
<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/notifications.png`}
  priority
  width="1200"
  height="628"
  class="border"
/>

I remember a day, a few years ago, I was reading the “Deep Work” by Cal
Newport. Cal was telling about the importance of focused deep work and
how high is the cost of distraction.

The book triggered me to start being mindful of the harm notifications
Starting from that day I started to turn notifications off but in a slow mode without stressing myself and throwing myself at the feet of the FOMO.

> 🙀 FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) — fear of not being included in something (such as an interesting or enjoyable activity) that others are experiencing

So, here is my one-year plan on how to gradually disable notifications.

| **Time**    | **Easy**                                                                             | Hard                                  |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------- |
| Q1 | Turning off secondary applications (e.g. photo editing, sports)                      | ---                                   |
| Q2 | Turning off productivity apps (e.g. todoist, Trello, apple reminder)                 | Turning off Emails                    |
| Q3 | Turning off social networks (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)                      | Turning off Services (delivery, taxi) |
| Q4 | Turning off all applications except phone calls (e.g. messenger, telegram, WhatsApp) | Turning off everything                |

_The plan is flexible, so you can change it as you wish._

## Additional Materials

- [Deep Work by Cal Newport](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692)
- [The Key to Happiness in a Distracted World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lay89Tk2nk)


Past year I was gradually limiting applications which can distract me and now I finally turned all notifications off.

🔇 Notifications off

A few years ago I was surrounded by people who were creating ugly and overwhelming slides with
tons of text, without graphic content and even mems 🥺. At that time no one taught me how to create slides,
so I was following others: dark colors, default fonts, text, text, and a little bit more text.
At that time I started to feel that something is wrong!

After different lessons and talks, failures and successes, good and back feedback I managed to create
a slides checklist that helps me to avoid popular mistakes.

Click on the button to go to the slides checklist or scroll down to read a little detail about the lessons I learned.

<Link href="/library/slides?checklist=show">
  <button
    type="link"
    className="w-full flex items-center justify-center px-8 py-2 border border-transparent text-base font-medium rounded-md text-indigo-700 bg-indigo-100 hover:bg-indigo-200 md:py-2 md:text-lg md:px-10"
  >
    {"See Slides Checklist"}
  </button>
</Link>



As I can see you decided to continue reading an article instead of jumping into the checklist.
Reading texts is a rare skill in the 21st century so I'm happy that you had one.

Anyway, let's come back to the moment when after feedbacks and personal experience I understood that slides
can influence on the lesson or talk someone is giving.
I started to analyze how different approaches can influence the audience and
understood that slides can both help or harm the process of information representation.

In a good way slides can help you:

- to keep audience attention and attract them even when the topic is boring (or let's say hard);
- to keep the lecturer focused and bring back to the topic (really helpful if you're as talkative as I am).

At the same time they can harm you by:

- distracting the audience's attention from the speech
- make the audience feel uncomfortable and overwhelmed

So let's discuss insights I came to:

### 1/5 The story of white space or why text matters.

<Image
  alt={`White Space`}
  src={`/images/blog/white-space.png`}
  priority
  width="1920"
  height="1080"
  class="border"
/>

Text can at the same time help people to understand what you're talking about or distract from the speech.
Be sure to include a small amount of text which will emphasize what you're telling.

Some people make a mistake by including tons of text in the slide.
It may make slides more informative but during the talk, people will start to read slides instead of listening.
If you want to make the talk more informative, it'd be better to write a blog post regarding the topic you're covering.

Studies in design show that proper use of white space between lines of paragraphs and its left and right margins can increase comprehension up to 20%.
So my recommendation is to add more white space into the slides by removing text.
Don't afraid that your slides will look poor because your task as a speaker is to fill something else than space on the screen.

### 2/5 🙂 Graphic content and its influence 🙃

<div
  class="border"
>

<Image
  alt={`White Space`}
  src={`/images/blog/graphic-content.png`}
  priority
  width="1920"
  height="1080"
/>
</div>

Please, add more visual content into your slides:

- Images, Gifs, Videos
- Emojis

- and even Mems

They all help the audience to refresh attention and get back their interest if they lost at some point.
Visual content also makes a hard and overwhelming topic look easier.

### 3/5 What about an interactive part?

Honestly, it's really hard for me to create a good interactive experience during the talks
so I'm working on it hard (feel free to ping me if you've any advice).

Anyway, any time small Q&A sessions or quizzes are held, it helps the audience to feel the presence and make
sure the material is mastered.

Think about it next time: how can you add an interactive experience for the slides?

### 4/5 Maybe some fun?

<Image
  alt={`White Space`}
  src={`/images/blog/mem.png`}
  priority
  width="1920"
  height="1080"
  class="border"
/>

Include some jokes or memes into the slides as visual or written content.
Don't be afraid of looking not serious: release your inner standup artist and you won't regret it.

Everyone loves jokes so help the audience to feel closer and have some good laughs.

### 5/5 Checklist

Open notes and create a checklist of things you're going to include in slides next time or just use the one, I've already created.
I've tried to create a structured list of things you need to do to make slides look better.

<Link href="/library/slides?checklist=show">
  <button
    type="link"
    className="w-full flex items-center justify-center px-8 py-2 border border-transparent text-base font-medium rounded-md text-white bg-indigo-600 hover:bg-indigo-700 md:py-2 md:text-lg md:px-10"
  >
    {"See Slides Checklist"}
  </button>
</Link>

## Don't forget Literature!

- [Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo](https://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Secrets-Steve-Jobs-Insanely/dp/1491514310)

Insights about making great slides and link to the checklist I've created to make life easier!

Slides Checklist 1.0


Recently I had a webinar (in Armenian) where I was talking about programming languages and stacks, their differences, and how to choose one.

<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/how-to-choose/how-to-choose.png`}
  priority
  width="1920"
  height="1080"
  class="border"
/>

In the article we're going to speak about five major software application types and ecosystems (languages, frameworks, libraries they have):

## Table of contents

- Part 1. Software Application Types
  - [Web Applications](#web-applications)
  - [Mobile Applications](#mobile-applications)
  - [Desktop Applications](#desktop-applications)
  - [Machine Learning](#machine-learning)
- Part 2. Algorithm for choosing a language
  - [Tips](#tips)
  - [Experience](#experience)
- Part 3. [Materials](#materials)

<span class="text-red-400">Note,</span> I've created also a <a
  target="_blank"
  href="https://mm.tt/1772184228?t=1vsSDGshVQ"
>
  Mind Map
</a> for the information I'm going to tell below. Make sure to follow mind map using
the link or images that I've attached to each chapter.

## Web Applications

When speaking of web apps one should imagine sites that he is using every day. They usually consist of two parts: frontend and backend.

> Frontend — is the practice of converting data to a graphical interface, through the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so that users can view and interact with that data. (Wikipedia)

<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/how-to-choose/frontend.png`}
  priority
  width="1654"
  height="2024"
  class="border"
/>

HTML stands for hypertext markup language — the backbone of every page that lives on the web.

> Hypertext is the text which contains links to other texts. (Ted Nelson, 1965)

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and its main purpose is to make sites look gorgeous.

And JS stands for the most popular language that millions of people use daily.

> The front end is an interface between the user and the backend. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. To handle the backend of given applications, programmers or backend developers have to deal with backend technologies that include languages like Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and many others.

<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/how-to-choose/backend.png`}
  priority
  width="1434"
  height="1958"
  class="border"
/>

One of the groups of backend languages includes those that have a strict type system and tight coupling with OOP ideas. These languages are Java, C#, C++, and many others. They are very popular among big enterprise companies due to their strictness and safety. Usually, newbies find them hard as a first language because of the high entry threshold.

Another group of languages includes those that have a dynamic type system, mostly they are multiparadigm with a low entry threshold. They are easier for learners because you can jump into the language very fast and see the result. JS (Node.js), Python, Ruby, PHP are the most famous languages. Big tech companies, like Twitter, Github, Basecamp are using Ruby (and Ruby on Rails framework) for backend development. Facebook and VK have been created using PHP (at least first versions).

Pros of web apps:

- One development team for all Operating Systems (user only needs browser)

- Development speed due to the infrastructure of libraries and frameworks which allow solving almost all problems.

- Low entry threshold

Cons of web apps:

- They lose to native apps because of the lack of access to hosting platforms (for example, Notifications, GPS, Cameras). Although I hope that Web 2.0 and PWA's will change the situation and WEB will be great again.

- There's no way to create high GPU-consuming apps (like big games) in WEB.

## Mobile Applications

<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/how-to-choose/mobile.png`}
  priority
  width="1580"
  height="1360"
  class="border"
/>

Researches by Statista are showing that in the third quarter of 2020 the half of the traffic worldwide came from mobile devices. I'm almost sure that half of the readers are also using mobiles so there is no need to describe what mobile applications are.

What is not clear when we're speaking about mobiles is their types and what languages one should master to start coding. To clarify that, let's explore three approaches to mobile development.

### 1. Hybrid applications

> A hybrid app is essentially a combination of a native app and a web app. Although this type of app can be installed on a device like a native app, it technically is a web app. These types of apps are built with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and run in a web view.

So technically you still are writing your HTML, CSS, and JS
 code like you was doing in the case of web apps but now you're running the code in a web view.

One might think that this is brilliant technology and we should use it as a standard because now we can share the code between web and mobile, but things are not that easy. Hybrid apps are not showing good performance: apps are freezing and their UX suffers a lot (you can sense that even physically that the app is written for the web, not the mobile world).

### 2. Native Applications

When speaking about native apps, we should mention that there are two major operating systems for mobile: iOS and Android and both of them have their languages with big ecosystems.

For many years in the iOS world, the main language was Objective-C but then apple presented Swift which is easier for developers and now it's a de-facto standard for iOS applications.

In the case of Android, there's the same scenario, Java was the main language but then JetBrains presented Kotlin which took part in the market.

Native Apps had better UX due to their connection with host OS and direct access to the Notification, Camera, and other APIs.

At the same time, companies need two development teams to handle both Operating systems because it's not frequent when one developer knows both languages. It's the main disadvantage of native applications.

### 3. React Native

React Native combines the best parts of these worlds: it allows to write code that runs on both Operating Systems (actually 70-80% of the code), it allows companies to use frontend developers and their knowledge of JS and React and during the parts where React (and js) are close to their limits (GPU-consuming operations), you can write code on Swift or Kotlin and connect it with React Native via the so-called bridge (see RN docs for more info, it's really interesting. I promise).

## Desktop Applications

<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/how-to-choose/desktop.png`}
  priority
  width="1002"
  height="464"
  class="border"
/>

The desktop world is similar to mobile. As the main advantage, we can see better UX because of the access to the Host Environment.

And as in mobile, here in Desktop, there are two popular approaches to development.

1. Native Applications
   Here we can use a lot of languages, like C# (created by Microsoft and works great on Windows), C++, Java, etc. The only problem is that in some cases we need multiple languages for different Operating Systems.

2. Electron Applications
   JS Ecosystem has reached even this point and using HTML, CSS, and JS we can build cross-platform desktop apps. VS Code, Facebook Messenger, Figma, WhatsApp have been created with Electron. Also, it worth mentioning that Electron applications are cross-platform which means the code can be run in different OS environments.

## Machine Learning

<Image
  alt={`Preview`}
  src={`/images/blog/how-to-choose/ml.png`}
  priority
  width="928"
  height="368"
  class="border"
/>

There are many languages that one can use for creating ml products: Python, R, JS, C, C++, Java, C# but the big part of the market are developing the products using Python because of its big infrastructure: tons of libraries and platforms like Tensorflow are available for Python (also for JS). That's why Python is the number one choice for ML.

## Tips

Finally, we know about most software application types and now we can create an algorithm for picking a language and our algorithm will base on three criteria.

### Skills and interests

If you are interested in visual information representation and working with the product that end-users are gonna face, then maybe frontend, mobile or desktop stacks are for you. Elsewhere, if you're not interested in visual and more in data processing and manipulation then you should consider Back End or ML stack is right for you.

### Mentors and Environments

Mentors and people who surround you are also very important. So if most of your colleagues and friends know any programming language, then you should consider that one because their role in your first steps will be crucial.

### Languages by market

The one thing that newbies should also take into consideration is the market. If there's no need for developers for the language that you consider then maybe it's not the best option. That's why it's really important to check what the market needs. I'd recommend to stard with [Stack Overflow survey](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020) to understand market needs better.

## Experience

I chose JS and React Ecosystem because of their cross-environmental approach. JS and React are being used in Web, Mobile, Desktop, and even ML which allows me to focus not on technologies but on creating applications. I also understand that JS Ecosystem is not the best performance-wise and sometimes reaches its limits but in most cases, it gives me tons of other benefits.

I hope that I helped to create a framework that will help you to find your language and most importantly, your ecosystem.

## Materials

1. [Mind Map for different languages and their infrastructure](https://mm.tt/1772184228?t=1vsSDGshVQ)
2. <a target="_blank" href="/static/slides/how-to-choose-language.pdf">
     Get Slides
   </a>
3. [Stack Overflow Survey](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020)
4. [Frontend Interview Questionnaire](https://github.com/vre2h/interview-questionnaire)


Text version of a webinar that I've been given on 27th of March, 2021.

How to choose a programming language?

You don’t agree? Let me explain why you are mistaken 🔝

😈 Second Monitor is overrated. Ep 5

Ep 5: Second Monitor is overrated.

You might also like

🔇 Notifications off

Slides Checklist 1.0

How to choose a programming language?