Q&A: My First Job, Favorite Languages and Frameworks

The first proper Q&A video, answering three questions from the comments. Thanks to Emdirty, Andrew and Vishal for asking them.

The questions I answered

What was your first job as a developer? Freelancing, in late middle school. I had just learned HTML and CSS and my aunt and uncle needed a site for their chair caning business. The second was an upholstery shop in town, built as a skinned WordPress install so the owner could edit it himself. Then in high school a friend and I interned building a karate tournament registration app in ASP.NET, which was the first time I was employed for real.

Do you prefer front-end or back-end? Front-end, and I feel like I have to defend that. I started out building websites, so I’ve always valued the customer-facing experience more than a lot of colleagues do. I did Rails in college, then landed at Amazon on one of the first teams there to adopt React.

What are you working on now, and what’s your favorite language? Mostly Ruby on Rails with React, plus AWS services and data stores like Elasticsearch. Favorite language is Ruby, partly because I write a lot of it and partly for the functional bits.

Key takeaways

• Understanding the concepts behind a framework matters more than learning the framework. Caching layers, HTTP communication and serialization carry across Django, Rails and Flask alike.
• Surround yourself with people smarter than you. I moved teams inside Amazon when I was not getting that from my team or my manager.