“I’ll just email them my resume, they’ll look at it and give me a call.”

Are you sure?

This is a very common misconception and this is what most developers don’t understand about cover letters.

Many of the developers I have spoken to think that a cover letter is just a simple email where you need to say “Hi!” and attach your resume.

But it’s not.

Let’s become a recruiter for 1 minute and look at everything through their eyes.

BAM, BAM, BOOM!

You’re a recruiter now.

You open your email application and see this:

Subject: Backend Engineer hiring

Subject: Backend Engineer…

I’ve been coding wrong my whole life.

I thought it was okay to just sit down at my desk, open my laptop, take a task from my to-do list, and code it until I felt tired.

But in reality, this style of work always killed my productivity levels after 2–4 hours of coding. I felt so tired that I didn’t want to do anything except different low energy tasks (like code review).

Today I can code 8+ hours without feeling like crap after.

What has changed?

My approach to work.

After 62+ self-development books, dozens of articles and studies about productivity, and my trials and errors, I have created a productivity system that helps me to code, write, create, and live at my maximum capabilities without procrastination, tiredness, and brain fog. …

Coding Is Not About the Coding

What do you think programming is about?

Writing code?

Writing good code?

No.

It’s just a part of the truth.

Programming is not about coding — programming is about solving problems with coding.

End customers don’t care what technologies, languages, frameworks, or methodologies you use. They care only about one thing: whether your product solves their problem or not.

That’s why no one cares what technologies Google search is using under the hood. Until people can find relative information with it, they will use it.

It’s the number one thing I wish I knew when I started programming.

I would spend less time writing “best code” and more time solving customer’s problems best. …

Originally published: https://blog.nickbulljs.com/do-you-actually-know-what-string-in-javascript-is-heres-what-i-found

We preferred to think that String in JavaScript is an array of characters.

const name = ‘Nick’console.log(name.length) // 4

Variable name has 4 characters ‘N’, ‘i’, ‘c’, ‘k’ and length is also 4.

Everything seems logical.

Let’s go further and add emoji to my name.

const name = ‘Nick 🐃’console.log(name.length) // 7

Hmm, strange.

Variable name must have 6 characters ‘N’, ‘i’, ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ ‘ (whitespace) and ‘🐃’

But have 7.

It seems like the bull has 2 characters.

const emoji = ‘🐃’console.log(emoji.length) // 2

Interesting 🤔

Let’s figure out why.

We go to the official documentation of ECMAScript (it’s a programming language on which JavaScript is based). …

Thanks to Babel, I’ve been using the new ECMAScript 2021 features for over a year. Almost all the features are useful, but three of them stood out from the pack by saving me a lot of time and making my code more readable.

Let’s go over them.

1. Logical Assignment Operator

The logical assignment operator combines logical operations (like ??, &&, or ||) with an assignment (e.g. =).

Here are some examples.

a ||= b returns a if a is truthy or b if a is falsy.

Originally published on my blog: blog.nickbulljs.com

Here’s how things went down:

1. I finished developing a CSS game Flex Box Adventure using Gatsby.
2. Deployed it to Netlify.
3. Shared it with folks on Twitter and said, “Share your feedback with me.”
4. Went to sleep.
5. Woke up.
6. Opened Twitter DMs.
7. Saw this message:

We face it constantly — at work, at home, in various life situations. And if we don’t know how to manage it right, we will probably struggle with anxiety and be unproductive at work.

So here are the five techniques I use to manage stress.

1. Morning Journal

This is a technique I’ve been using for over three years, and it’s freaking golden.

Every morning, I write two things:

1. Brain dump — all thoughts, feelings, and experiences I want to write down.
2. The goal for today — one main goal that I have to achieve today, no matter what.

I do it every morning for 5-10 minutes, and by the end, I feel completely different. My mind is calm. …

Most of us who have a fear of coding, in reality, have a fear of failing.

Even if we haven’t started learning a programming language yet, we already think we will fail instantly.

Why do we think like this?

There are can be a bunch of reasons:

• We think that it’s too difficult.
• We think that we are not meant to code.
• We think that it’s too late and we are too old.

And the list goes on.

But let’s face the truth. All of them are just excuses. And behind every excuse, we hide a fear of failure. …