Hello World, Hello Stars, Hello Universe

Hi there,

Welcome to the very first Zero to Hero Weekly digest where I share my thoughts about the week and give a brief overview fo what has happened in “Zero to Hero”, in the industry, and in the open-source ecosystem recently.

About These Newsletters

I’m planning to send these newsletters to the Zero to Hero subscribers every week—possibly on Friday so that you’ll have some nice weekend bedtime reading material 🙂.

This is the very first Zero to Hero Weekly Digest: The format of this newsletter will evolve and change in time—of course, your feedback is vastly appreciated—join Zero to Hero Discord Server to send your comments and suggestions.

Random Thought of the Week

Here’s a random thought: Have you ever got stuck while doing your work, and needed help but you were afraid to ask for help because you feared bothering your team mates?

When I find myself in that kind of a situation, here’s what I do:

Firstly, I double-check the question is worth asking: I do my homework, search the web, read internal company wiki, read the source code and fiddle with the problem for a while-if the thing is something that I can learn by myself with minimal hassle, I just jump on it.

If I cannot effectively handle the issue myself, then the next thing I try to find is a path of least resistance: Oftentimes finding the best person to ask the question, how to ask it, and when to ask the question are equally important (if not “more” important) than actually asking the question.

I additionally pay attention to the person’s communication style: While some people are all about Slack messages, some prefer email, and some would rather do an ad-hoc chat around the water cooler.

Remember: communication is what the listener does.

In the end of the day my goal is to make the life of the person who’s going to help me as easier. In a sense, I’m helping them help me.

Also whenever possible, I provide as much context as I can. I show the person the work I’ve done so far, and the pain points that I’m having. That also shows that I value their time.

It might sound trivial, but having a place that I hold the information that I gathered from this person is also important. I would not want to end up asking the same questions over and over again after all.

So far these tricks served me well when asking for help. I hope you’ll find them useful too.

Recently on Zero to Hero

Here’s a selection from the recent Zero to Hero articles:

  • Setting Up Your Go Development Environment (4min read): In this mini-article, we’ll see how we can set up our Go development environment. Installing and configuring Go on your system is pretty streamlined.
  • Let’s Create a Node: (1min read): This is still a work in progress. We are creating a Node object that we’ll later use in fancy data structures like LFU Caches, and Doubly-Linked Lists.
  • Every Saga Has a Beginning: This is the initial article outlining how this all started. It‘s a bit personal, reflecting on myself, my life, and what my plans are for “Zero to Hero”s future.

Look What I’ve Found

Here are the things that grabbed my attention this week.

I typically don’t share these anywhere else.

Exclusively hand-picked for you 👌. Enjoy.

  • Trisha Gee: Code Review Best Practices - SCLConf 2018: In this talk, Trisha will identify some best practices to follow. She’ll talk about what’s really important in a code review, and set out some guidelines to follow in order to maximize the value of the code review and minimize the pain.
  • Vulture: Find Dead Python Code: Vulture finds unused code in Python programs. This is useful for cleaning up and finding errors in large code bases. If you run Vulture on both your library and test suite you can find untested code.
  • Mentee Missteps: Given the importance of the mentor-mentee relationship, it is imperative that mentees put their ”best foot forward”. The article outlines what kind of “behavior smells” mentees might manifest that can make the mentor-mentee relationship unsustainable.

Thanks a Lot ❤️

That’s all for this week–hope you liked it.

And until next time… May the source be with you 🦄.