DeveloPassion's Newsletter #11 - Team Management

Welcome to the 11th edition of DeveloPassion’s newsletter. Before we start, I’d like to ask all of you to help me out a bit. If you find this newsletter interesting, then please do take a bit of time to share to others on social media: With your help, others will also get a chance to discover and enjoy reading it. As an added benefit, it’ll also motivate me to continue the experience! Don’t forget that you can also follow me on Twitter and Medium where I currently publish my articles.

The last weeks have been incredibly hard and painful for me. Sometimes, life likes to tell us that we’ve got it all wrong. We all inherit issues from our parents and can have a real hard time to get past those and move forward with life. We imprison ourselves in situations that don’t make us happy and we even expect for happiness to be offered to us magically. We suffer and position ourselves as victims, we make choices while thinking that we aren’t, etc. We sometimes screw up, break things, make mistakes, and even end up hurting people that we love and cherish… And we don’t always know why. But each mistake is an opportunity to learn and improve. This is why I’ve disconnected myself and have been doing serious introspection for about two weeks. I hope that I’ll find some answers to steer my future self in the right direction. Every day is a new chance to learn, adjust, and find gratitude for what life brings us. It’s up to us to choose how to react to what happens, to see the glass half-full or half-empty. Next to that, I’ve also just lost one of my cats, Shazam. He was an incredibly adorable, cute, and sweet little buddy. I’m so sad he’s gone… I wasn’t even at home, so I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Life is hard sometimes… At the same time, I’m also at a crossroads in life, for various reasons… I’ve been employed for 12 years and have started my own company, DeveloPassion at the beginning of last year. Now I’m about to launch a new company with two associates, hoping to help the world wasting less time with meetings. I’ll tell you more about that soon. As you might guess, working full-time on that project will certainly take my focus away from some other initiatives I’ve launched, like my coachings on Fiverr. I’ll continue writing, but since it’s so complicated at the moment, I’m going to put things on hold for a little while. Still, here are some news and interesting links.

As usual, here are some news about TypeScript. TypeScript 4.1 beta has just been released. I haven’t had a chance to read the release notes, but I’ll get to that soon and I’ll probably blog about it. A while ago, I wrote a small article, to explain how to iterate on a TS string enum, another one about how to never forget a switch case with TypeScript and avoid bugs when you change enums. The last article I wrote about TS is one where I make the case for interfaces/custom types instead of classes. Generally speaking, I prefer using classes and custom types over TS classes. The main advantage that I see is the fact that it’s dead easy to create variants of types, combine them and avoid the ceremony of constructors, as well as many issues introduced by overzealous usage of OOP. Of course, it isn’t always possible; there are very valid cases for using classes. Read the article to learn more and do share your opinion!

Team management is a subject that I’m deeply interested into. Recently, I’ve published a few articles explaining many ways to kill a team, make it implode, unproductive, frustrating, etc.

Whether you’re a team leader/manager or a team member, there are certainly things for you to learn in those articles. I’ve also published an article explaining why junior team members should never be left alone.

RxJS 7 has been released a few weeks back. I wrote an article that goes over everything that you need to know about this release; the new features, the breaking changes, etc. To me, RxJS is at the core of modern Web apps. Reactive programming is here to stay, and it’s true whether you’re using Angular, React, Vue, Java, C# or whatever else. There are obvious advantages.

Angular now has an official (and public) roadmap. It is awesome news for the community, which is why I took some time to analyze the news as well as everything that is currently on that roadmap.You can find the article here. Hopefully, we’ll finally have a type-safe Reactive forms API; it’s all that matters to me ;-)))

As you might know, I’m a huge fan of board games. I now own more than 600, which is a bit scary (contrary to my digital collections, board games do take A LOT of physical space). Arkham Horror LCG is one of my favourite games, set in the universe of H.P Lovecraft, which I also like a lot. Recently, while playing a new campaign, I chose “Zoey Samaras” as my main character and the idea came to me to write a fan fiction around that character. I’ve published the very first part over here (in French). If you’re curious, then don’t hesitate to check it out. The first part is pretty short, so even if you’re not comfortable with French, it might be a good exercise for you! I’ll probably publish a dozen more parts for that story; I have TONS of ideas.