A Busy Week With New Remote Job
Hey folks, the last week has gone a lot faster than I expected. My first week at a new job was fun, busy, and a little bit overwhelming as I expected, there are some learnings I'm writing here for you. Besides, I also managed to make some updates on my website and wrote 2 articles this week.
Learnings from first week at a remote job
As a new remote engineer, the first week is usually packed with networking with people, onboarding into technical architecture and actual repositories.
At a remote startup where things move fast and remotely, networking is not easy and you have to be proactive with it. What I did was going to the architecture, making some notes and assumptions myself, then setup quick chats with several people in the team to quickly go through, ask if there's any mistake or things I should learn more, and also use that as a chance to get to know each other.
I wrote my first line of code right at the first day. I usually ask for the smallest possible feature that I can work on so that I can have my first commit, this way I feel more confident and connected. On the technical side, when you join a live product, looking at its whole architecture is just overwhelming, so don't try to understand the whole repository, instead think of it as a library/API then find a way to add a new feature on top of it, the goal is to make it work. Make a PR right after things worked, you'll know how it should be done better from the reviewer. I did it and I was able to quickly add a new feature that involves full-stack repositories (the frontend was even implemented in a framework that I've never used).
Learnings from building my website and open-source
This week, I wrote a very simple script but reduced my production bundle size by 50% (that's a lot). See Simple Script Cut 50% Size Of My React Website .
My favorite open-source tool: Dependabot, which automatically upgrades dependencies of your projects. This week, I wrote an article talking about Dependabot's benefits and how I used it, see How-to Keep Your Packages Always Up-to-date with Dependabot .
Alright! That's it, thank you for subscribing to the newsletter and I wish you a great week ahead. Personally, I'm working a little less next week so that I can meet a couple of my friends and re-energize myself as it was coming to the end of the year (I celebrate Lunar New Year). So you may expect a little bit less output from me, but don't worry I'll still try to build as many more things as possible and write new interesting learnings for you. Cheers 🍻!