We are back to presenting our incredible team as part of the Marzee clippings. This month we are happy to present our glorious Teach Lead, all-rounder Batman, full-stack developer, JavaScript expert and React enthusiast.
With a degree in biochemistry (yes, I know, no one would guess) Luís started to code for fun and ended up following a programmer career instead. Good for us!
Luís is a critical and logical thinker. There is nothing that he can't debug if he has his chocolate milk and cookies. He learns really fast and is able to work with a variety of technologies. His attention to details makes him an outstanding developer (also makes him that colleague that will instantly correct you if you write or say something wrong).
As our Tech Lead, Luís is great in tech architecture. He is currently responsible for proposing the best technologies for each of the projects we work in, being sure to share the pros and cons of each tech stack.
We did an interview with him, so you get to know him better. Prepare to be amazed.
What is like to work on the web/code for a living?
It's fun. I find programming to be a great mixture of logic and creative thinking. It's fulfilling to approach a task in both of those distinct but complementary lines of thought, and then seeing the results of that exercise out in the world almost immediately.
How did you become a developer?
For fun during college. At that time, I had a bunch of extensions and customizations for my Firefox browser, and some were "misbehaving". I thought about looking under the hood and seeing if I could fix them myself. The first such case was a simple stylesheet for the sidebar.
What are your favourite tech stack and why?
JavaScript, especially React frameworks, mostly because javascript is becoming increasingly powerful and intuitive to use. What are a few of your favorite development tools?
Atom to write code. Netlify to preview and quickly share some results. The rest is gravy.
What was the most challenging project you worked on and why?
I'd have to say it was a project where I was required to learn ElasticSearch (from never having used it at all, along with best practices) while implementing an instance in an AWS infrastructure for the first time. I was essentially learning both at the same time, and while the basics were easy, in that particular case we needed a lot of optimizing due to the characteristics of the project (indexing large amounts of data with well performant searches). I wound up confusing a lot about what was ES and what was AWS in the beginning. Thinking back on it just makes me face-palm.
How do you approach a mystery bug?
With a cookie in my hand and chocolate milk nearby. Besides that, with patience mostly. Try to replicate it first, then dig into the code with lots of console.log's to try to figure out what's going on.
What coding standards are mandatory for you?
Organization is key, well-named directories and files go a long way to figuring out what's going on. Lining is also critical for me, as it leads to better code consistency, making it much easier to read. I also prefer a modular approach whenever possible, as it helps with reusing code, as well as organization. Beyond that I also try to write modern code, transpiling down only if necessary.
What inspires and motivates you?
Challenges go a long way to keeping me motivated, keeping the brain active avoids repetition and monotony. Being paid to work is a big source of inspiration as well.
If you could have a super-power, what would you most prefer? Would you use it for good or evil? What super-name would you be known for?
I would be able to see 3 seconds into the future. That way I could foresee what people do, and do it before them, or hamper their efforts. Everyone would believe I could read their minds, and frightened they would consider every single thought they have into exhaustion and insanity. My name would be Captain Déjà Boo!
Luís in the interwebs:
- GitHub: https://github.com/Quicksaver
- Medium: https://medium.com/@luismz
UPCOMING EVENTS
- [Porto] Thursday, December 12, 2019 - Nerdzão PT #6 - Porto.io There will be 2 lectures [TBD]. Stay connected.
- [Porto] Thursday, December 19, 2019 - Porto Codes: Infrastructure as code using Terraform We use git to keep track of what changes we do to our code, and why we do them. Some use Chef/Salt/Puppet to keep track of server installations. I use terraform to apply the same process to manage my AWS accounts, both personal and professional.
- [Porto] Thursday, December 19, 2019 - #3 Agile Beer Porto Obeya Room- Why agile teams are not enough, por Marco Pinheiro.