dev.to staff

Posted on Apr 10, 2018

Welcome Thread - v11

#welcome

Hey there! Welcome to dev.to!

Welcome!

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about yourself.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋

tar -xvzf robot_welcomes_you_to_community.gif

Top comments (322)

Lea Reimann 🦄 • Apr 10 '18

Hi all!
I'm Lea, a web developer in training for over a year now. I'm not very proficient with any specific programming language yet but I can use some and do so in my day job. I try to code in my free time too but there are often too many distractions :P My next project is a React Native app, even though I haven't used React a lot yet (wish me luck!)

Hope you all have a nice day :)

Ben Halpern • Apr 10 '18

I'm not very proficient with any specific programming language yet

Aww I'm sure you're making great progress.

Good luck with React Native!!!

Lea Reimann 🦄 • Apr 12 '18

Thank you very much! :)

xDeveloper • Apr 30 '18

Hello world, my name is Mike this my first day joining you guy’s. It’s nice to meet everyone. Lea, I’m sorry but I hope the next time I can assist.

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 5 '18

Hi Mike! Nice to have you here :) Have fun on your journey! What are you currently working on?

Syed Zulqarnain • May 8 '18

Hi Lea, how are you coping with learning various languages and being at a "not very proficient" stage?

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 18 '18

Let's say: I'm not really coping with it ;) It's confusing and overwhelming most of the time but as long as I have no pressure finishing things on a certain date (I can take the time I need for all the things I have to do/build - as an apprentice in my company) I can manage it. I know things won't be like this when I'm a senior developer but hopefully I will be more proficient in coding with various languages until then! I'm currently trying to focus more on some technologies/languages and this makes working as a developer a whole lot easier for my brain! Well, after all - it's quite the standard to use multiple languages as a web developer so I better start coping with it ;)
Are you proficient in any programming/scripting language? :)

Carlos Fabara • Apr 28 '18

Hi, keep it up! web development is an amazing journey of constant learning. :)

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 5 '18

I will! I think so too, but this is sometimes difficult but most of the time: so exiting :)

Mohammad Salem • Apr 30 '18

Good luck with React Native!!!

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 5 '18

Thank you! :) I found so many tutorials and guides that I want to look at in the next few days and weeks - hopefully I will have time for it :o

Andre Barreto • Apr 20 '18

Go for it! Start a project and finished it is a great path to get proficiency.

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 5 '18

That is very true!

Blek Ulv • Apr 20 '18

Good luck, Lea!

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 5 '18

thank you! :)

Raul Guerrero Carrasco • May 4 '18

Hi!!

The last year i did a post in my blog while i was learning how to use.

If you have any doubt, just ask :)

Lea Reimann 🦄 • May 5 '18

Thank you for your response :) Would love to read that post if you'd drop a link :D

DevLorenzo • Feb 13 '21

Hello! Good luck with your project

Demi Lee • Apr 10 '18

Hi guys, I'm a dev in Toronto who's been a dev.to lurker for a while. Finally decided to make an account. Excited to become a part of this community!

Ben Halpern • Apr 10 '18

Awesome to have you!

Colin Principe • Apr 19 '18

Yay for Toronto! I was born and raised in Toronto. Go Leafs!

Bertoldi • Apr 25 '18

Hi from another long time lurker!

Donald Merand • Apr 10 '18 • Edited

Hi, I'm Donald, and I'm jazzed to have found such a supportive and diverse community of developers, on the internet no less!

Fun fact: I recently designed a password-generating app as a way to learn some basic Elm, and an accompanying Ruby Gem that uses Markov chains against a dictionary to generate words that sound right, but aren't usually real words!

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Apr 12 '18

Woah! Would love to see the dictionary app in action!

Donald Merand • Apr 12 '18

:) Well, I use it in the password app to generate "words that sound like English, but usually aren't English". The thinking being that you want a nice long password, easy to remember + type, but hard(er) to crack against a dictionary.

I also have a semi-secret API that I use to generate fake names for humans: robot.lab.explo.org/randomname/3 where you can substitute any number for 3 and get back that number of names :) You can also get JSON from it: robot.lab.explo.org/randomname/3.json. Handy!

And in general, if you have a dictionary (say, of Elvish words), you can make an "Elvish word generator" like this:

require 'markov_words'

generator = MarkovWords::Generator.new(corpus_file: '/path/to/elvish_words.txt')
# returns a random word
puts generator.word

Ben Halpern • Apr 10 '18

Welcome welcome welcome!!!

Everyone is super welcome to contribute in any way, but one of the simplest ways to get started is to ask an interesting question in #discuss.

All are welcome and it is awesome to have you.

Víctor Adrián • Apr 10 '18

How many of we are in dev.to now? :D

Ben Halpern • Apr 10 '18

Coming up on 70,000 registered devs. But many more lurkers who haven't signed up yet.

Víctor Adrián • Apr 10 '18

Whoa! Cheers! :D

Niv Dror • Apr 12 '18

Hello! I am Niv 🤷‍♂️

Ben Halpern • Apr 12 '18

Liana Felt (she/her) • Apr 12 '18

¯\(ツ)/¯

asalgarni • Jun 23 '18

Hay there Niv.

Adam Hopkins • Apr 12 '18

Adam Hopkins here. I like to call myself a "solutions developer", but really I am a full stack dev that thinks highly of himself. Don't we all? Or, is it that I don't take myself seriously. One of them. Not sure which.

I am not a trained developer, although I have been doing it for 20+ years. Programming is actually my second career. I started out as an attorney, and practiced law for a while. All jokes welcome.

Python is my main language of choice. But, I am definitely a proponent of finding the right tools and languages to get the job done.

I am looking forward to meeting you all, and learning more about this community.

Colin Principe • Apr 19 '18

"All jokes welcome." Is legalese more opaque than software programming?

Adam Hopkins • Apr 19 '18

legalese == self.ego + 1

John Copella • Apr 23 '18

Hello, long-time reader of the dev.to Twitter feed, and just popped in to share some thoughts on tools/tech/skills that would be good for new developers but maybe tend to get overlooked.

Have been a developer for a long time (since 1988) and have worked on projects ranging from manned spaceflight to mortgage loan portfolio analysis. I've had the occasional forays into development management, project management, product management, etc. but have always stayed hands-on with the code.

Hoping to share some hard-won wisdom and learn the same from others here.

Sarah Cohen • Apr 16 '18

Hello everyone!

I'm Sarah, a Computer Science major from NYC, and I'm excited to be here!
I love Java and I find algorithms fascinating to figure out and learn.

Right now, my biggest project is actually not coding, but putting together an all-women's high school, undergrad, and boot camp hackathon and pre-hackathon workshops. It's a ton of work, but I love being able to create an opportunity for female students at the beginning of their career get excited about comp-sci in a fun and supportive environment. (If anyone wants to check it out, the website is hackittogetherlcw.com and there are a ton of pictures on FB, facebook.com/hackittogether !)

I also would love to get more involved in open-source, and will soon be starting a remote internship doing just that, which is super exciting.

Looking forward to talking with all of you!

Colin Principe • Apr 19 '18

Hi Sarah. Love your hackathon idea! I hope it goes well for you!

Comment marked as low quality/non-constructive by the community. View Code of Conduct

Waris231 • May 8 '18 • Edited

I like hacking and helping from others for hacking....good luck sarah

Haider Noor • Apr 14 '18

Hi everyone. I'm Haider (pronounced Hi there). I'm from Mozambique. I'm a webdev. Been coding for some time now mostly with JavaScript and react. I found this community through Twitter and got immediately interested because I just love these "techie conversations"

I hope I can teach as much as I've been learning from this forum.

Christian Chicoine • Apr 16 '18

Hey all,

I'm Christian, based in Montreal, Canada. I'm involved in software development since back the good old days of 5 1/4 floppy disks or before being geek was cool. :) I've done a lot of coding using a bunch of languages mostly Microsoft related (with the exception of PHP I also coded a lot). Today, most of my time, I'm a solution architect at a large international corporation in the automotive industry. But because of my love for start-ups, entrepreneurship and open source, I'm involved in many projects at the same time.

Beside IT, I have a degree in international trade and in photography.

I've join this community to meet new cool people and to help if I can.

Cheers!
Christian

Colin Principe • Apr 19 '18

Hi Christian. Welcome to another Canadian. Did you use the old floppy disk hack back in the day to turn a single-sided into a double-sided by punching a hole in the disk?

Christian Chicoine • May 1 '18

LOL. No. I never had one of those. I first had a 8086 PC and its floppy disks didnt need to be flipped manually. It was high tech. ;)

Ricky White • May 1 '18

Hi all,
I'm a new dev who has been playing around with code for fun on and off for a few years. I'm in a position where I can get stuck in and do it seriously.

I have got HTML/CSS/Python 'under my belt', and looking for the next step to take me from advanced beginner to a pro.

Tips welcome... Ha!

Nice to meet you all. 😊

Arik • Jul 7 '18

SQL would be useful if you want to store anything in a database

Ricky White • Jul 8 '18

Thanks. I recently made a start on this, actually. But appreciate your feedback 😊

Angela Riggs • Apr 18 '18

Hi! 😄 I'm a QA Engineer at a tech agency in Portland, Oregon. I've recently started writing more about my experiences and growth in my role, in the hopes of expanding what that looks like at my company, and helping create some insight in general around what QA can be!

Nino • Apr 30 '18 • Edited

Hi everyone,

my name is Nino and I've been a web dev since I bought my first computer magazine in 2002. Lucky for me, the issue focused on web development basics, HTML, and CSS. I was about 10 years old at the time and lived in a small town, population 10,000, in Croatia.

After becoming 18, I started working on and off as a developer, and then in 2015 I joined Upwork and started working full time while traveling the world, a la digital nomad (nomadlist.com/@ninoskopac).

Ever since I started in 2002 I've been trying to create a web app that people will love and use, but so far I've failed to do that. A year ago I launched Read2Me (producthunt.com/posts/read2me), which is a text-to-speech web app, and even though I do have more than 550 users right now, it's not making any money, so 8 months ago I decided to venture into the B2B market and create a widget inspired by Facebook Embeddables - an HTML/JS snippet that you can just copy paste into your website and it'll create podcasts out of your blog or news articles in an instant without any backend integration.

What I've done last week is I've created 11 demos (by integrating my service into existing news publications), recorded videos of myself giving a walkthrough of those 11 demos (a video for each demo), sent those demos and videos to companies, and so far I've failed to receive a single response (or even anyone clicking on either the demo or the Youtube link).

What I'll be doing in the next month is following up on those emails and reaching out to more, creating a homepage for the B2B product, automating the onboarding, etc. I haven't even figured out how much I want to charge for it yet. If I can get 5 companies to pay me $30 per month (for say, 5 hours worth of conversion time) during May, I'll be a happy camper, cause all I need right now is a little bit of validation.

Here's a couple of demos:
Standard design, British accent: widget-demos.read2me.online/examin...
Minimal design, American accent: widget-demos.read2me.online/chiang...
Feature list/API: github.com/read2me-online/read2me-...

Also, here's a video of me giving a walkthrough of the product, for entertainment purposes: youtu.be/dWx_KMsmdpo (i'm thinking of doing one where I just scream and meow next).

SDD • May 3 '18

Brawo!

Liam Norman • Apr 13 '18 • Edited

Hi! I'm Liam and I'm a software engineer at rhinoafrica.com and organiser of the PHP Cape Town user group. With experience working on monolithic systems, smaller SPA systems as well as API's. I have a passion for TDD, Laravel, CI/CD, and API Development. When not coding late into the night, I can be seen hiking table mountain or dabbling with anything PHP related. Mostly joined Dev.to to learn new things and try contribute to the community :)