The Programmer's Hangout - Veksen Q&A

veksen is answering Elliott's Question:

Question: If you could travel back in time and give a younger Veksen one piece of career advice, what would it be?

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veksen: Spend more time on fundamentals of programming, language agnostic: data structures, basic algorithms, databases in general

veksen is answering botus's Question:

Question: Whats the most obscure open source project you've worked on?

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veksen: To be fair I don't think I've ever worked on a super obscure open source project, perhaps my weirdest open source work/contributions were pull requests/issues to very small repositories that were very core to the app I was working on at the time

veksen is answering shan's Question:

Question: Which es6 feature do you dislike in production code?

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veksen: I generally dislike overly zealous enforcement of linters on ES features, like useless object destructuring. Other than that, I see a trend from newer developers to turn everything into almost unreadable one liners, making it very hard for junior developers to read and contribute back. "Smart" code is no bueno.

veksen is answering Toby Larone's Question:

Question: You mentioned you've worked on your own startup as well as helping others get off the ground. What is one piece of advice you'd give to anyone here that is thinking about starting their own tech business?

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veksen: I think a lot of people getting started in tech startups/business compare themselves to giants and don't understand the power they have to be small: you have the power to move much faster, take blunt decisions, take relatively safe risks, compared to giants that don't have the opportunity to move at your speed, no matter the money. You can by yourself challenge large companies and build much better products than they do. Other than that, I see a lot of small startups spread themselves left and right and waste time on useless features, focus on your limited time and get that MVP out, get it tested, get feedback early, talk about it as much as possible!

veksen is answering DresLeches's Question:

Question: when is it too early to leave a job?

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veksen: I don't think it's ever too "early" to leave a job. Perhaps avoid jumping jobs (less than a year) multiple times as it will look very bad on your resume. But other than that, if you're not happy, don't ruin yourself in a job that isn't for you.

veksen is answering Plastic's Question:

Question: How'd you find your way to TPH?

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veksen: Lana is to blame for that, I was in another programming server and people kept on referencing "the other server", TPH ended up being the other server

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veksen is answering PHOENiX's Question:

Question: Any advice on getting a job or interviews?

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veksen: Focus on your skills and becoming a better developer, less on the process of getting a job. The market is highly favourable (at the moment!), we need qualified developers! Make sure your resume is clean and informative, keep your LinkedIn updated and don't be scared to connect with recruiters, they can bring you places, and bring you on top of the resume stacks. They might even get you a much better salary than you could have imagined! (it was the case for me).

veksen is answering Exouxas's Question:

Question: What future technologies are you looking forward to?

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veksen: I'm really looking forward more "stable" frameworks/platforms to handle the boring parts of building applications. I'm seeing way too much time/money spent on features that are needed everywhere, from emails, notifications, authentication, etc etc

veksen is answering HalfOf2's Question:

Question: how do I make UIs that don't totally suck, or look like they were made in 2001

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veksen: Start with getting inspired, don't be afraid to copy bits and pieces of what works. In general, just like anything, to get good at building UIs, you'd naturally need to build a lot of UIs, there is not magic process to it. Make sure you grab a modern design software (Like Figma, XD, Sketch), they are much faster than trying to move HTML/CSS around until you're happy.

veksen is answering fridge777's Question:

Question: Do you think WebAssembly will kill JS?

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veksen: No in the near future as least, I must say I'm quite far from the WASM trend, but until it feels stable and there are enough resources to get started with it, I'm not seeing it getting popular in the near future (1-3 years). I think we must ask ourselves of the need for WASM at the moment. Is it for the speed of it? Until it does something that JS cannot do at the moment, or is much efficient, JS/TS developers are probably not interested in switching to a new technology.

veksen is answering Toby Larone's Question:

Question: After 7 years of professional experience with web UI's, are there any design trends you'd like to see make a come back? Where do you see design trends heading in the next 5 years?

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veksen: I think it's slowly happening, but we're slowly seeing companies get a lot more bold with design, neon colors, animations, etc. Those used to be exclusively used by those trendy ad agencies, but we would never see them in the real world. We had a few years of very boring "boxxy" layouts, and I'm glad we're going past this. It's a very good question and I'd probably need to put more time in answering it

veksen is answering kenndel's Question:

Question: What is an effective way to motivate a junior engineer doing front end work who thinks that front end is "beneath" backend work?

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veksen: I'm not 100% sure if I understand the question but I'll try my best: it might be a team culture thing, make sure the team works tightly together, and that the backend devs and frontend devs both need each other's collaboration on tasks.

veksen is answering Shone's Question:

Question: Did you hear about the Livewire framework for Laravel, its end goal and what is your opinion on the future development of it and the impact on PHP as a whole? Do you see yourself ever using it?

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veksen: I've used Laravel in the past (it used to be my main stack!), and I'm still following up on what they do. I've seen examples on Livewire, which seems to work for very simple stuff, but I'm having a hard time to see it used extensively given how limitative it is. I'm not seeing it saving a whole lot of code, while it's a lot of abstraction for what it really saves. Just my opinion.

veksen is answering comfortablezucchini7's Question:

Question: What traits have you noticed that distinguish a good developer from an average developer in web application development?

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veksen: Two main points I'm seeing more and more from more junior/intermediate developers: - A good developer will ship new code, and test that accompanies this code - A good developer writes code for humans, not for the machine

veksen is answering Level's Question:

Question: Why did you decide to go for a custom Gatsby site when creating https://theprogrammershangout.com/?

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veksen: We had the opportunity to go with whatever technology we wanted, and I was the one leading the show. React is my main tool of choice, and Gatsby just makes sense given the format. Markdown is generally simple for contributors that work on content. React/Gatsby gives us enough flexibility for any features we want to add, without being blocked by the platform. Gatsby itself it quite fast/optimized out of the box (benchmark our site if you're curious :))

veksen is answering Fox's Question:

Question: If you could back 5 years in time under the stipulation that the only thing that you could do is provide 30 words (or less) worth of information to yourself about technology and programming, what would you say to yourself and why?

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veksen: Focus less on technologies and more on the problem. Be more empathic to other humans/developers, either via your communications, code, or the product you deliver.

veksen is answering Sonata's Question:

Question: What non-programming / tech skill has helped you the most in your career?

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veksen: Communication in general, I used to be very shy and not very communicative. I could definitely see a huge change through the years, like getting my opinions taken seriously from teammates/management. I even got feedback from people who've known me for several years.

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veksen is answering Plastic's Question:

Question: Do you think GraphQL will replace restful APIs for web and mobile applications?

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veksen: I used to think so when I started using it, but I'm seeing a lot of problems with the abstractions, mainly performance. It takes a LOT of knowledge with the underlying techs/abstractions to properly implement a GraphQL API/system in the same way you could flesh out a REST API. If interested, recently, Ben Awad (@benawad on Twitter) has been showing pretty good analysis of his journey on optimizing performance on production.

veksen is answering 1anakin20's Question:

Question: do you think web apps is the way to go for cross-platform?

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veksen: Web apps/Electron is definitely the cheapest way to go about it, if you need a native application. Other than that, you don't always need an app

veksen is answering botus's Question:

Question: What basics do you think experienced web developers still don't know?

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veksen: I think it's just so hard to know everything, I don't think there's anything specific that comes to mind. You'll see experienced devs what a bunch of holes in their knowledge. A lot of people seem to assume that we know everything, but we don't! Dan Abramov (one of the core contributors on React, and creator of Redux) had a blog post in 2018 named: "Things I don't know as of 2018". You could be surprised with the holes in knowledge in some very experienced developers. There is so little time and so much to learn. Ultimately we pick the things that make sense for us to learn.

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veksen is answering Laddo's Question:

Question: When it comes to working for startup vs working for enterprise, what are pros and cons of each ?

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veksen: Startup pros - You get a much bigger voice - Your contributions feel more valuable Entreprise pros - Money - Probably (hopefully!) working in a more structured manner

veksen is answering Zomatree's Question:

Question: whats your method of making, then testing? do you do tiny bits then test each part or do bit bits then test it all at once

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veksen: I try to split up my work in small, digestible parts. It's easier to test (unit test), to get a code review on. Of course it's not always possible, but I think aiming for smaller parts is easier for everybody.

veksen is answering Level's Question:

Question: What do you do personally to reduce programming burnout?

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veksen: I try to do stuff I enjoy, from hobbies, to hanging with people I love outside of work. Also, one important thing I've found is to be communicative with your managers of your burn out. In any good company, they will understand. If you can take vacations, even unpaid, do it!

veksen is answering Lgneous's Question:

Question: You mentioned photography in your small bio, have you ever done a project involving both photography and programming ?

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veksen: The farthest I went to was to include my photography work on my personal page (veksen.com), including a little npm package I built to extract convert EXIF data from shutter speed to a human readable version (https://github.com/veksen/exif-shutter-speed-to-human). I thought of creating a platform for selling sports photography, but that never concretized.

veksen is answering Toby Larone's Question:

Question: Do you have a complicated/interesting bug story? If so what happened, and what was the resolution?

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veksen: I wrote a very simple algorithm that parsed employee shifts per day, per position, and it worked fine! However, our client was running an old iPad 2, and the algorithm took about 15 seconds to run with about 100 employees. Ended up rewriting the bit of code with performance in mind: it ran in 0.5 second on their slow iPad

veksen is answering Ping | Pong's Question:

Question: what is it about development that drives your passion to continue doing it?

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veksen: I think it's simply the fact of building stuff, while combining my technical and creative abilities.

veksen is answering KnightShade's Question:

Question: How do you effectively budget your time with software development and everything else so that you can enjoy what you do as much as possible with as little stress as possible?

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veksen: It's hard and I'm still figuring it out! I think it's a lot of learning to say no, pick your priorities. Try to emotionally detach yourself from your work problems: they are for your company to handle: provide your best work.

veksen is answering botus's Question:

Question: What are your programming quirks?

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veksen: I think one that I'm seeing more and more clash with my co-workers is my idea of a clean Git history. I tend to rebase my branches, be really careful in the content of my commits, and their message. This definitely does not work in a team where only a single dev does not follow this pattern. Oops!

veksen is answering OverMighty's Question:

Question: What do you think of the trend of making web-based everything? (e.g., slowly starting to replace native desktop apps with web apps)

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veksen: I don't think it's a bad thing, web applications are much easier/cheaper to build. Not everything deserves an app! Stay mindful of humans and if they actually want to install just one another app on their device.

veksen is answering 1anakin20's Question:

Question: Do you have a problem with procrastination? If so how do you get over it and do stuff?

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veksen: One big thing that I do is have my phone on silent, turned face to the desk, and avoid checking it when I'm working. Otherwise, I have a computer that is specifically for working: no games on that computer! I'm in work mode at that point.

veksen is answering Level's Question:

Question: What would you say is your greatest contribution to open source?

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veksen: My work on the remake of Lodash.com was probably my biggest contribution. I've also been working on a new version, which hopefully can come out in early 2020.

veksen is answering spirit_warriors's Question:

Question: In your experience, what have been some differences that you have encountered between working for a startup vs. a large enterprise?

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veksen: I found myself learning a lot more with startups given the range of tasks I had to solve, and the complexity of the tasks. In entreprise, I could find myself months without ever feeling like I was ever learning something.

veksen is answering Toby Larone's Question:

Question: Every so often some technology will reach the "buzzword hype" stage, some examples being NoSQL, Blockchain, and Machine learning. Sometimes it leads to people using them in the wrong place for the wrong job. Do you think this kind of hype benefits or hinders these technologies?

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veksen: I think it more hinders it. It gets used for the wrong reasons, and then gets a bad name just because it was improperly used. NoSQL being a big one for me, people tend to try and reproduce a relational database, and it was never really meant for that.

veksen is answering lambda's Question:

Question: Any advice for people who want to change their current line of work into a CS/programming one?

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veksen: Build stuff, work on somewhat real projects. Don't push learning stuff if you're truly wanting to get into the field. The market for tech is good right now, use it to your advantage to get a foot in. Get involved, from meetups, communities, perhaps social media (twitter, dev.to, etc).