Hello fellow programmers, Swimmers and all that are interested in coffee and code (and even if you’re not interested in coffee)! I’m Anita, the new member of the Swimm team and I’m interested in sharing some of the things that are happening in Swimm offices with the rest of the world. Joining Swimm has been really educational for me so far for mainly two reasons:
- Although I’m from Italy and Turkey - both countries known for their coffee - I wasn’t much of a coffee person. Guess what! I definitely learned to appreciate good coffee within a few days of joining Swimm. The coffee culture here is just something else…
- Potentially equally important, (debatable), I also started learning about tips and tricks that are shared over coffee.
That’s what brings us here… I got inspired to share tips and tricks from developers to developers, adding a little personality to it by asking our team a couple rather more personal questions too. These are questions like how you describe what you do to your grandma! And trust me some of these answers will make you laugh! So here we go:
while (coffee) read(); No1
Meet Eden everyone!
First things first, how do you take your coffee?
This does help decode someone’s personality it seems...
Cappuccino with no sugar and regular milk, when possible in a ceramic mug.
Okay now we’re ready for it. Can you describe what you do without using your job title?
Tough one! I guess I can say I’m having fun building something that will help developers.
And more specifically, my purpose is to help make the coding experience better by ensuring their code based documentation is something fun and easy to write. Most importantly that their documentation won’t go out-of-sync with their code.
And how would you describe what you do to your grandma?
Grandma, I’m doing something with computers. I’m helping other people do things with computers.
What are you working on these days?
Working on taking Swimm to the web. More on that soon...
How long have you been developing? And what started your journey?
Actually, I started back in high school in 2011. 10 years ago! Wow, I'm getting old! And how I started; well, I always liked computer games, I liked working with computers and wanted to better understand how things work behind the scenes. That was the driver of it all.
What’s your favourite coding language?
Well, that actually depends on the use-case. If I have to choose one, I would go for Javascript. This is for two reasons, first the fact that it can be used both for backend and frontend. And second, the community around it makes it totally worth it.
Something you’re aiming to learn soon?
Python!
What are your top 3 tips for Swimmers to make best use of our product?
1. Play with the product, see what happens when you “break” a document and let the app auto sync it! You’ll be surprised by the result.
2. Explore community repositories - you can even add and help other people while at the same time showing off with your code.
3. Make your documentation fun! Casually add emojis, images and videos to make it more exciting.
What are your top 3 tips for more efficient working coding teams and a better future for all?
1. Listening. A great life hack too by the way!
2. Find a system to manage your tasks. Take time to think about the “how” before jumping into the implementation. Planning and thinking ahead is key!
3. As programmers, we like to sit for hours and debug code but the one thing that we don’t want to debug is other people’s thoughts. I don’t like to invest time into guessing what was the context behind someone else’s code. I’m all for proactively reading documentation that is structured well (particularly when it is coupled and synced with the current code).
Your biggest fear when coding?
CSS. I think that this gif describes it much better than words:
(Takes out his phone and shows the most hilarious gif on CSS I ever saw! )
A surprising thing that gets you each time when coding?
When things work the first time without testing them in advance! Makes me really happy every single time!
Your favourite moments when coding?
When you get positive feedback from a user without even asking them! Also the feeling you get when you look back a week and see all the developments that were done in the short amount of time! Super rewarding!
What is your favourite Swimm Memory?
The first time I succeeded at latte-art on a cappuccino. I don’t like CSS but I’m all for designing on coffee!
Cannot compete with this but I guess also the first time I realized that the team started growing… We’re a true startup so these realizations are really what makes us see the bigger picture! Being the first employee of Swimm I can really compare the initial times to now - we’re growing at scale… It's really exciting to finally have more people joining the family!
What brings you passion / excitement to your role?
Developing a tool for developers, being the user of something that I help create adds a lot of excitement! To go ahead and fix something that I need fixed is super empowering.
What do you do for fun?
I play instruments - guitar, piano and the next thing I want to learn is how to play the saxophone!
And that's a wrap for an interview that I personally really enjoyed! It is always very interesting for me to get an idea of the different things that bring excitement to people's lives.
If you are interested in learning more about Swimm, sign up for a 1:1 personalized Swimm demo.
