The last couple of months, my team at Transferwise, has been working to deliver a new feature on our product. We call this feature Money Tracker and helps TransferWise users to track their money better. I鈥檝e been developing it for the web using Angular in an external component. As a general approach for our frontend all of our new features are created in their own repository, using ES2015, Webpack and Babel....
During the early stages of a company the focus is to move fast. It鈥檚 a matter of survival. The founders have probably left some lofty careers, the money is limited and the competition feels very threatening. In an environment like this, where speed is the name of the game, quality is not exactly the number one priority. To be honest, that鈥檚 the right approach. A mediocre product that鈥檚 in front of users now is better that a very well written that never sees the light of the day....
Recently I was on a trip to New York. One of my first destinations was the Museum of Modern Art, and for a good reason. The MoMA is one of the best museums I鈥檝e even been (along with Tate Modern in London). In there I had the opportunity to see amazing exhibits like sculptures from the amazing Louise Bourgeois, paintings from Pablo Picasso and one of my favourites Giorgio de Chirico ....
Today British Airways was all over the news. Fortunately no airplane tragedy happened. Unfortunately an IT tragedy happened. Specifically all systems went down worldwide due to a power supply issue. Now, if you鈥檝e worked on IT for more than a couple of years you鈥檒l have to wonder. How did they manage this? Do they have only 1 database with a laptop running all operations? What happens with backup data centers? Backup systems?...
Back in the early 90s a group of experts, led by sociologist James Baron looked through various companies and followed them until the dot com crash in the dawn for the 21st century. They did focus mostly around, how the companies were managing to grow and the strategies they followed. They categorised these firms in three basic categories : Companies that hired people based on professional skills. These are people that are highly skilled on a specific field....
Noise /n蓴瑟z/ A sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes disturbance. Lately I鈥檝e been thinking a lot about the concept of feedback. Specifically when the feedback stops being something constructive, that can enable you to grow, and becomes noise. It becomes something that distracts your from the things that you should be really focusing on and instead it puts you in a constant state of alert and uneasiness....
Back in 2008 I was serving in the Greek army. It was a dull and boring period of my life, but not without learnings. During one of these dull mornings, i was sent by my major to do a really mundane task (it was so mundane that i don鈥檛 even remember what it was anymore). When i came back i was visibly upset by the lack of sense this task made for me, but i tried to be stoic, hide it and move on....
tl;dr: Buy it if you have a laptop before 2015, don鈥檛 buy it if you have last years Macbook Pro. Also there are cheaper alternatives if you can鈥檛 justify the steep price point. Overall it鈥檚 really enjoyable and I like it. For the last 3 years, or so, I鈥檝e been using a Macbook Air. It was the 2013 edition with an upgraded intel i7 and 8gb of RAM. It鈥檚 been a wonderful machine....
There are certain types of work out there that you can visibly measure the work you did. When you are writing code you can measure the lines of code you wrote, or if you are more experienced the features you deployed. If you are a designer you can tell how many new things you produced, how many solutions you provide. Same if you are a builder building a house. You can visibly see the progress. ...
For the past 10 years of my career i鈥檝e been extremely lucky as I worked with some very talented people. In several occasions i felt inspired by the talent my colleagues possessed. Still remember the first intern i worked with and how good she was (she is thriving now), that technical architect in my first job that had all the answers and my amazing colleagues at TransferWise now. The thing that i haven鈥檛 had though, in such extend, is the amount of driven people around me....