āOk you got my attention.
Why would you want to work for Pydantic?ā
In my email I explained why I may be a good match, so letās talk about why Iād like to work with you specifically.
- I love working on developer tools because itās a great way to widen my impact. In the last 2.5 years I switched to a B2C product and I miss the opportunity to discuss with other devs, think about ways to make their work easier, etc. I also believe that the most powerful tools enhance rather than replace.
- Pydantic is at the beginning of its journey and this also means more opportunity to be involved where it matters. Iām a fullstack developer converted to frontend developer but overall I just want to be useful where Iām needed. Working at a startup, one must be able to adapt and itās my luck: I donāt really like being stuck in a role.
- I want to work with great people. I donāt know yāall but the fact that many of you were already involved in the open source community, and the way you talk about the Pydanticās goals make me think that youāre indeed great!
āOk, cool, cool. Butā¦
What makes you special Julien?ā
I can try to explain it to you by telling you what drives me:
- Everyday is a new opportunity to learn. And eventually the best way to learn is to share/teach. This is why I share stuff on my blog or in local meetups. This is also my way of encouraging others to do the same because I canāt wait to learn from them too.
- I believe the best work comes from kind human beings working together. This might be the reason I communicate well even in asynchronous settings and why I never miss an opportunity to do some pair programming.
- Iām usually a happy fellow. Iām quite glad to say that my coworkers enjoy working with me because I am resourceful, enthusiastic and I am always available to help.
- Iām pretty good at executing a vision. This vision may not be clear, but Iām used to iterating toward a goal and communicating along the way to make sure weāre on track.
āOk, so in addition to all that, youāre humble, ha!
And if you were to join us, how would you work?ā
It dependsā¢. š
Iām not the kind of guy that barges in and changes everything on day one. I must first understand the environment Iām working on to solve the real problems at hand instead of copy/pasting previous solutions. I wrote about it on my blog : Lead to change (originally in FR but translated in EN using Google Translate: so there will be some language oddities).
However I would guess that there is a first Cloud Service that you want to put out there. So based on the little I know for now, I would take this course of action:
- Understand what is your MVP, who are your users and how you plan to monetize it
- Understand what are your big dreams in the future to better understand what could affect the frontend stack (should it be consumable by external developers?)
- Work on a first reasonably sized project to better learn how the team interacts, get a sense of the initial stack you are working with and start delivering value.
- During this first project, I will likely take the opportunity to introduce some tools that I use daily depending on what was already setup in the stack (ex: Prettier, Eslint, Storybook, Vitest/Jest): the kind of tools that make me faster daily while simplifying the contribution of other developers (more safeguards, better documentation).
- And then iterate from there, striving for usefulness, efficiency & accessibility while keeping in mind the necessary tradeoffs that comes with building a company.
- I will also need to take a bit of time to read some pull requests written in Rust & Python. Seeing real world use cases will help me get up to speed quickly to make sure collaboration between back & front goes smoothly. Plus I may be able to provide valuable insights by providing a newbie perspective.