General

From Coding Lonely to DevRel Ceremony - My Apprenticeship Journey

Published Jul 20, 2021

Updated Jan 31, 2023

7 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

👎 Nervous, confused, belittled, defeated. These words describe the beginning of my professional coding journey.

👍 Empowered, excited, determined, appreciated. These words describe how I feel now, at the end of my apprenticeship.

This sounds like an impossible 180, doesn't it? Let me tell you about this wild journey, and the things I learned along the way.

🐣 Where it all began..

At some point in our careers, we've been on that rollercoaster of excitement that quickly mixes with fear and doubt. Maybe you just started a new job, transitioned careers, or perhaps you're on that rollercoaster RIGHT NOW. 🎢 I felt this intensely when I was in my first dev job - I just moved to a new city, graduated from coding boot camp, and immediately started in the tech field within four months. Talk about moving fast! 💨

Fast forward seven months into my first dev job, and I found myself terrified of asking for help, staring at bugs with no support or solutions, and crying every night from the frustration. 😪 Although there were people who were sympathetic to my situation, I didn't feel good about myself or my job. I think we've all worked at places where we didn't feel supported, so I'll spare you the details.

Bottom line - I realized that this environment was not conducive to my learning, and my confidence had broken down into rubble.

🤷‍♀️ Where was this person who was so eager and excited to learn?

🤔 Where was this person who was determined to find solutions, and contribute to the team?

These were questions with answers that I didn't like, and didn't want to accept. So, I finally scrounged up the courage to quit. I FELT SO MUCH RELIEF! 😮‍💨 I didn't realize this at the time, but this was my form of self-care. To prioritize my health, and to stop the abuse. This new feeling of freedom felt so foreign to me. It was almost scary. But, I knew I broke the cycle, and I felt like I could breathe again. 🫁

My Stress by NF speaks to the internal turmoil I felt during this time. (".. Internal turmoil?" I know it sounds dramatic, but this period of my life was.. Rough.)

.... So, what now? 🦗

🤷‍♀️ Why an apprenticeship?

I wanted to code professionally, and stumbled upon This Dot's apprentice program, which was geared towards women in tech. This felt like a good mix of getting support as a junior dev, but also exploring opportunities to help others in underrepresented groups. I felt hesitant about an apprenticeship at first. 😰 I felt embarrassed to go from a junior dev position to being an apprentice. Of course, the clouds of doubt started reigning over. What if I can't fulfill the job? What if I look stupid? But when I started at This Dot, that attitude changed REAL quick. I was welcomed with open arms by people who didn't even know me yet.

In the back of my mind, I felt... suspicious. Why are they being so nice? What are they buttering me up for? 🧈 My past experience wouldn't let me trust the positivity that I witnessed in this workspace. But in this new position, I had access to a whole new team, including senior engineers who had been through what I've been through and more. Not only was I able to work on coding projects with various clients - I was able to experience a whole new role in tech called DevRel (aka developer relations). And when I tell you that the work took off, IT 👏 TOOK 👏 OFF.

As an apprentice, I had the flexibility to try out different projects. Within DevRel, I was able to write blogs, create Twitter content, and host This Dot events. But most importantly, I worked with a team that treated me with respect. I was afraid to veer away from 100% coding because it was all I knew, but I gained so much fulfillment from writing technical content, and engaging with the dev community. I was openly curious about how to write better content, and asked ALL the questions! I felt like I was learning, contributing, and engaging with the dev community in some manner, and it felt like I won the jackpot. 🥳 There was no longer any doubt. There was no question that this is where I was meant to be.

I knew what it felt like to be respected at my job. I knew what it felt like to contribute something meaningful to my projects. (Side note: From the bottom of my heart, I hope you've celebrated your wins, and experienced this type of enthusiasm and growth in your career. If you haven't yet, don't worry - it'll come. ❤️ )

🗺 Where am I now?

After eight months in the apprentice program, I'm happy to write that I'll be starting my permanent full-time role as a Community Engineer 💻 at StackBlitz. This role will allow me to continue engaging with the community, and leading internal and external projects to improve the community's experience. This role encompasses tasks along the DevRel side that make me even more excited to be a part of this community. Like This Dot, StackBlitz has welcomed me with open arms, and I'm so excited to work with a great team. 🏅

📝 Tips I learned

1. Be Explicit 🗣

Nothing can harm a project or team more than ambiguity. Ambiguity can cause misunderstandings in objectives, delays in progress, and miscommunication in your team. Especially when you're starting out, be explicit in the support you need. Be explicit when you're outlining the work you're doing. When you're talking to your manager or mentor about professional goals, be explicit about what you want! Remember, we are not mind readers. 😊

2. Find Your A-Team 📣

There's no cookie-cutter outline in what this looks like. It all depends on what YOU need! Find a group of people who truly support you, whether it's your manager, a coworker, or a mentor outside of your company. Find the people who will celebrate your wins as their own. Find the people who won't be afraid to call you out when you're in the wrong. Find people who are invested in your growth just as much as you are. 🌱

3. Get Out of Your Head 🧠

When we're too inside of our heads, we may unintentionally inflate situations that make it harder to construct realistic resolutions. I find it so helpful (and therapeutic 💆🏻‍♀️ ) to write things out. Whether it's in my physical bullet journal, Notion, a sticky note, or just talking to someone - Getting the thoughts out of my head allowed me to understand the situation at hand, and outline what I needed to do next. Our minds are prime real estate 🏠 so choose wisely what you allow to live rent-free. 😉 (Admittedly, I allow this dog to live rent-free because he's so stinking adorable. 🐶 )

4. Show Empathy & Be Compassionate 🤗

These can be shown in big or small ways, and every bit matters. Sometimes that can be adding resilient tests, and writing code that other developers can easily understand and maintain. Sometimes, that can be contributing well-written documentation that's accessible to your user community. And sometimes it can look like asking someone how their day has been. My favorite way of doing this is celebrating wins, and giving kudos to others because when one of us wins, we all win. 🎉 We're humans, not machines! 🤖 So let's treat each other as such. 💜

🎬 Conclusion

I know this was a lengthy read, and I appreciate you taking the time to read about my journey! I'm very fortunate to have found people who support me and to be in a position to acknowledge my growth. I encourage "Code Newbies" to consider an apprenticeship as part of their developer journey. Kudos to This Dot for their evolving apprentice program, and a big "thank you" to StackBlitz for allowing me to continue my tech journey with them! 🚙

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

Susan Ma
@sukisupremo

Effective Communication Strategies Within The Software Development Organization

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were communicating effectively, only to realize later that the other person misunderstood what you were saying? Have you ever communicated with someone only to hear that they felt you provided way too much detail, or that you didn’t provide nearly enough detail? Communication in the workplace is how ideas, updates, directions, etc are transferred to others. Each party in a software development organization has differing needs and expectations when it comes to workplace communication. By learning to tailor your communication to meet the needs of each stakeholder, you can become a more effective communicator and achieve greater success within your organization. The requirements of various parties that you interact with in the workplace can vary wildly depending on several factors. Your awareness of these individualized communication preferences and how you can give each party what they want and need will impact your effectiveness in your daily activities, your perception by others, and even your upward mobility within the organization. That's the power of communication, and why it's so important to master effective communication strategies in the workplace! In this article, we'll explore the different types of stakeholders in a software development organization, the communication strategies that work best for each group, and how effective communication can help you advance your career in the industry. We'll start by discussing the difference between “communication” and “effective communication”, before diving into the different types of stakeholders in a software development organization. Then, we'll explore the communication strategies that work best for each group, and provide actionable tips for improving your communication skills. Communication vs. Effective Communication When it comes to communication, it's important to remember that the intended message is only effective if it's received and understood by the recipient, regardless of their background or level of familiarity with the topic. Effective communication is about sharing thoughts, ideas, opinions, knowledge, and data in a way that ensures that the message is received and understood by the recipient. With effective communication, the sender and receiver leave the exchange feeling satisfied. There is a shared understanding of what was intended to be transmitted by the sender. Stakeholder Types In any organization, you have many different types of parties involved in a software project. Let's group the parties involved in software development into three categories for the sake of clarity: - Development Team - This consists of individual contributors, project managers, scrum masters, QA testers, UX designers, UI designers, architects, etc. - Product Team - The product team is made up of a diverse group of individuals, including product owners, business analysts, architects, and more. - Executive Team - CTO, CEO, etc. Each of these parties requires a different type of communication, a different level, and has different needs from your interactions to allow you to provide value from what you are saying and to for them view you as an effective communicator. Let’s talk a bit about what each of these parties needs, and how you can interact with them in the most meaningful way possible. Development Team This is the most detailed version of the interaction. This group needs to be communicated with on the level of individual tickets and the details of those tickets. When interacting with the development team, it's important to focus on the nitty-gritty details of each task, ensuring that everything is sorted through meticulously. With this group, we will sort through specific implementation details. An example of interaction with someone from this group might look like this, “I am currently working on ticket 473, and trying to get the checkbox to behave correctly during testing. I have no blockers currently.” Product Team This group will be communicated with at the level of features and larger increments of work such as project milestones. This group is interested in chunks of a project, milestones, progress on the overall initiative, etc. An example of interaction with someone from this group might look like this, “The team is wrapping up development of the new Project X User Interface and will be moving to the implementation of the functionality next”. Executive Team This group is interested in the conversation at the highest levels of abstraction. Generally, they will be more concerned with things at the overall project level. When updating the executive team, it's important to provide high-level updates that summarize progress and focus on next steps. For example, you might say, 'We're making great progress on Showcase X and are on track to complete it soon. Next, we'll be shifting our attention to project Y.' Types of Communication What are some of the types of communication? It’s a great question. When you begin to study various communication styles, you will read about different personality types, and how those personalities interact with the world around them. You might hear things like aggressive, passive-aggressive, passive, and assertive communication styles. While understanding these can help you communicate effectively, we will focus on how different roles in a company require different levels of detail and specificity in their interactions. Your Natural Communication Style We all have a natural way that we prefer to communicate. Some are very direct and assertive. We might tend to be very to the point, with no filler, no fluff. Others might naturally tend to be more verbose, to fill in lots of details and context and information. Some naturally meet somewhere in the middle on the spectrum of detail vs direct higher-level type of communication. There is no right or wrong answer, but you must be aware of your natural tendencies in conversation, and know how to use those effectively, or tailor your communication style to a specific situation or audience. Benefits of Tailored Communication What are the benefits of tailored communication? The primary benefits of tailoring your communication to different stakeholders are that you can provide each person with what they want and need in a way that resonates with them. For instance, I once had to adapt my communication style when working with a highly detail-oriented developer who preferred a more granular level of communication. This eases the amount of effort required by the other party to understand you, and allows them to be more effective in taking your message forward. It increases the perception of your effectiveness, and credibility in their eyes as well. If people know that you are someone who can communicate with multiple parties with varying interests and needs, and do so effectively, you will be trusted with more responsibility, and be given more opportunities. Using Effective Communication To Advance Your Career As you can see, developing effective communication skills is a powerful way to advance your career in the software development industry. How have you seen effective communication impact your work? People who are seen as effective communicators have staying power in an organization. They are viewed as competent and necessary. They are given positions of authority and trusted to get things done. I remember that, when I was just starting out in software development, I struggled to communicate effectively with stakeholders at different levels of the organization. But over time, I learned the value of tailoring my communication to each person's unique needs, and it has paid off in my career in countless ways. Basic Strategies For Improving Your Communication Know your audience When preparing for a presentation or conversation, it's essential to consider your audience and tailor your communication style to their needs. What are some strategies you use to ensure your message is received and understood? Write notes in advance, when possible Draw an outline or even the bulk of what you need to deliver before the time comes. Even if you don’t ultimately use these notes directly, preparing them will help you to distill your thoughts and clarify your message, as well as review that they have the appropriate amount of detail for the intended audience. Practice your delivery Though you will not always be giving a speech, talking through what you plan to say will help you to see gaps, smooth the flow, and make sure that you are comfortable with the material you will be presenting or communicating. Conclusion In this article, we learned about the importance of effective communication, strategies for improving your communication, and the direct and indirect positive impacts these improvements can have on your effectiveness and value in the organization. We explored various strategies and approaches to improve communication. Development in this area can yield amazing results for you as you make the investment to improve your skills. We hope you enjoyed this article, and found it helpful. If you have any questions please feel free to join the discussions going on at starter.dev or on our Discord....

Apr 26, 2023

6 mins

GeneralSoftware Engineer

7 Tips to be a Successful Developer in a Remote Company

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, most companies were forced to go remote and millions of workers had to learn how to work from home. Two years later, a lot people now prefer the work from home option, and many job seekers are looking for remote-only companies to work for. For software developers, there are many advantages to working from home and still effectively working as a team to produce high quality results. But how can you be successful in a remote company? In this article, I will provide 7 tips on what it takes to be a successful developer in a remote company. Communication is key It is now more important than ever to communicate effectively with your team. Now that everyone is working from home instead of being in one physical office, you have to be very conscious to reach out to teammates and share your progress on a project. In a physical office, you are surrounded by other co-workers all day, which makes it easier to walk over to someone's office and share what you have been working on. It also makes it easier to have impromptu meetings with other team members throughout the day. But in a remote setting, it is very easy to become isolated and get carried away with work without reaching out to anyone all day. This becomes an issue for your team, because now they are no longer keeping up to date on the latest changes you have been contributing to the project. My tip would be to post periodic updates throughout the day of what you have been working on. If your company is using something like Slack or another chat server, make sure to post a detailed update on what you have been up to the past few hours. Here is an example of one of the status updates I would post to my team. Status update: - finished making changes to xyz case study and put it up for review - reviewed a couple of PRs - ran accessibility audits for the homepage and working on increasing the performance score I would usually post this in the middle of the day to update the team on what I have been working on. I also try to ask questions throughout the day to ensure that I don't get blocked on a particular issue for to long. This method of communication helps me stay connected with the team and helps my manager know where I am at in the project. Find a separate space in your home just for work When you are working in an office, there is a clear separation between work and home. This makes it easier to end your day and leave your work at the office. But with remote work, sometimes these lines between work and home become a little bit blurry. This is why it is important to designate a separate work space in your home. In my situation, I have a small desk in another room where I do all of my work. That space is only used Monday through Friday for work purposes. I have found that by creating a work space, it allows me to be in the moment and fully concentrate on my duties. Then at the end of the day, I logout out of everything and leave the work space just like I would leave a physical business. That has given me freedom to relax in my home when I am not working and fully recharge for the next day. I understand that everyone's living situation is different, and you might not have room for a designated work area. In those cases, do the best you can to carve out some space in your living situation just for work. The more you can do to separate home and business, the more productive you will be at work. Set consistent work hours When you are working in an office, you have set hours for when you are going to be there. It might be 9-5 or 8-3 with breaks throughout the day. But when you are working from home, it is very easy to work without a set schedule and put in more time outside of the standard work hours. This can quickly lead to burnout which is a huge issue within the developer community. It is really important to set a consistent work schedule so your team knows when you are available, and when you are off work. This also forces you to work within a time frame which will lead to better focus, time management and productivity. I have personally found that setting that time frame from 8-5 with breaks helps me structure my day better and get more done than if I had an open schedule. Take breaks throughout the day Developer health is another huge issue within the community. Many developers, including myself have gone for hours hunched over their computers trying to get something to work. In these situations, it is very easy to lose track of time and develop back, neck, shoulder, and eye problems. One of the key advantages of working from home is being able to take breaks and leave your work space. Take ten minute breaks throughout the day and make sure to walk around, stretch, go outside, and drink water. Taking breaks from the computer will give your body and brain a chance to rest and recharge. When I first started working remotely, I would be glued to the computer for hours at a time. But I quickly felt the negative health effects and started becoming more intentional about taking breaks. Now, I have developed a healthier work situation and can see the difference in the quality of work I am producing. Dress appropriately for important meetings We all enjoy the relaxed dress code that often accompanies working from home. In an office, you will typically be in a more work appropriate attire especially when it comes to meetings with clients. But when you are at home, it is very easy to work in some sweatpants and a t shirt. If you don't have any meetings that day, then coding in your casual attire is fine. But if you are meeting with clients or interviewing remotely, it is important to dress appropriately. Remember that it is still a business and you want to be as professional as possible, even in a remote setting. Avoid mixing personal tasks and work tasks When you are in an office, you don't worry about personal chores like doing laundry or taking the trash out. But when you are working from home, it is very easy to get distracted and mix personal tasks with work tasks. It is very important that while you are working, you are focused on work. Then during breaks, you can take care of personal items. In my situation, I make sure to finish up the task I was working on and then take a break to put a load of laundry on or take care of another personal chore. There are definitely times where something has come up and I will make sure to communicate that with the team so they know I will be unavailable for a certain amount of time. But just try to do the best that you can separating personal tasks and issues from your work tasks. Time management and structuring your day In order to work productively, it is important to plan out your day as best you can and structure your time accordingly. For example, as I am writing this blog today, I made sure to set aside time for writing the first draft, revising it and submitting it for review. During that time block, I am not focused on other PR's or other work responsibilities. That ensures I am focused 100% on writing a high quality article. Once I complete a large task, then I make sure to take a break, hydrate, walk around and eat something. That allows me to energize and gear up for the next task in my day. I found that breaking up my day into manageable tasks has provided me the opportunity to focus and produce good work. Conclusion Those are my 7 tips on what it takes to be a successful developer in a remote company. I encourage you to give each of those tips a try and see how it affects your work productivity....

May 16, 2022

7 mins

General

#StateOfAutomation - Simple Solutions for Complex Problems

🤔  What in the world is Automation? 😱  How can we utilize automation to improve our developer experience and productivity? 🤯  Is it possible to over-engineer automation? If you or your team have ever asked these questions, come dive into some of the talking points discussed at Modern Web's State of Automation event. In this article, I will review some of the major points brought up during this conversation, hosted by Tracy Lee (@ladyleet) and Matthew Pagan (@mastapegs) of This Dot Labs. Let's meet our panelists, and hear about what their teams have been working on! 👩‍💻  Alison Dowdney (@alisondowdney) Developer Advocate from Weaveworks - Weaveworks dropped an early release of Weave Gitops Core, a tool that’s backed by Flux, an open-source tool backed by CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). 🧑‍💻  Taylor Dolezal (@onlydole) Senior Developer Advocate from HashiCorp - Terraform, an open-source code software tool that enables you to safely create, change, and improve infrastructure, just hit 1.0 earlier this month! - Waypoint went to 0.4, which includes mutable deployments and makes it easier to work with Kubernetes. 🧑‍💻  Zan Markan (@zmarkan) Developer Advocate from CircleCI - CircleCI has acquired Vamp, a release orchestration tool. - They’ve also released new features like enhanced ARM support, as well as Dynamic Config, which allows users to use jobs and workflows to not only execute the work, but determine the work they want to run. 👩‍💻  Tracy Miranda (@tracymiranda) Executive Director from Continuous Delivery Foundation - Continuous Delivery Foundation hosted cdCon, which supports the tech community by helping organizations focused on tackling the diversity and inclusion gap. 🔑  Key Takeaway Points - As we work through the pandemic, and see all the workplace and cultural changes happening, we see that people are really prioritizing automation to help with distributed work and burnout. 🔥 - Concepts and platforms such as GitOps and Kubernetes Projects have helped us expand automation outside of the coding realm for tasks such as simplifying the interaction between communities. - Automation helps with the technical aspect of our workflows, but it might not necessarily solve human or process problems in an organization. - It _is_ possible to over-engineer automation! Maintainability is so important to keep in mind to make sure we've created a sustainable workflow for our future teams. - And no, Jenkins is not dead. Far from it. 😉 🧠  Resource Recommendations - 📚  Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim - 📚  Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal - 💻  Perspective API: Free API that uses machine learning to help mitigate toxicity and ensure healthy dialogue online. - 💻  kind: Tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container “nodes”. 🙋‍♀️  Have any questions or points to share? Use #StateOfAutomation on Twitter and talk with us! 📺  View the replay here for fun stories, great tips, and faces to names! 🤝...

Jun 28, 2021

3 mins

Web Development

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

As web developers, we're often working with data from external sources like APIs we don't control or user inputs submitted to our backends. We can't always rely on this data to take the form we expect, and we can encounter unexpected errors when it deviates from expectations. But with the Zod library, we can define what our data ought to look like and parse the incoming data against those defined schemas. This lets us work with that data confidently, or to quickly throw an error when it isn't correct. Why use Zod? TypeScript is great for letting us define the shape of our data in our code. It helps us write more correct code the first time around by warning us if we are doing something we shouldn't. But TypeScript can't do everything for us. For example, we can define a variable as a string or a number, but we can't say "a string that starts with user_id_ and is 20 characters long" or "an integer between 1 and 5". There are limits to how much TypeScript can narrow down our data for us. Also, TypeScript is a tool for us developers. When we compile our code, our types are not available to the vanilla JavaScript. JavaScript can't validate that the data we actually use in our code matches what we thought we'd get when we wrote our TypeScript types unless you're willing to manually write code to perform those checks. This is where we can reach for a tool like Zod. With Zod, we can write data schemas. These schemas, in the simplest scenarios, look very much like TypeScript types. But we can do more with Zod than we can with TypeScript alone. Zod schemas let us create additional rules for data parsing and validation. A 20-character string that starts with user_id_? It's z.string().startsWith('user_id_').length(20). An integer between 1 and 5 inclusive? It's z.number().int().gte(1).lte(5). Zod's primitives give us many extra functions to be more specific about *exactly* what data we expect. Unlike TypeScript, Zod schemas aren't removed on compilation to JavaScript—we still have access to them! If our app receives some data, we can verify that it matches the expected shape by passing it to your Zod schema's parse function. You'll either get back your data in exactly the shape you defined in your schema, or Zod will give you an error to tell you what was wrong. Zod schemas aren't a replacement for TypeScript; rather, they are an excellent complement. Once we've defined our Zod schema, it's simple to derive a TypeScript type from it and to use that type as we normally would. But when we really need to be sure our data conforms to the schema, we can always parse the data with our schema for that extra confidence. Defining Data Schemas Zod schemas are the variables that define our expectations for the shape of our data, validate those expectations, and transform the data if necessary to match our desired shape. It's easy to start with simple schemas, and to add complexity as required. Zod provides different functions that represent data structures and related validation options, which can be combined to create larger schemas. In many cases, you'll probably be building a schema for a data object with properties of some primitive type. For example, here's a schema that would validate a JavaScript object representing an order for a pizza: ` Zod provides a number of primitives for defining schemas that line up with JavaScript primitives: string, number, bigint, boolean, date, symbol, undefined, and null. It also includes primitives void, any, unknown, and never for additional typing information. In addition to basic primitives, Zod can define object, array, and other native data structure schemas, as well as schemas for data structures not natively part of JavaScript like tuple and enum. The documentation contains considerable detail on the available data structures and how to use them. Parsing and Validating Data with Schemas With Zod schemas, you're not only telling your program what data should look like; you're also creating the tools to easily verify that the incoming data matches the schema definitions. This is where Zod really shines, as it greatly simplifies the process of validating data like user inputs or third party API responses. Let's say you're writing a website form to register new users. At a minimum, you'll need to make sure the new user's email address is a valid email address. For a password, we'll ask for something at least 8 characters long and including one letter, one number, and one special character. (Yes, this is not really the best way to write strong passwords; but for the sake of showing off how Zod works, we're going with it.) We'll also ask the user to confirm their password by typing it twice. First, let's create a Zod schema to model these inputs: ` So far, this schema is pretty basic. It's only making sure that whatever the user types as an email is an email, and it's checking that the password is at least 8 characters long. But it is *not* checking if password and confirmPassword match, nor checking for the complexity requirements. Let's enhance our schema to fix that! ` By adding refine with a custom validation function, we have been able to verify that the passwords match. If they don't, parsing will give us an error to let us know that the data was invalid. We can also chain refine functions to add checks for our password complexity rules: ` Here we've chained multiple refine functions. You could alternatively use superRefine, which gives you even more fine grained control. Now that we've built out our schema and added refinements for extra validation, we can parse some user inputs. Let's see two test cases: one that's bound to fail, and one that will succeed. ` There are two main ways we can use our schema to validate our data: parse and safeParse. The main difference is that parse will throw an error if validation fails, while safeParse will return an object with a success property of either true or false, and either a data property with your parsed data or an error property with the details of a ZodError explaining why the parsing failed. In the case of our example data, userInput2 will parse just fine and return the data for you to use. But userInput1 will create a ZodError listing all of the ways it has failed validation. ` ` We can use these error messages to communicate to the user how they need to fix their form inputs if validation fails. Each error in the list describes the validation failure and gives us a human readable message to go with it. You'll notice that the validation errors for checking for a valid email and for checking password length have a lot of details, but we've got three items at the end of the error list that don't really tell us anything useful: just a custom error of Invalid input. The first is from our refine checking if the passwords match, and the second two are from our refine functions checking for password complexity (numbers and special characters). Let's modify our refine functions so that these errors are useful! We'll add our own error parameters to customize the message we get back and the path to the data that failed validation. ` Now, our error messages from failures in refine are informative! You can figure out which form fields aren't validating from the path, and then display the messages next to form fields to let the user know how to remedy the error. ` By giving our refine checks a custom path and message, we can make better use of the returned errors. In this case, we can highlight specific problem form fields for the user and give them the message about what is wrong. Integrating with TypeScript Integrating Zod with TypeScript is very easy. Using z.infer<typeof YourSchema> will allow you to avoid writing extra TypeScript types that merely reflect the intent of your Zod schemas. You can create a type from any Zod schema like so: ` Using a TypeScript type derived from a Zod schema does *not* give you any extra level of data validation at the type level beyond what TypeScript is capable of. If you create a type from z.string.min(3).max(20), the TypeScript type will still just be string. And when compiled to JavaScript, even that will be gone! That's why you still need to use parse/safeParse on incoming data to validate it before proceeding as if it really does match your requirements. A common pattern with inferring types from Zod schemas is to use the same name for both. Because the schema is a variable, there's no name conflict if the type uses the same name. However, I find that this can lead to confusing situations when trying to import one or the other—my personal preference is to name the Zod schema with Schema at the end to make it clear which is which. Conclusion Zod is an excellent tool for easily and confidently asserting that the data you're working with is exactly the sort of data you were expecting. It gives us the ability to assert at runtime that we've got what we wanted, and allows us to then craft strategies to handle what happens if that data is wrong. Combined with the ability to infer TypeScript types from Zod schemas, it lets us write and run more reliable code with greater confidence....

Nov 15, 2024

7 mins

JavaScriptZod

Let's innovate together!

We're ready to be your trusted technical partners in your digital innovation journey.

Whether it's modernization or custom software solutions, our team of experts can guide you through best practices and how to build scalable, performant software that lasts.

From Coding Lonely to DevRel Ceremony - My Apprenticeship Journey

🐣 Where it all began..

🤷‍♀️ Why an apprenticeship?

🗺 Where am I now?

📝 Tips I learned

1. Be Explicit 🗣

2. Find Your A-Team 📣

3. Get Out of Your Head 🧠

4. Show Empathy & Be Compassionate 🤗

🎬 Conclusion

Susan Ma

You might also like

Effective Communication Strategies Within The Software Development Organization

7 Tips to be a Successful Developer in a Remote Company

#StateOfAutomation - Simple Solutions for Complex Problems

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Effective Communication Strategies Within The Software Development Organization

7 Tips to be a Successful Developer in a Remote Company

#StateOfAutomation - Simple Solutions for Complex Problems

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation