JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

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

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

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

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

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

Questions for Wade and Ramya

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:30] What is Emmet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

AJ O’neal

Breath on the Wild
Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge

Charles Max Wood

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

Wade Anderson

Kindle Paperwhite
Twitter @waderyan_

Ramya Rao

Open source
Twitter @ramyanexus

Full Article

MJS #022 Cory House

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 21 Jun 2017 06:00:00 -0400

My JS Story Cory House

On this Episode we have another JS Story, and this time it’s with Cory House, a Pluralsight author, software architect for Cox Automotive, and a consultant with a focus on React. Listen to Charles Max Wood and Cory discuss a bit about how Cory got into programming, how learning how to learn is vital to being a talented developer, as well as using documentation as your development environment to ensure your code’s documentation doesn’t fall behind. This and more right here. Stay tuned.

How did you get into programming?

Cory starts his story as a business major in college but had interest in computers. He spent time around various computers and machines, giving him experience in various operating systems and platforms. On any given day he would be using any of three different operating systems. His interest in computers inspired him to double major. He started learning Cobalt and Visual Basic and C++. He talks about being interested in web development, including Flash. He specialized in Flash throughout college, as well as early on in his software development career. He also talks a bit about that the open web seems to innovate in a way that keeps it relevant. He talks about using Flash to make websites with entering screens and animations and now that is obsolete. Charles mentions that it’s interesting that his main interest was business and computers became something he was interested in later on and that you don’t have to be someone who started young to be proficient. Cory talks about being driven to catch up, being around people who knew things off the top of their head while he was still asking questions and looking things up.

Learning How to Learn

Out of college Cory found that he had a degree, but what he had really learned was how to learn. He never used Cobalt, C ++, or visual basic after school. Learning how to learn combined with being able to create a focus on a specific technology are vital. Charles adds that he would hear often that it took being a natural in programming to get it, and that maybe being a natural was really just being someone who has learned how to learn and to focus.

Getting Good With Your Craft

Cory mentions that working with someone who head and shoulders ahead of everyone else. They were working in Unix and seemed to know every single Unix command and flag. He found it inspiring to see someone take the craft so seriously and to learn a specific technologies tool with so much dedication. Some technologies will be so important that they will be key technologies that will still be useful many years later. Cory suggests that one of those tools seem to be JavaScript. JavaScript is almost mandatory in frontend web development. Additionally, JavaScript is reaching into other new technology types including IoT and VR and other places, constantly expanding.

How did you get into JavaScript?

Cory talks about how it really all got started when Steve Jobs killed Flash. He opened his mind to other technologies and started working with JavaScript. Remembering learning jQuery, he found himself really enjoying it. He started building online business applications. Browser inconsistencies were a huge issue, making it so that you’d have to check your work on each browser to make sure it worked cross platform. Things are moving so quickly that being a full stack developer is becoming less and less prevalent, to the point where he considers himself primarily a JavaScript developer. Being an expert in a single technology can make you really valuable. Companies are running into issues with not finding enough people that are experts in a single tech. Cory suggests that employers should find employees that seem interested and help allow them to focus and learn whatever that tech is. Charles talks about the split between developers that tend to lean full stack and plug in technologies when they need it versus developers that work exclusively in front end. He suggests it may be a case by case situation.

Service Oriented Architecture

Cory suggests that service oriented architecture movement has moved us that way. Once you have a set of services set up, it becomes more realistic to turn on the front end. If there were a good set of services there, Cory adds that he doesn’t think he would be able to build services faster using a server side framework like Rails, Django, or ASP.Net MVC than he could in React today using something like create React app. The front end has become much more mature. Cory mentions that he has had good experiences with ASP.Net NPC and Visual Basic being a Microsoft stack developer. He adds that he doesn’t feel like he has given up anything working with JavaScript. He adds that with the nesting of different models together, he gets to reuse a lot of code in server side development. NPM makes it easy to stand up a new package. If you are planning to create an API, it becomes much harder to use a server side rendering stack, with so many APIs available, it’s a logical move to go client side.

Possible Future for Front-end and Back-end Roles

Charles brings up that the development of things like VR are making changes in the roles that front end and back end development play. The front end will more to taking care of the overall application development of apps, while the back end will become supporting roles as services and APIs. New technology like VR and artificial intelligence will need a high amount of computing power on the backend. The front end will focus more on the overall experience, display, and the way we react with things. Charles talks about how the web may move away from being just an HTML platform. He says that it will be interesting to find where JavaScript and frameworks like React will fall into this shift into this next generation. We already are seeing some of this with the capabilities with canvases, WebVR, and SVG and how they are changing how we experience the web.

Reasonable Component Story

Cory brings up being interested in the Reasonable component story. Sharing code from a traditional web app, to a native app, and to potentially a VR app as well is exciting and he hopes to see it flesh out more in the coming years. He talks about going to conferences and how much we have built and how much we don’t have easily sharable innovation. He hopes to see it solved in the next few years.

What contributions have you made to the JavaScript community?

Cory mentions working on the open source project Slingshot. He was trying to solve issues that many found in React. React isn’t very opinionated. React is for writing reasonable components for the web, but it doesn’t have opinions on how you structure your files, how you minify, bundle, deploy, or make API calls, etc. He realized that telling people to use React and to deal with those issues wasn’t reasonable. He created React Slingshot as a development boilerplate. He put it to use in many applications and it became popular. It’s easy because it did things like allow you to run NPM to pull independencies and pull a file, it would fire up a web browser, watch your files, run tests, hot reloading on save, and had a running Redux application build it. It allowed people to get started very quickly. He talks about how he wasn’t the only person trying to solve this issue. He says that if you look now there are well over one hundred boiler plates for React that do similar things. Most popular being Create React App. Contributions outside of this, he talks about editing documentation on open source projects being part of his biggest contribution, writing it in markdown and then making pull requests.

What are you working on now?

Cory adds that he just finished his 7th or 8th Pluralsight course on creating usable React components. At work they create their own reusable React component library. He says that he realizes that it’s a complicated process, where all decisions you make, in order to have a reusable component story, you have to make a lot of decisions. Things like how granular to make the components, reusable styles and how they are packaged, how they are hosted, will it be open or source, etc.

Publicly Closed - Internally Open Source Projects

Cory talks about the idea of having it as a closed source project, but treating it like an internal open source project for the company, having many people feel invested into the project. He found creating the documentation story was the toughest part. Having solid documentation story that helps with showing how to use the components and it’s features and behaviors. He spends much of his type looking at other documents to help him come up with ways to create his own. He talks about generating the documents automatically with the updates so that they are always in sync. Charles adds that documentation syncing often happens right in the comments, which are also acceptable to being outdated.

Pull-request-Template.md

Cory adds that a useful way to allow for well documented and safe pull requests is to make a pull request template in GitHub by creating a file called pull-request-template.md so that any time someone makes a pull request, that .md template will populate the pull request. Cory has a checklist for a pull request like making sure there are tests for any new components, the file name should have an uppercase character, is there a ticket open, etc. All of the basic things that should happen in a pull will be in the pull-request-template.md. Charles adds that documentation is one of the things that gets ignored. Having a standard process is very important, more so than getting the job done faster. Also having an outlined expectation for how it’s delivered is important as well.

Documentation as Development Environment

A useful trick that Cory uses, is using the documentation as the development environment. Anytime they are working on a new component, they start with a documentation site, making changes within the documentation and then it hot loading your changes live. This way your documentation is front of mind and keeps the documentation fall behind.

Why React instead of the other frameworks?

Cory says that he can sum up React in a single sentence. He says that your HTML sits right in the JavaScript. Which usually sounds bad to a large group of developers. He expects people to react negatively when he talks about it. What he has run into as a common problem, is people separating concerns by filetype and technology, but with React he seems the common problems in terms of components. Cory says that components are the future. Industries that have matured utilize components. For example car manufacturers or even electronic manufactures build things in modules and components. Things that are reusable should be encapsulated into a component instead of trying to hold it in our heads. This makes it so things look the same and reduces many mistakes. You can create components in different frameworks, but React co-mingles markup and javascript with something like JSX. You’re not writing HTML, you’re writing JSX that boils down to HTML. That one element is fundamentally what makes React easier to Cory. For the most part, React can be learned by JavaScript developers in less than a day because many of the things you need to do in React, is just basic JavaScript. Charles adds that components are a concept coming up in various frameworks and is becoming more popular.

Picks

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

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

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

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

[00:01:35] – Overview

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

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

[00:04:50] – Browser support issue

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

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

[00:07:50] – Polymer

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

[00:14:20] – Standards are dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:36:00] – Reusable components

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

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

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

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

[00:47:45] – Mobile to web crossover

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

[00:50:00] – Challenge

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

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

Picks

Cory House

Joe Eames

UI-Router
Persistence

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Upwork.com

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

[00:01:35] – Overview

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

[00:04:50] – Browser support issue

[00:07:50] – Polymer

[00:14:20] – Standards are dead

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

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

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

[00:36:00] – Reusable components

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

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

[00:47:45] – Mobile to web crossover

[00:50:00] – Challenge

Picks

Cory House

Joe Eames

UI-Router
Persistence

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Upwork.com

Full Article

JSJ 270 The Complete Software Developers Career Guide with John Sonmez

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

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

Full Article

MJS #026 Chris Coyier

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 06:00:00 -0400

MJS 026 Chris Coyier

This week’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with Chris Coyier. He is from the ShopTalk Show and CodePen. Listen to learn more about Chris!

How did you get started programming?
Chris has an atypical story. good time in life. He is from a small town in Madison, Wisconsin and had a very privileged upbringing. He went to a nice high school that had a programming elective in his high school. He took a class that taught Turbo Pascal and loved it. He had a lot of fun doing it and became set on doing it in college.

How do you go from that to professional web developer?

Have to give up on it first. He almost got a degree in university management computer systems, which was more management focused than programming focused. He tried and gave up on Java. He then tried graphic design and ended up getting a degree in that. He got into digital prepress at print jobs where he designed documents. It was fun but it was not as fun as being a “real programmer” would be in his mind. He then got a job at an agency doing web developer work. During this time JavaScript was not on his radar.

How do you get from front-end work to building something like CodePen and starting a front-end podcast?

He has made his career his hobby. He loves doing this stuff. When he was building websites for the first time he started CSS tricks. It became really fun. He grew it over ten years. Because it’s his career and hobby he got better over time. All of his time was spent helping friends, writing, or at conferences. He then decided to build CodePen with some of his friends.

What are you working on these days?

Chris wants to be careful not to be working on too many things at once. His top priority is CodePen, which he says is hard to keep up with what developers want there. The second priority is CSS tricks. He likes to publish quality articles for people to read. This third priority is his podcast.

What’s the thing you’ve done that you’re the proudest of?

CodePen is what has been so continually rewarding. This last month he is all money accounted for. He is really proud of CodePen because they made a company from nothing. He and his coworkers have made the podcast over a decade of growing an audience and it feels entrepreneurial.

Charles’ most proud thing is the decision to go full time with his podcast for the last year and a half.

Picks

Chris:

CodePen https://codepen.io/
ShopTalk www.shoptalkshow.com
Alien Covenant http://www.alien-covenant.com/

Charles:

Links

Full Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:14:30] Best Way to Save

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

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

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

Kevin follows Dave Ramsey’s advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:39:00] Put Your Money Somewhere

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

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

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

[00:47:08] Why index funds?

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Cory

Aimee

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

Charles

Sean

Kevin

Links

Full Article

JSJ 282: Trails.js with Scott Wyatt

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 10 Oct 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Joe Amies

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Cory House

Special Guests:

Scott Wyatt

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers talk with Scott Wyatt. Scott is the Co-founder, CTO, UEX at Cali StyleTechnologies, and is a Node developer and graphic designer. Scott is on JavaScript Jabber to talk about Trails.js. and its simplistic build, but many useful functions.

Scott mentions that Trails.js was created by Travis Webb. Scott gives us an introduction to the Trails.js framework, as the Jabbers take apart and dive deep into the build, functions, and uses. Scott goes into what trail packs are, and the similar or related projects. Scott talks about the ease of using trails to build with, and not ending up in frustration.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Trails.js is Node Framework and lightweight or Blueprint
Similar to Redux?
Is it MVC like Rails
You don’t need to understand it, it is all under the hood.
Tuple Space
Is this sole for server-side rendering?
Closest projects - Sails
Avoid problems like React.
Not dealing with corporations
Why would you want to use trails instead of other projects like Sails, rails, etc.
How do you get started - trailjs.io
Quickest way to learn Trails is to build a Trail Pack
Don’t be afraid to kill you darlings
Testing
It Trails production ready?
It is a particular type of app where Trails shines?

Links

trailsjs.io

Travis Webb

Picks

Amy

Full Stack Developers by Brad Frost
Tracking Macros

Joe

The Behavior Gap

Charles

Profit First
Keto Diet
scott-wyatt/GitHub

Cory

Never write another high Order Component

Scott

Proxy Engine

Full Article

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

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests:

Chris Dias

PJ Meyer

In this episode, Charles is at Microsoft Connect 2017 in NYC. Charles speaks with Chris Dias and PJ Meyer about Visual Studio Code and Live Sharing. Chris and PJ explain more on their demo at Microsoft Connect on Live Collaborative Editing and Debugging. Learn more about the new features with Visual Studio Code and the efficient workflows with screen sharing, and much more.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Demo of Live Collaborative Editing and Debugging explained
New Features with VS Code
Developer productive
Debugging pain points
Getting feedback
New in VS Code
Language support and Java Debugger
Live Share
Debugging from different machines and platforms
Multi-Stage Docker File
TypeScript compiler
More on debugging with Cosmos db
Debugging in the Cloud?
Docker Extensions
Data Bricks
Updated python tools
Coming up with Visual Studio Code in the next 6 months
TypeScript and Refactoring
Getting the word out about code - Word of mouth?
Number of people using VS Code?
Envision for what VS Code is becoming?
Preparing for a keynote and processes?
And much more!

Links:

https://code.visualstudio.com
https://github.com/chrisdias
GitHub.com/microsoft
@code

Picks:

Chris

Pizza

Deli

Charles

Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC

Full Article

MJS 038: Peter Cooper

By
Published On :: Wed, 06 Dec 2017 06:00:00 -0500

MJS 038: Peter Cooper

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Peter Cooper

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Peter Cooper. Peter was one the original panelist on Ruby Rogues and JavaScript Jabber. Currently, Peter runs several weekly new letters on JS, Ruby, Go, React, etc. Peter talks about his journey as a programmer, which started at an early age tinkering with his father’s computer at home. Peter describes the beginning as a hobby until he learned the skills to being programming on many platforms. Peter talks about how he learn Ruby and JavaScript, and in early stages of noodling or learning code. Lastly, Peter talks about his contributions to the community and giving back.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

How did you get into programming?
Playing with computers at an early age
Computers were a hobby, rather than a career builder then
Being heavily into to anything can become your career, age does not matter
Finding the skill or passion in programming
Natural ability to see and make sense of code
UseNet
AJax
Directness
Blogging
New Letters
rubyflow.com
What is the ultimate goal of the new letters?
Contributions
Helping host podcasts
Current work?
and much, much more!

Links:

Picks

Peter

Litmus
Cheap Gaming consoles on eBay
Jason Scott of archive.org

Charles

Full Article

JSJ 292: CosmosDB with Kirill Gavrylyuk

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 19 Dec 2017 18:30:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Kirill Gavrylyuk

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Kirill Gavrylyuk. Kirill is a dev manager at Cosmos DB, and works professionally with Azure CosmosDB. Kirill is on JavaScript Jabber to talk about what CosmosDB is in the world of development technology. Chuck and Kirill discuss the nuances of this database technology, how it is implemented, and how to manage and migrate data, among other great features.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What is Cosmos DB?
Bring your data anywhere your users are
It is a website
Multimodel database
Works with Mongodb
Cassandra
Started as database DB
Throughput
Key data pairs
Switching from MongoDB to Azure
How do you decide what goes into this? It looks like an everything database.
Migration path
Uses cases, problems solved
Supporting APIs
Does it only exist in the Cloud? An emulator is available.
Subscription info.
And much more!

Links:

@kirillg-msft
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirillgavrylyuk

Picks:

Kirill

Shared Debugging with VS Code - Keynote

Charles

USB Powered Monitor on Amazon

Full Article

MJS 044: Ben Coe

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 17 Jan 2018 06:00:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ben Coe

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Ben Coe. Ben is the co-founder of attachments.me. Currently, work for NPM, and had worked for Freshbooks where he began his professional development career. Ben talks about his journey into programming and learning JavaScript, and the many experiences into his successful dev career. Ben shares his contributions to the Javascript community and the open source world with technologies like Yargs and InstanbulJS.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

How did you get into programming?
Noodling around with old computers from Waterloo
Geo cites
How did you get into Javascript?
Working at Freshbooks
Backend infrastructure at NPM
How did you end up working at NPM?
Operations person at NPM
Dev Ops
What was it like being there in the early days?
Automation
Yargs
InstanbulJS
Product management at NPM
C8
What is next?
and much, much more!

Links:

https://github.com/bcoe
@BenjaminCoe
http://blog.npmjs.org/post/81600398588/npm-install-ben-coe-g
Yargs
InstanbulJS

Picks

Ben

https://www.hackillinois.org
C8 tool

Full Article

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

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

AJ O'Neal

Special Guests: Ben Coe, Aaron Abramov, and Issac Schleuter

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk with Ben Coe, Aaron Abramov, and Issac Schleuter about test coverage and testing tools. They talk about the different tools and libraries that they have contributed to the coding community, such as NYC, conf, and Jest. They also discuss what test coverage is actually about and when using test coverage tools is necessary.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What have you contributed to the testing tools community?
npm
NYC tool and instanbul project
conf
Jest
These libraries were developed to be easy and have “batteries included”
False positives with test coverage
Encourage testing practices that don’t practice in a superficial way
Test coverage is about making sure you test every state a public API can get into
Think through the test you’re writing first
Barriers against testing
Don’t spike the code too quickly
Provides guardrails for newer developers to contribute to open source projects
Use tests to understand the system
How to spend your time better
When you need tests
Value is very short term
TDD
And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Galentine’s Day
Dnote CLI

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

Corey

We are hive project guidelines
Tip: You can install node as a dependency on your project

Ben

Aaron

Reason

Issac

Full Article

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

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Aimee Knight
Joe Eames
AJ O'Neal
Special Guests: Orta Therox

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about the tool Danger with Orta Therox. Danger allows you to create cultural rules about your pole request workflow. They discuss what Danger is, how it works, and how it can help you to catch errors and speed up code review. Danger lets you erase discussions so that you can focus on the things that you should really be focusing on, like the code. They also compare Danger to other ways of doing test converge.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

What is DangerJS?
Think of it as being on the PR level
Provides an eval context
Used on larger projects
React, React Native, Apollo, and RxJS
Experimenting with moving Danger onto a server
Danger can run as a linting step
Pre-commit hooks
Prettier
How do you use Danger on your own machine?
Danger Ruby vs Danger JS
NPM install
How is using Danger better that other ways of test coverage?
What kinds of rules can you write for this system?
Can use with Ruby or JavaScript
React Storybooks
Retrospectives
And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Joe

Orta

Full Article

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

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Matt Hernandez and Amanda Silver

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

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

Matt

Amanda

Full Article

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

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Rachel MacFarlane and Matt Bierner

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Rachel

GitLens

Matt

The Bronx Warriors

Full Article

JSJ 326: Conversation with Ember co-creator Tom Dale on Ember 3.0 and the future of Ember

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 14 Aug 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Joe Eames
Aimee Knight
AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Tom Dale

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Tom Dale about Ember 3.0 and the future of Ember. Tom is the co-creator of Ember and is a principle staff engineer at LinkedIn where he works on a team called Presentation Infrastructure. They talk about being in the customer service role, having a collaborative culture, and all the information on Ember 3.0. They also touch on the tendency towards disposable software, the Ember model, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

How Joe met Tom
Programmers as rule breakers
The pressure to conform
Tom intro
Staff engineer at LinkedIn
Customer service role
Having a way to role improvements out to a lot of different people
JavaScript and Ember at LinkedIn
Having a collaborative culture
All about Ember 3.0
Banner feature – there is nothing new
Cracked how you develop software in the open source world that has longevity
Major competition in Backbone previously
The Ember community has never been more vibrant
Tendency towards disposable software
The idea of steady iteration towards improvement
The Ember model
Being different from different frameworks
Ember adoption rates
Python 3
Valuable from a business perspective to use Ember
Ember community being friendly to newbies
How much Ember VS how much JavaScript will a new developer have to learn?
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Joe

Aimee

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham

James Veitch

Tom

Full Article

MJS 074: Scott Wyatt

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 15 Aug 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Scott Wyatt

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Scott Wyatt. Scott is a VC partner and is the CTO at Cali Style Technologies, works with startups, and was the CTO of the Dollar Beard Club. He first got into programming because his dad was a computer programmer and he really got hooked from a young age writing games and playing on the computer. They talk about the benefit of not living in the hustle and bustle of California and the Silicon Valley, how he got into JavaScript, what was it about JavaScript that hooked him, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

JavaScript Jabber Episode 282
Scott intro
Works remotely from Indiana
The pros to not living in Silicon Valley
How did you first get into programming?
Father was a computer programmer
Strong arts background
Started coding really young
How did you get into JavaScript?
Started out with ActionScript
JavaScript to jQuery
The cool part of having a diverse background as a programmer
What was it that got you into JavaScript?
Back-end JavaScript
Node.js
JavaScript is very versatile
How did you get into doing something like Trails.js?
Sails.js
Fabrix and TypeScript
What have you done in JS that you are most proud of?
Partitioned apps
Contributing to freedom of information
What are you working on now?
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks

Charles

Scott

Full Article

JSJ 337: Microstates.js – Composable State Primitives for JavaScript with Charles Lowell & Taras Mankovski

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Panel:

Aimee Knight
Charles Max Wood
Joe Eames
AJ O’Neil
Chris Ferdinandi

Special Guests: Charles Lowell (New Mexico) & Taras Mankovski (Toronto)

In this episode, the panel talks with two special guests Charles and Taras. Charles Lowell is a principle engineer at Frontside, and he loves to code. Taras works with Charles and joined Frontside, because of Charles’ love for coding. There are great personalities at Frontside, which are quite diverse. Check out this episode to hear about microstates, microstates with react, Redux, and much more!

Show Topics:

1:20 – Chuck: Let’s talk about microstates – what is that?

1:32 – Guest: My mind is focused on the how and not the what. I will zoom my mind out and let’s talk about the purposes of microstates. It means a few things. 1.) It’s going to work no matter what framework you are using. 2.) You shouldn’t have to be constantly reinventing the wheel. React Roundup – I talked about it there at this conference.

Finally, it really needs to feel JavaScript. We didn’t want you to feel like you weren’t using JavaScript. It uses computer properties off of those models. It doesn’t feel like there is anything special that you are doing. There are just a few simple rules. You can’t mutate the state in place. If you work with JavaScript you can use it very easily. Is that a high-level view?

7:13 – Panel: There are a lot of pieces. If I spoke on a few specific things I would say that it enables programming with state machines.

7:42 – Panel: We wanted it to fell like JavaScript – that’s what I heard.

7:49 – Aimee: I heard that, too.

7:59 – Guest.

8:15 – Aimee: Redux feels like JavaScript to me.

8:25 – Guest: It’s actually – a tool – that it feels natural so it’s not contrived. It’s all JavaScript.

8:49 – Panel.

9:28 – Guest: Idiomatic Ember for example. Idiomatic in the sense that it gives you object for you to work with, which are simple objects.

10:12 – Guest: You have your reducers and your...we could do those things but ultimately it’s powerful – and not action names – we use method names; the name of the method.

11:20 – Panel: I was digging through docs, and it feels like NORMAL JavaScript. It doesn’t seem like it’s tied to a certain framework or library platform?

11:45 – Guest: Yes, we felt a lot of time designing the interfaces the API and the implementation. We wanted it to feel natural but a tool that people reach for.

(Guest continues to talk about WHY they created microstates.)

Guest: We wanted to scale very well what you need when your needs to change.

13:39 – Chuck: I have a lot of friends who get into React and then they put in Redux then they realize they have to do a lot of work – and that makes sense to do less is more.

14:17 – Guest: To define these microstates and build them up incrementally...building smaller microstates out of larger ones.

Guest continued: Will we be able to people can distribute React components a sweet array of components ready for me to use – would I be able to do the same for a small piece of state? We call them state machines, but ultimately we have some state that is driving it. Would we be able to distribute and share?

16:15 – Panel: I understand that this is tiny – but why wouldn’t I just use the native features in specific the immutability component to it?

16:42 – Guest: I’m glad you asked that question. We wanted to answer the question...

Guest: With microstates you can have strict control and it gives you the benefit of doing sophisticated things very easily.

18:33 – Guest: You mentioned immutability that’s good that you did. It’s important to capture – and capturing the naturalness of JavaScript. It’s easy to build complex structures – and there is an appeal to that. We are building these graphs and these building up these trees. You brought up immutability – why through it away b/c it’s the essence of being a developer. If you have 3-4-5 levels of nesting you have to de-structure – get to the piece of data – change it – and in your state transition 80% of your code is navigating to the change and only 20% to actually make the change. You don’t have to make that tradeoff.

21:25 – Aimee: The one thing I like about the immutability b/c of the way you test it.

21:45 – Guest: There a few things you can test.

23:01 – Aimee: You did a good job of explaining it.

23:15 – Guest: It makes the things usually hard  easy! With immutability you can loose control, and if that happens you can get so confused. You don’t have a way to have a way to navigate to clarity. That’s what this does is make it less confusing. It gives you order and structure. It gives you a very clear path to do things you need to do. If there is a property on your object, and if there is a way to change it...

25:29 – Guest: The only constant is change no matter what framework you are working on.

24:46 – Chuck: We are talking about the benefits and philosophy. What if I have an app – and I realize I need state management – how do I put microstates into my app? It’s using Angular or React – how do I get my data into microstates?

26:35 – Guest: I can tell you what the integration looks like for any framework. You take a type and you passed that type and some value to the create function so what you get is a microstate.

(The Guest continues diving into his answer.)

28:18 – Guest: That story is very similar to Redux, basically an event emitter. The state changes on the store.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about the stability benefits and the lazy benefits because microstates is both of those things.

Stability – if I invoke a transition and the result is unchanged – same microstate – it doesn’t emit an event. It recognizes it internally. It will recognize that it’s the same item. Using that in Ember or Redux you’d have to be doing thousands of actions and doing all that computation, but stability at that level.

Also, stability in the sense of a tree. If I change one object then that changes it won’t change an element that it doesn’t need to change.

31:33 – Advertisement: Sentry.io

32:29 – Guest: I want to go back to your question, Chuck. Did we answer it?

32:40 – Chuck: Kind of.

32:50 – Guest.

32:59 – Guest: In Angular for example you can essentially turn a microstate...

33:51 – Guest: You could implement a connect, too. Because the primitive is small – there is no limit.

34:18 – Chuck summarizes their answers into his own words.

34:42 – Guest: If you were using a vanilla React component – this dot – I will bind this. You bind all of these features and then you pass them into your template. You can take it as a property...those are those handlers. They will perform the transition, update and what needs to be updated will happen.

35:55 – Chuck: Data and transitions are 2 separate things but you melded them together to feel like 1 thing. This way it keeps clean and fast.

36:16 – Guest: Every framework helps you in each way.

Microstates let’s you do a few things: the quality of your data all in one place and you can share.

38:12 – Guest: He made and integrated Microstates with Redux tools.

38:28 – Guest talks about paths, microstates to trees.

39:22 – Chuck.

39:25 – Panel: When I think about state machines I have been half listening / half going through the docs. When I think of state machines I think about discreet operations like a literal machine. Like a robot of many steps it can step through. We have been talking about frontend frameworks like React - is this applicable to the more traditional systems like mechanical control or is it geared towards Vue layered applications?

40:23 – Guest: Absolutely. We have BIG TEST and it has a Vue component.

41:15 – Guest: when you create a microstate from a type you are creating an object that you can work with.

42:11 – Guest: Joe, I know you have experience with Angular I would love to get your insight.

42:33 – Joe: I feel like I have less experience with RX.js. A lot of what we are talking about and I am a traditionalist, and I would like you to introduce you guys to this topic. From my perspective, where would someone start if they haven’t been doing Flux pattern and I hear this podcast. I think this is a great solution – where do I get started? The official documents? Or is it the right solution to that person?

43:50 – Guest: Draw out the state machine that you want to represent in your Vue. These are the states that this can be in and this is the data that is required to get from one thing to the other. It’s a rope process. The arrow corresponds to the method, and...

44:49 – Panel: It reminds me back in the day of rational rows.

44:56 – Guest: My first job we were using rational rows.

45:22 – Panelist: Think through the state transitions – interesting that you are saying that. What about that I am in the middle – do you stop and think through it or no?

46:06 – Guest: I think it’s a Trojan horse in some ways. I think what’s interesting you start to realize how you implement your state transitions.

48:00 – (Guest continues.)

48:45 – Panel: That’s interesting. Do you have that in the docs to that process of stopping and thinking through your state transitions and putting into the microstate?

49:05 – Guest: I talked about this back in 2016. I outlined that process. When this project was in the Ember community.

49:16 – Guest: The next step for us is to make this information accessible. We’ve been shedding a few topics and saying this is how to use microstates in your project. We need to write up those guides to help them benefit in their applications.

50:00 – Chuck: What’s the future look like?

50:03 – Guest: We are working on performance profiling.

Essentially you can hook up microstates to a fire hose.

The next thing is settling on a pattern for modeling side effects inside microstates. Microstates are STATE and it’s immutable.

52:12 – Guest: Getting documentation. We have good README but we need traditional docs, too.

52:20 – Chuck: Anything else?

52:28 – Guest: If you need help email us and gives us a shot-out.

53:03 – Chuck: Let’s do some picks!

53:05 – Advertisement for Charles Max Wood’s course!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

ShopTalk Episode 327
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers
Technical Debt
Stripe

Taras

Charles Lowell

Chalkboards
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Chris

Joe

The Developer Experience Bait and Switch
Good Bye Redux
Recording Dungeon and Dragons

Charles

Podwrench.com - beta
getacoderjob.com

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

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

Panel:

Aimee Knight
AJ O’Neal
Aaron Frost
Christopher Ferdinandi

Special Guests: Christopher Buecheler

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

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19:45 – Guest.

19:47 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

20:47 – Guest.

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

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

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

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

25:36 – Panel: Good for you.

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

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

27:18 – Guest answers Aimee’s question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

33:58 – Guest: I like JEST, too.

34:20 – Aimee: Let’s go to PICKS!

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

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

Podflix

Chris F.

Canada Dry with Lemonade

Aaron

ABQ Ballon Festival
Joe Eames DND Recording Channel

Christopher

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

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 13 Nov 2018 06:00:00 -0500

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

Paul Graham - Blog

Rust

Charles

Music - Max Richter

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JSJ 344: Inclusive Components with Heydon Pickering

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Mon, 17 Dec 2018 21:02:00 -0500

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Aimee Knight
Chris Ferdinandi
Joe Eames

Special Guest: Heydon Pickering

In this episode, the panel talks with Heydon Pickering who is a designer and writer. The panel and the guest talk about his new book, which is centered on the topic of today’s show: inclusive components. Check out Heydon’s Twitter, Website, GitHub, and Mastodon social accounts to learn more about him. To purchase the book – go here!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:38 – Chuck: Aimee, Chris, Joe, and myself – we are today’s panel. My show the DevRev is available online to check it out.

1:30 – Guest: Plain ice cream would be frozen milk and that would be terrible. So I am lemon and candy JavaScript!

2:13 – Chuck: We are talking today about...?

2:22 – Chris: He’s talking about “inclusive components” today!

2:41 – Guest: Traveling is very stressful and I wanted something to do on the plane. I’ve done this book, “Inclusive Design Patterns.”

If you don’t want to buy the book you can go to the blog. I have been talking with Smashing Magazine.

5:40 – Panel.

5:47 – Guest: I approached Smashing Magazine initially. They didn’t think there was a market for this content at the time. They were very supportive but we will do it as an eBook so our costs our down. At the time, the editor came back and said that: “it was quite good!” We skimmed it but came back to it now and now the content was more relevant in their eyes. I didn’t want to do the same book but I wanted to do it around “patterns.” Rewriting components is what I do all the time. I use Vanilla JavaScript. Backbone.js is the trendy one.

9:52 – Panel: The hard book did it get published?

10:02 – Guest: We are in the works and it’s all in the final stages right now. It has to go through a different process for the print version.

11:54 – Panel.

11:58 – (Guest continues about the editorial process.)

12:09 – Panel: They probably switched to TFS – it’s Microsoft’s.

12:23 – Guest: There was this argument on Twitter about the different processors.

13:35 – Chris: What are the ways that people are breaking accessibility with their code through JavaScript?

13:59 – Guest: The whole premise is that there aren’t a ton of different components that we use. Generally, speaking. Most things we do through JavaScript – it’s just different ways of doing this/that, and hiding things. I am discounting things with Node or other stuff. Most of what we are doing, with interactive design, is showing and hiding.

18:37 – Chris: I have some specialty friends where they tell me where I’ve screwed up my code. For example Eric Bailey and Scott O’Hara but, of course, in very kind ways. What are some things that I can make sure that my code is going to work for many different people.

19:18 – Guest: You have accessibility and inclusive design. People think of accessibility as a check-list and that’s okay but there could be problems with this.

26:00 – Panel: That’s a great guideline.

26:05 – Chris: You talked about ARIA roles and it can be confusing. One side is: I don’t know when to use these and the other side is: I don’t know when NOT to use these so I’m going to use them for EVERYTHING! I guess both can be detrimental. What’s your advice on this topic?

27:00 – Guest: Scott is great and I would trust him to the end of the Earth about what he says.

Guest mentions Léonie Watson and her talks about this topic.

29:26 – (Guest continues.)

29:36 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

30:31 – Chris.

30:40 – Guest: There is a lot of pressure, though, right? People wouldn’t blog about this if it wasn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t matter what the style is or what the syntax is.

The guest talks about not throwing ARIA onto everything.

36:34 – Aimee: Is this something that was mentioned in the book: people with disabilities and accessibility.

37:28 – Guest: Yes, of course. I think it’s important to make your interfaces flexible and robust to think and include people with disabilities.

39:00 – Guest mentions larger buttons.

40:52 – Panelists and Guest talk back-and-forth.

42:22 – Chris: It’s an accessibility and inclusivity element. I saw a dropdown menu and worked great on certain devices but not others. I could beat this horse all day long but the whole: what happens of the JavaScript file doesn’t load or just accordion options?

43:50 – Guest: It’s the progressive enhancement element.

44:05 – Guest: I think it’s worth noting. I think these things dovetail really nicely.

46:29 – Chris: Did you do a video interview, Aimee, talking about CSS? Is CSS better than JavaScript in some ways I don’t know if this is related or not?

47:03 – Aimee: When I talk about JavaScript vs. CSS...the browser optimizes those.

47:27 – Aimee: But as someone who loves JavaScript...and then some very talented people taught me that you have to find the right tool for the job.

47:29 – Guest: I am the other way around – interesting.

52:50 – Chuck: Picks!

52:55 – Advertisement – Get A Coder Job!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Joe

Aimee

Chris

Web Dev Career Guide: https://gomakethings.com/career-guide/
Use FREECAREER at checkout to get it for free
Neapolitan Ice Cream
Netflix Web Performance case study

Charles

Heydon

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JSJ 369: Azure Functions with Colby Tresness LIVE at MIcrosoft BUILD

By
Published On :: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Sponsors

Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus
Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
Linode offers $20 credit
CacheFly

Panel

Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Colby Tresness

Episode Summary

Coming to you live from the podcast booth at Microsoft BUILD is Charles Max Wood with Colby Tresness. Colby is a Program Manager on Azure Functions at Microsoft. Azure functions are the serverless functions on Azure. Colby explains what the Azure functions premium plan entails, then talks about KEDA – Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling, a Microsoft and Red Hat partnered open source component to provide event-driven capabilities for any Kubernetes workload. One of the other cool features of serverless functions they talk about is the Azure serverless community library.

Colby and Charles discuss the best way to get started with Azure functions, as well as the non-JavaScript languages it supports.

Picks

Colby Tresness:

Barry (TV Series 2018– ) – IMDb

Charles Max Wood:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The MFCEO Project Podcast – Andy Frisella
Downtown Seattle

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JSJ 374: CosmosDB with Steve Faulkner LIVE at Microsoft BUILD

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 16 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Sponsors

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

Panel

Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Steve Faulkner

Episode Summary

Coming to you live from the podcast booth at Microsoft BUILD is Charles Max Wood with Steve Faulkner. Steve is a Senior Software Developer for Azure Cosmos DB at Microsoft. Cosmos DB is a global distributed, multi-model noSQL database. Steve explains the Cosmos DB service and scenarios it can be used in. They discuss how Cosmos DB interacts with Azure functions and how partition keys work in Cosmos DB.

Listen to the show for more Cosmos DB updates and to find out how Steve he got his twitter handle @southpolesteve.

Picks

Steve Faulkner:

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JSJ 379: FindCollabs and Podcasting with Jeff Meyerson

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Thu, 01 Aug 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Sponsors

Netlify
RxJS Live

Panel

Aimee Knight
AJ O’Neal
Charles Max Wood

With Special Guest: Jeff Meyerson

Episode Summary

Jeff Meyerson is the host of the Software Engineering daily podcast and has also started a company called FindCollabs, an online platform for finding collaborators and building projects. Jeff started FindCollabs because he believes there are all these amazing tools but people are not combining and collaborating as much as they could, when so much good could be accomplished together. FindCollabs is especially useful for working on side projects. The panelists discuss the problems encountered when you try to collaborate with people over the internet, such as finding people who are facing similar and gauging interest, skill, and availability. Thankfully, FindCollabs has a feature of leaving reviews and rating your partners so that users can accurately gauge other’s skill level. Users can also leave comments about their experience collaborating with others. The only way you can show competence with an interest is to contribute to another project. FindCollabs is also a good place to look for mentors, as well as for Bootcamp graduates or people going through an online coding course. If you are part of an organization, you can create private projects. The company plans to expand this feature to all users in the future.The panelists talk about their past experiences with collaborating with other people.

Jeff talks about his podcast Software Engineering Daily and how it got started and the focus of the podcast. As someone working in technology, it is important to stay current on up and coming technology, and listening to podcasts is an excellent way to do that. Jeff talks about where he thinks podcasting is going, especially for programmers. The panel discusses some of the benefits of listening to programming podcasts. Jeff talks about how he is prepping Software Engineering Daily for the future. He shares the audience size for Software Engineering Daily and some of the statistics for his different channels. Jeff has also released an app for Software Engineering Daily, and he shares some information on how it was written. Finally, Jeff gives advice for people who want to use FindCollabs and some of the next steps after creating a profile.

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

Links

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Aimee Knight:

Burnout and the Brain

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Saber’s Edge from Final Fantasy by Distant Worlds

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Adventures in Machine Learning on FindCollabs
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JSJ 408: Reading Source Code with Carl Mungazi

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 06:00:00 -0500

Carl Mungazi is a frontend developer at Limejump in London. He is a former journalist and switched to programming in 2016. Today the panel is discussing the benefits of reading source code. Carl began reading source code because he came into programming late and from a different field. His first project was with Mithril, and he read the source code and documentation to help him understand it. The panelists discuss how reading the source code has helped them and others to improve their coding. They compare reading and understanding source code to learning a foreign language, and discuss different methods.

Carl gives some suggestions for reading source code effectively. He advises people to be patient and step through the code. Accept that you will probably take a wrong path at some point or another, but the more you read, the more you will see patterns in how libraries are structured. He also encourages listeners to approach the authors, as they are often happy to lend a hand. Reading source code is an active approach of stepping through, debugging, putting in break points, checking the stack, and so forth. It’s also important to do outside research.

Since he has been reading source code, Carl has come to prefer plain JavaScript and libraries with as little code as possible. The panel discusses the benefits of small, simple libraries. Carl gives examples of techniques that he learned from reading a library source code and how he applied it to his own coding style. Reading source code has made him more careful about mixing logic and UI, and now he separates them. He also is more confident in seeing a problem, going to a preexisting library, and just importing the fix for that problem rather than the whole library. Reading source code is really about understanding the code you use in your project. It may slow you down, but you’ll be thankful in the long term because it will help you solve future bugs more efficiently. Carl talks more about his debugging process. He still relies on a debugger, but reading a library helps you to see patterns and guess the output of a function. These patterns persist in other libraries as well. Once you can guess correctly what will happen, you go back to reading the code and find instances where the output is unexpected, and fix it. Carl’s closing thoughts are that through reading source code, he has learned that although code is used differently in each library, they are all written in the same language, and therefore interrelated. This gave him more confidence in reading code because they’re all fundamentally the same. When a bug is discovered, he encourages listeners to look at the source code before googling a solution.

Panelists

AJ O’Neal
Dan Shapir
Steve Edwards
Charles Max Wood

Guest

Carl Mungazi

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Carl Mungazi

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The MaxCoders Guide To Finding Your Dream Developer Job

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 14:48:00 -0500

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

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The MaxCoders Guide To Finding Your Dream Developer Job

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 15:01:00 -0500

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

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JSJ 419: Google App Script with Ben Collins

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 06:00:00 -0500

Today’s guest is Ben Collins, who creates online courses, writes tutorials, and teaches workshops around G Suite and App Script. Apps Script is a scripting platform developed by Google for light-weight application development in the G Suite platform. It is an implementation of JavaScript with the express purpose of extending Google apps. App Script was started 10 years ago as a side project, and it eventually took on its own life. Ben talks about some of the different things that App Script can do and where things are stored. They discuss different ways you can get into the script and how to import external scripts from a CDN. Ben gives two examples, one simple and one sophisticated, that you might build from App Script. He talks about event triggers and how authentication is handled. He goes over the three deployment options, namely web app, app executable, sheets add-on, and deploying from the manifest. Ben talks about how triggers are managed in App Script and options for debugging. There is also the option to develop locally as well as in the browser. The show ends with him talking about how to build using HTML in App Script.

Panelists

Aimee Knight
Steve Edwards
Dan Shapir

Guest

Ben Collins

Sponsors

G2i
Split

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King Kong Apparel

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Developers Mentoring Other Developers

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The Web Almanac

AJ O’Neal:

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Bem Collins:

Cold Turkey app
Follow Ben at Benlcollins.com and Twitter

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MJS 135: Paul Cowan

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 06:00:00 -0500

My JavaScript Story this week welcomes Paul Cowan. Paul works as a consultant in front end development. He learned how to program at a really early age but didn't own an email address until he was 30 years old. When he was 30 years old he wanted to change his lifestyle and attended a course in London and took a job as a software developer.

Paul was interested in React because, for him, much of programming didn’t make a whole lot of sense until he read about the flux model and React Redux was one of the few frameworks that followed the flux model. Spending most of his life outside of the programming world has granted him a unique perspective framework like React.

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined By Special Guest: Paul Cowan

Sponsors

G2i
CacheFly

______________________________________

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

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JSJ 424: UI5 and web components with Peter Muessig

By devchat.tv
Published On :: Tue, 10 Mar 2020 09:01:00 -0400

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber the panelists and guest delve into the advantages of the shadow dom, transitioning from polymer js polyfills to native web components when moving for SAP UI to UI5, which works within React, Vue, Angular, and others.

Panel

AJ O’Neal
Aimee Knight
Steve Edwards
Dan Shappir

Guest

Peter Müßig
Follow Peter on Twitter > @pmuessig, Github

Sponsors

Taiko, free and open source browser test automation

____________________________________________________________

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

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Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Aimee Knight

Announcing Div Ops as the Slack and Reddit communities

Steve Edwards

Today on Pearls Before Swine - Comics by Stephan Pastis

Dan Shappir

Peter Müßig

JavaScript Jabber

Follow JavaScript Jabber on Twitter > @JSJabber

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