July, 2017: Love, Time & Death
“We all yearn for love”
“We all want more time”
“We all fear death”
Great quotes from a movie I love: “Collateral Beauty”.
A great young man died in recent weeks; he was one of the best interface designers in Nigeria; his name was Imogie Mubarak. He was in his mid-twenties.
The death of Mubarak got me thinking; “Bolu, Life is short, make the best of it.”
If I die today, would I die a happy man? Have I been giving the world my best? Have I loved and been loved whole-heartedly? Am I healthy?
Before Mubarak died, I had heard a lot of great things about him. After his death; I heard even more; tons of tributes to him; it was inspiring. He had gone early, but I feel he had given his all while alive; he helped people, made an impact, he’d be dearly missed.
The above experiences taught me that: “It is the quality of my life that matters. Not the quantity.”
I might not live to be old; but whatever time I spend on this earth; I need to spend it making people’s lives better, loving wholeheartedly and being happy.
Of course, the best scenario is to live a long life; full of quality experiences.
July 2017: The Back-end
July was the month of the Back-end. I built Freecodecamp’s API projects:
- Timestamp Microservice ( source code )
- Request Header Parser Microservice ( source code )
- URL Shortener Microservice ( source code )
- Image Search Abstraction Layer Complete ( source code )
- File Metadata Microservice Complete ( source code )
I also built a ToDo List app ( source code ) with Vanilla JavaScript. It was a fun exercise and helped with practicing JavaScript.
Reading YDKJS book 4 was not fun; it took a lot of grit but I learnt about:
Asynchrony in JavaScript, Callbacks, Callback hell and its problems (sequential code and the “inversion of control” problem), how Promises solve the “inversion of control” problem, and how Generators help us write asynchronous code in a beautiful way. There were also chapters on program performance and benchmarking.
The book was a tough read, especially as a lot of the concepts were new to me; but it was fulfilling because my mental model of JavaScript has improved.
Chingu Voyage
Chingu is at it again; we are on a journey to build 1000 projects by 2020. It’s hugely ambitious. If you don’t already know what Chingu is:
It is simply the best community for learning web development. Chingu is made up of people from all over the world who help one another learn web development. There’s no better place to be as a web developer ( novice or expert ).
The amount of passion, commitment, kindness and support I have experienced on Chingu is simply unique; I am glad to be part of the community.
Chingu Voyage is a programme where people are split into teams of 3–4 people to work on various projects. Some are building really cool landing pages, chrome extensions, bots, job boards etc.
I happen to be part of a team that is cloning a Jobs Board application. We are all Front-end developers that have almost zero experience with building full stack applications. The monumental challenge for us is learning how to work together remotely while figuring out how to build the application ( all within 6 weeks ). The project seems impossible, but I’m lucky to be part of a team of people who believe we can get it done, are excited to learn and I hope we do just that. Watch out for our app.
Picks
I recently started listening to JavaScript Jabber; a podcast about JavaScript. On the podcast they have this tradition of recommending stuff they like, and I have decided to try this out. Here are my picks for this month:
- JavaScript Jabber: ironical but perfect for my first pick; it’s a great podcast about JavaScript and the web development world. Just listen to one or two talks and you’d understand.
- Collateral Beauty: the movie touched my heart. I could feel Will Smith’s pain, a story of love and despair. It’s beautiful.
- How to talk to Developers by Ben Orenstein: a talk on how to talk; Ben does a brilliant and entertaining job. I wanted to check out the video for 5 minutes and spent the next 50 minutes enthralled.
- Small Doctor’s Penalty: I recently came across this song/dance and it made me dance for the first time in ages.
My biggest Lesson from July, 2017 was to keep learning from other people. Ask questions, ask for advice, ask for feedback, let others teach you and show you how. It’s okay not to know how to go about something, even if you do, still ask for other people’s opinion, listen to it and decide on what you think is best.
There’s so much to learn; there’s so much to live for.
Happy New August !
