Welcome New Hire: Getting started in Frontend at RIMdev
New to the frontend at RIMdev, or looking for more about our Frontend team? Here’s a quick overview of our team, tools, and culture!
As a whole, RIMdev has always strived to use the technology that best suits the task. This post will give you a current overview, but software changes and so do we.
The majority of our frontend team are Mac users, so this post will seem Mac-biased, but rest assured, that’s where it stops. We promote developers to use whichever platform makes them happiest.
Some of this content may be mirrored in @buhakmeh’s post Welcome New Hire: Getting Started At RIMdev
Communicating
Communication is at our core; we can accomplish more as our sum that we can as our parts, so we talk. About projects, goals, vision, and the path to get there. Slack is where we live, comment, post gifs, cat videos, ya know.
Environment
We continue hard to deliver a great frontend experience to our users. In this section, you’ll see the tools used to successfully build our experiences. On the frontend, most projects leverage VueJS, webpack, and, SASS heavily to build our Ritter Platform and family of static marketing sites.
- Node & npm
- Homebrew🍺: Mac’s missing package manager.
- Git & GitHub
- RBenv: Ruby version management (for Jekyll)
- Jekyll: Ruby based static site generator.
- Hugo: Go lang based static site generator.
- [VS Code](Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined https://code.visualstudio.com/), Atom, other?
- iTerm2 or ”Oh My ZSH!”
- .NET Core SDK
- Docker Desktop: To run our shared dependencies locally (MSSQL, Elasticsearch, Azurite).
Supporting cast
- LastPass
- Highfive: Video conferencing.
- Spotify Premium 😏
- Headphones
That’s really great, but what about professional development (me)?
Conferences
Conferences are great opportunities to learn, be inspired, or inspire others by speaking! VueConf and An Event Apart have become 2 of our top choices to date. We also encourage each member of our team to seek out new conferences.
Writing
As a developer or designer, you’re faced with unique challenges every day — so are your peers. Write about them! Share your solution with the community. None of us work in a vacuum, and how you approach a solution through code or design can help everyone.
Open Source
We love Open Source, from things we’ve made, to contributing to community projects and Hacktoberfest. Everyone on the team uses their personal GitHub account to build your community footprint. Some of our projects are private, although we keep much public in an effort to show your contributions.
Ongoing
Our professional landscape changes constantly, so we adapt and learn all the things. We all learn differently so we make many options available: Instructor-led training, book reimbursements, subscriptions, whatever you need to succeed. Some examples of learning tools include Pluralsight, egghead.io, Vue Mastery.
Conclusion
If being a part of a diverse, transparent, and growing team while growing your own career is what you’re seeking, Ritter Insurance Marketing’s development team is a great environment. Team members are here to help you grow and face new challenges! If you’re new the team, then Welcome! If you’d like to find out more, reach out to any of us on Twitter 😃and if you’re new, don’t be afraid to start a conversation with your new team members.
