A dumping ground for miscellany; the amusing, the thought-provoking, the otherwise memorable.
“And, to be honest, if I could be uploaded tomorrow into some AI version of the internet or become a nascent Mars colonist, I would reject both options as morally, ethically wrong. You cannot trash an entire planet, kill billions of organisms (often for no reason at all), and then simply take up elsewhere with no change in thinking or accountability.”
– Jeff VanderMeer, Redefining Utopia and Dystopia or Post-Apoc
Why Hiring for “Culture Fit” Hurts Your Culture:
Mathias Meyer’s discussion of “culture fit” works with too broad of a definition (e.g., ping-pong may be an instrument or reflection of your culture, but it isn’t culture itself) but manages to make a couple of important points. First (and most important) is the idea that relying on the “culture fit” question is usually an indication of an exclusive culture – and that you’re using it to keep out people who would disrupt the status quo. Which leads to the second critical point, that an over-reliance on that question suggests a toxic environment that is too busy being insular and self-congratulatory, at the expense of questioning its assumptions.
Meyer uses a lot of examples that involve drinking and bars, but I’d say that you should closer to the office first. How does the team engage with the work itself? With each other? When something fails, does it turn into a witch hunt? Or a learning opportunity? Are you using “culture fit” to find more people that are just like you? Or are you building an inclusive team with diverse opinions and talents?
Angular is Easy. React is Hard.:
Eric Clemmons’ perspective on the perception (myth?) that React is easier to reason about and therefore easier overall than AngularJS. Among his main criticisms of React: that it’s only solving the view problem, that you need to “bring your own architecture”, that there subtle bugs may be introduced by JSX, and that confusion around props vs. state can lead to tightly-coupled components.
Ultimately Clemmons’ opinion is that AngularJS is better for prototyping while React is a better fit for “universal” applications. He admits though that all his points may be irrelevant in the near future as newer versions of these frameworks come online. His conclusions seem even-handed and worthy of consideration (though I think he under-states how useful AngularJS can be when properly applied).
kategavino:
Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
What Is Code? If You Don’t Know, You Need to Read This:
They will do their standups. And after the standups, they will go off and work in the integrated development environments and write their server-side JavaScript and their client-side JavaScript. Then they will run some tests and check their code into the source code repository, and the continuous integration server will perform tests and checks, and if all goes well, it will deploy the code—perhaps even in August, in some cloud or another. They insist that they’ll do this every day, continuous releases.
Read every word. Every one of those 38,000 goddamn words. Even if it takes you 6000 hours.
Essential reading from (surprise!) John Allspaw. Not a new post by any means, but so relevant you’ll think it was published yesterday. It’s a great reminder that what puts the “senior” in “senior engineer” is not knowing 10 languages, or having done 10,000 deploys – it’s having maturity, and perspective, and caring and concern for the peers on your team. Or as Allspaw puts it:
Being able to write a Bloom Filter in Erlang, or write multi-threaded C in your sleep is insufficient. None of that matters if no one wants to work with you. Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes.
Seriously. File this one for later and come back to it once a year.
How we built the new gocardless.com:
Sounds like there are quite a few wins in there. The most intriguing bit is around using Express only to render the known routes/pages, generate them statically, and then serve the whole thing out of S3.
“These apps aren’t packaged and deployed through stores, they’re just websites that took all the right vitamins.”
– Alex Russell, Progressive Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul
De Stijl: How necessary are var, let, and const?:
Wherein Reg Braithwaite takes a close look at JavaScript’s variable keywords, their semantics, and what’s gained by having them… by seeing what the functions would look like without them. A useful thought experiment.
Nicholas Zakas writes this post underscoring the reasons to emphasize only checking in code that you understand:
In my current role at Box, I’m famous for repeating the phrase, “no accidental standards.” We don’t accept that things are “the way” just because they pop up in a couple of places. When we see this happening, we stop, discuss it, and either codify it as “the way” or disallow it. We then update code appropriately before it gets too far. Through automation, code reviews, and code workshops, we are able to keep an eye on the code and make sure we’re all on the same page.