Article Roundup - October 19, 2018

What’s a senior engineer’s job?
This is a nice opinion article talking about what is and isn’t a senior software engineer’s job. I do have to so that by far my favorite part of the article is that it links to a Twitter post showing Mozilla’s engineer career ladder. I wish more organizations had career progression and high-level expectations laid out like this.

Announcing a Competition for Ethics in Computer Science, with up to $3.5 Million in Prizes
The Omidyar Network, Mozilla, Schmidt Futures, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies are partnering to start a new competition focusing on ethics and responsibility in computer science education. With the increasing power wielded by software, this may be a critically important initiative to ensure software does what it should and not everything it could.

Only One Deliverable Matters
This is a great article and I love the idea of it. It’s actually agile instead of being “Agile”. Depending on your project and process there may be time for UX design, or there may be no time for it. There should be some time set aside for it, that’s where you can get an idea of the content that needs to be on the page and how it needs to be structured. You don’t need to spend significant amounts of time creating wireframes and design after design. Everyone’s goal, in the end, is the product, so move as much pre-development design work into earlier stages of the development cycle and let the designers keep refining things as the product is built.

Taming this In JavaScript With Bind Operator
There is currently a proposal that would add a new bind operator to JavaScript. The bind operator could help simplify this in many cases and remove the need to call the bind method in React. The article does a nice job going over what the proposed bind operator would do. The article also has some examples showing virtual methods, which would be a very interesting feature to have.