It's officially February and it's a leap year. Years of studying programming has somehow got me to linking leap years with a program to check if it's a leap year.
CSS Tricks is one of those publications that I have followed throughout my career. From the days I spent tinkering templates in college to building professional web apps for clients, CSS Tricks has been a constant companion. Some of their talented ensemble of authors are the ones that inspired me and whom I wish to emulate. To publish an article for them and have an author page is truly dream come true.
When Iowa Caucus App failed, it bought up how these applications are created in front of the whole world, and Boy! it wasn't pretty. There are already multiple articles that refer to what went wrong with it and why. It is surely an interesting trade off that Goverments have to make when it comes to quality vs price. While there exists quality standards with many of the existing architectures, none of them hold up for software and we need to invent some. The incident reminded me of this XKCD Comic.
I started with KeystoneJS this month and ran into an issue with creating database tables in my first try. After trying n number of times, I ran across an issue and submitted a PR for it. KeystoneJS has not started making sense for me yet, but so far so good.
I watched an Oscar nominated Jojo Rabbit - A heartfelt comedy (could be tragic depending on how you look at it) about a young boy's journey to fight his upbringing with his imaginary friend Hitler (played by my favorite Taika Waititi) and a jewish girl.
I watched Arming the Rebels - Tobias Lütke - Founder of CEO - A podcast where Tobias talks about building Shopify to arm rebels against Amazon. But he goes into more wisdom about building a company and entrepreneurship. When asked about hiring he says, "If everyone in the team looks like you, find someone else.", he talks about talent acceleration teams at his company and developer velocity.
I read The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo. Julie was the manager of the design team at Facebook and has assumed the position from the time it is a small startup. Julie puts into words what being a manager and lists steps to excel at it. As she is moving on from Facebook this month, looking forward to her doing it all over again.
What are some interesting stuff you are reading/writing/watching/building? Let me know your suggestions/improvements by replying to this newsletter or find me on Twitter
Until next month,