Panel:

• Aimee Knight
• AJ O’Neal
• Aaron Frost
• Christopher Ferdinandi

Special Guests: Christopher Buecheler

In this episode, the panel talks with Christopher Buecheler who is an author, blogger, web developer, and founder of CloseBrace. The panel and Christopher talk about stepping outside of your comfort zone. With a technological world that is ever changing, it is important to always be learning within your field. Check out today’s episode to learn more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

1:08 – Aimee: Our guest is Christopher Buecheler – tell us about yourself and what you do.

1:22 – Guest: I run a site and help mid-career developers. I put out a weekly newsletter, too.

2:01 – Aimee: It says that you are a fan of “getting comfortable being uncomfortable”?

2:15 – Guest: I am a self-taught developer, so that means I am scrambling to learn new things all the time. You are often faced with learning new things. When I learned React I was dumped into it. The pain and the difficulty are necessary in order to improve. If you aren’t having that experience then you aren’t learning as much as you could be.

3:26 – Aimee: I borrow lessons that I learned from ice-skating to programming.

3:49 – Guest: I started running a few years ago for better health. It was exhausting and miserable at the start and wondered why I was doing it. Now I run 5 times a week, and there is always a level of being uncomfortable, but now it’s apart of the run. It’s an interesting comparison to coding. It’s this idea of pushing through.

5:01 – Aimee: If you are comfortable you probably aren’t growing that much. In our industry you always have to be learning because things change so much!

5:25 – Guest: Yes, exactly. If you are not careful you can miss opportunities.

6:33 – Panel: You have some ideas about frameworks and libraries – one thing that I am always anxious about is being able to make sense of “what are some new trends that I should pay attention to?” I remember interviewing with someone saying: this mobile thing is just a fad. I remember thinking that she is going to miss this opportunity. I am worried that I am going to be THAT guy. How do you figure out what sort of things you should / shouldn’t pay attention to?

7:47 – Guest: It is a super exhausting thing to keep up with – I agree. For me, a lot of what I pay attention to is the technology that has the backing of a multi-million dollar company then that shows that technology isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. The other thing I would look at is how ACTIVE is the community around it?

9:15 – Panel: Is there a strategic way to approach this? There is so many different directions that you can grow and push yourself within your career? Do you have any kinds of thoughts/tips on how you want your career to evolve?

10:00 – Guest: I am trying to always communicate better to my newsletter audience. Also, a good approach, too, is what are people hiring for? 

11:06 – Aimee: Again, I would say: focus on learning.

11:30 – Panel: And I agree with Aimee – “learn it and learn it well!”

12:01 – Panel: I want to ask Chris – what is CloseBrace?

12:17 – Guest: I founded it in November 2016, and started work on it back in 2013.

14:20 – Panel: It was filled with a bunch of buzz worthy words/title.

14:32 – Guest continues his thoughts/comments on CloseBrace.

16:54 – Panel: How is the growth going?

17:00 – Guest: It is growing very well. I put out a massive, massive tutorial course – I wouldn’t necessarily advice that people do this b/c it can be overwhelming. However, growth this year I have focused on marketing. I haven’t shared numbers or anything but it’s increased 500%, and I am happy about it.

18:05 – Panel: Are you keeping in-house?

18:13 – Guest: I think it would be cool to expand, but now it is in-house. I don’t want to borrow Egg Head’s setup. I would love to cover MORE topics, though.

19:05 – Panel: You are only one person.

19:08 – Guest: If I can get the site creating more revenue than I can hire someone to do video editing, etc.

19:35 – Panel: I think you are overthinking it.

19:45 – Guest.

19:47 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

20:47 – Guest.

21:30 – Aimee: There are SO many resources out there right now. Where do you think you fit into this landscape?

21:44 – The landscape is cluttered, but I feel that I am different b/c of my thoroughness. I don’t always explain line by line, but I do say how and why things work. I think also is my VOICE. Not my radio voice, but the tone and the approach you take with it.

23:25 – Panel: I was trying to copy folks in the beginning of my career. And at some point I realized that I needed to find my own style. It always came down to the reasons WHY I am different rather than the similarities. Like, Chris, you have these quick hits on CloseBrace, but some people might feel like they don’t have the time to get through ALL of your content, because it’s a lot. For me, that’s what I love about your content.

24:46 – Christopher: Yeah, it was intentional.

25:36 – Panel: Good for you.

25:49 – Guest: I am super device agnostic: Android, Mac, PC, etc. I have a lot of people from India that are more Microsoft-base.

26:28 – Aimee: I think Egghead is pretty good about this...do you cover testing at all with these things that you are doing? It’s good to do a “Hello World” but most of these sites don’t get into MORE complex pieces. I think that’s where you can get into trouble. It’s nice to have some boiler point testing, too.

27:18 – Guest answers Aimee’s question.

28:43 – Aimee: We work with a consultancy and I asked them to write tests for the things that we work with. That’s the value of the testing. It’s the code that comes out.

29:10 – Panel: Can you explain this to me. Why do I need to write tests? It’s always working (my code) so why do I have to write a test?

29:39 – Guest: When working with AWS I was writing...

31:01 – Aimee: My biggest thing is that I have seen enough that the people don’t value testing are in a very bad place, and the people that value testing are in a good place. It even comes back to the customers, because the code gets so hard that you end up repeatedly releasing bugs. Customers will stop paying their bills if this happens too often for them.

33:00 – Panel: Aimee / Chris do you have a preferred tool? I have done testing before, but not as much as I should be doing.

33:25 – Aimee: I like JEST and PUPPETEER.

33:58 – Guest: I like JEST, too.

34:20 – Aimee: Let’s go to PICKS!

34:35 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

Links:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• React
• Elixir
• Elm
• Vue
• JEST
• Puppeteer
• Podflix
• Autojump
• Brutalist Web Design
• YouTube: Mac Miller
• Balloon Fiesta
• DocZ
• CloseBrace
• Christopher Buecheler’s Website
• Christopher Buecheler’s LinkedIn
• Christopher Buecheler’s GitHub
• Go Learn Things – Chris Ferdinandi

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Cache Fly
• Get a Coder Job

Picks:

Aimee

• Podflix

Chris F.

• AutoJump 
• Brutalist Web Design
• Mac Miller Tiny Desk Concert

AJ

• Canada Dry with Lemonade

Aaron

• ABQ Ballon Festival
• Joe Eames DND Recording Channel

Christopher

• Docz
• South Reach Trilogy
• Jeff Vandermeer

Sponsors

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

• Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

• Linode

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• AJ O’Neal

• Joe Eames

Episode Summary

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

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

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

Links

• JWT

• Angular

• Vue

• Backbone

• GoLang

• Express

• React

• Redux

• Hyper HTML

• 4each

• Pascal

• JQuery

• Npm.js

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Podwrench

Aimee Knight:

• How to Love Your Job and Avoid Burnout

• So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Vanilla JS toolkit

• Thinkster

• Artifact Conference

AJ O’Neal:

• Binary Cocoa

• Binary Cocoa Slamorama Kickstarter

• Binary Cocoa Straight 4

• Root

Sponsors

• Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

• Linode

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• AJ O’Neal

• Joe Eames

Episode Summary

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

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

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

Links

• Heroku

• Github Pages

• Netlify

• Eleventy

• DigitalOcean

• Lightsale

• Ubuntu

• Git clone

• Node static server

• Systemd script

• NGinx

• Cloud66

• Thinkster

• Gatsby

• Docker

• Gentoo

• How to schedule posts with a static website

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

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

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Microsoft build

Aimee Knight:

• Systems Thinking is as Important as Ever for New Coders

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Adrian Holivadi framework video

• Server Pilot

AJ O’Neal:

• Jeff Atwood tweet

• More on Stackflow Architecture

• Minio

Joe Eames:

• Miniature painting

Sponsors

• Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• AJ O’Neal

• Christopher Beucheler

Episode Summary

Today the panel discusses the effect of current development practices, such as the heavy reliance JavaScript, on the web. Chris explains why he believes that current development practices are ruining the web. The panelists discuss different situations where they see complications on the web. They discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using an enterprise scale platform like React. The panel discusses Twitter’s move away from their legacy code base to CSS and JavaScript. 

The panelists agree that the way things are built, since it’s so JavaScript heavy, is alienating to people who work with other languages, and in turn other areas like UI are undervalued. They talk about possible reasons things ended up this way and some of the historical perception of a frontend as not a place for ‘real’ development. Because the web is now a serious platform, things associated with the backend has been thrown at the frontend where it doesn’t belong. They talk about changes in the ways programming is viewed now versus the past. 

There is a discussion about how market demands that have influenced the web and if the market value CSS as highly as other languages. They mention some of the Innovations in CSS. Chris shares his solutions for the problems they’ve been discussing, namely using less JavaScript, leaning more heavily on what the browser gives you out of the box, and avoiding dependency where possible. They talk about ways to get involved if you want to take a leaner approach to the web. Ultimately, it is important to embrace things about the past that worked, but sprinkle in new technology when it makes sense

Links

• Stimulus

• React

• Vue

• AppleScript

• Perl

• .NET

• Angular 

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Tiny Epic Galaxies

• EverywhereJS

Aimee Knight:

• Complete Guide to Deep Work

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Developer Bait and Switch

• Vanillajslist.com

• Chris will be speaking at Artifact Conference

AJ O’Neal:

• Weird Al: White and Nerdy

• Quantum board game

• Deploy Sites with Only Git and SSH

Christopher Beucheler:

• Material

• Monstress

Sponsors

• Datadog  

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

Panel

• Aimee Knight

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

With Special Guest: Rene Rubalcava

Episode Summary

Rene is a software developer for ESRI and works in spatial and mapping software. ESRI has been around since 1969 and has seen their work explode since they shifted to providing address and location services. Rene talks about how he thinks about location and mapping when building software around it and things that he has to approach in unique ways. The panel discusses some of their past experiences with location software. Some of the most difficult aspects of this software is changing time zones for data and actually mapping the Earth, since it is not flat nor a perfect sphere. Rene talks about the different models used for mapping the Earth.

Most mapping systems use the same algorithm as Google maps, so Rene talks about some of the specific features of ArcGIS, including the ability to finding a point within a polygon. Rene talks about what routing is, its importance, and how it is being optimized with ArcGIS, such as being able to add private streets into a regular street network.

The panel discusses how the prevalence of smartphones has changed mapping and GPS and some of their concerns with privacy and location mapping. One thing ESRI is very careful about is not storing private information. Rene talks about the kinds of things he has seen people doing with the mapping and location data provided by ArcGIS, including a Smart Mapping feature for developers, mapping planets, indoor routing, and 3D models. 

Links

• Webricate 

• Esri

• ArcGIS

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Rene Rubalcava:

• Old Man’s War series

• Always Be My Maybe

• Rene’s website

AJ O’Neal:

• INTL

• Colorful

• Time zones in Postgress

• Time zones in JavaScript

Aimee Knight:

• Advice to Less Experienced Developers

Charles Max Wood:

• Heber Half Marathon

• Netlify CMS

• Villainous

• Firefox

Sponsors

• RxJS Live

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Christopher Beucheler

Episode Summary

Today Charles and Christopher discuss what can you do with JavaScript. They talk about the kinds of things they have used JavaScript to build. They discuss non-traditional ways that people might get into JavaScript and what first drew them to the language. They talk about the some of the non-traditional JavaScript options that are worth looking into. Christopher and Charles talk about some of the fascinating things that have been done with JavaScript, such as Amazon Alexa capabilities, virtual reality, and games. They spend some time talking about JavaScript usage in game creation and building AI. They talk about how they’ve seen JavaScript change and progress during their time as developers. They talk about areas besides web that they would be interested in learning more about and what kinds of things they would like to build in that area. They finish by discussing areas that they are excited to see improve and gain new capabilites. 

Links

• Node.js

• WebGL

• React

• React Native

• Quake

• TenserFlow.js

• WebAssembly

• Hermes

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Instagram

• JavaScript Jabber Reccomendations

• New shows: Adventures in Block Chain, Adventures in .Net

Christopher Beucheler:

• Pair programming

• VS Code Live Share

Episode Summary

Surma is an open web advocate for Google currently working with WebAssembly team. He was invited on the show today to talk about using web workers and how to move work away from the browser’s main thread. His primary platform is bringing multithreading out of the fringes and into the web. 

The panel talks about their past experience with web workers, and many of them found them isolated and difficult to use. Surma believes that web workers should pretty much always be sued because the main thread is an inherently bad place to run your code because it has to do so much. Surma details the differences between web workers, service workers, and worklets and explains what the compositer is. 

The panel discusses what parts should be moved off the main thread and how to move the logic over. Surma notes that the additional cost of using a worker is basically nonexistent, changes almost nothing in your workflow, and takes up only one kilobyte of memory. Therefore, the cost/benefit ratio of using web workers gets very large. They discuss debugging in a web worker and Surma details how debugging is better in web workers. 

Surma wants to see people use workers not because it will make it faster, but because it will make your app more resilient across all devices. Every piece of JavaScript you run could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. There’s so much to do on the main thread for the browser, especially when it has a weaker processor, that the more stuff you can move away, the better.

The web is tailored for the most powerful phones, but a large portion of the population does not have the most powerful phone available, and moving things over to a web worker will benefit the average phone. Surma talks about his experience using the Nokia 2, on which simple apps run very slow because they are not being frugal with the user’s resources. Moving things to another thread will help phones like this run faster.  

The panel discusses the benefit of using web workers from a business standpoint. The argument is similar to that for accessibility. Though a user may not need that accessibility all the time, they could become in need of it. Making the app run better on low end devices will also increase the target audience, which is helpful is user acquisition is your principle metric for success. 

Surma wants businesses to understand that while this is beneficial for people in countries like India, there is also a very wide spectrum of phone performance in America. He wants to help all of these people and wants companies acknowledge this spectrum and to look at the benefits of using web workers to improve performance.

Panelists

• Charles Max Wood

• Christopher Buecheler

• Aimee Knight

• AJ O’Neal

With special guest: Surma

Sponsors

• Adventures in DevOps

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

• Adventures in Angular

Links

• Web workers

• Service workers

• Worklets 

• Ecto model

• Babel

• Swoosh

• Comlink

• WhatsApp

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• For Love of Mother-Not

Surma:

• Follow Surma @DasSurma on Twitter and at dassur.ma

• WebAssembly Spec

AJ O’Neal:

• The GameCube Ultimate

• Pikmin for Wii and GameCube

• Super Monkey Ball

Christopher Buecheler

• CinemaSins Sincast podcast

Jonathan Lee Martin is an instructor and developer. He got his start in teaching at Big Nerd Ranch doing 1-2 week trainings for mid to senior developers, and then transitioned to 16 week courses for career switchers. He also worked for Digital Crafts for a year, and then wanted to focus on building out his own personal teaching brand. One of his first steps toward building his own brand was to publish his book, Functional Design Patterns for Express.js.The inspiration for Jonathan’s book came from his experience teaching career switchers. He wanted to experiment in the classroom with teaching functional programming in a way that would be very approachable and applicable and dispel some of the magic around backend programming, and that became the template for the book. 

Jonathan loves the minimalist nature of Express.js and talks about its many uses. He believes that it knowing design patterns can take you pretty far in programming, and this view is related to his background in Rails. When he was working in Rails taming huge middleware stacks, he discovered that applying design patterns made builds take less time. He talks about other situations where knowing design patterns has helped. Express.js leans towards object oriented style over functional programming, and so it takes to these patterns well. Express.js has its shortcomings, and that’s where Jonathan’s favorite library Koa comes into play. 

The conversation switches back to Jonathan’s book, which is a good way to start learning these higher level concepts. He purposely made it appealing to mid and senior level programmers, but at the same time it does not require a lot of background knowledge. Jonathan talks about his teaching methods that give people a proper appreciation for the tool. Jonathan talks more about why he likes to use Express.js and chose to use it for his book. He cautions that his book is not a book of monads, but rather about being influenced by the idea of composition over inheritance. He talks about the role of middleware in programming. 

The panel asks about Jonathan’s toolchain and approach to writing books, and he explains how his books are set up to show code. They discuss the different forms required when publishing a book such as epub, MOBI, and PDF. Jonathan found it difficult to distribute his book through Amazon, so he talks about how he built his own server. Charles notes that your method of distributing your book will depend on your goal. If you want to make the most money possible, make your own site. If you want to get it into as many hands as possible, get it on Amazon.

Many of the JavaScript Jabber panelists have had experience publishing books, and Jonathan shares that you can reach out to a publisher after you’ve self-published a book and they can get it distributed. Jonathan believes that If he had gone straight to a publisher, he would have gotten overwhelmed and given up on the book, but the step by step process of self-publishing kept things manageable. The panelists discuss difficulties encountered when publishing and editing books, especially with Markdown. Jonathan compares the perks of self-editing to traditional editing. Though he does not plan to opensource his entire editing pipeline, he may make some parts available. The show concludes with the panelists discussing the clout that comes with being a published author. 

Panelists

• Charles Max Wood

• Christopher Buecheler 

• J.C. Hyatt

With special guest: Jonathan Lee Martin

Sponsors

• Adventures in Blockchain

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

• The Freelancers’ Show

Links

• Big Nerd Ranch

• Digital Crafts

• JSJ 070: Book Club JavaScript Allonge with Reginald Braithwaite

• JavaScript Allonge by Reginald Braithwaite

• Functional Design Patterns for Express JS by Jonathan Lee Martin

• Node.js

• Express.js

• Koa

• Minjs 

• Sinatra

• Http.createserver

• Monads

• Middleware 

• Markdown

• Pandoc

• Diff-match-path library

• Epub

• MOBI

• LaTeX 

• Stripe Checkout

• Fstoppers

• Softcover

• Bookseller API 

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

• Cluisbrace.com newsletter

J.C. Hyatt:

• Corsair wireless charging mouse pad

Charles Max Wood:

• Magnetic whiteboard baskets

• Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books

Jonathan Lee Martin:

• Eric Elliot JS

• YellowScale

• Follow Jonathan and find his book at jonathanleemartin.com

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is available on Amazon. Get your copy here today only for $2.99!

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is available on Amazon. Get your copy here today only for $2.99!

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