Brightcove Shadowing

Brightcove Shadowing

Recently I had the chance to shadow Zach Shaw at Brightcove. This was a lot of fun and I really appreciate the opportunity.

Cloud Fluency

The first thing that struck me was how heavily cloud based tools played a central role. I’ve been aware of the plethora of services provided by companies like Amazon, Rackspace and the like for a while, but I hadn’t given them a serious look. This area has been popping up much more for me recently, so I’m trying to figure out some hobby system to build with them. Expect more blog posts in this area.

Code Review

One of the activities I worked on with Zach was a code review. I’ve done a lot of code reviews, but I’ve never watched anybody else as they’ve gone through the process. There were a couple things I found interesting about Zach’s approach.

At the beginning of the code review, Zach gave me an overview of the context, and then he listed his objectives for the review. I’ve always dived right into walking through the code, I found this much more disciplined.

As we went through the changes, occasionally one of would say something along the lines of “It would be better if…” Normally when I have those thoughts I add them to a laundry list of notes to give back to the original developer. This has always been a really awkward exchange, and there’s usually a feeling of annoyance that I nitpicked enough to say something needed to be renamed. It never occurred to me that I could just change the code.

Conclusion

As I mentioned before, this was a lot of fun and I really appreciate it. Thanks to Brightcove and Zach for giving me the opportunity.

If you’re interested in letting me shadow, drop me an email at shadowing@colinwilliams.name.

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