Exploring Tech Choices and Team Dynamics with Jesse Spivak - RUBY 669
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Ruby Rogues. I'm David Kumira. And today on our panel, we have Luke Sutters. Hi. And we have John Epperson.
Hello, everybody.
And today we have a special guest, Jesse Spivak. Great to be here. So, Jesse, would you mind explaining just a bit about who you are, some of the things that you're doing, who you work for and why you're famous and all that good stuff? Sure.
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Justin Spivak. I'm a senior engineer at a company called Ibotta, which is a cashback for shopping app based in Denver, Colorado. I've been working there for about three and a half years. We are doing some hiring, so check out our careers page. I guess I'm famous, as it were, because I gave a talk at the first remote RailsConf this past May. And I talked about kind of how crummy of a developer I am. Yeah.
I think we can all relate to that on a daily basis sometimes. So would you mind giving a bit of a, you know, highlight talk about what you covered at the conference and stuff, so we can just kind of pick it up from there. We'll link to the, in the show notes, a link to the conference, but just for those who maybe didn't see it. Sure.
And, and there, there's no substitute for actually watching this fantastic talk. But more seriously, the talk is really about my experience as a tech lead at Ibotta working on a pretty critical project over the course of about six months or so. And over that time, I made four very big mistakes that put the project in jeopardy. And hopefully they're mistakes that I will learn from and not make again as I continue to lead projects that I've got in the future. And my hope is that by Sort of articulating these mistakes and what I learned from them, other folks can benefit. And so the four mistakes that I made are, first, we picked the wrong technology. We can get more into that. We also, as a team, we siloed work.
So work was divided up in not the best way. We fell into the premature optimization trap. And then maybe worst of all, we made way too many changes at one time. So I can go into detail on any of those.
Yeah, and I think it's fair to say that I, our listeners, other members on the panel have been there before.
Yeah, I've worked with loads of people who've made those mistakes. Obviously, I've never made them myself, but oh, my words.
Luke is the perfect developer, let's be fair. No, I was actually going to jump in and say that, like, I don't feel like I'm alone, but usually when you make a mistake, it cascades into more. For whatever reason, I generally feel like you either are rolling along and you feel pretty good about stuff, Or you're just like in a bottomless pit. And there's very little in-between time. You just suddenly notice that you're at the bottom. So yeah, just saying.
And absolutely. And I just want to kind of call out that there's like a certain amount of privilege that comes with being able to talk about our mistakes, right? I'm not worried that my boss is going to fire me. And I'm also not worried that Folks won't take me seriously for giving this talk. If anything, it probably improves my reputation as evidence by getting to talk to three of you gentlemen. So I just want to call that out because I think it's important.
I think that. OK, so so speaking of that, I think there's a give and take there, too. So I think this is one of the this will get into a thing that I care a lot about this particular subject, because for most of my shoot, I still feel it today or whatever. It doesn't really matter. I still always feel this pressure. to not let people know about the mistakes that I made, right? Because letting people know about the mistakes that I made makes me more vulnerable to them not wanting me to work for them, right? Like fire me, whatever the bad thing is that it's a boogeyman. It's not real. It's just a pressure, right? And so I guess what I'm trying to get at is like, I kind of feel like one of the things that I always care a lot about with mistakes is telling people about your mistakes. I actually... have discovered in reality actually makes people respect you more, But it doesn't change the fact that it's like really hard. And I still feel that pressure to this day.
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