August 6th, 2020: What did you learn this week?

Wow! First week of the August!

It's that time of the week again for the first time this year. So wonderful devs, what did you learn this week? It could be programming tips, career advice etc.

Feel free to comment with what you learnt and/or reference your TIL post to give it some more exposure.

#todayilearned Follow

Summarize a concept that is new to you.

And remember, if something you learnt was a big win for you, then you know where to drop it as well.👇👇🏻👇🏼👇🏽👇🏾👇🏿

What was your win this week?

Gracie Gregory (she/her) for The DEV Team ・ Aug 7 '20

#discuss #weeklyretro

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Comments

[Daniel Brady]

I learned how to interact with spreadsheets programatically via the Google Sheets API, and now my GatsbyJS site has a simple, functional database in the cloud ☁️.

Dunno what I’ll use it for yet, but hey, I’ve got a database 😄

[Mike Bybee]

Here's an idea I'm working on myself: Let a user connect theirs and use it to keep your "real" cloud database (e.g. Firebase Cloud Firestore, DynamoDB, FaunaDB) within free tier for as long as possible (or just more affordable in general) by offloading their old sales data (e.g. older than this month, per transaction, whatever) to their own Google Drive account.

[Rafi]

I once built a simple jobs board with google sheet as the database and google forms as a way to collect data.

[Mike Bybee]

That's actually how I set up comments on my now-ancient personal site (static and built a long time ago with Foundation v5 and an old version of Assemble still based on grunt). I added an "approved" column to the Sheet not available in the form (a Handlebars partial which appended the page URL and submitted to Google Forms via AJAX), so I could moderate the comments in Google Sheets after getting an email of a new Google Forms submission.

It's so old that I don't think I ever got around to updating it after Google changed their CORS policy. Bloop.

[Nick Taylor]

[Nick Taylor]

[Txai]

Not something technical, but I learned, after spending almost a week blocked in a problem, that talking to someone more senior in the project could save a lot of time! And I also learned to documenting how things work, so future me, and people who find similar problems won't be stuck as well

[Nick Taylor]

[Heiker]

I learned that Debian has an "alternatives" system. Is like a symlinks manager but for commands that are interchangeable in some way.

For example, I installed neovim and without doing anything I already have the commands vi and vim pointing to a neovim symlink. Nodejs also has one, it's called js, I can run a script like this js ./path-to-script.js. To see what commands have "alternatives" check the /etc/alternatives folder.

ls -l /etc/alternatives

And for more details read the manpage.

man update-alternatives

[Nick Taylor]

Noice!

[AtOmXpLuS]

💘👻🌷🙊

[Alvaro Saburido]

I actually learn how to use MutationObserver and IntersectionObserver, quite useful.

[Nick Taylor]

Yeah!

[Manyong'oments]

Learned some basic cryptography. Generating SSH Keys and GPG Keys.

Learned something annoying about flutter web.
You have to repeat your code 3 times and adjust the parameters to make your site truly dynamic (support mobile, tablet view and desktop view).

All mobile apps have a back buttons (<), if not, it's a menu

There aren't any comprehensive Flutter Game Development courses

[Nick Taylor]

Sounds like your learnings/frustations with Flutter would make for a great post Prince! 😉

[Manyong'oments]

Definitely going to write about that, thanks. I am mostly learning through code labs and cloning github repos to my machine.

[Benjamin Trent]

I learned how XGBoost multi-class classification works.

Turns out that every n_classes tree (read estimator) is for that particular class. Neat way of keeping boosted regression tree leafs restricted to one value.

[ML] add multi:softmax|softprob XGBoost support #246

benwtrent posted on Aug 05, 2020

This commit adds support for XGBoost multi-class classification model transformations.

XGBoost handles multiclass classification by having n_classes * n_estimators trees. Then, every n_classes tree corresponds to their respective classes

Since Elasticsearch supports multi-valued leaves, we can transform the xgboost format by choosing the appropriate leaf value index given the tree id.

This commit also fixes a minor model transformation bug where if xgboost actually defined the feature_names instead of the default f1,...fn we would blow up.

closes github.com/elastic/eland/issues/242

View on GitHub

[Nick Taylor]

[KHALID ISMAIL]

learn how git works and made my first pull request

[Nick Taylor]

Congrats on your first PR!

[Waylon Walker]

I learned how to run integration testing for my personal website inside of github actions with python and testproject.io.

Integration testing with Python, TestProject.io, and GitHub Actions

Waylon Walker ・ Aug 3 ・ 9 min read

#python #webdev #testing

[Nick Taylor]

[Waylon Walker]

@nickytonline crushing it with killer gifs

[Nick Taylor]

It was one of the job requirements when I was considering working at DEV. "Must be able to crush it with killer gifs" 😂

[Mike Bybee]

I learned that I still have a lot to learn about serverless (on the heels of Cloudflare's latest Workers announcement), reinforcing my belief that I never want to touch a server again if I can help it (funny considering my last tech talk just last year was alluding to building containerized microservices around or instead of monoliths).

[Nick Taylor]

[Steven Diamante]

I learned how to send myself weekly emails for my fantasy football league using the Send Grid Java API, JSoup, and cron jobs. Code available here: github.com/SDiamante13/fantasy-foo...

[Nick Taylor]

Awesome!