[BAWD #122] Fear Makes You a Worse Programmer

May 06, 2024

Hello 👋🏾,

I trust you had a blissful past few days and are keen for the week ahead. It’s been a long while since you heard from me and I’m sorry. It’s been really busy times and I did miss writing to you. Hopefully, you will hear from me more often as planned. Btw, here’s a friendly reminder for you not to say just hello in chat; always go straight to the point.

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Nerd Memes of the Week 🥲

Featured Technical Articles ✍🏾👩🏽‍💻

Fear makes you a worse programmer by Julia Evans.
CSS Modules; Welcome to the Future by Glen Maddern.
The “const” Deception by Josh Comeau.
Who is Speaking On Your Behalf? by Prosper Otemuyiwa.
How to Navigate Tech as a Woman by Angie Jones.
Why do Client Components get SSR'd to HTML? by Dan Ambrov.
Do you need an LLM for that? by Sophia Willows.
You probably don't need GraphQL by Max Stoiber.
Become a +10% engineer by Tomasz Łakomy.
How to Create an Automated Profile README using Nodejs and GitHub Actions by Bolaji Ayodeji.
Measuring Successful Communities in Open Source by Brian Douglas.
Why you should probably be using SQLite by Kent C. Dodds.
How to Build an Audio Chatbot with Nextjs, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs by Bolaji Ayodeji.

Featured Productivity Articles ✍🏾🦅

The Proven Path to Doing Unique and Meaningful Work by James Clear.
Hard work vs. Long work by Seth Godin.
How to Take Risks by Mike Manson.
The Omnipresence of Work by Lawrence Yeo.

Product of the Week ✨

IMG.LY has built a creative engine that allows developers and businesses to add video and photo editing features to their applications. The engine is used to build different SDKs, that can power photo, video, design editing, and creative automation features for unlimited distributed end-users.

Good Tidings 🔊

Here’s a collection of some ongoing Udacity scholarships you can apply for including the AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program, Vodacom Mozambique Foundation STEM Scholarship Program, etc.
Awarri has announced Nigeria’s first multilingual Large Language Model (LLM), in partnership with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), and data․org. The Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy mentioned that the LLM will be trained on five low-resource languages (Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Pidgin, Ibibio) and accented English to ensure stronger representation in existing datasets. Anyone can assist with data collection using this website.
React 19 Beta is now available! You can learn more about all the new cool features like actions, use API, and some hooks in the official blog post.
Here’s a YouTube playlist of computer networking videos created by Prof. Nick Feamster and also used in Udacity's Computer Networks offering.
If you write Golang, you should check out Uber’s open-sourced style guide. “The goal of this guide is to … by describing in detail the Dos and Don'ts of writing Go code at Uber. These rules exist to keep the code base manageable while still allowing engineers to use Go language features productively.”
If you reside in Abuja 🇳🇬, you should consider participating in this open-source hackathon. There are cool software/hardware challenges with prizes up to 2000 USD. This is an opportunity to network and build new experiences in the Energy Access sector
Here’s a very insightful 6000-word guide to developer marketing written by a dev tool startup CMO for practitioners.

Lists and Collections 🗂️

You can take over 2,500 MIT courses from various fields online for free through MIT OpenCourseWare.
Here’s a curated list of project-based programming tutorials you can use to learn how to build applications from scratch.
Here’s a complete computer science study plan you can use to become a software engineer.
Here is a collection of universities, companies, and organizations that offer free online courses with certificates.
Here’s a collection of the best promotional deals for developers to level up your skills, workspace gadgets, etc.
If you’re looking to get started with technical writing, you should check this for a curated list of articles, books, videos, tools, podcasts, etc.
For managers, here’s a collection of engineering leadership resources that you’d find helpful.
Are you looking to network with other student community leaders and professionals or level up your skills and give back to your community? You can join the GitHub Campus Experts program now and expand your connections!
Here's a recommendation of the top websites to find remote jobs for different software engineering and product fields in tech.
Here’s a curated list of interview questions for different programming languages, frameworks, and technologies.

Book Recommendations 📚

All of Grace by Charles Spurgeon.
Fluent React by Tejas Kumar.
Developer Experience (DX) by Addy Osmani.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner.
Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI by Abdulazeez Adeshina.

Featured Tweets and Videos 😍

Here are some cool tweets and my favorite videos from YouTube these past weeks.

⬇️: Node.js Crash Course

⬇️: JavaScript Visualized - Event Loop, Web APIs, (Micro)task Queue

⬇️: Do Square Eggs Have Square Yolks?

⬇️: The Early Church - Daily Life for Believers

Quote of the Week 💙

“Finish your projects. Don’t let fear or that last 10% hold you back. Keep finishing things and your body of work will continue to grow over time.” —Aaron Francis.

Sponsors and Patrons 💫

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Bolaji Ayodeji's Weekly Digest