Programming Time Capsule

20 Jul 2020 #career #interview

These days, while watching YouTube, I found a Mexican YouTuber explaining what life was like in his city during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. I thought it was a good idea to write something similar but for coding. This is an opinionated view of what coding is like in 2020. Software developers from the future, this is programming in 2020.

GitHub has archived all public repositories until July 2020. It was part of his archive initiative. We earned a batch on our GitHub profiles if any of our repositories got into the Arctic vault. I got mine too. It will show future generations how code was in 2020. Should we be ashamed or proud? I don’t know. But this archive doesn’t show some of the practices around it.

Dear developers from the future, this is coding and interviewing in 2020.

1. On coding

• Visual Studio 2019 is the latest version of Visual Studio. C# 8 is the latest C# version. And we don’t have SQL Server Management Studio for Mac or Linux yet.
• Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE. This is a different one.
• Windows is still the most used operating system among developers.
• JavaScript is the most popular programming language. The market is divided between React, Angular, and Vue. Although, every once in a while, a new front-end framework appears. Or a new version appears, changing almost everything from all previous versions. We even have a term for that: JavaScript fatigue.
• Single-page applications are the norm now. Especially when you build them with one of the trending frameworks. Or with a library built on top of one of them.
• Everyone is doing microservices these days. Monoliths are the evildoers.
• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are the next big things.
• Everybody, when stocked, uses StackOverflow. It’s a place to post questions and receive answers. A forum.
• Null is still a problem in mainstream languages.
• When things break, we say “It works on my machine”. Then, we came up with containers. So we can ship developer’s machines to the clients or the cloud.
• Most developers upload and share their code on GitHub. Oh yes! Git is the most popular version control system. There are also GitLab and BitBucket.
• Every day, we have a (hopefully) short meeting. A “daily meeting.” It’s part of a ceremony called SCRUM methodology. Everyone calls himself “Agile” to hide the fact companies don’t know what they’re doing.
• I’m writing this from a laptop with a 1.8GHz 4-Core processor, 16GB of memory, 500GB of hard drive, and a 6-hour battery life.

2. On interviewing

• Interviewing is broken. Everybody with a blog complains about the interview process. Even on Twitter. Oh, Twitter. The place to complain in less than 280 characters.
• We solve or attempt to solve algorithms and data structures exercises on whiteboards. Although, a study reveals whiteboarding only tests the candidate’s ability to deal with stress. Most of the time, we don’t use those subjects after the interview process.
• There are pages to train for whiteboarding: HackerRank, LeetCode, CodeWars…
• Interviewing is based on rejection. Only a small percentage of applicants are hired. A story tells some managers at a big company rejected all applications they were asked to review. Later, the secret was revealed. They reviewed their own applications.
• Ninjas, superheroes, wizards, 10x engineers…Ping-pong tables, open spaces, cool offices, being “agile” and [put the latest next big thing here] are often listed on job descriptions as perks and benefits.

During the 2020 global pandemic, some companies turned remote. We started to use Zoom, a conference room tool. Most people started working from home without any previous experience working remotely. _“Please, turn off your microphone.” “You’re muted.” We all heard these phrases in meetings every once in a while.

I hope the 2020 pandemic is still on Wikipedia or whatever you have these days to look things up…or are brains already connected to the Internet, like in the Matrix movie? Do you watch Matrix in class? Wait! Do you still have schools?

Greetings from 2020