Personal Archives - Alexandre Vazquez

My Take On the Kubernetes Certification (CKAD)

2022-05-092022-02-06 by Alexandre Vazquez

girl in black t-shirt writing on white paper

My Experience and Feelings After Clearing the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

Last week I cleared the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) certification with a 95/100 score, and it was more difficult than it sounds even though this is the easiest of the Kubernetes certifications, the way the exam is designed and the skills that are evaluated on it make you unsure of your knowledge.

I have been using Kubernetes daily for more than three years now. Because of my work, it is required to deploy, define, troubleshoot Kubernetes-based workloads on different platforms (Openshift, EKS, AKS… anything), so you could think that I shouldn’t need to prepare for this kind of exam, and that could be the impression too. But this is far from reality.

I feel that there is no certification that you can clear without preparation because the certification does not measure how skilled you are on any other topic than the certification process itself. You can be the master of any technology, but if you go to a certification exam without any specific exam preparation, you have a lot of chances to fail.

Even in this case that we have shifted from the traditional theoretical test-case question to a more practical one, it is no different. Because yes, you don’t need to learn anything, and yes, it requires that you can really do things, not just know about a thing, but everything else is the same.

You will be asked about things you will never use in real life, you will need to use commands that you only are going to use in the exam, and you will need to do it in the specific way the expected too because this is how certification works. Is it bad? Probably… is there any other way to do it? We didn’t find it yet any better.

I have to admit that I think this process is much fairer than the test-case one, even though I prefer the test case just for a matter of timing during the process.

So, probably, you are asking if that is my view, why I try to clear the certification in the first place? There are several reasons to do it. First of all, I think certification is a great way to set a standard of knowledge for anyone. That doesn’t mean that people with the certification are more competent or better skilled than people without the certification. I don’t consider myself more qualified today than one month ago when I started to prepare for the certification, but at least it settled some foundation of what you can expect.

Additional to that is a challenge to yourself, to show you that you can do it, and it is always great to push your limits a bit beyond what is mandatory for work. And finally, it is something that looks good in your CV, that is for sure.

Do I learn something new? Yes, for sure, a lot of things. I even improved myself because I usually do some tasks, and just that alone made it worth it. Even if I failed, I think it was worth it because it always gives you something more to add to your toolchain, and that is always good.

Also, this exam doesn’t ensure that you are a good Kubernetes Application Developer. In my view, I think the exam approach is focused on showing that you are a fair Kubernetes Implementer. Why am I saying that? Let’s add some points:

You don’t get any points to provide the best solution for a problem. The ask is so specific that there is a matter of translating what is written in plain English to Kubernetes actions and objects.
There are troubleshooting questions, yes, but there are also quite basic ones that don’t ensure that your thought process is efficient. Again, efficiency is not evaluated on the process.

So, I am probably missing a Certified Kubernetes Architecture exam where you can have the definition of a problem, and you need to provide a solution. You will get evaluated based on that. Even with some way to justify the decision you are making and the thought process, I don’t think we ever see that. Why? Because, and that’s very important because any new certification exam we are going to face needs to be specific enough so it can be evaluated automatically.

From Docker Desktop to Rancher Desktop: Quick and Simple

2022-05-092022-01-31 by Alexandre Vazquez

assorted-color filed intermodal containers — Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

As most of you already know, the 31st of January is the last day to use Docker Desktop without applying the new licensing model that pretty much generates a cost for any company usage. Of course, it is still free to use for open-source and small companies, but it is better to meet the requirements using Docker official documentation.

So because of that situation, I started a journey to find an alternative to Docker Desktop because I used docker-desktop a lot. The primary use I do is to startup server-like things for temporary usage that I don’t like to have installed in my machine to keep it as clean as possible (even though this is not always true, but it is an attempt).

So, on that search, I discovered Rancher Desktop was released not a long time ago and promised to be the most suitable alternative. The goal of this post is not to compare both platforms, but if you like to have more information I leave here a post that can provide it to you:

Rancher Desktop

Container management to build, push, and pull images and run containers. It uses the same container runtime as Kubernetes. Built images are immediately available to use in your local workloads without any pushing, pulling, or copying.

The idea here is to talk more about the journey of that migration. So I installed the Rancher Desktop 1.0.0 on my Mac and the installation was very, very easy. The main difference with Docker Desktop is that Rancher Desktop is built with Kubernetes in mind and for Docker Desktop, that came as an afterthought. So, by default we will have a Kubernetes environment running in our system, and we can even select the version of that cluster as you can see in the picture below:

But also in Rancher, they noticed the opportunity window they have in front of them, and they were very aggressive in providing an easy migration path from Docker Desktop. And the first thing you will notice is that you can configure Docker Desktop to be compliant with the Docker CLI API as you can see in the picture below.

This is not enabled by default, but it is very easy to do it and it will make you not need to change all your “docker-like” commands (docker build, docker ps.. ) so it will smooth a lot of the transition.

Maybe in the future, you want to move away from everything resembling docker even at the client-side and move to a Containers kind of approach, but for now, what I needed is to simplify the process.

So, after enabling that and restarting my Rancher Desktop, I can type my commands as you can see in the picture below:

So, the only thing I need to do is migrate my images and containers. Because I’m not a pure docker usage, I don’t follow sometimes the thing to have your container stateless and using volumes especially when you are doing a small use for some time and that’s it. So, that means that some of my containers also need to be moved to the new platform to avoid any data loss.

So, my migration journey had different steps:

First of all, I will commit the stateful containers that I need to keep on the new system using the command docker commit with the documentation that you can find here:

docker commit

docker commit: It can be useful to commit a container’s file changes or settings into a new image. This allows you to debug a container by running an interactive shell,…

Then, I will export all the images that I have now in TAR files using the command docker save with the documentation that you can find it here:

docker save

docker save: Produces a tarred repository to the standard output stream. Contains all parent layers, and all tags + versions, or specified `repo:tag`, for each argument provided.

And finally, I will load all those images on the new system using docker load command to have it available there. Again, you can find the documentation of that specific command here

docker load

docker load: Load an image or repository from a tar archive (even if compressed with gzip, bzip2, or xz) from a file or STDIN. It restores both images and tags….

To automate a little bit the process even that I don’t have much images loaded because I try to clean up from time to time using the docker system prune command:

docker system prune

docker system prune: Remove all unused containers, networks, images (both dangling and unreferenced), and optionally, volumes.

I prefer not to do it manually, so I will use some simple scripts to do the job.

So, to perform the export job I need to run the following command:

docker image ls -q | xargs -I {} docker image save {} -o {}.tar

This script will save to have all my images on different tar files into a specific folder. Now, I just need to run the following command from the same folder I had run the previous one to have all the images back into the new system:

find . -name "*.tar" -exec docker load -i {} \;

The reason why I’m not doing both actions at the same time is that I need to have running Docker Desktop for the first part and Rancher Desktop for the other. So even though I can automate that as well, I think it is not worth it.

And that’s it, now I can remove the Docker Desktop from my laptop, and my life will continue to be the same. I will try to provide more feedback on how it feels, especially regarding resource utilization and similar topics in the near future.

Learn How Much You Can Earn in Medium As a Regular Writer

2022-05-062021-12-26 by Alexandre Vazquez

Let’s Take a Look at my Medium metrics in Detail So You Can Estimate Yours —My Year 2021 in Review.

I want to do this article to try to be as transparent as possible about how my year in Medium has gone in different aspects: readers, followers, subscribers… and yes, earnings!!!

I know that there are a lot of articles explaining a lot of insights about how they are performing in Medium. And, probably, you will not see here the most significant numbers in any of the metrics I could choose, which is why I think this is a good post for everyone.

This post shows you how something as regular as you could be if you decide to start your journey as a Medium writer can perform with the same dedication I put it.

The additional motivation for this post is to set the expectations for the next year that I hope will be better. I could focus more on this great activity of sharing knowledge with all the audience and the great community we are creating here at Medium.

Posts Written

This section covers the first metric I would like to focus on because this is the most important. And this is clear. If you write more, you will engage more with your audience. For sure, the content needs to be of excellent quality, but it is essential that the number of posts you write is high and the frequency is stable so that you can grow a community and know when they can expect the next piece. As you know, this is not my first job or dedication, so I am not as good at this aspect as I should be, but let me show the numbers:

As you can see, I try to keep the stability in my published posts, trying to target a weekly period, so trying to reach 4 per month. However, I could stick to it for half of the months. Also, you can see the boost in the motivation n when you start a new year you can see as you can see in the first three months of the year. So, in total, you can see that I have published 46 posts. It is not a significant mark, but it is what I could do.

Followers and Subscribers

This metric is pretty much the most important because it tells you how your community behaves. If you are engaging with them if they like the topics you write, and how the changes you are doing are affecting this community. This community is your core, and it will decide how the rest behaves. You need to invest in it, you will feed it. You need to treat it as it deserves.

So, what are my numbers on this topic? I didn’t start from scratch, so let me share first the numbers I had on January 1st, 2021: 119 Followers, 0 Email subscribers, and 0 Referred Members (this is normal as it has been introduced at a late point this year). So, here are the numbers for the 2021 year:

So, I am ending the year with a total of 261 subscribers what it means an increase of 120% what is excellent. Still, this increase has been fantastic until October, and after that, it is a little bit steady, and as you can see, it matches with the less post published on my side. So you can see the trend genuinely because the community is growing and your published posts. If you don’t believe me, let’s take a look at this chart:

So, as you can see, you need to invest in starting seeing your community growing. After my three great months with a lot of publishing, I could see that. After that point, when my publication rate decreased also it did the growth of the community. And, when I kept the pace steady, I was able to stay steady the growth. So, the more you publish, the more consistent you are, the stronger your community will grow.

Show me the money!!

And last… but totally not least, because I am sure this is what you would like to see the different earnings. So I will talk here about earnings before taxes so we can compare the same things and it would be more beneficial to you, but before we start a disclaimer: We had “a different year” because of the Medium Partner program that I was able to engage on some months of the year so that makes my year much more successfully as I could think, but here are the numbers, but before we start again let’s see the starting point. In December 2020, I earned $30,41 with all the posts I had published.

So, as you can see, I am not making myself rich, but that’s fair. I get a lot of joy from writing and sharing my knowledge, and if any of my posts have helped you, this is more important to me than any number you can see in the graph above. But let’s talk about the numbers:

You can see several periods: the one where we had the boost of the Medium Partner Program is clear on the screen (August — October 2021), and others were were good because some posts generated a lot of attention. The rest set the base bar, and we can consider the “base earning.”
The good thing about Medium is that this is based on your monthly viewers and reading time, so all the posts you have published during all your life are counting and generating revenue each month. So again, the most you published, the most you will generate because it is not the same generate $0.01 per post when you have 100 posts than when you have 10.000 posts.
I have earned (before taxes) $965.06, which is an average of $87.73 / month on the 11 months I have considered for this study. So it is not bad at least to help you pay some tools you use to write and encourage you to continue on 2022 stronger.

Summary

I hope you have liked this post, and again, I tried to be as transparent as possible, and I hope you have acknowledged that. This is to show you how somebody like me who uses some of my spare time to write can earn in Medium. For sure, this will not make me rich, at least not in any currency I can trade with, but there are much more things than just $ and BTC when you talk about things that all this work is generating.

So, I hope I can count on you for our 2022 journey!

Let’s Face It: Top Devs Are Not In Twitch Or YouTube!!

2022-05-072021-09-19 by Alexandre Vazquez

Content creators are educating junior Devs on social platforms that probably idealize their view even when they are not top of their class.

We are living a moment of maximum exposure to content creation with software development topics. The last news regarding this topic is the creation of a specific section regarding Software Development Channels in the popular streaming platform Twitch:

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And that is just an additional stage on the trend that we are seeing in the past years where the content created and the people investing their time in sharing their knowledge on the internet are exploding.

You pretty much can find a Live Channel that will teach or share with you a lot of knowledge and experience on all the topics regarding software development. No matter what topic you are looking for, you will have it there. For example, I just went earlier today. I found the following live channels: Making an MMO from scratch, Maya Development, Java Programming, GoLang programming, CMS programming using Django and Python, and much more.

This is a great thing. We live in an era where we have great quality content at our disposal, especially in our industry, that will help us improve our skills and knowledge base. All these content creators are the key contributors to that. And those are increasing the popularity of the best content creators reaching outstanding levels.

But that situation is also creating the circumstance that junior devs or just people starting a new skill start to think that the people showing their view or experience regarding a topic are the top devs in that area, and that is very far from the truth. So it is leaning to a dangerous situation.

To be clear: Content Creators are not usually Great Devs. Normally there are regular devs with awesome communication skills. And that is more important with a will to share what they know with their audience. Even that there are earning money with this, to be fair, they have an unambiguous determination to play a social role of sharing the knowledge with the world, and that’s very important.

This is not just trying to shame content creators because of their quality; this is happening in all industries. Best knowledge shared is not usually top of their practice. You can think of any topic: Mathematics, Physics but also Sports. Are the best narrators of Football the best players? No, for sure.

But because of this reason, it is important to keep in mind this where we are attending to those channels or viewing those videos that they are not the true experts, so you should always cross-check their statements to be sure this is aligned with the best practices and processes.

If you would like to see what real good devs are doing, it is much easier to find it close to where the code resides. Using platforms such as GitHub or SourceForge top star projects that provide value and reading their conversations or analyzing their commits, we will provide you a much clearer view of what real top developers are doing.

Another option is subscribing to the mailing list of those projects where you can see real developer discussion, the main points they are doing, and the reasoning behind those decisions.

This is much important knowledge rather than what you can see in a live session of somebody programming on a streaming platform, but this is also part of the process because you will need to have the foundation to be ready to understand what the discussion is referring to and to that introduction level the way that this awesome content creator is sharing the knowledge is the best way for anyone to understand it and assimilate it.

Top 3 Hacks To Use Medium To Keep You Current in the Tech Industry

2022-05-062021-07-12 by Alexandre Vazquez

Medium can be one of your best allies in this neverending task of keeping pace with the updates in the Tech Industry.

All of us that are here use Medium. I am a little bit Captain Obvious here because if you are reading this, I am sure you are already using Medium for professional growth and to learn new things, but I’d like to highlight how I use it to keep pace with the current situation.

You know that things change so fast. Of course, this is happening for all industries and businesses, but this is even more pressing in the technology industry.

We’re seeing new technologies each week or even each day. Frameworks change as fast as we can imagine, and try to keep the pace of that is quite complex for any of us. So, we must use all the tools at our disposal to make sure we do our best in this situation.

#1 Tune your Personalized Recommendations

One of the great things about Medium is that it uses your interests and the articles you have been reading and how much time you spent reading them to recommend new articles relevant to you.

So, here the recommendations are clear: Use Medium all the time. Try to use the search capability to search into many available articles because the most you use it, the most accurate the recommendations are for you.

I had a time, a few weeks ago, when I was really interested in Modern, Cloud-Native Data Architectures because of some professional duties. So I have started to look for those articles in Medium. Since that time, the recommendations have been quite accurate of what I was looking for and help me to improve my knowledge and find articles that I had no clue that was available at Medium.

Additional to that, you need to make sure your interests are well set. Usually, when we set up an account and ask about our interests, we probably don’t think about it for so long because of the only thing that we want to get access to the content right now (guilty person here!).

So, you must take your time now to make sure the interest you selected when you joined is still the most relevant for you today. If you want to check your current interests s you need to go to your profile and click on “Control Your Recommendations,” as you can see in the picture below:

Also, you will see the topics that you’re interested in now and a bunch of suggestions of new topics based on your reading history that they think you could be interested in. So it is important to visit the page from time to time to make sure these are accurate and check the recommendations they’re providing to you.

#2: Read Later Feature

Another key feature is saving all the interesting articles to continue to read them later or keep it as your own library. This is the main use I do to that concept. I try to use the Read Later feature to create and manage my own “Medium-based library.”

And the main reason behind this approach is because we all have suffered this situation when we found a great article about a topic. Still, we change to another task, and later, when we need to find that article again, we don’t remember the title or the author, and we spend so much time trying to locate it again.

#3: Search Capability

Even when we are used to using Google as our main search option to search for anything but I think it’s important to use the search capabilities in-site Medium because several reasons:

The content we have available in Medium is huge, and most of them is of great quality because of the curation process.
It is important to get Medium to know you better, and that will fine-tune all the recommendations we already have been commented on.

And all of this without worrying that you will find a lot of advertisements based on your search history 🙂

#4: Medium Member

And I have left to the end the one that I think is the most important part: Become a Medium Member.

Medium is so great, no matter if you are a member or not. Still, when I wasn’t a Medium member, it was just annoying to find the article that I need, but I cannot read it because I already spent using the “starred” articles for the month, and I need to wait an additional time month. So we know that this is not valid if you want to keep updated in the tech industry, so please, make yourself a favor and just become a Medium member. You will feel more comfortable around the platform, and you start living inside it.

Why I Declined an Offer From a Popular Tech Company

2022-01-252021-06-25 by Alexandre Vazquez

No, it wasn’t a matter of salary. It was about trust

Work meeting — Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash.

We all go through several recruiting processes each year. We might not feel comfortable about our current company or role. I tend to use them to see what is available outside and make sure I am not getting rusty.

I don’t apply to online offers in normal situations, but when somebody reaches out to me with an interesting proposal, I tend to listen to them to see what they have to offer.

This is how I started my latest recruiting process.

The main reason to be on board with the process was that the company (I will not name it here) and the role were what I had on my radar as my next step.

The Process

It started with a basic talk with the recruiter to get an overview of the company’s role (the company is pretty much known by everyone alive, so that was quick) and what they were expecting. We agreed on the terms, and the numbers that he shared regarding salary convinced me to move forward with the next steps to invest some time in this opportunity.

I have to admit I am not someone who prepares and studies for interviews. I am who I am. If my knowledge and skills are OK for the company, I don’t want to pretend to be somebody else or show that I am smarter than I am.

We started with a virtual process and some virtual assignments — first, a role model that I liked because it was unexpected. You have a virtual mailbox, you get emails from your boss or colleagues, and you need to decide what answer is the most suitable one.

Then we moved on to a technical questionnaire that was as expected. Normal low-level stuff for the role that I was trying to get (Senior Solution Architect), but that was OK.

So, we went to the first call with my future Hiring Manager, and it was more role-based than technical. He wanted to know about my previous experience that had shown some aspects he considered relevant for the job. That was fine, and it was a comfortable discussion. But this was the first interview, and I started to detect something was not right. Everything would become clear in the last part of the process.

Before that, I had another technical assignment that was pretty easy. It was focused on solving a problem, providing improvements for the medium and long term. It was a great one-hour exercise. As I said, nothing complicated but still fun.

The last part of the process consisted of a series of interviews with different profiles in the company. It followed the same approach as the previous one. Most of them focused on role-model questions and others focused on topics regarding technologies that I would use in my job or general IT-related questions.

The Resolution

Apart from the time-consuming process (in the end, I did nine interviews with HR), I didn’t have any problem with those interviews. They were fine and they all made me feel very comfortable, but the process was took the wrong approach in several ways:

The technical questions were not focused on the right things. I have done many interviews in my life on both sides of the table, and in this case, it felt like more of an IT exam than an interview. Most of the questions were very low-level for a Senior Architect and more similar to the kind of things you see when you’re fresh out of college. I never liked this approach to interviews like this is an exam that you need to pass. It was the first warning.
But the second warning was during each of the interviews. All of the interviews included five minutes for me to ask questions regarding my role or the company. If I had seven interviews (I will not count the ones with HR), I had five minutes on each of them. I had 35 minutes to ask my questions (that I prepared in advance), and they had 385 minutes for their questions. That left me with 9% of the interview time to decide if this was the right company for me.

Summary

Finally, I got the offer and decided to decline it because this was not the approach that I would expect when you are hiring someone properly. I can understand big companies need to have a defined process to make sure they only hire the best among a large pool of candidates. Still, I think there is a missing aspect they are not covering.

This is a two-way road: As a company, it should be as important for me to select the right candidate as it is for them. They failed in that regard. I didn’t feel comfortable or like I had enough information. Even worse, I don’t think that they even cared if I was having any second thoughts about the company.

I won’t pretend that this article will make companies rethink their processes. I just wanted to show my thought process and why the right job and the right salary in an amazing company were not enough. If I was not even able to feel comfortable during the process, this company would not be a good fit for me in the long term.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Please feel free to share your opinions and views — especially if you think that I acted like a fool.

Apache NetBeans Is Still My Preferred Option for Java Development

2022-05-062021-06-22 by Alexandre Vazquez

Discover what are the reasons why to me, Apache NetBeans is still the best Java IDE you can use

Let me start from the beginning. I always have been a Java Developer since my time at University. Even that I first learned another less-known programming (Modula-2), I quickly jump to Java to do all the different assignments and pretty much every task on my journey as a student and later as a software engineer.

I was always looking for the best IDE that I could find to speed up my programming tasks. The main choice was Eclipse at the university, but I have never been an Eclipse fan, and that has become a problem.

If you are in the Enterprise Software industry, you have noticed that pretty much every Developer-based tool is based on Eclipse because its licensing and its community behind make the best option. But I never thought that Eclipse was a great IDE, and it was too flexible but at the same time too complex.

So at that time is when I discover NetBeans. I think the first version I tried was in branch 3.x, and Sun Microsystem developed it at that time. It was quite much better than Eclipse. Indeed, the number of plugins available was not comparable with Eclipse, but the things that it did, it did it awesomely.

To me, if I need to declare why at that time Netbeans was better than Eclipse, probably the main things will be these:

Simplicity in the Run Configuration: Still, I think most Java IDE makes things too complex just to run the code. NetBeans simple Run without needed to create a Run Configuration and configure it (you can do it, but you are not mandated to do so)
Better Look & Feel: This is more based on a personal preference, but I prefer the default configuration from NetBeans compared with Eclipse.

So because of that, Netbeans become my default app to do my Java Programming, but Oracle came, and things change a little. With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems from Oracle, NetBeans was stalled like many other Open source projects. For years no many updates and progress.

It is not that they deprecated the product, but Oracle had a different IDE at the time JDeveloper, which was the main choice. This is easy to understand. I continued loyal to NetBeans even that we had another big guy in the competition: IntelliJ IDEA.

This is the fancy option, the one most developers used today for Java programming, and I can understand why. I’ve tried several times in my idea to try to feel the same feelings that others did, and I could read the different articles, and I acknowledge some of the advantages of the solution:

Better performance: It is clear that the response time from the IDE is better with IntelliJ IDEA than NetBeans because it doesn’t come from an almost 20-years journey, and it could start from scratch and use modern approaches for the GUI.
Fewer Memory Resources: Let’s be honest: All IDE consumes tons of memory. No one does great here (unless you are talking about text editors with Java compiler; that is a different story). NetBeans indeed requires more resources to run properly.

So, I did the switch and started using the solution from JetBrains, but it never stuck with me, because to me is still too complex. A lot of fancy things, but less focus on the ones that I need. Or, just because I was too used to how NetBeans do things, I could not do the mental switch that is required to adopt a new tool.

And then… when everything seems lost, something awesome happens: Netbeans was donated to the Apache Foundation and became Apache NetBeans. It seems like a new life for the tool providing simple things like Dark Mode and keeping the solution up-to-date to the progress in Java Development.

So, today, Apache NetBeans is still my preferred IDE, and I couldn’t voucher more for the usage of this awesome tool. And these are the main points I would like to raise here:

Better Maven Management: To me, the way and the simplicity you can manage your Maven project with NetBeans is out of this league. It is simple and focuses on performance, adding a new dependency without go to the pom.xml file, updating dependencies on the fly.
Run Configuration: Again, this still is a differentiator. When I’m coding something fast because of a new kind of utility, I don’t like to waste time creating run configuration or adding a maven exec plugin to my pom.xml to run the software I just coded. Instead, I need to click Run, a green button, and let the magic begins.
There is no need for everything else: Things evolve too fast in the Java programming world, but even today, I never feel that I was missing some capability or something in my NetBeans IDE that I could get if I move to a more modern alternative. So, no trade-offs here at this level.

So, I am aware that probably my choice is because I have a biased view of this situation. After all, this has been my main solution for more than a decade now, and I’m just used to it. But I consider myself an open person, and if I saw a clear difference, I wouldn’t have second thoughts of ditching NetBeans as I did with many other solutions in the past (Evernote, OneNote, Apple Mail, Gmail, KDE Basket, Things, Wunderstling.. )

So, if you have some curiosity about seeing how Apache NetBeans has progressed, please take a look at the latest version and give it a try. Or, if you feel that you don’t connect with the current tool, give it a try again. Maybe you have the same biased view as I have!!!

Top 4 Unexpected Benefits Of My Runner’s Life

2022-01-252021-02-14 by Alexandre Vazquez

Let me walk you through the benefits

I’ve never been a runner in my life until recently. I was always a team sports guy. I always enjoy competition and teamwork, so running was not a thing, but at some point, I needed to do something to change my life.

The reason for that is clear, after gaining more than 20 kg in my college days and adult life, it was affecting my health both physically and mentally.

Now, after two marathons, several half-marathons, and a lot of 10k races, I can tell you my experience and especially some of the unexpected benefits after joining this movement that probably you are not aware of yet if you are not into this or if you already are I hope reading this can put a smile in your face.

#1 You Will Have Your Own Moment To Find Yourself

Running is a sport that you can practice by yourself and pretty much anywhere and everywhere. The only thing that you need to start is a pair of sneakers and your motivation to go out and start running.

That means that is when you are on your own in a private moment with your own mind. I discovered that this is a great moment to organize my head. Not only to release all the stress from my daily life and embrace this moment of my own to be happier but also to be healthier.

I do not have a clear routine regarding this topic or any meditation technique that I do. It depends on what I need at each moment.

Some days I need to listen to music to release everything after a bad day at work or to charge my batteries to start my day fully, or I need to listen to my podcasts in an intimate way that I can focus much more on their content than I can probably do in my normal life.

But other days, I use that time to focus on solving a problem that I have at work (how to solve this production problem, how to implement these feature that I was not clear about, how to focus this presentation that I need to do…) or even to think about my life and goals to the future.

#2 You Will Be Part Of A Community

Runners are part of the same community, and no one can change that. Even people like myself that always run alone and are not part of any Runner’s club that meet together to do the defined training belong to this brotherhood/sisterhood.

It is a strange experience when you get up to go to do our morning running, and you meet for a few seconds another person doing the same thing as you are doing. It is a strange connection that feels with that person. Probably you even greet him/her even if you don’t know it just because you both know you are part of the same secret club and you share something in common.

This is even greater if you join other runner communities like Runners Publications, Podcast, or Runner’s Club, as I was saying. It is not important the pace that you have or how many marathons you have done. As soon as you put on your sneakers and hit the road, you are part of the club. You have joined the force.

#3 You Will Feel The Competition Spirit

It is nothing comparable with the feeling of running in a big venue. I have the opportunity to do two marathons until the pandemia put all of us on hold, and it was in Madrid 2019 and Valencia 2019, and the experience was the best of my life. All the public supporting you all the way, all the other runners suffering with you and at the same time enjoying each of the km from the start to the end.

All the people you meet every 10km you find each other Sunday morning when the rest of the people are just getting up and brewing their coffee, and you are on the road trying to beat your personal best.

Because each time you run, you are trying to beat you. You are trying to be the best version of yourself, which helps you in all the aspects of your life.

#4 You Will Find Another Way To Discover The City

I usually do two kinds of training sessions depending on my schedule and what my body and mind are demanding for that session. Some of them that are specific training (series, fartlek, and so on) require to be done on a specific location, but most of the time, I just run without the need to be on a specific place and help me discover the city in a very different way.

I follow what I called “the green-lights path,” so I started without any specific itinerary in mind. I follow the “green lights” on the zebra crossing because I hate to stop when I am running, so that makes me run across the street that I have never been on (it is incredible the few you know about a city that you lived in) or if you are in another city because leisure or business reasons it is an incredible way to discover a city in a very different way to fully embrace and connect with it and feeling its soul in a very different way.

Summary

I hope these highlights will seed inside of you if you were thinking about giving it a try to the Runner’s Life, and probably at this moment, you are looking at the sneakers you have in your wardrobe waiting to be part of your routine since now on. And if you are already a Runner, I hope you enjoy and maybe agree with some of this as the great benefits usually not talking about when we read about running benefits.

How to know the biggest publications in Medium to share your articles?

2022-09-152021-01-13 by Alexandre Vazquez

Follow these tips to select the right publication for your article to make sure you guarantee the best impact.

When we are writing an article in Medium, and we would like to share it with our audience, we all know that using Publication is the best way to do it. A Publication is like a media-site or a traditional magazine that hosts articles regarding a topic and share it with its subscriber. The bigger the publication, the more people will be notified that your article is available, and the better the chance that your articles are shown on the home page of the Medium users. So select the right publication is crucial in this process.

Find the followers of any publication.

The first thing we need to do to know the number of followers for each publication is to select the publication that we would like to check. For example, I am going to use one of the main ones as it is The Innovation. If you go to their main page: https://medium.com/the-innovation

You will not see the number of followers directly on their menu bar as it is shown in the image below:

Some other publications can show their follower number in the top bar menu but this is not happening for all publications. But you still have the option to know the number of followers of each publication doing this small trick. If you have the main URL for a publication, if you add the /latest to that URL, you will be on a page that always shows the same layout for all publication, and as part of that layout, you will find on the right sidebar the number of followers:

So, now you can check the number of followers of each publication available in Medium, and also it will help to know how long it has been since its last post was published. If the publication is not publishing anything new, your story will never reach all the followers it has, so also check the date of the last post available on the same page.

Find the biggest publications today.

We now know how to know the number of followers for each publication, but that requires publication to publication checking that to get that number, and this is tedious. But even worse, we need to know the publication that we would like to check, and I don’t think anyone in the Medium space knows all the publications to make sure they have checked all the relevant ones. So, how can we do that faster and better? Easy. Here is the magic trick you were waiting for.

Just go to this URL: https://medium.com/search/publications?q=*. This URL is going to send all the publications (* acts as a wildcard that says “everything”), so all the publications are going to be shown, and they are going to be sorted based on the number of publishers, as you can see here:

To show the number of followers, I grab the first 20 and do the trick on step one to get the following table:

Find the right one for you

Now that we have all the data in our hands, we just need to select the one suitable for the article that we would like to submit based on the topic that we are covering and the perspective and style that we use to generate our story. It is very recommended to look at the creator guidelines each publication has to adapt the content to what the publication’s audience is expected. That way, we maximize our success with the audience.

Why we should care less about paying for online service

2022-05-092020-05-14 by Alexandre Vazquez

Four arguments that change your thinking about those expenses.

Online Services are part of our new life and we should evaluate them as we do for the physical ones. — Online Services are part of our new life, and we should evaluate them as we do for the physical ones.

If you are in your mid-thirties, you are probably like me, and you should remember the old age of this world where every online service was free. We lived in a world where piracy was a normal situation. Everything from movies to music, from books to software was for free. You can quickly found a torrent, a direct download link, or even if you’re older, a Mule link. Do you still remember Mule? Haha, Yep, I do too.

Our generation moved away from an “all for free without the best quality” era to a “pay-per-service” approach. And this transition is being complicated. So, if that’s your case or you know someone that usually has this kind of thinking, I’ll try to explain why you should care less about the cost of those services.

1. We’re not evaluating those expenses equally as we do for physical services

That’s the first topic, and I’d like to explain it a little bit more. Imagine the Medium subscription, If I’m not wrong, this is 50€ per year for unlimited access to those articles, and I know a lot of people that think that’s expensive that it doesn’t worth what they provide.

The same people can spend 50€ per month for a Gym subscription and they don’t think this is expensive at all. So, now, probably you’re thinking something like this: Come on! You’re not fair! How you dare to compare Medium subscription to a Gym subscription.

The gym has a physical infrastructure they need to maintain. They have people working there, at the reception, cleaning services, personal trainers and so on. They also have additional cost because of the use of the infrastructure like Electricity, Water, Taxes and so on.

Yes, that’s true! And what about Medium? doesn’t it have the same situation? They have a cloud infrastructure they need to maintain, servers, network, storage, backups, and so on. They also have people working on it: On the site itself, curators, but also developers, system administrators, and so on, to do all the housekeeping tasks to keep the place at the best possible level for you to use. So, this is not different at all in both cases. But this is not just the only argument.

2. Online services are incredible cheaper!

Now, instead of talking about Medium, let’s talk about an Application that you could think it’s expensive. Let’s talk about Netflix with depending on your country can be a monthly fee of about 15–20€.

And you can argue, but I don’t watch even 0.1% of their catalog, why should I pay for all of it if I’m not going to use it everything it provides?

But think about how much cinema tickets cost you the last time you were able to go outside (Yeah yeah I know, this is not the best time to talk about cinemas and going out in this situation but bear with me on this one).

Let’s do the maths with me: Two people going to the cinema, 10 € each for the tickets. If you have something else to drink or eat, you could quickly go for 35 € per just a 2 hours session.

For sure, even with the best home cinema system, it is not comparable at all at what you can feel in a cinema session, but that’s not the topic. The argument is if you’re able to afford one cinema session per month (Yes, just one per month) and you don’t feel you’re wasting your money, you can afford Netflix + Disney + Prime Video at the same rate.

And this applies to everything. I always recommend when talking about this with other people to compare with something physical they do without thinking a lot about it — for example, a morning coffee. A lot of us grab a cup of coffee to go each day of our working life. Imagine an average cost of 1.5€, and each month has 20 working days than means you’re spending 30 € per month just on your morning coffee. Once again, the same amount for three top video streaming services.

The main idea of this argument is not for you to stop grabbing this first cup of coffee that you need to get your body working and prepare for the day. Still, you think if you’re not feeling a lot about that morning coffee, you shouldn’t be so worried about the online service fee as well.

3. You can reevaluate your decision anytime

Also, another argument to not worry a lot about this is because you can review this every time you want. The procedure here is not just the same as you use to evaluate the purchase of your new iPad, or you need a laptop or a car. That you need to be very sure that you’re going to make the most of it.

In this case, this is a recurring fee that you can cancel anytime if you think you’re not going to use it or you see it is not useful as you think too. So, there is no problem trying it for a few months, and if it doesn’t work, just cancel it. So, if you have that power and options in your hand, what are you so worried about making that step to pay for the first time just to try.

We do all time in other aspects of life. Imagine the following situation in the market, when you see a new brand of something you’re going to buy. It can be fresh yogurt, fresh juice, or even a new beer. How many times do you get something from a new brand, just to a try? Probably the answer is ALL THE TIME! And yes, you’re paying for it, it is not like you go to the cashier and tell him/her: No, no, Let me just try this for several months and probably next year I can see it is worth it.

4. We’re investing in ourselves

This argument can be strange at the beginning because it seems more: No, no, no. I’m investing in this company, its developers, and I can feel happy about it, but this is a transaction. Yes, that also right, but imagine that. What happens to you if all the services that you’re using online disappear because this is not a substantial business for them anymore. Is going to be your life affected? Yes, for sure.

I just remember the first application that I used a lot that was deprecated and removed. I always have been a Linux guy, and I’ve used a lot of a task management tool named BasKet as part of the KDE environment that was similar to what today is OneNote. You can put a lot of kind of content together and manage it as you’d like.

It was amazing, but finally, they decide to stop working on the tool, and the tool was not updated, and yet, they remove the tool. My life changed a lot. I need to find another tool to do the same job and imagine what: There was none at the time (I was talking about 2006 🙂 ). So my life was worse because nobody supports their effort at the level they needed to keep it doing it. So, you should also think that, how much will it cost to me it this X application disappeared?

Wrap up

So, I hope these arguments can help you to change your mind or be useful in your conversations with other people that have this all-should-be free in the online world to be more coherent with the reality we’re living now. So, let’s try new online services, and probably we will find our online life can be better!