A Snowy Last-Minute Friday Edition
Good afternoon, devs! How did your week go?
This week has been a very productive one for me, but not when it comes to being prepared for the scheduled newsletters. So I apologize for this one being a little half-assed. 🙂
Having multiple blizzards this week here in Wisconsin hasn’t helped!
Here are some random tidbits for your Friday. I’ll see you next week with the regular actionable issues. 💙 ❄️
Friday is the perfect day for reflection.
Do you reflect on your job and career often?
Fridays are a perfect time to do so. Here are ways to reflect on your week as an engineer:
How did you feel this week? Did you enjoy work? Find ways to do more of that work you enjoyed. Did you have a crappy week? How come? Recognize your emotions and how they impact your job, whether they’re caused by your job or not.
What did you learn this week? Take time to actually think about it. Probably more than you realized once you quantify it.
Check in with your people. Did a teammate have a good or bad week? Reflect on it with them. You will improve your influence on the team by sharing your attention and showing you care about them.
Write down your successes. Big ones are great for your résumé. Small ones are great for you – every success is a bit of experience and growth.
Write down your failures. Ask how you got to that failure point and what you learned to make sure it won’t happen again. Share your failures with your team or network
Sharing your failures is part of leaving everything better than you found it:
Happenings & Findings
Articles
Mihhail Lapushkin reflects on and shares tips from building the Paper text editor for macOS & iOS.
PostgreSQL data types – what are they, and when to use each.
Technologies
shadcn/ui – Beautifully designed components that you can copy and paste into your apps. Accessible. Customizable. Open Source.
Phoenix Framework – A web development framework for the Elixir programming language that gives you peace of mind from development to production.
Jobs
Flycore, building the next generation of software in aviation, is hiring a founding engineer.
Flood is hiring a remote Web3 full stack engineer.
How is BASE doing?
Newsletter free tier: 17 subscribers
Newsletter paid tier: 0
LinkedIn followers: 12
Twitter followers: 3
Honestly not bad for a publication less than a month old, by a new author with almost zero existing following. I hope to improve those numbers through the end of January. I’d love to see 50 subscribers by then.
LinkedIn will continue to get attention as a driver to the newsletter. Twitter is not a priority, but will still get regular content.
I’d love it if you shared BASE with your colleagues to help me achieve these goals. It’s free, only takes a minute, and it helps me tremendously. And you can get a free upgrade to a paid subscription!
Community
Subscriber Joel Clermont shares his favorite code editor feature:
The GitHub PR feature in PHPStorm is great. Getting syntax highlighting in the PR is so nice!
Hope you have an awesome weekend, and your 2024 is off to a happy and productive start. 💙
Nice read, Aken! Noticed you mentioned Elixir/Phoenix - is that something you use regularly in your work? I’m learning it now, and curious to see more success stories of folks building with it.