Forem: Mirza

Am I A Good Software Engineer

Mirza — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 10:11:42 +0000

I was thinking about writing this piece, for the past couple of weeks. It's more of a personal catharsis mixed with some observations I've made in the last 3 months. This post ain't about bashing others. Rather, it's about me trying to find to figure out about myself. Feel free to share your thoughts, critiques and suggestions about this.

Let me start with a confession: I've started to feel that I've this love/hate relationship with LinkedIn. Every day I see 100s of posts about someone passing X certification, contributing in Y OSS project or something else. Then there's another trend going on where people quote something like If you don’t come out of this quarantine with a new skill, your side-hustle started, or more knowledge gained, that you never lacked time, you lacked discipline. This is utter nonsense. Am I a bad SWE if I am not busting my ass coding during weekends, not writing tech blogs every week or taking deep learning courses online? Who gets to decide who's a good and bad engineer? I work with engineers who've 10+ years of experience, worked on commercial projects only, don't have any certifications and never written a tech blog. Are they bad too?

Every time I see these kinds of posts, I feel guilty. of not doing enough. The anxiety keeps growing. Yes I want to improve, work on a side project and prepare for my masters applications. But it's really hard!. Keeping motivational level stable is a daily grind for me. I tried contributing in Zulip, pursuing AWS certification but I failed either because they were too difficulty or I didn't had time because of my 9-5 hr job. In fact, I've failed more often than I would like to admit. What does this make me then?

I studied electrical engineering for a year before transferring were to computer science. There were 2 reasons: first, I wasn’t happy studying it. Second, job market is for software engineers is much better compare to others. The last point is important especially if you're living in country like Pakistan where economy is in pretty bad shape. Money is the primary motivation for most of the people, for obvious reasons. The idea of passionate programmer and 10x ninja developer is a myth. Whole field of CS has become so much complex that impossible to be jack of all trades and master of all simultaneously. Most people just want to have a strong work-life balance with financial stability.

I am still struggling with my demons. I don't know about the future. All I know is that I've to wake up every day and try...

P.S: I am happy for those who're still doing productive work during these awful times especially those who've families to take case of, switching career and/or facing some other life issues. More power to you!

Explain Dependency Injection (DI) like I am five.

Mirza — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 03:14:47 +0000

I have watched some videos about it but they weren't really helpful in explaining the underline workings and philosophy. All I know is that some frameworks like .NET Core and Spring use it extensively.

Preparing for Software Engineering Interviews

Mirza — Sat, 11 Jan 2020 15:11:21 +0000

Gonna keep this as brief and direct as possible.

I am trying to create a presentation on the subject of How To Ace Your Very First Software Engineering interview for the seminar which I'll be conducting in my former college. The target audience will mostly be students of senior year. The purpose behind all of this activity is guide students in about the whole process without facing the extra grind. Because this my first intance where I'll be delivering any sort of seminar, I want to avoid as many mistakes as possible. Hence, I need the help from the awesome community of Dev.to.

I've already compiled a list of topics which I want to cover in the seminar. Here's the list.

Besides this, I also want to share your stories within the context of following questions:

Which steps did you take for interview prepping in terms of technical and soft skills?
What sort of challenges did you while giving interviews at run time?
How did you cope with failures after getting rejected by the companies?
Tips for effective writing resume/CV
Any type of discrimination you faced during the hiring process ** in the form of sexism/racism/ something else? (For this, input from people of color, LGBT community and women will be really appreciated**).
How to effectively engage with recruiters and HR managers?
How much does networking impact on the whole job hunting process? Was it helpful in your case

By covering your experiences, I'll be able to reduce tunnel vision of my own and deliver maximum objectivity.

P.S: Feel free to add anything which I haven't mentioned yet you it find important

Computer Science Books

Mirza — Sun, 26 May 2019 16:10:03 +0000

Quick Announcement:

I am sharing my Google Drive folder which contains multiple computer science books (in PDF form). I've collected them over the past 4 years of college life. I've divided them according to their domains (web/mobile/desktop development, computer vision data science etc).

Feel free to explore and download them :)

PDFs folder

Learning for Life

Mirza — Thu, 16 May 2019 15:13:29 +0000

Today marks my first month as a fresh SW in As a associate engineer. I mainly deal with ReactJS and Flask in front and back end respectively. I've. I've some past experience with Flask (made a chat bot once) unlike React which is totally new for me. So far, my work as has been a mix of both excitement and challenges.

My main issue is that there's so much that I don't know yet I would love to learn. I want to pursue cloud certifications, become a full-stack engineer (my front-end skills are rusty compare to back-end for now), contribute in OSS projects and learn sign sign language.

I've heard a lot of stories about SWs getting burned out period after 3-5 years because apparently they start to loose their stamina to absorbing latest knowledge. I find this thought really scary to be honest. Spending 5 years in CS undergrad just to get stagnant after 2 or 3 would be nightmare for me.

In short,my fears boil down to these questions:

How can one maintain a habit of constant learning for lifetime?
What sort of strategies have you adopted for learning new stuff?
How do you develop a sustaining stamina?

I would love to hear your thoughts and tips on this!

Need Help With Guzzlehttp error 28 Exception

Mirza — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 07:00:41 +0000

Need help with Guzzlehttp error 28 Exception

Remote Internships

Mirza — Sat, 12 May 2018 13:52:02 +0000

Is anyone here offering any remote software engineering internships this summer? If so, please comment here.