We held our first #AskMeAnything session at JSConf.Asia 2018 with top leader of the international engineering community, Matteo Collina, currently the Principal Architect of nearForm and author of Node.js MQTT Broker, Mosca, the fastest logger Pino, and the Fastify web framework.

When someone wants to get together into the same space with you in, what should they be doing and what would you look out for?

Matteo: The first thing I’ll look out is whether they want to learn new things. I think to some extent we’re opinionated. You don’t follow blindly on what it’s in store, but rather, you should be autonomous and you can fix things. 

Another thing that we can look out for is whether they are fully open. We follow our way of development structure which is close to open source software. Show off your open source portfolio. Of course, there’s a technical interview after that.

If someone who is fresh in today’s workplace, out of school, their portfolio might be limited?

Matteo: You don’t need a huge portfolio. 

Pick whatever library or whatever project you like, fix a bug, and it doesn’t take too much of your time. Maybe one day or two days, but you definitely will learn a few things, so it doesn’t require a huge investment time of months or years to build the stuff. 

It just needs you to stick with pull request, fix a bug and maybe introduce a new feature in one of your libraries and sticking through it. 

Whenever you find a pull request, the pull request does not finished there. 

You actually have to follow up and implement the changes. During the process, you demand the hard skill and learn how coworkers work. So, if you go to this site a couple of times, you know what’s going to be expected when you join this type of companies.

Another super important thing to get into this space as a fresh grad is that you learn very well in unit testing. Like I’ll put this as an essential. That’s another big way of developing this skill.

Where can people get access to these problems to solve and prove it to you and your team?

Matteo: There’s no specific site for people to access. Unit testing is a generic skill. You can develop it in Java, .net and PHP. 

It’s not important that you know the technological knowledge. The very important thing is to know this type of stuff. 

Unit testing is the cornerstone of software developers these days. Before talking about technologies, invest in these fundamentals first. Then, you can be good at technologies. 

About Matteo

Matteo is a code pirate, mad scientist and part of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee. As a Principal Architect at nearForm, he consults for the top brands of the world. He authored Node.js MQTT Broker, Mosca, the fast logger Pino, and the Fastify web framework.