140 JSJ Using Art to Get and Keep People Interested in Programming with Jenn Schiffer

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 277: Dojo 2 with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly

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

JSJ 277: Dojo 2 with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly

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

[00:02:03] Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

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

[00:02:22] Introduction to Kitson

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

[00:02:43] Elevator Pitch for Dojo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call out to Angular 4 vs Angular 2.

[00:12:44] AMD Modules

Why use AMD instead of ES6 modules?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For package builds and CI, Grunt is used.

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

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

Internationalization in Angular 2 or 4 seems unfinished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sitepen Blog series on picking a framework

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

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

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

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

Theming systems is another selling point for Dojo.

[00:34:10] Ending the framework wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:49:08] Testing

They've got intern.

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

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

The Dojo CLI uses intern as the default test framework.

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

Dojo Links

Picks

Cory

Amateur vs Professional

Aimee

DevFest Florida (use code 'jsjabber')

Chuck

Taking some time off
AudioTechnica ATR2100
How to define your life purpose in 5 minutes

Dylan

Kitson

Dunbar Number

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MJS #033 Dylan Schiemann

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

MJS 033: Dylan Schiemann

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

[01:10] – Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

SitePen

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

Dojo

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

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

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

[07:45] – JavaScript

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

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

Picks

Dylan Schiemann

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

Charles Max Wood

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JSJ 278 Machine Learning with Tyler Renelle

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:00:00 -0400

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Tyler Renelle is a contractor and developer who has worked in various web technologies like Node, Angular, Rails, and much more. He's also build machine learning backends in Python (Flask), Tensorflow, and Neural Networks.

The JavaScript Jabber panel dives into Machine Learning with Tyler Renelle. Specifically, they go into what is emerging in machine learning and artificial intelligence and what that means for programmers and programming jobs.

This episode dives into:

Whether machine learning will replace programming jobs
Economic automation
Which platforms and languages to use to get into machine learning
and much, much more...

Links:

Picks:

Aimee

Joe

Everybody Lies

Tyler

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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

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MJS 048: JC Hiatt

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 06:00:00 -0500

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: JC Hiatt

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks

CSS Grid
The Punisher

Charles

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

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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

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JSJ 315: The effects of JS on CSS with Greg Whitworth

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 30 May 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

AJ O’Neal
Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Greg Whitworth

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss the effects of JavaScript on CSS with Greg Whitworth. Greg works on Microsoft EdgeHTML, specifically working on the Microsoft Layout team, is on the CSS working group, and is involved with the Houdini task force. They talk about JS engines and rendering engines, what the CSSOM is, why it is important to understand the rendering engine, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Greg intro
What is the Houdini task force?
Extensible web manifesto
DOM (Document Object Model)
Layout API
Parser API
Babel
jQuery
Back to basics
JavaScript engine and rendering engine
What is the CSSOM?
Every browser has its separate JS engine
Browsers perspective
Aimee ShopTalk Podcast Episode
Why is it important to understand how the rendering engine is working?
Making wise decisions
Give control back to browser if possible
When you would want to use JavaScript or CSS
Hard to make a hard or fast rule
CSS is more performant
Overview of steps
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Microsoft Surface
Microsoft Cursor

Aimee

Greg’s Talk
What Your Conference Proposal Is Missing by Sarah Mei

Greg

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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

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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 333: “JavaScript 2018: Things You Need to Know, and a Few You Can Skip” with Ethan Brown

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 02 Oct 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Special Guests: Ethan Brown

In this episode, the panel talks with Ethan Brown who is a technological director at a small company. They write software to facilitate large public organizations and help make projects more effective, such as: rehabilitation of large construction projects, among others. There is a lot of government work through the endeavors they encounter. Today, the panel talks about his article he wrote, and other topics such as Flex, Redux, Ruby, Vue.js, Automerge, block chain, and Elm. Enjoy!

Show Topics:

2:38 – Chuck: We are here to talk about the software side of things.

Let’s dive into what you are looking at mid-year what we need to know for 2018. You wrote this.

3:25 – Ethan: I start off saying that doing this podcast now, how quickly things change. One thing I didn’t think people needed to know was symbols, and now that’s changed. I had a hard time with bundling and other things. I didn’t think the troubles were worth it. And now a couple of moths ago (an open source project) someone submitted a PR and said: maybe we should be using symbols? I told them I’ve had problems in the past. They said: are you crazy?!

It’s funny to see how I things have changed.

4:47 – Panel: Could you talk about symbols?

4:58 – Aimee: Are they comparable to Ruby?

5:05 – Ethan talks about what symbols are and what they do!

5:52 – Chuck: That’s pretty close to how that’s used in Ruby, too.

6:04 – Aimee: I haven’t used them in JavaScript, yet. When have you used them recently?

6:15 – Ethan answers the question.

7:17 – Panelist chimes in.

7:27 – Ethan continues his answer. The topic of “symbols” continues. Ethan talks about Automerge.

11:18 – Chuck: I want to dive-into what you SHOULD know in 2018 – does this come from your experience? Or how did you drive this list?

11:40 – Ethan: I realize that this is a local business, and I try to hear what people are and are not using. I read blogs. I think I am staying on top of these topics being discussed.

12:25 – Chuck: Most of these things are what people are talking.

12:47 – Aimee: Web Assembly. Why is this on the list?

12:58 – Ethan: I put on the list, because I heard lots of people talk about this. What I was hearing the echoes of the JavaScript haters. They have gone through a renaissance. Along with Node, and React (among others) people did get on board. There are a lot of people that are poisoned by that. I think the excitement has died down. If I were to tell a story today – I would

14:23 – Would you put block chain on there? And AI?

14:34 – Panel: I think it’s something you should be aware of in regards to web assembly. I think it will be aware of. I don’t know if there is anything functional that I could use it with.

15:18 – Chuck: I haven’t really played with it...

15:27 – Panel: If you wrote this today would you put machine learning on there?

15:37 – Ethan: Machine Learning...

16:44 – Chuck: Back to Web Assembly. I don’t think you were wrong, I think you were early. Web Assembly isn’t design just to be a ... It’s designed to be highly optimized for...

17:45 – Ethan: Well-said. Most of the work I do today we are hardly taxing the devices we are using on.

18:18 – Chuck and panel chime in.

18:39 – Chuck: I did think the next two you have on here makes sense.

18:54 – Panel: Functional programming?

19:02 – Ethan: I have a lot of thoughts on functional programming and they are mixed. I was exposed to this in the late 90’s. It was around by 20-30 years. These aren’t new. I do credit JavaScript to bring these to the masses. It’s the first language I see the masses clinging to. 10 years ago you didn’t see that. I think that’s great for the programming community in general. I would liken it to a way that Ruby on Rails really changed the way we do web developing with strong tooling. It was never really my favorite language but I can appreciate what it did for web programming. With that said...(Ethan continues the conversation.)

Ethan: I love Elm.

21:49 – Panelists talks about Elm.

*The topic diverts slightly.

22:23 – Panel: Here’s a counter-argument. Want to stir the pot a little bit.

I want to take the side of someone who does NOT like functional programming.

24:08 – Ethan: I don’t disagree with you. There are some things I agree with and things I do disagree with. Let’s talk about Data Structures. I feel like I use this everyday. Maybe it’s the common ones. The computer science background definitely helps out.

If there was one data structure, it would be TREES. I think STACKS and QUEUES are important, too. Don’t use 200-300 hours, but here are the most important ones. For algorithms that maybe you should know and bust out by heart.

27:48 – Advertisement for Chuck’s E-book Course: Get A Coder Job

28:30 – Chuck: Functional programming – people talk bout why they hate it, and people go all the way down and they say: You have to do it this way....

What pay things will pay off for me, and which things won’t pay off for me? For a lot of the easy wins it has already been discussed. I can’t remember all the principles behind it. You are looking at real tradeoffs. You have to approach it in another way. I like the IDEA that you should know in 2018, get to know X, Y, or Z, this year. You are helping the person guide them through the process.

30:18 – Ethan: Having the right tools in your toolbox.

30:45 – Panel: I agree with everything you said, I was on board, until you said: Get Merge Conflicts.

I think as developers we are being dragged in...

33:55 – Panelist: Is this the RIGHT tool to use in this situation?

34:06 – Aimee: If you are ever feeling super imposed about something then make sure you give it a fair shot, first.

34:28 – That’s the only reason why I keep watching DC movies.

34:41 – Chuck: Functional programming and...

I see people react because of the hype cycle. It doesn’t fit into my current paradigm. Is it super popular for a few months or...?

35:10 – Aimee: I would love for someone to point out a way those pure functions that wouldn’t make their code more testable.

35:42 – Ethan: Give things a fair shake. This is going back a few years when React was starting to gain popularity. I had young programmers all about React. I tried it and mixing it with JavaScript and...I thought it was gross. Everyone went on board and I had to make technically decisions. A Friend told me that you have to try it 3 times and give up 3 times for you to get it. That was exactly it – don’t know if that was prophecy or something. This was one of my bigger professional mistakes because team wanted to use it and I didn’t at first. At the time we went with Vue (old dog like me). I cost us 80,000 lines of code and how many man hours because I wasn’t keeping an open-mind?

37:54 – Chuck: We can all say that with someone we’ve done.

38:04 – Panel shares a personal story.

38:32 – Panel: I sympathize because I had the same feeling as automated testing. That first time, that automated test saved me 3 hours. Oh My Gosh! What have I been missing!

39:12 – Ethan: Why should you do automated testing? Here is why...

You have to not be afraid of testing. Not afraid of breaking things and getting messy.

39:51 – Panel: Immutability?

40:00 – Ethan talks about this topic.

42:58 – Chuck: You have summed up my experience with it.

43:10 – Panel: Yep. I agree. This is stupid why would I make a copy of a huge structure, when...

44:03 – Chuck: To Joe’s point – but it wasn’t just “this was a dumb way” – it was also trivial, too. I am doing all of these operations and look my memory doesn’t go through the roof. They you see it pay off. If you don’t see how it’s saving you effort, at first, then you really understand later.

44:58 – Aimee: Going back to it being a functional concept and making things more testable and let it being clearly separate things makes working in code a better experience.

As I am working in a system that is NOT a pleasure.

45:31 – Chuck: It’s called legacy code...

45:38 – What is the code year? What constitutes a legacy application?

45:55 – Panel: 7 times – good rule.

46:10 – Aimee: I am not trolling. Serious conversation I was having with them this year.

46:27 – Just like cars.

46:34 – Chuck chimes in with his rule of thumb.

46:244 – Panel and Chuck go back-and-forth with this topic.

47:14 – Dilbert cartoons – check it out.

47:55 – GREAT QUOTE about life lessons.

48:09 – Chuck: I wish I knew then what I know now.

Data binding. Flux and Redux. Lots of this came out of stuff around both data stores and shadow domes. How do you tease this out with the stuff that came out around the same time?

48:51 – Ethan answers question.

51:17 – Panel chimes in.

52:01 – Picks!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

Pettier

Joe

Charles

Ethan

Full Article

JSJ 347: JAMstack with Divya Sasidharan & Phil Hawksworth

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 15 Jan 2019 05:00:00 -0500

Sponsors

KendoUI
Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
Clubhouse

Panel

AJ O’Neal
Chris Ferdinandi
Charles Max Wood

Joined by special guest: Phil Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan

Episode Summary

This episode features special guests Philip Hawksworth and Divya Sasidharan. Phil lives just outside of London and Divya lives in Chicago, and both of them work for Netlify. Divya is also a regular on the Devchat show Views on Vue. The panelists begin by discussing what JAMstack is. JAM stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. It used to be known as the new name for static sites, but it’s much more than that. Phil talks about how dynamic ‘static’ sites really are. JAMstack sites range from very simple to very complex, Static is actually a misnomer. JAMstack makes making, deploying, and publishing as simple as possible.

The panelists discuss the differences between building your own API and JAMstack and how JavaScript fits into the JAMstack ecosystem. They talk about keys and secrets in APIs and the best way to handle credentials in a static site. There are multiple ways to handle it, but Netlify has some built in solutions. All you have to do is write your logic for what you want your function to do and what packages you want included in it, they do all the rest. Every deployment you make stays there, so you can always roll back to a previous version.

Charles asks about how to convert a website that’s built on a CMS to a static site and some of the tools available on Netlify. They finish by discussing different hangups on migrating platforms for things like Devchat (which is built on WordPress) and the benefits of switching servers.

Links

API
React
JAMstack
CMS (content management system)
CDM (Customer Data Management)
Markup
UI (User Interface)
Jekyll
Progressive Enhancement
11ty
Hugo
React Static
Gatsby
Vue
AWS
AWS Lambda
Azure
Markdown
WordPress
Zapier
Stefan Baumgartner article
RSS feed

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Prince Ali Ababwa (Aladdin)
Node v.10.12

Chris Ferdinandi:

Charles Max Wood:

Mastadon Social
Thanksgiving turkey

Phil Hawksworth:

Dripping (solidified meat drippings spread on toast)
They Shall Not Grow Old

Divya Sasidharan:

Full Article

JSJ 352: Caffeinated Style Sheets: Supporting High Level CSS with JavaScript with Tommy Hodgins

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Mon, 18 Feb 2019 23:37:00 -0500

Sponsors

Sentry- use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
Netlify
Clubhouse
CacheFly

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, the panelists talk with Tommy Hodgins who specializes in responsive web design. He starts with explaining to listeners what it means by a responsive web layout and goes on to discuss the techniques in using JavaScript in CSS in depth.

He elaborates on dynamic styling of components, event-driven stylesheet templating, performance and timing characteristics of these techniques and describes different kinds of observers – interception, resize and mutation, and their support for various browsers. He also talks about how to go about enabling certain features by extending CSS, comparison to tools such as the CSS preprocessor and Media Queries, pros and cons of having this approach while citing relevant examples, exciting new features coming up in CSS, ways of testing the methods, caffeinated stylesheets, along with Qaffeine and Deqaf tools.

Picks

Joe

The Captain Is Dead

Aimee

Developer on Call
Tip – Try to follow a low-sugar diet

Chris

Charles

Coaching by Charles in exchange of writing Show Notes or Tags

Tommy

JS in CSS

Full Article

JSJ 357: Event-Stream & Package Vulnerabilities with Richard Feldman and Hillel Wayne

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 26 Mar 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Sponsors

Triplebyte
Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
Clubhouse
CacheFly

Panel

Aaron Frost
AJ O’Neal
Chris Ferdinandi
Joe Eames
Aimee Knight
Charles Max Wood

Joined by special guests: Hillel Wayne and Richard Feldman

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Hillel Wayne kicks off the podcast by giving a short background about his work, explains the concepts of formal methods and the popular npm package - event-stream, in brief. The panelists then dive into the recent event-stream attack and discuss it at length, focusing on different package managers and their vulnerabilities, as well as the security issues associated with them. They debate on whether paying open source developers for their work, thereby leading to an increase in contribution, would eventually help in improving security or not. They finally talk about what can be done to fix certain dependencies and susceptibilities to prevent further attacks and if there are any solutions that can make things both convenient and secure for users.

Links

Picks

Joe Eames:

Stuffed Fables

Aimee Knight:

Aaron Frost:

JSConf US

Chris Ferdinandi:

Charles Max Wood:

Richard Feldman:

Hillel Wayne:

Full Article

MJS 110: Phil Hawksworth

By
Published On :: Tue, 04 Jun 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Sponsors

Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan
CacheFly

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined By Special Guest: Phil Hawksworth

Episode Summary

Currently the Head of Developer Relations at Netlify, Phil has been a developer for 20 years. Even though he was interested in computers from an early age, he started studying Civil Engineering in university before changing course and switching to Computer Science. Though he didn't particularly enjoy studying Computer Science, he really liked working with HTML where he didn't have to compile any code and that's when he started thinking about a career in web development.

Phil talks about his favorite projects he has worked on using JAMstack and JavaScript. He works remotely out of London, UK and as head of developer relations he spends a lot of time traveling for conferences for work. He doesn't have a 'typical' work day, but when he is not traveling for work he enjoys catching up on conversations on Slack and Twitter about JAMstack and collaborating with the rest of is team in San Francisco.

Picks

Phil Hawksworth:

Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity

Charles Max Wood:

EverywhereJS JavaScript Community

Full Article

JSJ 396: Publishing Your Book with Jonathan Lee Martin

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 01 Oct 2019 06:00:00 -0400

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

Full Article

JSJ 405: Machine Learning with Gant Laborde

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Gant Laborde is the Chief Innovation Officer of Infinite Red who is working on a course for beginners on machine learning. There is a lot of gatekeeping with machine learning, and this attitude that only people with PhDs should touch it. In spite of this, Gant thinks that in the next 5 years everyone will be using machine learning, and that it will be pioneered by web developers. One of the strong points of the web is experimentation, and Gant contrasts this to the academic approach.

They conversation turns to Gant’s course on machine learning and how it is structured. He stresses the importance of understanding unicode, assembly, and other higher concepts. In his course he gives you the resources to go deeper and talks about libraries and frameworks available that can get you started right away. His first lesson is a splashdown into the jargon of machine learning, which he maps over into developer terms. After a little JavaScript kung fu, he takes some tools that are already out there and converts it into a website.

Chris and Gant discuss some different uses for machine learning and how it can improve development. One of the biggest applications they see is to train the computers to figure monotonous tasks out while the human beings focus on other projects, such as watching security camera footage and identifying images. Gant restates his belief that in the next 5 years, AI will be everywhere. People will grab the boring things first, then they will go for the exciting things. Gant talks about his creation NSFW.js, an open source train model to help you catch indecent content. He and Chris discuss different applications for this technology.

Next, the panel discusses where machine learning can be seen in everyday life, especially in big companies such as Google. They cite completing your sentences in an email for you as an example of machine learning. They talk about the ethics of machine learning, especially concerning security and personal data. They anticipate that the next problem is edge devices for AI, and this is where JavaScript really comes in, because security and privacy concerns require a developer mindset. They also believe that personal assistant devices, like those from Amazon and Google, will become even more personal through machine learning. They talk about some of the ways that personal assistant devices will improve through machine learning, such as recognizing your voice or understanding your accent.

Their next topic of discussion is authenticity, and how computers are actually incredibly good at finding deep fakes. They discuss the practice of placing passed away people into movies as one of the applications of machine learning, and the ethics surrounding that. Since developers tend to be worried about inclusions, ethics, and the implications of things, Gant believes that these are the people he wants to have control over what AI is going to do to help build a more conscious data set.

The show concludes with Gant talking about the resources to help you get started with machine learning. He is a panelist on upcoming DevChat show, Adventures in Machine Learning. He has worked with people with all kinds of skill sets and has found that it doesn’t matter how much you know, it matters how interested and passionate you are about learning. If you’re willing to put the pedal to the metal for at least a month, you can come out with a basic understanding. Chris and Gant talk about Tensorflow, which helps you take care of machine learning at a higher level for fast operations without calculus. Gant is working on putting together a course on Tensorflow. If you’re interested in machine learning, go to academy.infinite.red to sign up for Gant’s course. He also announces that they will be having a sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Panelists

Christopher Buecheler

With special guest: Gant Laborde

Sponsors

React Round Up
Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan
Adventures in Angular

Links

Machine Learning: How To go from Zero to Hero
NSFW.js
Tensorflow.js
PyTorch
Keras
Academy.infinite.red
Gantlaborde.com

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

Next.js
Big Wreck, But For The Sun

Gant Laborde:

Nicornot.com

Free 5 day mini course on academy.infinite.red

Full Article

JSJ 432: Internet of Things (IoT) with Joe Karlsson

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 05 May 2020 06:00:00 -0400

JavaScript Remote Conf 2020

May 13th to 15th - register now!

Joe Karlsson is a developer advocate at MongoDB. He and the panel walk through the different approaches, uses, and libraries for building IoT with JavaScript

Panel

Aimee Knight
Charles Max Wood
AJ O’Neal
Dan Shappir
Steve Edwards

Guest

Joe Karlsson

Sponsors

G2i | Enjoy the luxuries of freelancing

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today!

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Aimee Knight:

Cutting Your own Hair
Joe's Appartment

Charles Max Wood:

Steve Edwards:

Pearls Before Swine

Dan Shappir:

Joe Karlsson:

Follow Joe on Twitter > @JoeKarlsson1
MongoDB.live

Follow JavaScript Jabber on Twitter > @JSJabber

Full Article