MIMIC this!

David: Your project made some serious waves on Agora, tell Codemotion's readers about yourself Maayan!

Maayan: I'm Maayan Glikser and I'm the CTO at 500Tech, a frontend development, training, and consultancy agency in Israel.
I occasionally talk at meetups and conferences and I help to organize React Next international conference.
One of my passions is creating tools to ease the development process as well as being able to communicate better with others which is what Mimic helps me do.

David: So how did the early days look like before you were called CTO?

Maayan: I started my career as a backend developer working on .NET and PHP. Every once in awhile I had opportunities to build small frontend features to facilitate the products I've built on the front end.
Over time the frontend part grew more and more and I've started writing more and more code starting from bits of jQuery to the backbone, angularJS and eventually React as I've moved to be a dedicated frontend developer.

David: Are you good at what you do?

Maayan: I suppose I am, as everyone there are specific things I'm well versed in and specific things which I'm not.
Luckily I'm surrounded by very smart people with different specialties that help each other when we have a specific need.

David: What One Skill Makes You the Most Qualified for Your Current Position?

Maayan: Understanding that my productivity is focused on making other people better rather than doing things myself as well as passing on the knowledge I've acquired during my career.

David: What Excites You Most About Your Project(s) You Posted On Agora?

Maayan: It is my dream tool, I use it whenever I have the chance and we use it regularly at my company, it solves a real need I had and probably always will.
The ability to mock any request I want and let whatever other requests pass through to the real server make my development life much easier.

David: Why Should Our Readers Vote For Your Project?

Maayan: Because it solves a real problem effortlessly and if you're a web developer you're most likely to have some use for Mimic.
Whether if it's mocking API's that don't exist yet or stabilizing integration tests against specific API responses or even preparing a demo environment for marketing to show the system with fake data.

David: What Was The Coolest Project You Contributed To?

Maayan: I'm not sure, I've done a bunch of contributions from small to big. I contributed to the documentation of webpack which is a very cool project but I was more involved in other projects such as xhook which is the engine behind Mimic and was originally developed for XDomain which in the past allowed us to do CORS requests. Eventually, from my contributions, I was invited to be a maintainer for xhook.

David: Do Your Boss And Colleagues Know You Have Side-Projects?

Maayan: Of course and they support me as well, I've had a bunch of colleagues including my Boss help me build Mimic and providing very much needed feedback.
The point where I knew I was onto something was that my colleagues started using Mimic for their projects without me asking them, so it showed it had potential.

David: What Do You Think Developers Need In 3 Words?

Maayan: Passion, Confidence and Business thinking

David: If You Won The €5000 Top Prize On Agora, Would You Spend It On Your Project? You do not need to, we are just curious!

Maayan: I will spend probably additional resources I'm not good at, for example for v2 I hired a UX person to help me realize my dream with a slick new UI.
I also have an issue with the marketing/copywriting side for explaining what Mimic is and what it is good for so I can use help there as well.

David: Sounds like a solid plan!

Check out his and other projects at >>> http://myproject.codemotion.com!
Watch MIMIC on AngularNYC >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPU9QOhhsrY&feature=youtu.be

Maayan Glikser is the CTO at 500Tech, a frontend development, training, and consultancy agency in Israel. His profile page on Agora can be reached here >>> http://myproject.codemotion.com/author/morsdyce/