MJS 031: Mike Hostetler

Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Mike Hostetler. Mike talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community. Listen to learn more about Mike!

[00:50] – Introduction to Mike Hostetler

Mike was on episode 133 which was like 2.5 years ago.

[01:45] – How did you get into programming?

First computer

Mike got their first computer when he was 5 or 6 years old. 286 IBM Clone had a command prompt that he spent several years trying to figure out how to code with it until he stumbled on a few basic books at their local public library in junior high. He began teaching himself how to code with QBasic and Borland C++. He, then, found the internet early high school and downloaded the Mosaic browser. He started coding HTML and early JavaScript, late 90’s. Then, he went off to college to get a Computer Science degree.

First job

When Mike was late high school, he decided that he knew enough coding that he was going to try to get a job. He ended up finding web development companies in the phone book and calling each one of them, trying to explain that his 16-year-old self could help them code and build websites. He ended up landing a job and was paid minimum wage to build HTML sites - a lot of 1x1 pixels transparent gifs, coding HTML by hand and notepad. Then, he ended up working for that company for his first couple of years of college as well.

[05:30] – How did you wind up doing JavaScript?

After college, the job that Mike landed was spent on learning Microsoft technologies and then half on the open-source side of learning the LAMP stack. At that time, it required hand-coding JavaScript. His next role is building a custom mapping application which was a single page application that heavily relied upon JavaScript. This was client-side object-oriented. There were no frameworks but it was enough script to build a URL that called a custom CGI to render the map. So, he immediately jumped in and started using the early JavaScript frameworks and prototypes.

The role that Mike was in next was building a touchscreen capable device. They needed custom plug-ins to provide the highlight focus effect around the button. He needed to write a plugin to do that and jQuery has just been released. So, he stripped all the prototype code, throw JQuery in there, and then, write a plug-in to navigate this interface by keyboard.

[09:20] – Contributions with JavaScript

jQuery

Mike’s first participation was on the JQuery project. If you ever use the JQuery plug-ins site, the old site, that was his contribution. He ended up running infrastructure for JQuery for several years. JQuery launched his business career. He switched into an entrepreneur around 2009. Since then, he’s contributed in numerous ways through speaking, leading training, and writing articles. He was a co-author of the JQuery Cookbook.

Node.js

As Node began to get more popular, Mike switched his attention to Node and found passion around the Sails.js project. It was a Node framework that made it easy to build Express-powered apps with Node and limit a lot of the convention over configuration elements of the Sails framework. That morphed into ES6 rewrite of Sails called the Trails framework. Currently, he is an organizer of the Chicago Node.js Meetup and he’s a contributor to the Trails framework.

[11:50] – JQuery challenges and experiences

jQuery 1.4

Mike and the team made community’s problems their problems so the gravity of what they were working didn’t hit them very much until jQuery 1.4. They had an online conference. They all recorded talks and they’re releasing a talk a day for jQuery that will be going to accommodate the 1.4 release. He remembered that he was setting up, managing the servers, and was doing some last-minute configuration. Then, John had tweeted that 1.4 was ready, pointing to jQuery.com. The web server just ground to a halt as he saw the traffic come in off a tweet.

Open-source community

Mike remain friends with a lot of them. According to Mike, they were just normal people who made a choice to lean in, contribute, where those contributions ended up becoming popular. Looking forward, he said that he’s going to continue to contribute to the open-source community. He wants to help the junior developer that is learning ES6 for the first time and is solving a syntax error. From Mike’s perspective, technologies come in waves. jQuery was a wave but jQuery’s wave focuses its energy into JavaScript’s wave. Certain people catch a contribution wave. React is on the upswing. Node is in an interesting spot because they’ve been on the upswing for many years but there’s new work that could be done. He said that had a shot to be at the forefront of the wave and got to see it.

Advice

For anybody else that maybe listening, find a spot where there’s new ground that you can contribute to and just dive in and do what you can to solve a problem to make it better. You’ll catch your wave.

[21:00] – How to pick frameworks

Node frameworks

There was a Reddit thread about Node frameworks in 2017 that listed out all the possible frameworks. The classic answer is to use the right tool for the right job but Mike’s answer is: Node has grown so big that different frameworks are built to different people on the learning curve of Node. The other thing that Node has done is they have this culture of really running away from any Monolithic one-size-fits-all solution. The community of Node has made sure that they make space for an incredible diversity of solutions and frameworks.

Antipattern

The anti-pattern is: what is the best framework of 2017. That’s the wrong question in the Node culture. Look at your team, look at your project, what framework can you be most productive in and what framework can you contribute back into the community with? That is one of the key reasons that Node itself has remained and continued to grow in popularity.

[23:40] – Role in Sails and Trails

Mike’s not contributing to the Sails project at the moment. He has been focusing on the Trails project. He has written a couple of Trails packs or the equivalent of plug-ins, messed around with GraphQL. He is also helping answer questions in the Gitter chat – small ways.

[24:25] – Best ways to contribute

Stack Overflow

Go on to Stack Overflow. Subscribe to tags where you can answer questions. Every answer on Stack Overflow is a contribution. Go, watch, subscribe to the issue queues for the projects that you use. Just even sharing your experience with how you solve a problem, there is somebody that you could reach down to and answer their questions that take their burden off.

Gitter

Get involved in the Gitter chat. Listen, watch, stand on the sidelines, and see what’s going on how the community works.

Pull request

The next step, if you see a problem, submit a pull request, listen to see what the roadmap is, and see what you can contribute.

Infrastructure

A lot of projects need help in infrastructure in their build scripts to produce better-written code. You can document for them. If you wait for the next sexy thing to do, you’ll never get there. Be humble.

Fun

Remember that open-source is fun. If it becomes a drag, you are doing it wrong. Look for the opportunities that are aligned with what you do so it’s a fun, happy experience.

[26:45] – What are you working on now?

Raise Marketplace

Currently, Mike is taking on a new role as Director of Front-end Engineering at Raise Marketplace. It is a marketplace start-up in Chicago. His focus is rebuilding the front-end of Raise on a micro service Node.js in Go service architecture. They have also been listed to help some folks at Google in the web performance team. They are always hiring. If you are looking for a remote role for a start-up. Feel free to reach out to him on Twitter or on Raise.

ModernWeb

Mike’s side-project now is a website called ModernWeb.com, where they help connect companies with teams of software developers and tell the stories of those software projects. A lot of developers are great at writing code but are terrible at telling the awesome things that we do. So, ModernWeb exists to tell the stories of development. The great side effect is companies want to work with you when you tell your stories. They help complete that circle. Go over to ModernWeb.com and you can contact them through the website or you can drop him an email at mike@modernweb.com.

Picks

Mike Hostetler

• App: OmniFocus
• App: Sleep Cycle
• App: Life Cycle
• Zapier
• Twitter: @mikehostetler
• Mike-hostetler.com

Charles Max Wood

• Talk: Setting up and Contributing to Open-source Projects by Kent C. Dodds
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

Panel:

• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Jeremy Fairbank

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Jeremy Fairbank about his talk Practical Functional Programming. Jeremy is a remote software developer and consultant for Test Double. They talk about what Test Double is and what they do there and the 6 things he touched on in his talk, such as hard to follow code, function composition, and mutable vs immutable data. They also touch on the theory of unit testing, if functional programming is the solution, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Jeremy intro
• Works for Test Double
• What he means by “remote”
• What is Test Double?
• They believe software is broken and they are there to fix it
• His talk - Practical Functional Programming
• The 6 things he talked about in his talk
• Practical aspects that any software engineer is going to deal with
• Purity and the side effects of programming in general
• Hard to follow code
• Imperative VS declarative code
• Code breaking unexpectedly
• Mutable data VS immutable data
• The idea of too much code
• Combining multiple functions together to make more complex functions
• Function composition
• Elm, Elixir, and F#
• Pipe operator
• Scary to refactor code
• Static types
• The idea of null
• The theory of unit testing
• Is functional programming the solution?
• His approach from the talk
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Test Double
• His talk - Practical Functional Programming
• Elm
• Elixir
• F#
• @elpapapollo
• jeremyfairbank.com
• Jeremy’s GitHub
• Jeremy’s YouTube

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Aimee

• American Dollar
• Force with lease

AJ

• Superfight

Joe

• The 2018 Web Developer Roadmap by Brandon Morelli
• Svelte

Jeremy

• Programming Elm
• The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Connect.Tech

Sponsors

• Triplebyte
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• Clubhouse
• CacheFly

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.

Links

• Keith’s website
• Keith’s GitHub
• Keith’s Twitter
• GitHub Engineering blog
• Financial Times – Polyfill service
• Include fragment - element

Picks

Aaron Frost:

• Bag Man
• What It’s Like to Be A Woman on the Internet

Aimee Knight:

• Smooth Sailing with Kubernetes

Joe Eames:

• GitHub Free users get free unlimited private repositories
• Swig
• Things I don’t know as of 2018

AJ O’Neal:

• Isopropyl alcohol
• Bang good electronics
• Soldering Iron – Hakko, X-Tronic

Keith Cirkel:

• GitHub careers
• Heston’s Pod & Chips
• Brexit

Chris Ferdinandi:

• 52 things I learned in 2018
• Learn Vanilla JS

Sponsors

• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• Linode offers $20 credit
• CacheFly

Panel

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

Joined by special guest: Mikeal Rogers

Episode Summary

This episode of JavaScript Jabber starts with Mikeal Rogers introducing himself and his work in brief. Charles clarifies that he wants to focus this show on some beginner content such as node.js basics, so Mikeal gives some historical background on the concept, elaborates on its modern usage and features and explains what “streams” are, for listeners who are starting to get into JavaScript. The panelists then discuss how languages like Go and Python compare to node.js in terms of growth and individual learning curves. Mikeal answers questions about alternate CLIs, package management, Pika, import maps and their effect on node.js, and on learning JavaScript in general. Chris, Charles and AJ also chip in with their experiences in teaching modern JS to new learners and its difficulty level in comparison to other frameworks. They wrap up the episode with picks.

Links

• Mikeal on Twitter
• Mikeal on GitHub

Follow JavaScript Jabber on Devchat.tv, Facebook and Twitter.

Picks

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Artifact Conference

Aimee Knight:

• A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There
• Programming: doing it more vs doing it better

Mikeal Rogers:

• The Future of the Web – CascadiaJS 2018
• Brave Browser

Charles Max Wood:

• Podwrench

Sponsors

• Datadog

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

Panel

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• Joe Eames

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

With Special Guests: Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington

Episode Summary

Today’s guests Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington are developers for Ionic, with Josh working on the open source part of the framework on Ionic. They talk about their new compiler for web components called Stencil. Stencil was originally created out of work they did for Ionic 4 (now available for Vue, React, and Angular) and making Ionic 4 able to compliment all the different frameworks. They talk about their decision to build their own compiler and why they decided to open source it. Now, a lot of companies are looking into using Stencil to build design systems

The panel discusses when design systems should be implemented. Since Ionic is a component library that people can pull from and use themselves, Jeff and Mike talk about how they are using Stencil since they’re not creating a design system.

The panel discusses some of the drawbacks of web components. They discuss whether or not Cordova changes the game at all. One of the big advantages of using Stencil is the code that is delivered to a browser is generated in such a way that a lot of things are handled for you, unlike in other systems.The panelists talk about their thoughts on web components and the benefits of using a component versus creating a widget the old fashioned way. One such benefit of web components is that you can change the internals of how it works without affecting the API. Josh and Mike talk about some of the abilities of Stencil and compare it to other things like Tachyons. There is a short discussion of the line between frameworks and components and the dangers of pre optimization. If you would like to learn more about Stencil, go to stenciljs.com and follow Josh and Mike @Jtoms1 and @mhartington.

Click here to cast your vote NOW for JavaScript Jabber - Best Dev Podcast Award

Links

• Building Design Systems book

• Stencil

• Cordova

• Shadow DOM

• Tachyons 

• Ionic 4

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Aimee Knight:

• What Does Debugging a Program Look Like?

AJ O’Neal:

• Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

• Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack

• Prettier

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Kindle Paperwhite

• Company of One

Charles Max Wood:

• Ladders with feet

• Lighthouse

• Acorns

Joe Eames:

• Moment.js

• How To Increase Your Page Size by 1500% article

• Day.js

Josh Thomas:

• Toy Story 4

Mike Hartington:

• Building Design Systems

• Youmightnotneed.com

Mike North is the Ember guy at Frontend Masters and LinkedIn’s web developer trainer. Today the panel is talking about the upcoming Ember update, which Mike calls a total reinvention of the way you build with Ember. Finally, they are letting go of the cruft and stuff they had to hold on to in order to support IE8 and using modern interface

The panel talks about some of the issues with IE8, and agree that the reason Ember felt its age because it was built for IE8. Ember 314 is moving from the past into the present, a sleek modern way to build apps. Mike talks about how easy the new Ember is to use. 

Mike talks about the excitement in the Ember community because the new build is focused on stability and seamlessness. Charles talks about his less seamless experience with the Angular community. For context, Mike North’s first frontend masters course was recorded in 2014, and he’s only had to change two lines of code. Ember is the only framework that has managed to go all the way from IE7/IE8 to today without a major gap,breaks, or rewrites.

They transition to talking about what keeps Ember going. There is an effort to make sure things are decentralized and not tied to any specific company, although Apple, Netflix, Nasa, and PlaysStation all use it. LinkedIn has also been hiring Ember core member to continue working on it, and sponsoring open source work. 

Next, they talk about how Ember works with TypeScript. You can install an Ember add on with one terminal command that will enable TypeScript in an Ember app.There are some issues that could cause misalignment with JavaScript and TypeScript, but Ember has designed things around it. MIke talks about the major change in the learning curve with using Ember and how far Vanilla JS will take you. Overall, it is a lot more approachable than it used to be. 

They move on to talk about the availability of third party solutions with Ember. Mike assures them that Ember has add-ons, and parts of the framework are opening up to allow experimentation with components. There are lots of ways to make Ember your own without running the risk of diverging, giving more flexibility than ever while maintaining the happy path. Testing within Ember is also a priority, and they want the code to be as readable as possible.

The last topic discussed in this show is the importance of developer education. LinkedIn looks at employment numbers and the rate at which new jobs open, and software engineering is growing like crazy and will likely continue to grow.The rate at which new people are graduating with computer science and programming degrees, as well as those from unconventional backgrounds, is not keeping up with the number of jobs. This means that there will be fewer senior people spread across bigger groups of developers with less experience. The panel agrees that it is the responsibility of people who have been around or learned something period to pass on the knowledge because the more knowledge is passed on, the more stable things will remain as seniors become more scarce. It is also important for companies to level up junior developers. They conclude by talking about tools available for people who want to learn more about Ember Octane, and Mike makes an open request to the JS community. 

Panelists

• Charles Max Wood

• Steve Emmerich

• Chris Ferdinandi

• Aimee Knight

• AJ O’Neal

• Christopher Buecheler

With special guest: Mike North

Sponsors

• React Native Radio

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan

• Dev Ed Podcast

Links

• Ember

• Frontend Masters

• IE8

• Ember Octane

• Sprout Core

• TypeScript

• ES6

• Lodash 

• Mocha

• Backstop.js 

• Semver

• https://twitter.com/thefalken/status/1177483501777473537

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Vanilla JS Academy, get 30% off with code ‘jsjabber’

• leanweb.dev

Steve Emmerich:

• 123 Magic

• RGDK

Aimee Knight:

• Recursion blog post

• Wholesome Provisions Protein Cereal

AJ O’Neal:

• Carby V2 by Insurrection Industries

• GameCube Mods

Charles Max Wood:

• Nikon D5600

• Rode Newsshooter

• Viltrox light panel

• Quest Nutrition pumpkin bars

Christopher Buecheler:

• Tool’s Fear Inoculum on Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play

Mike North:

• Github Universe

• Github Tracer Bench

• Follow Mike @mike-north on Github, @northm on LinkedIn, and @michaellnorth on Twitter

In this episode of My JavaScript Story is Charles talks to Mike Hartington. Mike Hartington is a Developer Advocate for Ionic Framework and a Google Developer Expert, but he is most famous in the developer community because of his beard.

Charles asks how Mike got introduced to development. Mike tried to code Tic-Tac-Toe and that was a challenge because knowing the rules to the game and trying to tell a computer the rules are two very two different things.

Mike then majored in Graphic Design at Rhode Island College, and started learning Flash and ActionScript. Mike talks about what kind of projects he created with Flash and ActionScript and then the process of teaching himself JavaScript.

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Mike Hartington

Links

• Mike's Twitter

• Ionic

Sponsors

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan

• Adventures in DevOps

• Adventures in Blockchain

• CacheFly

Picks

 Mike Hartington

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Trailer

Charles Max Wood:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Superfans by Pat Flynn

Going by a letter written by Nawaz Sharif to Narendra Modi, that he was 'much satisfied' with their meeting in New Delhi, the two prime ministers have succeeded in striking up a working relationship.

Clarke, Arthur C. (Arthur Charles), 1917-2008

Culy, Martin M., author

Siker, Jeffrey S., author

Eikelboom, Alexandria, 1987- author

43 cases from Ganjam district; State’s total mounts to 271

Edmonds, Mike, author

Korschun, Daniel

Seiwert, Lothar

Seiwert, Lothar

Seiwert, Lothar, author

Song, Mike, 1964-

Interview with Scott David. Solomon, MD, author of Association of Influenza-like Illness Activity With Hospitalizations for Heart Failure: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study

The broader structure of Nifty still looks weak though

While many other parts of the country are bracing for a heatwave, India Meteorological Department (IMD), Goa, has said the state may be spared of the phenomenon and may only face a slight increase in temperature.

Dewey Library - K3255.A958 2018

Online Resource

Online Resource

Online Resource

Dewey Library - KZ4264.V57 2018

Experts point out in India it is left to individuals to quarantine themselves voluntarily

The spillover of compliance requirements from FY20 to FY21 makes experts wary of the ripple effect on business financials

Cryo-EM structure of key coronavirus protein could help develop vaccines against the virus

President Donald Trump, who publicly identified the affected Pence aide, said he was "not worried" about the virus spreading in the White House. Nonetheless, officials said they were stepping up safety protocols for the complex.

Dordrecht : Springer, 2006

The company is planning to hire 1000 employees by the end of June across markets. Companies such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS, WNS and others have delayed pay hikes and put promotions on hold as they see uncertainty over business growth in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak across key markets. CSS Corp has also paid 100% of variable salary to the majority of its employees.