Meet The Speaker: Michel Weststrate

As part of our preparations for YGLF 2019 Code Camp we're excited to share with you another interview, in the series of interviews, with this year's amazing speakers. Hear their stories and their professional insights. This time we're with Michel Weststrate (@mweststrate)

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself

Hi! My name is Michel and some unpronounceable last name. Most people will know me from my OSS work like MobX, mobx-state-tree or immer. And recently I've started my own training / consultancy firm around that. 

Q: Who is your favourite tech thought leader and why?

I don't have any particular list, but the first two people that pop to my mind are Sebastian Markbåge (@sebmarkbage), since he often brings ideas from different fields in to the community. And Rich Harris (@Rich_Harris), who always challenges the status quo by wondering whether we can do more with less. (...Rich is going to be talking at YGLF 2019: Code Camp as well, and you can read the interview we had with him -- The YGLF team)

Q: What advice would you give yourself at the outset of your career?

1. Take responsibility in your own hand, and sell solutions instead of problems. Too often I see devs just dumping their problems in the laps of their managers; "This should be refactored, we need time for that" etc. But they are in a worse position to make judgement calls on how important that is than you are. So make sure you understand the business you are working for, and offer a well balanced proposal.

2. Travel before you start a family. Although nothing beats the feeling of coming back home to a family (until the first diaper). 

Q: What will you teach us at YGLF 2019: Code Camp ?

In the workshop I will take us through the basics of modern React. That is, building an apps with purely function based components, hooks and context. After that, we'll go through the basics of MobX as well and dwell on the the philosophy, fundamentals and benefits of its reactive programming model. 

In the hands-on session, we will combine the two and discuss how the combination of these two technologies sets you up for a very scaleable application architecture.

Thank you, Michel!

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