Yesterday I got the news of the suicide of a brilliant actor Sushant Singh Rajput. The reason for his suicide turned out is that he was going through a rough patch from the past few years. I tried to be okay all day but I couldn’t. I don’t know if I am startled by the incident or the reason behind that. Yes, I am disturbed by the rationale. So I decided to pen down my thoughts on it, otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep.

So here I am, it’s 3:02 AM (June, 15) in my room, lights off, laptop’s night mode on, thinking why do I get so affected by this news. The major reason behind this is the opinions on depression and mental health from the people around me.

Why am I writing this now? Unfortunately, it is perhaps the only time people will take suicide, depression and mental health seriously. Hence, I think this is the perfect time to share this with you all.

Before you start reading this, I want to share one quote with you:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I’ve said it unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense” — Buddha

So whatever you’re going to read below is my perception, feel free to disagree and there are a lot of things I’ve written are debatable. Take only the things which you like.

Let’s Start

Today I want you to understand the difference between Emotional Wounds and Physical Wounds so that we can dig deep and find out the real mental state of a person who is suicidal and going through an extreme stress situation. So this whole article will revolve around one comparison.

i.e. EMOTIONAL HEALTH v/s PHYSICAL HEALTH

AND,

1. Is there a difference between mental health and emotional health, if yes, then what?
2. Why do we need to emphasise more on emotional health than physical health?
3. The mindset behind ending your own life.
4. Is there a solution?

tl;dr:

Before coming to the main one, let’s see Emotional Health vs Mental Health,

Q: Is there a difference between mental health and emotional health, if yes, then what?

In simple words, Mental Health as the name suggests it is connected to the brain/mind. If you’ve seen the movie “Lage Raho Munna Bhai”, then you can easily connect with this scene where the lead character starts to see the spirit of “Mahatma Gandhi” everywhere due to chemical imbalance in his brain. This can be natural or due to some external factors. (like family conditions, intense mental focus on something for a very long time without any break).

However, on the contrary, Emotional Health deals with matters of the heart. The issues that develop more often when people have to deal with traumatic or negative life events. People often have different symptoms when they struggle with emotional or mental health issues.

And people can suffer from both at the same time. So where we need to focus. Which one is more important to take care of? Both are crucial but which should be on more priority? Mind dominates Heart or it’s the other way around. Let’s take an example of this to get the answer.

Let’s say there’s a girl who is in love with a guy and her mind knows that this guy is not right for her. Their families are against their relationship, there’s no compatibility, her brain knows all these calculations however her mind will soon surrender to her heart. That’s the power of the heart. You can train your mind to control your emotions however it doesn’t work always. So it’s substantial to train our heart as well with our mind to keep ourselves healthy mentally and emotionally.

Q: Why do we need to emphasise more on emotional health than physical health?

Okay, This is an integral part of this article, bear with me on this. I’ll try to explain this as simple as possible. First, We need to realize that it’s not all possible to know what a person is going through. However, we do compare some time. Mental or emotional health is not like physical health we cannot get an idea by seeing a person on how strong he is mentally and emotionally. There’s no device invented yet to know the emotional or mental pressure.

Comparing/Judging a person for his emotional and mental abilities is like comparing a strong wrestler with a thin person on based on the ability to pick a weight/dumble and in this case, even weights of dumble are different. Life doesn’t give dumbles based on the capability/strength of the lifter. All we see is physical health but no-one knows what’s going on inside the mind of a physically healthy person.

How can someone even think of suicide?

Here we need to understand how Emotional Wounds are more dangerous than Physical Wounds? And how it leads to that big decision?

Let’s try to understand this with an example, let’s say your arm is wounded, it’s bleeding. Your mind will know that we need to take care of this. Your heart will know that it is dangerous and your body needs to get rid of this and it gives your mind a signal that it has to heal. Then your mind will take measures like calling a doctor or doing first aid or taking medicines. And then mind follows the ongoing process, whether those medicines are working or not, does your body needs rest or do you need to consult another doctor and all, this process goes on until your arm is fully recovered.

The problem when your heart is wounded:

Now let’s assume some tragedy happened and your heart is wounded, Now your central system got affected. In this case, even if you’re mentally sound, your heart will not allow your brain to start working on the healing part. It will never signal your mind to even think about calling a doctor or taking medicine.

Like I said before, your heart always dominates your brain and your brain surrenders. You don’t feel like doing anything. You want this world to be stopped at that moment. You don’t feel like sharing anything with anyone, sometimes because of trust issues or sometimes it’s just that you think nobody can understand you. Nobody can feel your pain.

Which is true, nobody (not even your family, true friends), literally nobody can feel your pain or can share your pain.

Do you remember this scene from the movie Kabir Singh?

And it is very true, suffering is very personal. But that doesn’t mean nobody can help you. Nobody can feel or share your pain however people can help you to get out of that zone.

The flow of changing mindset:

So now when your heart is not signalling at all, you become a pessimist, experience worthlessness. 👇

With that worthless feeling, you start to overthink about things. Which starts affecting your eating and sleeping patterns. You’ll isolate yourself.👇

Impacted eating habits will disturb your physical health, you’ll feel a lack of energy and disturbed sleeping patterns will affect your mind. 👇

Now your mind is losing power to think, making decisions and facing difficulties in concentrating, remembering things. 👇

Now your body and mind are at their weakest zones. You have already lost interest in your regular activities at this time. And you’re about to lose hope. 👇

This is the last step, you lost your hope. You’re fed up of crying and those panic attacks. Thoughts of suicide have started. You may have been thinking about it for a long period. 👇

And this step is very quick to call and it just takes 5 to 10 minutes, literally no thinking involved. Suicide Plan to Attempt. And everything is over! 🥀

What we need to understand is especially in India, we don’t give much attention to terms like stress, anxiety, depression. These are still a taboo in our country.

We take physical health so seriously but mental health not enough.

So coming back to this incident of Sushant Singh Rajput, 34 years old, successful, intelligent, rich, healthy, happy? Now many people may wonder that he had such life which million people wish for, if you got this question in your mind, please do read this article again, you probably missed the point.

as Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

This incident taught us not to leave each other alone, not to be hard on ourselves. No matter how popular, intelligent, healthy, rich you are, situations or circumstance may go wrong, people you get along with can also be wrong, life can be too harsh sometimes. We learnt that self-worth is not about the size of the car, the bank balance or brand of your clothing.

Q: Is there a solution?

Let’s see,

Having someone willing to listen and ask concerned questions can make all the difference. This is it.

We are living in an era of social media, Everyone is flaunting their lives, luxuries, and how happy they are. Sometimes it’s obvious one get jealous and start hating his own life. And in this busy life, there is no one to talk to regarding mental health. Everyone in this world has to fight their own battles.

If I have to give a quick (1 line) solution to this, that would be, “The moment you feel that something is wrong, go to your family. In the end, the family is the only option which can save you from this”

And if you’re getting suicidal thoughts, pick up your phone and call your family. Remember this scene from 3 idiots, this works! Just imagine what would happen to your family’s smile when they’ll see your dead body.

Depression is real. The world needs to accept it, not stigmatize it.

Depression, anxiety, mental stress these are real disease and 100% curable, if you think it’s troubling you, getting medical help makes sense.
Attaching one Hindi video, on symptoms, causes & treatment

On a lighter note, if you want to go deep into Emotional Health and Physical Health, Do watch this 👇 ENJOY 😀!

Please treat depression like we treat physical illness, Don’t say things you wouldn’t tell someone with a physical illness like cheer up or smile or why are you like this always. You can make that case worse by saying this.

I wish I could have read this kind of article 2 or 3 years back but anyways I figured this much in a very hard way. I hope this will help someone somewhere in their life. A lot of people don’t face this in their life so this is not for everyone, don’t overthink that it may happen to you someday somewhere.

The core idea of writing this bit so that we can reprogram our mind to accept the idea of emotional wellbeing. Because our mind tells us that the pain we cannot see is the pain that does not exist or is not important.

And be kind to people because we cannot see this pain but it exists and people generally hide it behind laughs and smiles.

Clap & Follow

The original article is here. Thank you and God bless you. If you found this article insightful, feel free to give some rounds of applause if you don’t mind.

You can also follow me on Medium (Ashmeet Sehgal) for more insightful articles you may find helpful. You can also follow me on Twitter (@ashmeetsehgal)

You must have heard this at least once if you’re from the IT industry that making the transition from QA or some other technical role to a software developer can be extremely difficult. And actually a lot of people want to do that, discipline/domain change from QA/Support to Software Developer. If you are one of them, this article is for you.

I made this transition myself, So I thought of sharing some points which helped me in this journey and might be helpful for you as well. In this post, I‘ll share with you what I have experienced and the lessons I learned, that might help you in your journey. I hope something in this post resonates with you and adds value to your life.

Beginning

I started programming at my college. I did some freelancing work / developed websites for different companies. Worked for a startup as a PHP developer. After that, I got placed from my college in an MNC.

In that company, I started my journey with learning technologies/frameworks like selenium, appium, cucumber, and various automation frameworks. Then there was a turning point when I got an opportunity to work on a framework called Galen Framework, which is used for creative automation. When I started working on it in 2016, it was pretty new at that time, there was no detailed documentation, mostly people were not aware of it. After 3 months of R&D, I made a Javascript automation framework on top of it. In those 3 months, I developed an interest in Javascript and this is how I made my bridge to a development role. This was my first step towards learning Javascript.

Learning

It is hard to learn anything at first because often you get confused in the middle. Don’t feel bad it happens to everyone so choose one of the programming languages and stick with it until you feel comfortable and never give up.

I started with some of the online courses from Lynda, Udemy, FrontendMasters, Pluralsight, and youtube and did assignments that came along with courses. Practised on freeCodeCamp, codewars, w3Schools. Read books like “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide” by David Flanagan and “JavaScript: The Good Parts” by Douglas Crockford & Participated in Hackathons. I spent a lot of time learning Javascript and started exploring some libraries like handlebar and react. However, I had PHP programming experience earlier, which somehow helped me because I could relate things. Its always good to have a secondary programming language experience so you can relate things and understand it better.

Things which helped me during this phase and still helping me:

1. Start from the basics. Start reading books, at least ONE.
2. Avoid (STOP) looking for answers in StackOverflow, or Don’t directly jump to answers, instead try to read things around the problem.
3. Start looking for the BEST solution instead of an easy solution, try to read all possible solutions.

The Struggle

Even though I was working on Javascript on top of automation framework, I wasn’t getting any opportunity to work as a developer for any project. As they say in IT industry “Once you have a role within a company, people tend to always see you like that particular role, regardless of your skill set or how you grow.”

In the software development world, in particular, there is usually a sharp distinction between software developers and testers (or QA).

Because of this bias, coming into a new company as a software developer is often easier than transitioning to a software development role from being a tester or other position. This can be extremely frustrating — especially if you’ve outgrown your previous role.

You will have to be patient, and realize that although it will take time for perceptions to change, they eventually will.

The more you can involve yourself in the software development side and take on more programming tasks, the more other people will start to see you in the new role.

Sometimes, though, you may have to move to a completely different company to escape the box you’ve been put into.

Opportunity

You might have to make your own opportunities. My first piece of advice to you would be to go ahead and make your goal known as widely as possible. Let your coworkers know that you are aspiring to move into development.

Ask for a meeting with your manager, and frankly tell them that you’d like to move into a software development role and that you are willing to do whatever it takes to get there. When you talk about this goal with your manager, make sure you discuss how your testing background will benefit the company when you eventually move into a programmer role.

Talk about the benefits your company will gain from you making the transition.

The more it is known that you want to move into a software development role, the more you’ll start to chip away at the bias people might have about keeping you in your current role, so don’t be afraid to openly talk about it.

When you do have this conversation with your manager, see if you can get a list of requirements or a course you can take that will move you from your current role to one working as a software developer.

If you can nail down a list of things you need to learn or milestones you need to achieve, you can create a much more solid case for making the transition, when you are ready.

I’ve used this exact technique, so my manager knew that he has a potential resource, So next time when my project needed a developer with handlebar experience (there was no handlebar experienced resource available in the project), instead of taking resource from outside, he gave me that opportunity. That's how I got my first project as a Software developer.

During that project tenure, I got a chance to showcase my potential. I implemented the modules with proper design patterns and best practices. After that project, I got selected into a react.js project as a software developer. And meanwhile, they changed my discipline/domain officially.

Since then I am working as a Software Developer.

Conclusion

If you are thinking about changing roles, then one of the key pieces of advice is to prepare ahead of time, work out areas and tasks that you can work on before actually making the role change to try and make it easier for the first few months in your transition.

Having reached the end of this article, I’m sure you would have learned something here. Keep learning, keep improving your skills, keep looking for opportunities and making your own and you’ll get what you are after.

Clap & Follow

If you found this article insightful, feel free to give some rounds of applause if you don’t mind. The original blog is here.

You can also follow me on Medium (Ashmeet Sehgal) for more insightful articles you may find helpful. You can also follow me on Twitter (@ashmeetsehgal)

Too often I see developers and QA people manually doing repetitive, annoying tasks. Testing is one such thing. When you deploy, do you verify it’s actually running? To check that, you have to open the browser, log in to the site, click around and see whether you got the expected results. Boring! I wish there would be some “robot” who does this all for us!

A few days back I then saw a feed on my LinkedIn mentioning Selenium, Node and a project called Nightwatch. That caught my attention and I quickly jumped in to give it a try.

And believe me, this is pretty AWESOME. I was totally impressed. So Let’s start with basics,

So what is Nightwatch?

Nightwatch is an automated testing framework for web applications and websites, written in Node.js and using the W3C WebDriver API (formerly Selenium WebDriver.)

It is a complete browser (End-to-End) testing solution which aims to simplify the process of setting up Continuous Integration and writing automated tests. Nightwatch can also be used for writing Node.js unit tests.

The Setup

Follow the installation instructions on the official Nightwatch page about installing

• Node and NPM
• Nightwatch
• Selenium server

Once you have everything, you can start creating your test specs. Here’s how it looks like.

You basically define your tests within a Node module:

module.exports = { 
"My test case": function(browser) {
  // control the browser
 }
}

Under the hood, the Nightwatch test runner communicates with the Selenium server over the Selenium WebDriver Wire protocol.

What Can/Should You Test?

There are two types of testing which you can do with this setup:

1. Functional testing
2. Regression testing

Functional testing is the type of testing which tries to see if your website conforms with all of its requirements. Usually, this means implementing tests that make sure it has all of the features required.

For example, if the client wants a login form, you could write a test to check that when you’re logged in, your name is visible on the web page.

The other type of testing is Regression Testing. This is done to make sure the website you developed and tested before still works the same way after it has changed. This is especially useful when clients can edit parts of their website that could potentially cause functionality errors.

For example, you might write a test to make sure that a page has the correct meta tags and information.

So here are some points I found, Why you should consider Nightwatch?

- Clean syntax
The simple but powerful syntax which enables you to write tests very quickly, using only Javascript (Node.js) and CSS or XPath selectors.
- Built-in test runner
Built-in command-line test runner which can run the tests either sequentially or in parallel, together, by the group, tags or single. Grunt support is built-in.
- Selenium server
Controls the Selenium standalone server automatically in a separate child process; can be disabled if Selenium runs on another host.
- Cloud services support
Works with cloud testing providers, such as SauceLabs and BrowserStack.
- CSS & XPath support
Either CSS or XPath selectors can be used to locate and verify elements on the page or execute commands.
- Continuous Integration support
JUnit XML reporting is built-in so you can integrate your tests in your build process with systems such as TeamCity, Jenkins, Hudson, etc.
- Easy to extend
Flexible command and assertion framework which makes it easy to extend to implement your application-specific commands and assertions.

Conclusion:

I tried some single tests, parallel tests with BrowserStack and it works beautifully. I liked it, It is open source. Pretty easy to set up. All in all worth a try.

Feel free to check the code here.

Thanks for reading…

If you found this article insightful, feel free to give some rounds of applause if you don’t mind. The original blog is here.

You can also follow me on Medium (Ashmeet Sehgal) for more insightful articles you may find helpful. You can also follow me on Twitter (@ashmeetsehgal)