Good morning fellow developers. It's Friday morning (or depending when you read this, maybe evening or the following day) and it's time for another Dev Breakfast. This month's newsletter comes to you from our Berlin office and is created by Henry.
Henry Burnett is an American literature-student-turned-fullstack-dev working at Futurice Berlin. A love for problem solving brought him to software, and he’s most excited at the intersection of user needs, business requirements and tech. Outside of work he’s likely cooking or tending to his hydroponic tomato plants. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
It’s a common trope that developers spend more time experimenting with new technologies than delivering features to users. Endless refactoring into the latest bleeding-edge tech may be satisfying for curious developers, but often delivers little value for users or project stakeholders. In his talk at React Advanced London 2019, Kitze says that this curiosity is in fact often driven by a developer’s fear of missing out (FOMO) on the latest cool tech. Whether or not the problem is as widespread as he claims, his humorous talk provides actionable ways to reduce FOMO and evaluate when a project is ready for a new technology.
In this talk, Philip Roberts, Staff Engineer at GitHub, breaks down the JavaScript event loop in a way that’s accessible and relevant to both beginner developers and senior engineers. Since the start of my career as a self-taught developer, I’ve sought to understand the inner workings of JS which, due to modern frameworks and tooling, I can fortunately take for granted most days. The growing number of front-end libraries and developer tools only further abstracts the inner mechanics of JavaScript and the browser. While JavaScript still sometimes feels like a black box, this has always been one of my favorite talks which helped orient me to the JS event loop and how the browser works under the hood.
Overengineering to developers often means writing more complex code than is necessary to solve a problem. Amanda Woo discusses overengineering from a product manager’s perspective. She argues that a lack of clarity in the design process often cascades into overengineered solutions during development. When priorities are uncertain, developers are forced to plan for multiple scenarios and end up spending time implementing features that don’t bring proportional value to the product, and sometimes even increase technical debt. Woo proposes 10 ways for teams to spot overengineering early in the design and development process and correct, rather than when it’s too late.
Senja, in this TechWeeklies session talks about getting rid of toxic team and individual shaming habits. She discusses non-technical terms like shame, guilt and scarcity and see how they might be manifesting in our own thoughts, habits and maybe even team practices; and also goes over how to live with thoughts and change our habits and team practices.
This role is for you if you enjoy creating elegant solutions for our clients’ problems and embrace a true consultant mindset and teamwork mentality while doing so.
Mid-Senior Full-stack/ Frontend Developer | Berlin
If you can position yourself in frontend, backend or somewhere in between and you have the proven ability to implement complex, multi-layered services with high-quality frontend and backend code, this one's for you.