124 JSJ The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich

This episode was recorded live from The Microsoft Build Conference 2016. In this episode we chatted with Jeremy Thake of Microsoft about MS Office. You can follow him on Twitter, see what he’s done over on GitHub, or visit his blog.

Resources:

Office Dev Center

Picks

Billions (Jeremy)

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211 JSJ Ember and EmberConf with Michael North

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 11 May 2016 09:00:00 -0400

02:22 - Michael North Introduction

04:10 - Ember vs React or Angular

JavaScript Jabber Episode #203: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg

07:13 - Convention Over Configuration

09:39 - Changes in Ember

16:04 - Ember FastBoot

Building a performant real-time web app with Ember Fastboot and Phoenix

18:53 - EmberConf

Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale

22:47 - Mobile/Native Experience & Optimization

Service Worker
Hybrid Apps

29:52 - Electron

30:46 - Open Source Empowerment; The Ember Learning Team

33:54 - Michael North's Frontend Masters Ember 2 Series

37:11 - The Ember Community

Picks

React Rally (Jamison)
Embedded (Jamison)
Remy Sharp: A debugging thought process (Jamison)
NashDev Podcast (Aimee)
JS developers who don’t know what closure is are fine. (Aimee)
Sublime Text (Chuck)
DesktopServer (Chuck)
MemberPress (Chuck)
Frontend Masters (Mike)
Wicked Good Ember Conf (Mike)
Debugging Node.js with Visual Studio Code (Mike)

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212 JSJ Horizon.js with Horizon.js with Michael Glukhovsky: Live from ng-conf!

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 18 May 2016 09:00:00 -0400

02:34 - Michael Glukhovsky Introduction

02:35 - horizon-js

04:52 - Versus Open Source Firebase

06:15 - The Security Model

Horizon.io

07:56 - The Admin Interface

09:16 - RethinkDB + Horizon

10:56 - Versus Meteor

13:35 - Message Format

14:26 - Getting Started

19:01 - Real-time

21:24 - Security

26:56 - The Grand Vision; Use Cases

32:17 - Managing Deployment with Redundancy

Picks

That Conference (Joe)
AngularConnect (Joe)
React Rally (Joe)
Soft Skills Engineering Podcast (Dave)
May the 4th (Chuck)
The Developer Preview (Mike)
The Art Spirit Paperback by Robert Henri (Mike)
React Rally (Jamison)
Uncanny Valley Podcast (Jamison)
Kishi Boshi (Jamison)
David R. MacIver: On criticizing programming languages (without criticizing their users) (Aimee)

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215 JSJ ChakraCode with Guarav Seth Live from Microsoft Build 2016

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 08 Jun 2016 09:00:00 -0400

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

Picks

TypeScript (Gaurav)
Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin from .NETRocks

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216 JSJ Angular with Rob Wormald Live from Microsoft Build 2016

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:00:00 -0400

This episode was recorded live from The Microsoft Build Conference 2016. In this episode we chatted with Rob Wormald of the Angular Core team at Google about Angular. You can follow him on Twitter, or check out what he’s done over on GitHub.

Picks

Visual Studio Code (Rob)
Service Workers (Rob)
Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin from .NETRocks (Chuck)

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221 JSJ Visual Studio Code with Wade Anderson Live From Microsoft Build 2016

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 09:00:00 -0400

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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229 JSJ Elm with Richard Feldman

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Published On :: Wed, 14 Sep 2016 08:00:00 -0400

1:13 No Red Ink is hiring; Richard’s book-in-progress

2:10 Frontend Masters Workshop

2:55 Elm’s primary function

5:10 Using Elm over using Haskell, React, Javascript, etc.

9:15 Increased usability of Elm with each update

13:45 Striking differences between Elm and Javascript

16:08 Community reactions to Elm

20:21 First Elm conference in September

22:11 The approach for structuring an Elm app

23:45 Realistic time frame for building an app from scratch

32:20 Writing pure functions and immutable data; how Elm uses Side-Effects

38:20 Scaling a big FP application

44:15 What Javascript developers can take away from using Elm

48:00 Richard on Twitter

PICKS

“In a World…” Movie

Building a Live-Validated Signup Form in Elm

Apple Cider Vinegar

CETUSA – Foreign exchange program

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236 JSJ Interview with Mads Kristensen from Microsoft Ignite

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 02 Nov 2016 08:00:00 -0400

TOPICS:

4:00 Things that make web development more difficult

7:40 The developer experience with Angular

10:40 How cognitive cost affects the user experience

16:52 The variety of users for whom Mads’ software is built

22:14 Creating accessible javascript tools that aren’t immediately outdated

28:20 Why people shouldn’t be using dependency installers

34:00 Node updates

QUOTES:

“The massive introduction of new tools all the time is a big part of what makes web development harder.” -Mads Kristensen

“I’m not a pretty pixels person, I’m a code and algorithms person.” -AJ O’Neill

“I’m not hearing hype about people using HTTP2 to get those benefits, I’m only hearing hype around tools that Static built.” -AJ O’Neill

PICKS:

Death Note Anime Show

JS Remote Conference

The Alloy of Law Book by Brandon Sanderson

Zig Zigler Books on Audible

Mr. Robot TV Show

RESOURCES & CONTACT INFO:

Mads on Twitter

Mads’ Website

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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

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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)

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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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MJS #010: Richard Feldman

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Welcome to the 9th My JS Story! Today, Charles Max Wood welcomes Richard Feldman. Richard works at No Red Ink, and he is the author of Elm in Action. He was in JavaScript Jabber and talked about Elm with Evan Czlapicki in episode 175 and covered the same topic alone in episode 229 . Stay tuned to My JS Story Richard Feldman to learn more how he started in programming and what he's up to now.

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JSJ 255 Docker for Developers with Derick Bailey

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 28 Mar 2017 06:00:00 -0400

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles Max Wood, AJ O'neal, Aimee Knight, Joe Eames, and Cory House discuss Docker for Developers with Derick Bailey. Derick is currently into Docker and has been doing a series on it at WatchMeCode. He is also writing an ebook titled Docker Recipes for Node.js Development which aims to provide solutions for things that concern Node.js. Stay tuned to learn more about Docker and the ebook which Derick is working on!

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JSJ 257 Graphcool with Johannes Schickling

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

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles, Aimee, and AJ discuss Graphcool with Johannes Schickling. Johannes is based in Berlin, Germany and is the founder of Graphcool, Inc. He also founded Optonaut, an Instagram for VR, which he sold about a year ago. Tune in to learn more about GraphQL and see what's in store for you!

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JSJ 258 Development in a Public Institution with Shawn Clabough

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 06:00:00 -0400

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles and Aimee discuss Development in a Public Institution with Shawn Clabough. Shawn is a developer and developer manager at Washington State University. He works with the research office, and has been in the industry for 20 years. Tune in to this exciting episode!

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JSJ 260 Practical JavaScript with Gordon Zhu

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 02 May 2017 06:00:00 -0400

On today's episode, Charles, Joe, and Cory discuss Practical JavaScript with Gordon Zhu. Gordon is the founder of Watch and Code, and teaches the Practical JavaScript online course. His mission is to help beginners become developers through tutorials. Tune in!

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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 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.

Picks

Aimee:

Eric

Charles

Ionic Framework

Links

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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.

Picks

Joe Eames

Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak

Aimee Knight

Conference: React Rally
Pancakes

Charles Max Wood

Terrance Smith

Full Article

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

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

JSJ 283: A/B Testing with Nick Disabato

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Amy Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests:

Nick Disabato

In this episode, Java Script Jabbers talk with Nick Disabato. Nick is a newbie to JavaScript Jabber. Nick is the founder of Draft, an interaction design agency where he does research driven A/B testing of E-commerce business.

This is a practical episode for those who are running a business and doing marketing for the products and services. Nick talks about A/B testing for a number scenarios within the company, such as for websites, funnels, and various marketing mechanisms. Nick further goes into how this helps companies strategically increase revenue by changing things such as websites design or building funnels.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Testing of changes of Copy, Websites, etc.
What does it mean of changes, Tools, Framework, Plugins, etc
Does it matter what tools you use? Framework that works within your stack
How do make we company money
Researching for the next test
Testing for conversion rate to decide which design to go implement - Variant
Responsibility for the designs
Feature and getting pay for the service
Learn more about the resources and Copy Hackers
Large organization or developers, or a QA department
Optimization teams
Usability tests and coming up with A/B tests
Expertise
Why should be care?
And much more!

Links:

@nickd

Picks:

Amiee

Nodevember

Charles

Nick

HotJar.com

Full Article

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

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

JSJ 290: Open Source Software with Dirk Hohndel - VMWare Chief Open Source Officer

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 05 Dec 2017 06:00:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

Joe Eames

Special Guests:

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Aimee

Dirk

Track This Critical Thinking

Charles

Nicholas Zakas - Books

Corey

Fun Fun Function Show

Joe

Dice Forge
Concept of empathy

Full Article

MJS 043: Nick Disabato

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 10 Jan 2018 21:15:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nick Disabato

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks

Charles

Nick

Full Article

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

JSJ 304: React: The Big Picture

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 13 Mar 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

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

Special Guests: None

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Joe

Marital Bliss Card Game

Pplwink.com

Full Article

MJS 055: Johannes Schickling

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:47:00 -0400

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Johannes Schickling

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks

Charles

Johannes

Full Article

MJS 059: Merrick Christensen

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 02 May 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Merrick Christensen

This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Merrick Christensen. Christensen works at a company called Webflow, where they try to empower people to create software without code. The company is similar to Squarespace or Wix, except they give 100% design control to the client.

Christensen talks about his journey into programming, starting by creating websites for his childhood band. He moved on from Microsoft to Dreamweaver, and his Dad got him started with some freelance jobs to create websites for people, which really sparked his interest. Christensen discusses his path to where he is as a programmer today.

In particular, We dive pretty deep on:

How did you get into programming?
Getting into JavaScript
Infogenix job
Red Olive job using Flash
Got into JavaScript through ActionScript
Discovered Moo Tools
Flex
Steve Jobs says no Flash on iPhone
Why Moo Tools and not jQuery?
Liked flexibility of JavaScript
How did you get into Angular?
Angular was trendy at the time and was easier to use
New code base with React
Backbone
Programming as an art form
Webflow
Meta-layers
Working a remote job
Framework Summit
Angular, React, View, and Backbone
And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Merrick

Full Article

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

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

JSJ 317: Prisma with Johannes Schickling

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
AJ O’Neal

Special Guests: Johannes Schickling

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss Prisma with Johannes Schickling. Johannes is the CEO and co-founder of GraphCool and works with Prisma. They talk about the upcoming changes within GraphCool, what Prisma is, and GraphQL back-end operations. They also touch on the biggest miscommunication about Prisma, how Prisma works, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

JSJ Episode 257
MJS Episode 055
Raised a seed round
Rebranding of GraphCool
What are you wanting to do with the seed money you raised?
Focused on growing his team currently
Making GraphQL easier to do
The change in the way people build software
What is Prisma?
Two things you need to do as you want to adopt GraphQL
Apollo Client and Relay
GraphQL on the back-end
Resolvers
Resolving data in one query
Prisma supports MySQL and PostgreSQL
How do you control access to the GraphQL endpoint that Prisma gives you?
Biggest miscommunication about Prisma
Prisma makes it easier for you to make your own GraphQL server
Application schemas
How do you blend your own resolvers with Prisma?
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Audible
The 5 Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman
Facebook Backyard Homesteader Groups
CharlesMaxWood.com
Sling TV
Roku Express

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Johannes

Full Article

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

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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

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JSJ 322: Building SharePoint Extensions with JavaScript with Vesa Juvonen LIVE at Microsoft Build

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Vesa Juvonen

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Vesa Juvonen about building SharePoint extensions with JavaScript. Vesa is on the SharePoint development team and is responsible for the SharePoint Framework, which is the modern way of implementing SharePoint customizations with JavaScript. They talk about what SharePoint is, why they chose to use JavaScript with it, and how he maintains isolation. They also touch on the best way to get started with SharePoint, give some great resources to help you use it, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Vesa intro
What is SharePoint?
Has existed since 2009
People either know about it and use it or don’t know what it is
Baggage from a customization perspective
Why JavaScript developers?
Modernizing development
SharePoint Framework
Microsoft Ignite Conference
Is there a market for it?
System integrators
Angular Element and React
React for SharePoint Framework back-end
Supports Vue
React Round Up Podcast
How do you maintain isolation?
What’s the best way to get started with SharePoint extensions?
Office 365 Developer Program
SharePoint documentation
SharePoint YouTube
What kinds of extensions are you seeing people build?
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Vesa

Armada by Ernest Cline

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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!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Aimee

American Dollar
Force with lease

Superfight

Joe

Jeremy

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