Making Gatsby easy to understand with Laurie Barth

Software Engineering Unlocked

Links:

• Laurie's website
• Laurie's twitter
• Gatsby career

Show notes:

We start off with Laurie describing her day-to-day work at Gatsby. Turns out, Laurie works fully-remote from her home office on a variety of things. Somehow, the tasks she describes sound to me like typical developer relations or developer advocacy tasks, but Laurie explains to me that there are, next to the similarities, fundamental differences.

Laurie also tells me about how she started to blog and how that somehow lead to her making a connection with Gatsby. Even more, Laurie suspects that her blogging endeavor leads her to get that awesome job of hers.

When Laurie joined Gatsby, she suddenly became an open-source maintainer. This means, she has to through contribution of the community, and decide whether they are accepted or rejected. She also has to give feedback to the contributors on what they should change in order to get their contribution accepted.

Laurie explains to me, what mechanisms are in place at Gatsby to make the code review process smooth and a pleasant experience for everyone.

We also talk about her many conference talks, her work as an egghead instructor and her online presence on Twitter.

Because Laurie managed to build a community of over 10,000 people on Twitter in a relatively short period of time.

So, I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did.

Cheers,

Michaela