08 February 2019
We have a generous benefit at work which is that we get to enjoy two hack days per month. The term “hack days” is slightly confusing… It does not mean that we all disappear into the darknet, communicate via forums and find your credit card details… no, it just means that we can work on something outside of our usual user stories. Anything goes that helps our team, the company or our personal development.
31 March 2018
The other day I decided to finally use CSS Grid in one of my personal projects. There’s so much hype about it - at least in my social media bubble - that I already felt like I was lagging behind completely because I wasn’t using it on a daily basis. Finally it was my turn to be all modern and cutting edge.
26 January 2018
I gave a talk last night at the Extreme Programming London meetup (XProLo). The talk was about why everyone should start blogging. Or continue blogging if you’re already on it. Lots of people said to me afterwards that they felt really inspired to write blog posts because of my talk, which is great! I love to hear that I inspire people.
04 October 2017
I’m part of the organiser team of the Ladies of Code meet up, a monthly tech meetup for people who identify as women or non-binary gender.
Sometimes I take on the job of a bouncer for our meetup, because I’m usually the one who doesn’t mind telling people (well, men) that they’re not welcome. Be it when I see that someone with a male name and male looking photo RSVPs on meetup.com or in person, when men randomly turn up to the event.
12 August 2017
There are a lot of things I want to get better at. One of those things is writing.
Oh, wait… I’ll try again:
There are a lot of skills I want to improve on. One of those is writing.
Baby steps.
10 August 2017
With our London office growing and more and more people working on client site, it becomes harder for everyone to communicate and stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the office.
My colleague Enrique had made an attempt to create a weekly newsletter at the beginning of the year which he named “London Calling”. I thought it was such a great idea! Reading weekly news about what’s happening in our office was really valuable.
17 May 2017
I am in the process of setting up a development environment on a virtual machine for an Elixir project and thought I’d write about it: mainly for myself for future reference. And also because I have loads of down time while I wait for vagrant up to run, so I might as well use that time.
08 May 2017
Loads of people say that it will drive you crazy to set up a React project. And yes, I have thought to myself several times today: this is madness! Why is this so hard? All I wanted was to get to a basic setup with webpack to develop my innovative web app idea.
22 February 2017
When I first started learning Go I was very confused by its usage of pointers. It wasn’t the specific way in which Go used pointers which confused me. The problem was that I had never written a language with pointers before at all. So I had no idea how to use them.
I followed some tutorials and found out that variables that start with an ampersand are pointers and variables that don’t are not pointers. And sometimes a variable can also start with an asterisk. But what does all this mean?
14 September 2016
Over the course of 2016 I’d heard quite a few talks on progressive web apps and/or service workers and I became quite interested in this new technology. So I decided to research it in detail and try to really understand it. And then I wrote a blog post about it.
25 April 2016
In April I wrote my first blog post for the 8th Light blog!
12 March 2016
Two years ago I worked in marketing. If you had told me back then to take a day off, buy a train ticket to Bath and go to a marketing conference, I would have… Well, I don’t even know how to finish this sentence to adequately express how ridiculous this suggestion would have been.
How things have changed! Today I took a day off, bought a train ticket to Bath and went to a Ruby conference. On top of that I took notes and have decided to summarise the day in this blog post to help me recap what I’ve learned.
23 January 2016
Such a small word. But with such big implications.
We use it all the time. “Sure, I’ll just pop down the shops and get some milk.” “I’ll just call you tomorrow instead”. “Oh, it’s just a little scratch.” It’s a normal word that everybody uses in any given sentence.
So why write a blog post about it? What’s the big deal?
28 November 2015
“Rabea is leaving? How long has she been here?”
“Six months.”
“Only six months? Who would do such a thing?”
That’s how the conversation between two of my colleagues went when it was announced that I had resigned.
15 November 2015
Yesterday was Global Day of Coderetreat and I attended the event for the first time.
10 November 2015
Recently, whenever I meet a woman who is showing the slightest interest in learning how to code, I practically jump at her out of excitement. I’ll start overwhelming her with tons of advice, meetup suggestions, workshop invites and links to tutorial websites. Suddenly I’ve become passionate about women joining the tech industry as developers.
13 August 2015
An aspect of my current job that I find quite difficult at the moment is estimating how long it will take me to create a feature. We work following Agile principles and will usually have a sprint planning session with the team during which we have to estimate the time it will take us to code a particular requirement.
20 July 2015
In my quest to become a better developer, I try to practise test driven development (TDD) by doing different code katas or challenges. We don’t use TDD at work, so due to a mix of my desire to one day be a really good developer and my FOMO, I try to practise it when I have some free time.
23 June 2015
If you had told me a year ago that I would be working as a developer now, I wouldn’t have believed you. A developer? Me? Surely that’s waaaaayy to difficult.
19 June 2015
I finished the General Assembly web development bootcamp at the end of February and haven’t really blogged since.