Leading From the Top, Creating a Community, and Balancing It All with Tracy Lee

Great things come in unexpected places. For Tracy Lee, an ex-boyfriend's T-shirt sporting the Ember Tomster is what tipped her off to software development. Following curiosity and a three-week bootcamp, Tracy was hooked and ready to take on a career in coding.

Today, Tracy is the CEO of This Dot Labs. She leads a team of 50 developers with a focus on reactive programming, web performance, and developer experience. Her clients and colleagues have become her closest friends and she's always looking to help fellow developers expand their careers. When she's not running an agency, Tracy is part of the RX Core Team (one of her many professional memberships), posting tech content to social media, and raising a new baby boy. So how does she manage it all? 

In this episode, Tracy talks with Chuck and Robbie about wearing every hat under the sun and wearing them well, why she loves RxJS, having hard conversations with over-eager developers, what's so often ignored by non-technical CEOs, and what keeps Tracy motivated above all else. 

Key Takeaways

• [00:09] - A Cinco De Mayo-themed beverage review. 
• [02:47] - An intro to Tracy.
• [06:17] - What RxJS is used for. 
• [09:28] - How Tracy balances everything.
• [18:55] - Tracy's life outside of coding, parenting, and business ownership. 
• [27:17] - How Tracy first got into web development. 
• [38:23] - Tracy's advice for developers and the hardest pill to swallow when you're over-eager. 
• [45:05] - An important conversation about whiskey and Tracy's liquor cabinet. 

Quotes

[08:24] - "Check out RxJS if you have not checked out RxJS. And then if you like it, I think it takes people a little bit to wrap their heads around it because it's a new way of thinking, but once people do I feel like people just want to RxJS all the things." ~ @ladyleet  [https://twitter.com/ladyleet]

[15:19] - "I hope I can turn my life into only doing my hobby again. So that's my goal. Hire enough people to where I can actually not have to do all the things I don't love." ~ @ladyleet  [https://twitter.com/ladyleet]

[29:36] - "I love development because it was so challenging to me, instead of business. I think developers go the other way, they're like, 'oh development's easy, let me do business stuff because that's challenging.' For me it was different, I was like, 'man this is so invigorating, this is hard and it's awesome and I can build things and create things.'" ~ @ladyleet  [https://twitter.com/ladyleet]

[35:19] - "I always talk about web performance and generally no one really wants to invest in it but performance is such a huge deal." ~ @ladyleet  [https://twitter.com/ladyleet]

Links

• Tracy on Twitter [https://twitter.com/ladyleet]
• This Dot Labs [https://www.thisdot.co]
• Cutwater Spirits [https://www.cutwaterspirits.com] 
• Bartesian [https://bartesian.com]
• Keurig [https://www.keurig.com]
• RxJS Core Team [https://rxjs.dev/team?group=Core%20Team]
• Google Developer Expert [https://developers.google.com/community/experts]
• GitHub Stars [https://stars.github.com]
• Microsoft MVP [https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/]
• RxJS [https://rxjs.dev]
• Angular [https://angular.io]
• Ember.js  [https://emberjs.com]
• ember-concurrency [http://ember-concurrency.com/docs/introduction/] 
• tc39 Proposal for Observable  [https://github.com/tc39/proposal-observable]
• Introduction to RxJS Patterns in React [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF8XcEwwPpU]