Forem: Francesco Napoletano

How to get into "the zone" while programming?

Francesco Napoletano — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 17:51:23 +0000

The Urban Dictionary definition of "the zone" is really on the spot IMHO.

Being Completely unaware of what's going on around you as you are so extremely into what's going on right in front of your face; like anything more than 3 feet away just doesn't register in the brain.

So, how do I get into "the zone" in order to work as much as possible?

It's really personal and here is what's working for me recently:

A Spotify playlist of electronic music with few lyrics. I like this one from John Resig, the creator of jQuery, but there are many, just try some of them and find what you like
Shut down notifications from your phone
Use SelfControl or similar apps to block websites and social networks you use to procrastinate

Can you share some suggestion? What do you use to get into "the zone" while programming?

How to handle rejection when interviewing

Francesco Napoletano — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 16:35:02 +0000

If you’ve faced several rejections so far in your job search, it can be easy to feel dejected and disheartened. Here are some suggestions that helped me a lot in the past:

Remember: it’s not only about you! If you’ve prepared fully and tried your best, there’s little else you could have done.
Rejection is not feedback. Don’t just assume that everything you’ve done was wrong. Ask politely for a feedback if you feel so.
You just learned something new. Even rejection is a lesson, remember this!
And now try again!!! Next time you might score your next perfect job!

What is Deno? A 1 minute read

Francesco Napoletano — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 16:40:58 +0000

A 1 minute read post about Deno, the new kid in town. Is Node.js safe? Yes. Will you need to learn something new soon? Probably.

Deno is a project (written in Rust) which was created by the original creator of Node.js, Ryan Dahl and has recently gone 1.0 (currently 1.0.5).

It's defined on its website as:

A secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript

Read also: https://kitsonkelly.com/posts/deno-is-a-browser-for-code/
See also: https://github.com/denolib/awesome-deno

Why Deno runtime is secure?

In Deno by default your code can not:

Access the filesystem
Access the network
Access the environment

To allow this, you have to explicitly enable access by providing a flag when executing your code.

Deno is trying to bring the "disabled by default" nature of the browser, to the server-side. They do this by sandboxing your code mostly like a browser does.

Here is an example.

If you run this without using the --allow-net flag you'll see an error.

So to run this server you need to type deno run --allow-net server.ts

What are the features of Deno's runtime?

In Deno things are quite different from Node.js, in particular:

Dependency management (URLs instead of package.json, still somehow controversial for some people and some alternatives have been proposed)
A secure/audited standard library is available! https://deno.land/std (HTTP, websockets, UUID, DateTime, etc...)
Unlike Node.js, where once built/compiled you are given a set of files, with a single entry point, Deno will always give you a single executable binary (great for portability)
Built-In linting and much more is coming in version 1.1!

TypeScript by default

In Deno there’s no difference in running JavaScript code or TypeScript code. In Node.js, you have to configure your project to compile TypeScript and while improved, the process is not yet friendly for new users.

Done, I told you this was fast.

Check also the deno.land website! And this 50 minutes crash course about Deno

A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website

Francesco Napoletano — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 20:06:28 +0000

I own a little website I use for some SEO experiments. Of course there's some content and a facebook sharing button for every post. The website is so little it runs on a "single controller" PHP app + a 400kb SQLite db, but can generate thousands of different pages.

Everything is hosted (together with a bunch of other websites) on a cheap DigitalOcean machine + free cloudflare plan for some caching. One of those websites has some alerting and it started to alert me about being down.

After some investigations I've found out the problem... the Facebook Crawler

That crawler was making more than 7M requests per day (with a peak of 300req/second) to that website.

Their doc was not helping on how to block the bot.

og:ttl -> ignored
robots.txt -> ignored
HTTP 429 -> ignored

I had to block the user-agent using cloudflare rules.

If there's someone working on that crawler here on dev.to, please stop ignoring basic Internet netiquette about crawlers.

Next time you could hit someone on AWS. And then they'll probably ask you to pay the bill ;)

So, you want to be a programmer?

Francesco Napoletano — Fri, 22 May 2020 14:58:17 +0000

Originally published on my blog

How many times have you said this?

"I'd like to learn to code some day."

Sitting at coffee with a friend:

"I'd like to create a website some day."

Mingling at the office Christmas party:

"I want to create an app some day."

Plenty of people are wannabe programmers. They'll tell you about their idea, all the research they've done, the cool features they've come up with. Very few actually do anything about it. They sit on their nice, comfy couches and say, "I'd like to learn to code some day."

You've said it yourself, haven't you? The couch is very comfortable. No one blames you. You work hard at your job. When you get home, you're tired. The couch calls to you: Rest! You've earned it! A fellow enjoying his well-earned rest on the couch.

But do you ever wonder? Do you ever wonder what it would be like?

To create that app that's in your head. To see it outside your head, on a screen. But apps or websites don't get there by themselves. Programs need a programmer to write them. Do you want to be a programmer?

If so, there are two things you absolutely have to do.

Decide you want to be a programmer.
Prove to yourself that you are a programmer.

Do you want to be a programmer? Say it, prove it.

Prove to yourself that you're a programmer. What does a programmer do? A programmer writes code. You must write code.

Any pro will tell you (I consider myself a professional programmer), the secret is perseverance. Programmers write code.

It's really that simple.

Adapted from couchto50k.club

And now, if you're already a programmer, share this article with the guy/girl you know is always saying: "I want to learn to code some day".

I published two books last week and you can publish a book too!

Francesco Napoletano — Sat, 09 May 2020 11:01:55 +0000

Ok, so this was the plan last monday morning:

I have a one week long holiday (at home, thanks Covid-19) with my wife working in the other room (no kids or pets around)
I'm a programmer (they pay me to program, so I must be good)
I want to achieve "something" by the end of the week
I want to do something "print related"

Spoiler: I have two books published on Amazon!

What?

Yes, you got it. I've published two books on Amazon in less than a week. More specifically two sudoku puzzle books:

Why?

I didn't want to publish just another app. I choose something you can print and touch. A book was the best choice.

How?

If you follow me you've probably read this post: https://dev.to/napolux/how-to-generate-pdf-from-web-pages-5781.

So, I've used a Sudoku generator in a little PHP app to generate HTML books. Then I created the "master" PDF file for my book with Weasyprint and a cover with Canva.com.

I've spent a couple of days fine-tuning my PDF and then I was ready.

The final book and cover were uploaded to the Amazon KDP platform, et voilà, my books were ready to be printed on demand! No ebook as I said, a real book!

You can publish a book (or an ebook) too!

So, what's blocking you? You can easily publish (and sell) a book in a matter of minutes. Your blog posts and tutorials, your ideas, your puzzles, your personal diary or that novel about dinosaurs that work as programmers.

We all have something to say. This time were Sudokus, but I'll probably publish something more in the next weeks!

Will I make money?

I don't know and I don't care. The achievement was really what I was looking for (at least for now).

If you have any question, just ask in the comments section!

My two books

How to generate PDF from web pages

Francesco Napoletano — Mon, 04 May 2020 07:56:51 +0000

Originally published on my blog

For a little project of mine I had to generate PDF files from a fairly complex HTML web page.

The original page was created in PHP, so I’ve looked at libraries like dompdf and TCPDF I used many years ago. They’re still like 10 years ago… Not working well with CSS3 and tables.

After many tries the only library working fine was WeasyPrint. You can use in your Python projects or from the command line.

weasyprint https://napolux.com output.pdf

Perfect output and small PDF size. Give it a try!

Signs it's time to leave your company

Francesco Napoletano — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 08:37:11 +0000

@catalinmpit asked this question yesterday on twitter...

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This is an easy one, happened to me in 2019: you know it's time to move on when:

You're no longer having fun
You're not learning or applying anything new in your daily routine
You have no mentors in the company
You struggle for challenges, but challenges are not there anymore

A weather API with Node.js, OvernightJS and TypeScript

Francesco Napoletano — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 07:36:14 +0000

I am, like many of us, working from home. I leave my house only for basic necessities, like food or emergencies. My time is split between work, my wife, videogames and some side-projects.

While cleaning up my GitHub account I've found this little project I made a while ago: a weather API with Node.js, OvernightJS and TypeScript. I was pretty proud of it (it's 100% TypeScript, there's automatic documentation, linting and tests), so I said: "Let's write a post about it".

My goal was to map the OpenWeatherMap API to serve a subset of its data in our app, while learning OvernightJS.

What is OvernightJS?

OvernightJS is a simple library to add TypeScript decorators to Express routes.

The thing I like the most about OvernightJS is its simplicity: it's not meant to act as an extra layer on top of Express or take you away from the RESTful style of writing back-end web APIs.

Check this tutorial if you want to get started with OvernightJS.

Let's start

Ok, what will this project do? The app will expose 3 endpoints for 3 specific cities: Stockholm, Madrid and Milan.

ENDPOINTS
http://localhost:4000/api/weather/CITY/forecast	Forecast for CITY (stockholm,madrid,amsterdam)
http://localhost:4000/api/weather/CITY/current	Current weather for CITY (stockholm,madrid,amsterdam)
http://localhost:4000/api/weather/stats	Avg. temp for the 3 cities and the highest temp/humidity

Application setup

First of all: for safety reasons, the API token is not included in this repo. Please check .env.example for details. Get an API key from https://openweathermap.org/api and store it in a file called .env file at the root of your project.

# The port where the application is listening
APPLICATION_PORT=4000

# The https://openweathermap.org/ API token
OWM_APP_ID=YOUR_API_TOKEN

Now, let's setup our app. We're adding a bit of stuff here:

Application scripts in package.json
tsconfig.json for TypeScript
tslint.json for linting

Just run:

npm install -g typescript
tsc --init

You should find your TypeScript config file in the root of your project. If you want to follow a more detailed guide check https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-set-up-a-typescript-project-67b427114884.

You can just grab the three files mentioned above from the github repo if you're lazy.

Let's dive a bit into these files

package.json

Apart from the packages (you can install them by running an npm install once the file is in your project directory) the interesting part here is the scripts section.

"scripts": {
    "docs": "./node_modules/.bin/typedoc --out docs --mode modules src",
    "start-dev": "nodemon --config \"./util/nodemon.json\"/",
    "build": "rm -rf ./dist/ && tsc",
    "start": "node dist/start.js",
    "test": "./node_modules/.bin/mocha -r ts-node/register src/**/*.spec.ts",
    "lint": "tslint --fix -c tslint.json 'src/**/*.ts'"
},

The scripts are pretty self-explanatory:

docs generates the app documentation using TypeDoc
start-dev launches the app in "watch-mode" for your local environment
build compiles the code for distribution
start launches the app
test runs the tests for your app
lint runs tslint for your code

tsconfig.json & tslint.json

Configuration file for TypeScript and linting rules. Not much to say, pretty standard files...

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "module": "commonjs",
        "esModuleInterop": true,
        "strict": true,
        "baseUrl": "./",
        "outDir": "dist",
        "removeComments": true,
        "experimentalDecorators": true,
        "target": "es6",
        "emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
        "moduleResolution": "node",
        "importHelpers": true,
        "types": [
            "node"
        ],
        "typeRoots": [
            "node_modules/@types"
        ]
    },
    "typedocOptions": {
        "mode": "modules",
        "out": "docs"
    },
    "include": [
        "./src/**/*.ts"
    ]
}

And...

{
    "extends": "tslint:recommended",
    "rules": {
        "max-line-length": {
            "options": [100]
        },
        "member-ordering": false,
        "no-consecutive-blank-lines": false,
        "object-literal-sort-keys": false,
        "ordered-imports": false,
        "quotemark": [true, "single"],
        "variable-name": [true, "allow-leading-underscore"]
    }
}

Let's move to our app...

The server

Our app entry point will be src/start.ts as you can see from util/nodemon.json (check the start-dev in the scripts section of our package.json.

The script simply includes our ApiServer class which will setup our controllers on the routes configured using OvernightJS. OvernightJS makes this super simple, just a loop on the controllers.

/**
 * Adds controllers to the application
 * by looping on the imported classes
 */
private setupControllers(): void {
    const ctlrInstances = [];
    for (const name in controllers) {
        if (controllers.hasOwnProperty(name)) {
            const controller = (controllers as any)[name];
            ctlrInstances.push(new controller());
        }
    }
    super.addControllers(ctlrInstances);
}

The controllers

Let's see how OvernightJS makes easy for us to configure our application controllers: first of all let's define a class...

/**
 * @class ApiController
 * is the class managing endpoints for our API
 */
@Controller('api')
export class ApiController {

}

/api (check the @Controller annotation) will be the "root" of our URL. Each method of this class will have its own route...

/**
 * It should return the Current Weather Forecast given a city as input among three
 * @param req
 * @param res
 */
@Get('weather/:city/current')
@Middleware([cityValidatorMiddleware])
private async getCurrentWeather(req: Request, res: Response) {
    let weather;
    try {
        weather = await this.owm.getCurrentWeather(req.params.city);
        return res.status(Ok).json({
            currentWeather: weather,
        });
    } catch (err) {
        return res.status(InternalServerError).json({ error: err });
    }
}

We're adding @Get annotation to define a GET route with the weather/:city/current path and a @Middleware to validate our request (we only serve three cities, do you remember?).

The method itself is pretty simple: we call the getCurrentWeather() method in the src/openweathermap/OpenWeatherMapApiClient.ts class and return the result as a JSON object.

{
    "currentWeather": {
        "cityName": "Amsterdam",
        "cityWeather": "Clear, clear sky"
    }
}

The api will answer at the http://localhost:4000/api/weather/amsterdam/current.

Using OvernightJS will allow you to define your routes in a super easy way, and inside your controllers, closer to your actual code. To me it's more clear than the classic "Express way":

// GET method route
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
    res.send('GET request to the homepage');
});

// POST method route
app.post('/', function (req, res) {
    res.send('POST request to the homepage');
});

Recap

Here's a little recap, useful if you just want to download and run the code:

The three allowed cities are Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam
Run tests with npm run test
The project is using OvernightJS, a simple library to add TypeScript decorators for methods meant to call Express routes. It also includes a package for printing logs.
You can generate TypeDoc documentation by running npm run docs, the documentation will be stored in the docs folder.
The project is using dotenv-safe for env. configuration. See .env.example for details.

Ok, we're done. Check the full code here: https://github.com/napolux/weather-api-typescript.

The code itself is over-commented, so you should not have any problem in following the code flow.

If you have any question just get in touch!

Some tips from when you work from home

Francesco Napoletano — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:05:12 +0000

Here are some tricks for the occasional "work from home": many of us are working from home right now due to the coronavirus flu and I'd like to share what I've learnt in these years of constant (but not full) work from home.

Maybe they can be applied also to freelancers, but they are more used to work from home and they get their working routine very early...

Respect the usual morning routine: shower, brush your teeth…
Dress casual if you want, but dress yourself (no pajamas) and always put your shoes on (this tricks your mind into thinking you’re not home for "lazyness")
Wake up at the same time you wake up when you go to the office
Do your laundry, bed, etc... BEFORE actually start working (avoid housing distractions!)
Find a silent spot in your home away from kids, if you have any. Discard this if you have to watch for your kids while working from home (you’re my hero in this case)
Take your time. If you are used to get a coffee around 11am in the office, do the same at home
Lunch break of 1 hour? Make a 1 hour break. Usually eating at your desk? Do a speed lunch even at home.
If you usually leave the office at 6pm, stop working at 6pm
If you need Internet connection stop every torrent/heavy download you may have on your own network
Check the VPN (or whatever connection you use) the night before (or better, some time in advance) in order to be ready in case of problems.
NO TV! (just put some music on if you feel bored)
Do some little walk around the house every hour
Drink plenty of water

How to find the perfect solution

Francesco Napoletano — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 15:14:51 +0000

Let's say you have a huge programming problem to solve. This is one of the approaches I’ve found to work.

You spend hours scouring Google, StackOverflow and some obscure tutorials
You try tons of approaches, none of which work
PANIC
Defeated, you try to explain it to a colleague in search for help
You suddenly find the perfect solution while you explain the problem to your colleague
You go back to your desk and solve your problem

I’ve found solutions to my problems this way more times than I’d like to admit.

That's the power of rubber duck debugging!

Let's go remote!

Francesco Napoletano — Mon, 20 May 2019 19:10:19 +0000

I've recently moved to a new position as Full Stack Software Engineer for a cool tech company in Italy, my home country. I'm super happy with my new job (a really exciting environment, super cool technology, wonderful colleagues, a solid business, a shiny office full of amenities, 2 days of smartworking per week, etc...)

While looking for this new job, I took the chance to think about the job market for programmers. We're very lucky compared to other jobs and the demand for programmers is hitting an all-time high. But...

But... There's still something really old in our job. Most of us are still stuck to a 9-5 (plus commuting) routine.

I spend 2 hours per day commuting. Sometimes, it takes 3 (train delays, strikes, etc...). Let' do a little math.

2 hours per day
10 hours per week
40+ hours per month

It's not only about commuting. It's about what I need for my job. Let's face it: offices are cool, but I just need a computer and a fast Internet connection for 100% of my duties.

If I want to talk to my colleagues I can call, slack, email them whenever I need. Collaboration over the Internet has never been easier: I can share documents, presentations, code with just a couple of clicks.

The Remote Only Manifesto should be applied by every "IT" company, and it's time for us (programmers, devops, IT managers, etc...) to push for this change.

I'll try to do my part and from now on, so, this will be my standard reply to recruiters getting in touch with me on LinkedIn (and elsewhere):

Hello, $recruiter,
I'm not actively looking for a job right now, but in the future I will only evaluate 100% remote positions.

As I said... I love my new job, but I'm 100% sure my next job will be remote.

Share this (and many more articles about remote working) using the hashtag #letsgoremote

Let's go remote!

This post originally appeared on https://coding.napolux.com, but was brought to dev.to for your reading pleasure ❤