Flexport's engineering team writes about React, linting, code formatting, security findings, and typing a Rails monolith at a freight logistics company.
HN mostly sees it in Flexport's hiring posts and in discussions of code formatting tools such as Prettier.
Flexport | Software Engineers, Staff Engineers, Data Scientists, Product Managers and Product Designers | San Francisco | flexport.com / flexport.engineering
Flexport's mission is to fix the user experience in global trade and bring the world free trade through technology. Here at Flexport, we share a vision where any two businesses can trade with each other without regard for geographic distance, logistical complexity, or regulatory challenges.
Our services put clients back in control of their logistics and supply chain needs. We offer faster freight quotes, lower prices, improved visibility and notifications, and advanced analytics. Our lean team of ~35 engineers are building products flexible, maintainable products that are reshaping this fragmented industry.
Started in 2013, we've raised $204M from investors that include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Y Combinator, & more.
Check us out if you:
-Want to be part of a close-knit engineering team that releases new code every day
-Take a product-first approach to building software
-Care about the real world functionality of your programming
-Desire to build scalable programs that standardize information flow and increase operational capacity
-Have amazing coding skills and CS fundamentals; and
-Know modern javascript frameworks.
Our stack
We deploy every 20 minutes with our Buildkite CI setup. Our frontend is built with Flow-typed ES2017. We have around 1500 React…
The semantic formatting seems better to me, but I feel like I'll get used to almost any reasonable formatting. If you spend enough time with a consistently formatted codebase, your eye will be drawn to the important parts when you review code. In a tiny way, you develop "expertise" with the formatting, and when you look at other code there is an ever-so-subtle friction to understanding it. Manually reindenting code after editing or refactoring it is also pretty annoying, though of course that's the instinct that "code is meant to be read" is intended to argue against.
It's interesting that the creator of Rubocop isn't that bullish on Prettier, because my company literally uses Rubocop to replicate a Prettier-like experience [1]. Rubocop makes a totally decent Prettier replacement, with the right rules. Another advantage of using a separate opinionated formatting tool is that you avoid issues with a diversity of editors which never quite have the same auto-indentation to mess up code diffs.
1: https://flexport.engineering/approximating-prettier-for-ruby-with-rubocop-8b863bd64dc6
Flexport is also hiring engineering interns! Contact me via my profile here, or apply directly: https://www.flexport.com/careers/job/221999
You can learn more about what's involved on our engineering blog at https://flexport.engineering.