js

JSJ 332: “You Learned JavaScript, Now What?” with Chris Heilmann

Panel:

Special Guests: Chris Heilmann

In this episode, the panel talks with programmer, Chris Heilmann. He has written books about JavaScript, in addition to writing a blog about it and is an educator about this program.  He currently resides in Berlin, Germany. Let’s welcome our special guest and listen to today’s episode!

Show Topics:

2:19 – Chuck talks.

2:41 – Chris: He has talked about JavaScript in Berlin upon an invitation. You can get five different suggestions about how to use JavaScript. The best practices, I have found, are on the projects I am on now. JavaScript was built in ten days. My goal is to help people navigate through JavaScript and help them feel not disenfranchised. 

5:47 – Aimee: The overall theme is...

5:54 – Panelist: I really like what you said about helping people not feeling disenfranchised.

6:47 – Chris: There is a lot of peer pressure at peer conferences

7:30 – Aimee chimes in with some comments.

7:50: Chris: I think we need to hunt the person down that put...

8:03 – Panelist: A good point to that is, I try to avoid comments like, “Well, like we ALL know...”

8:27 – Chris: There are things NOT to say on stage. It happens, but we don’t want to say certain things while we are teaching people. We are building products with different groups, so keep that in mind.

9:40 – Aimee: My experience in doing this is that I have found it very rewarding to share embarrassing experiences that I’ve had. My advice would to tell people to let their guard down. It’s encouraging for me.

10:26 – Chris: It helps to show that you are vulnerable and show that you are still learning, too. We are all learning together. 90% of our job is communicating with others.

11:05 – Chuck: Now, I do want to ask this...

11:35 – Chris answers.

12:24 – What makes you say that? (Question to Chris)

12:25 – Chris answers.

13:55 – Chuck: The different systems out there are either widely distributed or...

You will have to work with other people. There is no way that people can make that on their own. If you can’t work with other people, then you are a hindrance.

14:31 – Aimee chimes in.

14:53 – Chris: They have to be very self-assured. I want to do things that are at the next level. Each developer has his or her own story. I want to move up the chain, so I want to make sure these developers are self-assured.

16:07 – Chris: Back to the article...

18:26 – Chuck: Yes, I agree. Why go and fight creating a whole system when it exists.

18:54 – Chris chimes in with some comments.

19:38 – Panelist: I still use console logs.

19:48 – Chris: We all do, but we have to...

19:55 – Aimee: In the past year, I can’t tell you how much I rely on this. Do I use Angular? Do I learn Vue? All those things that you can focus on – tools.

10:21 – Chris: We are talking about the ethics of interfaces. Good code is about accessibility, privacy and maintainability, among others. Everything else is sugar on top. We are building products for other people.

22:10 – Chuck: That is the interesting message in your post, and that you are saying: having a deep, solid knowledge of React (that is sort of a status thing...). It is other things that really do matter. It’s the impact we are having. It’s those things that will make the difference. Those things people will want to work with and solves their problems.

23:00 – Chris adds his comments. He talks about Flash.

24:05 – Chris: The librarian motto: “I don’t know everything, but I can look “here” to find the answer.” We don’t know everything.

24:31 – Aimee: Learn how to learn.

24:50 – Chris: There is a big gap in the market. Scratch is a cool tool and it’s these puzzle pieces you put together. It was hard for me to use that system. No, I don’t want to do that. But if you teach the kids these tools then that’s good. 

24:56 – Chuck: Here is the link, and all I had to do was write React components.

26:12 – Chris: My first laptop was 5x more heavy then this one is. Having access to the Internet is a blessing.

27:24 – Advertisement

28:21 – Chuck: Let’s bring this back around. If someone has gone through boot camp, you are recommending that they get use to know their editor, debugging, etc.

Chris: 28:47 – Chris: Yes, get involved within your community. GitHub. This is a community effort. You can help. Writing code from scratch is not that necessary anymore. Why rebuild something if it works. Why fix it if it’s not broken?

31:00 – Chuck talks about his experience.

31:13 – Chris continues his thoughts.

Chris: Start growing a community.

32:01 – Chuck: What ways can people get involved within their community?

32:13 – Chris: Meetup. There are a lot of opportunities out there. Just going online and seeing where the conferences

34:08 – Chris: It’s interesting when I coach people on public speaking. Sharing your knowledge and learning experience is great!

34:50 – Chuck: If they are learning how to code then...by interacting with people you can get closer to what you need/want.

35:30 – Chris continues this conversation.

35:49 – Chris: You can be the person that helps with x, y, z. Just by getting your name known then you can get a job offer.

36:23 – Chuck: How do you find out what is really good content – what’s worth your time vs. what’s not worth your time?

36:36 –Chris says, “That’s tricky!” Chris answers the question.

37:19: Chris: The best things out there right now is...

38:45 – Chuck: Anything else that people want to bring up?

39:00 – Chris continues to talk.

42:26 – Aimee adds in her thoughts.

Aimee: I would encourage people to...

43:00 – Chris continues the conversation.

Chris: Each project is different, when I build a web app is different then when I build a...

45:07 – Panelist: I agree. You talked about abstractions that don’t go away. You use abstractions in what you use. At some point, it’s safe to rly on this abstraction, but not this one. People may ask themselves: maybe CoffeeScript wasn’t the best thing for me.

46:11 – Chris comments and refers to jQuery.

48:58 – Chris continues the conversation.

Chris: I used to work on eight different projects and they worked on different interfaces. I learned about these different environments. This is the project we are now using, and this will like it for the end of time. This is where abstractions are the weird thing. What was the use of the abstraction if it doesn’t have longevity? I think we are building things too soon and too fast.

51:04 – Chris: When I work in browsers and come up with brand new stuff.

52:21 – Panelist: Your points are great, but there are some additional things we need to talk about. Let’s take jQuery as an example. There is a strong argument that if you misuse the browser...

53:45 – Chris: The main issue I have with jQuery is that people get an immediate satisfaction. What do we do besides this?

55:58 – Panelist asks Chris further questions.

56:25 – Chris answers.

Chris: There are highly frequent websites that aren’t being maintained and they aren’t maintainable anymore.

57:09 – Panelist: Prototypes were invented because...

57:51 – Chris: It’s a 20/20 thing.

58:04 – Panelist: Same thing can be said about the Y2K.

58:20 – Panelist: Yes, they had to solve that problem that day. The reality is...

58:44 – Chris: We learned from that whole experience.

1:00:51 – Chris: There was a lot of fluff around it.

1:01:35 – Panelist: Being able to see the future would be a very helpful thing.

1:01:43 – Chris continues the conversation.

1:02:44 – Chuck: How do people get ahold of you?

1:03:04 – Twitter is probably the best way.

1:03:32 – Let’s go to picks!

1:03:36 - Advertisement

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js

MJS 078: Steve Edwards

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Steve Edwards

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Steve Edwards who is a website developer and lives in Portland, OR. He is a senior developer at an international corporation called, Fluke. Today’s main topic of conversation is Drupal. Check out the episode to hear about this and much more! 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:05 – Chuck: Welcome! I appreciate your contributions with hooking me up with some people.

2:22 – Started in IT in 1995.

2:38 – Chuck: How did you get into software development?

2:46 – Steve: In high school not much courses on it. Then in college did some programming there. After college, I was supposed to get married. I was thinking finance. Never nailed down what I wanted to do. Called Bank of America in 1991 – called them. He said let me put in touch with someone. One of the things I got to put classes on “how does this system work.” I got into the banking job and realized not for me. Did realize that I do like teaching. Got software support for another bank. My banking software experience got me the job. We did interfaces – data from PC base to main systems like IBM, etc. I dealt with the source. Same time, I was a diehard racket ball player; on the board state organization. Someone organizing a website for group through Front Page. Hey do you want to take this over? Got to know Front Page. It’s painful to think about it. Same time a position opened up. I got PHP books, and created a new website for our racket ball organization. Off-time learning this. At work I used other tools for the job. That’s where I got into programming and developing. I was an analyst and wanted to program. I created a website from nothing in 2004 for a mountain bike shop. Learned a lot about PHB – and learned that I never want to build anything from scratch ever again. 2006 I start looing for a CMS and I got into some evaluations and got into Drupal. Now I got to do fulltime Drupal. Some guys left the company and got to do Drupal, also. There’s a book on basic JavaScript, and haven’t gotten into it. It’s nice because since 2009 I have been working from home. 3-4 years ago I heard about Angular and how it was used in Drupal. Weather.com – they did things with Angular. I started diving into Angular. Then a small project – worked with Travis then we started with our new ideas/projects. Then I went and took some Angular classes, and I was working on my project. I had these questions. They said that this was used for a one-time use. Okay, I had to figure it out. Travis one day asked: What are you doing? I showed him with the calendar and integrated with... Travis asked if I wanted to go to work with him. Then the past few years I have been working with Vue.js.

12:41 – Chuck: In 2006 I got into Ruby on Rails. I got into jQuery and did some backbone and progressed the same way you did. Worked with Angular and Vue. There is a lot going on there. Interesting to see how this has all progressed. At what point did you decide – JavaScript is the focus to some of these projects?

13:42 – Steve: Lightweight functions.

15:25 – Advertisement – Coder Job

16:05 – Chuck: What are you proud of with the work you’ve done?

16:20 – Steve: Article - All the different projects that it looks like for a developer – I have 5 or 6 projects that I want to get to that I haven’t had time to get to.

Steve talks about one of the projects he is working on.

17:55 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

17:59 – Steve: My company, Fluke, we have a cool setup. It has a three-legged system. In that we have all the background data, another for digital assets, and...

Steve: It’s so fast – I am trying to enhance it to make it even faster.

Another thing that I am working on is that we have a scheduling website for the fire department I am apart of. Band-Aids and glue hold it together. I am trying to work with a calendar so it can integrate – take over the data of a cell and put y stuff in there.  It would be efficient so I don’t get all these errors with this old system. It would give me grand control.

20:16 – Steve: I want to get more and more into JavaScript. The one thing that I like about my story is that you did in your spare time. That’s how I got into Google. Multiple years working up late, working with people and different modules. I got good enough (in 2009) and got good enough – it got me into the door.

21:13 – Chuck talks about his course on how to get a job.

Chuck: All you have to do to level-up is to put into the time. Working on open-source project

21:56 – Steve: Learning – find a project you want to do. What is something you want to tackle? What and how can you get it done with your tools? Stack overflow, or Slack questions. We started a new Meetup (last meeting was last month) and people do Vue on a regular basis. Slack room. That’s how I got into...

Personal experience you can help people and find

23:00 – Chuck: People want to level-up for different reasons. Whether you are trying to get better, or learn new things – getting to know people and having these conversations will shape your thinking.

23:33 – Steve: Also, networking.

24:10 – Chuck: I wasn’t happy where I was at and talked to people. Hey – what else is out there?

24:37 – Chuck: Any recommendations?

24:42 – Steve: The amount of courses that are out there, and it can be overwhelming. Find courses when they go on sale. I found some courses that were only $10.00. There is stuff that is free and things that you can pay for. It can be inexpensive.

26:38 – Chuck: I do the same thing. I wait for things to go on sale first. I’ve done that with courses. However you learn it. Some people work through a book and for others that’s not the way. Sometimes I will start with a video course then I get frustrated. It helps, though. There are different ways to do it. Go do it.

27:39 – Steve: There is a lot of good jobs – get your foot in the door as a junior guy. Getting the real-life experience.

28:15 – Chuck: How do people get ahold of you?

28:18 – Steve: Twitter, GitHub, wherever...

28:48 – Picks!

28:53 – Advertisement for Digital Ocean

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JSJ 333: “JavaScript 2018: Things You Need to Know, and a Few You Can Skip” with Ethan Brown

Panel:

Special Guests: Ethan Brown

In this episode, the panel talks with Ethan Brown who is a technological director at a small company. They write software to facilitate large public organizations and help make projects more effective, such as: rehabilitation of large construction projects, among others. There is a lot of government work through the endeavors they encounter. Today, the panel talks about his article he wrote, and other topics such as Flex, Redux, Ruby, Vue.js, Automerge, block chain, and Elm. Enjoy!

Show Topics:

2:38 – Chuck: We are here to talk about the software side of things.

Let’s dive into what you are looking at mid-year what we need to know for 2018. You wrote this.

3:25 – Ethan: I start off saying that doing this podcast now, how quickly things change. One thing I didn’t think people needed to know was symbols, and now that’s changed. I had a hard time with bundling and other things. I didn’t think the troubles were worth it. And now a couple of moths ago (an open source project) someone submitted a PR and said: maybe we should be using symbols? I told them I’ve had problems in the past. They said: are you crazy?!

It’s funny to see how I things have changed.

4:47 – Panel: Could you talk about symbols?

4:58 – Aimee: Are they comparable to Ruby?

5:05 – Ethan talks about what symbols are and what they do!

5:52 – Chuck: That’s pretty close to how that’s used in Ruby, too.

6:04 – Aimee: I haven’t used them in JavaScript, yet. When have you used them recently?

6:15 – Ethan answers the question.

7:17 – Panelist chimes in.

7:27 – Ethan continues his answer. The topic of “symbols” continues. Ethan talks about Automerge.

11:18 – Chuck: I want to dive-into what you SHOULD know in 2018 – does this come from your experience? Or how did you drive this list?

11:40 – Ethan: I realize that this is a local business, and I try to hear what people are and are not using. I read blogs. I think I am staying on top of these topics being discussed.

12:25 – Chuck: Most of these things are what people are talking.

12:47 – Aimee: Web Assembly. Why is this on the list?

12:58 – Ethan: I put on the list, because I heard lots of people talk about this. What I was hearing the echoes of the JavaScript haters. They have gone through a renaissance. Along with Node, and React (among others) people did get on board. There are a lot of people that are poisoned by that. I think the excitement has died down. If I were to tell a story today – I would

14:23 – Would you put block chain on there? And AI?

14:34 – Panel: I think it’s something you should be aware of in regards to web assembly. I think it will be aware of. I don’t know if there is anything functional that I could use it with.

15:18 – Chuck: I haven’t really played with it...

15:27 – Panel: If you wrote this today would you put machine learning on there?

15:37 – Ethan: Machine Learning...

16:44 – Chuck: Back to Web Assembly. I don’t think you were wrong, I think you were early. Web Assembly isn’t design just to be a ... It’s designed to be highly optimized for...

17:45 – Ethan: Well-said. Most of the work I do today we are hardly taxing the devices we are using on.

18:18 – Chuck and panel chime in.

18:39 – Chuck: I did think the next two you have on here makes sense.

18:54 – Panel: Functional programming?

19:02 – Ethan: I have a lot of thoughts on functional programming and they are mixed. I was exposed to this in the late 90’s. It was around by 20-30 years. These aren’t new. I do credit JavaScript to bring these to the masses. It’s the first language I see the masses clinging to. 10 years ago you didn’t see that. I think that’s great for the programming community in general. I would liken it to a way that Ruby on Rails really changed the way we do web developing with strong tooling. It was never really my favorite language but I can appreciate what it did for web programming. With that said...(Ethan continues the conversation.)

Ethan: I love Elm.

21:49 – Panelists talks about Elm.

*The topic diverts slightly.

22:23 – Panel: Here’s a counter-argument. Want to stir the pot a little bit.

I want to take the side of someone who does NOT like functional programming.

24:08 – Ethan: I don’t disagree with you. There are some things I agree with and things I do disagree with. Let’s talk about Data Structures. I feel like I use this everyday. Maybe it’s the common ones. The computer science background definitely helps out.

If there was one data structure, it would be TREES. I think STACKS and QUEUES are important, too. Don’t use 200-300 hours, but here are the most important ones. For algorithms that maybe you should know and bust out by heart.

27:48 – Advertisement for Chuck’s E-book Course: Get A Coder Job

28:30 – Chuck: Functional programming – people talk bout why they hate it, and people go all the way down and they say: You have to do it this way....

What pay things will pay off for me, and which things won’t pay off for me? For a lot of the easy wins it has already been discussed. I can’t remember all the principles behind it. You are looking at real tradeoffs.  You have to approach it in another way. I like the IDEA that you should know in 2018, get to know X, Y, or Z, this year. You are helping the person guide them through the process.

30:18 – Ethan: Having the right tools in your toolbox.

30:45 – Panel: I agree with everything you said, I was on board, until you said: Get Merge Conflicts.

I think as developers we are being dragged in...

33:55 – Panelist: Is this the RIGHT tool to use in this situation?

34:06 – Aimee: If you are ever feeling super imposed about something then make sure you give it a fair shot, first.

34:28 – That’s the only reason why I keep watching DC movies.

34:41 – Chuck: Functional programming and...

I see people react because of the hype cycle. It doesn’t fit into my current paradigm. Is it super popular for a few months or...?

35:10 – Aimee: I would love for someone to point out a way those pure functions that wouldn’t make their code more testable.

35:42 – Ethan: Give things a fair shake. This is going back a few years when React was starting to gain popularity. I had young programmers all about React. I tried it and mixing it with JavaScript and...I thought it was gross. Everyone went on board and I had to make technically decisions. A Friend told me that you have to try it 3 times and give up 3 times for you to get it. That was exactly it – don’t know if that was prophecy or something. This was one of my bigger professional mistakes because team wanted to use it and I didn’t at first. At the time we went with Vue (old dog like me). I cost us 80,000 lines of code and how many man hours because I wasn’t keeping an open-mind?

37:54 – Chuck: We can all say that with someone we’ve done.

38:04 – Panel shares a personal story.

38:32 – Panel: I sympathize because I had the same feeling as automated testing. That first time, that automated test saved me 3 hours. Oh My Gosh! What have I been missing!

39:12 – Ethan: Why should you do automated testing? Here is why...

You have to not be afraid of testing. Not afraid of breaking things and getting messy.

39:51 – Panel: Immutability?

40:00 – Ethan talks about this topic.

42:58 – Chuck: You have summed up my experience with it.

43:10 – Panel: Yep. I agree. This is stupid why would I make a copy of a huge structure, when...

44:03 – Chuck: To Joe’s point – but it wasn’t just “this was a dumb way” – it was also trivial, too. I am doing all of these operations and look my memory doesn’t go through the roof. They you see it pay off. If you don’t see how it’s saving you effort, at first, then you really understand later.

44:58 – Aimee: Going back to it being a functional concept and making things more testable and let it being clearly separate things makes working in code a better experience.

As I am working in a system that is NOT a pleasure.

45:31 – Chuck: It’s called legacy code...

45:38 – What is the code year? What constitutes a legacy application?

45:55 – Panel: 7 times – good rule.

46:10 – Aimee: I am not trolling. Serious conversation I was having with them this year.

46:27 – Just like cars.

46:34 – Chuck chimes in with his rule of thumb.

46:244 – Panel and Chuck go back-and-forth with this topic.

47:14 – Dilbert cartoons – check it out.

47:55 – GREAT QUOTE about life lessons.

48:09 – Chuck: I wish I knew then what I know now.

Data binding. Flux and Redux. Lots of this came out of stuff around both data stores and shadow domes. How do you tease this out with the stuff that came out around the same time?

48:51 – Ethan answers question.

51:17 – Panel chimes in.

52:01 – Picks!

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MJS 079: Michael Garrigan

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Michael Garrigan

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with http://michaelgarrigan.com who is one of the podcast’s listeners. He is changing careers midway and has had many exciting careers in the past, such as being a professional chef, carpenter, repairman, and so on. Listen to today’s episode to hear Michael’s unique experience with programming and JavaScript.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:18 – Chuck: I started this show but interviewing guests and then opened up to listeners. Michael scheduled an interview and here we go! I find that his experience will be different than mine than others. We will be getting guests on here, but wanted this to be a well-rounded view within the community.

2:25 – Michael’s background! His experience is a mid-career change. To see the things that are intimidating and exciting.

3:16 – How did you get into programming?

3:23 – Michael: How do people talk to machines? What are the different computer languages out there? What do people prefer to use? The C programming language, I saw as the “grandfather” program. That’s the first thing I looked at. Then I was like, “what is going on?” I got a copy of the original K&R book and worked through that.

4:58 – Chuck: I did the C language in college. The Java that I was learning then was less complicated. How did you end up with JavaScript then?

5:26 – Guest: It was easy and you can just open up a console and it works. You want to see things happen visually when you program is great. It’s a great entry point. We started building things in React and how fun that is. I enjoy JavaScript in general.

6:11 – Chuck: What is your career transition?

6:18 – Guest: I have always been a craftsman and building things. I had a portion time I was a professional chef, which is the cold side like sausages and meats and cheeses, etc. I used to do a lot of ice carvings, too. Stopped that and opened a small business and repaired antique furniture for people. Wicker restoration. It was super cool because it was 100+ years old. To see what people did very well was enjoyable. Every few years I wanted to see how something worked, and that’s how I got into it. That was the gateway to something that was scary to something that made programs.

8:24 – Chuck: I was working in IT and wrote a system that managed updates across multiple servers. There is some automation I can do here, and it grew to something else. What made you switch? Were you were looking for something more lucrative?

9:01 – Michael: Main motivation I appreciate the logic behind it. I always build physical items. To build items that are non-physical is kind of different. Using logic to essentially put out a giant instruction sheet is fun.

9:52 – Chuck: At what point do you say I want to do a boot camp?

10:04 – Michael: I might to this as a career. Hobby level and going to work is definitely different. I could see myself getting up every day and going to meetings and talking about these topics and different issues. Coding day to day.

10:51 – Chuck: Who did you talk to who got you started?

10:57 – Guest: Things I read online and friends. They said get the basics behind programming. Languages come and go. Be able to learn quickly and learn the basics.

12:13 – Chuck: In NY city? It’s pricy to live there.

12:33 – Guest: Cost of living is much greater.

12:42 – Chuck: What was it like to go to a boot camp?

12:50 – Guest answers question.

14:30 – Advertisement – Get a Coder Job

15:11 – Chuck: What different projects have you worked on?

15:19 – Guest talks about his many different projects. Like senses.gov.

18:11 – Michael: Working on getting a job. I put together a portfolio and just graduated this past week.

19:38 – Charles: Anything that has been a huge challenge for you?

19:47 – Not really just one. I’ve done big projects in the past. Seeing that I can do them and sheer amount of work that I have put in. Not really too concerned. Only concern is that mid-30s any bias that is out there. I don’t think that will really affect me.

20:25 – Chuck: Yeah, it’s rally not age-bias.

20:55 – Michael: “Making your bones” is an expression in culinary school. That means that you put in the hours in the beginning to become a professional at it. So I have had transitioned several times and each time I had to make my bones and put in the time, so I am not looking forward to that for me right now, but...

21:43 – Chuck: Anything else?

21:51 – Guest: Meetups.

22:40 – Chuck: I have been putting time into making this book.

22:53 – Guest puts in his last comments.

24:00 – Chuck: Thinking about what I want DevChat TV to be. I have been thinking and writing the mission statement for DevChat TV.

25:14 – Chuck: It’s a big deal to get out of debt. My wife and I will be at the end of the year.

25:37 – Guest: Discipline not to spend money, and peer pressure.

25:48 – Picks!

25:57 – Advertisement for Digital Ocean!

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JSJ 334: “Web Performance API” with Dan Shappir

Panel:

Special Guests: Dan Shappir (Tel Aviv)

In this episode, the panel talks with Dan Shappir who is a computer software developer and performance specialist at Wix.com. As Dan states, his job is to make 100 million websites (hosted on the Wix platform) load and execute faster! Past employment includes working for companies, such as: Ericom, Ericom Software, and BackWeb. He studied at Technion Institute of Management and currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. The panel talks about web performance API among other things. Check it out!

Show Topics:

1:29 – Charles: Let us know who you are and why you’re famous!

1:39 – “Hello!” from Dan Shappir.

2:25 – Charles: You should say that you go to EACH site EVERY day out of the millions of sites out there.

2:53 – Charles: My mom mentioned Wix to me at first. My mom teaches High School Math.

3:16 – Dan: Yes that is our mission statement. That everyone can get a website without the knowledge of how to build a website.

3:52 – Aimee makes her comments.

3:59 – Dan: On our platform we try to offer people flexibility. There are bounds and limits, but people can do their very own thing, though. To make Wix faster because as we add more features and functionality that is our goal.

4:40 – Chuck: Okay, I know how to make X perform a little bit better. You are looking at a platform that controls TONS of sites, how do you even go about that?

4:58 – Dan: It is more difficult then that. We have millions of users leveraging the platform but there are a lot of developers in Wix who are developing the platform. I don’t think anyone at Wix has a total grasp of the complexity of the platform that we built. We have hundreds of frontend people working on our platform. All of them have pieces to the kingdom. We have processes in place with code reviews and whatnot, but there is so much going on. There is a change every 2 minutes, 24/7. We need to make sure progressing instead of regressing. 

6:54 – Aimee: I think it was interesting in one of the links you sent over. Because you know when something is getting worse you consider that a bug.

7:15 – Dan: It is more than a bug because if we see regression in performance then that is a problem. I can literally see any part of the organization and say, “stop” if it will

7:57 – Chuck: We are talking about performance, but what does that mean? What measures are there?

8:15: Dan: We are looking at performance can mean different things in different contents. User sites, for example, most important aspect is load time. How quickly the page loads and gets open to the viewer to that specific site. When they click something they want it instantly and no drag time. It does change in different contexts.

9:58 – Chuck: People do talk about load time. People have different definitions of it.

10:12: Dan: Excellent question. When you look at the different sites through Wix. Different people who build sites – load time can mean something else to everybody. It can mean when you see the MAIN text or the MAIN image. If it’s on an ECON site then how soon can they purchase or on a booking site, how long can the person book X product.

I heard someone at a conference say that load time is when: HERO TEXT And HERO IMAGE are displayed.

12:14 – Chuck: What is faster React or Vue?

12:21 – NEW HOST: Not sure. It all depends.

12:34 – Dan: We are big into React. We are one of the big React users outside of Facebook. I joined Wix four years ago, and even back then we were rebuilding our framework using React. One of our main modifications is because we wanted to do server-side rendered.

13:27 – Christopher asks Dan a question.

14:16 – Dan: We are in transition in this regard. Before we were totally client-site rendered, and that was the case until middle of last year. Then we deployed...

Dan: We are 100% server-side rendered now. Some things we are still using JavaScript. We have another project going on now and it’s fully CSS, and little JavaScript as possible. What you might want to do with that site is...

You might get in a few months every Wix site will be visible even if JavaScript is disabled.

16:26 – Aimee adds in her comments and observations to this topic.

16:55 – Dan: We don’t want things displayed incorrectly before it lays out. We hide the content while it’s downloading then make it visible. They lay-outing are done faster, because...

17:44 – Christopher asks Dan a question.

18:04 – Dan: I got into API...

Either you are moving forward or are you moving back. AKA – You are either progressing or regressing.

Different stages:

1.) Development stage

2.) Pre-Production (automated tools that check the performance with specific use cases)

3.) Check it out!

It’s beneficial to use these APIs.

21:11 – Christopher: What is performance APIs?

21:38 – Dan: There is a working group – Todd from Microsoft and others who are exposing the information (that is available in the browser) out into the browser. When the browser downloads a certain source (image, font, etc.) it can measure the various stages of downloading that feature.  You have these different sages of downloading this resource. The browser can measure each of these stages and then expose them to you. Basically it’s for the browser to expose this information to you and in a way that is coherent and uniform. It essentially maintains this buffer that puts performance entries sequentially.

Dan continues explaining this topic in detail.

25:55 – Dan: You have this internal buffer...

28:45 – Advertisement – Sentry – They support opensource.

29:39 – Christopher: everything you are saying seems that I can use this or that tab right now...

Why would I prefer the API to something visual, hypothetically?

30:03 – Dan: Three Different Stages. (See above.)

This information is very, very helpful during the developmental stage. Say you got a link from someone...

Dan mentions: Performance.mark

34:04 – Aimee: When you were talking about resource-ends. Many people don’t know what this is. Can you spend 2-3 minutes about how you guys are using these? Are there people can add for big bang for their buck?

34:41 – Dan: This might want to be a topic for its own podcast show.

Dan gives a definition of what a resource-end means.

Go back to fonts as an example.

Pre-connect for example, too.

39:03 – Dan: Like I said, it’s a huge topic.

You have to exercise some care. Bandwidth is limited. Make sure you aren’t blocking other resources that you do need right now.

40:02 – Aimee: Sounds like a lot of great things to tap into. Another question I have is about bundling.

40:27 – Dan: One of the things that we try to do (given that we are depending on the JavaScript we are downloading) we need to download JavaScript content to the client side. It has been shown often that JS is the most impactful resources that you need to download. You really want to be as smart as possible with that. What is even more challenging is the network protocols are changing.

Dan continues to go in-depth about this topic.

Dan: What we have found is that you want to strive to bundle resources together.

44:10 – Aimee: Makes sense.

44:15 – Dan continues talking about this topic.

45:23 – Chuck asks two questions. (First question is now and second question is at 51:32.)

2 Questions:

1. You gather information from web performance AI - What system is that?

45:42 – Dan: I am not the expert in that. I will try not to give misleading information. Actually let me phrase it different. There are 3rd party tools that you can use leverage in your website. IF you are building for commercial reasons I highly recommend that you use performance-monitoring solution. I am not going to advertise one because there are tons out there. We ended up rolling out our own infrastructure because our use case is different than most.

At a conference I talked with a vendor and we talked about...

51:32 – 2nd Question from Charles to Dan: Now you’ve gathered this information now what to you do? What patterns? What do you look for? And how do you decide to optimize things?

54:23 – Chuck: Back to that question, Dan. How should they react to it and what are they looking for

54:41 – Dan: Three main ways: 1.) Generate alerts 2.) See trends over long period of time 3.) Looking at real-time graphs.

Frontend developer pro is that likely being woken up in the middle of the night is lower. We might be looking at the real time graph after we deployed...

57:31 – Advertisement – Get a Coder Job!

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js

MJS 080: Ely Lucas

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ely Lucas

This week on My JavaScirpt Story, Charles speaks with Ely Lucas who is a software developer. He loves technologies and mobile technologies among other things. Let’s listen to today’s episode where Chuck and Ely talk about Ionic, Angular, React and many other topics! Check it out!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:33 – Hello!

1:40 Chuck: Give us a background on who you are, and tell us how famous you are!

2:31 – Chuck: What do you do with Ionic?

2:40 – Ely answers the question.

3:51 – Chuck: How did you get into your field?

3:55 – Ely: When I was a kid and played with video games. Later on I got into web development, like my website. Then I got into a professional-level of developing.

Ely goes into detail about how his passion for developing began and developed.

6:30 – Chuck: Yeah, I’ve talked with people who have gotten into video games, then got into software development.

7:01 – Ely: Someday I would like to develop games.

7:12 – Chuck: Yes, web developing is awesome.

Chuck asks Ely another question.

7:25 – Ely answers the question and mentions web controls.

9:17 – Ely: I thought Ajax was easier.

9:38 – Chuck: When I got into web development jQuery was sort of new. It made things a lot easier.

9:58 – Ely: A lot of people like to sneer at jQuery now, but back in the day it was IT.

10:28 – Chuck: How did you get into Ionic?

10:43 – Ely: I got a fulltime gig working on Ionic; I like the framework. I saw a job application and sent in my résumé. Two days later I got a callback and was amazed. They were hiring remotely. The team liked me and started over a year ago.

11:46 – Chuck asks a question.

11:54 – Ely answers the question.

13:20 – Chuck: Why Ionic?

13:35 – Ely: It was based off of Angular.

15:17 – Chuck: You mentioned...what has the transition been like?

15:32 – Ely talks about past programs he has worked with. He taught React in the early React days.

16:37 – Ely: I have a deep appreciation on React now.

17:09 – Chuck: I like seeing the process that people go through.

17:24 – Ely continues the conversation.

Ely: It is interesting to see the learning process that people go through to arrive in the same place.

18:18 – Chuck: Redux is a good example of this. Anyway, this is near the end of our time.

18:39 – Chuck: Anything else you want to talk about?

18:48 – Ely: Yes, I have been involved in the Denver community. Check us out.

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js

JSJ 335: “CanJS 4.0” with Justin Meyer

Panel:

Special Guests: Justin Meyer

In this episode, the panel talks with Justin Meyer who is a co-author of DoneJS, CanJS, jQueryPP, StealJS, and DocumentJS. Justin currently works for Bitovi and is their Director of R&D. He is also a fan of basketball and Michael Jackson. The panel and Justin talk about CanJS in-detail – check it out!

Show Topics:

0:58 – We had you on Episode 202.

1:14 – Chuck: Can you tell everyone who you are?

1:20 – Justin tells us his background.

1:50 – Chuck.

1:58 – Justin.

2:06 – Chuck: Can you give us an introduction to what CanJS 4.0?

2:11 – Justin: It is a JavaScript framework and is similar to Vue. It adds a very model layer, and uses Real Time very well.

2:44 – Panelist.

2:49 – Justin.

2:55 – Panelist: What is the current...

3:09 – Justin: Compatibility is very important to us. A lot of the same tools are still available. It has over 80 different repositories.

Justin continues to talk about the differences/similarities between the different versions.

4:55 – Panelist: Angular, React, and Vue are dominating, so I have 2 questions.

1.) Where is the core strength of JS and its user base?

2.) What is like to be the CanJS when everyone is talking about the other programs?

5:31 – Justin: We have dealt with this for the past 10 years. Emotionally it’s not great, I wished it was more popular, but our priority is keeping our user-based happy. We’ve had big companies use it.

Justin answers the second question.

8:44 – Panelist: You mentioned two things.

9:22 – Aimee: I think everything has trade-offs. I would use something because it was the right tool for the job. I wouldn’t want to make something that was “cool.” I would want to make it super accessible in a network.

10:10 – Justin: That is a great marketing angle. We are trying to remove the worst parts of the program.

10:26 – Now I am intrigued.

10:32 – Justin: You have this mutable state and you aren’t sure. At least for CanJS I don’t see that occurring too often.

10:54 – Aimee.

10:58 – Justin: Deep inheritance is definitely a problem and it can create...

11:13 – Aimee.

11:19 – Justin: We have changed strategies a lot, and I think it’s helped CanJS grow; like 60% since January. We are doing a lot of user studies now. I run Meetups, etc. That being said inheritance schemes aren’t something that people will encounter. This is something that they won’t encounter months down the road.

13:00 – Aimee.

13:05 – Panelist: I would like to dig deeper into state-management. Everyone is doing Flux, talk about that with CanJS.

13:20 – Justin: Yeah. It depends on what kind of user you are talking to. When I talk to new users off the street (people who just graduated, etc.)...

If you look at React’s statistics – more than 50% doesn’t use any state management.

16:15 – Panelist: I think it’s interesting that there are people that aren’t “oh my gosh...”

16:43 – Justin: The last coolest thing I’ve done is...

18:02 – Justin continues.

18:16 – Panelist: I kind of have this belief that we as a community turn to frameworks and tools too much. From your perspective when does it make sense to turn to a tool like this or better off working with native...

18:56 – It depends on how complex your app is and our ability to work through those problems. I think that’s a generic answer, but hopefully that helps. I don’t think you really can’t live without.

19:49 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. One thing that I found is that there are many things layered into state-management. Because you mentioned performance, which is something I care about, too. At what point does the extra tooling become too heavy for the user’s experience? Where do you draw the line?

21:11 – Justin: It depends. I don’t know what the parallel is – it’s like a richer developer problem. You have too many users where you can make those fine tuned adjustments. Do whatever is going to deliver the product first and then worry about performance later? I think our things are geared towards performance by default.

22:41 – Panelist: Playing devil’s advocate, though. But isn’t there some danger in kind of suggesting that you focus on performance WHEN it’s a business issue? Maybe there is there a lack of empathy among developers. I worry that advice is hurting us.

23:53 – Justin: No matter what you can build your homepage with Angular weird monstrosity, but then when you get to the point when people are using your product – you can just use native HTML, and native methods and build that one widget and as easy and fast as possible.

24:50 – Panelist: Dealing with complexity. Now we need to do things like bundlers, and such to deal with this issue. I feel like a crotchety old man yelling because it takes forever.

25:38 – Justin: I think it depends on where you are sitting. I think that comes down to the design. If your design has a lot of complex states, then...

26:37 – Panelist: Because you care about performance...

26:54 – Advertisement

27:53 – Justin: I don’t think that the run time of CanJS is going to be a critical performance path for anybody. Is there a responsibility? This is the oldest question. It’s like saying: where do you draw the line that you need to choose success/be elected to fight the battles if you really want to win.

You need someone using your product or it doesn’t really matter. Start-ups use our product because they need to get something up and in. I am going to flip this back onto you guys.

30:48 – Panelist: I think that’s fair.

31:00 – Aimee: I have a question. You got into consultancy when do you recommend using CanJS or something else?

31:15 – Justin: I always suggest people using CanJS.

31:53 – Aimee: What do these people do when their contract is over? I have used an older version of Can, and...

32:20 – Justin: Are you on Gitter?

Aimee: No, I am not.

32:25 – Justin: We do offer promote job posting to help them find somebody. We try our best to help people in any way we can.

33:05 – Aimee: That’s helpful. Another question.

33:28 – Justin: DoneJS is that. It uses the full kitchen sink. That’s what DoneJS is.

33:50 – Panelist: Let’s talk about CanJS in the mark-up. Do you think it’s better now or worse than 2012? Less space or more space?

34:13 – Justin: It’s probably worse. I think the methodology that we are using: focusing on our users. We get their feedback frequently. We are listening to our users, and I think we are being smarter.

35:16 – Panelist: Is the space getting more welcoming or less?

35:31 – It depends on what framework you are. It’s very hard to compete if you are the exact same thing as...

The market is so dense and there are so many ideas, so it’s getting harder and harder. What helps people break-through? Is it the technology or the framework?

36:36 – Panelist: I appreciate the richness of the field, as it exists right now. There aren’t a few things SMELT and ELM

37:10 – Justin: Elm for sure. I don’t have a lot of experience with SMELT.

37:23 – Panelist continues the talk.

37:54 – Chuck.

38:00 – Justin: I think it spreads by word-of-mouth. I used to think it was “technology” or... all that really matters is “can you deliver” and the person have a good experience.

Usability is the most important to me. We will see how this turns out. I will be either right or wrong.

39:18 – Panelist: Can we talk about the long-term future of Can JS?

39:28 – Justin: We are connecting to our user-base and making them happy. If I had it my way (which I don’t anymore) I think JSX is the best template language. We have been building integrations between JSX and...

I am putting out proposals where most people don’t like them.

Justin continues this conversation.

44:24 – Picks!

44:28 - Advertisement

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js

MJS 081: Christiané Heiligers

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Christiané Heiligers

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Dr. Christiané Heiligers who is new to the industry. Her background is in physics where she has her Ph.D. in the field. Listen to today’s episode to hear her background, experience with the different programs/languages, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Beginning – Advertisement: Code Badges!

1:07 – Christiané: Hello!

1:17 – Chuck: I like hearing people’s stories from our community. Tell us where you come from and who you are?

1:33 – Christiané: I am from South Africa, and have been in the US for 2 years now. My formal training is in physics. I have been a researcher with lab coats and test tubes. Through immigration, which took 2 years. I couldn’t be still, and started learning code on my own. I enjoyed the art. I had to use Python, and then I was hooked. I enjoyed the functional programming and other things. I had some experience with Ruby on Rails. I enjoy development because its problem solving, methodically approach, and uses your creative side, too. My preference is a Mac, need the Internet and decided to go to camps and take courses.

I snagged a job a week before I graduated!

4:36 – Chuck: your journey, thus far. You said that you couldn’t be idle – so why code?

4:53 – Guest: The UK is cold you don’t want to do anything outside! From South American I couldn’t stand the cold. I kept busy indoors – hint the code. You can’t get bored – frontend or backend.

5:28 – Chuck: Can you give us background on the Grace Hopper Academy.

5:40 – Guest: Sure! It’s based in NY City.

6:26 – Chuck: Did you move somewhere or was it remote?

6:30 – Guest: I had to live somewhere e

6:51 – Chuck: Where did you

6:55 – Guest: NY City. There were 16 of us in the course.

7:14 – Chuck: Why did you feel like you had to go to coding school?

7:25 – Guest: I am impatient with myself. The home-life you ask yourself: “Am I doing the right thing? Am I going in the right direction?” I wanted to go and pick up some skills.

7:56 – Chuck: You go through Grace Hopper – is this how you got into JavaScript?

8:11 – Guest: I didn’t know a line of JavaScript.

I did my application code line in Ruby.

My husband has been in software development my whole life.

9:16 – Chuck: What have you done with JavaScript since learning it?

9:24 – Guest: Some card playing games for my nieces in South Africa.

10:50 – Guest: Stack Overflow is wonderful.

11:05 – Chuck.

11:11 – Guest: I wasn’t actively contributing, but I did...

11:30 – Chuck: What is it like being a prof

11:37 – Guest: It’s addictive. When I am writing code in the frontend / backend side. It’s always learning.

12:11 – Chuck: What’s next for you?

12:18 – Guest: I would love to continue this journey. Maybe into the DevOps, but my passion happens with React. The Hapi Framework.

13:10 – Guest: The community is wonderful to work with – everyone is very helpful.

13:22 – Chuck: People are usually talking about Express and not Hapi.js.

13:35 – Guest: I have some contact names you can call.

13:43 – Guest: I am working on a few small projects right now. Some Angular sites that need assistance. Helping out where I can. It’s a small team that I am working with. There is only a few of us.

14:31 – Chuck: Usually people stick with one. What’s your experience using the different frameworks?

14:40 – Guest: It’s an eye-opener! React vs. Angular.

15:07 – Chuck: How can people find you?

15:14 – Guest: LinkedIn, Twitter, Tallwave, etc.

15:37 – Chuck: Picks!

15:40 – Advertisement!

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js

JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint” with Nicholas Zakas

Panel:

Special Guests: Nicholas Zakas

In this episode, the panel talks with Nicholas Zakas who writes on his site, Human Who Codes. He is the creator of ESLint, also the author of several books, and he blogs, too. He was employed through Box and today he talks about ESLint in full detail! Check it out! 

Show Topics:

0:05 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:37 – Hello! The panel is...(Chuck introduces everyone).

1:04 – Nicholas who are you?

1:17 – Nicholas: Yeah it’s been about 5 years and then you invited me again, but I couldn’t come on to talk about ESLint back then. That’s probably what people know me most for at this point. I created ESLint and I kicked that off and now a great team of people is maintaining it.

1:58 – Chuck: What is it?

2:04 – It’s a Linter for JavaScript. It falls into the same category as JSLint. The purpose of ESLint is to help you find problems with your code. It has grown quite a bit since I’ve created it. It can help with bugs and enforcing style guides and other things.

2:53 – Where did it come from?

2:57 – Guest: The idea popped into my head when I worked at Pop. One of my teammates was working on a bug and at that time we were using...

Nothing was working and after investigating someone had written a JavaScript code that was using a native code to make an Ajax request. It wasn’t the best practice for the company at the time. For whatever reason the person was unaware of that. When using that native XML...there was a little bit of trickiness to it because it was a wrapper around the...

We used a library to work around those situations and add a line (a Linter) for all JavaScript files. It was a text file and when you tried to render code through the process it would run and run the normal expression and it would fail if any of the...matched.

I am not comfortable using normal expressions to write code for this. You could be matching in side of a string and it’s not a good way to be checking code for problems. I wanted to find a better way.

6:04 – Why did you choose to create a product vs. using other options out there?

6:15 – Guest: Both of those weren’t around. JSHint was pretty much the defector tool that everyone was using. My first thought was if JSHint could help with this problem?

I went back to look at JSHint and I saw that on their roadmap you could create your own rules, and I thought that’s what we need. Why would I build something new? I didn’t see anything on GitHub and didn’t see the status of that. I wanted to see what the plan was, and they weren’t going to get to it. I said that I really needed this tool and I thought it would be helpful to others, too.

8:04 – My history was only back when it was customizable.

8:13 – Aimee: It’s interesting to see that they are basing it on regular expressions.

8:32 – Guest: Interesting thing at Box was that there was...I am not sure but one of the engineers at Box wrote...

9:03 – Aimee: I was going to ask in your opinion what do you think ES Lint is the standard now?

9:16 – Guest: How easy it is to plug things in. That was always my goal because I wanted the tool not to be boxed in – in anyway.

The guest continues to talk about how pluggable ESLint is and the other features of this tool.

13:41 – One thing I like about ESLint is that it can be an educational tool for a team. Did you see that being an educational tool?

14:24 – Guest: How do you start introducing new things to a team that is running at full capacity? That is something that I’ve wondered throughout my career. As a result of that, I found that a new team there were some problems I the code base that were really hard to get resolved, because when one person recognizes it there isn’t a god way to share that information within a team in a non-confrontational way. It’s better to get angry at a tool rather than a person.

Guest goes into what this can teach people.

18:07 – Panelist: I am not surprised. Is there a best practice to get a team to start with ESLint?

Do you get the whole team in a room and show them the options or take the best guess and turn it on?

18:34 – Guest: The thing I recommend is that first and foremost get ESLint in your system with zero rules on. It starts that mindset into your development process. We can do something to automatically check...

Get Syntax checking and you will se improvements on the number of bugs that are getting out of production. I recommend using the default the ESLint configuration. This has all of the things that we have found that are most likely errors and runtime errors vs. syntax errors. You can go through with those and sometimes it is easier to run that check with...

Using those ESLint rules will clean up a lot of problems that you didn’t know you had with your code. There are too many problems with those rules. I recommend instead of turning them off then put the severity to warning and not error. That is something we started with in the beginning. We turned on as many rules as we could and it drove people crazy. They didn’t feel like when they were committing to a file why should I be...

The idea with the different scenario levels you don’t’ want to turn off rules so people don’t know there is a problem. There can be a rule on so people will know that there is a problem, but...

Doing that alone will give you a lot of benefit in using ESLint. How do you decide as a team on the rules that are maybe not for finding errors but for stylistic in error? Do we use four spaces, semi-colons, etc. To figure that out I am a big component on finding a pre-existing style guide and adapting it. Get everyone to agree.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to stylistic preferences. It really is just getting everyone to do the same thing. I think it was Crawford that said: Whether you drive on the right side of the left side of the road – it doesn’t matter as long as everyone is dong the same thing. I agree with that and it applies to style guides. It can get heated but for the best thing for the team is stick with a guide and work together.

24:36 – Aimee: I can go through the options to pick one of the style guides out there and then it will automatically create my configuration for me is helpful. Question: If you had to pick 2 or 3 rules that you are super helpful what would they be?

25:30 – Guest: To touch briefly on indentation. Whether you like four spaces or whether you are wild and like tabs, I think the indent rule is very helpful. Just for wiping out and eliminating that discussion through your team. Have your editor setup however they want but on the pre-hook...

But my favorite rules I tend to lean towards the ones that saved me.

The Guest goes through his favorite rules with ESLint. Check it out!

26:51 – Guest mentions his second favorite rule, here!

28:24 – Guest mentions his third favorite rule, here!

29:03 – Guest mentions the rule that makes him giggle a lot, here!

30:07 – Advertisement – Sentry!

31:22 – What is your take on running Fix? Does it make sense to run Fix?

32:00 – Guest: It depends and the idea behind Fix is the idea of doing a one time (at the start) fix everything that it can find wrong b/c I don’t want to do it by hand. It morphed into a more of a tool that people are using all the time. I too have mixed feelings about it. I think the greatest value you get out of Fix is that when you first install it or when you enable a new rule. I think in those situations you get a lot of value out of Fix. I think that when people were getting aggressive with their code styles it took us down a path where we...

As a pre-commit hook it could be to fix things and part of the built system you wouldn’t want...

People are probably wondering: Why doesn’t ESLint doesn’t fix all the time?

It can be a team decision: do you want to run Fix at the point that the developer is writing the code, do you want to use Fix as running it as a build when you are bundling? It really seems more of a personal preference. I am on the fence about it. Even though I am leaning more towards...

35:16 – Do you run Premier?

35:20 – Guest: No I don’t. I don’t have anything against Premier but I think Prettier uses a very interesting space.

37:50 – Chuck: What is next for ESLint and what is next for you?

37:55 – Guest: Well, to be honest I am not sure what is next for ESLint. I haven’t been involved with keeping it maintained for the last few years. I do help out with feedback with decisions. But in general the ESLint the direction is that let’s add tings that help people avoid language hazards and make sure that ESLint is still pluggable. Lastly, that we will be there to help people and the community. There is this virtuosic cycle and tools like Babble and then tools like ESLint introducing rules adapting new rules and features better.

For myself, and the future, I haven’t been involved with ESLint because I am focusing on my health. I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease and it meant that I needed to focus on my health. That’s why, too, I wasn’t able to join a few years ago. I am doing better but I am a few years away for working fulltime and writing books and blogging, again. The trajectory is upward. I want to stress that you need to take care of yourself.

There is interesting stuff that we are doing and I love it, but make sure you take care of yourself! If you don’t have your health then nothing will really matter. I want to encourage you all to take care of yourselves better. This industry can take a toll on your body b/c it is high-stressed. If you are stressed your immune system will shut down. For a lot of us we are working too much and there isn’t an off-switch. I would like to encourage people to examine their life and their time.

When you take time to turn off your analytic brain, and work on your creative brain then the pathways will connect better.

Please save your money!

Lyme disease is spread through tick bites.

44:30 – Aimee: Thank you for sharing that!

44:38 – Chuck: It’s encouraging to me that you are still trying to come back even after this disease. I think we take things for granted sometimes. You can’t always count on things going the way you want it to go.

45:19 – Guest: What happened to me was I left work and one Friday afternoon I had a normal weekend. My health was on the decline, and I rested all weekend. And Monday I couldn’t get out of bed. That started this whole period where I stopped leaving the house completely. That’s how quickly things can change for you. I harp on people a lot to save their money. If I didn’t have savings there would be a very different end to my story. I want to encourage people to save.

46:33 – Chuck: I think on that note let’s go to picks. Where can people find you?

46:45 – Guest: My blog is Human Who Codes.

47:10 – Chuck: Anything people can do to help you? Check out his books you won’t regret it!

47:33 – Guest: Buying books is always helpful. I would say that if you can spend some time contributing to ESLint that is always a great help. Anything you can do to help them will help me. I want to make sure that those folks are happy, healthy and productive. For me, personally, I love when people Tweet at me and say HI! I love hearing other people’s stories of how they have overcome past diseases or illnesses. If you want to send monetary gifts – donate to a wonderful organization that helps children with Lyme disease. I would encourage you to support if you feel inclined.

50:49 – Chuck: We appreciate it, and I appreciate you being so open about your personal story.

51:11 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

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js

MJS 082: Benjamin Hong

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Benjamin Hong

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Benjamin Hong who is a Senior UI Developer at Politico where he lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He has worked with other companies including Treehouse, Element 84, and Udacity. Charles and Benjamin talk about his past and current projects, and how it’s different working for the government vs. working for a business. Check it out!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:06 – Chuck: Tell us a brief introduction, please.

1:23 – Ben: I am a lead frontend developer at Politico.

1:43 – Chuck: It’s an area that can affect everyone. How did you get into developing?

1:52: Ben: I had everything you can think of to develop at first.

2:10 – Chuck: For me it was a TI90 calculator!

2:18 – Chuck: Was it somebody or something that pushed you towards this area?

2:32 – Ben: I wanted to change something with the theme, Googled it, and it went from there, and the Marquis Tag.

2:51 – Chuck: And the Blink Tag! The goodies. So you got the he HTML book – and what website did you build that was your first big project?

3:07 – Ben: It was fiddling around, but it was fortune cookie universe.

3:20 – Chuck: You will have to recreate it!

3:27 – Ben: I think this was 1993/1995 timeframe.

3:40 – Chuck: Yep, me too same time frame. If you had something move on your website it was so cool. You went to building...

4:02 – Ben: JavaScript was a roadblock for me. There was nobody to correct me. I had a JavaScript book and it was a massive failure.

4:33 – Chuck: You took a break and you came back?

4:40 – Ben: Oh – people will PAY you to do this?!

4:54 – Chuck: Did you go to college?

5:01 – Ben: Yes, I have a Master’s in a different field. I was always a tech junkie. I just wanted to put things together.

5:20 – Chuck: Take us through your journey through JS?

5:30 – Ben: I started off with the jQuery piece of it. I needed Java, and it took me awhile to wrap my head around it at first. Through the trial and process of trying to get into Angular and React, too.

6:19 – Chuck: Did you play with Backbone, Knockout, or Ember?

6:32 – Ben: I did do SOME Ember and some Knockout. Those were my first interactions.

6:49 – Chuck: What got you into the profession? How did you get from your Master’s to being a tech guy?

7:14 – Ben: From the Master’s field I learned a lot about human experience, and anted to breed the two together. Also, consulting and helping to build things, too.

7:44 – Charles: What was the career change like?

7:53 – Ben: I went to the federal government at first around the recession – it was good having a stable job. I was bored, though. While I was working for the government I was trying to get my foot in the door. From there I have been building my way up.

8:30 – Ben: I was working on Medicare.gov and then later...

8:46 – Charles: We won’t use the word “disaster”!

What is it like to work for the government?

9:20 – Ben: Yep. The federal government is a different area because they are stake holders. They were about WHO owned the content, and who do we have to talk to get something approved. It was not product oriented like a business. I made my transition to Politico, because I wanted to find solutions and diversify the problems I was having.

10:31 – Chuck: Have you been there from the beginning?

10:39 – Ben answers the question.

Ben: They were looking for frontend developers

10:54 – Chuck: You are the lead there now. What was that like with the transition?

11:08 – Ben talks about the beginnings stages of his time with Politico and the current situation. He talks about the different problems, challenges, and etc.

11:36 – Chuck: Do you consider yourself a news organization or?

11:47 – Ben: We have Politico Pro, too. I have been working with this site more so. There are updates about campaign and voting data. People will pay a fee.

12:25 – Chuck: Do they pain themselves as leaning one way or another or nonpartisan?

12:38 – Ben: We are objective and nonpartisan.

12:51 – Chuck: I know, I was hesitant to ask. What’s the mission of the company and into what you do?

13:09 – Ben: The projects get dumped to us and we are about solving the problems. What is the best route for solving it? I had to help pioneer the new framework into the tech staff is one of my roles.

13:48 – Chuck: What’s your tech stack?

13:55 – Ben: JavaScript and Vue.js. We are experimenting with other software, too.

14:16 – Chuck: We should get you talking about Vue on the other show!

Are you working at home?

14:32 – Ben answers the question.

Ben: One thing I am helping with Meetup. Community outreach is important and I’m apart of that.

15:09 – Chuck: Yep, it’s interesting to see various fields into the tech world. I am not one of those liberal arts majors, I do have a computer science degree. It’s interesting to see the different perspectives. How little it is for someone to be able to dive-in right away.

What are you working on?

16:09 – Ben: Meetup population and helping with the work at Politico.

16:27 – Chuck: Reusable components. Are those opensource or only internal?

16:41 – Ben: They are now opensource but we are seeing which portions can be opensource or not.

17:01 – Chuck: Different companies have come out and offered their opensource.

Where do they find you?

17:20 – BenCodeZen! They are more than welcome to message me.

17:36 – Chuck: Any advice on newbies to this field?

17:46 – Ben: Attending those meetings and making those connections.

18:18 – Chuck: I have been writing a book on HOW to get a job as a coder. That’s the same advice that I am giving, too.

18:46 – Chuck: Picks!

18:51 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

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js

JSJ 337: Microstates.js – Composable State Primitives for JavaScript with Charles Lowell & Taras Mankovski

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • Charles Max Wood
  • Joe Eames
  • AJ O’Neil
  • Chris Ferdinandi 

Special Guests: Charles Lowell (New Mexico) & Taras Mankovski (Toronto)

In this episode, the panel talks with two special guests Charles and Taras. Charles Lowell is a principle engineer at Frontside, and he loves to code. Taras works with Charles and joined Frontside, because of Charles’ love for coding. There are great personalities at Frontside, which are quite diverse. Check out this episode to hear about microstates, microstates with react, Redux, and much more!

Show Topics:

1:20 – Chuck: Let’s talk about microstates – what is that?

1:32 – Guest: My mind is focused on the how and not the what. I will zoom my mind out and let’s talk about the purposes of microstates. It means a few things. 1.) It’s going to work no matter what framework you are using. 2.) You shouldn’t have to be constantly reinventing the wheel. React Roundup – I talked about it there at this conference. 

Finally, it really needs to feel JavaScript. We didn’t want you to feel like you weren’t using JavaScript. It uses computer properties off of those models. It doesn’t feel like there is anything special that you are doing. There are just a few simple rules. You can’t mutate the state in place. If you work with JavaScript you can use it very easily. Is that a high-level view?

7:13 – Panel: There are a lot of pieces. If I spoke on a few specific things I would say that it enables programming with state machines.

7:42 – Panel: We wanted it to fell like JavaScript – that’s what I heard.

7:49 – Aimee: I heard that, too.

7:59 – Guest.

8:15 – Aimee: Redux feels like JavaScript to me.

8:25 – Guest: It’s actually – a tool – that it feels natural so it’s not contrived. It’s all JavaScript.

8:49 – Panel.

9:28 – Guest: Idiomatic Ember for example. Idiomatic in the sense that it gives you object for you to work with, which are simple objects.

10:12 – Guest: You have your reducers and your...we could do those things but ultimately it’s powerful – and not action names – we use method names; the name of the method.

11:20 – Panel: I was digging through docs, and it feels like NORMAL JavaScript. It doesn’t seem like it’s tied to a certain framework or library platform?

11:45 – Guest: Yes, we felt a lot of time designing the interfaces the API and the implementation. We wanted it to feel natural but a tool that people reach for.

(Guest continues to talk about WHY they created microstates.)

Guest: We wanted to scale very well what you need when your needs to change.

13:39 – Chuck: I have a lot of friends who get into React and then they put in Redux then they realize they have to do a lot of work – and that makes sense to do less is more.

14:17 – Guest: To define these microstates and build them up incrementally...building smaller microstates out of larger ones.

Guest continued: Will we be able to people can distribute React components a sweet array of components ready for me to use – would I be able to do the same for a small piece of state? We call them state machines, but ultimately we have some state that is driving it. Would we be able to distribute and share?

16:15 – Panel: I understand that this is tiny – but why wouldn’t I just use the native features in specific the immutability component to it?

16:42 – Guest: I’m glad you asked that question. We wanted to answer the question...

Guest: With microstates you can have strict control and it gives you the benefit of doing sophisticated things very easily.

18:33 – Guest: You mentioned immutability that’s good that you did. It’s important to capture – and capturing the naturalness of JavaScript. It’s easy to build complex structures – and there is an appeal to that. We are building these graphs and these building up these trees. You brought up immutability – why through it away b/c it’s the essence of being a developer. If you have 3-4-5 levels of nesting you have to de-structure – get to the piece of data – change it – and in your state transition 80% of your code is navigating to the change and only 20% to actually make the change. You don’t have to make that tradeoff.

21:25 – Aimee: The one thing I like about the immutability b/c of the way you test it.

21:45 – Guest: There a few things you can test. 

23:01 – Aimee: You did a good job of explaining it.

23:15 – Guest: It makes the things usually hard  easy! With immutability you can loose control, and if that happens you can get so confused. You don’t have a way to have a way to navigate to clarity. That’s what this does is make it less confusing. It gives you order and structure. It gives you a very clear path to do things you need to do. If there is a property on your object, and if there is a way to change it...

25:29 – Guest: The only constant is change no matter what framework you are working on.

24:46 – Chuck: We are talking about the benefits and philosophy. What if I have an app – and I realize I need state management – how do I put microstates into my app? It’s using Angular or React – how do I get my data into microstates?

26:35 – Guest: I can tell you what the integration looks like for any framework. You take a type and you passed that type and some value to the create function so what you get is a microstate.

(The Guest continues diving into his answer.)

28:18 – Guest: That story is very similar to Redux, basically an event emitter. The state changes on the store.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about the stability benefits and the lazy benefits because microstates is both of those things.

Stability – if I invoke a transition and the result is unchanged – same microstate – it doesn’t emit an event. It recognizes it internally. It will recognize that it’s the same item. Using that in Ember or Redux you’d have to be doing thousands of actions and doing all that computation, but stability at that level.

Also, stability in the sense of a tree. If I change one object then that changes it won’t change an element that it doesn’t need to change.

31:33 – Advertisement: Sentry.io

32:29 – Guest: I want to go back to your question, Chuck. Did we answer it?

32:40 – Chuck: Kind of.

32:50 – Guest.

32:59 – Guest: In Angular for example you can essentially turn a microstate...

33:51 – Guest: You could implement a connect, too. Because the primitive is small – there is no limit.

34:18 – Chuck summarizes their answers into his own words.

34:42 – Guest: If you were using a vanilla React component – this dot – I will bind this. You bind all of these features and then you pass them into your template. You can take it as a property...those are those handlers. They will perform the transition, update and what needs to be updated will happen.

35:55 – Chuck: Data and transitions are 2 separate things but you melded them together to feel like 1 thing. This way it keeps clean and fast.

36:16 – Guest: Every framework helps you in each way.

Microstates let’s you do a few things: the quality of your data all in one place and you can share.

38:12 – Guest: He made and integrated Microstates with Redux tools.

38:28 – Guest talks about paths, microstates to trees.

39:22 – Chuck.

39:25 – Panel: When I think about state machines I have been half listening / half going through the docs. When I think of state machines I think about discreet operations like a literal machine. Like a robot of many steps it can step through. We have been talking about frontend frameworks like React - is this applicable to the more traditional systems like mechanical control or is it geared towards Vue layered applications?

40:23 – Guest: Absolutely. We have BIG TEST and it has a Vue component.

41:15 – Guest: when you create a microstate from a type you are creating an object that you can work with.

42:11 – Guest: Joe, I know you have experience with Angular I would love to get your insight.

42:33 – Joe: I feel like I have less experience with RX.js. A lot of what we are talking about and I am a traditionalist, and I would like you to introduce you guys to this topic. From my perspective, where would someone start if they haven’t been doing Flux pattern and I hear this podcast. I think this is a great solution – where do I get started? The official documents? Or is it the right solution to that person?

43:50 – Guest: Draw out the state machine that you want to represent in your Vue. These are the states that this can be in and this is the data that is required to get from one thing to the other. It’s a rope process. The arrow corresponds to the method, and...

44:49 – Panel: It reminds me back in the day of rational rows.

44:56 – Guest: My first job we were using rational rows.

45:22 – Panelist: Think through the state transitions – interesting that you are saying that. What about that I am in the middle – do you stop and think through it or no?

46:06 – Guest: I think it’s a Trojan horse in some ways. I think what’s interesting you start to realize how you implement your state transitions.

48:00 – (Guest continues.)

48:45 – Panel: That’s interesting. Do you have that in the docs to that process of stopping and thinking through your state transitions and putting into the microstate?

49:05 – Guest: I talked about this back in 2016. I outlined that process. When this project was in the Ember community.

49:16 – Guest: The next step for us is to make this information accessible. We’ve been shedding a few topics and saying this is how to use microstates in your project. We need to write up those guides to help them benefit in their applications.

50:00 – Chuck: What’s the future look like?

50:03 – Guest: We are working on performance profiling.

Essentially you can hook up microstates to a fire hose.

The next thing is settling on a pattern for modeling side effects inside microstates. Microstates are STATE and it’s immutable.

52:12 – Guest: Getting documentation. We have good README but we need traditional docs, too.

52:20 – Chuck: Anything else?

52:28 – Guest: If you need help email us and gives us a shot-out.

53:03 – Chuck: Let’s do some picks!

53:05 – Advertisement for Charles Max Wood’s course!

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js

MJS 083: Christine Legge

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Christine Legge

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Christine Legge who is a computer software engineer who works for Google in New York. Previous employment includes Axiom Zen, and Vizzion, Inc. She and Chuck talk about her background, past and current projects, and her future goals.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:07 – Hello!

1:10 – Chuck: You were on Episode 328 in the past. Tell us about yourself!

1:24 – Christine: I started working with Google about 2 weeks ago. In the past I worked in Vancouver, Canada.

2:05 – Chuck: Let’s start with how you got into programming?

2:14 – Christine: When I was in HS I wasn’t interested at all into computers. I wanted to do applied math in Toronto Canada for college. For engineering you have to take an introduction to programming in the 1st year. I had a 4-hour computer science course in the morning and I dreaded it. I dropped out 3 months later b/c I didn’t like the program. Surprisingly, enough, I did like the computer science course. I went back to Vancouver and I said to my parents that I wanted an office job. I went to the YMCA center and wanted to be hired. The man there asked if I had any interest in data entering, and I started working for him. I worked 4 hours a week with him where he taught me C+. I decided to go back to school for it.

5:37 – Chuck: What did you like about it?

5:43 – Christine: I liked the problem solving part of it. I like how you can break things down. The technology doesn’t interest me that much, but I like the problem-solving aspect. The guy wasn’t that up-to-date with the newest technologies either.

6:53 – Chuck: You have a 4-year degree in computer science.

7:05 – Yes that and statistics, too.

7:13 – Chuck: I was going to say “nerd.”

How do you go from desktop applications to web apps?

7:25 – Christine: I worked with a company part-time and fulltime depending on the year/season.

I didn’t know what web development was but I thought that THAT was computer science. I thought that if I knew how to do web development then I was going to be good to go. This company asked: What do you want to do? And I answered that I wanted to do web development b/c I thought that’s what I was lacking. I basically got thrown into it. I didn’t understand anything at all. It took me to write one line of CSS and it took 4 hours.

10:35 – Why did JavaScript attract you more so than C# or other languages that you’ve used?

10:43 – It’s simpler and you don’t need a lot of setup; from top to bottom. I am working in typescript, I like it even more, but I like how Java is more free to do what you want. I like functional programming in JavaScript. I like the big community for Java, and there are tons of applications for it. I really like how flexible the language is. You can do functional and oriented or you can combine the two. You aren’t constrained.

12:00 – Chuck: You get in, you work through JavaScript, were you only doing backend?

12:14 – Christine: Yep, backend.

13:00 –Chuck: I know you talked at the conference, and what are you most proud of?

13:14 – Christine: To be honest, no. My mentor (Pablo) at the last company – he wrote a book about D3. He started learning and writing the book. To me that I had thought that all these people are experts from the get go. I realized that everyone has to start somewhere to eventually become an expert. I do want to make an impact even outside of my job. I don’t have anything new that I’ve been working on. It’s a goal for me within the next couple of months.

15:30 – Chuck: I understand that.

15:36 – Christine: I haven’t found that balance, yet. When I gave that talk during Developer Week I was moving and stressed out. “I am NEVER doing this again!” It was over and it was very rewarding. People gave good feedback, and I would like to do that again.

16:56 – Chuck: People have different experience with that kind of stuff. People are interested in different things. So you’ve been working on moving and all that stuff right? What would you like to dive back into?

17:32 – Christine: Yes we are using Angular 2 and typescript and a Reactive Library. Angular is interesting to me. I would like to dive into the dependency injection in Angular. I really like typescript.

19:24 – Chuck: Have you looked at resources?

19:39 – Christine: I read the documentation so far. Like for React I just read the documentation but I haven’t found a central source just, yet. Not a single source. The docs are okay to get started but I haven’t found that they were enough.

20:50 – Chuck: This is about your story. I worked through the Tour of Heroes, and that helped me with Angular. It’s in the Angular Documentation.

21:23 – Christine: When you are starting at a new job I want to make sure I’m settled-in. And now I want to start thinking at a high-level of how these things work. I think the cool thing working here is that you can talk to the people who are working on Angular and get some insight that way.

22:27 – Chuck: People are usually very approachable.

22:34 – Christine: Yes, I agree. To be apart of the communities people want you to use their stuff.

22:48 – Chuck: Do you have another talk in mind when you are ready to give your next talk?

22:59 – Christine: Not sure. I have one thing on my list right now and that’s it.

23:42 – Chuck: I haven’t looked at RJX documentation but I think it’s pretty easy to pick-up. Ben who is the main developer RJX joined the team last year.

24:04 – Christine: It’s a lot of promises. When I figure it out that’s how something would work if it were a promise then I can usually get there.

24:25 – Chuck: Yeah.

24:38 – Christine: I kind of want to make connections in the office rather than me trying to do myself. I don’t want to waste time. Working on those connections would be good.

25:20 – Chuck: Let’s do some picks!

25:30 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

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js

JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler

Panel:

Special Guests: Christopher Buecheler

In this episode, the panel talks with Christopher Buecheler who is an author, blogger, web developer, and founder of CloseBrace. The panel and Christopher talk about stepping outside of your comfort zone. With a technological world that is ever changing, it is important to always be learning within your field. Check out today’s episode to learn more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

1:08 – Aimee: Our guest is Christopher Buecheler – tell us about yourself and what you do.

1:22 – Guest: I run a site and help mid-career developers. I put out a weekly newsletter, too.

2:01 – Aimee: It says that you are a fan of “getting comfortable being uncomfortable”?

2:15 – Guest: I am a self-taught developer, so that means I am scrambling to learn new things all the time. You are often faced with learning new things. When I learned React I was dumped into it. The pain and the difficulty are necessary in order to improve. If you aren’t having that experience then you aren’t learning as much as you could be.

3:26 – Aimee: I borrow lessons that I learned from ice-skating to programming.

3:49 – Guest: I started running a few years ago for better health. It was exhausting and miserable at the start and wondered why I was doing it. Now I run 5 times a week, and there is always a level of being uncomfortable, but now it’s apart of the run. It’s an interesting comparison to coding. It’s this idea of pushing through.

5:01 – Aimee: If you are comfortable you probably aren’t growing that much. In our industry you always have to be learning because things change so much!

5:25 – Guest: Yes, exactly. If you are not careful you can miss opportunities.

6:33 – Panel: You have some ideas about frameworks and libraries – one thing that I am always anxious about is being able to make sense of “what are some new trends that I should pay attention to?” I remember interviewing with someone saying: this mobile thing is just a fad. I remember thinking that she is going to miss this opportunity. I am worried that I am going to be THAT guy. How do you figure out what sort of things you should / shouldn’t pay attention to?

7:47 – Guest: It is a super exhausting thing to keep up with – I agree. For me, a lot of what I pay attention to is the technology that has the backing of a multi-million dollar company then that shows that technology isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. The other thing I would look at is how ACTIVE is the community around it?

9:15 – Panel: Is there a strategic way to approach this? There is so many different directions that you can grow and push yourself within your career? Do you have any kinds of thoughts/tips on how you want your career to evolve?

10:00 – Guest: I am trying to always communicate better to my newsletter audience. Also, a good approach, too, is what are people hiring for? 

11:06 – Aimee: Again, I would say: focus on learning.

11:30 – Panel: And I agree with Aimee – “learn it and learn it well!”

12:01 – Panel: I want to ask Chris – what is CloseBrace?

12:17 – Guest: I founded it in November 2016, and started work on it back in 2013.

14:20 – Panel: It was filled with a bunch of buzz worthy words/title.

14:32 – Guest continues his thoughts/comments on CloseBrace.

16:54 – Panel: How is the growth going?

17:00 – Guest: It is growing very well. I put out a massive, massive tutorial course – I wouldn’t necessarily advice that people do this b/c it can be overwhelming. However, growth this year I have focused on marketing. I haven’t shared numbers or anything but it’s increased 500%, and I am happy about it.

18:05 – Panel: Are you keeping in-house?

18:13 – Guest: I think it would be cool to expand, but now it is in-house. I don’t want to borrow Egg Head’s setup. I would love to cover MORE topics, though.

19:05 – Panel: You are only one person.

19:08 – Guest: If I can get the site creating more revenue than I can hire someone to do video editing, etc.

19:35 – Panel: I think you are overthinking it.

19:45 – Guest.

19:47 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

20:47 – Guest.

21:30 – Aimee: There are SO many resources out there right now. Where do you think you fit into this landscape?

21:44 – The landscape is cluttered, but I feel that I am different b/c of my thoroughness. I don’t always explain line by line, but I do say how and why things work. I think also is my VOICE. Not my radio voice, but the tone and the approach you take with it.

23:25 – Panel: I was trying to copy folks in the beginning of my career. And at some point I realized that I needed to find my own style. It always came down to the reasons WHY I am different rather than the similarities. Like, Chris, you have these quick hits on CloseBrace, but some people might feel like they don’t have the time to get through ALL of your content, because it’s a lot. For me, that’s what I love about your content.

24:46 – Christopher: Yeah, it was intentional.

25:36 – Panel: Good for you.

25:49 – Guest: I am super device agnostic: Android, Mac, PC, etc. I have a lot of people from India that are more Microsoft-base.

26:28 – Aimee: I think Egghead is pretty good about this...do you cover testing at all with these things that you are doing? It’s good to do a “Hello World” but most of these sites don’t get into MORE complex pieces. I think that’s where you can get into trouble. It’s nice to have some boiler point testing, too.

27:18 – Guest answers Aimee’s question.

28:43 – Aimee: We work with a consultancy and I asked them to write tests for the things that we work with. That’s the value of the testing. It’s the code that comes out.

29:10 – Panel: Can you explain this to me. Why do I need to write tests? It’s always working (my code) so why do I have to write a test?

29:39 – Guest: When working with AWS I was writing...

31:01 – Aimee: My biggest thing is that I have seen enough that the people don’t value testing are in a very bad place, and the people that value testing are in a good place. It even comes back to the customers, because the code gets so hard that you end up repeatedly releasing bugs. Customers will stop paying their bills if this happens too often for them.

33:00 – Panel: Aimee / Chris do you have a preferred tool? I have done testing before, but not as much as I should be doing.

33:25 – Aimee: I like JEST and PUPPETEER.

33:58 – Guest: I like JEST, too.

34:20 – Aimee: Let’s go to PICKS!

34:35 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

Chris F.

AJ

Aaron

Christopher




js

MJS 084: Henry Zhu

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Henry Zhu

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Henry Zhu who is working full-time on Babel! They discuss Henry’s background, past/current projects, Babel, and Henry’s new podcast. Check-out today’s episode to hear more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:00 – Chuck: Today we are talking with Henry Zhu! You are the maintainer of Babel – and we have had you on the show before. Anything else?

1:25 – Henry: I used to work with Adobe and now live in NY.

1:44 – Chuck: Episode 321 we talked to you and you released Babel 7. Tell us about Babel, please.

2:01 – Henry: It’s a translator for programming languages and it’s a compiler. It only translates JavaScript to JavaScript. You would do this because you don’t know what your users’ are using. It’s an accessibility thing as well.

3:08 – Chuck: Later, we will dive into this some more. Let’s back-up: how did you get into programming?

3:22 – Henry: I think I was in middle school and I partnered with a friend for science class and we made a flash animation about earthquakes. Both of my parents worked in the field, too. They never really encouraged me to do it, but here I am.

4:07 – Chuck: How did you get into Java?

4:11 – Henry: I made some games and made a Chinese card game. Then in college I went to a bunch of Hackathons. In college I didn’t major into computer science, but I took a bunch of classes for fun. I learned about Bootstrap and did a bunch of things with that.

5:12 – Chuck: How did you settle on JavaScript?

5:28 – Henry: It was my experience – you don’t have to download anything. You can just open things up in the console and it’s easy to share. I think I like the visual part of it and their UI.

6;07 – Chuck: At some point you ran across Babel – how did you get into that?

6:17 – Henry: After college I wanted to do software. I threw out my degree of industrial engineering. I tried to apply to Google and other top companies. I applied to various places and picked something that was local. I met Jonathan Neal and he got me into open source. Through that, I wanted to contribute to Angular, but it was hard for me. Then I found a small issue with a linting error. After that I made 30 commits to Angular. I added a space here and there. JSES is the next thing I got involved with. There is one file for the rule itself and one for the test and another for the docs. I contributed there and it was easy. I am from Georgia and a year in I get an email through Adobe. They asked if I wanted to work through Enhance in Adobe. I moved to NY and started working here. I found JS LINT, and found out about Babel JS LINT. And that’s how I found about Babel.

9:24 – Chuck: Was Sebastian still running the project at the time?

9:33 – Henry.

10:53 – Chuck: It seems like when I talk with people that you are the LEAD on Babel?

11:07 – Henry: I guess so, because I am spending the most time on it. I also quit the job to work on it. However, I want people to know that there are other people out there to give you help, too.

11:45 – Chuck: Sebastian didn’t say: this is the guy that is the lead now. But how did that crystalize?

12:12 – Henry: I think it happened by accident. I stumbled across it. By people stepping down they stepped down a while ago and others were helping and making changes. It was weird because Sebastian was going to come back.

It’s hard when you know that the person before had gotten burnt-out.

14:28 – Chuck: What is it like to go fulltime on an open source project and how do you go about it?

14:34 – Henry: I don’t want to claim that you have to do it my way. Maybe every project is different. Maybe the focus is money. That is a basic issue. If your project is more of a service, then direct it towards that. I feel weird if I made Babel a service. For me it feels like an infrastructure thing I didn’t want to do that.

I think people want to do open source fulltime, but there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

16:38 – Chuck.

16:50 – Guest.

16:53 – Henry.

16:55 – Chuck: How do you pay the bills?

17:00 – Henry: Unlike Kickstarter, Patreon is to help donate money to people who are contributing content.

If you want to donate a lot then we can tweak it.

19:06 – Chuck: Is there something in particular that you’re proud of?

19:16 – Henry: I worked on JS ES – I was a core team member of that. Going through the process of merging them together was quite interesting. I could write a whole blog post about that. There are a lot of egos and people involved. There are various projects.

Something that I have been thinking about...

20:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

20:58 – Henry: We released 7 a while ago and 7.1. Not sure what we are going to do next. Trying to figure out what’s important and to figure out what we want to work on. I have been thinking long-term; for example how do we get reviewers, among other things. I can spend a lot of time fixing bugs, but that is just short-term. I want to invest ways to get more people in. There is a lot of initiatives but maybe we can do something new. Maybe pair with local universities. Maybe do a local Meetup? Learning to be okay with not releasing as often. I don’t want to put fires out all day. Trying to prioritize is important.

23:17 – Chuck.

23:2 – Henry: Twitter and other platforms.

23:37 – Chuck: Picks!

23:38 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

24:45 – Picks.

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Henry

  • My own podcast – releasing it next week
  • Podcast about Faith and Open Source

Charles

  • Ruby Rogues’ cohost + myself – Data Podcast – DevChat.Tv
  • Reworking e-mails




js

JSJ 339: Node.js In Motion Live Video Course from Manning with PJ Evans

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: PJ Evans

In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more?

1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course.

2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about.

2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state. 

2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node?

3:20 – Aimee.

3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course!

4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the...

4:13 – Chuck.

4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell.

4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node!

5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess.

5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is?

5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right?

They are arguing about how to implement it. 

6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are!

6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there.

7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it.

7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it?

Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard?

7:38 – PJ.

8:11 – Panel.

8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though!

8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please.

8:30 – PJ.

8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it.

9:05 – PJ.

9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side?

9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak.

9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are.

9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak.

9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from...

Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea.

10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!”

10:52 – Panel.

11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well.

11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users...

11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS.

Chuck asks two questions.

12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled.

13:22 – Chuck: What are those things?

13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics.

15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do.

15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space.

16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE.

17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more.

18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs.

Aimee mentions Vanilla Node.

18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM.

19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug.

20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE.

20:56 – Aimee.

21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch.

22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level.

22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working.

23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were.

24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend.

24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended.

No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions...

To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly.

25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that...

26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly.

There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article!

28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article.

28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now.

29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday.

29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course.

29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck?

30:00 – PJ answers the question.

30:23 – Aimee.

30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days.

31:20 – Aimee.

32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight.

32:18 – Aimee.

32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for...

32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to?

33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals.

It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course.

34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node?

34:38 – PJ answers the question.

PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms.

35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other?

35:31 – PJ answers the question.

PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge.

36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express.

Google Classroom and Google Calendar.

39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below.

40:09 – Node can be used all over the place!

40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space.

40:31 – PJ: Yep!

40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you?

40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog!

41:04 – Picks!

41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Charles

PJ




js

MJS 085: Chris McKnight

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Chris McKnight

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Chris McKnight who is a software developer who knows Angular, Ruby, Node.js, and iOS. He went to college at Louisiana State University and graduated with a computer science degree from LSU. They talk about Chris’ background, past/current projects, among other things. Check out today’s episode to hear the panel talk about JavaScript, Angular, C and C++, Node, React, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:12 – Chuck: Hello! Introduce yourself, please!

1:15 – Guest: I am a software engineer outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I work for a medium consultancy company. I know JavaScript, Angular, NativeScript, and JS, too.

1:41 – Chuck: Cool! Tell us your story and how you got into programming?

2:00 – Guest: I was a really big nerd in high school and grew up in Louisiana, USA. There was one other person in the school that knew what I was talking about. I was learning C++ and Visual Studio in 2003. That was really back in the day and Microsoft Foundation class was a thing. I moved onto PHP and started working for a company in Baton Rouge after graduating college. I have a computer science degree with a secondary discipline in mathematics. I graduated from LSU and got a job offer before I graduated. Doing some part-time work for them b/c they were swamped. I was writing PHP and they said that they used jQuery a lot.

4:47 – Chuck: You got started and you said you used C and C++, why those languages?

5:05 – Guest: I did a little bit of Java, but it was the “new kid on the block.” I wanted to get into a program that was user-friendlier.

6:21 – Chuck: I took C and C++ classes in college. Eventually I did Ruby on Rails. I totally understand why you went that way.

6:44 – Guest: I picked-up Rails, because a company (that I worked for at the time) used it. I usually reached for jQuery among other options.

7:31 – Chuck: When did you start taking JavaScript seriously?

7:40 – Guest: 2012-2013. Frustrations of not using JavaScript as good as I could. For jQuery you have to call when you have an issue. Then you run into all of these bugs, and...

9:18 – Chuck: It sounds like it was more out of necessity.

9:30 – Guest: Yep, exactly. Those pain points have been reduced b/c I have been using Type Script and Angular and now version 6 and version 7. You try to call a number method on a string and vice versa, and app development time.

10:03 – Chuck: ...it has a process running with it.

10:13 – Guest: Catching a lot of those easy mistakes (bugs) and it’s a 5-10 minute fix. It takes a lot of that away. Sometimes you can say: I want to ignore it.

Or it doesn’t give you runtime guarantees.

Some other libraries out there have been on the forefront of fixing those problems. REST TYPE is an example of that.

11:39 – Chuck: When I talk to people about JavaScript a lot of times I get basically that they are saying: I started doing more things in Node or React – I fell in love with the language. Your reasons for starting JavaScript are because “I hated running into these problems.” Did you start loving to work in JavaScript?

12:11 – Guest: I did start loving it but it took a while. I could write a short amount of code and then at the end I get a result.

Another thing that bothers me is FILTER. What does it return? It’s actually FIND and FIND INDEX and you use the pattern of filter and run this expression and give me index zero.

14:16 – Chuck: What work have you done that you are proud of?

14:20 – Guest: I started a new job last month; beforehand I worked at a mortgage company. I was proud of the Angular application and applications that I worked on. 

16:55 – Chuck: How did you get into Angular?

17:00 – Guest: Interesting story. October of 2016 – at this time I was all against Angular. However someone came to me and said we have to...

At the time I wasn’t impressed with the language. I learned about Angular at the time, though, and learned through Egghead. I learned a lot in 2 days, and I got pretty decent at it. I was writing Angular applications pretty quickly, and it made sense to me.

20:53 – Chuck: I am a fan of the CLI b/c that’s what we have in Rails. It’s really nice. What are you working on these days?

21:13 – Guest: Less on Angular b/c of the new job. I will do Angular on my free time. I work on Angular at nighttime. I build some things in React these past few weeks.

23:07 – Chuck: Any part of your experience that could help people?

23:17 – Guest: Learn what’s happening under the hood of libraries such as jQuery. Explore and find resources to help you. Keep learning and keep at it. Tools are so god now – such as Prettier and Lint – they will tell me “you don’t want to do this.” Use the tooling and learn the fundamentals. Also, use Babel! Those are my tips of advice.

25:55 – Chuck: That’s solid. Yes, the fundamentals and the poly-fills will fill in the gaps. So now it’s: what do I want to stack on top of this? Once you know the fundamentals.

26:55 – Guest: Learn what the frameworks and libraries are doing.

Don’t get overwhelmed. That’s my advice.

28:16 – Chuck: Where can people find you?

28:24 – Guest: GitHub and Twitter. I’ve been working on a website, but not ready, yet.

29:08 – Chuck: Picks!

29:15 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

35:45 – Cache Fly

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Chris

Chuck




js

JSJ 340: JavaScript Docker with Julian Fahrer

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Joe Eames
  • Charles Max Wood
  • Chris Ferdinandi

Special Guest: Julian Fahrer

In this episode, the panel talks with Julian Fahrer who is an online educator and software engineer in San Francisco, California (USA). The panel and the guest talk about containers, tooling, Docker, Kubernetes, and more. Check out today’s episode!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

1:00 – Chuck: We have today Julian. Julian, please tell us why you are famous?

1:10 – Julian (Guest): I am a software engineer in San Francisco.

1:35 – Chuck: We had you on Elixir Mix before – so here you are! Give us a brief introduction – tell us about the

1:56 – Julian: About 11 hours. You can get it done in about 1 week. It’s a lot to learn. It’s a new paradigm, and I think that’s why people like it.

2:22 – Aimee: How did you dive into Docker? I feel that is like backend space?

2:35 – Julian: I am a full stack engineer and I have been in backend, too.

3:10 – Aimee: I know that someone has been in-charge of our Dev Ops process until the first job I’ve had. When there is a problem in the deployment, I want to unblock myself and not wait for someone else. I think it’s a valuable topic. Why Docker over the other options?

3:58 – Julian: Let’s talk about what Docker is first?

4:12 – Chuck.

4:23 – Julian: Containers are a technology for us to run applications in isolation from each other.

Julian talks in-detail about what contains are, what they do, he gives examples, and more. Check it out here!

5:27 – Chuck: Makes sense to me. I think it’s interesting that you are talking about the dependencies. Because of the way the Docker works it’s consistent across all of your applications.

5:59 – Julian. Yes, exactly.

Julian talks about containers some more!

6:56 – Chuck asks a question about the container, Docker, and others.

7:03 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about your company’s running operating system, and what you want to use – basically everything runs in the container...

7:30 – Chuck: This short-circuits a lot of it.

7:46 – Guest.

8:00 – Chuck: People will use Docker if your employer mandates it. Is there a learning curve and how do you adapt it within the person’s company?

8:25 – Guest.

8:52 – Aimee: We are using it, too.

8:57 – Guest: Awesome!

9:03 – Aimee: The only downfall is that if you have people who are NOT familiar with it – then it’s a black box for us. We can’t troubleshoot it ourselves. I want to be able to unblock from our end w/o having to go to someone else. That’s my only issue I’ve been having.

10:03 – Guest: I want to see that tooling to be honest.

10:12 – Aimee: Can you talk about how Civil and Docker work together?

10:19 – Guest: Yes!

Julian answers the question.

10:56 – Chuck: How much work it is to get a Docker file to get up and running? How much work would it take?

11:18 – Guest: For the development side in about an hour or two – this is if you understand it already. Putting it into production that’s a different story b/c there is a million different ways to do it. It’s hard to put a time on that.

12:24 – Chuck: Let’s assume they have the basic knowledge (they get how server setup takes place) is this something you could figure out in a day or so?

12:47 – Guest: If you have touched Docker then you can do it in a day; if never then not really.

13:02 – Guest: There might be some stones you will fall over.

13:39 – Panel: The part of the learning curve would be...

13:52 – Guest: The idea behind the container is that the container should be disposable. You could throw it away and then start a new one and it’s fresh and clean.

Guest continues with his answer.

15:20 – Chuck: I have seen people do this with their database engine. If you need to upgrade your database then they grab their container...

15:55 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about setting it up - its provided in the container and...

16:09 – Chuck asks a question.

16:17 – Guest: For production, I would go with a hosted database like RJS, Azure, or other options.

Guest continues.

17:13 – Chuck.

17:20 – Guest: If it dies then you need to...

17:30 – Chuck: We talked about an idea of these containers being something you can hand around in your development team.

Chuck asks a question.

17:50 – Guest answers the question. He talks about tooling, containers, web frontend, and more.

18:48 – Guest asks Aimee a question: Are you using Compost?

18:50 – Aimee: I don’t know b/c that is a black box for us. I don’t know much about our Docker setup.

19:00 – Guest to Aimee: Can I ask you some questions?

19:14 – Guest is giving Aimee some hypothetical situations and asks what their process is like.

19:32 – Aimee answers the question.

20:11 – Guest: You have customizing tooling to be able to do x, y, and z.

20:25 – Aimee: They have hit a wall, but it’s frustrating. Our frontend and our backend are different. We are getting 500’s and it’s a black box for us. It’s the way that ops have it setup. I hate having to go to them for them to unblock us.

21:07 – Chuck: I have been hearing about Kubernetes. When will you start to see that it pays off to use it?

21:20 – Guest answers the question.

22:17 – If I have a simple app on a few different machines and front end and job servers I may not need Kubernetes. But if I have a lot of things that it depends on then I will need it?

22:35 – Guest: Yes.

22:40 – Chuck: What are the steps to using it?

22:45 – Guest: Step #1 you install it.

The guest goes through the different steps to use Docker.

25:23 – Aimee: It makes sense that your UI and your database don’t live in the same container, but what about your API and your database should that be separate?

25:40 – Guest: Yes they should be separate.

26:09 – Chuck: What has your experience been with Docker – AJ or Chris?

26:17 – Panel: I have used a little bit at work and so far it’s been a black box for me. I like the IDEA of it, but I probably need to take Julian’s course to learn more about it! (Aimee agrees!)

One thing I would love (from your perspective, Julian) – if I wanted to get started with this (and say I have not worked with containers before) where would I start?

28:22 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

29:20 – Guest: Good question. You don’t have to be an expert (to use Docker), but you have to be comfortable with the command line, though.

30:17 – Panel: Is there a dummy practice within your course?

30:27 – Julian: We run our own web server and...

30:44 – Panel: I need to check out your course!

31:04 – Guest: It is some time investment, but it’s saved me so much time already so it makes it really worth it.

31:38 – Panel: You are a version behind on Ruby.

31:46 – Guest: ...I just want to make code and not worry about that.

32:04 – Chuck: Updating your server – you would update Ruby and reinstall your gems and hope that they were all up-to-date. Now you don’t have to do it that way anymore.

32:37 – Guest: You know it will behave the same way.

32:48 – Guest: I have some experience with Docker. I understand its value. I guess I will share my frustrations. Not in Docker itself, but the fact that there is a need for Docker...

35:06 – Chuck.

35:12 – Panel: We need someone to come up with...

35:40 – Panel: It’s not standard JavaScript.

35:51 – Chuck: One question: How do you setup multiple stages of Docker?

36:12 – Guest: The recommended way is to have the same Docker file used in the development sate and through to production. So that way it’s the same image.

37:00 – Panel: ...you must do your entire configuration via the environmental variables.

37:29 – Chuck asks a question.

37:36 – Panel: If you are using Heroku or Circle CI...there is a page...

38:11 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth.

39:17 – Chuck: Gottcha.

39:18 – Guest.

39:52 – Chuck: I have seen systems that have hyberized things like using Chef Solo and...

You do your basic setup then use Chef Solo – that doesn’t’ make sense to me. Have you seen people use this setup before?

40:20 – Guest: I guess I wouldn’t do it.

40:30 – Chuck.

40:36 – Guest: Only reason I would do that is that it works across many different platforms. If it makes your setup easier then go for it.

41:14 – Chuck: Docker Hub – I want to mention that. How robust is that? Can you put private images up there?

41:38 – Guest: You can go TOTALLY nuts with it. You could have private and public images. Also, your own version. Under the hood it’s called container registry. Yeah, you can change images, too.

42:22 – Chuck: Should I use container registry or a CI system to build the Docker system and use it somewhere else?

42:35 – Guest.

43:24 – Chuck: Where can people find your Docker course?

43:30 – Guest: LEARN DOCKER ONLINE! We are restructuring the prices. Make sure to check it out.

44:05 – Chuck: Picks! Where can people find you online?

44:14 – Guest: Twitter! eBook – Rails and Docker! Code Tails IO!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

AJ

Aimee

Chris

Joe

Charles

Julian




js

MJS 086: James Adams

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: James Adams

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with James Adams who is a web and a full stack developer who currently resides in Melbourne, Australia. Chuck and James talk about James’ background, current projects, JavaScript, Ruby, Meetups, and much more! Check out today’s episode to hear all of the details.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:55 – Chuck: Welcome to My Java Script story! You are the 4th person I have talk to today. I have only talked to one person in the U.S. Other people were from Denmark, Tennessee (USA), and Bulgaria.

1:39 – Guest: I am in Australia!

1:48 – Chuck: I try to open it up for different times and different locations. I started making my own program. I want one tool to manage my podcast company.

2:20 – Guest.

2:26 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please!

2:33 – Guest: I have been working in JavaScript for 2 years now, and I just FOUND it. I could have been put anywhere but working with a large company. I discovered React.js. I went to study Math and Chemistry originally.

3:24 – Chuck: What was it – why did you change from mathematics to programming?

3:38 – Guest: I like solving problems and that has been true my whole life.

4:25 – Chuck: I identify with that – you’re right – for me, it’s more tangible and it’s neat to see something being built.

White line on a black floor is mentioned.

5:30 – Guest: I had a great education, but seems like the education in the U.S. is more fun. We didn’t get to program and stuff like that.

5:51 – Chuck: My experience was that I got to do really interesting things in High School.

6:20 – Guest: I think you reap benefits by diving into one topic.

6:36 – Chuck: We were building little circuits that were turning on/off LED. We then went to building robots and then computer chips. How did you get into JavaScript?

7:01 – Guest: We didn’t touch JavaScript until my 3rd year. I went to a school in Jerusalem for a while.

9:05 – Chuck: How did you get your first programming job?

9:10 – Guest: I wasn’t really applying – I thought I would travel for a year or so. It was weird I didn’t think I had to apply to jobs right away. I applied to a few jobs, and my friend started sharing my resume around and I ended up doing some contract work for that company. I used RUBY for that team.

10:18 – Chuck: First few jobs I got were through the “spray-and-pray” method. The best jobs I got are because I KNEW somebody.

10:30 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth.

11:31 – Guest mentions networking.

11:41 – Chuck: What have you done with JavaScript that you are especially proud of?

11:45 – Guest.

13:43 – Chuck: I didn’t know that honestly. I never really thought of integrating React Native into a native app.

14:00 – Guest: Yeah, it’s really cool. I didn’t think about it before either!

14:24 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

14:28 – Guest: Actually, I am working on some integration with different parties. Now we are routing everything back to the backend.

15:46 – Chuck: I think I have heard of Pro...

15:52 – Guest: Yeah, they are located in the U.S.

16:01 – Chuck: Every community/country is different, but what is it like to be a programmer in Melbourne, Australia?

16:16 – Guest: It’s cool and I think it has a way to go. We have a React Meetup.

16:55 – Chuck: Sounds like you have a healthy community down there. So in Denmark if you get away from the bigger cities then you have a harder time finding a community in the rural areas.

17:30 – Guest: Do you spend more time online?

17:50 – Chuck: Yeah, I don’t know. I live in Utah. It is hard because there is a community North in Logan, UT.

18:13 – Guest: You have 5-6 main cities in Australia. We don’t have medium-sized cities. In the U.S. you have a mixture out there.

18:42 – Chuck talks about the population throughout Utah.

19:03 – Guest asks a question to Chuck.

19:09 – Chuck: Yes, Facebook is putting in Data Center about 20 minutes away from my house. They have built satellite offices here. The startup scene is picking up, too.

19:49 – Chuck: We are fairly large land wise. We can spread-out more.

20:07 – Guest talks about the population density in Australia vs. U.S.

20:20 – Chuck: It’s interesting to see what the differences are.

If you are in a community that HAS a tech community you are set.

20:39 – Guest: I find it really interesting.

21:25 – Guest: Humans are a funny species – you can put out your hand, shake it, and you start talking.

21:45 – Chuck talks about the tech hubs in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in U.S.

22:17 – Guest: Yeah, if you aren’t interested than you aren’t interested.

22:28 – Chuck.

22:37 – Guest.

22:53 – Chuck: Join the mailing list, get involved and there are online groups, too.

23:11 – Guest: I really didn’t get into functional programming at first. I got to talk about this at a React Meetup.

24:25 – Chuck: The logic is the same.

24:32 – Guest: You put these functions together and there you go!

24:40 – Chuck: Go ahead.

24:48 – The guest is talking about React’s integrations.

24:56 – Chuck: Anything that is shared and put in some functional component, hook it up, and that’s it. Picks!

25:09 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

29:55 – Guest: Shout-out to my mentors. I am really blessed to have these mentors in my life and I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for them. Lucas is one of them who work with Prettier.

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Chuck

  • Presser switch for my Furnace – Goggle Search

James




js

JSJ 341: Testing in JavaScript with Gil Tayar

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Gil Tayar

In this episode, the panel talks with Gil Tayar who is currently residing in Tel Aviv and is a software engineer. He is currently the Senior Architect at Applitools in Israel. The panel and the guest talk about the different types of tests and when/how one is to use a certain test in a particular situation. They also mention Node, React, Selenium, Puppeteer, and much more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:35 – Chuck: Our panel is AJ, Aimee, myself – and our special guest is Gil Tayar. Tell us why you are famous!

1:13 – Gil talks about where he resides and his background. 

2:27 – Chuck: What is the landscape like now with testing and testing tools now?

2:39 – Guest: There is a huge renaissance with the JavaScript community. Testing has moved forward in the frontend and backend. Today we have lots of testing tools.  We can do frontend testing that wasn’t possible 5 years ago. The major change was React.

The guest talks about Node, React, tools, and more!

4:17 – Aimee: I advocate for tests and testing. There is a grey area though...how do you treat that? If you have to get something into production, but it’s not THE thing to get into production, does that fall into product or...what?

5:02 – Guest: We decided to test everything in the beginning. We actually cam through and did that and since then I don’t think I can use the right code without testing. There are a lot of different situations, though, to consider.

The guest gives hypothetical situations that people could face.

6:27 – Aimee.

6:32 – Guest: The horror to changing code without tests, I don’t know, I haven’t done that for a while. You write with fear in your heart. Your design is driven by fear, and not what you think is right. In the beginning don’t write those tests, but...

7:22 – Aimee: I totally agree and I could go on and on and on.

7:42 – Panel: I want to do tests when I know they will create value. I don’t want to do it b/c it’s a mundane thing. Secondly, I find that some times I am in a situation where I cannot write the test b/c I would have to know the business logic is correct. I am in this discovery mode of what is the business logic? I am not just building your app.

I guess I just need advice in this area, I guess.

8:55 – Guest gives advice to panelist’s question. He mentions how there are two schools of thought.

10:20 – Guest: Don’t mock too much.

10:54 – Panel: Are unit tests the easiest? I just reach for unit testing b/c it helps me code faster. But 90% of my code is NOT that.

11:18 – Guest: Exactly! Most of our test is glue – gluing together a bunch of different stuff! Those are best tested as a medium-sized integration suite.

12:39 – Panel: That seems like a lot of work, though! I loathe the database stuff b/c they don’t map cleanly. I hate this database stuff.

13:06 – Guest: I agree, but don’t knock the database, but knock the level above the database.

13:49 – Guest: Yes, it takes time! Building the script and the testing tools, but when you have it then adding to it is zero time. Once you are in the air it’s smooth sailing.

14:17 – Panel: I guess I can see that. I like to do the dumb-way the first time. I am not clear on the transition.

14:47 – Guest: Write the code, and then write the tests.

The guest gives a hypothetical situation on how/when to test in a certain situation.

16:25 – Panel: Can you talk about that more, please?

16:50 – Guest: Don’t have the same unit – do browser and business logic stuff separated. The real business logic stuff needs to be above that level. First principle is separation of concerns.

18:04 – Panel talks about dependency interjection and asks a question.

18:27 – Guest: What I am talking about very, very light inter-dependency interjection.

19:19 – Panel: You have a main function and you are doing requires in the main function. You are passing the pieces of that into the components that need it.

19:44 – Guest: I only do it when it’s necessary; it’s not a religion for me. I do it only for those layers that I know will need to be mocked; like database layers, etc.

20:09 – Panel.

20:19 – Guest: It’s taken me 80 years to figure out, but I have made plenty of mistakes a long the way. A test should run for 2-5 minutes max for package.

20:53 – Panel: What if you have a really messy legacy system? How do you recommend going into that? Do you write tests for things that you think needs to get tested?

21:39 – Guest answers the question and mentions Selenium!

24:27 – Panel: I like that approach.

24:35 – Chuck: When you say integration test what do you mean?

24:44 – Guest: Integration tests aren’t usually talked about. For most people it’s tests that test the database level against the database. For me, the integration tests are taking a set of classes as they are in the application and testing them together w/o the...so they can run in millisecond time.

26:54 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

27:52 – Chuck: How much do the tools matter?

28:01 – Guest: The revolutions matter. Whether you use Jasmine or Mocha or whatever I don’t think it matters. The tests matter not the tools.

28:39 – Aimee: Yes and no. I think some tools are outdated.

28:50 – Guest: I got a lot of flack about my blog where I talk about Cypress versus Selenium. I will never use Jasmine. In the end it’s the

29:29 – Aimee: I am curious would you be willing to expand on what the Selenium folks were saying about Puppeteer and others may not provide?

29:54 – Guest: Cypress was built for frontend developers. They don’t care about cross browser, and they tested in Chrome. Most browsers are typically the same. Selenium was built with the QA mindset – end to end tests that we need to do cross browser.

The guest continues with this topic.

30:54 – Aimee mentions Cypress.

31:08 – Guest: My guessing is that their priority is not there. I kind of agree with them.

31:21 – Aimee: I think they are focusing on mobile more.

31:24 – Guest: I think cross browser testing is less of an issue now. There is one area that is important it’s the visual area! It’s important to test visually across these different browsers.

32:32 – Guest: Selenium is a Swiss knife – it can do everything.

33:32 – Chuck: I am thinking about different topics to talk about. I haven’t used Puppeteer. What’s that about?

33:49 – Guest: Puppeteer is much more like Selenium. The reason why it’s great is b/c Puppeteer will always be Google Chrome.

35:42 – Chuck: When should you be running your tests? I like to use some unit tests when I am doing my development but how do you break that down?

36:06 – Guest.

38:30 – Chuck: You run tests against production?

38:45 – Guest: Don’t run tests against production...let me clarify!

39:14 – Chuck.

39:21 – Guest: When I am talking about integration testing in the backend...

40:37 – Chuck asks a question.

40:47 – Guest: I am constantly running between frontend and backend.

I didn’t know how to run tests for frontend. I had to invent a new thing and I “invented” the package JS DONG. It’s an implementation of Dong in Node. I found out that I wasn’t the only one and that there were others out there, too.

43:14 – Chuck: Nice! You talked in the prep docs that you urged a new frontend developer to not run the app in the browser for 2 months?

43:25 – Guest: Yeah, I found out that she was running the application...she said she knew how to write tests. I wanted her to see it my way and it probably was a radical train-of-thought, and that was this...

44:40 – Guest: Frontend is so visual.

45:12 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

45:16 – Guest: I am working with Applitools and I was impressed with what they were doing.

The guest goes into further detail.

46:08 – Guest: Those screenshots are never the same.

48:36 – Panel: It’s...comparing the output to the static site to the...

48:50 – Guest: Yes, that static site – if you have 30 pages in your app – most of those are the same. We have this trick where we don’t upload it again and again. Uploading the whole static site is usually very quick. The second thing is we don’t wait for the results. We don’t wait for the whole rendering and we continue with the tests.

50:28 – Guest: I am working mostly (right now) in backend.

50:40 – Chuck: Anything else? Picks!

50:57 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Charles

Gil




js

MJS 087: Rob Eisenberg

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Rob Eisenberg

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Rob Eisenberg who is a principal software engineer at InVision, and is the creator of Caliburn.Micro, Durandal, and Aurelia. Today, they talk about Rob’s past and current projects among other things.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:40 – Chuck: Our special guest is Rob Eisenberg. We’ve had you on Adventures on Angular (09 and 80), JavaScript Jabber, and others like Episode 203.

2:36 – Rob: That was over the period of 4 years all of those podcasts. I am getting older.

2:50 – Chuck: Anything that you’ve done that you want to talk about?

3:04 – Rob: I am known for opensource work over the years. Maybe we can talk about my progression through that over the years.

3:25 – Chuck: How did you get into this field?

3:29 – Rob: When I was 8 years old my dad wanted to buy a computer. We went to Sears and we bought our first computer. You’d buy the disk drive and the keyboard looking unit. You could by a monitor, we didn’t, but we used a black and white TV for our monitor. Later we bought the colored monitor and printer. That’s where my fascination started. We set up the computer in my bedroom. We played games. I got intrigued that you could write code to make different games.

It was just magical for me. As being an adult engineer I am trying to go back to that moment to recapture that magical moment for me. It was a great creative outlet. That’s how I first started. I started learning about Q basic and other flavors of Basic. Then I heard about C! I remember you could do anything with C. I went to the library and there wasn’t the Internet, yet. There were 3 books about C and read it and re-read it. I didn’t have any connections nor a compiler. When I first learned C I didn’t have a compiler. I learned how to learn the codes on notebook paper, but as a kid this is what I first started doing. I actually saved some of this stuff and I have it lying around somewhere. I was big into adventure games. That’s when I moved on C++ and printed out my source code! It’s so crazy to talk about it but at the time that’s what I did as a kid. In JHS there was one other kid that geeked-out about it with me. It was a ton of fun.

Then it was an intense hobby of mine. Then at the end of HS I had 2 loves: computers and percussion. I was composing for music, too. I had to decide between music or coding. I decided to go with music. It was the best decision I ever made because I studied music composition. When you are composing for dozens of instruments to play one unified thing. Every pitch, every rhythm, and it all works together. Why this note and why that rhythm? There is an artistic side to this and academia, too. The end result is that music is enjoyed by humans; same for software.

I did 2 degrees in music and then started my Master’s in Music. I then realized I love computers, too, how can I put these two together? I read some things on audio programming, and it stepped me back into programming. At this time, I was working in music education and trying to compose music for gamming. Someone said look at this program called C#! I don’t know cause...how can you get any better than C++?!

In 2003 – I saw a book: teach yourself C# in 24 hours. I read it and I was enthralled with how neat this was! I was building some Windows applications through C#. I thought it was crazy that there was so much change from when I was in college.

17:00 – Chuck: You start making this transition to web? What roped you in?

17:25 – Rob: I realized the power of this, not completely roped in just, yet. Microsoft was working (around this time) with...

19:45 – (Continued from Rob): When Silver Light died that’s when I looked at the web. I said forget this native platform. I came back to JavaScript for the 2nd time – and said I am going to learn this language with the same intensity as I learned C++ and C#. I started working with Durandal.

21:45 – Charles: Yeah, I remember when you worked with the router and stuff like that. You were on the core team.

21:53 – Rob: The work I did on that was inspired by screen activation patterns.

23:41 – Rob (continued): I work with InVision now.

24:14 – Charles: I remember you were on the Angular team and then you transitioned – what was that like?

24:33 – Rob comments.

25:28 – Rob (continued): I have been doing opensource for about 13 years. I almost burned myself a few times and almost went bankrupt a few times. The question is how to be involved, but run the race without getting burned-out. It’s a marathon not a sprint.

These libraries are huge assets. Thank God I didn’t go bankrupt but became very close.

The more popular something if there are more varieties and people not everyone is so pleasant. It’s okay to disagree. Now what are the different opinions and what works well for your team and project? It’s important to stay to your core and vision. Why would you pick THIS over THAT?

It’s a fun and exciting time if you are

28:41 – Charles: What are you

28:47 – Rob: InVision and InVision studio. It’s a tool for designing screens. I work on that during the day and during the night I work on Aurelia.

30:43 – Chuck: I am pretty sure that we have had people from InVision on a show before.

31:03 – Rob comments.

Rob: How we all work together.

31:20 – What is coming in with Aurelia next?

31:24 – Rob: We are trying to work with as much backwards compatibility as we can. So you don’t see a lot of the framework code in your app code. It’s less intrusive. We are trying next, can we keep the same language, the same levels, and such but change the implementation under the hood. You don’t learn anything new. You don’t have new things to learn. But how it’s implemented it’s smaller, faster, and more efficient. We have made the framework more pluggable to the compiler-level. It’s fully supported and super accessible.

Frameworks will come and go – this is my belief is that you invest in the standards of the web. We are taking that up a notch. Unobtrusiveness is the next thing we want to do. 

We’ve always had great performance and now taking it to the next level. We are doing a lot around documentation. To help people understand what the architectural decisions are and why? We are taking it to the next level from our core. It’s coming along swimmingly so I am really excited. We’ve already got 90% test coverage and over 40,000 tests.

37:33 – Chuck: Let’s get you on JavaScript Jabber!

38:19 – Chuck: Where can people find you?

38:22 – Twitter, and everywhere else. Blog!

39:17 – Chuck: Picks?

39:23 – Rob dives in!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Rob

Charles




js

JSJ 342: Aurelia in Action with Sean Hunter

Panel:

  • AJ O’Neal
  • Joe Eames
  • Jesse Sanders

Special Guest: Sean Hunter

In this episode, the panel talks with Sean Hunter who is a software developer, speaker, rock climber, and author of “Aurelia in Action” published by Manning Publications! Today, the panelists and Sean talk about Aurelia and other frameworks. Check it out!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:38 – Joe: Hello! Our panelists are AJ, Jesse, myself, and our special guest is Sean Hunter (from Australia)! What have you been doing with your life and what is your favorite movie?

1:45 – Guest talks about Vegemite!

2:20 – Guest: I was in the UK and started using Aurelia, which I will talk about today. I have done some talks throughout UK about Aurelia. Also, the past year moved back to Australia had a baby son and it’s been a busy year. Writing a book and being a new parent has been hard.

3:22 – Panel: Tell us the history of Aurelia, please?

3:31 – Panel: Is it like jQuery, React, Vue or what?

3:44 – Guest: Elevator pitch – Aurelia is a single-page app framework! It’s most similar to Vue out of those frameworks; also, similarities to Ember.js.

4:30 – Guest goes into detail about Aurelia.

6:15 – Panel: It sounds like convention over configuration.

6:42 – Guest: Yes that is correct.

7:21 – Panel: Sounds like there is a build-step to it.

7:39 – Guest: There is a build-step you are correct. You will use Webpack in the background.

9:57 – The guest talks about data binding among other things.

10:30 – Guest: You will have your app component and other levels, too.

10:37 – Panel: I am new to Aurelia and so I’m fresh to this. Why Aurelia over the other frameworks? Is there a CLI to help?

11:29 – Guest: Let me start with WHY Aurelia and not the other frameworks. The style that you are using when building the applications is important for your needs. In terms of bundling there is a CUI and that is a way that I prefer to start my projects. Do you want to use CSS or Webpack or...? It’s almost a wizard process! You guys have any questions about the CLI?

14:43 – Panel: Thanks! I was wondering what is actually occurring there?

15:25 – Guest: Good question. Basically it’s that Aurelia has some built-in conventions. Looking at the convention tells Aurelia to pick the Vue model by name. If I need to tell the framework more information then...

17:46 – Panel: I think that for people who are familiar with one or more framework then where on that spectrum would Aurelia fall?

18:20 – Guest: It’s not that opinionated as Ember.js.

19:09 – Panel: Talking about being opinionated – what are some good examples of the choices that you have and how that leads you down a certain path? Any more examples that you can give us? 

19:38 – Guest: The main conventions are what I’ve talked about already. I can’t think of more conventions off the top of my head. There are more examples in my book.

20:02 – Panel: Your book?

20:10 – Guest: Yep.

20:13 – Panel.

20:20 – Guest. 

21:58 – Panel: Why would I NOT pick Aurelia?

22:19 – Guest: If you are from a React world and you like having things contained in a single-file then Aurelia would fight you. If you want a big company backing then Aurelia isn’t for you.

The guest goes into more reasons why or why not one would or wouldn’t want to use Aurelia.

24:24 – Panel: I think the best sell point is the downplay!

24:34 – Guest: Good point. What does the roadmap look like for Aurelia’s team?

25:00 – Guest: Typically, what happens in the Aurelia framework is that data binding (or router) gets pushed by the core team. They are the ones that produce the roadmap and look forward to the framework. The core team is working on the NEXT version of the framework, which is lighter, easier to use, and additional features. It’s proposed to be out for release next year.

26:36 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

27:34 – Panel: I am going to take down the CLI down and see what it does. I am looking at it and seeing how to teach someone to use it. I am using AU, new command, and it says no Aurelia found. I am stuck.

28:06 – Guest: What you would do is specify the project name that you are trying to create and that should create it for you. 

28:40 – Panel.

28:45 – Panel.

28:50 – Panel: Stand up on your desk and say: does anyone know anything about computers?!

29:05 – Panelists go back-and-forth.

29:13 – Panel: What frameworks have you used in the past?

29:17 – Guest: I was using single-paged apps back in 2010.

31:10 – Panel: Tell us about the performance of Aurelia?

31:17 – Guest: I was looking at the benchmarks all the time. Last time I looked the performance was comparable. Performances can me measured in a number of different of ways.

The guest talks about a dashboard screen that 20 charts or something like that. He didn’t notice any delays getting to the client.

33:29 – Panel: I heard you say the word “observables.”

33:39 – Guest answers the question.

35:30 – Guest: I am not a Redux expert, so I really can’t say. It has similar actions like Redux but the differences I really can’t say.

36:11 – Panel: We really want experts in everything! (Laughs.)

36:25 – Panelist talks about a colleagues’ talk at a conference. He says that he things are doing too much with SPAs. They have their place but we are trying to bundle 8-9 different applications but instead look at them as...

What are your thoughts of having multiple SPAs?

37:17 – Guest.

39:08 – Guest: I wonder what your opinions are? What about the splitting approach?

39:22 – Panel: I haven’t looked at it, yet. I am curious, though. I have been developing in GO lately.

40:20 – Guest: I think people can go too far and making it too complex. You don’t want to make the code that complex.

40:45 – Panel: Yeah when the code is “clean” but difficult to discover that’s not good.

41:15 – Guest: I agree when you start repeating yourself then it makes it more difficult.

41:35 – Panel: Chris and I are anti-framework. We prefer to start from a fresh palette and see if a framework can fit into that fresh palette. When you start with a certain framework you are starting with certain configurations set-in-place. 

42:48 – Joe: I like my frameworks and I think you are crazy!

43:05 – Panel.

43:11 – Joe: I have a love affair with all frameworks.

43:19 – Panel: I think I am somewhere in the middle.

43:49 – Panel: I don’t think frameworks are all bad but I want to say that it’s smart to not make it too complex upfront. Learn and grow.

44:28 – Guest: I think a good example of that is jQuery, right?

45:10 – Panelist talks about C++, jQuery, among other things.

45:34 – Guest: Frameworks kind of push the limits.

46:08 – Panelist talks about JavaScript, frameworks, and others.

47:04 – Panel: It seems simple to setup routes – anything to help with the lazy way to setup?

47:35 – Guest answers question.

48:37 – Panel: How do we manage complexity and how does messaging work between components?

48:54 – Guest: The simple scenario is that you can follow a simple pattern, which is (came out of Ember community) and that is...Data Down & Actions Up!

50:45 – Guest mentions that Aurelia website!

51:00 – Panel: That sounds great! Sounds like the pattern can be plugged in easily into Aurelia.

51:17 – Picks!

51:20 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Joe

AJ

Jesse Sanders

Sean




js

MJS 088: Nicholas Zakas

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nicholas Zakas

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Nicholas Zakas who is a blogger, author, and software engineer. Nicholas’ website is titled, Human Who Codes – check it out! You can find him on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn among other social media platforms. Today, Nicholas and Chuck talk about Nicholas’ background, JavaScript, and current projects.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:00 – Chuck: Welcome! Give us a background, please, Nicholas!

1:14 – Guest: I am probably best known for making ESLint and I have written a bunch of books, too! (See links below.)

1:36 – Chuck: JSJ 336 and JSJ 075 episodes are the two past episodes we’ve had you on! (See links below.) Let’s go back and how did you get into programming?

1:58 – Guest: I think the first was written in BASIC, which was on a Laser computer. It was a cheaper knockoff version. I think I was into middle school when I got into BASIC. Then when I got into high school I did this computer project, which was the first time someone else used one of my programs.

4:02 – Chuck: Was it all in BASIC or something else?

4:13 – Guest: Just BASIC, but then transferred to something else when we got our first PC.

5:13 – Chuck: How did you get to use JavaScript?

5:18 – Guest: 1996 was my freshman year in college. Netscape 3 got into popularity around this time. I had decided that I wanted to setup a webpage to stay in-touch with high school friends who were going into different directions.

I got annoyed with how static the [web] pages were. At the time, there was no CSS and the only thing you could change was the source of an image (on webpages).

On the <a tag> you could do...

8:35 – Chuck: You get into JavaScript and at what point did you become a prolific operator and author?

8:52 – Guest: It was not an overnight thing. It definitely was fueled by my own curiosity. The web was so new (when I was in college) that I had to explore on my own. I probably killed a few trees when I was in college. Printing off anything and everything I could to learn about this stuff!

10:03 – Guest (continues): Professors would ask ME how to do this or that on the departmental website. When I was graduating from college I knew that I was excited about the WEB. I got a first job w/o having to interview.

12:32 – Guest (continues): I got so deep into JavaScript!

13:30 – Guest (continued): They couldn’t figure out what I had done. That’s when I got more into designing JavaScript APIs. About 8 months after graduating from college I was unemployed. I had extra time on my hands. I was worried that I was going to forget the cool stuff that I just developed there. I went over the code and writing for myself how I had constructed it. My goal was to have an expandable tree. This is the design process that I went through. This is the API that I came up with so you can insert and how I went about implementing it. At some point, I was on a discussion with my former colleagues: remember that JavaScript tree thing I wrote – I wrote a description of how I did it. Someone said: Hey this is really good and you should get this published somewhere. Huh! I guess I could do that. I went to websites who were publishing articles on JavaScript. I went to submit the article to one of them. I think it was DevX or WebReference.

18:03 – Guest: A book is a compilation of different articles?! I can do that. I wanted to write a book that would fill in that next step that was missing. I didn’t know what the book was going to be, and I decided to start writing. Once I’ve had enough content I would take a step back and see what it was about. (Check out Nicholas’ books here!)

19:01 – Chuck: Oh you can turn this into a book!

19:10 – Guest: There was very little that I had planned out ahead of time. Anything that happened to me that was exciting had stumbled into my lap!

19:37 – Chuck: That’s how I felt about podcasting – it fell into my lap/life!

19:50 – Chuck: Listeners – check out the past episodes with Nicholas, please. Nicholas, what are you proud of?

20:10 – Guest: In 2006, I was at Yahoo and started off with My Yahoo Team. This was the first time that I was exposed to a massive amount of JavaScript in a single web application.

26:21 – Chuck: Can you talk about your health issues? People would definitely benefit from your example and your story.

26:44 – Guest: I think it is something important for people to understand.

The guest talks about Lyme Disease.

35:49 – Chuck: Yep taking care of yourself is important!

36:00 – Guest: Yes to enjoy time with friends and explore other hobbies. Help yourself to de-stress is important. Cognitive work is very draining. When you aren’t getting the right amount of sleep your body is going to get stressed out. Take the time to do nonsense things. You need to let your brain unwind! I love these adult coloring books that they have!

38:07 – Chuck: I love to take a drive up the canyon.

38:12 – Guest.

38:24 – Chuck: Yeah to focus on ourselves is important.

38:36 – Guest: Your body will make it a point to say: pay attention to me! Your body goes into flight or fight mode and your systems shut-off, which of course is not good. You don’t want your body to stay in that state.

New parents get sick frequently with newborns, because they aren’t getting enough sleep.

41:08 – Guest: Get some R&R!

41:20 – Chuck: This is great, but I have another call! Let’s do some Picks!

41:35 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

Links:

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Charles Max Wood

  • Wall Calendars – 6 ft. x3 ft.

Nicholas Zakas




js

JSJ 343: The Power of Progressive Enhancement with Andy Bell

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • Aimee Knight
  • Chris Ferdinandi
  • AJ O’Neal

Special Guest: Andy Bell

In this episode, the panel talks with Andy Bell who is an independent designer and developer who uses React, Vue, and Node. Today, the panelists and the guest talk about the power of progressive enhancements. Check it out!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:34 – Chuck: Hi! Our panel is AJ, Aimee, Chris, myself and my new show is coming out in a few weeks, which is called the DevRev! It helps you with developer’s freedom! I am super excited. Our guest is Andy Bell. Introduce yourself, please.

2:00 – Guest: I am an independent designer and developer out in the U.K.

2:17 – Chuck: You wrote things about Vanilla.js. I am foreshadowing a few things and let’s talk about the power and progressive enhancement.

2:43 – The guest gives us definitions of power and progressive enhancements. He describes how it works.

3:10 – Chuck: I’ve heard that people would turn off JavaScript b/c it was security concern and then your progressive enhancement would make it work w/o JavaScript. I am sure there’s more than that?

3:28 – The guest talks about JavaScript, dependencies, among other things.

4:40 – Chuck: Your post did make that very clear I think. I am thinking I don’t even know where to start with this. Are people using the 6th version? How far back or what are we talking about here?

5:09 – Guest: You can go really far back and make it work w/o CSS.

5:49 – Chris: I am a big advocate of progressive enhancement – the pushback I get these days is that there is a divide; between the broadband era and AOL dialup. Are there compelling reasons why progressive enhancements even matter?

6:48 – Guest.

8:05 – Panel: My family lives out in the boonies. I am aware of 50% of American don’t have fast Internet. People don’t have access to fast browsers but I don’t think they are key metric users.

8:47 – Guest: It totally depends on what you need it for. It doesn’t matter if these people are paying or not.

9:31 – Chris: Assuming I have a commute on the trail and it goes through a spotty section. In a scenario that it’s dependent on the JS...are we talking about 2 different things here?

10:14 – Panelist chimes-in.

10:36 – Chris: I can take advantage of it even if I cannot afford a new machine.

10:55 – Panel: Where would this really matter to you?

11:05 – Chris: I do have a nice new laptop.

11:12 – Chuck: I had to hike up to the hill (near the house) to make a call and the connection was really poor (in OK). It’s not the norm but it can happen.

11:37 – Chris: Or how about the All Trails app when I am on the trail.

11:52 – Guest.

12:40 – Chris: I can remember at the time that the desktop sites it was popular to have...

Chris: Most of those sites were inaccessible to me.

13:17 – Guest.

13:51 – Chuck: First-world countries will have a good connection and it’s not a big deal. If you are thinking though about your customers and where they live? Is that fair? I am thinking that my customers need to be able to access the podcast – what would you suggest? What are the things that you’d make sure is accessible to them.

14:31 – Guest: I like to pick on the minimum viable experience? I think to read the transcript is important than the audio (MP3).

15:47 – Chuck.

15:52 – Guest: It’s a lot easier with Vue b/c you don’t’ have to set aside rendering.

17:13 – AJ: I am thinking: that there is a way to start developing progressively and probably cheaper and easier to the person who is developing. If it saves us a buck and helps then we take action.

17:49 – Guest: It’s much easier if you start that way and if you enhance the feature itself.

18:38 – AJ: Let me ask: what are the situations where I wouldn’t / shouldn’t worry about progressive enhancements?

18:57 – Guest answers the question.

19:42 – AJ: I want people to feel motivated in a place WHERE to start. Something like a blog needs Java for comments.

Hamburger menu is mentioned, too.

20:20 – Guest.

21:05 – Chris: Can we talk about code?

21:16 – Aimee: This is the direction I wanted to go. What do you mean by that – building your applications progressively?

Aimee refers to his blog.

21:44 – Guest.

22:13 – Chuck: I use stock overflow!

22:20 – Guest.

22:24 – Chuck: I mean that’s what Chris uses!

22:33 – Guest (continues).

23:42 – Aimee.

23:54 – Chris.

24:09 – Chris

24:16 – Chris: Andy what do you think about that?

24:22 – Guest: Yes, that’s good.

24:35 – Chris: Where it falls apart is the resistance to progressive enhancements that it means that your approach has to be boring?

25:03 – Guest answers the question.

The guest mentions modern CSS and modern JavaScript are mentioned along with tooling.

25:50 – Chuck: My issue is that when we talk about this (progressive enhancement) lowest common denominator and some user at some level (slow network) and then they can access it. Then the next level (better access) can access it. I start at the bottom and then go up. Then when they say progressive enhancement I get lost. Should I scrap it and then start over or what?

26:57 – Guest: If it’s feasible do it and then set a timeline up.

27:42 – Chuck: You are saying yes do it a layer at a time – but my question is HOW? What parts can I pair back? Are there guidelines to say: do this first and then how to test?

28:18 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

29:20 – Guest: Think about the user flow. What does the user want to do at THIS point? Do you need to work out the actual dependencies?

30:31 – Chuck: Is there a list of those capabilities somewhere? So these users can use it this way and these users can use it that way?

30:50 – Guest answers the question.

31:03 – Guest: You can pick out the big things.

31:30 – Chuck: I am using this feature in the browser...

31:41 – Guest.

31:46 – Chris: I think this differently than you Andy – I’ve stopped caring if a browser supports something new. I am fine using CSS grid and if your browser doesn’t support it then I don’t have a problem with that. I get hung up on, though if this fails can they still get the content? If they have no access to these – what should they be able to do?

Note: “Cutting the Mustard Test” is mentioned.

33:37 – Guest.

33:44 – Chuck: Knowing your users and if it becomes a problem then I will figure it out.

34:00 – Chris: I couldn’t spare the time to make it happen right now b/c I am a one-man shop.

34:20 – Chuck and Chris go back-and-forth.

34:36 –Chris: Check out links below for my product.

34:54 – AJ: A lot of these things are in the name: progressive.

36:20 – Guest.

38:51 – Chris: Say that they haven’t looked at it all before. Do you mind talking about these things and what the heck is a web component?

39:14 – The guest gives us his definition of what a web component is.

40:02 – Chuck: Most recent episode in Angular about web components, but that was a few years ago. See links below for that episode.

40:25 – Aimee.

40:31 – Guest: Yes, it’s a lot like working in Vue and web components. The concepts are very similar.

41:22 – Chris: Can someone please give us an example? A literal slideshow example?

41:45 – Guest answers the question.

45:07 – Chris.

45:12 – Guest: It’s a framework that just happens to use web components and stuff to help.

45:54 – Chuck: Yeah they make it easier (Palmer). Yeah there is a crossover with Palmer team and other teams. I can say that b/c I have talked with people from both teams. Anything else?

46:39 – Chuck: Where do they go to learn more?

46:49 – Guest: Check out the Club! And my Twitter! (See links below.)

47:33 – Chuck: I want to shout-out about DevLifts that has $19 a month to help you with physical goals. Or you can get the premium slot! It’s terrific stuff. Sign-up with DEVCHAT code but there is a limited number of slots and there is a deadline, too. Just try it! They have a podcast, too!

49:16 – Aimee: Yeah, I’m on their podcast soon!

49:30 – Chuck: Picks!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

Chris

AJ

Charles

Andy




js

MJS 089: Gareth McCumskey

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Gareth McCumskey

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Gareth McCumskey who is a senior web developer for RunwaySale! They talk about Gareth’s background, current projects and his family. Check out today’s episode to hear all about it and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:53 – Chuck: Hey everyone! Welcome! We are talking today with Gareth McCumseky!

1:05 – Gareth: Hi!

1:22 – Chuck: Are you from Cape Town, Africa? (Guest: Yes!)

1:35 – Gareth and Chuck talk about his name, Gareth, and why it’s popular. 

1:49 – Chuck: I am in my late 40’s. You were here for JSJ’s Episode 291! It’s still a hot topic and probably should revisit that topic.

2:20 – Guest: Yes!

2:30 – Chuck: It’s interesting. We had a long talk about it and people should go listen to it!

2:45 – Guest: I am a backend developer for the most part.

3:03 – Chuck: Yeah I started off as an ops guy. It probably hurt me.

3:21 – Guest: Yeah, if you poke it a certain way.

3:29 – Chuck: Let’s talk about YOU! How did you get into programming?

3:39 – Guest: South Africa is a different culture to grow-up in vs. U.S. and other places. I remember the computer that my father had back in the day. He led me drive his car about 1km away and I was about 11 years old. We would take home the computer from his office – played around with it during the weekend – and put it back into his office Monday morning. This was way before the Internet. I was fiddling with it for sure.

The guest talks about BASIC.

6:20 – Chuck: How did you transfer from building BASIC apps to JavaScript apps?

6:30 – Guest: Yeah that’s a good story. When I was 19 years old...I went to college and studied geology and tried to run an IT business on the side. I started to build things for HTML and CSS and build things for the Web.

The guest goes into-detail about his background!

9:26 – Chuck: Yeah, jQuery was so awesome!

9:34 – Guest: Yeah today I am working on an app that uses jQuery! You get used to it, and it’s pretty powerful (jQuery) for what it is/what it does! It has neat tricks.

10:11 – Chuck: I’ve started a site with it b/c it was easy.

10:19 – Guest: Sometimes you don’t need the full out thing. Maybe you just need to load a page here and there, and that’s it.

10:39 – Chuck: It’s a different world – definitely!

10:48 – Guest: Yeah in 2015/2016 is when I picked up JavaScript again. It was b/c around that time we were expecting our first child and that’s where we wanted to be to raise her.

Guest: We use webpack.js now. It opened my eyes to see how powerful JavaScript is!

12:10 – Chuck talks about Node.js.

12:21 – Guest: Even today, I got into AWS Cognito!

13:45 – Chuck: You say that your problems are unique – and from the business end I want something that I can resolve quickly. Your solution sounds good. I don’t like messing around with the headaches from Node and others.

14:22 – Guest: Yeah that’s the biggest selling point that I’ve had.

15:47 – Chuck: How did you get into serverless?

15:49 – Guest: Funny experience. I am not the expert and I only write the backend stuff.

Guest: At the time, we wanted to improve the reliability of the machine and the site itself. He said to try serverless.com. At the time I wasn’t impressed but then when he suggested it – I took the recommendation more seriously. My company that I work for now...

17:39 – Chuck: What else are you working on?

17:45 – Guest: Some local projects – dining service that refunds you. You pay for a subscription, but find a cheaper way to spend money when you are eating out. It’s called: GOING OUT.

Guest: My 3-year-old daughter and my wife is expecting our second child.

18:56 – Chuck and Gareth talk about family and their children.

22:17 – Chuck: Picks!

22:29 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles Max Wood

Gareth McCumskey




js

JSJ 344: Inclusive Components with Heydon Pickering

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • Aimee Knight
  • Chris Ferdinandi
  • Joe Eames

Special Guest: Heydon Pickering

In this episode, the panel talks with Heydon Pickering who is a designer and writer. The panel and the guest talk about his new book, which is centered on the topic of today’s show: inclusive components. Check out Heydon’s Twitter, Website, GitHub, and Mastodon social accounts to learn more about him. To purchase the book – go here!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:38 – Chuck: Aimee, Chris, Joe, and myself – we are today’s panel. My show the DevRev is available online to check it out.

1:30 – Guest: Plain ice cream would be frozen milk and that would be terrible. So I am lemon and candy JavaScript!

2:13 – Chuck: We are talking today about...?

2:22 – Chris: He’s talking about “inclusive components” today!

2:41 – Guest: Traveling is very stressful and I wanted something to do on the plane. I’ve done this book, “Inclusive Design Patterns.”

If you don’t want to buy the book you can go to the blog. I have been talking with Smashing Magazine.

5:40 – Panel.

5:47 – Guest: I approached Smashing Magazine initially. They didn’t think there was a market for this content at the time. They were very supportive but we will do it as an eBook so our costs our down. At the time, the editor came back and said that: “it was quite good!” We skimmed it but came back to it now and now the content was more relevant in their eyes. I didn’t want to do the same book but I wanted to do it around “patterns.” Rewriting components is what I do all the time. I use Vanilla JavaScript. Backbone.js is the trendy one.

9:52 – Panel: The hard book did it get published?

10:02 – Guest: We are in the works and it’s all in the final stages right now. It has to go through a different process for the print version.

11:54 – Panel.

11:58 – (Guest continues about the editorial process.)

12:09 – Panel: They probably switched to TFS – it’s Microsoft’s.

12:23 – Guest: There was this argument on Twitter about the different processors.

13:35 – Chris: What are the ways that people are breaking accessibility with their code through JavaScript? 

13:59 – Guest: The whole premise is that there aren’t a ton of different components that we use. Generally, speaking. Most things we do through JavaScript – it’s just different ways of doing this/that, and hiding things. I am discounting things with Node or other stuff. Most of what we are doing, with interactive design, is showing and hiding.

18:37 – Chris: I have some specialty friends where they tell me where I’ve screwed up my code. For example Eric Bailey and Scott O’Hara but, of course, in very kind ways. What are some things that I can make sure that my code is going to work for many different people.

19:18 – Guest: You have accessibility and inclusive design. People think of accessibility as a check-list and that’s okay but there could be problems with this.

26:00 – Panel: That’s a great guideline.

26:05 – Chris: You talked about ARIA roles and it can be confusing. One side is: I don’t know when to use these and the other side is: I don’t know when NOT to use these so I’m going to use them for EVERYTHING! I guess both can be detrimental. What’s your advice on this topic?

27:00 – Guest: Scott is great and I would trust him to the end of the Earth about what he says.

Guest mentions Léonie Watson and her talks about this topic.

29:26 – (Guest continues.)

29:36 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

30:31 – Chris.

30:40 – Guest: There is a lot of pressure, though, right? People wouldn’t blog about this if it wasn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t matter what the style is or what the syntax is.

The guest talks about not throwing ARIA onto everything.

36:34 – Aimee: Is this something that was mentioned in the book: people with disabilities and accessibility.

37:28 – Guest: Yes, of course. I think it’s important to make your interfaces flexible and robust to think and include people with disabilities.

39:00 – Guest mentions larger buttons.

40:52 – Panelists and Guest talk back-and-forth.

42:22 – Chris: It’s an accessibility and inclusivity element. I saw a dropdown menu and worked great on certain devices but not others. I could beat this horse all day long but the whole: what happens of the JavaScript file doesn’t load or just accordion options?

43:50 – Guest: It’s the progressive enhancement element.

44:05 – Guest: I think it’s worth noting. I think these things dovetail really nicely.

46:29 – Chris: Did you do a video interview, Aimee, talking about CSS? Is CSS better than JavaScript in some ways I don’t know if this is related or not?

47:03 – Aimee: When I talk about JavaScript vs. CSS...the browser optimizes those.

47:27 – Aimee: But as someone who loves JavaScript...and then some very talented people taught me that you have to find the right tool for the job.

47:29 – Guest: I am the other way around – interesting.

52:50 – Chuck: Picks!

52:55 – Advertisement – Get A Coder Job!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Joe

Aimee

Chris

Charles

Heydon




js

MJS 090: AJ O’Neal

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: A.J. O’Neal

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:23 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please.

1:27 – AJ: I brief introduction: I am a quirky guy who is ADD and I love to figure out why/how things work. I like self-hosting or owning things in technology.

2:00 – Chuck: Where do you work now?

2:02 – AJ: I work in UTAH at Big Squid!

3:29 – AJ: I have my own company, too!

3:41 – Chuck: Yeah we’ve talked about that before. Where can we go?

3:54: AJ: We have 2 products that are both Node. Greenlock for Node.js is one of them! The other one is Telebit.

5:44 – Chuck: This interview is all about your background. How did you get into programming?

6:04 – AJ: I was in middle school but before that my grandmother was a secretary at the Pentagon. She worked on getting people paid and she wrote a program to assist these paychecks to be printed with fewer errors. Because of that she had a computer at home. I remember playing games on her computer.

The guest talks about his background in more detail.

15:21 – Chuck: No it’s interesting! I’ve done a couple hundred interviews and they all say either: I went to school for it OR I did it for my free time. It’s interesting to see the similarities!

16:00 – AJ: Yep that’s pretty much how I got into it! I went on a church service mission to Albania and really didn’t do any computer work during those 2 years.

19:39 – Chuck: You went to BYU and your mission trip. A lot of that stuff I can relate to and identify with b/c I went to BYU and went on missions trip, too! And then you got into Ruby and that’s how we met was through Ruby!

20:25 – AJ: Yep that’s it. Then that’s when I learned about Node, too. There was a guy with a funny hate – do you remember that? (No.)

21:03 – Chuck: Maybe?

21:07 – AJ continues.

27:53 – Chuck: What made you make the transition? People come into and out of different technologies all the time.

28:18 – AJ: Yeah it started with me with jQuery!

Rails has layers upon layers upon layers.

AJ talks about different technologies their similarities/differences and mentions: JavaScript, Rails, Python, Node, Ruby, and much more.

31:05 – Chuck: Node went out of their way on certain platforms that Rails didn’t prioritize.

31:11 – AJ continues to talk about different technologies and platforms.

33:00 – Chuck: You get into Node and then at what point does this idea of a home-server and Node and everything start to come together? How much of this do you want to talk bout? At one point did they start to gel?

33:33 – AJ: It’s been a very long process and started back in high school. It started with me trying to think: How do I get this picture on my phone to my mom? I thought of uploading it to Flickr or could I do this or that? What about sending it to someone in China?

39:57 – Chuck.

40:01 – AJ continues and talks about libraries and certificate standards.

42:00 – AJ continues with the topic: certificates.

42:44 – Chuck: I am going to go to PICKS! Where can people find you?

42:55 – AJ: Twitter! Blog! GitHub! Anywhere!

43:55 – Chuck: Picks!

43:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

A.J.

Chuck




js

JSJ 345: Azure Devops with Donovan Brown LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

Panel:

Charles Max Woods

Special Guests: Donovan Brown

In this episode, the Charles speaks with Donovan Brown. He is a principal DevOps Manager with Microsoft with a background in application development. He also runs one of the nation’s fastest growing online registration sites for motorsports events DLBRACING.com. When he is not writing software, he races cars for fun. Listen to today’s episode where Chuck and Donovan talk about DevOps, Azure, Python, Angular, React, Vue, and much, much more!

Show Topics:

1:41 – Chuck: The philosophies around DevOps. Just to give you an idea, I have been thinking about what I want to do with the podcasts. Freedom to work on what we want or freedom to work where we want, etc. Then that goes into things we don’t want to do, like fix bugs, etc. How does Microsoft DevOps to choose what they want to do?

2:37 – Guest: We want to automate as much as we can so the developer has less work. As a developer I want to commit code, do another task, rinse and repeating.

Minutes and not even hours later then people are tweeting about the next best thing. Do what you want, where you want. Code any language you want.

4:15 – Chuck: What has changed?

4:19 – Guest: The branding changed. The name wasn’t the most favorite among the people. The word “visual” was a concerned. What we have noticed that Azure will let me run my code no matter where I am. If you want to run Python or others it can run in Azure.

People didn’t need all of it. It comes with depositories, project management, and so much more! People could feel clumsy because there is so much stuff. We can streamline that now, and you can turn off that feature so you don’t have a heart attack. Maybe you are using us for some features not all of them – cool.

7:40 – Chuck: With deployments and other things – we don’t talk about the process for development a lot.

8:00 – Guest talks about the things that can help out with that.

Guest: Our process is going to help guide you. We have that all built into the Azure tab feature. They feel and act differently. I tell all the people all the time that it’s brilliant stuff. There are 3 different templates. The templates actually change over the language. You don’t have to do mental math.

9:57 – Chuck: Just talking about the process. Which of these things we work on next when I’ve got a bug, or a ...

10:20 – Guest: The board system works like for example you have a bug. The steps to reproduce that bug, so that there is no question what go into this specific field. Let the anatomy of the feature do it itself!

11:54 – Chuck comments.

12:26 – Chuck: Back to the feature. Creating the user stories is a different process than X.

12:44 – Guest – You have a hierarchy then, right? Also what is really cool is we have case state management. I can click on this and I expect this to happen...

These are actual tasks that I can run.

13:52 – Chuck: Once you have those tests written can you pull those into your CI?

14:00 – Guest: “Manual tests x0.”

Guest dives into the question.

14:47 – I expect my team to write those test cases. The answer to your question is yes and no.

We got so good at it that we found something that didn’t even exist, yet.

16:19 – Guest: As a developer it might be mind

16:29 – Chuck: I fixed this bug 4x, I wished I had CI to help me.

16:46 – Guest: You get a bug, then you fix a code, etc., etc. You don’t know that this original bug just came back. Fix it again. Am I in Groundhog Day?

They are related to each other. You don’t have a unit test to tell you. When you get that very first bug – write a unit test. It will make you quicker at fixing it. A unit test you can write really fast over, and over, again. The test is passing. What do you do? Test it. Write the code to fix that unit test. You can see that how these relate to each other. That’s the beauty in it.

18:33 – Chuck: 90% of the unit tests I write – even 95% of the time they pass. It’s the 5% you would have no idea that it’s related. I can remember broad strokes of the code that I wrote, but 3 months down the road I can’t remember.

19:14 – Guest: If you are in a time crunch – I don’t have time for this unit test.

Guest gives us a hypothetical situation to show how unit tests really can help.

20:25 – Make it muscle memory to unit test. I am a faster developer with the unit tests.

20:45 – Chuck: In the beginning it took forever. Now it’s just how I write software now.

It guides my thought process.

21:06 – Guest: Yes! I agree.

22:00 – Guest: Don’t do the unit tests

22:10 – Chuck: Other place is when you write a new feature,...go through the process. Write unit tests for the things that you’ve touched. Expand your level of comfort.

DevOps – we are talking about processes. Sounds like your DevOps is a flexible tool. Some people are looking for A METHOD. Like a business coach. Does Azure DevOps do that?

23:13 – Guest: Azure DevOps Projects. YoTeam.

Note.js, Java and others are mentioned by the Guest.

25:00 – Code Badges’ Advertisement

25:48 – Chuck: I am curious – 2 test sweets for Angular or React or Vue. How does that work?

26:05 – Guest: So that is Jasmine or Mocha? So it really doesn’t matter. I’m a big fan of Mocha. It tests itself. I install local to my project alone – I can do it on any CI system in the world. YoTeam is not used in your pipeline. Install 2 parts – Yo and Generator – Team. Answer the questions and it’s awesome. I’ve done conferences in New Zealand.

28:37 – Chuck: Why would I go anywhere else?

28:44 – Guest: YoTeam  was the idea of...

28:57 – Check out Guest

29:02 – Guest: I want Donovan in a box. If I weren’t there then the show wouldn’t exist today.

29:40 – Chuck: Asks a question.

29:46 – Guest: 5 different verticals.

Check out this timestamp to see what Donovan says the 5 different verticals are. Pipelines is 1 of the 5.

30:55 – Chuck: Yep – it works on my Mac.

31:04 – Guest: We also have Test Plant and Artifacts.

31:42 – Chuck: Can you resolve that on your developer machine?

31:46 – Guest: Yes, absolutely! There is my private repository and...

33:14 – Guest: *People not included in box.*

33:33 – Guest: It’s people driven. We guide you through the process. The value is the most important part and people is the hardest part, but once on

33:59 – Chuck: I am listening to this show and I want to try this out. I want a demo setup so I can show my boss. How do I show him that it works?

34:27 – Azure.com/devops – that is a great landing page.

How can I get a demo going? You can say here is my account – and they can put a demo into your account. I would not do a demo that this is cool. We start you for free. Create an account. Let the CI be the proof. It’s your job to do this, because it will make you more efficient. You need me to be using these tools.

36:11 – Chuck comments.

36:17 – Guest: Say you are on a team of developers and love GitHub and things that integration is stupid, but how many people would disagree about...

38:02 – The reports prove it for themselves.

38:20 – Chuck: You can get started for free – so when do you have to start paying for it?

38:31 – Guest: Get 4 of your buddies and then need more people it’s $6 a month.

39:33 – Chuck adds in comments. If this is free?

39:43 – Guest goes into the details about plans and such for this tool. 

40:17 – Chuck: How easy it is to migrate away from it?

40:22 – Guest: It’s GITHub.

40:30 – Chuck: People are looing data on their CI.

40:40 – Guest: You can comb that information there over the past 4 years but I don’t know if any system would let you export that history.

41:08 – Chuck: Yeah, you are right.

41:16 – Guest adds more into this topic.

41:25 – Chuck: Yeah it’s all into the machine.

41:38 – Chuck: Good deal.

41:43 – Guest: It’s like a drug. I would never leave it. I was using TFS before Microsoft.

42:08 – Chuck: Other question: continuous deployment.

42:56 – When I say every platform, I mean every platform: mobile devices, AWS, Azure, etc.

Anything you can do from a command line you can do from our build and release system.

PowerShell you don’t have to abandon it.

45:20 – Guest: I can’t remember what that tool is called!

45:33 – Guest: Anything you can do from a command line. Before firewall. Anything you want.

45:52 – Guest: I love my job because I get to help developers.

46:03 – Chuck: What do you think the biggest mistake people are doing?

46:12 – Guest: They are trying to do it all at once. Fix that one little thing.

It’s instant value with no risks whatsoever. Go setup and it takes 15 minutes total. Now that we have this continuous build, now let’s go and deploy it. Don’t dream up what you think your pipeline should look like. Do one thing at a time. What hurts the most that it’s “buggy.” Let’s add that to the pipeline.

It’s in your pipeline today, what hurts the most, and don’t do it all at once.

49:14 – Chuck: I thought you’d say: I don’t have the time.

49:25 – Guest: Say you work on it 15 minutes a day. 3 days in – 45 minutes in you have a CSI system that works forever. Yes I agree because people think they don’t “have the time.”

50:18 – Guest continues this conversation.

How do you not have CI? Just install it – don’t ask. Just do the right thing.

50:40 – Chuck: I free-lanced and setup CI for my team. After a month, getting warned, we had a monitor up on the screen and it was either RED or GREEN. It was basically – hey this hurts and now we know. Either we are going to have pain or not have pain.

51:41 – Guest continues this conversation.

Have pain – we should only have pain once or twice a year.

Rollback.

If you only have it every 6 months, that’s not too bad.

The pain will motivate you.

52:40 – Azure.com/devops.

Azure DevOps’ Twitter

53:22 – Picks!

53:30 – Advertisement – Get a Coder Job

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Donovan




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JSJ 346: Azure Pipelines with Ed Thomson LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

Sponsors:

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Ed Thomson

In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news!

Show Topics:

0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite

1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure.

1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps!

1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great.

2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use.

2:54 – Ed.

3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub.

3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub.

3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now.

3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone...

Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories.

6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me.

6:54 – Chuck.

6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way.

7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or?

7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate.

8:17 – Chuck.

8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out.

8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling.

9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that.

9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk.

9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there.

10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this?

11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know.

12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend?

12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the...

There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there.

13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated.

13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this...

It’s not just running a script.

15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows?

15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that?

15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail.

16:03 – Chuck asks a question.

16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails...

Our default task out of the box...

16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy).

17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed.

17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment.

17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!).

Ed continues this conversation.

18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it?

18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility

19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials?

19:10 – Ed: Just run the...

19:25 – Chuck comments.

19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip...

20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it.

20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean.

20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with...

20:55 – Chuck.

20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations.

21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix?

21:20 – Chuck explains it.

21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support.

22:41 – Advertisement.

23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and...

23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen.

23:55 – Ed: Exactly.

24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud?

24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk.

25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment...

25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master...

Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out!

27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet!

27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining.

27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source?

That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time.

30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments.

31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things.

I can take mental shortcuts.

31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then...

32:30 – Chuck adds his comments.

Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those?

33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and...

34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages.

34:14 – Ed.

34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry...

35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it.

Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those.

35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too!

35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run.

36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right?

36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in...

Azure DevOps.

37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product.

37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps.

37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out?

37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but...

37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website.

39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that...

39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there.

You are an eMac’s guy?

The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box.

Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it.

40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are.

Chuck talks about code editor and tools. 

41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible.

We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time.

42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure.

42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that.

42:30 – Ed: That Chuck.

42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news?

42:42 – Ed: Go to here!

42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you?

43:00 – Ed: Twitter!

43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks!

43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!

Links:

Picks:

Ed




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JSJ 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth

Sponsors

Panel

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by special guest: Phil Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan

Episode Summary

This episode features special guests Philip Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan. Phil lives just outside of London and Divya lives in Chicago, and both of them work for Netlify. Divya is also a regular on the Devchat show Views on Vue. The panelists begin by discussing what JAMstack is. JAM stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. It used to be known as the new name for static sites, but it’s much more than that. Phil talks about how dynamic ‘static’ sites really are. JAMstack sites range from very simple to very complex, Static is actually a misnomer. JAMstack makes making, deploying, and publishing as simple as possible.

The panelists discuss the differences between building your own API and JAMstack and how JavaScript fits into the JAMstack ecosystem. They talk about keys and secrets in APIs and the best way to handle credentials in a static site. There are multiple ways to handle it, but Netlify has some built in solutions. All you have to do is write your logic for what you want your function to do and what packages you want included in it, they do all the rest. Every deployment you make stays there, so you can always roll back to a previous version.

Charles asks about how to convert a website that’s built on a CMS to a static site and some of the tools available on Netlify. They finish by discussing different hangups on migrating platforms for things like Devchat (which is built on WordPress) and the benefits of switching servers.

Links

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Chris Ferdinandi:

Charles Max Wood:

Phil Hawksworth:

Divya Sasidharan:




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JSJ 348: EnactJS with Ryan Duffy

Sponsors

Panel

Aimee Knight

Aaron Frost

Chris Ferdinandi

Joe Eames

Special Guest: Ryan Duffy 

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, the panelists talk with Ryan Duffy who works on the EnactJS framework at LG Electronics. Ryan explains the framework in depth and answers all the questions about its design and implementation from the panelists and discusses some challenges faced along the way. Check it out!

 

Show Notes:

00:28 – Advertisement - KendoUI

1:08 - Ryan introduces himself and explains a bit about the EnactJS framework. While giving some background, he says that it is the 3rd generation of web frameworks that supports apps on webOS and they started building Enact on top of React about two years ago.

2:00 - Aimee asks what exactly does webOS mean. Ryan answers that webOS was created by Palm for phones and related devices and it has several instances of chromium running on device with some service layer stuff.

2:36 - Aaron mentions that webOS was big when other operating systems were still coming up, and Ryan agrees saying that it didn’t get the adoption needed to make it successful later.

3:00 - Ryan says that he always loved building apps for webOS phones given the flexibility and ease coming from a web development background.

3:53 - Aaron asks on which other applications is webOS running other than TV. Ryan answers that TV is one of the major consumptions, and it also runs on certain robots such as the concierge ones, watches to some extent and a lot of projects internally, not yet released in the market.

4:50 - Aaron asks if the Enact framework is big internally at LG. Ryan replies that it is the primary framework used for apps running on webOS.

5:03 - Aaron enquires about the nature of adoption of Enact for third party or non-LG people, to which Ryan states that Enact remains the standard framework for people who are building apps.

5:32 - Joe joins in the conversation.

6:25 - Aaron remarks that given that webOS is used in latest robots, televisions, watches and other such apps, it sounds like they are heavily investing into it. Ryan affirms by saying that the webOS journey goes from Palm phones to HP tablets to finally coming to LG. He goes on to explain their team structure, stating that there are two major teams in play right now - the R&D team is in the US and the implementation team is in Korea.

8:00 - Aaron asks about the role their team plays in the app development. Ryan replies that his team is the stack team that forms the foundation for the apps and they take decisions on what the components should look like and similar tasks. The app teams based in Korea decide their menu based on those decisions.

8:35 - Aaron asks what exactly is meant by the Blink team. Ryan answers that the it’s the team that works with an LG customized version of chromium.

9:10 – Aaron then asks about his individual role in the team. Ryan says that he is one of the managers of the stack team and he’s been on the team for little more than 4 years.

9:30 - Aaron asks about the evolution of the framework over time. Ryan describes the historical background by saying that in the initial Enyo design the team built, was component based, and every tool needed to build single page apps had to be developed from scratch. He says that they felt the need to move on to an improved framework as they wanted to take advantage of the robust ecosystem that existed, so they ported component libraries of Enyo using the React toolset to form Enact.

11:43 - Aaron asks if Enyo then ceased to exist to which Ryan states that it is still around to some extent.

12:20 - Aaron asks if the team has something like “create Enact app” to create a new app internally, like React. Ryan mentions that Jason - a tooling and automation expert from their team has built a feature called V8 snapshot - which loads JavaScript into memory and takes a snapshot - can in turn be loaded by the TV to launch the app in order to achieve a faster load time. He says that their long-term goal is to increase compatibility with the ecosystem.

14:40 - Aaron asks if he can use the React CLI to create something for TV as a third-party developer. Ryan elaborates that CLI can be used to build, compile and bundle apps and there is another tool- SDK to bundle it for delivery to the TV. The app is tested fully in chrome, bundled and deployed to the TV.

15:25 - Aaron asks if choosing React was a natural decision for the team. Ryan explains that they researched on some component-based frameworks that were available at that time and found that React was the best choice.

17:30 - Aimee asks the reason for open sourcing the framework. Ryan mentions that Enyo always has been open source. He also remarks that the team does not get a lot of input from the community and would like to get more information about what’s working and what’s not and how they can contribute back.

19:40 - Aaron asks about the kind of apps can be built by using Enact except for TV. Ryan says that any kind can be built but the hesitation is that the UI library is specially designed for TV, so they may look different for other spaces like phones or other devices.

20:35 – Advertisement – Sentry – Use the code “devchat” to get two months free on Sentry’s small plan.

21:30 - Aaron asks what decisions around making apps are made by Enact for the developers. Ryan explains that the architectural pattern they have chosen is higher order components, and there is a lot of attention on render props that can be easily plugged into the apps.

22:48 - Aaron asks if the state part was built by the team on their own. Ryan answers in affirmative that everything in Enact is completely built by the team, no external states are used within the framework. No decisions are made in the data space yet. He mentions that they had tried to limit their Enact development effort in cases where the solution was already available unless they had a new perspective on the problem.

24:30 - Aaron remarks the idea of Enact being something like a webpack is becoming clearer for him and asks Ryan if his team is spending most of their time in building component libraries. Ryan affirms by explaining that Enact is designed in layers. He goes on to explain that focus management is a difficult problem to solve where the ability to navigate an application intuitively such as in the case of remote control is handled by a certain component. Also, as LG ships TVs all over the world, there are significant internationalization requirements. He then elucidates the TV centric moonstone library in detail and states that they took all the base capabilities from it and formed a UI layer.

27:26 - Aaron asks if moonstone is theme-able. Ryan says that it’s not and the UI layer in not styled.

28:40 - Chris asks, as someone who manages open source projects and builds tools, about the process of making decisions on the kind of components to include and challenges Ryan and his team faced in the open source space.

29:45 – Ryan says that they haven’t had the ideal open source experience yet. They do have a lot of discussions on API design and components but it’s a struggle to what to include and what to not.

31:25 - Chris shares his own experience while stating that finding a common ground is always hard especially when there is internal resistance in convincing people to use new software. Ryan says that internally their biggest struggle is that a group of people use the Qt platform and there is chunk of webOS that is built on it and not on Enact. Trying to convince people to do the migration from Enyo to Enact was difficult but they have had most success in trying to eliminate friction and it was easier in the sense that there weren’t any required parameters for things.

36:05 – Aaron states that all his questions are answered and his understanding of Enact is clear.

36:21 – Advertisement  - Clubhouse

37:10 – Picks!

43:41- END – Advertisement - CacheFly!

 

Picks

Joe

Chris

Aimee

  • Coworkers at NPM

Aaron

Ryan




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MJS 091: Jamund Ferguson

Sponsors




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JSJ 349: Agile Development - The Technical Side with James Shore

Sponsors

Panel

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Aimee Knight

  • Joe Eames

  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

James Shore is a developer who specializing in extreme programming, an Agile method. He also used to host a screencast called Let’s Code Test-Driven JavaScript. They begin by discussing the core of Agile development, which James believes is being responsive to customers and business partners in a way that’s sustainable and humane for the programmers involved. It prioritizes individuals and interactions over processes and tools. More can be found in The Agile Manifesto.

James delves into the historical context of the immersion of Agile and how things have changed from the 90’s. Now, the name Agile is everywhere, but the ideals of agile are not as common. There is a tendency to either take Agile buzzwords and apply them to the way it was done long ago, or it’s absolute chaos. James talks about ways to implement Agile in the workplace. He believes that the best way to learn Agile is work with someone who knows Agile, or read a book on it and then apply it. James recommends his book The Art of Agile Development: Pragmatic Guide to Agile Software Development for people who want to started with Agile development. The panelists talk about where people often get stuck with implementing Agile. The hosts talk about their own processes in their company.

They discuss how people involved in the early days of Agile are disappointed in how commercial it has become.They agree that what’s really the most important is the results. If you can respond to a request to change direction in less than two weeks and you don’t have to spend months and months preparing something, and you do that in a way where the people on the team feel like their contributing, then you’re doing Agile. James thinks that the true genius of Agile is in the way the actual work is done rather than in the way your organize the work.

Links

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Aimee Knight:

Joe Eames:

  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix

Charles Max Wood:

  • Getting up early

  • John Sonmez Kanbanflow video

  • Drip

James Shore:




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MJS 092: Shashank Shekhar

Sponsors

Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Shashank Shekhar

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Shashank Shekhar, a product developer at Localtrip from India.

Shashank was introduced to programming when he was in school with Logo language. He then attended freeCodeCamp and learned JavaScript. Shashank talks about his journey as a developer and the projects he is working on now at Localtrip.

Links

Picks

Shashank Shekhar:

  • Do what you love

Charles Max Wood:




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JSJ 350: JavaScript Jabber Celebrates Episode 350!

Sponsors

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Aimee Knight
  • Aaron Frost
  • Chris Ferdinandi
  • Joe Eames
  • Tim Caswell

Notes:

This episode of JavaScript Jabber has the panelists reminiscing on the past. First, they discuss the projects they’re working on. Tim has joined MagicLeap doing JavaScript and C++. Aaron Frost is one of the founders of HeroDevs. AJ works at Big Squid, a company that takes spreadsheets and turns them into business actions, and is expecting a daughter. Aimee has been exploring developer advocacy, but wants to focus primarily on engineering. She is currently working at MPM. Joe has taken over the CEO position for thinkster.io, a company for learning web development online. Chris switched from being a general web developer specializing in JavaScript and has started blogging daily rather than once a week, and has seen an increase in sales of his vanilla JavaScript educational products. Charles discusses his long term goal for Devchat.tv. He wants to help people feel free in programming, and help people find opportunities though the Devchat.tv through empowering content.

Next, the panelists discuss their favorite episodes. Some of the most highly recommended episodes are

JSJ 124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich (1:44:07)

JSJ 161: Rust with David Herman (1:05:05)

JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint with Nicholas Zakas” (1:08:01)

JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler (43:36)

JSJ 218: Ember.js with Yehuda Katz (42:47)

Last, the panelists discuss what they do to unwind. Activities include working out, reading, playing Zelda and Mario Kart, studying other sciences like physics, painting miniatures, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Picks:

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

AJ O’Neal

Aimee Knight

Aaron Frost

Chris Ferdinandi

Tim Caswell




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MJS 093: Ben Lesh

Sponsors

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Ben Lesh, RxJS Lead and senior software engineer at Google.

Ben studied to be an illustrator in Columbus College of Art & Design, but upon graduation he realized he wanted to work in web development. Ben thinks having an interest in problem solving was a key factor on his journey in becoming a developer.

For his first programming job, he applied to a position and when he didn’t hear back he kept calling them until they gave him an opportunity. He then worked as a consultant at several other positions before he was offered a job at Netflix where he became the development lead for RxJS 5. Ben then switched over to Google’s Angular team. He is currently working on Angular Ivy at Google.

Ben then talks about the projects he has worked on that he is proud of. In his journey as a developer, Ben believes that the take-away lesson is asking lots of questions. He himself had no formal programming training and he got to where he is today by asking sometimes embarrassingly simple questions.

Links




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JSJ 351: Dinero.js with Sarah Dayan

Sponsors

Panel:

  • Joe Eames
  • Aimee Knight
  • Chris Ferdinandi
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest - Sarah Dayan

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, the panelists talk to Sarah Dayan, who is a Frontend Software Engineer working for Algolia in Paris. They about the complications in handling money in software development and ask Sarah about the journey that led to the creation of Dinero.js, it’s implementation details, importance of maintaining good documentation, dealing with issues faced along the way, various features of Dinero and working with open source projects in general. Check it out!

Show Topics:

0.40 - Advertisement : Netlify

1:44 - Sarah introduces herself and Chris talks about his interest in learning more about Dinero and compliments Sarah on its great documentation.

3.10 - Sarah gives some background saying that she created and published Dinero around a year ago. She goes on to explain that the Dinero library helps in handling monetary values. It comes with several methods to parse, manipulate and format these values. The reason behind creating it is that there is no consensus on representing money in software development currently. She shares the story from her previous job where her work was to maintain legacy accounting software, and along the way they realized, that since JavaScript did not have a way to natively represent decimal values, it led to adding large numbers of rounded up numbers continuously, eventually leading to wrong computations.

6:50 - Aimee asks about ways to handle different currencies in Dinero. Sarah answers that she has followed Martin Fowler’s money pattern where two different currencies were not allowed to be worked on directly, conversion was mandatory, just like in real life.

7:50 - Charles talks about his old freelance work where he was overwhelmed while handling and representing money in software.

8:25 - Aimee enquires if Dinero can be used for both frontend and backend. Sarah replies that it can be used anywhere and explains that there is no such thing as just a number when it comes to money, there must be a currency associated with it.

9:30 - Charles asks how to figure out the direction to go to when dealing with money and to make sure that all use-cases are covered. Sarah answers that in cases such as floating-point math where the computations don’t end up being accurate as handling is not supported, numbers can be used if treated as subunits (for e.g. 100cents = 1$). However, even then, there are issues in dividing money. She then explains the procedure of “allocation” from the Fowler pattern and she says that Dinero helps in doing the same in such scenarios.

12:54 - They discuss how they did not realize how difficult it was dealing with monetary values in development. Sarah talks about the fact that there are numerous aspects involved in it, giving the example of rounding off and stating that there are even factors such as different laws in different countries that need to be considered.

16:00 - AJ asks details about crafting the library, maintaining the centralized code and covering of edge cases and using inheritance. Sarah explains the concept of domain driven development and the importance of being an expert in the respective domains. She talks about the library structure briefly, describing that is kept very simple with a module pattern and it has allowed her to manage visibility, make it immutable, include currency converters, formatters and so on.

19:34 - AJ asks about the internal complexity of the implementation. Sarah answers that code wise it is extremely simple and easy, anyone with a limited JavaScript experience can understand it.

20:50 - AJ asks if it’s open source to which Sarah answers in affirmative and says that she would like external help with implementing some features too.

22:10 - Chris asks about Sarah’s excellent documentation approach, how has she managed to do it in a very detailed manner and how important it is in an open source project. Sarah says that she believes that documentation is extremely important, and not having good docs is a big hindrance to developers and to anyone who is trying to learn in general. She talks about her love for writing which explains the presence of annotations and examples in the source code.

27:50 - Charles discusses how autogenerated documentation gives an explanation about the methods and functions in the code but there is no guidance as such, so it is important to have guides. Sarah agrees by saying that searching for exact solutions is much simpler with it, leading to saving time as well.

29:43 - Chris speaks about Vue also being quite good at having guides and links and thanks Sarah for her work on Dinero.

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31:23 - Chris asks what the process is, for creating and running Dinero in different places. Sarah explains that she uses rollup.js which is a bundler suited for libraries, it takes in the ES module library and gives the output in any format. She states that the reason for using the ES module library is that she wanted to provide several builds for several environments with a clean and simple source and goes on to explain that these modules are native, have a terse syntax, easy to read and can be statically analyzed. She also gives the disadvantages in choosing webpack over rollup.

36:05 - Charles asks if anyone else is using Dinero. Sarah replies that around two or three people are using it, not much, but she is happy that it is out there to help people and she enjoyed working on it.

37:50 - Joe asks if there are any interesting stories about issues such as involving weird currency. Sarah answers in affirmative and gives the example of the method “hasCents”. She explains that she had to deprecate it because the unit “cents” does not have any value in non-Western currencies, and has created “hasSubUnits” method instead. She explains some problems like dealing with currencies that don’t support the ISO 4217 standard.

42:30 - Joe asks if social and political upheavals that affect the currencies have any effect on the library too. Sarah gives the example of Chinese and Japanese currencies where there are no sub-units and states that it is important to be flexible in developing stuff in an ever-changing domain like money. She also says that she does not include any third-party dependency in the library.

46:00 - AJ says that BigInts have arrived in JavaScript but there is no way to convert between typed arrays, hexadecimal or other storage formats. But later (1:10:55), he corrects that statement saying that BigInts in fact, does have support for hexadecimals. Sarah talks about wanting to keep the code simple and keep developer experience great.

49:08 - Charles asks about the features in Dinero. Sarah elaborates on wanting to work more on detecting currencies, improve the way it is built, provide better support for type libraries and get much better at documentation.

52:32 - Charles says that it is good that Sarah is thinking about adopting Dinero to fit people’s needs and requirements and asks about different forms of outreach. Sarah says that she blogs a lot, is active on Twitter and attends conferences as well. Her goal is not popularity per se but to help people and keep on improving the product.

55:47 - Chris talks about the flip side that as the product grows and becomes popular, the number of support requests increases too. Sarah agrees that open source projects tend to eat up a lot of time and that doing such projects comes with a lot of responsibility but can also help in getting jobs.

59:47 - Sarah says that she is available online on her blog - frontstuff, on Twitter as Sarah Dayan and on GitHub as sarahdayan.

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1:11:42  - END - Advertisement - CacheFly!

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MJS 094: Lee Byron

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest:  Lee Byron

Episode Summary

In this episode of My Ruby Story, Charles hosts Lee Byron, web engineering lead at Robinhood, a financial services company based in California.

Listen to Lee on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode and on the podcast Ruby Rogues on this episode.

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JSJ 352: Caffeinated Style Sheets: Supporting High Level CSS with JavaScript with Tommy Hodgins

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Episode Summary  

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, the panelists talk with Tommy Hodgins who specializes in responsive web design. He starts with explaining to listeners what it means by a responsive web layout and goes on to discuss the techniques in using JavaScript in CSS in depth.

He elaborates on dynamic styling of components, event-driven stylesheet templating, performance and timing characteristics of these techniques and describes different kinds of observers – interception, resize and mutation, and their support for various browsers. He also talks about how to go about enabling certain features by extending CSS, comparison to tools such as the CSS preprocessor and Media Queries, pros and cons of having this approach while citing relevant examples, exciting new features coming up in CSS, ways of testing the methods, caffeinated stylesheets, along with Qaffeine and Deqaf tools.

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Joe

Aimee

Chris

Charles

Tommy




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MJS 095: Misko Hevery

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Miško Hevery

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Miško Hevery, creator of Angular and Senior Computer Scientist at Google.

Miško was introduced to computers when his father brought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum home for them to play with. When they moved to the United States from Czech Republic, Miško attended Rochester Institute of Technology and studied Computer Engineering. After working for companies such as Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Xerox, he joined Google where created the Angular framework. For more on the story of how Miško created AngularJS, listen to the ‘Birth of Angular’ episode on the Adventures in Angular podcast here.

Miško is currently working on Angular Ivy at Google and plans to restart a blog in the future.

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MJS 096: Bart Wood

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Bart Wood

 

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood speaks with his namesake Bart Wood. They talked about tools for tracking and monitoring problems while using apps.  One app in particular was able to track new releases and errors, automatically scrub passwords to secure information as well as customize the scrubbing process while allowing users to provide feedback. 

Charles delves into the past of Bart Wood who has been working with the same company, Henry Shine.  He started studying Economics before he got into programming by chance and eventually ended up graduating with a Masters in Computer Science.  Initially Bart had misconceptions of computing and eventually realized that it was not only about maintaining the OS system and learning keyboard strokes, but creating new apps and delving into the world of creating new software.




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JSJ 353: Signal R with Brady Gaster LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

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Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Brady Gaster

In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics.

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Brady

Charles




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JSJ 354: Elm with Richard Feldman

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Panel

  • Joe Eames
  • Aimee Knight

Joined by special guest: Richard Feldman

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Richard Feldman, primarily known for his work in Elm, the author of “Elm in Action” and Head of Technology at NoRedInk, talks about Elm 0.19 and the new features introduced in it. He explains how the development work is distributed between the Elm creator – Evan Czaplicki and the other members of the community and discusses the challenges on the way to Elm 1.0.

Richard also shares some educational materials for listeners interested in learning Elm and gives details on Elm conferences around the world touching on the topic of having diversity among the speakers. He finally discusses some exciting things about Elm which would encourage developers to work with it.

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MJS 097: Charles Lowell

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest:  Charles Lowell

Episode Summary

In this episode of My Ruby Story, Charles hosts Charles Lowell, founder and  developer at The Frontside Software based in Austin, TX.

Listen to Charles on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode.

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JSJ 355: Progressive Web Apps with Aaron Gustafson LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

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Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by special guest: Aaron Gustafson

Episode Summary 

This episode of JavaScript Jabber comes to you live from Microsoft Ignite. Charles Max Wood talks to Aaron Gustafson who has been a Web Developer for more than 20 years and is also the Editor in Chief at “A List Apart”. Aaron gives a brief background on his work in the web community, explains to listeners how web standardization has evolved over time, where Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) come from, where and how can they be installed, differences between them and regular websites and their advantages. They then delve into more technical details about service workers, factors affecting the boot up time of JavaScript apps, best practices and features that are available with PWAs. 

Aaron mentions some resources people can use to learn about PWAs, talks about how every website can benefit from being a PWA, new features being introduced and the PWA vs Electron comparison. In the end, they also talk about life in general, that understanding what people have gone through and empathizing with them is important, as well as not making judgements based on people’s background, gender, race, health issues and so on.

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MJS 098: Vitali Zaidman

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Vitali Zaidman

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Vitali Zaidman, Technical Lead at WellDone Software Solutions. He is also the author of the popular blog piece: “An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2019”.

Vitali has been writing code since he was 13 years old. After completing his military service, he attended The Open University of Israel where he took computer science courses. He picked JavaScript not knowing that it was going to be so popular.

He has been working for WellDone Software Solutions since he was a student where he has had the chance to work in many different projects. Vitali feels in order to keep up with technology it is important to work in different projects.

Vitali talks about projects he has worked on that he is proud of, one of which is his library at https://github.com/welldone-software/why-did-you-render

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JSJ 356: Build Websites Like It's 2005 with Keith Cirkel

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Panel

  • Chris Ferdinandi
  • Aimee Knight
  • Aaron Frost
  • AJ O’Neal

Joined by special guest: Keith Cirkel

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Keith Cirkel, Senior Application Engineer at GitHub, briefly explains the projects he is working with and moves on to the recent changes done by GitHub to their website, including the decision to remove jQuery, and not choosing a popular framework such as React or Vue. He talks about some problems in using Internet Explorer 11, how these GitHub changes can help with certain browser compatibility issues, and a few challenges the team had to face during the redesigning process.

The panelists then discuss event delegation, performance considerations, Polyfill.io and web components. Keith gives some insight into accessibility and they talk about related user concerns.

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MJS 099: Christopher Buecheler

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Christopher Buecheler

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Christopher Buecheler, novelist, web developer and founder of CloseBrace, a JavaScript tutorial and resource site.

Christopher is a self-taught full-stack web developer with extensive experience in programming with JavaScript, jQuery, React.js, Angular.js, and much more. Listen to Christopher on the  JavaScript Jabber podcast.

Christopher started CloseBrace because he really enjoys helping people and giving back to the community. In his spare time, he writes science fiction novels and is also working on a web application for knitting called Stitchly with a friend.

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JSJ 357: Event-Stream & Package Vulnerabilities with Richard Feldman and Hillel Wayne

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Panel

  • Aaron Frost
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Chris Ferdinandi
  • Joe Eames
  • Aimee Knight
  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by special guests: Hillel Wayne and Richard Feldman

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Hillel Wayne kicks off the podcast by giving a short background about his work, explains the concepts of formal methods and the popular npm package - event-stream, in brief. The panelists then dive into the recent event-stream attack and discuss it at length, focusing on different package managers and their vulnerabilities, as well as the security issues associated with them. They debate on whether paying open source developers for their work, thereby leading to an increase in contribution, would eventually help in improving security or not. They finally talk about what can be done to fix certain dependencies and susceptibilities to prevent further attacks and if there are any solutions that can make things both convenient and secure for users.

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MJS 100: Joe Eames

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Joe Eames

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Joe Eames, CEO of Thinkster.io and organizer of many different conferences, two of which are the AngularJS conference, ng-conf, and the WordPress developer conference, LoopConf.

Joe is a front end web developer and an educator. He has authored over 10 Pluralsight.com courses. He is also a panelist on the JavaScript Jabber podcast and the Adventures in Angular podcast on DevChat.TV.

Joe talks about his passion project, being on the organization team of Framework Summit, a two-day conference focused on all front end JavaScript frameworks, the first of which was held in Utah in October 2018. It was a great success and he and the rest of the organization team will be looking to repeat it in January of 2020.

Another conference Joe was involved in organizing was React Conf 2018 which took place in October in Henderson, Nevada. He is in the process of organizing the React Conf 2019 with the rest of the organization team.

Aside from organizing conferences Joe’s second passion is education. He has started up a podcast called Dev Ed Podcast.

Joe has recently become the CEO of Thinkster.io. Thinkster.io is a unique platform where learners can really master web development with a lot of hands on training. Joe wants developers to be able to learn how to “generate” solutions to problems. He explains the concept of “interleaving” while learning a subject which helps students retain more and learn faster.

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MJS 101: Chris Ferdinandi

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Chris Ferdinandi, a Senior Front-End Engineer at Mashery. Chris is also a panelist on the podcast JavaScript Jabber and runs Go Make Things.

Chris started out his career as in Human Resources, decided he wanted to go into development after he was asked to work on a coding project by his manager and he really enjoyed it. He got his first coding job as an entry level developer after attending a web development conference.

Chris authors Vanilla JavaScript Pocket Guides which are short, focused e-books and video courses made for beginners.

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  • Running along San Francisco Bay
  • Marriage