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JSJ 255 Docker for Developers with Derick Bailey

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 256 Wordpress and Wordpress API for JavaScript Developers with Roy Sivan

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




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JSJ 258 Development in a Public Institution with Shawn Clabough

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 259 Clean Code JavaScript with Ryan McDermott

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles, Joe, Aimee, Cory, and AJ discuss Clean Code JavaScript with Ryan McDermott. Ryan is a UX Engineer at Google and has been a professional developer for 5 years. He's focused on frontend Angular and backend node.js. Stay tuned to learn more about his current project with JavaScript!




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JSJ 262 Mozilla Firefox Developer Tools with Jason Laster

Join AJ, Aimee, and Joe as they discuss Mozilla Firefox Developer Tools with Jason Laster. Jason just started working at Mozilla since March. But even before that, he has been working on Chrome's dev tool extension called Marionette. That's when he discovered that the browser is an open source that anyone can play with. Now, he is working on a new debugger in Firefox. Tune in!




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

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




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JSJ 264 Mendel with Irae Carvalho




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JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

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

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

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

Questions for Wade and Ramya

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:30] What is Emmet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

AJ O’neal

  • Breath on the Wild
  • Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge

Charles Max Wood

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

Wade Anderson

  • Kindle Paperwhite
  •  Twitter @waderyan_

Ramya Rao

  • Open source
  • Twitter @ramyanexus




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


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

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


[1:56] Is Node 8 just an update or is there more?
  • More than just an update
  • Two main points:
  • Improved Prana support
  • Native API
  • Native APIs are helpful for Native Add-ons. For both the consumer and the developer side.
  • Prior to update these Node Native modules ran in C++ and bound to specific to Node 8 APIs.
  • Causes these modules to be updated or reconciled every time these modules are rereleased.
  • Creates burden for module maintainers.
  • Creates friction in upgrading Node versions in production departments.
  • If you have a deployment depending on a certain Native module, some of the modules may not get updated in time when updating your Node versions. Keeping people from updating Node.
  • Creates compatibility issues with Node users not using Node 8
  • Experimental support for a Native layer in Node 8 to eliminate these issues as much as possible.
  • Important milestone for the module ecosystem.
  • You can write extensions for Node in C++ and it decouples V8 so you can use something else on the front.
  • Modules takes dependency on V8 API specific to a particular version. So if V8 changes your module will be extracted from that.
  • As a side benefit, you can have another VM to take advantage of that.
  • Major version upgrades mean updating Native modules and usually some of those modules haven’t updated to the newest version of Node and be complicated.
  • Deep dependency wise, about 30% depends on a Native module somewhere
  • In the future, with the Native API, you’ll be able to update Node without breaking modules.
[5:51] What kind of work went into this?
  • Most of the work was in C++
  • First thing that was done was, they looked at the top dependent Native modules in the ecosystem.
  • Looked for what kind of V8 exposure they had and cataloged it
  • Looked at how these APIs and what their purposes were
  • Looked for a way to extract them so that they are part of Node Core
  • Created neutral APIs, now part of the Node core.
  • All C APIs
  • Also has a C++ wrapper to improves usability of the API.
[7:17] What’s an example of what you can do with these APIs?
  • Native modules allows for tighter integration and better module performance
  • Specific APIs that you can use in V8 that isn’t available through JavaScript
  • If you have a C++ variable code and you want to expose a variable into JavaScript, that is V8 API note a Node 8 API
  • Having it bound directly to the VM was something they wanted for a long time
  • Google controls V8 and they bind to V8
  • Created a better relationship with Google starting in IOJS
  • Also worked with Microsoft with their Node Shocker work.
  • Same with SpiderMonkey
  • SpiderNode is in the works
[9:23] Have you guys done any testing for performance?
  • Some. There is a performance working group.
  • There is a need to stay on top of V8
  • V8 team has focused on new language features
  • Many features have been added over the years
  • Many didn’t come in optimized
  • The performance profile has changed with these features
  • If you’re using new language features, you will see a performance boost
  • In core, still tracking down code that was specific to the old optimizer and rewriting i to work the new optimizer
  • Turbo C compiler hasn’t landed yet, but is to come.
  • Will have a completely different performance profile
  • In most real world applications it will be faster
  • Waiting on the release to take a version of V8 to make it easier to upgrade features in the future
[11:28] Are the new features picked up from V8 or implemented in Node?
  • It’s all in V8
  • Better longterm support
  • Promises are made better in Node as a platform
  • Added new method called util.promisify()
  • Implementation comes from V8
  • Allows for more optimization for promises in Node core
  • Promise support for the one-deprecated domains module.
[13:02] Is there anything more than NMP 5?
  • First off, delete your NMP cache.
  • It’s in your home directory usually with a .npm extension
[14:09] What are the new features in V8?
  • Unlimited heap sizes, previously had a 4gb limit. No fixed limit.
[14:09] Will you see things like chakra come out tuned for servers?
  • Profiles of a server for application process are getting smaller
  • Getting cut into containers and VMs and micro services
  • Vms that have cold boot time and run quickly in a strained environment is looking more like what we will see in the future
  • Yes, especially if you’re using cloud functions
  • V8 is optimized for phones, but Chakra is even more so
  • Looking for opportunities for VMs can be solely optimized for a device target
  • Node take advantage of that VM
  • VM neutrality is an interesting concept
  • VM Vendors trying to optimize it based on workloads of a server
  • Opens opportunities for Node
  • Node Chakra has been proved to iOS. You can cut off jitting off which was a requirement to be able to be in the Apple App Store
  • Node is not just for servers anymore
  • Node doesn’t take a long time configuring it
  • When a developer runs code on an IoT or a mobile app they don’t control the VM that is bundled, they run it on top of Node and it just works.
  • VM neutrality gives a new vector, so you can swam a whole different VM
[18:44] When running different engines like iOS vs Android, does the profile change?
  • What it comes down to is if it’s eventive programming
  • The browser is an eventive environment, is very efficient waiting for things to happen before it does something
  • The way that we program servers and nodes are the same as well
  • the basics are the same generally
  • environmental differences exist but the programming model is usually the same
  • What does impact it is memory and processor and hardware and things like that
  • That is where tuning the VM comes into play
[20:29] What is the new Async Hooks API used for?
  • Node has been lacking for automated inspection of Async Hook
  • No way for Node to tell you when scheduling and beginning of an Async operation. Hook helps with that
  • it’s a way for developers to write debugging features
  • Node tells the application that it’s working with Asynchronous way.
  • The embedded inspector has been embedded since Node 6
  • Now has a JavaScript API to use it
  • You can use things like Chrome debugger inside the running node process
  • Old debugging protocol has been removed
  • VM.run is still there but in the process of being deprecated
[22:34] How like is the experimental Node API will change?
  • Marked as experimental because it’s the first time in the open
  • Hopefully out of experimental soon
  • Soon can port API to the existing LTS
  • Looking for more people to participate with the new API and give feedback
  • Fix any concerns before it goes to LTS
  • Some other experimental things are in the works like ASync Hooks and how it interacts with promises
  • Renaming some features
  • Another new feature - serializer and deserializer that comes with V8
  • experimental but will most likely stay
[25:31] what is your standard for going to LTS?
  • Major releases every 6 months
  • Next Oct Node 9 will come out and then Node 8 will be LTS
  • Documentation, updates, additions etc will be ready then
  • Plan to do it for 2.5 years
  • Every even releases come out to LTS as the odd release comes out
  • Helps keeps a current line while having something new in the release line
  • Node 6 is the current LTS version
[27:26] What are you taking out or deprecating in Node 8?
  • Use the word deprecate sparingly
  • If many people use features, it’s hard to get rid of
  • Security issue with Buffer, constructor argument was ambiguous
  • Had added APIs that were more explicit over time and pushed those
  • Now it will be deprecated
[28:43] 21% - 33% Performance increase with some Node updates
  • Someone online updated their React app to Node 8 and found an 21% - 33% increase
  • Benchmarking group tests to make sure things are getting faster
  • V8 is always getting faster as well
  • Code changes fast and so there is a chance performance slows down so they have people to check
  • Benchmark test are all automated by a team
[30:47] Is it safe to just switch to Node 8?
  • For front-end, yes
  • clear your NPM cache
  • Back use cases will usually wait until LTS
[31:28] Where any of the features hard to implement?
  • The API work took about a year
  • It was a collaboration which made it interesting
  • IBM, Intel, Google were involved
  • The collaboration took a while
  • Also Async hooks took at least a year.
  • Async hooks used to be called async wraps and has been in the work for almost 3 years
  • many of the changes were the accumulation of small chances
[33:07] It’s the little things
  • Letting people get small changes in accumulate into a big difference
  • the product gets much better that way
[33:57] What versions of Node are you actively updating?
  • Current releases of Node 8 for a half of year
  • Node 6 is LTS
  • Additional year of maintenance of previous LTSs.
  • Schedule is at http://github.com/node8js/lts in a chart
  • Support for Node 4 with only critical updates, Node 6 minor updates, and Node 8
  • Node 7 doesn’t get much support unless it’s vital security supports.
  • If you’re running 0.10 or 0.12 stop. Those do not get security fixes anymore
[35:42] Where do you see things going from here?
  • Mostly still working out Async hooks
  • Maybe add some web worker or worker support for Node JS
  • ES module support
  • Working to make promises better
  • Working on the performance profile and internal systems
[20:29] What is the adoption like of Node 8?
  • Node team gets better at getting people to adopt quickly
  • but about 5% - 6% will not upgrade
  • community doubles each year at 8 million users right now
  • Here is a graph on Twitter posted by NPM
  • Limiting breaks and softly deprecating things makes it’s easier to upgrade
[40:11] How can people contribute and get involved?
  • NodeToDo.org shows how to make contribution
  • Occasionally major conferences have information on how to contribute
  • Test it out and help make it stronger
[42:08] If people install Node 8 and have issues what can they do?
  • If it’s an NPM problem check with them
  • clear cache!
  • install newest version with: npm install -g npm@latest
  • Report problems to either NPM or Node
  • If you’re not sure where the problem is, check github.com/nodejs/help

Links

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

Mikael on Twitter and GitHub Arunesh on Twitter Anna on Twitter


Picks

AJ

Overclocked Remix Super Mario RPG Window to The Stars

Amiee

Blogpost RisingStack on Node 8
2 Frugal Dudes

Charles

Homeland
House of Cards

Joe

Shimmer Lake

Mikael

Blake2b-wasm

Aremesh

Current Nightly News





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JSJ 270 The Complete Software Developers Career Guide with John Sonmez


JSJ 270 The Complete Software Developers Career Guide with John Sonmez

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


Did the book start out being 700 pages?

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

Is this book aimed at beginners?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were any of those surprises to you?

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

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

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

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

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

Is the classic computer science stuff important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Picks

Joe

Wonder Woman

AJ

The Alchemist

Charles

Artificial Intelligence with Python

John

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


Links

Simple Programmer Youtube




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MJS #027 Chris Anderson

MJS 027 Chris Anderson

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:12:02] Having fun at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much Angular have you worked on yourself?

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

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

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

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

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


Picks

Chris

Mountain Dew Pitch Black
The Expanse Series on SciFi
Application Insights

Charles

Wheel of Time
Coolage
Dog Company
Data Dog


Links

Twitter
GitHub




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:14:30] Best Way to Save 

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

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

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

Kevin follows Dave Ramsey’s advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:39:00] Put Your Money Somewhere

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

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

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

[00:47:08] Why index funds?

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Cory

Aimee

  • Hacker News Thread – How to Not Bring Emotions Home With You
  • Phantogram 

Charles

Sean

Kevin

Links




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JSJ 275: Zones in Node with Austin McDaniel

JSJ 275: Zones in Node with Austin McDaniel

The panel for this week on JavaScript Jabber is Cory House, Aimee Knight, and Charles Max Wood. They speak with special guest Austin McDaniel about Zones in Node. Tune in to learn more about this topic!

[00:01:11] Introduction to Austin

Austin has worked in JavaScript for the past ten years. He currently works in Angular development and is a panelist on Angular Air. He has spent most of his career doing work in front-end development but has recently begun working with back-end development. With his move to back-end work he has incorporated front-end ideas with Angular into a back-end concept.

[00:02:00] The Way it Works

NodeJS is an event loop. There is no way to scope the context of a call stack. So for example, Austin makes a Node request to a server and wants to track the life cycle of that Node request. Once deep in the scope, or deep in the code, it is not easy to get the unique id. Maybe he wants to get the user from Passport JS. Other languages – Python, Java – have a concept called thread local storage. They can associate context with the thread and throughout the life cycle of that request, he can retrieve that context.

There is a TC39 proposal for zones. A zone allows you to do what was just described. They can create new zones and associate data with them. Zones can also associate unique ids for requests and can associate the user so they can see who requested later in the stack. Zones also allow to scope and create a context. And then it allows scoping requests and capturing contacts all the way down.

[00:05:40] Zone Uses

One way Zone is being used is to capture stack traces, and associating unique ids with the requests. If there is an error, then Zone can capture a stack request and associate that back to the request that happened. Otherwise, the error would be vague.

Zones are a TC39 proposal. Because it is still a proposal people are unsure how they can use it. Zones are not a new concept. Austin first saw Zones being used back when Angular 2 was first conceived. If an event happened and they wanted to isolate a component and create a scope for it, they used Zones to do so. Not a huge fan of how it worked out (quirky). He used the same library that Angular uses in his backend. It is a specific implementation for Node. Monkey patches all of the functions and creates a scope and passes it down to your functions, which does a good job capturing the information.

[00:08:40] Is installing the library all you need to get this started?

Yes, go to npminstallzone.js and install the library. There is a middler function for kla. To fork the zone, typing zone.current. This takes the Zone you are in and creates a new isolated Zone for that fork. A name can then be created for the Zone so it can be associated back with a call stack and assigned properties. Later, any properties can be retrieved no matter what level you are at.

[00:09:50] So did you create the Zone library or did Google?

The Google team created the Zone library. It was introduced in 2014 with Angular 2. It is currently used in front-end development.

[00:10:12] Is the TC39 proposal based on the Zone library?

While Austin has a feeling that the TC39 proposal came out of the Zone library, he cannot say for sure.

[00:10:39] What stage is the proposal in right now?

Zone is in Stage Zero right now. Zone JS is the most popular version because of its forced adoption to Angular. He recommends people use the Angular version because it is the most tested as it has a high number of people using it for front-end development.

[00:11:50] Is there an easy way to copy the information from one thread to another?

Yes. The best way would probably be to manually copy the information. Forking it may also work.

[00:14:18] Is Stage Zero where someone is still looking to put it in or is it imminent?

Austin believes that since it is actually in a stage, it means it is going to happen eventually but could be wrong. He assumes that it is going to be similar to the version that is out now. Aimee read that Stage Zero is the implementation stage where developers are gathering input about the product. Austin says that this basically means, “Implementation may vary. Enter at your own risk.”

[00:16:21] If I’m using New Relic, is it using Zone JS under the hood?

Austin is unsure but there something like that has to be done if profiling is being used. There has to be a way that you insert yourself in between calls. Zone is doing that while providing context, but probably not using Zone JS. There is a similar implementation to tracing and inserting logging in between all calls and timeouts.

[00:17:22] What are the nuances? Why isn’t everybody doing this?

Zone is still new in the JavaScript world, meaning everyone has a ton of ideas about what should be done. It can be frustrating to work with Zone in front-end development because it has to be manually learned. But in terms of implementation, only trying to create a context. Austin recommends Zone if people want to create direct contacts. The exception would be 100 lines of Zone traces because they can get difficult.

Another issue Austin has is Node’s native basic weight. Weight hooks are still up in the air. The team is currently waiting on the Node JS community to provide additional information so that they can finish. Context can get lost sometimes if the wrong language is used. He is using Typescript and doesn’t have that problem because it is straightforward.

[00:21:44:] Does this affect your ability to test your software at all?

No, there have not been any issues with testing. One thing to accommodate for is if you are expecting certain contexts to be present you have to mock for those in the tests. After that happens, the tests should have no problems.

Picks

Cory:

Aimee:

Charles:

Austin:

Links




de

JSJ 279: ES Modules in Node Today! with John-David Dalton

Tweet this Episode

John-David Dalton is probably best known for the Lodash library. He's currently working at Microsoft on the Edge team. He makes sure that libraries and frameworks work well in Edge.

The JavaScript Jabber panel discusses the ECMAScript module system port to Node.js. John wanted to ship the ES module system to Node.js for Lodash to increase speed and decrease the disk space that it takes up. This approach allows you to gzip the library and get it down to 90 kb.

This episode dives in detail into:

  • ES Modules, what they are and how they work
  • The Node.js and NPM package delivery ecosystem
  • Module loaders in Node.js
  • Babel (and other compilers) versus ES Module Loader
  • and much, much more...

Links:

Picks:

Cory:

Aimee:

Aaron:

Chuck:

John:




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JSJ 284 : Helping Developers Build Healthy Bodies

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

JC Hiatt

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers speak with JC Hiatt. JC is a software consultant, and working a starting a company called DevLifts. DevLifts is a company that helps developers learn to live healthier lives. JC mentions this business was base on this health journey.

JC and the panel discuss output and mental clarity to get work done in a healthy fashion. Also, the benefits of eating a healthy diet, rather it is the Keto Diet or others types of healthy clean eating, there is a physical and mental benefit. JC and the panel talk about count macros, healthy food intake, and a basic outline of getting into ketosis. Also, the panel discusses finding the motivation to get into a healthy lifestyle to benefit work and your lifestyle.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Mental Clarity
  • Keto Diet
  • Cutting out processed foods
  • Counting Macros
  • Getting into Ketosis
  • Supporting brain function
  • Motivation for a healthy lifestyle
  • Gaining energy
  • Getting started  - Walking, Eat Whole. Etc.
  • Pack your own lunch
  • Mindset change -  you are responsible for anyone else’s healthy choices
  • Drink Water
  • You can find a healthy balance and practice moderation
  • Cheat day?
  • Sugar
  • Sitting to0 long at work
  • Sleep - brain wave activity, caffeine, and light
  • Naps
  • And much more!

Links:

@jchiatt

@devlifts

devlifts.io

Picks:

Amiee

  • https://www.womenwhotech.com/panelist-bios
  • https://github.com/AllThingsSmitty/css-protips

Charles

JC




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JSJ 285 : Finding a Job Even If You're Not a Senior Developer by Charles Max Wood

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Charles does a solo episode talking about entrepreneurship and the topic/course on “How to Get a Job.” This is an informative episode for those looking for a job as a developer and how to prepare your resume for your career search. Charles covers the core pieces of the course and specific areas of tailoring your credentials for the job you want to acquire.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • How do I get a great job? Companies are only hiring Senior Devs.
  • Your selling point as a Jr. Dev.
  • Framing your experience for the companies to better see your experience.
  • I don’t want a ( this kind of boss)
  • Feeling like you are making a difference in your job.
  • Who do you want to work for, with, where, and how, etc?
  • Working in a facility or remotely. What do you want?
  • Check out the meet-up places or workplaces (WeWork), Glassdoor
  • Check out the people who work that these companies, LinkedIn.
  • Check out company’s Slack rooms, forum, etc. to make connections
  • Visit the companies personally
  • Look into contacting the Meetup Organizers
  • Building rapport
  • Resume mistakes - how to properly format it so it is skim-able
  • Top 3 bullet points and tailor you resume for each job
  • Unnecessary material in your resume - again tailor to the company
  • Important material to include on your resume, contributions on projects
  • The cover letter - How to do this correctly with a personal touch
  • What to do when you get the interview - the offer!
  • And much more!

Links:




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

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:

Picks:

Chris

  • Pizza

PJ

  • Deli

Charles

  • Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC
 




de

MJS 037: Nader Dabit

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nader Dabit

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links: 

Picks

Nader

Charles

 

 




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

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

Charles

Corey

Joe

 

 




de

JSJ 294: Node Security with Adam Baldwin

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Special Guests: Adam Baldwin

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with Adam Baldwin. Adam is a return guest and has many years of application security experience. Currently, Adam runs the Node Security Project/Node Security Platform, and Lift Security. Adam discusses the latest of security of Node Security with Charles and AJ. Discussion topics cover security in other platforms, dependencies, security habits, breaches, tokens, bit rot or digital atrophy, and adding security to your development.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • What is  the Node Security Project/Node Security Platform
  • Dependency trees
  • NPM
  • Tokens and internal data
  • What does Node Security do for me?
  • NPX and NSP
  • Command Line CIL
  • Bit Rot or Digital Atrophy
  • How often should you check repos.
  • Advisories
  • If I NPM install?
  • Circle CI or Travis
  • NSP Check
  • What else could I add to the securities?
  • Incorporate security as you build things
  • How do you find the vulnerabilities in the NPM packages
  • Two Factor authentication for NPM
  • Weak Passwords
  • OL Dash?
  • Install Scripts
  • Favorite Security Story?
  • And much more!

Links:

Picks:

Adam

Charles

AJ

Joe




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JSJ 295: Developers as Entrepreneurs with Ryan Glover

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood 

Cory House

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight  

Special Guests: Ryan Glover

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with Ryan Glover. Ryan is on JavaScript Jabber to talks about Entrepreneurship as a developer.  Ryan runs Clever Beagle in Chicago Illinois. Clever Beagle is a mentorship company that helps people build their first software Product. Ryan and the panel discuss the many roads of entrepreneurship, startup business ideas, servicing and teaching the community, how to’s, and psychological challenges, hiring, seeing your ideas through to the end, and privilege. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • How do you get started as an entrepreneur? 
  • Clever Beagle
  • The Meteor Chef
  • Where are people getting stuck on the builds? 
  • Fear, unknowns
  • Simple, but not easy 
  • Drive and ability to step into the unknown
  • Survival of the fittest
  • Hire before you are already 
  • Losing your marbles
  • Starting on a smaller scale
  • How do I know my idea is going to work? 
  • Book - Brick by Brick
  • Multiple lines of business
  • Managing a portfolio of business 
  • Revenue streams 
  • Marketing 
  • Quitter
  • When do I quit? 
  • 6-12 months of cash before you quit
  • Making mistakes in entrepreneurship?
  • Be a reader and study
  • Go out a read books! 
  • Experiential not taught 
  • Luck and Privilege
  • Video - Life of Privilege Explained in a $100 Race
  • Procrastinate on Purpose
  • And much more! 

Links:

Picks:

Cory

Charles

Aimee

Joe

Ryan




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JSJ 297: Scrollytelling with Russell Goldenberg and Adam Pearce

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Russell Goldenberg and Adam Pearce

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Adam

Charles

Aimee

Joe

Russel




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MJS 045: Gant LaBorde

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Gant LaBorde

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links: 

Picks

Gant

Charles




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

Panel: 

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Chris Ferdinandi

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

AJ

Aimee

Joe

Chris




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JSJ 301: CSS Grids: The Future of Frontend Layout with Dave Geddes

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Cory House

AJ O'Neal

Joe Eames

Aaron Frost

Special Guests: Dave Geddes

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Cory

AJ

Joe

Aaron

Dave




de

JSJ 310: Thwarting Insider Threats with Greg Kushto

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • Cory House
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Greg Kushto

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss thwarting insider threats with Greg Kushto. Greg is the vice president of sales engineering for Force 3 and has been focused on computer security for the last 25 years. They discuss what insider threats are, what the term includes, and give examples of what insider threats look like. They also touch on some overarching principles that companies can use to help prevent insider threats from occurring.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Greg intro
  • Insider threats are a passion of his
  • Most computer attacks come from the inside of the company
  • Insider threats have changed over time
  • What does the term “insider threats” include?
  • Using data in an irresponsible manner
  • Who’s fault is it?
  • Blame the company or blame the employee?
  • Need to understand that insider threats don’t always happen on purpose
  • How to prevent insider threats
  • Very broad term
  • Are there some general principles to implement?
  • Figure out what exactly you are doing and documenting it
  • Documentations doesn’t have to be a punishment
  • Know what data you have and what you need to do to protect it
  • How easy it is to get hacked
  • Practical things to keep people from clicking on curious links
  • The need to change the game
  • Fighting insider threats isn’t fun, but it is necessary
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Cory

  • Plop
  • VS code sync plugin

Aimee

  • Awesome Proposals GitHub

AJ O’Neal

Greg




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MJS 058: Dean J Sofer

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Dean J Sofer

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Dean J Sofer. Dean currently works at PlayStation now and has recently taken a step back from open source recently. He first got into programming because his Dad was really into technology, and he first started off with scripting and creating portfolio websites. They also talk about his time using Angular and what he is working on now.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Episode 95 JSJ
  • Dean intro
  • Realized he prefers working at larger corporations
  • How did you first get into programming?
  • Dove into computers because of his Dad
  • Started with scripting
  • Creating portfolio websites
  • CSS, HTML, and MVC
  • Node scripts
  • Took a visual basic class in High School
  • Liked being able to create things that other people could interact with
  • Cake PHP and Node
  • What was it that made you want to switch over to JavaScript?
  • Angular
  • What was it about Angular that appealed to you?
  • Why he went searching for Angular
  • Angular UI
  • Don’t be zealot when it comes to frameworks
  • Create states in your application
  • Is there anything that you are particularly proud of in your career?
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Picks

Charles

Dean




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

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

Matt

Amanda




de

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

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

Matt




de

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

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




de

JSJ 330: “AWS: Amplify” with Nader Dabit

Panel:

  • AJ O’Neal
  • Aimee Knight
  • Joe Eames

Special Guests: Nader Dabit

In this episode, the panel talks with programmer, Nader Dabit, who has been with Amazon’s AWS for the past six months. They discuss the new innovations that Amazon is currently working on, and the exciting new projects that Nader gets to be involved with. Check out this episode to hear all the latest!

Show Topics:

1:45 – There are two main things that Nader works with. Check out this timestamp to see what they are.

3:29 – AJ to Nader: Tell me more about manage cloud. I am not sure about Cognito.

3:56 – Yes, Cognito is used by/through Amazon.

5:06 – What are the other manage cloud services that companies want to offer through the tools you have?

5:12 – Nader answers AJ’s question.

7:30 – Can you give me more specifics on the storage solutions you are offering?

8:03 – Nader answers AJ’s question. People store websites there for example. Frontend developers are using S3 buckets, and they are using the library, which is a storage solution.

9:10 – AJ and Nader are having a dialogue between different situations, and Nader is giving the solutions to those hypothetical situations.

10:17 – AJ: “I am interested in what you are talking about AppSync. Can you tell me how that works?” AJ is picking Nader’s brain about how AppSync works.

11:05 – Nader: “It is a single API layer for a point of entry. You can have multi-data sources.” Nader continues, in detail, answering AJ’s question.

12:36 – AJ: As a frontend developer, it sounds like I will have to become familiar with the backend, too. How is it providing the most value? What is it that I do not have to touch, because I am using this?

15:37 – How would these relations work? As a frontend developer, and I do not want to learn sequel, how would that might look like; currently or in the future? How do you extract that knowledge?

16:18 – Yes, it is not an easy solution to solve. Nader goes into detail about how he would approach this situation.

18:26 – AJ: Are these resolvers written in JavaScript?

22:04 – Acronym fun!

22:45 – Node

23:51 – Summarizing these pasts 20-some-minutes: Off-Storage, AppSync, Landis, and others are what people are using Amplify for. New Question/New Topic: Simplify.

25:45 – AWS MOBILE – is not mobile specific.

26:44 – If you are using Angular, we have a plugin in Angular to help you. We also have that for React and Vue as well.

27:52 – Advertisement

28:56 – What should we be talking about?

29:04 – Let’s talk about Amazon’s Lex, Chat Bot. Nader goes into full detail of this service.

33:52 – Apple T.V.

34:00 – AJ: Sounds like this is more platform/ more agnostic than getting different things to come together, and the Microsoft one is more hybrid and the Amazon one is more open?

35:13 – Joe, let’s go back to what you had to ask.

35:28 – Nader, you talked about PUSH notifications earlier. What is Pub/Sub?

36:30 – Is this like traditional hooks? Or custom?

37:25 – What is the “stuff” that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work at AWS?

38:40 – Nader: I really had no desire to change career paths, but it happened.

41:30 – AJ: I totally agree with the idea in that finding the common patterns, so that way someone on the lower-level can participate. AJ wants a platform that is open or purchase that can offer some of these benefits. It could be open-source or you used to buy the different tools.

43:27 AJ: What about for the hobbyist?

43:40 – Nader: I agree, that would be really nice. I can’t think of any free services that would be nice.

44:03 AJ – Not free in “free,” but “free” towards the idea of “free speech.” They would all be available and you get to choose what works well for you.

45:00 – SHOUTOUT to LISTENERS: Have an idea about this? Shoot the panel an e-mail!

45:33 – Hopefully this opens the listeners’ eyes to what’s out there.

45:48 – Cloud services.

46:55 – Innovation follows niche markets. When something gets big and established, innovation comes to a plateau. The innovation will develop in a new economic area like hydraulics. AJ thinks a niche will develop.

49:03 – Is there anything, Dabit, which you would like to talk about?

49:15 – Can we talk about AI as a service?

51:10 – Nader saw a demonstration recently.

52:26 – Hearing these implications is so cool, but when it comes to ML a panelist dabbled a little bit. He watched some videos, unless you want to devote a year or two to learning it then it’s too complex to put together. Do you have to be genius-level to get through?

53:29 – ML you are passing data. Nader is not quite sure.

56:00 Nader just did a blog post  check-it-out!

56:49 – Let’s do Picks!

56:50 – Advertisement

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Nader Dabit




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JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler

Panel:

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:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

Chris F.

AJ

Aaron

Christopher




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JSJ 339: Node.js In Motion Live Video Course from Manning with PJ Evans

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: PJ Evans

In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more?

1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course.

2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about.

2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state. 

2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node?

3:20 – Aimee.

3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course!

4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the...

4:13 – Chuck.

4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell.

4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node!

5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess.

5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is?

5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right?

They are arguing about how to implement it. 

6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are!

6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there.

7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it.

7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it?

Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard?

7:38 – PJ.

8:11 – Panel.

8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though!

8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please.

8:30 – PJ.

8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it.

9:05 – PJ.

9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side?

9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak.

9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are.

9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak.

9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from...

Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea.

10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!”

10:52 – Panel.

11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well.

11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users...

11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS.

Chuck asks two questions.

12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled.

13:22 – Chuck: What are those things?

13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics.

15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do.

15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space.

16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE.

17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more.

18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs.

Aimee mentions Vanilla Node.

18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM.

19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug.

20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE.

20:56 – Aimee.

21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch.

22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level.

22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working.

23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were.

24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend.

24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended.

No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions...

To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly.

25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that...

26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly.

There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article!

28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article.

28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now.

29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday.

29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course.

29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck?

30:00 – PJ answers the question.

30:23 – Aimee.

30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days.

31:20 – Aimee.

32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight.

32:18 – Aimee.

32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for...

32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to?

33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals.

It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course.

34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node?

34:38 – PJ answers the question.

PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms.

35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other?

35:31 – PJ answers the question.

PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge.

36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express.

Google Classroom and Google Calendar.

39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below.

40:09 – Node can be used all over the place!

40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space.

40:31 – PJ: Yep!

40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you?

40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog!

41:04 – Picks!

41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Charles

PJ




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JSJ 345: Azure Devops with Donovan Brown LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

Panel:

Charles Max Woods

Special Guests: Donovan Brown

In this episode, the Charles speaks with Donovan Brown. He is a principal DevOps Manager with Microsoft with a background in application development. He also runs one of the nation’s fastest growing online registration sites for motorsports events DLBRACING.com. When he is not writing software, he races cars for fun. Listen to today’s episode where Chuck and Donovan talk about DevOps, Azure, Python, Angular, React, Vue, and much, much more!

Show Topics:

1:41 – Chuck: The philosophies around DevOps. Just to give you an idea, I have been thinking about what I want to do with the podcasts. Freedom to work on what we want or freedom to work where we want, etc. Then that goes into things we don’t want to do, like fix bugs, etc. How does Microsoft DevOps to choose what they want to do?

2:37 – Guest: We want to automate as much as we can so the developer has less work. As a developer I want to commit code, do another task, rinse and repeating.

Minutes and not even hours later then people are tweeting about the next best thing. Do what you want, where you want. Code any language you want.

4:15 – Chuck: What has changed?

4:19 – Guest: The branding changed. The name wasn’t the most favorite among the people. The word “visual” was a concerned. What we have noticed that Azure will let me run my code no matter where I am. If you want to run Python or others it can run in Azure.

People didn’t need all of it. It comes with depositories, project management, and so much more! People could feel clumsy because there is so much stuff. We can streamline that now, and you can turn off that feature so you don’t have a heart attack. Maybe you are using us for some features not all of them – cool.

7:40 – Chuck: With deployments and other things – we don’t talk about the process for development a lot.

8:00 – Guest talks about the things that can help out with that.

Guest: Our process is going to help guide you. We have that all built into the Azure tab feature. They feel and act differently. I tell all the people all the time that it’s brilliant stuff. There are 3 different templates. The templates actually change over the language. You don’t have to do mental math.

9:57 – Chuck: Just talking about the process. Which of these things we work on next when I’ve got a bug, or a ...

10:20 – Guest: The board system works like for example you have a bug. The steps to reproduce that bug, so that there is no question what go into this specific field. Let the anatomy of the feature do it itself!

11:54 – Chuck comments.

12:26 – Chuck: Back to the feature. Creating the user stories is a different process than X.

12:44 – Guest – You have a hierarchy then, right? Also what is really cool is we have case state management. I can click on this and I expect this to happen...

These are actual tasks that I can run.

13:52 – Chuck: Once you have those tests written can you pull those into your CI?

14:00 – Guest: “Manual tests x0.”

Guest dives into the question.

14:47 – I expect my team to write those test cases. The answer to your question is yes and no.

We got so good at it that we found something that didn’t even exist, yet.

16:19 – Guest: As a developer it might be mind

16:29 – Chuck: I fixed this bug 4x, I wished I had CI to help me.

16:46 – Guest: You get a bug, then you fix a code, etc., etc. You don’t know that this original bug just came back. Fix it again. Am I in Groundhog Day?

They are related to each other. You don’t have a unit test to tell you. When you get that very first bug – write a unit test. It will make you quicker at fixing it. A unit test you can write really fast over, and over, again. The test is passing. What do you do? Test it. Write the code to fix that unit test. You can see that how these relate to each other. That’s the beauty in it.

18:33 – Chuck: 90% of the unit tests I write – even 95% of the time they pass. It’s the 5% you would have no idea that it’s related. I can remember broad strokes of the code that I wrote, but 3 months down the road I can’t remember.

19:14 – Guest: If you are in a time crunch – I don’t have time for this unit test.

Guest gives us a hypothetical situation to show how unit tests really can help.

20:25 – Make it muscle memory to unit test. I am a faster developer with the unit tests.

20:45 – Chuck: In the beginning it took forever. Now it’s just how I write software now.

It guides my thought process.

21:06 – Guest: Yes! I agree.

22:00 – Guest: Don’t do the unit tests

22:10 – Chuck: Other place is when you write a new feature,...go through the process. Write unit tests for the things that you’ve touched. Expand your level of comfort.

DevOps – we are talking about processes. Sounds like your DevOps is a flexible tool. Some people are looking for A METHOD. Like a business coach. Does Azure DevOps do that?

23:13 – Guest: Azure DevOps Projects. YoTeam.

Note.js, Java and others are mentioned by the Guest.

25:00 – Code Badges’ Advertisement

25:48 – Chuck: I am curious – 2 test sweets for Angular or React or Vue. How does that work?

26:05 – Guest: So that is Jasmine or Mocha? So it really doesn’t matter. I’m a big fan of Mocha. It tests itself. I install local to my project alone – I can do it on any CI system in the world. YoTeam is not used in your pipeline. Install 2 parts – Yo and Generator – Team. Answer the questions and it’s awesome. I’ve done conferences in New Zealand.

28:37 – Chuck: Why would I go anywhere else?

28:44 – Guest: YoTeam  was the idea of...

28:57 – Check out Guest

29:02 – Guest: I want Donovan in a box. If I weren’t there then the show wouldn’t exist today.

29:40 – Chuck: Asks a question.

29:46 – Guest: 5 different verticals.

Check out this timestamp to see what Donovan says the 5 different verticals are. Pipelines is 1 of the 5.

30:55 – Chuck: Yep – it works on my Mac.

31:04 – Guest: We also have Test Plant and Artifacts.

31:42 – Chuck: Can you resolve that on your developer machine?

31:46 – Guest: Yes, absolutely! There is my private repository and...

33:14 – Guest: *People not included in box.*

33:33 – Guest: It’s people driven. We guide you through the process. The value is the most important part and people is the hardest part, but once on

33:59 – Chuck: I am listening to this show and I want to try this out. I want a demo setup so I can show my boss. How do I show him that it works?

34:27 – Azure.com/devops – that is a great landing page.

How can I get a demo going? You can say here is my account – and they can put a demo into your account. I would not do a demo that this is cool. We start you for free. Create an account. Let the CI be the proof. It’s your job to do this, because it will make you more efficient. You need me to be using these tools.

36:11 – Chuck comments.

36:17 – Guest: Say you are on a team of developers and love GitHub and things that integration is stupid, but how many people would disagree about...

38:02 – The reports prove it for themselves.

38:20 – Chuck: You can get started for free – so when do you have to start paying for it?

38:31 – Guest: Get 4 of your buddies and then need more people it’s $6 a month.

39:33 – Chuck adds in comments. If this is free?

39:43 – Guest goes into the details about plans and such for this tool. 

40:17 – Chuck: How easy it is to migrate away from it?

40:22 – Guest: It’s GITHub.

40:30 – Chuck: People are looing data on their CI.

40:40 – Guest: You can comb that information there over the past 4 years but I don’t know if any system would let you export that history.

41:08 – Chuck: Yeah, you are right.

41:16 – Guest adds more into this topic.

41:25 – Chuck: Yeah it’s all into the machine.

41:38 – Chuck: Good deal.

41:43 – Guest: It’s like a drug. I would never leave it. I was using TFS before Microsoft.

42:08 – Chuck: Other question: continuous deployment.

42:56 – When I say every platform, I mean every platform: mobile devices, AWS, Azure, etc.

Anything you can do from a command line you can do from our build and release system.

PowerShell you don’t have to abandon it.

45:20 – Guest: I can’t remember what that tool is called!

45:33 – Guest: Anything you can do from a command line. Before firewall. Anything you want.

45:52 – Guest: I love my job because I get to help developers.

46:03 – Chuck: What do you think the biggest mistake people are doing?

46:12 – Guest: They are trying to do it all at once. Fix that one little thing.

It’s instant value with no risks whatsoever. Go setup and it takes 15 minutes total. Now that we have this continuous build, now let’s go and deploy it. Don’t dream up what you think your pipeline should look like. Do one thing at a time. What hurts the most that it’s “buggy.” Let’s add that to the pipeline.

It’s in your pipeline today, what hurts the most, and don’t do it all at once.

49:14 – Chuck: I thought you’d say: I don’t have the time.

49:25 – Guest: Say you work on it 15 minutes a day. 3 days in – 45 minutes in you have a CSI system that works forever. Yes I agree because people think they don’t “have the time.”

50:18 – Guest continues this conversation.

How do you not have CI? Just install it – don’t ask. Just do the right thing.

50:40 – Chuck: I free-lanced and setup CI for my team. After a month, getting warned, we had a monitor up on the screen and it was either RED or GREEN. It was basically – hey this hurts and now we know. Either we are going to have pain or not have pain.

51:41 – Guest continues this conversation.

Have pain – we should only have pain once or twice a year.

Rollback.

If you only have it every 6 months, that’s not too bad.

The pain will motivate you.

52:40 – Azure.com/devops.

Azure DevOps’ Twitter

53:22 – Picks!

53:30 – Advertisement – Get a Coder Job

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Donovan




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JSJ 349: Agile Development - The Technical Side with James Shore

Sponsors

Panel

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Aimee Knight

  • Joe Eames

  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

James Shore is a developer who specializing in extreme programming, an Agile method. He also used to host a screencast called Let’s Code Test-Driven JavaScript. They begin by discussing the core of Agile development, which James believes is being responsive to customers and business partners in a way that’s sustainable and humane for the programmers involved. It prioritizes individuals and interactions over processes and tools. More can be found in The Agile Manifesto.

James delves into the historical context of the immersion of Agile and how things have changed from the 90’s. Now, the name Agile is everywhere, but the ideals of agile are not as common. There is a tendency to either take Agile buzzwords and apply them to the way it was done long ago, or it’s absolute chaos. James talks about ways to implement Agile in the workplace. He believes that the best way to learn Agile is work with someone who knows Agile, or read a book on it and then apply it. James recommends his book The Art of Agile Development: Pragmatic Guide to Agile Software Development for people who want to started with Agile development. The panelists talk about where people often get stuck with implementing Agile. The hosts talk about their own processes in their company.

They discuss how people involved in the early days of Agile are disappointed in how commercial it has become.They agree that what’s really the most important is the results. If you can respond to a request to change direction in less than two weeks and you don’t have to spend months and months preparing something, and you do that in a way where the people on the team feel like their contributing, then you’re doing Agile. James thinks that the true genius of Agile is in the way the actual work is done rather than in the way your organize the work.

Links

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Aimee Knight:

Joe Eames:

  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix

Charles Max Wood:

  • Getting up early

  • John Sonmez Kanbanflow video

  • Drip

James Shore:




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JSJ 350: JavaScript Jabber Celebrates Episode 350!

Sponsors

Panel:

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

Notes:

This episode of JavaScript Jabber has the panelists reminiscing on the past. First, they discuss the projects they’re working on. Tim has joined MagicLeap doing JavaScript and C++. Aaron Frost is one of the founders of HeroDevs. AJ works at Big Squid, a company that takes spreadsheets and turns them into business actions, and is expecting a daughter. Aimee has been exploring developer advocacy, but wants to focus primarily on engineering. She is currently working at MPM. Joe has taken over the CEO position for thinkster.io, a company for learning web development online. Chris switched from being a general web developer specializing in JavaScript and has started blogging daily rather than once a week, and has seen an increase in sales of his vanilla JavaScript educational products. Charles discusses his long term goal for Devchat.tv. He wants to help people feel free in programming, and help people find opportunities though the Devchat.tv through empowering content.

Next, the panelists discuss their favorite episodes. Some of the most highly recommended episodes are

JSJ 124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich (1:44:07)

JSJ 161: Rust with David Herman (1:05:05)

JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint with Nicholas Zakas” (1:08:01)

JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler (43:36)

JSJ 218: Ember.js with Yehuda Katz (42:47)

Last, the panelists discuss what they do to unwind. Activities include working out, reading, playing Zelda and Mario Kart, studying other sciences like physics, painting miniatures, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Picks:

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

AJ O’Neal

Aimee Knight

Aaron Frost

Chris Ferdinandi

Tim Caswell




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JSJ 358: Pickle.js, Tooling, and Developer Happiness with Anatoliy Zaslavskiy

Sponsors

Panel

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Anatoliy Zaslavskiy

Summary

Anatoliy Zaslavskiy introduces pickle.js and answers the panels questions about using it. The panel discusses the automated testing culture and employee retention. The panel discusses job satisfaction and why there is so much turn over in development jobs. Charles Max Wood reveals some of the reasons that he left past development jobs and the panel considers how the impact of work environments and projects effect developers. Ways to choose the right job for you and how to better a work situation is discussed. Anatoliy finishes by advocating for junior developers and explaining the value they bring to a company.

Links

Picks

AJ O’Neal

Charles Max Wood

Anatoliy Zaslavskiy

  •  




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JSJ 360: Evolutionary Design with James Shore

Sponsors

Panel

  • Aaron Frost
  • AJ O’Neal
  • Joe Eames
  • Aimee Knight
  • Chris Ferdinandi

Joined by special guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

Special guest James Shore returns for another episode of JavaScript Jabber. Today the panel discusses the idea of evolutionary design. Evolutionary design comes from Agile development. It is based on the principles of continuous integration and delivery and test driven development. In short, evolutionary design is designing your code as you go rather than in advance.

The panelists discuss the difficulties of evolutionary design and how to keep the code manageable.  James Shore introduces the three types of design that make up evolutionary design, namely simple design, incremental design, and continuous design. They talk about the differences between evolutionary design and intelligent design and the correlations between evolutionary design increasing in popularity and the usage of Cloud services. They talk about environments that are and are not conducive to evolutionary design and the financial ramifications of utilizing evolutionary design.

The panelists talk about the difficulties of planning what is needed in code and how it could benefit from evolutionary design. James enumerates the steps for implementing evolutionary design, which are upfront design, reflective design, and refactoring . The team ends by discussing the value of frameworks and how they fit with evolutionary design.

Links

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Aimee Knight:

James Shore:

Aaron Frost:

Joe Eames:

Chronicles of Crime board game




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JSJ 362: Accessibility with Chris DeMars

Sponsors

  • Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

  • Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

  • Aimee Knight

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Joe Eames

Joined by Special Guest: Chris DeMars

Episode Summary

Special guest Chris DeMars is from Detroit, MI. Currently, he works for Tuft and Needle and is an international speaker, Google developer expert, Microsoft mvp, and web accessibility specialist. He comes from a varied work background, including truck driving and other non-tech jobs.

 

Today the panel discusses web accessibility for people with disabilities. According to a study done by WebAIM, 97.8% of homepages tested had detectable WCAG 2 failures. The panel discusses why web accessibility is doing so poorly. Chris talks about some of the biggest mistakes he sees and some very simple fixes to make sites more accessible. Chris talks about the importance of manual testing on screen readers and emphasizes that it is important to cover the screen to make sure that it really works with a screen reader. Chris talks about some of the resources available for those who wish to increase accessibility on their sites.

 

The team discusses tactics for prioritizing accessibility and if there is a moral obligation to make sites accessible to those with disabilities. Chris talks about his experience making accessibility a priority for one of the companies he worked for in the past. They discuss the futue of legal ramifications for sites that do not incorporate accessibility, and what responsibility falls on the shoulders of people who regularly use assistive devices to notify companies of issues. They finish the show with resources available to people who want to learn more.

Links

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

Aimee Knight:

Chris Ferdinandi:

AJ O’Neal:

Joe Eames:

Chris DeMars:




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MJS 107: Dan Fernandez

Sponsors

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

Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest:  Dan Fernandez

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Dan Fernandez, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft.

Listen to Dan on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode.

Dan went to a programming camp and fell in love with programming. He majored in Computer Science in college and started working for IBM upon graduation.  Listen to the show for Dan’s journey into programming and much more!

Links

Picks

Dan Fernandez:

 




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MJS 112: Ryan McDermott




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JSJ 371: The Benefits and Challenges of Server-Side Rendering (SSR) with Dan Shappir

Sponsors

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood
  • Joe Eames
  • Christopher Buecheler
  • Aimee Knight
  • AJ O’Neal

Joined by special guest: Dan Shappir

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, special guest Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead at Wix, kicks off the discussion by defining server-side rendering (SSR) along with giving its historical background, and touches on the differences between server rendering and server-side rendering. He helps listeners understand in detail how SSR is beneficial for the web and takes questions from the panel about how it affects web performance in cases where first-time users and returning users are involved, and how does SSR fare against technologies such as pre-rendering. He then elaborates on the pitfalls and challenges of SSR including managing and declaring variables, memory leaks, performance issues, handling SEO, and more, along with ways to mitigate them. In the end, Dan sheds some light on when should developers use SSR and how should they start working with it.

Links

Follow JavaScript Jabber on Devchat.tv, Facebook and Twitter.

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

  • Tip - Take some time off once in a while

Aimee Knight:

AJ O’Neal:

  • Fatherhood!

Joe Eames:

Charles Max Wood:

Dan Shappir:




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JSJ 372: Kubernetes Docker and Devops with Jessica Deen LIVE from Microsoft BUILD

Sponsors

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Jessica Deen

Episode Summary

Coming to you live from the podcast booth at Microsoft BUILD is Charles Max Wood with The Deen of DevOps aka Jessica Deen. Jessica is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. As an advocate she acts a liaison between developer communities and Microsoft to help understand developer pain points and road blocks especially in areas such as Linux, open-source technologies, infrastructure, Kubernetes, containers and DevOps. Jessica explains how to go about setting up a containerized application, Kubernetes and how to use Dockerfiles. Charles and Jessica then talk about how to get started with a Kubernetes cluster and the resources available for developers that don't have any infrastructure. Jessica advises that developers start with Azure DevOps Services and then go to Microsoft Learn Resource.

Charles also encourages listeners to also check out the Views on Vue podcast Azure DevOps with Donovan Brown for further references. Jessica also recommends following people on Twitter and GitHub to find out about solutions and resources.

Links

Follow Adventures in Angular on tv, Facebook and Twitter.

Picks

Jessica Deen:

Charles Max Wood:




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JSJ BONUS EPISODE: Observables and RxJS Live with Aaron Frost

JSJ BONUS EPISODE: Observables and RxJS Live with Aaron Frost

Mon Jul 29 2019 13:00:56 GMT+0300 (+03)

Episode Number: bonus

Duration: 29:35

https://media.devchat.tv/js-jabber/JSJ_Bonus_Aaron_Frost.mp3

 

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Aaron Frost

Episode Summary

Aaron Frost joins Charles to talk about what Observables are and why developers should learn about them and use them in their code. He explains the difference between Observables, Promises and Callbacks with an example. Aaron then invites all listeners to attend the upcoming RxJS Live Conference and introduces the impressive speaker line-up. The conference will take place on September 5-6 in Las Vegas and tickets are still available. Aaron also offers a $100 discount to all listeners with the code "chuckforlife". For any questions you can DM Aaron at his Twitter account.

Links




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JSJ 378: Stencil and Design Systems with Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington

Sponsors

Panel

  • Aimee Knight

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • Joe Eames

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Charles Max Wood

With Special Guests: Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington

Episode Summary

Today’s guests Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington are developers for Ionic, with Josh working on the open source part of the framework on Ionic. They talk about their new compiler for web components called Stencil. Stencil was originally created out of work they did for Ionic 4 (now available for Vue, React, and Angular) and making Ionic 4 able to compliment all the different frameworks. They talk about their decision to build their own compiler and why they decided to open source it. Now, a lot of companies are looking into using Stencil to build design systems

The panel discusses when design systems should be implemented. Since Ionic is a component library that people can pull from and use themselves, Jeff and Mike talk about how they are using Stencil since they’re not creating a design system.

The panel discusses some of the drawbacks of web components. They discuss whether or not Cordova changes the game at all. One of the big advantages of using Stencil is the code that is delivered to a browser is generated in such a way that a lot of things are handled for you, unlike in other systems.The panelists talk about their thoughts on web components and the benefits of using a component versus creating a widget the old fashioned way. One such benefit of web components is that you can change the internals of how it works without affecting the API. Josh and Mike talk about some of the abilities of Stencil and compare it to other things like Tachyons. There is a short discussion of the line between frameworks and components and the dangers of pre optimization. If you would like to learn more about Stencil, go to stenciljs.com and follow Josh and Mike @Jtoms1 and @mhartington.

Click here to cast your vote NOW for JavaScript Jabber - Best Dev Podcast Award

Links

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Aimee Knight:

AJ O’Neal:

Chris Ferdinandi:

Charles Max Wood:

Joe Eames:

Josh Thomas:

Mike Hartington:




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MJS 117: The Devchat.tv Mission and Journey with Charles Max Wood

Sponsors

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

Host: Charles Max Wood

Episode Summary

Charles talks about his journey as a podcaster and his mission with Devchat.tv. Devchat.tv  is designed to home podcasts that speak to all developer communities. Charles also plans Devchat.tv to host shows for technologies that are on the verge of a breakthrough and will be a lot more widely available in the near future such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). There are new shows being added continuously to reach out to new communities, some examples of which are: a Data Science show, a DevOps show and an Open Source show. As a kid, Charles would record his own shows on a tape recorder. He was always interested in technology. While studying Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University, he worked in the University's Operations Center. Upon graduation, he started working for Mozy where he was introduced to podcasts. Listen to the show to find out the rest of Charles' story, some of the lessons and tips he learned throughout his journey and the evolution of the shows on Devchat.tv. If there isn't a show for your community and you would like there one to be, reach out to Charles. Also if there was a podcast about a programming related subject that ended abruptly and you would like it to continue, reach out to Charles. Devchat.tv would like to host these podcasts.

Links

Picks




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JSJ 384: FaunaDB: Support for GraphQL and Serverless Development with Evan Weaver

Sponsors

  • Sentry– use the code “devchat” for $100 credit 

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Joe Eames

  • Aimee Knight

With Special Guest: Evan Weaver

Episode Summary

Evan Weaver is the CEO and cofounder of FaunaDB, a serverless database and a great way to get started with GraphQL. Evan talks about what went into building the FaunaDB and his background with Twitter. FaunaDB arose from trying to fix Twitter’s scalability issues, and the panel discusses scalability issues encountered in both large and small companies. They talk about the difference between transient and persistent data. They discuss how to develop locally when using a serverless database and the importance of knowing why you’re using something. Evan talks about how developing locally works with FaunaDB. He addresses concerns that people might have about using FaunaDB since it is not backed by a tech giant. Evan talks about some of the services FaunaDB offers and talks about the flexibility of its tools. He talks about how to get started with FaunaDB and what the authentication is like. Finally, Evan talks about some well known companies that are using FaunaDB and what they are doing with it. 

Links

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

Aimee Knight:

Joe Eames:

Evan Weaver




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JSJ 391: Debugging with Todd Gardner

Episode Summary

Todd Gardner is a software developer, podcaster on the show Script and Style, startup founder,  and comedy host for Pub Conf, a ‘comedy after party for developers’. Since he was last on the show 6 years ago, he has seen his startup TrackJS become quite successful. TrackJS is a JavaScript error monitoring service which gives you visibility into your client side experience. It’s different from other tools because focused on simplicity, so you’ll never need a guy on your team dedicated solely to TrackJS because everyone can use it.

The panel begins by talking about debugging methods and tools. Some rely solely on the debugger built into their platform while others prefer to use a third party service. They discuss the necessity of using a third party debugger and if there are better solutions than just the built in debugger. 

They then discuss what to do after you’ve fixed a bug, such as if it is necessary to write a test to make sure it was completely fixed They talk about things to do to make debugging more effective. Todd and Aimee believe that code needs to begin by being designed for debug-ability. 

The panel discusses issues with invisible boundaries encountered while debugging, such as running out of memory. They talk about ways to mitigate issues that happen outside of your code base. Todd talks about the dangers of ad-blockers, and the panel agrees that it is important to consider how your website will be crippled by the user’s own technology. The end user in a production environment will have a different experience than you did writing it on a professional computer. 

Todd talks about the difference between debugging for the web versus a mobile application. Todd has encountered particular problems with debugging on a remote device, and he talks about how he solved the issue. The show concludes with Todd giving a quick elevator pitch for TrackJS

Panelists

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • Christopher Buecheler

  • Aimee Knight

  • Charles Max Wood

  • Steve Emmrich

With special guest: Todd Gardner

Sponsors

Links

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

Chris Ferdinandi:

Aimee Knight:

Charles Max Wood:

  • Atomic Habits

  • Getting up at 4 am

Steve Emmrich:

  • Trello

  • Babushkas and grandmas to help you with your newborn

Todd Gardner:

  • PubConf

  • Follow Todd @toddhgardner or todd.mn




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JSJ 394: SMS Integration with Dominik Kundel

Episode Summary

Dominik Kundel works as developer evangelist at Twilio. Dominik talks about the history of Twilio, which actually started with integrating phone calls into apps and then moved to SMS integration. 

Today Charles and Dominik are talking about how the SMS message approach can augment your user experience. Since many people are not familiar with implementing SMS, Dominik talks about how Twilio can help. Twilio created was a supernetwork where they work with carriers and gateways around the world to ensure that they provide reliable services. They also focus heavily on making sure that the developer experience is great.

Uber and Lyft are two of the companies that use Twilio, and Dominik shares some of the interesting things that they’ve accomplished. He is particularly excited about phone number masking to support privacy. Uber and Lyft use phone number masking so that your driver doesn’t see your real number and you don’t see theirs. Instead, each of you sees a Twilio number. This use case is becoming more common. 

Twilio recently introduced Flex, which Dominik explains is their contact center solution. Flex is designed to keep with their philosophy of everything should be programmable and configurable, and take it on to a software shipment. This is their first time shipping software instead of just APIs. Flex is highly customizable and flexible, allows you to build React plugins that let you change anything you want.

Charles asks Dominik about some of the gotchas in telephony. One major issues is spam calls, which Twilio is trying to work with some providers on a ‘verified by Twilio’ list. This list lets companies get verified, and they’re working on ways to let you know the reason why they’re calling without having to answer your phone. This can be difficult because each country has different regulations.

Dominik talks about what it would take for someone who wanted to build an SMS gateway themselves. They would have to work with carriers and learn SMS protocols. It’s important to note that SMS and phone calls have different protocols

Dominik talks about some of the unique use cases they’ve seen their system. Some examples are contextual communications, account verifications, and codex creation. There are other fun examples, such as a drone controlled via text message, a fake boyfriend app, and a dog that was taught to take selfies that are sent to his owner. 

Charles asks about ways to get started with Twilio. If you want to explore this and don’t know where to get started, try Twilio Quest, a game to teach you how to use Twilio. There is also documentation, which is good if you know exactly what you want to achieve, or if you just want to explore possibilities then download Twilio Quest. 

They delve into a more specific use case for Twilio to send text to subscibers of DevChatTV. Dominik talks about ways of dealing with sending notifications to people outside of the US. You can send with a US number to any country code, or you can personalize it, so that people in the UK receive it from a UK number and so on through automatic geocode matching. They talk about Twilio’s billing. 

Finally, they talk about security within telephony in light of recent hacks. They discuss the security of two factor authentication.Two factor authentication and security, especially in light of recent hacks. Dominik talks about the API called Authy, where you can implement different ways of doing two factor authentication, such as push notifications, time based one time password, sms, and phone calls. For most people in the world two factor authentication is very safe, unless you’re a very important person, then you’re more at risk for targeted attacks. They conclude by talking about Twilio’s acquisition of Sendgrid.

Panelists

  • Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Dominik Kundel

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JSJ 397: Design Systems with Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent is a self taught web developer from west France. He has worked for BBC, The Guardian, and The Financial Times in the UK. He has also worked in the US for SalesForce and currently works for Shopify on their Polaris design system. Shopify has multiple design systems, and Polaris is open source. Today the panel is talking about design systems and developer tooling around design systems. 

To begin, Kaelig explains what a design system is. A design system is all of the cultural practices around design and shipping a product. It includes things like the words, colors, spacing grid system, and typography, plus guidance on how to achieve that in code. The panelists discuss what has made design systems so popular. Design systems have been around for a while, but became popular due to the shift to components, which has been accelerated by the popularity of React. The term design system is also misused by a lot of people, for it is much more than having a Sketch file. 

Next, they talk about whether design systems fall under the jurisdiction of a frontend developer or web designers. Kaelig has found that a successful design system involves a little bit of everyone and shouldn’t be isolated to one team. They talk about what the developer workflow looks like in a design system. It begins with thinking of a few common rules, a language, and putting it into code. As you scale, design systems can become quite large and it’s impossible for one person to know everything. You either give into the chaos, or you start a devops practice where people start to think about how we build, release, and the path from designer’s brain to production.

The panelists then talk about how to introduce a design system into a company where there are cultural conflicts. Kaelig shares his experience working with SalesForce and introducing a design system there. They discuss what aspects of a design system that would make people want to use it over what the team is currently doing. Usually teams are thankful for the design system. It’s important to build a system that’s complete, flexible, and extensible so that you can adapt it to your team. A good design system incorporates ‘subatomic’ parts like the grid system, color palette, and typography, referred to as design tokens. Design systems enable people to take just the bits of the design system that are interesting to them and build the components that are missing more easily. 

The conversation turns to the installation and upgrade process of a design system. Upgrading is left up to the customer to do on their own time in most cases, unless it’s one of the big customers. They talk about the role of components in upgrading a design system. Kaelig talks about the possibility of Shopify transitioning to web components. Kaelig shares some of his favorite tools for making a design system and how to get started making one. A lot of design teams start by taking a ton of screen shots and looking at all the inconsistencies.Giving them that visibility is a good thing because it helps get everyone get on the same page. The panelists talk about the role of upper management in developing components and how to prioritize feature development. Kaelig talks about what drives the decision to take a feature out. The two main reasons a feature would be removed is because the company wants to change the way things are done and there’s a different need that has arisen. The show concludes by discussing the possibility of a design system getting bloated over time. Kaelig says that Design systems takes some of the burden off your team, help prevent things from getting bloated, allow you to ship less code.

 

Panelists

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • Aimee Knight

  • Steve Emmerich

With special guest: Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

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