees it can read out the message. This is what a string is. A collection of letters (in programming they are char or characters) arranged in an order so it can be used to be readable.

So let's write our very first line of code with python using the function print and a string!

print('Hello, world!')

YOU DID IT!

You should see the output in the console say Hello, world!

Now, let's move on to talk about variables since this is the first topic of our series.

Wikipedia says that a variable is ..." a storage address (identified by a memory address) paired with an associated symbolic name, which contains some known or unknown quantity of information referred to as a value. The variable name is the usual way to reference the stored value, in addition to referring to the variable itself, depending on the context. This separation of name and content allows the name to be used independently of the exact information it represents. The identifier in computer source code can be bound to a value during run time, and the value of the variable may thus change during program execution."

It takes different strokes for different folks I guess?

To put it simply, a variable is a way to store a value for use later. Sorta like a bucket. Yeah... a bucket. Except you can't just throw anything in the bucket mixed with other stuff. No junk buckets with random doodads. You have to stick with a type.

The standard variable types are:

Number
String
List
Tuple
Dictionary

We will just go over the first one for now, and then we can focus on the others in a later post.

You already used the String type, we just didn't store it in a string variable. So if we wanted to print out "Hello, World" over and over, we would have to hand type it out every time we used the print function. That would be tiresome, and it also makes it easy for us to make a spelling error. So instead we can declare a variable and assign it a value.

Look at that, we are already using fancy programming lingo... we will be impressive to the dev community in no time!

Let me show you how that is done.

str = "Hello, Mr. Fancy Pants
print(str)

Let's break it down.

str Is the variable being declared. In Python, you don't have to explain if you want to use a number, string, etc. This is inferred when you assign the value to the variable. I used str, it's short for 'string' just as an example. I could name this whatever I wanted. poopy pants hiya pal, whatever you wanted it would work. BUT, in programming we want to name things so that we can understand the code better.

The str is the declare we talked about earlier. Just like God declares in the OT In Genesis "Let there be light"! We declare things to exist in our program. In this case we are declaring a variable named 'str'.

The next part = is the assign we talked about. This is where we attribute value to the variable "bucket" we made. This is also where Python infers the variable type. It looks after the = to see the string `"Hello, Mr. Fancy Pants!" makes the variable a string type and assigns the value of the variable the string we give it after the assignment operator. Now that we have a bucket for our string, we can use it elsewhere without having to type out the string. So we can pass this as a parameter in the print function.

print(str) str is referencing the variable we declared, then passing it to the function, which then prints this to the console!

And that is the concept of variables in a nutshell. Wow... we learned a good amount in such a short period of time. Until next blog!

Let'ssss get sssstarted!

Zachary Stone — Sat, 23 May 2020 18:21:55 +0000

A Little introduction to this new series I thought of, while in the shower.

Teach & Learn is a new series I wanted to make for my blog AND for all that follow me in dev.to. I have always learned a new topic quicker when I learn to teach. It seems strange, but I enjoy teaching. Well, it's not strange to enjoy that, what is strange is that although I love to teach, I have no desire to be a teacher. Okay, I should clarify more. I DO LOVE TEACHING, but not in the traditional "get paid to be a teacher" kind of way. I just love teaching as a tool to learn.

In practice this would mean at school, I would join a study group and be fascinated by teaching what I learned in new and exciting ways to my study buddies. I found that focus to drive my desire to study much better than studying to understand on my own.

In this series, I am going to be 1 or two steps ahead of you in learning a programming language and I will add blog posts as I go to help give examples, code snippets, code along, and strange and maybe funny analogies to help you think about these concepts in a new way. I am not a pro at programming, although this is my career. I have been programming, professionally for almost 2 1/2 years now, I still have a lot of learning ahead of me, So join me!

For my first language of choice for no real reason other than I like being popular and Monty python and top 10 lists of programming languages articles... okay I am kidding. I actually chose Python because two Christmas' ago I got into Python while buying a raspberry pi and learned how to tinker with microboards whilst searching for a job. I also thought Python would be a good choice because the syntax¹ is super simple to follow, and it's a good language to learn some programming basics. I will be adding code snippets, footnotes for words that you may need clarification on, like the footnote below, and other helpful hints to help you grasp what the heck I am talking about.

Although I love writing, I am terrible at spelling, grammar, and sentence structures. So forgive me for not following any sense of structure with these blogs. Although I am writing these to help the community, I am also writing to help myself grow in consistency with learning programming outside of work.

Here are some helpful resources to get you started! I will not be going over how to download Python, pick a text editor, how to run the code. I will be focusing on the language itself. Also, I will be using Python version 3+. Here is a good resource if you are completely new to programming: Non-Programmers Python Guide.

Let's get started!

This is the first footnote. Congrats you found it! Anyways, Syntax, what do I mean by Syntax? Syntax refers to the spelling and grammar of the programming language. Like syntax in languages used between humans, the syntax is important to follow in regards to programming languages too. One thing you have to know is that COMPUTERS ARE STUPID! Seriously, humans can usually figure out what someone is talking about, even if they misspell, say the wrong word, etc because they can see the meaning in the context of everything said! Computers can't. You have to spell out every single step, explain every single aspect of what you want your program to do, or your program won't do it. ↩

I have always been a weirdo

Zachary Stone — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 21:09:39 +0000

If you met me you wouldn't imagine that I have social anxiety, or that I was not popular in school. I seem like an average, talkative and overall positive person.

But the truth is, I have always been an outcast. And it took me 30 years to be fully okay with that.

I got married back in 2015 after being a student at a local bible college in Louisville Ky. I had just gone through the motions of school and didn't know what I was going to do for a career. I dropped out of high school when I was 17, got my GED and worked a full-time job for most of the latter half of my teenage years. I tried my hand at a lot of different industries not finding something that fits. I had always been creative with words from an early age, my mom still has many poems that erupted from my 9-year-old self. I wanted so badly to find a creative outlet that could be a "job", but my skill set didn't fit. Although I liked writing, It wasn't interesting enough for me to be an author, and honestly, my poems were the only decent thing.

I say all of this to give you a firm grasp of the panic that set in while working at a call center for nearly 3 years. Panic. Pure, adrenaline-pumping panic. The kind where you have so many questions, you can't grab a hold of one to even consider an answer. Being recently married, and then finding out we were expected our first child had put my panic in turbo!

But alas, a silver lining appeared in the dark cloudy sky. I had a good friend of mine feeling the same dread of having to come into work. The mundane aspect of answering 160+ phone calls a day saying the same ole things. My lifeline out of here lied in our common "AH-HA!" moment. We had both asked for more work, to pull us into some sort of challenge and what we were given changed our lives forever.

We were told to assist in coding. Now, I won't size this up to make it seem like we were given something rad, but for us, it was an escape and an introduction to our new career of choice. We used HTML/CSS to write documentation. I am talking using tables to add "format" to the documents because anything else would break the pages completely. But this was enough to give us a taste, and from there we started finding out more projects we could get our hands-on.

Fast forward a year and a half and I completed an online Software Bootcamp and had convinced my work to allow me to create a full-stack .NET/C# web app.

Now I have worked professionally in software development for almost 3 years. The dev community has opened up its arms to me and my weirdness and I am so thankful for that! The amount of teamwork and collaboration our industry has is astounding!

You made it through my rant!

What is your story?
What got you into Programming?

Birthstone challenge with loops

Zachary Stone — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 19:51:09 +0000

A really simple challenge. But it was still fun to do. You don't have to have massive challenges to overcome, sometimes a quick 15 min thing you throw together is fun to exercise your mind with. I threw this together while helping a student on the problem. I wanted to see if I could do it and what my thought process would be. Don't be afraid of overcoming mole hills. Too many times I don't do challenges because I can't climb Everest!

Comment below how I could clean this up and make it simpler! All while keeping the for loops. (It's part of the warmups for loops.)

Explain React Hooks Like I'm Five

Zachary Stone — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 15:33:51 +0000

I have worked with ReactJs on a previous project at a previous employer, but I never got to use React Hooks. Since that is the way React is going explain to me what it is!