Simon Belak
Where to Start?
You’ve joined a Clojure company. Your dream job! Your first day, you clone the repo … and it’s 100kloc. Yikes! Where to start? How to start? What will your new colleagues think of your fumbling? Relax, take a deep breath, and remember your Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: DON'T PANIC.
In this talk I’ll recount my experiences of how it starting at Metabase (a pure Clojure open-source BI tool coming in at about 80kloc), fumbles and all; what worked for me, and what didn’t; how to ask for help in and efficient manner (including some thoughts on an area I always struggle with: what’s the right ratio between digging in on your own, and asking for help); and what can you do to make life easier for the next team member joining you.
About Simon
Simon built his first computer out of Lego bricks and learned to program soon after. Emergence, networks, modes of thought, limits of language and expression are what makes Simon smile (and stay up at night). The combination of lisp and machine learning put Simon on the path of always striving to make himself redundant if not outright obsolete. Currently he's working hard to become obsolete at Metabase where he is trying to build an artificial data scientist and imbue visualisations with understanding and context.