Lots of New Things Cooking in the Kitchen 👩‍🍳,

Welcome to the third issue of Zero to Hero Weekly.

This week has been a total rush with many articles and content and some functional and visual updates.

Ah, I’ve updated the about page too. The page describes what Zero to Hero is and where it is heading towards. You can also find a video of me talking about it.

There is a new use cases section where I’ll write and talk about actual production projects that real people use. It will not be a sandbox “restaurant rating React app” or a yet ’nother “to-do list” clone. I’ll develop and talk about real, living, evolving production apps in the use cases section.

These use cases will be as real as it gets. We’ll together learn how to design, deploy, develop, secure, scale up, and maintain the application for real-life use. It’ll be so much fun! I’m really excited about this.

Additionally, I will take my notes to create separate articles and videos about any tool, technology, and foundational knowledge that I use in those use cases. I will provide enough learning material to deep dive for the interested.

Random Thought of the Week

Along with the rapid development of technology, it’s getting harder and harder to do everything by yourself. You inevitably find yourself having to work with each other to establish a shared vision.

By that token, even when you are an individual contributor, you’ll find yourself having to convince, persuade, guide, and coach others.

That also means that regardless of tenure, expertise, or title, everyone has to act as a leader in some way, shape, or form to succeed in today’s multi-faceted work culture.

To be a good leader, you’d need to know how you lead; and to understand how you lead, you’d need to self-reflect.

It might sound coming from the mouth of the oracle of Delphi (and it actually is) and a bit wishy-washy, but knowing how you lead starts with knowing yourself.

So how do you know yourself? Well, that’s obviously personal, but there are certain key areas that you can focus on and there are specific questions that you might want to seek answers to.

You can group those areas under five main categories.

  • Self-awareness
  • Self-regulation
  • Self-motivation
  • Empathy
  • Influence

Of course, there are many more, but focusing on these five and improving your emotional maturity on these five tangents will help you the most.

Let’s look at these topics with a larger lens.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is knowing your strengths, weaknesses, desires, and values. It is also knowing how you are influenced by others and how you influence others.

When you are self-aware, you are confident, you can realistically (and often brutally) self-assess your behaviors. You have an insatiable thirst for constructive criticism.

Self-regulation

Related to self-awareness, self-regulation is controlling disruptive impulsive and moods that may prevent you from actualizing your potential.

When you self-regulate, you observe and understand how you feel, but you don’t let that feeling define your behavior. You maintain your integrity and trustworthiness no matter how dire the circumstances are.

When you learn yourself, and by extension, learn how to regulate yourself, you’ll be comfortable with ambiguity and change.

Self-motivation

Self-motivation is how it sounds: It’s a passion for achievement for the sake of achievement. You don’t do your best for money, fame, visibility, promotion, or anything else. You do your best, and you are at your best because you simply cannot think of any other way.

When you are self-motivated, you have an infinite passion and energy for improvement. You’ll maintain your optimism in the face of failure.

Empathy

You can write books about empathy, and it’s a skill that’s the toughest to master. And like any skill, you can master it when you constantly observe, modify, and change your behavioral patterns.

Empathy is, at its core, is understanding people’s emotional setups.

That will help you become a better leader who can understand and develop others. You will become more perceptive to people’s identities and understand the nuances in cross-cultural differences in how people act.

Empathy (not charisma, not power, not anything else but empathy) is the force that attracts and retains people around you.

Influence

Again, you can write books about how to influence people, how to negotiate, how to convince. Yet, at its very core, you can define influence as building enough impact around you to move people towards a shared vision that you desire.

When you learn how you influence, you’ll be better and effective in leading change. You’ll be more persuasive; you’ll be amazed at how extensive your network has become. You’ll see that you are building and leading teams naturally.

Recently on Zero to Hero

Here are the recent articles for the week:

  • It’s time to Fizz that Buzz: In this video, I’m talking about FizzBuzz Pro—a sister project of Zero to Hero. I’m outlining a high-level architecture of the login flow of the project, how it integrates with the Ghost content publishing platform as a membership provider, and how I’m going to proceed.
  • Installing Go on a Mac: This is a step-by-step set of instructions to install a Go development environment on a Mac OS. I’ve also created a video to show you how the process actually looks. Still, it’s not ready yet—I’ll publish the video sometime next week.
  • Places to learn Go: This article covers tools and resources that can help you ramp up with Go programming and make you learn enough Go to be dangerous, at least.

Yes, there will be more Go content on the way; that said, we’ll be covering a hell lot of JavaScript and other related technologies too. Stay tuned.

One thing that I constantly emphasize is the fact that languages are tools. And you use tools, not rules: You pick the right tool for the job. And Go is the right tool for certain topics that we are going to cover.

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.

  • Simplenetes is a simple and opinionated alternative to Kubernetes, especially useful for small (<20 nodes) clusters. The project is still in beta, yet it looks promising.
  • Velero is an open-source tool to safely back up and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes.
  • In Making Strides Toward Serverless, Matt is writing about the “serverless” deployment model, the integration points to your serverless architecture, serverless functions, and various patterns for serverless adoption.

Thanks a Lot ❤️

That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll gather more unique content and resources.

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