Little background

I saw it in one of Alex Hormozi’s video, where he got super pissed when he heard some entrepreneur’s belief does not align to their goal. The founders were saying that “ we are high anxiety people” . Though it could be true, he got super annoyed once he heard them say it.

The kind of person I am

I call myself a rational realist. I think I picked it up from one of naval’s fancy vocabulary. So what that means is, I will only believe in things that I know for sure. I will believe in a task only if I have done it in the past. Or I need to be able to figure it out and piece them together so I know how to execute and get it done.

The mindset I had

I very well knew this was limiting my potential. Ofcourse, you know X but you keep improving so you can reach 2X or 3X right? I mean that’s how we learn and improve. The point is I run my own software services agency. When I get on exploration calls with clients. It’s basically a call where we sit with the client and scope out the requirements. Whenever they say something that I haven’t done before, I’ll become all negative and shut them down. In my head, I was telling the truth and being a realist. But in hindsight, I was actually limiting my own potential. I’m not always saying one should exaggerate their ability and make false promises. But you’ve solved problems in the past! Walked unknown territories and got out of it. So I think we owe us all that extra confidence and stretch to our capabilities.

Realisation

After watching the video I realised why am I holding onto this though it’s not serving my purpose?

This unlocked a chain of realisations that made me aware of all the beliefs I hold that don’t really serve my purpose. Yes I have developed it through my experiences, but I can’t hold onto them if they don’t serve my purpose. There is no utility to being emotionally attached to your beliefs that once might have served you. I need to let go of them and align myself properly. In his video, Alex suggests a mindset where you work your way backwards to figure out the belief that will serve your purpose. Then you project yourself as someone who is struggling to meet your beliefs. I’m an entrepreneur and I need to be high energy and irrationally believe to what is possible. I don’t want to say the same shit like “im a programmer, I always think about the worst case” . I now can’t believe that I used to tell myself this crap.

Conclusion

I have gotten over morals i.e. good or bad and adapted to utility led life. So me hearing this blew my mind so I could be more efficient. That is why I am consciously making a decision to align my beliefs and going to conduct myself so I become the person I want to become.

Let me know if it makes sense to you too

Link to the video: https://youtu.be/ErWpi_91b70

The story starts with El Salvador. The first-ever country to legalise Bitcoin alongside the US dollar bypassing the law on September 2021. This historic moment was made possible by the El Salvador president Nayib Bukele. The whole world got inspired after the law and was trying to make similar moves. The citizens of the country felt liberated and started using Bitcoin for their day-to-day transactions. It included buying groceries, paying bills…etc.

In November, Nayib Bukele made a stunning announcement to build Bitcoin City! A city ushering with modern technologies and digital education. More importantly, it will be backed by Bitcoin itself.

There would be no Taxes whatsoever in this city. Like the image below illustrates, 0% on all taxes.

To top it all, they have managed to find a sustainable, clean and renewable energy source that produces 0% CO2 Emissions. If you’re wondering where the energy is coming from? It’s from a friggin volcano. Apparently, El Salvador sits at the Pacific Ring of fire 🔥 It spans at least 20 active volcanoes within its borders.

So they got the juice, the people’s belief and led by the President of the nation himself. You might be thinking, Why wouldn’t you invest in Bitcoin Bond? I would say, hold your horses. Always Do Your Own Research! (DYOR) Do not jump in FOMO cause the Bitcoin market is still highly volatile.

Here are the specifications for the Bitcoin Bond. In simple terms, a bond is a fixed-income instrument that represents a loan made by the borrower. In this case, the borrower is the government. Since it is fixed-income, the interests are quite low compared to other financial instruments like Stocks or crypto. Bitcoin Bonds are expected to provide an interest rate of 6.5%. Samsom Mow, CSO of BLOCKSTREAM says “There would be special bitcoin dividends that may be 90–140% APY on top of the 6.5% coupon rate”.

He elaborates how this is made possible. The answer is in the specifications of the Bond itself. The Bond is expected to raise a total sum of 1 Billion USD. Only half of it would be used for building the infrastructure of Bitcoin City. The rest half would be invested in Bitcoin itself. Since Bitcoin is appreciating 30–45% every year, they claim to satisfy their promises.

The city, if built would be revolutionary, El Salvador could have a probable shot at becoming a massive player in world markets. This is due to the inevitable truth of web3 and crypto-assets being massively adopted all over the world.

Overall it seems to be a very attractive investment option, but the decision of whether to invest in this or not lies at your own discretion. Always DYOR 😉

Where it all started

Online certificates have become a huge thing nowadays. With people posting certificates on LinkedIn, no one seems the bother about its authenticity or value. All this for what? to incentivize people? Hmm…
More and more digital documents came into play. Things like Photo frames, Online ID Cards, Badges for attending events…etc. Assigning people with badges seemed like a cool thing to do. That’s when we started digging and came to know about DSC OMG event. DSC OMG is a global conference for talks, workshops and events for developers. They had used a badges framework wrapped around their event. At the end people had badges in their dashboard for crazy things like attending a particular session, logging in first, staying up till the end. One could easily think of a billion ways to assign badges.

The badges Framework

We at DSC NIT Rourkela have wrapped our website with the same badges framework which DSC OMG had used. Thanks to Kautuk Kundan (the creator of the badges framework).

After setting up the badges server, even we went crazy and started giving away badges for all sorts of activities. At the end of October, I had this thought of assigning badges to the ones who have completed the Hacktoberfest 2020 Challenge. When I first thought about it, I didn’t really give much thought about it. Since it is GitHub and DigitialOcean has already done, assumed it to be fairly straightforward. And it is if you know how it is done :).

Getting to work

Before getting into coding, I first picture the flow of all the things that need to be done. Firstly, there would be a login button on the front-end which authenticates the user and send a token to some server. Then that server fetches the PR history and does the validation check, return with a Success True/False response.

Setting up an OAuth GitHub app was really easy. Once that is done, I started looking into the GitHub API Docs.

The Problem

As I was going through the Docs, I couldn’t find any API which gives away the PR of an authenticated user. That really hit me hard. It didn’t make sense, because DO has done it, so there must be a way. I was thinking to use search queries, even considered scrapping the page( sorry GitHub :/). No luck whatsoever.
I pretty much gave up and thought maybe DO has some internal affair with GitHub. The big enterprises get it done. It was a big surprise to me when I got to know that the entire Hacktoberfest website, server and client was on GitHub. I felt like I hit a JackPot! It didn’t even last for a second :(.

### Exploring DO’s Hacktoberfest Repo

The entire codebase was on Ruby and I have no idea of Ruby. Tried going into random files in hope to figure something out, but no luck. I’ve used Python, JavaScript, C++ and even PHP. But Ruby was totally strange! No one I knew had a good understanding of Ruby. Out of frustration, I went to the contributors list and started mailing them!

Yes, that is what I did. Found the top contributor, her name is Frida. She had her mail on GitHub, even though I couldn’t really comprehend why she would help me. Yet I mailed her, then I found a username called MattIPv4. This dude had his Twitter handle on GitHub, and his GitHub Profile said Community Platform Manager @digitalocean. Now, this is the real jackpot.

The Magic

I texted Matt on Twitter, He asked me to drop a mail to Hacktoberfest support. As Matt suggested, I sent the same mail which I had sent to Frida. I was surprised to get a reply back within *17 mins*.
Below is the reply I got

As one could see, the file for the individual functionalities was clearly mentioned. This was like the ultimate tip, went right into the files, although I was not able to recognise any Ruby Code. I found out that there is a GraphQL query which fetches PR History. Yes, I was initially referring to only REST API of GitHub as I wasn’t very much comfortable with GraphQL. I didn’t even have to write my own GraphQL query, I copy-pasted the exact query which was in the repo to my NodeJS GraphQL client.

Actual work begins

Now that I have the data, I just had to filter the PR based on the guidelines. Quickly I fired up an Express Server with all the basic setup. I always prefer Express and NodeJS for backend, it is powerful and super fast to build. With NPM, one could any damn thing they want to, cause there would be an NPM package for every damn thing B|.
I filtered the data according to the updated guidelines, even added support to handle PRs which counts before the guidelines were updated.

What the API does

The API takes in the user token and responds with a {success:True} if they have completed the challenge else {success:False} if they haven’t. Check out the Repository on GitHub to see an example Request and Response.

HarishTeens/hacktoberfest-validation

How the API works

Here are the steps which execute in sequence
- Get User Token
- Fetch PR History
- Filter the PRs following DO’s guidelines.
- Return True/False based on the count of valid PRs.

What more could be improved

- For now, it just works. There is literally zero error handling, if things don’t go as expected, the app would definitely break. I am not super proud about that, will definitely work on it.
- Also the filtering logic and steps could be done more efficiently. Couldn’t really get that logic from DO’s repo as it was in Ruby.

Conclusion

If you have reached this point, probably you are wondering. What is so great about this? This is a piece of cake to me, I could code this in an hour. I’d say great!
This is not a tutorial on how to build the Hacktoberfest Validation API. This is the story of how I got to it. It felt really magical to see Matt replying to a random stranger’s Twitter text and a magic mail which points me in the right direction. All adding more beauty of how opensource works. Also, I got the mail back from Frida a day later! Lastly, this is not an article to praise DigitalOcean and their support.
P.S. Shhh… They didn’t pay me ;)

I was really amazed that day when I realised that people are so kind and helping in the open-source community. It was a blissful experience on the whole ❤.

How I built the API for Hacktoberfest Validation was originally published in GDSC NIT Rourkela on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post targets all of those who have no idea about what GitHub Campus Experts program is or even what GitHub is, or you might have heard these names somewhere and want to shine a little light on what exactly these are.

What is GitHub?

GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere. If you are getting into tech and have not used Github, I promise you it will be a delight and will make your life a lot less painful.

GitHub Education helps students, teachers, and schools access the tools and events they need to shape the next generation of software development. There are a variety of programs GitHub offers as part of GitHub Education. Among one is the GitHub Campus Experts Program.

What is a GitHub Campus Expert?

People learn better when they can learn with a community of like-minded peers. A Campus Expert improves the technical community on their campus, with training and support from GitHub. Once you complete the training and become a GitHub Campus Expert, you will have access to resources and support from GitHub, such as swag, sponsorship, and the opportunity to attend events like the company’s annual conference, GitHub Universe.

How can I become one?

After reading the above, if you too got excited like me and want to know how you can also become one, Check out this link.

GitHub Campus Experts

This is the first place you want to go to kickstart your journey of becoming a campus expert. Once you click Start, GitHub will take some time to get things ready for training. You will get all the instructions about your training and submissions, right after it is complete. It took me about a month to complete my training, GitHub does not have any deadline over the submissions, you can submit these at your own pace. After you complete your submissions, you have to be patient and wait for a reviewer to review your submissions. After a reviewer reviews your submissions and merges your PR, the final step is a screening call. And then you would have become the GitHub Campus Expert for your Campus.

Now let us answer some serious questions!

What is the use of becoming a GitHub Campus Expert?

Ever thought about having an enriching community where you can find like-minded peers and have fun together? Or maybe you want to organize many events for your campus so that people get excited and join hands together? Where would you go? Whom would you ask for help? Most importantly, What about the funds?

That is where the GitHub Campus Expert Program will come into the picture. We have a fantastic community of passionate people backed by GitHub all over the world, who will support you in building a better Technical Community for your Campus. If you think that your campus lacks a good technical community, do not wait for a leader or someone, take things on your hand and start the movement.

Leaders are not born; they are made.

Finally, the question for which everyone wants to know the answer to

What tools and resources does a GitHub Campus Expert get access to?

The ultimate resource is always People, People, People.

You will be added to the slack channel where you can find all the GitHub Campus Experts around the world. Then you gain access to tools that help you make resource requests, and collaborate with GitHub Staff and other Campus Experts. GitHub will ship you cool swags as I got below,

With the network of amazing people and GitHub supporting in you in every way it could, you can build something greater than yourself.
Thanks for reading the article. I cannot thank enough GitHub for the fantastic resources it has given.

Everything you need to know about Github Campus Expert was originally published in GDSC NIT Rourkela on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been developing PHP applications for almost 2 years now , until recently I never really like it that much because it was really hard for me to maintain PHP code , I was not able to directly push to server with git like I do for my NodeJS projects , because it required some configuration changes . So we will be seeing some of the best practices which I think would make your life less miserable with PHP.

1. Handling Base URL in server side

This right here is code which handles your Localhost URL and Server URL for production. You can also tried to do with configuring environment variable but I prefer this as it is straightforward and easy to use.

2. Handling Base URL on Client Side

Handling base URL might not be a problem in HTML as PHP code can be embedded in between HTML code . But there might be a problem with your JS files , so I would suggest the below implementation.

The above code passes the base URL as an attribute so that it can be get from the dependency file like this :

3. Pushing code to server with git and github

Now that we everything ready to push our local code to server how are we going to do that? Most PHP hosting website just give you access to the Cpanel from which you can use File Manager to add and edit your files on server . I have been using a workaround for the past couple months , I wont say it is best solution but It works very well for me. To do this , you need to do the following steps

• Get SSH access to your Server so that you can remote login from your PC’s terminal
• Install Git and create a separate github account for server
• Now You can push your local code to the github repo
• And by SSHing into the server you can pull from the github repo to the server

I find this really helpful because Even If I want to make some changes I can right away make it , commit it and push it back to github So that I keep track of everything.

4. Editing Code on Server

Now that we have come this far , we should also be able to edit code on server. There are some File Managers offered by Hosting platforms but those are not really good enough. Installing IDEs on server just doesnt make any sense as it occupies storage on server which is not preferred. If you’re favorite text editor is VSCode , You are in for a treat …

Developing on Remote Machines using SSH and Visual Studio Code

Here you can find a plugin and step by step guide on how to setup the plugin so that you can browse edit files on server from your PC’s VsCode . This right here is a beauty because you are not installing anything on your server !

5. Handling SQL Database Configuration

Wherever there is PHP , SQL follows along , So the configurations for setting up database is also a bit of headache. It is best to have the Database Name , DB User Name and DB Password same in both server and localhost .

Editing database structure and data is still have to be handled manually , if anyone has any workaround feel free to comment below…