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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 21, 2023
> Hey hey! Today's missive continues exploring the space of JavaScript and mobile application development.
> By this point, I assume everyone is a capable programmer—their experience, skill, and focus will vary, but everyone is capable.[9] Therefore, I’m not interested in assessing how well someone rehearsed or memorized questions focused on algorithms or data structures, so common in technical interviews, and largely irrelevant to our day-to-day work.[10] I’m also not going to time them, supervise them so they don’t cheat, or force them to use an online tool like this is an academic exam. Engineers who have been working professionally, especially ones with strong professional networks, will simply not submit themselves to this type of interview process.
> I want to treat people professionally. I want the candidate to be comfortable, to use the tools they are accustomed to, and to have the assignment be a reflection of the quality of their professional work. Consequently, the assignment is practical and modelled on the types of distributed systems and IoT problems we work on every day. Almost every candidate finds the assignment interesting and enjoyable.[11] If they don’t, this team is not the right fit. The assignment itself is not difficult, but it does involve many trade-offs that demonstrate expertise and engineering judgement.
> Being a Staff+ engineer can leave you feeling overwhelmed with duties that may sometimes fall completely outside of your perceived remit. What practices can mitigate these instances?
> I just finished watching “Local-first Software” by Peter Van Hardenberg and loved it!
> He talks about changing the paradigm we’re currently in where a program runs in the cloud and we look at it when we’re online, to one where the program runs on the device in our hands and we send data to the cloud for “durability or accessibility”. In other words, leverage the cloud without being dependent on it.
> It almost sounds like a form of resilient design (i.e. progressive enhancement) if you think about it — the cloud as an optional, layered enhancement of your application. Now that’s a paradigm shift!
> So here’s to you, make - quirks and all. You may not be perfect, but you’re pretty darn close. Thank you for being the tool that I never knew I needed, and for making my life as a programmer so much easier and more enjoyable.
> You’ve spent hours reading, and a seed of an idea has germinated in your mind. You fire up your favorite text editor, plant it down, and spend a couple hours letting the idea grow out. You’ve finished! You are about to publish your freshly-grown post on the web when you get that sinking feeling in your gut: something’s missing…
> You scan over the post. Is anything wrong? Nope: argument is solid, formatting is A-Ok. But wait… what’s that?
> Where are all the links?
> No links, no game. (It is the web you are publishing to, after all.) Sighing, you stumble around with Google for a bit before giving up. Maybe some other time. If only there were a better way…
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