Van Emden, Joan

Panel:

• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• Charles Max Wood

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!

Links:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• React
• Elixir
• Elm
• Vue
• Automerge - GITHUB
• Functional – Light JavaScript
• Lego’s Massive Cloud City Star Wars
• Lego Shop
• The Traveler’s Gift – Book
• Jocks Rule, Nerds Drool by Jennifer Wright
• 2ality – JavaScript and more
• Cooper Press
• Book – Ethan Brown
• O’Reilly Community – Ethan Brown’s Bio
• Ethan Brown’s Twitter

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean
• Cache Fly
•  

Picks:

Aimee

• Pettier

Joe

• Lego - Star Wars Betrayal at Cloud City
• Functional-Light JavaScript

Charles

• The Traveler’s Gift
• The Shack
• The Expanse

Ethan

• Jocks Rule, Nerd Drool
• JavaScipt Blog by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
• Cooper Press

Sponsors

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

• Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

• Linode

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• AJ O’Neal

• Joe Eames

Episode Summary

Today the panel discusses the necessity of a front end framework. Overall, there is a consensus that frameworks are not necessary in all situations. They discuss the downsides of using frameworks, such as being restricted by the framework when doing edge development and the time required for learning a framework. They talk about the value of frameworks for learning patterns in programming.

The panel delves into the pros and cons of different frameworks available. Joe shares a story about teaching someone first without a framework and then introducing them to frameworks, and the way it helped with their learning. One of the pros of frameworks is that they are better documented than manual coding. They all agree that it is not enough to just know a framework, you must continue to learn JavaScript as well.

They talk about the necessity for new programmers to learn a framework to get a job, and the consensus is that a knowledge of vanilla JavaScript and a general knowledge of the framework for the job is important. New programmers are advised to not be crippled by the fear of not knowing enough and to have an attitude of continual learning. In the technology industry, it is easy to get overwhelmed by all the developments and feel that one cannot possibly learn it all. Charles gives advice on how to find your place in the development world. The show concludes with the panel agreeing that frameworks are overall a good thing and are valuable tools.

Links

• JWT

• Angular

• Vue

• Backbone

• GoLang

• Express

• React

• Redux

• Hyper HTML

• 4each

• Pascal

• JQuery

• Npm.js

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Podwrench

Aimee Knight:

• How to Love Your Job and Avoid Burnout

• So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Vanilla JS toolkit

• Thinkster

• Artifact Conference

AJ O’Neal:

• Binary Cocoa

• Binary Cocoa Slamorama Kickstarter

• Binary Cocoa Straight 4

• Root

Sponsors

• Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

• Linode

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• AJ O’Neal

• Joe Eames

Episode Summary

Today the panel discusses what is necessary to get a website up and how complicated or simple it needs to be. They mention different tools they like for static sites and ways to manage their builds and websites. They talk about why some people choose to host their websites and at what point the heavier tools become a concern. They discuss whan it is necessary to use those heavy tools. 

They caution listeners to beware of premature optimization, because sometimes businesses will take advantage of newer developers and make them think they need all these shiny bells and whistles, when there is a cheaper way to do it. It is important to keep the tools you work with simple and to learn them so that if you encounter a problem, you have some context and scope. The option of serverless website hosting is also discussed, as well as important things to know about servers.

The panel discusses what drives up the price of a website and if it is worth it to switch to a cheaper alternative. They discuss the pros and cons of learning the platform yourself versus hiring a developer. The importance of recording the things that you do on your website is mentioned. Several of the panelists choose to do this by blogging so that if you search for a problem you can find ones you’ve solved in the past.

Links

• Heroku

• Github Pages

• Netlify

• Eleventy

• DigitalOcean

• Lightsale

• Ubuntu

• Git clone

• Node static server

• Systemd script

• NGinx

• Cloud66

• Thinkster

• Gatsby

• Docker

• Gentoo

• How to schedule posts with a static website

• How to set up automatic deployment with Git with a vps

• Automating the deployment of your static site with Github and Hugo

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Microsoft build

Aimee Knight:

• Systems Thinking is as Important as Ever for New Coders

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Adrian Holivadi framework video

• Server Pilot

AJ O’Neal:

• Jeff Atwood tweet

• More on Stackflow Architecture

• Minio

Joe Eames:

• Miniature painting

Sponsors

• Sustain Our Software

• Sentry– use the code “devchat” for $100 credit 

• Adventures in Blockchain

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

Episode Summary

In today’s show, Chuck talks about the recent tweet thread about 10x engineers. He goes through each of the points in the tweet and talks about each of them in turn. There are only two points he sort of agrees with, and believes the rest to be absolute garbage. One of the issues with this tweet is that it doesn’t define what a 10x engineer is. Defining a 10x engineer is difficult because it is also impossible to measure a truly average engineer because there are many factors that play into measuring productivity. Chuck turns the discussion to what a 10x engineer is to him and how to find one. A 10x engineer is dependent on the organization that they are a part of, because they are not simply found, they are made. When a 10x engineer is added to a team, the productivity of the entire team increases. Employers have to consider firstly what you need in your team and how a person would fit in. You want to avoid changing the entire culture of your organization. Consider also that a 10x engineer may be hired as a 2x engineer, but it is the employer that turns them into a 10x engineer. Overall, Chuck believes these tweets are asinine because it’s impossible to measure what makes a 10x engineer in the first place, and hiring a person that fits the attributes in the list would be toxic to your company. 

Links

• 10x engineer twitter thread

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Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Copyhackers.com

• Good to Great by Jim Collins

• Keto diet

• Podcast Movement

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Charles talks about the new direction he has for the company. He wants  to drive people to the point that they have the skills that make people want to hire and work with them, to teach them how to ‘Max out’. Today the panel the skills that developers need to progress in their careers: social skills. 

The panel talks about their observations from work that the people who advanced and grow in their career were the ones with social skills, not necessarily with technical skills. The company wants to get stuff done, and if your social skills are getting in the way of projects getting done because you can’t work with others, you are not that useful to the company, and you will be stuck in the lower ranks while others who may not have the same technical skills will rise in the ranks because they are pleasant to work with. Mani talks about his personal experience getting laid off for lacking these soft skills. But then he read the book 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green, realized his shortcomings, and started to apply just one lesson from the book. Within 6 months, he was promoted.

Mani delves deeper into the first lesson taught in 48 Laws of Power, Never Outshine the Master. Fundamentally, this means that you don’t try to prove in meetings how good you are, or that they’re wrong, or that you think that you are better than them. The more you the aforementioned things, the less likely you will be to get promoted or trusted. Mani talks about how he used to do these things and how it cost him multiple jobs. When he put this lesson into practice, he changed his methods and the boss started to like him, leading to his promotion 6 months later. The panel discusses this lesson and what benefits can come from it. 

Mani shares another lesson that he learned through the story of a friend trying to get him to invest in his business. After Mani refused to invest multiple times, his friend stopped asking him to invest, but instead asked him for business advice. Eventually, Mani invested in the business because when he saw that his friend was influenced by his advice, it engendered trust between them. The panel agrees that if you want to influence someone, you have to be influenced by them. It is important to treat someone as a person rather than an asset or wallet, and ensure them that their investment is not their end goal. One of the most fundamental social skills that you must be able to like people, because other people can smell manipulation. 

The panel transitions to talking about the paradoxical nature of social skills and that they are often the opposite of what you think will work in a situation. Unfortunately, there will always be difficult people to work with. To illustrate how to work with difficult people, Mani shares the story of how Gengis Khan was convinced not to destroy a city of artists and engineers by his advisor, Yelu Chucai. Gengis Khan agreed because Yelu Chucai was able to structure his plea in a way that would also benefit Gengis Khan. 

The conversation shifts to how to conduct an interview to see if a candidate will fit into your team culture. First, you must know what you’re looking for and understand your team culture, and then ask for stories of when they accomplished something in the interview. If every story is all about how they did something and they don’t include other people, then that may indicate their self-centeredness. They discuss the Ben Franklin Effect. 

For those listeners wondering where to begin with all this self improvement, Mani has read over 2,000 books on business and offers a course on his website, 2000books.com. Mani has teamed up with JavaScript Jabber to offer a special deal to the listeners of this podcast. To get lifetime access to Mani’s courses at a 40% discount, follow the links below. 

Panelists

• Steve Edwards

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Mani Vaya

Sponsors

• React Native Radio

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

• React Round Up

Links

• 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green

• The 360 Degree Leader by John C. Maxwell

• The Ben Franklin Effect

• javascriptjabber.com/social and 2000books.com 

  • 40% off for the first 200 people

  • Coupon code: Jabber

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Steve Edwards:

• Rex Chapman

Charles Max Wood:

• BombBomb

• IndieHackers.com 

• Stolen bike prank

Mani Vaya: 

• How I Built This by NPR

• As a Man Thinketh

Busse, Richard C

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Weis, Judith S., 1941-

Barrass, Robert

Swales, John

Hughes, Michael Pycraft, 1970-

Rietman, Ed

Rieth, Michael

Theodore, Louis

Edwards, Steven A. (Steven Alan), 1951-

Roco, M.C. (Mihail C.)

Singh, Ashok K., author

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