Every Monday we will round up some of the last week's top posts, comments, and tweets. This is version zero. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment. â¤ï¸
Fine-tuned concentration
Andrew Lucker wrote last week's top article, which walked through some of the scientific justification for blocking out distractions while trying to concentrate:
The article sparked an expansive discussion both in the comments section and on Twitter, as many a programmer shared their personal audio recipe for maximizing focus in a world full of interference:
@ThePracticalDev It typically has to be songs I've listened to a million times... Otherwise I'll focus on the music and get distracted22:29 PM - 25 Apr 2017
Have you tried Betawave music (low key music engineered to increase beta waves in the brain) or Classical music (nonvocal music can still be a great "white noise")?
Another option is to listen to soundtracks from video games. The music for them is engineered to keep the player engaged and not distract from the game.
Have you tried Betawave music (low key music engineered to increase beta waves in the brain) or Classical music (nonvocal music can still be a great "white noise")?
Another option is to listen to soundtracks from video games. The music for them is engineered to keep the player engaged and not distract from the game.
Keep it clean!
Mohit Rajput reminded us all why taking the time and effort to write clean, readable code is so important, citing, among other reasons, communicability, extensibility, and reusability as key advantages of a well written program:
dev.to members appreciated the post, although one reminded us that there will be natural variations in the quality of one's code and to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Nice article. I would add just one thing. There will always be "better" and "worse" parts of your codebase, because it's natural, that one you get better, you tend to solve stuff in different way. You should just accept that there is rarely (if ever) finished project and that there is no way you'll have code that you're 100% satisfied with what you got.
Anyway, keep writing!
Nice article. I would add just one thing. There will always be "better" and "worse" parts of your codebase, because it's natural, that one you get better, you tend to solve stuff in different way. You should just accept that there is rarely (if ever) finished project and that there is no way you'll have code that you're 100% satisfied with what you got.
Anyway, keep writing!
Hackathon How-to
Marie-Philippe, writing under her nom de plume Girl Knows Tech, compiled ten tips for those interested in competing in a hackathon, taking the uninitiated from setting up a Trello board beforehand to grabbing some free swag while you're there:
All-natural Interviews
Beekley Cheung, perhaps better known as Professor Beekums, used his personal job-hunting experience to argue that preparing for an interview is optimizing for the wrong thing—candidates should fit the job, not the interview:
Most of the commenters agreed, although at least one found value in the act of interview prep:
I 'cramed' for 3-5 month. Was a great time, not a waste, brought me a little bit further and i will do this again.
And learning is never a waste anyway :)
I 'cramed' for 3-5 month. Was a great time, not a waste, brought me a little bit further and i will do this again.
And learning is never a waste anyway :)
A certifiably good idea
Vykintas Narmontas is looking to boost his engineering profile by picking up some certifications in areas like business analysis and software testing, and was kind enough to share his methodology and search results:
If you too are considering certifications, their impact is discussed in this episode of Soft Skills Engineering.
Capture the Flag
In a post that introduced a lot of the Dev.to community to a new type of competition, Antoinette Maria summarized hr first experience at Capture the Flag, which she describes as "games for security offense professionals a.k.a. what most would call hackers (red team) and security defense professionals (blue team) alike and everyone who falls in the middle."
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For more on CTF competitions, check out this episode of The Secure Developer.
Git organized!
In a comprehensive and meme-packed post, Nikola Brežnjak reviewed the core ideas of version control and ran through the idea of gitflow:
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In response, one commenter opined that code reviews should not be done with the code's author present:
One thing regarding code reviews. I've experienced a desire from developers who want me to be present while they review the code. This practice eliminates the utility of code reviews because it ends up taking far too much time to pair program review.
One thing regarding code reviews. I've experienced a desire from developers who want me to be present while they review the code. This practice eliminates the utility of code reviews because it ends up taking far too much time to pair program review.
That's it for our weekly wrapup! Keep an eye on Dev.to this week for daily content and discussions...and if you miss anything, we'll be sure to recap it next Monday!
Top comments (5)
How do you decide what content to highlight? Do you use Google Analytics to rank the popularity of articles of that week and choose the articles that received the most hits and views? Could this same process also be used for comments (you already have the "like" functionality built in to get feedback about the popularity of certain comments)?
Essentially, I would like to know if you can automate the generation of ICYMI blog posts. I doubt you can fully automate away everything (you probably have to manually pick the pictures and write out the short summaries), but automating away a lot of the work could help to make ICYMIs more sustainable.
It's a good question -- we're a bit liberal with the term "Most Popular" ... I think there's both science and art to these roundups. Sure we could just pick the top 10 articles from last week from a pageview count perspective, but that doesn't allow us to correct for diversity in thought and content. So we'll likely start with an extended list of the most viewed articles from last week and make adjustments that we see fit. Plus we can't yet automate the selection of 🔥 gifs
This was an idea we had and we threw together some of the features needed to make this post quickly this afternoon. I hope you like this, and if you don't, we'll give it some more thought before next week and improve on anything.
I like it a lot! Especially when my post is featured! :D So happy!
But if I'm serious: I like it, because there is always so much new content on dev.to, I feel like I'm always missing out on the best articles, so I'm glad I can catch up if y'all do a roundup every week!
Like it a lot. I try to get onto here every couple of days, but it's nice to have a post for a quick catch up when I'm busy. Great idea!