This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.
Answering Have you ever quit a job without anything else lined up?, @gypsydave5 how they got into software development in the first place:
This is how I (eventually) got into software development. Finished my degree, worked in a library. Realised I was stuck in a deadend job in the countryside at the age of 25. So, quit the library and moved to London with nothing lined up. At the beginning of the financial crash. That was hard.
Eventually found work writing copy which sort of turned into a career in marketing. Changed companies and found myself in a bad place. Hated my boss, hated the company, was desperately unhappy - so I quit without anything lined up.
Did a bit of temping, found a lovely company who took good care of me and for whom I enjoyed working. But I wanted to change careers entirely - I didn't enjoy marketing and I wanted to be more satisfied with my work. So took the plunge and went to a twelve week bootcamp.
It was hard; no money, no security, no idea what was going to happen next. I got lucky and found work about a month or so after I left. That was about four years ago. Haven't looked back.
What led to these decisions? Necessity. It was necessary for me to escape from these things or else I would be miserable, and there was no time like the present to do it.
I couldn't have done it without my wife to be honest. Both financially and emotionally she kept me afloat.
@yechielk shared an awesome achievement in What was your win this week?:
This week, I...
Spoke at my first Meetup!
It was at Flatiron for a group of friends.
The talk was based on this post:
The What's your type? thread discussed different types of managerial styles. @thorstenhirsch chimed in with their nightmare manager story:
Worst manager I know was of type shilly-shally. He had no goals for the team, not even small ones that would've lasted a few weeks. He was always just repeating what his superiors told him and requested every minor matter to be worked on immediately by the whole team. Progress came to a complete standstill, but he's still in charge today.
2nd worst manager I know had long-term goals for herself, but was micro-managing everything. Worse than that she also sold to her superiors that everything was done by herself, even replacing her team members' names with her own name in documents and presentations. In the end most of her team quit all of a sudden and she was degraded.
Best manager I know had deep engineering knowledge, but wasn't micro-managing at all. He spent most of the time sheltering the team, which is IMHO a very good way to keep productivity up. He also followed the rule "praise in public, criticize in private". Nobody wanted to quit the team.
Yesterday, we had an April Fool's related goof:
In response, people started telling their own stories in Tell me about a time you messed up. None more beloved than the mistake shared by @jrtibbetts:
I forked a GitHub repo my first week at work, then had to delete it when I realized I'd forked the wrong one. Well, despite GitHub's repeated warnings, I managed to delete the source repo, not the fork. There were at least 6 open PRs in active development against it, and nobody had a full local clone that we could use to restore it. Thankfully, GitHub support was incredibly helpful and restored it.
The worst part is that some sympathetic coworkers humorously explained that this happens to all GitHub n00bs at some point. The problem was that I'd been using GH for at least 5 years at that point, and I should have known better.
Finally, it's always so cool when a community resource is visited by a true authority on the subject. In the You've been doing mapDispatchToProps wrong this entire time , @markerikson pops in to offer confirmation and additional context:
Yep! We recently rewrote the React-Redux docs from scratch, and as part of that, we explicitly encourage people to use the "object shorthand" form of mapDispatch.
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (1)
Congrats to @gypsydave5 , @yechielk , @thorstenhirsch , @jrtibbetts , and @markerikson for making the list this week!