Monika Janota on web.dev

GDE community highlight: Lars Knudsen

2022-11-09T00:00:00Z

Monika: What inspired you to become a developer? What’s your current professional focus?

Lars: I got my MSc in engineering, but in fact my interest in tech started much earlier. When I was a kid in the 80s, my father owned a computing company working with graphic design. Sometimes, especially during the summer holidays, he would take me to work with him. At times, some of his employees would keep an eye on me. There was this really smart guy who once said to me, “Lars, I need to get some work done, but here's a C manual, and there’s a computer over there. Here’s how you start a C compiler. If you have any questions, come and ask me.” I started to write short texts that were translated into something the computer could understand. It seemed magical to me. I was 11 years old when I started and around seventh grade, I was able to create small applications for my classmates or to be used at school. That’s how it started.

Over the years, I’ve worked for many companies, including Nokia, Maersk, and Openwave. At the beginning, like in many other professions, because you know a little, you feel like you can do everything, but with time you learn each company has a certain way of doing things.

After a few years of working for a medical company, I started my own business in 1999. I worked as a freelance contractor and, thanks to that, had the chance to get to know multiple organizations quickly. After completing the first five contracts, I found out that every company thinks they’ve found the perfect setup, but all of them are completely different. At that time, I was also exposed to a lot of different technologies, operating systems etc. Around my early twenties, my mindset changed. At the beginning, I was strictly focused on one technology and wanted to learn all about it. With time, I started to think about combining technologies as a way of improving our lives. I have a particular interest in narrowing the gap between what we call the A and the B team in the world. I try to transfer as much knowledge as possible to regions where people don’t have the luxury of owning a computer or studying at university free of charge.

I continue to work as a contractor for external partners but, whenever possible, I try to choose projects that have some kind of positive impact on the environment or society. I’m currently working on embedded software for a hearing-aid company called Oticon. Software-wise, I’ve been working on everything from the tiniest microcontrollers to the cloud; a lot of what I do revolves around the web. I’m trying to combine technologies whenever it makes sense.

Monika: Were you involved in developer communities before joining the Google Developer Experts program?

Lars: Yes, I was engaged in meetups and conferences. I first connected with the community while working for Nokia. Around 2010, I met Kenneth Rohde Christiansen, who became a GDE before me. He inspired me to see how web technologies can be useful for aspiring tech professionals in developing countries. Developing and deploying solutions using C++, C# or Java requires some years of experience, but everyone who has access to a computer, browser, and notepad can start developing web-based applications and learn really fast. It’s possible to build a fully functional application with limited resources, and ramp up from nothing. That’s why I call the web a very democratizing technology stack.

But back to the community—after a while I got interested in web standardization and what problems bleeding edge web technologies could solve. I experimented with new capabilities in a browser before release. I was working for Nokia at the time, developing for a Linux-based flagship device, the N9. The browser we built was WebKit based and I got some great experience developing features for a large open source project. In the years after leaving Nokia, I got involved in web conferences and meetups, so it made sense to join the GDE community in 2017.

I really enjoy the community work and everything we’re doing together, especially the pre-pandemic Chrome Developer Summits, where I got to help with booth duty alongside a bunch of awesome Google Engineers and other GDEs.

Monika: What advice would you give to a young developer who’s just starting their professional career and is not sure which path to take?

Lars: I’d say from my own experience—if you can afford it—consider freelancing for a couple of different companies. This way, you’ll be exposed to code in many different forms and stages of development. You’ll get to know a multitude of operating systems and languages, and learn how to resolve problems in many ways. This helped me a lotI gained experience as senior developer in my twenties. This approach will help you achieve your professional goals faster.

Besides that, have fun, explore, play with the hardware and software. Consider building something that solves a real problem—maybe for your friends, family, or a local business. Don’t be afraid to jump into something you’ve never done before.

Monika: What does the future hold for web technologies?

Lars: I think that for a couple of years now the web has been fully capable of providing a platform for large field applications, both for the consumer and for business. On the server side of things, web technologies offer a seamless experience, especially for frontend developers who want to build a backend component. It’s easier for them to get started now. I know people who were using both Firebase and Heroku to get the job done. And this trend will grow—web technologies will be enough to build complex solutions of any kind. I believe that the Web Capabilities - Project Fugu 🐡 really unlocks that potential.

Looking at it from a slightly different point of view, I also think that if we provide full documentation and in-depth articles not only in English but also in other languages (for example, Spanish and Portuguese), we would unlock a lot of potential in Latin America—and other regions, of course. Developers there often don’t know English well enough to fully understand all the relevant articles. We should also give them the opportunity to learn as early as possible, even before they start university, while still in their hometowns. They may use those skills to help local communities and businesses before they leave home and maybe never come back.

Thomas: You came a long way from doing C development on a random computer to hacking on hardware. How did you do that?

Lars: I started taking apart a lot of hardware I had at home. My dad was not always happy when I couldn’t put it back together. With time, I learned how to build some small devices, but it really took off much later, around the time I joined Nokia, where I got my embedded experience. I had the chance to build small screensavers, components for the Series 30 phones. I was really passionate about it and could really think outside the box. They assigned me a task to build a Snake game for those devices. It was a very interesting experience. The main difference between building embedded systems and most other things (including web) is that you leave a small footprint—you don’t have much space or memory to use. While building Snake, the RAM that I had available was less than one-third of the frame buffer (around 120 x 120 pixels). I had to come up with ways to algorithmically rejoin components on screen so they’d look static, as if they were tiles. I learned a lot—that was the move from larger systems to small, embedded solutions.

Thomas: The skill set of a typical frontend developer is very different from the skill set of someone who builds embedded hardware. How would you encourage a frontend developer to look into hardware and to start thinking in binary?

Lars: I think that the first step is to look at some of the Fugu APIs that work in Chrome and Edge, and are built into all the major systems today. That’s all you need at the start.

Another thing is that the toolchains for building embedded solutions have a steep learning curve. If you want to build your own custom hardware, start with Arduino or ESP32—something that is easy to buy and fairly cheap. With the right development environment, you can get your project up and running in no time.

You could also buy a heart rate monitor or a multisensor unit, which are already using Bluetooth GATT services, so you don’t have to build your own hardware or firmware—you can use what’s already there and start experimenting with the Web Bluetooth API to start communicating with it.

There are also devices that use a serial protocol—for these, you can use the Web Serial API (also Fugu). Recently I’ve been looking into using the WebHID API, which enables you to talk to all the human interface devices that everyone has access to. I found some old ones in my basement that had not been supported by any operating system for years, but thanks to reverse engineering it took me a few hours to re-enable them.

There are different approaches depending on what you want to build, but to a web developer I would say, get a solid sensor unit, maybe a Thingy 52 from Nordic Semiconductor; it has a lot of sensors, and you can hook up to your web application with very little effort.

Thomas: Connecting to the device is the first step, but then speaking to it effectively—that’s a whole other thing. How come you did not give up after facing obstacles? What kept you motivated to continue working?

Lars: For me personally the social aspect of solving a problem was the most important. When I started working on my own embedded projects, I had a vision and a desire to build a science lab in a box for developing regions. My wife is from Mexico and I saw some of the schools there; some that are located outside of the big cities are pretty shabby, without access to the materials and equipment that we have in our part of the world.

The passion for building something that can potentially be used to help others—that’s what kept me going. I also really enjoyed the community support. I reached out to some people at Google and all were extremely helpful and patiently answered all of my questions.

Thomas: A lot of people have some sort of hardware at home, but don’t know what to do with it. How do you find inspiration for all your amazing projects, in particular the one under the working name SimpleMouse?

Lars: Well, recently I have been in fact reviving a lot of old hardware, but for this particular project—the name has not been set yet, but let’s call it SimpleMouse—I used my experience. I worked with some accessibility solutions earlier and I saw how some of them just don’t work anymore; you’d need to have an old Windows XP with certain software installed to run them. You can’t really update those, you can only use those at home because you can’t move your setup.

Because of that, I wondered how to combine my skills from the embedded world with project Fugu and what is now possible on the web to create cheap, affordable hardware combined with easy-to-understand software on both sides, so people can build on that.

For that particular project, I took a small USB dongle with a reflexive chip, the nRF52840. It communicates with Bluetooth on one side and USB on the other. You can basically program it to be anything on both sides. And then I thought about the devices that control a computer—a mouse and a keyboard. Some people with disabilities may find it difficult to operate those devices, and I wanted to help them.

The first thing I did was to make sure that any operating system would see the USB dongle as a mouse. You can control it from a native application or a web application—directly into Bluetooth. After that, I built a web application—a simple template that people can extend the way they want using web components. Thanks to that, everyone can control their computer with a web app that I made in just a couple of hours on an Android phone.

Having that set up will enable anyone in the world with some web experience to build, in a matter of days, a very customized solution for anyone with a disability who wants to control their computer. The cool thing is that you can take it with you anywhere you go and use it with other devices as well. It will be the exact same experience. To me, the portability and affordability of the device are very important because people are no longer confined to using their own devices, and are no longer limited to one location.

Thomas: Did you have a chance to test the device in real life?

Lars: Actually during my last trip to Mexico I discussed it with a web professional living there; he’s now looking into the possibilities of using the device locally. Over there the equipment is really expensive, but a USB dongle normally costs around ten US dollars. He’s now checking if we could build local setups there to try it out. But I haven’t done official trials yet here in Denmark.

Thomas: Many devices designed to assist people with disabilities are really expensive. Are you planning on cooperating with any particular company and putting it into production for a fraction of the price of that expensive equipment?

Lars: Yes, definitely! I’ve already been talking to a local hardware manufacturer about that. Of course, the device won’t replace all those highly specialized solutions, but it can be the first step to building something bigger—for example, using voice recognition, already available for web technologies. It’ll be an easy way of controlling devices using your Android phone; it can work with a device of any kind.

Just being able to build whatever you want on the web and to use that to control any host computer opens up a lot of possibilities.

Thomas: Are you releasing your Zephyr project as open source? What kind of license do you use? Are there plans to monetize the project?

Lars: Yes, the solution is open source. I did not put a specific license on it, but I think Apache 2.0 would be the way to go. Many major companies use this license, including Google. When I worked on SimpleMouse, I did not think about monetizing the project—that was not my goal. But I also think it would make sense to try to put it into production in some way, and with this comes cost. The ultimate goal is to make it available. I’d love to see it being implemented at a low cost and on a large scale.

GDE community highlight: Alba Silvente Fuentes

2022-09-22T00:00:00Z

Monika: What products are you working with? What's your professional focus, and what tools make your day-to-day work easy and efficient?

Alba: Most of my work on the frontend is done in Vue 3, with the new Webpack for the ecosystem called Vite, with semantic HTML, Tailwind CSS, and sometimes with Nuxt.js—depending on the specifics of the project. Most of the time I'm creating web applications, although recently I also worked on creating Chrome extensions.

I usually focus on the frontend part—building components—but I also like to keep in mind the project architecture, especially taking into account maintainability, performance, and scalability. That's why the content I'm creating in the community includes topics like Atomic Design, Jamstack, and design systems—I like to learn about new architectures that catch on.

And if there are tools that can't be missed in my day-to-day, these are: VS Code synchronized with my account to add extensions such as Volar, Eslint, and Prettier; Notion to document my work and for content creation; Chrome extensions like Toby, Web Vitals metrics, and Axe; and Fig.io for the terminal.

Monika: How did you get here? When did you decide to focus on web development and frontend?

Alba: I studied image and sound engineering in telecommunications, so nothing directly related to web development. During my studies, I learned the basics of coding with C and C++. When I realized I had a knack for programming, I decided to follow that path and dive deeper into web development. During my third year of college, we were required to do an internship, and since I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I chose a web agency—there I was taught PHP, HTML, CSS, and jQuery, working as a full-stack developer.

This made me realize that I actually prefer frontend development, I really liked what I was doing and wanted to focus just on that. So I started learning about frontend frameworks—Vue, React, and Angular. I tried all of them to finally fall in love with Vue.

Monika: What do you think is the next big thing for web technologies?

Alba: For me, the next big thing is about the changes going on with browsers like Chrome. The way we're improving CSS, the use of WebGL, and other JavaScript APIs, the accessibility standards, and so on. We can create a world inside a browser, just like in video games, or focus on making it accessible for everyone, inclusive.

The future is to improve the way we use the web, so that performance is no longer a problem because we have it covered by all the emerging technologies. And so we can focus on creating value, digitizing our daily tasks and automating what wastes our time.

Monika: What's the idea behind your podcast "No me da la vida"?

Alba: When I became a content creator, I started writing articles in English. At that time, I moved to the Netherlands and thought it would also help me learn the language to use it professionally.

My first language is Spanish, but back then I did not think about creating anything specifically for the community in Spain. The idea emerged when I met my co-host—I thought it would be good to create something together. So we joined forces and decided to give the podcast format a try.

One idea led to another—we wanted to create a space where less well-known people could talk about their experiences in the industry, but decided to focus on women. It was also an opportunity for us to meet great professionals. Thanks to the podcast, we got to know them and establish relationships.

Of course, the ultimate goal was to exchange knowledge and learn from our guests. It's rarely about the frontend; the co-host and I are both frontend developers, so we liked the idea of being able to bring in people with other roles in the tech industry to tell us more about themselves. So far, we've had a chance to chat about AI, product management, and much more. It's fascinating.

Monika: How do you keep your audience engaged?

Alba: That's an interesting question! Actually, I'm lucky to be working with an expert. My co-host, Miriam, is creating content for social media, so we have this part covered. We shoot many short clips and share those on TikTok and Instagram, but also on our LinkedIn profile. The idea is to get people interested in the topic—only reveal a bit of the conversation and encourage them to find out what's next.

We also agreed that we should invite the truly engaged followers—people who know us and our work. We decided to build a community on Discord to have everything in one place, this way it's easier for our audience to follow the podcast. It also creates an opportunity to interact, and exchange thoughts.

We're planning to organize live coding sessions or events at Twitch, Discord and such. It'll give us an opportunity to actually interact with our community, chat in real time and have fun together. We want to get to know our audience and with podcasts, the options are limited.

Our podcast also has a section called "Cuéntame tus Penurias" ("Tell me about your hardships")—the guests tell stories of how they failed or suffered in their jobs working in the tech industry. The stories are not necessarily tech-related, they may tackle mental health, legal issues and so on. The audience can relate, but also offer some advice or help find a solution to the problem. This type of engagement is important because it shows that we're all just humans.

Monika: Do you see the industry changing, becoming more inclusive?

Alba: As a content creator and blogger I have met many people in the community, most of them inclusive and always reflecting on their actions, but I could say I live in a sort of bubble.

People who listen to our podcast and form a community around it are very inclusive and open-minded, but the thing is I don't really leave that circle that often. My closest environment is extremely friendly and inclusive. But on the other hand, I think we need to start somewhere. We can start to improve some things with a certain group of people, and they would later spread the word.

Monika: What's important while building a community?

Alba: I believe that it's crucial to have the right people organizing the events. Whenever I attend a meetup here in Amsterdam, I can feel that the organizers are relatable and human—going through difficulties, optimizing the way they work and talking about it openly. They would admit they feel nervous before a speech, and it makes the audience feel better around them.

For example, watching prepared tutorials on YouTube won't give you the same feeling.The creators of those don't make mistakes, unless it's a livestream, you don't see their real reactions, they have scripts prepared for that.

Communities—for example, Google Developer Groups—are great, because you feel that you can fail live, and they'll still love you. It's amazing to feel that people around are just the same as me, and we can grow together.

Monika: What's your story as a Google Developer Expert in web technologies? Would you recommend the program to a friend?

Alba: My story as a GDE goes back to the beginning of the pandemic, when I was creating a lot of content. I met a few community members, one of them was Debbie O'Brien, who's also a GDE and an amazing supporter of women in tech. She appreciated my work and encouraged me to apply to the GDE program. Only problem—back then I did not know what it was! I was just starting my adventure with the dev community. It never occurred to me that I could be called an Expert.

I followed Debbie's advice and created a portfolio of all my contributions. The application process went really well, and I believed my knowledge and experience are truly valuable to the community.

Being a GDE is really cool. I'm learning so much from the community! I now spread the word about the program and hope some of my friends and colleagues will give it a try soon.

Monika: What are your activities in the community besides blogging and podcasting? Do you do open source?

Alba: When I first got involved in open source projects, I created more documentation than actual code. Now I'm working on some boilerplates and demo projects for the new and upcoming technologies, for example, Nuxt 3. My goal is to help people who want to start building an app quickly—they can just use those pieces of code. I've never created a library of my own, I just contribute to and try to improve those that exist.

I was also quite engaged in hackathons—contests where organizers ask you to build an app, make it open source, and prepare documentation for it. You would not get the prize if any of those were missing. And I won one of those! I created a Potato Mood Generator. You can read all about it here.

I also host workshops where I teach people how to code a website from scratch using Jamstack technologies, a headless CMS, and a Static Site Generator. I really prefer hosting those workshops over delivering speeches. I love seeing how people are learning as we go—you don't have that during a talk. After a speech, you may receive some feedback, but you won't see someone's finalized project. I love how everyone is typing together during a workshop.

Monika: And what makes a good workshop?

Alba: You need to always explain the basics to make sure everyone understands. I try to explain each step in detail — the attendees need to know the process. I also always create a little glossary of new terms to be looked up during the class.

During the workshop, it's crucial to set time to debrief and check the different projects' status after completing each step. I encourage the attendees to ask questions as often as they need.

So to sum up—it's all about communication. Ask the right questions, try not to lose people's attention, just be there for them. That's the best way to teach someone something new.

A win-win situation

2022-07-14T00:00:00Z

Monika: Let's start by learning a bit about you. What was your journey as a developer? What are you up to now?

Enrique: I'm Enrique, but everyone calls me Quique. I've been a developer ever since I can remember. I was probably around 13 years old when me and my friend started to program very basic websites, we called them Homer Simpson-like websites—just for fun and for the sake of learning. Step by step, I continued programming on my own. In the end I decided to study engineering, but instead of computer science, I chose telecommunication.

I've been working as a front-end developer for as long as I can remember. I worked with many frameworks, including Angular, Vue, and React. Nowadays I'm based in Romania, working as a country director of engineering at my company. We're hiring truly outstanding professionals and I'm happy I get to share with them our work culture and help them along the way. I still consider myself a frontend specialist, but I'm more focused on managing people and projects.

Monika: Have you always been an active member of the community?

Enrique: All this time I've been involved in various communities, I love this kind of networking. I started speaking at events and conferences, sharing content, and creating open-source libraries.

Nine years ago I decided to put my skills into use and fund HelpDev—an NGO focused on helping other NGOs with website development. It runs in my family—everyone is involved in NGOs, we love giving back to the community.

With HelpDev, the initial idea was to combine two kinds of activity—helping NGOs without resources and supporting young developers without any professional experience who wanted to improve their resumes. If you don't have any experience, it may be hard for you to secure a job since every company now asks for experience. We only work with NGOs that don't have any financial resources; if they're able to pay, we make sure they hire a contractor who'll be able to carry out what they need.

We started as a huge group of 50 people, which turned out to be impossible to manage properly. We needed to change the way of operating and continued for the next three to four years in a small group of five. At that point we were creating simple websites with Wordpress for our NGOs. When the pandemic started, we needed to rethink our activity and find better ways to make things happen.

Monika: And what did you change?

Enrique: At the beginning of 2022, we moved all the content from Wordpress to GitHub, making the websites open-source. All the code is public now. We're using Storyblok—a headless CMS which offers an API with all the content and is easy to manage for non-technical users. Some people we're working with are very engaged volunteers but have limited technical knowledge. The tool needs to be really easy to allow them to operate on their own without problems.

For the frontend, we're using a technology called Nuxt based on Vue. Combining those tools makes it easy for us to create more websites, only having to change color, branding, and content. We can use the same components for different websites.

Hopefully this year we'll finish the migration of the websites to the new platform. Now the NGOs don't have to pay anything for maintaining a website, just the domain, but other than that we ensure that the hosting is free. Storyblok is actually sponsoring us, and thanks to that, we have a free license. The companies we're partnering with usually help our NGOs with some assets they might need, for example, providing them with new branding.

Sometimes NGOs are founded in times of need—that happened after a devastating earthquake in Nepal, when organizations didn't have time to set everything up properly. We came to help.

Our goal is to make volunteering for NGOs as easy as possible—accessible anytime, from any place on earth. Open-sourcing our work was a way to do that. Now anyone can answer a request and fix a bug, or improve a website in some way. It allows more people to be engaged, but spend less time working on something.

Monika: While creating HelpDev, after the initial hype, did you work with anyone? Did anyone help you?

Enrique: In the beginning, when there were 50 of us, the meetings were chaotic and we were not able to reach an agreement. In the end, four founders stayed to help me turn the HelpDev project into an official, registered NGO. They're still with the organization, working as vice presidents or advisors, and tackling financial and legal issues. Now, since we operate in an open-source model, we don't need that many people to be engaged all the time. It works really well.

Monika: HelpDev is an NGO helping other NGOs. Do you have a particular focus while choosing your partners?

Enrique: Before becoming an open-source NGO we were only working with Spanish NGOs. Everything was done in a traditional way—face-to-face meetings, planning, phone calls, legal actions, and so on. Nowadays we're no longer limited to that, we can work with anyone around the world. We're also no longer focussed on offering each of our partners an individual solution anymore—their websites are currently unified, which makes it easier to maintain and further develop. Whenever I create a new component, I can use it for all the websites. What is more, with Storyblok, the NGOs will be able to implement most of the changes on their own.

The Spanish NGOs we previously worked with are really diverse, each having a different focus and different priorities. NeedU works with homeless people in Barcelona, Asocciación APISF supports doctors in Africa—the scope is really wide. In Spain, we have many NGOs for different causes and people frequently volunteer. It's quite popular.

Monika: What's next for HelpDev? What's going to change after moving to GitHub?

Enrique: The challenge I'm currently facing is transforming an NGO into a GitHub project. Every community member knows how GitHub works—you have templates for issues and people helping with your request. It's not just libraries—I believe we can have much more than that. I'd love the whole project to be maintained entirely by the community—obviously our core team would still coordinate the main library and implement all changes if needed. Nonetheless, all the bugs, new components, and small issues will eventually be fixed by volunteers around the world. I'm 100% sure community members would be eager to help us with that. And it's also beneficial for them—many of our requests are tagged as ‘Good First Issue' on GitHub, meaning that they're not technically challenging and would be a good fit for beginners who are just starting to build their portfolio. For example, right now we don't have a component for Carousel, but it's super easy to do. Everyone is welcome to join and help.

For us, it's just as we planned from the beginning—helping both NGOs in need and young developers.

Monika: Are you involved in any other community activity right now?

Enrique: Oh yes! I also created a web app called Talento para tu evento (Talent for your event). Again, its goal is to help organizers looking for a speaker who can deliver a presentation on JavaScript and connect them with tech professionals searching for opportunities to share their knowledge. The whole idea is to be free of unconscious bias when choosing a speaker. That's why all the personal info about the person is anonymized; an organizer will be choosing based on experience and proposed topics. I hope this will help underrepresented groups, for example, women, get the opportunities they deserve.

Monika: What motivated you to join the Google Developer Experts community?

Enrique: I've always been involved in community activities. One day a friend of mine who is also a GDE—Jorge del Casar—invited me to the program. Our paths actually crossed 12 years ago—at that point we were both engaged in dev communities in our area. I thought it would be a great idea to join the GDE community. I even told the team during the interview that I'm not here for the swag (which is, of course, nice), but because I love interacting with people and chatting about technology, especially directly, during conferences and workshops. Being a Google Developer Expert also lets me exchange ideas and knowledge with the brightest minds in the industry, people who know a hundred times more than me—I appreciate their experience and expertise.

After joining the program, I also took part in Women Developer Academy as a mentor in 2021. It was a unique and inspiring experience—being able to mentor someone and put my knowledge into good use.

I also discovered new ways of sharing with a community. Last year I created a podcast and invited ten people from the industry to talk, not about technology but about themselves, to learn who they really are.

All of this wouldn't be possible without the GDE community. We're in touch on Slack, we see each other during different meet-ups and conferences, we have a chance to inspire each other.

Monika: Would you say that developers have the resources and ability to change the world for good?

Enrique: I'm sure they do. In fact, not only developers, but all the professions out there have a lot to offer. The problem is often the people—we grow up in a society that pressures us to pursue perfection, do more than others, try harder. I believe sometimes it's good to stop for a moment and think that doing something for free, even though it doesn't bring you money, will bring you other kinds of benefits that money cannot buy.

We're now very well paid, it's a good moment for our profession. We can spare a moment to help others by mentoring, sharing knowledge, or teaching.

Monika: What would you say to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?

Enrique: I think that for me, one of the most important learnings of my professional career was not to be too specialized, not to focus on just one technology. It's better to enjoy what the industry has to offer. Even though I'm working on frontend, I've also tried a bit of DevOps, backend, IoT, and apps. I don't really care about being the best in Angular or any other framework. My goal is rather to be a good professional than just a good developer. As a hiring manager, I prefer a professional who maybe needs to improve their technical skills, but who is a well-organized, effective communicator.

Finding courage and inspiration in the developer community

2022-05-09T00:00:00Z

How do we empower women in tech and equip them with the skills to help them become true leaders? One way is learning from others' successes and failures. Web GDEs—Debbie O'Brien, Julia Miocene, and Glafira Zhur—discuss the value of one to one mentoring and the impact it has made on their own professional and personal development.

A 2019 study showed that only 25% of keynote speakers at tech events are women, meanwhile 70% of female speakers mentioned being the only woman on a conference panel. One way of changing that is by running programs and workshops with the aim of empowering women and providing them with the relevant soft skills training, including public speaking, content creation, and leadership. Among such programs are the Women Developer Academy (WDA) and the Road to GDE, both run by Google's developer communities.

With more than 1000 graduates around the world, WDA is a program run by Women Techmakers for professional IT practitioners. To equip women in tech with speaking and presentation skills, along with confidence and courage, training sessions, workshops, and mentoring meetings are organized. Road to GDE, on the other hand, is a three-month mentoring program created to support people from historically underrepresented groups in tech on their path to becoming experts. What makes both programs special is the fact that they're based on a unique connection between mentor and mentee, direct knowledge sharing, and an individualized approach.

Julia Miocene

Some Web GDE community members have had a chance to be part of the mentoring programs for women as both mentors and mentees. Frontend developers Julia Miocene and Glafira Zhur are relatively new to the GDE program. They became Google Developers Experts in October 2021 and January 2022 respectively, after graduating from the first edition of both the Women Developer Academy and the Road to GDE; whilst Debbie O'Brien has been a member of the community and an active mentor for both programs for several years. They have all shared their experiences with the programs in order to encourage other women in tech to believe in themselves, take a chance, and to become true leaders.

Different paths, one goal #

Although all three share an interest in frontend development, each has followed a very different path. Glafira Zhur, now a team leader with 12 years of professional experience, originally planned to become a musician, but decided to follow her other passion instead. A technology fan thanks to her father, she was able to reinstall Windows at the age of 11. Julia Miocene, after more than ten years in product design, was really passionate about CSS. She became a GDE because she wanted to work with Chrome and DevTools. Debbie is a Developer Advocate working in the frontend area, with a strong passion for user experience and performance. For her, mentoring is a way of giving back to the community, helping other people achieve their dreams, and become the programmers they want to be. At one point while learning JavaScript, she was so discouraged she wanted to give it up, but her mentor convinced her she could be successful. Now she's returning the favor.

Debbie O'Brien

As GDEs, Debbie, Glafira, and Julia all mention that the most valuable part of becoming experts is the chance to meet people with similar interests in technology, to network, and to provide early feedback for the web team. Mentoring, on the other hand, enables them to create, it boosts their confidence and empowers them to share their skills and knowledge—regardless of whether they're a mentor or a mentee.

A huge part of being a mentee in Google's programs is learning how to share knowledge with other developers and help them in the most effective way. Many WDA and Road to GDE participants become mentors themselves. According to Julia, it's important to remember that a mentor is not a teacher—they are much more. The aim of mentoring, she says, is to create something together, whether it's an idea, a lasting connection, a piece of knowledge, or a plan for the future.

Glafira mentioned that she learned to perceive social media in a new way—as a hub for sharing knowledge, no matter how small the piece of advice might seem. It's because, she says, even the shortest Tweet may help someone who's stuck on a technical issue that they might not be able to resolve without such content being available online. Every piece of knowledge is valuable. Glafira adds that, "Social media is now my tool, I can use it to inspire people, invite them to join the activities I organize. It's not only about sharing rough knowledge, but also my energy."

Working with mentors who have successfully built an audience for their own channels allows the participants to learn more about the technical aspects of content creation—how to choose topics that might be interesting for readers, set up the lighting in the studio, or prepare an engaging conference speech.

Learning while teaching #

From the other side of the mentor—mentee relationship, Debbie O'Brien says the best thing about mentoring is seeing the mentees grow and succeed: "We see in them something they can't see in themselves, we believe in them, and help guide them to achieve their goals. The funny thing is that sometimes the advice we give them is also useful for ourselves, so as mentors we end up learning a lot from the experience too."

Glafira Zhur

Both Glafira and Julia state that they're willing to mentor other women on their way to success. Asked what is the most important learning from a mentorship program, they mention confidence—believing in yourself is something they want for every female developer out there.

Growing as a part of the community #

Both Glafira and Julia mentioned that during the programs they met many inspiring people from their local developer communities. Being able to ask others for help, share insights and doubts, and get feedback was a valuable lesson for both women.

Mentors may become role models for the programs' participants. Julia mentioned how important it was for her to see someone else succeed and follow in their footsteps, to map out exactly where you want to be professionally, and how you can get there. This means learning not just from someone else's failures, but also from their victories and achievements.

Networking within the developer community is also a great opportunity to grow your audience by visiting other contributors' podcasts and YouTube channels. Glafira recalls that during the Academy, she received multiple invites and had an opportunity to share her knowledge on different channels.

Overall, what's even more important than growing your audience is finding your own voice. As Debbie states: "We need more women speaking at conferences, sharing knowledge online, and being part of the community. So I encourage you all to be brave and follow your dreams. I believe in you, so now it's time to start believing in yourself."

GDE community highlight: Nishu Goel

2022-04-05T00:00:00Z

Nishu Goel is a renowned web engineer from India, Google Developer Expert for Angular and web technologies, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. She's the author of Step by Step Angular Routing (BPB, 2019) and A Hands-on Guide to Angular (Educative, 2021) as well as the author of Web Almanac 2021 JavaScript chapter. Nishu currently works at epilot GmbH as a full stack engineer. She told us about her community involvement, career plans and the best ways to learn web development.

Monika: Let's start with your story. What inspired you to become a developer and take on an active role within dev communities?

Nishu: I got my bachelor's degree in computer science, we studied data structures, and that's where the interest in programming started. During the third year of engineering, a connection with the developer community was established through my participation in the Microsoft Imagine Cup Nationals competition where we presented solutions through code. The idea of the application we built was to bring educational opportunities to local students, especially girls. I met some very inspiring people, both contestants and organizers in this journey.

In 2018, my professional career took off, and I started working with Angular. Angular became the primary technology that connected me to the GDE program. Around the same time, I started writing blog posts and creating content around the subject I was working on and learning . Dhananjay Kumar helped me get started on this journey and ensured to keep me on track. My first articles tackled the basics of Angular. Soon after I started speaking at events-the first one being ngNepal, Nepal's Angular Conference. This led to more speaking invitations about Angular and web technologies.

Monika: What's your professional experience technology-wise?

Nishu: It was all about Angular and web components for the first two years. I was using Angular for building the web, but soon I decided to go beyond that and explore other fields. I didn't want to limit myself in case I'd have to switch projects. That's how I started creating web components in Angular to use in other frameworks.

The first thing I did was to create web components using Angular. I published it to npm and used it as a demo in a React project. I've discussed this during some of my talks and presentations later. My next job required using React and Typescript. Now, because I was working with React, I wasn't just using one framework anymore, but the web in general. At that moment I learned a lot about the web, especially web performance. That's when I had to start thinking about the Largest Contenful Paint (LCP) or First Contentful Paint (FCP), which means how much time it will take your application to load or what's going to be the maximum time for the page to render. I have been working towards choosing best practices and an improved performance of the applications.

Because of this interest in web performance, I got involved in the Web Almanac and wrote the JavaScript chapter. Web Almanac is an annual report on the state of the web in general—it tells us how people are using different features. Last year 8.6 million websites were screened, the data was analyzed and presented in the report. The report includes statistics like the usage of the async and defer attributes in a <script> element. How many websites are using them correctly, how many are not using that at all, and how many improved those compared to 2020. The last Web Almanac report mentioned that around 35% of websites used two attributes on the same script, which was an anti-pattern, decreasing the performance. This was pointed out last year, and this year we tried to see if the situation improved. I also spoke at ngConf and Reliable Dev Summit, where I focused on the performance of the web.

Monika: You're also very much involved in giving back to the community. Lately you've been volunteering with a Ugandan NGO YIYA—how did it start and what was the main point of that cooperation?

Nishu: It started with the GDE team informing us about the volunteering opportunity with YIYA. The Ugandan NGO was looking for engineers to help them with either the content preparation or technical features. The program aims to empower school-aged children in Uganda and offer them education opportunities using the technologies available locally—not computers or textbooks, but rather basic keypad phones and radios. The children would dial a certain number and receive a set of information, dial another one for more insights, and so on. It became even more useful during the pandemic.

Since I've always been involved with the community and sustainable development goals, I decided to reach out. After a meeting with the YIYA team, I offered my help with the Python scripts or any bugs they came up with, any issues with the portal. We worked together for a brief amount of time.

Monika: What are your plans for 2022? Is there anything you're focusing on in particular?

Nishu: I'm switching jobs and moving to another country. I'll be working on the web in general, improving the site performance, and also on the backend, using Golang. I'll continue to zero in on the web performance area since it's very interesting and complex, and there's a lot to understand and optimize. Even now, after dedicating a lot of my time to that, there's still so much to learn. For example, I'd love to understand how using a CDN for my image resources would help me make my app even faster. I want to become THE expert of web performance—I'm gradually getting there, I like to believe :)

Monika: You've mentioned starting to write at a point when you were not an expert, you were just writing what you were learning. What would your advice be to new developers coming through and feeling they don't have anything to share?

Nishu: That's exactly how I felt when I started writing. I thought that maybe I should not put this out? Maybe it's just wrong? I was worried my writing was not going to help the readers. But the important thing was that my writing was helping me. I would forget things after some time and then come back to something I wrote earlier. Writing things down is a great idea.

So I would suggest everyone—just write, at whatever stage. Even if you've only finished one part of a course you're going through—you're learning by writing it down. A piece of information that you got to know at some point may be useful to others who don't know that yet. You don't need to be an expert. Writing will help you. And anyone, at any stage of their career.

Monika: It's best to follow people who just learned something because they know all the things they had to figure out. Once you're an expert, it's hard to remember what it was like when you were new. And any advice for someone who's just getting into web development?

Nishu: Many people ask which framework they should choose when they're starting, but I think that's not the right question. Whatever we are learning at any point should be useful at a later stage as well. I would advise anyone to drop the limitations and start with HTML or JavaScript—that's going to be profitable in the future.

And then take any opportunity that comes your way. This happened to me when I stumbled upon information about the Web Almanac looking for authors. I just thought, "oh, this is interesting, this may help everyone with the performance side of things". That's how I became a content lead for the JavaScript chapter, and I've spent six months writing it. So I think it's just about grabbing the opportunities and working hard.

Monika: Do you have any predictions or ideas about the future of web technology in general? What's going to be the next hot topic? What's going to be growing fast?

Nishu: I love the fact that we're able to run servers within browsers now, this is a great advancement. For example, running Node.js from the browser has been introduced lately, meanwhile in the past we could not run anything without having Node.js installed in our systems. Now we can do anything from the browser. This is a huge step further in the web ecosystem. And the OMT—Off the Main Thread. Working on the threads is going to be much improved as well. Web Assembly is advancing and enables developers to do that, and I think that is the future of the web ecosystem.