Yotam Laufer

Should every #juniordeveloper focus on the number of connections they have on LinkedIn? This was the debate from last nights workshop. What do you think? Is this the networking strategy you are employing? Does it work? Is it worth it? Fyi, there are 2x workshops for #developers on my course. Visit the Crushing Digital website for more details.

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React 19 was originally anticipated to be released back in May during 2024 React Conf but we're now heading in July and there is still no release date in sight. The initial feedback on React 19's new features was rather positive, new hooks, no longer having to worry about memoization, etc. As developers started using the release candidate more they encountered massive performance issues when using suspense boundaries. If sibling nodes under a suspense boundary previously triggered asynchronous data fetches, those operations would execute in parallel. Under React 19 that has changed, they are now executing sequentially. The React team's response can be summed up as "you're doing it wrong, this new way is better", which if you rewrite your code it could be but this is a rather large change that will negatively impact applications that utilize suspense and don't rewrite. If you want to go in depth into the drama behind React 19's release there's an excellent blog that you can check out https://lnkd.in/gvZHbQXd

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MVPs shouldn't go to the bin, unless the business pivots to something else. Way too often I've seen agencies & devs building MVPs in a 'poor' way (and that's a nice way of putting it), because 'who cares, it will go to the bin anyway when you get PMF and fundraise'. I disagree. There's absolutely NO reason that your MVP should go to the bin, unless your business model or product change dramatically. And even then, a lot of boilerplate (like signup, subscriptions management, emails, etc) - can and should stay the same. If done right, that should be a given, with 0 extra effort on the dev side. If someone's quoting you to do a poor job, don't work with them. You can stay agile & lean (as a startup should) without compromising on quality, and forcing yourself to rewrite the next version of your app. When you're investing in something, especially at an early stage when money is tight, it's important to NOT buy garbage.

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🚨 JavaScript Contractor Pay Rates 🚨 Over the last 2 weeks I've spoken to 80+ JavaScript Engineers, who are all contractors, and are all highly skilled and experienced with React. They have other skills of course, but their core skill is React/Typescript. Below is a scatter graph of what they are getting paid right now in a contract role. I did this a couple of years ago and I remember there was a huge variety of rates regardless of experience, what I can see from below is that rates have stabilised massively, and people are now getting paid pretty consistently dependant on their level. It's good to see the market has stabilised and that people are getting paid what they are worth. If you feel you are getting paid below market rates, reach out and we can see what other opportunities I have for you. Or if you are looking to ramp up contingent staff quickly, and need to know what you should be paying, reach out. #JavaScript #TypeScript #React #Contractors #Sydney

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I've decided to make it easier for the "AI" to parse my "ATS compliant" CV so from now on it will be written in "See sharp" (C#). It will also comply with the DRY principle (hopefully they won't ask me later to fill the same data again in several other HR systems, call the public Print() method if needed, I might add the PrinToPdf(), PrintToWord(), SendEmail(), etc. in the next release). I promise it will also reverse binary trees when completed. (I'm aiming to get into the Guinness book with this feature, chances are very high for this to be the first real life software solution that does that in production) public class AndreiFCv: ICv { public string Location => "Remote only"; public AndreiFCv() { } public string Print(){ var sb=new StringBuilder(); sb.AddNewLine(Location); //TODO: return sb.ToString(); } } Should I use Python instead?

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Do you have a React Native app and want to extend your app into the land of Vision OS? Well look no further than this wonderful little package https://lnkd.in/eGrjCe2K (I have no affiliation). It definitely isn't ready for production use but it's a great step forward in bridging the gap and bringing React Native and VisionOS closer together. I will try it out and share some findings... I feel like I have to because I am doing literally nothing else with my Vision Pro. #ReactNative #VisionOS #Development

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Was playing around with the #Zed IDE from Zed Industries this evening. There's no Windows installer for it yet but you can compile it pretty easily. Yesterday I updated my #Rust toolchain, and with Visual Studio Community made sure the MSVC C++ build tools and Windows 11 SDK were installed. I let `cargo run` do its thing while I did other stuff, and when it eventually finished, it just launched without any build errors. Love that. Still early days though, it's not yet the most intuitive to use. I do like the docs as they are now, and also the familiar keybindings from VS Code. I wonder how easy a complete newcomer would find it though. The idea of built in #collaboration features for the IDE is great. I first saw this kind of feature many years ago in JetBrains #IntelliJ IDEA, where you could do things like viewing a colleague's session and diffing files against their local copy. I thought that was amazing! We've also seen it in recent years in Visual Studio Code and VS proper with #LiveShare. One thing these kinds of tools have issues with usually though is challenges within corporations - networking policies, proxies and firewalls, data privacy policies, etc. Having an ability to use an on-premise/local server for this would be nice too I think. As far as I understand, you can run a local collaboration version, but it's just a dev tool at the moment more than a product. The ability to follow collaborators is useful for #remotePairing or #mobProgramming. Channels with a side-by-side chat window, and note links to Markdown notes is nice. I haven't really used all the features fully, but I think it might support voice? Since COVID days I've wanted a way to combine something like Discord with Live Share or MS Teams, where you can enter a "room" with your colleagues/team, similar to being in an open office while working on-site, but now working remotely. Need a break, go over into the "coffee corner" virtual room and see what people in there are chatting or talking about - whether its collaborating on something, or just socializing. Need to have a quick team breakaway discussion, use another room/channel. Having AI as another "collaborator" in the IDE is of course nice. Interesting to see the support of multiple language model integrations too. I've recently been wanting to get back into the command line world as a primary environment, and like that it has built in vim emulation (yes... I'm finally wanting to figure out how to be a vim power user... maybe). Glad to see there's a #csharp extension, as well as an #asciidoc extension, think I might be testing those pretty soon :) Looking forward to not just playing around a bit, but trying it out on a proper project, to see how it performs. zed.dev https://lnkd.in/e5Shjx8P

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🎨 A fascinating observation with the Element Timing API (Blink only). I have a client who is keenly interested in tracking key paints, not just the largest one. To help measure them, I’m using the Element Timing API and sending the data off to SpeedCurve. We noticed some oddities in the timings—sometimes, rarely, things are much, much later than we expected. Sometimes whole seconds later than, for example, largest contentful paint. The problem was much more pronounced on mobile. Time to get digging. On desktop, their site is a two-column layout. On mobile, the righthand column sits beneath the main content. An incredibly common design pattern. We were capturing paint timings of content in this rightmost column that was either very much above or very much below the fold depending on your screen size. This was my first line of enquiry: Do element timings fire when the element is rendered *regardless of whether it was on screen*, or do they fire when they’re rendered and in viewport and actually observable? In practice, it turns out it’s kind of a both and sort of neither. 1) Chrome will fire the timing when the element is first rendered regardless of whether or not it’s visible to the user, but; 2) Chrome also (defensively) doesn’t render content until it’s almost in viewport. This means that elementtimings that are way way way off screen (like my client’s) may never fire at all if a user doesn’t scroll far enough, but if they do fire, they’ll fire before they’re necessarily visible. To see this phenomenon in action, I made a super simple demo—scroll this page and keep an eye out for the red paragraph: https://lnkd.in/evuNN5tG

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I once seen a post which suggested that junior developers should think about the question they’re wanting to ask before asking it. That if they think it’s stupid they shouldn’t ask it. I couldn’t disagree more. Better to ask the silly question than suffer in silence. No judgements here, even if it’s something basic like centering a div or how to correctly use a washing machine. (Btw - I still haven’t figured either of those out 🙄). Ask a silly question or not ask a silly question? That’s the question.

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Edition #60 of the DevNewsletter: DevTool Weekly Roundup has just been published on Linkedin and our website (link below in the comments). Here's the TL;DR 🏆 Funding Wins Supabase Soars with $80M Series C to Simplify Postgres for Developers Platformatic Raises $4.3M Seed to Supercharge Node.js Development Raycast Secures $30M Series B to Tackle Workplace Context Switching 🚀 3, 2, 1 … Launches MindsDB Launches Minds AI to Simplify Data Querying Kurve Emerges from Stealth with AI-Powered Data Discovery Tool Stytch Unveils Fraud & Risk Prevention Solution to Combat Advanced Threats Sieve Unveils SieveSync to Advance Lip Sync Pipelines Airbyte 1.0 Launches, Setting a New Standard for Data Movement Harness Introduces AI-Powered DevOps Tools 🔦 DevTools of the Week streamvisor: Boosting Pulsar Management with v3.1.0 Release ServBay: Redefining Localized Web Development for Modern Teams #DevTools #Develocity #DeveloperTools

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Watched a portion of the old Brian Will video on why OOP is bad (https://lnkd.in/epvfRpPR), and bombed out fairly hard when he came out with the puzzling assertion that messages between objects properly speaking shouldn't include object references. Well, there goes your visitor pattern; there goes the UI staple of registering objects with some event bus for callbacks when particular events happen. Is there some source in the literature (Alan Kay, I guess) for this odd restriction? It seems like a basic misapprehension: sure, messages should transfer representations of internal state and not haphazardly leak references to the state itself (otherwise external parties can mutate it without going through the owning object's protocol), but it's also a pretty basic affordance of message-passing systems that the addresses of things that can receive messages are first-class things that can be passed around (compare URIs in REST, or channels in pi calculus). The other odd assertion was that permitting many objects in an arbitrary graph to hold a reference to an object and access its methods was as bad as having global shared state. It fairly obviously isn't: the ability to exercise the protocol for reading or updating a particular bit of state can get passed around to wherever it needs to be, but isn't immediately available to everything, and pretty much the whole point is that you're passing a pointer to the protocol, not the rights to inspect and modify the data structures it guards. It seems that Will wants to argue for a hierarchical flow of messages down a DAG-shaped stack of routines and subroutines with a single controlling root procedure, rather than a potentially cyclic call graph with objects fielding requests from all angles. In practice that's what your average Spring Boot service actually does of course: controller to service to persistence or external client layer, and back up again. But (and this is an argument for a future post) that's because the average Spring Boot service is fundamentally procedural code, with a bit of indirection between modules. Other topologies are possible, and appropriate for particular use cases. The most generous reading I can give of Will's argument is that OOP offers more flexibility than perhaps a majority of actually existing programs really need, and we'd be happier and less burdened by object bureaucracy if we wrote those programs in a more constrained idiom. I actually think that's kind of true, but haven't got to the bottom of what it means in practice just yet.

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🤖 Devs.. how do you keep your commits clean (or within convention)? We had an internal debate in our PL office recently... There is plenty of people who completely doesn't care about the commits contents (SHAME SHAME!). On the other hand, there are perfectionists and purists (#me 🙃 ) who would love to have a convention on top of everything. ## My ideal commit message is built with: <type>[optional scope]: <description> [optional body] [optional footer(s)] ## Where: 👉 type: fix/feat/BREAKING CHANGE/chore/build/ci/docs/style/refactor/perf/test - type from the Conventional Commits convention (see: https://lnkd.in/d5X5KEiX) 👉 description: {Past Simple Verb} {WHAT} (optional) {WHAT_FOR} 👉 body: additional context, details, information, e.g. JIRA ticket or information for other developers --- 👨‍💻 Łukasz for example suggested keeping ticket numbers directly in the commit - as it's exposed in the repo directly and immediately points towards history of the changes. I'm not against, but I think it'd loose a little bit of clean state and would force having ticket for everything - what is not a bad thing and side effect hmmm. Not even going into the area of SQUASHING vs. NOT SQUASHING commits yet... But let me feed my curiosity and share how do you approach it? Do you care about the content of your commit messages? Do you keep any convention around it?

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The 5 Levels of .Net Full Stack Unicorns 🦄 – FinTech Edition (Yes, I'm Hiring) 🔍 Level 1: The Focused Unicorn They’ve got .NET down pat, but if you ask them to flex into Angular or Azure? Let’s just say they’re a bit single-minded in their magic. 🔍 Level 2: The Flexible Unicorn They can work wonders on the front-end with Angular, but getting them to handle the back-end or take the reins in Azure might require a few extra spells. 🔍 Level 3: The Cloud-Savvy Unicorn They’ve got Azure expertise for days, but we’re after someone who knows the ropes of both the cloud and the craziness of a FinTech startup. That combo? Truly rare. 🔍 Level 4: The Startup-Seasoned Unicorn They’ve been there, done that in the FinTech startup world, so they can handle the heat. The real trick is finding one who doesn’t need hand-holding and is ready to own this project. 🔍 Level 5: The All-Star Unicorn This is the full package—on-site, FinTech startup experience, a master of both .NET and Angular, with Azure cloud expertise. Plus, they’ve got that “go-getter” spirit that takes projects to the finish line without breaking a sweat. Total unicorn status here. If you know where to find one of these all-stars in the #Dallas area, let’s chat. I've got an opportunity. #Fullstackdevelopers #FinTech #UnicornHunt

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Just My2ClicksWorth this hump day. When aiming to launch a product, start by detailing every feature, UI element, and mechanic. Create user stories based on these specifics, then execute and push the product live. Along the way, disregard any input unless it’s regulatory or legal. Opinions are just that—opinions. Your primary goal is to gather data quickly. Racing to data ensures your product evolves based on real user feedback, not conjecture. Stay focused, execute precisely, and let data drive your decisions.

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One of the best traits any developer (junior or senior) can bring to their work/team is creative problem solving. Many times, I've seen developers give up too quickly on a problem saying it can't be solved The technical part of how to do something can always be figured out, but sticking with a problem to find a solution is key to personal growth. Our clients need problem solvers. Don't be too quick to throw in the towel. There's always a solution! #webdevelopment #problemsolving

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A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone. A QA engineer walks into a bar, WITH a team of QA AI agents. Asks AI agents to test the app while drinking an ice-cold Modelo Especial. Trained AI agents order X factor of Y elements in Z universes, in parallel using customer behavior data to identify common patterns in the test coverage. The QA engineer keeps drinking and curates the strategy. Real customer walks in, and shares a Modelo with the QA engineer. Lessons: 1. AI is here to help QAs, not just replace them 2. Modelo Especial es muy deliciosa y refrescante

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I summarised some thoughts about bad software experiences recently by realising one of the MOST frustrating things about janky software is the amount of time it wastes. It can be buggy/unreliable or it can be not as easy to use, but either way, when you are finding yourself sitting there frustrated with 100 things to do today, bad software is going to suck far more of your life and day than you would like, adding unneeded stress. In my experience I find that easy to use software has had much more thought and consideration to get it to that point than normal blah software. It's blah software because they're not giving it 100% - and noone is not guilty of that. But a measure of a good software company is, are they doing anything to fix it? Some really good examples I've seen recently of just the wide experiences available in the payments space: 😦 A telco which was burying their "easy" bill payments into an app which required a series of other steps to work, has now added a series of improvements to their payments process, including - and I love this - a "Pay now" button into the PDF invoices they send. Click the Pay Now button and you can ....pay now. 😢 That same company as above, also requiring you to manually enter a credit card into said "Pay now" page, which involves searching for a physical credit card. 😁 An ecommerce site offering many payment methods, AND a very simple 😭 An ecommerce site offering shipping/delivery timeframe upsells post order via email, but then a bug resulting in shipping being added to the shipping upsell fee. In this last example, the tighter delivery window upsell was $15 and you needed to enter your order number to a custom field which was fine, but then the bug meant you were paying an additional $30 for the tighter delivery timeframe. So $45 at the checkout for a $15 item so several calls needed to be made to bypass this tech. Sigh/ All of these hurdles just add to the day and stress and software fatigue. Gosh, do we need more stress and fatigue in our lives 😅

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Not a Tech Guru but Need to Hire Top Developers? Here’s What I’ve Learned from Hundreds of Interviews... I know the feeling—interviewing software developers when you don’t speak “code” can feel like trying to read a foreign script. But let me tell you: YOU DON'T NEED TO BE A TECH EXPERT TO SPOT AMAZING TALENT. It’s all about digging deeper and understanding how they think. 1. Stop Getting Hung Up on Tech Stacks: I can’t tell you how often I hear, “Oh, you’re a React developer? Sorry, we need Angular.” Really?! If someone’s a pro with React, they can pick up Angular in no time. It’s like saying, “You know how to drive a Ford? Sorry, we only hire people who drive Toyotas.” 😂 Skills are transferable if the person has the drive to learn! 2. Understand Their Problem-Solving Mindset: I always ask candidates to walk me through a complex problem they’ve tackled. If they can explain it in simple terms and show excitement while doing it, that’s a major win. Great developers are also great at explaining things clearly. 3. Focus on Thought Process Over Syntax: I’m not here to critique their code line by line (I can't anyway 😅) . What I care about is why they made certain choices. Are they thinking ahead? Are they considering the end-user? Are they predicting future challenges? That’s where the real value is. 4. Passion Beats Pedigree EVERY Time: I’ve seen developers from non-traditional backgrounds CRUSH it. It’s not about where they studied; it’s about the side projects they’ve built, the new languages they’ve learned on their own, and the communities they contribute to. Hustle > Resume. 5. Culture Fit is EVERYTHING: Skills can be learned, but fitting in with your team’s values? That’s the game-changer. I always ask myself: Would I want to work with this person every day? That’s a big clue. 6. Ask “Why?” Until They Drop Some Real Gems: I keep digging. “Why’d you choose that framework?” “Why take this approach?” “Why are you in this game?” The best talent loves these questions and gives you insights you didn’t even know you needed. In my opinion? Don’t get caught up in the tech details if that’s not your world. Stay curious, keep it simple, and remember: it’s the HUMAN behind the code that matters most. 🚀 #Recruitment #Talent #NonStopTalent #Interviewskills #Softwaredeveloper #hiring

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This year I decided that I'll talk more about software testing, especially TDD and automated tests. Today I want to talk about the ability to incrementally view the design of a system shape up as you do TDD (Test Driven Development). It's an interesting visualisation exercise. 🥋 When there's nothing, you start with simple definitions and your tests reflect that. They might be simple tests to to check if a function is defined. As you incrementally build the system, the tests get more nuanced and complex. There are mocks, test datasets, fixtures and several other testing mechanisms weaved into the "tests fabric". Together, all of this, or the test fabric as I call it, is a blueprint of your design. This is a valuable insight because once you understand this, you will be able to spot "cracks" in your design. As we continue to add tests and refactor existing ones, several design decisions become intentional & conscious. These decisions tell us about the building blocks of the system. They provide insight into the behaviour & implementation of the system in a compact, clearly specified manner. At any point, simply reading the test cases is like flashing a bright light on a dimly lit architecture diagram that resides in our minds! While I describe this feature in terms of a TDD workflow, the same insights can be derived even if you don't follow TDD. Being able to visualize the design of a software system via it's tests is a feature of automated testing itself! Let that sink in and remember this the next time you work on a project. If you join a startup and there are no tests, write them! (Topic for another day!) The next time you write tests, pay close attention to your design and how the tests subtly, and sometimes, quite evidently impact it. These small, simple acts of observation and reflection can take you a long way in your craft. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments section! ✨ #SoftwareCraftsmanship #TestDrivenDevelopment #TDD #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #AutomatedTesting #SoftwareDesign

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