As a self-taught junior dev, a semi-introverted person, and a woman, I can’t help but perceive tech conferences as a somewhat hostile, jungle-like environment :scream:. Lots of “10X” developers flexing their muscles and making bold statements about the future of the Internet, people furiously answering their emails and avoiding eye contact, niche washed out t-shirts and inside jokes that you don’t understand…It’s really easy to start feeling intimidated and like you don’t belong there....
My name is Sergio and I’m studying Computer Science at University. I’ve completed my third year. Vibbio offered me an internship during this summer, so I’ve been working with them for several weeks.
Before starting: what will I do as an intern? I have no experience with web development, so touching the Vibbio codebase, frontend or backend, would have been a bad idea. The people at Vibbio had a better idea for me: build a mobile app for Android....
We had the joyous occasion of having a new developer join VIBBIO this week 🎉🔥 Some people choose to see this as something that “slows the team down” short term as someone needs to point the new developer in the right direction to get the development environment up and running. When viewing this as a distraction and a loss of productivity you are missing out on a great learning opportunity of seeing your codebase from a different perspective than what you normally have....
I have a confession to make. I have a preference for mobile development over web frontend. Don’t get me wrong, I’m falling in love with React, but I’ve been doing iOS development for many years before joining Vibbio and it’s where I can do a lot very fast. I also love backend development, specially Node since I did some performance tests 5+ years ago. And Serverless… butterflies in my stomach....
You may have had this experience where every team at the company presents what they’ve done. Usually it’s a mix of slides, demos and someone talking. This works fine when there are less than six - seven teams, but once you surpass that, these things get tedious.
Spending hours at demos isn’t all that rewarding. Companies try to deal with this in many different ways. Some run multiple demos at the same time, resulting in teams needing to spread out to cover in case there are mention of things which are important to them....
To my own amazement, I have single-handedly managed to hire an entire engineering team of three. đź’Ş
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Documenting software is always a challenge, one for which there are numerous tools and kilometers of books written. But with most documentation them you’re still left wondering:
What where they thinking when they created this? A tweet recently grabbed our attention. It was from @buritica, VP of Eng at Splice, and it was a link to an article entitled 6 lessons I learned while implementing techincal RFCs as a management tool....
At VIBBIO we have adopted a devops mindset to everything we do. An essential part of such a mindset is to 🚢 the 💩 to production. In order to do so safely and with even more control we have added a new tool to our toolbox: feature toggles.
The lovely people at Finn.no have developed an Open Source server for administering and using feature toggles. The project is called Unleash and is their company, but it is also gaining traction in a lot of other Norwegian companies as well....
I’ve recently been working on improving the experience of the video time selector inside the Vibbio platform. It’s a little component that allows you to select a range of time from a video.
Previously, it worked like this: you move one handle to a point along the timeline, and the video updates its position.
This isn’t ideal. The user has to rely on that clunky thumbstrip on the timeline to guess where they want the marker to land....
One of my first tasks when I started at Vibbio was to take a look at our frontend webpack bundle size and see if there were any wins to be had. Sure enough, I found some quick and easy repeatable steps that anyone could use to reduce an inflated bundle size.
We started out with a bundle size of 3.88mb (minified and gzipped). Not ideal, not ideal at all. The first step was finding out where the problems lay....