One of the best things, as software engineers, is to get “into the zone.” Basically code flows off of your fingertips and you get a lot done.
What typically breaks that focus?
I've been building a learning management system for education and I've decided to just go open source with it. It's a Next.js app with tailwind and MongoDb.
If you are interested in contributing, give it a star and do a pull request!
Tech debt can be defined as a code that will need to be refactored or rewritten at a later date.
What are some tips to convince your boss that tech debt needs to be addressed?
CI/CD as software engineers is the best to get code to production. There a bunch of pipeline providers out there, Jenkins, GitHub actions, etc.
Which CI/CD provider is your favorite?
@mcuban
Its going to get harder and harder to distinguish the difference. They are especially targeting those who are susceptible, which sadly is getting closer and closer to common day people.
When designing software, there is risk of over engineering if you focus only on the long term.
If you focus only on the short term, you risk loads of tech debt.
What is the right balance between long term and short term solutioning?
Hey all, I'm starting a new community geared to help mentor anyone who wants to get into software development. This is a group for the newbies. Please check it out or pass it along!
I heard an interesting theory today, the more frequently a developer deploys changes in an app, the more unstable it is. When they don’t deploy for a period of time, it’s more stable.
What do you think?
There are some fast engineers, slow engineers, high quality and low quality engineers.
Should software engineers be paid by the hour, salary, or based on delivery?
Here’s some tips I recommend when learning a new technology:
- Use the technology in a real way. Build an app, solve a problem
- As blockers come up, use everything to solve those. (LLM, Google, etc.)
- Find example code and follow their practices
What else works for you?
The real magic in software isn't just in the coding, it's in understanding when not to code. Over-engineering is the silent killer of app performance.
What are the best indicators that an app is over-engineered?
There are books, documentation, blogs, examples, videos, tutorials, tutors, and AI to help you learn a new technology. Each person is different.
What's the best way you learn a new tech?
One of the most annoying phrases for a non-developer is “we’ll add it to the backlog”
Basically it means they’ll never get to it.
How do you avoid this?
Software engineers have many paths. One thing my boss asked me was, “what do you want to be known for?” It’s a hard question.
What do you want to be known for?
It’s easy to work at a company and feel stale, because of legacy tech, etc... I’d argue that this is your problem, not your company’s.
What do you do to prevent yourself from becoming stale?
JavaScript is a pretty flexible language, which is probably why people have tried to build literally everything with JavaScript.
Can you name one thing not built with JavaScript yet?
In my opinion, it's easy to tell the difference between code written by experienced engineers verses an inexperienced dev. For example, isolation of business logic vs business logic sprawl.
In your opinion, what is the main difference?
When preparing for a software development job interview, you’ll most likely be asked to complete a coding problem. Here’s a few sites that I recommend to use to practice questions, or to gauge where you are at:
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The further I get into my career, the more I realize that the more knowledge of your business you have and the more technical knowledge you have, it creates this overlap, where you can apply the technology to any business problem.
The bigger the overlap, the more useful you are
In my opinion, one of the most important skill to transition out of being a junior dev is having the ability to solve problems. Not just simple code problems but complex problems.
What problems have been the best experience for you to solve?
Firecrawl is an SDK built by
@mendableai
, which crawls and converts any website into an LLM ready markdown. If you are building LLM tools that require any sort of web scraping, this is the SDK for you.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been helping to mentor a few people who want to get into development.
What tips do you have when mentoring a new software engineer?
I’ve had a number of people reach out to me for recommended resources to follow to stay up to date. Here’s what I personally use:
- - this is great because it shows what the open source community is working on and typically what I’ve seen is it follows the
Hey all,
On Thursday, July 12, is a spaces-only career fair, where we'll give a select number of companies a short window to pitch their company and connect software developers with potential employers. RSVP to join and we'll see you there!
Came across this tool called
@refine_dev
, this looks like a solid option for those who need to get enterprise apps up fast, without the unextensability of a drag and drop only interface. Check it out!
Pro tip, when you are processing large amounts of data, create iterative checkpoints where you save the data to a file.
This will protect you if your internet dies or your computer glitches.
I have a bud who has been looking for a job for the past 6 months, he's not willing to change these:
- He only wants remote work
- He does not work any government contract work
- He only wants Php or Ruby on Rails work
Simply changing his requirements, he could get a job.
Here's the 3 main git commands you'll need to know.
1. git add . (adds every file from the current directory recursively)
2. git commit -m 'message' (preps the files you added with a message)
3. git push (pushes the committed code to the remote server)