I'm a heavy Redux user and quite a fanboy of the library itself as well to a point I also dabbled into Redux Toolkit which is the Redux's team opinionated way of using the library efficiently and tried it out by using it on a production application. (I took the risk but hey! things went well!)

It is a solid state manager for React. It works out of the box and does everything that you expect from it to do not to mention that it is configurable with various plugins created by the community to make your work easier as well.

A lot of people talk about Redux's setup that they have to write a good amount of boilerplate code to make it work, although that is true it is solvable when using Redux Toolkit since it offers a preconfigured setup with redux-thunk and setup with the Redux DevTools extension out of the box.

My biggest issue with Redux is that using other library's hooks is quite a pain, take an example of React Toastify library which offers a hook to show a toast on your website (a small popup). If I want to use that library along with Redux then either I have to pass it along with my dispatch function or create a Context component that uses the useSelector hook inside of it and use that hook to make a popup when a user inserts wrong information (or maybe I have been using Redux incorrectly and I have found a proper way to handle this situation)

Come to think of it, React does offer a decent amount of hook functions that do the job as expect and the best part: you don't have to install other libraries for state management since you already have one built-in for free!

The best part about Context is that you get to use all of React's cool features out of the box and use other hooks inside of it without any issue at all.

The worst part is that you will have to manage multiple Contexts inside of your app (you could use one Context just like what Redux does but I prefer to split things down into small manageable chunks).

Here I will be offering a small example using React Native and React Navigation to check whether a user is logged in or not

import React, {useState, useEffect, createContext, useContext} from 'react';
import AsyncStorage from '@react-native-community/async-storage';
import {useNavigation, CommonActions} from '@react-navigation/native';

const checkIfLoggedIn = async () => {
	const token = await AsyncStorage.getItem('token');
    if(token !== null) {
    	return true;
    }
    return false;
}

const flushToken = async () => {
	await AsyncStorage.clear();
}

export const AuthContext = createContext(null);

const AuthProvider = ({children}) => {
  const [authorized, updateAuthorization] = useState(false);

  const navigation = useNavigation();

  useEffect(() => {
    checkIfLoggedIn().then((response) => {
      if (response) {
        navigation.navigate('App');
        updateAuthorization(true);
      } else {
        navigation.navigate('Auth');
      }
    });
  }, [authorized]);

  const logout = async () => {
    await flushToken();
    navigation.dispatch(
      CommonActions.reset({
        index: 0,
        routes: [{name: 'Auth'}],
      }),
    );
    updateAuthorization(false);
  };

  return <AuthContext.Provider value={logout}>{children}</AuthContext.Provider>;
};

const useLogout = () => {
  const context = useContext(AuthContext);
  if (context === null || context === undefined) {
    throw new Error('useLogout must be inside of the AuthProvider');
  }
  return context;
};

export {AuthProvider, useLogout};

When the user opens the app, it checks if there is a token saved in the device's localStorage first. If there is a token then it navigates to the App Stack, if not then it takes the user to the Auth Stack so that they can sign up or log in.

Inside that Context is a logout function which what it does is that it sets the authentication state to false and triggers the useEffect hook which navigates the user back to the Auth Stack and removes the previous history so that they don't go back (some Android phones have a back button, if you didn't clear your navigation stack then they can go back to the App Stack even though they are logged out) and deletes your token from the phone.

I also created a useLogout hook which lets me to logout in any component that is encapsulated within that AuthProvider component (handy for later use) which relies on the logout function that is inside of my AuthProvider (inside of my AuthContext).

See that I have relied on useNavigation, a hook from the React Navigation library and it was easily integrated inside of my application.

Yes, you can do a similar action with Redux but the key difference is that you have to add a reducer in your store and create some actions to dispatch an action for logout and logging in not to mention that you need to find a way to pass the useNavigation hook function to navigate the user to a different screen.

Here I made things a bit simpler for me to debug not to mention that if I wanted to add a different hook function or send an API function whenever I logout then it is easily done with the Context example. This way I encapsulate each functionality with its own state and keep things modular rather than sticking everything in one store and one place.

I've tried multiple state managers in React and React Native, they did their job as intended but Context does things a little bit different and a bit better

This blog post is based on the reflections that I have written in both of my second and third journals, the intentions of writing this very blog post are not to show that I had a good year but rather to show the lessons that I have learned throughout this journey.

This blogpost is not here to write about what are my goals for 2021 nor talk about the good stuff that I have done in 2020 but rather the things that I have learned in between, those hard lessons that really left an impact. If you are expecting some goals or plans then I am sorry, you can ask about them privately in a direct message or talk about them on a cup of coffee at Starbucks then I would have the honors to do so otherwise you can skip this blog post all together since it might/might not serve you any benefits.

I didn't write this blog post as a method of lecturing people or any of that sort, but rather as a note to myself to live and meditate on. I don't have an audience in mind plus I don't intend on having one in the first place. 

This blog post and the upcoming ones are not here to lecture you and tell you that the path I am on is the right path, but rather as a guide that you may or may not consider. As we all have different points of view and different ideas of life itself, you might see it in a different direction. Some might see these points as informative and helpful while some might think that it is a direct attack on them or conflicts with their morals and ego, it is your responsibility on how you see it since you are the judge of that.

I was and still hesitant about writing this blog post. Unlike the things I have written before from previously deleted blog posts along with the words and sentences that live in my journal, I am taking a new approach to everything: I am not going to write any of that.

I usually write about the good stuff in life that I have accomplished like reading 52 books, earning a certain certification, or getting lucky in life. Although the intentions are to share the good things and make a good impression/motivation for others yet I realized that I haven't taken into consideration the people around me and how they view it. Upon reflection and realization that I saw myself as a showoff, a self-centered asshole who only cared about himself, and I was trying really hard to impress the people around me without knowing that I have been doing it in an egoistic way or sometimes trying to prove that I am better than the people around me.

Hence I'll take a different route and just move on in life, those milestones are to prove to myself that I am moving on and progressing in life but not as a mechanism of showing off. It seemed that it doesn't bring any benefits but rather problems and pain.

Yes, I still fill my fountain pens using an ink bottle that I carry around in my bag.

Yes, I still stay at night writing code and do weird stuff.

Yes, I still journal and starting a new journal in these upcoming days.

Yes, I still organize my day in a separate notebook and structure my day, week, month, and year in sprints.

Those are not going to change but you probably don't care about them anyway so why sharing them in the first place? 

Trust me to ditch social media, it is not the real world

That world that you see online is not what you think it is, everyone is trying to show you the good parts of their lives but not the bad ones. We all have problems that we face on a day-to-day basis but we don't talk about them either it is forbidden/taboo or fearing that someone might mock/envy us.

The problem is that social media gives every single human on the planet a voice, but the issue is that not every voice is worth listening to. If you ever read The Odyssey by Homer, it explains the story of Ulysses who almost got killed by sea witches known as "The Sirens"

The Sirens pretend to be beautiful women with amazing voices, try to assure sailors, who pass their island, that they just want to entertain them with beautiful melodies. What they really want, however, is to kill them. Although Ulysses gave beeswax to his sailors to soften it and put it in their ears to prevent hearing those melodies as a gift from the goddess Circe, he ordered them to tie him completely to the boat just to see what Circe meant about those melodies. As he got enchanted by their voices, he demanded multiple times from his sailors to untie him so he can swim to them but upon arriving near the island, Ulysses saw two beautiful women combing their long golden hair, calling after him but what the sailors saw were two hungry monsters with crooked claws waiting for their next target.

Ulysses came back to his sense, later on, realized that he got saved from a catastrophe. The point of this story is that not everything you see or listen to is real on social media, and every single day we see more of those "Sirens" popping up.

Keep things to yourself more often and say that you don't know

We all have stories to share and ideas to spread but not everything we talk or share with might bring us any benefits. I have learned this lesson three years later where I shared my perspective about something three years ago with someone yet to find out that I got reminded by this person about it. Ashamed about the fact that this perspective was completely wrong but back then I thought I knew what I am doing, in reality, I wasn't at all.

if you don't know something don't make a hypothesis about it from your perspective nor come up with something completely different just to show that you are right. Say that you don't know, say that you will search for an answer and get back to it but give a genuine and authentic answer, don't bullshit on people.

It might give you a boost of ego for a small while but it will come back to you if things go south with this person, like Russian roulette: there is a 1/6 chance of being hit by a bullet, that doesn't mean that you won't die from it.

It is okay to do some mistakes if you are willing to admit that you did them

We all know this famous sentence of "It is not me man!!! I didn't do it!", I see it on a day to day basis not to forget that I have used it a lot in the past. It works for a while till you cry wolf the third time and find out that nobody will believe you anymore.

The process of growth starts from accepting our mistakes not by blaming others for them. Accept the consequences and move on, it will bring more shame not accepting the mistake than the mistake itself.

We all have things that we want to do in our lives but sometimes we might get distracted like a moth to a light bulb chanting "OHHHH SHINY OBJECT!" or we might be in a very bad position that anything that looks and seems good might be a trap or not worth it.

A lot of people approach me with their million-dollar idea, a plan for settling in Amsterdam if they have 10K$ in their pockets, and how bad and underpaying their current job is. But ironically we might have encountered some opportunities that might have helped in achieving this goal or task but we were afraid to do so.

We are so afraid that we call the people who did it lucky or plain bullshitters (depending on your perspective of life, you will be the judge of that). But if we took that extra risk then it might have yielded something better later on even if the current benefit might not yield much. 

I am not the kind of person who expects an "end of the road" in a tunnel in fact I am the kind of guy who doesn't expect an end in the first place, but I am a firm believer that one of those roads might lead to somewhere. It doesn't matter where but I would say that it is better than staying in the same place. You might not reach the end but at least the adventures are worth talking about.

So it is more about working on something to get it and not sitting on your butt expecting it to come to you on a plate of gold then I would encourage you and wish you luck on your long journey, and if you think about the law of attraction that this thing will come to you if you sat on your butt and thought about it all day long then good luck buddy.

"Most real failures are due to limitations which men set up in their own minds" - Napoleon Hill, Outwitting the devil

You don't have to buy expensive stuff to show everyone that you are rich, life is not about how many cars you have in your garage nor the furniture in your triplex apartment. You can live in a decent apartment and have a Honda Civic while being rich with seven figures and all.

Being rich is the ability to see the people you care about safe and sound, work on yourself by learning new things constantly, and stay on the morals and believes that you are raised on. It sickens my heart seeing the poor fooling themselves and others into buying things they can't afford to please people that don't care about them, because they know deep inside that they will never be those kinds of people and not in a million years.

The world doesn't owe you anything, so stop chasing things that were not meant for you. If you had everything that you truly need from the beginning then there shouldn't be a reason to go after the things that weren't meant for you, just to show and impress others that we have it.

Two years ago, I started journaling on a day to day basis. Sure, there are some days that I have missed but I sure wrote the hell out of those other days. Some were a couple of sentences while others are pages of ongoing events. Upon rereading those pages, I became more aware of myself and more conscious of my actions, I reached a position that I have done psychoanalysis on myself in full details which low key kinda interesting yet frightening.

Those pages grew to several books and as I am starting my fourth journal in the upcoming days, I realized a lot of things that I wasn't aware of myself. One of the things that I have discovered about myself is that I have what is called Hypergraphia which is a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write constantly and on a day to day basis, the good thing about it is that it is the complete opposite of writer's block where I always have material to write about but it does have a bad part where it might go out of hand, and some notable people that have this condition are the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lewis Carroll. 

I can see myself in the third person when reading those journal entries, replaying those moments that I have lived before as if it is a simulation, and predict what to do next. In other words, I became aware of myself to a position that I am self-conscious (or some people say "being woke") of almost everything.

Identifying your strength and weak points is crucial to self-mastery, and when you are able to find out how the way your brain process ideas, you can use this to your advantage to learn almost anything in ease.

People with lies and ego leave, people with honesty and integrity stay

This will create some misunderstanding that I might be specifying a certain individual, but in reality, I am taking a more general approach to this. If you got triggered or affected by this then it might be something that you might have or have not done before with someone.

Lately, I have been canceling all my plans hanging out with others, even reaching a position of ditching those talkative yet annoying people with their useless gossip/conversations. I have obligations and work that I have to do in my life plus a real-life and career to focus on not to mention that lockdown is closing a lot of places hence there aren't that many options really. This canceling and ditching triggered certain people to a position of stopped talking with you altogether, unfollowing you/ blocking you/ ghosting you on social media to create a stand that they no longer care about you then talk behind your back as if they are the right ones.

Remember the part that I mentioned previously about social media that it gives voices to people but not all voices are right, well you know where I am heading on this.

The moral of this short paragraph is to show how ego takes over a human in unexpected ways, if they did this to you then they go "tough luck buddy! good luck finding someone like me!" mode but in reality, they did you a favor.

It is annoying to find some people in life disappear all the sudden but what really matters are the people that stay even if you don't talk/interact that much, they have already earned that friendship long ago so there is no reason for them to fight about it even if it means being with just three people, for it is better to have three people whom you trust than a thousand whom you don't.

There is still more to talk about but these are the lessons that I have learned throughout this journey, they might not be a lot but worth talking about. My journey is still at its beginning and there is so much to talk about later on.

I don't know where I might head towards but at least where I stand right now is in a better position than I was a couple of years before.

This is my thoughts of 2020 based on my journal entries

This is probably the 5th if not 6th time redoing the blog but I have a legit reason this time

the previous blog was created using a Gatsby template which served its purpose but adding one thing or removing something was somewhat of a pain so I decided to take matters into my hand and redo it from scratch.

The Gatsby template relied on a git-based CMS called Forestry (tho the UI of Forestry is lit 🔥  and I really liked it) but it is time to move to a new CMS! so I chose Prismic which offered a very generous free tier (and an actual client library to mess around with 🤷‍♀️)

I went beyond the edge and used Nextjs and Tailwind, rewrote the entire thing from scratch even though I have postponed the development of the site for quite some time (exactly 3 months, it should have been finished 3 months ago but anyway)

This is a beta version of the site, there are a lot of things that needs modifications and a lot of features coming on the way but for a starting point it is not bad

you can access this admin section and post whatever you want! no restrictions no boundaries whatsoever!

Better SEO, Better analytics, Better tagging

in the previous template, it lacked SEO to a point that any blogpost pointed to nowhere. This time I have written the SEO tags according to the standards so they should appear on Facebook, Google, and Twitter as expected.

The site now uses Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics as expected, this functionality is also written from scratch whereas the previous site relied on a Gatsby plugin (and it was performing poorly)

This version of the blog is optimized for performance and speed, although it is still in beta mode the results are not so bad after all! There is more room for improvement but as a starting point, it is not that bad.

2020 was tough, I stopped blogging for quite some time to focus on the things that mattered the most. Now that I have recreated the blog and starting to have a little bit of time on my hand, I might dedicate around 30 mins to write more.

I used to write a blogpost and spam it on Facebook, even though some might be interested yet the majority aren't so I have decided to post it on the Facebook page and some subreddit groups on Reddit where it reaches the right people. I might utilize the Instagram page to add the blog posts there as well.

As for the content, I have made a promise in the past that I will deliver high-quality content and I am still on my promise.

here are the upcoming features that I have in mind for the next update:

Newsletter (serverless, secure, and always on the first day of the month but also made from scratch)

Support page (if you felt that the blog is benefiting you and you wish to support it)

Book recommendations page (separate thing and it can be included in the newsletter)

Contact page (plans is to make a Slack bot not emails which are easier for me to manage)

rewrote the whole thing from scratch, but this time it is quite different! I promise

It was the 28th of August, where my friend send my CV to a small company of 2 senior developers asking to have a junior developer onboard in their team.

after they contact me and arranged a meeting, I was given a task (or it was so call homework). The "homework" was to create an employee directory application where it services basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionalities.

I was given to use what type of frontend (they use Angular in house but since I have some experience with React so React it was) and Nodejs + Express for backend (they use Nodejs heavily for backend). Part of the "homework" is to go wild with it by including scripts that help and aid in development (example: set a script in your package json to remove your build folder using rimraf [a nodejs package] and build your project to have the latest project possible), use of linters and code formatters, use new technologies like Graphql, and as well using external services like Algolia for searching employees.

They have included a detailed description of how to structure the application in a way they find it efficient, clean, scaleable . And they value code quality and git commit quality

This is the first time you find someone asking for git commit quality, usually a recruiter will ask for code you have written before so they can review

typically you would provide your github/gitlab/bitbucket link so they can review your code but that doesn't end here: they review something that not all seniors and CTO do focus on and that is git commits

I didn't get the job but I've learned something from this "homework", you rarely get this kind of chance anywhere.

Idea of this "homework" is not about flexing your skills (if you can flex your skills then good for you) but rather more into adapting and learning new things as well reviewing yourself

why they focused on git commits anyways? 🙂

turn out that with every version of a website/application/library they developed, they put in the README.md file all of the updates done on each version

having proper git commits help a-lot in populating the README.md file as well if any errors occurred, you can always git revert back to a specific commit

having non proper or poor git commits will cause you to have a hard time remembering which commit is responsible for a specific push (and let's be real, not everyone have a photographic memory to remember everything. We humans can forget and that is okay, really!)

here you said that you have updated the navbar, but what did you update in it? 🤔

navbar updated, elements now stacked in a linear way

also still poor because you said that the elements are stack in a linear way but how? why? what was the problem in the first place?

date reverser function for bookings is working

great, you created a function that reverses the date's format but is it inside of the bookings file? why did you create it in the first place? what purpose does it follow?

navbar updated [check description]

- used css-grid instead of flexbox for aligning the elements
- used grid-template-columns with a repeat of 4 columns 1fr wide
- every element is placed in the center to the main grid div tag
- this setting can help us in mobile much faster by switching columns to rows

remember those first two git commits, compare them with this: they are the same but this commit is better to read

I know what is going on and what I used so incase of any errors I can always refer back to this commit

date reverser function on bookings [check description]

- date reverser function was created in the utils folder
- purpose of this function to reverse the format from YYYY-MM-DD to DD-MM-YYYY
- eventhough this should be a backend issue but currently the backend team is busy and we needed a quick fix
- when backend engineers are free, they can reverse it from their side and this function has served its purpose

compare the first date reverser function commit  with this one, the purpose you created this function is because the backend team is not free to reverse a date format and you need to have a quick solution to work with

majority will ignore the description written under those commits and here is why:

the first line written will always will be the title, anything under the title will be considered as body. on Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket the title will show only unless you press on that commit to see the description

adding this to the tittle makes the developer curious of what is written in the body

[UPDATE] stacking elements on Navbar [check description]

- [IMPLEMENT] use css-grid instead of flexbox
- [IMPLEMENT] use grid-template-columns repeated 4 times with 1fr wide
- [IMPLEMENT] every element is placed in the center respectively to the parent grid div
- [SUGGESTION] this setting can help us better in mobile development by switching columns to rows
- [FIX] fix padding on each element by decreasing it from 15px to 10px
- [FIX] set the elements div's left margin to auto to be aligned at the end of the parent navbar div automatically
- [UPDATE] remove bootstrap classes and use own made classes

here is a more verbose version of it, it is more detailed. It might look weird yet time consuming but take into consideration the amount of time you will save trying to guess what you did in that commit

I rarely use this until recently because I know what I have done in details whether it was a fix or a new implementation or future suggestions for later

how to write those commits? 🤔 my terminal doesn't allow me

I use VSCode for this purpose (I use VSCode for everything so it makes sense to set it up as my git editor as well)

easiest way to do it is by setting VSCode as your default git editor

first enable VSCode to work in the terminal by setting a path to VSCode (read it here)

git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

this sets VSCode as your core git editor, and whenever you want to commit in git you do it this way:

and it will open a new window in VSCode, write the commit you want then save it then close the file so it stops waiting for VSCode

write better git commits by following a specific procedure and modify your editor to help with your commits