Enjoy the Vue

This week's episode is sponsored by Cloudflare Pages!

Laurie Barth, or Laurie on Tech as she is well-known in the dev industry, is a software engineer who started as a mathematician, currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Additionally, Laurie is a content creator and technical educator across various mediums. She is also a frequent conference speaker, speaking at events across the globe, and a technical blogger contributing to publications such as CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and A List Apart, as well as an active member of the TC39 Educator's committee and a Google Developer Expert. In today’s episode, we share some of our more memorable job interview experiences, both good and bad, but mostly terrible, and we dive into how those experiences could be improved upon, starting with the company setting realistic expectations for potential candidates from the beginning. We also touch on unnecessary and unfair technical demonstrations, the value of affording candidates the option to show themselves in their best light, and the inherent biases that exist when interview panels aren’t diverse, and Laurie highlights the power that candidates actually have given the shortage of engineers making this appeal to listeners: take some of that power back! Tune in today for all this and so much more, including, of course, our weekly picks.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Laurie shares a terrible technical interview that stands out from her experience.
• Why a generic interview format very rarely makes sense for any company.
• Why companies need to set their expectations at the beginning of the interview.
• The importance of recognizing how much time it takes to develop a technical interview.
• Why you can’t steal an interview from elsewhere rather than writing one yourself.
• The value of judging what is important based on the signal a company is looking for.
• Alex talks about one of the more memorable (read: terrible) interviews he has been through.
• Ari reflects on a pair programming interview that she describes as ‘interesting’.
• The pressure that is put onto incoming developers to demonstrate their technical skills when it isn’t necessary for the role they will fill.
• Laurie emphasizes why companies should be looking for someone to augment their team.
• Why it’s not about working with people ‘smarter’ than you, but people you can learn from.
• Laurie’s frustration with the use of trivia questions and the benefits of offering candidates options to present themselves in their best light.
• Tessa’s turn to share her experience with a terrible interview that featured live UI coding.
• The disconnect that exists between hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates.
• Laurie highlights the power that candidates hold given the shortage of engineers and urges listeners to take that power back.
• What Ari calls ‘douchebag alert’ questions, how people answer, and what it says about them.
• The gender bias that typically exists when interview panels aren’t gender diverse.
• Why it’s important for team members to meet potential candidates and vice versa.
• Tessa shares the acronym, REACTO: repeat, example, approach, code, test, optimize.
• How interviews tend to cater towards those who are extroverted, outgoing, and talkative.
• Laurie highlights some positive interview experiences and what companies can do better.
• Alex shares a tip about asking the same question of everybody, such as “what is the focus of your company?”

Tweetables:

“People can't read your mind. You need to preface, you need to set your expectations at the beginning [of the interview].” — @laurieontech [0:07:45]

“I want to work with people who are smarter than I am, but here's the trip: everyone is smarter than I am. It depends what the measuring stick is and what category we're talking about.” — @laurieontech [0:26:51]

“The goal of an interview, in my mind, should be for people to show you what they know instead of what they don't know. If you're giving people options, you are giving them the opportunity to present themselves in their absolute [best light].” — @laurieontech [0:29:59]

“Right now, in this moment in time, unless you are an entry level candidate, the candidates have all the power. There's such a shortage of engineers. I would like to see people taking that power back a little bit.” — @laurieontech [0:38:41]

“Interviews, pretty much no mat...

Key Points From This Episode:

• Felix introduces himself and what he does as a game designer.
• Felix explains what it means to be a game designer, using a door in a game as a metaphor,
• Game development and how it parallels with user experience or user interface design.
• How Felix strives towards guiding people through an optimal and less frustrating experience.
• Felix explains what a AAA game is – they are the big-budget, summer blockbusters of games.
• Hear more about what led Felix to game design.
• Going into gaming, Felix had some programming knowledge from his HTML coding hobby.
• How Felix leads a user to make certain decisions, from lighting and UI to manipulating time.
• Felix defines affordances as what’s possible with an object as expressed through its design.
• Felix outlines some examples of how game designers include prompts to guide players.
• Restrictions and repetitions are introduced throughout a game to establish a design language and what the affordances are for the user.
• Felix explains how he balances high intensity difficulty with ease of play through play testing.

Tweetables:

• “We have to constantly strive to make sure that people are being guided towards an optimal, not so frustrating experience. Unless we do want to frustrate them, in which case that's an entirely different design challenge. The goal is to make sure that anybody can play our games with the minimum amount of direct interference or touch on that”. — @uhfelix [0:05:07]
• “Games are this thing you just make up in [their] entirety. Down to the very weird, basic, physical elements, you can use all of them to influence people.” — @uhfelix [0:14:54]
• “Affordance is this concept of how does the design communicate its use to the user? In games, it’s very important because in the virtual world anything is possible. You want to be able to really limit the space of possibility within the player's mind, or else they'll be stuck. They’ll be at a loss as to what to do to progress, or move forward, or to accomplish goals.” — @uhfelix [0:17:57]
• “If you have a lot of focus on player experience, then that would lead you to integrate more player feedback into that process.” — @uhfelix [0:25:11]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

• Felix Park on Twitter
• Felix Park
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Enjoy the Vue on Twitter
• Enjoy the Vue

Special Guests: Felix Park and Ringo Kim.

Support Enjoy the Vue

• Ari Clark
• Chris Fritz
• Ben Hong
• Elizabeth Fine

Enjoy the Vue Episode 3 - VV Day, DevRel & More with Jen Looper

Thanks so much to Jen Looper for being our guest today! You can find her at:

Twitter: @jenlooper
Github: jlooper
Website: [jenlooper.com](jenlooper.com)

Other helpful links:

• Vue Vixens Website: https://www.vuevixens.org/
• Vue Vixens Day Website: https://vvdayus.vuevixens.org/
• Vue Vixens Slack Invite: https://communityinviter.com/apps/vuevixens/vue-vixens
• Donate via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vuevixens/posts
• Partner with them to create experiences
• Donate time to help with code reviews
• @VueVixens Twitter account: https://twitter.com/VueVixens
• Slack is a great way to get in touch

• Official Episode #3 Site
• Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram
• Podcast website

Special Guest: Jen Looper.

Support Enjoy the Vue

Shownotes
[00:03:38] Maria explains the resources that people should know about, tools, and techniques in the accessibility space.

[00:08:55] Color issues are touched on with accessibility tools and how to deal with it. An app called, “Color Oracle,” is brought up to help for the color impaired.

[00:12:44] Chris mentions a utility that is very useful called, CUID, which generates unique ideas.

[00:16:12] A trick is explained that is very useful if you don’t want attributes to be passed and a Chrome extension called Vimium is mentioned.

[00:23:00] Maria saw a really great talk at an Accessibility Conference by CB Averitt that you should check out.

[00:28:21] Chrome has an extension called, Focus Indicator, that Maria says, “It’s really cute.” Hear what it does.

[00:29:57] The topic of accessibility “faux pas” of touch devices is discussed.

[00:36:35] If you’re having to retrofit an app with accessibility find out where you can start and where are places you can go to get easy wins.

[00:41:13] Accessible design from the beginning was touched on earlier, but now the discussion is on the bigger picture with layouts.

[00:44:37] Screen readers and compatibility is touched on as well as WCAG resources which have really good coding examples.

[00:47:33] If you want to see a cool YouTube series go check out Rob Dodson’s “A11ycasts!”

Picks of the week:
[00:50:05] Ari has two picks: A song called “The Light,” by The Album Leaf. Also, a song called, “Da Funk,” by Daft Punk.
[00:50:33] Chris has two picks: A game called, “Disco Elysium,” and to protect against the COVID-19 virus using scarves and bandanas instead of surgical masks.
[00:54:40] Elizabeth’s pick is a keyboard shortcut on VS code, Ctrl+G, on Mac and Windows.
[00:56:57] Maria’s pick is that she let her dog lead her on a walk recently and he led them to a secret new dog park inside their neighborhood and it has changed her life!
[00:58:01] Ben has two picks: Check out Maria’s talk at VueConf on Vue Mastery and the tv show, “Survivor” Season 33: Millennials Vs. Gen-X.

Resources:
Maria Lamardo's Twitter
Maria Lamardo's Linkedin
Pendo
Color Oracle
Vimium
Cuid
Focus Indicator
CB Averitt
Vue Enterprise Boilerplate base-link component
GitHub Ally Organization
Rob Dodson-A11ycasts on YouTube
Vue School-Web Accessibility with Maria
“The Light” by The Album Leaf
“Da Funk” by Daft Punk
Disco Elysium
VS Code shortcut
Web Accessibility Talk at VueConf with Maria
“Survivor”-Season 33

Sponsor:
Linode

Special Guest: Maria Lamardo.

Support Enjoy the Vue

The theme of this episode is EDUCATION. We have special guest, Hope Wilder, the Founder of Pathfinder Community School, which is a self-directed learning community for ages 5-14, located in Durham, North Carolina. They focus on self-directed education and applying principles with children. Remember these catchphrases: Is it good enough for now? Is it safe to try? Those who do the work decide.

[00:01:13] Chris starts off and talks about his background as an educator and voiced his opinions on the traditional education systems.

[00:04:21] Hope discusses how she got into education and founding a school. The more she worked with kids, the more she saw that forcing kids to learn things just doesn’t really work.

[00:06:08] Hope explains what it means for it to be a democratic school and how it’s a very systems level of approach.

[00:11:22] How do the kids learn skills such as conflict resolution and being responsible for getting their work done when working in groups?

[00:15:41] Ari wonders if Hope provides any sort of suggestions, guidance, or options for the kids to work from or if it’s very much from their own imaginations and personal motives.

[00:19:36] Chris brings up finding your own resources and how a former student at Pathfinder, now co-works at a tech company and he’s only 15 years old!

[00:23:08] Ben asks both Chris and Hope about how they feel that self-directed learning relates to development in the Open Source community as far as the relationship between them and how we can learn from that.

[00:28:00] Hope discusses sociocracy which is a form of democracy. There are two important principles or catchphrases that they use a lot at the school.

[00:41:12] Chris gives his thoughts on bootcamps vs self-taught.

[00:49:09] Hope reveals why she created Pathfinder, which was a part of self-healing.

[00:57:26] Hope mentions some resources people can dig into if they are looking into self-directed learning for their kids. She gives MANY, so listen.

Picks of the week:
[01:01:02] Ben’s pick is a book called, “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown.
[01:01:54] Chris’s pick is to check out self-directed education, like Pathfinder.
[01:03:18] Hope has two picks: “Outlander” on Netflix and a blog called “Post Secret.”
[01:06:38] Ari has three picks: two songs by music group “Moderat,” called, “A New Error” and “Les Grandes Marches.” The third is a TV show on HULU called, “Community.”

Sponsor:

Linode

Special Guest: Hope Wilder.

Support Enjoy the Vue