Intro into dev and emojineering

[anxolerd]

Hi Monica,

While being an amazing emojineer 🎉 what would you advise to those who are just starting their path as developers and emojineers? What skills do they need to succeed? 😎

BTW, what are the VCS skills/tricks 😎 which were the most useful for you?

Best regards

[notwaldorf]

I think it all depends what kind of developing you want to do, and whether you want to focus more on the front end or the back end. I think I'm a bad example for how to do things, because I sort of only learn things as I need them, so I don't really have a personal improvement plan. For example, about a year ago I started working on Polymer (after working in C++ for the last 2 years), so it pretty much went "shit, I should learn Javascript and the DOM", because that's what I needed. I still don't know React or jQuery or any other front end framework, because I haven't needed to yet. I think if I wanted to build A Real Production Webapp™️, I'd probably start by doing a survey of what other people are using, and take it from there. Basically: be flexible and always ready to learn.

(that's how I became an emojineer, too. I wanted to fix emoji rendering on osx Chrome and accidentally learnt about unicode in the process)

Re, version control system, the secret is that I'm really bad, but consistent. I know how to push/pull/rebase, and I've learnt about reflog which basically lets you go back in time and unbork a mistake you've made. In 90% of the cases, that's enough. In the other 10% of the cases I page @holman in a panic and hope he can fix it 😀