Why hire a developer when you can hire a barista and teach them to code?

Mike is the founder and CEO of the Sails framework (aka Sails.js). He asks: "Why hire a developer when you can hire a barista and teach them to code?"

POST/CON
June 7, 2018
San Francisco, CA
Dogpatch Studios
https://www.getpostman.com/post-con

Transcript

1. Why hire a
   developer
   when you can hire a barista
   and teach them how to code?
   

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2. Why hire?
   

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3. because you can't
   do it all by yourself
   not fast enough, anyway
   

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4. The Company
   

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5. The Company
   Mike McNeil
   @mikermcneil
   founder & CEO of sails co.
   digital studio
   (a.k.a. design/dev/product shop)
   open-source MVC framework for Node.js
   creator of
   

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6. senior developer lead / architect
   junior developer
   $$ $$$
   $
   

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7. trainee apprentice
   barista
   4-6 weeks 2-3 months
   blank slate
   

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8. A culture of teaching
   

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9. Yeah, I'm finished!
   Yikes! Not like that!
   

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10. Teaching makes work
    less boring.
    Wow, I'm learning a ton!
    (They really like me...)
    

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11. Who are these
    "recruiters"?
    (One of them said I
    was a rockstar...) Ignore them, we'd miss you here!
    

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12. What about velocity?
    Teaching takes time.
    

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13. capture business value
    along the way
    (You don't have to hire at day one, either.)
    

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14. super soldier
    barista
    

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15. Business needs:
    

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16. New requirements pop up all the time
    

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17. New requirements pop up all the time
    

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18. Junior developer:
    

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19. Senior developer:
    

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20. Lead / architect:
    

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21. You're paying developers to grow anyway
    

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22. You're paying developers to grow anyway
    

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23. Why not embrace growth from day one?
    

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26. The Company
    Questions?
    @mikermcneil
    twitter.com/mikermcneil
    sailsjs.com/about
    

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27. The Company
    Appendix A:
    Some notes about the "how"
    

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29. The Company
    Layout & markup Interactivity
    Rudimentary terminal skills
    Text editor / IDE setup
    Running a local server
    Onboarding
    Wireframing
    Browser dev tools
    Floats & how to clear them
    Flexbox
    Normal flow, positioning &
    z-index
    Namespacing & mixins
    Using {{dynamic}} data
    Conditional classes & HTML
    ., +, &&, ||, and ?:
    Handling DOM events
    Media queries & animations
    Committing, pulling, pushing, &
    merge conflicts
    encodeURIComponent()
    Creating new pages
    Communication & agile
    Using other preexisting UI components
    Creating email templates
    Custom modal dialogs
    Pull requests
    

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30. The Company
    DevOps & QA HTTP & APIs
    Forms & persistence
    AJAX forms
    Loading states
    Client-side validation
    Server-side errors
    Routes & actions
    Querying the database
    Basic QA skills
    Server-side rendering
    Deploying to staging
    Using the REPL / db client to
    access the staging db
    DNS & registrar
    Reading 3rd party API docs
    Using Postman
    Making HTTP requests in server-
    side code
    SSL cert & redirects
    Setting environment variables
    Language/framework-specific
    configuration basics
    Reading 3rd party API docs
    Encoding request data & headers, parsing
    response data & headers
    Creating reusable helpers
    Negotiating errors, throwing custom errors, &
    using status codes
    

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31. The Company
    File uploads Security
    Messaging features
    Expiring, one-time-use tokens
    Scalability
    When to paginate
    Controlling the size of query result
    sets
    Stability
    Timeouts, retries & exponential
    backoff
    Most common language-specific
    gotchas
    Managing API rate limits
    Optimization
    Running things in parallel
    Secure file uploads
    Negotiating errors & throwing custom errors
    Reducing the # of queries and other
    async operations
    Using native queries & batch
    operations
    S3 bucket configuration
    Safe stream processing
    Listening for WebSocket messages
    in the browser
    Subscribing & broadcasting on the
    server
    PCI compliance
    re charging a card
    or enrolling a customer in subscription billing
    Automated SMS & emails
    Hashed passwords
    Untrusted requests
    Enforcing size quotas
    

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