Timeless software engineering skills:
1. Not feeling scared to change code you didn't write
2. Empathy for your users and for your collaborators
3. Ability to communicate ideas clearly
I'd hire someone with these skills any day.
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life hack: console log function that auto-indents based on the depth of your call stack
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Knuth check
ALT photo of a signed check from Donald E. Knuth made out to Sophie Alpert for 0x$5.20 (or “Five and 32/256 hexadecimal dollars”)
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To the YouTube commenters saying me being a “thing in a dress” takes away from the content of my keynote:
I was React’s #1 committer for its first 5 years, and now I manage the team. This content wouldn’t _exist_ without me. Would be cool if you respected me as a person too.
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365/365
ALT screenshot of my apple watch fitness rings showing all three rings closed every day this year
ALT screenshot of Apple Fitness app showing that I’ve won each monthly challenge award this year
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Just got out of an interview during which the candidate searched Stack Overflow and copy-pasted some code… from an answer I wrote. (They didn’t notice.)
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I have 10 years of react experience
ALT A pull request from me to facebook/react, merged on May 30, 2013. Titled “Change TodoMVC to not modify state in place #31”, it changes an array .push preceding a setState call to use .concat instead.
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Today's my last day at Facebook.
I'm gonna miss working on React full time, but I'm excited to try something smaller and new: I'm joining @humuinc next week as an engineer.
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Today's props go to Airbnb, who kindly edited my new name and pronouns into all the past reviews I've received from hosts – so new hosts who read them aren't confused. I feel appreciative of processes that aren't garbage to trans people.
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My programming strategy: if something can be fixed or made better in less than 15 minutes, don’t file a task for later or for someone else: just do it!
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Unpopular opinion: moving "constants" that are used once to the top of the file is often less readable/maintainable than leaving them inline
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The real “clean code” is code that is easy to understand, verify, and change. Which often means more repetition and less abstraction.
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Don't listen to people who tell you your tools are bad. If you're happy with your tools and they're helping you build great stuff, that's all you need.
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my rule for .reduce(): only use it when the result has the same type as the items and the reducer is associative, like
.reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0)
✅ summing some numbers
✅ multiplying some numbers
🚫 building up a list or object
🚫 just about anything else (use a loop)
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My one tip for organizing code:
If two files are usually edited together, combine them into one. That is, organize your code to minimize the number of files (or directories) that the average commit needs to touch.
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In this community we respect all people. If you have a problem with that, you don’t have to use React.
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if I was starting a new company I’d seriously consider using Rails
not because I agree with most of their technical decisions (I actually disagree with a lot of them!) – but because having a Polished, Proven Universe That Works is _super_ valuable
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dinner with the @reactjs team!!
first time I’ve seen the whole team in one place since 2016 💖💖
ALT photo of 8 of us at dinner
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instead of frontend vs backend as the two Main Types Of Engineers maybe we should talk about
low-level code vs high-level
product vs infra
external users vs internal users
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Really excited to share with all of you: I'm trans!
Today is a great day because I get to start being me. 💖 benalpert.com/2017/08/26/hi-…
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at facebook someone told me, “coding is the most important part of being an engineer, which is why 2/4 of the onsite interviews are coding”, which only seems like a worse and worse take as I think about it each passing year
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Someone asked me today about the differences between Google’s and Facebook’s engineering cultures.
Based on what I know, here’s what I said:
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literally just got an email offering me $600 if I send a pull request to their project because of the visibility it’ll give them
what is the world coming to
ALT screenshot of aforementioned email: Up to $600 for your PR. Hi Sophie, As I previously said, the visibility you could bring to our open-source repository would help us a lot. I have reviewed my compensation spreadsheet and I am willing to triple the initial amount. Just get back to me and we will work out the details.
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After getting back into app dev, I feel like the React team has
* underestimated how much code in apps is related to data fetching/management
* overestimated how complex data reqs for most apps are.
At least, I did! Now feeling like a read only react-fetch pkg _would_ cover 95%.
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he didn’t notice 500ms of latency in his own workflow; he was investigating the source of high sshd CPU usage reported in performance monitoring tools
ALT Freedom of Speech painting by Norman Rockwell (aka man taking a stand at town hall meme)
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you can see me today because it’s #TransDayOfVisbility! being me is one of the best things I’ve ever done 🏳️🌈
ALT selfie of me stylized in black and white
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React v16 is out! 😄 Read my post going behind the scenes of how we rewrote the whole thing: code.facebook.com/posts/1716….
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google cloud support, week 1: are you sure you’re not using it wrong
week 2: ok we’re looking into your problem
week 3: we’re still looking
week 4: still looking
week 5: it’s been a month so we don’t have the logs any more to investigate. case closed! ✅
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What you should take away from this:
In a typical app, tons of components only rerender when there’s new data. This will let you run those components on the server instead.
Which reduces client bundle size. A lot.
As 2020 comes to an end we wanted to share a special Holiday Update on our research into zero-bundle-size React Server Components. The demo is available now whether you want to play with it during the holiday, or when work picks back up in the new year. reactjs.org/server-component…
ALT Data Fetching with Server Components
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Returning from a 1-week vacation is the worst length because everyone will have just waited for you to come back instead of figuring their shit out another way…
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who do I need to bribe to make the next apple watch have a co2 sensor? it would be a gift to global public health
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using a monorepo solves many code management problems, and in turn it does introduce some of its own.
but ime, the problems caused by a monorepo can be tackled by a single centralized team, whereas the downsides of many repos end up slowing everyone on a team down slightly
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Hi! Watch my talk from last week's React Conf! It's about how to build your own React renderer.
React DOM?
React Native?
React <whatever you want>!
piped.video/watch?v=CGpMlWVc…
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Excited to say I'm now considering new job opportunities! I was an early user of React, managed the team at FB, and recently finished a VP Eng role at Humu.
Now I'm looking to join a diverse, kind, hypercompetent team, with a role where I can empower and upskill engineers.
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👀 Looks like the React Devtools extension on the Chrome webstore now has over 1,000,000 users. That's over a million developers using @reactjs! 🎉
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Working at a 50-person startup, I feel like the most important things I can spend time on are building the right culture and habits on our team for the future. Feels way more important to me than any of the actual product decisions.
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Using fancy words instead of simple, common ones makes things harder to understand. Your writing will be clearer if you stick with a small vocabulary.
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I'm shocked global calendar optimization is still Not A Thing.
* Need a room all day, but it has a 30min block already?
* Need to meet w/ 7 people, but every slot has _1_ person with a conflict?
* Back-to-back mtgs on opposite sides of an office?
Computers should solve this. 🙈
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TIL: `background-color: currentColor` pulls the element's text color! Works on all modern browsers (IE9+).
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instead of making a rainbow logo for pride month, make it so people can easily change their name *everywhere* it appears in your products
looking at you @Spotify with the unchangeable usernames 😠
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my new favorite thing is how every language has its own little abbreviation of "for example"
e.g. – English
p.ej. – Spanish
p.ex. – French
z.B. – German
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Some people seem impressive on the internet but are disappointing when you get to know or work with them.
Dan's the real deal. A great person, and talented too.
A++, would work with again
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At Facebook we often ended up preferring GraphQL types based more around a "view model" rather than a pure, normalized "model" for a few reasons:
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New blog post: "Fast and maintainable patterns for fetching from a database" sophiebits.com/2019/01/01/fa…
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what
ALT Screenshot of Twitter DM saying “Hi Sophie!! We are looking for software engineers with professional experience with react! For Facebook! Do you know anyone who will be interested in working with Facebook?”
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sure React 16.6 is good but just wait until you see what we’ve got for 16.7! I think I’m more excited about 16.7 than any release before it 😀
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More than anyone else I know, I like to fix stuff. Especially in code I didn't write. In this post, I explain why and how. sophiebits.com/2018/12/03/ya…
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luv 2 find a stack overflow answer I wrote 7 YEARS AGO that tells me exactly what I want to know
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How to build a good test suite:
1. Every time you fix a bug, add tests that would have caught it
2. Wait a year or two
(There is no step 3.)
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Instead of Google forcing AMP on people, someone should make guidelines for writing fast webpages and a way to statically verify if pages follow them. Then G can add an icon in search results to mark fast pages.
You could call that standard Accelerated Mobile Pages or something.
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If we wrote official React guides with examples and “best practices” for topics like: animations, forms, error handling, data management… what would you most want us to cover? (More specific suggestions are better!)
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Heading to Google HQ this afternoon to host a Q&A with their engineers about building with React!
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If I have to choose between building a community that attracts
(a) a diverse group that cares about the consequences of their words and actions, and
(b) only people who aren’t offended by anything,
I know I’ll choose the former every time.
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Looks like about 1 in 4 developers (professional or not) use @reactjs according to the @StackOverflow survey. And 3/4 of them would happily use it again! 😎
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Whenever a rule is added in a team, first ask:
Will the existence of this rule discourage future people from using their human judgement to make smart decisions in nuanced situations?
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people say “manager readmes” are cocky+prescriptive, but if I want to tell things like
* your health is more important to me than your work, or
* if you’re unhappy please lmk and I’ll try to help even if that means you leaving the team
why _shouldn’t_ I write in a durable doc?
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25% of professional developers use @reactjs.
At least, according to Stack Overflow's 2019 Developer Survey (17,800 out of 72,500). Wow.
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You should apply for jobs that list some qualifications you don’t have. But also: if you do meet all of the preferred qualifications in a job ad, there’s a good chance you are overqualified.
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is there anything worse than a mobile website that scrolls horizontally (just a little bit)
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in uncertain times, remember to focus on the important questions
ALT photo of a storefront whose neon sign says “ARE FEET SHOES”. (I guess it actually says “BARE FEET SHOES” but the B lightbulb is burned out)
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I can’t believe I missed the date but: as of this past weekend, it’s been a year since I came out as trans!
I’m much happier now. 💖 (Supporting trans folks is good and saves lives!)
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Feelin' bored tonight so I just wrote and published a new post: why do code reviews?sophiebits.com/2018/12/25/wh…
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I used to say "I believe in capitalism" to mean "I think markets are sometimes good at optimizing for things"
but then I realized that most other people who say that mean closer to "if you're starving, you deserve it" – so I stopped saying it
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tell me you use z-index without telling me you use z-index
ALT screenshot of a PayPal webpage showing a blurred-out region of the page, covered partially by a floating cookie banner. except the part of the cookie banner that intersects the blurred region is also blurred, even though it shouldn't be
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WTB a lint rule that detects
const [processedData, setProcessedData] = useState();
useEffect(() => {
let processed = /* do something with data */;
setProcessedData(processed);
}, [data]);
and tells you to use useMemo instead.
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the jar of pickles I just bought says
Serving size: 1/2 pickle
so I’m not convinced the person who wrote it actually knows what a pickle is
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I wonder if React should warn against <button> without a type. it's type="submit" by default but that's often not what you want!
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Email in my inbox. Think I should take them up on it? 🤔
ALT Email offering me React support with “I was wondering if you or Humu needed a React consultant to help you through this.”
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My evening hack: speeding up Babel by 40% on some inputs. github.com/babel/babel/pull/…
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Why does everyone claim GitLab is the obvious GitHub alternative? My mind goes to BitBucket.
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Making your code unnecessarily general can really hurt maintainability because it's less likely to fit your future needs.
Corollary: Third-party libraries, unless supremely well designed, also often hurt maintainability because you're likely to outgrow them.
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1. first full year of being a manager (imo it went pretty well)!
2. first full year of being a lady (or rather, being treated as one)!
3. made some new friends (whom I love a lot)!
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shot 2 ✅
please get it if you can – and I’m hoping that our government decides to offer help to folks in India and elsewhere who desperately need it
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