Studio Espresso Weekly - 13/02📚
😴 "The more tired you are, the more susceptible you become to short-term thinking." - Brian Norgard
Good morning friends, hope you had a good weekend and are ready for another week.
I have a week off from work, which will mostly be spent on painting and finishing things in the house. I gave notice on my rental apartment last week so the moving-out countdown can now officially start 🙂.
This week away from work also comes at the pretty good time, as I've been extremely tired (and as a result more stressed) for a couple of weeks now. So a couple of days to recharge, regroup and find focus again are more than welcome.
A little compliment goes a long way
A week or 2 ago, during a meeting with the entire team, one of my coworkers said she really appreciated the energy she gets from seeing me and another developer on the team work together. It was a small compliment but it really meant a lot to me.
I get tremendous amounts of energy from mentoring people who are eager to learn, who ask a ton of questions and who aren't afraid to challenge me on solutions or approaches as I see them. Mentoring other developers isn't the only part of my job and combining it with my own projects/tasks/deadlines can sometimes be hard but I'm really happy with the people I get to work with every day 🙂.
Building castles in the sand
why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before - "The Market for Lemons" - infrequently.org
This quote (and the entire article) really resonated with me. All too often, I see developers reach for solutions or libraries that are only a month old, that don't have a userbase yet, that are in no way maintainable, that don't fit the rest of our stack, etc...
The same sometimes happens with client: "couldn't we run this entirely in Javascript, that's what everyone else is doing right?". I'd much rather talk about the problem they have and how we can solve that best than debate the merit of a certain stack.
At the office, we tend to stick to a more conservative approach in 99% of projects: the backend renders HTML and we use CSS and Javascript to style & enhance that. In very specific and limited use-cases we add components that are 100% javascript but always within our usual LAMP stack projects.
The reason we, or I should say why I personally, shy away from more exotic stacks is two fold:
- You can't go all-in on a stack that only 1 person on the team can maintain. That might a fine when you're building it but 6 months down the line, when that person leaves the company you're in trouble.
- Secondly, and this one is specific to the types of projects we build (both in size and budget), the classic stack web stack is a) more then enough and b) just as fast, so there isn't really a reason to change things.
Anyway, spontaneous ramble over 🤓.
That's all for the week folks, a bit of a shorter newsletter this week. I'll catch up with you in a week or 2 👋
Jan