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{31} Hiring Traits, Frontend Frameworks & Creative Confidence

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{31} Hiring Traits, Frontend Frameworks & Creative Confidence

Featuring Carlos Iborra, Brian Ball, jhey, Trey Nobles, and Shaurya Nagpal

Dane Lyons
Feb 22
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{31} Hiring Traits, Frontend Frameworks & Creative Confidence

www.dailysubset.com

Subsribe to The Daily Subset and develop the skills needed to build a strong product led growth startup.


Product: Hiring Traits

Carlos Iborra

Twitter avatar for @carigar3
Carlos Iborra @carigar3
These are the traits I look for in people before hiring them: - Proactivity - Going the extra mile - Infinite learner - Healthy - Thinking out of the box Would you add anything else?
8:18 PM ∙ Feb 21, 2023

I like this list of traits. I do worry about hiring someone based on my perception of their health. That seems potentially discriminatory. But it is an otherwise solid foundation.

Here are a few additions I’d consider:

  1. Autonomous – While being proactive is often related to autonomy, I think they are different and both valuable. Proactive contributors might rally the troops around a new opportunity. Autonomous contributors might take it upon themselves to explore the viability of a new opportunity.

  2. Diversity – Having a team composed of people who lack shared experiences means that you have a much broader set of overall experiences to draw inspiration from.

  3. Optimists – This is a trait I’ve been thinking about lately. When you encounter a new opportunity, you need a team capable of mentally exploring the space. Optimists tend to think “There is a path to get from A to B, let’s find it”. Pessimists approach ideas as “This won’t work because of X, Y, or Z”. I’ll take pragmatic optimism over pessimism any day.


Frontend: Framework

Brian Ball

Twitter avatar for @brianball
Brian Ball @brianball
Status: 1. DB set up (postgresql) 2. API started ( node / express ) Haven't decided on frontend yet, probably react or vue or svelte. What are you using? ( maybe I'll make my decision based on who I can chat with about it )
2:02 AM ∙ Feb 22, 2023

I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of React. There are just a lot of small annoying quirks, like attribute renaming (i.e. className), state management, and JSX. I find it far more intuitive to use Vue, which does a much better job of extending pure HTML.

But I tend to use the React-based NextJS framework because it makes up for some of the quirks. One of the things I love about NextJS is the intuitive routing. You don’t have to manage any routing files. Just add files to the ‘pages’ folder and be aware of a few naming conventions, and that’s it. The same system works for building out an API.

NextJS is also compatible with my preferred hosting platform, Vercel. The developer experience in Vercel is superb. It takes care of all the basic devops requirements you need to get started. Just push your code to a github repo, and deployments are automatic. You can even push to a feature branch, and that’ll trigger a preview deployment!

The only thing I’d like to see improved in Vercel is a more intuitive way to manage assets. Adding image assets to a repo isn’t always ideal, and there isn’t an obvious alternative solution.


CSS: Animated Transforms

jhey

Twitter avatar for @jh3yy
jhey 🔨🐻✨ @jh3yy
CSS Tip! ✨ You can animate individual transform properties 🙌 They're used in this 3D cube loader 🤓 keyframes grow { 0% { scale: 1 1 1; } 25% { scale: 1 1 2; } 50% { scale: 2 1 2; } 75%, 100% { scale: 2 2 2; } } Kinda fun! 💙 @CodePen link below! 👇
4:03 PM ∙ Feb 21, 2023
1,068Likes116Retweets

Codepen is a great tool for learning a variety of frontend skills. In this example, you’ve got a complex loading animation with 3d transforms to scale and rotate a cube.

When I see the code shared by jhey, my first thought is to wonder about the 3rd parameter in the scale animations. I’m much more familiar with scaling everything uniformly with 1 param or scaling the x/y with 2 params…so I’d assume the 3rd param scales the z-axis. But I’m not really sure how that works in practice because you can’t really make a div “thicker”.

With Codepen, it’s easy to fork someone’s code. Then strip it down to the bare bones. Remove everything you aren’t concerned with. Remove the shadows and the jumping animation. Make the cube just sit in place so you can manually manipulate an attribute to get a better sense of its purpose.

Once you understand the foundation of how to achieve a desired outcome by adjusting attributes, you’ll be ready to add complexity. Maybe you don’t build back the same animation. Use other skills you’ve previously acquired to derive an entirely new animation.


Learning: Acquiring New Skills

Trey Nobles

Twitter avatar for @Trey_Nobles
Trey Nobles @Trey_Nobles
You don’t “need” music theory to make music, but learning basic music theory makes the creation process so much easier.
Twitter avatar for @fionaspawn
s 🦈 @fionaspawn
what are some of your music hot takes? https://t.co/tvxND6yn7K
3:52 PM ∙ Feb 22, 2023
33Likes7Retweets

I appreciate music from afar. I enjoy how I can use it to positively impact my mood. I like the poetic nature of the lyrics. Music is simply an enjoyable part of life.

I was recently gifted an AKAI Professional MPK Mini MK3, and every acronym in the name is a mystery to me. In fact, I don’t have enough technical music vocabulary to even begin to describe what I’d do with it. It’s just a device with a bunch of buttons and knobs sitting on my coffee table.

The only thing I really have going for me is that I love pushing buttons and adjusting knobs. It’s probably the perfect musical instrument for me. As soon as I find the right cables, I’m excited to make some terrible music. Then maybe I’ll advance from terrible to bad music. If I stick with it long enough, who knows? Someone once said I look like Post Malone. It’s half delusional to imagine making music professionally. I am an optimist, so I know there is some potential path from A to B. But it’s probably not the path for me.

The point is, learning something new requires you to embrace being terrible. If you don’t accept that reality, you give up before you ever get started.


Founder: Zero to One

Shaurya Nagpal

Twitter avatar for @shauryanagpal7
Shaurya Nagpal @shauryanagpal7
Being solo founder you go from zero to one a 1000 time The zero to one journey starts like this 0.1 I don't know how to do this 0.2 No other option I need to learn it 0.5 let's give it try now 0.8 Need more iteration 1 Done Loop 🔁 goes on 🚀 #startups
7:13 PM ∙ Feb 21, 2023
2Likes2Retweets

Founding a company and going from zero to one is similar to learning to create music. It’s a different type of skill, but some of the underlying principles are the same. You have to go through a period of time when you have no idea what the hell is going on. It might be scary and feel unnatural. If you do it enough times, you’ll start to feel comfortable with uncertainty.

You might even start to crave uncertainty. That sounds masochistic, but I don’t see it as deriving pleasure from pain. It’s the calm before the storm. It’s the excitement of a potential discovery. This is the foundation of what I call “creative confidence”.


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{31} Hiring Traits, Frontend Frameworks & Creative Confidence

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