Monica Lent has been interested in software from a very young age, and made her first domain name when she was 9 years old. She left her job and founded a startup, analytic tool designed for bloggers designed around affiliate marketing. She talks about some of the lessons she’s learned, including how to sift through data and how to make it useful for people. 

The panel discusses how to distill the priorities from the project manager so you know where to spend your time, something that takes a lot of experience and failure. They also talk about the merits of different practices such as whether or not to deploy on Friday and having engineers on call. Monica explains her opinion on how copying and pasting code instead of adding dependencies is a positive constraint. She prefers this method most of the time but not in all cases because it keeps your code flexible and avoids unnecessary specialization. However, she is not advocating for copy/paste over dependencies in every situation : rather the point comes down to using copy/paste instead of inappropriate coupling.


They also dive into how so much programming deals with other people and the importance of keeping your ego out of it when designing constraints, especially since developers hate other developer’s abstractions. They debate whether pride is a characteristic of junior or senior developers. They note that it is easier to get prideful and opinionated when you’re not working on a team. 


Sponsors

Links

Picks