DEV Community: John Best

On empathy (or lack thereof) in tech

John Best — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 02:53:04 +0000

Recently, I've noticed a disturbing pattern among companies I've worked at that seem to care very little for their employees professional development, unrealistic expectations, etc. I keep wondering, is it me? am I a bad developer? Bad at setting expectations? All this seems very soul crushing and I wonder if it might not be time to find a different career.

How do you all deal with it?

Should one just find another job, or should you work to improve the culture?

What reference books should devs have handy on different CS subfields?

John Best — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 04:05:21 +0000

Say you were starting a new role soon, what CS books should you always have as a reference?

On coding challenges.

John Best — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 21:14:02 +0000

As a dev candidate who's been unemployed for a while now, I see a lot of companies wanting you to take these timed tests to implement some challenge or algorithm. These have been criticized for not meaning much.
And I myself am not sure if I want to feed into a culture that perpetuates this kind of meaninglessness, however, should I bite the bullet for the sake of a job or hold out on principal?

On recruiting contractors and developers

John Best — Sun, 17 Sep 2017 22:19:21 +0000

I wanted to share some thoughts on having been a contractor for the last few years and how what I've seen ties into how we as an industry recruit developers and how we can do better.

I started my career as a contractor and was basically treated like a meat grinder. Not a lot of training and not a lot of cushion if you screw up. very little mentorship. No job security whatsoever, so if they don't like you or whatever, you can be out on your ass with no recourse. I wish I hadn't started out that way because of how difficult it was to learn good habits later.

It definitely exacerbated my latent PTSD from adolescence.

Had to take prevacid every day to deal with anxiety induced heartburn.

Companies should be clearer about recruiting candidates.

Companies should be willing to train people.
It isn't hard.

We're smart people.
We just need a positive environment to grow in,
like plants.

I hope this is useful to someone.
Because the way we recruit people right now doesn't work for companies or devs.

I've been left to flounder and it's the worst feeling as a professional.
No one should be made to feel that way by their bosses.

We all have a responsibility to do better as an industry.

Building custom tooling with a new API, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love Sitecore

John Best — Sun, 14 May 2017 17:23:46 +0000

So, I was working for a large staffing company and we had a few legacy ASP.NET Web Forms based sites with a large amount of user data to migrate to our regular CMS system called Sitecore.

Sitecore is an ASP.NET based CMS that exists in both Web Forms and MVC flavors. We had mostly used the Web Forms version.

Our project was a big redesign of a legacy site that we already had. We had some blog posts and other data that we had to dedupe and clean up. My code was maybe 500 lines, but the task was a sticking point for the rest of the team. I suggested the idea of the tool to my colleagues who let me run with it.

We had a bunch of data and duplicate data we had to clean up and import to Sitecore, so I studied the Sitecore API to transform all the data we had into Sitecore’s traditional data structure called Items. And Items existed for different kinds of objects, depending on what template you derived from, Folder, Page, Layout, SubLayout, etc.

So I wrote a tool that would strip out duplicates from the data that we already had, move it all into Sitecore items where it can be easily manipulated and stored using Sitecore’s .NET API from SQL Server.

The tool took a while to run, but it worked the first time and it saved the other 3 people who were working on it a few weeks of effort. And it only took me a week or so to write the tool itself.