🤖 free courses, bots and data
Hello, friend!
I have been thinking and reading a lot about mentorship because I joined a new company and I need to be intentional about my professional development. I also have been fascinated by this American figure-of-speech-like phrase “my mentor [drop a name]” when folks are trying to make a point or to give more credibility to a story.
I am a mentor-like person to a few folks – I used to be their teacher and we just continued check-ins, dev chats, and career planning. These relationships were usually initiated by me as a former teacher. On the flip side, I have a few friends to whom I reach out for advice like a mentee but I struggle with communicating my needs beyond those moments of complete despair. I wish there was some standard or etiquette for setting up mentorships between friends.
If you have good (or poor) experiences with mentorship on either side of the relationship or if you read anything that really spoke to you, please reach out! I would really appreciate it. I’m planning to gather such insights in a blog post, or maybe something else altogether.
Meanwhile, I’m leaving you with a bunch of snacks, this week mostly data-flavored ✨
~ Sylwia
✨ Lovely events
🔻 Let’s Discuss: Developer Relations (TODAY!)
I feel like DevRel is not a career path that’s much advertised, at least not in all the circles I have been a part of. If you’d like to learn more about this field, or even explore alternatives to the full-time dev role, the wonderful Angie Jones is hosting a discussion with an all-star panel: Sarah Drasner, Kelsey Hightower, Emily Freeman, James Q. Quick, and Colby Fayock.
The discussion is taking place today, 2 April 2021 at 2pm EDT on Twitter Spaces.
🔻 Pluralsight’s free April
Just like last year, Pluralsight opens all their 7,000 courses for the entire month of April.
This is not sponsored content (I wish! 💸).
🔻 Processing Fellowship
If you love processing tools (e.g. p5), check out this fellowship:
The Processing Foundation Fellowship program sponsors artists, designers, activists, educators, engineers, researchers, coders, and collectives in projects that conceive a new direction for what our software and community can do. (…) Fellowship sponsors diverse project from processing software projects (Processing, p5.js, Processing.py, Processing for Android), to creative and exploratory research for new iterations.
The deadline for applications is next Friday, April 9, 2021, 11:59PM PST.
🔻 React Summit’s free workshops
If you missed the opportunity to snatch free tickets to React Summit, you can still join their 18 free workshops.
A wealth of subjects covered, and catering to different experience levels: “Building a Shopify App with React & Node”, “Mixing Content, Commerce, and SEO with Headless WordPress”, “Creating Accessible React Native Apps”, “Build Fullstack Apps with Blitz.js in Record Time” , “Intermediate Gatsby Workshop” and “Landing Your Next Developer Job”.
The workshops start on this Monday, April 5th and take place on different dates.
✨ Dev Snacks
- Now, this is fantastic: an in-depth tutorial on using D3.js with React by Amelia Wattenberger – I feel tempted for yet another side project!
- And while we are on the subject of D3.js, Sarah Fossheim wrote a great a11y blog on making data viz charts accessible
- If you’ve lacked CSS inspiration or, to the contrary, have felt too confident with it, Jhey just prepared for us this mouse-navigated CSS plane
- There are better phrases for addressing groups than “hey guys” and if you’re tired of being the slack Social Justice Warrior prompting folks to use inclusive language, you can delegate these conversations to guys bot, a caring little friend created by Luke Oliff – you can also read a blog post about this project
✨ All the Fluff
- Ruby is my language of choice (more like love language, really) and of course I’d be remiss if I did not mention that Ben Greenberg is now running a #49DaysOfRuby daily blog series to celebrate Sefirat HaOmer! Check it out!
- Shoutout to the queen of shoutouts, Waverley Leung who met her March goal to celebrate Women’s History Month with a reflection blog post, even though her schedule is always filled with helping someone learn to code
- Emmanuel Jose has just written an in-depth and delightful walkthrough his beautiful Github Profile makeover!
- Not code-related but I can’t stop looking at these 1930 photos of how the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90° – it’s fascinating!
🛑 News and stuff
- Now, this is a feature that makes my life easier: Github automatically creates a table of contents for your README files; it is a result of a 412-comment-long discussion that started with an issue back in 2014
- Here’s an article and data viz on the Covid-19 vaccination state sites and “the results, measuring accessibility and privacy protections, were not always great”
- Please don’t look away from Amazon’s beef with unions and read about how they paid social media trolls and bots to join the discussion
- Here’s an article on how robots helping the fight against covid-19 in India