In this episode of Top End Devs, host David Camira is joined by panelists Luke Stutters and John Epperson, along with special guest Jesse Spivak, a senior engineer at Ibotta. Jesse shares his experiences and insights from a challenging project at Ibotta, where he navigated through four critical mistakes. These included choosing the wrong technology, siloing work, falling into premature optimization, and making too many changes at once. Jesse explains how these mistakes jeopardized the project but ultimately led to valuable learning experiences. The conversation also touches on the importance of discussing and learning from mistakes openly, the complexities of transitioning to new technologies, and the significance of making systematic, verified changes. Additionally, they delve into the evolving landscape of developer interviews, aiming to create a more inclusive and positive experience. Join us as we explore the trials, lessons, and growth that come from navigating the highs and lows of software development.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.
Full Episode
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.
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