Forem: Miklós Szeles

Test Automation Patterns - Selenideium Element Inspector and the Page Object Model-Tester Duo

Miklós Szeles — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 06:21:13 +0000

Intro

Recently I participated in Craft Conf 2022 which is one of the world's biggest developer conferences. There were more than 70 talks from top-notch experts from all around the world. The event was held in Budapest the capital of Hungary. Thanks to this I was able to visit the conference on-site.

Being a test automation engineer for no surprise my main focus was on listening to talks about various quality assurance topics. There were only a few talks in this category so I had the chance to listen to all of them. One of them was Fabrice Bernhard's fascinating talk about the Dantotsu method with which you can radically improve the quality of your software. I have already written my summary of that talk which you can find on my blog.

Being a Hungarian I definitely wanted to listen to the talks of the Hungarian speakers and to my luck I found one talk about test automation patterns by the Hungarian Gspr Nagy. Jackpot.

Gspr Nagy works as an independent coach, trainer, and test automation expert helping teams to implement Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). Gspr's talk about test automation patterns inspired me to write this article. In the first part of this writing, I will highlight some of the topics from Gspr's speech and in the second part I will talk about a tool Selenideium Element Inspector which I developed to automate one of the most repetitive tasks in end-to-end testing and I will also talk about 2 patterns I use in test automation.

A Brief History of Design Patterns

Have you heard about the term GoF? Not familiar? What about Gang of Four? I am pretty sure by this point most of the developers know what will I am talking about here.

It is the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. This book is kind of a bible for developers. The book has been published in 1994 which means 28 years ago. (Oh crap, I am too old) Despite being so ancient this book is still very actual many of the patterns are used by developers. By now these patterns became part of programming languages and libraries. However, Christoper Alexander came up with the concept of design patterns in 1977, this book was which made them popular.

The term design pattern was borrowed from architecture. In architecture, you do not start from zero when you would like to build something but you use previously proven patterns by which you make sure the building will function as expected.

If you are using design patterns you can progress faster, have a more reliable and maintainable code, and you also have a common language among developers. You do not have to explain the code all the time you just say I used the Builder pattern here or the Factory pattern there.

Test Automation Patterns

Test automation code should be a first-class citizen, which means it should have the same quality as production code. How can we achieve for our production code to have great quality? We can follow coding standards, do reviews, use design patterns, and of course write tests for our code. That raises a very interesting topic which was explained in Gspr's talk in a pretty funny way: if tests should have the same quality as production code, then we need tests to make sure it has high quality, but those tests should also be the same quality as production code which results in an endless loop.

In order to break that loop, we are typically applying exploratory testing to our tests. Many testing schools like TDD say you should see your test failing first and move forward only afterward. By seeing the tests first failing you can make sure your test can actually catch some error. That is exactly what we do in TDD.

As mentioned above, using design patterns can improve the quality of your code but the good news is you can also use test automation patterns to improve the quality of your tests.

Tests are typically composed of some sort of usual tasks for example for a complex automated test you have to reset the database to a known state. Collecting these usual repetitive tasks and their solutions into a test automation pattern knowledge base can help in not inventing the wheel every time. These patterns can be useful on a team level, some of them on a company level and some of them can be also useful outside your company.

In the upcoming part, I write about a repetitive task I have automated and I also introduce two design patterns. Let's see them one by one.

Automating Locator Creation

As a test automation engineer, my daily job includes writing both API and E2E tests depending on the actual need of the project. During writing E2E tests one of the most time-consuming tasks is to find the best locator of a certain web element.

As Gspr mentioned test automation patterns usually emerge from automating repetitive tasks and then reusing the same method again and again. This is actually what I did by developing the Selenideium Element Inspector (SEI) Chrome Extension.

Let me explain the task with an example. I have a complex form where you have to enter numerous personal information. For simplicity let's say the first name and last name are mandatory and the others are optional. I would like to test a happy path where I only fill the mandatory fields. For simplicity let's say it is just a part of the test and we won't do any assertion (more about that will come later).

So what is the task I should do? I have to determine a locator for the first name text field, the last name text field, and also for the submit button.

In an ideal world each web element has an ID or a class based on which every element can be located easily, but let's be honest very often that is not the case. Cause of this I have to come up with a locator based on ID, name, className, tagName, linkText, partialLinkText, CSS or xPath. Or at least those are the locators that you can use with Selenium Webdriver which is one of the most widely used frameworks for E2E test automation and also the one we use in combination with Selenide (more on that later) in our team.

At this point, I open Chrome dev tools and start to inspect the web elements. Let's say my first name text field has no id, but it has a class that seems unique. As I am not sure about that I open the console to run the selection in the form of a CSS selector just to realize there are other elements with the same class. Maybe it is not the best example, but if you did automation for a while I am pretty sure you encountered such problems.

So I look at the DOM again and come up with a CSS selector with which I can select the exact element. Then I repeat the procedure for the last name and also for the submit button. Of course, you can become pretty quick in writing locators still it is quite repetitive.

This repetitive task is not specific to my team, to Selenium but it is a task that has to be done by everyone writing E2E tests. Of course, some framework provides support for recording user interactions even Selenium has Selenium IDE, but I wanted a faster solution and also I did not want to leave the final choice for a framework as it can often happen that an id or class which it selects is an autogenerated value which will change on each page load.

In the end, I decided to develop a Chrome Extension with which you can automatically generate each relevant unique locator for a web element with a single click. You can not just generate the locator, but a complete line of copy-pastable code. You just have to look at the console and copy-paste the guaranteed unique selectors to your favorite IDE.

In the first run, I only implemented the code generation for Selenium Java and Selenide but I had some discussions with my colleagues from other teams during which I learned they are using TestCafe and Squish so I decided to support those frameworks too. By now I've added support for most of the other widely used frameworks including Playwright and Cypress and Selenium Javascript, C#, and Python too.

After I have developed the plugin I realized there are other similar tools like SelectorsHub, but I still prefer using my plugin as you can generate everything with a single click.

Of course, there is a lot of space for improvement one idea on my mind is to automatically generate page object models from the selected web elements. Please, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

You can read more about the plugin including full source code here, here and here and you can download it from the Chrome Webstore.

The Page Object Model (POM) and Tester Pattern Duo

During the talk, Gspr encouraged us to share test automation patterns that we use, so I decided to share two patterns I use in end-to-end test automation. However, Gspr gave his suggestion on how to document a pattern I did not want this article to be too formal so I decided to simply explain these patterns with my own words, but Gspr is working on a book with his colleagues which will contain many test automation patterns in a structure very similar to the GoF book. I am really looking forward to reading that book.

In order to introduce the patterns let me sketch up a simple scenario.

We have a login page with two text fields a username and a password and of course, we have a log-in button. After a successful login, the user is navigated to its profile page. In our test, we will test the positive scenario when we enter valid credentials and the user successfully logs in. After the login, we will verify the user is really logged in by making sure the user's name is visible and a logout button appears on the screen.

The Framework

As far as I know, Selenium Webdriver is the most widely used framework for web application testing. It is open-source, easy to learn, and supports many programming languages, browsers, and platforms. Well, in this article I won't use Selenium but I will use Selenide instead. Let me explain why.

Selenide is an open-source framework built on top of Selenium WebDriver whose main purpose is to make test automation simple. As it is based on Selenium WebDriver it also means we get the full feature set of Selenium WebDriver.

In addition to that, it has simpler syntax, a concise fluent API, additional selectors, simple configuration, profiler, and more. If you are interested in a more in-depth comparison just read my article Selecting an End to End Testing Framework - Selenium or Selenide?. Anyone who is familiar with Selenium WebDriver or other test automation frameworks can easily understand the Selenide tests.

Despite having the above-mentioned advantages Selenide is not as well known as it should be, so I would like to grab the opportunity to draw attention to it. However, in this example I will use very little from its functionality you can learn more about it in one of my previous articles..

The Test

For simplicity, I will use id-based locators and hardcoded test data as they are not relevant for introducing the patterns. So let's see the example code:

@Test
    public void successfulLogin() {
        open("https://mywebapp.com/");
        $(byId("username")).sendKeys("johndoe");
        $(byId("password")).sendKeys("pass");
        $(byId("login-button")).click();

        $(byId("logout-button")).shouldBe(visible);
        $(byId("user-display-name")).shouldHave(text("John Doe"));
    }

Selenide handles timeouts and the web driver in the background so we do not have to deal with them which makes our life much easier and we can also forget about the StaleElement exception. We have our test so it is time to do a little refactoring by introducing the Page Object Model.

Page Object Model (POM)

If there is only one test automation design pattern a developer knows I am pretty sure it is the POM. Using the POM pattern we create a corresponding class (Page Object) for each page in which we encapsulate all the web elements belonging to that page. In addition to that, we can also encapsulate higher-level interactions like the user login in our case.

Why we should use POM? Just imagine you have a web element that you use at multiple locations in your test code. If the element changes you have to modify all occurrences. In simple terms, we have a much more maintainable code by using the POM pattern, and also we can make our tests more readable by encapsulating multiple-step interactions into methods with meaningful names. Clean code is not just important for production code but also for tests.

Let's see our code for the login page:

public class LoginPage {

    private final By usernameInput = byId("username");
    private final By passwordInput = byId("password");
    private final By loginButton = byId("login-button");

    public void login(String username, String password) {
        $(usernameInput).sendKeys(username);
        $(passwordInput).sendKeys(password);
        $(loginButton).click();
    }

}

And also for the profile page

public class ProfilePage {

    private final By logoutButton = byId("logout-button");
    private final By userDisplayName = byId("user-display-name");

    public SelenideElement getLogoutButton() {
        return $(logoutButton);
    }

    public SelenideElement getUserDisplayName() {
        return $(userDisplayName);
    }

}

And the refactored test:

    @Test
    public void successfulLogin() {
        LoginPage loginPage = new LoginPage();
        ProfilePage profilePage = new ProfilePage();
        open("https://mywebapp.com/");
        loginPage.login("johndoe", "pass");
        profilePage.getLogoutButton().shouldBe(visible);
        profilePage.getUserDisplayName().shouldHave(text("John Doe"));
    }

Well at first look it might seem overkill to do this as from the 6 lines long test we made another 6 lines of test and 2 extra classes but imagine we have many login scenarios using the same elements again and again or having webpages with dozens of elements. From the page object, you can easily get an overview of the different elements belonging to a page. The two page objects can be moved to a before test initialization and if we have only login scenarios in this file then the webpage opening can be moved too, resulting in this code:

    @Test
    public void successfulLogin() {
        loginPage.login("johndoe", "pass");
        profilePage.getLogoutButton().shouldBe(visible);
        profilePage.getUserDisplayName().shouldHave(text("John Doe"));
    }

This code reflects our intention much more as it is clear we are doing login, but there is one problem with it. It does not reflect our intention regarding what we would like to test and here comes the Tester pattern in the picture.

The Tester Pattern

If you are not familiar with the name Tester pattern it is not your fault. I made up this name for the pattern as I have not heard about it before. I see very little chance that nobody else came up with this pattern before so if you know its original name then please share it with us in the comment section.

So what is our intention here? We would like to verify the user logged in. Let's make it clear by introducing the Tester pattern:

public class LoginTester {
    private final ProfilePage profilePage;

    public LoginTester(ProfilePage profilePage) {
        this.profilePage = profilePage;
    }

    public void verifyUserLoggedIn() {
        profilePage.getLogoutButton().shouldBe(visible);
        profilePage.getUserDisplayName().shouldHave(text("John Doe"));
    }
}

And the test after moving the tester initialization into a pretest initialization code:

    @Test
    public void successfulLogin() {
        loginPage.login("johndoe", "pass");
        tester.verifyUserLoggedIn();
    }

If we are taking into account the initialization code then we have a clear given-when-then structure which makes our test code easily understandable and maintainable.

That was my intro to the Tester pattern in a nutshell. I use it as it makes my life easier but I am pretty curious what you think about it. Do you find it useful? Or do you see some drawbacks? Share your thoughts in the comment section.

Thanks for staying with me up till this point. I am pretty sure you also have some test automation design patterns in your bag so do not hesitate to share them in the comment section.

My Report About The Craft Conf 2022 Software Development Conference

Miklós Szeles — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 16:06:03 +0000

The Craft Conf 2022 just ended a few days ago which was the first-ever offline conference I have attended. In this article, I will share the experiences I have collected at the conference.

I went to the Craft Conf with exact goals. I have written in my previous article Why Am I Attending The Craft Conf 2022 Software Development Conference? about them. I advise reading it before this writing as I will revisit my goals one by one and reflect on how much I was able to achieve from them.

Backstory

I remember I was a little nervous before the day of the conference. As I explained in my previous article, I am an introvert. The idea of being together with hundreds of software developers freaked me out a little bit.

Luckily I was not alone, as 4 of my friends came with me to the Craft Conf. I cannot exaggerate enough how much it meant for me. The idea of spending two days with my developer friends, talking about software development, and of course, about other friendish stuff made me happy and helped to reduce my nervousness.

I was not sure what to wear during the conference, but I was not alone with that problem as two of my friends also asked me about that. In the end, we decided to dress as we would go to work. For me, it meant jeans, a Hashnode T-shirt, and a shirt too which I took off in the end as it was pretty hot.

In today's fast-paced world, where new technologies emerge yearly, it is very important to train yourself if you do not want to fall behind. By now, many companies have realized how important it is to support their employees by sending them to training or giving them conference tickets. It is important for the company not just because the new learning will benefit them too, but also because this can be a factor that motivates a developer to stay with the company. At least for me, it is an important factor.

Unfortunately, my previous company hardly ever supported me in improving myself, which was also why I did not attend conferences before. Finally, after 15 years, I moved to another company in December.

My new company is different as it provides a budget and 4 extra holidays for its employees to train themselves. I have already spent one day visiting the Future of Testing Framework conference, about which you can read my report here. So I could visit the Craft Conf using two days from my holiday budget. I am not exactly sure what will I do with my fourth day. Still, if I have to answer now, then I would say I will visit the Crunch Conf, which is also organized by CraftHub, but instead of software developers, it is targeting Data Engineers and Data Scientists.

What about the imposter syndrome? Luckily I left it behind around half a year ago. So I was excited to visit the conference, as instead of thinking, "I have no place amongst these much better developers," I felt I would be in the right place with fellow developers who would be there to learn and have fun just like me.

That is enough about the backstory. Let's start the conference.

Registration

We arrived quite early at the conference as luckily my friend Szabi brought me to the location by car. Our first journey led us to the registration booth. It was quite a surprise to see the registration is on the dodgem field. Look: There were many desks where you were able to register. Almost nobody was there when we registered, but based on the number of staff there, I am pretty sure the fellow developers could register quickly too.

Catering

After the registration, we entered the building and headed directly to the breakfast area as both of us were hungry, especially me. A few (at least compared to the total number) of the developers were already having breakfast, as you can see in the picture. There were sandwiches and other food too and even dessert. I am a meat lover, so I sadly realized all the sandwiches were vegetarian, but this sadness faded as soon as I tasted the sandwiches. They not just looked good, but they were delicious too.

This was the same place where we had lunch. Luckily lunch was not self-serving, as I think it would have been chaos if hundreds of hungry developers would have appeared in an all-you-can-eat area. So the food was served by the staff thanks to which you did not have to wait too much. There were chicken, pork, beef, fish, and vegan food so that everyone could find something for him/herself.

There were many stands where you could get drinks and coffee too. Luckily there were many glasses prefilled with drinks, so you could simply grab one when thirsty. All in all, the food was delicious and as it was all-you-can-eat I am pretty sure no developer remained hungry.

Now that our stomach is full, let's look around at the location.

The Location

Craft Conf took place at the Hungarian Railway Museum. I have to admit I did not look around thoroughly, but during a lunch break I went out to see the locomotives. I have spent more than 10 years of my life traveling by train twice a week to visit my parents, then go back to school. To be honest, I did not like traveling, but I still love locomotives. I remember there was a beautiful black locomotive at the Mezhegyes railway station. I loved that locomotive. We always jumped on it with my brother Tams and played in the cockpit. After checking the trains it is time for a cigarette.

The Smoking Area

I have to admit, all my friends and also myself are smokers. Thanks to this our meeting point was the smoking area. After each talk, we gathered together in front of the main entrance where the smoking area was located. During smoking, we discussed the previously heard talk and also used the time to have many friendly talks. For me, that was the best part of the conference. Of course, we heard amazing talks and had a lot of fun, but spending two days with my friends was invaluable.

Talks and Speakers

More than 70 speakers were invited to the Craft Conf 2022. Most of them were there personally and the others had an online talk. Arranging the speakers' traveling, accommodation, local transportation, and creating the schedule must have been very difficult, but the CraftHub team did a great job, in my opinion.

Kevlin Henney opened the conference with the talk Non-Functional coding. His speech was fascinating and fun at the same time. Perfect start for the conference. I even brought a picture of one of the slides.

The Main Stage was full. You could even smell the scent of software development.

However, depression was not inside me this time, but it was pretty close to me as it was sitting right in front of me, as you can see in the picture above. I have no idea why the guy in front of me wore that T-shirt, but I was too shy to ask.

I used to love visiting meetups, as in addition to learning and networking, I always got a huge motivation boost for weeks. I am eagerly waiting for how long will the motivation boost last this time.

If you read my previous article, you know my plan was to visit Michael Feathers', Dan North's, and Ivett rdg's talk.

Michael's talk was the first one on the list. So I went to platform 2 to listen to his talk. To my biggest surprise, there was a completely different speaker there. I suppose the talk was canceled, and I did not reload the schedule on my phone. Never mind. As a photographer, I loved Platform 2. Just look at the lights:

When I realized Dan North's talk was a virtual talk, I decided to watch the talk from recording and visit a real-life talk instead, as that is the beauty of offline conferences. Listening to talks of top-notch developers from all around the world in person.

Luckily I could listen to Ivett's talk, which was the last talk of the conference. She was talking about how to sell a big refactor to the management. I had expected a bit more practical advice, but the presentation was still interesting.

I found Fabrice Bernhard's talk the most fascinating at the whole conference. I have to admit I am highly biased towards QA topics as I work as a test automation engineer. Fabrice was talking about the Dantotsu method with which you can drastically reduce the bugs in your code. I will write an article about his presentation as I would like to share the Dantotsu method with my team as I am pretty sure it would benefit us too.

To sum it up, there were many great talks during these two days, and I could only listen to a small portion of them thanks to the many parallel talks. I am pretty sure I will spend hours listening to the missed talks, and I will also watch some of the talks again as I would like to write a few articles about the ones I found most interesting.

Exhibitor Booths

Many of the conference supporters had a booth in the exhibition area. Epam, Morgan Stanley, Cloudera, Tesco, and of course CraftHub just to mention a few of them.

I believe the exhibitors knew most of the developers are there to learn and have fun and not to find a job, cause of this many of them prepared some minigames which made the booth visits quite memorable. Instead of job ads, they asked for your approval to get your contact info, so they could reach us after the conference with relevant content. I already got a few emails and I am sure more is on the way.

I have visited almost all the booths and played most of the games. You could win prizes by playing. Let's mention the most memorable minigames.

Minigames

Epam had a smartphone slide challenge where you got points depending on how close you could slide your phone to the center of the target. Sliding the phone to the center gave access to the highest gift category. My first slide was too weak and the second one almost blocked the center, but I nailed it on the third try. Here is a pic of the game:

At adnovum, you had to play an AR game. You had to catch bugs using a phone's camera on which either a cake or a bug appeared when you moved your camera above a symbol on the wheel. It was quite fun so I played it both on the first and second day too.

At the Tresorit booth, you had to open a safe by getting the code of the safe by answering a few questions from which you could figure out the code. Of course, we opened it and we could even get some chocolate from the safe.

At the Tesco booth, you had to decrypt a message which pointed to a location. I couldn't solve it right there but a cigarette later I went back with the solution.

(Almost) all the exhibitors had a grand prize. You could participate in the drawing by sharing your personal info and the winners were mostly selected randomly. Unfortunately, I had not won any of the grand prizes but I was not sad about that because of the swags.

Swag Here, Swag There, Swag Everywhere

The exhibitors prepared for the Craft Conf with an extreme amount of swag. I did not realize up till now how fun it is to collect swags. There very everything you could imagine. Pens, notebooks, socks, sunglasses, t-shirts, and even rubber ducks. I have to admit I might get too excited and collected too much swag, but I had a good excuse. I have collected almost all the swags for my son. This is mainly true, but I also gave some of them to my wife and I also kept a few. Here is a pic of almost all the loot I collected at the conference. 😊

The Staff

The CraftHub staff was very kind and helpful and we could even get mango-flavored beer from them, so it was no question whether we visited them or not. At the location, there were many people with a Staff label on their T-shirts who were there to help us if we had any questions.

Despite I had a map I had no idea where the Innovation stage was so a friendly staff guided me there. Actually, it was right behind me but I did not realize it. 😊

After the second talk on the main stage, I went to the CraftHub booth and asked them to increase the volume on the speakers' mic as thanks to sounds coming from the lively exhibition area we had a hard time listening to the talks from the back rows. They were quite helpful and I am almost sure they increased the volume, as, from the following presentation, I had no problem with it.

Networking Party

Unfortunately, I could not participate in the networking party as I had to go home to be with my son as my wife had an important appointment, but one of my friends was there and he told me it was great. Epam supported everyone with 4 beer coupon so the mood was guaranteed. Maybe next year I can visit the party too.

Being a Kid Again

Even at the age of 40, I still consider myself a kid, as I never grew up. Especially nowadays, when I play a lot with my son I can enjoy such activities as playing lego, video games and much more without feeling any guilt of not spending my time on "useful things". Luckily there were many activities at the Craft Conf which brought back my childhood memories.

Dodgem

I love dodgem since my childhood and for decades I never sat in a dodgem car as I thought that was for kids. Last summer and also recently I had the opportunity to realize how enjoyable it is even for an adult. I was even able to persuade two of my friends to jump into a dodgem. It was really fun.

Mini Train

As I mentioned before, the conference took place at the Hungarian Railway Museum. They have built a mini railroad at the location on which people could sit. I did not try this activity, but I saw many of the participants sitting on it. I brought you a picture to help you imagine it.

Candy Floss

I loved candy floss as a kid and I realized I love candy floss as an adult too. Luckily there was a candy floss stand right beside Cloudera's stand so it was no question whether I tried it or not. Look at my happy face. 😊

VR game

There was a stand beside SAP where you could play Playstation games with a VR headset. As I had never tried it before, I took the opportunity. It was fun, especially as you had two handles in your hand with which you could interact with the virtual world instead of a mouse or a controller. As I learned, you can borrow these VR headsets if you have an event like a birthday party or want to have fun with your friends.

Final Thoughts

I would like to say thank you to Anna, Felh bcsi, Mdea, Kroly, Barna, Vanda, Viktria, Anna, Renta, Fanni, Bianka, Rka, Kata, Barbara, Veronika, Vivien, Marcel, Martin, Emila, Kristf, Gerg, Lszl who are the people behind CraftHub the organizer of the Craft Conf. They made my first offline conference really memorable and I am pretty sure the organizers of my next conference will have a hard time outshining the Craft Conf 2022.

I would also say thank you to my friends Szabi, Frsz, Karesz, and Laci who joined me personally for the time of the conference. I really enjoyed this 2 days and I just hope we can repeat it next year too.

Dantotsu, Radical Software Quality Improvement - A Summary of Fabrice Bernhard's Talk From Craft Conf 2022

Miklós Szeles — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:38:49 +0000

As you might already know I have visited the Craft Conf 2022 Software Developer conference recently. You can find my report about it here. There were many outstanding talks and I have decided to highlight some of them by writing a summary of those talks.

As I am a test automation engineer it was no question I will listen to all the quality assurance related talks. My first pick is Fabrice Bernhard's talk called Dantotsu Radical Software Quality Improvement which definitely raised my curiosity with the unusual word Dantotsu and of course also with the promise of radically improving quality.

Fabrice Bernhard is the Co-Founder and Group CTO of Theodo a fast-growing custom digital software consultancy. They have adopted DevOps, Scrum, and lean and with their aid, they were able to grow from 10 to 600 people delivering great quality work despite the rapid growth.

The Dantotsu Book

In today's world where software is taking over basically everything, it is quite a big challenge to scale without sacrificing quality as Fabrice explained. One year ago a book by Sadao Nomura has been published with the title "The Toyota Way of Dantotsu Radical Quality Improvement" which immediately raised Fabrice's attention. His talk was about the Dantotsu method and how they adapted it for software development. Please let me share his talk in my own words.

Software is eating the world

As Marc Andreessen summarized in 2011: Software is eating the world. Starting around 20 years ago startups like Netflix, Amazon, and Airbnb disrupted whole sectors using software and this tendency is rising continuously many new players coming raising a huge amount of funds. This is of course good news for us software developers as a portion of that money will land in our pockets. It is good news for us up to the point that introducing bugs has very expensive consequences.

I think most of us heard about the Ariane 5 catastrophe. Does not sound familiar? What if I tell a rocket with 7 billion dollar development cost and 500 million dollar value exploded 40 seconds after its launch in 1996 due to an integer conversion error in a single line of code in which a 32-bit integer was passed to a function that expected a 16-bit integer.

The code which resulted in the catastrophe was responsible for the horizontal alignment of the rocket. Just a few lines above the bug the conversion for the vertical alignment was handled correctly, but for some reason, the developer(s) did not find it important to handle the same for the horizontal alignment.

When we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars it is not surprising space industry has extreme quality processes. To mention an example adding 6000 lines of code for the GPS feature needed 2500 pages of specification and the 400k line of code for the whole system required 40000 pages of specifications which means one page of specification for 10 lines of code.

Like it or not software is everywhere nowadays, not just in your thermostat, coffee machine, and television but also in more mission-critical things like self-driving cars. Cause of this in many cases we need especially high-quality software as we are not only talking about money but even about human lives.

Unfortunately writing 4 pages of documentation for 10 lines of code is not really scalable, especially in our fast-paced agile world where you have to deliver value for your customer frequently.

On the other end of the scale there is the move fast and break things approach with which of course you can scale but you have to sacrifice quality in order to do that.

The software practices used for the shuttle produced one defect per 400k lines while the industry average based on studies is around 10-20 defects per 1k lines of code which means 5000 times more defects.

As both of the approaches has their downsides we need another approach and here comes Dantotsu into the picture.

The Dantotsu Method

The Dantotsu method has been developed by Sadao Nomura at Toyota. Toyota is well known for its high-quality standards and I think there are no software developers who have not heard about lean thinking which also originated from Toyota.

A Brief History of Dantotsu

I am pretty sure this part won't be as fun as in Fabrice's talk so I am keeping it short. Sadao Namura an executive at Toyota regularly visited each branch to understand the individual situations of those branches. As an outcome of the visits, he wrote an A3-sized paper about the problems and also about their countermeasures.

When he visited months later to his surprise he realized nothing has changed, so he gave them a similar A3-sized page and asked them to implement it this time, just to realize a few months later nothing has changed.

As Sadao realized it does not work this way he decided to make a major change in his policy and that was which lead to the birth of the Dantotsu Quality Activities.

The Method

First, let's see what are the key points of the Dantotsu method.

Visual quality management is highly emphasized. Tracking daily, and monthly defects on the vehicles visualized on a wall, not on a computer. And also tracking the ambitious goals on the monthly view.
Defects are classified by stages of outflow instead of priority. No defects should reach the customer, so they are focusing on how to detect that earlier in the flow. There are four categories of these defects as you can see in the below image. What is very important to mention is that they also classify based on the source of the defect determining whether it is coming from production engineering, from the supplier, from welding, ...
The team leader is highly involved in examining the product defect which is an 8-step procedure. The procedure's steps are:
1. Team leader examines the defective part to identify the faulty process
2. Team leader checks other parts in stocks for the same effect
3. Team leader investigates the defect's cause through interviews with workers
4. Team leader implements countermeasures
5. Team leader reports on defect analysis and countermeasures during a daily meeting
6. Team leader creates/improves standards and deploys horizontally to handle similar processes/items
7. Team leader train workers
8. Team leader checks if workers are performing according to standard throughout go and sees As you can see the team leader takes a significant part in all 8 steps. There is one more very important aspect of this procedure. The whole process is conducted in 24 hours. The first four steps happen during the first day and the other four happen during the next day.
Systematic defect analysis. They collect defect details, determine causes, and then define the required countermeasures. You can see an example below. At this point, Fabrice mention they had an ongoing debate in his team for years. The testing passionates said we could have avoided bugs by introducing more unit tests, and better end-to-end tests, and the other half of the group was of the opinion to design a better architecture, doing a better domain-driven design. Fabrice was more on the prevention side than on the testing side, but thanks to the Dantotsu book he realized the whole debate was wrong. They should do both of them.
Dantotsu invests in systems to leave no chance for defects to appear again. As soon as a defect appears two or three times they invest in systems that prevent the appearance of those bugs.

This was a short summary of the Dantotsu method. In order to get a better grasp on the method, it is highly recommended to read the book.

At this point you might think, it is great they found a method that can be used to radically improve quality in a factory but how can we apply it in software development. Please, keep on reading to find out as Fabrice gave an answer to that in the second part of his talk by telling what they did in order to implement the process.

Dantotsu and Software Development

The first thing that was done by his team was to standardize the definition of a defect. In the end, they agreed everything is a defect that was unexpected by the user.

Standardize the way the group measure bugs. They tried different approaches to measure the bugs they even tried it on paper as Sadao Namura emphasized you should not use a computer for that, but you should do it on paper/wall. This approach might work in a factory but in the era of remote work is not feasible, so they have built a tool with which they can track defects on different projects.

They have standardized their outflow classification by defining 5 groups:

A defects: Defects detected by developers
B defects: Defects detected by the team during code reviews or functional reviews
C defects: Defects detected during an inspection by PO or QA
D defects: Defects detected in production
E defects: Defects that generated a customer complaint

They also determined the source of the defects as you can see in the below diagram.

After defining the basics they went on by putting the Dantotsu method into practice. Their team lead became their tech lead whose responsibility was to analyze one bugfix a day.

The tech leads not just analyze the bugfix but if it is not clear who should fix it then the dev lead's responsibility is to fix it. After fixing the bug, all the information collected about it, even a screenshot of the code which fixed the bug. After that, the tech lead does a root cause analysis and defines the needed countermeasures. He/she analyzes how they could have detected it earlier and also how they could prevent it in the future. In terms of timing, the tech lead fixes the bug, analyzes the defect, checks other parts of the codebase for similar defects, and comes up with suggested countermeasures. During the next day, the tech lead shares his findings and the suggested countermeasures the next day during the daily bugfix analysis session. And during the next sprint, the team implements the countermeasures on which they agreed.

To mention a few examples of potential countermeasures:

Creating Lint rules
Adding tests
Rewrite parts of the system
Create or improve training material
Train team members on identified skill gaps.

Fabrice mentioned they even experimented with A defects. They call a bug A defect when the code does not work as expected at the first manual test. They even gamified it. If your code works on the first try you get a "right the first time" award. They even have a Slack bot congratulating every time. It not just promotes the celebration of quality but also thinking before coding.

That was the summary of how you can use the Dantotsu method in your software development project. Before I close this article let me write a few words about the learnings Fabrice shared with us.

Learnings

Try to connect efforts better with the big picture: Putting so much effort at the defect level might result in losing the big picture. In order to avoid it, the team has a very good visual representation of the architecture on which they can map the defects to the architecture.
On large ongoing projects the result will take months: They have introduced the method on large ongoing projects and the sad reality is it might take several months to see the results. When they did root cause analysis there were cases when the root cause dated back 9 months.
They also have experience with a project which used the Dantotsu method right from the beginning. It is a small project with 5789 lines of code developed in 118 engineer days. They found 2 defects in production ( D defect) and 2 defects in inspection ( C defect) which means 0.3 defects in 1000 lines of code or 0.02 defects per engineer-day which is one order of magnitude better than what they saw in other projects.

To sum it up I found Fabrice's talk about how they implemented the Dantotsu method very fascinating. I really like the idea and I will definitely share this article with my team. We work on a much bigger project and I do not see much chance to have a dedicated person responsible for analyzing bugfixes and determining countermeasures daily, but having 1-2 sessions weekly by cherry-picking some of the bugs might be feasible. As Fabrice's project and their experiences are relatively fresh I am pretty curious about how their project evolved over time and I am sure Fabrice will share their learnings with us.

How to Write an Article Just About Almost Anything

Miklós Szeles — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 16:01:01 +0000

In my previous article, I wrote about the reasons why you should start blogging. In this article, I explain what are the steps needed to write a great article according to my current experience. As I do not want to overwhelm you, I divided my advice into 3 articles: The basics, publication, and advanced tips. In this article, we will focus on the basics.

Preparation

Choose a Topic in Which You Are Interested

I would never write an article about a topic that does not make me enthusiastic. I do not recommend it to you either. I am pretty sure you could do it, but writing should be fun, and in case you are not enjoying you won't be happy with the result. In order to engage your readers, you have to be engaged with the topic too.

I love writing articles (however that was not always the case), and that is why I have selected this topic.

Choose One Topic Only

You can also use the Single Responsibility Principle(SRP) for articles. It is important to narrow down your scope and not write about many different topics in one article (except in case your goal is exactly to introduce many topics as a starter for an article series). It often happens that many related ideas pop into my mind which cannot fit into the current topic, in that case, I just save the ideas for later.

Have Specific Goals on Your Mind

Now you have the topic. It is a great start, but let's go one step further. Having the goal to share your knowledge is a great thing in itself, but be more specific. I like to set SMART goals. SMART is the acronym for:

S pecific
M easurable
A chievable
R elevant
T ime-bound I won't explain it in detail, as others have already done it many times. Check for example this article if you are interested. So let's examine my goal:
Specific : I would like to inspire others, to start writing articles , by providing all the necessary info to start this great journey of self-development. In addition, I would like to extend my audience.
Measurable : In the case, that at least one person will write an article thanks to my post I will be happy. Measuring extending my audience is not that straightforward, but let's say get 10 more followers either on LinkedIn or on my blog.
Achievable : I might be too optimistic, but I do believe I will achieve my goal.
Relevant : I really enjoy writing articles and also reading good articles, so the more we have the better.
Time-bound : My plan is to write at least one article every 2 weeks. So let's set a 2-week long timeframe to create my article. For reaching the goal it is harder because after reading my article somebody has to persuade him/herself to write one and they will also need at least 2 weeks. So I would say let's have one week after posting to have the 10 extra followers and 3 weeks more after that to have the first article. So in order to verify I achieved my goal, please let me know in case you write an article , I would really appreciate that. 😊

It is very useful to also have a higher-level goal, like publishing an article once a month. That will help you keep on track. My higher-level goal is to publish an article biweekly.

Find And Process Relevant Materials on The Topic

Even if you are familiar with the topic I recommend you to read/watch further to expand your knowledge on the subject , especially as you would like to give something valuable.

Instead of just getting the information try to analyze those materials using the points I will provide you in the next section. Are they following those ideas? Are they doing something better? What else can you take with you to help you write your own article?

To be honest, in this case, I did not use any extra material, I was building on my prior experience some of them are recent, and some of them are several years old.

Writing Basics

The Ugly First Draft

The "ugly first draft" term comes from Ann Hadley. The hardest part is to start writing. No matter how many words you have you should write them on your computer (or notebook if you prefer that). Maybe just one thought, a sentence, a paragraph, or whatever it is on your mind.

If you have something you can iterate on it. Extending the words to sentences. Sentences to paragraphs and paragraphs to chapters and in the end, you will arrive at the point when you have a complete article.

I have another good reason why I create the ugly first draft. I cannot keep too much thought in my head, but if I write them done, then I can start thinking about the follow-up. This method is extremely effective for me.

Choose The Right Title

I do not have to elaborate on how important the title is. In case you cannot catch the reader's attention , then they will simply scroll to the next article. You don't have to come up with the best title at the beginning. It is okay if you have a good enough one. I am pretty sure you will have great new ideas while you are writing the article.

I have chosen "How to write an article just about almost anything". It is quite generic, but I hope is still able to raise curiosity (even if some might will come with a negative attitude to see how miserably will I fail here).

Use Images

" One picture worth a thousand words." - it is even more true in today's information-overloaded world. Actually, this point should have come first, as it is more important than the title. Our brain processes visual information way faster than written text. By the time you read the title your brain most probably decided whether the info is relevant to you or not.

As the outcome of the above, I suggest always using a cover image. Ok, but what type of image should you use? As always, it depends. It depends on your audience. I do not recommend filling the article with pictures of half-naked women for example. It would surely draw lots of attention, but you have to catch the audience relevant for you.

The best is to use your own pictures , but in case that is not an option, I recommend using stock photos/graphics. Freepik is a great site where you can have unlimited image download for a few dollars a month, which can be more than enough for a couple of articles in case you think in advance. In order to cut, edit, and combine images, you can use the poor man's Photoshop Gimp. Joking apart, It is an awesome tool with more than enough features than you need.

You should use images inside your article too. Of course, you should not overdo it, and you should use images only relevant to your article. It happens very often that you need a diagram or chart. For that purpose, I use draw.io which is an awesome tool with lots of possibilities. You can save directly to GitHub, GitLab, Dropbox, and more.

For a cover image, I have chosen one of my favorite water droplet photos taken by myself a few years ago. It is personal, and colorful and hopefully, it also makes you think: What the heck is it? Is it a bottle in the water? Is it only water? Is it a real photo at all? It is a real photo indeed, no Photoshop was used except for what I needed to process the RAW image. In case you like the image you can find more on my Facebook page.

I also used 3 stock photos to represent each section.

Provide the Context

Tell the readers what you will write about, so they can decide whether they are really interested or not.

My title speaks for itself, so not much extra info is needed. And also it is a follow-up to a previous article on the topic.

Use Headings and Paragraphs

In order to make navigation easier, and make your article more understandable, you should use headings and instead of writing everything in one paragraph, you should separate your text logically. One thing is important. Do not use an H1 heading in your article as Hashnode uses H1 for the title and search engines do not like articles with multiple H1 headings.

As you can see this article is structured, having many headings and paragraphs.

Highlight Your Message

Personally, I prefer longer articles, but before reading them, I like to skim through to see if there is really something useful for me. Time is money, providing the important information easily available makes your reader's life easier. Cause of this I usually write the main takeaways in bold.

In case you read this article, you can get all the info in a few seconds. In case you are interested in the whys, then you will surely read the article, in case not, then why should we waste each others' time.

Try to Think With the Reader's Mind

Of course, everyone is different and has their own personal background but there is one common in them. They are interested in the topic you are writing about. Try to predict what questions will arise in their mind , and provide the answers to those questions. Or at least follow the next advice.

Provide Links for Readers to Further Deepen Their Knowledge

Of course, everyone can use google. A quite harsh joke about it is LMGTFY(Let Me Google That For You). In case you already researched the subject and have the best links then why should you not share it with your readers? It would be a waste of time not to do that.

However I did not use any study material for this article I still linked many tools, and pages that can be useful for you.

Use Spell-Checking Software

There is nothing more annoying than reading a text and bumping into spelling mistakes all the time. It gives a quite negative impression of you. I am not a native English speaker, so I have to be really careful not to make big mistakes.

I use Grammarly, which is available as a browser plugin and automatically offers corrections for most of my mistakes.

Do Not Repeat Yourself

It is not a good experience to read the same words and phrases all the time again, so try to not repeat yourself. Use synonyms, and different phrases to refer to the same thing. I highly recommend thesaurus.com to find synonyms and Grammarly can suggest alternatives right in your browser during writing. I still have to make myself use it more often. However it is an advanced topic, but even search engines prefer not to have the same phrase appearing again and again.

Ouch. You got me. I just wrote the word "again" twice (and now this is the third). Of course, that was a phrase that is completely okay to use. Apart from that, I tried to avoid repeating it.

Be Personal

I know some will disagree with me on this point, especially in case we are talking about technical stuff. But developers are also humans. They are not just technical people, they have feelings, humor, empathy, ...

Share some background information about yourself , an old story, or whatever you like. Show your humor. I am pretty sure not everyone will love it, but the good news is that it is completely fine. But whoever likes it will be much more engaged with you. They won't only read your articles because they are interested in the topic, but they will read them because they are written by you. It is the perfect opportunity to draw your audience's attention to different topics which might be relevant to them.

Nobody is perfect , everybody makes mistakes. I do not like the word "mistake", I prefer Robin Sharma's words:

There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery. From struggle comes strength. Even pain can be a wonderful teacher. Show you are not perfect and you are one of us humans. Tell the readers about your learned lessons. I am pretty sure it will be useful for many of them.

Of course, you should not overdo this, you should not post a picture of your dog or child in each article. Less is more in this case also.

I brought a personal image here, and also shared ways how I like working. I also put in some jokes that you might or might not notice. 😊

Do Not Leave Your Article Unfinished

You should close your article with either a summary or a conclusion. Without that, your reader will feel something is missing.

I did close my article with some encouraging words.

Get Reviewers

However I am not doing it at the moment, but in the past, I always asked for feedback from multiple people.

Whom should you ask for feedback? Again, it depends. It depends on your subject. In case you are writing about something non-technical as I do in this article, you can get almost anyone's opinion. But be careful as your family and friends will be biased towards you , despite this they can still provide valuable feedback. Ask them to point out parts that they especially loved, and also parts that were not that good , instead of asking "How do you like my article". For more specific topics it is best to have someone who has the domain knowledge , so asking your colleagues or other experts in the field would be the best option.

Whenever I wrote this article my plan was to ask my wife and some of my colleagues and friends to read this article and provide feedback before I post it, but months passed since I wrote the article and I decided to not ask for feedback about this article.

Give Time to Mature Your Article

It is often worth waiting a couple of days before you post your article. You can have new ideas , and you can get even more feedback. But do not wait too much. Release it, get feedback, learn from it and then write again and then repeat this cycle frequently. You will be surprised how much you improved in case you read one of your articles from several months ago. Developers have a saying for this: In case you look at your code after a few months, and you still think it is great, it only means you did not improve anything during those months. 😊

Well, I wrote this article around 3 months ago so I left way too much time to mature my article. I did this because I found more joy in writing other articles. But now I feel the time to publish this article.

You Cannot Fail

This is the last, but maybe the most important topic. I remember the time when I was learning Lindy Hop and I was afraid to go to a party to use my learnings in real life. Every miracle starts with the first step, which might be hard, but believe me, in case you want to improve, you have to USE what you have.

You might get negative comments, and feedback (however in case you are choosing the right reviewers or readers, they won't let you down, but suggest improvements), but use them for your own gain , consider them, and use what is useful and simply ignore the others.

Ready to Go

And that's all for now. I believe it is enough to jumpstart you on writing your first article. I am pretty sure there are a lot of other important factors which are relevant for you, but you can only find out them in case you start on this fun and valuable journey. I am sure you won't embarrass anybody (including yourself) in case you write your first article now.

As you can get used to it by now, I won't leave you here without any questions.

In case you are writing your first article: Which point from above gives you the biggest headache? I am happy to help in case you have stuck anywhere. Just post a comment or drop me a private message.

In case you are an experienced writer: What is your number one advice for newbies which is not listed here?

P.S: Support me by sharing this article if you like it 👍

Hackernoon interviewed me , so if you would like to learn more about me , just click here and read it!

Become an agileish superhero!

Learn how to memorize anything in the world. In this series, I teach you everything I know about learning and memorization, including memory palaces, marker images, number memorization techniques, associations, etc.

You can already find the first videos on my Youtube channel in which I show you that it is possible to memorize such boring things as positions of circles.

Don't forget to read How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC) before you watch the videos.

Join the Agileish Superheroes Facebook group to learn memorization techniques, thinking techniques, agility, reading and learning techniques and also to get notified about new live sessions and videos

As I am a crazy person, I have open-sourced my life on GitHub on Fool's day.

I am sharing my thoughts, writings, and creations, and as I am frequently committing, I have open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process, and also my creation process.

Just click here to check my open-sourced life on Github!

My credo : The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet

Read my story , in case you would like to understand how I think and act as a developer and tester in the real world. You can get some insights about my humor , and I am also happy to tell you that this is my article about which I am the proudest of now.

In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram.

Saroj Behera, Software Engineer AKA Bloggers of Hashnode by Miki Szeles 001

Miklós Szeles — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 19:44:29 +0000

During the last 4 months, I have read more than 500 Hashnode articles. There were articles from beginner bloggers, seasoned bloggers, and also from hardcode bloggers.

Of course, there were huge differences in terms of topic, readability, structure, and matureness in these articles, but there was one common in all of them:

They were not just able to grab my attention but also to keep it till the end of the article.

As I read the articles week by week many names started to appear again and again which made me curious. I wanted to know a little bit about the background of these great hloggers and I am pretty sure I am not the only one who would love to read about the creators of these excellent articles.

Hundreds of new articles appear on Hashnode each week cause of this it is very hard to stand out and reach the readers no matter how good are the articles we write.

I have learned about self-branding in the past and one of the main takeaway for me was the following:

If you would like to sell your product, no matter whether it is a photograph, a physical product, or an article in our case, it is not enough to have a quality product you have to make people interested in you.

Sharing personal stories, thoughts, or our everyday struggles will result in much more engagement from our readers as they realize we are also a human similar to them having the same everyday struggles as they have.

As my name Mikls means Claus and I also have a quite big belly, I decided to put my red hat on and become the secret Santa. From now on, I will approach bloggers of the Hashnode community and interview them regularly.

That's enough from the backstory, let's see who is the first Hashnode blogger. 😊

The Hlogger: Saroj Behera

If you read my Hashnode weekly articles, then you know I am not really into blockchain and crypto, still, I decided to make the first interview with Saroje Behera who is writing harticles about the blockchain.

I am not into blockchain and crypto so much that I have bought Team Fortress 2 keys for 17 bitcoin several years ago when bitcoin was not really known to the public.

Such an idiot, I guess that is what you think now. Still, I have no nightmares about that and can talk about it without having any bad feelings.

Blockchain is much more than crypto and being a beginner in the field Saroj Behera's article can help you to understand the fundamentals of blockchain technology.

Dear reader, please welcome Saroj Behera.

The Interview

Hello, Saroj! Let's start! Can you tell us a few words about your childhood? Where did you come from? How was your life before you became a software engineer?

Well, My childhood is very different from what I am today. :) I was born in district Angul in Odisha state, India. In my family, I am the elder son, including my younger sister we are 4 members. I was very distracted and always used to roam outside, enjoying and chilling In my childhood. Till the 12th standard, I studied in a private school. After 12th I got interested in computer science. Then I joined city govt college for the degree course. After that again I did my Master in Computer Application(MCA) at a private university in Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

From MCA until now, I am doing my professional career in Software Industry.

What was your first memorable moment related to your profession?

Yepp! It's interesting. When I used to learn first time coding, my trainer used to give me tasks every day. And I was not able to complete those on time. I used to forget all things.

Then I asked my mentor, and then he suggested trying the Forgetting Curve methods while learning new skills. After applying these methods, I completed all tasks on time.

Can you tell me a little bit about what your job entails? What does the day-to-day look like?

As you know, I work for Maveric Systems Limited, Bangalore, India as a Software Engineer. In Maveric, I used to work on different tech stacks like JavaScript, Node, React, etc.

My day starts with a coffee and looking through what I have to do for the day. I always make a list one day earlier. My team mainly used Jira as a ticketing system, and we have sprints.

A sprint will be a week or two. In that amount of time, I need to complete my given work to be on track with my goal. Then it comes to coding! While doing code, I always care about the test cases, code quality, and other essential factors.

Every day we used to have a stand-up meeting with my team to learn about how the project was going on and what issues are facing like that.

What was your worst moment related to your profession?

Eight months back, one day, I got an outside project. I accepted it and started working on it. My friend and I used to do that project. I handled the frontend part, and the friend is the backend part. On the day of our first demo, my friend's PC got some windows problem, and it was formatted. That day I am remembering, I was blank. Somehow I convinced the client, and we postponed it to a new date.

What was your best moment related to your profession?

Well, best moment! Once in my previous organization there is an issue with some AWS authentication logic, 2 developers were tried for 4-5 days. After that, my manager gave me that task, then luckily I did it in 1 day. That was one of the best moments in my professional life.

Do you think a degree is required to be a software engineer these days?

Great question! If you know the skills, there is no need for a degree. Of course, you should be good at logic building and a great problem solver. Yaa, the degree also matters. If anyone is looking for a degree that can help to get a job in software, then I will be recommended for Software engineering or computer science.

Also, just a degree wont get you the job. With a degree, you must also have the skills and programming languages like Java, C, C++, etc.

Again, the most important is your passion. If you are passionate about software engineering, then only you can deliver the work. You wont succeed without a great passion. Passion for learning new skills, passion for having patience, and passion for exploring new tech.

Please tell me 7 things you would like to share about yourself!

7 things! Its interesting. Well, firstly, I can say I am passionate about programming. Every day I try to write something.

Second, I always believe in myself. I think if we imagine one thing, then we can achieve it. We need hard work and focus.

Third, I love to read books, any books that may be technical, self-help, or any story. I love to read. I believe every day we should read something. I called it brain exercise.

Fourth, I can't say NO.

Fifth, I love to stay with my parents and family. I believe work can be done anywhere if we know the right skills.

Sixth, I have a shallow friend circle. We will be the average of 5 people around us, thats why I always choose the right people.

Last, my long-term goal is to make a charity where I can give free education to the needy.

Thats all my 7 things!

Do you have a specific area of interest?

Thanks for this question. I am always a learner. Every day I try to learn something new that can help my career. Currently, I am exploring blockchain and its applications. I think you already know what blockchain is. Blockchain is a great technology that may change the future.

How do you think blockchain will change the future?

Well, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. It works on the decentralized network model. It means, that both data and functionality(business logic) of an application reside on multiple servers that are not owned and managed by a single entity.

With the help of this, we can build great applications. Currently, maximum applications work on central databases, where our data are not safe. But in blockchain, there is no single authority that controls our data. It works on a peer-to-peer network, where every peer acts as a server. Blockchain is immutable, which means any new data added to the blockchain network is permanent, and no one can modify or delete it. In this way, blockchain will help you to build robust apps.

Interesting! As far as I know, you are not just learning about blockchain, but you also share your knowledge with the community. Where can our readers find your writings?

Yes, I have a blog; you can find it here on Hashnode, and you can also read me on medium.

Here I write articles about blockchain and other crypto-related topics.

Can you share some insights about how you write your articles?

It was a kind of new habit for me. Till 2021 November I never ever wrote even a single article. At that time I used to train under one mentor on an online platform. He was a kind of writer also. He motivated me a lot in this new world.

After that, I tried writing one article, and luckily I got a huge response, but then I never stopped.

Normally I used to write articles on Blockchain-related domains. I believe Blockchain is a future technology.

Do you have some advice for new or wannabe bloggers?

Yes, I will advise new bloggers like, they must focus on one category like I am focusing only on blockchain-related. The also most important thing is consistency, at least try to write one article in a week and keep doing it. That's it.

Why do you like Hashnode?

Well, I like hashnode. Because it is mostly for software professionals. Also in the Hashnode, I can find great articles every day. I love the hashnode UI and personal blog domain feature.

Yepp! I also used to write articles on different platforms, but mostly I used hashnode!

Cool. Do you have a favorite fictional character? Why he/she/it is your favorite?

I believe in Ankur Warikoo. Ankur is an Indian author, investor, and businessperson. I always follow him.

Who is your favorite real-life idol? Why?

My Mother! She is working as a school teacher. Also, she always cooks for us, not only cooks but all other minor work. She is always my real-life idol.

Do you play video games? What do you do in your free time?

Interesting. I very rarely play these types of games. Instead, I love to read books in my free time and always try to learn new skills so that they will help in my professional career.

Thank you, Saroj. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Do you have any message or some closing words for our readers?

For readers, I will always say one thing, focus on your goal, and love what you are doing, always keep trying till the work is done.

Also thanks to you Miki, for giving your time to me for this great interview. it was one type of great moment for me. I hope I'll meet soon with you :)

Dear readers. Thank you for taking the time to read Saroj Behera's interview. You can follow him on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, and also on Twitter if you do not want to miss his posts.

P.S.: Something Good Will Happen To You Today!

Hashnode Randomly 007 by Miki Szeles

Miklós Szeles — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:00:01 +0000

Maudience: Hello, dear Readers! Hello, Miki!
Miki: Hello, dear Readers! Hello, Maudience!
Maudience: How many articles did you bookmark this time, Miki?
Miki: 86.
Maudience: Wow, you found 86 harticles worth mentioning in one week?
Miki: Yes, and I have not even had the chance to check all of the titles.
Nikolai: But, there are only around 40 articles here. How is that possible?
Miki: I had very little time, and including all 86 articles would take me several hours more, as I need to write the recommendation for all of them.
Minnie: So, you decided to post more frequently!? Very clever.
Miki: Well, I am not sure that I will post more frequently as I have much less time to read articles nowadays, but I am planning to post around 40 articles in each Hashnode Randomly.
Minnie: Oh, so keep the name Hashnode Randomly!?
Miki: Yes. Having the name weekly put too much pressure on me. I wanted to finish the article during the weekend, then I pushed myself to read again every title, and I have no time for that now.
Nikolai: I guess you were wasting your time on stupid things, so you had no time to read all the titles.
Miki: Well, I wouldn't call spending time with my family and friends, reading, working, relaxing, and sleeping stupid.
Nikolai: Umm. Okayish.
Maudience: What can our readers expect from you in the upcoming weeks, Miki?
Miki: My plan is to move back to test automation. I have started a series about the Selenide test automation framework, which I would like to continue. I have also begun a harticle about Karate DSL, which would be great to finish, but before that, I am planning to post an article in which I give a complete path that can help people land their first job as a test automation engineer.
Maudience: Sounds interesting. How can our readers make sure they won't miss your articles?
Miki: At the top of each of my harticles (including this one), there is a subscribe to my newsletter section, so they can get all my articles in their inbox as soon as I post them.
Maudience: Great. So once again. What about the Hashnode Randomly?
Miki: I love reading Hashnode articles; it has become my hobby. Again. There are so many great articles that get lost due to the tremendous amount of new articles appearing on Hashnode weekly. That is why I started the Hashnode weekly back then to draw attention to those hidden gems.
Nikolai: But you are not objective, Miki. Your article selection is highly biased by your preference.
Miki: That is true and completely okay too.
Nikolai: Why?
Miki: First of all, no matter who creates a newsletter, that will be biased. Secondly, I suppose there is some overlapping between my readers' preferences and my preferences. All in all, that is why they are reading my articles.
Nikolai: That's all?
Miki: No. As you know, Nikolai, I like to broaden my view, so I read three types of articles nowadays.
Nikolai: What are they?
Miki: Anything testing related. Unfortunately, there are only very few articles from this category here on Hashnode, but I hope it will change in the future.
Nikolai: What else?
Miki: Anything which is highly related to my current interest, which means articles about Python development, productivity, psychology, self-improvement, AI, and data analysis.
Nikolai: What is the third?
Miki: Interesting articles which are not closely related to my current knowledge. I have written about this in detail in my article where I summarized the experiences of my first month as a hlogger.
Maudience: Guys! Let's start with the harticles. I do not want to lose our readers right at the beginning.

Today in The Spotlight 🔦: Creator, Curator, Commentator, or Connector from Arvid Kahl

I have read a very insightful article from Arvid Kahl, which made me think about myself. In his article Choose Your Own Adventure: Creator, Curator, Commentator, or Connector, Arvid mentions four boxes into which you can be put on social media: Creator, Curator, Commentator, or Connector.

In short, you are a Creator if you create content. You are a Curator if you collect and share other people's content. You are a Commentator if you pick other people's content and talk about that. And finally, if you create and "manage" communities, you are a connector.

You can be in multiple boxes at the same time. I thought about this for a while, and I came up with the following values: 25% 10% 10% 20% 35%

I am writing articles. That is why I am 25% creator. I am posting the Hashnode Randomly from time to time, so I am a 10% curator. I often comment on others' articles sharing my relevant e[xperience there. I am building multiple online communities (Selenide User Group, Agileish Superheroes, so I am a connector too.

Yes, there is a fifth number too, but I won't tell you what it is as I want you to read the article, as it is worth every minute you spend on it.

Software Development

Do you know what are progressive web apps? I have to admit I did not hear about them until last week. Vinay Krishnan gives a great intro about progressive web apps in his writing Progressive Web Apps: An introduction.
yaox023 explains pretty well how token based authentication works.
Are you interested in web scraping? Nicolae Rotaru explains how you can use Page2API API to scrape Reddit in his writing How to Scrape Reddit Data: Posts, Images, Comments, and more..
Saumya Ranjan Nayak collected a list of advice on how you can advance from a coder to a software engineer in his article How to Become a Software Engineer from a Coder ?. However, he is talking about the technical side. It is equally important to improve your soft skills if you really want to become a good software developer.
Have you ever wondered how you can build scalable and secure web applications in Python? Ashutosh Krishna gives an intro about the Flask microframework in his post Getting Started With Flask.
Writing clean code is a must-have skill that should be learned by every software developer. It is highly advised to follow the SOLID principles whenever you write code. Ashraf Mohamed explains the dependency inversion principle in his post S.O.L.I.D Principles: Dependency Inversion Principle..
Almost every company is moving towards becoming agile nowadays, but it is very easy to do it the wrong way. Ganesh Pilli collected some pitfalls with which a leader can mess with Agile. I also added my thoughts in the comment section.
Being a software developer has its challenges. Brock Herion gives some advice based on his experience about the topic in his writing Things about software development I wish somebody had told me.
Maxi Contieri continued his extremely helpful series about code smells. It is unbelievable, but he just posted Code Smell 135 - Interfaces With just One Realization, which is the 135th element of his series.
Are you learning Python? Do you like the Hangman game? Just read Ashutosh Krishna's Hangman Game using Python article.
Have you ever struggled with solving a problem? Saptarshi Sarkar gives you valuable advice in his How to Improve Logic Building Skills in Programming article.
Rakesh Potnuru introduced a new solution with which you can incentivize open-source contribution in his Taking Open Source contributions and communities to next level with the Reward System post. I also did something similar with the Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward program.
Joseph Perez was a Twitch streamer and also managed a cheese store. I think that is enough info to convince you to read his story My Experience Of Becoming A Software Engineer.
Caroline participated in the Craft Conf giveaway and won a ticket for the Craft Conf. She participated with her Five Basics Of Web Development For Beginners: "AKA Craft Conf Giveaway Participation" article.

Testing

Srgio Martins posts are worth reading if you are a tester or a test automation engineer. His latest post that I read was Five C's of a Test Engineer, but you can find much more valuable content on his blog.
If you would like to test APIs, then Tiffany Lewis's Top 5 API Testing Tools For 2022 And Beyond article is highly recommended. I also recommend checking Karate DSL, which is my number one favorite for API automation.
Have you ever heard about DevTestOps? I have to admit I heard about it the first time in KMS Solutions Blog's What is DevTestOps and how can it transform Agile? article.

Data analysis, Artificial Intelligence

Do you know what is a serverless service? Well, I had no idea before I read Austen Collins's Deploying PyTorch Model as a Serverless Service article.
keerthi reddy gives advice on what kind of data science project you should work on in order to make your portfolio more appealing in his Topmost data science project to add to your portfolio in 2022 harticle.
Do you know what is topic modelling? I had no idea, but luckily we can learn it from Neurotech Africa's Get Started With Topic Modelling Using Gensim In Nlp harticle.

Networks

Dev Valecha clearly explains what is load balancing in his post Understanding Load Balancing!! (NGINX) ft. Jethalal..

Productivity, Self-Improvement, Psychology, Soft-skills

Did you know we develop an opinion about a person in 3 seconds? Do you also put people in boxes? moalsare33's Why We Misjudge People All the Time is definitely a good read on the topic.
"Some people in society do not need power, they dont need status, they dont need, but they want someone who can work with them, who can show them the right path." This quote is from FARZANA bano short but valuable harticle called Topic: How do you use your voice to positively impact yourself and your community?. Just check it if I made you curious.
I loved Loran L's Internal dialogue of a procrastinator harticle as he was also using a conversational style and also because I am also often a procrastinator. Luckily Meadline joined my team, so she makes sure everything will be delivered on time.
The imposter syndrome affects many of us developers. I believe it is more common in the tech community as we have to keep face with the constantly uprising new technologies year by year and month by month. Despite this, imposter syndrome is still taboo in many places. Luckily saningo lekalantula toom the courage and gave also ideas on how you can deal with imposter syndrome.
Nik F P introduces 5 phases of management in his very interesting Soft Skills checkup: The many phases of Managing harticle.

Blogging, SEO

Alexander Richterich gives some advice on How should I write my first post. I also wrote a post about the topic months ago, but I did not post it yet. Maybe the time is here to share my experiences too.
Frank Elda talks about SEO in his writing SEO for Medium writers: get more views on your articles!. It is definitely worth reading even if you are not using medium, but instead, you use your own domain with Hashnode.

Blockchain

Have you heard about NFTs? Jamie V. talks about them in his writing NFTs - Disrupting technology or hype?.

Inspiring Stories

Damilola Abiola is a product manager who had lots of struggles in her life, and she is brave enough to share them with us in her writing Product Manager Diaries #1. I really appreciate it.
Julia Furst Morgado, similarly to many of us, have to learn new things while she has a full-time job. I have to admit it is very challenging to do that. However, she gives advice on how to code when you have a full-time job, her advice is equally valuable no matter what you are learning. Balancing a full-time job while learning to code
"On days when I feel discouraged, being grateful regardless helps me to persevere and carry on without letting the false thoughts of unworthiness hinder me from pursuing my purpose in life." quote is from Eula Chua's An Attitude of Gratitude and Exam Preparation harticle. Definitely worth reading if you need a little motivation.

Tools and Resources

Are you planning to create a website? If you are just interested in colors, then Suraj Vishwakarma's 5 Color Inspiration Website You Should Bookmark is definitely for you.

Non-Technical Articles

I was innocently browsing through the technical articles here on Hashnode when the picture of a yummy Beans on Toast appeared in front of me. I think I do not have to say I became hungry immediately. Sandra shared the recipe in her Beans on Toast Recipe How to Make it Perfect? writing.
Do you play Backgammon? Do you know how ancient it is? Just read baccaratsite top's Origin of Backgammon article to learn about this game.
Believe it or not, you can read tractor reviews on Hashnode. Just check Mukesh Gupta's Powertrac Tractor Price, Features, and Specifications- Khetigaadi article.

Newcomers

Phillip Cooper is a developer with more than a decade of experience and many ideas. He has decided to share them in the form of blog posts. You can read his first harticle here: Beginnings...
Puleeno Nguyen will write about WordPress and ReactJS. He was a little bit short on words, but you can still check his first post Hello Hash node.
However, KaguraTart wrote a longer sentence in her first post Hello World!, I still do not know what she will write about. Follow her if you are interested.
The same applies to Zubaydullo Abdirakhmonov's first article called Hello world!.
Kyle Yu will record his programming-related learnings on his blog. Here you can find another Hello world article: Hello World.
Vit Dng has been working for five years in the field of SAP HCM in Vietnam. Read his first post if you would like to know what we can expect from him. You can find it here: Hello world~
Aditya Rizki Pratama is an Indonesian kid who loves backend development, so that we can expect articles about that. You can find his first post here: Hello, it's Aditya Here
Shivaditya Shivganesh just started blogging similarly to the others. I asked him what he would write about, but no answer had arrived yet. You can still check the first post here: Hello World
Minnie: Despite keeping it short, it is still a lot of great list of harticles.
Miki: Yes, I think so.
Minnie: Where is the teaser trailer.
Miki: Wait for it. It will come.
McMuck: Here comes the part where we ask our readers to support us.
Miki: You are right.
Maudience: Dear Readers! As you might already know, Miki needs coffee not just to produce code but also for writing articles. He even hired our illustrator illustratoth to create a nice buy me a coffee image. So please support him with a few coffees if possible.
McMuck: Where is the logo?
Miki: We have to commit it to Github to make it live forever.
McMuck: Ummm. Okayish. Whatever you want, just get the money.

Hackernoon interviewed me , so if you would like to learn more about me , just click here and read it!

Become an agileish superhero!

You can already find the first videos on my Youtube channel in which I show you that it is possible to memorize such boring things as positions of circles.

Don't forget to read How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC) before you watch the videos.

Minnie: Are we there yet?
Miki: No, it is still the call to action section.
Minnie: I can't wait to see it.

As I am a crazy person, I have open-sourced my life on GitHub on Fool's day.

I am sharing my thoughts, writings, and creations, and as I am frequently committing, I have open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process, and also my creation process.

Just click here to check my open-sourced life on Github!

Minnie: And now?
Miki: Almost, Minnie. Almost.

My credo : The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet

In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram.

Minnie: And now?
Miki: We are there finally.
Minnie: So what is the teaser?
Miki: An upcoming article series.
Minnie: Really? About what?
Miki: I cannot tell, but I can say similarly to Hashnode weekly, it will also be related to Hashnode.
Minnie: Cool. I want to see it now.
Miki: Well, it is almost ready so that you can read it.
Minnie: Cool.

P.S.: Something good will happen to you today!

Hashnode Randomly 006 by Miki Szeles AKA Hashnode Weekly Reloaded

Miklós Szeles — Sun, 22 May 2022 12:34:56 +0000

Maudience: Dear reader! Miki likes to read. Miki likes to read a lot. During the reading, he bookmarks all of the harticles he finds insightful, interesting, or fun. Luckily, Miki likes to write too. Miki likes to write a lot. So he decided to create a newsletter in which he not just lists the articles, but also writes a few sentences about them, so you can easily find out whether the article is relevant for you or not.

Tableish Contentish

Nikolai: If you do not give a sh.t about what Miki was doing during the last two months and you are only here for your weekly dose of harticles, just click here!
If you want to know what harticles Miki wrote since he posted the last Hashnode weekly, then click here!
If you would like to become a super learner, thinker, or have a super memory just click here!
Do you want to know how Miki open-sourced himslef? Click here!
Want to read the interview Miki gave to Hackernoon? Read it here!
If you want to know how you can get access to your brain from your code for the price of a mid-level mobile phone, or if you want to know with which article Miki is participating in the Hashnode Writeathon Click here!
Do you want to win a ticket to Craft Conf 2022, which is one of the world's biggest software developer conferences? Click here for details!

What has happened in the last two months?

Minnie: Yuppie. I can't believe it. Another Hashnode Weekly. Finally.
Miki: Yeah, I am also happy about that.
Minnie: What happened? Why didn't you post for two months?
Miki: You know, I read 80-100 articles weekly and I realized I could not focus on other things if I am reading so much. I also burnt out on reading a little bit, so luckily I stopped.
Minnie: Luckily?
Miki: Luckily.
Minnie: Why?
Miki: As I had time to be creative and focus on other topics too.
Minnie: So what did you do in the last 2 months? ### Writing 9 Harticles
Miki: Well. Let's see. I have written 9 articles:
- How To Customize Your LinkedIn URL in 6 Easy Steps AKA How To Boost Your LinkedIn SEO AKA Lifehacks By Miki Szeles
- How you can find a job in one round of interview? AKA Perfectish Matchish Partnerish Opportunityish From Developerishish AKA The Great Refactoring.MD
- How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC)
- How to Improve Your Memory With Exponential Speed AKA How You Can Become An Agileish Superhero AKA Sprint 0003
- To Test, or Not to Test, That is Not The Question Reloaded - AKA Why You Should Replace Your Automated Tests With Manual Tests
- Do You Want to Learn Software Development From Top-Notch Experts From All Around The World? Here is Your Chance! AKA The Craft Conf Giveaway
- Breaking News! The Craft Conf Giveaway Submission Deadline Has Been Extended by a Week!
- A Brainwave Based Solution With Which Completely Paralyzed People Can Communicate With Their Loved Ones Using a Muse EEG Band
- Why Am I Attending The Craft Conf 2022 Software Development Conference?
Nikolai: 9 articles in 9 weeks? Such a loser. Earlier, you posted daily.
Miki: Well, you are partially right, but 4 of them are above 20 minutes read time and 2 of them above 30 minutes.
Nikolai: You are crazy, nobody will read them.
Miki: Well, I might be a little bit crazy, but I have employed Maudience to make sure we can keep (the attention of) our audience and make sure they can get the most out of our articles if they do not have 10+ minutes.
Nikolai: Does that work?
Miki: We will see. We will see, Nikolai!
Nikolai: So that's all that you did in the last two months?
Miki: Nope. I have worked in my full-time job as a test automation engineer and also spent a lot of time with my son, Levi.
Minnie: Yes, family time is very important. The most important one is from all the mentioned things. I will make sure you will never lose focus on that.
Miki: Thanks, Minnie.Return to tableish contentish!
Helping You to Redicover Your Inner Superhero
Nikolai: I am still not impressed with what you did. Is there anything else?
Miki: Yes. I have learned many many memorization, learning, and thinking methods during the last three decades of my life.
Nikolai: I know. None of them stuck, you gave up using them after a short while.
Miki: None of them worked up till recently as suddenly everything started to work.
Nikolai: How is that possible?
Miki: I have employed Metro.
Nikolai: Who is he?
Miki: He is our Scrum master responsible for retros.
Nikolai: Ah, so he helps with your full-time job?
Miki: No, he helps in almost everything that I am doing in my life?
Nikolai: Whaaaaat?
Miki: No matter what I am doing, I am doing it in short 15min-3 hours iterations. I do them up till the flow remains.
Nikolai: How is that helpful?
Miki: I have a retrospective after each session.
Nikolai: A retro what?
Miki: Retrospective comes from Scrum. After each sprint, the team gathers and creates a list of what went wrong, what went well, and what will they do differently.
Nikolai: I still do not get it.
Miki: Just read this article and you will understand.
Maudience: So, I am happy you improved your memory and thinking process, but how can our readers benefit from that.
Miki: I have started a live memorization series in which I show the power of the different memorization techniques by combining them, thinking aloud, and involving my audience in the memorization, so they can not just see how they can use it, but they get hands-on experience in them immediately.
Minnie: What if somebody was not able to participate?
Miki: I am uploading all my recordings to Youtube. Just click here to watch them.
Minnie: What the hell was that?
Miki: Ups. Sorry. Wrong link. Here is the correct link.
Minnie: What if people would like to ask questions and get involved in conversations about memorization, learning, and thinking?
Miki: They can join my Facebook group called Agileish Szuperhsk.
Minnie: What if they do not speak Hungarian?
Miki: Then they can join my English Facebook group called Agileish Superheroes.Return to tableish contentish!

Open-sourcing myself
Minnie: That's enough about memorization and learning. Have you done anything else in the last two months?
Miki: Sure. As you know, I am a crazy person. I have open-sourced myself on Fool's day.
Minnie: Whaaat?
Miki: I open-sourced my thoughts, writings, and artistic creations, and as I am doing it on Github, I also open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process, and my art creation process thanks to the commit history.
Minnie: Hmm. I have not heard of anyone else who did that.
Miki: Me neither.
Minnie: Is there anything else important about this?
Miki: I believe this will be the first project on GitHub where people will go to read the comments instead of the content itself.
Minnie: ???
Miki: As in all the comments messages, I am talking with you, Minnie, Nikolai, and all the others.
Minnie: Cool.
Nikolai: You are an idiot, Miki.
Miki: Thank you, my friend.
Minnie: Where is the project?
Miki: Just click here and you will find it!
Minnie: Can they find this article there too?
Miki: Sure. Unfortunately, I messed up the naming of the file, and you cannot read back all the comments except if you go to the project's commit history, but still you can find this harticle here.Return to tableish contentish!

Giving an Interview to Hackernoon
Minnie: What else you did do?
Miki: I gave an interview to Hackernoon.
Minnie: I know that. Here is the link!
Miki: Thanks, Minnie.Return to tableish contentish!

Developing a mind-controlled app and participating in Hashnode Writeathon
Neveloper: Any programming related?
Miki: Sure. I have developed an open-source brainwave-based app with which paralyzed people can communicate with their loved ones using a Muse EEG device.
Neveloper: Finally. I wanted to learn Python for quite a while.
Maudience: How can our readers learn more about the project?
Miki: I have written an article about it with which I am also participating in the Hashnode Writeathon. Just click here to read it!Return to tableish contentish!

Starting a Craft Conf Giveaway
Nikolai: Ok, I am pretty sure you cannot come up with any other stuff.
Miki: Are you sure?
Nikolai: Yes, I am sure Miki.
Miki: Well, then you are wrong. I have started a Craft Conf conference ticket giveaway.
Nikolai: Craft conf? Never heard of it.
Neveloper: It is because you have no idea about conferences and software engineering. Craft Conf is one of the biggest software development conferences in the world, featuring 70+ top-notch experts' talks. 1000+ developers take part each year.
Maudience: How can our readers participate in this?
Miki: They have to write an article about anything. Just click here to read the rules!
Maudience: But Miki, the deadline is the 25th of May, which is very close.
Miki: That is true, but they can even participate with an article they have written before up till the 11th of May, the start of the giveaway. They just have to follow the rules.
Maudience: So, basically any of the articles mentioned in this newsletter can participate in this, right?
Miki: Right, they just have to follow the link above and read the rules.
Nikolai: A 399 ticket for something which our readers would do anyway? Where is the catch?
Miki: The winners have to write a 1000 words article after the conference about the conference.
Nikolai: I knew it. Nobody will participate.
Miki: We will see. Most of the fellow hloggers would write an article anyway about it if they participate.
Minnie: There is one thing I do not understand. If you do so many things, why do you reboot Hashnode Weekly?
Miki: As I realized, I love writing it, and I do believe it is valuable for our readers.

Return to tableish contentish!

Your Weekly Dose of Harticles

Today in Spotlight 🔦: Being a Dabbler by Jamie V.

As you might get used to it I always put one article in the spotlight, usually an article with which I can highly relate.

This week it is Jamie V.'s The Power of the "Dabbler" article. According to Jamie, he was a Dabbler during his whole life. He shares his thoughts about being a dabbler in his article. It is a must-read in my opinion.

I can highly relate to this as I am a dabbler myself too. In the past, I have started a lot of new things. Just to mention a few examples: playing poker, becoming a barista, playing go, photography, running, Lindy Hop, and creating a Facebook group. When I start something, I put 100% into it, which has usually resulted in burnout after a few weeks, months, or years.

No matter what, sooner or later, I lost my interest and gave up on them. I have considered this a bad thing for decades, up till recently.

Today I see this from a completely different perspective. I believe all of those experiences were valuable. There are many topics on which I gave up, but still, all of them helped me to become the person I am now. And from time to time, I move back to a topic like I am photographing and playing go again.

The above-mentioned topics are seemingly unrelated, but as I am always looking for ways to combine my previous learnings, I usually find a way that might result in something unique.

If you read what have I done during the last two months, you could see I have started many completely different topics.

Will I give up some of them?

I am almost sure. I have my limits, and I cannot handle as many things in parallel.

Will I give up all of them?

I doubt it. As I am doing many things in parallel, I believe I can make sure I won't burn out this time.

Which topics will I continue?

I will continue those ones in which I find the most joy, which is usually the topic that gives the most value to my followers.

Before we continue, my friend DjMic is here to play some music that you can listen to during reading.

Miki: DjMic! What do you have for us today?
DjMic: I know, Miki, you love pirates. You played with the iconic Pirates both on C64 and PC. You also played Port Royale, Sea of Thieves, and you live Pirates of The Caribbean too. So here is some music from the world-class Hungarian band Paddy And The Rats. Click here and start listening.

And now let's see this week's harticles:

Software Development

Do you want to learn how you can build a complete Spring-based project from requirements up to containerization? Read marinsborg's excellent article called [URL shortener - Java and Spring complete tutorial].(https://marinsborg.hashnode.dev/url-shortener-java-and-spring-complete-tutorial)!
Maxi Contieri is doing an awesome job as he does not just collect code smells but also gives the solution for them. He just posted the 133rd!!!! article in his series: Code Smell 133 - Hardcoded IF Conditions
I do not know anything about Kotlin, so when I saw Vincent Tsen's How to Create Singleton Class in Kotlin? harticle I felt the urge to read it, especially as I could learn about Kotlin via an example with which I am quite familiar: the Singleton design pattern.
You can learn the ins and outs of pseudocode from Mfon.'s What You Need to Know About Pseudocode article. I have seen way too much pseudo-code during my university years, but if you are not familiar with it, then this article is highly recommended.
Do you want to read an inspiring story about how a woman with a tourism background became a software developer? Just read Eleanor Opiyo's Making the big switch to Software development harticle.
Do you want more motivation to become a software developer? Read Souvik Das's My journey of becoming a developer harticle.
Eden AI explains what is OCR, how it works, and what kind of solutions are there on the market, and he even provides an example in Javascript in his How to use OCR with JavaScript? post.
If you are also not familiar with CSS then Ravi Kumar's The CSS Box Model is must-read. Ravi explains the CSS box model in an easily understandable way.
Are you new to Git or GitHub? Read Ishita Keshawani's Learn Git and Github in 5 minutes harticle to jumpstart your git learning.
I usually do not like "which is the best" articles as they are biased in most cases. Still, I read idukpaye Alex's harticle Which Frontend Javascript Framework/library is the Best?, and I did not regret it.
Have you ever used a listener in your code? Then most probably, you used the Observer design pattern even without noticing it. Learn about the pattern from Abdulrhman Elsaed by reading his The Observer Pattern harticle.
I do not know any other profession which has so many controversial topics as software development. It is possible it is because I am not familiar with other professions, but still Joel Tanzi was able to list five oddly controversial topics in software development. I even added one more, the "feature vs. bug" never-ending debate.
Have you ever tried to automatically collect data from websites? Was it slow? If yes, then reading Ander Rodriguez's Speed Up Web Scraping with Concurrency in Python article is highly recommended.
BeautifulSoup is a Python library for scraping the web. You can learn more about it by reading Ndongmo christian's WebScraping(BeautifulSoup) with Python harticle.
Are you struggling with drawing diagrams? Just read Allen Helton's Solutions Architect Tips: How to Build Your First Architecture Diagram, and you won't feel overwhelmed when you have to draw a diagram next time.
News API is a paid REST API based service with which you can get access to more than 5000 news sources to aid your business intelligence or monitor your company's news appearance and also your competitor's. You can learn more about it in Rajat Thakur's News API: Ultimate Beginners guide.
Are you relatively new to Python like me? Do you have to use some resources like files? Is it cumbersome to make sure you always close the resources? Vojko Pribudi introducing Python context managers which are quite similar to Java's try with resource solution.
Have you ever played Chrome's dino game? Do you want to have unlimited lives? Francis Faniku shows you how to hack the Chrome dino game
Are you programming in JavaScript? Is it often cumbersome and error-prone to work with it? dev_avocado switched to TypeScript to overcome this problem.
Are you new to programming? Do you want to learn another programming language?Ana Vela provides useful advice on how to do that.
Have you ever wondered how search engines can find the right results even if you mistyped something? Levenshtein distance is the answer for you. Just read Ary Hegde's How to suggest similar words in Javascript using Levenshtein distance? article to find out the details.

Testing

Testing articles are a scarce resource on Hashnode, so I am always happy if I read an article about testing from a fellow hlogger. Knowing the fundamentals of testing is a must if you would like to become a good tester. Do you want to learn what is white box and black box testing? Just read Matheus Gomes's Black box testing and White box testing harticle.
Eric Ampire introduced an interesting concept called property-based testing in his harticle Create Powerful Tests using Property Based Testing. After reading it, I was not convinced about its usefulness, so I asked him some questions. I hope he will answer soon. I am pretty curious what do you think about this approach?

Writing, Blogging, Groth-hacking

Are you struggling with making a passive income via writing? Me too. A fellow Hungarian kos Kmves gave some tips in his writing Make your First Dollar online as a Creator.
Do you want to have more Twitter followers? Get tips from Abel, who has accumulated 16k followers in 2 months: How I grew my Twitter audience to 16,000 in less than 2 months!

Self-improvement, Productivity, Psychology, Learning

Self-reflection is a crucial part of my life, especially since Metro, who is our Scrum Master responsible for the retro, joined our team. It can highly boost your motivation if you summarize what went well from time to time. James 'Dante' Midzi asks one of the best motivation booster questions What Was Your Win This Week?.
Do you also find it hard to keep your mental health in today's fast-paced world? Just read Linda Smith's How to Improve your Mental Health harticle in which she gives some advice.
If you read the first section of my article, you already know I am obsessed with learning. Alejandro Napoles provides great advice on how to improve your learning in hos harticle called How to learn better with proven techniques.
Amokrane Chentir's Solving problems through writing is short but still valuable writing.
Is it hard for you to keep focus and achieve your goals? SURYA L provides his advice in How can you focus on your goals to achieve success?.
Soft skills are as important as hard skills in today's world, and I am pretty sure soft skills will be even more important in the near future when AI-based programmers like Google's AlphaCode will take over coding from us. Precious Eyoh lists a list of skills that are important for a software developer in his Some Important Skills need as a Software Engineer post.

Machine Learning, Data Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence

lke Candan Bengi helps us to put our feet in the field of machine learning by introducing decision trees with hands-on examples in her writing Learning and Predicting, Machine Learning.
From Neurotech Africa, you can learn how to do your sentiment analysis using Python's NLTK library. Just read his writing Sentiment Analysis With Python's NLTK Library to find out.
Have you ever wondered how recommendation systems are working? Rahul Banerjee not just explains it but also builds a solution in his writing How to Build a Recommender System with Embeddinghub.
Creating a machine learning based solution is one thing, but operating that is at least as crucial as implementing it. Patrick Alves gives his advice regarding the operation in his harticle [MLOps: What it is and why does it Matter?]. (https://cpatrickalves.hashnode.dev/mlops-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters)
Tiia shows us how we can leverage machine learning to create an animated avatar that reacts to our voice.
If you read the first section of this article, you know I am obsessed with brainwaves. I am using a Muse S EEG band which has lots of limitations. Sajal Tiwari goes multiple steps further and shows us what results can be achieved by using an fMRI device in the Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity harticle.
I will be honest. I believe we are in a war with AI. We have already lost many battles: We lost in chess, go, Starcraft, and in other fields too. In a few years (or months), AI will beat us in programming too. Up till it is not guaranteed that AI is emphatic, understandable, non-biased, and ethical we cannot feel safe. Alao D. I. compares Humanish Intelligence (HI) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in his blogpost The Thinking of Man: Human Vs. A.I..

Security

Do you think you are safe and you won't be a target of cyberattacks? Well, I have bad news for you. Chidiogo debunks some myths in Cyber Security Facts and Misconceptions.
Have you ever heard the name Snyk? Me neither, up till I started to work at my new company. Ashutosh Krishna tells us about Snyk everything in the How to Find and Fix Security Vulnerabilities Using Snyk harticle.

DevOps, CI/CD

Kubernetes is a frequently used buzzword nowadays, but it is a buzzword with a good reason. Containerization and handling of containers became crucial in today's world. Eshan Sharma [A Simple Guide to Kubernetes] explains what is Kubernetes in his writing (https://eshansharma.hashnode.dev/a-simple-guide-to-kubernetes).
You cannot become really agile without having a great CI/CD pipeline. Ozone Ozone tells about the history of CI/CD pipelines in his CICD Pipelines: Evolution with Time blog post.

Blockchain and Web3

Have you ever heard the word DAO? No, I am not talking about Data Access Objects. I am talking about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Nonstack tells almost everything about DAOs in his writing The Complete Guide to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. I said almost as reading his article raised a few questions in me for which hopefully I will get the answer soon in the article's comment section.
Nonstack also wrote an excellent article from which you can learn the basics of blockchain technology. Just read his harticle called Demystifying Blockchain Technology.

Tools and resources

Do you use Visual Studio Code? Well, I am not using it anymore, but if you do Ivan's post can be helpful for you, so here it is: 5 Of My Favorite VSCode Extensions
Being a software developer is a never-ending journey as you have to keep pace with the continuously changing world. One of the weapons you can use is learning from a platform specialized in teaching software development. Maheshwar Ligade lists 5 online platforms with which you can grow your software engineering skills.

Technicalish articles

My motto is: Writing is fun, reading should be fun too. Based on the inspiration coming from Leandro Melendez, I have decided to become a technicalish writer to write about technical topics in a fun (yeah, I know, my humor s.cks) way.

An interesting conversation between JVM & the Java Compiler is the first-ever technicalish article I have ever read on Hashnode. Thanks, Debashis Panda. I hope this is not the last one.

New Hloggers

I had no idea what was DevReal, but after reading Lucas D.'s first post Ok, so I definitely belong in DevRel, I googled it. No. I won't tell, and not because it is still not completely clear for me, but because I leave the joy of discovery for you. 😊
Eula C. just debuted on Hashnode), but she is not new to blogging as she has a WordPress blog too. We can expect articles related to cybersecurity from her.
Utsav bhattarai is quite ambitious as he is already telling us how to write a blog in his first-ever blog post, still, I like his courage, and if you read his article My first Blog - How to write 8log🙂🙂, you can find valuable advice there.
yash pandit started a new good habit! by starting blogging. He is a little bit mysterious as he did not tell us what he would write about, so I asked him in the comment section. I hope he will answer soon.
We are on the same page with Markos Korvesis, who says, "The idea that my words may help even one single person is for me as good a reason as any to write them". If you would like to find out what will he post about, then just read his first post Oh no... not another one..

That's all, folks. We have arrived at the end of this article.

NoShare: Dear Reader! In case you found this article boring and useless, then please do not share it as we do not like negative marketing.

But in all other cases please share it with your social media friends, so they might also get inspired thanks to this collection of awesome harticles.

Don't forget to read the previous Hashnode Weely Newsletters:

P.S.: Something good will happen to you today!

My goal is to become a freelancer doing test automation in half time and doing technicalish writing in the other half. I am available to work as a technicalish writer and I would really appreciate it if you would support me if you found my writings valuable in any sense.

Hackernoon interviewed me , so if you would like to learn more about me , just click here and read it!

Become an agileish superhero!

You can already find the first videos on my Youtube channel in which I show you that it is possible to memorize such boring things as positions of circles.

Don't forget to read How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC) before you watch the videos.

As I am a crazy person, I have open-sourced my life on GitHub on Fool's day.

I am sharing my thoughts, writings, and creations, and as I am frequently committing, I have open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process, and also my creation process.

Just click here to check my open-sourced life on Github!

My credo : The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet

In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram.

Minnie: Finally the CTO is over. We can get to the teaser.
Miki: Yes, finally.
Minnie: What are you working on recently?
Miki: I am writing an article with the title "How You Can Become a Test Automation Engineer in 2022 AKA How I Became a Test Automation Engineer".
Minnie: Sounds fun.
Miki: This time it won't be fun, as I am writing it alone, as I this is a serious topic.
Minnie: I see. When will you publish it?
Miki: I do not know yet, but the draft is available on my GitHub if somebody would like to follow the birt of the harticle.
Minnie: Cool.

Why Am I Attending The Craft Conf 2022 Software Development Conference?

Miklós Szeles — Fri, 20 May 2022 09:32:17 +0000

UPDATE: Just write an article about anything and win an online ticket for Craft Conf 2022. Click here for details!

Maudience: Dear Reader! Miki likes to write. Miki likes to write a lot. The whole team tried to persuade him to write shorter articles, but Miki couldn't stop doing that. Last time he wrote an article with 42 minutes of reading time. So instead of writing less, he hired me to make sure our readers could get the most out of our articles no matter how much time they had.

So in order to make your life easier, I have created a table content like thingy for you.

Tableish Contentish

Click here to learn a little bit about Miki's present!
Click here if you would like to know what Miki and his brother Tomi got for Christmas several years ago!
If you want to know which were Miki's favorite games back then , then click here!
Miki was the perfect examplar of impostor syndrome and he is also an introvert so Miki did not attend conferences for 39 years. Click here to learn more about it.
Miki's first conference was a disappointment. Click here to find out why.
If you want to know how Miki fell in love with conferences on second sight, just click here!
Click here if you want to know the short answer to why Miki is attending the Craft Conf 2022!
If you want to know the long answer to why Miki is attending the Craft Conf 2022, then click here!
Do you want to have a Google spreadsheet with which you can quickly create your schedule for the conference? Click!
Are you only interested in the 20% ticket discount? Just click here!
Do you want to have a free ice cream coupon for the conference? Just click here and claim it from our good old friend Rick!
Do you like endless loops? Click here!

Who Am I?

HI!

I am Miki Szeles from Hungary, Budapest. I am a father, a husband, and a soon-to-be happy dog owner.

Software Engineer in Test (SDET)

I am a software developer with 15 years of work experience, from which 8 also included leading the dev and test team. At the moment, I am working as a Senior Software Engineer in Test using Selenide for E2E automation, Karate DSL for API automation, and Gatling for performance testing.

Agileish Human

I am developing software the agile way, but in addition to that, I made my whole life agile.

By introducing short 15min - 3 hours ~~sprints~~ walks with a retro at the end, my life has changed completely.

No matter what I am doing, I am improving rapidly thanks to the very short feedback cycle.

I believe learning is the most crucial skill of humans. In case we can learn fast, we can become better rapidly in anything we are doing.

Cause of this, I am focusing on improving my memory and reading skills.

You can read more about being an agile human with super learning, super memory, and super thinking superpowers in my article: How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC)

That's more than enough about my present, but if you still want to know more, I recommend reading this Hackernoon interview: 'I Open-Sourced My Thinking Process': Meet HackerNoon Writer & Test Automation Engineer Miki Szeles!

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

My First Contact With Computers

I will never forget the moment when a few weeks before Christmas we were jumping on our parent's bed with my brother Tomi. We accidentally jumped so high we saw a box on top of the wardrobe. We got really excited, so we tried to jump even higher to see what was that. Then we suddenly saw it, and we couldn't believe our eyes.

It was the long-desired Commodore 64.

I do not have to tell you we were so excited we couldn't wait till Christmas, so we begged our parents until we did not get it.

That was the moment when I made first contact with computers.

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

My First Programming Experience

In the beginning, we were only playing games. I had many favorites like Giana Sisters, Bruce Lee, Pirates, Defender of The Crown, and Ugh Olympics, just to highlight some of them.

It didn't take too much time, and I wanted to create my own games. There was a guy in the town who could program, so I asked him to teach me programming. He gave me 3 Commodore 64 programming books called Hetedht, so I started to learn BASIC from those books.

I remember I was drawing pixelated graphics in a notebook, trying to figure out how the hell I could display them on the computer. I have to admit I did not really understand the binary system back then, but still, I was able to draw some sprites on the screen.

That is how my software development career started.

I won't bore you with the other details, so let's fast forward to the beginning of 2022.

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

Why I Did Not Attend Conferences

Despite attending meetups and code retreats several years ago, I have never attended a conference. When my son was born, I even gave up visiting the meetups as I wanted to spend as much time with Levi as I could.

I played with the thought of attending a software development conference, but in the end, I never went for multiple reasons:

I was an introvert. The thought of being together with hundreds of people whom I do not know scared me like hell.
My previous company did not support me in any way to attend a conference. Neither with extra free days for the time of the conference nor with conference tickets. I do believe sending your developers to a conference is an investment. It is an investment as the knowledge they get can benefit your company. If you do not support them, then 2 things can happen. a. They will simply not go to the conference. b. They attend the conference in their own time using their own money. If a developer cares about his/her future a little bit, then sooner or later, he/she will ask for the price of the extra knowledge he/she got from the conference. I guess I do not have to explain why it is better to sit down to negotiate the salary in the case in which you supported your developer to get that valuable knowledge. CraftHub, the organizer of the Craft Conf conference, even created an email template that helps you convince your employer to support you in visiting the conference. Just click here to download it!. If I wouldn't have a ticket, I would use the reasons from the email template to convince my employer personally to support me in attending the conference.
I was the perfect exemplar of the impostor syndrome. I was working on neural code (almost every piece of code is connected to nearly all the others) with outdated technologies. Looking through the job ads just made me feel worthless. Seeing all those long lists of technologies in those ads ensured me that I am one of the world's worst developers despite loving programming since I was 10. I knew I had nothing to do at a conference where great developers from all around the world were gathering together. It might sound funny, but that was my reality not so long ago. Luckily, in the end, I decided to start at another company, and since then, I have been thriving. I can do my daily job pretty well as I am using cool and very effective frameworks like Selenide, Karate DSL, and Gatling. Leaving behind my impostor syndrome, I realized no matter what level I am with programming. I can benefit a lot from visiting conferences. So at the beginning of 2022, I started to look for worthwhile conferences

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

My First Contact With Conferences AKA Love at First Sight? Nope!

Well, as it might happen, the first one was not the best. It is possible I had too high expectations, but it is also possible it misled me with her kind words.

She told to me we had a great future together but in the end, I realized she was living her life in the past, not looking forward to the future at all.

Despite this, she had many values, but all in all, we weren't a perfect match.

I will always remember her, as she was my first one.

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

My Second Contact With Conferences AKA Love at Second Sight

Since February, I have been attending the data analysis course at Budapest University of Economics and Technologies (BME) as an external student. It was by accident I got aware of this opportunity.

Our tutor Istvn mentioned a conference which is about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) including deep learning too, of course.

This conference was the Reinforce AI conference.

I got very excited, but the excitement went away pretty quickly as I realized I only had 3 days of vacation left as I had to book all my other days at the beginning of the year. As AI and machine learning are not (yet) closely related to my current job, I couldn't ask for support from my company.

After looking at the talk topics, I still decided to invest three vacation days in this conference.

By now, I can tell you this was one of the best investments in my life. Without it, I would know almost nothing about the current state of AI, and without visiting the conference, I wouldn't write this article now. More about that later.

Reinforce AI was a 3 days long conference featuring talks of great experts from all around the world. As I later got to know, it was organized by Felh, Anna, Mdea, Kroly, Barna, Vanda, Viktria, Anna, Renta, Fanni, Bianka, Rka, Kata, Barbara, Veronika, Vivien, Marcel, Martin, Emila, Kristf, Gerg and Lszl. They are the people behind CraftHub.

CraftHub organizes conferences on various topics. I stole the short descriptions from their site. I hope they won't be mad at me 😊:

Craft Conf: Craft is an inclusive conference about software craft, giving tools, methods, and practices that can be used in the life of a modern developer or company. This conference serves as a compass for new technologies and trends shared by international experts.
Stretch Conference: An international platform and community for leaders and managers to share stories and hands-on solutions and explore new trends and ideas to lead, fail, learn and stretch.
Crunch Conference: A conference for people working as Data Engineers, Data Scientists, or simply interested in how to utilize data to develop their business. No matter the size of the venture or job description, everyone can find exactly what they need.
Amuse Conference: An international conference and learning platform about user experience, product design, user research, service design, creativity, and more. An event dedicated to UX practitioners, product managers, frontend developers, designers or market researchers of digital products, or anyone who is simply interested in whats happening on the other side of the screen.
Reinforce AI Conference: This conference brings together world-leading experts on AI and creates a platform for discourse, innovation, and networking. It provides opportunities for learning and discussing the different fields of AI, such as ethics, production, and the future of artificial intelligence.
Impact Conference: Impact Conference brings together people who are passionate about building amazing, high-impact products. The perfect conference if you aspire to become a Product Manager, Product Owner, Product Leader, Business Analyst or if you are simply an enthusiast who is eager for knowledge, ideas, and best practices shared by world-renowned experts.

I just read the descriptions of these conferences at the time of writing this article, but I am pretty sure I will do what I can to visit all of them.

Most probably, I will have to take out unpaid holidays, but that seems a fair price in exchange for what I can get from these conferences.

However, most of them are not closely related to my current daily job (being a Software Development Engineer in Test). I believe you can achieve great things if you combine not closely related things.

As I am always looking for these opportunities, I usually find a way to combine them. Thanks to this, my water droplet photographs came to life by combining software development, hardware tinkering, and photography. photo

In addition to organizing conferences, CraftHub also organizes Hackathons, and Meetups.

Turning back to the Reinforce AI conference, I have to tell you this was the most eye-opening event I have ever attended. I got insights about not just the present but also the future of AI.

The first speaker was Richard Boyd, who is the CEO and founder of Tanjo Inc. His talk was the most astounding technical speech I have ever heard, and I am sure it will take some time to listen to another address that can take the first place.

If you would like to know what I have heard, just read my Would You Freak Out If You Could Talk To Dead People? - Miki Szeles's Report on Reinforce AI Conference article.

Many other talks followed Richard's speech on various topics like real-time sentiment analysis, synthetic data, AI singularity, responsible AI, time series analysis with deep learning, interpretable AI, AI ethics, and more.

I took notes during almost all the talks, but I am almost sure I won't have time to write articles from them, so I have uploaded my draft to my GitHub.

All in all, this was the story of how I fell in love with conferences at second sight. Click here to return to tableish contentish!

Why Am I Attending The Craft Conf 2022 Software Development Conference? AKA The Short Answer AKA Cooperation with CraftHub, the organizer of the Craft Conf conference

Three weeks after the conference Anna Dalma Kajtr sent me a message on LinkedIn.

Anna told me they had really loved my article about the Reinforce AI conference and they would like to cooperate with me.

She asked me to write an article before the conference and after the conference too.

After a few rounds of negotiation, we came up with a deal that is beneficial both for CraftHub and myself.

This is the short answer for why I am attending the Craft Con 2022 conference.

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

Why Am I Attending The Craft Conf 2022 Software Development Conference? - The Long Answer

The first answer is a true story, but that was only the beginning. As soon as I got the offer, I started to think about how I could get the most out of this conference. So let's see why I am attending the Craft Conf in reality.

Spending 2 days with my friends

During the 15 years of my professional career and during my university years, I have met many exceptional professionals. Some of them became my friends.

Unfortunately, life has carried us away, and I am meeting regularly only a very few of them.

This is why I decided to make Craft Conf the place where we will meet each year. Cause of this, I asked for conference tickets from CraftHub instead of money in exchange for my technicalish writing.

It is not easy for me to find time to hang out with my friends, but in case we can not just spend time together, but we can learn a lot in parallel, that really makes this reunion a great opportunity for meeting with my pals. Hopefully, their employer will support them with paid vacation days.

Four of my friends and hopefully my brother Tams will come with me this time, but I hope they will come next year too and hope other friends will join.

Listen to talks of familiar faces

I have to admit I only know three names from the 70+ speakers.

My life was quite a rollercoaster ride during the last few years, and I couldn't focus on keeping up with the continuously changing software industry.

I improved myself by Udemy courses and reading technical articles but as I was mostly interested in test automation, I did not face the speakers.

Craft Conf is the perfect opportunity to get back on track, so I will definitely listen to Michael Feather's, Dan North's, and Ivett rdg's talks.

Listen to talks about topics I am most interested in

2019 was the last time when Craft Conf was an offline event. Back then, there were 81 speakers and around 2500 visitors.

Then Covid came, so there was no Craft Conf in 2020, but one year later, CraftHub organized the event online with 84 speakers. More than 1200 software developer was interested in Craft Conf 2021.

To be honest, not all of them were Software Developers, as many Software Designer, Agile Coach, Business Developer, DevOps Engineer, Engineering Manager, Front-end Developer, Product Manager, and Software Architect visited the event too.

I am pretty sure most of the talks will be outstanding, but I still would like to highlight some of the talks:

Dmitry Razorionov - How AI/ML shapes EPAM into the Adaptive Enterprise (Epam)
Eric Brewer - Open Source Security: The World Needs Our Help (Berkeley)
Jessica Kerr - Gamification without the Garbage (Honeycomb)
Linda Rising - About trees, agility, and me (Independent consultant)
Marian Hartman - Using Empathy to Make Tests Easy and Code Safe (Dig Deep Roots)
Meri Williams - 5 Things I Wish I'd Known Sooner About Scaling Teams (Chromerose)
Rebecca Allen - Making big changes feel small: technical evolution within an organisation (Liveeo)
Matthew Lavoie - Assumptions on the Road to Success or Failure (NASA)
Matthew Phili - No (Lab) Jacket Required: Designing Experiments for Learning (Pfizer)
Mohammad Aboullaite - Move fast Build things Safely! (Spotify)

Networking with other developers

Well, I am not sure about that. My friends will be there, and I am pretty sure I will see a few familiar faces, but I am still an introvert so we will see.

CraftHub is organizing a networking party on the first day, so most probably, I will give it a try. Or not. I do not know yet.

To ride dodgem with my friends

I fell in love with dodgem when I was a child. Unfortunately, I grew up, and I thought it was awkward to play dodgem as an adult, so I gave up doing that. Luckily I have an eight years old son, Levi, so I can play dodgem again without feeling wrong about that.

The good news is that there will be a dodgem at the conference, and they will borrow a kid who sits beside you to make sure you won't feel awkward in the dodgem.

Ok, I have to admit that would be more awkward, but luckily they are not planning to do that.

Based on my experience, three common things are enough to start a relationship that might end up in a friendship.

Loving software development, being interested in conferences, and having a car accident together are more than enough to start a conversation. Especially as car accidents make people talkative, just don't forget your neck brace at home.

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

Your Craft Conf Planner

I got a Google spreadsheet from Anna Kajtr in which the complete schedule is included. I made a conference planner with which you can easily create your schedule by simply highlighting the ones you will attend.Click here to access the docu! You just have to create a copy of it, and you can start planning.

Click here to return to tableish contentish!

20% Craft Conf 2022 Discount

I've almost arrived at the end of this article. I just want to write one last closing section in which I am providing a registration link with a 20% discount on the price. I just have to figure out what to write so that I will use the Pomodorish technique.

I'm a big fan of the Pomodorish productivity technique in which a 5min-15min ~~smoking~~ coffee drinking session is followed by a 15min to 2 hours long writing/programming period, depending on how long the flow remains.

If my son comes after 15 minutes to play something, then 15 minutes, but if my family is sleeping or I am at my workplace, the flow can remain even for 2 hours.

As I almost finished this article, I will go out now to come up with some witty closing words. Up till then I leave here a video about the Craft Conf 2019 conference:

Re.

Believe me! I tried it! I tried it, but I couldn't come up with something funny. I have seen 1 hooded crow, I've walked 2 blocks, smoked 3 coffees, met dame Sophie 4 times, and meditated with my new Muse S for 5 minutes, but nothing came into my mind.

So here is the link. Just click here to register for Craft Conf 2022 with a 20% discount!

Thanks for taking the time to read my article. Before I leave, please let me give the mic to my marketing expert, NoShare.

NoShare: Dear Reader! In case you found this article boring and useless, then please do not share it as we do not like negative marketing.

But in all other cases please share it with your social media friends, so they can they might get inspired to visit the conference.

Miki, NoShare: Thanks! Have a nice day!

Minnie: Pssst. Miki! Are you still here?
Miki: Sure. I am always waiting till the end of the movie since Marvel started to put teaser trailers after the cast list.
Minnie: Me too. I love those teasers. Shouldn't we create our trailer?
Miki: That is a great idea.
Minnie: What should it be?
Miki: There will be a Craft Conf giveaway soon on my Hashnode-powered blog.
Minnie: Cool. How can the readers get info about the giveaway?
Miki: The details will be out in a day on my blog, and I will also update this article when I have the link.
Minnie: Wow. I want a ticket too. How can I participate?
Miki: You have to write articles, but more on that later.
Minnie: I love that. Bye for now.
Miki: Bye.
Maudience: Minnie, Miki! The Craft Conf giveaway article is already out. Click here for details!
Miki, Minnie, Maudience: Something good will happen to you today!

A Brainwave Based Solution With Which Completely Paralyzed People Can Communicate With Their Loved Ones Using a Muse EEG Band

Miklós Szeles — Sun, 15 May 2022 06:34:48 +0000

From this article, you can learn how you can get access to your brain from your app for the price of a mid-level mobile phone by buying an EEG band and an app with which you can get the raw EEG data from the device.

I will lead you through the development of an app with which you can detect eyeblinks using a Muse S EEG band. We will convert the eyeblinks to text using the Morse code. As a result, we will have a solution with which completely paralyzed people can communicate with their loved ones.

I will also demonstrate how you can build an app in pure Python with the aid of Kivy resulting in a program that can be packed to Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.

Before we start coding, please let me share some moments from my life which led me to start tinkering with my brain.

The Backstory

My First Contact With Brainwaves

Let's move back 30 years in time.

I was sitting in front of my Commodore 64 computer in my room. My brother had already moved out by then, but I was not alone, as my friend Szabi was also with me.

I loved computer games. Playing games like Ugh Olympics, Pirates, Defender of The Crown, Boulder Dash, Wizard of Wor, Nebulus, and Bruce Lee gave me more pleasure than anything else in the world.

At that time, I was playing a newly discovered game called Benji. I was trying to figure out how to play the game with little success.

Suddenly I saw something in the corner of my eye, so I turned right to look through the window. There was nothing unusual except one thing.

A black figure was floating in the air above the roof of our garage.

I got scared as hell, so I asked Szabi whether he also saw the figure or not.

No! There is nothing there. - he replied.

Szabi went downstairs to tell my parents what had happened to me. My parents came up in a hurry, and they quickly realized something was not ok, so they saw me down in the living room.

I remember they asked what my name was. I started to think, but I couldn't answer as I couldn't recall it. The feeling I felt at that moment when I couldn't remember my name had been burnt into my mind for eternity.

From this point, I couldn't recall anything as I lost my consciousness. A few seconds after my parents called the doctor, my whole body started to shake unstoppably.

That was the first time when I had an epileptic seizure.

My next memory is being in the hospital. A few hours later, a nurse led me into a room, lubricated tiny thingies with a cold gel, then put a bizarre hat on my head. The hat was strange as many wires were coming out of it, all of them connected to a machine.

I had to lay down and stay calm, and then the machine drew lines on paper.

As I found out later, those were my brainwaves, and the machine was an electroencephalography (EEG) device. I couldn't understand the EEG diagram, but based on what I heard, they looked pretty bad back then.

A couple of days later, I could to go home.

I was not allowed to play on computers or watch TV, and I couldn't go to the disco with my friends.

Fear became my and my family's best friend from that point as we could never know when another epileptic seizure would come.

During the upcoming years, I had to take medicines, and I also had to visit the hospital many times to have regular checkups with a neurologist. During these visits, I started to form a friendship with this EEG device. Month by month, my EEG results became better and better.

I can still remember the room's smell, the feeling of the cold gel, the long wires, the small diodes, the strange hat, and the EEG curves painted on paper.

I never had another epileptic seizure again, and after three years, my neurologist told me I had recovered.

My Second Contact With Brainwaves

The year is 1994, just two years after my epileptic seizure. My parents enrolled me and my brother Tomi in a Silva Mind Control for kids course.

I have very few memories, but I remember that when I heard about delta, theta, alpha, and beta brainwaves. I have not just heard about them, but I also learned how to control the brainwaves by relaxation in theory.

I visited the Silva Mind Control training with my friend Edit four years later. By then, I understood and learned many techniques that were taught there.

Even if none of the magical techniques would work, I still learned about peg lists and relaxation.

In reality, I used the other techniques, and I do believe they worked, but as I had no parallel life (at least I am not aware of that) in which I could live the same life without doing the Silva course, I cannot tell if my achievements were related to those techniques.

One of the biggest benefits of the course was learning relaxation. Unfortunately, there was one massive problem with it:

I couldn't tell if I was really in alpha or not. More on that later.

A few years later I went to the Budapest University of Technology (BME) two years later, and I became a scientistish.

Scientistish means I do not believe in anything except it was proven by science. Thanks to this, I was sure all the Silva methods were fake similar to all the other supernatural things I have heard of.

My Third Contact With Brainwaves

Twenty-four years later, we arrive in the present. During the last years, I went through an emotional rollercoaster. I had such deep depression I was sure I would lose my job, my flat, my family left me, I became homeless, and I will even be bad for a homeless, and I die in a couple of days.

I know it sounds funny, but that was my reality back then.

It took me two psychologists, 2 psichoterapeut, a RED EQ trainer, and the support of my family and friends, but finally, I managed to come back.

This experience has changed my life forever. I am currently re-reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now Book, and I see some similarities between his life and my life. However, I did not become homeless in reality, I was homeless in my mind. Now I understand much more from that book.

Also, by now, I have become a hscienistish. Hscientistish means I believe in what humans say, and I try to verify it by talking to that person and using somewhat scientific techniques.

I cannot tell exactly what the trigger was. Still, I decided to order a Muse EEG band and examine my brainwaves during experimenting with different meditation and relaxation techniques to find out which worked and which did not.

My Muse S arrived three weeks ago, but before it arrived, I had already come up with an idea in which I could combine programming and my brainwaves. Before I get to the point, please let me tell you about how I got inspired to implement my first mind-controlled app.

The Inspiration

I was googling different apps developed for the Muse band, but I realized there are almost no apps, or at least it is not easy to find them via Google. Luckily I found an article from Anush Mutyala with the title Muse 101 How to start Developing with the Muse 2 right now.

Anush has developed a hands-free slideshow that can be navigated by using eyeblinks. He was also able to switch Chrome tabs using eyeblinks and scrolling via measuring the focus/concentration of the user using only the raw EEG data. He even made a video summarizing solutions built on brainwaves.

In addition to Anush's article, I found a fascinating project. Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have developed a solution that was able to recognize words/sentences with 96% accuracy.

There are some drawbacks of their solution:

The number of recognized sentences is limited to 30-50 sentences.
Their solution is not open-source, as far as I know.

Despite this, it is a fantastic achievement as they proved it is possible to recognize sentences by analyzing our brainwaves. And this was in 2020, I am very curious about where they are at the moment.

They have published their research paper in Nature Neuroscience journal.

So, in the end, these projects were my inspiration to start my journey in the field of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI).

The Idea

After reading the articles, my brain started to spin, and after thinking for quite a while, I came up with the idea of developing my version of a brainwave to text application.

I detect eyeblinks via brainwaves and convert them to text using the Morse code. However, it is much slower than the UCSF scientist's solution it is still a solution with which completely paralyzed people can communicate with their loved ones.

While looking for information about detecting eyeblinks,I realized there are already implemented solutions for detecting eyeblinks and converting them to text using the Morse code. Some of them use a camera, but others use an EEG band.

Despite this, the project is still valuable for the following reasons.

I am building a framework that handles the whole communication with the EEG bands, so developers and neuroscientists can focus on what matters: implementing the different algorithms with which they can extract information from brainwaves.
There are many different EEG devices, and my goal is to support many of them. As soon as you get the raw EEG data, it does not matter which device it came from.
This is an open-source project, and I hope a couple of enthusiastic people will contribute to the project.
This is my first step in the field of Brain-Computer Interfaces. A learning project from which I learn about brainwaves, Python, and the Kivy framework.
I am providing a solution with which completely paralyzed people can communicate for the price of a mid-level phone (400). My project is open-source and free, but it requires a Muse band (I recommend Muse S) and the Mind Monitor app.
It can be used in complete darkness as no camera is needed.

We have the inspiration, the idea, so it is time to set a goal.

The Goal

Recently, I usually set HSMART goals for myself, which is my extension of the SMART goal concept. Here are the meanings of the letters:

H umanish: It has to be something that makes this world a little bit better, and at least a small portion of humanity can benefit from it.
S pecific: The goal has to be clear and specific.
M easurable: To track my progress and stay motivated, the progress has to be measurable.
A chiavable: The goal has to be realistic. It does not make much sense to set an unrealistic goal.
R elevant: The goal has to matter to you. If you are working on something not relevant to your current situation, it will be tough to find motivation.
T ime-bound: Without a deadline, you can quickly lose focus. Parkinson's law straightforwardly expresses this: "work expands to fill the time available for its completion." From this, it is easy to see if you do not have a deadline, you can work forever without any real progress on your task.

So let's see my concrete HSMART goal:

Humanish : I believe Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) can make the world better if used for the good. Having a framework that can be used to develop BCI-based apps and having a solution with which paralyzed people can communicate with their loved ones is definitely humanish.
S pecific: I want to develop an app with which completely paralyzed people can communicate with others. In addition to this, I want to develop a framework with which any developer can jumpstart their brainwave project.
M easurable: I have defined multiple milestones to measure my progress
1. Get the RAW data from the Muse
2. Display live brainwaves
3. Detect eyeblinks using brainwaves
4. Classify the detected blinks based on their length
5. Convert the blinks to text using the Morse code
6. Design the UI of the mobile app
7. Develop the app
8. Write the article to participate in the Hashnode Writeathon
A chiavable: Considering that I have a full-time job and a family, the deadline is very strict, but it is still achievable. I have time for the project when my son is sleeping which means ~2 hours in the morning and 2-3 hours in the evening, and 8-10 hours during the weekend. On weekdays I always spend ~2 hours with my son when I arrive from work. We split the day into 1-2 hours long blocks during the weekend. One block spending time together and one block me time. We repeat this from the morning till the evening, so we spend a lot of time together, and everybody has time to focus on their things.
R elevant: I am highly motivated to put my feet in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). I recently visited a data analysis course as an external student at the Budapest University of Economics and Technology (BME). We learn fundamental data analysis, machine learning (ML), and deep learning. I will definitely put my recently acquired knowledge into practice in this project.
T ime-bound: From the moment I get the Interaxon Muse S, I have 3 weeks.
- One week to learn about brainwaves and develop the framework.
- One week to implement the blink detection algorithm.
- One week to create a mobile app and write an article to participate in the Hashnode Writeathon.

We have the HSMART goal, so it is time to start our project and select the technologies.

Selecting The Tech-stack

As Python is the number one programming language for data analysis and machine learning, the choice was almost straightforward. Apart from a few scripts, I have not used Python during my career, so this will be my first ever Python project. According to the TIOBE index, Python is the most popular programming language, and it is also easy to learn, so I chose Python.

At first, I wanted to develop a web app, and I selected Anvil Works as the framework for development as with it, you can create and host a web app in no time.

While reading the tutorials, I realized I have to communicate with the Muse device, which could be problematic from the browser. I will need not just a frontend but a backend implementation. To communicate with the Muse, it is highly advised to do it on a local network, which means I should host my backend locally.

After some thinking, I realized a mobile/desktop app is more suitable for my task. After a little googling and comparison, I decided to go with Kivy.

Kivy is a free open source cross-platform Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps and it is even GPU accelerated.

As I had no chance to learn a frontend framework like Angular in a few days, the idea of developing a mobile app in pure Python enlightened me.

However, after googling, I found Muse has an SDK (one of the main reasons I ordered the Muse). When I asked the Interaxon support for the link, they told me at the moment, there is no publicly available SDK, so I had to look for another solution.

Luckily I found Mind Monitor, which connects to the Muse and gets the RAW data, and it can even stream it using the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol as UDP packets.

Because of this, pythonosc was a straightforward selection to grab the live EEG data.

That is enough from the tech stack. Let's start implementing the solution.

Learning About The Interaxon Muse S

The Muse S is a 4 channel band which means you can measure signals at 4 different points on your head. Thez are AF7, AF8, TP9 and TP10. AF7 and AF8 are positioned on the front of your skull, and TP9 and TP10 are placed at the back of your head. To learn more, just read the 10-20 EEG system description on Wikipedia.

You have to know that the scientist at UCSF used 120-200 EEG channels, and we only have 4. But I am completely fine about that, as having more channels would be overwhelming initially. Having such a limit inspires me to be creative, and thanks to the price of 379.99, it is affordable to anyone who would like to start developing brain-computer interface (BCI) based solutions.

However, I am pretty sure four channels will be adequate for a while. I already found the device that will probably be the next EEG device I use. It is the EPOC Flex Saline Sensor Kit which has 32 channels, but it costs four times as much as the Muse S ($1800).

Most probably, I will only get that if I find supporters for this project or in case, I hit the limits of the Muse S.

The Muse has the earlier mentioned 4 channels and 2 amplified Aux channels in the specification. It has a 256Hz sample rate and 12bits/sample resolution, which seems more than enough as usually, we are only interested in delta(0.5-4Hz), theta(4-8Hz), alpha(8-13Hz), beta(13-32Hz), and gamma(32-100Hz) waves. For more details, check this page.

The EEG band also has a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a PPG sensor (which can measure heart rate), and a thermistor.

The band comes with an app with which you can get real-time feedback about your meditation's effectiveness, and it has many guided meditations. In addition to this, it has many soundscapes and journeys that help you fall asleep and track your sleep.

That is more than enough about the Muse S band, and it is time to make our hands dirty and write some code.

The Implementation

This is my first real Python project, so I am sure my code is rather messy, mainly because I focused on the quick results.

But here comes one of the real advantages of open-source development. I can get feedback about my code and even code change suggestions in pull requests. So I am sure it only needs a few weeks, and this project will be a good starting point if somebody would like to start open-source contribution, learn Python, or brain-computer-interface (BCI) development. I will personally make sure it will be a kind and supportive community.

However, Python is a scripting language it also supports object-oriented development, so most of my code is object-oriented, but not all of them. I still have to find the balance.

Implementing Data Classes

I have created multiple Python modules. One of them is eeg_commons, which contains generic data that can be acquired from an EEG band. In addition to raw EEG data, it also supports gyroscope and accelerometer data which can be used in further applications.

I also created a WindowedSeries and an EEGSeries class to plot the data and get the median.

from enum import Enum
from statistics, import mean, median
import datetime

class DataType(Enum):
    EEG = 1
    GYROSCOPE = 2
    ACCELEROMETER = 3

class EEGChannel(Enum):
    AF7 = 1
    AF8 = 2
    TP9 = 3
    TP10 = 4
    AUX = 5

class EEGChannelMapping:
    def __init__ (self, *args):
        self.index_to_channel = {}
        self.channel_to_index = {}

    def add_mapping(self, index, channel):
        self.index_to_channel[index] = channel
        self.channel_to_index[channel] = index

    def get_channel(self, index):
        return self.index_to_channel[index]

    def get_index(self, channel):
        return self.channel_to_index[channel]

class Data(object):
    def __init__ (self, data_type):
        self.creation_time = datetime.datetime.now()
        self.type = data_type

class EEG(Data):

    @classmethod
    def create_eeg_data_map(cls, channel_mapping, data_tuple):
        data_per_channel = {}
        for idx, data in enumerate(data_tuple):
            data_per_channel[channel_mapping.get_channel(idx)] = data
        return data_per_channel

    def __init__ (self, eeg_data_map):
        super(EEG, self). __init__ (DataType.EEG)
        self.data_per_channel = eeg_data_map

    def get_channel_value(self, eeg_channel):
        return self.data_per_channel[eeg_channel]

    def channel_count(self):
        return len(self.data_per_channel)

    def get_channels(self):
        return self.data_per_channel.keys()

class Gyroscope(Data):
    def __init__ (self, *args):
        super(Gyroscope, self). __init__ (DataType.GYROSCOPE)
        self.x = args[0]
        self.y = args[1]
        self.z = args[2]

    def get_up_down_location(self):
        return self.x

    def get_tilt(self):
        return self.y

class Accelerometer(Data):
    def __init__ (self, *args):
        super(Accelerometer, self). __init__ (DataType.ACCELEROMETER)
        self.x = args[0]
        self.y = args[1]
        self.z = args[2]

    def get_left_right_pitch_acc(self):
        return self.x

    def get_up_down_acc(self):
        return self.y

    def get_left_right_acc(self):
        return self.z

class WindowedSeries:
    def __init__ (self, window_size):
        self.elements = []
        self.window_size = window_size

    def add_element(self, element):
        self.elements.append(element)
        if self.window_size == len(self.elements):
            del (self.elements[0])

    def get_average(self):
        if len(self.elements) == 0:
            return 0
        return mean(self.elements)

    def get_median(self):
        if len(self.elements) == 0:
            return 0
        return median(self.elements)

class EEGSeries:
    def __init__ (self, eeg_channels, series_length):
        self.time_series = {}
        self.last_stamp = None
        for channel in eeg_channels:
            self.time_series[channel] = WindowedSeries(series_length)

    def add(self, eeg_data):
        if self.last_stamp is not None and (eeg_data.creation_time - self.last_stamp).total_seconds() < 0:
            print('Data from past: ' + str((eeg_data.creation_time - self.last_stamp).total_seconds() * 1000))
            return
        else:
            self.last_stamp = eeg_data.creation_time
        channels = eeg_data.get_channels()
        for channel in channels:
            self.time_series[channel].add_element(eeg_data.get_channel_value(channel))

    def get_median(self, channel):
        return self.time_series[channel].get_median()

class EEGConverter:
    def __init__ (self, converter):
        self.converter = converter

    def convert(self, data):
        converted_data = {}
        for channel in data.data_per_channel.keys():
            converted_data[channel] = self.converter.apply(data.data_per_channel[channel])
        return EEG(converted_data)

Implementing The Muse Band Handler

To communicate with the Muse band, I introduced multithreading to ensure the main thread was not blocked while getting the device's data.

As I have implemented the Observer design pattern by introducing listeners, the other parts of the code are not dependent on the used device, which means we can easily add support for new devices.

After we start the Muse plugin, it starts listening on the given UDP port to get the data from the EEG band via pythonosc.

from pythonosc import dispatcher
from pythonosc import osc_server
from eeg_commons.eeg_commons import EEG, Gyroscope, Accelerometer, EEGChannelMapping, EEGChannel
from threading import Thread

addresses = []

class MuseEEGChannelMapping(EEGChannelMapping):
    def __init__ (self):
        super(MuseEEGChannelMapping, self). __init__ ()
        self.add_mapping(0, EEGChannel.TP9)
        self.add_mapping(1, EEGChannel.AF7)
        self.add_mapping(2, EEGChannel.AF8)
        self.add_mapping(3, EEGChannel.TP10)
        self.add_mapping(4, EEGChannel.AUX)

MUSE_EEG_CHANNEL_MAPPING = MuseEEGChannelMapping()

class MuseEEG(EEG):
    def __init__ (self, *args):
        super(MuseEEG, self). __init__ (EEG.create_eeg_data_map(MUSE_EEG_CHANNEL_MAPPING, args[0]))

class Muse:
    eeg_channels = [EEGChannel.AF7, EEGChannel.TP9, EEGChannel.TP10, EEGChannel.AF8, EEGChannel.AUX]

    def __init__ (self, ip, port):
        self.ip = ip
        self.port = port
        self.listener_thread = None
        self.server = None
        self.listeners = {}

    def add_listener(self, data_type, data_arrived_func):
        if data_type not in self.listeners.keys():
            self.listeners[data_type] = []
        self.listeners[data_type].append(data_arrived_func)

    def notify_listeners(self, data):
        if data.type in self.listeners.keys():
            for callback in self.listeners[data.type]:
                callback(data)

    def handler(self, address: str, *args):
        if address.endswith('eeg'):
            self.notify_listeners(MuseEEG(args))

        if address not in addresses:
            addresses.append(address)
            print(address)
        raw_entry = str(address) + ':'
        for arg in args:
            raw_entry += "," + str(arg)
        # print(raw_entry)

    def start_muse_listening(self):
        disp = dispatcher.Dispatcher()
        disp.map("/*", self.handler)
        print("Connecting to " + self.ip + ":" + str(self.port))
        self.server = osc_server.ThreadingOSCUDPServer((self.ip, self.port), disp)
        print("Connected")
        self.server.serve_forever()

    def start(self):
        self.listener_thread = Thread(target=self.start_muse_listening, daemon=True)
        self.listener_thread.start()

    def stop(self):
        print('Shutdown OSC server')
        self.server.shutdown()

That's it. With these few dozens of lines of code, we can get all the data from the Muse EEG band.

Let's talk about more exciting things.

Detecting and Classifying Eyeblinks

Usually, eyeblinks are considered artifacts that should be removed to have an artifact-free EEG for processing, but in our case, this is the only relevant information.

The eyeball acts as a dipole with a positive pole oriented anteriorly (cornea) and a negative pole oriented posteriorly (retina). Thanks to this, it highly affects our EEG data.

Here are the different types of blinks and how they appear in our EEG diagram. Normal eyeblink:

Short eyeblink:

Long eyeblink:

I have even created a short video demonstrating how detected brainwaves change when we do things like moving our eyes, blinking, and clenching our jaw.

The detection algorithm is straightforward. After some observation, I realized eyeblink results in a considerable drop, then a slight rise in the EEG signal and the time between the fall and the rise is the length of the eyeblink.

Here is the detection code:

    def detect_blink(self, data):
        self.eeg_series_lock.acquire()
        base_level = self.eeg_series.get_median(CHANNEL_USED_FOR_DETECTION)
        self.eeg_series_lock.release()
        channel_value = data.get_channel_value(CHANNEL_USED_FOR_DETECTION)
        if channel_value > self.max:
            self.max = channel_value
        if (channel_value < base_level - BLINKING_START_FALL) and (self.blinking_start_time is None):
            self.blinking_start_time = datetime.datetime.now()
            if self.pause_timer is not None:
                self.pause_timer.cancel()
        if (self.blinking_start_time is not None) and (channel_value > base_level + BLINKING_STOP_RISE):
            blinking_end_time = datetime.datetime.now()
            blink_length = (blinking_end_time - self.blinking_start_time).total_seconds() * 1000
            blink = BlinkDetector.classify_blink(blink_length)
            for callback in self.blink_listener_callbacks:
                callback(blink, blink_length)
            if blink == Blink.VERY_LONG_BLINK:
                # Resetting conversion
                self.blinks.clear()
            else:
                self.blinks.append(blink)
            self.blinking_start_time = None
            if blink == Blink.SHORT_BLINK or blink == Blink.LONG_BLINK:
                self.pause_timer = Timer(1, self.pause_detected, args=['Pause detected'])
                self.pause_timer.start()

After having the eyeblink, I can classify them based on their length. I have experimented with different lengths of blinks, and I have defined the thresholds based on that.

There are the normal blinks which are very short. There are short blinks that are a little bit longer than the natural eyeblinks.

Then comes the long blink and the very long blink.

Here is the code for the classification:

    def classify_blink(blink_length):
        if blink_length < NORMAL_SHORT_BLINK_BORDER:
            blink = Blink.NORMAL_BLINK
        elif blink_length < SHORT_LONG_BLINK_BORDER:
            blink = Blink.SHORT_BLINK
        elif blink_length < LONG_VERY_LONG_BLINK_BORDER:
            blink = Blink.LONG_BLINK
        else:
            blink = Blink.VERY_LONG_BLINK
        return blink

That was it. As you can see, there is no magic here. I did not even use Fourier transformation as it was unnecessary for this first step, but I will definitely introduce it soon.

We have almost all the logic in place, and we can start implementing our mobile app using Kivy. But before that, let's sketch our UI.

Sketching the UI

Whenever I have to draw a diagram, create a UI mock, or create a mind map, my one-to-go tool is draw.io.

Draw.io is free, and it contains many flexible elements you can use to create whatever you want.

So here is my mockup:

Finally, we can start using Kivy to implement our UI.

Implementing the UI using Kivy

In Kivy, layouts are used to arrange widgets within a component. If you have ever worked with a frontend framework, you probably already know these.

I have experience with C#, Java Swing, and Windows Forms regarding the frontend. Most of them are outdated by now, but most of the frontend frameworks have similarities.

We split the main widget into an upper and lower part using BoxLaxout. The upper part is also a BoxLayout which will contain the two Labels and TextInputs. Again, if you have ever worked with a frontend framework, you are already familiar with most of the widgets which can be used. At least I am pretty sure you used labels and text input fields.

The bottom panel has a GridLayout, containing all the Morse code-letter pairs functioning as a dictionary to aid communication.

The UI can be created using Python code or Kivy's design language kv.

I have created my user interface using Python code. Here it is:

class MainWidget(BoxLayout):
    def __init__ (self, **kwargs):
        super(MainWidget, self). __init__ (**kwargs)
        self.orientation = 'vertical'
        self.morse_code = ''
        self.converted_text = ''
        Window.clearcolor = (1, 1, 1, 1)
        self.top_panel = BoxLayout(orientation='vertical', size_hint=(1.0, 0.5))
        self.padding = (15, 15, 15, 15)
        self.color = (1, 1, 1, 1)
        self.orientation = 'vertical'
        self.add_widget(self.top_panel)

        self.morse_code_label = Label(text='Morse code', font_size=NORMAL_FONT_SIZE, size_hint=(None, 0.1),
                                      halign='left', color=(0, 0, 0, 1))
        self.top_panel.add_widget(self.morse_code_label)

        self.current_code = TextInput(multiline=False, font_size=NORMAL_FONT_SIZE, size_hint=(None, 0.1))
        self.current_code.readonly = True
        self.top_panel.add_widget(self.current_code)

        self.output_text = Label(text='Text output', font_size=NORMAL_FONT_SIZE, size_hint=(None, 0.1),
                                 halign='left', color=(0, 0, 0, 1))
        self.top_panel.add_widget(self.output_text)

        self.text_output = TextInput(multiline=True, font_size=NORMAL_FONT_SIZE, size_hint=(1.0, 0.7))
        self.text_output.readonly = True
        self.top_panel.add_widget(self.text_output)

        self.bottom_panel = GridLayout(size_hint=(1.0, 0.5), cols=6, rows=6)
        self.add_widget(self.bottom_panel)
        for name, member in MorseCode. __members__.items():
            if name.startswith('N_'):
                text = member.code + ' ' + name[2:]
            else:
                text = member.code + ' ' + name
            print('text: ' + text)
            self.bottom_panel.add_widget(Label(text=text, font_size=LARGE_FONT_SIZE, color=(0, 0, 0, 1)))

And here is the result:

It could look better, but as my main goal is to create a useful open-source app, it is completely fine for me. It does what it should do.

We only have one final step to finish our application. We have to implement the eyeblink to text conversion and display it on the UI.

Implementing Eyeblink to Text conversion via Morse Code

Here is the Morse code enum:

class MorseCode(Enum):
    A = ('a', '.-')
    B = ('b', '-...')
    C = ('c', '-.-.')
    D = ('d', '-..')
    E = ('e', '.')
    F = ('f', '..-.')
    G = ('g', '--.')
    H = ('h', '....')
    I = ('i', '..')
    J = ('j', '.---')
    K = ('k', '-.-')
    L = ('l', '.-..')
    M = ('m', '--')
    N = ('n', '--')
    O = ('o', '---')
    P = ('p', '.--.')
    Q = ('q', '--.-')
    R = ('r', '.-.')
    S = ('s', '...')
    T = ('t', '-')
    U = ('u', '..-')
    V = ('v', '...-')
    W = ('w', '.--')
    X = ('x', '-..-')
    Y = ('y', '-.--')
    Z = ('z', '--..')
    N_1 = ('1', '.----')
    N_2 = ('2', '..---')
    N_3 = ('3', '...--')
    N_4 = ('4', '....-')
    N_5 = ('5', '.....')
    N_6 = ('6', '-....')
    N_7 = ('7', '--...')
    N_8 = ('8', '---..')
    N_9 = ('9', '----.')
    N_0 = ('0', '-----')

    def __init__ (self, character, code):
        self.character = character
        self.code = code

    @classmethod
    def get_character(cls, morse_code):
        for name, member in MorseCode. __members__.items():
            if member.code == morse_code:
                return member.character
        return None

The conversion happens the following way:

If we detect a short blink, we convert it to a "." and if we have a long blink, we convert it into a "-" character. As soon as we do not detect a blink for 1 second, we transform our Morse characters into a letter or a number and display it in the "Text Output" widget.

If we detect a very long blink of 1,2 sec or more, then we delete the last converted character. Believe me, with the current state of the app, you will use this quite often. 😊

Here is the code:

    def blink_detected(self, blink, blink_length):
        print(str(blink) + ' with length: ' + str(blink_length))
        if blink == Blink.SHORT_BLINK:
            self.morse_code += '.'
        elif blink == Blink.LONG_BLINK:
            self.morse_code += '-'
        elif blink == Blink.PAUSE:
            try:
                char = MorseCode.get_character(self.morse_code)
                if char is not None:
                    self.converted_text = self.converted_text + char
                    print('Converted "' + self.morse_code + '" to ' + char + ' full text: "' + self.converted_text + '"')
                self.morse_code = ''
            except AttributeError as e:
                logging.critical(e, exc_info=True)
                print('Invalid Morse code: ' + self.morse_code)
                self.morse_code = ''
        elif blink == Blink.VERY_LONG_BLINK:
            self.morse_code = ''
            self.converted_text += 1
        Clock.schedule_once(self.update_ui)

There is no magic here, except in the last line. It is needed as the UI cannot be updated from an arbitrary thread. Our EEG handler runs on a separate thread, so the last line schedules the call of our UI update with 0 delay. As soon as there are no other jobs in the queue, our UI will be updated.

We are ready with the development so it is high time for the demo.

The Demo

I could say the demo did not went well, but that wouldn't be true. I wanted to demonstrate the current state of the blinkish to textish app. As you can see from the video there is space for improvement. I already have many ideas but in case you have too, do not hesitate to contact me.

Here is the result of 3 weeks of work:

We have only one step remaining, which is packaging our app to have an Android app.

Creating Our Android App

Here comes the beauty of Kivy:

You have to write only one application, and you can generate an app for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.

As I am developing on Windows and as I have an Android phone, my choice is to make an Android package (APK).

There are multiple ways to do that:

Using Buildozer
Packaging with python-for-android
Packaging your application for the Kivy Launcher

According to the documentation, Buildozer is the easiest. You can find all the info here regarding packaging.

Just follow the instructions, and you will have an app in no time.

I have included the necessary steps in the Readme.MD file of the project.

You can find the project on my GitHub.

Huh. That was quite a ride, but I have good news:

That's all, folks. We are completely ready with our application. We are not just ready, but we implemented a mobile/desktop app using only pure Python. I think this can be called "Implementing a mobile app the Pythonian way." Or, because I am not too good in Python yet, I would call it "Implementing a mobile app the Pythonianish way".

Before we leave, let's talk about my plans for the future.

Plans for the future

I have not overthought the future as I was focusing on the present, but here are some ideas I came up with:

Instead of using hardcoded values for blink classification, a training feature could be introduced which guides you through the process of doing eyeblinks with different lengths. Based on this info, you can immediately start using the app with little or no error, and later when you get used to it, you can calibrate again to achieve a better speed.
Make the application more robust by filtering artifacts like jaw movement and eye movement.
Modify pythonosc, or implement our solution to grab the OSC data streamed by Mind Monitor to access the timestamps based on which we can rearrange the samples.
Making a more robust solution by analyzing only the relevant part of the frequency spectrum using Fourier transformation.
Using data like eye movement, gyroscope, and accelerometer to implement a much faster brainwave to text solution.

That's all, folks. I hope you enjoyed it.

I would love to hear from you. Whether you are just thinking about starting your own brainwave-based BCI project or have already developed something, just contact me and let's have a friendly chat. I am pretty sure both of us can benefit from that.

P.S.: Something good will happen to you today!

Hackernoon interviewed me , so if you would like to learn more about me , just click here and read it!

Become an agileish superhero!

You can already find the first videos on my Youtube channel in which I show you that it is possible to memorize such boring things as positions of circles.

Don't forget to read How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC) before you watch the videos.

As I am a crazy person, I have open-sourced my life on GitHub on Fool's day.

I am sharing my thoughts, writings, and creations, and as I am frequently committing, I have open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process, and also my creation process.

Just click here to check my open-sourced life on Github!

My credo : The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet

In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram.

Minnie: What do you have for today?
Miki: Nothing.
Minnie: Nothing nothing?
Miki: It is so nothing it is not even nothing.
Maudience: Stop it. We are losing our readers!
Miki: But there is nothing else to read here.
Maudience: Fair enough.

Breaking News! The Craft Conf Giveaway Submission Deadline Has Been Extended by a Week!

Miklós Szeles — Fri, 13 May 2022 13:03:49 +0000

Do you want to win a ticket for one of the world's biggest conferences?

Participate in the Craft Conf giveaway!

I just realized most of you are busy with writing your submission to Hashnode Writeathon. The deadline has been extended by one week, so you can participate in both the Writeathon and the Craft Conf giveaway too.

The new deadline is 25th of May.

I am looking forward to your article.

P.S.: Something good will happen to you today!

https://mszeles.com/do-you-want-to-learn-software-development-from-top-notch-experts-from-all-around-the-world-here-is-your-chance-aka-the-craft-conf-giveaway

Do You Want to Learn Software Development From Top-Notch Experts From All Around The World? Win a Ticket For Craft Conf 2022

Miklós Szeles — Wed, 11 May 2022 16:13:08 +0000

UPDATE 1: The deadline has been extended by one week, so the new deadline is the 25th of May.
UPDATE 2: If you are interested in why I am attending the Craft Conf 2022 conference, just click here!

Nikolai: What is this bul.shit again? -Miki: This is not bul.shit, this is one of the biggest conferences about software development.
Nikolai: YAC!
Miki: What does YAC mean?
Nikolai: Yet another conference.
Miki: YAC!
Nikolai: My YAC?
Miki: My YAC!
Nikolai: What YAC?
Miki: This YAC.
Maudience: Guys! Stop it! We are losing our readers!
Nikolai: So what does your YAC mean?
Miki: Yes, Another Conference!
Nikolai: But this is your third conference this year. Just recall the first conference about the Future of Testing framework. That was a huge disappointment.
Miki: You are right, we heard almost nothing about the future, but it was still very valuable. Anyway, do you remember Reinforce AI? That was a great conference.
Nikolai: Sure. I have been waiting to give me life since you wrote Would You Freak Out If You Could Talk To Dead People? - Miki Szeles's Report on Reinforce AI Conference.
Miki: Who knows, maybe in the future when you will have enough digital footprint. I might resurrect you then.
Nikolai: I have to admit, it was a very eye-opening conference, even I enjoyed it, but how can you tell based on that Craft Conf will be a great conference?
Miki: There were multiple successful Craft Confs during the last years.
Nikolai: Ok, but is there anything else,?
Miki: Sure. There will be more than 70 talks.
Nikolai: 70+? That is crazy.
Miki: Yep. 70+ talks from experts from all around the world.
Nikolai: You almost convinced me to visit the conference, but is there anything else with which you can come up?
Miki: Sure. This conference is organized by Felh, Anna, Mdea, Kroly, Barna, Vanda, Viktria, Anna, Renta, Fanni, Bianka, Rka, Kata, Barbara, Veronika, Vivien, Marcel, Martin, Emila, Kristf, Gerg and Lszl. Nikolai: Who are they? Miki: They are the people behind CraftHub, the organizer of the Reinforce AI conference.
Nikolai: Ok, that conference was pretty cool. I was amazed at where AI is at the moment. You convinced me. Where is my ticket?
Miki: Ok. If you want your ticket right now, just click here, and you can buy a ticket at a 20% discount.
Maudience: Can our readers use this link too?
Miki: Yeah, sure. But I do advise them to keep on reading.
McMuck: Are they paying for this article? You should definitely ask a huge some for this.
Miki: Not for this article, but I made an agreement with CraftHub regarding other articles.
Nikolai: So why do you write this article?
Miki: I want to make a giveaway to reward our readers. My plan was to offer 3 tickets from mine, but they were so nice they gave 3 tickets for this giveaway.
Nikolai: Cool. Will you be at the conference personally then?
Miki: Yep.
Nikolai: Can I go?
Miki: All of us will go, which means 30+ characters.
McMuck: We will go bankrupt. Do we have to pay for tickets for all of us?
Miki: Easy, McMuck. Easy. We will be disguised.
McMuck: So we create a wooden horse, and all of them will get into it?
Miki: No, we will look like one normal person.
McMuck: Who?
Miki: We will look like as Miki Szeles 😊
McMuck: Huh. We are saved.
Nikolai: Ok, so can we get back to the conference?
Miki: Sure.
Nikolai: So, we have decided we will go. I do believe it is time to make our schedule.
Miki: You are right. How will we create our schedule?
Maudience: Don't worry, Anna from CrafHub provided a Google Spreadsheet containing the schedule, so based on that and our readers can easily create their schedule too.
Miki: Cool. Where is it?
Maudience: It does not exist yet.
Miki: What?
Maudience: I will need 1-2 hours to do that.
Miki: But we will lose our readers by then.
Mikaru: Do not worry. I brought here a great Japanese anime. I am pretty sure they will stick to the screen.
Miki: Oh. I think I know what you will bring. You will get the anime which inspired me to play go back then.
Mikaru: Exactly. It is the Hikaru No Go anime. The whole series is available on Youtube. Click here to watch it.

Creating Our Schedule

Manality: I am back.
Miki: Wow. You have finished in 10 minutes. Cool.
Manality: I have not finished.
Miki: What? But I wrote a script for you to collect the talks and the names.
Manality: That is true, but I have not found any schedule on the homepage,
Miki: Ouch. What will we do then?
Minnie: I have an idea!
Miki, Nikolai, Manality: Hello Minnie!
Minnie: Hi. Sorry for being late. I just had the data analysis class taught by experts from Dmlab at the Budapest University of Economics and Technology (BME).
Miki: Cool. What have you learned?
Minnie: I learned about time series, but to be honest, I could not focus as Meadline pushed me to do my work as the deadline was very close.
Maudience: Minnie, guys! Focus. Focus. You know, our audience...
Miki: We know, Maudience. We know.
Minnie: So we can write the end of the article, and as we will meet Anna today, we can ask for a schedule from here.
Miki: Cool. Then let's write the Giveaway section.
Miki: I have finished with the giveaway section. By now, you can find the schedule on the Craft Conf homepage, and we also got the spreadsheet.
Minnie: Cool.
Miki: DJMic! Can you please provide us with some music.
DJMic: Sure. This time I brought a world-class Hungarian band.
Miki: Cool. Who are they? The Carbonfools?
DJMic: This time, I will play Paddy and The Rats.
Miki: I know them. I love it. I love pirates since I played Pirates back then on my C64 and PC.
DJMic: Me too. Just click here and start the planning!

Really Creating Our Schedule

Miki: Just one note before we start. The schedule might slightly change, so I advise you to check the conference's page a few days before the conference to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Just click here, make your own copy, and you can already start your planning.

Minnie: Cool. Let's start.
Miki: There will be 4 offline stages: Main stage, Platform 2, Blue stage, and Green stage. The green stage is different from the others as that is hands-on, which means you can make your hand dirty by writing code.

There will be 2 online stages Pink stage and the Red stage. As the speakers are from all around the world, not all of them can travel to Hungary so that they will have a virtual talk.

Miki: There will be 3 speakers I know. I know Micheal Feathers and Dan North as they were already very famous back then before my Udemy course era (I am learning almost everything related to software development from Udemy courses). And I know Ivett rdg personally.
Minnie: Holy moly! Michael Feathers, Daniel Terhorst-Nort and Ivett rdg at the same conference. I hope we can visit all three. Can we?
Miki: Yes, luckily, there is no overlapping. All of them will be on the 3rd of June. Here are the talks in CET time:
11:25-12:10: Team Autonomy and the Capability-Aware Organization by Michael Feathers - Platform 2
13:40-14:25: Rethinking Transformation by Daniel Terhorst-North (VIRTUAL TALK)
16:40-17:25: How to sell a big refactor or rewrite to the business? by Ivett rdg
Minnie: Oh. Dan North will have a virtual talk. That is almost the same as watching it later from recording.
Miki: You are right. We might choose a different topic. We will see.
Minnie: I am especially happy about Ivett's talk as we had a conversation recently about testing and business, and selling a refactor was also mentioned, of course.
Maudience: Guys! We are losing our readers. Move on!
Miki: The first talk will be Non-Functional Coding by Kevlin Henney. As there will be no other talks, it is an easy choice. The table is quite colorful, so I will use cyan color to highlight the selected one.

From 10:50, there will be 6 talks:

Squaring the circle - mastering the next level of architectural design by Uwe Friedrichsen
Driving effective Prioritization for optimal business outcomes by Smruti Patel
Taking the 737 to the MAX! by Nickolas Means
Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies: Architecting for Fast Flow by Nick Tune & Zsfia Herendi
5 Things I Wish I'd Known Sooner About Scaling Teams by Meri Williams (VIRTUAL TALK)
Dantotsu Radical Software Quality Improvement by Fabrice Bernhard (VIRTUAL TALK)
Minnie: What a pity we cannot listen to all of them.
Miki: Don't worry, all the talks will be recorded, and they will be available to all the participants.
Minnie: Cool. So which will we choose?
Miki: It is not an easy choice. Some names are quite mysterious, like "Taking the 737 to the MAX!" but I guess it is about the Boeing 737, but I can be totally wrong, of course.
Minnie: So will we listen to that?
Miki: Looking at the five talks, "Dantotsu Radical Software Quality Improvement" by Fabrice Bernhard is the most relevant in our current situation.
Minnie: Why?
Miki: As you know, I work as a test automation engineer, so ensuring quality is my number one prio.
Minnie: I would like to listen to "Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies: Architecting for Fast Flow" by Nick Tune & Zsfia Herendi, especially as there will be a Hungarian speaker.
Miki: You can watch the record later.
Minnie: Oh, you are right. I almost forgot about that. So what will we listen to from 11:55?
Miki: As Nick Tune & Zsfia Herendi talk is longer, there will be 5 talks:
Balancing Coupling in Software Design by Vladik Khononov
Applying Friction for Development Productivity with Circuit Breakers by Frank Chen
How To Build Your Own Heroku in 2022? by Viktor Farcic
Micro-Frontends anti-patterns by Luca Mezzalira (VIRTUAL TALK)
When life gives you Orange, make data speak volumes! by Drishti Jain (VIRTUAL TALK)
Minnie: I've seen the Heroku name so many times in the last few months, so I would like to listen to that.
Miki: I think in order to get the most out of this talk, we should have basic Heroku knowledge, so maybe next time.
Minnie: Which will be then?
Miki: After reading Frank Chen's bio, it is a clear choice:

At Slack, Frank focuses on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive in the Developer Productivity group.

They have a productivity group which is fantastic. I have fallen in love with the idea of a productivity team since I heard Kathryn Koehler's talk. in which she explains Netflix has a productivity engineering team that is focusing on helping other teams to be more productive.

I hope sometime in the future there will be such a team in my employer's company. It is a little bit similar to the automation engineer idea about which I was talking in To Test, or Not to Test, That is Not The Question Reloaded - AKA Why You Should Replace Your Automated Tests With Manual Tests.

Minnie: So, what's next?
Miki: Lunch.
Miki: I am hungry too, but I meant what will come in the schedule.
Miki: Lunch.
Minnie: Stop it, Miki. It is not lunchtime yet.
Mictor: I am hungry too. Where is my mustard?
Miki: No! No! I mean lunch is the next part of the conference.
Minnie: 🤦
Miki: So let's continue. Here are the talks from the next etap:
Stop Focusing on Tech Debt by Aviv Ben-Yosef
Open Source Security: The World Needs Our Help by Eric Brewer
Delivery through Retrospection for Improvement by Anjali Leon & April Jefferson
Loosely or lousily coupled? Understanding communication patterns in microservices architectures by Bernd Rcker (VIRTUAL TALK)
Engineering for Software - How to Amplify Creativity by Dave Farley (VIRTUAL TALK)
Minnie: Which one will be your selection, Miki?
Miki: You know, Minnie, one of my goals is to become more creative, so I will listen to Dave Farley's "Engineering for Software - How to Amplify Creativity".
Minnie: Cool.
Meadline: I am sorry for the interruption, but it is time to stop this planning part and talk about the giveaway as we have to post this article today, and we also have to develop a mobile app and write an article about it in order to participate in the Hashnode Writeathon. The deadline is only 4 days away.
Miki: Ok. Let's talk about the giveaway.

The Craft Conf Giveaway AKA Your Chance To Win an Online Craft Conf Ticket

Dear fellow (wannabe) Bloggers!

I would like to inspire you for writing articles, so I have decided to have a giveaway in which you can win a ticket for the Craft Conf 2022.

I do not believe in luck, so I will personally select the winners.

There are 3 categories in which you can participate:

Funniest technical article. Writing is fun, reading should be fun too. I would like to awaken the technicalish writer in you.
Most inspiring article. I was inspired multiple times by your writings, so I would like to encourage you to continue posting new valuable content.
Any other article. I do not want to exclude any type of article, as all of them are valuable. In the worst case, if nobody reads it, it is still valuable for the writer as you can learn a lot by writing about a topic.

You can participate with multiple articles.

The selection process will be sobjective, which means it will be subjective as there is no single person in the world who can be totally objective, and it will be objective as my whole team will evaluate the articles, which means 30+ different viewpoints.

Rules of participation:

You have to write and publish an article.

In case you have no blog yet, I highly advise using Hashnode because I do believe this is the best blogging platform for software developers. Both for reading and writing high-quality, valuable articles. I highly recommend reading my summary of my first month on Hashnode: My First Month on Hashnode - A Retrospection About Blogging on Hashnode Developer Journaling Platform by Miki Szeles.

Here is my Hashnode referral link. I do not get anything if you use it (I am already a Hashnode Ambassador), but it would be motivating to see how many people I inspired to start Hashnode blogging.

The article's title has to end with "AKA Craft Conf Giveaway Participation".

The deadline for the submission is the 25th of May.

I will share all participating articles on my LinkedIn and Twitter.

In case you will be selected as a winner, you have to write a 1000 words article about the conference in exchange for the ticket. It can be a general article or an article about one or more talks. I need this as that was the agreement between CraftHub and me. I will share the article on my LinkedIn and Twitter, and CraftHub will also share it.
In order to participate, you have to comment the following sentence under this article:

"I am participating in the Craft Conf giveaway, and I will write a 1000-word article about the conference if I win."

How will I find your article

I will follow everyone who is commenting the above-mentioned sentence under this article if they are from Hashnode, dev.to, or medium.com, as I can only follow you on a platform where I am registered.

I highly recommend posting the link here for 2 reasons:

To make sure I won't miss it
Others can also find and read your article.

I am looking forward to your articles.

Cheers,

Miki

NoShare: Dear Reader! In case you found this article boring and useless, then please do not share it as we do not like negative marketing.

But in all other cases please share it with your social media friends, so they can they might get inspired to visit the conference.

P.S.: Something good will happen to you today!

** BECOME AN AGILEISH SUPERHERO!**

Learn how to memorize anything in the world with me. In this series, I teach you everything I know about learning and memorization, including memory palaces, marker images, number memorisation techniques, associations, etc.

You can already find the first videos on my Youtube channel in which I show you that it is possible to memorise such boring things as positions of circles.

Don't forget to read How You Can Become An Agileish Super Learner AKA How You Can Become A Super Thinker AKA The Proof Of Concept (POC) before you watch the videos.

The next session's date is still under discussion, join the Agileish Superheroes Facebook group to learn memorization techniques, thinking techniques, agility, reading and learning techniques and also to get notified about new live sessions and videos

As I am a crazy person, I have open-sourced my life on GitHub on Fool's day.

I am sharing my thoughts, writings and creations and as I am committing frequently, I have open-sourced my thinking process, my writing process and also my creation process.

Just click here, to check my open-sourced life on Github!

My credo: The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red ❤ Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet

Read my story, in case you would like to understand how I think and act as a developer and tester in the real world. You can get some insights about my humour, and I am also happy to tell you that this is my article about which I am the proudest of now.

In case you do not want to miss my posts, just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram. 😊

How To Customize Your LinkedIn URL in 6 Easy Steps AKA How To Boost Your LinkedIn SEO AKA Lifehacks By Miki Szeles

Miklós Szeles — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 05:07:04 +0000

Have you ever noticed that ugly hexadecimal number at the end of your LinkedIn URL?

I have good news for you:

You can get rid of it completely.

And you can even write anything there. For example, you can write your job title in it, which might aid your SEO as search engines consider the URL a significant source of information.

So how can you do that?

Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn profile!
Click the View Profile button!
Click Edit public profile & URL link!
Click on the pencil icon right after your URL!
Change your URL to whatever you like! I advise you to consider SEO, so to boost your search results, you should put all your keywords into it.
Click the Save button to save your new unique URL.
+1: You do not have to change your pointers to your LinkedIn profile after you change your URL as LinkedIn keeps all the previous URLs alive.

Thanks for reading!

Please hack your friends' lives by sharing this article with them and your social media friends.

Are you blogging on Hashnode? Yes? Cool. No? What are you waiting for? Hashnode is my number one blogging platform as a developer.

Please use my referral link to join Hashnode and become a Hlogger (Hashnode Blogger)!. I do not get anything for it as I already became a Hashnode Ambassador by referring 3 of my friends, but it would be awesome to see how many people I have inspired to start blogging. 😊

In case you want to understand why Hashnode is the best developer blogger platform, just read my My First Month on Hashnode - A Retrospection About Blogging on Hashnode Developer Journaling Platform by Miki Szeles harticle (Hashnode article)!

In case you are still not sure why you should start blogging, please read my harticle:

Start writing now! Seriously! is the first harticle in the series in which I share my learnings, which can be valuable for newcomers and advanced bloggers.

My credo: The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red ❤ Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet Read my story , in case you would like to understand how I think and act as a developer and tester in the real world. You can get some insights about my humour , and I am also happy to tell you that, this is my article about which I am the proudest of now.

In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram. 😊

Contribute to the open-source Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension, with which test automation teams can save hours daily by automatically generating all the relevant selectors for Selenide, Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Squish and TestCafe.

Follow the Selenideium Element Inspector Twitter channel to get updated on the latest happenings regarding Selenideium, to get help, to share your experience and also to talk about any (test automation) related topic! 😊

Join the Selenide User Group on LinkedIn to connect with more than a hundred test automation engineers and learn and get help regarding the most astounding e2e test automation framework: Selenide.

Join the Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program and earn ☕s by contributing to this open-source project. 🚀 This is the perfect opportunity to make the first step into open-source contributing, and also in case you would like to learn about JavaScript and Chrome extension development. 😊

I am building a friendly, supportive, knowledgeable community around Selenideium. I did not dare to contribute to any open source project for a very long time. I was afraid that the developer community would take my code and myself into parts. And to be honest, seeing the sad fact that there are rude and ignorant people in the dev community too, most probably that is what has had happened back then.

This is why I guarantee that Selenideium Element Inspector is the perfect project to start your open-source contribution; I will also make sure it will stay like that. No matter how genius you are, if you do not respect the community members, this project is not for you.

To show my gratitude and motivate you, I will invite you for ☕ for every contribution.

I will even give a shoutout to you both on Selenideium and on my personal Twitter accounts in case you contribute.

Minnie: Where are you?
Miki: I am here, I just bought popcorn, but I guess I only missed the ads.
Minnie: Miki, the story is over.
Miki: Whatttt?
Minnie: That's it. We can go home.
Miki: You are trying to trick me, Minnie.
Minnie: I am not tricking you. Why do you think that?
Miki: As Miki, Szeles wouldn't write any story which is shorter than at least half an hour.
Minnie: Fair enough.
Miki: However I should have known that based on the short title which is definitely not usual from Miki. What should we do now?
Minnie: We should watch another story.
Miki: Which one do you recommend?
Minnie: Do you like science fiction? You know, robots, fremens, Skynet.
Miki: Sure.
Minnie: Then we should watch Miki Szeles's Adventures in The Field of Data Science - The backstory.
Nikolai: No way, Miki. Self-promo again? Really?
Mictor: Such professionalism.