📚 Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

I just finished reading the book about sleep and, as usual, want to share my findings from the book with you. Often there is a perception that sleep is something that is NOT that important, it is something that is stealing our time, something that prevents us to live our life more hours. It turns out that it is...not true.

🧘 Is sleep a time when we relax? No, sleep is the time when our brain works and, sometimes, works as hard as if we are awake. We need sleep to process what we had today and prepare ourself for being awake the next day. So we can ... sleep again. Author also slightly asks the question — what if we live to sleep and not otherwise? Because of us as biological creatures sleep is one of the best states, why do we bother to awake?

🥱 Why do we want to sleep? First — we have suprachiasmatic nucleus in our brain. This thing tracks light and sets our circadian rhythms, so that we live within the 24-25h cycle. This rhythm gives us the "awake" urge. Secondary — when it is getting darker our brain starts to release melotonin. This way our body knows that, in principle, we can go sleep. Third — when we are awake we accumulate adenosine. When we have enough of it, than we want to sleep.
Together — when our circadian rhythm tells us that we do not need to be awake, melotonin tells that we may sleep and adenosin makes us sleepy, than we want to sleep.

☕️ Coffee, does it make me awake? Coffee does not make you awake, it just blocks those receptors that feel adenosin. So that you do not feel the sleep pressure. But when the effect from the coffee dissolves, then you still will feel the same adenosine. Half-life of the coffee is 4h. That means, that if you drink coffee at 4 p.m., that it will still affect you at the time you go to bed. Be careful taking coffee after midday, it might affect your sleep.

🛌 What happens when I sleep? We sleep in 1.5h cycles. There are three phases — deep sleep (NREM), light sleep and REM (rapid eye movement). At the start of the night we experience more NREM sleep, closer to the awake time — more REM. All phases are needed.

NREM — during this phase our brain distributes what we have learned today (and not only) through other parts of the brain. This is why sleep is important when we study. Even more, based on our perception our brain knows what it should remember and what not. After this phase our operatin memory is fresh and we can operate the next day.

REM — our brain bumps into each other the information we already know. This way we can derive new ideas. We see dreams in this phase. This phase is very important for the emotional development and processing of the emotions. Our brain reviews the emotional experience of the day, removes the emotional part and writes it as autobiographical memories. This is why the next day we have less pain thinking about the loss of our favorite football team.

light phase — nothing specific is said, but our brain also cleans itself up from the chemicals from yesterday (glia), so that the next day we feel ourself fresh.

😮‍💨 When we are sleep deprived. In case you do not sleep 7-8h daily you ARE sleep deprived. When we have not enough sleep — everything is bad. We control our emotions worse, we take less initiative, we drive worse, our immune system underperforms. There is another trick, people just do not feel that they underperform, they think they are fine.

It is proven, that you can not sleep it over on the weekends. I mean, you sleep <7h daily, and then sleep 10h on the weekend. It will not compensate your sleep deprivation. We, we as a species, have to sleep 7-8h daily to be in top shape.

There is no hack to sleep. Sleep is integrated very deeply to our biological body. We have to sleep 7-8h. Sleep deprivation leads to the illnesses and all the bad things.

#GoodDevDigest

🖼 I started to use Figma

Recently one random TG channel posted a random ad which was advertising the intensive course (marathon) about Figma for UI/UX designers. Obviously it's just a selling funnel for one of the modern IT schools. I'm not going to advertise it. But I thought it's an opportunity for me to learn the new instrument, so I participated.

Throughout the "marathon" I was just repeating what tutor did and now I can do Figma. Enough to cover my own needs.

How Figma can help a good dev:
I will use it to prototype my #1to100 app. I was struggling to create a design, because I was doing it right away in the app. Now I can quickly draft it there, see and feel how all the screens may look like.
Figma has their own Jam board or just board like Miro and Mural. We can use it to collaborate (boring, and Miro does better) and to draw nice diagrams. For example, with Cloud Icons plugin we have all the ... cloud icons quickly available!

You can also do this marathon at your own pace (1, 2, 3), also I was recommended this channel to learn even more Figma. ⚠️ This message is not an ad, I don't know anything about the school itself.

Does anyone of you use it for some purpose?

🐘PostgreSQL unknown features

Nice article about the less known features of PostgreSQL. We do know, that PostgreSQL is a great thing. Especially I like it's JSON capabilities, which allow us to store and documents and do complex queries about the content. But there is more, this article covers stuff from the unknown unknown part of our knowledge base. We just did not know that it's there so we would not search for it.

🌍 localtunnel — free ngrok alternative

ngrok is a great tool to tunnel internet request to your local server. But it quickly evolved to the paid one. You need to register, they added bazillion features that you don't need, etc. If you are looking for the free alternative — consider trying localtunnel. For example, it shall allow you to route webhooks to your local server.

⬛️ That was it for today.

Hi people,

The webinar recording is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSWfaFXeeXU

Please, to those who were there, write a short feedback on how was it. What did you like and what can be improved.

To me it was the first webinar. What surprised me and was unexpected, that there is a delay between Zoom and YouTube. And this delay is pretty big for the cognition. I first was not even sure if you see how I change slides.

Thanks to everyone who joined 🙌

YouTube

Хто такий інженер Staff+ та як ним стати? | Павло Поляков [Вебінар Fwdays]

Опис воркшопу: Чи є життя після Senior? Чи всі повинні бути менеджерами? Хто такі Staff+, що вони роблять, скільки вони заробляють? Як допомогти собі стати Staff+? Ми поговоримо про позицію Staff+: вплив, рівень доходу, підводні камені. А також Павло поділиться…

Who are Staff+ webinar starts at 19:00 Kyiv time. Let's meet!

👆It would be great to see you at our free webinar. Just shortly before the workshop we are organising the webinar to talk about Staff+ overall and cover my promotion experience. Also I'm going to share three tools which you can use right away to strengthen your chances for the promotion!

Fwdays

Воркшоп | Як будувати кар'єру senior-розробнику: Staff+

Розбір позиції Staff+ та практична підготовка до цієї ролі.

💡Fwdays запрошує розробників на безкоштовний вебінар з розбору позиції Staff+!

🤔Що робити, коли вам вже тісно в ролі Senior, і ви прагнете далі розвиватися в технічному напрямку?
✅Дізнайтеся про особливості позиції Staff+ та її специфіку в різних IT-компаніях. Ми розберемо приклад промоушену, і ви ознайомитесь з інструментами, які допоможуть вам розвивати кар’єру в цьому напрямку вже зараз!

🕖Коли? 16 квітня (вівторок) о 19:00
👉🏻Участь безоплатна за попередньою реєстрацією: https://bit.ly/3TMUZvE
👥Кому буде цікаво? Senior розробникам, архітекторам та всім, хто планує розвивати свою кар'єру у технічному напрямку.

🗣Спікер - Павло Поляков, Principal Engineer в SHARE NOW. Має досвід 15+ років в IT, 3+ роки на позиції Staff+. Автор ТГ-каналу GoodDevKnows та статей на Medium і DOU.

Розвивайте свою кар’єру з Fwdays!

I've finished reading the "Learning Domain-Driven Design" book and want to share some thoughts that were the most important for me.

The thing that was most new to me was the types of the subdomains concept. We know that any business can be divided into domains or subdomains, we've met several types of subdomains, and we've been operating this for a long time. But DDD specifies them and suggests, that we work differently with any of them.

In DDD there are three types:
Core subdomain(s). This is what makes your business different from others. This is your competitive advantage, and the one where you are the experts. This subdomain is the most complex and volatile. It shall be developed in-house and you shall invest in its architecture so that it remains maintainable. What brings your company money?
✨*Example: Imagine our business is a call center — Unique logic of calls distribution.

• Supporting subdomain(s). This is what you have to have to make your core subdomain work. Maybe there are solutions on the market, but they do not satisfy your requirements. So the company decided to develop it in-house. The complexity of such shall be lover than the core subdomain.
  ✨Example: internal CRM

• Generic subdomain(s). This is what every company in the industry should have, and they do it the same way. If it's possible, this functionality will be bought as SaaS or it can be outsourced.
  ✨Example: authentication system

Good developers shall understand the business of the company well enough. To be able to identify (together with business experts) the types of subdomains. Then we know where we should invest our time and resources. We can explain to ourselves and the stakeholders that it does not make sense to continue to develop our own in-house authentication system.

Subdomain types may change. With time, you can discover that the one that was generic yesterday brings the company more money. So it makes sense to take care of it, and the way we deal with it may change.

Subdomains are, as well, a good way to split the work between teams. No two teams shall work on one subdomain.

In general, I would rate this book 7/10. Have you read it?

Amazon

Learning Domain-Driven Design: Aligning Software Architecture and Business Strategy

Learning Domain-Driven Design: Aligning Software Architecture and Business Strategy

👆And I want to remind you, that for our close community there is a promo code GOODDEVKNOWS, which gives you 20% discount.