1-Week of Tech Experiments
What happens when a Freelancer falls sick
In the mail 📧
Why the experiments?
K8s with Kind
How do my students make me a better Pythonista?
Is create-react-app still a thing?
Unlike our usual ones, this one is longer and has a lot of links. I appreciate the time you spend reading this. Once you do let me know if you like to read more like this.
Uncertain Discomfort
Last week was tough. When a freelancer falls sick for 2-weeks, the most common side effect is that there are no calls or business on week 3. After providing Data Engineering and Infra services for the last three months, that’s where I was last week. The reality is that living the worst fear wasn’t easy.
Thanks to Doomscorlling, I landed on a video of Paul Milled and Ali abdal, where they mentioned Uncertain discomfort that I felt was written just for me.
Add this sense of wonder and possibility to an uncertain discomfort. Uncertain discomfort is terrifying yeah that's pretty scary but if you pair it with Wonder like ooh what might also happen then you can sort of in immunize yourself for a certain period of time
Now instead of thinking of this as a letdown, how can I use it to my advantage? I planned to dust off projects that I kept on the side.
DevOps & Data
Local Kubernetes Cluster
If you ever wanted to learn/try Kubernetes and are afraid of trying it in a Cloud account, try setting up a local cluster with Kind
Robusta
No, it’s not the coffee I was drinking. Robusta-Dev is a Kubernetes Opensource project I have been eyeing. Robusta installs itself on your k8 cluster on top of Prometheus and sends alters to your slack or Microsoft teams. It also has a UI platform to track the number of alters.
The project is fairly new and has a lot of scope for contribution. Just going through their Github issues and Natan Yellin’s Linkedin profile will help you learn alot about Kubernetes.
Apache OSS Data Tools
As a freelancer, you must skill up and constantly understand the ecosystem you’re in. Since I started with Apache, which has a large ecosystem of data tools, I used the time to research and write about the different Apache OSS data tools and when to use them.
My students make me a better Pythonista.
A new batch of the PythonToProject bootcamp started last week, and the students are already thinking about what project to build in the next 5 weeks.
For this batch, I’ve added a module covering Git and GitHub. YES! It’s available for you for free.
During the 0th week of the bootcamp, we do primer exercises to solidify some Python concepts. I also introduce my students to advanced concepts. The one function that alarms all beginners in Python classes is __new__. Here is me explaining it to one of my students last year, which came in handy this year
Do you know Python’s sorted method looks like this?
sorted(iterable, /, *, key=None, reverse=False)
1:1 Coaching
Do you do 1:1 coaching/training? This a question I get a lot.
I have been thinking about opening a few slots per month for a 1:1 training over a zoom call. I haven’t jotted down the specifics yet, but if this interests you, reply to this email.
Frontend
Is create-react-app still a thing?
I’m always suspicious of doing things the way I’ve done years back. I was wary of using `create-react-app` for my new project. The last time I checked, my frontend friends on Twitter Unanimously suggested Vite, so I tried it.
Here are the reasons I will stick with it
The Super easy-to-set-up the project
The Vite Development server is super fast to spin up and reflect new changes.
Vite keeps the terminal clean while the browser console displays the actual errors.
To Ease the pain of Backend Dev’s Frontend Aspirations
I’m still very much a backend developer. Tailwind CSS replaced the pain of writing barebones CSS with memorizing different class names. Thanks to Google, I found something more than Tailwind CSS.
Component Libraries are a library of pre-written components in the particular frontend framework(e.g., React).
These two looked promising, and I started using Antd. You no longer have to fiddle with CSS or install multiple libraries from different creators. You need this one library for other components. (Grid/Layout/Calender/Datatable
Thanks for staying till the end. I hope you learned a thing or two from my tech experiments. But the one thing I want you to leave with is you don’t need permission to create something outside your 9-5. It’s scary but also fun.