This episode features an interview with Sara Vieira, Founding Engineer at axo. At the time of this recording, Sara was working at Remote as a Senior Frontend Developer. As a developer with nearly a decade of experience, Sara has formed a few controversial opinions over the years. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Sara discuss QueerJS (a meetup series for queer folks), why good code is overrated, and if TypeScript is really necessary.
This episode features an interview with Sara Vieira, Founding Engineer at axo. At the time of this recording, Sara was working at Remote as a Senior Frontend Developer. As a developer with nearly a decade of experience, Sara has formed a few controversial opinions over the years.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Sara discuss QueerJS (a meetup series for queer folks), why good code is overrated, and if TypeScript is really necessary.
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Episode Timestamps:
(02:26): Sara’s inspiration for founding QueerJS
(05:51): What Sara’s day-to-day looks like
(13:01): Rapid Fire Questions
(22:26): Random Segment Generator
(31:14): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I think good code is overrated. And this is a very controversial thing to say, but I don't think code is art. I think code has a purpose and the purpose is to build something. And even if your code is not the nicest, as long as it works, it doesn't matter. In the end, your user doesn't care if your code looks nice.” – Sara Vieira
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy Williams:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Dev Morning Show (At Night). I am your host, Cassidy Williams, and I am accompanied by my lovely co-host Zach Plata. Hey, Zach.
Zach Plata:
Hey, Cass.
Cassidy Williams:
I am very excited to chat with our guest today, Sara Vieira. She is at Remote. We first met right before the pandemic in early 2020. Hey, Sara.
Sara Vieira:
Oh, yeah. In Austria, right?
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah. Yeah, you were MCing AgentConf.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. Yeah. That is correct. That is correct. Love AgentConf. They're the only conference that takes good pictures of me.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh, that's good.
Sara Vieira:
Why do you think I always go back? Not in the snow. We don't have snow in Portugal.
Cassidy Williams:
It's an important thing.
Sara Vieira:
It's very important.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh, yes. Snow's nice. Yes. So Sara, I know who you are because we work together. But what do you do, for those out there who don't know who you are?
Sara Vieira:
Yes. So my name's Sara, as said. I am a front end developer. Currently I work at Remote. And yeah, what else do you want to know? I need specific questions.
Cassidy Williams:
You also wrote a book and do things for the environment and stuff.
Sara Vieira:
Okay. Oh, so you want me to go over my entire life. So I was born in Portugal.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh, that'd be cool.
Sara Vieira:
The hospital I was born in eventually closed. It's very sad. I was the last baby to ever be born there. Not true. That would've been amazing though.
Cassidy Williams:
I was going to say, "Whoa, this stops me outside [inaudible 00:01:28] turn."
Sara Vieira:
It closed. So if I wanted my birth certificate, I have no idea how to get that. Gladly, I'm a white European woman, so I'm fine. About four years ago I moved to Berlin. I currently live in Berlin with my wife. I wrote a book about two years ago during the Pandemic. During the pandemic, I also started doing a bunch of legos, as you can see. So my parents didn't like legos. I mean, it's not that they didn't like it, we were mostly just poor, to be fair. They didn't like video games though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote a book. It's called The Opinionated Guide to React and it is about a lot of so many things in React. And I tried to condense the things.
Cassidy Williams:
And they're good opinions, so that's always a good thing.
Sara Vieira:
They're opinions. Yeah, you got opinions. And none of them says it depends. No, I do think it says it depends in two places.
Cassidy Williams:
A true sense.
Sara Vieira:
I'm ashamed to my country.
Cassidy Williams:
Engineers. It could depend.
Zach Plata:
Sara, I also caught that you're the founder of QueerJS, you mind elaborating on that or what that is?
Sara Vieira:
Said founder and I was like, "I'm the founder of nothing. I've never done anything. I didn't make QueerJS." Yeah, so about, I think it was in 2019, so I guess three years ago I started a meet up here in Berlin and called QueerJS, which the idea was that anyone could attend this meetup but only queer people could speak. And it kind of there was more people that wanted to do the meetup in other places. This was before the pandemic, then the pandemic came, right? And it kind of grew a lot. And which was incredible at the time. And there were meetups in London, there were meetups in New York. There was I think one in New York and one in Josef. There was one in Toronto as well. I think those were the only ones that weren't in Europe. And then there was a crap town in Europe. There was Barcelona, Lisbon, Berlin, Amsterdam, a bunch of them.
Cassidy Williams:
That's huge.
Sara Vieira:
So we just had, the last meetup we had was actually last week. We had one in Berlin. It was the first time after the pandemic that we did a meetup. We did it at the pitch office. It was really, really nice. I got lost. But eventually I made it there 45 minutes late. And we had the minute. No, it was fine because I was supposed to be there an hour before and I was there 15 minutes before.
Cassidy Williams:
There you go.
Sara Vieira:
There you go. You can take the Portuguese out of Portugal. You can't take the... Wait. No, you can't, wait. What? You can take the Portuguese out Portugal, but you can't take the Portugal out of the Portuguese.
Cassidy Williams:
There you go.
Sara Vieira:
I'll always be late. That's the point of this story. Yeah. So I'm really happy on how QueerJS went. We can now pay for people's travels and everything. Like one person came from Amsterdam because we have an open [inaudible 00:04:08]. So it's really, really nice.
Zach Plata:
That's amazing.
Cassidy Williams:
That's so cool.
Zach Plata:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast, means someone has to pay the bills around here. We're sponsored by LaunchDarkly. And LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want. Fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the money LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy Williams:
So Sara, what are you working on right now?
Sara Vieira:
So besides working at Remote, obviously, I'm also hoping a friend of mine who's [inaudible 00:04:51], obviously. I'm also hoping a friend of mine who's making a startup. So I worked out on my off days, Saturday and Sunday sometimes, and after work I was making a startup called Web Studio, [inaudible 00:05:01] here from Berlin [inaudible 00:05:02]. And it's been really fun to start something from start, and I don't know how, but I became the DevOps person kind of. I'm making off.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh that's different.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, I'm making off and Prisma database changes. So that's who I am now. It's weirdly fun. It's weirdly fun because you don't have to care about does it look good? Does it work? That's the only thing you have to care about.
Cassidy Williams:
That's true. If it works, it just works.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. There's no UI to it. That's it. The database ain't never going to look good. It's a database. Okay. But the point is, so I'm doing that and I'm also help, I'm trying to learn Gado and been doing some Blender and legos.
Cassidy Williams:
So the next great game will be coming from you.
Zach Plata:
Amazing.
Sara Vieira:
I don't think so. Incredible.
Cassidy Williams:
Maybe.
Sara Vieira:
No, generally don't think so.
Cassidy Williams:
Sara, what does your day to day look like?
Sara Vieira:
Thats honestly a very bad question to ask me because I always feel bad about it because I don't wake up at normal adult times. Today I woke up, it was 11:40 AM. So I never started working before 11:00 AM.
Cassidy Williams:
You could just that you're on-
Sara Vieira:
I wake at 6:00. I wake up at 6:00. And then I go to the gym and I'm definitely not wearing pajama pants right now. They're actually short because it's 30 degrees in this godforsaken city.
Cassidy Williams:
Me neither.
Sara Vieira:
Yes. We're we all have pants and Zach is like, Yeah, I have pants. Zach, Jesus.
Zach Plata:
We would all never know.
Cassidy Williams:
You could say that you're working on US East Coast time.
Sara Vieira:
Unless the person listening British.
Cassidy Williams:
You could say that you're working on East Coast US time zone-
Sara Vieira:
Oh, I usually tell people-
Cassidy Williams:
Then you are waking up at-
Sara Vieira:
Oh yeah. I usually tell people I have a New York schedule because of that. Because there's no way this is... so I usually wake up pretty late. I've decided during my life that if I don't have to wake up early then I won't. Because it makes me sad. And then I don't have to be sad. I don't like mornings. So I may just not, unless I have to get a plane or something. Which I also try to avoid in the morning. So I wake up, I do some work, mostly just like, I mean I have coffee, otherwise I'm not actually awake. I do some work mostly just checking emails and looking at them and then not answering them and be thinking to yourself, I have to answer this later. And then not answering it for two weeks and then you never answer because you feel bad about answering now, because it's been three weeks. I don't know if anyone relates, but I think everyone relates to this.
Cassidy Williams:
That's me in a nutshell.
Sara Vieira:
I feel like all my emails should already my default start with, "I'm sorry for the delay." So review Mrs, PRs, all of that stuff, I try to do that in the morning. Then I have lunch. Do I have breakfast? I just eat a banana. That's case. I have to eat. I used to have low blood sugar when I was a kid. So if I don't eat, I think that I'm just going to pass out even though I don't have low blood sugar anymore. But my brain is like, "Where's the food? What have you done? Where is the food? I will just die right now if you don't give me the food." Yeah. And yeah. So then I work for four hours, right? Or six hours or something like that. I have dinner. And then I play video games or try to learn how to make video games or try Blender again.
Zach Plata:
There we go.
Cassidy Williams:
Games, games, games. That's what [inaudible 00:08:25].
Sara Vieira:
Till I cry.
Zach Plata:
Awesome. All right, well what terminal or editor are you using these days?
Sara Vieira:
Oh, I use for the terminal. Oh my god. I was going to say Chrome. I use Warp, which I think is, it's quite new.
Cassidy Williams:
Warp. It's the Rust one, right?
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, it's built in Rust. It's stupid fast, and okay, I just want you both to imagine this, right? So you're typing something in the terminal and you messed up something, the second (bleep) letter. What you can do in Warp is command A and go to the beginning of the line because the line is just a text editor. You can click on things. It's incredible. Everyone has to download this, seriously. I can recommend it enough. I can't. I just (beep) can't. I should have asked if I could curse in here.
Cassidy Williams:
You can't. But we have editors for this.
Sara Vieira:
Sad. For the editor, the same, I use VS Code. So when I was young, a teenager with undiagnosed ADHD, I used to... interesting. I used to just do a bunch of stuff in computers. I learned the basics of pretty much everything. After Effects VS Code, not VS Code. I was going to say After Effects, what's the other one? Premier. And Photoshop and all that stuff. I never understood the point of Premier, it's just a paid movie maker, to be fair. I always
Cassidy Williams:
It's Windows movie maker but with more.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, it's fancy movie maker and now you have the Venture Resolve. So it's okay. Yes. And then my dad was, when I was a kid. Oh, so when was a kid, I learned some Blender, I looked at it, I cried. And then I downloaded Cracked Cinema 4D because that didn't look as bad.
Cassidy Williams:
Blender has come a long way.
Sara Vieira:
In the past. Oh yeah, Blender looks good now. They've actually hired designers and everything and the UI is good now. I think it looks better than the rest of them now, actually. But that's just my opinion. I mean I also am the one that looks at it, right? But on the other side, if you look at Unity, Unreal and Gado, Gado actually probably has the better UI, and it's also the one that's free and open source. So I don't know.
Cassidy Williams:
Open source will eat all software. Anyway, go on.
Sara Vieira:
Somebody will make the icons for you and you don't have to make them. It's like, oh my God. No, that's not the point. I was going to say old and real. Unreal for, looked so bad. You had bevels and things. Remember you all?
Cassidy Williams:
It's good times.
Sara Vieira:
It's good.
Cassidy Williams:
I'm getting you back on topic so we don't run out of time.
Sara Vieira:
So my dad, right? He was a 3D designer, so he just made buildings.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh cool.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, yeah. Then yeah, so he made buildings and stuff. It's not that cool, but it's okay. He made the buildings that you go and then you show to project developers and stuff like that. And he wanted to make a website for himself, but he doesn't have any design skills. And when I say any, I mean none. I mean at that time, I don't know if he does now. I don't know. Did he grow as a person? Who knows? Let's ask him. And so I remember that he showed me the website he made and I was very angst as a teen, right?
Cassidy Williams:
Weren't we all?
Sara Vieira:
I was very emo as a teen. I was very angry at everything because just basically I was emo and gay and undiagnosed ADHD. And I went to Catholic school so all the pieces play out. And yeah, so I looked at my dad and I was like, "That's cool, but that kind of looks like crap." And he was like, "Can you do better?" And I was like, "I'll learn." And I did. And I learned and I made him the website. And then I was like, "Wait, I kind of like this." And then I found that I could get paid to do that. And I was like, "Hells yeah."
And then I found out I could get paid actual money to do that. It was a job and not just €50 a month. And I was like, "Hells yeah." So I started doing programming. I think the part of me that still wants to learn everything, all the random software still lives, right? And I still kind of want to learn everything. But I found one thing that I'm like, "I'm okay at this, Sara. Don't try. Don't further away. You're fine. You found the one thing. You got very lucky." Because I know that if I was passionate about painting, I would still be living with my moms and trying to make it in painting, even if I sucked. So I got real lucky.
Cassidy Williams:
You could have made it. Maybe.
Sara Vieira:
I don't have any connections in the art industry. Valid point?
Cassidy Williams:
Get into that whole topic another time. Anyway, let's go into rapid fire questions. Rapid fire questions. We're going to be asking you a bunch of questions, rapidly, back and forth. First one, what is a domain name that you're squatting on?
Sara Vieira:
I have many domain names that I do not use. I know that I own the domain, Sara is gay. Sara is that gay? Don't do anything with it. But Name Sheet does not tell you how many domains you have. But I have three pages on Name Sheet. So that's something.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh Gosh.
Zach Plata:
Oh wow.
Sara Vieira:
I have a lot of domains.
Cassidy Williams:
That's a lot.
Sara Vieira:
Just leave it there. It's fine. It's fine. I have the domain terrible but incredible, which I found it's a very good domain.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh, that's cool. Yeah.
Sara Vieira:
There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Zach Plata:
It's cool. All right, next question. What is the most recent thing you over-optimized?
Sara Vieira:
Oh, I made a use effect into a hook just because I think it looks better because you can hide your shame. That was two days ago. And I was like, "Should I leave this here or should I make it into a hook? Does it change anything? Is this going to be used anywhere else? Is this going to be used anywhere else? No. Why shouldn't I make it into a hook?" And now it's a hook and you can use resizable columns. It's not going to work anywhere else except that specific place. But it's a hook now.
Cassidy Williams:
For those out there who don't know React, use effect is a blessing and a curse where it does the thing, it does the thing well sometimes, and then sometimes it can get very gross.
Sara Vieira:
And it just loads your browser to eternity and then you have to restart your computer.
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah, the default behavior is an infinite loop.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. I went into a rabbit hole because of this effect. I think I can understand it now, but it took me bad, bad days.
Cassidy Williams:
I think. Yeah, it's taken all our people a minute. Anyway, what is your golden rule for coding?
Sara Vieira:
I think good code is overrated. And this is a very controversial thing to say, but I don't think code is art. I think code has a purpose and the purpose is to build something. And even if your code is not the nicest, as long as it works, it doesn't matter. In the end, your user doesn't care if your code looks nice.
Cassidy Williams:
That's true.
Sara Vieira:
That it doesn't matter unless it's readable. And I feel like this is a very bad opinion to have as a developer. I want to say that not all my...I don't write terrible code. I try to write decent code, but-
Cassidy Williams:
You write very good code.
Sara Vieira:
But if it comes to a point where to build something, I have to write something that everyone will squirm at, I don't care. If I have to get element by ID in a React app, I don't care. It works.
Zach Plata:
What is your favorite, it depends, question?
Sara Vieira:
Should I learn how to code?
Cassidy Williams:
That's a good one.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, I feel like a lot of, I think that if you asked me that five years ago, I'd be like, "Yes." Oh I forgo, I was going to say (beep), let's learn how to code. And finally they can believe it so that's fine. I'll be like, " (beep) you should learn how to code." There's so many jobs, but I feel like the quantity of jobs is not that it has decreased a lot, but it has that most companies are just not hiring juniors a lot and the ones that are, really take advantage of you. So I feel like right now I mostly ask, it depends. Are you going to hate it? Because if you're going to hate it, I'm not sure it's worth it because I'm not sure that it's as easy to make a good living as it was five years ago.
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah. And I also think in general, it depends on the types of companies that you're going for or that you're interested in. It depends on just the type of code that you want to do. If you want to do frontend, backend, DevOps. CIS admin stuff, data sciencey stuff. There's so many different avenues. I think you got to figure out what you're interested in first. What is the oldest piece of tech that you own?
Sara Vieira:
That is a very good question. Oh, it's my ps4, wait, is it my ps4?
Cassidy Williams:
That's not that old.
Zach Plata:
Yeah.
Cassidy Williams:
It's pretty nice.
Sara Vieira:
No, I still have my... oh no. Back in my mom's house. I have Guitar Hero guitars from the ps3.
Cassidy Williams:
Nice.
Sara Vieira:
I have two Guitar Hero guitars from the ps3. And I have a Pebble watch, which is very sadly kind of that.
Cassidy Williams:
Pebble watch.
Sara Vieira:
I have a Pebble watch.
Cassidy Williams:
I have one of those too.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. Yeah, I think those are the two oldest. I may still have my Game Boy, but it has not worked in 10 years.
Cassidy Williams:
It's just, it exists. And maybe it'll work.
Sara Vieira:
I think it's there. It's probably there, right? I don't think my mom threw it in the trash, but I remember him. He was yellow and had a bubble sort of sticker. He was a good boy. He was a good boy.
Zach Plata:
All right. Next question. Have you written a piece of cringey code? And if so, what was that lately?
Sara Vieira:
So the worst code that I think I've ever wrote was the one where, so when I was working at, I don't think I should say where I was working, but we had to make markdown files, right?
Cassidy Williams:
The previous company.
Sara Vieira:
When I was working at previous company, we had to, so we had these markdown files, and they made this, this was for designers to everyone else to be able to contribute. And one of designers came to me and he was like, "What if this did an accordion?" And I was like, "But this is a markdown file. This is not a React component. How can I make this to an accordion?" And he was just like, "But what if it did?" And I was like, "No." And like, "But what if it did?" And I was like, "Fine. You know what? Fine, fine." So how that works, right? Is that it has to use effect, obviously, and when it loads the page, right? All of the things, it goes through every H2, if you don't add an H2, it won't work. That's how it is. It goes to every H2 in the page. It finds all the Ps after that H2 until the next H2 and hides them.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh, just deletes. Oh gosh.
Sara Vieira:
No, it doesn't delete them. It doesn't delete them, it hides them. It adds a class of hidden or something, or style hidden. And then it attaches a button, not a button, but it's on click of every H, any H2, it adds all of the button things. It will open the Ps at the bottom. And you're wondering, right? Does it open them if you have three Ps, do they open one, oh sorry, one, two? Yes. Yes. [inaudible 00:19:34]. Yes, they do. But does it work? Yes. Is it disgusting code? Yes. Did I one time even gave into a friend of mine because she needed some code that did the exact same thing and she looked at me and was like, "I'm not going to judge you because I'm going to use it but what the (beep)."
Zach Plata:
Now you have an accordion.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. And it's in a hood so no one knows. You open that page and it just says, "Use accordion." It's almost like, "Wow, there's a hook for that?"
Zach Plata:
That's a great.
Sara Vieira:
And then they opened the page and there's a comment at the top saying, "I'm sorry about this." I'm sorry for what I've done.
Zach Plata:
I'm thinking of that TikTok sound that's like, "Wow, she's really good."
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. Wow. Then they open and they're like, "Wow, let go wow."
Cassidy Williams:
Oh no. Oh man. Okay. What is your favorite programming pun?
Sara Vieira:
It's one that I've heard from Sara Jasmine. I've been thinking about it for 20 minutes and I can't think of what. Oh. Oh my god, what was it? Okay, Carson you got to help me out here. There was one. I heard it, is my internet dead? No. I heard it from Sara. That was like, "Do you know what this is in JavaScript or something like that?"
Cassidy Williams:
Oh yeah. And I don't either or something.
Sara Vieira:
No, it was something that was really good. It was good. It was actually good. And I'm whole guy on this hill. It was really good [inaudible 00:21:03].
Cassidy Williams:
There is a good pun that exists.
Sara Vieira:
There is one and I can't think of it. Oh my god. The worst pun though.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh man.
Sara Vieira:
Is the, I love you pun. But instead of saying new, you say view. Did you ever hear that?
Cassidy Williams:
No. But there it is.
Sara Vieira:
There it is. I love you.
Cassidy Williams:
That's the one. It reminds me of the worst corporate pun I've seen. And it was done by the WeWork CEO.
Sara Vieira:
Oh no.
Cassidy Williams:
But he called himself the CWEO.
Zach Plata:
Oh no.
Sara Vieira:
The CWEO?
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah. Because WeWork.
Sara Vieira:
I hate everything.
Zach Plata:
Last one. What is your most used emoji?
Sara Vieira:
I think it's actually the, what's the name of this? The party thing where you have the little...
Cassidy Williams:
Oh, the little party triangle?
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. Yeah. I think if I'm saying I might [inaudible 00:21:55].
Cassidy Williams:
I don't actually know what that one's called. I always alias it to party triangle.
Sara Vieira:
I think it's party pooper, but I don't think it's party pooper. I think it's something else. But yeah, it's that one.
Cassidy Williams:
Party popper?
Sara Vieira:
Popper. Yeah, it's that. Yeah. I like that one. Yeah.
Zach Plata:
There you go.
Cassidy Williams:
I think it's that. Party pooper and popper are very different things, but you never know.
Sara Vieira:
Oh, I also really use the one where it's like this, there's a tear but he's smiling.
Cassidy Williams:
Oh yeah, that's a good new one.
Sara Vieira:
I really like that one. I like that one.
Cassidy Williams:
I do use that one.
Sara Vieira:
I like that.
Zach Plata:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good.
Cassidy Williams:
It's nice. It conveys a lot of solid emotions. Okay. It is time for the random segment generator. There will be random segments and we will pick from them and you're going to answer questions. The first one is talk and ship slash sip. We're going to spill some tea. What's something that's underrated or overrated in the dev community in your opinion?
Sara Vieira:
Something that's incredibly overrated. I feel like it's TypeScript and Code Quality. I feel like TypeScript is good. I don't precisely hate TypeScript. I just think that we all need to stop. We all need to stop, look around and wonder, does this single page application that has two pages really need TypeScript? Does it really need TypeScript in this styled component? It does not. I'm going to answer that for you. That's my thing. Why did I say think? That's my thing. So I do think it's very useful when it comes to state management and design systems and stuff like that. But I'm like-
Cassidy Williams:
I think it's good in large teams because it forces people to stay within certain boundaries and stuff. But on side projects and smaller things, I agree with you.
Sara Vieira:
It's also like, would you use PropTypes for this? No. Then why are you using TypeScript for it? Why? Doesn't make sense. A friend of mine that, she's the tech lead, and I was like, "Do you use TypeScript at your company?" And she was like, "No. And I'll make sure we never do, because I make the decisions. And every time someone comes up and is like, "Can we use TypeScript? I'm like, no." And I'm like, "God bless your soul woman." I want to go work there. That sounds [inaudible 00:24:13]. We also don't use TypeScript at Remote.
Cassidy Williams:
I remember when I was at Netlify, we partially used it, but because it was partial, it was not worth using.
Sara Vieira:
We did use it at CodeSandbox, a lot. And that's where I actually learned TypeScript. It was very painful. And not for state, it was actually very useful.
Zach Plata:
We do use at Rive. We maintain a library that has types and I think that's probably the one time that, or I really appreciate TypeScript, is not trying to use a new library.
Sara Vieira:
That does make sense, I think.
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah. Library is a smart way to use it.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. The model library that we released also has types. I think that's, it should have it because even if you don't use TypeScript, VS Code can catch on those types. And I think that's the nice thing to do, right?
Cassidy Williams:
The TypeScript linter is great. I do like the linter because it forces thing even if you don't use it.
Sara Vieira:
I don't think TypeScript is used because it's useful as people really believe it is. I think it's used because VS Code is heavily used and VS Code gives you a lot of good things if you use TypeScript. It's auto complete. Don't lie to me. It's auto complete. If VS Code did not have auto complete, would you still use TypeScript? That's the real question?
Zach Plata:
Alright, moving on to the next random segment. It's dev Opposites. So we'll just ask you a series of questions about what you do outside of the dev life. So what do you do outside your day job, I guess?
Sara Vieira:
I'm learning how to make video games. I'm learning Gado. I also do a lot of, not a lot, but I try to do Blender and 3D modeling and stuff like that. I think it's something that, it's like, it's a thin line between design, art, and this makes sense mathematically in my head because it's points that make a cube and that helps, right? Because it's like-
Cassidy Williams:
It's mathy art.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. And it's not that I like math, but I like when things make sense and they're not completely, one person says it looks good and the other one says it looks like crap. My brain needs something that is like, yeah. And yeah, I also really like football. European football, I mean non-American football. Yeah, I used to watch it, I tried to watch it a lot. It's really weird because football is the way I know that I'm okay mentally, because if I don't want to watch football, I know that something is wrong. Because it means that my brain, does not have the space to enjoy anything. So it's like I know that if I still want to watch football, I'm going to be okay. The moment I'm like, "I don't feel like watching football."
Cassidy Williams:
That's when you know [inaudible 00:26:56].
Sara Vieira:
Sara, have you been taking your medication? Kind of situation. So yeah. I also really like B movies. Okay. B movies are basically, the B does not stand-
Cassidy Williams:
Bad movies.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, the B stands for bad. The B doesn't actually stand for bad, but you can pick up the B as it stands for bad. So B movies are very low budget movies that are made by people. Some of them are very high budget, they just look low budget. Good examples of that are Sharknado, for example. I think that's the most known B movie to be honest.
Cassidy Williams:
That is a very well known movie.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. So there's like five Sharknados at this point, but there's also the Rome and stuff like that. I really enjoy watching that. I don't know why, but it makes me really weirdly happy.
Cassidy Williams:
Do you think you enjoy just the fact that it's bad and you can be like, "Oh this is terrible." Or something else?
Sara Vieira:
I think a part of me enjoys the failing as well. Because there's so much failing, and there is a nostalgia to very bad CGI. There's a love for it. And it's so bad. And there's also ones that are actually really good. They're not actually good, right? They're not the definition of good, but it's like, so the way we rate this, so I'm part of this Berlin B movies club in Berlin, which makes sense.
Cassidy Williams:
That's awesome.
Sara Vieira:
I know it was the best thing I found in this city. So we usually watch a movie every Sunday. We're skipping this time because it's summer. I don't know how it's related, but the thing was nine, and am like, "Valid." And so how we rate these movies, it's not just like was this fun? Was how painful was this from one to 10 and how fun was this from one to 10?
Cassidy Williams:
That sounds like such a good time with other people.
Sara Vieira:
It's great. No, it's honestly great and it's in that way you can actually give a good rating because even if something is fun, if it's an eight in fun but it's like an eight in pain, is it really worth it? Because most of them you will cringe.
Cassidy Williams:
I love that.
Sara Vieira:
You will cringe. It is what it is. Yeah. Love it. B movies, everyone, I can recommend Troll 2. It's a great B movie.
Cassidy Williams:
So good.
Zach Plata:
Amazing.
Sara Vieira:
Also one about Llamas, [inaudible 00:29:19].
Zach Plata:
I do have one other follow up for this segment. Do you have a go-to karaoke song?
Sara Vieira:
Yes. It's Toxic by Britney Spears.
Cassidy Williams:
Excellent choice.
Zach Plata:
So good.
Cassidy Williams:
Excellent choice.
Sara Vieira:
Okay. The Llama movie's called Llamageddon and was made by a bunch of students and you all should watch it.
Cassidy Williams:
Our last random segment is 404s and Heartbreak. What is something that was taken off the internet and is a page not found that you used to love?
Sara Vieira:
It's not really a page not found, but Pebble in general.
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah. Pebble.
Sara Vieira:
The entire existence of Pebble was very hard for me to take in. The fact that it just died and they took all the servers out and everyone stopped being able to use it. I think you can use it now with some-
Cassidy Williams:
Rebel?
Sara Vieira:
... same group of people. Yeah, Rebel. But it was such a love thing and there was never a possibility for them to just be like, "You all, here's the thing. Can you all host it?" And people would've been like, "Sure." But they never gave people the possibility to do that. And I know people who still use a Pebble. I was using it last year. I know guy that still uses it. It's very, very loved. And it was for very sad.
Cassidy Williams:
For people who don't know what Pebble is, by the way, it's a smartwatch that was the OG smartwatch, but it was open and so anybody could make plugins for it. It had kind of an e-reader type screen. It was great. I made an app for Pebble back in the day. It was good times.
Zach Plata:
Yeah, I remember you noodling on that in college. It was like you programmed in C++ or something.
Cassidy Williams:
Yes. Because I remember complaining to you because it was C++.
Zach Plata:
We feel the pain.
Sara Vieira:
But it was great. It was great and it was cheap. And it was hackable. It was great. I loved it.
Cassidy Williams:
Now it is time for some sage advice. And I'm going to take a leaf out of Sara's book and say that my advice to you is, don't meddle or worry so much about your code quality. When you're writing your code, if it works, it works and ship it. A lot of times you can start a side project or try to learn something and you want it to be so perfect that you get bogged down in the details and you might want to understand something to the nth degree so you can really, really know it. But that just slows you down. And most of the time I'm talking to myself about this, you end up just never shipping it and it just is a pile on your computer, something that you can't maintain or deal with. So just write the code, ship it, and understand it later. Because the more you do that, the more you can ship and the better you do. And I will say, this might not necessarily apply to work, but-
Sara Vieira:
I wish you did though.
Cassidy Williams:
It kind of can. It starts to, and then you can always fix it later. You can just get code out the door, get your projects out the door, and then fix it.
Sara Vieira:
How many GitHubs repos do you have? Because I have 300. Because I never finish anything. [inaudible 00:32:32] Oh, there you go. And she's just like, " Oh, this is actually a good question for a follow-up."
Cassidy Williams:
It is a good question. I have 142.
Sara Vieira:
Yeah. Issue with never finishing anything.
Cassidy Williams:
Yeah. Well and I will say a lot of my projects are private code pens that I never actually ship. Because I tend to start a base layer there and then move it into [inaudible 00:32:52].
Sara Vieira:
Oh yeah, no, I have a lot of code Sandboxes that were either for testing or we're copied over, but still, I don't understand how I have 414 repositories and 279 of those are source repositories. I made those repos. They're not for it and I don't know what they have. What if we just release everything on one day?
Cassidy Williams:
Just release everything, it'll be chaos.
Sara Vieira:
Everything it's done.
Cassidy Williams:
Like Pandora's box. But it's Sara's repos.
Zach Plata:
It's going to be a great day.
Cassidy Williams:
Okay. Anyway, Sara, it has been so much fun. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We really enjoyed having you. It was a great time.
Zach Plata:
Yes, thanks so much, Sara.
Cassidy Williams:
Thank you so much. It was really fun. Where can people find you on the internet? Do you have any plugs that you want to share?
Sara Vieira:
Yeah, I'm mostly on Twitter. I don't really use Instagram that much, so I'm mostly on Twitter. You can find me at Nikkiftw, with two Ks on the Twitters.
Cassidy Williams:
Cool. And once again, because Making podcast is expensive, this show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly toggles peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day, and that number continues to grow. And you should use them. You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible LaunchDarkly. I've been Cassidy Williams. You can find me @cassidoo, C-A-S-S-I-D-O-O on most things. And I'm CTO over at Contenda.
Zach Plata:
I'm Zach and I'm a dev at Rive, and you can find me on Twitter @ZachPlata.
Cassidy Williams:
Thank you for tuning into The Dev Morning Show (At Night). Make sure you head over to our YouTube channel where you can like and subscribe. You can also listen to the audio version of this wherever you get your podcasts.