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Peter Kim Frank for The DEV Team

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Top 5 DEV Comments from the Past Week

This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.

One of the most popular discussions this week was the What was your worst interview experience? thread. @avalander hopped in with a truly brutal interview recap:

I had been working for about a year and a half and I was looking for a new job. I show up at the company at the appointed time. When I'm at the door of the building I ring through the intercom and say that I'm there. They tell me to wait. They don't let me in, I'm supposed to wait outside, apparently. Older me would have left on the spot, but this was younger me, naiv and ignorant of how a good place to work looks like.

I have been waiting at the door fifteen minutes now. I know because I've just looked at my watch, and I decide that if they don't let me in in five minutes I'm going home. Two or three minutes later, as I'm getting ready to leave, the door finally opens.

I politely go in and get ready for the interview, but I've already decided that I don't want to work here.

The interview itself was pretty standard, with someone from HR. They ask me a bit about my experience, what kind of tech I want to work with, and so on. Then they ask me if I work well under pressure. Now, younger me is still very naiv, but younger me has been working in a poorly managed project where overtime was the norm and knows what "working well under pressure" is all about. I answer that I will stay overtime when production breaks, but that I value my free time and I don't feel particularly compelled to compensate lack of proper planning with unpaid overtime. The interview ends shortly after. I never hear from them again and I live happily ever after.

In a heavily-bookmarked article entitled 5 CSS tips you didn't know you needed, @quantumsheep adds another useful tip:

The most useful trick I use in every project is:

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}
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Which prevent breaking box dimensions with margin, padding or borders.

</div>
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The parent comment in What is the future of software development pay range? describes a potential future where the coding profession eventually becomes so popular that wages fall substantially (full comment). @davidk01 offered a rebuttal:

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@canderson93 jumped into a #help thread — Why function deceleration overrides — to provide an explanation and some useful context:

What's happening here is that you've hit the difference between a function expression and function declaration.

function myName () {
console.log ("Rich");
}
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This is a function declaration, and it is subject to a javascript feature called hoisting, which moves it to the top of the scope it's declared in. This means that when you set var myName = "Richard", it actually comes afterwards in the order of execution and overwrites the function.

By contrast, myName = function() { ... } is a function expression, and it is evaluated in place, and behaves as you'd expect with your code laid out as it is.

I actually just wrote a post on this exact thing -- carlanderson.xyz/function-declarat...

Finally, @nepeckman shared some information about Nim in the What language should I use in 2018 if I want to ~easily~ compile a single binary for the end-user? discussion thread. This has got me craving more "advocate for this language" comments/articles:

I'm going to throw Nim into the ring. Its not as popular as Rust or Go (and lacks the corporate backing) but it really is a jack of all trades language. More powerful than Go (macros, generics, and sum types), and way easier than Rust (Garbage Collector, more forgiving compiler without the borrow checker). It compiles to a static binary for all operating systems, has easy C interop, has a JavaScript target with easy JavaScript interop. It has a nice syntax that feels like a scripting language, but static types. Its really fast. It can do native GUIs, CLI tools, web apps. I can't recommend it for corporate use (yet!) because it hasn't hit the 1.0 release, but its been my hobby language for a while now and I've really enjoyed it. I came to it from a JS heavy background, let me know if you have any questions!

See you next week for more great comments ✌

Top comments (4)

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

Congrats to @avalander , @quantumsheep , @davidk01 , @canderson93 , and @nepeckman for making the list this week!

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nepeckman profile image
nepeckman

So excited to have made the list! Glad people found my post interesting 😄

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avalander profile image
Avalander

Yay, I made it! I can stop posting comments now, haha! 😜

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quantumsheep profile image
Nathanael Demacon

I'm happy to be on the list this week! 😄