Overview
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?")
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