I agree, it's also (ironically) sometimes hard to disambiguate the differences between Next.js/Vercel/modern versions of React. I like the latter two! The former has just given me some whiplash.
I find the ending particularly funny, we have a small team where we're often building things in-house that we should probably just buy, or rely on manual processes for.
The fumbling with "oops, there's some test data in here" and the issues with the service worker hit a little close to home from some of our demos I've been a part of.
I've had good and bad managers, and the best ones were always ones that were good at doing something. Even if it was something less related to what I did on the day to day it's nicest when someone levels me up vs mostly being the communication glue between me and the rest of the company.
On our team, we deploy our web app through Vercel primarily because of this (maybe there is some hype factor bias in there too?..). Everything else we rely on runs on AWS. We don't necessarily need Vercel for any of the edge computing or serverless environments, but the experience of building, previewing, and deploying our app is FAR superior to AWS's Amplify offering because it just works.
Trialing Amplify for a few weeks led to a world of hurt, leftover build artifacts in our accounts, failed builds left and right, unreliable preview environments, etc.
At a past startup we had many employees organize a grassroots effort to make pay transparent by crowdsourcing a big spreadsheet of engineering salaries. What was found emphasized the disparity between the extremes of the pay distribution.
I think it resulted in better pay for the under-performer (that was pushed up towards the middle of the pay distribution) and worse pay for the top-performer (that was forced down). There were benefits to knowing we were all playing on a level field, but I'm not sure I'm in favor of it now.
I felt like I could be a high performer, and I also had visibility into exactly what I'd be making for the next few years if I stayed there. With that info, I started fielding messages from recruiters who offered to pay 20 and 30k more.
> we live in an environment which is not perfect, and the code is meant to contribute to the this environment
That's a really delightful take! Makes me feel like the code I throw at the wall to see what sticks does make a difference in my corner of the world.
When you add that the definition of perfect can be subjective, one person's definition of perfect might have evolved into it by passing through what is now their good enough definition.
When I was the first engineer at one job my manager (who joined after I did) anticipated others saying this kind of thing about me, and told me to always remember that "the reason any of us engineers have jobs is because of your code".
It's a good reminder, and I appreciate others taking care to build others up.
As I've worked in design and development, I've found resources that have been most helpful at teaching principles are the ones that can present content in multiple formats, especially ones that are interactive.
I worked on Egghead courses focused on building animations in React that resonated really well with users because what is being taught is so visual. Before that, I worked on the docs for Gatsby.js and designed a lot of tutorials and content, including illustrations and interactive components we embedded in our docs that were also very well received by our community.
I decided to combine some of those things that I love and put them together in a course platform where I could organize and store tips and strategies for good UI design, alongside fundamental principles and theories.
I'm having fun with the project and interested to hear feedback! Thanks!
