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# System prepended metadata

title: Alex Frontender Meeting

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# Alex Frontender Meeting

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexpuertasr/

## Vish's opinion

In Medl, in my opinion we need someone very experienced to catch problems. Alex
has some experience but he wasn't able to always articulate the 'why' behind
decisions.

He could be a useful asset to the team, and I think he can deliver, but I would
prefer someone more senior who would be less hands on, as Medl already has Dillon
who seems capabale, but needs mentoring.

## Specific Things asked

### Testing

- He spoke about classical unit testing, but that breaks down when 99% of the logic
  is in the backend.
  
- He seems to do far more end-to-end testing, which is kinda awesome. He has used
  cyprus for it. This would be help Medl quite a bit.
  
- I would have liked to hear more about the different testing strategies he has
  used, but I couldn't quite get him to speak about that.
  
### Git Based Workflows

- I wanted to understand how much experience he has by collaborating with others in Git
  Many companies used a Git-flow, which I'm not fond of. He knew about it, but didn't 
  articulate what problems it was trying to solve, and what are the cons of this
  approach
  

### GraphQL

- We spoke about GraphQL, since he has a lot of experience with it.
- Overall, I struggled to get him to explain why someone should use it over REST
  and more importantly when does it not make sense.
- He did articulate some advantages

### State Management

- I tried to talk to him about Redux in React
- I wanted him to explain the concrete problems that it is solving and where it would
  be useful and where it wouldn't be useful
  
- He spoke about how Redux isn't super useful these days as lots of the things it is
  solving are done by other frameworks. The only specific feature mentioned was
  "caching".
  
- I'm not convinced about his ability to articulate and convince others about
  these kind of larger architectural decissions.
  
  
