ri

220 JSJ Teaching JavaScript with Kyle Simpson

02:25 - Kyle Simpson Introduction

04:43 - Development => Teaching

16:20 - Inheritance and Delegation

29:40 - Evolving a Language

36:23 - Cohersion

50:37 - Performance

  • The Width Keyword

54:33 - Developer Education Programs and The Skill of Teaching

 

Picks




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224 JSJ Cypress.js with Brian Mann

Angular Remote Conf and React Remote Conf

 

03:18 - Brian Mann Introduction

03:33 - Cypress.io

04:09 - Selenium

08:56 - Cypress vs Selenium

16:54 - Similarities: Cypress and Protractor

18:22 - Mocking API Data

20:40 - Getting Started with Cypress and The Migration Process

21:54 - Testing

30:31 - Handling Data on the Backend

34:16 - What’s coming next in Cypress?




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227 JSJ Fostering Community Through React with Benjamin Dunphy, Berkeley Martinez, and Ian Sinnott

03:08 - Benjamin Dunphy Introduction

04:07 - Berkeley Martinez Introduction

04:19 - Ian Sinnott Introduction

05:19 - The React Codebase

12:38 - Other Important Parts of the React Ecosystem

14:22 - The Angular vs the React Ecosystem and Community

22:07 - Community

Developer Experience

26:56 - Getting Connected to the React Community

29:34 - Conferences

33:28 - Technology From the Community

40:19 - The Future of React

42:39 - Starting More Communities

 

Picks




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229 JSJ Elm with Richard Feldman

1:13 No Red Ink is hiringRichard’s book-in-progress

2:10 Frontend Masters Workshop

2:55 Elm’s primary function

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

9:15 Increased usability of Elm with each update

13:45 Striking differences between Elm and Javascript

16:08 Community reactions to Elm

20:21 First Elm conference in September

22:11 The approach for structuring an Elm app

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

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

38:20 Scaling a big FP application

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

48:00 Richard on Twitter

PICKS

“In a World…” Movie

Building a Live-Validated Signup Form in Elm

Apple Cider Vinegar

CETUSA – Foreign exchange program




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234 JSJ JAMStack with Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen

1:00 Intro to guests Brian Douglas and Matt Christensen

2:20 Definition of JAMStack

8:12 JAMStack and confusion over nomenclature

12:56 JAMStack and security, reliability and performance

17:05 Example of traffic spike for company Sphero

18:26 Meaning of hyperdynamic

20:35 Future and limits of JAMStack technology

26:01 Controlling data and APIs versus using third parties

28:10 Netlify.com and JAMStack

31:16 APIs, JavaScript framework and libraries recommended to start building on JAMStack

35:13 Resources and examples of JAMStack: netlify.comNetlify blogJAMStack radioJAMStack SF Meetup

QUOTES:

“I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see the limits being pushed a lot for what you can do with this.” - Matt

“Today we’re starting to see really interesting, really large projects getting built with this approach.” - Matt

“If you can farm 100% of your backend off to third parties, I feel like that really limits a lot of the interesting things you can do as a developer.” - Brian

PICKS:

Early History of Smalltalk (Jamison)

React Rally 2016 videos (Jamison)

FiveStack.computer (Jamison)

Falsehoods programmers believe about time (Aimee)

Nodevember conference (Aimee)

48 Days Podcast (Charles)

Fall of Hades by Richard Paul Evans (Charles)

Jon Benjamin Jazz (Brian)

RailsConf 2016 (Brian)

React Native (Brian)

Book of Ye Podcast (Brian)

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (Matt)

Sequoia Capital website

Sphero website

Isomorphic rendering on the Jam Stack by Phil Hawksworth

SPONSORS:

Front End Masters

Hired.com




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235 JSJ JavaScript Devops and Tools with Donovan Brown and Jordan Matthiesen

00:50 Intro to guests Donovan Brown and Jordan Matthiesen

1:14 Javascript and Devops

3:49 Node JS and integrating with extensions

11:16 Learning Javascript coming from another language

15:21 Visual Studio Team Services at Microsoft, integration and unit testing

25:10 Visual Studio Code and mobile development

  • Apache Cordova open source project

31:45 TypeScript and tooling

33:03 Unit test tools and methods

38:39 ARM devices and integration

QUOTES:

“It’s not impossible, it’s just a different set of challenges.” - Donovan Brown

“Devops is the union of people, process and products to enable continuous delivery of value to your end users” - Donovan Brown

“Apps start to feel more native. They can actually get form.” - Jordan Matthiesen

PICKS:

Veridian Dynamics (AJ)

Jabberwocky Video (AJ)

Hard Rock Cafe - Atlanta (Charles)

CES (Charles)

3D printers (Donovan)

High-Yield Vegetable Gardening (Jordan)

taco.visualstudio.com

Jordan on Twitter @jmatthiesen

Visualstudio.com

Donovanbrown.com

Donovan on Twitter @donovanbrown

SPONSORS:

Front End Masters

Hired.com




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236 JSJ Interview with Mads Kristensen from Microsoft Ignite

TOPICS:

4:00 Things that make web development more difficult

7:40 The developer experience with Angular

10:40 How cognitive cost affects the user experience

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

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

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

34:00 Node updates

QUOTES:

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

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

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

PICKS:

Death Note Anime Show

JS Remote Conference

The Alloy of Law Book by Brandon Sanderson

Zig Zigler Books on Audible

Mr. Robot TV Show

RESOURCES & CONTACT INFO:

Mads on Twitter

Mads’ Website

 




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240 JSJ Visual Studio Code with Chris Dias

Previous Episodes with Visual Studio Code’s Team:

JSJ Episode 199, Visual Studio Code with Chris Dias and Erich Gamma

JSJ Episode 221, Visual Studio Code with Wade Anderson

1:45 - What’s new at Visual Studio Code

3:42 - Confusion with Javascript versus separate languages

7:15 - Choosing your tools carefully

8:20 - Integrated shell and docker extensions

12:05 - Agar.io Extensions and extension packs

16:15- Deciding what goes into Visual Studio Code and what becomes an extension

18:20 - Using Github Issues and resolving user complaints

22:08 - Why do people stray away from VS proper?

23:10 - Microsoft and VS legacy

27:00 - Man hours and project development

31:30 - The Visual Studio default experience

37:10 - What are people writing with VS Code?

39:20 - Community versus developer views of VS Code

41:40 - Using Electron

44:00 - Updating the system

44:50 - How is Visual Code written?

48:00 - The future of Visual Code Studios

Picks:

Don McMillan (AJ)

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

Daplie (AJ)

Facebook feed blocker plug-in (Charles)

Tab Wrangler (Charles)

Smart Things (Chris)

Wood Pizza Ovens (Chis)

PJ Mark, Chris’ friend and marketer (Chris)




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242 JSJ Visual Studio and .NET with Maria Naggaga

1:15 - Introducing Maria Naggaga

2:32 - .NET new developers

3:55 - NYC Microsoft bootcamp

6:25 - Building a community of .NET programmers

7:25 - Why would a Javascript developer care about .NET?

9:30 - Getting started with .NET

15:50 - The power of asking questions

22:45 - Recruiting new programmers to the industry

37:00 - Javascript and C#

48:30 - Running .NET on Raspberry Pi

Picks:

Super Cartography Bros album by OverClocked ReMix (AJ)

Daplie (AJ)

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

The Eventual Millionaire (Charles)

Devchat Conferences (Charles)

15- Minute Calls (Charles)

Codeland Conference (Maria)

March by Congressman John Lewis (Maria)

Microsoft Virtual Academy (Maria)




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JSJ 246 GraphQL and Apollo with Uri Goldshtein

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood and Aimee Knight discuss GraphQL and Apollo with Uri Goldshtein. Uri is a core developer at Meteor Development Group, and is an expert with GraphQL and Apollo.




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MJS #009: Joe Fiorini

Welcome to the 9th My JS Story! Today, Charles Max Wood welcomes Joe Fiorini. Joe has been into programming since his teenage years. He discussed about functional reactive programming in episode 61 of JavaScript Jabber. Get to know him better at My JS Story Joe Fiorini.




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JSJ 254 Contributor Days with Tracy Lee

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Aimee Knight and Charles Max Wood discuss Contributor Days with Tracy Lee. Tracy is a Google Developer Expert and a co-founder of This Dot Media and This Dot Labs. She's passionately into helping startups create a connection with investors. Part of what she's been up to lately is what this episode is about. Tune in to learn about it!




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MJS #010: Richard Feldman

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




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JSJ 255 Docker for Developers with Derick Bailey

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




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MJS #011: Valeri Karpov

Welcome to the 11th My JS Story! Today, Charles Max Wood welcomes Valeri Karpov. Valeri is a Platform Tech Lead at Booster Fuels, the author of Professional Angular JS and The 80/20 Guide to ES2015 Generators, and a blogger at codebarbarian.com. He is also the one who maintains mongoose JS. Stay tuned to My JS Story Valeri Karpov to learn more how he started coding and what he is currently up to!




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JSJ 256 Wordpress and Wordpress API for JavaScript Developers with Roy Sivan

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




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JSJ 259 Clean Code JavaScript with Ryan McDermott

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




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JSJ 260 Practical JavaScript with Gordon Zhu

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




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MJS #023 Laurie Voss


My JS Story 023 Laurie Voss

This week we have another My JavaScript story. This week’s guest is Laurie Voss. Laurie has worked with NPM from the start and has been a vital piece to getting it off the ground. Hear how Laurie got interested in computers, how Laurie got started with NPM, as well as a few things about the newly released NPM 5.


How did you get into programming?

Laurie started by going into a computer camp, at the time Laurie hadn’t spent time around computers, and it wouldn’t be until the second time that he went to the computer camp that he would see a computer again. Laurie grew up in Trinidad where not many people could afford computers. He started making his first website in Angelfire using HTML before CSS became a thing.

How did you go from web development to hardcore Javascript?

Laurie had been writing JavaScript since it was invented. Laurie started a web development company in high school using JavaScript. Laurie met Issac while working at Yahoo and he introduced Laurie to Node which was a starting point to taking JavaScript more seriously for Laurie. When Node was ready in 2013, NPM Inc was on it’s way.

What do you do at NPM Inc?

IN the beginning of 2014, Laurie was doing a lot of the JavaScript and was the CTO. Laurie says that part of his strategy has always been to hire JavaScript developers that are better at writing JavaScript that he is. Making him the worst JavaScript programmer at NPM. Laurie’s main job was doing what was needed to get NPM happen, including talking to layers and the business side of things. There are many companies that don’t understand how open source works, and in many cases it leads to run ins with lawyers. Many times NPM acts as an umbrella for open source tools that aren’t able to fight overzealous corporations.

What do you think is your biggest contributions to NPM?

Laurie expresses that it has changed over the years. A year ago he would say that he would have to say it leans towards the piece of software that is the registry. It’s very scalable and has worked great for small scale up to very large scale. Laurie works hard to gather funds and help make NPM grow as well as be scalable. He says that he is very proud that he build something that let’s others build things.

How did you get involved?

Laurie has been with NPM since the beginning. He tells us how Issac had been running NPM on donated hardware in spare time while working with Node. NPM would break a lot and be down due to the borrowed equipment. They decided that they needed to create a business model around NPM to help it grow. Laurie had just finished working on a startup and knew how to get funding and got their first round in 2014.

How did you get to being profitable?

Laurie talks about making sure that their plan is in line with their customers. NPM could easily charge for many parts of NPM but they would rather charge for things that make sense to charge, so in this case the private packages. Enough people are using the private package to getting NPM to profitability. Laurie says that even if money stopped coming in they would have to git rid of a few employees but would be able to keep a small team and sustain the NPM registry, but would never build anything new. It’s always between being profitable or using money to build new things.

What are you working on now?

NPM 5 was just released and it’s much faster, five times faster. Laurie talks about being excited about the team and what they are putting into it. Things like making deployments easier. Many developers use NPM to put code together as well as to deploy it. If you didn’t have a lock file, it’s possible that it would change. But the lock file can take a long time, and you already know what needs to go there so they are adding npm store and npm fetch making deploys much faster. Additionally they will be adding a feature called insights. They are able to see information about different users packages, security information, performance information, etc. They can use that information to help developers with suggestions based off of data gathered by what other people are doing. Charles adds that it would be great for coming up with topics for the podcast.

Anything else?

Laurie reminds everyone about NPM Organizations as well as NPM Enterprise. NPM Organizations is a way to organize packaging as well as teams of developers and helps you to collaborate. NPM Enterprise allows for single sign on support, license auditing, and features that corporations care about.


Picks

Laurie

Zite and NextJS
Slides.com

Charles

VMWorld
Tweet or email if you’re looking at resources for learning VR AI or Iot


Links

Twitter
NPM Organizations
NPM Enterprise





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JSJ 268 Building Microsoft Office Extensions with JavaScript with Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

JSJ 268 Building Microsoft Office Extensions with Javascript with Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

This episode is live at the Microsoft Build 2017 with Charles Max Wood and AJ O’Neal. We have Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee from the Office Team at Microsoft. Tune in and learn more about what’s new with Microsoft Office Extensions!

[00:01:25] – Introduction to Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee are Program Managers on the Microsoft Office team, focused on Extensibility.

Questions for Tristan and Sean

[00:01:45] – Extending Office functionality with Javascript

Office isn’t just an application on Windows that runs on your PC. It is running on iPhone, iPad, Android tablet, and apps on the browser with Office Online. The team needs a new platform, add-ins, which allow you to build apps that run across all places. It’s HTML and Javascript. HTML for all the UI and a series of Javascript module calls for the document properties. Sometimes we call it OfficeJS.

[00:03:20] – This works on any version of Office?

It works on Office on Windows, Mac, Online and iPad.

[00:03:55] – HTML and CSS suck on mobile?

There are things that you’re going to want to do when you know you’re running on a mobile device. If you look at an add-in running on Outlook for iPhone, the developer does a lot of things to make that feel like part of the iPhone UI. Tristan believes that you could build a great add-in for Office using HTML and JavaScript.

[00:05:20] – Are these apps written with JavaScript or you have a Native with WebView?

Office itself is Native. All of it is Native code but the platform is very much web. The main piece of it is pointing at the URL. Just go load that URL. And then, you can also call functions in your JavaScript.

[00:06:35] – Why would you do this? How does it work?

The add-in platform is a way to help developers turn Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the apps that actually solve user’s business problems. The team will give you the tools with HTML and JavaScript to go and pop into the Word UI and the API’s that let you go manipulate the paragraph and texts inside of Word. Or in Excel, you might want to create custom formulas or visualizations. The team also let people use D3 to generate their own Excel charts.

And developers want to extend Office because it’s where a lot of business workers spend their days 0 in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel.

[00:10:00] – How did this get delivered to them?

There are 2 ways to get this delivered. One, there’s an Office Store. Second, if you go into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, there’s a store button and you can see tons of integrations with partners.

For enterprises, IT can deploy add-ins to the users’ desktops without having stress about deploying MSI’s and other software deployments that the web completely rids off. The add-ins make a whole lot of pain the past completely go away.

[00:11:00] – Everybody in the company can use a particular plug-in by distributing it with Office?

That’s right. You can go to Office 365 add-in experience. Here’s the add-in and you can to specific people or everyone who’s part of a group.

For the developer’s perspective, if you have the add-in deployed to your client, you could actually push updates to the web service and your users get the updates instantly. It’s a lot faster turn-around model.

[00:14:20] – What about conversations or bot integrations?

There’s the idea of connectors at Teams. You can subscribe to this web book and it’ll publish JSON. When the JSON is received, a new conversation inside of Teams or Outlook will be created. For example, every time someone posts on Stack Overflow with one of the tags that team cares about, it posts on Outlook.

It’s a great way to bring all the stuff. Rather than have 20 different apps that are shooting 20 different sets of notifications, it’s just all conversations in email, making do all the standard email things.

And in the connector case, it’s a push model. The user could choose what notifications they want.

You’d also learn things like bots. You can have bots in Teams and Skype. The users can interact with them with their natural language.

[00:18:40] – How about authentication?

As long as you’re signed into Office, you can call JavaScript API to give you an identity token for the sign in user and it will hand you a JWT back. That’s coming from Azure Active Directory or from whatever customer directory service. That’s standard.

If you want to do more, you can take that identity token and you can exchange that for a token that can call Microsoft graph. This app wants to get access to phone, are you okay with that? Assuming the user says yes, the user gets a token that can go and grab whatever data he wants from the back-end.

[00:20:00] – Where does it store the token?

That’s up to the developer to decide how they want to handle that but there are facilities that make sure you can pop up a dialog box and you can go to the LO-flow. You could theoretically cache it in the browser or a cookie. Or whatever people think is more appropriate for the scenario.

[00:20:55] – What does the API actually look like from JavaScript?

If you’re familiar with Excel UI, you can look at Excel API. It’s workbook.worksheets.getItem() and you can pass the name of the worksheet. It can also pass the index of the worksheet.

[00:22:30] – What’s the process of getting setup?

There’s a variety of options. You can download Office, write XML manifest, and take a sample, and then, side loads it into Office. You can also do that through web apps. There’s no install required because you can go work against Office Online. In the Insert menu, there’s a way to configure your add-ins. There’s upload a manifest there and you can just upload the XML. That’s going to work against whatever web server you have set up.

So it’s either on your local machine or up in the cloud. It’s as much as like regular web development. Just bring your own tools.

[00:24:15] – How do you protect me as a plug-in developer?

There’s an access add-in that will ask your permission to access, say, a document. Assume, they say yes, pipes are opened and they can just go talk to those things. But the team also tries to sandbox it by iframes. It’s not one page that has everybody’s plug-ins intermingle that people can pole at other people’s stuff.

[00:27:20] – How do you support backward compatibility?

There are cases where we change the behavior of the API. Every API is gated by requirement set. So if a developer needs access to a requirement set, he gets an aggregate instead of API’s that he can work with but it isn’t fixed forever.

But it’s not at that point yet where we end up to remove things completely. In Office JS, we’ve talked about API’s as one JavaScript library but really, it’s a bootstrap that brings in a bunch of other pieces that you need.

[00:30:00] – How does that work on mobile? Do they have to approve download for all components?

You can download components by using the browser that the operating system gives. It’s another one of the virtues of being based on the web. Every platform that has a web browser can have JavaScript execution run-time. It allows for the way that their app guidelines are written.

[00:33:15] – How about testing?

It’s a place where there’s still have work to do. There’s a bunch of open-source projects that partners have started to do that. What they’ve done is they’ve built a testing library. Whatever the mock is, it's just a thing on Github. It is open-source friendly. So the team could be able to contribute to it. “Here’s an interesting test case for this API. I want to make sure that it behaves like this.

[00:35:50] – Could you write it with any version for JavaScript e.g. TypeScript?

A Huge chunk of the team is big TypeScript fans. They’ve done a lot of work to make sure that TypeScript experience is excellence.

Type is basically a collection of typing files for TypeScript. There’s a runtime process that parses your TypeScript, gives you feedback on your code, and checks for errors. You can also run it in the background.

There’s an add-in called Script Lab. Script Lab is literally, you hit the code button and you get a web IDE right there. You can go start typing JavaScript code, play with API’s, and uses TypeScript by default. It’ll just actually load your code in the browser, executes, and you can start watching.

[00:39:25] – Are there any limitations on which JavaScript libraries you can pull in?

There a no limitations in place right now. There are partners that use Angular. There are partners that are big React fans. If you’re a web dev, you can bring whatever preferences around frameworks, around tools, around TypeScript versus JavaScript.

[00:45:20] – What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen done with this API?

Battleship was pretty cool. There’s also Star Wars entering credits theme for PowerPoint.

[00:46:40] – If a developer is building a plug-in and get paid for it, does Microsoft take credit for that?

There are 2 ways that folks can do it. You can do paid add-ins to the store. Either you do the standard perpetual 99 cents or you can do subscriptions, where it’s $2.99/month. Tristan encourages that model because integrations are just a piece of some larger piece of software.

But Microsoft is not in the business of trying to get you to pay me a little bit of 10 cents a dollar. It’s really in the business of making sure that you can integrate with Office as quickly as possibly can.

When the users go to the store, they can use the same Microsoft account that you use to buy Xbox games or movies in the Xbox, Windows apps in the Windows store.

[00:52:00] – The App Model

If folks are interested in the app model, they should go to dev.office.com to learn more about it because that’s where all the documentation is. Check out our Github. Right there in the open, there’s the spec. Literally, the engineers who are coding the product are reading the same marked-down files in the same repo that you, as a developer, can come and look at. And you can comment. You can add issues like you could have a dialogue with that PM. Under the OfficeDev, you’ll find a tunnel repository that contains samples. Our docs are there.

Picks

AJ O'Neal

  • Lithium

Charles Max Wood

Tristan Davis

Sean Laberee




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JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

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

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood

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

Aimee Knight

Charles Max Wood




ri

MJS #026 Chris Coyier

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:

Charles:

Links




ri

JSJ 271: SharePoint Extensions in JavaScript with Mike Ammerlaan and Vesa Juvonen

JSJ 271: SharePoint Extensions in JavaScript with Mike Ammerlaan and Vesa Juvonen

This episode is a live episode from Microsoft Build where AJ O'Neal and Charles Max Wood interview Mike Ammerlaan and Vesa Juvonent about building extensions for SharePoint with JavaScript.

[00:01:28] Mike Ammerlaan introduction
Mike has worked at Microsoft for a long time on multiple Microsoft products and projects. He's currently on the Office Ecosystem Marketing Team.

[00:01:52] Vesa Juvonen introduction
Ves a is Senior Program Manager for the SharePoint Splat team. He's been with Microsoft for about 11 years and manages the community and documentation for the SharePoint framework.

[00:02:18] What is the SharePoint Framework?
This is how you write SharePoint extensions with JavaScript. SharePoint has changed. It now works with common modern development tools and web development techniques. SharePoint consolodates the extension effort

[00:03:32] What is SharePoint?
File sharing, team sites, communication points for teams. Part of Office 365. You use Web Parts to add functionality to SharePoint. Web Parts provide functionality like widgets and are scoped to a team, group, or set of users. It's usually hosted on premises, but you can also use it with Office 365 as a hosted solution.

[00:05:56] What extensions can you build for SharePoint?
You can build widgets for your front page or intranet. You can also add user management or data management or document management.

Examples:

  • Dashboards
  • Mini Applications
  • Scheduling and Time Tracking
  • Document Storage
  • Source code repositories

[00:07:39] What is WebDAV and how does it relate?
WebDAV is a protocol for accessing documents and SharePoint supports it among other protocols for managing documents.

[00:08:36] Do I have to build front-end and back-end components to get full functionality?
You can build the front-end UI with Angular and other frameworks. And then build a service in Azure on the backend. The backend systems can then access Line of Business systems or other data systems.

It really does take multiple skill sets to build extensions for SharePoint.

[00:11:10] SharePoint on Mobile
There is a mobile web app and the Web Parts work through the mobile application. You can also use any browser to connect to the application.

[00:12:08] Building extensions with standard Angular or React component libraries
There are standard Yeoman templates. You can also pull in the components through React or Angular just like what Microsoft does.

Newer Angular versions are designed for Single Page Apps and SharePoint isn't necessarily set up to work that way. The Web Parts are isolated from each other and Angular requires some workarounds.

[00:14:30] Getting around sandboxing
Google and Microsoft are talking to each other to see how to work around this when there are multiple sandboxed applications that can't talk to each other in very simple ways.

[00:15:39] Application library or naming collisions if my UI uses different versions or clobber page wide settings
There are guides for a lot of this. React does a bunch of the isolation work.

Addons are iframed in and an API token is given to grant access to the data and APIs.

Microsoft also reviews and approves plugins.

[00:18:30] How do you get started and make money at this?
Look at the SharePoint store. You can build things through websites and pages and offer the plugins through the store.

You can request a SharePoint tenant installation from the Microsoft Dev Tools for free. Then you can build into the tenant site. The rest of the tools are available on npm.

SharePoint Developer Tools

[00:22:13] Automated testing for SharePoint extensions
Unit testing is built in for JavaScript. Testing the UI's require you to sign into Office 365. There are people doing it, though.

[00:22:54] Building internal-only extensions
SharePoint is an enterprise tool, so a lot of enterprises may not want to install extensions from the store. You can definitely build and install private plugins for SharePoint setups. They also have their own backend systems that will require custom development.

[00:25:50] Office 365, SharePoint, and OneDrive
Office 365 is used by people across many different sized organizations and SharePoint is much more enterprise. Office 365 tools store files and information in SharePoint.

What about OneDrive versus Sharepoint? OneDrive is focused for one person. SharePoint is focused around a team. But they have the same APIs and use the same technology stack.

[00:29:05] The history and future of SharePoint
It started out on premises and has moved to the cloud. The SharePoint team is working to keep it available and useful in the modern cloud based era.

[00:30:25] What does the API footprint look like?
It spans modifying lists, data objects, attributes, items in a list, put Web Parts on a page, modify the experience, and manage and modify access, users, and documents. SharePoint is a way of building a way of conveying information.

SharePoint is layers of data and scopes.

[00:35:26] Tutorials and Open Source
dev.office.com
The Sharepoint framework is not open source yet, but they're working on that. They also need to open source the Yeoman templates.
Open source samples are available at github.com/sharepoint.

Picks

Charles Max Wood

  • BlueTick
  • Zapier
  • ScheduleOnce
  • Moo.com
  • Advice: Take the time to go talk to people.
    Vesa adds that you should go to a session that's on something completely outside your experience.

AJ O'Neal

Mike Ammerlaan

Vesa Juvonen

  • Family

A big thanks to Microsoft, DotNetRocks, and Build!




ri

MJS #027 Chris Anderson

MJS 027 Chris Anderson

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:12:02] Having fun at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much Angular have you worked on yourself?

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

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

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

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

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


Picks

Chris

Mountain Dew Pitch Black
The Expanse Series on SciFi
Application Insights

Charles

Wheel of Time
Coolage
Dog Company
Data Dog


Links

Twitter
GitHub




ri

JSJ 272: Functional Programming and ClojureScript with Eric Normand

JSJ 272: Functional Programming and ClojureScript with Eric Normand

This episode of JavaScript Jabber features panelists Aimee Knight and Charles Max Wood. Special guest Eric Normand is here to talk about functional programming and ClojureScript. Tune in to learn more!

[00:1:14] Introduction to Eric Normand

Eric works for purelyfunctional.tv. The main target market for his company is those people who want to transition into functional programming from their current job. He offers them support, shows them where to find jobs, and gives them the skills they need to do well.

[00:02:22] Address that quickly

Functional programming is used at big companies such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, EBay, Paypal, and banks. They all have Clojure but it is not used at the scale of Java or Ruby.

So yes, people are using it and it is influencing the mainstream programming industry.

[00:3:48] How do you build an application?

A common question Eric gets is, “How do I structure my application?” People are used to using frameworks. Most start from an existing app. People want a process to figure out how to take a set of features and turn it into code. Most that get into functional programming have development experience. The attitude in functional programming is that they do not want a framework. Clojure needs to be more beginner friendly. His talk is a four-step process on how to turn into code.

[00:05:56] Can you expand on that a little?

There are four steps to the process of structuring an application.

  1. Develop a metaphor for what you are trying to do. Developing the first implementation. How would you build it if you didn’t have code?
  2. Develop the operations. What are their properties? Example: will have to sort records chronological.
  3. Develop relationships between the operations.
  4. Run tests and refactor the program. Once you have that, you can write the prototype.

[00:13:13] Why can’t you always make the code better?

Rules can’t be refactored into new concepts. They have to be thrown away and started completely over. The most important step is to think before beginning to write code. It may be the hardest part of the process, but it will make the implementation easier.

[00:17:20] What are your thoughts on when people take it too far and it makes the code harder to read?

He personally has written many bad abstractions. Writing bad things is how you get better as a programmer. The ones that go too far are the ones that don’t have any basis or are making something new up. They are trying to be too big and use no math to back up their code.

[00:20:05] Is the hammock time when you decide if you want to make something abstract or should you wait until you see patterns develop?

He thinks people should think about it before, although always be making experiments that do not touch production.

[00:23:33] Is there a trade off between using ClojureScript and functional JavaScript?

In terms of functional programming in JavaScript don’t have some of the niceties that there are in Clojure script. Clojure Script has a large standard library. JavaScript is not as well polished for functional programming; it is a lot of work to do functional programming it and not as much support.

[00:27:00:] Dave Thomas believes that the future of software is functional programming. Do you agree?

Eric thinks that it seems optimistic. He doesn’t see functional programming take over the world but does think that it has a lot to teach. The main reason to learn functional programming is to have more tools in your toolbox.

[00:31:40] If this is a better way to solve these problems, why aren’t people using it?

There is a prejudice against functional programming. When Eric was first getting into it, people would ask why he was wasting his time. Believes that people are jaded. Functional programming feels foreign because people are used to a familiar way of programming; they usually start with a language and get comfortable.

[00:40:58] If people want to get started with it, is there an easy way in?

Lodash is great to start replacing for loops. It will clean up code. There are other languages that compile to JavaScript. For example, Elm is getting a lot of attention right now. It is a Haskell like syntax. If you want more of a heavyweight language, use TypeScript or PureScript. ClojureScript is into live programming. You are able to type, save, and see results of the code immediately on the screen in front of you.

Picks

Aimee:

Eric

Charles

  • Ionic Framework

Links




ri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:14:30] Best Way to Save 

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

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

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

Kevin follows Dave Ramsey’s advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:39:00] Put Your Money Somewhere

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

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

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

[00:47:08] Why index funds?

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Cory

Aimee

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

Charles

Sean

Kevin

Links




ri

JSJ 280: Stackblitz with Eric Simons and Albert Pai

Panel:

Joe 

Amy 

Charles 

 

Special Guests: 

Eric Simmons 

Albert Pai

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers talk to Eric Simmons and Albert Pai, the co-founder of thinkster.io, where their team teaches the bleeding edge of javascript technology’s various frameworks and backend. Also, with the recent creation of Stalkblitz, which is the center topic of today discussion. 

Stackblitz it an online VS Code IDE for Angular, React, and a few more others are supported. This is designed to run web pack and vs code inside your browser at blazing fast speeds. Eric and Albert dive into the many different advantages and services available by StackBlitz and thinker.io

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Similarities  and differences to Heroku 
  • System JS 
  • Stacklets  
  • Testing and creating an in-browser system file system
  • Creating a type of VS Code experience, Working Off Line 
  • Updating of the Stacklets
  • Deployment tools or exporting 
  • Hot Reloading
  • Integrated terminals
  • Monaco
  • Language Services 
  • How do you architect this implementation 
  • The innovation of browsers
  • Guy Bedford 
  • Financing vs. Chipotle Burritos 
  • Will this product in the future cost money

Links

 

Picks

Amy

Joe

Charles

Eric 

Albert 




ri

JSJ 287: Blockchain and JS with Ari Lerner

Panel:

Aimee Knight

AJ O’Neal

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Ari Lerner

In this episode, Java Script Jabbers speak with Ari Lerner. Ari is the author of NG Book: The Complete Book on AugularJS, Full Stack React,  and a few others.  Ari co-runs newline.co a platform that teaches about the Block Chain, Ethereum, New Contracts, etc. Ari mentions a few upcoming books on Machine Learning, Elixir, and react Native.

Ari gives a rundown on what the Block Chain is about, and an explanation of a Hash. Ari explains the value of a Hash and 6-bit strings of a Hash. Also, Ari explains the exchange of currency in Bitcoin and the rate of exchange in the Block Chain. Next Ari covers web 3.0 and much more.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • What is the Block Chain?
  • A Hash?
  • The blockchain is an order of ledger.
  • The blockchain is a  list of transactions
  • How is a Hash used?
  • Sha 256
  • Bitcoin and Block Chains
  • What If two machines get the same answer?
  • Describe a transaction in a blockchain?
  • Exchanging currency
  • The cost of Bitcoin
  • Web 3.0
  • Everything on the Block Chain is public!
  • Where else is Block Chain is used besides bitcoin type currency
  • Public Key.
  • What should JS developer be doing to prepare?
  • And much more!

Links:

Picks:

Amiee

Charles

AJ

  • Spice Labels and Spice Jars
  • Marriage

Ari




ri

JSJ 288: TypeScript with Amanda Silver

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Amanda Silver

In this episode, Charles is at Microsoft Connect 2017 in NYC. Charles speaks with Amanda Silver. Amanda is deemed the  TypeScript and future of JavaScript guru, and this year's speakers at Microsoft Connect with Visual Studio Live Share. Amanda shares what is new with TypeScript and how that is a kind of subscript to JavaScript. Amanda explains the big picture of TypeScript’s inception and where she believes the language will be most efficient and effective for JavaScript and TypeScript developers.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • What is new in TypeScript?
  • Keep JavaScript and TypeScript aligned
  • TypeScript is implemented to create larger scaled applications
  • Integration with VS Code, etc.
  • Building better tools for JavaScript Developers
  • When would this be taken on by users
  • Defaults in Visual Studio
  • TypeScript replacing JavaScript type service
  • TypeScript is written in TypeScript
  • Chakra runtime
  • Diaspora
  • The different faces of JavaScript
  • Optimized JavaScript runtime
  • Languages should be created with tooling
  • A satisfying tooling experience
  • Foot Guns
  • New Tokens
  • Eco-systems and metadata
  • Multi-phase
  • Minimum common denominator constantly changing
  • Collaborating on the same code
  • Open Source and the impact
  • How to move to open source
  • Contributing
  • The next thing for TypeScript
  • The future of JavaScript
  • And much more!

Links:

  • @amandaksilver
  •  

Picks:

Amanda

Charles

 

 

 




ri

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Chris Dias

PJ Meyer

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Chris

  • Pizza

PJ

  • Deli

Charles

  • Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC
 




ri

JSJ 291: Serverless For JavaScript with Gareth McCumskey

Panel:

Charles Max Wood 

Aimee Knight

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames 

Special Guests: Gareth McCumskey

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Gareth McCumskey about Serverless For JavaScript. Gareth leads the dev team at Expat Explore in Cape Town, South Africa. Gareth and this team specialize in exploring the Serverless realm in JavaScript. The JavaScript Jabbers panel and Gareth discuss the many different types of serverless systems, and when to implement them, how serverless system work, and when to go in the direction of using Serverless. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • What does it mean to be Serverless? 
  • Since platform as a service.
  • Microservice on Docker 
  • Firebase
  • “no backend” 
  • Backend systems 
  • Cloud functions and failure in systems 
  • How do you start to think about a serverless system? 
  • How do decide what to do?
  • AWS Lambda 
  • Working in a different vendor
  • Node 4 
  • Programming JS to deploy 
  • Using libraries for NPM
  • How is works with AWS Lambda
  • Where is the database?
  • More point of failure? 
  • Calls to Slack?
  • Authentication
  • Micro Services
  • Elastic Bean Stalk
  • Static Assets, S3, Managing
  • Testing the services 
  • Integration testing
  • And much more! 

Links:

Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Charles

Gareth

Joe 

 




ri

JSJ 292: CosmosDB with Kirill Gavrylyuk

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

Charles

 

 

 




ri

JSJ 294: Node Security with Adam Baldwin

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Special Guests: Adam Baldwin

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Adam

Charles

AJ

Joe




ri

JSJ 298: Angular, Vue and TypeScript with John Papa

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Cory House

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: John Papa

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with John Papa. John has been doing web programming for over twenty years on multiple platforms and has been contributing to the developer communities through conferences, authoring books, videos and courses on Pluralsight.

John is on the show to discuss an articles he wrote on A Look at Angular Along Side Vue, and another article on Vue.js  with TypeScript. John talks about the new features with the different versions of Angular technologies, anxiety in the different features, comparisons between the technologies and use case with Angular.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • A look at Angular Along Side Vue - Article
  • Angular 5, Amber,Vue,  React, Angular
  • Angular 2 - different features
  • CLI
  • Spell Webpack
  • Comparisons - Why the anxiety?
  • Opinions of Angular and sprinkling in other technologies
  • Vue is the easy to use with Angular
  • Are there breakpoints with the uses case?
  • Choosing technologies
  • Talk about working with Vue and Angular
  • DSL - Domain Specific Language
  • Vue and 3rd party libraries
  • Talk about Vue working with TypeScript
  • Vue.js  with TypeScript
  • Vue with TypeScript looks similar to Angular
  • Vetur
  • What does 2018 have in store for Angular?
  • Native apps and web functionality
  • And much more!

Links:

Picks:

Corey

Charles

Aimee

Joe

John




ri

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

Panel: 

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Chris Ferdinandi

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

AJ

Aimee

Joe

Chris




ri

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

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Cory House

AJ O'Neal

Joe Eames

Aaron Frost

Special Guests: Dave Geddes

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Cory

AJ

Joe

Aaron

Dave




ri

JSJ 309: WebAssembly and JavaScript with Ben Titzer

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • Cory House
  • Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Ben Titzer

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss WebAssembly and JavaScript with Ben Titzer. Ben is a JavaScript VM engineer and is on the V8 team at Google. He was one of the co-inventors of WebAssembly and he now works on VM engineering as well as other things for WebAssembly. They talk about how WebAssembly came to be and when it would be of most benefit to you in your own code.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Ben intro
  • JavaScript
  • Co-inventor of WebAssembly (Wasm)
  • Joined V8 in 2014
  • asm.js
  • Built a JIT compiler to make asm.js faster
  • TurboFan
  • What is the role of JavaScript? What is the role of WebAssembly?
  • SIMD.js
  • JavaScript is not a statically typed language
  • Adding SIMD to Wasm was easier
  • Easy to add things to Wasm
  • Will JavaScript benefit?
  • Using JavaScript with Wasm pros and cons
  • Pros to compiling with Wasm
  • Statically typed languages
  • The more statically typed you are, the more you will benefit from Wasm
  • TypeScript
  • Is WebAssembly headed towards being used in daily application?
  • Rust is investing heavily in Wasm
  • WebAssembly in gaming
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Cory

Aimee

Ben

  • American Politics




ri

JSJ 311: Securing Express Apps with Helmet.js with Evan Hahn

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Evan Hahn

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss securing Express apps with Helmet.js with Evan Hahn. Evan is a developer at Airtable, which is a company that builds spreadsheet applications that are powerful enough that you can make applications with. He has also worked at Braintree, which does payment processing for companies. They talk about what Helmet.js is, when you would want to use it, and why it can help secure your Express apps. They also touch on when you wouldn’t want to use Helmet and the biggest thing that it saves you from in your code.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Evan intro
  • JavaScript
  • What is Helmet.js?
  • Node and Express
  • Why would you use the approach of Middleware?
  • Helmet is not the only solution
  • Http headers
  • Current maintainer of Helmet.js
  • npm
  • Has added a lot to the project, but is not the original creator
  • Outbound HTTP response headers
  • Helmet doesn’t fully secure your app but it does help secure it
  • How does using Helmet work?
  • Are there instances when you wouldn’t want to use Helmet?
  • No cash middleware
  • Where do you set the configuration options?
  • Top level Helmet module
  • 12 modules
  • What is the biggest thing that Helmet saves you from?
  • Content security policy code
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Evan




ri

MJS 059: Merrick Christensen

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Merrick Christensen

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

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

In particular, We dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Merrick




ri

JSJ 313: Light Functional JavaScript with Kyle Simpson

Panel:

  • AJ ONeal
  • Aimee Knight
  • Joe Eames

Special Guests: Kyle Simpson

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss light functional JavaScript with Kyle Simpson. Kyle is most well-known for writing the books You Don’t Know JS and is on the show today for his book Functional-Light JavaScript. They talk about what functional programming is, what side-effects are, and discuss the true heart behind functional programming. They also touch on the main focus of functional programming and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • You Don’t Know JS
  • Functional-Light JavaScript
  • From the same spirit as first books
  • JavaScript
  • Documents journey of learning
  • What does Functional Programming mean?
  • Functional programming is being re-awoken
  • Many different definitions
  • History of functional programming
  • Programming with functions
  • What is a function?
  • “A collection of operations of doing some task” is what people think functions are
  • What a function really is
  • Map inputs to outputs
  • What is a side-effect?
  • Side-effects should be intentional and explicit
  • The heart of functional programming
  • Refactoring
  • Can’t write a functional program from scratch
  • What functional programming focuses on
  • Making more readable and reliable code
  • Pulling a time-stamp
  • Defining a side-effect
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Joe

Kyle




ri

JSJ 317: Prisma with Johannes Schickling

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • AJ O’Neal

Special Guests: Johannes Schickling

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

AJ

Johannes




ri

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

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Ori Zohar and Gopinath Chigakkagari

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss Cloud-Hosted DevOps with Ori Zohar and Gopinath Chigakkagari at Microsoft Build. Ori is on the product team at VSTS focusing on DevOps specifically on Azure. Gopinath is the group program manager in VSTS primarily working on continuous integration, continuous delivery, DevOps, Azure deployment, etc. They talk about the first steps people should take when getting into DevOps, define DevOps the way Microsoft views it, the advantages to automation, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Ori and Gopi intro
  • VSTS – Visual Studio Team Services
  • VSTS gives developers the ability to be productive
  • Developer productivity
  • What’s the first big step people should be taking if they’re getting into DevOps?
  • The definition of DevOps
  • The people and the processes as the most important piece
  • DevOps as the best practices
  • Automating processes
  • What people do when things go wrong is what really counts
  • Letting the system take care of the problems
  • Have the developers work on what they are actually getting paid for
  • Trend of embracing DevOps
  • Shifting the production responsibility more onto the developer’s
  • Incentivizing developers
  • People don’t account for integration
  • Continuous integration
  • Trends on what customers are asking for
  • Safety
  • Docker containers
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Ori

  • Fitbit
  • Pacific Northwest Hiking

Gopinath

  • Seattle, WA




ri

MJS 066: Henrik Joreteg

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Henrik Joreteg

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Henrik Joreteg. Henrik has been on JavaScript Jabber previously discussing &yet back in December of 2014 on episode 137. He has since then left &yet and now does independent consulting and works on his own projects. He first got into programming when he started a company that created online video tours for houses and he needed to teach himself programming in order to create the website. They talk about what led him to JavaScript, what he’s proud of contributing to the community, what he is working on now, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks

Charles

Henrik




ri

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Vesa Juvonen

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Vesa




ri

JSJ 323: "Building a JavaScript platform that gives you the power to build your own CDN" with Kurt Mackey

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Kurt Mackey

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Kurt Mackey about Fly.io. At Fly.io, they are "building a JavaScript platform that gives you the power to build your own CDN." They talk about how Fly.io came to fruition, how CDN caching works, and what happens when you deploy a Fly app. They also touch on resizing images with Fly, how you actually build JavaScript platforms using Fly, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Fly.io
  • Building a programmable CDN
  • High level overview of Fly.io
  • How did this project come together?
  • CDNs didn’t work with dynamic applications
  • Has been working on this since 2008
  • Extend application logic to the “edge”
  • Putting burden of JavaScript “nastiest” onto the web server
  • Fly is the proxy layer
  • Getting things closer to visitors and users
  • CDN caching
  • Cache APIs
  • Writing logic to improve your lighthouse score
  • Have you built in resizing images into Fly?
  • Managing assets closer to the user
  • Can you modify your own JavaScript files?
  • What happens when you deploy a Fly app
  • Having more application logic
  • DOM within the proxy
  • Ghost
  • React and Gatsby
  • Intelligently loading client JavaScript
  • How do you build the JavaScript platform?
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

AJ

Kurt




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JSJ 325: Practical functional programming in JavaScript and languages like Elm with Jeremy Fairbank

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • Joe Eames
  • AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Jeremy Fairbank

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Jeremy Fairbank about his talk Practical Functional Programming. Jeremy is a remote software developer and consultant for Test Double. They talk about what Test Double is and what they do there and the 6 things he touched on in his talk, such as hard to follow code, function composition, and mutable vs immutable data. They also touch on the theory of unit testing, if functional programming is the solution, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Jeremy intro
  • Works for Test Double
  • What he means by “remote”
  • What is Test Double?
  • They believe software is broken and they are there to fix it
  • His talk - Practical Functional Programming
  • The 6 things he talked about in his talk
  • Practical aspects that any software engineer is going to deal with
  • Purity and the side effects of programming in general
  • Hard to follow code
  • Imperative VS declarative code
  • Code breaking unexpectedly
  • Mutable data VS immutable data
  • The idea of too much code
  • Combining multiple functions together to make more complex functions
  • Function composition
  • Elm, Elixir, and F#
  • Pipe operator
  • Scary to refactor code
  • Static types
  • The idea of null
  • The theory of unit testing
  • Is functional programming the solution?
  • His approach from the talk
  • And much, much more!

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JSJ 328: Functional Programming with Ramda with Christine Legge

Panel: 

  • Joe Eames
  • Aimee Knight
  • AJ O'Neal
  • Joe Eames

Special Guests: Christine Legge

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Christine Legge about functional programming with Ramda. Christine is a front-end software engineer and just recently got a new job in New York working at Google. Ramda is a utility library in JavaScript that focuses on making it easier to write JavaScript code in a functional way. They talk about functional programming and what it is, using Ramda in Redux, and referential transparency. They also touch on why she first got into Ramda, compare Ramda to Lodash and Underscore, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • Chirstine intro 
  • Works as a front-end software engineer
  • What is Ramda
  • JavaScript
  • Utility library like Lodash and Underscore
  • Lodash and Underscore VS Ramda
  • Functional programming
  • Ramda and Functional programming as a mindset
  • Ramda at ZenHub
  • Ramda with Redux and React
  • What is referential transparency?
  • Why would you use Ramda VS Lodash or Underscore?
  • Why she first got into Ramda
  • Didn’t always want to be a programmer
  • Background in Math
  • Learning functional programming as a new programmer
  • Erlang
  • DrRacket and Java
  • Ramda makes it easy to compose functions
  • Creating clean and reusable code
  • How do you start using Ramda?
  • And much, much more! 

Links:

Sponsors

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Charles

Aimee

AJ

  • Goat’s Milk

Joe

Christine




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MJS 076: Kevin Griffin

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kevin Griffin

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kevin Griffin. Kevin is one of the hosts of the 2 Frugal Dudes Podcast which helps programmers learn how to be smarter with handling their money. He first got into programming really young when his Dad brought home a computer and he was curious about it so he read books and taught himself basic programming that way. They talk about his first job out of college and how that has impacted him now, the fact that you have to create your own job security, and what kind of frameworks he uses. They also touch on the importance of exposing yourself to new technologies and being open-minded, what he is working on currently, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

  • JavaScript Jabber Episode 273
  • Helping programmers handle their money
  • 2 Frugal Dudes Podcast
  • Runs financial peace university at his church
  • Mindset is everything
  • How did you first get into programming?
  • Got started really young when his Dad brought home a computer
  • DOS for Dummies
  • Taught himself very basic coding
  • Really into text adventures as a child – wrote some of his own
  • Taught Logo in Middle school
  • Computer Science degree in college
  • Got into software developer community because he was laid off from first job
  • You have to build your own job security
  • Do you do JavaScript full-time?
  • Doesn’t like to pigeon hole himself into one language
  • C++ and C#
  • Didn’t want to support JavaScript originally
  • Using jQuery, Knockout, Ember, and Backbone
  • Working with Vue and React now
  • The same problems persist now, just with different frameworks
  • Looking at the project and then deciding which tool to use
  • And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks

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Kevin




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JSJ 329: Promises, Promise.finally(), and Async/await with Valeri Karpov

Panel:

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

Special Guests: Valeri Karpov 

In this episode, the panel talks with programmer, Valerie Karpov from Miami, Florida. He is quite knowledgeable with many different programs, but today’s episode they talk specifically about Async/Await and Promise Generators. Val is constantly busy through his different endeavors and recently finished his e-book, “Mastering Async/Await.” Check-out Val’s social media profiles through LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, and more.

Show Topics:

1:20 – Val has been on previous episodes back in 2013 & 2016.

1:37 – Val’s background. He is very involved with multiple companies. Go checkout his new book!

2:39 – Promises generators. Understand Promises and how things sync with Promises. Val suggests that listeners have an integrated understanding of issues like error handling.

3:57 – Chuck asks a question.

6:25 – Aimee’s asks a question: “Can you speak to why someone would want to use Async/Await?”

8:53 – AJ makes comments.

10:09 – “What makes an Async/Await not functional?” – Val

10:59 – “What’s wrong with Promises or Async/Await that people don’t like it?” - AJ

11:25 – Val states that he doesn’t think there really is anything wrong with these programs it just depends on what you need it for. He thinks that having both gives the user great power.

12:21 – AJ’s background is with Node and the Python among other programs.

12:55 – Implementing Complex Business Logic.

15:50 – Val discusses his new e-book.

17:08 – Question from Aimee.

17:16 – AJ answers question. Promises should have been primitive when it was designed or somewhat event handling.

17:46 – The panel agrees that anything is better than Call Backs.

18:18 – Aimee makes comments about Async/Await.

20:08 – “What are the core principles of your new e-book?” – Chuck

20:17 – There are 4 chapters and Val discusses, in detail, what’s in each chapter.

22:40 – There could be some confusion from JavaScript for someone where this is their first language. Does Async/Await have any affect on the way you program or does anything make it less or more confusing in the background changes?

24:30 – Val answers the before-mentioned question. Async/Await does not have anyway to help with this (data changes in the background).

25:36 – “My procedural code, I know that things won’t change on me because it is procedural code. Is it hard to adjust to that?” – AJ

26:01 – Val answers the question.

26:32 – Building a webserver with Python

27:31 – Aimee asks a question: “Do you think that there are cases in code base, where I would want to use Promises? Not from a user’s perspective, but what our preferences are, but actual performance. Is there a reason why I would want to use both or be consistent across the board?”

28:17 – Val asks for some clarification to Aimee’s question.

29:14 – Aimee: “My own personal preference is consistency. Would I want to use Promises in ‘x’ scenario and/or use Async/Await in another situation?”

32:28 – Val and AJ are discussing and problem solving different situations that these programs

33:05 – “When would you not want to use Async/Await?” – AJ

33:25 – Val goes through the different situations when he would not use Async/Await. 

33:44 – Chuck is curious about other features of Async/Await and asks Val.

36:40 – Facebook’s Regenerator

37:11 – AJ: “Back in the day, people would be really concerned with JavaScript’s performance even with Chrome.” He continues his thoughts on this topic.

38:11 – Val answers the AJ’s question.

39:10 – Duck JS probably won’t include generators.

41:18 – Val: “Have anyone used Engine Script before?” The rest of the panel had never heard of this before.

42:09 – Windows Scripting Host

42:56 – Val used Rhino in the past.

43:40 – Val: “Going back to the web performance question...”

47:08 – “Where do you see using Async/Await the most?” – Chuck

47:55 – Val uses Async/Await for everything on the backend because it has made everything so easy for him.

48:23 – “So this is why you really haven’t used Web Pack?” – AJ

49:20 – Let’s go to Aimee’s Picks!

50:18 – AJ’s story, first, before we get to Promises.

54:44 – Let’s transition to Promises Finally.

54:53 – Val talks about Promises Finally.

59:20 – Picks

Links:

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AJ

Val




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JSJ 331: “An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2018” with Vitali Zaidman

Panel:

Special Guests: Vitali Zaidman

In this episode, the panel talks with programmer, Vitali Zaidman, who is working with Software Solutions Company. He researches technologies and starts new projects all the time, and looks at these new technologies within the market. The panel talks about testing JavaScript in 2018 and Jest.

Show Topics:

1:32 – Chuck: Let’s talk about testing JavaScript in 2018.

1:53 – Vitali talks about solving problems in JavaScript.

2:46 – Chuck asks Vitali a question.

3:03 – Vitali’s answer.

3:30 – Why Jest? Why not Mocha or these other programs?

3:49 – Jest is the best interruption of what testing should look like and the best practice nowadays. There are different options, they can be better, but Jest has this great support from their community. There are great new features.

4:31 – Chuck to Joe: What are you using for testing nowadays?

4:43 – Joe: I use Angular, primarily.

6:01 – Like life, it’s sometimes easier to use things that make things very valuable.

7:55 – Aimee: I have heard great things about Cypress, but at work we are using another program.

8:22 – Vitali: Check out my article.

8:51 – Aimee: There are too many problems with the program that we use at work.

9:39 – Panelist to Vitali: I read your article, and I am a fan. Why do you pick Test Café over Cypress, and how familiar are you with Cypress? What about Selenium and other programs?

10:12 – Vitali: “Test Café and Cypress are competing head-to-head.”

Listen to Vitali’s suggestions and comments per the panelists’ question at this timestamp.

11:25 – Chuck: I see that you use sign-on...

12:29 – Aimee: Can you talk about Puppeteer? It seems promising.

12:45 – Vitali: Yes, Puppeteer is promising. It’s developed by Google and by Chrome. You don’t want to use all of your tests in Puppeteer, because it will be really hard to do in other browsers.

13:26: Panelist: “...5, 6, 7, years ago it was important of any kind of JavaScript testing you had no idea if it worked in one browser and it not necessarily works in another browser. That was 10 years ago. Is multiple browsers testing as important then as it is now?

14:51: Vitali answers the above question.

15:30 – Aimee: If it is more JavaScript heavy then it could possibly cause more problems.

15:56 – Panelist: I agree with this.

16:02 – Vitali continues this conversation with additional comments.

16:17 – Aimee: “I see that Safari is the new Internet Explorer.”

16:23: Chuck: “Yes, you have to know your audience. Are they using older browsers? What is the compatibility?”

17:01 – Vitali: There are issues with the security. Firefox has a feature of tracking protection; something like that.

17:33 – Question to Vitali by Panelist.

17:55 – Vitali answers the question.

18:30 – Panelist makes additional comments.

18:43 – If you use Safari, you reap what you sow.

18:49 – Chuck: I use Chrome on my iPhone. (Aimee does, too.) Sometimes I wind up in Safari by accident.

19:38 – Panelist makes comments.

19:52 – Vitali tells a funny story that relates to this topic.

20:45 – There are too many standards out there.

21:05 – Aimee makes comments.

21:08 – Brutalist Web Design. Some guy has this site – Brutalist Web Design – where he says use basic stuff and stop being so custom. Stop using the web as some crazy platform, and if your site is a website that can be scrolled through, that’s great. It needs to be just enough for people to see your content.

22:16 – Aimee makes additional comments about this topic of Brutalist Web Design.

22:35 – Panelist: I like it when people go out and say things like that.

22:45 – Here is the point, though. There is a difference between a website and a web application. Really the purpose is to read an article.

23:37 – Vitali chimes in.

24:01 – Back to the topic of content on websites.

25:17 – Panelist: Medium is very minimal. Medium doesn’t feel like an application.

26:10 – Is the website easy enough for the user to scroll through and get the content like they want to?

26:19 – Advertisement.

27:22 – See how far off the topic we got?

27:31 – These are my favorite conversations to have.

27:39 – Vitali: Let’s talk about how my article got so popular. It’s an interesting thing, I started researching “testing” for my company. We wanted to implement one of the testing tools. Instead of creating a presentation, I would write first about it in Medium to get feedback from the community as well. It was a great decision, because I got a lot of comments back. I enjoyed the experience, too. Just write about your problem in Medium to see what people say.

28:48 – Panelist: You put a ton of time and energy in this article. There are tons of links. Did you really go through all of those articles?

29:10 – Yes, what are the most permanent tools? I was just reading through a lot of comments and feedback from people. I tested the tools myself, too!

29:37 – Panelist: You broke down the article, and it’s a 22-minute read.

30:09 – Vitali: I wrote the article for my company, and they ad to read it.

30:24 – Panelist: Spending so much time – you probably felt like it was apart of your job.

30:39 – Vitali: I really like creating and writing. It was rally amazing for me and a great experience. I feel like I am talented in this area because I write well and fast. I wanted to express myself.

31:17 – Did you edit and review?

31:23 – Vitali: I wrote it by myself and some friends read it. There were serious mistakes, and that’s okay I am not afraid of mistakes. This way you get feedback.

32:10 – Chuck: “Some people see testing in JavaScript, and people look at this and say there are so much here. Is there a place where people can start, so that way they don’t’ get too overwhelmed? Is there a way to ease into this and take a bite-size at a time?”

32:52 – Vitali: “Find something that works for them. Read the article and start writing code.”

He continues this conversation from here on out.

34:03 – Chuck continues to ask questions and add other comments.

34:16 – Vitali chimes-in. 

34:38 – Chuck. 

34:46 – Vitali piggybacks off of Chuck’s comments.

36:14 – Panelist: Let’s go back to Jest. There is a very common occurrence where we see lots of turn and we see ideas like this has become the dominant or the standard, a lot of people talk about stuff within this community. Then we get this idea that ‘this is the only thing that is happening.’ Transition to jQuery to React to... With that context do you feel like Jest will be a dominant program? Are we going to see Jest used just as common as Mocha and other popular programs?

38:15 – Vitali comments on the panelist’s question.

38:50 – Panelist: New features. Are the features in Jest (over Jasmine, Mocha, etc.) so important that it will drive people to it by itself?

40:30 – Vitali comments on this great question.

40:58 – Panelist asks questions about features about Jest.

41:29 – Vitali talks about this topic.

42:14 – Let’s go to picks!

42:14 – Advertisement.

Links:

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Picks:

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Chuck

Vitali