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JUN 1 2020

Meet Rado Stankov - speaker at the second online # hackconf gathering

This week, on June 4th the second online meetup for our community is coming up! 

Today, we'd like to meet you with the speaker who is going to share tips and insights from his day-to-day work. 

In the spotlight is Rado Stankov. 🙌


Rado is a web developer with 15+ years of experience, the head of engineering at Product Hunt (by Angel List). 


He stands behind the conference React.NotAConf and the React. Sofia meetup. Also, he is an extraordinary speaker at HackConf's 2018 and 2019 editions. 🙌 


Find out bellow what Rado Stankov shares about his work, challenges and other exciting details. 😉


You've been at Product Hunt for 6 years now. Can you tell us how did it look like in the beginning through your perspective?


When I joined the company, we just got our A round of funding. We started building the team and the company. We already had the core of the product. 


Since day one, the company is remote. I joined quite early, so there were challenges around building the team and the process around the team.


How has changed since then?


Quite a lot. From the team we had back then, only 5 people are still with the company. We re-invited the team and the company multiple times. 

The first couple of years were a bit turbulent. Then we got acquired by AngelList. Then, we focused on revenue projects like Product Hunt Ship and Founders Club, not with our newest project YourStack.


What changed is a lot of the mechanics and process of what we did. What is still here is our initial values.


How long you've been working remotely?


Let's see. I worked remotely in two batches. The first was from 2006 to 2012. While I was in university, I was working for a local agency named Pixeldepo, then joined a startup named LOOKK. 


Then for 2 years, I had to go to an office. I was not fond of the office very much, so I joined Product Hunt in 2014.  


Which means I had done remote for ~12 years now.


Can you tell us more about the difficulties you faced at Product Hunt in time?


We had the typical difficulties as every startup - finding a product-market fit, scaling our user base. 


For me, one difficult thing was to learn to let off projects which didn't work out. For example, we worked on a podcast discovery product - Product Hunt Podcast. I was the tech lead on this project. It launched quite successfully. However, over time, it didn't justify us investing in it. So we removed it.


What is your "why" for choosing to use React?


I chose to use React because it is straightforward. The core of the framework is relatively small.


The other reason is that React philosophy of reusable components, making functional patterns accessible, fits quite nicely with my style of working.


I started using it. I didn't anticipate all innovation in State management, GraphQL, CSS-in-js, and so React community did.


What's the most important piece of advice you would like to pass to the developers who want to learn React?


Learn the basics; don't immediately jump to fancy libraries. React documentation is a great place to start. In general, when you learn something, start from its source.

For example, if you want to learn Redux, the best way to start is via its author video on egghead - egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux


What are your 3 favorite tools you use daily?


My favorite tools are VIM, Bear app, and Fork.



What's the last useful resource you've read or listen to?


A couple of days ago, I finished Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach it was a quite fun read.

On the video side, I watched lectures from GDC (Game Developer Conference) on YouTube. They had some great talks.


I don't plan to work on any games any time soon, however.  


Join us this Thursday

If you're interested to learn what Rado is going to share with us about "Developing Desktop apps with React and Electron", join us in advance with a free registration here: hopin.to/events/hackconf-online-talks-2-with-radoslav-stankov


Save the date 4th of June, 19:00 EEST and be sure you will get some actionable takeaways you can apply at work. 😉



See you all! 👋