Forem: Kate Travers

Recommended Tech Newsletters

Kate Travers — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 22:14:42 +0000

One of my preferred strategies for staying up to date in tech is newsletters. Call me old school, but I love a good email newsletter. A curated list of recommended blog posts, talks, and career opportunities delivered directly to my inbox? Yes please, much appreciated. I'm subscribed to a ton of them, and I've found them immensely helpful for staying on top of things.

Which isn't to say I read all of them right away (c'mon, I wish I had that kind of time). Most I'll just skim, maybe save a few links to read later, then archive away. Others I archive instantly, leveraging inbox filters to make sure everything's sorted and tagged for easy retrieval later. The result is my own automated archive of helpful resources, stored safely away in my inbox. When I'm researching something new or looking for inspiration, it's the first place I look.

Below are a few of my favorites. I hope they're as helpful for you as they have been for me. I'm always looking for new recommendations, so be sure to leave your faves in the comments!

General

1. A List Apart from L. Jeffrey Zeldman et al.

"A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices." One of the most long-standing, well-respected magazines in the field. An invaluable resource for thoughtful, insightful, and resonant writing. If you're looking to improve your own technical writing, I also recommend their style guide.

2. Increment from Stripe

"Increment is a print and digital magazine about how teams build and operate software systems at scale." A glossy newsletter that's also available in print form. Impeccably crafted in every sense, it offers monthly issues organized around a single them, like "APIs" or "Open Source", with contributions from some of the biggest names in the industry. [Example issue]

3. Pointer.io from Suraj Kapoor

"Pointer is a reading club for developers. It's a window into what other current and future CTOs are reading and thinking about. Super high quality engineering-related content, not just trendy topics or link bait." So incredibly well-curated, I end up reading or saving almost every link in every issue. If I could only subscribe to one tech newsletter, it'd be this one, no joke. [Example issue]

4. Assaf's Weekend Reading from Assaf Arkin

"Once a week, in your inbox, the top links about software design and development, people and management, culture and technology. A mix of insightful and funny. Goes great with coffee. ☕️" This one I usually read right away, start to finish, as soon as it lands in my inbox. It's an absolute delight, as promised. I also enjoy that it includes spicy and/or hilarious tweets from the non-obnoxious part of tech Twitter. [Example issue]

5. SIGAVDI from Avdi Grimm

"...handpicked links to interesting articles, talks, or resources; an update on what I've published lately; and some reflections at the intersection of software and life." Avdi Grimm's semi-regular newsletter. A nice glimpse into his personal reading/viewing/listening lists, along with some delicious food pics. [Example issue]

6. LeadDev Originals from LeadDev

"Weekly words and voices on engineering leadership...[with] the latest advice and upcoming events from LeadDev.com to help you lead effective tech teams." Roundup of articles and upcoming events from LeadDev.com. They run a fantastic conference series, and I've been really impressed with the caliber of their blog content and talks as well.

Career

1. Diversify Tech from Veni Kunche

"Diversify Tech connects underrepresented people in tech to jobs scholarships, events, speaking opportunities and more." A fantastic resource for job seekers from underrepresented groups. Includes weekly resources and job alerts. [Example issue]

And for companies, founders, recruiters and allies, don't miss the weekly Business and Ally edition, with articles on diversity and inclusion from diverse voices, candidates from underrepresented groups who are looking for jobs, and opportunities to learn and advocate for diversity in tech. [Example issue]

2. Break In from Sophie DeBenedetto

"...bi-weekly newsletter designed to help you break in to the tech world." Whenever someone asks me for advice about changing careers into tech, I always point them to www.break-in.tech. It's got a fantastic collection of resources on learning to code, interviewing, and succeeding as a junior dev.

3. Technically Speaking from Chiu-Ki Chan and Cate Huston

"Technically Speaking delivers call for proposals (CFPs), speaking tips, and inspirational videos straight to your inbox." No longer active, but the archives are worth diving into if you're a current or aspiring technical speaker. [Example issue]

Language-specific

1. Ruby Weekly from Peter Cooper, Glenn Goodrich, and Cooperpress

"A free, once–weekly e-mail round-up of Ruby news and articles." A must-subscribe for any Ruby developer. Includes job postings. [Example issue]

2. Elixir Weekly from @elixirstatus

"Elixir Community News, one email every Thursday." Modeled after Ruby Weekly. Includes a mix of blog posts, podcast episodes, and project updates. [Example issue]

3. Elixir Radar from Hugo Baraúna

"Weekly Elixir Newsletter. Keep updated with what's happening in the Elixir community." Includes content, news, events, and job postings. [Example issue]

4. CSS Weekly from Zoran Jambor

"Weekly e-mail roundup of css articles, tutorials, experiments and tools" [Example issue]

5. CSS Layout News from Rachel Andrew

"A weekly collection of tutorials, news and information on all things CSS Layout." [Example issue]

Stack-specific

1. Codrops Collective Newsletter from Codrops

"Collective features the latest news and resources from the web design & web development community." One of the first tech newsletters I subscribed to and still one of my faves. Consistently high quality, where every link is interesting. Almost exclusively front-end focused. [Example issue]

2. This Week in Web Design & Development Newsletter from CSS-Tricks

"The most interesting and relevant news and information published [this] week both on CSS-Tricks and off." Don't let the name of the publisher fool you; they cover all things front-end, not just CSS. [Example issue]

3. Codepen Spark from Codepen

Round-up of the week's coolest Pens (HTML, CSS, and JS demos from the community). Always super impressive. [Example issue]

4. UI Animation Newsletter from Val Head

"Keep up-to-date on the best web animation, motion design, and UX resources on the web! Subscribe for a weekly collection of curated tutorials and articles -- plus advice on how to make web animation work for you." I subscribed to this newsletter while working on a UI animation feature, thinking I'd unsubscribe when it shipped. But that was almost 3 years ago at this point 😄 [Example issue]

Geocoder Dos and Do Nots

Kate Travers — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 19:01:35 +0000

I was working on a Rails project recently where we needed to 1) track the location of fine art delivery trucks and 2) give dispatchers visibility into which trucks were closest to a given location. Perfect use case for the Ruby geocoder gem, right?

This gem is a long-respected fan favorite in the Ruby community, first released in 2009 and used by upwards of 23.5k projects. However, this was my first time working with it, and I managed to bungle my first implementation. I wanted to share my journey from sad path to happy path, in hopes that it'll help someone else out there, too.

Setup

We're starting with the following schema:

# app/models/truck.rb
class Truck < ActiveRecord::Base
  def location
    # TODO
  end

  def set_location(latitude:, longitude:)
    # TODO
  end
end

# schema.rb
ActiveRecord::Schema.define(version: 20191008222320) do
  create_table "trucks", force: :cascade do |t|
    t.string "name", null: false
    t.datetime "created_at", null: false
    t.datetime "updated_at", null: false
  end
end

What Didn't Work 🙅‍♀️

For my first pass, I opted to create a separate locations table. The idea was to maintain separation of concerns between trucks and locations, keeping them loosely coupled so they'd both be easier to extend (or deprecate, in case this whole truck tracking idea didn't work out).

I also didn't originally like the idea of tacking latitude and longitude on to the existing trucks table. Those didn't seem like inherit properties of a truck; instead, in my mind, a truck has many locations, current and past. Another bonus of a separate locations table is that it allows us to keep track of a truck's past locations, which also seemed appealing to me (in case we wanted to recreate a timeline of the truck's movements, for example).

So with that rationale in mind, I added a locations table, model, and associations:

# app/models/location.rb
class Location < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :truck
end

# app/models/truck.rb
class Truck < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :locations

  def address
    # TODO
  end

  def location
    return nil if locations.empty?
    most_recent_location = locations.order(created_at: :desc).first

    [most_recent_location.latitude, most_recent_location.longitude]
  end

  def set_location(latitude:, longitude:)
    locations.create(latitude: latitude, longitude: longitude)
  end
end

# schema.rb
ActiveRecord::Schema.define(version: 20191008351012) do
  create_table "trucks", force: :cascade do |t|
    # same as above
  end

  create_table "locations", force: :cascade do |t|
    t.integer "truck_id", null: false
    t.decimal "latitude", precision: 10, scale: 6, null: false
    t.decimal "longitude", precision: 10, scale: 6, null: false
    t.datetime "created_at", null: false
    t.datetime "updated_at", null: false
    t.index ["truck_id"], name: "index_locations_on_truck_id"
  end
end

Next, I checked the geocoder docs. Per the docs, there's four things necessary to geocode an object:

1. Provide a method that returns an address to geocode

I'd read somewhere it was ok to stub this out to return nil, so I opted to start there, since knowing a truck's address wasn't one of our requirements.

2. Provide a way to store latitude and longitude coordinates.

The docs suggest adding :latitude and :longitude attributes to the model you're geocoding (in our case, Truck), but I figured I could overwrite these by adding methods that hooked into the associated Location attributes instead.

3. Tell geocoder where to find the object's address

I opted to start with the default examples provided in the docs: geocoded_by :address

4. Add after_validation :geocode to model

...all of which lead to the following updates to my Truck model:

# app/models/truck.rb
class Truck < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :locations

  geocoded_by :address
  after_validation :geocode

  def address
    nil # stubbed, not necessary for our requirements
  end

  def latitude
    location.try(:first)
  end

  def longitude
    location.try(:last)
  end

  def location
    return nil if locations.empty?
    most_recent_location = locations.order(created_at: :desc).first
    [most_recent_location.latitude, most_recent_location.longitude]
  end

  def set_location(latitude:, longitude:)
    locations.create(latitude: latitude, longitude: longitude)
  end
end

This configuration worked fine in terms of setting and getting location:

irb(main):001:0> truck = Truck.first
  Truck Load (0.1ms)  SELECT  "trucks".* FROM "trucks" ORDER BY "trucks"."id" ASC LIMIT ?  [["LIMIT", 1]]
=> #<Truck id: 1, name: "Maquette Fine Art Services", created_at: "2019-10-10 04:10:58", updated_at: "2019-10-10 04:10:58">
irb(main):002:0> truck.location
  Location Exists (0.2ms)  SELECT  1 AS one FROM "locations" WHERE "locations"."truck_id" = ? LIMIT ?  [["truck_id", 1], ["LIMIT", 1]]
=> nil
irb(main):003:0> truck.set_location(latitude: 37.782267, longitude: -122.391248)
   (0.2ms)  begin transaction
  SQL (2.9ms)  INSERT INTO "locations" ("truck_id", "latitude", "longitude", "created_at", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)  [["truck_id", 1], ["latitude", 37.782267], ["longitude", -122.391248], ["created_at", "2019-10-10 04:12:12.953575"], ["updated_at", "2019-10-10 04:12:12.953575"]]
   (5.5ms)  commit transaction
=> #<Location id: 1, truck_id: 1, latitude: 0.37782267e2, longitude: -0.122391248e3, created_at: "2019-10-10 04:12:12", updated_at: "2019-10-10 04:12:12">
irb(main):004:0> truck.location
  Location Load (1.3ms)  SELECT  "locations"."latitude", "locations"."longitude" FROM "locations" WHERE "locations"."truck_id" = ? ORDER BY "locations"."created_at" DESC LIMIT ?  [["truck_id", 1], ["LIMIT", 1]]
=> [37.782267, 122.391248]

However, it broke down immediately when I tried to actually geocode anything:

irb(main):005:0> truck.geocode
  Location Load (0.5ms)  SELECT  "locations"."latitude", "locations"."longitude" FROM "locations" WHERE "locations"."truck_id" = ? ORDER BY "locations"."created_at" DESC LIMIT ?  [["truck_id", 1], ["LIMIT", 1]]
Traceback (most recent call last):
        1: from (irb):5
NoMethodError (undefined method `latitude=' for #<Truck:0x00007ff3c2b58098>)

There's not really a good workaround for this error. Adding setter methods for Truck#latitude= and Truck#longitude= doesn't do the trick, because we don't want to create new Location records with only one of those attributes filled in. I thought about adding some kind of temp Location object that'd be persisted after both attributes were filled in, but at that point, the code smell was pretty obvious. It shouldn't be this difficult. I was clearly doing something wrong.

What Worked 🏄‍♀️

I went back to the geocoder docs and recognized that latitude and longitude attributes had to live on the model I wanted to geocode (Truck). That's what the library expects, and things start to get gnarly if you try to override that.

Plus after giving it more thought, there's not much to be gained by separating out these properties into a separate table.

There's no immediate need to keep track of past locations, so no need to make a premature optimization to support it.
It's just as easy to drop columns as a table, should I want to deprecate this functionality in the future.

With that in mind, the next step was to undo the work I did to add locations, then run a migration to add latitude and longitude to trucks.

# app/models/truck.rb
class Truck < ActiveRecord::Base
  geocoded_by :address
  after_validation :geocode

  def address
    nil # stubbed, not necessary for our requirements
  end

  def location
    [latitude, longitude]
  end

  def set_location(latitude:, longitude:)
    update(latitude: latitude, longitude: longitude)
  end
end

# schema.rb
ActiveRecord::Schema.define(version: 20191008351012) do
  create_table "trucks", force: :cascade do |t|
    t.string "name", null: false
    t.decimal "latitude", precision: 10, scale: 6, null: false
    t.decimal "longitude", precision: 10, scale: 6, null: false
    t.datetime "created_at", null: false
    t.datetime "updated_at", null: false
  end
end

To the great suprise of no one, following the docs' recommended implementation allowed me to greatly simplify my code, and -- most importantly -- actually get it working.

irb(main):006:0> truck.set_location(latitude: 37.782267, longitude: -122.391248)
   (0.1ms)  begin transaction
   (0.1ms)  commit transaction
=> true
irb(main):007:0> truck.geocoded?
=> true

Now that we can properly geocode our Trucks, we have access to helpful methods like near and distance:

irb(main):008:0> nearby_trucks = Truck.near([truck.latitude + 0.1, truck.longitude + 0.1], 50)
  Truck Load (0.6ms)  SELECT  trucks.*, (69.09332411348201 * ABS(trucks.latitude - 37.882267) * 0.7071067811865475) + (59.836573914187355 * ABS(trucks.longitude - -122.29124800000001) * 0.7071067811865475) AS distance, CASE WHEN (trucks.latitude >= 37.882267 AND trucks.longitude >= -122.29124800000001) THEN  45.0 WHEN (trucks.latitude <  37.882267 AND trucks.longitude >= -122.29124800000001) THEN 135.0 WHEN (trucks.latitude <  37.882267 AND trucks.longitude <  -122.29124800000001) THEN 225.0 WHEN (trucks.latitude >= 37.882267 AND trucks.longitude <  -122.29124800000001) THEN 315.0 END AS bearing FROM "trucks" WHERE (trucks.latitude BETWEEN 37.15860808444576 AND 38.60592591555424 AND trucks.longitude BETWEEN -123.20811433750569 AND -121.37438166249433) ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT ?  [["LIMIT", 11]]
=> #<ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Truck id: 1, name: "Maquette Fine Art Services", created_at: "2019-10-13 18:22:51", updated_at: "2019-10-13 18:23:55", latitude: 0.37782267e2, longitude: -0.122391248e3>]>
irb(main):008:0> nearby_trucks.first.distance
  Truck Load (1.2ms)  SELECT  trucks.*, (69.09332411348201 * ABS(trucks.latitude - 37.882267) * 0.7071067811865475) + (59.836573914187355 * ABS(trucks.longitude - -122.29124800000001) * 0.7071067811865475) AS distance, CASE WHEN (trucks.latitude >= 37.882267 AND trucks.longitude >= -122.29124800000001) THEN  45.0 WHEN (trucks.latitude <  37.882267 AND trucks.longitude >= -122.29124800000001) THEN 135.0 WHEN (trucks.latitude <  37.882267 AND trucks.longitude <  -122.29124800000001) THEN 225.0 WHEN (trucks.latitude >= 37.882267 AND trucks.longitude <  -122.29124800000001) THEN 315.0 END AS bearing FROM "trucks" WHERE (trucks.latitude BETWEEN 37.15860808444576 AND 38.60592591555424 AND trucks.longitude BETWEEN -123.20811433750569 AND -121.37438166249433) ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT ?  [["LIMIT", 1]]
=> 9.116720519305336

Takeaways

Working with the geocoder gem for the first time was a good reminder not to over-architect too early, and most importantly, go with what the docs recommend. Especially with an established, widely-used library like geocoder, you can trust the library authors to steer you in the right direction, especially for straight-forward use cases like mine. Let's hope future Kate remembers this next time she tackles a new library.

References

Interview Prep: Critical Questions for You and Them

Kate Travers — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 18:52:11 +0000

At the end of 2019, I started looking for a new software engineering job, something I hadn't done in almost five years. I'd been very involved with my previous company's hiring process, helping design our interview process and running dozens of interviews for engineering and product team candidates at every level and role, so I thought was ready to be on the other side of the table.

Welp, surprise surprise, turns out I was super rusty. After floundering through my first couple behavioral interviews, I realized I couldn't go into these things cold. I needed to put some work in.

To prep, I put together two lists of questions (compiled from these excellent resources) -- ones for me to ask the interviewer ("Questions for them") and ones I'd expect to have to answer myself ("Questions for you") -- and kept both lists in front of me to reference as needed during interviews. I wrote out short answers to all the "Questions for you" in advance, prepping a couple different examples for each, so I could choose one in the moment best suited for the role/team. I also made of a copy of the "Questions for them" for each company and took notes on their answers during the interview. Keeping track of all the different responses made it easier to compare and contrast these opportunities later, but also provide direct, specific feedback afterwards, including thank you notes ✨

I ended up putting more work into these questions than more purely technical prep (memorizing algorithms, etc). That might surprise you, but it unquestionably paid off. Having this Q&A at the ready enabled me to get the information I needed from each interviewer and have a fun conversation while doing so. And when it came time to make a decision, it was easy to compare notes and say yes to the right team.

Below are both lists. You'll notice the questions aren't specific to any particular role, stack, or level. Rather, they're intended to be broadly applicable for anyone interviewing for a role on an engineering team -- or at least give you a good starting point that you can refine and adapt to your specific situation. I hope they're as helpful for you as they were for me.

QUESTIONS FOR THEM

🎯 Opportunities

What does this team need, and how can you help them?

What's the story for this team in the coming year?
How much of the team's workload is maintenance vs. building new features?
What are you working on now that you're most excited about?
What's broken right now that you want to fix?
What separates someone who does good work from someone who does great work in this role?
What are some of the skills you've learned on the job so far?
What kinds of tasks would I do on a "usual" day?

🚀 Process

How the team works is just as important as what the team works on.

Can you walk me through your team's development process, from planning to shipping?
During your time on the team, what processes have you seen break down? How have you adjusted?
What does your onboarding process look like?
Does your team have a standard development environment? Does everyone use it?
What's your team's approach to pair programming?
What does your deployment process look like?
How quickly can you set up a new test environment for the product? (mins / hours / days)

📣 Communication

How does this team like to communicate? Does it match your style?

How does your team deliver and handle feedback? Is there a formal process, ad hoc, both, neither?
How are differences of opinions resolved?
What kinds of tools and processes do you use to support remote/asynchronous work?
Who takes notes during meetings?
Who maintains documentation?
How much input/influence do developers have in team processes vs. the manager?
How do you raise issues when you observe them?

There's a lot you can (and should) cover in this area, so check out the "Communication and Feedback" and "Dealing with Conflict" sections below for more questions that apply to both interviewer and interviewee.

🤹‍♀️ Team Logistics

Fact check your understanding of the team's structure.

How much specialization is there in roles?
What's the junior/senior balance of the team?
Tell me about your manager.
Does the team include dedicated product managers, designers, or QA engineers?
Who are your primary stakeholders? How often do you interact with them?
How much of the support burden falls on engineers vs. QA team vs. support team vs. the end user?
Do you have an on-call rotation? (If yes) Who's on it and how is it managed?

🏢 Company

Don't miss the opportunity to get an inside perspective on the company itself.

What do you like about COMPANY compared to other companies you've worked at?
How does the engineering culture differ from the overall company culture?
What are some of the biggest challenges facing COMPANY right now?
Are there known problems that COMPANY is trying to solve right now?
What problems would COMPANY be foolish not to fix in the next year?

QUESTIONS FOR YOU

🏢 Company

Show them you've done your research.

Why COMPANY?
List company values. Prep an example for each one.
What do you think your potential impact at this company could be?
What do you think the impact of this company could be?
What would make you choose our company over others?
If you come in, what will your first order of business be?

🎯 Team/Role Fit

See if their expectations stack up to yours.

Why do you want to leave your current job?
What are you looking for in your next role?
What's important to you in a team?
What are the three things that are most important to you in a job?
What's the role you tend to fill when in a team? ("Workhorse", "Leader", "Morale booster", "Coordinator", "Specialist", etc.)
Talk about about a time in the last week/month/year when you've been satisfied, energized, and productive at work. What were you doing?

📣 Communication and Feedback

Here's your chance to tell (and show) what you'd be like to work with as a teammate.

Talk about about how you collaborate with people who have a different background than you.
Talk about about your code review process.
Talk about how you accept/deliver feedback to/from team members.
Talk about about a time when you were communicating with someone and they did not understand you. What did you do?
Describe a situation where you needed to persuade someone to see things your way. What steps did you take? What were the results?
Have you ever had to "sell" an idea to your coworkers or group? How did you do it? What were the results?
What's one critical piece of feedback you've received that was really difficult to hear? Why was it difficult and what did you do with that information? What did you learn about yourself?
What's some constructive criticism that you got at your current job, and how have you tried to address it?
When was the last time you asked for direct feedback from a superior? Why?

🙅‍♀️ Dealing with Conflict

These questions can be some of the most revealing -- for you and them. Stay alert for red flags.

Give an example of when you had to work with someone who was difficult to get along with. How did you handle interactions with that person?
Everybody has off days. How do you handle those?
What do you do if a team member is having an off-day?
Do you have an example of how you have boosted morale in your previous role?
What do you do when you don't see eye-to-eye with a team member? How do you move forward with a project?
Talk about about a time when you had to admit you were wrong. What did you learn?
Describe a time when you felt stressed or overwhelmed. How did you handle it?

🆕 Dealing with Change

Same as above, these questions can tell you as much about the company as the candidate. Be ready with clarifying follow-up questions.

Can you share an experience where a project dramatically shifted directions at the last minute? What did you do?
Talk about about the last time something significant didn't go according to plan at work. What was your role? What was the outcome?
Talk about about the biggest change that you have had to deal with. How did you adapt to that change?
Talk about about a time when you had to adjust to a colleague's working style in order to complete a project or achieve your objectives.
Describe a situation in which you embraced a new system, process, technology, or idea at work that was a major departure from the old way of doing things.
Recall a time when you were assigned a task outside of your job description. How did you handle the situation? What was the outcome?

📚 Learning and Growth

How much learning and growth is expected as part of this role, and does it line up with what you're looking for?

What are some things you want to learn more about?
What do you read to stay up-to-date?
What was the best new thing you learned in the last year?
What do you do in your job that's not in your job description? How did you identify those opportunities?
Describe a time when you volunteered to expand your knowledge at work, as opposed to being directed to do so.
Describe a skill you had to acquire on-the-job to accomplish something you needed to do.
Talk about about a time when you were asked to do something you had never done before. How did you react? What did you learn?

⏰ Planning and Time Management

How do you get stuff done?

Imagine you are starting a new project (pick a sample project related to the role) - take me through your initial planning process?
Talk about about a project that you planned. How did you organize and schedule the tasks?
Talk about about a time when you had to juggle several projects at the same time. How did you organize your time? What was the result?
Give an example of a time when you delegated an important task successfully.
How do you determine what amount of time is reasonable for a task?
Talk about about a time you set difficult goals. What did you do to achieve them? Walk me through the process and purpose.
When it's crunch time, how do you handle a big volume of work?
How does your workflow change when you have a generous deadline vs. a tight deadline?
How do you balance getting your work done vs. being available to help teammates or chip in on team tasks like bug reports or out of process tasks that pop-up?

🦸‍♀️ Leadership

What kind of leader are you? What kind of leader do you want to work with?

Give an example of a time when you felt you led by example. What did you do and how did others react?
Describe the best partner or supervisor with whom you've worked. What part of their managing style appealed to you?
Recall a time when your manager was unavailable when a problem arose. How did you handle the situation? With whom did you consult?
What's the the toughest decision you had to make in the last six months?

🏆 Accomplishments

Go ahead, brag a bit.

Discuss a project or two that you're very proud of.
What's the biggest career goal you've ever achieved?
Talk about about one of your favorite experiences working with a team and your contribution.
Talk about about a project you were primarily/solely responsible for shipping end-to-end (from ideation to launch). What inspired the idea? What determined what features you built and didn't build?

👩‍💻 Expertise

Demonstrate your smarts.

Give two scenarios where you would and wouldn't use LANGUAGE (ex. Ruby, Elixir, Go, etc).
Give two scenarios where you would and wouldn't use FRAMEWORK (ex. React, Node, etc).
Talk about about a recent project and what you(r team) could have done better.
What are some of your coding pet peeves or issues that you make your mission to correct?
What are some of your favorite tools to work with? What are the tools you're most comfortable with? Which aren't you comfortable with?
What are some strategies you use to navigate ambiguity in the workplace? (e.g. feature requirements, management decisions, etc)

🏄‍♀️ Non-work life

Don't forget about sharing a little bit about you, as a person.

What does work/life balance look like for you?
What do you do for fun?
What's the most interesting thing about you that's not on your resume?
What's the biggest misconception your co-workers have about you and why do they think that?

Sources

TIL How to Select Merge with Ecto.Query

Kate Travers — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 02:01:54 +0000

Here's the scenario: you're working with Elixir and Ecto, and you need to retrieve data from a table plus maybe a field or two from an unassociated table. In the past, whenever I ran into this, I'd spin up something I wasn't totally satisfied with - maybe updating the schema(s), breaking it up into multiple queries, or building a multi-select statement if I was feeling fancy.

Happily, today I learned there's a better way. You can accomplish the same end result in a single query expression with Ecto.Query#select_merge/3.

Let's run through an example to see it in action.

Setup

Say you work at a school with an admissions department, and you've been tasked with displaying an event log showing all the events related to a given admission, organized into three columns: 1) date, 2) action taken, and 3) who the action was taken by.

To start with, we have an AdmissionEvent schema that looks like this:

defmodule Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent do
  use Ecto.Schema

  schema "admission_events" do
    field(:action, :string)
    field(:admission_id, :integer)
    field(:admitter_uuid, Ecto.UUID)
    field(:occurred_at, :naive_datetime)
  end
end

…and a User schema that looks like this:

defmodule Registrar.User do
  use Ecto.Schema

  schema "users" do
    field(:uuid, Ecto.UUID)
    field(:full_name, :string)
  end
end

The problem here is the admitter's full name lives on the users table, which currently isn't associated with the admissions_events table. So if we did a straight-forward select query, we'd end up with the admission events we need to populate the table, but not the admitters' full names.

defmodule Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent do
  use Ecto.Schema
  import Ecto.Query, only: [from: 2]

  alias Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent

  schema "admission_events" do
    field(:action, :string)
    field(:admission_id, :integer)
    field(:admitter_uuid, Ecto.UUID)
    field(:occurred_at, :naive_datetime)
  end

  def for_admission(query \\ AdmissionEvent, admission) do
    from(ae in query,
      where: ae.admission_id == ^admission.id,
      order_by: [desc: ae.occurred_at]
    )
  end
end

Taking our query function for a spin in console:

iex(1)> admission = Repo.get(Admission, 1)
iex(2)> AdmissionEvent.for_admission(admission) |> Repo.all()
[
  %Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent{
    __meta__: #Ecto.Schema.Metadata<:loaded, "admission_events">,
    action: "Student Admitted",
    admission_id: 3,
    admitter_uuid: "7edd4d7f-a790-41f9-b4ef-16f1dc3b33ea",
    id: 1,
    occurred_at: ~N[2019-07-29 02:22:18]
  }
]

So, how do we want to go about getting the full name? We've got lots of options to choose from, but for this post, we'll compare two: one folks might reach for first (adding an association and preloading data) and one we'll hopefully reach for more often moving forward (select merge).

Option 1: Add an Association and Preload the Data

If we associate the users and admissions_events tables, then we can preload the associated User struct and read the full name from it.

defmodule Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent do
  use Ecto.Schema
  import Ecto.Query, only: [from: 2]

  alias Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent
  alias Registrar.User

  schema "admission_events" do
    field(:action, :string)
    field(:admission_id, :integer)
    field(:admitter_uuid, Ecto.UUID)
    field(:occurred_at, :naive_datetime)
    # New association
    belongs_to(:admitter, User, foreign_key: :uuid)
  end
end

defmodule Registrar.User do
  use Ecto.Schema

  alias Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent

  schema "users" do
    field(:uuid, Ecto.UUID)
    field(:full_name, :string)
    # New association
    has_many(:admission_events, AdmissionEvent)
  end
end

Trying out our new association in the console:

iex(1)> admission = Repo.get(Admission, 1)
iex(2)> events = AdmissionEvent.for_admission(admission) |> Repo.all() |> Repo.preload(:admitter)
[
  %Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent{
    __meta__: #Ecto.Schema.Metadata<:loaded, "admission_events">,
    action: "Student Admitted",
    admission_id: 3,
    admitter: %Registrar.User{
      __meta__: #Ecto.Schema.Metadata<:loaded, "users">,
      id: 1,
      name: "Albus Dumbledore",
      uuid: "7edd4d7f-a790-41f9-b4ef-16f1dc3b33ea"
    },
    admitter_uuid: "7edd4d7f-a790-41f9-b4ef-16f1dc3b33ea",
    id: 1,
    occurred_at: ~N[2019-07-29 02:22:18]
  }
]
iex(3)> event = List.first(events)
iex(4)> event.admitter.name
"Albus Dumbledore"

This approach gets the job done, but it's a little heavy. We only need the admitter's full name, so why retrieve an entire User struct? You can also see how this pattern could lead to a super cluttered User schema. Right now it has many admission_events, but soon it could have many application_events, interview_events, billing_events, etc.

Option 2: ✨ Select Merge ✨

Ecto.Query#select_merge/3 gives us an option that's much more succinct and precise. Check out this slickness:

defmodule Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent do
  use Ecto.Schema
  import Ecto.Query, only: [from: 2]

  alias Registrar.User
  alias Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent

  schema "admission_events" do
    field(:action, :string)
    field(:admission_id, :integer)
    field(:admitter_uuid, Ecto.UUID)
    field(:occurred_at, :naive_datetime)

    ###### STEP ONE #######
    #  Add Virtual Field  #
    #######################
    field(:admitter_name, :string, virtual: true)
  end

  def for_admission(query \\ AdmissionEvent, admission) do
    from(ae in query,
      where: ae.admission_id == ^admission.id,
      order_by: [desc: ae.occurred_at],

      #### STEP TWO ####
      #  Join on User  #
      ##################
      join: u in User,
      on: ae.admitter_uuid == u.uuid,

      ############ STEP THREE #############
      #  Select Merge into Virtual Field  #
      #####################################
      select_merge: %{admitter_name: u.full_name}
    )
  end
end

Trying out select merge in the console:

iex(1)> admission = Repo.get(Admission, 1)
iex(2)> AdmissionEvent.for_admission(admission) |> Repo.all()
[
  %Registrar.Tracking.AdmissionEvent{
    __meta__: #Ecto.Schema.Metadata<:loaded, "admission_events">,
    action: "Student Admitted",
    admission_id: 3,
    admitter_name: "Albus Dumbledore",
    id: 1,
    occurred_at: ~N[2019-07-29 02:22:18]
  }
]
iex(3)> event = List.first(events)
iex(4)> event.admitter_name
"Albus Dumbledore"

By adding a virtual field and populating it with select_merge, we end up with a much lighter-weight solution. We get exactly the data we need without adding any new associations, keeping our schemas decoupled. Plus we have a pattern to follow that's a little more extensible moving forward, should we need to introduce event logs for different types of events.

Summary

Ecto.Query#select_merge/3 allows us to populate a virtual field directly within a select query, giving us all kinds of flexibility when it comes to designing schemas and composing queries.

10/10 Would compose again.

Resources

Pattern Matching in Elixir

Kate Travers — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 14:36:40 +0000

At the Flatiron School, our mission is to help people learn how to code. That means that as a member of the engineering team, my work reminds me almost every day of that important, universal truth: learning new stuff is hard.

Take learning to play a musical instrument, for example, like guitar. When you start, you have these lofty aspirations. You wanna be the next David Bowie. But when you’re first starting out, that dream is so, so far away. It takes a ton of hard work to get there, and it’s easy to get discouraged. Without some early wins, you might give up.

You need to learn that one cool riff that gets you hooked, where you don’t wanna put the guitar down, because now you’re in it.

It’s kinda the same thing with Elixir.

Lots of folks are excited about the language because of all the great things you get from using it - concurrency, fault tolerance, scalability - the hype list goes on and on. But none of these are things you can enjoy right away. You pretty much have to build and ship an entire app to production before you really start seeing any of this good stuff.

You need a quick win to keep you going, you need that cool riff. And for me, that cool riff was pattern matching.

So let's break down what it is and why it's so great.

The Match Operator

To understand pattern matching in Elixir, start by reframing the way you think about tying values to variables. Take the statement x = 1. You probably read that as "x equals 1", where we're assigning the value 1 to the variable x, right?

Welp, not in Elixir.

In that statement, the = is known as the "match operator", and it's not doing any assigning. Instead, it's evaluating whether the value on the right matches the pattern on the left. If it's a match, then the value is bound to the variable [1]. If not, then a MatchError is raised.

x	=	1
pattern	match operator	value

What does it mean to "match"? It means the value on the right matches the form and sequence of the pattern on the left.

Simple Examples

Let's run through the basics of pattern matching with these simple examples below.

Binding on Match

x = 1

Here, the match evaluates to true, since anything on the right-hand-side will match on an empty variable, so the empty variable on the left is bound to the value on the right.

Match Without Binding

x = 1
1 = x

Both of these statements are valid expressions, and they also both match (!!!)

In the top expression, the match evaluates to true and the value is bound to the variable. In the bottom expression, the match evaluates to true, but nothing is bound, since variables can only be bound on the left side of the = match operator. For example, the statement 2 = y would throw a CompileError, since y is not defined.

Re-binding

x = 1
x = 2

If you pattern match on a bound variable, like x above, it will be rebound if it matches.

Pin Operator

 x = 1
^x = 2
#=> ** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: 2

If you don't want the variable to be rebound on match, use the ^ pin operator. The pin operator prevents the variable from being rebound by forcing a strict match against its existing value.

Lists

iex(1)> [a, b, c] = [1, 2, 3]
iex(2)> a
#=> 1
iex(3)> b
#=> 2
iex(4)> c
#=> 3

We can pattern match on more complex data structures, like lists. Again, any left side variables will bound on a match.

List `[head | tail]` Format

iex(1)> [head | tail] = [1,2,3,4]
iex(2)> head
#=> 1
iex(3)> tail
#=> [2,3,4]

One cool thing you can do with lists is pattern match on the head and tail. Use the | syntax to bind the leftmost variable to the first element in the list and the remaining elements to the rightmost variable (these variables don't have to be named head and tail; you can choose any names you want).

This syntax comes in handy when you have a list of elements you want to operate on one-by-one, since it allows you to recursively iterate over the list very cleanly and succinctly.

iex(1)> list = [2,3,4]
iex(2)> [1 | list]
#=> [1,2,3,4]

You can use this syntax to prepend elements to lists, too, if you're feeling fancy.

iex(1)> [first | rest] = []
#=> ** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: []

Watch out for empty lists, though. You'll raise a MatchError if you use this syntax on an empty list, since there's nothing to bind either variable to.

Match Errors

iex(1)> [x,y] = [4,5,6,7]
#=> ** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: [4,5,6,7]

Keep in mind, the match will fail if you compare different size lists.

iex(1)> [foo, bar] = {:foo, :bar}
#=> ** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: {:foo, :bar}

Matches also fail if you try to compare two different data structures, like a list and a tuple.

Tuples

iex(1)> {a, b, c} = {1,2,3}
iex(2)> a
#=> 1
iex(3)> b
#=> 2
iex(4)> c
#=> 3

Pattern matching with tuples operates much the same as with lists.

iex(1)> {:ok, message} = {:ok, "success"}
iex(2)> message
#=> "success"
iex(3)> {:ok, message} = {:error, "womp womp"}
#=> ** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: {:error, "womp womp"}

One common pattern you'll see in Elixir is functions returning tuples where the first element is an atom that signals status, like :ok or :error, and the second element is a string message.

`_` Underscore Variable

iex(1)> {_, message} = {:ok, "success"}
iex(2)> message
#=> "success"
iex(3)> {_, message} = {:error, "bummer"}
iex(4)> message
#=> "bummer"
iex(5)> [ head | _ ] = [1,2,3,4]
iex(6)> head
#=> 1

For times when you want to pattern match but don't care about capturing any values, you can use the _ underscore variable. This special reserved variable matches everything; it's a perfect catch-all.

iex(1)> {_, message} = {:ok, "success"}
iex(2)> _
#=> ** (CompileError) iex:2: unbound variable _

Just be aware that _ really truly is a throw-away variable, in that you can't read from it. If you try, Elixir will throw a CompileError.

So what's the big deal?

Maybe you're not blown away by the examples above. Elixir has some nice syntactic sugar for pattern matching... but what's so groundbreaking about that?

Let's take a look at some practical real world applications.

Real World Examples

We'll start with a problem that's probably familiar to most web developers: displaying public-facing user “display names” based on user-inputted data.

This was something I worked on recently in the Learn.co codebase. On our site, we like to encourage an active, friendly sense of community, so we display users' names (built from information volunteered by the user) in lots of places across the site, including the Ask a Question chat feature.

Problem is, we don't require users to give us their full name or even set a username, so when it comes to building a public-facing display name, there's no guarantee that any "friendly" identifying information - first name, last name, or username - is available. Additionally, all of this information is inputted manually by the user, and while we sanitize it to some degree before persisting, weird stuff can still get through.

To address this problem, our product team developed the following requirements:

If the user has provided their first and last name, display both together as their full name
If we don't have first or last name, check if the user has provided their username, and if yes, display the username in place of full name
If we don't have any of the above, display a reasonable generic default (here, we'll just use "New User")

How could we represent these conditions in code?

Javascript Example

Writing that function in Javascript might look something like this:*

export const displayName = (user) => {
  if (user.firstName.length > 0) {
    if (user.lastName.length > 0) {
      return `${user.firstName} ${user.lastName}`.trim();
    } else {
      return `${user.firstName}`.trim();
    }
  } else if (user.username.length > 0) {
    return user.username;
  } else {
    return 'New User';
  }
}

* I realize these examples are somewhat contrived, but bear with me. They're for illustrative purposes, not code review.

There's a lot of things that make this function pretty hard to grok in one glance. First off, there's Javascript's punctuation-heavy syntax, which can be a little rough on the eyes if you've been away from it for a little while. All the nested conditionals add complexity, too, as well as mental overload. Then additionally, we're also doing some nil checking (via length) and throwing in some string sanitation for good measure. All-in-all, not super readable.

Ruby Example

If we switch to Ruby, a language praised for being "developer-friendly", the situation doesn't improve much.

def display_name(user)
  if user.first_name.length > 0
    if user.last_name.length > 0
      "#{user.first_name} #{user.last_name}".strip
    else
      "#{user.first_name}".strip
    end
  elsif user.username.length > 0
    user.username
  else
    'New User'
  end
end

We still have our nested conditionals, and this long, "pointy" method decidedly does not pass the Sandi Metz "squint test".

Elixir Example

Let's see if we can fare any better with Elixir.

defmodule Account do
  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last}) do
    String.trim("#{first} #{last}")
  end

  def display_name(%{username: username}), do: "#{username}"

  def display_name(_), do: “New User”
end

Here, each conditional has been separated out into its own function clause. Unlike in other languages like Ruby, when we "overload" a function like this (e.g. make multiple function declarations with the same function name), we're not overwriting the original function. Instead, these are known as multi-clause functions, and when you call a function that has several clauses, it'll will try each clause (starting at the top of the file and moving down) until it finds one that matches.

You want to put your most specific clauses at the top, since those will match first. If you put something too general at the top, then it'll match everything and none of the clauses below it will ever get hit. Luckily, Elixir is pretty cool and usually throws a warning if you make this mistake.

Multi-clause functions allow us to break our conditional logic into the smallest, atomic pieces, thereby keeping it isolated, encapsulated, and much more legible. It's easy to tell at a glance what each of these function clauses is doing.

Handling the Un-Happy Path

But you might have noticed our Elixir example here has a bit of an unfair advantage. Most of the added complexity in the Ruby and Javascript examples came from handling nil cases, and we're not checking for those at all in the Elixir example - yet.

You might be tempted to throw a case statement into the first display_name/1 function clause (more on function name/arity syntax here). You'll want to resist, though, because case statements are not The Elixir Way™.

Your next thought might be to try adding more higher-specificity clauses to the top of the file:

defmodule Account do
  # Unwieldy nil checks
  def display_name(%{first: nil, last: nil, username: nil}), do: display_name(%{})
  def display_name(%{first: nil, last: nil, username: username}) do
    display_name(%{username: username})
  end
  def display_name(%{first: nil, last: nil}), do: display_name(%{})

  # Happy paths
  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last}), do: do_trim("#{first} #{last}")
  def display_name(%{username: username}), do: "#{username}"
  def display_name(_), do: “New User”
end

However, as you can see, this can get unwieldy fast. Today, we're checking for nils in three fields, but what if requirements change? Given the possible permutations of all the possible fields on User we need to check against, you could end up with a super long, bloated module.

What to do instead? Elixir has our back here, too: guard clauses to the rescue.

Guard Clauses

defmodule Account do
  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last}) when not is_nil(first) do
    String.trim("#{first} #{last}")
  end

  def display_name(%{username: username}) when not is_nil(username) do
    "#{username}"
  end

  def display_name(_), do: "New User"
end

Elixir function declarations support guard clauses, which are a handy tool for augmenting pattern matching with more complex checks. Guard clauses are a nice way to match against more complex patterns without adding too much clutter to your functions. Only a handful of expressions are supported, and they're meant to be short and sweet.

In the code block above, we've added not is_nil() guards to our first two clauses. Thanks to guard clauses, just adding a couple extra characters was all we needed to protect against nil values.

Custom Guard Clauses

Let's throw one more curveball into the mix. There's another case we need to guard against with display names, and that's where a user has given us their full name, but it contains personal identifying information (PII).

This situation actually used to happen not infrequently on Learn.co. For some reason on our public, free Bootcamp Prep course sign up page, users would often enter their email in the full name field.

Clearly, we needed to change something about this UI (and add more validations on user input, but that's a separate blog post). However, since the bad data exists, we need to protect against it, and we can do so via some more complex pattern matching techniques.

So far, our display_name/1 function clauses look like this:

defmodule Account do
  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last}) when not is_nil(first) do
    String.trim("#{first} #{last}")
  end

  def display_name(%{username: username}) when not is_nil(username) do
    "#{username}"
  end

  def display_name(_), do: "New User"
end

You might be asking yourself, is now when we finally give up on this pattern matching thing and just add some logic inside the body of the first function clause? Surprise (not surprised) - the answer is NO. We haven't exhausted Elixir's pattern matching toolbox yet.

In addition to predefined guard clause expressions, Elixir also supports custom guard clauses. Now "custom" doesn't mean you can throw any function in there; custom guard clauses still have to built from the limited list of allowed expressions. But they're still super handy for keeping things DRY and simple.

You can create custom guards with macros, but the docs recommend defining them with defguard or defguardp because those perform "additional compile-time checks" (which sounds good to me).

# Not recommend: macros
defmodule Account.Guards do
  defmacro is_private(first_name, email) do
    quote do
      not(is_nil(unquote(first_name))) and
      not(unquote(email) == unquote(first_name))
    end
  end
end

# Recommended: defguard
defmodule Account.Guards do
  defguard is_private(first_name, email) when not(is_nil(first_name)) and not(email == first_name)
end

Now we can add one more function clause to the top of our module to satisfy our PII requirement.

defmodule Account do
  import Account.Guards, only: [is_private: 2]

  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last, email: email}) when is_private(first, email) do
    “<<Redacted>>”
  end

  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last}) when not is_nil(first) do
    String.trim("#{first} #{last}")
  end

  def display_name(%{username: username}) when not is_nil(username) do
    "#{username}"
  end

  def display_name(_), do: "New User"
end

Wrap Up

Thanks to the power of pattern matching and multi-clause functions, we now have clear, clean, and effective code to handle displaying user names. And as new requirements come up, we don't have to touch any of these existing methods. We can simply add new clauses as needed.

defmodule Account do
  import Account.Guards, only: [is_private: 2]

  # function heads only

  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last, email: email}) when is_private(first, email)
  def display_name(%{first: first, last: last}) when not is_nil(first)
  def display_name(%{username: username}) when not is_nil(username)
  def display_name(_)
end

Takeaways

As mentioned back at the beginning, working with pattern matching in Elixir requires you to think a bit differently - but different in a good way. The way the language is designed - the paradigms it embraces, the functionality it supports - encourages you to follow general programming best practices. Pattern matching is one of the best examples of this.

Take pattern matching on multi-clause functions. By supporting this, Elixir nudges you towards writing small, declarative functions - short functions that do one thing only, e.g. functions that follow the Single Responsibility Principle.

Likewise, by declaring the pattern you want to match against, you're sending a clear signal about what inputs you expect to receive. Your code becomes more self-documenting by default.

Plus, since pattern matching is ubiqutious in the language, once you master this concept, you're set up to master it all. It's the perfect jumping off point for exploring all the other amazing things in Elixir built around this core concept, like GenServers, plug... the list goes on and on.

All-in-all, Elixir encourages you to write code that’s 1) declarative 2) self-documenting and 3) well scoped. It’s helping you become a stronger programmer, and it's setting you up to become a true rockstar Elixir developer.

Now that's impressive.

Any questions? Leave them in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Want to work on a team that builds cool stuff in Elixir? Flatiron School is hiring!

And for examples of more cool stuff our team has built recently, check out our newly launched Data Science Bootcamp Prep course, featuring an Elixir-backed Jupyter notebook integration.

Resources

Footnotes

[1] Binding vs. Assignment

The distinction between variable binding vs. variable assignment is small, but critical when it comes to pattern matching in Elixir. For any readers familiar with Erlang, all the binding and re-binding variables above may have seemed odd. In Erlang, variables are immutable, and since Elixir is built on top of the Erlang VM, variables are immutable in Elixir, too.

If variables are immutable, then why are we allowed to tie and re-tie values to variables with pattern matching?

We have to drop down to machine-level memory management to get the answer. Assignment assigns data to a place in memory, so re-assigning a variable changes the data in place. Binding creates a reference to a place in memory, so re-binding just changes the reference, not the data itself.

Think of the variable as a suitcase. Binding the variable is like slapping a label on the suitcase. Assigning is like swapping out the contents [source].

For more context, Elixir creator José Valim has a nice post on Comparing Elixir and Erlang variables.

How To Work With Developers - A Guide for Non-Developers

Kate Travers — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 04:02:33 +0000

Software developers, have you ever felt misunderstood by your non-developer teammates? It happens to most of us, which is why I wrote this post to help clear up some of the most common misunderstandings, miscommunications, and missed opportunities. Feel free to pass it along to anyone who’d love to have an easier time working with developers.

Below, I'll be sharing my (completely unbiased 😉) perspective on how to work with software developers. My goal is that after reading this article, every reader feels confident they can work effectively with their development team thanks to some proven tools and strategies we'll review together.

Developers: They're Just Like Us... or are they?

So why is this talk necessary? Are developers really so different from your average co-worker?

Yes. Yes, we absolutely are.

Take Flatiron School's engineering team, for example. Here's a picture of us from last summer, happily hacking away in the park outside our office.

Why are we in a park? Well, this was moments after our building was evacuated during a fire at about 5:30pm in the afternoon. When the alarms went off, the rest of the office did what you'd expect: went home for the day.

Not us. Without any pre-planning or conversation, every single one of our engineers picked up their laptops, filed outside, sat down on the nearest benches, and immediately went back to work.

Like I said, we're a little different.

Why Bridge the Divide?

As a bootcamp graduate, I didn't begin my career as a programmer. I’ve worked in a number of different fields - both in and outside tech - and in every workplace, there’s been a divide between developers and the rest of the company.

Having been on both sides of that divide, I like to think I have a uniquely well-informed perspective, and as far as I can tell, the problems are almost exclusively due to miscommunication.

That’s a good thing, because it means that with a little empathy from both sides, we can bridge the divide. And we want to, because the rewards are unquestionably worth it.

Succeeding here is in everyone's best interest. It's good for your business to have a happy, productive office. But it's also good on an individual level. Being able to communicate with the “other side” is one of the most valuable skillsets you can bring to the table.

An engineer who’s a good communicator is perceived as better than an engineer with more technical skills but poorer communication skills.
Likewise, a non-technical person who can “speak developer” is perceived as more valuable, because engineers are more likely to get stuff done for them.

So what are some of the obstacles we're up against? We'll look at two of the biggest: vocabulary and misconceptions.

Vocabulary

Developer, engineer, programmer

What's the difference between these terms? As far as your average day-to-day work is concerned, nothing. These terms all describe people who code. There's no need to make it any more complicated than that.

For anyone interested in the technical distinction, check out this blog post from Alan Skorkin.

Feature Development

What does the engineering workflow look like at most companies? Most startups follow some version of the agile scrum process, where team members from the Product, Engineering, and QA teams work together with stakeholders to deliver a feature.

Product manager oversees feature ideation, manages backlog.
Product manager works with stakeholders and engineering to identify discrete set of stories/tickets for sprint
Product manager (and/or engineering manager) assigns tickets to developers.
Developers work through stories, with daily standups and feedback from product manager.
Engineering and product work with QA to fully test before launch
Review (ideally with a “retro” where everyone involved provides feedback)
Launch / deliver to stakeholders
Repeat

That's the ideal flow. See the “real” picture: http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/2

Stories / Tickets

During a sprint, engineering work is broken down into stories (which you may also hear referred to as "tickets"). Each story represents a discrete task or unit of work.

Tasks are typically assigned to an individual developer.

At Flatiron School, we like to manage our project queues using Github Projects (read more here and here).

The Stack

You may hear engineers referring to the "stack".

"What kind of stack are you working with?"

"What's your stack look like?"

Wikipedia defines a software stack as:

“A set of software subsystems or components needed to create a complete platform such that no additional software is needed to support applications” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_stack

Here's a diagram of our stack that supports Learn.co.

Yes, I mainly showed this diagram to scare you.

If you ask an engineer to describe your company’s stack to you, they’ll probably sketch out something like this. Entities and relationships, more of a high level abstraction than exhaustive detail. And that’s the right amount of information for most people. Think about a car engine, for example. Most of us don’t need to know the exact inner workings. We can get by knowing that gas goes in and force for turning the wheels comes out.

So don’t sweat having a perfect grasp on this stuff. It's complicated for everyone, even the most experienced engineers.

Backend vs. Frontend vs. Full Stack

You'll also hear engineers talking about what part of the stack they work in.

"We're looking for a front-end specialist."

"She's a backend engineer."

"We expect all our engineers to be fullstack engineers."

These terms loosely refer to what part of the codebase the engineer spends most of their time in.

Backend deals with data handling.
Frontend handles UI/UX (User Interface, User Experience).
Fullstack can do a little bit of everything.

Keep in mind the divisions between these categories are fluid / fuzzy. Few engineers are purely one or the other. Most work across multiple parts of the stack, mostly be necessity.

API

API stands for Application Program Interface.

APIs define an interface that developers can use to request and receive data from a data source.

Flatiron School's founder, Avi Flombaum, likes to use the restaurant analogy to explain APIs. Say I go to a restaurant and I really want a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm not just going to walk into the kitchen and start grabbing sandwich ingredients. Instead, there's a protocol. I ask the waiter for a menu, and make my selection from the menu's pre-defined choices. My request goes in, then the waiter brings me back a grilled cheese sandwich.

Think of that menu as your API. It has predefined choices set by the restaurant that allow you to request and receive food.

A public API works the same way. For example, if I want to put a Twitter feed on my website, I can use Twitter's API to request tweet data, following the rules they've defined and documented.

The :shipit: Squirrel

This little cutie started as an inside joke at Github, but its adorableness quickly permeated the industry. When your code has been approved to ship, your teammates tag it with the :shipit: squirrel, the universal mascot of pushing code.

So if you notice your engineering team sharing a bunch of squirrel pictures, don’t worry - they haven’t lost their minds. They’re just excited to push some new code to your users.

Read the full lore here and here.

Misconceptions

Misconception 1

True or false? "Engineers... do not like speaking with people. Coding all day is good fun, talking with people is torture."

False.

Engineers are just as social as your average co-worker. We’re just very protective of our precious (and limited) attention span.

1. Choose the appropriate communication channel for the situation.

Different situations call for difference means of communication. Choose the appropriate channel based on the urgency of the situation.

Situation	Timeframe	Appropriate Channel
Emergency	Cannot wait. Equivalent to pulling someone out of a meeting	Tap on the shoulder
Urgent	Within the hour	Synchronous channel (ex. DM)
General	Within the next few days / weeks	Asynchronous channel (ex. email)

2. Respect chain of command

Most of the time, you’ll want to talk to a manager first, rather than an individual engineer. Managers are the ones who have the most information about their team’s availability, abilities, and work load. Trust them to triage your request appropriately.

Type of request	Contact
Feature request	Product manager
Technical issue	Engineering manager / QA manager

Misconception 2

True or false? When you ask for something from an engineer, don't get too detailed. They're the experts, so let them decide how to do it.

False.

Engineers are detail-oriented problem solvers. Ambiguity slows us down; the more blanks we have to fill in, the more likely we’ll end up with a final product that doesn’t make anyone happy.

Here's a true story from Salesforce's engineering team about the importance of being precise. A Salesforce product manager asked that “when an account was updated, shoot the owner an email.” The developer said ok. Then the first email the account owner received read “TRUE”.

Remember to clearly define your desired outcome, but not the means of getting there. For example, often times a stakeholder will ask for data in a specific format - like CSV - which they then take and upload into Google Sheets and spend hours making pivot tables, etc. An easier route would have been to just tell the developer that they need to know X from this data. The developer might know an easier, faster means of analyzing the data (using tools like Periscope, for example).

Finally, don’t hide things from developers; if you think feature requirements will change soon or eventually, disclose that up front. That way the engineers can adjust their design accordingly, with the right balance of flexibility vs. speed.

Misconception 3

True or false? Engineers love details and hate meetings, so don’t bring them into a project until you’ve mapped everything out completely in advance.

False.

Bring engineers in early. Their insights can save you from sinking time and effort into unrealistic goals, and by including them in the decision-making process, you’ll help them feel more invested in the project and its outcomes.

Cliff Gilley describes this problem very well:

“..there’s a tendency in many companies to ‘insulate’ the development teams from ‘the business’... This is a very sideways way of thinking, which usually results in expecting people to execute without context — without understanding the vision, the strategy, the tactics, or especially the customer. And therein lies the problem — people are motivated most when they share a vision of what the future might be, and can see themselves and their contributions in that picture.” [source]

Exercises

Let's practice what we've learned so far. All examples are credit Spencer Rogers, one of our top engineers at Flatiron School.

Conversation 1: Project Manager to Engineer

Project Manager:
How’s the password reset feature going?

Developer:
I started looking into the Postmark API and installed their client library, but I started running into some issues in my development environment because of an outdated library we’re using for image handling.

Rough translation: I am working.

How could this make the project manager feel? Confused, agitated, stone-walled, impatient, questioning the common sense of the developer

Is this good communication? No.

What was the meaningful information? I need an update on your progress, so I can assess whether to assign more or less resources.

What would be useful to have said instead? I hit a roadblock, which set me back by ~1 day.

How could the other party respond to invite a better answer? How does this affect the original estimate? Do you need anything from me to get past this?

How could the initial question have been asked better? I’m working on assignments for next week. Can you give me a quick status update on the password reset feature?

Conversation 2: Marketing Manager to Engineer

Marketing manager to developer:
Can you please build us something to address the sign-up conversion rate by the end of the day?

Rough translation: Can you do something you don’t know how to do in an arbitrary time frame that may or may not be realistic?

Is this good communication? No.

How does this make the developer feel? Overwhelmed, unsupported, disrespected, cog-in-machine, irritated that question is so ignorant of their capabilities, reality, etc.

What was the meaningful information? We need something built to solve a business problem.

What would be useful to have said instead?

a) Not a lot of people are signing up for the new service. Do you know how we can fix it? No? Well let’s figure something out that you can build within our deadline.

b) Not a lot of people are signing up for the new service. Do you know how we can fix it? Yes? That’s great. How long would something like that take to build? (then potentially) That’s too long, is there a simpler or interim solution we could use?

How could the other party respond to invite a better answer? I can try my best, but I’ve never had to do that before and I don’t have any idea how long it will take or whether it will be effective.

Conversation 3: Engineer to CEO

Developer:
I just used a really cool algorithm to guess similar words using something called “Levenshtein distance”. The data consistency problem should be fixed by EOD.

CEO:
Ok, but what about the landing page update?

Developer Rough translation: I just did something cool to fix the problem and deliver it on time.

CEO Rough translation: I expect you to fix problems like this, what about the stuff that’s actually going to move this business forward?

Is this good communication? Nope.

How does the developer feel? Proud, unhappy that their work wasn't appreciated, rushed.

How does the CEO feel? Agitated that something that set the business back is being celebrated before something that is completing the CEO’s vision of the company is finished.

Two perspectives:

1) Developers spend 99% of their day working on stuff that many people can’t see or appreciate. It can be frustrating, especially when they’ve built something they’re proud of and it’s all they’ve thought about for weeks.

Some developers make themselves less efficient simply in order to manage the expectations of the people waiting on their product. It is tough to gauge if you don’t have a window that you can trust.

There’s also many ways to be a “good” developer. At a small startup, a good metric is whether the developer is producing value for the company, which can be difficult to measure. Many of the ways a developer produces value are not visible to a lot of the company.

CEOs ultimately want their company to be successful. As a developer (or anyone), you should do your best to understand the high level goals of the company.

This doesn’t mean that they’re going to be mean by default. If you had two companies, both producing the exact same revenue, but one had a healthy culture and one had an unhealthy culture, which one would you choose as a CEO?

2) It might be better to find someone else to tell about your cool algorithm, though.

Conversation 4: Engineer to Product Manager

Developer to product manager:
I’m working on the search feature and noticed that some of these filtering options don’t make sense together. What if we did it like this instead?

Rough translation: I was working on this but my common sense kicked in and realized it didn’t make sense. I have an idea that would fix it though.

Is this good communication? Yes.

What was the meaningful information? Everything.

What would be useful to have said instead? Maybe an estimate for the proposal.

How could this have gone wrong? If the dev had changed stuff without talking to someone. It doesn’t mean they have to give up total ownership of the product, but everyone should be on the same page. A lot of people have probably been thinking about this feature.

The best course of action here isn’t the best course of action everywhere. Have an understanding of how these things should work.

Takeaways: Things You Can Do Right Away For Great Good

Take an engineer out for coffee :)
- Get their perspective on this subject - what’s their advice for working well with developers?
- Ask them about what they’re working on
- Ask about non-work stuff too
- In general: spend time with people from other departments - game nights, lunches, coffee
Attend open engineering events (demos, retros, code talks)
- Get familiar with the team and what they’re working on
- Get comfortable with shared vocabulary, company terminology
Get into the product
- Look for opportunities to work with developers (doesn’t have to be on a development project; could be event organizing, etc)
- Volunteer to help out on other teams. Some personal examples:
- helping with QA / user testing
- hosting meetup events (and helping with set up / tear down)
- writing blog posts
- user outreach

Last but not least, let developers know when you appreciate their work. Thank you!

Interested in working on a team that values effective cross-departmental communication? Flatiron School is hiring!

Resources: Articles

Resources: Videos

How to Run Ecto Migrations on Production

Kate Travers — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 03:15:42 +0000

You'd think the answer to this question would be a simple Google search away. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for me this afternoon, working on a Phoenix project with a newly-added Ecto backend. In an effort to save others (and let's be honest, future me) the same frustration, here's the most straight-forward solutions I found.

What Doesn't Work

Mix. Mix tasks aren't compiled into your deployed release, and as evidenced in this exciting discussion, there's no plans to change this any time soon.

So don't try using your trusty local mix ecto.migrate task on production. Not gonna help you here.

What Does Work

1. Ecto.Migrator

Ecto ships with Ecto.Migrator, a first-class module for Ecto's migration API.

Run it manually by ssh'ing onto your app server, attaching to your Phoenix app, and running the following:

path = Application.app_dir(:my_app, "priv/repo/migrations")

Ecto.Migrator.run(MyApp.Repo, path, :up, all: true)

Ideally, you'd wrap up the above in its own task that can be called during your build and deployment process. Check out Plataformatec's blog for a nice example.

2. eDeliver

Our app uses edeliver for deployments, and it has a super handy command for manually running migrations:

mix edeliver migrate production

If we peek at the source, turns out this command actually just wraps up Ecto.Migrator for you, saving some precious keystrokes.

To run successfully, you'll need to add ECTO_REPOSITORY="MyApp.Repo" to your .deliver/config file.

Again, Plataformatec has a nice blog post on deploying your Elixir app with eDeliver.

Summary

Hi future me! Hope this post was still helpful the nth time around.

References:

How My Bash Color Settings Broke edeliver

Kate Travers — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 03:13:19 +0000

Yep, you read that right. My bash color settings broke edeliver, the tool my team uses to deploy our Elixir apps.

Now, anyone who's tinkered with their .bash_profile knows there's an infinite number of ways to totally bork your system. But this bug was well camouflaged, hiding inside a common, seemingly-benign bash setting I'd had in place for over two and a half years without issue - a bash setting you, too, might have on your machine RIGHT NOW 😱

But don't worry, I tracked down the little bugger, so read on to save yourself the same hassle I went through. And for those of you in a rush, here's the tl;dr.

The Problem
Debugging Steps
The Turning Point
The Explanation
The Solution
Learnings

The Problem

I'd just started working on one of our Elixir projects, doing my best to learn a new codebase and a new language all at once. Things were going well until it came time to deploy changes. I could build a release, no problem, but I couldn't deploy; the command would fail every time with the following output:

$ mix edeliver deploy release to production --version=X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX --verbose

DEPLOYING RELEASE OF MY_APP APP TO PRODUCTION HOSTS

-----> Authorizing hosts
-----> Authorizing release store host
-----> Authorizing deploy hosts on release store
-----> Uploading archive of release X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX from remote release store
Uploading release file failed
  source: /home/deployer/my_app/builds/complete/my_app_X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX.release.tar.gz on deployer@host
  destination: /home/deployer/my_app/my_app_X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX.tar.gz on deploy hosts

My teammates could deploy using the same command; I was the only one getting this error. I tried running the command from my work and personal computers, and it errored out the same way consistently on both machines (I use shared dotfiles, so this wasn't super surprising).

Debugging Steps

Hard Reset
Get Verbose
Manual Workaround
SSH Sanity Check

1. Hard Reset

My first recourse here was the same I use any time I hit a weird error: start over fresh. I deleted the project directory from my machine, re-cloned it back down, and tried deploying the master branch (which was already running on production). No dice.

Outcome:

✅ Confirmed issue wasn't with something I'd changed in the codebase

❌ Didn't work. Deploy still failed.

2. Get Verbose

I was running the deploy command with the --verbose flag, but the edeliver error message wasn't telling me much about why the command was failing (more on that later). I needed more info.

On my teammate Steven's excellent advice, I opened up my_app/deps/edeliver, found the command that was failing by searching for the error message ("Uploading release file failed"), and flipped it into verbose debug mode by adding the -vvvvv option (more v's == more verbose):

# https://github.com/edeliver/edeliver/blob/master/libexec/erlang#L685-L759

# copies the release archive to the production hosts to the given path.
upload_release_archive() {
  # lotsa code, omitted here for brevity
  ssh -A -vvvvv -o ConnectTimeout="$SSH_TIMEOUT" "$_release_store_host" "$_remote_job $SILENCE" || \
    error "Uploading release file failed\n  source: ${_release_store_path%%/}/${_release_file} on $_release_store_host\n  destination: $_dest_file_name on deploy hosts"
}

This gave me way more insight into what this script was trying (and failing) to do. Honestly, probably too much insight. Re-running the deploy command in verbose debug mode gave me back ~200 lines of output:

$ mix edeliver deploy release to production --version=X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX --verbose

DEPLOYING RELEASE OF MY_APP APP TO PRODUCTION HOSTS

-----> Authorizing hosts
-----> Authorizing release store host
-----> Authorizing deploy hosts on release store
-----> Uploading archive of release X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX from remote release store
OpenSSH_7.4p1, LibreSSL 2.5.0
debug1: Reading configuration data /Users/kate/.ssh/config
debug1: /Users/kate/.ssh/config line 1: Applying options for *
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug2: resolving "xxx.xxx.xx.xxx" port XXX
debug2: ssh_connect_direct: needpriv 0
debug1: Connecting to xxx.xxx.xx.xxx [xxx.xxx.xx.xxx] port XXX.
debug2: fd 3 setting O_NONBLOCK
debug1: fd 3 clearing O_NONBLOCK
debug1: Connection established.
debug3: timeout: 99999969 ms remain after connect
debug1: identity file /Users/kate/.ssh/id_rsa type 1

### approx 180 more lines...

debug3: send packet: type 1
debug1: fd 0 clearing O_NONBLOCK
debug1: fd 1 clearing O_NONBLOCK
debug3: fd 2 is not O_NONBLOCK
Transferred: sent 4624, received 2996 bytes, in 0.2 seconds
Bytes per second: sent 20610.0, received 13353.7
debug1: Exit status 1
Uploading release file failed
  source: /home/deployer/my_app/builds/complete/my_app_X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX.release.tar.gz on deployer@host
  destination: /home/deployer/my_app/my_app_X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX.tar.gz on deploy hosts

Steven did the same thing on his machine, so we'd have his successful debug log for comparison.

His output also gave us another valuable piece of information: the actual bash command $_remote_job built by the upload_release_archive function, i.e. the one that copies the release from our build server to our production server, i.e. the one throwing the error. We'd follow that lead next.

Outcome:

✅ Better output with verbose debug mode

✅ Confirmed exact point of failure

✅ Learned a new debugging technique (thanks Steven!)

❌ Hard to separate signal from noise

3. Manual Workaround

We'd pinpointed the command that was failing locally, so why not try running it directly from the build server?

I ssh'd into our build server, switched to our deployer user, and ran the $_remote_job command above. What do you know, it worked! The release archive was copied from the build server to our production server, as expected.

I dropped back onto my local machine, commented out the upload_release_archive function from the edeliver script (since the archive was already copied over), and ran the deploy command. Success!

So now things are getting interesting. When I run the command from my local as my kate user, it fails. When I run it from our build server as deployer, it succeeds. Conclusion: something's messed up with my user.

Outcome:

✅ We found a usuable (albeit super manual) workaround

✅ Confirmed problem wasn't with our project's edeliver config

❌ Still can't deploy from my local

4. Sanity Check

We'd narrowed down the issue to my user, so next step was to check my ssh config. I confirmed that my keys were on the required servers by ssh'ing in as my user... no problems there. Then I compared my .ssh/config file to my teammates' config... nothing out of wack there either.

I also tried deploying after removing everything from the following config files (testing each in isolation, one-by-one), still with zero success:

~/.ssh/known_hosts
~/.bashrc
~/.profile

Outcome:

✅ Confirmed problem wasn't with my ssh config

❌ Running out of ideas

The Turning Point

At this point, desperation was setting in. My teammates and I were stumped, and we'd run out of things to try.

Enter Andres from OzoneOps, our devops contractor. I'd sent him Steven's and my output logs, and he was the first to notice a pretty important difference: in my output, the archive filename had a bunch of weird characters in it.

# Filename from Steven's output
my_app_X.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX.release.tar.gz

# Filename from Kate's output
my_app_\033[4;38m\033[KX.X.X-XXX-XXXXXXX\033[m\033[K.release.tar.gz

What was going on here? Where were those extra characters coming from?

A quick Google search revealed that these are terminal escape sequences, or ANSI escape codes. The terminal normally interprets these sequences as functions, not characters, so you can use them to format output, like adding color to the output of grep or ls commands.

I like me some colors in my terminal output, so way back in the day (like, two and a half years ago), I added settings to my .bash_profile to colorize my ls and grep output.

export LSCOLORS=gxxxxxxxcxxxxxcxcxgxgx
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=always'
export GREP_COLOR='4;38'

I'd never given these settings a second thought... until now. Turns out they've been a ticking time bomb, just waiting for this specific scenario.

The Explanation

The settings above work their colorizing magic by adding ANSI escape codes to output from ls and grep commands. For example, let's run grep on example.txt below.

$ cat example.txt
abcdef

$ grep abc example.txt
abcdef

$ grep --color=always abc example.txt
abcdef

Seems harmless, right? The escape codes are properly "escaped", interpretted as functions instead of characters... EXCEPT when your terminal doesn't know how to interpret the sequence. For example, look what happens when you pipe colorized grep output into less:

$ grep --color=always abc example.txt | less
ESC[01;31mabcESC[00mdef
(END)

Here's the problem. If you pipe colorized output into a function like less that doesn't know how to interpret it, the escape codes get treated as if they're regular ol' characters. Same thing happens if you're colorizing ls or grep in a terminal that doesn't support whatever escape codes you've set through LSCOLORS or GREP_COLOR variables (see this helpful post for a longer explanation).

And that's what was happening to me in the edeliver deploy script.

Looking back at the edeliver source code, the archived release file name is built from the output of ls and grep commands. Because I had those colorization variables set in my .bash_profile, my machine added the color escape codes to the output, which were "misinterpretted" as extra characters in the release archive filename, breaking the deploy.

✋

.

.

.

🎤 ::mike drop::

The Solution

Remove any ls or grep color settings from your .bash_profile:

# ☠️☠️☠️ incompatible with edeliver deploy script ☠️☠️☠️
export LSCOLORS=gxxxxxxxcxxxxxcxcxgxgx
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=always'
export GREP_COLOR='4;38'

[update] Based on this helpful comment from Charles Miller, even simpler solution is simply to change export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=always' to export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'.

Learnings

Debugging is hard, especially when you're working in a new codebase and/or new language. One thing that can really save you is good error messaging, something Elixir does well and edeliver can do better.

Next steps from here will be to raise this issue for edeliver and try to contribute some error message improvements (and maybe a fix for this escape sequence nonsense... think we'll just need to disable the color settings before running the deploy command).

Forem: Kate Travers

Recommended Tech Newsletters

General

1. A List Apart from L. Jeffrey Zeldman et al.

2. Increment from Stripe

3. Pointer.io from Suraj Kapoor

4. Assaf's Weekend Reading from Assaf Arkin

5. SIGAVDI from Avdi Grimm

6. LeadDev Originals from LeadDev

Career

1. Diversify Tech from Veni Kunche

2. Break In from Sophie DeBenedetto

3. Technically Speaking from Chiu-Ki Chan and Cate Huston

Language-specific

1. Ruby Weekly from Peter Cooper, Glenn Goodrich, and Cooperpress

2. Elixir Weekly from @elixirstatus

3. Elixir Radar from Hugo Baraúna

4. CSS Weekly from Zoran Jambor

5. CSS Layout News from Rachel Andrew

Stack-specific

1. Codrops Collective Newsletter from Codrops

2. This Week in Web Design & Development Newsletter from CSS-Tricks

3. Codepen Spark from Codepen

4. UI Animation Newsletter from Val Head

Geocoder Dos and Do Nots

Setup

What Didn't Work 🙅‍♀️

What Worked 🏄‍♀️

Takeaways

References

Interview Prep: Critical Questions for You and Them

QUESTIONS FOR THEM

🎯 Opportunities

🚀 Process

📣 Communication

🤹‍♀️ Team Logistics

🏢 Company

QUESTIONS FOR YOU

🏢 Company

🎯 Team/Role Fit

📣 Communication and Feedback

🙅‍♀️ Dealing with Conflict

🆕 Dealing with Change

📚 Learning and Growth

⏰ Planning and Time Management

🦸‍♀️ Leadership

🏆 Accomplishments

👩‍💻 Expertise

🏄‍♀️ Non-work life

Sources

TIL How to Select Merge with Ecto.Query

Setup

Option 1: Add an Association and Preload the Data

Option 2: ✨ Select Merge ✨

Summary

Resources

Pattern Matching in Elixir

The Match Operator

Simple Examples

Binding on Match

Match Without Binding

Re-binding

Pin Operator

Lists

List [head | tail] Format

Match Errors

Tuples

_ Underscore Variable

So what's the big deal?

Real World Examples

Javascript Example

Ruby Example

Elixir Example

Handling the Un-Happy Path

Guard Clauses

Custom Guard Clauses

Wrap Up

Takeaways

Resources

Readings:

List `[head | tail]` Format

`_` Underscore Variable