Daniel Salvagni - Yet another front-end developer

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Everyday Leadership

Foundations of Everyday Leadership is the very first course of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. It’s taught by professor Gregory Northcraft which also teaches the following course Applications of Everyday Leadership.

This first course really gives you a ground base of leadership and its challenges. The most important thing from this first classes was to get an overview of different types of leadership, how to make individual and group decisions and how to manage motivation. I’d like to share my notes about it.

Finished my first Half Marathon

Last quarter of 2019, I decided that I’d run a half-marathon & marathon in 2020. Unfortunately, 2020 hit us hard, and I had to postpone my plans. At that point in time, I had no idea whether I’d be able to run any of the races anytime soon. For a while, I kept training hard, but gradually I started putting my training sessions aside. Although I skipped the marathon, I finally managed to finish a half-marathon.

Yet another developer writing a rich text editor

Back in 2012, when I discovered the possibilities of having a rich text input by simply adding the contenteditable=true attribute to my element, I tried to build a full content editor. I didn’t know the purpose of it at that point in time, however, it was nice to dig into these new possibilities. I remember it was a simple editor, although you could drop files and images into it, and it would automatically upload the files and attach them to the editor area. Expand the image previews as well. Furthermore, it also embedded content from Youtube and other platforms. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of o hacks and workarounds as well. Not any longer after that, I sent this idea to the cemetery of side projects.

3 books to read while commuting

Last summer I changed jobs. I’ve moved from working remotely to a position onsite, after almost three years remote. One of the biggest changes was having to commute and to spend almost one hour on public transport. I had two hours every day to either listen to music and podcasts, take a look at Instagram or try to read a book. On the bright side, it was a great opportunity to read the books I had on my shelf.

The sweet road of building a custom date picker

Recently I had to replace a date picker component in an Angular application and I decided, along with my teammates, to go with a custom solution. The previous date picker we’ve been using was a component from ngx-bootstrap library, which is a great one.

The decision of building a custom one was taken mostly because we need mobile support, and we didn’t find a solution off-the-shelf that would fit our requirements. It wasn’t an easy decision, a calendar is always tricky to build. Although, on our side, there was a narrow range of use cases that would make it simpler than building a date picker for global usage.

Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage

The fifth course of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera, Business Strategy, is taught by Deepak Somaya, Professor of Business Administration. This course is about how organizations can create, capture and maintain value and how it’s fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage.

In the third module of the course, we learned about internal analysis and competitive advantage. How to understand the origin and consequences of the unique internal strength of a firm, using the analytical viewpoint of activities, resources, and capabilities.

In my opinion, Business Strategy was one of the best courses in this specialization with real case study analysis as assignments after every module. Both the content, methodology and the professor were great and I could enjoy taking the classes. The assignment for this module I shared in another blog post.

Business Strategy: Case Study Analysis of Starbucks’ Competitive Advantage

As I mentioned in a previous post, Business Strategy: Soft-drinks Industry Analysis, I’m taking the fifth course, called Business Strategy, of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. This course is taught by Deepak Somaya, Professor of Business Administration.

These assignments demand a couple of hours to get it done, due to the amount of information and analysis that is needed. However, it gives you amazing insights while analyzing real cases and practicing what you just learned.

Business Strategy: Soft-drinks Industry Analysis

I’m taking the fifth course, called Business Strategy, of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. This course is taught by Deepak Somaya, Professor of Business Administration.

This is a four-module course, one module per week, and at the end of each module, we have an assessment: to write a case study analysis about a given topic. In the first week, I had to write a hypothetical memo to the CEO of Uber, suggesting a new mission statement. The second week, that I just finished, I had to write a hypothetical memo to Warren Buffet to suggest to increase or decrease the investments on Coca-Cola Company. Both assignments were hard to write and demand a considerable amount of time to get it done, and, the first one I couldn’t get it right in the first attempt and had to resubmit my assignment. For the second one, I’m now waiting for a review of my peers. Anyway, I think it would be good to share it here to gather some feedback if it might occur.

AccessRole Guard for Angular apps

There’s always that moment when you need to implement authentication and authorization to an application and, besides intercepting and protecting requests, we also need to protect the application’s routes. Angular uses Route Guards through canActivate and or canLoad methods to decide whether a route or a child module should be available or not, and, it can use multiple conditions – or Guards – to decide that.

Once again at Liepnitzsee

More than once I mentioned here that one of the things that I like the most about Berlin is the easy access to nature in a fair distance. Especially Liepnitzsee that, in spite of its surprising cold water, always worth the visit. Last weekend I went with my wife and some friends to this lake again, this time to spend the night in a camping there as well.

There are small things about camping that if you don’t take some time to enjoy it, you might miss it.

Managerial Decision Making

Early this year I decided to focus my studies on the leadership & management sides of organisations, and I enrolled for Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization, a specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. I found the courses really complete in terms of content and recommended material, and, so far, these courses gave me a great background on topics such as the foundations and applications of leadership, group decisions and fostering decision, conflict management and so on. When I took Designing the Organization: From Strategy to Organizational Structure, I thought it would be far from what I’d like to learn at this moment, however, it helped me to understand why organisations are designed in the way they are. I’m currently in the 4th course of 7, called Managing the Organization: From Organizational Design to Execution where I’m currently learning about effective organisational decision-making. This is such a great topic that worth to leave my notes with kind of a course summary here.

Building time is a disappointing issue on Angular development experience

I am not judging, although it might appear as I am. I already mentioned a couple of features that make me think Angular is a great choice for a web framework and I’m still decided to invest my time on it. However, I failed by not evaluating it more deeply, to be fair. Anyway, we all have our flaws, don’t we?

Giving Angular another try

I have been playing with the latest Angular version for the last couple of weeks and I’m enjoying it. The last time I touched Angular 2+ was in 2016 on an Ionic mobile project and before that, only had experienced working with the now called AngularJS. The current version (7) looks great!

The Journey from Berlin to Copenhagen on Bikes

On Friday, April 19th, Luísa and I started our journey from Berlin to Copenhagen by bike, on our first bike tour. We took 8,5 days to get there, sound and safe, and we crossed some fantastic paths and landscapes. This is a well-known bike route and we discovered later that it’s part of a bigger EuroVelo, which starts in Malta and finishes in the North Cape – or the other way around, the EuroVelo 7.

Find the closest bar open

As the weather gets warmer, people tend to hang out more often and Berlin offers many options of bars, pubs, and biergartens to have a great time with your friends. Doesn’t need to be in summer though, the first warm day of spring already takes people out of their homes.