Forem: Idrees Dargahwala

The Dunning Kruger Effect

Idrees Dargahwala — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 06:14:21 +0000

Back in eighth grade of my high school, i first started this programming thing with BASIC programming language which is the acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and thought “asking a machine to do stuff is pretty easy, a few lines of instructions and BOOM, it’s done !”, but with education and experience i agree to the fact that programming is not easy.

I believe in the concept of self evaluation. It has always been very important to me, because it doesn’t matter what the world around you thinks, but what matters is what you think, the kind of thought process you agree with. During this evaluation i thought about strengths, weaknesses, education, and personal growth. This allowed me to reflect, learn and think about what it means to be a programmer.

Often the new, the beginners entering into the field of programming live in an illusion that teaching a computer to act according to the steps provided, is a cakewalk. It was the same scenario for me when i stepped into the arena. However, it is untrue. This particular category of people go through an effect known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

According to the definition by Wikipedia, “In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is”. In simple words, when unskilled people overestimate their abilities and skilled people underestimate their abilities. As you become better at programming, better at making mobile applications, you realize how little you know. It’s like getting to the top of the mountain only to find that you are at the bottom of a bigger mountain.

This effect has huge implications in software development. After the initial struggle of learning a language, you might get over confident which leads to underestimation of learning technologies as you go ahead in the journey. Not only programming, there have also been several other cases where people have been identified with the similar condition related to their driving skills, behavioral skills and even academic performance.

To prevent the adverse outcomes, one can keep in mind the following points.

Keep learning and practicing: Instead of assuming you know all there is to know about a subject, keep digging deeper. Once you gain greater knowledge of a topic, the more likely you are to recognize how much there is still to learn.
Get to know the progress of other people: Another effective strategy involves asking others for constructive criticism. While it can be difficult to hear sometimes, such feedback can provide valuable insights into how others perceive your abilities.
Question yourself: Are you open to learn new concepts ? Are you open to try a new language ? Are you humble ? Are you able to take criticism and evaluate feedback ? Are you a good listener ? These questions will help you to self assess yourself and be realistic.

While it may be easier to recognise the effect in others, it is important to remember that it is something that impacts everyone. By understanding the underlying causes that contribute to this bias, you might be better able to spot these tendencies in yourself and find ways to overcome them. As earlier mentioned, self-evaluation is what makes you better from yesterday.

Coursehunt: Hunt your courses for free !

Idrees Dargahwala — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 09:45:07 +0000

Coursehunt

A desktop application made and built with Electron which gives you an ability to batch download free courses provided by coursehunters. Now, Coursehunters is a platform wherein they provide free online courses to be downloaded, indeed spreading knowledge around the globe.

The desktop app is completely open sourced on Github and is available for Windows.

Note: The app will be available to other platforms in future releases.

Show some love ❤️

In case you loved the project, leave a star on the repository so as to help the project to grow more and more.

Contribute 🙌

Feel free to fork the project, and open pull requests.

Happy Coding !

functions.js

Idrees Dargahwala — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 08:27:11 +0000

functions.js is a hub of various functions or methods which act differently according to their functionality.

The project was originally named as okay-string which had only string validation methods. To go further with the learning process, i thought of renaming it to functions.js & create, practice more functions and make a contribution to the open source community.

The project is work in progress i.e more and more functions are needed to implemented in order to excel in JavaScript programming. The project is open for contributions via pull requests.

The project is open-sourced on Github and available on npm for download.

I hope you love this project & this small quick read.

happy coding ! ❤️

Projects are everything

Idrees Dargahwala — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:22:39 +0000

Life is too short for non-wow projects.

Back in the third quarter of 2015, i decided to start with HTML, CSS & JavaScript which are the core of the web, after getting into grade 11. I practiced HTML, went into tags and learned a lot from W3Schools. Thanks to the website.

I always believe that one actually learns not by mugging up, instead making small projects out of it and get a more wide understanding about that. I started making some small projects and open sources some of them on Github (I also learned basics of version control 'Git' and 'Github').

Material Loaders

Material Loaders is a small library which contains loaders and spinners which act as small elements of a professional website having a fill of material colors.

omkarshinde.me

To practice my early HTML, CSS skills & also to get my friend Omkar Shinde a portfolio, i built a website for him. This project made me learn so many things while in the process.

Href Scraper

A tiny chrome extension which scraps all the hrefs from a particular page and downloads them as a text document.

GFont.js

GFont.js is a small library where it uses the Google Fonts API to get all fonts and displays in a <select> tag. It was my first experience working with an API.

Inspire Me

When i started into web development, i would search around the web for great Front End Developers & have a look on their portfolios and read about their stories. But i would not find much. So i implemented a SQL & PHP based project which was a crowd sourced application.

A web application where users can add developer's portfolio links, inspire beginners in that particular field.

FireUpload

FireUpload is a small desktop application made with Electron which is mainly used to upload files to Firebase, simultaneously retrieve those and download on your machine. It also had a semester marks tracker system where i could enter my semester marks and keep a track of it. It would also save my files & backup them on Firebase & i could retrieve those anytime, anywhere in the world.

Jumble Password

A small electron utility, creates unique combinations of passwords(or id's) out of your name and date of birth. The app uses the random permutation of numbers algorithm known as Fisher Yates Shuffle Algorithm which in short jumbles a sequence.

The above projects are open-sourced on my Github Profile. I know the post has become long, but i hope you enojoyed reading it !

If you loved my projects, do show some ❤️ by starring the repository.

Thank you.

happy coding ❤️

Source Me

Idrees Dargahwala — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 08:06:55 +0000

A free and easy-to-use resource application.

Get useful resources in a minute

The purpose of the application to be built was to get useful utilities and tools in a minute or two. These utilities helped me to build and simultaneously save time by not searching on the web.
The tools and utilities are : -

Material Design Colours
Content Delivery Networks
Fonts
Epsum Generator
Material Designed Icons
URL Shortener
Emoji Picker
Image Compress

Idrees

@theiyd

Source me
Version: 0.1.1

Rewrote the application with @reactjs and built with @electronjs

Check it out over here… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…

13:54 PM - 20 Nov 2017

The application is open-sourced on GitHub and the latest release can be downloaded over here.

Note: The application currently does not support Mac systems ( i do not own one). If someone is willing to contribute for the support, file an issue or contact me.

The application is built with Electron and React. Thank you for reading this small article on Source Me.

With ❤️,
Idrees Dargahwala

Okay... string

Idrees Dargahwala — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 03:15:26 +0000

What is it about ?
okay-string is a npm package which contains numerous methods which can be used anywhere in your application according to your need by writing a single line of code.

The need of this library was to create a hub of functions which would do anything in a program, be it validation, getting a factorial of a number, getting a random number or anything else. I did need one and i created it.

Idrees

@theiyd

Okay ..... string
v0.1.10

Play with numerous functions and do various stuff !

npmjs.com/package/okay-s…

15:07 PM - 06 Dec 2017

How do i get it ?
The package is open-sourced on github, check it out over here. Also it is published on npm .

Do leave issues or feature requests or pull requests on Github.

I hope you like this package....

Enjoy !