RRU 037: Make Backend Devs Jealous of Your Test Suite with Carly Litchfield

Panel: Nader DabitLucas ReisJustin Bennett Special Guests: Carly Litchfield In this episode, the panelists talk with Carly Litchfield who is a Full-stack engineer of React and React Native. The panel and Carly talk about frontend and backend developing and the issues that teams could face day-in and day-out. Listen to today’s episode to hear about that and much more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Kendo UI 0:30 – Nader: Welcome! Our panel is Justin, Lucas, myself, and our guest is Carly. Welcome to the show! Thanks for joining us. Introduce yourself please. 0:56 – Carly: I am a fullstack engineer at a company called Zocdoc. I have been there for 4 years, and we use C# framework. 1:17 – Nader: C# interesting! 1:26 – Nader: You can do game development and other stuff. 1:33- Carly: I haven’t gotten into game development at all, just using C# for web development. 1:50 – Nader. 1:55 – Carly. 2:08 – Nader: The topic for today is: being a frontend developer and a team that is mostly focused on backend. Also, other topics with testing if we have time. How did you get into web development? 2:32 – Carly goes into detail about how she got into web development. 5:02 – Carly: I have worked with React Native, too. 5:22 – Nader: That is my favorite thing to work with (React Native). 5:27 – Panel: Everyone was learning about this new domain and this frontend domain. How was the knowledge spread? How was it spread throughout the company? 5:50 – Carly: One of the people someone that was on this 3 – person team (Thomas) and he went around to anyone who knew React. He made a lot of tooling. He made a lot of configuration libraries. You’d have your NPM integration like everyone else. It was cool to hook it into our servers. It was crucial to help with adoption. Those libraries aren’t being well maintained and it’s causing some pain. 7:32 – Panel: I remember this one case when I was working with an engineer and he was working on backend stuff. He was like I don’t understand here is JSS and JavaScript. Did you have those cultural differences? 8:27 – Carly: Yeah, definitely. You will see a thousand two-thousand lines that are written by us and it’s impossible to know how it hooks-up, etc. It’s painful to work with and some of the internal tooling nobody is updating. That served a forcing mechanism b/c we built tons of the frontend that it’s so complicated and we are paralyzed. That served us b/c frontend is hard and we just can’t go plopping around wherever we want. That’s how they tried to use Backbone. We never hired a specific frontend engineer. We just kept hiring backend to learn frontend. It’s harder to hire someone to avoid those mistakes. They will have to learn the hard way, where a Senior Developer can help. Even our Backbone apps were heavy and hard to work with. At that time we thought we were going to go to React. We thought we could hire someone with true frontend experience. We started an interview process and hard to get off the ground. We have gotten a lot better b/c we have Senior and Principle engineers to help. 12:12 – Panel: This isn’t easy and this is hard. Building UIs are extremely difficult.  13:06 – Carly: I have an old manager that posted a quote...that just shows how much things are changing. These are advanced strategies. On the backend you have all of these services and go to AWS. However, on the frontend the problems aren’t solved, yet. WE don’t have a perfect answer. A lot of the dynamics are interesting and the right answers are yet to be found. 14:32 – Panel: I think that in some ways, an application...