This article, What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity, caught my eyes this week. I’ve always valued work-life balance when I started working. While my professional achievements are significant to me, they never defined me. To some degree, the separation was easy because no one knew of the companies I worked for for the first seven years.

After I started working at Netflix, people who I meet for the first time know of me as a “Netflix engineer.” Who I am is less impressive to them than where I work. At first, I appreciated the new respect and interests my job has brought to me. But now I worry that this prestige would be too hard to let go, especially when I keep measuring myself against my peers and friends.

The article has several recommendations to battle this trapping; I found it most helpful to broaden my perspective to see my career in terms of not my company or title, but skills and greater goals. It will be hard to let go when the time comes. But I hope the article helps me in the future.

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

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Software Engineering 🌐

Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.

It is an interesting read because I haven’t seen many “real” unit tests in real life. Most teams I worked at chose not to mock/fake things out because of difficulty. But I agree with the premise that the unit tests are useful only in some instances.

What are the differences between the private keyword and private fields in TypeScript?

Private fields (fields that start with #) are part of Class fields proposal, which is at stage 3. This StackOverflow question helped to clarify the differences; the core is that private keywords check at compile-time and private fields check at runtime.

7.8.0 Released: ECMAScript 2020, .mjs configuration files and @babel/cli improvements

Now that null coalescing operators and optional chaining are at stage 4, Babel 7.8 support them by default.

The story of a V8 performance cliff in React · V8

A probably useless, still eye-opening article for UI engineers. I find leaking abstractions fascinating.

Business 💸

State of Startups 2019

This annual survey made me appreciate that startups don’t happen overnight. Looking at the age of the startups, most have been around for more than three years, but yet, most are not profitable.

Enforcing Against Manipulated Media

Facebook, while it won’t remove political ads, will delete manipulated/generated photos or videos (think deepfake). On a related note, a notable Facebook leader Andrew Bosworth posted thoughts on its role in the past and the coming elections.