Day job - Doing what I love

I joined Globant almost exactly 3 months ago 🎉 and it’s been refreshing! It is also my first time joining a company as a Web developer (in the modern day terms this means front-end dev) this is aligned perfectly with my career goals.

This means I will always have a browser by my side to see what I am doing and my code will always impact the user-interface in a way or another. Annex on this: building back-end for front-end is also fine for me!

Even though I can’t exactly expose a lot of details, I can say that I am loving the current tech-stack: Next.js, React, TypeScript, MongoDB, Redis and Nest.js for the Node.js micro-services.

They’re using containers on Kubernetes hosted on AWS, I haven’t touched any of that yet, but hey I could always take a look if I wanted to. As long as I am careful enough 🫣

I know it sounds like I been living under a rock, but I am also working with logging/monitoring services such as Datadog and Splunk, the session-replay feature is a killer! 😮 (I am not sponsored)

And the cherry on top, is that my employer is paying for AI coding tools🍒

”👋 Welcome to the current year, Luciano”, I said to myself as I felt the glory of all the modern tools I can now use at my day job.

Context on this: Working for my previous employer, circa 2021, all I had was a 2012 node.js version, some broken babel config and a React SPA that had a gigabytes-worth of node_modules. Lucky I was using functional components.

Entrepreneurship - Maybe next time

There are no ideas yet! I used to have one but I had to discard it because the hype around it died. Sometimes nothing is better than a failure. 🤷

Social networks - Joining Bluesky

I remember back in 2022 when I joined Mastodon, I had to leave because discussions around front-end development (or coding in general) were not on my social circles and everything was starting to feel too political plus the majority of technical people I could find were die-hard free and open source afficionados. Note: nothing wrong with that, but that wasn’t the vibe I wanted. - More notes: I love open source, however I won’t ever condemn someone for using commercial software.

I set myself on the de-facto social network for microblogging (𝕏, as it’s called now), but I didn’t feel like I was an author there rather a consumer of content. So I sat there, quietly to read and doom-scroll technology news, code tips and snippets, scencially I quit microblogging. Note: the platform didn’t help, as my account was shadow-banned.

The day 𝕏 was banned on Brazil Note: I am not from there. , I decided to jump on Bluesky as I heard that a lot of people were joining and I thought to myself “well then probably some of them are devs, so I might as well try it out”, funny enough, I also had Duolingo by my side to help me grasp the basics of portuguese.

Unfortunately, it felt like a ghost town, ocassionally I had some quick discussions with a brazilian mutual that spokes English, I searched for the TypeScript hashtag, dev hashtag and tried to start conversations there but I could not call that a success.

Then something great happened, a lot of tech people from the aforementioned social network joined.

In Bluesky there’s the concept of starter pack, which is pretty much a list that someone can make to help new people get their firsts following. And provides a quick “Follow all” button. I asked politely to be part of a Web developers starter pack and that kick-started the discussions. (Of course, I followed everyone there as well)

A lot of open-source JavaScript tools joined, to list a few: Vite, Vitest, Vue, Node.js, Deno, Nuxt, Preact, Solid, Astro, Eleventy.

Heck, I even had interactions with Tanner Linsley (creator of TanStack, aka React Query), Daniel Roe (leader of the Nuxt framework team).

It feels awesome to be part of a community that I can actually join the conversation with! 🦋

Recreational programming - AKA projects for the portfolio

Being a developer who mostly does consulting work, it’s hard to show off what I do, due to the nature that the client owns the project and all it’s intellectual property.

Of course, I can prepare for job interviews as I done in the past, I mean this in the literal sense of displaying a project, both externally and internally (source code).

When entrepeneurship happens, I have some final products to show off, but no source code.

Picture a visual artist, that cannot show their paintings but can talk about technique and create simple proof-of-concept drawings when it’s needed.

To mitigate this, I am trying to build more open-source projects with the end-goal of displaying my skills. Right now, I am building a tree node editor, if this sounds confusing think of it as an “ideas organizer” app that lets you see in an hierarchy way your notes (which can be either plain text or pictures, It’s still a work-in progress).

I am using Remix, React, Prisma (with SQLite) and Tailwind for the tech stack. I forgot how confortable I was working with Remix, I have to confess that I like the “loaders” approach to the server-side rendering mechanism more than the React Server components that is often used on Next.

Closing words

Thanks for reading! Be well.

• thanks to Tyler Sticka for sharing his last blogpost on bluesky as it inspired me to write again.