DEV Community: Christian Bryant

Dan Mall, on Collaboration

Christian Bryant — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 13:16:40 +0000

🎉 New Stack Yack edition is out! This week, the focus is all on #collaboration, specifically between design and development teams. To dive deeper into the topic, I linked up with SuperFriendly founder, Dan Mall.

We touched on:

How to harness a collaborative environment in a remote world
Discuss some of the biggest snags devs and designs working together run into
Collaboration techniques and tools
What the future of collaboration looks like

This was one of my favourite interviews I've done for Stack Yack, and hope you enjoy watching it!

Check it out at https://stackyack.tv/

"I almost died twice..", a conversation with Weedmaps developer Kent Kawahara

Christian Bryant — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 17:58:14 +0000

Originally posted on Stackyack.tv

Hello, world! Thanks for tuning into the 15th edition of Stack Yack.

15 weeks strong here folks. When I first started SY, my biggest concern was how the hell am I going to create new content every week?! Surprisingly, it's hasn't been too hard. In fact, I've been a making content 1-2 weeks ahead of schedule now. Anyway, just tooting my own horn here a bit and how stoked I am about SY.

Side note - I'm definitely looking for help on how to grow it across various social channels, so if you are able to help or know someone who can, please reach out to christianlovescode@gmail.com :)

Okay, let's get into it.

This week (or last week rather), I caught up with Kent K - Senior SWE and former colleague of mine at Weedmaps, in Irvine, CA. We dive into what it's like to work at Weedmaps, how it's changed since COVID, pair programming, learning to code, how he almost died twice and his insanely useful app to help prevent that, staying healthy, and much much more.

This is a rather long episode, but lots of good nugs 😉 along the way you'll find valuable.

Watch here

As always thanks for tuning in, and I'm super grateful to have you as a Stack Yack supporter.

Enjoy the weekend!
Christian

Automating your workflow with PLOP

Christian Bryant — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:49:31 +0000

Originally posted on Stackyack.tv

This week my focus was on discovering ways I could automate routine tasks and workflows I go through when coding.

In my research I came across a JS library called PLOP. Plop is used by countless of companies like PayPal, Microsoft, Mozilla, Vimeo and more - so I figured I'd give it a quick spin.

I was blown away by how powerful it was. Especially when it comes to automating a lot of the boilerplate code I write daily.

Before I go any further, you may be wondering, is it even worth it to automate?

Should you spend the 30 minutes to an hour setting up an automation for a task that takes you just a minute?

Yes.

Well, really it just boils down to the frequency of that one minute task. If you find yourself doing said task on some sort of cadence, once a day, once a week, once a month even, then you absolutely should automate it.

That time adds up that you could use for something else.

Aside from saving time, automating your workflow minimises the amount of context switching you need to do, which consumes your mental energy – taking away from the primary tasks at hand.

Bottom line is that context switching should be dodged and avoided like jQuery.

So, if you're sold on automation and want to learn how, in this video, I dive into the Plop and show you an example of how you can use it to automate writing a React component.

If you care about saving time, you don't want to miss this one.

Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/OF1PJX1f-Jc