Author Archives: Mark Reyes

About Mark Reyes

Web Developer based out of Southern California.

Review of Soft Skills

Introduction

Coding is hard. And if you aren’t careful, it’ll suck you down a rabbit hole costing you the chance to be mindful of everything else. And that’s where this book comes into play.

Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual by John Sonmez, is a book which helped me understand that there’s more to this career path than creating object oriented code or deploying things into a cloud.

Here’s my summary and why I think you should add this to your developer book shelf.

Summary

The book is broken down into 7 thoughtful sections including: “Career”, “Marketing Yourself”, “Learning”, “Productivity”, “Financial”, “Fitness” and “Spirit”.

Sections are divided into chapters, with each chapter offering advice in short order and action items to do at the end. Think of this as a tiny list for you to digest. Use it as a way to take stock to then apply to your situation.

What’s Important

At 400ish pages in length, here’s what you’ll want to focus on first.

Career

People skills: You need them more than you think – a 5 page pep talk on informing you that it’s not all about code. John channels his inner Dale Carnegie to give advice on the ineffectiveness of criticizing other people, the value in avoiding arguments and more.

Marketing Yourself

Marketing basics for code monkeys – this headfirst explanation is written for the developer to understand the value of marketing oneself and options on how to do so.

Learning

Finding gaps in your knowledge – take inventory of where your knowledge gaps are with this series of written exercises challenging you to write down your questions and hardships with an intention to revisit them down the line.

Productivity

Pomodoro Technique – a timing exercise applicable to your daily work life. Although I don’t prescribe to the timer down to the exact second, I still leverage some form of this pattern throughout my day. It’s a nice flow of focus and rest that I strongly recommend you explore.

Financial

What are you going to do with your paycheck? – John paints a broad brush on finances, consistent in his opinions like other financial experts. Stop thinking short term and distinguishing between an asset and a liability are my personal favorites.

Fitness

Why you need to hack your health – a commitment to your health. Need I say more?

Spirit

Having the right mental attitude: Rebooting – this chapter molds itself as a personal reflection you must take when it comes to your thoughts. Essentially, techniques are given on how to take an x-ray of your thoughts and what to do with them next.

Conclusion

Enjoy the read. Don’t barrel through it. Read it in order. Jump around. It doesn’t matter.

John’s tone is very empathic. His narrative offers a sense of calm throughout and the format is set up for readers to consume advice in digestible pieces. If you choose to be in the software development career for the long haul, buy this book and never let it go.

This post may contain affiliate links. Should you make a purchase by clicking on any of the links, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Read my full affiliate disclosure here.

Losing The Bid

Introduction

I’m fairly rusty with freelance. Frankly, my last freelance gig was almost a decade ago. A lot has changed since then…namely starting a family. But alas, with 2020 being so unique, I thought I’d take a stab at getting back into this arena part time and I wanted to outline some things which happened along the way.

Long story short, I did not get the job.

Denied

Through word of mouth, a colleague of mine connected me to one of his clients in Los Angeles. Their company – an app based service for home cooked meals. They had a web app written in AngularJS and looked to add new features on an existing screen.

After a few days and filtering the true needs to be met, I emailed a quote. Thereby getting this reply:

$…for one screen being updated is way out of our budget. I thank you for your time.  Perhaps we can do something together in the future.

– Client XYZ

What Now?

I can’t knock the receiving end for saying no. I too am a customer and I empathize that every scenario is already influenced with a prefixed budget in mind.

But could I have done something else to have supply and demand equal out?

Honestly…no. That said, I thought it’d be best to leave a checklist for those of you in similar scenarios. Here are my essentials I obsessed about behind the scenes before ever striking into a conversation.

Freelance Checklist 2020

✅ Do I really want the gig?

Seriously…do you? Have you spent enough time on your own deeds? Would family time be in jeopardy should you say yes? Decline immediately if you’re on the fence. Neither side will benefit if you’re not all in.

✅ Are my conversations free?

Some people charge like lawyers. I’m not one of them. Free conversations (albeit, you must time box them) is the opportunity for you to filter out what the true needs are from the client.

✅ What’s my quote?

The hardest part. Honestly, the best advice I received as of late came from two fronts.

First, my colleague who connected me. In short, billing from total project cost is recommended if you’re absolutely sure of everything you had to quote. If you have a sense of uncertainty, bill by the hour.

Second, what rate to charge? Make it up (thanks CareerFoundry.com).

Conclusion

At this point, what matters most isn’t that I didn’t close the deal, but the lessons I can uproot after the fact. I hope this checklist sheds some light on your next freelance endeavor.

How do you balance freelance with a full-time career and other lifestyle dynamics? I’d love to know your opinion. Feel free to contact me and hopefully we can get a conversation on this sometime in the future.

Thanks. 🤙🏾

Add FAQ to Shopify Collection in 5 Steps

Introduction

An FAQ interface is a straightforward way to provide your customers with the insight they need without the need to call customer service. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can take an existing collection template (irrespective of theme) and add an editable interface by way of sections in 5 easy steps.

This specific case leverages Bootstrap 3 Accordion techniques (as the theme was built with it), however all of this can be integrated via Bootstrap 4, other JavaScript toggling solutions and CSS only implementations.

My 5 step tutorial assumes you have basic/intermediate knowledge of Shopify, HTML/CSS and that you’re able to read a JSON object (see schema tags).

In The Trenches

Step 1

First and foremost, you’ll need to embrace Shopify’s opinion on how code is organized.

Assuming you have access to your store, jump in to Shopify Admin > Online Store > Themes. From the Actions drop-down menu, click Edit code and you’ll be navigated to the online code editor built into Shopify.

Take stock on how Shopify organizes its codebase. You cannot deviate from this opinion. It is a tight structure and the abstractions are intentional.

Step 2

Navigate to Sections directory, click Add a new section and create this new file: collection-faq.liquid.

Step 3

The code. Here’s the breakdown of that in short order:

  • Line 7, 34: The for loop keys off from schema settings defined from line 44.
  • Line 8, 10, 33: A decision will be made to either print a header or a panel.
  • Line 23, 25, 27: A decision will be made to either display or hide the answer.
  • Lines 40-91: The required schema tag which ultimately defines your UI and its editable fields and initial settings.
  • Line 93, 94: optional custom CSS styling to lay on top of this section.
  • Line 96, 97: optional custom JavaScript to lay on top of this section.

Step 4

Reference this newly created section to on your theme’s collection template: /templates/collection.liquid

{% section 'collection-faq' %}

Frankly, you could add this interface to whatever template you see is most fitting for your use case.

Step 5

Test it! Navigate to Shopify Admin > Online Store > Themes and click Customize.

Inside of the preview panel, click into a collection page which leverages your new addition. From there, you will see your FAQ settings on the left panel and a preview screen on the right.

Once inside of the Customize screen, you have full authority in adding/removing FAQs and previewing that in real-time.

Go ahead and add/remove a header, question and an answer! It won’t save unless you click the Save button at the top-right.

Conclusion

Sections are awesome. It’s a great way to extend an established theme with your customizable interfaces.

If I have one gotcha to reinforce it’s this. Always revisit step 1. Acknowledge Shopify’s file system and don’t dance around it. The way it organizes its assets are very much intentional and if you can quickly accept the Physics of this particular world, you’ll very much learn how do these kinds of tasks in 5 steps or less.

Additional Resources