This episode was recorded live from The Microsoft Build Conference 2016. In this episode we chatted with Wade Anderson of Microsoft about Visual Studio Code. You can follow him on Twitter, or check out what he’s done over on GitHub.

Picks

Parks and Recreation (Wade)
VidAngel (Wade)

A special thanks again goes out to Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin from .NETRocks for putting this podcast series together! You rock!

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and

227 JSJ Fostering Community Through React with Benjamin Dunphy, Berkeley Martinez, and Ian Sinnott

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 09:00:00 -0400

03:08 - Benjamin Dunphy Introduction

04:07 - Berkeley Martinez Introduction

04:19 - Ian Sinnott Introduction

05:19 - The React Codebase

12:38 - Other Important Parts of the React Ecosystem

14:22 - The Angular vs the React Ecosystem and Community

The Learning Curve
create-react-app

22:07 - Community

Developer Experience

Functional Programming

26:56 - Getting Connected to the React Community

29:34 - Conferences

33:28 - Technology From the Community

redux
ThunderCats.js
38:23 - Choices Are Expanding; Not Shrinking
Linting

40:19 - The Future of React

42:39 - Starting More Communities

Picks

This Developing Story (Aimee)
Nashville (Aimee)
Nodevember (Aimee)
egghead.io: React in 7 Minutes (Ben)
Lee Byron: Immutable User Interfaces @ Render 2016 (Ben)
Nick Schrock: React.js Conf 2016 Keynote (Ben)
create-react-app (Ian)
Functional Programming Jargon (Ian)
The Serverless Framework (Ian)
Ben's Blog (Berkeley)
Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series (Berkeley)
Vsauce: The Zipf Mystery (Berkeley)
Kinesis Advantage for PC & Mac (Dave)

Full Article

and

228 JSJ React Native with Nader Dabit and Mike Grabowski

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 07 Sep 2016 08:00:00 -0400

Code-sharing between mobile and web apps with React Native

Using native code and Javascript

What to know about developing with React Native

The importance of tooling

Live and hot-reloading

Updating your app on the fly

Possible difficulties faced by transitioning to React Native

Bridging between native API’s and React Native

Writing apps in Swift or React Native

The future of React Native

How to start a React Native project

Resources:

React Native Radio Episode 8

Tadeu Zagallo’s Website

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and

231 JSJ Codewars with Nathan Doctor, Jake Hoffner, and Dan Nolan

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 28 Sep 2016 09:00:00 -0400

3:23 Discussing the purpose and aim of Codewars

7:30 The process for building a program with Codewars

11:07 The UI and editor experience

12:55 The challenges faced when first building Codewars

14:23 Explaining PJAX

16:54 Building code on Codewars

21:24 The expanded use of KATA on Codewars

23:11 Practicing “solving problems” and how it translates to real world situations

34:00 How Codewars proves out the persistence of coders

36:41 How Codewars appeals to collaborative workers

44:40 Teachable moments on Codewars

49:40 Always check to see if Codewars is hiring. Codewars uses Qualified.io, which helps automate the hiring process.

PICKS:

Marrow Sci-fi book

Uprooted Fantasy book

“Write Less Code” blog post

“The Rands Test” blog post

Five Stack software development studio

“Stranger Things” on Netflix

Angular 2 Class in Ft. Lauderdale, Discount Code: JSJ

Lean Analytics book

Code book

Datasmart book

Letting Go book

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and

232 JSJ GunDB and Databases with Mark Nadal

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 05 Oct 2016 08:00:00 -0400

03:45 What makes the Gun database engine special

07:00 Defining a database

12:58 The CAP Theorem

22:56 What Graphs are and how they function (circular references)

30:32 Gun and rotational disk systems

32:08 Gun’s optimizations for performance in ensuing versions

39:55 The prevalence of open source companies

42:45 Further discussing the CAP Theorem and its nuances

50:33 Gun’s purpose and design

52:13 What a Firebase is

54:22 How to get started with Gun - Visit Gun Tutorial, Gun's Github Page, and

Gun Node Module

QUOTES:

“I think the database should bend to your application’s demands, rather than you having to bend to the database’s demands.” –Mark Nadal

“…The protocol that GUN defines is something that can be implemented in any language. Because GUN is in the language, you don’t have the context which latency of having to make an HTTP call or socket request…” –AJ O’Neill

“Let’s demystify the black magic of CAP.” –Mark Nadal

PICKS:

Dan North’s Deliberate Learning Video

8Tracks Internet Radio

Pokemon Indigo League on Netflix

Daplie Personal Cloud

Young Frankenstein Movie

Mystic Vale Card Game

JS Remote Conference

React Remote Conference

Farm Heroes Super Saga Game App

Full Article

and

234 JSJ JAMStack with Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 08:00:00 -0400

1:00 Intro to guests Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen

2:20 Definition of JAMStack

8:12 JAMStack and confusion over nomenclature

12:56 JAMStack and security, reliability and performance

17:05 Example of traffic spike for company Sphero

18:26 Meaning of hyperdynamic

20:35 Future and limits of JAMStack technology

26:01 Controlling data and APIs versus using third parties

28:10 Netlify.com and JAMStack

31:16 APIs, JavaScript framework and libraries recommended to start building on JAMStack

35:13 Resources and examples of JAMStack: netlify.com, Netlify blog, JAMStack radio, JAMStack SF Meetup

QUOTES:

“I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see the limits being pushed a lot for what you can do with this.” - Matt

“Today we’re starting to see really interesting, really large projects getting built with this approach.” - Matt

“If you can farm 100% of your backend off to third parties, I feel like that really limits a lot of the interesting things you can do as a developer.” - Brian

PICKS:

Early History of Smalltalk (Jamison)

React Rally 2016 videos (Jamison)

FiveStack.computer (Jamison)

Falsehoods programmers believe about time (Aimee)

Nodevember conference (Aimee)

48 Days Podcast (Charles)

Fall of Hades by Richard Paul Evans (Charles)

Jon Benjamin Jazz (Brian)

RailsConf 2016 (Brian)

React Native (Brian)

Book of Ye Podcast (Brian)

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (Matt)

Sequoia Capital website

Sphero website

Isomorphic rendering on the Jam Stack by Phil Hawksworth

SPONSORS:

Front End Masters

Hired.com

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and

235 JSJ JavaScript Devops and Tools with Donovan Brown and Jordan Matthiesen

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 26 Oct 2016 08:00:00 -0400

00:50 Intro to guests Donovan Brown and Jordan Matthiesen

1:14 Javascript and Devops

3:49 Node JS and integrating with extensions

11:16 Learning Javascript coming from another language

15:21 Visual Studio Team Services at Microsoft, integration and unit testing

25:10 Visual Studio Code and mobile development

Apache Cordova open source project

31:45 TypeScript and tooling

33:03 Unit test tools and methods

38:39 ARM devices and integration

QUOTES:

“It’s not impossible, it’s just a different set of challenges.” - Donovan Brown

“Devops is the union of people, process and products to enable continuous delivery of value to your end users” - Donovan Brown

“Apps start to feel more native. They can actually get form.” - Jordan Matthiesen

PICKS:

Veridian Dynamics (AJ)

Jabberwocky Video (AJ)

Hard Rock Cafe - Atlanta (Charles)

CES (Charles)

3D printers (Donovan)

High-Yield Vegetable Gardening (Jordan)

taco.visualstudio.com

Jordan on Twitter @jmatthiesen

Visualstudio.com

Donovanbrown.com

Donovan on Twitter @donovanbrown

SPONSORS:

Front End Masters

Hired.com

Full Article

and

237 JSJ CLls - Ember Angular and React with Tracy Lee

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 09 Nov 2016 08:00:00 -0500

TOPICS:

3:57 The exciting facets of CLI’s

8:25 Advantages of CLI projects

11:25 Coding in RAILS

14:18 Disagreeing with conventions encoded in a CLI

19:30 How REACT CLI functions

20:43 Is Ember cheating by using REACT CLI?

26:52 Which CLI is easiest to use

29:00 How to add commands to a CLI

34:00 The future of current CLI’s

35:30 How well CLI’s are working for their respective communities

37:00 The impact of WebPac

PICKS:

“How Break Points are Set” Hacker News Article

Chocolate Mint Tea

Ten Things Wise Parents Know Book

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters Book

Boys Should Be Boys Book

“How Half of America Lost its Effing Mind” Blog Post

Elementary TV Show

Recommendation Form for Topics and Guests

Amazon Smile

Angular Cruise

Sweet Licorice Mint Tea by Choice Organic Teas

Van’s Nintendo Sneakers

RESOURCES AND CONTACT INFO:

Tracy's E-mail

Full Article

and

238 JSJ Intellectual Property and Software Forensics with Bob Zeidman

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 16 Nov 2016 08:00:00 -0500

TOPICS:

03:08 The level of difficulty in determining code creators on the Internet

04:28 How to determine if code has been copied

10:00 What defines a trade secret

12:11 The pending Oracle v Google lawsuit

25:29 Nintendo v Atari

27:38 The pros and cons of a patent

29:59 Terrible patents

33:48 Fighting patent infringement and dealing with “patent trolls”

39:00 How a company tried to steal Bob Zeidman’s software

44:13 How to know if you can use open source codes

49:15 Using detective work to determine who copied whom

52:55 Extreme examples of unethical behavior

56:03 The state of patent laws

PICKS:

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet Blog Post

Bagels by P28 Foods

Let’s Encrypt Indigogo Generosity Campaign

Super Cartography Bros Album

MicroConf 2017

MindMup Mind Mapping Tool

Words with Friends Game

Upcoming Conferences via Devchat.tv

Good Intentions Book by Bob Zeidman

Horror Flick Book by Bob Zeidman

Silicon Valley Napkins

Full Article

and

241 JSJ Microsoft Docs with Dan Fernandez

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 07 Dec 2016 08:00:00 -0500

0:55 - Dan Fernandez and his work

7:50 - Walkthrough of the doc experience

15:00 - Editable nature of the doc

21:00 - Test driving a language

26:30 - Catering to the user

32:30 - Open Source

34:40 - User feedback

37:30 - Filters and Tables of Content

40:45 - Form submissions

41:50 - Community contributors

Picks:

Ghostbusters (AJ)

Daplie (AJ)

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

.NET Rocks (Charles)

ScheduleOnce (Charles)

Devchat.tv 2017 Conferences (Charles)

Disable HTML5 Autoplay (Dan)

Visual Studio Code (Dan)

JSJ episode Visual Studio Code with Chris Diaz and Eric Gamma (Charles)

Full Article

and

242 JSJ Visual Studio and .NET with Maria Naggaga

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 14 Dec 2016 08:00:00 -0500

1:15 - Introducing Maria Naggaga

.NET
Twitter

2:32 - .NET new developers

3:55 - NYC Microsoft bootcamp

6:25 - Building a community of .NET programmers

7:25 - Why would a Javascript developer care about .NET?

9:30 - Getting started with .NET

15:50 - The power of asking questions

22:45 - Recruiting new programmers to the industry

37:00 - Javascript and C#

48:30 - Running .NET on Raspberry Pi

Picks:

Super Cartography Bros album by OverClocked ReMix (AJ)

Daplie (AJ)

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

The Eventual Millionaire (Charles)

Devchat Conferences (Charles)

15- Minute Calls (Charles)

Codeland Conference (Maria)

March by Congressman John Lewis (Maria)

Microsoft Virtual Academy (Maria)

Full Article

and

JSJ 245 Styled Components and react-boilerplate with Max Stoiber

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 06:00:00 -0500

On today's episode, Aimee and Chuck welcome Maximillian "Max" Stoiber to the show. Max hails from Austria and is an expert in open source development at Think Mill. Tune in to JSJ 245 Styled Components and React-Boilerplate with Max Stoiber.

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and

JSJ 246 GraphQL and Apollo with Uri Goldshtein

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 06:00:00 -0500

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood and Aimee Knight discuss GraphQL and Apollo with Uri Goldshtein. Uri is a core developer at Meteor Development Group, and is an expert with GraphQL and Apollo.

Full Article

and

JSJ 248 Reactive Programming and RxJS with Ben Lesh

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 07 Feb 2017 06:00:00 -0500

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood, Joe Eames, and Tracy Lee discuss Reactive Programming and RxJS with Ben Lesh. Ben works at Netflix and also has a side job for Rx Workshop with Tracy. He is the lead author of RxJS 5. Tune in to learn more about RxJS!

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and

JSJ 249 Loading and Optimizing Web Applications with Sam Saccone and Jeff Cross

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 06:00:00 -0500

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood, Joe Eames, and Aimee Knight discuss Loading and Optimizing Web Applications with Sam Saccone and Jeff Cross. Tune in to their interesting talk, and learn how you can improve user experience and performance with better loading!

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and

JSJ 256 Wordpress and Wordpress API for JavaScript Developers with Roy Sivan

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 04 Apr 2017 06:00:00 -0400

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles, Aimee, Joe, and Cory discuss Wordpress and Wordpress API for JavaScript Developers with Roy Sivan. Roy is a WordPress (WP) developer at Disney Interactive. He has long been a fan of JavaScript and WP. During a WordCamp, the WP Founder announced the need for WP developers to learn JavaScript. But, what's in WP that developers should be interested about? Tune in to learn!

Full Article

and

JSJ 263 Moving from Node.js to .NET and Raygun.io with John-Daniel Trask

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 23 May 2017 06:00:00 -0400

This episode features Moving from Node.js to .NET and Raygun.io with John-Daniel Trask. John-Daniel is the Co-founder and CEO of Raygun, a software intelligence platform for web and mobile. He's been programming for many years, and is originally from New Zealand. Tune in and learn what prompted them to move to the .NET framework!

Full Article

and

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 13 Jun 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

This episode is live at the Microsoft Build 2017 with Charles Max Wood and AJ O’Neal. We have Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao from the Visual Studio Code Team at Microsoft. Tune in and learn more about what’s new with Visual Studio Code!

[00:01:20] – Introduction to Ramya Rao and Wade Anderson

Ramya Rao and Wade Anderson are in the Visual Studio Code Team at Microsoft.

Questions for Wade and Ramya

[00:02:00] – Elevator Pitch for Visual Studio Code

Our vision on Visual Studio Code is to take what was best out of the IDE world (Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc.) and bring what was best from the lightweight editor world (Sublime Text, Notepad++, Atom) and merge those two together. We wanted the lightweight features from text editors and the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio and Eclipse. We did general availability last year. We’ve been stable for a year. Additionally, this is Visual Studio Code for Mac, Windows, or Linux. It’s also built in Electron.

[00:03:45] – What are your roles on the team? Do you have particular parts that each of you work on?

Wade’s title is a Program Manager. He does more non-developer things but Ramya is an engineer on the team so she gets a lot more coding that Wade does. Everybody has a key area to own but nothing stops them to go into another area. We try to share knowledge between people but we always have that one key owner that you always go to.

Ramya is a recent addition to the team. She started out maintaining the Go extension, maintaining and adding features. She’s slowly branching out to the Emmet features of the product.

[00:05:30] What is Emmet?

Emmet, or Zen Coding, is a must-have tool for you. You can write, say abbreviations and that expands to really huge HTML to update tags, rename tags, etc. That is one of the features of Emmet and Sergey actually wrote the library. We have an in built integration in the product. I [Ramya] am currently working on that.

[00:06:28] Does Visual Studio Code make it easy to go to the parts that I need to customize on an HTML?

In that case, we have a multi-cursor software in Visual Studio Code, as well. You could place your cursor in different positions, and then, simultaneously edit things.

[00:07:42] Is Emmet an extension or does it come with Visual Studio Code?

Right now, it’s in Built. If you want to know more about Emmet features, you can to emmet.io. That has all the documentation that you need to learn about Emmet features. In Visual Studio Code right now, we’re looking at making into an extension. We pull it out of the main code and maybe more people can contribute and make it even more better.

[00:08:21] – What’s new in Visual Studio Code?

One of our main pillars for this year is to improve performance of the product. We’ve grown a larger team so we’re adding a lot more features every month. Last few months has been, “How can we get some stability on the issues coming in while making sure we’re reducing our tech load?” We really keep to those core principles that we started with at the beginning, which was, we want a fast, lightweight editor.

We built a few extensions that we call key map extensions. They are just a mapping of key bindings that you learned in Sublime Text. You don’t have to re-learn any key bindings in Visual Studio Code.

We also build this Welcome page where you can flip through and see features really briefly. In that Welcome page, one of the key things is an interactive playground where you can play with existing code in different sections. Additionally, as we’ve mentioned, we also put multi-cursor features.

Another thing is workbench naming. You can change the theme of Visual Studio Code but it will be restricted to the editor and not the rest of the workbench.

[00:13:40] – Do you know how Xterm.js works as it was one of the features that you’ve added in Visual Studio Code?

Daniel’s another engineer that’s here with us today. He was the largest contributor to the Xterm.js project. He built the integrated terminal for Visual Studio code so I can’t speak to the internals of how that works.

[00:14:12] – Are we going to start seeing Visual Studio Code integrated into web experiences with other Microsoft products?

That’s actually where we started. We were Monaco editor where you get this cloud-based editing experience. We’re getting people to use it but we’re only getting people who were already using Microsoft products. When electron came out, we saw an opportunity of, “Hey, can we port this Monaco editor to Electron and we could then, run it on Mac and Linux.”

[00:19:45] – What are the performance things that you’ve done?

One thing that we did recently was adding an ability to calculate the start time for Visual Studio Code? That’s one of our full steps to get more information from the user-side. How can you get a profile of what things are running? Which part of the process took much time?

We also need to identify what are the things people are doing that’s causing the editor slow down. An example is when you open a large file and things get laggy.

Another exercise we did was we looked at all of our extension API’s to see which one of those could be a malicious extension.

The difference between VS Code and Atom is that, we ask questions like, “Are we using good data structures? Are we managing our memory properly? Are we removing stuff we don’t need anymore?” That just comes down to all those little things you learn from basic textbooks that have been around for decades about how to write good code. That’s what we have been doing and that’s what we’ll continue to try to do, to try and improve the performance.

[00:25:55] – Do you have problem on the desktop? Are all the modules just load at once?

We definitely don’t load everything at once. Different parts of the editor is loaded differently. When you do the Require, we don’t do it at first load. We do it when we notice that the user wants to use Emmet. We don’t try to load all the library at the beginning and delay the whole process.

We try to lazy load as much as possible, even the extensions. We have a separate process called extension host that takes care of loading all the extensions. Whether the extensions are completed loading or not, that does not stop you from typing in a file. Simple actions shouldn’t be bugged down by fancy actions.

[00:28:25] – What’s coming next for Visual Studio Code?

Every month, when we plan our iteration, we create iteration draft plan. We put it out there for people to see. Performance and helping people get started are probably the top two for us. You can look at github.com/Microsoft/vscode, look for the label ‘iteration plan draft.’ So that’s the current work that we’re doing that month.

Another feature is the multi-root workspace where you can open multiple folders. When you look at the issues and sort by most comments, multi-root is the number one. The second one that is little paper cuts around formatting and auto-intending – just things that make your code prettier.

Picks

AJ O’neal

Breath on the Wild
Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge

Charles Max Wood

Boom Beach
Bluetick.io
Emacs key binding extension for Visual Studio Code

Wade Anderson

Kindle Paperwhite
Twitter @waderyan_

Ramya Rao

Open source
Twitter @ramyanexus

Full Article

and

JSJ 267 Node 8 with Mikeal Rogers, Arunesh Chandra, and Anna Henningsen

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 27 Jun 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 267 Node 8 with Mikeal Rogers, Arunesh Chandra, and Anna Henningsen

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber we have panelists Joe Eames, AJ O’Neil, Amiee Knight and Charles Max Wood and we are talking about Node 8. To help us we have special guests Mikeal Rodgers, Arunesh Chandra, and Anna Henningsen. It’s going to be a great show. Tune in.

[1:56] Is Node 8 just an update or is there more?

More than just an update
Two main points:
Improved Prana support
Native API
Native APIs are helpful for Native Add-ons. For both the consumer and the developer side.
Prior to update these Node Native modules ran in C++ and bound to specific to Node 8 APIs.
Causes these modules to be updated or reconciled every time these modules are rereleased.
Creates burden for module maintainers.
Creates friction in upgrading Node versions in production departments.
If you have a deployment depending on a certain Native module, some of the modules may not get updated in time when updating your Node versions. Keeping people from updating Node.
Creates compatibility issues with Node users not using Node 8
Experimental support for a Native layer in Node 8 to eliminate these issues as much as possible.
Important milestone for the module ecosystem.
You can write extensions for Node in C++ and it decouples V8 so you can use something else on the front.
Modules takes dependency on V8 API specific to a particular version. So if V8 changes your module will be extracted from that.
As a side benefit, you can have another VM to take advantage of that.
Major version upgrades mean updating Native modules and usually some of those modules haven’t updated to the newest version of Node and be complicated.
Deep dependency wise, about 30% depends on a Native module somewhere
In the future, with the Native API, you’ll be able to update Node without breaking modules.

[5:51] What kind of work went into this?

Most of the work was in C++
First thing that was done was, they looked at the top dependent Native modules in the ecosystem.
Looked for what kind of V8 exposure they had and cataloged it
Looked at how these APIs and what their purposes were
Looked for a way to extract them so that they are part of Node Core
Created neutral APIs, now part of the Node core.
All C APIs
Also has a C++ wrapper to improves usability of the API.

[7:17] What’s an example of what you can do with these APIs?

Native modules allows for tighter integration and better module performance
Specific APIs that you can use in V8 that isn’t available through JavaScript
If you have a C++ variable code and you want to expose a variable into JavaScript, that is V8 API note a Node 8 API
Having it bound directly to the VM was something they wanted for a long time
Google controls V8 and they bind to V8
Created a better relationship with Google starting in IOJS
Also worked with Microsoft with their Node Shocker work.
Same with SpiderMonkey
SpiderNode is in the works

[9:23] Have you guys done any testing for performance?

Some. There is a performance working group.
There is a need to stay on top of V8
V8 team has focused on new language features
Many features have been added over the years
Many didn’t come in optimized
The performance profile has changed with these features
If you’re using new language features, you will see a performance boost
In core, still tracking down code that was specific to the old optimizer and rewriting i to work the new optimizer
Turbo C compiler hasn’t landed yet, but is to come.
Will have a completely different performance profile
In most real world applications it will be faster
Waiting on the release to take a version of V8 to make it easier to upgrade features in the future

[11:28] Are the new features picked up from V8 or implemented in Node?

It’s all in V8
Better longterm support
Promises are made better in Node as a platform
Added new method called util.promisify()
Implementation comes from V8
Allows for more optimization for promises in Node core
Promise support for the one-deprecated domains module.

[13:02] Is there anything more than NMP 5?

First off, delete your NMP cache.
It’s in your home directory usually with a .npm extension

[14:09] What are the new features in V8?

Unlimited heap sizes, previously had a 4gb limit. No fixed limit.

[14:09] Will you see things like chakra come out tuned for servers?

Profiles of a server for application process are getting smaller
Getting cut into containers and VMs and micro services
Vms that have cold boot time and run quickly in a strained environment is looking more like what we will see in the future
Yes, especially if you’re using cloud functions
V8 is optimized for phones, but Chakra is even more so
Looking for opportunities for VMs can be solely optimized for a device target
Node take advantage of that VM
VM neutrality is an interesting concept
VM Vendors trying to optimize it based on workloads of a server
Opens opportunities for Node
Node Chakra has been proved to iOS. You can cut off jitting off which was a requirement to be able to be in the Apple App Store
Node is not just for servers anymore
Node doesn’t take a long time configuring it
When a developer runs code on an IoT or a mobile app they don’t control the VM that is bundled, they run it on top of Node and it just works.
VM neutrality gives a new vector, so you can swam a whole different VM

[18:44] When running different engines like iOS vs Android, does the profile change?

What it comes down to is if it’s eventive programming
The browser is an eventive environment, is very efficient waiting for things to happen before it does something
The way that we program servers and nodes are the same as well
the basics are the same generally
environmental differences exist but the programming model is usually the same
What does impact it is memory and processor and hardware and things like that
That is where tuning the VM comes into play

[20:29] What is the new Async Hooks API used for?

Node has been lacking for automated inspection of Async Hook
No way for Node to tell you when scheduling and beginning of an Async operation. Hook helps with that
it’s a way for developers to write debugging features
Node tells the application that it’s working with Asynchronous way.
The embedded inspector has been embedded since Node 6
Now has a JavaScript API to use it
You can use things like Chrome debugger inside the running node process
Old debugging protocol has been removed
VM.run is still there but in the process of being deprecated

[22:34] How like is the experimental Node API will change?

Marked as experimental because it’s the first time in the open
Hopefully out of experimental soon
Soon can port API to the existing LTS
Looking for more people to participate with the new API and give feedback
Fix any concerns before it goes to LTS
Some other experimental things are in the works like ASync Hooks and how it interacts with promises
Renaming some features
Another new feature - serializer and deserializer that comes with V8
experimental but will most likely stay

[25:31] what is your standard for going to LTS?

Major releases every 6 months
Next Oct Node 9 will come out and then Node 8 will be LTS
Documentation, updates, additions etc will be ready then
Plan to do it for 2.5 years
Every even releases come out to LTS as the odd release comes out
Helps keeps a current line while having something new in the release line
Node 6 is the current LTS version

[27:26] What are you taking out or deprecating in Node 8?

Use the word deprecate sparingly
If many people use features, it’s hard to get rid of
Security issue with Buffer, constructor argument was ambiguous
Had added APIs that were more explicit over time and pushed those
Now it will be deprecated

[28:43] 21% - 33% Performance increase with some Node updates

Someone online updated their React app to Node 8 and found an 21% - 33% increase
Benchmarking group tests to make sure things are getting faster
V8 is always getting faster as well
Code changes fast and so there is a chance performance slows down so they have people to check
Benchmark test are all automated by a team

[30:47] Is it safe to just switch to Node 8?

For front-end, yes
clear your NPM cache
Back use cases will usually wait until LTS

[31:28] Where any of the features hard to implement?

The API work took about a year
It was a collaboration which made it interesting
IBM, Intel, Google were involved
The collaboration took a while
Also Async hooks took at least a year.
Async hooks used to be called async wraps and has been in the work for almost 3 years
many of the changes were the accumulation of small chances

[33:07] It’s the little things

Letting people get small changes in accumulate into a big difference
the product gets much better that way

[33:57] What versions of Node are you actively updating?

Current releases of Node 8 for a half of year
Node 6 is LTS
Additional year of maintenance of previous LTSs.
Schedule is at http://github.com/node8js/lts in a chart
Support for Node 4 with only critical updates, Node 6 minor updates, and Node 8
Node 7 doesn’t get much support unless it’s vital security supports.
If you’re running 0.10 or 0.12 stop. Those do not get security fixes anymore

[35:42] Where do you see things going from here?

Mostly still working out Async hooks
Maybe add some web worker or worker support for Node JS
ES module support
Working to make promises better
Working on the performance profile and internal systems

[20:29] What is the adoption like of Node 8?

Node team gets better at getting people to adopt quickly
but about 5% - 6% will not upgrade
community doubles each year at 8 million users right now
Here is a graph on Twitter posted by NPM
Limiting breaks and softly deprecating things makes it’s easier to upgrade

[40:11] How can people contribute and get involved?

NodeToDo.org shows how to make contribution
Occasionally major conferences have information on how to contribute
Test it out and help make it stronger

[42:08] If people install Node 8 and have issues what can they do?

If it’s an NPM problem check with them
clear cache!
install newest version with: npm install -g npm@latest
Report problems to either NPM or Node
If you’re not sure where the problem is, check github.com/nodejs/help

Links

Node8 Node’s Twitter Node’s Medium Node Evangelism Group

Mikael on Twitter and GitHub Arunesh on Twitter Anna on Twitter

Picks

Aremesh

Current Nightly News

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JSJ 268 Building Microsoft Office Extensions with JavaScript with Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

By
Published On :: Tue, 04 Jul 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 268 Building Microsoft Office Extensions with Javascript with Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

This episode is live at the Microsoft Build 2017 with Charles Max Wood and AJ O’Neal. We have Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee from the Office Team at Microsoft. Tune in and learn more about what’s new with Microsoft Office Extensions!

[00:01:25] – Introduction to Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee are Program Managers on the Microsoft Office team, focused on Extensibility.

Questions for Tristan and Sean

[00:01:45] – Extending Office functionality with Javascript

Office isn’t just an application on Windows that runs on your PC. It is running on iPhone, iPad, Android tablet, and apps on the browser with Office Online. The team needs a new platform, add-ins, which allow you to build apps that run across all places. It’s HTML and Javascript. HTML for all the UI and a series of Javascript module calls for the document properties. Sometimes we call it OfficeJS.

[00:03:20] – This works on any version of Office?

It works on Office on Windows, Mac, Online and iPad.

[00:03:55] – HTML and CSS suck on mobile?

There are things that you’re going to want to do when you know you’re running on a mobile device. If you look at an add-in running on Outlook for iPhone, the developer does a lot of things to make that feel like part of the iPhone UI. Tristan believes that you could build a great add-in for Office using HTML and JavaScript.

[00:05:20] – Are these apps written with JavaScript or you have a Native with WebView?

Office itself is Native. All of it is Native code but the platform is very much web. The main piece of it is pointing at the URL. Just go load that URL. And then, you can also call functions in your JavaScript.

[00:06:35] – Why would you do this? How does it work?

The add-in platform is a way to help developers turn Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the apps that actually solve user’s business problems. The team will give you the tools with HTML and JavaScript to go and pop into the Word UI and the API’s that let you go manipulate the paragraph and texts inside of Word. Or in Excel, you might want to create custom formulas or visualizations. The team also let people use D3 to generate their own Excel charts.

And developers want to extend Office because it’s where a lot of business workers spend their days 0 in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel.

[00:10:00] – How did this get delivered to them?

There are 2 ways to get this delivered. One, there’s an Office Store. Second, if you go into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, there’s a store button and you can see tons of integrations with partners.

For enterprises, IT can deploy add-ins to the users’ desktops without having stress about deploying MSI’s and other software deployments that the web completely rids off. The add-ins make a whole lot of pain the past completely go away.

[00:11:00] – Everybody in the company can use a particular plug-in by distributing it with Office?

That’s right. You can go to Office 365 add-in experience. Here’s the add-in and you can to specific people or everyone who’s part of a group.

For the developer’s perspective, if you have the add-in deployed to your client, you could actually push updates to the web service and your users get the updates instantly. It’s a lot faster turn-around model.

[00:14:20] – What about conversations or bot integrations?

There’s the idea of connectors at Teams. You can subscribe to this web book and it’ll publish JSON. When the JSON is received, a new conversation inside of Teams or Outlook will be created. For example, every time someone posts on Stack Overflow with one of the tags that team cares about, it posts on Outlook.

It’s a great way to bring all the stuff. Rather than have 20 different apps that are shooting 20 different sets of notifications, it’s just all conversations in email, making do all the standard email things.

And in the connector case, it’s a push model. The user could choose what notifications they want.

You’d also learn things like bots. You can have bots in Teams and Skype. The users can interact with them with their natural language.

[00:18:40] – How about authentication?

As long as you’re signed into Office, you can call JavaScript API to give you an identity token for the sign in user and it will hand you a JWT back. That’s coming from Azure Active Directory or from whatever customer directory service. That’s standard.

If you want to do more, you can take that identity token and you can exchange that for a token that can call Microsoft graph. This app wants to get access to phone, are you okay with that? Assuming the user says yes, the user gets a token that can go and grab whatever data he wants from the back-end.

[00:20:00] – Where does it store the token?

That’s up to the developer to decide how they want to handle that but there are facilities that make sure you can pop up a dialog box and you can go to the LO-flow. You could theoretically cache it in the browser or a cookie. Or whatever people think is more appropriate for the scenario.

[00:20:55] – What does the API actually look like from JavaScript?

If you’re familiar with Excel UI, you can look at Excel API. It’s workbook.worksheets.getItem() and you can pass the name of the worksheet. It can also pass the index of the worksheet.

[00:22:30] – What’s the process of getting setup?

There’s a variety of options. You can download Office, write XML manifest, and take a sample, and then, side loads it into Office. You can also do that through web apps. There’s no install required because you can go work against Office Online. In the Insert menu, there’s a way to configure your add-ins. There’s upload a manifest there and you can just upload the XML. That’s going to work against whatever web server you have set up.

So it’s either on your local machine or up in the cloud. It’s as much as like regular web development. Just bring your own tools.

[00:24:15] – How do you protect me as a plug-in developer?

There’s an access add-in that will ask your permission to access, say, a document. Assume, they say yes, pipes are opened and they can just go talk to those things. But the team also tries to sandbox it by iframes. It’s not one page that has everybody’s plug-ins intermingle that people can pole at other people’s stuff.

[00:27:20] – How do you support backward compatibility?

There are cases where we change the behavior of the API. Every API is gated by requirement set. So if a developer needs access to a requirement set, he gets an aggregate instead of API’s that he can work with but it isn’t fixed forever.

But it’s not at that point yet where we end up to remove things completely. In Office JS, we’ve talked about API’s as one JavaScript library but really, it’s a bootstrap that brings in a bunch of other pieces that you need.

[00:30:00] – How does that work on mobile? Do they have to approve download for all components?

You can download components by using the browser that the operating system gives. It’s another one of the virtues of being based on the web. Every platform that has a web browser can have JavaScript execution run-time. It allows for the way that their app guidelines are written.

[00:33:15] – How about testing?

It’s a place where there’s still have work to do. There’s a bunch of open-source projects that partners have started to do that. What they’ve done is they’ve built a testing library. Whatever the mock is, it's just a thing on Github. It is open-source friendly. So the team could be able to contribute to it. “Here’s an interesting test case for this API. I want to make sure that it behaves like this.

[00:35:50] – Could you write it with any version for JavaScript e.g. TypeScript?

A Huge chunk of the team is big TypeScript fans. They’ve done a lot of work to make sure that TypeScript experience is excellence.

Type is basically a collection of typing files for TypeScript. There’s a runtime process that parses your TypeScript, gives you feedback on your code, and checks for errors. You can also run it in the background.

There’s an add-in called Script Lab. Script Lab is literally, you hit the code button and you get a web IDE right there. You can go start typing JavaScript code, play with API’s, and uses TypeScript by default. It’ll just actually load your code in the browser, executes, and you can start watching.

[00:39:25] – Are there any limitations on which JavaScript libraries you can pull in?

There a no limitations in place right now. There are partners that use Angular. There are partners that are big React fans. If you’re a web dev, you can bring whatever preferences around frameworks, around tools, around TypeScript versus JavaScript.

[00:45:20] – What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen done with this API?

Battleship was pretty cool. There’s also Star Wars entering credits theme for PowerPoint.

[00:46:40] – If a developer is building a plug-in and get paid for it, does Microsoft take credit for that?

There are 2 ways that folks can do it. You can do paid add-ins to the store. Either you do the standard perpetual 99 cents or you can do subscriptions, where it’s $2.99/month. Tristan encourages that model because integrations are just a piece of some larger piece of software.

But Microsoft is not in the business of trying to get you to pay me a little bit of 10 cents a dollar. It’s really in the business of making sure that you can integrate with Office as quickly as possibly can.

When the users go to the store, they can use the same Microsoft account that you use to buy Xbox games or movies in the Xbox, Windows apps in the Windows store.

[00:52:00] – The App Model

If folks are interested in the app model, they should go to dev.office.com to learn more about it because that’s where all the documentation is. Check out our Github. Right there in the open, there’s the spec. Literally, the engineers who are coding the product are reading the same marked-down files in the same repo that you, as a developer, can come and look at. And you can comment. You can add issues like you could have a dialogue with that PM. Under the OfficeDev, you’ll find a tunnel repository that contains samples. Our docs are there.

Picks

AJ O'Neal

Lithium

Charles Max Wood

Tristan Davis

Amazon Echo
Microbiome

Sean Laberee

Running
Garmin watch

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JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 11 Jul 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber, we have panelists Joe Eames, Aimee Knight, Charles Max Wood, and playing the part of both host and guest, Cory House. Encourage your team to investigate reusable components, whether that’d be React, Angular, Vue, or Ember. Tune in!

[00:01:35] – Overview

We can finally write reusable components that it is really lightweight. It doesn’t take much framework-specific code to get things done.

Around 3 years ago, the idea of web component standard was all front-end developers could share our components with each other whether someone is in Angular or React. Web components continue to be an interesting standard but people continue to reach for JavaScript libraries instead – React, Angular, Vue.

[00:04:50] – Browser support issue

The story in JavaScript libraries is easier. You have more power, more flexibility, more choices, and get superior performance, in certain cases, by choosing a JavaScript library over the standard right now. If you try to use the web components standard, you have to Polyfill-in some features so you can run things across browser. You also won’t get JavaScript features like intelligently splitting bundles and lazy load different components.

Whether you’re in Angular or React, you have this model of putting your data in your curly braces. That setup is non-existent in standardized web components. You have to play the game of putting and pulling data into and out the DOM using DOM selectors. You actually take a step backward in developer ergonomics when you choose to leverage the platform instead.

[00:07:50] – Polymer

The reason that Polymer is useful is it adds some goodness on top of web components. One of those things is that it makes it easier to bind in data and not having to do things like writing a DOM query to be able to get your hands on this div and put this text inside of it. With Polymer, you can do something that feels more like Angular, where you can put in your curly braces and just bind in some data into that place. Polymer ends up adding some nice syntactic sugar on top of the web components standard just to make it easier to create web components. Polymer is also used to bundle in Polyfill for the features across browser.

[00:14:20] – Standards are dead

No. The standard itself has been embraced at different levels by different libraries. What you can see for the near future is popular libraries leveraging pieces of the web components platform to do things in a standard-spaced way. Effectively, Angular, Vue, Aurelia, are going to be abstractions over the web components standard. Arguably the most popular way to do components today is React. But React completely ignores the web components standard. When you look at React, you can’t see what piece of the web components standard would fundamentally make React a better component library.

Cory can’t seem to run to anybody that is actually using the standard in production to build real applications. People continue to reach for the popular JavaScript libraries that we so often hear about.

[00:17:05] – Libraries making reusable components

There is a risk that it would have been a waste for people writing components on Angular, for React, for Vue. But it’s not necessarily safer writing on the web component standard when you have so few people leveraging that standard. There’s always the risk that that standard may shift as well.

As an example, Cory’s team created approximately 100 reusable components in React. If they end up moving to a hot new library, the components are really just functions that take parameters and contain HTML. There is little there

[00:21:20] – Why opt for reusable components

Reusable components are inherently useful in a situation where you’re going to be doing something more than once. If you think about any work that you do as a software developer, we’d like to think that we’re coming in and creating new things but often it is groundhogs day. There are all sorts of opportunities for reuse.

As a company, we want to encapsulate our forms in reusable components so it’s literally impossible for our software developers to do something that goes against our standard. That’s the power of reusable components.

[00:31:20] – Rigid component vs. flexible component

As component developers, if we try to create a reusable component in a vacuum, bad things happen. If you’re going to do a reusable component, start by solving a specific problem on a given application. If we think that a component’s going to be useful in multiple places, we put it in a folder called reusable right there in our application source folder.

We try to follow that rule of three as well. If we’ve taken that component and used it in 3 places, that’s a good sign that we should extract it out, put it in our NPM package, that way, everybody has this centralized component to utilize. At that point, it has been tested. It’s been through the fire. People have used it in the real world in a few places so we can be confident that the API is truly flexible enough.

Be as rigid as you can upfront. Once you add features, it’s really hard to take features away. But it’s quite easy to add features later. If you start with something rigid, it’s easier to understand. It’s easier to maintain and you can always add a few more switches later.

[00:36:00] – Reusable components

The reason that we can’t reuse code is every time a new project comes up, people are spending up their own ideas rather than leveraging standards that should have been put in place previously.

We’ve had the technical ability to do this for a long time. We just haven’t been around long enough for consolidation to happen, for standardization to happen. You look at how quickly things are changing in our industry. For instance, a couple of years ago, everybody had pretty much decided that two-way binding was the way to build web applications. And then, React came along and shook that up. So today, you have different ways of thinking about that issue.

[00:42:45] – Component development on teams

Aimee’s team has component development and they’re using Angular 1.6. All of our base components are sitting in a seed application. We just go in when we want to create a new property and we just extend all of those components with specific functionalities that we need.

[00:47:45] – Mobile to web crossover

Cory’s team is creating React components but it’s not leveraged on a mobile application. But people use React Native components on the web. And in fact, if you use create-react-app today, you can do that right now. It’s wired up to work in React Native components. In that way, you can literally have these same components running on your Native mobile apps as you do on your web application.

[00:50:00] – Challenge

Cory’s challenge for everybody listening is sit down with your team and have a quick conversation about whether you think components make sense. Look back at the last few months of development and say, "if we have a reusable component library, what would be in it? How often have we found ourselves copying and pasting code between different projects? How much benefit would we get out of this story?"

Once you’ve realized the benefits of the component model, both in the way that makes you think about your application, in a way that it helps you move faster and faster over time, I really think you won’t go back to the old model. I’d encourage people to investigate reusable components, whether that’d be React, Angular, Vue or Ember.

Picks

Cory House

Joe Eames

UI-Router
Persistence

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Upwork.com

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

[00:01:35] – Overview

We can finally write reusable components that it is really lightweight. It doesn’t take much framework-specific code to get things done.

[00:04:50] – Browser support issue

[00:07:50] – Polymer

[00:14:20] – Standards are dead

[00:17:05] – Libraries making reusable components

[00:21:20] – Why opt for reusable components

[00:31:20] – Rigid component vs. flexible component

[00:36:00] – Reusable components

The reason that we can’t reuse code is every time a new project comes up, people are spending up their own ideas rather than leveraging standards that should have been put in place previously.

[00:42:45] – Component development on teams

[00:47:45] – Mobile to web crossover

[00:50:00] – Challenge

Picks

Cory House

Joe Eames

UI-Router
Persistence

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Upwork.com

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JSJ 271: SharePoint Extensions in JavaScript with Mike Ammerlaan and Vesa Juvonen

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 25 Jul 2017 07:00:00 -0400

JSJ 271: SharePoint Extensions in JavaScript with Mike Ammerlaan and Vesa Juvonen

This episode is a live episode from Microsoft Build where AJ O'Neal and Charles Max Wood interview Mike Ammerlaan and Vesa Juvonent about building extensions for SharePoint with JavaScript.

[00:01:28] Mike Ammerlaan introduction
Mike has worked at Microsoft for a long time on multiple Microsoft products and projects. He's currently on the Office Ecosystem Marketing Team.

[00:01:52] Vesa Juvonen introduction
Ves a is Senior Program Manager for the SharePoint Splat team. He's been with Microsoft for about 11 years and manages the community and documentation for the SharePoint framework.

[00:02:18] What is the SharePoint Framework?
This is how you write SharePoint extensions with JavaScript. SharePoint has changed. It now works with common modern development tools and web development techniques. SharePoint consolodates the extension effort

[00:03:32] What is SharePoint?
File sharing, team sites, communication points for teams. Part of Office 365. You use Web Parts to add functionality to SharePoint. Web Parts provide functionality like widgets and are scoped to a team, group, or set of users. It's usually hosted on premises, but you can also use it with Office 365 as a hosted solution.

[00:05:56] What extensions can you build for SharePoint?
You can build widgets for your front page or intranet. You can also add user management or data management or document management.

Examples:

Dashboards
Mini Applications
Scheduling and Time Tracking
Document Storage
Source code repositories

[00:07:39] What is WebDAV and how does it relate?
WebDAV is a protocol for accessing documents and SharePoint supports it among other protocols for managing documents.

[00:08:36] Do I have to build front-end and back-end components to get full functionality?
You can build the front-end UI with Angular and other frameworks. And then build a service in Azure on the backend. The backend systems can then access Line of Business systems or other data systems.

It really does take multiple skill sets to build extensions for SharePoint.

[00:11:10] SharePoint on Mobile
There is a mobile web app and the Web Parts work through the mobile application. You can also use any browser to connect to the application.

[00:12:08] Building extensions with standard Angular or React component libraries
There are standard Yeoman templates. You can also pull in the components through React or Angular just like what Microsoft does.

Newer Angular versions are designed for Single Page Apps and SharePoint isn't necessarily set up to work that way. The Web Parts are isolated from each other and Angular requires some workarounds.

[00:14:30] Getting around sandboxing
Google and Microsoft are talking to each other to see how to work around this when there are multiple sandboxed applications that can't talk to each other in very simple ways.

[00:15:39] Application library or naming collisions if my UI uses different versions or clobber page wide settings
There are guides for a lot of this. React does a bunch of the isolation work.

Addons are iframed in and an API token is given to grant access to the data and APIs.

Microsoft also reviews and approves plugins.

[00:18:30] How do you get started and make money at this?
Look at the SharePoint store. You can build things through websites and pages and offer the plugins through the store.

You can request a SharePoint tenant installation from the Microsoft Dev Tools for free. Then you can build into the tenant site. The rest of the tools are available on npm.

SharePoint Developer Tools

[00:22:13] Automated testing for SharePoint extensions
Unit testing is built in for JavaScript. Testing the UI's require you to sign into Office 365. There are people doing it, though.

[00:22:54] Building internal-only extensions
SharePoint is an enterprise tool, so a lot of enterprises may not want to install extensions from the store. You can definitely build and install private plugins for SharePoint setups. They also have their own backend systems that will require custom development.

[00:25:50] Office 365, SharePoint, and OneDrive
Office 365 is used by people across many different sized organizations and SharePoint is much more enterprise. Office 365 tools store files and information in SharePoint.

What about OneDrive versus Sharepoint? OneDrive is focused for one person. SharePoint is focused around a team. But they have the same APIs and use the same technology stack.

[00:29:05] The history and future of SharePoint
It started out on premises and has moved to the cloud. The SharePoint team is working to keep it available and useful in the modern cloud based era.

[00:30:25] What does the API footprint look like?
It spans modifying lists, data objects, attributes, items in a list, put Web Parts on a page, modify the experience, and manage and modify access, users, and documents. SharePoint is a way of building a way of conveying information.

SharePoint is layers of data and scopes.

[00:35:26] Tutorials and Open Source
dev.office.com
The Sharepoint framework is not open source yet, but they're working on that. They also need to open source the Yeoman templates.
Open source samples are available at github.com/sharepoint.

Picks

Charles Max Wood

BlueTick
Zapier
ScheduleOnce
Moo.com
Advice: Take the time to go talk to people.
Vesa adds that you should go to a session that's on something completely outside your experience.

AJ O'Neal

The Circle
Spontaneity/Happiness: AJ tells a story about a woman he saw running through sprinklers.
Oh the places you'll go by Dr. Seuss: AJ talks about a journal entry he read at a yard sale.

Mike Ammerlaan

Super hot VR on Oculus Rift

Vesa Juvonen

Family

A big thanks to Microsoft, DotNetRocks, and Build!

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MJS #027 Chris Anderson

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 26 Jul 2017 06:00:00 -0400

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

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JSJ 272: Functional Programming and ClojureScript with Eric Normand

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 01 Aug 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 272: Functional Programming and ClojureScript with Eric Normand

This episode of JavaScript Jabber features panelists Aimee Knight and Charles Max Wood. Special guest Eric Normand is here to talk about functional programming and ClojureScript. Tune in to learn more!

[00:1:14] Introduction to Eric Normand

Eric works for purelyfunctional.tv. The main target market for his company is those people who want to transition into functional programming from their current job. He offers them support, shows them where to find jobs, and gives them the skills they need to do well.

[00:02:22] Address that quickly

Functional programming is used at big companies such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, EBay, Paypal, and banks. They all have Clojure but it is not used at the scale of Java or Ruby.

So yes, people are using it and it is influencing the mainstream programming industry.

[00:3:48] How do you build an application?

A common question Eric gets is, “How do I structure my application?” People are used to using frameworks. Most start from an existing app. People want a process to figure out how to take a set of features and turn it into code. Most that get into functional programming have development experience. The attitude in functional programming is that they do not want a framework. Clojure needs to be more beginner friendly. His talk is a four-step process on how to turn into code.

[00:05:56] Can you expand on that a little?

There are four steps to the process of structuring an application.

Develop a metaphor for what you are trying to do. Developing the first implementation. How would you build it if you didn’t have code?
Develop the operations. What are their properties? Example: will have to sort records chronological.
Develop relationships between the operations.
Run tests and refactor the program. Once you have that, you can write the prototype.

[00:13:13] Why can’t you always make the code better?

Rules can’t be refactored into new concepts. They have to be thrown away and started completely over. The most important step is to think before beginning to write code. It may be the hardest part of the process, but it will make the implementation easier.

[00:17:20] What are your thoughts on when people take it too far and it makes the code harder to read?

He personally has written many bad abstractions. Writing bad things is how you get better as a programmer. The ones that go too far are the ones that don’t have any basis or are making something new up. They are trying to be too big and use no math to back up their code.

[00:20:05] Is the hammock time when you decide if you want to make something abstract or should you wait until you see patterns develop?

He thinks people should think about it before, although always be making experiments that do not touch production.

[00:23:33] Is there a trade off between using ClojureScript and functional JavaScript?

In terms of functional programming in JavaScript don’t have some of the niceties that there are in Clojure script. Clojure Script has a large standard library. JavaScript is not as well polished for functional programming; it is a lot of work to do functional programming it and not as much support.

[00:27:00:] Dave Thomas believes that the future of software is functional programming. Do you agree?

Eric thinks that it seems optimistic. He doesn’t see functional programming take over the world but does think that it has a lot to teach. The main reason to learn functional programming is to have more tools in your toolbox.

[00:31:40] If this is a better way to solve these problems, why aren’t people using it?

There is a prejudice against functional programming. When Eric was first getting into it, people would ask why he was wasting his time. Believes that people are jaded. Functional programming feels foreign because people are used to a familiar way of programming; they usually start with a language and get comfortable.

[00:40:58] If people want to get started with it, is there an easy way in?

Lodash is great to start replacing for loops. It will clean up code. There are other languages that compile to JavaScript. For example, Elm is getting a lot of attention right now. It is a Haskell like syntax. If you want more of a heavyweight language, use TypeScript or PureScript. ClojureScript is into live programming. You are able to type, save, and see results of the code immediately on the screen in front of you.

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JSJ 273: Live to Code, Don't Code to Live with 2 Frugal Dudes Sean Merron and Kevin Griffin

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 08 Aug 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 273: Live to Code, Don't Code to Live with 2 Frugal Dudes Sean Merron and Kevin Griffin

This episode of JavaScript Jabber features panelists Aimee Knight, Cory House, and Charles Max Wood. Special guests Sean Merron and Kevin Griffin discuss how to live frugally. Tune in to hear their advice!

[00:02:14] Introduction to Sean and Kevin

Sean and Kevin are the hosts of the 2 Frugal Dudes Podcast. They are middle class software engineers. Sean works a 9 to 5 job, while Kevin owns a small business called Swift Kick. Swift Kick is a company that focuses on independent consulting, software development, and training companies for software development.

[00:05:50] Different Types of Financial Advisors

There is no legal reason that financial advisors have to work in your best interest. On the 2 Frugal Dudes Podcast, Sean and Kevin advise people to use fiduciary advisors. These types of advisors are not legally allowed to accept kickbacks from different funds. This means that they are more likely to help you to the best of their ability. They get paid for their services. Laws are currently changing so that everyone has to be a fiduciary advisor unless clients sign a specific form.

[00:10:00] What do I do with money left over at the end of the month that I can’t put into a 401K and Roth IRA?

They suggest that you put only the amount of money in your 401K that your company will match. Then, put the rest into a Roth IRA and max that out. Before you decide to do what next, you need to decide why you are saving money. When will you need the money? What will you need it for? Once you know the answer to these questions, you will be able to assess what your money will best be placed. For example, if you are saving to buy a house you need to put your money in a safe investment. A Roth IRA can be used as a savings vehicle or as an emergency fund. Sean believes that a Bank CD is the safest return you can get.

[00:14:30] Best Way to Save

For those who are self-employed, it is a good idea to have two emergency funds – a personal and a business fund. Business emergency funds should have five months of personal salary. Kevin built his up over two or three years and uses it as self-insurance.

Sean says that the employee world is different. For him, he only keeps the minimum amount in his emergency fund. He knows that he is in a field where his job is in high demand, so feels comfortable with being able to get a job quickly. For others, this may not be the case. Have to evaluate how much to save based on how long you think you may need the money.

[00:18:50] What is the first thing people should be doing for their own financial well being?

Kevin follows Dave Ramsey’s advice.

Basic emergency fund. He uses $1,000. Most emergencies fall under that amount of money.
Get rid of all consumer debt. This includes car payments, credit cards, and student loans. Mortgage is not consumer debt.
Grow an emergency fund to three or six months of expenses.
Investments. Setting up retirement funds, paying for college, or mortgages.

Sean values early retirement so he focuses on that. What does retirement mean to me? What does rich mean? You should always track your money through a budget. Then you can funnel money towards emergency funds and tackling debt.

Self-insurance means that you don’t have to worry about funds. It helps lower your stress knowing that you have your finances in order. It is a peaceful place to be and opens up opportunities for you. If someone has stressors in their life – for example, their car breaks down – and they have no money to fix it, they now have car and money problems. This stress can then potentially lead to other problems such as marriage problems. If the money to fix the broken car would have been there, it would alleviate stress.

[00:28:23] Difference between 401k, IRA, and Roth IRAs

A 401k is an employer provided, long-term retirement savings account. This is where you put in money before it is taxed. With this plan you are limited with the funds you can choose from to invest in.

IRAs are long-term retirement plans as well. The first type of IRA is a Traditional IRA, which is similar to a 401k. You get tax reduction for the money you put in the account. You pay taxes once you withdraw money. A Roth IRA is where you already pay taxes on money that you are putting in, but don’t have to pay taxes when withdrawing money. You can withdraw contributions at anytime without being penalized, you just can’t take out any earnings.

Another thing that is potentially good for early retirement is a Roth IRA conversion ladder. This is where you take money from a 401k and convert it into a Roth IRA and use it before 60 years old to fund early retirement.

Traditional IRAs are good for business owners looking for tax deductions now. An HSA (Health Savings Account) can also be used as a retirement device. It goes towards medical expenses if needed.

[00:34:20] Are there tools or algorithms I can use to figure this stuff out?

There are some. Portfolio Visualizer allows you to choose different portfolio mixes and put different amounts of money in each one. Portfolio Charts is similar to Portfolio Visualizer but gives nice graphics. Sean created a JavaScript website to help people use to figure out early retirement.

The hardest part is calculating return because you have to estimate what your return will be each year.

[00:39:00] Put Your Money Somewhere

The only bad investment is not making an investment. Even making a bad investment is better than not having any at all. Inflation eats away at money that is just sitting.

[00:42:05] If you get one of these advisors what advice should you be looking for?

Need someone that tries to understand your particular situation. “It depends” is very true and your advisor should know that. No two people will have the same financial goals. They should want to help reach your goals in the least costly way possible. Other things they should be able to do is be honest and help you control your emotions during upswings and downswings.

[00:47:08] Why index funds?

As an investor, you can buy an index fund cheaper than buying the whole index. A mutual fund will try to buy and sell the stocks in that index in order to follow the index's performance. As an investor, you have the opportunity to buy into a mutual fund that handles it for you.

You don’t have to independently invest in companies either. You can invest in an index instead that will look at, for example, top performing technology companies. It is usually a better value.

[00:53:33] How much do I invest in my business verses putting money into a Roth IRA or 401k?

Sean thinks it comes down to retirement goals. At some point you will want money to come in passively and retire in the future. If you can passively put X amount of dollars into your company then it can be looked at as a form of investment.

Kevin evaluates his business goals every quarter. He creates a business budget based off of those goals.

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JSJ 274: Amazon Voice Services and Echo Skills with Terrance Smith

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 15 Aug 2017 06:00:00 -0400

JSJ 274 Amazon Voice Services and Echo Skills with Terrance Smith

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber, we have panelists Joe Eames, Aimee Knight, Charles Max Wood, and we have special guest Terrance Smith. He’s here today to talk about the Amazon Alexa platform. So tune in and learn more about Amazon Voice Services!

[01:00] – Introduction to Terrance Smith

Terrance is from Hacker Ferrer Software. They hack love into software.

[01:30] – Amazon Voice Service

What I’m working on is called My CareTaker named probably pending change. What it will do and what it is doing will be to help you be there as a caretaker’s aid for the person in your life. If you have to take care an older parent, My CareTaker will be there in your place if you have to work that day. It will be your liaison to that person. Your mom and dad can talk to My CareTaker and My CareTaker could signal you via SMS or email message or tweet, anything on your usage dashboard, and you would be able to respond. It’s there when you’re not.

[04:35] – Capabilities

Getting started with it, there are different layers. The first layer is the Skills Kit for generally getting into the Amazon IoT. It has a limited subset of the functionality. You can give commands. The device parses them, sends them to Amazon’s endpoint, Amazon sends a call back to your API endpoint, and you can do whatever you want. That is the first level. You can make it do things like turn on your light switch, start your car, change your thermostat, or make an API call to some website somewhere to do anything.

[05:50] – Skills Kit

Skills Kit is different with AVS. Skills Kit, you can install it on any device. You’re spinning up a web service and register it on Amazon’s website. As long as you have an endpoint, you can register, say, the Amazon Web Services Lambda. Start that up and do something. The Skills Kit is literally the web endpoint response. Amazon Voice Services is a bit more in-depth.

[07:00] – Steps for programming

With the Skills Kit, you register what would be your utterance, your skill name, and you would give it a couple of sets of phrases to accept. Say, you have a skill that can start a car, your skill is “Car Starter.” “Alexa tell Car Starter to start the car.” At which point, your web service will be notified that that is the utterance. It literally has a case statement. You can have any number of individual conditional branches outside of that. The limitation for the Skills Kit is you have to have the “tell” or “ask” and the name of the skill to do whatever. It’s also going to be publicly accessible. For the most part, it’s literally a web service.

[10:55] – Boilerplates for AWS Lambda

Boilerplates can be used if you want to develop for production. If you publish a skill, you get free AVS instance time. You can host your skill for free for some amount of time. There are GUI tools to make it easier but if you’re a developer, you’re probably going to do the spin up a web service and deal it that way.

[11:45] – Do you have to have an Amazon Echo?

At one point, you have to have the Echo but now there is this called Echoism, which allows you to run it in your browser. In addition to that, you can potentially install it on a device like a Raspberry Pi and run Amazon Voice Services. The actual engine is on your PC, Mac, or Linux box. You have different options.

[12:35] – Machine learning

There are certain things that Amazon Alexa understand now that it did last year or time before that like understanding utterances and phrases better. A lot of the machine learning is definitely under the covers. The other portion of it Alexa Voice Service, which is a whole engine that you have untethered access to other portions like how to handle responses. That’s where you can build a custom device and take it apart. So the API that we’re working with here is just using JSON and HTTP.

[16:40] – Amazon Echo Show

You have that full real-time back and forth communication ability but there is no video streaming or video processing ability yet. You can utilize the engine in such a way that Amazon Voice Services can work with your existing tool language. If you have a Raspberry Pi and you have a camera to it, you can potentially work within that. But again, the official API’s and docs for that are not available yet.

[27:20] – Challenges

There’s an appliance in this house that listens to everything I say. There’s that natural inclination to not trust it, especially with the older generations. Giving past that is getting people to use the device. Some of the programming sides of it are getting the communication to work, doing something that Alexa isn’t pre-programmed to do. There isn’t a lot of documentation out there, just a couple of examples. The original examples are written in Java and trying to convert it to Node or JavaScript would be some of the technical challenges. In addition, getting it installed and setup takes at least an hour at the beginning. There’s also a learning curve involved.

[29:35] – Is your product layered in an Echo or is your product a separate device?

Terrance’s product is a completely separate device. One of the functionality of his program is medicine reminders. It can only respond to whatever the API calls from Amazon tells you to respond to but it can’t do anything like send something back. It can do an immediate audio response with a picture or turn on and off a light switch. But it can’t send a message back in like two hours from now. You do want your Alexa device to have (verbally) a list of notifications like on your phone. TLDR, Terrance can go a little further with just the Skills Kit.

[32:00] – Could you set it up through a web server?

Yes. There are examples out there. There’s Alexa in the browser. You can open up a browser and communicate with that. There are examples of it being installed like an app. You can deploy it to your existing iPhone app or Android app and have it interact that way. Or you can have it interact independently on a completely different device like a Raspberry Pi. But not a lot of folks are using it that way.

[33:10] – Monetization

Amazon isn’t changing anything in terms of monetization. They make discovery a lot easier though. If you knew the name of the app, you could just say, “Alexa, [tell the name of the app].” It will do a lazy load of the actual skill and it will add it to your available skill’s list.

However, there is something called the Alexa Fund, which is kind of a startup fund that they have, which you can apply for. If you’re doing something interesting, there is a number of things you have to do. Ideally, you can get funding for whatever your product is. It is an available avenue for you.

[36:25] – More information, documentation, walkthroughs

The number one place to go to as far as getting started is the Amazon websites. They have the Conexant 4-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit. It has 4 mics and it has already a lot of what you need. You have to boot it up and/or SSH into it or plug it up and code it. They have a couple of these kits for $300 to $400. It’s one of the safe and simpler options.

There are also directions for the AVS sites which is under Alexa Voice Services, where you can go to the Github from there. There will give you directions using the Raspberry Pi. If not that, there’s also the Slack chatroom. It is alexaslack.com. Travis Teague is the guy in charge in there.

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JSJ 277: Dojo 2 with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 05 Sep 2017 20:43:00 -0400

JSJ 277: Dojo 2 with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly

This episode of JavaScript Jabber features panelists Aimee Knight, Cory House, and Charles Max Wood. They talk with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly about Dojo 2.

[00:02:03] Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

Dylan is the CEO at Sitepen and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit.

[00:02:22] Introduction to Kitson

Kitson is the CTO at Sitepen and project lead for Dojo 2.

[00:02:43] Elevator Pitch for Dojo

Dojo 1 has been around forever. Started back in 2004 as a way to solve the challenge of "I want to build something cool in a browser." Promises and web components were inspired by or created by Dojo. It's been a huge influence on the web development community.

Dojo 2 is a ground up re-write with ES 2015, TypeScript and modern API's. It's a modernized framework for Enterprise applications.

[00:04:29] How is Dojo different from other frameworks?

There's a spectrum: small libraries like React with an ecosystem and community of things you add to it to Angular which is closer to the MV* framework with bi-directional data binding. Vue lands somewhere in the middle. Dojo 2 is also somewhere in the middle as well. It's written in TypeScript and has embraced the TypeScript experience.

[00:06:00] Did the Angular 2 move influence the Dojo 2 development and vice-versa?

Dojo 2 had moved to TypeScript and 2 days later Angular announced that they were going to TypeScript. Angular also moved very quickly through their BETA phase, which caused some challenges for the Angular community.

With Dojo 2, they didn't start the public discussion and BETA until they knew much better what was and wasn't going to change. They've also been talking about Dojo 2 for 6 or 7 years.

The update was held up by adoption of ES6 and other technologies.

Dojo 1 was also responsible for a lot of the low-level underpinning that Angular didn't have to innovate on. Dojo 2 was built around a mature understanding of how web applications are built now.

People doing Enterprise need a little more help and assistance from their framework. Dojo provides a much more feature rich set of capabilities.

Angular could have pushed much more of TypeScript's power through to the developer experience. Dojo much more fully adopts it.

It's also easier if all of your packages have the same version number.

Call out to Angular 4 vs Angular 2.

[00:12:44] AMD Modules

Why use AMD instead of ES6 modules?

You can use both. Dojo 2 was involved in the creation of UMD. James Burke created UMD while working on Dojo.

ES6 modules and module loading systems weren't entirely baked when Dojo 2 started to reach maturity, so they went with UMD. It's only been a few months since Safari implemented the ES6 module system. Firefox and friends are still playing catchup.

The Dojo CLI build tool uses webpack, so it's mostly invisible at this point.

So, at this point, should I be using UMD modules? or ES6? Is there an advantage to using AMD?

With TypeScript you'd use ES6 modules, but UMD modules can be loaded on the fly.

[00:16:00] Are you using Grunt?

Internally, for tasks we use Grunt. But for users, we have a CLI tool that wraps around Webpack.

For package builds and CI, Grunt is used.

[00:18:30] What is the focus on Enterprise all about?

There are a lot of different challenges and complexities to building Enterprise apps. Dojo was the first framework with internationalization, large data grids, SVG charts, etc. Dojo has spend a long time getting this right. Many other systems don't handle all the edge cases.

Internationalization in Angular 2 or 4 seems unfinished.

Most Dojo users are building for enterprises like banks and using the features that handle large amounts of data and handle those use cases better.

[00:21:05] If most application frameworks have the features you listed, is there a set of problems it excels at?

The Dojo team had a hard look at whether there was a need for their framework since many frameworks allow you to build great applications. Do we want to invest into something like this?

React has internationalization libraries. But you'll spend a lot of time deciding which library to use and how well it'll integrate with everything else. A tradeoff in decision fatigue.

In the Enterprise, development isn't sexy. It's necessary and wants to use boring but reliable technology. They like to throw bodies at a problem and that requires reliable frameworks with easily understood decision points.

Producing code right is a strong case for TypeScript and they pull that through to the end user.

Many frameworks start solving a small set of problems, become popular, and then bolt on what they need to solve everything else...

Dojo tried to make sure it had the entire package in a clear, easy to use way.

You can build great apps with most of the big frameworks out there. Dojo has been doing this for long enough that they know where to optimize for maintainability and performance.

[00:29:00] Where is Dojo's sweet spot?

The Sitepen Blog series on picking a framework

The biggest reason for using Dojo over the years is the data grid component.

They also claim to have the best TypeScript web development experience.

You may also want a component based system with the composition hassles of React.

The composability of components where one team may write components that another uses is a big thing in Dojo where one person doesn't know the entire app you're working on.

Theming systems is another selling point for Dojo.

[00:34:10] Ending the framework wars

Try Dojo out and try out the grid component and then export it to your Angular or React app.

There are a lot of frameworks out there that do a great job for the people who use them. The focus is on how to build applications better, rather than beating out the competition.

Sitepen has build apps with Dojo 2, Angular, React, Dojo + Redux, etc.

[00:39:01] The Virtual DOM used by Dojo

2 years ago or so they were looking for a Virtual DOM library that was small and written in TypeScript. They settled on Maquette.

The more you deal with the DOM directly, the more complex your components and libraries become.

Makes things simpler for cases like server side rendering getting fleshed out in BETA 3.

It also allows you to move toward something like React Native and WebVR components that aren't coupled to the DOM.

They moved away from RxJS because they only wanted observables and shimmed in (or polyfilled) the ES-Next implementation instead of getting the rest of the RxJS that they're not using.

[00:46:40] What's coming next?

They're finishing Dojo 2. They're polishing the system for build UI components and architecture and structuring the app. They plan to release before the end of the year.

They're also wrapping up development on the Data Grid, which only renders what shows on the screen plus a little instead of millions of rows.

[00:49:08] Testing

They've got intern.

It pulls together unit testing, functional testing, continuous integration hooks, accessibility testing, etc.

It's rewritten in TypeScript to take advantage of modern JavaScript.

The Dojo CLI uses intern as the default test framework.

Kitson build the test-extras library to help with Dojo testing with intern.

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JSJ BONUS: Web Apps on Linux with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0400

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JSJ BONUS: Web Apps on Linux with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump

In this episode Aimee Knight and Charles Max Wood discuss Microsoft's Web Apps on Linux offering with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump.

[00:37] Michael Crump Introduction

Michael is on the developer experience team for Azure.

[00:52] Jeremy Likness Introduction

Jeremy is on the cloud developer advocacy team. Their mission is to remove friction and support developers and work with teams to build a positive experience.

The NodeJS team is headed up by John Papa. They have teams around the world and involved in many open source communities.

They're focused on building documentation and creating great experiences

[02:54] What is it about Azure that people should be getting excited about?

Azure is a huge platform. It can be overwhelming. They're trying to help you start with your problem and then see the solution as it exists on Azure.

Azure is growing to embrace the needs of developers as they solve these problems.

The experience is intended to be open and easy to use for any developer in any language on any platform. It allows you to work in whatever environment you want.

Standing up applications in production is tough. Azure provides services and facilities (and interfaces) that make it easy to manage infrastructure.

You don't have to be an operations expert.

Chuck mentions this messaging as he heard it at Microsoft Connect() last year.

It's not about bringing you to .NET. It's about making it easy where you're at.

Aimee adds that as a new-ish person in the community and Azure excites her because the portal and tutorials are easy to follow for many new programmers.

A lot of these features are available across command lines, tools, and much more.

The documentation is great. See our interview with Dan Fernandez on the Microsoft Docs.

[12:04] Web Apps on Linux

Web application as a service offering from Microsoft. I don't need to worry about the platform, just what's different about my application.

Web Apps has traditionally been on Windows. Web Apps on Linux is in preview.

You can choose the size of your infrastructure. You only get billed for what you use and can scale up.

Setting up multiple servers, managing synchronization and load balancing is a pain. Web Apps gives you a clean interface that makes this management easy.

You can also scale across multiple datacenters around the world.

[15:06] Why Linux? What's hard about Windows?

Node was originally created on Linux and many tools run nicely on Linux. It was later ported to Windows.

The toolchains and IDE's and build processes is in an ecosystem that is targeted more toward Linux than Windows.

This allows people to work in an environment that operates how they expect instead of trying to map to an underlying Windows kernel.

Aimee gives the example of trying to set up ImageMagick on Windows.

Web Apps on Linux also allows you to build integrations with your tools that let you build, test, and deploy your application automatically.

[19:12] Supported Runtimes

Web Apps on Linux supports Node, PHP, Ruby, and .NET Core.

You can run a docker container with Node up to 6.x. If you want Node 7.x and 8.x you can create your own Docker container.

Web Apps on Linux is build on Docker.

The containers also have SSH, so developers can log into the docker container and troubleshoot problems on the container.

If you can build a container, you can also run it on this service.

At certain levels, there's automatic scaling.

[22:06] Consistency between containers? Shared ownership of state or assets

It depends on how you build your app. The Docker containers have a shared storage where all the containers have access to the same data and state.

There's a system called kudu that makes this really simple.

You can also pull logs across all systems.

You can also use SSH in the browser

[25:23] What's painful about Linux and containers?

How is the application built and how does it manage state so that you can isolate issues.

If you have 20 containers, can you connect to the right one.

It's up to you to manage correlation between containers so you can find the information you need.

Knowing your traffic and understanding what to do to prepare for it with scaling and automation is sometimes more art than science.

[28:28] How should you manage state?

A lot of these systems lend themselves to running stateless, but you don't want to run mongodb on each container versus running one mongodb instance that everything attaches. You want a common place to store data for the entire app for shared state.

[30:34] CosmosDB (was DocumentDB)

It's an API equivalent to MongoDB. It's a database as a service and you can connect your containers to the CosmosDB in Azure using your portal to make it super easy.

You may need to open up some firewall rules, but it should be pretty straightforward.

[34:14] Third Party Logging Management Apps

Azure has a service that provides metrics (Application Insights) and a logging service. Many other companies use elasticsearch based solutions that solve some of these problems as well.

[36:06] How do people use Web Apps on Linux?

Companies building new applications many times want to run without managing any infrastructure. So, they use Azure Functions, and other services on Azure.

Lift and shift: Take a virtual machine and change it into a web app container that they can run in the cloud. They also move from SQL Server on a server to SQL Server on the cloud. Moving from hosted MongoDB to CosmosDB.

You can also use any images on DockerHub.

[40:06] Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Whether you're using a private registry or cloud registry. When you publish a new image, it'll use a webhook to pull the custom image and deploy it. Or to run it through Continuous Integration and then deploy it without any human interaction.

Chuck mentions the case when you haven't logged into a server for a while, there's a huge backlog of system updates. Updating your container definitions makes upkeep automatic.

[42:02] Process files and workers with PM2 format

You can set up instances to run across cores with the PM2 definitions. You can also make it run various types of workers on different containers.

Why did you use PM2? What other uses are there for this kind of setup?

You can tell it which processes to start up on boot. You can also have it restart processes when a file is changed, for example, with a config file you can have it restart the processes that run off that config file.

[45:38] How to get started

Getting started with Node

docs.microsoft.com

Trial account with a few hundred dollars in Azure credit.

Michael's Links

Jeremy's Links

Picks

Aimee

Having a little bit of mindfulness while waiting on code and tests to run.

Joe

Chuck

Travelers on Netflix

Jeremy

Ozark filming in Woodstock, GA
Autonomous Smart Desk
LED light strips

Michael

Full Article

and

JSJ 280: Stackblitz with Eric Simons and Albert Pai

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 26 Sep 2017 06:00:00 -0400

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

Picks

Amy

Promises Series by Andrew Del Prete
Crossfit

Joe

Charles

Eric

Albert

Full Article

and

JSJ BONUS: Cloud Services and Manifold with Matthew Creager and Peter Cho

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 18 Oct 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

Special Guests:

Matthew Creager and Peter Cho

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers speak with Matthew Ceager and Peter Cho. Matthew and Peter are part of the team at Manifold. Manifold is a marketplace for developer services. Matthew takes care of growth and relations, and Peter oversee products at Manifold.

The panel discusses with Peter and Matthew what Manifold does and the benefits of a Cloud Service. Matthew gives perspective on how developers can get their cloud product on the market compared to open source. Further discussion goes into how this will help the developer to get their products or services turned into a business quicker and save time Also learn about when it is the ideal time to move to cloud services vs. running a server yourself.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Different kinds of definition of Cloud Services
Anything you would rely on as a third party service
What is the cloud service ecosystem - Services that connect to an application
Independent market place - because it is difficult to turn a product into a business
Where are people using cloud services or running their own server
Spinning up a version of it is easier.
Time verses doing it yourself?
Experts running the services
Focusing on your product instead of managing the server and such
Where does the data live and who has access to that?
Lock In’s?
Tourist - Credentials management
How do I get this setup? Command Line or register online
And much more!

Links:

Manifold

https://github.com/mattcreager

@manifoldco

@etcpeter

@matt_creager

blog.manifold.com

Picks:

Amiee

Ryan McDermott

Charles

Joe

What You Can’t Say

Matt

Peter

Player Unknown Battle Ground
Sourdough by Robin Sloan

Full Article

and

JSJ 286: Creating a CSS-in-JS Library from Scratch and Emotion with Kye Hohenberger

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 07 Nov 2017 22:33:00 -0500

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests:

Kye Hohenberger

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers speak with Kye Hohenberger. Kye is a developer and co-founder of Side Way. One of Kye’s most notable works and library is Emotion, a CSS and JS library.

Kye talks about what CSS and JS library is about in the context of the Emotion library system. Kye discusses why this is practical for the writing process, in comparison to other types of tools that do similar jobs. Kye explains the how this tool reduces the number of lines of code and is compact and clearer.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What is a CSS and JS library?
Controlling CSS with JS, what does this solve?
Style bugs
What kind of styling are you using vs. complex styles?
Media query
A more declarative style
Using Sass
Where do you see people using this?
Class names and you can apply to anything
How Emotion works!
Style tags
Object styles
What are some of the problems you are solving
React Emotion - dynamic styles
How does this compare to other style components?
Glamor Styles
How do you test something like this?
Just Glamor React with Emotion
Can people use the Babel plugin
Pure flag and function calls
And much more!

Links:

Emotion.sh
Emotion-js/emotion
emotion.now.sh
@TKH44

Picks:

Amiee

Article on Medium
Antibiotics and Steroids
RX Bars

Charles

Disney Emoji Blitz
How To Get A Job - JavaScriptJabber.com

Kye

Full Article

and

JSJ 287: Blockchain and JS with Ari Lerner

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:04:00 -0500

Panel:

Aimee Knight

AJ O’Neal

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests:

Ari Lerner

In this episode, Java Script Jabbers speak with Ari Lerner. Ari is the author of NG Book: The Complete Book on AugularJS, Full Stack React, and a few others. Ari co-runs newline.co a platform that teaches about the Block Chain, Ethereum, New Contracts, etc. Ari mentions a few upcoming books on Machine Learning, Elixir, and react Native.

Ari gives a rundown on what the Block Chain is about, and an explanation of a Hash. Ari explains the value of a Hash and 6-bit strings of a Hash. Also, Ari explains the exchange of currency in Bitcoin and the rate of exchange in the Block Chain. Next Ari covers web 3.0 and much more.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What is the Block Chain?
A Hash?
The blockchain is an order of ledger.
The blockchain is a list of transactions
How is a Hash used?
Sha 256
Bitcoin and Block Chains
What If two machines get the same answer?
Describe a transaction in a blockchain?
Exchanging currency
The cost of Bitcoin
Web 3.0
Everything on the Block Chain is public!
Where else is Block Chain is used besides bitcoin type currency
Public Key.
What should JS developer be doing to prepare?
And much more!

Links:

https://www.ng-book.com/
http://www.newline.co.bw/
The History of Money
@Auser
Stack.io

Picks:

Amiee

Article - Learn Block Chain by Building One
The Source Bar

Charles

Microsoft Connect - Meet up at 7pm
Stranger Thing Season 2

Spice Labels and Spice Jars
Marriage

Ari

Moving to NYC
Learn Block Chain by Building One

Full Article

and

JSJ 288: TypeScript with Amanda Silver

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 20:22:00 -0500

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests:

Amanda Silver

In this episode, Charles is at Microsoft Connect 2017 in NYC. Charles speaks with Amanda Silver. Amanda is deemed the TypeScript and future of JavaScript guru, and this year's speakers at Microsoft Connect with Visual Studio Live Share. Amanda shares what is new with TypeScript and how that is a kind of subscript to JavaScript. Amanda explains the big picture of TypeScript’s inception and where she believes the language will be most efficient and effective for JavaScript and TypeScript developers.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What is new in TypeScript?
Keep JavaScript and TypeScript aligned
TypeScript is implemented to create larger scaled applications
Integration with VS Code, etc.
Building better tools for JavaScript Developers
When would this be taken on by users
Defaults in Visual Studio
TypeScript replacing JavaScript type service
TypeScript is written in TypeScript
Chakra runtime
Diaspora
The different faces of JavaScript
Optimized JavaScript runtime
Languages should be created with tooling
A satisfying tooling experience
Foot Guns
New Tokens
Eco-systems and metadata
Multi-phase
Minimum common denominator constantly changing
Collaborating on the same code
Open Source and the impact
How to move to open source
Contributing
The next thing for TypeScript
The future of JavaScript
And much more!

Links:

@amandaksilver

Picks:

Amanda

Visual Studio Live Share
Instinct of learning technology

Charles

Full Article

and

JSJ 289: Visual Studio Code and Live Sharing with Chris Dias and PJ Meyer LIVE at Microsoft Connect 2017

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 28 Nov 2017 20:53:00 -0500

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

Deli

Charles

Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC

Full Article

and

MJS 042: Kassandra Perch

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Thu, 04 Jan 2018 23:34:00 -0500

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:

Picks

Kassandra

Charles

Full Article

and

JSJ 296: Changes in React and the license with Azat Mardan

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 11:47:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Cory House

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Azat Mardan

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with Azat Mardan. Azat is a return guest, previously on JSJ Episode 230. Azat is an author of 14 books on Node JS, JavaScript, and React JS. Azat works at Capital One on the technology team. Azat is the founder and creator of Node University.

Azat is on the show to talk about changes in React and licensing. Some of the topics cover Facebook, licensing with React, using the wrong version of React, patent wars, and much more in-depth information on current events in React.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Facebook - Licensing with React
Using the Wrong version of React in some companies
BSD licensing
Patent wars
Facebook developing React
Difference in Preact and Inferno
Rewriting applications
What did Capital One do about the changes?
React 16
Pure React
Was the BSD patents - Med and Sm Companies
Patents explained
React Developers at Facebook
Fiber - New Core Architecture
And much more!

Links:

http://azat.co
https://node.university
https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/230-jsj-node-at-capital-one-with-azat-mardan

Picks:

Cory

Axel Rauschmayer post
Prettier

Charles

Aimee

Joe

Azat

Full Article

and

JSJ 297: Scrollytelling with Russell Goldenberg and Adam Pearce

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:45:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Russell Goldenberg and Adam Pearce

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with Russell Goldenberg and Adam Pearce Russell creates visualizations, interactive graphics, and documentaries for the web. Currently an editor at The Pudding. Adam is a graphics editor at The New York Times and a journalist engineers/developer Russell and Adam are on the show to talk about what Scrollytelling is, as well as Scrollama. Scrollama is a modern and lightweight JavaScript library for scrollytelling using IntersectionObserver in favor of scroll events. This is a great episode to understand another technology/tool created with JavaScript.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What is Scrollytelling!
Graph Scroll library
What is the intersection Observerable?
How long does it take to build an interactive graphic…?
How do you test something like this?
Test on a lot of different devices
Can you do automated testing?
Do you have to understand the use cases or can you implement quickly?
Recommendation for getting started?
Is this a skill set people have to have before that some on board?
How do design these interactions?
Scroll jacking
What JS developers should know about this technology.
Position sticky
What are other uses cases?
What can devs use it for?
Tax calculator
And much more!

Links:

https://github.com/russellgoldenberg/scrollama
https://pudding.cool/process/introducing-scrollama/
@codenberg
@adamrpearce
https://pudding.cool/
http://russellgoldenberg.github.io
https://github.com/1wheel?direction=desc&sort=created&tab=stars
https://roadtolarissa.com

Picks:

Adam

Dominion - Broad Game

Charles

Aimee

Deadlines
Quest Protein Powder

Joe

Giving!
Board Game - Azul

Russel

Crokinole
Bust Out

Full Article

and

JSJ 298: Angular, Vue and TypeScript with John Papa

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 21:35:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Cory House

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: John Papa

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with John Papa. John has been doing web programming for over twenty years on multiple platforms and has been contributing to the developer communities through conferences, authoring books, videos and courses on Pluralsight.

John is on the show to discuss an articles he wrote on A Look at Angular Along Side Vue, and another article on Vue.js with TypeScript. John talks about the new features with the different versions of Angular technologies, anxiety in the different features, comparisons between the technologies and use case with Angular.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

A look at Angular Along Side Vue - Article
Angular 5, Amber,Vue, React, Angular
Angular 2 - different features
CLI
Spell Webpack
Comparisons - Why the anxiety?
Opinions of Angular and sprinkling in other technologies
Vue is the easy to use with Angular
Are there breakpoints with the uses case?
Choosing technologies
Talk about working with Vue and Angular
DSL - Domain Specific Language
Vue and 3rd party libraries
Talk about Vue working with TypeScript
Vue.js with TypeScript
Vue with TypeScript looks similar to Angular
Vetur
What does 2018 have in store for Angular?
Native apps and web functionality
And much more!

Links:

Picks:

Corey

cypress.io

Charles

Aimee

Joe

John

Jumanji 2017
Emotional Intelligence

Full Article

and

JSJ 299: How To Learn JavaScript When You're Not a Developer with Chris Ferdinandi

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 06 Feb 2018 20:10:00 -0500

Panel:

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Chris Ferdinandi

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with Chris Ferdinandi. Chris teaches vanilla JavaScript to beginners and those coming from a design background. Chris mentions his background in Web design and Web Develop that led him JavaScript development. Chris and the JSJ panelist discuss the best ways to learn JavaScript, as well as resources for learning JavaScript. Also, some discussion of technologies that work in conjunction with vanilla JavaScript.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Teaching JavaScript - Beginners and Design patrons
Web Design and Web Development
CSS Tricks
Todd Motto
How to do jQuery Things without jQuery
Doing things like mentors (Todd)
When JavaScript makes sense.
CSS is easier to learn then JS?
Being good at CSS and JS at the same time?
How about Node developers?
jRuby, DOM
Documentation
And much more!

Links:

https://github.com/cferdinandi
https://gomakethings.com
@ChrisFerdinandi
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cferdinandi

Picks:

Discover Card
Mistborn

Aimee

Your Smart Phone is Making You Stupid…
Crypto Currency

Joe

Chris

Full Article

and

JSJ 303: Test Coverage Tools with Ben Coe, Aaron Abramov, and Issac Schleuter

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 06 Mar 2018 06:00:00 -0500

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:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Galentine’s Day
Dnote CLI

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

Aaron

Reason

Issac

Full Article

and

JSJ 305: Continuous Integration, Processes, and DangerJS with Orta Therox

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 06:00:00 -0400

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:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Joe

Orta

Full Article

and

JSJ 309: WebAssembly and JavaScript with Ben Titzer

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 17 Apr 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Cory House
Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Ben Titzer

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss WebAssembly and JavaScript with Ben Titzer. Ben is a JavaScript VM engineer and is on the V8 team at Google. He was one of the co-inventors of WebAssembly and he now works on VM engineering as well as other things for WebAssembly. They talk about how WebAssembly came to be and when it would be of most benefit to you in your own code.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Ben intro
JavaScript
Co-inventor of WebAssembly (Wasm)
Joined V8 in 2014
asm.js
Built a JIT compiler to make asm.js faster
TurboFan
What is the role of JavaScript? What is the role of WebAssembly?
SIMD.js
JavaScript is not a statically typed language
Adding SIMD to Wasm was easier
Easy to add things to Wasm
Will JavaScript benefit?
Using JavaScript with Wasm pros and cons
Pros to compiling with Wasm
Statically typed languages
The more statically typed you are, the more you will benefit from Wasm
TypeScript
Is WebAssembly headed towards being used in daily application?
Rust is investing heavily in Wasm
WebAssembly in gaming
And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Ready Player One Movie
DevChat.tv YouTube
Alexa Flash Briefings: Add skill for “JavaScript Rants”

Cory

Aimee

Ben

American Politics

Full Article

and

JSJ 314: Visual Studio Code and the VS Code Azure Extension with Matt Hernandez and Amanda Silver LIVE at Microsoft Build

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 22 May 2018 08:32:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Matt Hernandez and Amanda Silver

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber/Adventures In Angular, panelists discuss Visual Studio Code and the VS Code Azure Extension with Matt Hernandez and Amanda Silver at Microsoft Build. Amanda is the director of program management at Microsoft working on Visual Studio and VS Code. Matt works on a mix between the Azure and the VS Code team, where he leads the effort to build the Azure extensions in VS code, trying to bring JavaScript developers to Azure through great experiences in VS Code. They talk about what’s new in VS Code, how the Azure extension works, what log points are, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Amanda intro
Matt intro
What’s new in VS Code?
VS Code core
VS Live Share
Shared Terminal
Now have Linux support
Live Share is now public to the world for free
What would you use Shared Terminal for?
Are there other things coming up in VS Code?
Constantly responding to requests from the community
Live Share works for any language
How does the Azure extension work?
Azure App Service
Storage extension
Azure Cosmos DB
What are log points?
All a part of a larger plan to create a better experience for JS developers
Visual debuggers
Is it the same plugin to support everything on Azure?
Want to target specific services that node developers will take advantage of
And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Orphan Black
Shout out to VS Code team
Battle of the Books

Matt

Amanda

Full Article

and

JSJ 316: Visual Studio Code with Rachel MacFarlane and Matt Bierner LIVE at Microsoft Build

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 05 Jun 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Rachel MacFarlane and Matt Bierner

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss Visual Studio Code with Rachel MacFarlane and Matt Bierner, who are both developers on Visual Studio Code. They talk about what the workflow at Visual Studio Code looks like, what people can look forward to coming out soon, and how people can follow along the VS Code improvements on GitHub and Twitter. They also touch on their favorite extensions, like the Docker extension and the Azure extension and their favorite VS Code features.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Rachel and Matt intro
Month to month workflow of Visual Studio Code
VS Code JavaScript, TypeScript, and Mark Down support
Working on GitHub and within the community
Check out new features incrementally with insiders
Community driven work
What is coming out in Visual Studio Code?
GitHub helps to determine what they work on
Working on Grid View
Improved settings UI
Highlighting unused variables in your code
Improvements with JS Docs
Dart
Visual Studio Extension API
How do people follow along with the VS Code improvements?
Follow along on GitHub and Twitter
Download VS Code Insiders
Have a general road map of what the plan is for the year
Technical debt week
What do you wish people knew about VS Code?
Favorite extensions
Docker extension and Azure extension
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Rachel

GitLens

Matt

The Bronx Warriors

Full Article

and

JSJ 318: Cloud-Hosted DevOps with Ori Zohar and Gopinath Chigakkagari LIVE at Microsoft Build

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Ori Zohar and Gopinath Chigakkagari

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss Cloud-Hosted DevOps with Ori Zohar and Gopinath Chigakkagari at Microsoft Build. Ori is on the product team at VSTS focusing on DevOps specifically on Azure. Gopinath is the group program manager in VSTS primarily working on continuous integration, continuous delivery, DevOps, Azure deployment, etc. They talk about the first steps people should take when getting into DevOps, define DevOps the way Microsoft views it, the advantages to automation, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Ori and Gopi intro
VSTS – Visual Studio Team Services
VSTS gives developers the ability to be productive
Developer productivity
What’s the first big step people should be taking if they’re getting into DevOps?
The definition of DevOps
The people and the processes as the most important piece
DevOps as the best practices
Automating processes
What people do when things go wrong is what really counts
Letting the system take care of the problems
Have the developers work on what they are actually getting paid for
Trend of embracing DevOps
Shifting the production responsibility more onto the developer’s
Incentivizing developers
People don’t account for integration
Continuous integration
Trends on what customers are asking for
Safety
Docker containers
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Ori

Fitbit
Pacific Northwest Hiking

Gopinath

Seattle, WA

Full Article

and

JSJ 320: Error Tracking and Troubleshooting Workflows with David Cramer LIVE at Microsoft Build

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 03 Jul 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Alyssa Nicholl
Ward Bell

Special Guests: David Cramer

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk to David Cramer about error tracking and troubleshooting workflows. David is the founder and CEO of Sentry, and is a software engineer by trade. He started this project about a decade ago and it was created because he had customers telling him that things were broken and it was hard to help them fix it. They talk about what Sentry is, errors, workflow management, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

David intro
Founder and CEO of Sentry
What is Sentry?
Working with PHP
De-bugger for production
Focus on workflow
Goal of Sentry
Triaging the problem
Workflow management
Sentry started off as an open-source side project
Instrumentation for JavaScript
Ember, Angular, and npm
Got their start in Python
Logs
Totally open-source
Most compatible with run-time
Can work with any language
Deep contexts
Determining the root cause
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Socks as Swag

David

Full Article

and

JSJ 321: Babel and Open Source Software with Henry Zhu

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 10 Jul 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Aimee Knight
AJ ONeal
Joe Eames

Special Guests: Henry Zhu

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Henry Zhu about Babel and open source software. Henry is one of the maintainers on Babel, which is a JavaScript compiler, and recently left this job to work on doing open source full time as well as working on Babel. They talk about where Babel is today, what it actually is, and his focus on his open source career. They also touch on how he got started in open source, his first PR, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Henry intro
Babel update
Sebastian McKenzie was the original creator of Babel
Has learned a lot about being a maintainer
What is Babel?
JavaScript compiler
You never know who your user is
Has much changed with Babel since Sebastian left?
Working on open source
How did you get started in pen source?
The ability to learn a lot from open source
Atrocities of globalization
More decentralization from GitHub
Gitea and GitLab
Gitea installer
Open source is more closed now
His first PR
JSCS
Auto-fixing
Prettier
Learning more about linting
You don’t have to have formal training to be successful
Codefund.io
Sustainability of open source
And much, much more!

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JSJ 325: Practical functional programming in JavaScript and languages like Elm with Jeremy Fairbank

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 07 Aug 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Aimee Knight
Joe Eames
AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Jeremy Fairbank

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

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Jeremy

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