I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

I uploaded a test app to Ionic (don’t know the exact name for this) with the command ionic upload from the command line, and I can access them nicely with the Ionic View application I have installed on my iPhone.

However, I remember that they have a web interface for this too, but can’t find the link for the life of me. I searched the website, went through my emails, googled, but nothing. I even found the same question on the official forum – sadly unanswered.

I actually found the answer to this myself:

And, sure enough, after going through my deleted emails I found a welcome email from Ionic stating that the login is at https://apps.ionic.io/login. Will reply to that official post too…

In case you’re looking for a way to implement Google AdMob ads in Ionic framework 3, then check out this tutorial: How to make money with Google AdMob ads in Ionic framework 3.

If you want, you can take a look at the screencast of this tutorial. This is actually my first  screencast blog post so go easy on me 🙂

I’ve been searching for a start to end tutorial on this but with no luck. Now, when I finally figured out how to use it, I’m documenting the exact steps which I did in order to get the AdMob working inside my Ionic app. You can fork the project from GitHub or download and test the .apk file on your device.

I broke down the steps in two parts: AdMob settings and Ionic settings.

AdMob settings

Let’s start with AdMob settings:

1. Sign in /Sign up for AdMob at https://www.google.com/admob/
2. Click the Monetize new app button:
   
3. If your app is not yet published you can add it manually:
   
4. Create new tracking ID:
   
5. Configure the adds type, size, placement, style, name:
   
6. You can read additional info on how to implement GA and AdMob, but for now let’s just click Done:
   
7. You will now see the following similar screen:
   
   The most important thing to note here is this Ad unit ID, which in my test case is
   ca-app-pub-7957971173858308/3599533362

Ionic settings

I’m counting on the fact that you know how to use Ionic since you’re looking for a specific topic like this, so am going skip the part of actually explaining how to use the Ionic cli. Ok, enough chit-chat, now I’m going to show you the steps on how to implement AdMob in your Ionic project:

1. Start a new Ionic blank project:

   ionic create IonicAdMobTest blank

2. Add the platform for which you want to build the application:

3. ionic platform add android

   In case you’re developing on a Mac, you can also choose to add:

   ionic platform add ios

4. Add the cordova-plugin-admob plugin by entering the following command in your command prompt when in the root folder of your project:

   cordova plugin add com.rjfun.cordova.plugin.admob

   As a side note, you can always check the list of all installed plugins by executing:

   cordova plugin list

5. Add the following code to your app.js file (located in the www folder) inside the .run function:

   .run(function($ionicPlatform) {
       $ionicPlatform.ready(function() {
           // Hide the accessory bar by default (remove this to show the accessory bar above the keyboard
           // for form inputs)
           if (window.cordova && window.cordova.plugins.Keyboard) {
               cordova.plugins.Keyboard.hideKeyboardAccessoryBar(true);
           }
           if (window.StatusBar) {
               // org.apache.cordova.statusbar required
               StatusBar.styleDefault();
           }
   
           if(window.plugins && window.plugins.AdMob) {
               var admob_key = device.platform == "Android" ? "ca-app-pub-7957971173858308/3666912163" : "ca-app-pub-7957971173858308/3666912163";
               var admob = window.plugins.AdMob;
               admob.createBannerView( 
                   {
                       'publisherId': admob_key,
                       'adSize': admob.AD_SIZE.BANNER,
                       'bannerAtTop': false
                   }, 
                   function() {
                       admob.requestAd(
                           { 'isTesting': false }, 
                           function() {
                               admob.showAd(true);
                           }, 
                           function() { console.log('failed to request ad'); }
                       );
                   }, 
                   function() { console.log('failed to create banner view'); }
               );
           }
       });
   })

   Of course, change it according to your own admob_key which you obtained in the first part (step 8).

6. Start the emulator by running:

   ionic build ios && ionic emulate ios
   
   //or, for android
   ionic build android && ionic emulate android

7. and you should get the following screen in your emulated application:
   
8. You can clone the project from GitHub, or download the .apk (unzip needed) file and test on your Android device.

That’s all folks, hope this helps someone by saving time on endless testing as I did :/

A new cool project by Kilim Choi that lets you make a pull request with your engineering blog, that got quite a few stars on Github (4k+ currently).

And, that’s how my name got the be next to The Great Ones 

Make your pull request too!

From an official blog post, Ionic Analytics Alpha

gives you all the data you need to better understand and optimize your push notifications, deployments, and much, much more.

The go on to say that

You can chart your app’s progress, from the time of its initial release, and see which marketing strategies were most (or least) effective. You can even gain insights into your app’s demographics, allowing you to see how well your app is doing within a given population.

Some of the data this will be able to provide is:

• How many people log into my app every day?
• How many of those continue to use my app after a week? A month? A year?
• With which parts of my app are users interacting the most?
• What are users doing right now in my app?

If you were like me – thinking that this will cost some amount, here’s what they say:

During the alpha period, Ionic Analytics will be 100% free. In the future, we’ll release tiered pricing based on usage and will continue to offer a free tier.

All this is indeed remarkable, as Ionic team released push support and live updates just few weeks ago. Also, for developers alike, they announced Ionic Market where you’ll be able to make plugins for other users (and, I guess sell them too?). So, IMHO Ionic is building an awesome ecosystem and I bet they’ll become the best hybrid platform! What is left to see is how will the actual price tiers look like.

TL;DR

This is the simplest example which shows how to POST data from an Ionic app to a PHP server.

The tutorial covering the Ionic version 2 can be found here. The tutorial covering the Ionic version 3 can be found here.

Quickstart

To see it in action:

1. Clone the finished project from Github
2. Run ionic serve

1. You should see something like this:
   

If you want to make it work from your server:

1. Clone the finished project from Github
2. Upload the PHP/api.php file to your server
3. In the www/js/app.js file adjust the link variable to point to your server
4. Run ionic serve

Step by step on how to create this yourself from scratch

1. Create a new blank Ionic project with:

   ionic start ionicServerSendTest blank

2. Copy the following code (you’ll already have the .run() part, the .controller() part is novelty here) in www/js/app.js file:

   // Ionic Starter App
   
   // angular.module is a global place for creating, registering and retrieving Angular modules
   // 'starter' is the name of this angular module example (also set in a <body> attribute in index.html)
   // the 2nd parameter is an array of 'requires'
   angular.module('starter', ['ionic'])
   
   .run(function($ionicPlatform) {
       $ionicPlatform.ready(function() {
           // Hide the accessory bar by default (remove this to show the accessory bar above the keyboard
           // for form inputs)
           if (window.cordova && window.cordova.plugins.Keyboard) {
               cordova.plugins.Keyboard.hideKeyboardAccessoryBar(true);
           }
           if (window.StatusBar) {
               StatusBar.styleDefault();
           }
       });
   })
   
   .controller('AppCtrl', function($scope, $http) {
       $scope.data = {};
   
       $scope.submit = function(){
           var link = 'http://nikola-breznjak.com/_testings/ionicPHP/api.php';
   
           $http.post(link, {username : $scope.data.username}).then(function (res){
               $scope.response = res.data;
           });
       };
   });

3. On your server, create a api.php file with the following content:

   <?php
       //http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18382740/cors-not-working-php
       if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN'])) {
           header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: {$_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN']}");
           header('Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true');
           header('Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400');    // cache for 1 day
       }
   
       // Access-Control headers are received during OPTIONS requests
       if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'OPTIONS') {
   
           if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_METHOD']))
               header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, OPTIONS");         
   
           if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_HEADERS']))
               header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers:        {$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_REQUEST_HEADERS']}");
   
           exit(0);
       }
   
   
       //http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15485354/angular-http-post-to-php-and-undefined
       $postdata = file_get_contents("php://input");
       if (isset($postdata)) {
           $request = json_decode($postdata);
           $username = $request->username;
   
           if ($username != "") {
               echo "Server returns: " . $username;
           }
           else {
               echo "Empty username parameter!";
           }
       }
       else {
           echo "Not called properly with username parameter!";
       }
   ?>

   As you can see from the code, the first part is explained in detail in this StackOverflow question, and it basically solves the CORS issue that you would otherwise run into.

   The second part, explained in detail in this StackOverflow question,  deals with the way you POST data from Ionic (basically an AngularJS app) to your PHP server. The gist is that AngularJS POSTs by default in a JSON format, and thus you have to json_decode  the data that comes to your PHP server.

4. In www/js/app.js file adjust the link variable to point to the file on your server
5. In www/index.html file copy the following content:

   <!DOCTYPE html>
   <html>
       <head>
           <meta charset="utf-8">
           <meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no, width=device-width">
           <title></title>
           <link href="lib/ionic/css/ionic.css" rel="stylesheet">
           <link href="css/style.css" rel="stylesheet">
           <!-- IF using Sass (run gulp sass first), then uncomment below and remove the CSS includes above
           <link href="css/ionic.app.css" rel="stylesheet">
           -->
           <!-- ionic/angularjs js -->
           <script src="lib/ionic/js/ionic.bundle.js"></script>
           <!-- cordova script (this will be a 404 during development) -->
           <script src="cordova.js"></script>
           <!-- your app's js -->
           <script src="js/app.js"></script>
       </head>
       <body ng-app="starter" ng-controller="AppCtrl">
           <ion-pane>
               <ion-header-bar class="bar-stable">
                   <h1 class="title">Ionic Blank Starter</h1>
               </ion-header-bar>
   
               <ion-content padding="true">
                   <form ng-submit="submit()">
                       <label class="item item-input item-stacked-label">
                           <span class="input-label">Username</span>
                           <input type="text" name="username" placeholder="enter username" ng-model="data.username">
                       </label>
   
                       <input class="button button-block button-positive" type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit to server">                    
                   </form>
   
                   <div class="card">
                       <div class="item item-text-wrap">
                           Response: <b ng-bind="response"></b>
                       </div>
                   </div>
               </ion-content>
           </ion-pane>
       </body>
   </html>

   Here you basically created a form with an username input field and with a submit button. Using AngularJS ng-submit you’re saying that once the submit button is clicked AngularJS should handle it within the submit() function which you defined in app.js file before. Input username uses  the ng-model to bind to the variable on the $scope so that you can then use it in your submit() function.

6. Run ionic serve  from the root directory of your Ionic app (I’m sure you know this, but just in case that’s where the folders like www, plugins, scss reside).

Previously I wrote about running Node.js apps with Nodemon and Forever but nowdays I’m using the ever so slightly more professional PM2.

Running your Node.js application by hand is, well, not the way we roll. Imagine restarting the app every time something happens, or god forbid application crashes in the middle of the night and you find about it only in the morning – ah the horror. PM2 solves this by:

• allowing you to keep applications alive forever
• reloading applications without downtime
• facilitating common system admin tasks

To install PM2, run the following command:

sudo npm install pm2 -g

To start your process with PM2, run the following command (once in the root of your application):

pm2 start server.js

As you can see from the output shown on the image below, PM2 automatically assigns an App name (based on the filename, without the .js extension) and a PM2 id. PM2 also maintains other information, such as the PID of the process, its current status, and memory usage.

As I mentioned before, the application running under PM2 will be restarted automatically if the application crashes or is killed, but an additional step needs to be taken to get the application to launch on system startup (boot or reboot). The command to do that is the following:

pm2 startup ubuntu

The output of this command will instruct you to execute an additional command which will enable the actual startup on boot or reboot. In my case the note for the additional command was:

sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u nikola

If you want to learn more about the additional PM2 options you can take a look at this post.

I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

I have this as the style template:

<Style x:Key="myDogToggleButton1" TargetType="ToggleButton" BasedOn="{x:Null}">
    <Setter Property="FocusVisualStyle" Value="{x:Null}"/>
    <Setter Property="Template">
        <Setter.Value>
            <ControlTemplate TargetType="ToggleButton">
                <Grid>
                    <Image Name="Normal" Source="/images/dogs/dog1.png"/>
                    <Image Name="Pressed" Source="/images/dogs/dog3.png" Visibility="Hidden"/>
                    <Image Name="Disabled" Source="images/dogs/dog5.png" Visibility="Hidden"/>
                </Grid>
                <ControlTemplate.Triggers>
                    <Trigger Property="IsPressed" Value="True">
                        <Setter TargetName="Normal" Property="Visibility" Value="Hidden"/>
                        <Setter TargetName="Pressed" Property="Visibility" Value="Visible"/>
                    </Trigger>
                    <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="False">
                        <Setter TargetName="Normal" Property="Visibility" Value="Hidden"/>
                        <Setter TargetName="Disabled" Property="Visibility" Value="Visible"/>
                    </Trigger>
                </ControlTemplate.Triggers>
            </ControlTemplate>
        </Setter.Value>
    </Setter>
</Style>

And now I want another one which is based on the upper one, and this doesn’t work:

<Style x:Key="myDogToggleButton2" TargetType="ToggleButton" BasedOn="{DynamicResource myDogToggleButton1}">
    <Setter Property="Normal" Value="/images/dogs/dog2.png" />
    <Setter Property="Pressed" Value="/images/dogs/dog2.png" />
    <Setter Property="Disabled" Value="/images/dogs/dog2.png" />
</Style>

The error message I get is:

The member "Pressed" is not recognized or is not accessible.
The member "Normal" is not recognized or is not accessible.
The member "Disabled" is not recognized or is not accessible.

I suspect that my different style calling is wrong, so please point out the error.

The answer, by user Heena Patil, was:

Try this

Resource

<Window.Resources>
    <Style x:Key="myDogToggleButton1" TargetType="ToggleButton">
        <Style.Resources>
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Normal" UriSource="Images/darblue_tab.png"/>
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Pressed" UriSource="Images/img-whitebg.png" />
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Disabled" UriSource="Images/img-greenbg.png"/>
        </Style.Resources>
        <Setter Property="FocusVisualStyle" Value="{x:Null}"/>
        <Setter Property="Template">
            <Setter.Value>
                <ControlTemplate TargetType="ToggleButton">
                    <Grid>
                        <Image Name="Normal" Source="{DynamicResource ResourceKey=Normal}" Stretch="Fill"/>
                        <Image Name="Pressed" Source="{DynamicResource ResourceKey=Pressed}" Visibility="Hidden"/>
                        <Image Name="Disabled" Source="{DynamicResource ResourceKey=Disabled}" Visibility="Hidden"/>
                    </Grid>
                    <ControlTemplate.Triggers>
                        <Trigger Property="IsPressed" Value="True">
                            <Setter TargetName="Normal" Property="Visibility" Value="Hidden"/>
                            <Setter TargetName="Pressed" Property="Visibility" Value="Visible"/>
                        </Trigger>
                        <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="False">
                            <Setter TargetName="Normal" Property="Visibility" Value="Hidden"/>
                            <Setter TargetName="Disabled" Property="Visibility" Value="Visible"/>
                        </Trigger>
                    </ControlTemplate.Triggers>
                </ControlTemplate>
            </Setter.Value>
        </Setter>
    </Style>
    <Style x:Key="myDogToggleButton2" TargetType="ToggleButton" BasedOn="{StaticResource myDogToggleButton1}">
        <Style.Resources>
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Normal" UriSource="Images/img-darkbg.png" />
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Pressed" UriSource="Images/Screenshot_5.png"/>
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Disabled" UriSource="Images/img-bluebg.png"/>
        </Style.Resources>
    </Style>
</Window.Resources>

Xaml

<Grid>
    <ToggleButton HorizontalAlignment="Left" Style="{StaticResource myDogToggleButton1}"/>
    <ToggleButton  HorizontalAlignment="Right" Style="{StaticResource myDogToggleButton2}"/>
</Grid>

Update Using single style.

<Grid>
    <ToggleButton Height="300" Width="300" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Style="{StaticResource myDogToggleButton1}"/>
    <ToggleButton  Height="300" Width="300" Style="{StaticResource myDogToggleButton1}" HorizontalAlignment="Right">
        <ToggleButton.Resources>
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Normal" UriSource="Images/img-darkbg.png" />
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Pressed" UriSource="Images/Screenshot_5.png"/>
            <BitmapImage x:Key="Disabled" UriSource="Images/img-bluebg.png"/>
        </ToggleButton.Resources>
    </ToggleButton>
</Grid>

Here are my notes from an awesome 4th Infobip Dev Days 2015 conference:

[toc]

Introduction

• Presenter: Izabel Jelenić, Co-founder, CTO
• infobip – 600+ employees (122 devs)
• Worldwide A2P SMS traffic is expected to grow. Revenue > 45bn.
• They handle 150M transactions daily.
• They said they’re doing business with “one big social” network, but they didn’t name it actually, I wonder why is that (some kind of NDA or what? 🙂)
• Picture time:
  

How we ended up doing continuous delivery

• Presenter: Mario Žagar, Senior Software Architect
• ASAP and as often we have to go into production
• Unit & integration tests
• Scaling cube
• First they scaled by increasing monoliths
• Then they took some parts out of the monolith (API, Billing, Inbound SMS, …) => easier to focus, possible to deploy independently
• Typical feature deployment today:
  • Short lived feature branches with Git
  • Develop & run tests locally
  • Push feature branch to remote repository (Stash)
  • Jenkins – CI server builds the feature branch
  • Deployment artifacts published to Infobip repository (Artifactory)
  • Deploy feature branch to integration environment
  • Run tests on integration environment
  • Merge pull request to master branch & release
• Average about 80 deploys per day
• DevOps culture – you built it, you deploy it, you support it
• Troubleshooting tools:
  • Graylog
  • Graphite
  • Grafana
  • Nagios
  • Seyren
  • HipChat
  • Ansible
• Picture time:
  
• And a few more here, since, well, you know I love MEMEs:
  
  

Scrum experience

• Presenter: Marko Stipanov, Product Owner
• How to increase productivity?
  • hiring more devs?
  • best is to hire someone new and give them some totally new project
• PDD – Panic Driven Development
  • the bigger the panic the greater priority
  • how relates to this, please hands up 
• they tried with daily report writing
• Agile process manifesto
• they divided their 60 devs at a time to 12 teams and each team works on a small project
• Product Owner
  • vision and definition of products
  • goal setting
  • priority setting of the whole team
  • talks to stakeholders
• Scrum ceremonies
  • organisation
  • iterative process
• Scrum steps (they do the sprints fro 1-2 weeks instead of 2-4):
  • Product backlog
  • Sprint backlog
  • SPRINT
  • Deliverable
• 1 project = 1 team
• 1 team => more projects
• Priorities are defined by business value
• Kanban, Scrumban
• Daily team lead meeting with just few minutes
• You can’t do agile without teams!
• Scrum definitely give us a better intercommunication.
• Picture time:
  

Modern SQL

• Presenter: Markus Winand, SQL expert and author
  
• SQL 99 broke the relational standard
  • LATERAL
    • “for each” loop of SQL
  • WITH
    • “private methods” of SQL
  • WITH RECURSIVE
    • “while” loop of SQL
• SQL 2003
  • Turing complete
  • OVER and PARTITION BY

    SELECT dep, salary, SUM(salary) OVER (PARTITION BY dep) FROM ...

  • OVER and GROUP BY
    • actually, do this in the application, thank you very much
• SQL 2008
  • SELECT TOP is not official – it’s FETCH FIRST ROWS ONLY
• SQL 2011
  • OFFSET is EVIL
    • http://use-the-index-luke.com/ 
    • Also, the author was cool and he was giving these stickers:
      

Indexes: The neglected performance all-rounder

• Presenter: Markus Winand, SQL expert and author
• 50% SQL problems are caused by poor query/indexing
  
• CREATE INDEX is not in the standard!
• The solution- indexing is a development task!
•  And now the author hits the spots when he explains that in
  • 11 SQL books he analyzed only 1% of the pages are about indexes
  • 14 database administration books he analyzed only 6% of the pages are about indexes

• Everybody knows indexing is important for performance, yet nobody takes the time to learn and apply it properly.

Personal and Interpersonal Effectiveness

• Presenter: Danilo Goliani, PhD professor, enterpreneur
• Our clients are paying our paychecks!
• Personal effectiveness – others have faith in me
• Team effectiveness – I have faith in others
• Organisational effectiveness – clients love us
• Stephen R. Covey: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Courage – willingness and ability to express your thoughts and emotions
• Don’t just say NO to your children – explain also WHY
• Self induced interrupt
• Brain Games
• Picture time:
  

Machine learning

• Presenter: Jan Šnajder, PhD/assistant professor/FER
• IBM Watcson Developer Cloud
• 88% of unstructured data
• #1 Top skill on LinkedIn 2014
• Tools:
  • Weka
  • RapidMiner
  • Orange
  • R (mother of all)
  • Matlab (commercial)
  • mloss.org
  • Apache Mahout
  • Spark
  • Azure Machine Learning
  • Amazon Machine Learning
• Picture time:
  

Java puzzlers

• Presenter: Aleksandar Dostić, Senior Software Engineer IB
• Picture time intro:
  
• Puzzle 1:
  
• Puzzle 2:
  
• Puzzle 3:
  
• Puzzle 4:
  
• Puzzle 5 – the most sneaky one!
  
  and here is why!!! 

HA-JDNI as a Solution for Service Discovery in Distributed Systems

• Presenter: Aleksandar Branjković, Head of Mobile Payments R&D
• Picture time:
  

Yesterday (10.06.2015) Ionic announced the Deploy Alpha which enables you to update your app without having to wait for the review & approval.

They say that

Ionic Deploy lets you update your app on demand for any changes that do not require binary modifications.

You can roll back to a previous version of your app, automatically apply updates, and control every aspect of the upgrade.

Also, the features that they list as upcoming are stunning to say the least:

• live A/B tests
• analytics
• multiple version deployment to certain “Channels”

This is pretty awesome to be honest, and really shows that there is future for Ionic framework and that it’s a great time to be a hybrid app developer.

You can learn more about it from the official blog post.

[18.09.2015] edit: I honestly can’t believe it! This awesome book is now also available as an audiobook! Now I’ll be able to listen to this ever so slightly awesome content even in my car! John Sonmez, congratulations!, this is probably the first ever programming related book to be published as an audiobook!

I reviewed the book Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual by John Sonmez with 5 stars on Amazon with the following comment:

I believe Soft Skills will indeed become every software developers’ life manual, in a similar way as Code Complete 2 is.

I really enjoyed the book, and am recommending it to all my “IT” friends (just lent it today to a co-worker :)) – John Sonmez really poured his whole life experience into this, and for this I thank him since I think we all have something to learn from a man who made almost 50 courses for Pluralsight, wrote a bestseller, retired at 33, was a fitness model, bodybuilding contestant, and who is, well, just pure awesome. Btw, I also found that he’s damn speedy in answering any emails, so kudos for not being a hot headed superstar author as some these days play out to be.

The book is divided in 7 chapters, and it’s packed with awesome content. Those of you who have been following my Books category know that I like to mark the passages that I find valuable from books that I read, like for example:

but here I won’t be putting them online since that would be a whole lot portion of the book, and I don’t want to be chased for some copyright issues . Instead I’ll just show you the images of the chapters and comment a bit about them.

In the first section John talks about topics concerning ones career and steps to take in order to make the most out of it. Topics ranging from how to hack the interview, how to actually set goals, work as a freelancer, and even how to quit your job.

In the second section John talks about how to create your blog as a first thing you should do to start marketing yourself. John also has a free email course on how to build a successful blog, so make sure to get that free resource if you’re into starting your own blog, or increasing the views of your existing one.

In the third section John talks about why is continuous learning something you signed up for the minute you decided to make programming your calling. Also, he explains his own 10-step process for learning, which he used to learn and produce almost 50 courses on Pluralsight.

In fourth section John talks about methods and techniques he uses in order to stay crazily productive as he is. Few of them are KanbanFlow and Pomodoro technique.

In the fifth section John shares his own method of how he retired at the age of 33. He seems to be highly influenced by authors such as Robert Kiyosaki, and you can see my notes from his book Rich Dad Poor Dad.

In sixth section John talks about the importance of fitness in developers life as a tool for increased productivity and better well-being. Also, he covers few of the tech gear for geeks like me (I love my FitBit).

Section seven is all about having the right mental attitude, and I’ll quote one of my favorite authors, Napoleon Hill: “You can do it if you believe you can”. If you’re interested, you can read more Napoleon Hill quotes from my notes from his book Think and Grow Rich.

After the book I went on to check out his http://simpleprogrammer.com blog, and what’s awesome is that he gives a free email course on how to build a successful blog. Am currently on week 5, and am really learning some key things on what one should do in order to increase his blog credibility and, well, views. So, hope to see those 100k+ users monthly soon 😉