My JS Story Justin Meyers

On this week’s episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood interviews Justin Meyers Co­founder and CEO of Bitovi, a Javascript consulting firm focused on simplifying Javascript development through the use and creation of open source tools as well general consulting, training, and web applications. He was on Episode 202 and talked about DoneJS and CanJS. Tune in to hear Justin’s full story!

7th Grade and a TI­82 [3:02]
Justin’s discovery of conditional statements and methods on a classic TI­82 was his first taste of programming. With a little guidance, he soon learned to program games on the TI­82 and then later moved onto bigger and better mediums like C and QBasic.

Grunt work is good for you. [4:51]
While studying Computer Science, Justin finds out that professors often have grunt work, and although they may not pay well now, sometimes they can in time lead to loads of experience and maybe even a bigger job. After 4 years of working on websites and writing documentation, he gets his first real job at Accenture.

Open Source and reducing waste. [6:23]
Accenture, while giving him a great chance to make some impressive projects, provoked Justin to see the efficiency in sharing code. Justin and a college friend get together to work on a project to build a platform that…builds. Although their project was unsuccessful, the tools they started to create for the project had plenty of potential.

The Last desperate gasp. AKA shaving his head. [9:40]
Justin talks about the Ajaxian blog and conference. Ten years ago, the Ajaxian blog was one of the best online resources for Javascript news. Justin was running low on funds and struggling and as his “last desperate gasp” he heads to the Ajaxian conference with his head shaved. Leaving only “Javascript MVC” shaped out of his hair. This stunt gets him remembered by many of the important attendees and also scores him his big break with a consulting job with T­-Mobile. Two to Three weeks later, Justin had a stroke. Justin talks about how incredible the timing was.

How Javascript MVC came to be. [13:23]
Justin talks about starting with JSJunction and modeling after it. Their first steps were to add a model layer as well as Event Delegation. Javascript MVC reflects some of Ruby on Rails. Justin worked with Peter Svensson from Dojo, with a methodology that at the time seemed crazy. Justin reminisces when Steve Jobs “Killed” Flash with HTML5 and CSS.

Bitovi begins. [17:24]
Justin talks about how the T­-Mobile job meant that he would need an official business. Originally dubbing it JupiterIT. Justin found that MVC was too encompassing and that programmers enjoyed a sense of creativity. By pulling Javascript MVC’s tools apart and creating single frameworks from the tools, Justin then created tools like CanJS and DoneJS.

Who does the heavy lifting at Bitovi? [20:48]
As the CEO of Bitovi, Justin has less time to program as before. Working with Open Source, development is a mix between contributors and full time employees. The majority being the employees. Justin talks about not having a sales force and focusing on their product to drive sales. Mainly, long term cost of ownership and the ability for the framework to last, working hard to make sure that clients that have committed to Javascript MVC years ago still have a relevant use for the framework.

Exploring HTTP2 and Push. [23:42]
With the emergence of HTTP2 and Push, Justin talks about working on and exploring different ways for streaming/server side rendering. Justin describes one of the experiments with building an empty skeletons, javascript assets, but also pushing instructions on how to mutate the page to the client. Before the javascript payload is fully loaded, the page starts to mutate. Allowing for optimal performance on slower connections, fantastic for mobile. Problems they are looking at for the future include things like different ways that CDNs can work with HTTP2 and Push. Justin has also worked with using Fetch to enable streaming by building tools around that. He suggests that HTTP2 and Push will maybe bring a renaissance in the developer world.

Justin’s side Parsing Project. [28:45]
Additional to his other work, Justin is working on a generic parsing project. Similar to BISON or JISON. Designed for simple parsing at faster speeds. He describes how to compiles to the code that parses your code. Working in runtime.

A way other companies can learn from Bitovi. [29:52]
We don’t know what the future is going to be for code, so packaging the framework into separate repos allows for better scheduling and a better way to manage long term. Updating a segment of a framework can sometimes break another segment if having it all happen together.

Picks [34:26]

Justin:

Dean Radcliff’s Antares Framework

Charles:

Boom Beach

Clash of Clans

BlueTick.io

Nimble

Keeping up with Justin’s work.

Bitovi.com’s Blog

Justin’s Twitter.

Sponsors

Cachefly.com
Newbie Remote Conf 2017

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber, Charles Max Wood and panelist Joe Eames chat with Rebecca Turner, tech lead for NPM, a popular Javascript package manager with the worlds largest software registry. Learn about the newly released NPM 5 including a few of the updated features. Stay tuned!

[1:58] Was the release of node JS 8 tied to NPM5?

• Features in NPM5 have been in planning for 2 years now.
• Planned on getting it out earlier this year.
• Node 8 was coming out and got pushed out a month.
• Putting NPM5 into Node 8 became doable.
• Pushed really hard to get NPM5 into Node 8 so that users would get NPM5 and updates to NPM5.

[2:58] Why would it matter? NPM doesn’t care right?

• Right you can use NPM5 with any version of node.
• Most people don’t update NPM, but upgrade Node.
• So releasing them together allowed for when people updated Node they would get NPM 5.

[3:29] How does the upgrade process work if you’re using NVM or some node version manager?

• Depends. Different approaches for each
• NVM gets a fresh copy of Node with new globals. NVM5 and Node 8 are bundled.
• For some, If you manually upgrade NVM you’ll always have to manually. It will keep the one you manually upgraded to.

[4:16] Why NPM 5?

• It’s night and day faster.
• 3 to 5 times speed up is not uncommon.
• Most package managers are slow.
• NPM 5 is still growing. Will get even faster.

[5:18] How did you make it faster?

• The NPM’s cache is old. It’s very slow. Appalling slow.
• Rewrote cache
• Saw huge performance gains

[5:49] What is the function of the cache?

• Cache makes it so you don’t have to reinstall modules from the internet.
• It has registry information too.
• It will now obey http headers for timing out cache.

[6:50] Other things that made it faster?

• Had a log file for a long time. It was called shrinkwrap.
• NPM 5 makes it default.
• Renamed it to packagelog.json
• Exactly like shrinkwrap package file seen before
• In combo with cache, it makes it really fast.
• Stores information about what the tree should look like and it’s general structure.
• It doesn’t have to go back and learn versions of packages.

[7:50] Can you turn the default Packagelog.json off?

• Yes. Just:
• Set packagelog=false in the npmrc

[8:01] Why make it default? Why wasn’t it default before?

• It Didn’t have it before. Shrinkwrap was added as a separate project enfolded in NPM and wasn’t core to the design of NPM.
• Most people would now benefit from it. Not many scenarios where you wouldn’t want one.
• Teams not using the same tools causes headaches and issues.

[9:38] Where does not having a lock show up as a problem?

• It records the versions of the packages installed and where NPM put them so that when you clone a project down you will have exactly the same versions across machines.
• Collaborators have the exact same version.
• Protects from issues after people introduce changes and patch releases.
• NPM being faster is just a bonus.
• Store the sha512 of the package that was installed in the glock file so that we can verify it when you install. It’s Bit for bit what you had previously.

[11:12] Could you solve that by setting the package version as the same version as the .Json file?

• No. That will lock down the versions of the modules that you install personally, not the dependancies, or transitive dependancies.
• Package log allows you to look into the head of the installer. This is what the install looks like.

[12:16] Defaulting the log file speed things up? How?

• It doesn’t have to figure out dependences or the tree which makes it faster.
• Shrinkwrap command is still there, it renames it to shrinkwrap but shrinkwrap cannot be published.
• For application level things or big libraries, using shrinkwrap to lock down versions is popular.

[13:42] You’ve Adopted specifications in a ROC process. When did you guys do that?

• Did it in January
• Have been using them internally for years. Inviting people into the process.
• Specifications
• Written in the form of “Here is the problem and here are the solutions.”
• Spec folder in NPM docs, things being added to that as they specify how things work.
• Spec tests have been great.

[14:59] The update adds new tools. Will there be new things in registry as well?

• Yes.
• Information about a package from registry, it returns document that has info about every version and package json data and full readme for every version.
• It gets very large.
• New API to request smaller version of that document.
• Reduces bandwidth, lower download size, makes it substantially faster.
• Used to be hashed with sha1, With this update it will be hashed with sha512 as well as sha1 for older clients.

[16:20] Will you be stopping support for older versions?

• LTS version of NPM was a thing for a while. They stopped doing that.
• Two models, people either use whatever version came with Node or they update to the latest.
• The NPM team is really small. Hard to maintain old NPM branches.
• Supports current versions and that’s pretty much it.
• If there are big problems they will fix old versions. Patches , etc.

[17:36] Will there ever be problems with that?

• Older versions should continue to work. Shouldn’t break any of that.
• Can’t upgrade from 0.8.
• It does break with different Node version
• Does not support Node versions 0.10 or 0.12.

[18:47] How do you upgrade to NPM?

• sudo npm install -gmpm
• Yes, you may not need sudo. depend on what you’re on.

[19:07] How long has it been since version 4?

• Last October is when it came out.

[19:24] Do you already have plans for version 6?

• Yes!
• More releases than before coming up.
• Finally deprecating old features that are only used in a few packages out of the whole registry.
• Running tests on getting rid of things.

[20:50] Self healing cache. What is it and why do we want it?

• Users are sometimes showing up where installs are broken and tarbols are corrupted.
• This happens sometimes with complicated containerization setups makes it more likely. It’s unclear where the problem actually is.
• CaCache - content addressable cache. Take the hash of your package and use it to look up address to look it up in the cache.
• Compares the Tarbol using an address to look it up in the cache.
• Compares to see if it’s old. Trashes old and downloads updated one.
• Came out with the cache. Free side effect of the new cache.

[23:14] New information output as part of the update?

• NPM has always gave back you the tree from what you just installed.
• Now, trees can be larger and displaying that much information is not useful.
• User patch - gives you specifically what you asked for.
• Information it shows will be something like: “I installed 50 items, updated 7, deleted 2.”

[24:23] Did you personally put that together?

• Yes, threw it together and then got feedback from users and went with it.
• Often unplanned features will get made and will be thrown out to get feedback.
• Another new things ls output now shows you modules that were deduped. Shows logical tree and it’s relationships and what was deduped.

[25:27] You came up to node 4 syntax. Why not go to node 8?

• To allow people with just node 4 be able to use NPM.
• Many projects still run Node 4. Once a project has been deployed, people generally don’t touch it.

[26:20] Other new features? What about the File Specifier?

• File specifier is new. File paths can be in package json, usually put inside pointing to something inside your package.
• It will copy from there to your node modules.
• Just a node module symlink.
• Much faster. Verifiable that what’s in your node modules matches the source. If it’s pointing at the right place it’s correct. If not, then it’s not.
• Earlier, sometimes it was hard to tell.

[27:38] Anything else as part of the NPM 5 release? Who do you think will be most affected by it?

• For the most part, people notice three things:
• 1st. no giant tree at the end
• 2nd. Much faster
• 3rd. Package lock.

[28:14] If it’s locked, how do you update it?

• Run npm installer and then npm update
• Used to be scary, but works well now.
• Updates to latest semver, matches semver to package json to all node modules.
• Updates package lock at the same time
• Summary in Git shows what’s changed.

[28:59] Did Yarn come into play with your decisions with this release?

• The plans have been in play for a long time for this update.
• Yarn’s inclusion of similar features and the feedback was an indicator that some of the features were valuable.

[29:53] Other plans to incorporate features similar to yarn?

• Features are already pretty close.
• There are other alternative package managers out there.
• PMPM interesting because when it installs it doesn’t copy all the files. It creates hard links.

[30:28] Does PMPM and Yarn use NPM registry?

• Yes! Other than CNPM. The NPM client used in China.
• CNPM Registry mirror behind firewall. Have their own client to their registry. Their registry is a copy of ours.

[31:15] What about RNPM?

• I wouldn’t be surprised.

[31:45] “Won’t you come and say something controversial about your competitor?”

• We all want it to be collaborative.
• When we were writing our new cache, we also helped Yarn with their cache and sped things up tremendously.

Picks

Charles

Rush Limbaugh’s children’s books
Tinker Crate
Kiwi Crate
NPM
Episodes on My JS Story.

Joe

Gravity Falls
Board Games

Rebecca

NPX

Funstream

Links to keep up with NPM and Rebecca

Twitter @rebeccaorg
NPMjS on Twitter
blog.npmjs.com

My JS Story Cory House

On this Episode we have another JS Story, and this time it’s with Cory House, a Pluralsight author, software architect for Cox Automotive, and a consultant with a focus on React. Listen to Charles Max Wood and Cory discuss a bit about how Cory got into programming, how learning how to learn is vital to being a talented developer, as well as using documentation as your development environment to ensure your code’s documentation doesn’t fall behind. This and more right here. Stay tuned.

How did you get into programming?

Cory starts his story as a business major in college but had interest in computers. He spent time around various computers and machines, giving him experience in various operating systems and platforms. On any given day he would be using any of three different operating systems. His interest in computers inspired him to double major. He started learning Cobalt and Visual Basic and C++. He talks about being interested in web development, including Flash. He specialized in Flash throughout college, as well as early on in his software development career. He also talks a bit about that the open web seems to innovate in a way that keeps it relevant. He talks about using Flash to make websites with entering screens and animations and now that is obsolete. Charles mentions that it’s interesting that his main interest was business and computers became something he was interested in later on and that you don’t have to be someone who started young to be proficient. Cory talks about being driven to catch up, being around people who knew things off the top of their head while he was still asking questions and looking things up.

Learning How to Learn

Out of college Cory found that he had a degree, but what he had really learned was how to learn. He never used Cobalt, C ++, or visual basic after school. Learning how to learn combined with being able to create a focus on a specific technology are vital. Charles adds that he would hear often that it took being a natural in programming to get it, and that maybe being a natural was really just being someone who has learned how to learn and to focus.

Getting Good With Your Craft

Cory mentions that working with someone who head and shoulders ahead of everyone else. They were working in Unix and seemed to know every single Unix command and flag. He found it inspiring to see someone take the craft so seriously and to learn a specific technologies tool with so much dedication. Some technologies will be so important that they will be key technologies that will still be useful many years later. Cory suggests that one of those tools seem to be JavaScript. JavaScript is almost mandatory in frontend web development. Additionally, JavaScript is reaching into other new technology types including IoT and VR and other places, constantly expanding.

How did you get into JavaScript?

Cory talks about how it really all got started when Steve Jobs killed Flash. He opened his mind to other technologies and started working with JavaScript. Remembering learning jQuery, he found himself really enjoying it. He started building online business applications. Browser inconsistencies were a huge issue, making it so that you’d have to check your work on each browser to make sure it worked cross platform. Things are moving so quickly that being a full stack developer is becoming less and less prevalent, to the point where he considers himself primarily a JavaScript developer. Being an expert in a single technology can make you really valuable. Companies are running into issues with not finding enough people that are experts in a single tech. Cory suggests that employers should find employees that seem interested and help allow them to focus and learn whatever that tech is. Charles talks about the split between developers that tend to lean full stack and plug in technologies when they need it versus developers that work exclusively in front end. He suggests it may be a case by case situation.

Service Oriented Architecture

Cory suggests that service oriented architecture movement has moved us that way. Once you have a set of services set up, it becomes more realistic to turn on the front end. If there were a good set of services there, Cory adds that he doesn’t think he would be able to build services faster using a server side framework like Rails, Django, or ASP.Net MVC than he could in React today using something like create React app. The front end has become much more mature. Cory mentions that he has had good experiences with ASP.Net NPC and Visual Basic being a Microsoft stack developer. He adds that he doesn’t feel like he has given up anything working with JavaScript. He adds that with the nesting of different models together, he gets to reuse a lot of code in server side development. NPM makes it easy to stand up a new package. If you are planning to create an API, it becomes much harder to use a server side rendering stack, with so many APIs available, it’s a logical move to go client side.

Possible Future for Front-end and Back-end Roles

Charles brings up that the development of things like VR are making changes in the roles that front end and back end development play. The front end will more to taking care of the overall application development of apps, while the back end will become supporting roles as services and APIs. New technology like VR and artificial intelligence will need a high amount of computing power on the backend. The front end will focus more on the overall experience, display, and the way we react with things. Charles talks about how the web may move away from being just an HTML platform. He says that it will be interesting to find where JavaScript and frameworks like React will fall into this shift into this next generation. We already are seeing some of this with the capabilities with canvases, WebVR, and SVG and how they are changing how we experience the web.

Reasonable Component Story

Cory brings up being interested in the Reasonable component story. Sharing code from a traditional web app, to a native app, and to potentially a VR app as well is exciting and he hopes to see it flesh out more in the coming years. He talks about going to conferences and how much we have built and how much we don’t have easily sharable innovation. He hopes to see it solved in the next few years.

What contributions have you made to the JavaScript community?

Cory mentions working on the open source project Slingshot. He was trying to solve issues that many found in React. React isn’t very opinionated. React is for writing reasonable components for the web, but it doesn’t have opinions on how you structure your files, how you minify, bundle, deploy, or make API calls, etc. He realized that telling people to use React and to deal with those issues wasn’t reasonable. He created React Slingshot as a development boilerplate. He put it to use in many applications and it became popular. It’s easy because it did things like allow you to run NPM to pull independencies and pull a file, it would fire up a web browser, watch your files, run tests, hot reloading on save, and had a running Redux application build it. It allowed people to get started very quickly. He talks about how he wasn’t the only person trying to solve this issue. He says that if you look now there are well over one hundred boiler plates for React that do similar things. Most popular being Create React App. Contributions outside of this, he talks about editing documentation on open source projects being part of his biggest contribution, writing it in markdown and then making pull requests.

What are you working on now?

Cory adds that he just finished his 7th or 8th Pluralsight course on creating usable React components. At work they create their own reusable React component library. He says that he realizes that it’s a complicated process, where all decisions you make, in order to have a reusable component story, you have to make a lot of decisions. Things like how granular to make the components, reusable styles and how they are packaged, how they are hosted, will it be open or source, etc.

Publicly Closed - Internally Open Source Projects

Cory talks about the idea of having it as a closed source project, but treating it like an internal open source project for the company, having many people feel invested into the project. He found creating the documentation story was the toughest part. Having solid documentation story that helps with showing how to use the components and it’s features and behaviors. He spends much of his type looking at other documents to help him come up with ways to create his own. He talks about generating the documents automatically with the updates so that they are always in sync. Charles adds that documentation syncing often happens right in the comments, which are also acceptable to being outdated.

Pull-request-Template.md

Cory adds that a useful way to allow for well documented and safe pull requests is to make a pull request template in GitHub by creating a file called pull-request-template.md so that any time someone makes a pull request, that .md template will populate the pull request. Cory has a checklist for a pull request like making sure there are tests for any new components, the file name should have an uppercase character, is there a ticket open, etc. All of the basic things that should happen in a pull will be in the pull-request-template.md. Charles adds that documentation is one of the things that gets ignored. Having a standard process is very important, more so than getting the job done faster. Also having an outlined expectation for how it’s delivered is important as well.

Documentation as Development Environment

A useful trick that Cory uses, is using the documentation as the development environment. Anytime they are working on a new component, they start with a documentation site, making changes within the documentation and then it hot loading your changes live. This way your documentation is front of mind and keeps the documentation fall behind.

Why React instead of the other frameworks?

Cory says that he can sum up React in a single sentence. He says that your HTML sits right in the JavaScript. Which usually sounds bad to a large group of developers. He expects people to react negatively when he talks about it. What he has run into as a common problem, is people separating concerns by filetype and technology, but with React he seems the common problems in terms of components. Cory says that components are the future. Industries that have matured utilize components. For example car manufacturers or even electronic manufactures build things in modules and components. Things that are reusable should be encapsulated into a component instead of trying to hold it in our heads. This makes it so things look the same and reduces many mistakes. You can create components in different frameworks, but React co-mingles markup and javascript with something like JSX. You’re not writing HTML, you’re writing JSX that boils down to HTML. That one element is fundamentally what makes React easier to Cory. For the most part, React can be learned by JavaScript developers in less than a day because many of the things you need to do in React, is just basic JavaScript. Charles adds that components are a concept coming up in various frameworks and is becoming more popular.

Picks

Cory’s

Cory’s React Courses on Pluralsight Essentialism the book

Charles’

Get a Better Job Course Angular Remote Conf (now Ruby Dev Summit) React Podcast Kickstarter

Links

Cory’s Twitter

My JS Story 023 Laurie Voss

This week we have another My JavaScript story. This week’s guest is Laurie Voss. Laurie has worked with NPM from the start and has been a vital piece to getting it off the ground. Hear how Laurie got interested in computers, how Laurie got started with NPM, as well as a few things about the newly released NPM 5.

How did you get into programming?

Laurie started by going into a computer camp, at the time Laurie hadn’t spent time around computers, and it wouldn’t be until the second time that he went to the computer camp that he would see a computer again. Laurie grew up in Trinidad where not many people could afford computers. He started making his first website in Angelfire using HTML before CSS became a thing.

How did you go from web development to hardcore Javascript?

Laurie had been writing JavaScript since it was invented. Laurie started a web development company in high school using JavaScript. Laurie met Issac while working at Yahoo and he introduced Laurie to Node which was a starting point to taking JavaScript more seriously for Laurie. When Node was ready in 2013, NPM Inc was on it’s way.

What do you do at NPM Inc?

IN the beginning of 2014, Laurie was doing a lot of the JavaScript and was the CTO. Laurie says that part of his strategy has always been to hire JavaScript developers that are better at writing JavaScript that he is. Making him the worst JavaScript programmer at NPM. Laurie’s main job was doing what was needed to get NPM happen, including talking to layers and the business side of things. There are many companies that don’t understand how open source works, and in many cases it leads to run ins with lawyers. Many times NPM acts as an umbrella for open source tools that aren’t able to fight overzealous corporations.

What do you think is your biggest contributions to NPM?

Laurie expresses that it has changed over the years. A year ago he would say that he would have to say it leans towards the piece of software that is the registry. It’s very scalable and has worked great for small scale up to very large scale. Laurie works hard to gather funds and help make NPM grow as well as be scalable. He says that he is very proud that he build something that let’s others build things.

How did you get involved?

Laurie has been with NPM since the beginning. He tells us how Issac had been running NPM on donated hardware in spare time while working with Node. NPM would break a lot and be down due to the borrowed equipment. They decided that they needed to create a business model around NPM to help it grow. Laurie had just finished working on a startup and knew how to get funding and got their first round in 2014.

How did you get to being profitable?

Laurie talks about making sure that their plan is in line with their customers. NPM could easily charge for many parts of NPM but they would rather charge for things that make sense to charge, so in this case the private packages. Enough people are using the private package to getting NPM to profitability. Laurie says that even if money stopped coming in they would have to git rid of a few employees but would be able to keep a small team and sustain the NPM registry, but would never build anything new. It’s always between being profitable or using money to build new things.

What are you working on now?

NPM 5 was just released and it’s much faster, five times faster. Laurie talks about being excited about the team and what they are putting into it. Things like making deployments easier. Many developers use NPM to put code together as well as to deploy it. If you didn’t have a lock file, it’s possible that it would change. But the lock file can take a long time, and you already know what needs to go there so they are adding npm store and npm fetch making deploys much faster. Additionally they will be adding a feature called insights. They are able to see information about different users packages, security information, performance information, etc. They can use that information to help developers with suggestions based off of data gathered by what other people are doing. Charles adds that it would be great for coming up with topics for the podcast.

Anything else?

Laurie reminds everyone about NPM Organizations as well as NPM Enterprise. NPM Organizations is a way to organize packaging as well as teams of developers and helps you to collaborate. NPM Enterprise allows for single sign on support, license auditing, and features that corporations care about.

Picks

Laurie

Zite and NextJS
Slides.com

Charles

VMWorld
Tweet or email if you’re looking at resources for learning VR AI or Iot

Links

Twitter
NPM Organizations
NPM Enterprise

MJS 024 Aaron Frost

This episode can double as a My JavaScript Story and a My Angular Story and features Aaron Frost. Aaron has been on both JavaScript Jabber and Adventures in Angular. He has been a principal engineer for four years and recently organized his fourth NG-Conf.

How did you get into programming?

Aaron was working as a loan officer when he decided he needed a new career. He went to work at an accounting support phone center. There he discovered he was good at Sequel. He tried out for the QA team; the UA automation made sense to him. He became a senior QA and in 2010 jumped to working in development full time. He knew JavaScript; which made everyone wanted to hire him. He learned JQuery too.

What was it about JavaScript that really got you excited about it?

In Utah when he was working for a company, he had never learned JavaScript; he was told he had to learn jQuery to do browser extensions. The first night he learned jQuery he decided he loved the language. He stuck with it for three to four months. After that, he learned actual JavaScript. He explains that it just “fits in his head,” and made him feel well equipped and powerful.

How do you get to Angular?

He worked for a big, local corporation in Utah with powerful developers. The JavaScript community was strong there. They used Backbone and one day he emailed the developers. He suggested they Angular. One of the developers asked Aaron to help with the conversion. They were writing less code in Angular than in Backbone. It saved time.

Sometime after that, his friend Kip Lawrence suggested that they go to an Angular Conference. When they looked up conferences they couldn’t find any. They decided to start their own Angular conference after that.

How do you become a GDE?

There is a GDE app where you nominate yourself. In order to be picked, you have to meet a lot of criteria. You have to answer a lot of questions. There are things they want you to have done to prove you stand out and are a leader in the community. They want more than someone who is just smart. They want people who have presented at conferences, made open source contributions, written books, etc.

What else have you done in JavaScript or Angular?

One of the very first projects Aaron did is one that he considers one of the coolest. He built a browser extension for his twin brother’s real estate website that solved a captcha. He then marketed it to other people. He believes it is one of the most fun problems to solve.

What are you working on these days?                      

Aaron has a side project, which is a remote communication app for remote workers to use. He is working on how to make the NG-Conf bigger and better each year. He is also spending time being a dad.

Is there an overarching thing you’ve learned over the last 7 or so years of programming?

The thing that keeps recurring is that there is a need for engineers to focus on solving problems for users and less on having perfect code. He has noticed that developers make decisions to try to make perfect code that can sink a company. Developers should be more business focused than tech problems. It is more responsible for making a business profitable. Solve problems for the user first and don’t try to replace a language that’s working.

Picks

Aaron:

• Superpowers https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00YU1C4ZY/ref=dp_st_0141321342
• Yarn www.yarnpkg.com
• Samsung SmartThings  www.smartthings.com

Charles:

• Nimble www.nimble.com
• Bluetick www.bluetick.io
• Visual studio code www.code.visualstudio.com
• Wade Anderson interview, Microsoft build https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/jsj-265-wade-anderson-ramya-rao-visual-studio-code
• www.zapier.com

Links

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/js_dev
• GitHub: https://github.com/aaronfrost

MJS 025: Helen V. Holmes

This episode features a My JavaScript story with Helen V. Holmes. Helen has never before been a guest on the show. She is both a designer and front-end programmer who previously worked for Mozilla. In January, she started her own freelancing business. Listen to Charles Max Wood and Helen discuss how she got into programming, what made her decide to open a freelance business, and more!

How did you get into programming?

Helen started by making themes for herself and friends in LiveJournal using other people's CSS themes. Once she got to college she realized that although this wasn't a career, it was an aspect of a career. She then majored in graphic design, going on to do internships in both front-end development and design. Since college, she has gone back and forth between front-end development and design work.

How long ago was that?

Helen graduated college in 2013.

Did you graduate in computer science?

Helen did not even minor in computer science. At the time, she was focused on making stuff. The computer science major was too heavily focused on theory. She did take a couple of classes in it, but the graphic design major was more focused on building prototypes. Her graphic design major didn't teach her how to do anything - she said that you're on your own, and you have to figure out how to show off your ideas. The major appealed to her at the time because of that reason. Now Helen thinks majoring in computer science would have been really helpful for her career.

Charles points out that you don't have to have a computer science degree to do this work. Helen agrees; it can be wasted on you if you don't have the right enthusiasm to learn everything. Both say that you can get the education you want through self-education. Helen explains that so much of successful programming is good communication - this can be learned in college, while the specifics of how to code can be learned later.

How do you get from a graphic design major to "serious programming?"

Helen doesn't know how serious the programming she does is now. Her first real job was at Capital One as a front-end developer on their design team. She was doing prototypes and communicating between the design and production/engineering teams. She realized that nobody knew how to write JavaScript when trying to communicate between the two teams, so she decided that she should learn. A lot of the engineers came to the same realization at the same time. She started to write React as she was leaving Capital One. Everyone was trying to improve his or her JavaScript chops at the same time.

Did you get into Angular or React at Capital One?

When she first started at Capital One everyone was writing Angular. She wrote a lot of Angular in the beginning of her work. Most of the prototypes could be solved with React. Near the end of her time, she started using a lot of React.

What do you see is the difference between Angular and React?

Angular solves a lot more problems than React. It brings logic to the client side. React is only about solving visual problems. That's why it appealed to Helen. The design team she worked with was all about solving visual problems.

Why did you choose the front end?

Helen mainly chose it because she was a graphic design major. She believes that because the web is so accessible that it is the easiest thing. She also thinks the front end is fun.

How'd you wind up at Mozilla?

She met James Long through a mutual friend. Once they met, he thought she'd be a good addition to their team. He told her why it'd be a good switch for her - they were doing React work and they were looking for someone to understand problems that engineers go through.

What do they use React on?

She was on the browser team. The front-end of the developer tools was a JavaScript application that wasn't Angular. They were working on moving it to become a more documented framework. They wanted to use Redux and React. The team was converting it panel by panel.

What made you decide you were going to go freelance?

Helen had been missing things that she had done in college such as branding and illustration work. She had done some illustration work while at Firefox. She ultimately wanted to do a variety of different things instead of just product work. What gave her courage to go into freelance work was that James Long was also going freelance at the same time, so she thought that she was in good company. She also is related to a lawyer, so it wasn't as scary filing the paperwork because she had someone to ask for help during the process.

What contributions do you feel like you've made to the JavaScript community?

Helen believes that the highest impact work she has done has been on the Firefox browser. She didn't write a lot of code, but feels like what she did write is being used by a lot of people. She is most proud of the CSS grid because she says that it is exciting for people who do layout stuff on the web.

What are you working on now?

Helen started her own business at the beginning of the year. She is figuring out how she wants her skills to grow and with what kind of clients she wants to work. She has a lot of side projects, one being what she calls an art project. She is translating JPEG to Pixel art. She is taking NeoPixels, which are little programmable LEDs, and taking a matrix of values and displaying them on a sight board.

With everything that's out there in JavaScript, how do you keep current?

Helen answers that she doesn't. She tries to stay current with the tools she is using, which is React. She doesn’t try to be good at everything because she is also a designer, so she says that she has to pick and choose what she stays current on. Charles says that is what he tells people to do. There is so much out there that there is no way that anyone is going to stay current on everything. He says to keep current on what you are doing specifically.

Picks         

Helen:

• Wonder Woman http://wonderwomanfilm.com
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Charles:

• JavaScript Jabber Slack Room https://devchat.tv/javascript-jabber-slack
• Monthly Webinars  https://devchat.tv/webinars
• Angular Remote Conf https://devchat.tv/conferences/angular-remote-conf-2017

Links

• Helen V Holmes Twitter https://twitter.com/helenvholmes

JSJ 270 The Complete Software Developers Career Guide with John Sonmez

This episode features a panel of Joe Eames, AJ O’Neal, as well as host Charles Maxwell. Special guest John Sonmez runs the website SimpleProgrammer.com that is focused on personal development for software developers. He works on career development and improving the non-technical life aspects of software developers. Today’s episode focuses on John’s new book The Complete Software Developers Career Guide.

Did the book start out being 700 pages?

No. My goal was 200,000 words. During the editing process a lot of questions came up, so pages were added. There were side sections called “Hey John” to answer questions that added 150 pages.

Is this book aimed at beginners?

It should be valuable for three types of software developers: beginner, intermediate, and senior developers looking to advance their career. The book is broken up into five sections, which build upon each other. These sections are: - How to get started as a software developer - How to get a job and negotiate salary - The technical skills needed to know to be a software developer - How to work as a software developer - How to advance in career

Is it more a reference book, not intended to read front to back?

The book could be read either way. It is written in small chapters. Most people will read it start to finish, but it is written so that you can pick what you’re interested in and each chapter still makes sense by itself.

Where did you come up with the idea for the book?

It was a combination of things. At the time I wanted new blog posts, a new product, and a new book. So I thought, “What if I wrote a book that could release chapters as blog posts and could be a product later on?” I also wanted to capture everything I learned about software development and put it on paper so that didn’t lose it.

What did people feel like they were missing (from Soft Skills) that you made sure went into this book?

All the questions that people would ask were about career advice. People would ask things regarding: - How do I learn programming? - What programming language should I learn? - Problems with co-workers and boss - Dress code

What do you think is the most practical advice from the book for someone just getting started?

John thinks that the most important thing to tell people is to come up with a plan on how you’re going to become educated in software development. And then to decide what you’re going to pursue. People need to define what they want to be. After that is done, go backwards and come up with a plan in order to get there. If you set a plan, you’ll learn faster and become a valuable asset to a team. Charles agrees that this is how to stay current in the job force.

What skills do you actually need to have as a developer?

Section 3 of the book answers this question. There was some frustration when beginning as a software developer, so put this list together in the book. - Programming language that you know - Source control understanding - Basic testing - Continuous integration and build systems - What kinds of development (web, mobile, back end) - Databases - Sequel

Were any of those surprises to you?

Maybe DevOps because today’s software developers need to, but I didn’t need to starting out. We weren’t involved in production. Today’s software developers need to understand it because they will be involved in those steps.

What do you think is the importance of learning build tools and frameworks, etc. verses learning the basics?

Build tools and frameworks need to be understood in order to understand how your piece fits into the bigger picture. It is important to understand as much as you can of what’s out there. The basics aren’t going to change so you should have an in depth knowledge of them. Problems will always be solved the same way. John wants people to have as few “unknown unknowns” as possible. That way they won’t be lost and can focus on more timeless things.

What do you think about the virtues of self-taught verses boot camp verses University?

This is the first question many developers have so it is addressed it in the book. If you can find a good coding boot camp, John personally thinks that’s the best way. He would spend money on boot camp because it is a full immersion. But while there, you need to work as hard as possible to soak up knowledge. After a boot camp, then you can go back and fill in your computer science knowledge. This could be through part time college classes or even by self-teaching.

Is the classic computer science stuff important?

John was mostly self-taught; he only went to college for a year. He realized that he needed to go back and learn computer science stuff. Doesn’t think that there is a need to have background in computer science, but that it can be a time saver.

A lot of people get into web development and learn React or Angular but don’t learn fundamentals of JavaScript. Is that a big mistake?

John believes that it is a mistake to not fully understand what you’re doing. Knowing the function first, knowing React, is a good approach. Then you can go back and learn JavaScript and understand more. He states that if you don’t learn the basics, you will be stunted and possibly solve things wrong. Joe agrees with JavaScript, but not so much with things algorithms. He states that it never helped him once he went back and learned it. John suggests the book Algorithms to Live By – teaches how to apply algorithms to real life.

Is there one question you get asked more than anything else you have the answer to in the book?

The most interesting question is regarding contract verses salary employment and how to compare them. It should all be evaluated based on monetary value. Salary jobs look good because of benefits. But when looking at pay divided by the hours of work, usually a salary job is lower paid. This is because people usually work longer hours at salary jobs without being paid for it.

What’s the best place for people to pick up the book?

simpleprogrammer.com/careerguide and it will be sold on Amazon. The book will be 99 cents on kindle – want it to be the best selling software development book ever.

Picks

Joe

Wonder Woman

AJ

The Alchemist

Charles

Artificial Intelligence with Python

John

Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Apple Airpods

Links

Simple Programmer Youtube

MJS 026 Chris Coyier

This week’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with Chris Coyier. He is from the ShopTalk Show and CodePen. Listen to learn more about Chris!

How did you get started programming?
Chris has an atypical story. good time in life. He is from a small town in Madison, Wisconsin and had a very privileged upbringing. He went to a nice high school that had a programming elective in his high school. He took a class that taught Turbo Pascal and loved it. He had a lot of fun doing it and became set on doing it in college.

How do you go from that to professional web developer?

Have to give up on it first. He almost got a degree in university management computer systems, which was more management focused than programming focused. He tried and gave up on Java. He then tried graphic design and ended up getting a degree in that. He got into digital prepress at print jobs where he designed documents. It was fun but it was not as fun as being a “real programmer” would be in his mind. He then got a job at an agency doing web developer work. During this time JavaScript was not on his radar.

How do you get from front-end work to building something like CodePen and starting a front-end podcast?

He has made his career his hobby. He loves doing this stuff. When he was building websites for the first time he started CSS tricks. It became really fun. He grew it over ten years. Because it’s his career and hobby he got better over time. All of his time was spent helping friends, writing, or at conferences. He then decided to build CodePen with some of his friends.

What are you working on these days?

Chris wants to be careful not to be working on too many things at once. His top priority is CodePen, which he says is hard to keep up with what developers want there. The second priority is CSS tricks. He likes to publish quality articles for people to read. This third priority is his podcast.

What’s the thing you’ve done that you’re the proudest of?

CodePen is what has been so continually rewarding. This last month he is all money accounted for. He is really proud of CodePen because they made a company from nothing. He and his coworkers have made the podcast over a decade of growing an audience and it feels entrepreneurial.

Charles’ most proud thing is the decision to go full time with his podcast for the last year and a half.

Picks

Chris:

• CodePen https://codepen.io/
• ShopTalk www.shoptalkshow.com
• Alien Covenant http://www.alien-covenant.com/

Charles:

• www.getacoderjob.com
• React Native www.reactnative.com
• www.gocd.org
• JS Dev Summit https://jsdevsummit.com/

Links

• GitHub https://github.com/chriscoyier
• Twitter https://twitter.com/chriscoyier
• https://chriscoyier.net/

MJS 027 Chris Anderson

This episode is a My JavaScript Story with guest Chris Anderson. Chris works at Microsoft, specifically on Azure Functions and WebJobs SDK. Hear how he got his start, how he has contributed to the community, as well as a bit about what it’s like being a Program Manager for Microsoft. 

[00:01:50] ]How did you get into programming?

In college Chris was an aerospace engineer. His first taste of working with code was at an internship at Lockheed Martin. Most of his daily work was with spread sheets so he learned Visual Basic to help handle that. He found himself interested in writing code more so he took an intro in C summer course and then things snowballed. When he finished that semester, he talked to advisor about switching to Computer Science. Immediately landed into JavaScript. Chris talks about having a ‘clicking moment’ while in a topics class. A classmate was talking about NodeJS and so he tried it out and hasn’t stopped using it since.

[00:03:36] What about programing appealed to you?

Chris says that programming made him have a sense of having superpowers. In aerospace he learned how planes worked and that was fun, but programming had an immediately feedback on what he was working on. He adds that it made sense in the way that programming is a universal toolset for no matter what field you’re in. Charles adds that he dug into coding after working in tech support and needing it.

[00:05:22] Have you worked with JavaScript before learning about Node?

Chris’ first real coding experience was with his internship. He taught himself JavaScript on the job and after a few months found himself really liking it. He felt like JavaScript felt more natural and expressive. Javascript empowered him to work on the client side and the server side and he felt empowered to do full stack.

[00:06:55] Was this before Microsoft?

Microsoft’s hiring process for college graduates you apply the year you graduate and go through a handful of interviews. He got hired into a team working on databases, working in SQL server. He wanted to work in developer tools and learned how to use power shell and SQL works and how powerful it was. He started moving back and pushing NodeJS onto SQL. There was a driver for SQL purely in JavaScript called TDS and he would make pull requests and contributed to that. He talks about searching internally looking for other work and finding a mobile services team that needed a NodeJS person so he started there. Later he started WebJobs and then later Functions, as an effort to make NodeJS technology work with a .Net technology called Webjobs SDK. Functions exists because he wanted to add a NodeJS to a .Net product.

[00:11:07] ] Did you find pushing NodeJS into a well developed language ecosystem risky?

Chris talks about helping push adoption of .Net and creating prototype ideas, and it sparking from that. His goal was to make customers more productive.

[00:12:02] Having fun at work

Chris talks about the team culture being fun at times. Sometimes as a developer you get buffered by Project Managers, but in the case developers spend a lot of time talking to customers. They are excited so they have loads of interactions, helping develop diverse ideas. Charles adds that the preconception to how the environment feels in Microsoft tends to be negative but from talking to people who work there, things seem to be more open than expected. Chris points to open source concepts that really makes working with Microsoft great.

[14:40] What does a Program Manager do on a team?

Chris talks about how his job is to explore the issues and talk to customers and then prioritize how to make things better. He talks about doing whatever he can to make the product successful with the customers, including building a prototype of an idea, taking a sort of position similar to an entrepreneur. Charles adds that it’s refreshing to find that someone in the Program Manager also being technical sufficient and hands on. Chris talks about how teams are built naturally and pulled together with a group of people who love what they are doing.

[00:16:52] Does the Azure Functions team use Azure Functions to make Azure Functions work?

Chris talks about not using Azure functions under the covers, for the most part it’s built on top of the app service technology stack like web apps and mobile apps. Things that power that is what powers the Azure functions, like Angular. A lot of the engineering pieces are on top of that. They do use Azure for various Microsoft internal things. All of the tests they build are functions to test functions.

[00:18:24] How did you and your team come to use Angular?

Chris was working on the prototype for Azure Functions. Amed had experience with working on front end applications and he wanted to try out Angular 2 even though it was still in beta. He found that had the right amount of stuff out of the box. Additionally it had typescript which meshed well. They tend to pick things that people on the team know well and not as much as trying to stay tied into Microsoft supported systems. Chris talks about doing one or two major refactoring.

How much Angular have you worked on yourself?

Amed works the most on Angular, Chris’ job as Program Manager puts in him in a place where his commits don’t go into production, but he will often write prototypes. He played around a lot with the Monaco editor and adding features for that. As far as outside of that, he has written a few tutorials for using Functions plus Angular as well as written his wedding website with Angular.

[00:22:33] What other extracurricular projects have you worked on?

Chris talks about doing a lot of side projects for a while. One working with ExpressSocket.io. He also built a middleware project where you can write middleware into Functions. Plenty of little projects he puts on GitHub and never finishes. Chris talks about wishing he could switch hats between being the Program Manager and a developer.

[00:23:42] Is there anything in particular you feel like you’ve contributed to Angular?

Chris talks about improving by putting in loads of pull requests for tons of JavaScript libraries and a few NodeJS libraries. He would like to be more involved in the start of those processes. Chris says he hopes to maybe be involved in the next Node version update. He really likes the Node community.

Picks

Chris

Mountain Dew Pitch Black
The Expanse Series on SciFi
Application Insights

Charles

Wheel of Time
Coolage
Dog Company
Data Dog

Links

Twitter
GitHub

MJS 028 Zach Kessin

In this episode we have another JavaScript Story, this time our guest is Zach Kessin. Zach is a Developer and consultant. On the server side he works with Erlang and Elixir. On the front end he works on Elm. He also also written a few books for O’Reilly and a video course for Manning available sometime in the fall. He was a guest on episode 57 and is here with us today to tell us his story. Stay tuned!

[2:48] How did you get into programming.

Zack tells the story about how when he was 7 he asked his mother for a computer. She agreed that if he paid for half of it somehow, then she would help him get it. He Gathered his half by calling relatives and gathering funds. His mom taught him Basic and Logo. He also learned Pascal. While in University he picked up the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and loved it. He talks about remembering writing a HTML forum but not knowing how to submit entries. After college he started working.

[4:38] Resources then vs now.

Charles adds that if you’re tenacious enough to call your family members to find funding to buy a computer to learn, then you probably have the drive it takes to be a programmer. Charles and Zack talk about how in the 80s it was rare to have access to a computer, and now homes have multiple computers throughout. The resources are more readily available now with the internet. If you’re looking to get into development, there are plenty of great resources.

[7:45] How did you get into JavaScript and Erlang?

Zach starts explaining by telling how he get into JavaScript before the internet really existed. His first JavaScript program exposure was a loan calculator at a bank. Early on the only thing you could do was validate forms, but over time it grew. He started working for a company writing php. He felt like it wasn’t as functional or elegant as he was hoping for. He found various languages and landed on Erlang. Erland was designed to work for programming telephone switches. Due to phone services nature, It handles high scale, high reliability, has to be upgraded on the fly, etc. Zach talks about how server programming looks very similar to phone line programming. Zach adds that a few years ago he wanted work on some front end and after looking around finally he learned about Elm. He says that he is always looking for what’s new and useful.

[14:26] Programming Languages Change the Way We Think

Charles points out that it’s very interesting out about how functional programming has played out. He mentions that many JavaScript programmers use functional style programming to help with speed or efficiency. He adds that a fully functional programming language is very interesting and could be helpful. Zach talks about how learning new languages helps adjust the way we think.

[16:45] How have you contributed to the development community?

Charles starts off with mentioning Zach’s podcast that was called Mostly Erlang. Zach adds that he has wrote two books for O’ Reilly, one on HTML5 and Erlang. He has done some blogging and is creating a video course called Startup Elm. He mentions that he spends most of his time teaching. He admires people who write libraries and sustains them over years, but it isn’t something he sees himself getting into. He adds that having the libraries are useless unless you have someone to communicate about it and teach it. Charles mentions that contributions come in various ways and the community needs those sort of teachers. Zach mentions that he often speaks at conferences and meet ups. Public speaking can be a great way to progress your career. Charles brings up the idea of “Sweeping the dojo floor”. He was introduced to this idea by Dave Hoover. Sweeping the dojo floor means that you’ve got enough experience to talk about the topic, but maybe not fully contribute and so you do things like document code, or write articles and outreach for the topic. Talks can lead to work. You can easily find research papers and do talks on that. Zach adds that sometimes in a community, you see the same speakers over and over and new speakers are needed. Zach also mentions that there are plenty of opportunities to do talks in something other than english.

[26:36] What are you working on now?

Zach talks about the list of things he is working on. Starting with Startup Elm and it’s live course that will be happening in October. He is also working on a SaSS product for Instagram marketers called SquareTarget. He adds that he has a day job as well.

Picks

Zach

Intrepid Large Format Camera Kickstarter

Charles

Toast Masters
Zapier
Javascriptjabber.com/slack

MJS 029: Matt Creager

On this episode, we have another My JavaScript Story, our guest is Matt Creager. Matt works for Manifold. He's here with us today to tell us his story. Stay tuned!

[01:00] – Introduction to Matt Creager

Matt works for an interesting company called Manifold. They sponsored the show.

[01:35] – How did you get into programming?

Before Matt fell in love with programming, he was in love with technology. They bought his first computer. It was a Gateway 2000 and he got access to the internet around the same time. He spent all of his time on that computer because they were moving around so much. That became the way that he stayed in touch with people. He remembers taking it apart and formatting the hard drive accidentally.

His uncle has been in the IT industry since he was a kid too. Matt was always associating him with spending time with his computer programming, a role model, and stabilizer in his life. He was switching tapes. And then, his cousin decided that he was going to start scripting his character’s actions in a game that they were playing. And now, looking back, it was some combination of Lua and C++. He started taking his cousin’s scripts apart to automate his own character in the game. He was 13 or 14.

The first programming book that he bought was a result of not being able to figure out how to get his character what it wants to do. It was one of the C++ bibles. And then, he became active in the forums around the scripting language. He was sharing the scripts and he started to realize that he can harvest stuff in the game and sell it for real cash.

Matt never considered himself technical and never considered programming a career. He was just translating CPU and RAM for people who were shopping for computers. And then, he wanted people to measure theirs so he built tools that took the data they had in an office and turn them into reports. When the manager started using that, it became a nationwide program and suddenly, he was on the map. He was leading a team.

When Blackberry started a technical interview, he realized that he has the answers to these questions. Initially, he was just a Technical Issues Manager. He had a Data Science team and that team was responsible for identifying and prioritizing issues. They were using Node 0.4, very early version of Node. And then, he discovered Angular and dived head first to the Angular community.

[13:10] – BlackBerry got Matt to JavaScript

Matt looked at Node because he was trying to figure out how he could do real time analytics. He wanted these dashboards that data scientists are looking at. That was the stepping stone into JavaScript.

[15:30] – Hackathon

On the side, a couple of local companies started to run hackathons. Matt was going to hackathons all the time. Then, he ended up of hopping from BlackBerry to becoming a full time front-end developer at a start-up.

Matt was talking with one of the organizers at LA Hacks. She was telling him that the reason why people are going to these hackathons is because they want to win and they want to put that fact on their resumes. In his day, that was not hackathons were like. The prizes can act as a negative incentive. They really work hard for the prizes. Sometimes they actually end up becoming more creative as a result because they know they need to use this specific combination of API’s.

[18:45] – Contributions to JavaScript community

When Matt joined GoInstant, it was very early days of RTC. Web sockets are new at that point. You’re probably more familiar with Firebase. In the early days, GoInstant and Firebase are competing for the same developers. They’re working on the same problems. The tools that they are building were real time synchronization between the state you have on the client and the state you have on the server. A lot of those that they build, open-source tools, they went with GoInstant to Salesforce. But they inspired the libraries and a lot of it is probably on the same code base that you now see in libraries that pretty much does the same things with Firebase.

And then, most recently, Matt and the team built Torus. They realized that if they are going to be building smaller applications, going to start to use more cloud services, more services tailored towards developers, and going to manage a lot more credential, a lot of credentials that need to be secured and shared with the teammates, they needed to take those credentials and put them on applications wherever they are running, whether that’s a Docker container or Heroku. That’s his most recent open-source project.

[20:50] – What are you working on now?

Manifold is their latest project. They’re trying to build a market place for developer services. It’s been 3 months. They moved from Torus to building Manifold earlier this year. The official launch hasn’t happened yet. That’s hopefully to come earlier this year – September. If it’s something that you want to try out and experiment with, there is a coupon for My JS. Give it a try before they launch a $25 credit that they can use to provision a logging instance, monitoring, or database. You can use it with any type of services that you might need to build your app.

Picks

Matt Creager

• OpenCollective.com
• Scaphold GraphQL
• Elixir
• Manifold.co
• Twitter, Github: @matt_creager

Charles Max Wood

• AWS Lambda
• Zapier
• Heroku
• Udemy course for Ionic Framework

MJS 030: Mike North

This episode is a My JavaScript Story featuring Mike North. Tune in to learn more about how Mike started his journey as a developer in JavaScript!

[00:01:15] Introduction to Mike

Mike has a Frontend Masters Series for Ember 2 and has two other courses that help developers stand out from the software perspective.

[00:02:45] How did you get into programming?

Mike describes that he has taken a non-linear path to get to where he is now. He started programming as a teenager. He was laying dry wall with a construction company when he was 15 or 16. At the end of the job, he built a training app for the company in order to decrease their paperwork. Mike states that the programming work he does day-to-day he only learned two or three years ago.

[00:04:13] Is that due to things changing so quickly?

Mike’s role and passion keeps evolving. People pick what is important to them. A goal of his is to always stay learning; he enjoys having a deep understanding of topics. He enjoys using brand new skills and calls himself a “perpetual beginner.” Mike is always talking about something that he has just figured out how to do.

[00:05:20] How do you approach keeping current?

Mike thinks that it is impossible to keep up with everything. It is a full time job to keep track of everything. Developers don’t need to spend so much time going through information. He goes to teams once every quarter and helps them absorb the information in a distilled way so they do not have to filter through stuff such as what frameworks are worth paying attention to. This condenses the information and frees them from having to learn everything. Instead, they are able to focus on their product.

[00:08:27] How did you get into JavaScript and web development?

When Mike entered college, he was going into mechanical engineering and did not want to write code. He thought it was boring. When he began getting into code, it was because he could use it to solve real world problems. When he first started, he wrote engineering simulation code for Formula One racecars. When the iPhone came out, it gave him clarity that he wanted to work with that. He began to work with jQuery Mobile. He liked doing this enough that he ran a consultancy at night. He ran projects that he had no previous experience with in order to learn skills that would help him make JavaScript his full-time job.

[00:13:29] Where does Ember fit in with all of this?

When Mike started working at Yahoo, he became very familiar with Ember. Ember allowed employees to treat engineers as resources towards the larger goal of building and merging all apps together instead of having separate pockets of different technology everywhere. There were only a few Ember experts at the time, so Mike took advantage and spent a lot of time to gain expertise with the framework.

[00:16:50] What kinds of contributions do you feel like you’ve made to the JavaScript community?

Mike believes the way he has contributed to the community has evolved over time. In the past, he wrote libraries and worked with issues in the framework itself. The impact he has now is representing newcomers to a technology. He does workshops at conferences. He loves teaching and enabling people.

[00:19:07] How do you structure the learning to make it that it is approachable for people? How do you address both audiences?

As far as newcomers to programming, there is an alarming statistic of companies hiring computer programmers at 400% of the rate at which CS majors can graduate. The demand for software engineers exceeds the ability to educate conventionality. This means companies have to take people seriously that were educated via boot camps. There is a lot of material for new beginners. For people who are established programmers but new to specific technologies, there is a huge gap of material. Video courses, tutorials, and books should be made more accessible for these people. Mike also believes it is the job of a senior engineer to spend time teaching people.

Books, tutorials, and trainings that scrape the surface disappoint Mike. This has informed the techniques he uses to teach during his workshops. Students spend 50% of their time solving problems. His students are given code tests and spend time working how to solve problems. It takes a long time to build his curriculum but it is his main focus right now.

Picks

Mike:

• TypeScript Deep Dive by Basarat Ali Syed
• Proposal for Async Iteration

Charles

• Visual Studio Code
• Frontend Masters 

Links

• Twitter
• www.mike.works

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

MJS 032: Feross Aboukhadijeh

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

[01:00] – Introduction to Feross Aboukhadijeh

Feross was on episode 155 and he talked about Webtorrent. It was 2 years ago.

[01:35] – How did you get into programming?

Toddler

Feross has always been interested in computers and technology. His mom told him a story about how when he was a toddler, he was always watching people whenever they’re using technology – the television, the microwave, or the VCR. She said that he’s trying to imitate what he saw.

HTML and Web proxies

According to Feross, he became seriously interested when he was in middle school when he learned about HTML and wanted to make a personal site. In high school, there was this class that you could take. It’s a tech team where they went around and fixed teachers’ computers because they were understaffed. Some of the computers have administrator privileges turned on for the student accounts as well because some of the software that was required for certain classes needed it. The computers always had viruses on them because people would install first-person shooters and play during class time. They actually have school-wide filtering system so students can’t access certain sites. One of the categories they blocked was downloading sites. In order to even do their job, they have to figure out web proxies to get around the filters. He ended up setting up one of those on his own server.

First website

Feross’ real programming experience was PHP. It was in his junior year of high school. He bought a book in Barnes & Noble about PHP and MySQL. He wanted to build a site to host his favorite flash animations. That project was a database-driven website where people can segment their flash animations and soundboards, prank phone calls, and other internet humor. The site was called freetoflash. That was the first website that he built.

[07:10] – How did you get into JavaScript?

Feross thinks JavaScript is one of those languages that you don’t actually really bother to sit down and learn. There weren’t any good resources. According to him, He really didn’t know JavaScript until he started a company right after he graduated from college. He started taking JavaScript seriously because he was learning Node.js and realized that you can build real things from it. The start-up is called PeerCDN. They’re trying to make a content delivery network that would work in the browser using WebRTC. The idea is you would add a script tag to your website and then we would try to find other people visiting your site that already has the content that you want, you’ll fetch it from them over a peer-to-peer connection to save on your hosting build to reduce your CDN bill. That was a big Node application. It also has intense front-end component. He started learning about NPM, how you build things with microservices, and how do you deploy a JavaScript application. That was in 2013.

[09:35] – Webtorrent

Feross has been trying to transition Webtorrent into a distributed contribution model. It’s always been something that he would give out commit rights. If someone makes a good contribution, he’ll just add them to the Github for it. He recently made it into an organization on Github. He’s hoping to make it something that’s not completely dependent on him in order for it to continue existing. He’s going to be involved with it for the foreseeable future but he’s also trying to do new projects as well besides that. The good news is Webtorrent is mostly done in some sense. It works well. There are bugs. But if you use Webtorrent, especially if you use the desktop application to torrent things, it’s really polished and works nicely.

Picks

Feross Aboukhadijeh

• Decentralized web
• Dat Project
• Beaker Project
• IPFS
• Secure Scuttlebutt
• Patchwork
• Brave
• Twitter: @WebTorrentApp
• Twitter: @feross

Charles Max Wood

• Let’s Encrypt
• Digital Ocean

MJS 033: Dylan Schiemann

Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Dylan Schiemann. Dylan talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community to what JavaScript is back in 2004. Listen to learn more about Dylan!

[01:10] – Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

Dylan was on episode 62 of JavaScript Jabber, which was about 4 years ago. We had him on to talk about the Dojo Toolkit.

[02:00] – How did you get into programming?

When Dylan was 7 or 8 years old, he and his father took basic programming class together. In Junior high, probably mid-1980’s, he received his first Commodore 64 computer. He picked up the Programmer’s Reference Guide, toppled on Assembly, and tried to write data to a tape drive. It got updated to a floppy drive. And then in high school, he took some Pascal classes. He learned the basics - ranging from BASIC, Pascal, and to Assembly.

[03:00] – How did you get into JavaScript?

As an undergraduate, Dylan studied Chemistry and Mathematics. He did some basic HTML and discovered the web roughly when he was a junior year in college. And then, he went to graduate school and studied Physical Chemistry at UCLA. He was studying the topology and reality of quasi-two-dimensional phone. If you imagine a bunch of beer bubbles at the top of a glass, and you spin it around really quickly, you watch how the bubbles rearrange as force is applied to it. He wanted to put his experiments on the web so he started learning this new language that had just been invented called JavaScript. So, he dropped out of graduate school a few years later. Eight years after that point in time, it was possible to show his experiments with Dojo and SVG.

[04:25] – How did you get into Dojo and the other technologies?

SitePen

Right after grad school, Dylan helped start a company called SitePen. That let him really learn how JavaScript works. He started doing some consulting work. And he started working with Alex Russell, who had a project called netWindows at the time, which is a predecessor to any JavaScript framework that most people have worked with.

Dojo

Dylan got together and decided to create a next generation version of the HTML toolkit, which ended up becoming Dojo back in 2004. Things that they created back then are now part of the language - asynchronous patterns such as Promises, or even modules, widgets, which led to the web components pack. Over the years, they’ve built on that and done various utilities for testing and optimizing applications.

[06:20] – Ideas that stood the test of time

A lot of the things that Dylan and his team did in Dojo were on the right path but first versions ended up iterating before they’ve met their way into the language. Other things are timing. They were there very early and but to tell people in 2005 and 2006 that you need to architect the front-end application met some confusion of why you would want to do that. According to him, they never created Dojo to say that they want to create the world’s leading framework.

[07:45] – JavaScript

Dylan no longer answers the question of, “Oh, JavaScript, you mean, Java?”

The expectations of 2004 were the hope of making something that might work in a browser. The expectation today is we are competing against every platform and trying to create the best possible software in the world, and do it in a way that’s distributable everywhere in the browser. The capabilities have grown. There are audio, video and real-time capabilities. They were ways to do those things but they were brutal and fragile. And now, we have real engineering solutions to many of those things but there are still going to be ways to do this. There were few people who are interested in this and maybe this wasn’t even their day job. But now, literally hundreds and thousands of engineers who write code in JavaScript every day.

Picks

Dylan Schiemann

• JavaScript user groups
• JavaScript conferences
• SeattleJS
• Phoenix TypeScript Meet-up
• London HalfStack

Charles Max Wood

• Focuster
• BusyCal
• Asana
• Trello

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MJS 034: John-David Dalton

Today’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with John-David Dalton. JD talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community like Lo-Dash, Sandboxed Native, etc. Listen to learn more about JD!

[01:15] – Introduction to JD

JD has been on JavaScript Jabber. He talked about Lo-Dash.

[02:00] – How did you get into programming?

First website

This was when JD was a junior in high school. Then, he got involved with a flight squadron for a World War 1 online game. They needed a website so he created a GeoCities website for them. That’s what got him into JavaScript. He’d have to enhance the page with mouseover effects - cursor trail, etc.

JavaScript

From there, JD started created a Dr. Wiley little-animated bot that would say random things in a little speech bubble with the HTML on your page like a widget. He also passed an assignment turning a web page into an English class paper. He used to spend his lunch breaks learning JavaScript and programming. He also created a little Mario game engine – Mario 1 with movable blocks that you could click and drag and Mario could jump over it. That was back with the document.layers and Netscape Navigator.

Animation

JD wanted to be an animator in animation so he started getting into macro media flash. That led him to ActionScript, which was another ECMAScript-based language. He took a break from JavaScript and did ActionScript and flash animations for a while as his day job too.

PHP and JavaScript

JD started learning PHP and they needed to create a web app that got him right back into JavaScript in 2005. That was when AJAX was coined and that’s when Prototype JS came up. He was reading AJAX blog posts back then because that was the place to find all of your JavaScript news.

JS Specification

JD remembers being really intimidated by JavaScript libraries so he started reading the JavaScript specification. It got him into a deeper understanding of why the language does what it does and realized that there’s actually a document that he could go to and look up exactly why things do what they do.

[06:45] – What was it about JavaScript?

JD has been tinkering with programming languages but what he liked about ActionScript at the time was it is so powerful. You could create games with it or you could script during animations. He eventually created a tool that was a Game Genie for flash games that you could get these decompilers that would show you the variables in the game, and then, you could use JavaScript to manipulate the variables in the flash game. He created a tool that could, for example, change your lives to infinite life, grow your character or access hidden characters that they don’t actually put in the game but they have the animations for it.

JD was led to a page on the web archive called Layer 51 or Proto 51. That was a web page that had a lot of JavaScript or ActionScript snippets. There were things for extending the built-in prototypes - adding array methods or string methods or regex methods. That was how JavaScript became appealing to him. He has been doing JavaScript for almost 20 years. PHP also made him appreciate JavaScript more because, at the time, you couldn’t have that interface.

[09:30] – Lo-Dash, Sandboxed Native, Microsoft

Lo-Dash

Eventually, JD grew to respect jQuery because I became a library author. jQuery is the example of how to create a successful library. It’s almost on 90% of the Internet. He likes that right now but before, he was a hardcore Prototype fanboy. He didn’t like new tools either. He liked augmenting prototypes but over time, he realized that augmenting prototypes wasn’t so great whenever you wanted to include other code on your page because it would have conflict and collisions. Later on, he took Prototype, forked it, and he made it faster and support more things, which is essentially what he did with Lo-Dash.

Sandboxed Native

JD created something called Sandboxed Native, which got him into talking on conferences. Sandboxed Native extends the prototypes for the built-ins for your current frame. It would import new built-ins so you got a new array constructor, a new date constructor, a new regex, or a new string. It wouldn’t collide or step on the built-ins of the current page.

Microsoft

After that, JD ended up transitioning to performance and benchmarking. That landed him his Microsoft job a couple years later.

Picks

John-David Dalton

• JS Foundation
• Sonarwhal
• Twitter / Github: @jdalton

Charles Max Wood

• Aaron Walker
• Interview Valet

Tweet this Episode

John-Daniel Trask is the CEO and developer at Raygun.io.

JD and Chuck talk in this episode about learning to program as a kid, the arc of JD's career, and entrepreneurship.

Links:

• 154 JSJ Raygun.io Error Reporting and Workflow with John-Daniel Trask
• JSJ 263 Moving from Node.js to .NET and Raygun.io with John-Daniel Trask
• C
• C++
• Delphi
• NetScape Navigator
• VBScript
• JQuery
• Mindscape
• Raygun.io
• CoffeeScript
• Visual Studio
• Scott Hanselman on Dark Matter Developers
• Tensorflow
• Stripe
• @traskjd

Picks:

JD:

• Keygen.sh
• Octopus Deploy
• JavaScript x86

Chuck:

• The Miracle Morning
• Meditations App
• Vision Board App
• LootCrate
• Game of Thrones Journal
• Zelda Theme Journal

Panel:

Joe 

Amy 

Charles 

Special Guests: 

Eric Simmons 

Albert Pai

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers talk to Eric Simmons and Albert Pai, the co-founder of thinkster.io, where their team teaches the bleeding edge of javascript technology’s various frameworks and backend. Also, with the recent creation of Stalkblitz, which is the center topic of today discussion. 

Stackblitz it an online VS Code IDE for Angular, React, and a few more others are supported. This is designed to run web pack and vs code inside your browser at blazing fast speeds. Eric and Albert dive into the many different advantages and services available by StackBlitz and thinker.io. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Similarities  and differences to Heroku 
• System JS 
• Stacklets  
• Testing and creating an in-browser system file system
• Creating a type of VS Code experience, Working Off Line 
• Updating of the Stacklets
• Deployment tools or exporting 
• Hot Reloading
• Integrated terminals
• Monaco
• Language Services 
• How do you architect this implementation 
• The innovation of browsers
• Guy Bedford 
• Financing vs. Chipotle Burritos 
• Will this product in the future cost money

Links

• thinkster.io
• https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-code-ide-for-angular-react-7d09348497f4
• @stackblitz 
• stackblitz.com

Picks

Amy

• Promises Series by Andrew Del Prete
• Crossfit 

Joe

• Wholesome Meme
• Sara Cooper

Charles

• Pivotal Tracker 
• MatterMost 
• asana.com
• Zapier

Eric 

• realworld.io 
• David East 

Albert 

• thinkster.io
• Thing Explainer

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ryan Glover

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Glover, Ryan is the COO of Clever Beagle. Clever Beagle is a company that helps people create their first products and begin selling to their customers. Clever Beagle uses platforms like  Meteor JS, Node JS, and React to provide frameworks for help build applications.

Ryan describes their business as a technical therapist for bringing ideas to fruition. Ryan shares his journey into programming by learning to build websites with Geocities. Thereafter, Ryan had began his self-taught journey with programming after learning he did not like his college major. Ryan talks about his contribution to the JS community, his website called Meteor Chef designed to help newbies learn to build with Meteor JS.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Learning Geocites
• Becoming a Self Taught programmer
• Freelancing
• Building WordPress websites and learning JS
• By trade a  being a designer
• Building with JavaScript
• Learning about Meteor on Hacker News in 2013
• Sacha Greif 
• Apollo
• Raw Node JS
• Understanding Webpack?
• Gearheads vs. Builders
• Boilerplates
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• Sacha Greif
• Clever Beagle
• https://www.meteor.com
• https://themeteorchef.com/info/about
• https://cleverbeagle.com/subcribe
• @rglover
• ryanglover.net

Picks

Ryan

• Halt and Catch Fire
• Sacha Greif State of JavaScript
• Tom Coleman

Charles

• React Developer Summit
• JavaScript Developer Summit
• How To Find A Job Course 
• Stranger Things Season 2
• moviepass.com

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Chris Dias

PJ Meyer

In this episode, Charles is at Microsoft Connect 2017 in NYC. Charles speaks with Chris Dias and PJ Meyer about Visual Studio Code and Live Sharing. Chris and PJ explain more on their demo at Microsoft Connect on Live Collaborative Editing and Debugging. Learn more about the new features with Visual Studio Code and the efficient workflows with screen sharing, and much more.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Demo of Live Collaborative Editing and Debugging explained
• New Features with VS Code
• Developer productive
• Debugging pain points
• Getting feedback
• New in VS Code
• Language support and Java Debugger
• Live Share
• Debugging from different machines and platforms
• Multi-Stage Docker File
• TypeScript compiler
• More on debugging with Cosmos db
• Debugging in the Cloud?
• Docker Extensions
• Data Bricks
• Updated python tools
• Coming up with Visual Studio Code in the next 6 months
• TypeScript and Refactoring
• Getting the word out about code -  Word of mouth?
• Number of people using VS Code?
• Envision for what VS Code is becoming?
• Preparing for a keynote and processes?
• And much more!

Links:

• https://code.visualstudio.com
• https://github.com/chrisdias
• GitHub.com/microsoft
• @code

Picks:

Chris

• Pizza

PJ

• Deli

Charles

• Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nader Dabit

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Nader Dabit. Nader is a familiar guest on JavaScript Jabber, talking about the state of React Native. Nader is the host of React Native Radio, another podcast on the Dev Chat TV network. Nader is a React Native trainer that does consulting and workshops in major cities in the US.

Nader dives into his background and how he began his journey as a developer. Interestingly, Nader became successful as a developer without any formal training, but, by only learning to code on the job. This is a great episode to learn specific ways to build a career without formal training, and how to present yourself for the job.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• React Native Radio and the React Native world
• React Training and pop up workshops
• How Nader got into programming
• Learning HTML and Web Development
• E-commerce, WordPress
• Nader talks about getting his first job
• Positioning  yourself as a developer for success
• Specialization
• Presenting yourself for the job
• How Nader learn to do JavaScript
• Learning a viable option
• Ionic
• What is it about React Native that interest you?
• React Native In Action - Book!
• React Native Elements 
• Sharing Content
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• React Native In Action
• reactnative.training
• https://github.com/react-native-training
• Ideas anyone?

Picks

Nader

• Audio Book- A Guide To the Good Life 

Charles

• The Way of Kings
• Scratching your own itch!

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

Joe Eames

Special Guests: 

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Dirk Hohndel about Open Source Software. Dirk is the Chief Open Source Officer at VMWare and has been working with open source for over 20 years. Dirk duties as the Chief Open Source Officer is to engage with the open source community and help promote the development between the community, companies, and customers.

Dirk provides historical facts about open sources to current processes. The discussion covers vision and technological advances with languages, security, and worries of using open source software, view/consumption and burnout on maintaining a project. This is a great episode to learn about more different avenues of Open Source.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What does the Chief Open Source Officer do?
• What is really different and has stayed the same in open source?
• Technological advances
• Good engineering and looking ahead or forward
• 100 million lines of code running a car…
• This is in everything..
• Production environments
• Security
• Bugs in the software and the security issues
• Scaling and paying attention
• Where should we be worried about open source
• Notation and data sets
• Write maintainable software
• How does VMWare think about open source?
• View and Consumption of open source
• The burnout of open source projects - how to resolve this abandonment
• To much work to maintain open source  - not a money issue
• Scaling the team workload not the money
• Contribution and giving back
• Companies who do and don’t welcome open source
• What to do to make a project open source?
• Adopting an API
• And much more!

Links:

• @_drikhh
• VMWare
• Drikhh - everywhere!
• https://github.com/dirkhh

Picks:

Aimee

• De Contact 
• Dodow 

Dirk

• Track This Critical Thinking

Charles

• Nicholas Zakas - Books 

Corey

• Fun Fun Function Show

Joe

• Dice Forge
• Concept of empathy

MJS 038: Peter Cooper

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Peter Cooper

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Peter Cooper. Peter was one the original panelist on Ruby Rogues and JavaScript Jabber. Currently, Peter runs several weekly new letters on JS, Ruby, Go, React, etc. Peter talks about his journey as a programmer, which started at an early age tinkering with his father’s computer at home. Peter describes the beginning as a hobby until he learned the skills to being programming on many platforms. Peter talks about how he learn Ruby and JavaScript, and in early stages of noodling or learning code. Lastly, Peter talks about his contributions to the community and giving back.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• Playing with computers at an early age
• Computers were a hobby, rather than a career builder then
• Being heavily into to anything can become your career, age does not matter
• Finding the skill or passion in programming
• Natural ability to see and make sense of code
• UseNet
• AJax
• Directness
• Blogging 
• New Letters
• rubyflow.com
• What is the ultimate goal of the new letters?
• Contributions
• Helping host podcasts
• Current work?
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• http://peterc.org
• https://rubyweekly.com
• https://github.com/peterc/
• Cooper Press

Picks

Peter

• Litmus
• Cheap Gaming consoles on eBay
• Jason Scott of archive.org

Charles

• Hyper Drive
• J5
• Dash Pro In-Ear Headphones

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Tyler Renelle

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Tyler Renelle. Tyler is a contractor and developer who has worked in many web technologies like Angular, Rails, React and much more! Tyler is a return guest, previously on Adventure in Angular and JavaScript Jabber talking Ionic and Machine learning.

Tyler has recently expanded his work beyond JavaScript and is on the show to talk his interest in AI or Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. Furthermore, Tyler talks about his early journey as a game developer, web developer, and work with some content management systems, and more recently, his development in various technologies.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Writing games out of college
• Studies computer science in college
• Did web development to pay for college working with PHP and ASP
• Content management
• Working with various technologies
• Working with React, is this it?
• Problems React has solved with web apps
• What is the next big innovation?
• View
• Creating Podcasts
• Machine Learning
• Specialized application of AI
• NLP
• Never use his computer science degree as a web developer
• You don’t study code to be a developer
• AI and machine learn is based on Computer Science
• Tensor Flow
• Data Skeptic - podcast
• Performance
• Graphics cards
• Philosophy of Consciousness
• The subjective experience
• Job displacement phenomenon
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• http://ocdevel.com
• http://ocdevel.com/podcasts/machine-learning
• Tensor Flow
• Data Skeptic - podcast
• https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/jsj-278-machine-learning-tyler-renelle
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/lefnire

Picks

Tyler

• The Great Courses 

Charles

• CES
• Email beforehand and set up an appointment
• VRBO.com
• Autonomous.ai

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kitson Kelly

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kitson Kelly. Kitson is a return guest, previously on JavaScript Jabber 277. Kitson is the CTO at SitePen, and has been working and maintaining Dojo 2 for the last couple years.

Kitson talks about his journey as a developer. First, sparking his interest with old Atari games and getting his first computer in his early years.  Kitson talks about his education background and introduction to computers in high school and hang out with other in the same programming niche. Kitson talks about his challenges not having a degree in computer science, but still very successful as a developer after climbing the corporate latter.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Atari Games and old first computer
• Hangout with the computer nerds
• Community college
• No actual formal computer science degree
• Tech Support and Self Taught
• Challenges with not degree
• Climbing the latter
• Troubles even with a degree
• Is a degree in computer science really needed?
• Experience verses degree
• Working with other people is important
• Getting into JavaScript and Dojo
• What kept you working in JavaScript
• How do you get to being CTO and SitePen?
• What are you most proud of with the work on Dojo
• Contributions
• Side Projects  - Dojo 2
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://github.com/kitsonk
• Kistson Kelly
• https://www.sitepen.com
• https://dojo.io

Picks:

Kitson

• SVG 
• Noun Project

Charles

• adminlte.io
• Ruby on Rails, Jquery
• podwrench.com

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Austin McDaniel

This week on My JavaScript Story/My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Austin McDaniel. Austin is a return guest and was previously featured on JavaScript Jabber episode 275 . Austin talks about his journey getting into programming as an 11year old, to recently, as a web developer with more complex technologies. Austin talks about building widgets, working in Angular, JavaScript, and more in-depth web development on many different platforms. Lastly, Austin talks about his contributions to NGX Charts and speaking at a variety of developer conferences.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 

• How did you get into programming? 11 years old
• Cue Basic
• Web developer
• College jobs was in web developing
• IE6
• Building Widgets
• Components
• jquery 
• Web is the future
• How did you get into Angular? 2013, v1.2
• Backbone
• Angular 1 & 2
• NG X Charts
• Speaking at Conferences
• Augmented Reality and VR
• Web AR
• Angular Air Podcast
• Working as a contractor with Google
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• JavaScript Jabber episode 275
• jquery
• http://amcdnl.com
• Angular Air Podcast
• @amcdnl
• github.com/amcdnl
•  

Picks

Austin

• Todd Motto 

Charles

• NG Conf
• Angular Dev Summit
• Angular Air Podcast

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kassandra Perch

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kassandra Perch. Kassandra is a return guest from JavaScript Jabber episode 197. Kassandra is a developer relations engineer for IOpipe, that does AWS Lambda monitoring and visibility in the server-less space. 

Kassandra talks about her journey into program through game sharks or programming game cartridges. Also, furthering her interest in programming was taking computer science courses in college, and getting a part-time job in the technology field during college while networking. Kassandra shares her favorite contributions to javascript and open source projects. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming? Game Sharks
• Game Cartridges
• Austin Meetup Group and JavaScript
• Working in the open source community 
• College courses
• Contributions - Nodebotanist 
• Interest in education  and being autistic 
• Child of a teacher 
• Serving the community 
• Helping people with projects 
• IOT - Internet of Things
• Building Robots
• Serverless 
• What are you working on now? 
• AVR Girl
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://www.iopipe.com
• https://github.com/nodebotanist
• https://github.com/noopkat/avrgirl
• http://johnny-five.io
• IOpipe

Picks

Kassandra

• Sue Hitten
• Johnny 5 
• Serverless Framework 

Charles 

• VS Code Azure pluggin 
• Serverless Framework
• Amanda Silver interview 
• More VS Code Interviews on Dev Chat TV

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nick Disabato

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Nick Disabato. Nick is a return guest how was recent on JavaScript Jabber episode 283   talking about AB testing. Also, Nick is an interaction designer from Chicago and runs a consultancy called Draft, who do research AB testing for online stores to increase conversion rate without increase ad spend. Nick talks about his current work, and his journey into programming, more on testing, and contributions to the JavaScript Community.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How much programming do you do day today?
• Programming activities
• Interacting with programmers to deliver products
• What was your introduction to programmer
• Logo - Turtle
• Cue Basic
• How did that get you to where you are today?
• Did not want to be a mathematician
• Never been to art school?
• Being a creative person but not visual
• Describe the creative, design, position you are in.
• Wire Frames
• Verbal communication
• Web development, etc.
• Front facing pages
• How did you get into JavaScript and how much do you have to know?
• Where are the bottlenecks?
• Which framework is the best?
• What are you working on now?
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://draft.nu
• https://nickd.org/bio/
• draftsletters.com
• @nickd

Picks

Charles

• Dash Pro 
• convo.com

Nick

• Visual Web Optimizer 
• Designing for Accessibility 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ben Coe

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Ben Coe. Ben is the co-founder of attachments.me. Currently, work for NPM, and had worked for Freshbooks where he began his professional development career.  Ben talks about his journey into programming and learning JavaScript, and the many experiences into his successful dev career. Ben shares his contributions to the Javascript community and the open source world with technologies like Yargs and InstanbulJS.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• Noodling around with old computers from Waterloo
• Geo cites
• How did you get into Javascript?
• Working at Freshbooks
• Backend infrastructure at NPM
• How did you end up working at NPM?
• Operations person at NPM
• Dev Ops
• What was it like being there in the early days?
• Automation
• Yargs
• InstanbulJS
• Product management at NPM
• C8
• What is next?
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://github.com/bcoe
• @BenjaminCoe
• http://blog.npmjs.org/post/81600398588/npm-install-ben-coe-g
• Yargs
• InstanbulJS

Picks

Ben

• https://www.hackillinois.org
• C8 tool

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Gant LaBorde

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Gant LaBorde. Gant is a regular in React Native Radio of Dev Chat TV. Gant works for Infinite Red and works with Ignite, a toolkit/framework for React Native. Infinite Red is a mobile app consulting company.

Gant talks about his journey in programming and working in the development world. Gant describes his early introduction to programming through the fascination of home computers and friends. Gant talks about his experience in learning  Javascript, PHP, Data Base, Desktop apps, and much more. Lastly, Gant talks about his contributions to React Native, and other platforms, and his current projects.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• Got into programming by help his dad with technology and computers
• Started his intro into programming through a friend programming on their home computer
• Basic
• AOL world - Visual Basic
• Programming
• Backend web
• ASP
• PHP
• Javascript talk
• Typescript talk
• Cardboard talk
• How did you get into React Native?
• Ruby Motion
• Building the Story
• How does React Native allow you to build the story?
• Components and structures
• Reactotron 
• What are you working on now?
• Out of sync Yarn files
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://infinite.red
• https://infinite.red/ignite
• http://blog.npmjs.org/post/81600398588/npm-install-ben-coe-g
• Yargs
• InstanbulJS
• gantlaborde.com
•  

Picks

Gant

• Chain React Conference

Charles

• Avengers Infinity 
• forum.devchat.tv
• Donate
• React Podcast for Dev Chat TV 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Donovan Brown

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Donovan Brown. Donovan is a principle DevOps Manager at Microsoft. Donovan talks about his journey into programming starting in the 8th grade with Cue Basic to college and writing games in Cue Basic. Donovan talks about different avenues of programming and working independently, and being entrepreneurial, and finally getting a call from Microsoft. Donovan tells many great high energy stories and shares his enthusiasm in his career in DevOps. This is a great episode to hear the possibilities in the programming and developer world.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• 8th grade Cue Basic
• Computer Math  Cue Basic
• Selling notes  -  Chemistry class
• Board Game creation
• Teach yourself C in 21 days
• Change majors
• Work at Compaq Computers and go promoted as a software engineer
• Independent, then into Dev Ops
• Notion Solutions
• Ending up in Microsoft doing DevOps
• Hot Topic  - Dev Opts  - Release
• BrianKellerVM
• Demos
• DevOps and the Process
• Visual Studio and people
• Pain Points
• Programmers - Permission to do your job?
• JQuery
• Yeoman Generator 
• Power Shell Plugin
• Open source and Contributions to the community
• DevOps Interviews Podcast
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• http://donovanbrown.com
• https://github.com/DarqueWarrior
• @DonovanBrown
• DevOps Interviews Podcast 

Picks

Donovan

• Visual Studio Code 

Charles

• Installing Windows 10 
• Docker Support for Windows 

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Tim Caswell

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Tim Caswell. Tim got into programming when he was a kid and would mess around on a Commodore 64 he had found. He next moved onto writing games in Cue Basic, and once the internet came into play in the mid to late 90’s, his programming really took off, especially after he got Windows. Tim has since written his own language based on Lua, called Luvit, worked on browser-based IDE systems, like Cloud 9, and so much more. After working on many projects and programs over the years, he is now focusing on building his startup. His advice is to always balance your needs with what you can do and make sure that you are always moving forward.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• Commodore 64
• 386SX
• Games in Cue Basic
• CompuServe
• SweetSharks.com startup
• JavaScript and HTML
• Learning about CPUs in college
• Studied at Central Arkansas originally
• C++
• Software engineering at UT Dallas
• Connect Framework
• NVM in Bash
• Luvit computer language
• Polyglot startup
• New product, SDK, coming soon
• Daplie
• Balance and moving forward
• Getting paid for value
• His mission
• The power to create and to inspire
• And much, much more!

Links: 

• Fresh Books
• Linode
• @CreationIX
•  

Picks

Tim

• Daplie
• Upcoming SDK
• Beaker Browser
• Secure Scuttle Butt

Charles

• CES
• Upside.com (CODE: VGCU7O)

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Cory House

AJ O'Neal

Joe Eames

Special Guests: None

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists speak on where they are what they are up to today. Aimee is still in Nashville, Tennessee, and it is currently working at

Built Technologies and is working with JavaScript. Cory is still authoring courses for Pluralsite, has more recently been doing consulting with React, and is the principal engineer at Cox Automotive. Joe is doing a lot of Pluralsight work, puts together conferences, and is working on a new podcast with Charles. AJ recently did some side work with Dash, is interested in working on a new domain service, and recently got married. Charles is currently at ngATL conference, and has been attending a lot of conferences recently. He is also starting to head over to the video realm and is creating a new podcast called React Roundup and a View Podcast with Joe. They also talk about what they each have planned in the upcoming year for their careers and their lives.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Built Technologies
• JavaScript
• Front End and Full Stack
• Pluralsite
• React consulting
• Cox Automotive
• Front end apps
• View and React podcast
• Angular JS to Angular
• Pluralsight courses
• Big Picture React courses
• Fork of Bitcoin called Dash
• New domain service
• ngATL
• React Roundup Podcast
• New podcasts on artificial intelligence, IOT, augmented and virtual reality game development, python
• Node, JavaScript, and Rust
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Linode
• Built Technologies
• Pluralsite
• Cox Automotive
• Dash
• ngATL
• DevChat.tv Youtube
• FreshBooks

Picks:

Charles

• ATR2100 Microphone
• Zoom H6
• Apple AirPods
• ngATL
• ngGirls

Aimee

• Improving Ourselves to Death
• What Does Code Readability Mean?

Cory

• JavaScript Tip Tweet
•  

AJ

• How to Start a Startup YouTube Series
• Singham Movie
•  

Joe

• WebFlow.com

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: JC Hiatt

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with JC Hiatt. JC is a 25-year-old software consultant from Jackson, Mississippi. He first got into programming in the 7^th grade when he had the desire to create a website. He has since done a lot of work with WordPress, helped to found DevLifts, and much more. Now, he is doing a lot of little things to help make an impact on the programming world, including running multiple podcasts and creating tutorials for new programmers.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• w3schools.com
• HTML and CSS
• What got you into JavaScript?
• Hackers
• HackThisSite.com
• jQuery
• WordPress
• What are you most proud of?
• Tutorial involving React and WordPress
• Consulting
• Cryptocurrencies Podcast: HODL Daily
• DevLifts and DevLifts Podcast
• Cryptocurrency interest
• Balance
• And much, much more!

Links: 

• Linode
• w3schools.com
• DevLifts Website and Podcast
• HODL Daily Podcast
• FreshBooks
• JCHiatt.com
• @JCHiatt
•  

Picks

JC

• CSS Grid
• The Punisher

Charles

• Artemis by Andy Weir
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• React Dev Summit

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Cory House

AJ O'Neal

Joe Eames

Aaron Frost

Special Guests: Dave Geddes

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk with Dave Geddes about CSS Grids. Dave quit his job about a year ago and has been living the entrepreneur and programmer life since then. Now, he builds mastery games to help people learn CSS. Dave discusses the differences between Flexbox and CSS Grid and how the games that he creates can help people learn CSS Grid in a fun and interactive way.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• CSS Mastery games
• FlexboxZombies.com
• GridCritters.com
• Uses spaced repetition and delayed recall to learn
• CSS Grid
• Flexbox
• CSS Grid as the cake and Flexbox as the frosting
• Edge spec
• What Flexbox can do
• Sub-Grids
• Geddski.com
• Nesting Grids
• Old Grid vs New Grid layout
• Why would you move from Flexbox to CSS Grid?
• CSS Grid tools
• GridByExample.com
• Education and Gamification
• Pick a UI that interests you
• For a discount on Grid Critters: enter JS Jabber for 20% off
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Linode
• FlexboxZombies.com
• GridCritters.com
• Geddski.com
• GridByExample.com
• FreshBooks
• @Geddski

Picks:

Charles

• R Pods Earphones

Aimee

• NEU Cleanse
• “At Age 6, Girls Are Less Likely to Identify Females As ‘Really, Really Smart’”

Cory

• Cory Tweet

AJ

• How to Start a Startup
• Made in America by Sam Walton

Joe

• The Dungeoneers by John David Anderson
• NG Conf

Aaron

• Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff

Dave

• They Are Billions

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Sean Merron

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Sean Merron. Sean is currently in Austin, Texas and is originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is a full-time software engineer, and has been for a little over 15 years now, and runs a podcast called 2 Frugal Dudes. He first got into programming when he was in high school and went to a trade school for computer networking. This trade school really gave him a leg up with his certifications and led him to his first job where he did tech support for an office. Sean urges new programmers to always have a project and to never be afraid to learn something new.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• 2 Frugal Dudes
• How did you get into programming?
• CCNA and A+ certification
• Frist experience learning programming
• AP Computer Science
• C++ and Java
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Gaming led to him wanting to build websites
• GeoCities
• HTML files
• HTML application
• Any advice for new programmers?
• Scripting
• Life-long learning
• What have your contributed to the programming community?
• Teaching, meetups, and conferences
• How did 2 Frugal Dudes come about?
• The importance of learning about finances
• The goal of podcasts
• His podcast audience demographics
• They discuss finances in layman’s terms
• What are you working on now and what are your future plans?
• And much, much more!

Links: 

• Linode
• 2 Frugal Dudes
• EarlyRetirementRoadmap.com
• @SeanMerron

Picks

Charles

• React and View Podcast coming up
• PodWrench.com

Sean

• Mr. Money Mustache
• BogleHeads
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

AJ O'Neal

Special Guests: Kitson Kelly

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk with Kitson Kelly about evaluating web frameworks. Kitson is currently in Australia working for ThoughtWorks as a principle technologist. He has written many articles on frameworks and urges that people don’t get stuck on one framework in their programming. He talks about how using only frameworks that you know could hurt you in the long run. This episode is great for understanding when to use certain JavaScript frameworks and how branching out from what is comfortable might make your job easier.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Articles on web frameworks
• How do you pick a JavaScript framework to use?
• The framework depends on your changing needs
• Recommending less popular frameworks
• Angular, Ember, React
• React vs Redux
• Certain domains with different frameworks?
• Each framework takes a different approach
• How to decide which framework to use?
• Only give it a couple days to see if your app works with the framework
• Is it ever appropriate to not use a certain framework?
• Frameworks are there to make your job easier
• Don’t be afraid to try new frameworks
• Choose a framework that will “be there tomorrow”
• What is the future for frameworks?
• Experiment and be honest with what you need
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Linode
• ThoughtWorks
• Kendo UI
• LootCrate
• @KitsonK
• Kitson’s GitHub

Picks:

Charles

• Facebook
• The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moore
• Google Drive for Business

Aimee

• Would College Students Retain More If Professors Dialed Back The Pace?
• URL to PDF Converter
• CSS History

AJ

• Tylenol Cold and Flu Severe

Kitson

• Microsoft Azure
• Zype

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Azat Mardan

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Azat Mardan. Azat is the author of 14 books on Node JS, JavaScript, and React JS. He also founded Node University, speaks at conferences, and works at Capitol One. Azat first got into programming when he was in college and his major was Informatics in eastern Europe and then when he graduated, he taught himself JavaScript and PHP and did some freelance work. Once he came to the United States, he got his master’s degree in Information Systems Technology and was building websites for country embassies. His main advice to people new to programming and IT is to just focus on one thing and give yourself enough time to get comfortable with that technology, and then move on to a new technology to conquer.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• Major in informatics
• PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
• Freelancing
• Masters in Information Systems Technology
• C++ class
• FDIC
• Advice to new programmers
• The importance of focus
• His startup experience
• Ruby on Rails
• Mac vs Windows
• Taught himself different frameworks and languages
• Location matters
• MongoDB
• The best way to learn is to teach others
• What was it about JavaScript that really clicked for you?
• JavaScript has expressiveness
• The Talent Code
• What led you to React?
• Which contributions are you most proud of?
• And much, much more!

Links: 

• Node University
• The Talent Code
• Azat’s Blog: WebAppLog.com

Picks

Charles

• Gardenscapes
• Starcraft II
• The Osiris Method

Azat

• Echo JS

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

AJ O'Neal

Special Guests: Ben Coe, Aaron Abramov, and Issac Schleuter

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk with Ben Coe, Aaron Abramov, and Issac Schleuter about test coverage and testing tools. They talk about the different tools and libraries that they have contributed to the coding community, such as NYC, conf, and Jest. They also discuss what test coverage is actually about and when using test coverage tools is necessary.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What have you contributed to the testing tools community?
• npm
• NYC tool and instanbul project
• conf
• Jest
• These libraries were developed to be easy and have “batteries included”
• False positives with test coverage
• Encourage testing practices that don’t practice in a superficial way
• Test coverage is about making sure you test every state a public API can get into
• Think through the test you’re writing first
• Barriers against testing
• Don’t spike the code too quickly
• Provides guardrails for newer developers to contribute to open source projects
• Use tests to understand the system
• How to spend your time better
• When you need tests
• Value is very short term
• TDD
• And much, much more!

Links:

• @BenjaminCoe
• @AaronAbramov_
• Issac’s GitHub

Picks:

Charles

• React Roundup
• Views on Vue
• Adventures in Angular
• React Dev Summit 2018

Aimee

• Galentine’s Day
• Dnote CLI

AJ

• The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

Corey

• We are hive project guidelines
• Tip: You can install node as a dependency on your project

Ben

• Hack Illinois 2018
• C8

Aaron

• Reason

Issac

• The Tap 100
• Krypton App
• Friendly Fire Podcasts

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Todd Gardner

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Todd Gardner. Todd is one of the co-founders of Track JS, which is a JavaScript error monitoring service. He first got into programming in Jr. High when he and his friends played around with computers they had dumpster dived for from their school in order to play video games. In High School, he learned how to create websites so that people could register for his LAN parties online. They also discuss the importance of finding passion in what you do as well as what Todd is most proud of contributing to the JS community.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Track JS
• Stack trace
• Telemetry
• Decodes errors that are actually good to focus on
• How did you get into programming?
• Warcraft video game
• Started programming past gaming in High School
• LAN parties
• Pearl
• The importance of passion in programming
• C#
• He didn’t start off with programming as his focus
• Find the thing that inspires you and go do it!
• How did you wind up on JavaScript?
• Working as a consultant
• Knockout vs Backbone
• .net contractor to JS contractor
• Node JS
• What are you most proud of in JS?
• Understand that you’re never done with a JS app
• What are you doing now?
• And much, much more!

Links: 

• Track JS
• @ToddHGardner
• Todd.mn

Picks

Charles

• Eternium
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
• My Business on Purpose Podcast
• Jamie Masters 
• Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
• The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran

Todd

• Smart Things
• Rage

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• Cory House
• AJ O'Neal

Special Guests: None

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about React: The Big Picture, Cory’s course on Pluralsight and what React is all about. They discuss both the pros and cons when it comes to using React and when it would be the best to use this library. They also encourage programmers to use React in a more consistent way so that people can share components.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is React: The Big Picture course?
• React
• The frameworks work with each other
• Reason and Elm
• How to decide when using React is the best option?
• React tradeoffs
• JavaScript
• React expects you to do a little more typing and work
• React is very close to JavaScript
• React pushes you towards a single file per component
• React Round Up
• Are the Code Mods as wonderful as they sound?
• Angular
• Create React App
• What are Code Mods?
• Lack of opinionated approach in React
• Using React in a more consistent way
• MobX and Redux
• Start off using just plain React
• When wouldn’t you want to use React?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• React: The Big Picture
• Cory’s Pluralsight
• Reason
• Elm
• React
• JavaScript
• React Round Up
• Create React App
• Angular
• MobX
• Redux
• Framework Summit 2018
• Angular: The Big Picture
• React Dev Summit

Picks:

Charles

• Hunting Hitler
• The Greatest Showman: Sing-a-long

Aimee

• “Why being a perfectionist is an obstacle (and how to beat it)” by Gui Fradin
• “How to understand the large codebase of an open-source project?” blog post

Joe

• Marital Bliss Card Game

AJ

• Pplwink.com

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Jeremy Likness

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Jeremy Likness. Jeremy works for Microsoft currently and first got into programming when he was kept home while having a sunburn and taught himself how to type in a program into his family’s TI-99 4A computer and then later moved on to the Commodore 64. They stress the fact that you can be a successful programmer, no matter your background and they talk about the pros and cons of being a cloud developer advocate.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you first get into programming?
• How much Microsoft is in the different programming aspects
• Cloud developer advocates
• Azure
• TI-99 4A and Commodore 64
• C and C+
• You don’t have to go the traditional route to be a programmer
• Having a CS major is not the only way
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Discovered the internet in college
• Career focused on Web apps
• jQuery
• Backbone.js
• Hands-on career with the code
• He did consulting for 10 years
• Linux
• How has your earning changed?
• His biggest fear was getting out of touch with the realities of day-to-day programming
• Pros and cons of being a cloud developer advocate
• Community, Content, and Connection with engineering
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Microsoft Cloud developer advocates
• Azure
• JavaScript
• jQuery
• Backbone.js
• Linux
• @JeremyLikness
• Jeremy’s Blog

Picks

Charles

• BusyCal

Jeremy

• Dwitter.net
• Hello World: The Film
• Node.js documentation on Azure

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• AJ O'Neal
• Special Guests: Orta Therox

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about the tool Danger with Orta Therox. Danger allows you to create cultural rules about your pole request workflow. They discuss what Danger is, how it works, and how it can help you to catch errors and speed up code review. Danger lets you erase discussions so that you can focus on the things that you should really be focusing on, like the code. They also compare Danger to other ways of doing test converge.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is DangerJS?
• Think of it as being on the PR level
• Provides an eval context
• Used on larger projects
• React, React Native, Apollo, and RxJS
• Experimenting with moving Danger onto a server
• Danger can run as a linting step
• Pre-commit hooks
• Prettier
• How do you use Danger on your own machine?
• Danger Ruby vs Danger JS
• NPM install
• How is using Danger better that other ways of test coverage?
• What kinds of rules can you write for this system?
• Can use with Ruby or JavaScript
• React Storybooks
• Retrospectives
• And much, much more!

Links:

• React Dev Summit
• JS Dev Summit
• Danger JS
• React
• React Native
• Apollo
• RxJS
• Prettier
• Danger Ruby
• Ruby
• JavaScript
• Orta’s GitHub
• Artsy Blog

Picks:

Charles

• Hogwarts Battle Board Game
• Sushi Go Party! Game
• NYC tips

Aimee

• Max Stoiber Blog
• The Ultimate Guide to Kicking Ass on Take-home Coding Challenges

Joe

• SaltCON
• Stuffed Fables Board Game

AJ

• UniFi AC Lite
• Fullmetal Alchemist

Orta

• The Wire
• Worm Web Serial

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Quincy Larson

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Quincy Larson. Quincy created Free Code Camp, whose goal is to build a huge community of people who will then contribute to the project so that they can help more people learn code for free. Quincy first got into programming when he wanted to find a way to get teachers out from behind the computer and into the classrooms. This revealed to him how powerful technology was and really got him interested in learning more code. He feels very strongly about the importance of accessibility and strived to make his camp as accessible as he could so he could reach the most people with it. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Free Code Camp
• How did you first get into programming?
• Previously a school director and teacher
• AutoHotkey
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Focused on the problem of learning the code
• Free Code Camp was his main focus as a programmer
• The importance of accessibility
• Free Code Camp curriculum
• New update launching soon
• Build projects in order to get a certificate
• 6 certificates in total
• What is the work breakdown with Free Code Camp?
• Editorial staff now
• Free Code Camp YouTube Channel
• Writes on Medium
• Loves the fact that he gets to help others and positively affect their lives
• What else are you working on now?
• Beta.freeCodeCamp.org
• Expanding Free Code Camp Directory
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Free Code Camp
• AutoHotkey
• JavaScript
• Free Code Camp YouTube Channel
• Quincy’s Medium
• Beta.freeCodeCamp.org
• @Ossia
• Free Code Camp Medium

Picks

Charles

• VRBO
• Mesquite, Nevada
• Upside.com

Quincy

• The state of machine learning in JavaScript
• Tensor Fire

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Cory House
• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• AJ O'Neal

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about the Framework Summit. It was the brainchild of Merrick Christensen. This summit includes talks on multiple different frameworks all in a two-day conference, which allows you to get exposed to new frameworks while still learning more about the framework your job requires you to use. Another goal of the conference is that it will be able to open people’s eyes up to the different frameworks available to them and show that no one framework is superior to another.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is the Framework Summit?
• The framework you use plays a huge role in your programming
• For people who want to learn about more than one framework
• Allows you to explore
• The format of the conference
• Park City, Utah in October 2018
• Helps you answer which framework should you use?
• Goal is to open people’s eyes up to other frameworks
• Decrease internet arguments over which framework is better
• Fluent Conference
• Get to have conversation with other people who work in your framework
• Making connections
• React Rally Talk Evan Czaplicki
• The context matters
• Being able to deep dive into the different frameworks
• Using frameworks in conjunction with one another
• Have you seen “religionist” themes in programming frameworks?
• Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• Some people will never look beyond their frameworks
• If it’s working, why would you mess with it?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• React Dev Summit
• JS Dev Summit
• Framework Summit
• Angular
• React
• Ember
• JavaScript
• Fluent Conference
• React Rally Talk Evan Czaplicki
• Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• @FrameworkSummit

Picks:

Charles

• Parked Out By the Lake Dustin Christensen
• DevChat.tv
• Newspaper by Themeforest

Cory

• Quokka

Aimee

• Republic of Tea – Apple Cider Vinegar Tea
• The Way of Testivus

Joe

• Evan Czaplicki Talk

AJ

• Dinosaurs
• Cough Syrup by Young the Giant

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Gordon Zhu

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Gordon Zhu. Gordon is the founder of Watch and Code. The mission of the company is to take total beginners and turn them into amazing developers. He first got into programming by trying to avoid programming. He studied business in college and was really interested in the internet, leading him to have to learn coding. He talks about the importance of being focused, especially in the beginning, and the ability to figure things out.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Watch and Code
• How did you first get into programming?
• Studied business in college
• Peak
• Two different eras of programmers
• There is more than one way to get into programming
• Culture is promoting a new way of thinking about technology
• Black Mirror
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Marketing, product management, and engineering
• Angular
• Tried to avoid JS and focused on Python
• Importance of focus
• The ability to figure things out
• How to spend your time in the beginning
• Current focus
• Focus gives you freedom
• Reading a lot of code
• What are you proud of?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript
• Watch and Code
• Peak
• Black Mirror
• Angular
• Python
• @Gordon_Zhu
• Practical JavaScript

Picks

Charles

• 4k Camcorder
• 25 ft XLR Cables
• Zoom H6
• Roland R-09
• USB-C Dongle Docking Station
• ScreenFlow
• PB Works

Gordon

• How I Built This podcast
• Stay Tuned with Preet podcast

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Aimee Knight
• AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Peggy Rayzis

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about Apollo with Peggy Rayzis. Peggy is an open source engineer on the Apollo team where she primarily focuses on client stuff, working on Apollo Client, and also other libraries. Previously, she was a UI engineer at Major League Soccer where she worked primarily with React and React Native. She discusses what GraphQL is and how it is used, as well as how they use it in the Apollo team to make their lives as developers easier. They also touch on when it would work best to use GraphQL and when it is not ideal to use it.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• AiA 127 Episode
• Peggy intro
• What is GraphQL?
• What is a Typed Query Language?
• What is a schema?
• Where do schemas get defined?
• GraphQL SDL
• Apollo Stack and Apollo Server
• Tracing and cash control
• Apollo Engine
• How GraphQL Replaces Redux
• GraphQL cuts down on front-end management
• Apollo Link State
• The best code is no code
• Apollo Client allows for greater developer productivity
• Does the conversation change if you’re not using Redux or in a different ecosystem?
• When is the right time to use this?
• Data doesn’t have to be graph shaped to get the most out of GraphQL
• Analyze schema with Apollo Engine
• Is there a way to specify depth?
• Max Stoiber blog post
• How would people start using this?
• HowtoGraphQL.com
• And much, much more!

Links:

• React Dev Summit
• JS Dev Summit
• Apollo
• AiA 127 Episode
• Apollo Client
• Major League Soccer
• React
• React Native
• GraphQL
• GraphQL SDL
• Apollo Server
• Apollo Engine
• How GraphQL Replaces Redux
• Apollo Link State
• Redux
• Max Stoiber blog post
• HowtoGraphQL.com
• @PeggyRayzis
• Peggy’s GitHub
• Peggy’s Medium

Picks:

Charles

• GraphQL Ruby
• WordPress GraphQL
• Hogwarts Battles Board Game
• Pandemic Legacy
• Risk Legacy

Aimee

• How GraphQL Replaces Redux
• JavaScript Meetup in LA

AJ

• Simple.com
• BroccoliWallet.com
• The Four by Scott Galloway

Peggy

• Workshop.me
• Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Johannes Schickling

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Johannes Schickling. Johannes is the CEO and Co-Founder of GraphCool and works a lot on Prisma. He first got into programming when he started online gaming and would build websites for gaming competitions. He then started getting into creating websites, then single page apps, and has never looked back since. He also gives an origin story for GraphCool and the creation of Prisma. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Johannes intro
• How did you first get into programming?
• Always been interested in technology
• PHP to JavaScript
• Creating single page apps
• Self-taught
• The problem-solving aspect keeps people coming back to programming
• Always enjoyed math and physics
• Programmers make up such a diverse community
• How did you find JavaScript?
• Has used a wide range of front-end frameworks
• Node
• WebAssembly
• Opal
• What drew you into doing single page apps?
• Like the long-term flexibility of single page apps
• Don’t have to worry about the back-end right off the bat
• GraphQL
• What have you done in JavaScript that you are most proud of?
• Open source tooling
• GraphCool origin story
• What are you working on now?
• Prisma
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript
• GraphCool
• Prisma
• PHP
• Node
• WebAssembly
• Opal
• GraphQL
• @_Schickling
• @GraphCool
• GraphCool Blog

Picks

Charles

• PopSocket
• DevChat.tv/YouTube

Johannes

• Gatsby
• GraphQL Europe
• GraphQL Day

Panel:

• Joe Eames
• Cory House
• Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Ben Clinkinbeard

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about D3.js with Ben Clinkinbeard. D3.js is a JavaScript library that has you use declarative code to tell it what you want and then it figures out all of the browser inconsistencies and creates the notes for you. He talks about the two main concepts behind D3, scales and selections, which once you understand make D3 a lot more user friendly. He then touches on SPGs and discusses his Learn D3 in 5 Days course.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is D3.js?
• Stands for Data Driven Documents
• JavaScript
• How much of the learning curve is attributed to learning D3?
• SPG
• 2 main concepts behind D3: scales and selections
• Is learning about SPGs a prerequisite to leaning D3?
• How serious are you talking when saying idiosyncrasies?
• SPG tag
• Understanding positioning in SPG
• Positions with CSS transforms
• Are you required to use SPG?
• Not required to use SPG with D3
• Canvas
• SPG is vector based
• SPG utility function
• Responseivefy
• Learn D3 in 5 Days course
• Is there and overlap with D3 and React?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• D3.js
• JavaScript
• Responsivefy
• Learn D3 in 5 Days course
• React
• @bclinkinbeard
• Ben’s GitHub

Picks:

Cory

• React cheat sheet
• “Why software engineers disagree about everything” by Haseeb Qureshi

Joe Eames

• “JavaScript vs. TypeScript vs. ReasonML” by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Aimee

• “How To Use Technical Debt In Your Favor”
• Neuroscience News Twitter

Ben

• ComLink

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Jonathan Carter

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Jonathan Carter. Jonathan is a PM at Microsoft and has been a web developer for over 15 years. At Microsoft, he’s had the opportunity to work on tooling, platform pieces for JavaScript applications, and many other things. He first got into programming when his uncle let him shadow him and the IT department he had working for him, and this is where he was first introduced to software and the idea of working with computers as a career. They talk about his proudest accomplishments within the JavaScript community as well as what he is working on now.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Jonathan intro
• Asure
• How did you first get into programming?
• Interest in creating a website
• Dual enrollment in high school at local community college
• Started off with VB6
• Uncle was very active in his programming start
• .net
• Scrappy boredom mixed with curiosity led to him actually getting into software
• Everyone comes into programming differently
• Your past is important in explaining where you have ended up
• Node.js on Asure
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Worked at a newspaper in the software division
• Ajax
• jQuery
• Wanted to write better apps
• CodePush
• Stayed in JavaScript community because it brings him inspiration and excitement
• Likes to be able and look back on his past projects
• App development for fun
• Is there anything that you are particularly proud of?
• Profiling tools
• Liked building tools that meet people where they are at and simplify their jobs
• Qordoba
• React Native
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript
• Microsoft
• Asure
• Node.js
• jQuery
• CodePush
• Qordoba
• React Native
• @LostinTangent
• Jonathan’s GitHub

Picks

Charles

• Anti-Pick: Intellibed
• Tuft and Needle

Jonathan

• Notion
• Doomsday by Architects