General

This Dot Labs Acquires Stickman Ventures

Mar 23, 2020

2 min read

MARCH 23, 2020 - MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - Today, leading web development firm This Dot Labs, announced that it has completed its acquisition of Stickman Ventures, a custom software development and technology firm based in Oakdale, CA.

With this acquisition, This Dot’s software development team will be joined by Stickman Ventures CEO, Justin Ribeiro, MBA, a Google Development Expert with two decades of professional software development experience and the rest of the Stickman development team.

“Tracy [This Dot Labs CEO] and I have been working together for years, and the acquisition was a natural fit. The team is excited to join the This Dot team and we are ready to grow together.” says Ribeiro.

The acquisition further enhances the expertise on the This Dot Labs team in web platform engineering, web performance, web components, python, dot net, and other technologies.

“I am so excited to make the long term partnership Stickman and This Dot more official. We’ve worked with the Stickman team for years, and it will be great to join forces and continue to provide enterprises with the combined expertise of both teams.” says Tracy Lee, CEO of This Dot Labs.

Enterprises looking to optimize web performance with modern web technologies as part of their digital transformation efforts can hire the newly expanded This Dot team by emailing hi@thisdot.co.

About This Dot Labs

Founded in 2016, This Dot Labs is a modern web consultancy focused on helping companies realize their digital transformation efforts. For expert architectural guidance, training, or consulting in React, Angular, Vue, Web Components, GraphQL, Node, Bazel, or Polymer, contact us today at hi@thisdot.co.

Press Contact:

Tracy Lee CEO, This Dot Labs thisdotlabs.com 408-506-9660

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

This Dot

International Women's Day Recap

International Women's Day Event For this year's International Women's Day, we hosted a live event with Women Techmakers, featuring talks and a panel discussion on this year's topic: progress over perfection. It was a great conversation on what it's like to be a woman in tech, and how you can help yourself and others thrive in our industry. In case you missed it We have the full event on YouTube if you'd like to watch it yourself (which I highly recommend)! Here's a recap of everything that happened. Getting started in DevRel - Pachi Parra Pachi Parra was up first, sharing her journey into DevRel, and tips on how you can get started too! Some highlights include: - Roles that are available - What a day in the life might look like - Her journey into DevRel - What a DevRel professional actually does - things like public speaking, live coding, writing blogs, and giving talks at conferences. Her best tip for getting started? Find the type of content you like doing, and focus on doing that well! In DevRel, it's easy to spread yourself too thin between all the different types of content available, so focus on the one you like most, find a supportive community, and get yourself out there. :) Breathing Fire: Success and Growth as a Technical Woman - Stacy Devino Stacy Devino was up next, providing all kinds of insight into the cycle women go through in their career, as well as tips for each stage of the journey. She opened with an amazing quote: > Assume all women are technical and capable of breathing fire. - Jessie Frazelle Other highlights: - Igniting your world through learning, timing, your network, and leadership. - Staying warm by managing your focus and chores, recording your achievements, maintaining relationships, and researching ideas. - The key to avoiding burnout - keeping a long-term perspective, doing things for yourself, and allocating time for the things you enjoy and the people who support you. Riding the imposter wave to senior - Jessica Janiuk Jessica Janiuk wrapped up our talks today, providing insight into her journey through tech and the ways we can think about imposter syndrome and allowing ourselves to grow. Some highlights from her talk: - A few things to consider: what being "senior" means to companies and to yourself, if you're in the right place, and what you want in your career. - A great diagram of the imposter wave - the balance between our confidence and feeling like an imposter from this post by Ricardo Luevanos. - Considering how often we're comfortable, and that there's an inverse correlation between feeling comfortable and feeling like an imposter (they're opposite each other). - We have two choices: we can let it control us, or use that discomfort as a tool. - Looking back on our growth and realizing that our current lows are higher than our past highs. - Some senior advice: Be authentic, be proud of your work, have good mentors, remember that your work is not your life, and stay uncomfortable. She wrapped up with a brilliant reminder for us all: > You are capable. You are valid. You are important. Please take care of yourself. People care about you. If you're struggling, you're not alone. Panel Discussion We rounded out the day with a panel discussion featuring these accomplished women: - Erica Stanley - Amal Hussein - Deborah Kurata - Katerina Skroumpelou - Jessica Janiuk - Stacy Devino - Jae Bach Hardie - Linda Thompson The conversation flowed naturally, each panelist feeding off of each other's ideas, and we covered some very powerful and helpful tips and reminders for women in today's developer world. Here's a few of my favorite topics or ideas we talked about: What did you learn in the past year? - Have hobbies that don't involve tech. - Learning to let go of your previous tools. - How valuable close personal friends are - people you can trust and rely on. - Listen to yourself, and take time to introspect and evaluate. - Don't over commit! Finding a community and actively contributing to it - Women Techmakers! (Our joint sponsor) - Make use of social media. - "Reach one teach one" - always be willing to share your knowledge, and be the person you needed when you were getting started. - Engage people who align with your goals and values - reach outside your level of age, career scope, experience. - The interconnection between you and your people is not exclusive, it's inclusive! The more expansive your sphere is, the better you are at your job. - Also - we can find community in open source! The way people comment, commit, and support each other within a project counts too. Foundational knowledge vs tooling - Understand what problems you're actually solving and what to reach for, more than worrying about the specific tech stack itself. - This helps you build your own knowledge map, and pick up skills as you grow. - For more senior folks - realize when you've mastered something, and focus on clearing the road for those who come next. - Learning to delegate - if you always do something yourself, you're taking that opportunity away from someone else. - Knowing when to ask for help, and that asking is NOT a weakness or failure! It's a strength to know when you need to ask for help. Find your learning method - Ask multiple people if you need to until you find the answer that clicks for you! Ask why. - Not understanding the answer someone gives you is also not a failure - it's different viewpoints. - Also learn how the people around you learn - so you can help them in the way that best suits them. Communication and collaboration - Have compassion for everyone on your team. - When you collaborate, you get more done. - Being able to communicate and collaborate is a HUGE strength. Don't let anyone make you feel bad for being strong in those! - Being the person who's able to "glue" the team together is foundational to a strong team. Fighting stereotypes - Things that are commended in men and reprimanded in women, and fighting against those biases - Being authentic is the best way to lead your team - don't play into a stereotype you don't fit. - You don't have to sound "nice" or "pleasing" - you're still a strong woman and you're going to be judged a certain way, so don't compromise! - Unpacking all the social conditioning and learning to be comfortable with yourself all the time, in all the situations we find ourselves in. Wrapping Up The entire event was filled with wisdom, laughter, and camaraderie. We're so thankful to the ladies who came to speak with us, and hope to see you at the next one!...

Mar 10, 2022

5 mins

GeneralEvents

State of Headless CMS Wrap-up

We recently hosted State of Headless CMS where we were joined by some very talented people to talk about a growing ecosystem. There are a lot of problems that a headless CMS can solve when it comes to indie development, and even small restaurants and shops. Before we dive into the key points of the event, I'll give you a brief introduction to the hosts and panelists. Hosts - Jesse @jtomchak - Keionne @KeionneD Panelists - Kapehe - Senior DevRel, sanity.io - @kapehe_ok - Daniel Madalitso Phiri - DevRel, Strapi - @malgamves - Samuel Snopko - Head of Developer Relations, Storyblok - @samuelsnopko - Stefan Judis - Dev Rel, Contentful - @stefanjudis - Arisa Fukuzaki - Dev Rel Engineer, Storyblok - @arisa_dev There were a lot of great discussions during this event which is why I want to suggest that you head on over and watch The State of Headless CMS on Youtube to hear all of the great discussions. Who is a headless CMS for? Headless CMSs give developers the ability to use a CMS without being restricted to using the CMS platform itself. It's like using Wordpress, without having to actually use Wordpress itself. This enables developers to build more customized solutions for their clients. Some questions to ponder - What are some Headless CMS technologies that you're excited about? - How do we help the little shop manage their content? - What problems does Headless CMS solve for you? We want to give a huge shout out to our hosts and panelists for participating in the State of Headless CMS event....

Feb 8, 2022

2 mins

General

Announcing September JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

Join us September 23rd, 2020 for our next JavaScript Marathon! JavaScript Marathon is a full day of free, online courses on Angular, React, Vue, RxJS, Web Performance, and more. Come learn about some of the leading web development technologies, and concepts! Stay for one training, or stick around for the whole day! No two sessions will be the same! --- React Native in 60 Minutes - Introduction to Creating Your First Hybrid Native Application *Featuring Rob Ocel @ 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT* So, you know React, and you want to build a mobile application - how do you get started? In this training, we'll discuss the architecture of React Native and how it differs from competing approaches such as Progressive Web Applications, Ionic Capacitor, and Apache Cordova. Then, we'll make a basic application from scratch that uses data from remote APIs and device sensors, and we'll show how to test and debug the application on your device and in simulators. --- Using Angular Libraries in an Nx Monorepo *Featuring Patricio Vargas @ 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT* Learn how to use Angular libraries and share code between multiple enterprise applications in your current or your future monorepo project using Nx by the Nrwl team. --- JavaScript Animations with GreenSock *Featuring Christina Gorton @ 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT* Have you ever been to a website and wondered "Whoa, how did they do that?" In this session you will learn how to get started creating fun, interesting, and complex animations that delight users with the GreenSock animation library. --- Type-Safe Databases with Prisma *Featuring Ryan Chenkie @ 3:30pm - 4:30pm EDT* TypeScript is seeing huge adoption in all kinds of settings, from enterprises to open source projects to indie side projects. The promise of type safety via TypeScript is compelling: it allows you to catch a whole class of bugs before you even deploy your code. While there's a lot of focus on making your front-end and backend code type-safe, not as much focus is put on applying the same to your database access. That's where Prisma comes in. Prisma is a database toolkit that allows you to build type-safe databases with ease. It gives you a fully typed database client which means you get type hints, autocompletion, and you are prevented from accessing your database in an invalid way. In this session, we'll build a TypeScript node API that uses Prisma for database access. We'll see how Prisma can be used to give you confidence in how you access your data and how you can be more productive by using features such as the Prisma Schema Language, migrations, and more. --- Javascript-free Websites with .NET Blazor WebAssembly *Featuring Heather Downing @ 5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT* Curious about the development experience of building front-end with C#? Blazor WebAssembly makes it possible to replace all of your Javascript completely - even in the front end! Join us as we build a secure SPA in .NET and discover the tricks of debugging and the trade-offs of the server-side version of Blazor....

Aug 17, 2020

3 mins

EnterpriseGeneralJavaScriptTraining

How to Go from Software Engineer to AI Engineer with Shawn Wang

Shawn Wang discusses AI engineering’s potential impact on the software development labor market and developer experience. With the rise of artificial intelligence technologies, there is an increasing demand for professionals who can bridge the gap between AI and software engineering, and engineers are looking around for guidance on how to best learn AI. Shawn emphasizes the importance of acquiring core knowledge and skills in AI engineering, highlighting the need for a systematic approach to education and development. He envisions a future where AI engineering becomes a recognized profession, with specialized training programs and certifications. He further talks about mental models for approaching AI literacy, and skill building. Shawn also discusses the use of advanced AI technology in software development. He showcases tools like GPT Vision, which can automate tasks and generate code efficiently. While acknowledging the potential of AI in enhancing productivity, Shawn emphasizes the need to leverage AI tools to augment human capabilities rather than replace them. Download this episode here....

Apr 17, 2024

1 min

Artificial IntelligenceEngineering Leadership

This Dot Labs Acquires Stickman Ventures

This Dot

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