Technical due dil doesn't just need to look for poorly architected systems and bad code. It should also look for code that's prematurely optimised and over-engineered.
If an early stage team is building a massively complex microservices based product, using a new type of database and deploying it via kubernetes — where a Rails CRUD app on Heroku would easily satisfy requirements for years. Then someone seriously needs to ask the question as to whether using bleeding edge tech is necessary, and whether it will impact the ability to iterate and hire.
Due diligence is less about code and more about robustness, licensing and operating costs.
Common questions are what would happen if the data storage failed/datacenter went dark and do you have an up do date list of all libraries used, yes including copypasted stuff out of stack overflow.
Due diligence != code audit. Sure if you get in that level detail for the td then it's a waste of time, but otherwise knowing that the tech team is not sitting on a landmine it's kinda important
'Massively complex' -- ok I agree on that part, you want to avoid that.
But as far as microservices, its totally possible to do that in a way that doesn't add a bunch of complexity.
As far as new databases versus relational, a new database can make it easier to iterate (no/easier schema migration) and hire (can't prove this but I believe there are many people like me who got sick of relational dbs after many years and are just happy to deal with different types of problems.)
Something like kubernetes if done correctly can really help smooth things over because many apps have specific external dependencies which without a tool like that are hard to automate 100% and so create drag for new hires especially.
I can confirm this. Permanent salaries in the UK are OKish. Contracting is where the money is at.
An intermediate developer can pretty easily make £500 a day. If you can make yourself indispensable, or pick a tech stack used in finance, then £700-800 isn't uncommon.
As a benchmark, £600 a day is roughly equivalent to $200K USD permanent salary.
This is made all the more obvious by their relentless push of 'Memories'. Which just serve to drag up moments from a time when people actually shared relevant/fun content on Facebook.
OP here: Hadn't even considered that aspect, but that's so true. It's weird that facebook consider it so necessary to remind people how their service used to be fun.
Backend Developer | London (Clerkenwell) | Full-time | Onsite
Ambie (http://ambie.fm) is effortless music management for brands and spaces. We're a quick growing startup providing 24-7 streaming music to businesses across the world. We've just come out of the Techstars London Autumn program.
Our customers love us, and we want to keep it that way, so we need someone who always puts the customer first and who is a good communicator.
We have a fully functioning product, but there is a lot for us to do in order for us to keep up with our rate of growth.
As one of the early Ambie team members, you'll have to be comfortable with uncertainty. But you'll be having a massive impact, and will get to hear from satisfied customers all the time.
Our stack is primarily Django with a backbone front end. But we're evolving rapidly — so things will change. We're moving towards React for our front end, and technology for our back end is up for debate.
- The pay is competitive.
- The environment is fun, flexible and interesting.
- You'll have definite impact.
I just slip it in to my bag and open it when I get home. I sometimes have a few issues with after-work beers interfering with the sync process, but generally it works OK.
I definitely see the value in taking the time to design things correctly and making sure you're evaluating all angles — I'm not sure if it's 100% necessary to say that to do that you always need to be slow though.
I think the difference between a fast programmer and a slow programmer often isn't that the slow one is methodically designing and making everything perfect, it's that the slow one has so many more inefficiencies in their workflow.
A good and fast programmer generally knows their tools inside and out, and they're willing to learn new tools when they need to (and not dismiss them because their current setup works good enough and it's what they know).
Speed isn't an indicator of good or bad quality. I would say that both mastery and improvement of tool is more of an indicator.
We're a digital consultancy and agency who build products for late stage startups, government agencies and financial companies.
We're in the need of full stack Rails and React Native developers.
We work on some pretty interesting projects and have a pretty great culture. We're remote, but we catch up in tropical locations as often as we can.
Email me your details: toby@dovetaildigital.io Thanks!