{31} Hiring Traits, Frontend Frameworks & Creative Confidence
{31} Hiring Traits, Frontend Frameworks & Creative Confidence
Featuring Carlos Iborra, Brian Ball, jhey, Trey Nobles, and Shaurya Nagpal
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Product: Hiring Traits
Carlos Iborra
I like this list of traits. I do worry about hiring someone based on my perception of their health. That seems potentially discriminatory. But it is an otherwise solid foundation.
Here are a few additions I’d consider:
Autonomous – While being proactive is often related to autonomy, I think they are different and both valuable. Proactive contributors might rally the troops around a new opportunity. Autonomous contributors might take it upon themselves to explore the viability of a new opportunity.
Diversity – Having a team composed of people who lack shared experiences means that you have a much broader set of overall experiences to draw inspiration from.
Optimists – This is a trait I’ve been thinking about lately. When you encounter a new opportunity, you need a team capable of mentally exploring the space. Optimists tend to think “There is a path to get from A to B, let’s find it”. Pessimists approach ideas as “This won’t work because of X, Y, or Z”. I’ll take pragmatic optimism over pessimism any day.
Frontend: Framework
Brian Ball
I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of React. There are just a lot of small annoying quirks, like attribute renaming (i.e. className), state management, and JSX. I find it far more intuitive to use Vue, which does a much better job of extending pure HTML.
But I tend to use the React-based NextJS framework because it makes up for some of the quirks. One of the things I love about NextJS is the intuitive routing. You don’t have to manage any routing files. Just add files to the ‘pages’ folder and be aware of a few naming conventions, and that’s it. The same system works for building out an API.
NextJS is also compatible with my preferred hosting platform, Vercel. The developer experience in Vercel is superb. It takes care of all the basic devops requirements you need to get started. Just push your code to a github repo, and deployments are automatic. You can even push to a feature branch, and that’ll trigger a preview deployment!
The only thing I’d like to see improved in Vercel is a more intuitive way to manage assets. Adding image assets to a repo isn’t always ideal, and there isn’t an obvious alternative solution.
CSS: Animated Transforms
jhey
Codepen is a great tool for learning a variety of frontend skills. In this example, you’ve got a complex loading animation with 3d transforms to scale and rotate a cube.
When I see the code shared by jhey, my first thought is to wonder about the 3rd parameter in the scale animations. I’m much more familiar with scaling everything uniformly with 1 param or scaling the x/y with 2 params…so I’d assume the 3rd param scales the z-axis. But I’m not really sure how that works in practice because you can’t really make a div “thicker”.
With Codepen, it’s easy to fork someone’s code. Then strip it down to the bare bones. Remove everything you aren’t concerned with. Remove the shadows and the jumping animation. Make the cube just sit in place so you can manually manipulate an attribute to get a better sense of its purpose.
Once you understand the foundation of how to achieve a desired outcome by adjusting attributes, you’ll be ready to add complexity. Maybe you don’t build back the same animation. Use other skills you’ve previously acquired to derive an entirely new animation.
Learning: Acquiring New Skills
Trey Nobles
I appreciate music from afar. I enjoy how I can use it to positively impact my mood. I like the poetic nature of the lyrics. Music is simply an enjoyable part of life.
I was recently gifted an AKAI Professional MPK Mini MK3, and every acronym in the name is a mystery to me. In fact, I don’t have enough technical music vocabulary to even begin to describe what I’d do with it. It’s just a device with a bunch of buttons and knobs sitting on my coffee table.
The only thing I really have going for me is that I love pushing buttons and adjusting knobs. It’s probably the perfect musical instrument for me. As soon as I find the right cables, I’m excited to make some terrible music. Then maybe I’ll advance from terrible to bad music. If I stick with it long enough, who knows? Someone once said I look like Post Malone. It’s half delusional to imagine making music professionally. I am an optimist, so I know there is some potential path from A to B. But it’s probably not the path for me.
The point is, learning something new requires you to embrace being terrible. If you don’t accept that reality, you give up before you ever get started.
Founder: Zero to One
Shaurya Nagpal
Founding a company and going from zero to one is similar to learning to create music. It’s a different type of skill, but some of the underlying principles are the same. You have to go through a period of time when you have no idea what the hell is going on. It might be scary and feel unnatural. If you do it enough times, you’ll start to feel comfortable with uncertainty.
You might even start to crave uncertainty. That sounds masochistic, but I don’t see it as deriving pleasure from pain. It’s the calm before the storm. It’s the excitement of a potential discovery. This is the foundation of what I call “creative confidence”.