Isaac Harris-Holt

A seamless writing experience for open-source developers

Polar is on a mission to fix open source funding. Their platform and tools empower software engineers to more easily generate a meaningful income from the work that they do. It's a great project that I've started supporting with content and contributions in my free time! It's a content platform aimed at devs. What more could I want?

Hey folks.

Quick announcement: this is the first edition of what I'm hoping will become the continuation of my long-forgotten newsletter. I'm also finally going to give it a name, making this the inaugural edition of The Founding Engineer.

Enjoy!

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Sometimes it feels that in order to be a successful dev content creator/influencer these days, you need to come up with a tech stack with a catchy acronym. And as someone who does, in fact, want to become a successful dev content creator/influencer, I feel like I'm falling a bit behind.

Writing the world's software in Python

Anything that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

This quote, from Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood, is something we've been seeing become more and more true over the past few years.

Sometimes

There's been a lot of debate going on in dev circles around separation of concerns. Specifically, some larger creators in the dev sphere have spoken out against keeping logic in the database, instead preferring to keep the database purely for storing data.

And I get it. I really do. Keeping logic in the database can pose problems. Databases aren't typically designed for that, and you can tell from the developer experience.

And when to use which

I love Go. I think it's a fantastic language, and it's one of my favourite backend languages to write. We make extensive use of it at Pluto for serverless functions, and it's always really easy to onboard new people into that part of the codebase.

A challenge and a commitment

I was recently listening to an episode of Ali Abdaal's Deep Dive podcast with Nathan Barry, the founder of the newsletter platform ConvertKit. Now, Nathan is a prolific writer. That's probably not a surprise - he did create a SaaS business around helping people reach other people with their writing.

Keep money in your wallet when adopting stacked PRs

We've all been there. We arrive at our desk on Monday morning to find that our over-eager colleague has been working all weekend and completed their feature work early.

Great! Mostly...

Unfortunately, the feature they were working on was quite large, and your colleague got a bit wrapped up in the code. It's all in one PR.

You've got a fun morning ahead.

Finally, some peace of mind.

Photo by Lidia Nemiroff on Unsplash

Goodbye, slow code

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash