Dev Time Stories

This weekend I learned about a new concept called "ramen profitability". I've been listening to the "Indie Hackers" and "Startups for the rest of us" podcasts and kept hearing about being "ramen profitable". I decided to find out what's it all about and in this episode I share what I learned.

Recently, there was an issue with eslint-scope that gave the JavaScript community a good scare. I wrote about it one day after it happened os feel free to go and read the article here: https://oprea.rocks/blog/fix-eslint-scope-backdoor The gist was that some malicious third party was exfiltrating NPM auth tokens that it would probably later use to infect more packages in a ripple-like manner. What's even funnier is that while I was listening to Ryan Dahl's 2018 JSConf presentation, I heard him complain about a similar hypothetical situation with ESLint, namely, that it could take over your computer, due to Node's non-restrictive model with filesystem and network access. It's the first episode I've recorded in a while and I'd be happy if you would listen to it and give me some feedback. I'm going to publish a new episode each Tuesday so stay tuned.

In this episode I'm talking about the attitude we, as experienced professionals should have towards the people who want to learn web development. It's also short valuable lesson for aspiring web developers. I recently started researching the problems people have when trying to get into web development. I'm working on my first online course which is called "1-2-3 Web Development" and it will help people who want to get into web development establish what they want to do, what technologies should they learn and how to do it. What I found is very interesting. A lot of people ask what they need to do to become a web developer, and the majority of the answers only offer technical advice. "Learn HTML. Here's HTML, elements look like this, here's what all the elements mean" "Then learn CSS, and SASS, and LESS" "Then learn JavaScript. But learn IT first, and then learn jQuery or other libraries" I know these answers by heart because I've given them time and time again. Is there a problem with them? Technically, no. But most of the people asking these questions don't even know where to start. They need guidance from the mindset level. HTML and CSS come after. It's easy for us to point to the manual, and ask that it should be learned ad litteram. The problem is that people need to make sense of the context before they get into the specifics. Happy listening!

It seems that since Christmas Eve 2016 I've been running form one problem to the next. In this episode I go over the issues I had with my 15 inch retina MacBook Pro, how I tried to fix it and ho I ended up not fixing it. Luckily, I still have my old MacBook Air so I'm not completely without a laptop, but its performance is way lower than that of my main machine. I wrote an article previously, about the failed Apple update and how it cost me almost a week's worth of work — https://oprea.rocks/blog/high-sierra-update-messed-up-my-computer — if you'd like to learn more, go read that. Enjoy!

This time around, I'm offering you a strategy to quickly track down the source of the exceptions that kill your application in production. It's a crude and hacky way, but it gets the job done. And when your application runs in production and has live users, style and fashion with regards to exception handling are the least of your concerns. If you are looking for the show notes, or you prefer text, here's the article I wrote, to accompany this episode: https://oprea.rocks/blog/five-steps-to-quickly-track-and-handle-uncaught-exception-nodejs

In this episode, I will take you through the ins and outs of becoming a specialist in your field. I was in a huge dilemma with regards to my career and in this episode, I detail how I decided to zoom in on a small subset of skills. Here's the deal. I have been ignorant for a big part of my career. I always believed that being a generalist is far better than being a specialist. I also thought specialists and experts were lazy. That's not even remotely true.

In this first episode, I talk about the reasons why big rewrite projects often fail. The episode is based on an article I published at the beginning of this week, which is part of a larger, 6-article series on technology migration.