DEV Community: janarth10

Week 3: Junior to Intermediate Dev

janarth10 — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 23:59:53 +0000

What is this series?

I've been a developer for 2 years but my learning lacked focus. With this series, I want to look back at what I've done for 6 months to move towards being an intermediate developer.

TLDR

[GOAL] 32 Github contributions a month.
how to measure performance for an A/B test

Measuring my impact on Github

As of Feb 17, 2023, I've made 39 contributions. I've heard this is a shallow metric of productivity and impact. However I do want a metric to see how often I'm writing and reading code, so this will do for now. 39 contributions is on the low end of what I'm seeing for intermediate developers. Their in the 50-70 range. I'm seeing senior and staff engineers make 100+ contributions within ~7 weeks.

If you're interested in what counts as a contribution.

Learning how to A/B test

As an engineer on the experimentation team, I'm responsible for implementing and getting the metrics for features we're A/B testing.

We broke up the users into three groups. Users who were on the loading page for

<10s
10-30s
>30s

We were interested in how many of those users clicked our CTA when presented the treatment vs control loading page.

The general formula to see performance of treatment was

\frac{treatmentNumClicks - controlNumClicks}{controlNumClicks}

treatmentPerformance is the percentage that treatment performed when compared to control as a baseline. ie - treatmentPerformance = 5% means that treatment did 5% better than control.

Unfortunately treatmentPerformance was negative for each user group, meaning the experiment failed.

Cool [Random] learnings

China is losing the microchip war. US is forcing Taiwan(lynchpin in microchip supply chain) to choose sides. Beginning of new cold war? Was the old cold war about supply chain?
How am I being intentional about finding my dream job? Right now I'm focused on building career capital by working on my writing skills and my programming skills.

How come my debugger isn't working?

janarth10 — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 23:26:52 +0000

What is your question/issue (provide as much detail as possible)?

Placed a debugger in my code but it doesn't hit when I reload my page.

Console logs also not working

What technologies are you using?

next.js, server-side rendered react applications

What have you already tried/thought about?

Tried cleaning my build then running yarn start again.

Week 2: Junior to Intermediate Dev

janarth10 — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 00:42:20 +0000

What is this series?

I've been a developer for 2 years but my learning lacked focus. With this series, I want to look back at what I've done for 6 months to move towards being an intermediate developer.

TLDR

reflecting on week Friday afternoon was really helpful. I read through my conversations in Slack to see how inefficient I was at owning a project
TODOs before next week. Use github as a metric for how much code I'm pushing.

Reflection on owning my last project

Owning the project

Get stakeholders on a call to understand the impact of the project. Throw out all assumptions and start from scratch.
Find Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Check-in with Product Manager for prioritization
Get metrics to justify the project

For step 1, I didn't realize that the stakeholders hadn't made much effort to address the issue on their own. They said the project was valuable but their actions said otherwise.

Designing a solution

writing a design doc revealed gaps in my high level understanding of the issue
brainstorm with a group
again "start from scratch" mentality
TLDRs are welcome in any documentation

Mental frameworks

Starters | Finishers | Optimizers

Starters get dopamine hits from new ideas, finding problems to solve.
Finishers get dopamine hits from well defined to-do lists.
Optimizers get dopamine hits from dragging projects beyond scope to "perfection"

Evaluate which one you are. Try to use it to your advantage when you can (ie - starters can help product managers find meaningful work for a team). Keep the framework top of mind to notice when you'd benefit from playing another role.

Skill development isn't linear

Skill development is logarithmic. To motivate ourselves, we can use small tasks to make the learning curve feel steep in the short term. However in the long term, I'd imagine its wise to notice when you're in the tail end of your learning curve so that you can jump to an entirely new skill.

First heard of this in James Clear's newsletter but I found it again here

I don't agree with the faster growth in this diagram, but I agree you can disguise a large logarithmic curve as many small wins. The inaccuracy in the diagram comes from the steepness of the smaller growths when time is large. Smaller tasks don't give much growth to an expert in comparison to their total knowledge, hence why this is a logarithmic growth curve in the first place.

Week 1: Junior to Intermediate Dev

janarth10 — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 19:06:45 +0000

Overview

What is this series?
Projects
Learnings shared with team
Tools/Readings
Final thoughts

What is this series?

I've been a developer for 2 years but my learning lacked focus. With this series, I want to look back at what I've done for 6 months to move towards being an intermediate developer.

Projects

While working on a task assigned to me I found an issue our Marketing team was facing. Giving me the opportunity to work on the following

Create a 1-pager design document to find a solution
Solve a cross team problem
Communicate with stake holders directly, rather than having a well specced project handed to me

What could have went better?

I gave false promises that this was an easy fix, when I'm still quite new to the team & company. I didn't have a great understanding of the scope of the problem. Resulted in me coding up a solution that was blocked because our external APIs couldn't handle our volume. We would get rate limited if I pushed in my PR.

Spent time going into the

low level details of design doc
coding up a solution
going back and forth with Marketing and our external API support team before thinking to check the API docs for their rate limits.

Learnings shared in team slack

Lazy loading to reduce webpack bundle size
React profiling to debug re-renders

Tools/Readings

RequestBin

Alternative to sharing code hosted locally with ngrok. Offers clean UI to view past requests you've made. Useful tool if you need to host an endpoint quickly.

Josh Comeau's React Blog

His writing and explanations are concise. The website itself is beautiful. It feels alive with his animations. My favourite part is the like button that turns sad if you don't click it, then it's eyes follow your mouse movements.

Final thoughts

Take more time to deeply understand the high level requirements before moving into low level details.
Really impressed by my skip-level manager's ability to explain the hypothesis behind the A/B test I was working on. I thought of the change in terms of UI, whereas he thought of the hypothesis ("Do people enjoy educational content on loading screens?")