Weekly roundup #03 | 10th April — 16th April 2018
Hey DevChatters! Sorry this week’s roundup is a few days late, but all the stuff is still gonna be about the week from the 10th — 16th of April. So if you posted in #jobs or #intro on the 17th, don’t worry — you’ll be featured next week! 😅
The usual sections will be included in this roundup:
- ✍️ Articles published on the blog this week
- 🎤 A wonderful interview with Matiss Treinis
- 👋 A welcome to our new members!
- 💼 Jobs posted on DevChat this week
And as always, feedback is definitely welcome. Enjoy! 🎉
Articles on the DevChat Blog this week:
Thanks to Devon Campbell for writing another article this week!
Interested in writing your own? Join #blog_contributors on DevChat and tell me! (@Booligoosh). Even if you’ve never written a blog post in your life, feel more than welcome! I’ll even help you edit your post and get you set up with Medium.
Time for the interview, this week with Matiss Treinis! 🎤
Interview with Matiss Treinis
(@mrtreinis on DevChat)
Hi Matiss! Thanks for volunteering your time for this interview!
What are your coding interests and language(s) of choice?
The language(s) I choose largely depend on the task. I am currently using various JVM based languages (Java, Kotlin) for the majority of my ongoing projects. Python, JavaScript, PHP is also something I use
very often.
That being said, I do not really have a language of choice per-se, as I tend to choose language and other parts for whatever I am working on based on how these components would benefit the project, what developer availability there is, costs involved, infrastructure, libraries and similar. I think it’s imperative to keep an open mind in that regard.
There are some quite exotic stuff for certain tasks or on certain platforms I also either use or have used, or am forced to use — example that I have readily available is a thing called 1C BSL. It’s an obscure language for extending the 1C enterprise management platform. The best part? It’s in Russian. Yes, you read that right. You can get the idea from a sample here:
Apart from the monstrosity above, there are other things I actively try to avoid using for many different reasons, for example, Ruby (and Rails). Without going into too much detail, I personally find Ruby ecosystem too toxic and unstable, and not worth the benefits the platform would provide to justify not having a good nights sleep.
Wow! I’m amazed you even survived that 1C BSL language 😅. What are you working on and doing dev-wise? (work, uni, side projects etc.)
At the moment my main daily work drills down to design and implementation of a distributed query engine and analytics stack to support business intelligence, operations and sales staff for the company I work for. It is quite the endeavour, as there are so many things to consider, things that are not at all important unless you are dealing with distributed systems and high capacity computing. Whatever free time I do have, I am currently working building a headless API platform to power some other side endeavors of mine I have plans for. The time is scarce, so often some less important projects of mine does not receive the love they deserve, but what can you do. My GitHub largely reflects that unfortunately.
Ah yes, that’s unfortunate. At least your work is still development! How did you get to where you are today?
Long story short, my inspiration and drive towards working with technology originates from two things: cheesy Soviet era Sci-Fi novels and boredom as a child. I spent large portion of my childhood at my family home which happened to be situated in what one could only describe as “in the middle of nowhere”. The attic of our family house was filled with old Soviet Sci-Fi fantasy novels and broken electronics — from the first came the inspiration, from the second — multiple well deserved electrical shocks, and certain insight of how things worked, when reassembled in curious ways. Oddly enough, my first actual experience in tinkering with software and web per-se came from doing WML and developing things for mobile, like WAP specific pages and things alike. I later moved to web (PHP4 came out just around that time) and desktop development, mainly doing PHP, the web stack and C#NET. From there, to the infinity and beyond. By now, it’s difficult to account what I have not worked with or at least tried out during the years.
Cool story! I’m definitely sensing a Russian theme going on here 😜. What has your experience been with DevChat?
I think this is by far one of the most worth-wile development related communities to be a part of. There are strong opinions here and there for sure, but at least for now, it seems we are successfully able to avoid the usual toxicity associated with large scale communities. And that’s a good thing to have. In general, I find the community quite helpful and engaging. (Yes, that even includes you Mr. Palmer, haha.)
Awesome! I think that while the moderators here do have to intervene sometimes, a lot of that comes down to the awesome people we have here in the first place. Thanks everyone! 😁💖 How is your desktop and work environment set up?
I currently have two setups, one for my workplace, and one for my personal things. For work I usually use a triple-screen setup, two 24" displays for development, and a laptop screen for email, notes, etc. All of that running on top of a Dell Latitude mobile workstation with Elementary OS. There is also a lot of supporting infrastructure, most of which I also have duplicate of in my home setup — private GIT, Nexus OSS to publish internal packages and to cache-proxy vendor packages, SonarQube for static analysis, and many other things.
For my personal needs I have another triple screen setup with another laptop in the middle, running Windows and Fedora workstation in dual-boot setup (got to have that Steam, eh?. I also have a small commodity home server running Fedora Atomic host for things I want off my laptop, that I either want continuously online or so they do not use resources from my development / entertainment machine, databases and things alike.
The server is exposed in my home LAN and accessible over VPN if I need to, a rather convenient setup.
Wow, nice! Triple-screen setups have proven to be a lot more popular than I thought! Personally I prefer having only one place to look instead of switching my focus between screens, but different things work for different people. Do you have any good tips for staying productive?
Invest in learning your tools and spend time to learn using these tools for the task that you do. Pay special attention to IDE you use, build tools, automation tools, configuration management systems etc. Use a proper IDE instead of a generic text or code editor, if possible, IDE that is optimized for the language and platform you use. Using things that are essentially a glorified text editor for professional development not only hurts your productivity, but also hinters your personal development, in more ways that you could imagine. The tools you use have to have a benefit of making your work easy, and if possible, perform things in automated manner so that you do not have to.
I agree that the tools you use have a massive impact on how productive you are. There are many people out there who think that IDE’s shouldn’t be used because you might not code well without it, but in reality you’re almost always going to have access to your IDE (maybe except for in some job interviews). How do you like to work?
With headphones on. Jokes aside, I usually try my best to write good code without compromising on the business requirements. I believe it’s far too often developers forget that what might seem best from an engineering standpoint is not necessarily best for the companies they work for, and that usually ends with what you could describe as “clever” systems that do not exactly work.
Do you have any handy terminal commands, keyboard shortcuts of bits of code that come in handy day-to-day?
Yes, but not many. I use Fabfile/Fabric to automate a lot of things, as well as quite a few tools provided by ZSH. git-extras is also a thing I heavily rely on. I also think I am using `kill -9` just a little bit too often…
I like that part you said before, we should make it a quote.
“Far too often developers forget that what might seem best from an engineering standpoint is not necessarily best for the companies they work for.”
~ Matiss Treinis, 7th April 2018
There we go, it’s official now 😂. What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done in development? (if you’re willing to share)
To be perfectly honest, nothing springs to mind. There are your usual dumb mistakes, typos, and just plain wrong logic, as with everyone else. I have a recent one, invert comparison for access control. Instead of user.hasRole() the production ended up having !user.hasRole(), which as you might imagine resulted everyone having access to a feature except for those who actually needed it. Almost no impact (emergency deploys, yayy!), but still quite embarrassing.
Thanks so much Matiss for the interview this week! It was really interesting, and you had some wonderful answers there 😀
Jobs this week
If you’re not interested, skip to the next section! 👀⬇︎
NOTE: I cannot guarantee that these jobs are still up for grabs, they may have been taken already. But check anyway! 😜
Here are your jobs for the week!
From @Georgia DigiTech Search on Tuesday:
Java Developer WANTED — EU citizens only please:
From @Ibby on Tuesday:
Hey, need a node developer for some projects!
PM me for more information. Give examples of work you’ve done, please 🙂From @Shrey Batra on Tuesday:
Hello Folks,Finally the Team Invite Form is open!! Join the team of open-source developers to develop and contribute to Real Time Scalable Projects. Professionals from any domain in Computer Science field are welcome!
https://goo.gl/forms/MZAN7Yc0sadDWcL33
From @Sophie on Thursday:
Hello 🙂 Currently looking for a Sitecore Technical Lead for a 6 Month contract in Birmingham. Please send me a message if you’re interested! https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6389843842476044289From @benJSross on Friday:
Looking for a JavaScript Developer in London for a Y Combinator Graduate. Stack is React + Node. Details in link — https://goo.gl/mUTAFKFrom @Freitas on Friday:
We have a position for Senior Software Engineer at Delivery Hero — Berlin HQ: Consumer Team | You can find more information here: http://bit.ly/2HlZYh3From @Ibby on Saturday:
Hey! Looking for someone to help me with a couple quick responsiveness issues on my company website. Potential to continue with projects as well. This is a quick thing, so just PM me and let’s chat.From @ryanchartrand on Sunday:
Hey all! We have immediate openings for DevOps engineers working with some big brand names. Work from anywhere, be part of a highly motivating community and get a $2,500/yr budget for your growth and wellbeing.👉 https://x-team.com/remote-devops-engineer-jobs/
From @Georgia DigiTech Search on Tuesday:
PHP TEAM LEAD WANTED — EU citizens only please:
That’s all the jobs for the week! 💼
Welcome to these new DevChat members!
- @Sam Nguyen
- @Jesse Kanner
- @Sharla
- @RWheeler
- @RickyRicardo
- @Sean
- @peteBytes
- @Durag
- @z3r0
- @vladimirsh
Note: There are many other people who joined DevChat this week — unfortunately too many to list 😞. So, these are just the awesome folks who introduced themselves for the first time in #intro! If you haven’t done so, go ahead and do it right now! 😁
Conclusion
Hey folks, thanks for an awesome week! As always, feedback is welcome. If there’s anything you’d like to be included in here, just tell me! Also, don’t forget to join #blog_contributors if you want to contribute yourself 😜
See you next week!
~ @Booligoosh, moderator of DevChat
