I’m in Tenerife, Spain with the entire Conversio team.
What I love most about working at Conversio is that we’re family-first. This isn’t just a feel good line, it’s what everyone on the team believes. The importance of putting your family first before anything is emphasized and respected. The team itself also feels like a family, or a team of good friends all working together on something we’re excited about.
I’m crazy about the way we work at Conversio. Our founder, Adii (him and I above at dinner with the team) set up a way of working that focuses on doing deep work as opposed to the frantic meetings and pretend busyness of most startups. As a developer, I get to have meetings with the senior developers to help my learning, but I also get to have long periods of uninterrupted focus to code, debug and deepen my skills. Conversio gives me the space and time to work deeply and absolute freedom to make my own schedule. All of this makes me work better, and motivates me to work even harder.
Getting the chance to see a small bit of Spain has been amazing. It’s my first time here. I’ve gotten to swim, snorkel, hike, and explore new places. Being so far from home shakes me awake to how big the world is and how many different kinds of cultures there are. Being in Spain gives me a newfound fascination with its history. At the same time, being outside of the U.S. makes me so thankful I was born in America because of our language. English is the most popular language in the world. I’ve been in Spain and briefly in Amsterdam in the last few weeks, and in both places (and so many others) everyone speaks English. This is a huge benefit to me as it’s just generally easier to get around when my language is everywhere, yet before I didn’t realize this as much and didn’t have the appreciation I do now.
I recently went on Kyle Shevlin’s podcast and talked about becoming a developer, what I was doing before I got into coding and what worked for me when it came to making the transition. Kyle is an awesome guy and it was such a fun conversation. Check out the episode here!
We start with seeing exactly React.createElement is doing. HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document or web page, once this has been parsed into the Document Object Model. HTML is composed of a tree of HTML nodes, such as text nodes.
Next, Dodds asks: what if we wanted to take the hello world and externalize it to a variable?
Then we replace hello world with an interpolation. What is an interpolation? It is the insertion of something of a different nature into something else.
An expression is any valid unit of code that resolves to a value.
As Dodds explains, this gives us a lot of power and flexibily as our view logic is in our markup.
Lastly, what’s common to do with JSX is create a props object.
These are some of the basics of what JSX is. Check out the free tutorial here.
One of the first times I started feeling interested in understanding the internet was when I heard it was ‘broken’.
This has happened various times, but once such time was when a DDos attack happened and everyone was talking about how the internet broke. But how? How could in the internet break?
Domains. Here’s a domain: madisonkanna.com, which you’re on right now.
IP addresses. Domains are just nice containers over IP addresses. Our brains can’t remember an IP address (like 172.16.254.1.) So instead, we have Madisonkanna.com, the domain name that wraps over the IP address. Voila! So easy to remember now.
DNS: Domain name servers are the phonebook of the internet. (If you don’t remember what a phonebook is since none are around anymore, google that…) They essentially draw an arrow from your IP address to your domain name. So if you looked up ‘Madisonkanna.com’ in the internet’s phonebook, you could find my IP address. Just like my name and phone number in a phonebook.
Now to the broken-internet part: So when the internet broke that time I heard about it, it was a DDoS attack. What the heck is that? It means an attack when the attacker targets a DNS server and the DNS was taken offline.
So when someone went to type in Madisonkanna.com, this domain name could not be resolved to my IP address–no one could go to my site (oh, the horror!) or any site. And thus the internet was in a way broken–temporarily, at least.
What are modules when it comes to Node and why do we use them?
In node in your module system, each file is a separate module. Why? It’s an easy way to keep track of things. Our brains can conceptualize modules pretty well. Think of a module called ‘redbutton’ that could have your red button inside it–and nothing else.
Modules are also reusable chunks of code. You can use that redbutton module again in different areas. Although everything that lives in that module should stay in that model, you can include that module into another module by using the require function. This means we don’t have to worry about code that accidentally impacts other code and yet we can add certain code where we want it.
Require is a function and you pass it the location of the module that you want to import into your desired file. By using the require function above you’re really just saying, “Node, go get this module for me and make it available in my current file.” You’ve invoked this function, given it a string with the name of the file where that module lives, and now Node is grabbing this file.
Now the redbutton module exposes this function, and makes it available outside just the module it lives in.
Writing technical posts is a fun and interesting challenge–it’s trying to write in two languages at once and have it come out clear. What are your tips on getting started with writing technical blog posts?