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

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

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

[1:56] Is Node 8 just an update or is there more?

• More than just an update
• Two main points:
• Improved Prana support
• Native API
• Native APIs are helpful for Native Add-ons. For both the consumer and the developer side.
• Prior to update these Node Native modules ran in C++ and bound to specific to Node 8 APIs.
• Causes these modules to be updated or reconciled every time these modules are rereleased.
• Creates burden for module maintainers.
• Creates friction in upgrading Node versions in production departments.
• If you have a deployment depending on a certain Native module, some of the modules may not get updated in time when updating your Node versions. Keeping people from updating Node.
• Creates compatibility issues with Node users not using Node 8
• Experimental support for a Native layer in Node 8 to eliminate these issues as much as possible.
• Important milestone for the module ecosystem.
• You can write extensions for Node in C++ and it decouples V8 so you can use something else on the front.
• Modules takes dependency on V8 API specific to a particular version. So if V8 changes your module will be extracted from that.
• As a side benefit, you can have another VM to take advantage of that.
• Major version upgrades mean updating Native modules and usually some of those modules haven’t updated to the newest version of Node and be complicated.
• Deep dependency wise, about 30% depends on a Native module somewhere
• In the future, with the Native API, you’ll be able to update Node without breaking modules.

[5:51] What kind of work went into this?

• Most of the work was in C++
• First thing that was done was, they looked at the top dependent Native modules in the ecosystem.
• Looked for what kind of V8 exposure they had and cataloged it
• Looked at how these APIs and what their purposes were
• Looked for a way to extract them so that they are part of Node Core
• Created neutral APIs, now part of the Node core.
• All C APIs
• Also has a C++ wrapper to improves usability of the API.

[7:17] What’s an example of what you can do with these APIs?

• Native modules allows for tighter integration and better module performance
• Specific APIs that you can use in V8 that isn’t available through JavaScript
• If you have a C++ variable code and you want to expose a variable into JavaScript, that is V8 API note a Node 8 API
• Having it bound directly to the VM was something they wanted for a long time
• Google controls V8 and they bind to V8
• Created a better relationship with Google starting in IOJS
• Also worked with Microsoft with their Node Shocker work.
• Same with SpiderMonkey
• SpiderNode is in the works

[9:23] Have you guys done any testing for performance?

• Some. There is a performance working group.
• There is a need to stay on top of V8
• V8 team has focused on new language features
• Many features have been added over the years
• Many didn’t come in optimized
• The performance profile has changed with these features
• If you’re using new language features, you will see a performance boost
• In core, still tracking down code that was specific to the old optimizer and rewriting i to work the new optimizer
• Turbo C compiler hasn’t landed yet, but is to come.
• Will have a completely different performance profile
• In most real world applications it will be faster
• Waiting on the release to take a version of V8 to make it easier to upgrade features in the future

[11:28] Are the new features picked up from V8 or implemented in Node?

• It’s all in V8
• Better longterm support
• Promises are made better in Node as a platform
• Added new method called util.promisify()
• Implementation comes from V8
• Allows for more optimization for promises in Node core
• Promise support for the one-deprecated domains module.

[13:02] Is there anything more than NMP 5?

• First off, delete your NMP cache.
• It’s in your home directory usually with a .npm extension

[14:09] What are the new features in V8?

• Unlimited heap sizes, previously had a 4gb limit. No fixed limit.

[14:09] Will you see things like chakra come out tuned for servers?

• Profiles of a server for application process are getting smaller
• Getting cut into containers and VMs and micro services
• Vms that have cold boot time and run quickly in a strained environment is looking more like what we will see in the future
• Yes, especially if you’re using cloud functions
• V8 is optimized for phones, but Chakra is even more so
• Looking for opportunities for VMs can be solely optimized for a device target
• Node take advantage of that VM
• VM neutrality is an interesting concept
• VM Vendors trying to optimize it based on workloads of a server
• Opens opportunities for Node
• Node Chakra has been proved to iOS. You can cut off jitting off which was a requirement to be able to be in the Apple App Store
• Node is not just for servers anymore
• Node doesn’t take a long time configuring it
• When a developer runs code on an IoT or a mobile app they don’t control the VM that is bundled, they run it on top of Node and it just works.
• VM neutrality gives a new vector, so you can swam a whole different VM

[18:44] When running different engines like iOS vs Android, does the profile change?

• What it comes down to is if it’s eventive programming
• The browser is an eventive environment, is very efficient waiting for things to happen before it does something
• The way that we program servers and nodes are the same as well
• the basics are the same generally
• environmental differences exist but the programming model is usually the same
• What does impact it is memory and processor and hardware and things like that
• That is where tuning the VM comes into play

[20:29] What is the new Async Hooks API used for?

• Node has been lacking for automated inspection of Async Hook
• No way for Node to tell you when scheduling and beginning of an Async operation. Hook helps with that
• it’s a way for developers to write debugging features
• Node tells the application that it’s working with Asynchronous way.
• The embedded inspector has been embedded since Node 6
• Now has a JavaScript API to use it
• You can use things like Chrome debugger inside the running node process
• Old debugging protocol has been removed
• VM.run is still there but in the process of being deprecated

[22:34] How like is the experimental Node API will change?

• Marked as experimental because it’s the first time in the open
• Hopefully out of experimental soon
• Soon can port API to the existing LTS
• Looking for more people to participate with the new API and give feedback
• Fix any concerns before it goes to LTS
• Some other experimental things are in the works like ASync Hooks and how it interacts with promises
• Renaming some features
• Another new feature - serializer and deserializer that comes with V8
• experimental but will most likely stay

[25:31] what is your standard for going to LTS?

• Major releases every 6 months
• Next Oct Node 9 will come out and then Node 8 will be LTS
• Documentation, updates, additions etc will be ready then
• Plan to do it for 2.5 years
• Every even releases come out to LTS as the odd release comes out
• Helps keeps a current line while having something new in the release line
• Node 6 is the current LTS version

[27:26] What are you taking out or deprecating in Node 8?

• Use the word deprecate sparingly
• If many people use features, it’s hard to get rid of
• Security issue with Buffer, constructor argument was ambiguous
• Had added APIs that were more explicit over time and pushed those
• Now it will be deprecated

[28:43] 21% - 33% Performance increase with some Node updates

• Someone online updated their React app to Node 8 and found an 21% - 33% increase
• Benchmarking group tests to make sure things are getting faster
• V8 is always getting faster as well
• Code changes fast and so there is a chance performance slows down so they have people to check
• Benchmark test are all automated by a team

[30:47] Is it safe to just switch to Node 8?

• For front-end, yes
• clear your NPM cache
• Back use cases will usually wait until LTS

[31:28] Where any of the features hard to implement?

• The API work took about a year
• It was a collaboration which made it interesting
• IBM, Intel, Google were involved
• The collaboration took a while
• Also Async hooks took at least a year.
• Async hooks used to be called async wraps and has been in the work for almost 3 years
• many of the changes were the accumulation of small chances

[33:07] It’s the little things

• Letting people get small changes in accumulate into a big difference
• the product gets much better that way

[33:57] What versions of Node are you actively updating?

• Current releases of Node 8 for a half of year
• Node 6 is LTS
• Additional year of maintenance of previous LTSs.
• Schedule is at http://github.com/node8js/lts in a chart
• Support for Node 4 with only critical updates, Node 6 minor updates, and Node 8
• Node 7 doesn’t get much support unless it’s vital security supports.
• If you’re running 0.10 or 0.12 stop. Those do not get security fixes anymore

[35:42] Where do you see things going from here?

• Mostly still working out Async hooks
• Maybe add some web worker or worker support for Node JS
• ES module support
• Working to make promises better
• Working on the performance profile and internal systems

[20:29] What is the adoption like of Node 8?

• Node team gets better at getting people to adopt quickly
• but about 5% - 6% will not upgrade
• community doubles each year at 8 million users right now
• Here is a graph on Twitter posted by NPM
• Limiting breaks and softly deprecating things makes it’s easier to upgrade

[40:11] How can people contribute and get involved?

• NodeToDo.org shows how to make contribution
• Occasionally major conferences have information on how to contribute
• Test it out and help make it stronger

[42:08] If people install Node 8 and have issues what can they do?

• If it’s an NPM problem check with them
• clear cache!
• install newest version with: npm install -g npm@latest
• Report problems to either NPM or Node
• If you’re not sure where the problem is, check github.com/nodejs/help

Links

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

Mikael on Twitter and GitHub Arunesh on Twitter Anna on Twitter

Picks

AJ

Overclocked Remix Super Mario RPG Window to The Stars

Amiee

Blogpost RisingStack on Node 8
2 Frugal Dudes

Charles

Homeland
House of Cards

Joe

Shimmer Lake

Mikael

Blake2b-wasm

Aremesh

Current Nightly News

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

• The Circle
• Spontaneity/Happiness: AJ tells a story about a woman he saw running through sprinklers.
• Oh the places you'll go by Dr. Seuss: AJ talks about a journal entry he read at a yard sale.

Mike Ammerlaan

• Super hot VR on Oculus Rift

Vesa Juvonen

• Family

A big thanks to Microsoft, DotNetRocks, and Build!

MJS 028 Zach Kessin

In this episode we have another JavaScript Story, this time our guest is Zach Kessin. Zach is a Developer and consultant. On the server side he works with Erlang and Elixir. On the front end he works on Elm. He also also written a few books for O’Reilly and a video course for Manning available sometime in the fall. He was a guest on episode 57 and is here with us today to tell us his story. Stay tuned!

[2:48] How did you get into programming.

Zack tells the story about how when he was 7 he asked his mother for a computer. She agreed that if he paid for half of it somehow, then she would help him get it. He Gathered his half by calling relatives and gathering funds. His mom taught him Basic and Logo. He also learned Pascal. While in University he picked up the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and loved it. He talks about remembering writing a HTML forum but not knowing how to submit entries. After college he started working.

[4:38] Resources then vs now.

Charles adds that if you’re tenacious enough to call your family members to find funding to buy a computer to learn, then you probably have the drive it takes to be a programmer. Charles and Zack talk about how in the 80s it was rare to have access to a computer, and now homes have multiple computers throughout. The resources are more readily available now with the internet. If you’re looking to get into development, there are plenty of great resources.

[7:45] How did you get into JavaScript and Erlang?

Zach starts explaining by telling how he get into JavaScript before the internet really existed. His first JavaScript program exposure was a loan calculator at a bank. Early on the only thing you could do was validate forms, but over time it grew. He started working for a company writing php. He felt like it wasn’t as functional or elegant as he was hoping for. He found various languages and landed on Erlang. Erland was designed to work for programming telephone switches. Due to phone services nature, It handles high scale, high reliability, has to be upgraded on the fly, etc. Zach talks about how server programming looks very similar to phone line programming. Zach adds that a few years ago he wanted work on some front end and after looking around finally he learned about Elm. He says that he is always looking for what’s new and useful.

[14:26] Programming Languages Change the Way We Think

Charles points out that it’s very interesting out about how functional programming has played out. He mentions that many JavaScript programmers use functional style programming to help with speed or efficiency. He adds that a fully functional programming language is very interesting and could be helpful. Zach talks about how learning new languages helps adjust the way we think.

[16:45] How have you contributed to the development community?

Charles starts off with mentioning Zach’s podcast that was called Mostly Erlang. Zach adds that he has wrote two books for O’ Reilly, one on HTML5 and Erlang. He has done some blogging and is creating a video course called Startup Elm. He mentions that he spends most of his time teaching. He admires people who write libraries and sustains them over years, but it isn’t something he sees himself getting into. He adds that having the libraries are useless unless you have someone to communicate about it and teach it. Charles mentions that contributions come in various ways and the community needs those sort of teachers. Zach mentions that he often speaks at conferences and meet ups. Public speaking can be a great way to progress your career. Charles brings up the idea of “Sweeping the dojo floor”. He was introduced to this idea by Dave Hoover. Sweeping the dojo floor means that you’ve got enough experience to talk about the topic, but maybe not fully contribute and so you do things like document code, or write articles and outreach for the topic. Talks can lead to work. You can easily find research papers and do talks on that. Zach adds that sometimes in a community, you see the same speakers over and over and new speakers are needed. Zach also mentions that there are plenty of opportunities to do talks in something other than english.

[26:36] What are you working on now?

Zach talks about the list of things he is working on. Starting with Startup Elm and it’s live course that will be happening in October. He is also working on a SaSS product for Instagram marketers called SquareTarget. He adds that he has a day job as well.

Picks

Zach

Intrepid Large Format Camera Kickstarter

Charles

Toast Masters
Zapier
Javascriptjabber.com/slack

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

• Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel 
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki 
• Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

Aimee

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

Charles

• Money Master the Game by Tony Robbins 
• ELPs (Endorsed Local Providers) Dave Ramsey

Sean

• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle
• Mr. Money Mustache Blog 
• www.mint.com

Kevin

• Unshakable by Tony Robbins
• YNABS 
• The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley

Links

• 2 Frugal Dudes Twitter
• Sean's Twitter
• Kevin's Twitter
• www.swiftkick.in
• www.kevgriffin.com
• http://earlyretirementroadmap.com/
• 2 Frugal Dudes Podcast

JSJ 274 Amazon Voice Services and Echo Skills with Terrance Smith

On today’s episode of JavaScript Jabber, we have panelists Joe Eames, Aimee Knight, Charles Max Wood, and we have special guest Terrance Smith. He’s here today to talk about the Amazon Alexa platform. So tune in and learn more about Amazon Voice Services!

[01:00] – Introduction to Terrance Smith

Terrance is from Hacker Ferrer Software. They hack love into software.

[01:30] – Amazon Voice Service

What I’m working on is called My CareTaker named probably pending change. What it will do and what it is doing will be to help you be there as a caretaker’s aid for the person in your life. If you have to take care an older parent, My CareTaker will be there in your place if you have to work that day. It will be your liaison to that person. Your mom and dad can talk to My CareTaker and My CareTaker could signal you via SMS or email message or tweet, anything on your usage dashboard, and you would be able to respond. It’s there when you’re not.

[04:35] – Capabilities

Getting started with it, there are different layers. The first layer is the Skills Kit for generally getting into the Amazon IoT. It has a limited subset of the functionality. You can give commands. The device parses them, sends them to Amazon’s endpoint, Amazon sends a call back to your API endpoint, and you can do whatever you want. That is the first level. You can make it do things like turn on your light switch, start your car, change your thermostat, or make an API call to some website somewhere to do anything.

[05:50] – Skills Kit

Skills Kit is different with AVS. Skills Kit, you can install it on any device. You’re spinning up a web service and register it on Amazon’s website. As long as you have an endpoint, you can register, say, the Amazon Web Services Lambda. Start that up and do something. The Skills Kit is literally the web endpoint response. Amazon Voice Services is a bit more in-depth.

[07:00] – Steps for programming

With the Skills Kit, you register what would be your utterance, your skill name, and you would give it a couple of sets of phrases to accept. Say, you have a skill that can start a car, your skill is “Car Starter.” “Alexa tell Car Starter to start the car.” At which point, your web service will be notified that that is the utterance. It literally has a case statement. You can have any number of individual conditional branches outside of that. The limitation for the Skills Kit is you have to have the “tell” or “ask” and the name of the skill to do whatever. It’s also going to be publicly accessible. For the most part, it’s literally a web service.

[10:55] – Boilerplates for AWS Lambda

Boilerplates can be used if you want to develop for production. If you publish a skill, you get free AVS instance time. You can host your skill for free for some amount of time. There are GUI tools to make it easier but if you’re a developer, you’re probably going to do the spin up a web service and deal it that way.

[11:45] – Do you have to have an Amazon Echo?

At one point, you have to have the Echo but now there is this called Echoism, which allows you to run it in your browser. In addition to that, you can potentially install it on a device like a Raspberry Pi and run Amazon Voice Services. The actual engine is on your PC, Mac, or Linux box. You have different options.

[12:35] – Machine learning

There are certain things that Amazon Alexa understand now that it did last year or time before that like understanding utterances and phrases better. A lot of the machine learning is definitely under the covers. The other portion of it Alexa Voice Service, which is a whole engine that you have untethered access to other portions like how to handle responses. That’s where you can build a custom device and take it apart. So the API that we’re working with here is just using JSON and HTTP.

[16:40] – Amazon Echo Show

You have that full real-time back and forth communication ability but there is no video streaming or video processing ability yet. You can utilize the engine in such a way that Amazon Voice Services can work with your existing tool language. If you have a Raspberry Pi and you have a camera to it, you can potentially work within that. But again, the official API’s and docs for that are not available yet.

[27:20] – Challenges

There’s an appliance in this house that listens to everything I say. There’s that natural inclination to not trust it, especially with the older generations. Giving past that is getting people to use the device. Some of the programming sides of it are getting the communication to work, doing something that Alexa isn’t pre-programmed to do. There isn’t a lot of documentation out there, just a couple of examples. The original examples are written in Java and trying to convert it to Node or JavaScript would be some of the technical challenges. In addition, getting it installed and setup takes at least an hour at the beginning. There’s also a learning curve involved.

[29:35] – Is your product layered in an Echo or is your product a separate device?

Terrance’s product is a completely separate device. One of the functionality of his program is medicine reminders. It can only respond to whatever the API calls from Amazon tells you to respond to but it can’t do anything like send something back. It can do an immediate audio response with a picture or turn on and off a light switch. But it can’t send a message back in like two hours from now. You do want your Alexa device to have (verbally) a list of notifications like on your phone. TLDR, Terrance can go a little further with just the Skills Kit.

[32:00] – Could you set it up through a web server?

Yes. There are examples out there. There’s Alexa in the browser. You can open up a browser and communicate with that. There are examples of it being installed like an app. You can deploy it to your existing iPhone app or Android app and have it interact that way. Or you can have it interact independently on a completely different device like a Raspberry Pi. But not a lot of folks are using it that way.

[33:10] – Monetization

Amazon isn’t changing anything in terms of monetization. They make discovery a lot easier though. If you knew the name of the app, you could just say, “Alexa, [tell the name of the app].” It will do a lazy load of the actual skill and it will add it to your available skill’s list.

However, there is something called the Alexa Fund, which is kind of a startup fund that they have, which you can apply for. If you’re doing something interesting, there is a number of things you have to do. Ideally, you can get funding for whatever your product is. It is an available avenue for you.

[36:25] – More information, documentation, walkthroughs

The number one place to go to as far as getting started is the Amazon websites. They have the Conexant 4-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit. It has 4 mics and it has already a lot of what you need. You have to boot it up and/or SSH into it or plug it up and code it. They have a couple of these kits for $300 to $400. It’s one of the safe and simpler options.

There are also directions for the AVS sites which is under Alexa Voice Services, where you can go to the Github from there. There will give you directions using the Raspberry Pi.  If not that, there’s also the Slack chatroom. It is alexaslack.com. Travis Teague is the guy in charge in there.

Picks

Joe Eames

• Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak

Aimee Knight

• Conference: React Rally
• Pancakes

Charles Max Wood

• Conference: Angular Dev Summit
• Conference: React Dev Summit
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

Terrance Smith

• Language: Elm
• Youtube channel: The School of Life
• Game: Night in the Woods
• Hacker Ferret Software
• Hackerferret.com

MJS 030: Mike North

This episode is a My JavaScript Story featuring Mike North. Tune in to learn more about how Mike started his journey as a developer in JavaScript!

[00:01:15] Introduction to Mike

Mike has a Frontend Masters Series for Ember 2 and has two other courses that help developers stand out from the software perspective.

[00:02:45] How did you get into programming?

Mike describes that he has taken a non-linear path to get to where he is now. He started programming as a teenager. He was laying dry wall with a construction company when he was 15 or 16. At the end of the job, he built a training app for the company in order to decrease their paperwork. Mike states that the programming work he does day-to-day he only learned two or three years ago.

[00:04:13] Is that due to things changing so quickly?

Mike’s role and passion keeps evolving. People pick what is important to them. A goal of his is to always stay learning; he enjoys having a deep understanding of topics. He enjoys using brand new skills and calls himself a “perpetual beginner.” Mike is always talking about something that he has just figured out how to do.

[00:05:20] How do you approach keeping current?

Mike thinks that it is impossible to keep up with everything. It is a full time job to keep track of everything. Developers don’t need to spend so much time going through information. He goes to teams once every quarter and helps them absorb the information in a distilled way so they do not have to filter through stuff such as what frameworks are worth paying attention to. This condenses the information and frees them from having to learn everything. Instead, they are able to focus on their product.

[00:08:27] How did you get into JavaScript and web development?

When Mike entered college, he was going into mechanical engineering and did not want to write code. He thought it was boring. When he began getting into code, it was because he could use it to solve real world problems. When he first started, he wrote engineering simulation code for Formula One racecars. When the iPhone came out, it gave him clarity that he wanted to work with that. He began to work with jQuery Mobile. He liked doing this enough that he ran a consultancy at night. He ran projects that he had no previous experience with in order to learn skills that would help him make JavaScript his full-time job.

[00:13:29] Where does Ember fit in with all of this?

When Mike started working at Yahoo, he became very familiar with Ember. Ember allowed employees to treat engineers as resources towards the larger goal of building and merging all apps together instead of having separate pockets of different technology everywhere. There were only a few Ember experts at the time, so Mike took advantage and spent a lot of time to gain expertise with the framework.

[00:16:50] What kinds of contributions do you feel like you’ve made to the JavaScript community?

Mike believes the way he has contributed to the community has evolved over time. In the past, he wrote libraries and worked with issues in the framework itself. The impact he has now is representing newcomers to a technology. He does workshops at conferences. He loves teaching and enabling people.

[00:19:07] How do you structure the learning to make it that it is approachable for people? How do you address both audiences?

As far as newcomers to programming, there is an alarming statistic of companies hiring computer programmers at 400% of the rate at which CS majors can graduate. The demand for software engineers exceeds the ability to educate conventionality. This means companies have to take people seriously that were educated via boot camps. There is a lot of material for new beginners. For people who are established programmers but new to specific technologies, there is a huge gap of material. Video courses, tutorials, and books should be made more accessible for these people. Mike also believes it is the job of a senior engineer to spend time teaching people.

Books, tutorials, and trainings that scrape the surface disappoint Mike. This has informed the techniques he uses to teach during his workshops. Students spend 50% of their time solving problems. His students are given code tests and spend time working how to solve problems. It takes a long time to build his curriculum but it is his main focus right now.

Picks

Mike:

• TypeScript Deep Dive by Basarat Ali Syed
• Proposal for Async Iteration

Charles

• Visual Studio Code
• Frontend Masters 

Links

• Twitter
• www.mike.works

MJS 031: Mike Hostetler

Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Mike Hostetler. Mike talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community. Listen to learn more about Mike!

[00:50] – Introduction to Mike Hostetler

Mike was on episode 133 which was like 2.5 years ago.

[01:45] – How did you get into programming?

First computer

Mike got their first computer when he was 5 or 6 years old. 286 IBM Clone had a command prompt that he spent several years trying to figure out how to code with it until he stumbled on a few basic books at their local public library in junior high. He began teaching himself how to code with QBasic and Borland C++. He, then, found the internet early high school and downloaded the Mosaic browser. He started coding HTML and early JavaScript, late 90’s. Then, he went off to college to get a Computer Science degree.

First job

When Mike was late high school, he decided that he knew enough coding that he was going to try to get a job. He ended up finding web development companies in the phone book and calling each one of them, trying to explain that his 16-year-old self could help them code and build websites. He ended up landing a job and was paid minimum wage to build HTML sites - a lot of 1x1 pixels transparent gifs, coding HTML by hand and notepad. Then, he ended up working for that company for his first couple of years of college as well.

[05:30] – How did you wind up doing JavaScript?

After college, the job that Mike landed was spent on learning Microsoft technologies and then half on the open-source side of learning the LAMP stack. At that time, it required hand-coding JavaScript. His next role is building a custom mapping application which was a single page application that heavily relied upon JavaScript. This was client-side object-oriented. There were no frameworks but it was enough script to build a URL that called a custom CGI to render the map. So, he immediately jumped in and started using the early JavaScript frameworks and prototypes.

The role that Mike was in next was building a touchscreen capable device. They needed custom plug-ins to provide the highlight focus effect around the button. He needed to write a plugin to do that and jQuery has just been released. So, he stripped all the prototype code, throw JQuery in there, and then, write a plug-in to navigate this interface by keyboard.

[09:20] – Contributions with JavaScript

jQuery

Mike’s first participation was on the JQuery project. If you ever use the JQuery plug-ins site, the old site, that was his contribution. He ended up running infrastructure for JQuery for several years. JQuery launched his business career. He switched into an entrepreneur around 2009. Since then, he’s contributed in numerous ways through speaking, leading training, and writing articles. He was a co-author of the JQuery Cookbook.

Node.js

As Node began to get more popular, Mike switched his attention to Node and found passion around the Sails.js project. It was a Node framework that made it easy to build Express-powered apps with Node and limit a lot of the convention over configuration elements of the Sails framework. That morphed into ES6 rewrite of Sails called the Trails framework. Currently, he is an organizer of the Chicago Node.js Meetup and he’s a contributor to the Trails framework.

[11:50] – JQuery challenges and experiences

jQuery 1.4

Mike and the team made community’s problems their problems so the gravity of what they were working didn’t hit them very much until jQuery 1.4. They had an online conference. They all recorded talks and they’re releasing a talk a day for jQuery that will be going to accommodate the 1.4 release. He remembered that he was setting up, managing the servers, and was doing some last-minute configuration. Then, John had tweeted that 1.4 was ready, pointing to jQuery.com. The web server just ground to a halt as he saw the traffic come in off a tweet.

Open-source community

Mike remain friends with a lot of them. According to Mike, they were just normal people who made a choice to lean in, contribute, where those contributions ended up becoming popular. Looking forward, he said that he’s going to continue to contribute to the open-source community. He wants to help the junior developer that is learning ES6 for the first time and is solving a syntax error. From Mike’s perspective, technologies come in waves. jQuery was a wave but jQuery’s wave focuses its energy into JavaScript’s wave. Certain people catch a contribution wave. React is on the upswing. Node is in an interesting spot because they’ve been on the upswing for many years but there’s new work that could be done. He said that had a shot to be at the forefront of the wave and got to see it.

Advice

For anybody else that maybe listening, find a spot where there’s new ground that you can contribute to and just dive in and do what you can to solve a problem to make it better. You’ll catch your wave.

[21:00] – How to pick frameworks

Node frameworks

There was a Reddit thread about Node frameworks in 2017 that listed out all the possible frameworks. The classic answer is to use the right tool for the right job but Mike’s answer is: Node has grown so big that different frameworks are built to different people on the learning curve of Node. The other thing that Node has done is they have this culture of really running away from any Monolithic one-size-fits-all solution. The community of Node has made sure that they make space for an incredible diversity of solutions and frameworks.

Antipattern

The anti-pattern is: what is the best framework of 2017. That’s the wrong question in the Node culture. Look at your team, look at your project, what framework can you be most productive in and what framework can you contribute back into the community with? That is one of the key reasons that Node itself has remained and continued to grow in popularity.

[23:40] – Role in Sails and Trails

Mike’s not contributing to the Sails project at the moment. He has been focusing on the Trails project. He has written a couple of Trails packs or the equivalent of plug-ins, messed around with GraphQL. He is also helping answer questions in the Gitter chat – small ways.

[24:25] – Best ways to contribute

Stack Overflow

Go on to Stack Overflow. Subscribe to tags where you can answer questions. Every answer on Stack Overflow is a contribution. Go, watch, subscribe to the issue queues for the projects that you use. Just even sharing your experience with how you solve a problem, there is somebody that you could reach down to and answer their questions that take their burden off.

Gitter

Get involved in the Gitter chat. Listen, watch, stand on the sidelines, and see what’s going on how the community works.

Pull request

The next step, if you see a problem, submit a pull request, listen to see what the roadmap is, and see what you can contribute.

Infrastructure

A lot of projects need help in infrastructure in their build scripts to produce better-written code. You can document for them. If you wait for the next sexy thing to do, you’ll never get there. Be humble.

Fun

Remember that open-source is fun. If it becomes a drag, you are doing it wrong. Look for the opportunities that are aligned with what you do so it’s a fun, happy experience.

[26:45] – What are you working on now?

Raise Marketplace

Currently, Mike is taking on a new role as Director of Front-end Engineering at Raise Marketplace. It is a marketplace start-up in Chicago. His focus is rebuilding the front-end of Raise on a micro service Node.js in Go service architecture. They have also been listed to help some folks at Google in the web performance team. They are always hiring. If you are looking for a remote role for a start-up. Feel free to reach out to him on Twitter or on Raise.

ModernWeb

Mike’s side-project now is a website called ModernWeb.com, where they help connect companies with teams of software developers and tell the stories of those software projects. A lot of developers are great at writing code but are terrible at telling the awesome things that we do. So, ModernWeb exists to tell the stories of development. The great side effect is companies want to work with you when you tell your stories. They help complete that circle. Go over to ModernWeb.com and you can contact them through the website or you can drop him an email at mike@modernweb.com.

Picks

Mike Hostetler

• App: OmniFocus
• App: Sleep Cycle
• App: Life Cycle
• Zapier
• Twitter: @mikehostetler
• Mike-hostetler.com

Charles Max Wood

• Talk: Setting up and Contributing to Open-source Projects by Kent C. Dodds
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

MJS 032: Feross Aboukhadijeh

Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community to the decentralized web. Listen to learn more about Mike!

[01:00] – Introduction to Feross Aboukhadijeh

Feross was on episode 155 and he talked about Webtorrent. It was 2 years ago.

[01:35] – How did you get into programming?

Toddler

Feross has always been interested in computers and technology. His mom told him a story about how when he was a toddler, he was always watching people whenever they’re using technology – the television, the microwave, or the VCR. She said that he’s trying to imitate what he saw.

HTML and Web proxies

According to Feross, he became seriously interested when he was in middle school when he learned about HTML and wanted to make a personal site. In high school, there was this class that you could take. It’s a tech team where they went around and fixed teachers’ computers because they were understaffed. Some of the computers have administrator privileges turned on for the student accounts as well because some of the software that was required for certain classes needed it. The computers always had viruses on them because people would install first-person shooters and play during class time. They actually have school-wide filtering system so students can’t access certain sites. One of the categories they blocked was downloading sites. In order to even do their job, they have to figure out web proxies to get around the filters. He ended up setting up one of those on his own server.

First website

Feross’ real programming experience was PHP. It was in his junior year of high school. He bought a book in Barnes & Noble about PHP and MySQL. He wanted to build a site to host his favorite flash animations. That project was a database-driven website where people can segment their flash animations and soundboards, prank phone calls, and other internet humor. The site was called freetoflash. That was the first website that he built.

[07:10] – How did you get into JavaScript?

Feross thinks JavaScript is one of those languages that you don’t actually really bother to sit down and learn. There weren’t any good resources. According to him, He really didn’t know JavaScript until he started a company right after he graduated from college. He started taking JavaScript seriously because he was learning Node.js and realized that you can build real things from it. The start-up is called PeerCDN. They’re trying to make a content delivery network that would work in the browser using WebRTC. The idea is you would add a script tag to your website and then we would try to find other people visiting your site that already has the content that you want, you’ll fetch it from them over a peer-to-peer connection to save on your hosting build to reduce your CDN bill. That was a big Node application. It also has intense front-end component. He started learning about NPM, how you build things with microservices, and how do you deploy a JavaScript application. That was in 2013.

[09:35] – Webtorrent

Feross has been trying to transition Webtorrent into a distributed contribution model. It’s always been something that he would give out commit rights. If someone makes a good contribution, he’ll just add them to the Github for it. He recently made it into an organization on Github. He’s hoping to make it something that’s not completely dependent on him in order for it to continue existing. He’s going to be involved with it for the foreseeable future but he’s also trying to do new projects as well besides that. The good news is Webtorrent is mostly done in some sense. It works well. There are bugs. But if you use Webtorrent, especially if you use the desktop application to torrent things, it’s really polished and works nicely.

Picks

Feross Aboukhadijeh

• Decentralized web
• Dat Project
• Beaker Project
• IPFS
• Secure Scuttlebutt
• Patchwork
• Brave
• Twitter: @WebTorrentApp
• Twitter: @feross

Charles Max Wood

• Let’s Encrypt
• Digital Ocean

JSJ 277: Dojo 2 with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly

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

[00:02:03] Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

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

[00:02:22] Introduction to Kitson 

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

[00:02:43] Elevator Pitch for Dojo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call out to Angular 4 vs Angular 2.

[00:12:44] AMD Modules

Why use AMD instead of ES6 modules?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For package builds and CI, Grunt is used.

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

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

Internationalization in Angular 2 or 4 seems unfinished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sitepen Blog series on picking a framework

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

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

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

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

Theming systems is another selling point for Dojo.

[00:34:10] Ending the framework wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:49:08] Testing

They've got intern.

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

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

The Dojo CLI uses intern as the default test framework.

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

Dojo Links

• dojo.io
• github.com/dojo/meta
• sitepen.com/blog
• gitter channel
• github.com/dylans
• twitter.com/dylans
• twitter.com/sitepen
• twitter.com/dojo
• github.com/kitsonk
• twitter.com/kitsonk

Picks

Cory

• Amateur vs Professional

Aimee

• DevFest Florida (use code 'jsjabber')

Chuck

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

Dylan

• zenhub
• HalfStack Conference
• How to choose a framework series on the Sitepen Blog

Kitson

• Dunbar Number

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JSJ BONUS: Web Apps on Linux with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump

In this episode Aimee Knight and Charles Max Wood discuss Microsoft's Web Apps on Linux offering with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump.

[00:37] Michael Crump Introduction

Michael is on the developer experience team for Azure.

[00:52] Jeremy Likness Introduction

Jeremy is on the cloud developer advocacy team. Their mission is to remove friction and support developers and work with teams to build a positive experience.

The NodeJS team is headed up by John Papa. They have teams around the world and involved in many open source communities.

They're focused on building documentation and creating great experiences

[02:54] What is it about Azure that people should be getting excited about?

Azure is a huge platform. It can be overwhelming. They're trying to help you start with your problem and then see the solution as it exists on Azure.

Azure is growing to embrace the needs of developers as they solve these problems.

The experience is intended to be open and easy to use for any developer in any language on any platform. It allows you to work in whatever environment you want.

Standing up applications in production is tough. Azure provides services and facilities (and interfaces) that make it easy to manage infrastructure.

You don't have to be an operations expert.

Chuck mentions this messaging as he heard it at Microsoft Connect() last year.

It's not about bringing you to .NET. It's about making it easy where you're at.

Aimee adds that as a new-ish person in the community and Azure excites her because the portal and tutorials are easy to follow for many new programmers.

A lot of these features are available across command lines, tools, and much more.

The documentation is great. See our interview with Dan Fernandez on the Microsoft Docs.

[12:04] Web Apps on Linux

Web application as a service offering from Microsoft. I don't need to worry about the platform, just what's different about my application.

Web Apps has traditionally been on Windows. Web Apps on Linux is in preview.

You can choose the size of your infrastructure. You only get billed for what you use and can scale up.

Setting up multiple servers, managing synchronization and load balancing is a pain. Web Apps gives you a clean interface that makes this management easy.

You can also scale across multiple datacenters around the world.

[15:06] Why Linux? What's hard about Windows?

Node was originally created on Linux and many tools run nicely on Linux. It was later ported to Windows.

The toolchains and IDE's and build processes is in an ecosystem that is targeted more toward Linux than Windows.

This allows people to work in an environment that operates how they expect instead of trying to map to an underlying Windows kernel.

Aimee gives the example of trying to set up ImageMagick on Windows.

Web Apps on Linux also allows you to build integrations with your tools that let you build, test, and deploy your application automatically.

[19:12] Supported Runtimes

Web Apps on Linux supports Node, PHP, Ruby, and .NET Core.

You can run a docker container with Node up to 6.x. If you want Node 7.x and 8.x you can create your own Docker container.

Web Apps on Linux is build on Docker.

The containers also have SSH, so developers can log into the docker container and troubleshoot problems on the container.

If you can build a container, you can also run it on this service.

At certain levels, there's automatic scaling.

[22:06] Consistency between containers? Shared ownership of state or assets

It depends on how you build your app. The Docker containers have a shared storage where all the containers have access to the same data and state.

There's a system called kudu that makes this really simple.

You can also pull logs across all systems.

You can also use SSH in the browser

[25:23] What's painful about Linux and containers?

How is the application built and how does it manage state so that you can isolate issues.

If you have 20 containers, can you connect to the right one.

It's up to you to manage correlation between containers so you can find the information you need.

Knowing your traffic and understanding what to do to prepare for it with scaling and automation is sometimes more art than science.

[28:28] How should you manage state?

A lot of these systems lend themselves to running stateless, but you don't want to run mongodb on each container versus running one mongodb instance that everything attaches. You want a common place to store data for the entire app for shared state.

[30:34] CosmosDB (was DocumentDB)

It's an API equivalent to MongoDB. It's a database as a service and you can connect your containers to the CosmosDB in Azure using your portal to make it super easy.

You may need to open up some firewall rules, but it should be pretty straightforward.

[34:14] Third Party Logging Management Apps

Azure has a service that provides metrics (Application Insights) and a logging service. Many other companies use elasticsearch based solutions that solve some of these problems as well.

[36:06] How do people use Web Apps on Linux?

Companies building new applications many times want to run without managing any infrastructure. So, they use Azure Functions, and other services on Azure.

Lift and shift: Take a virtual machine and change it into a web app container that they can run in the cloud. They also move from SQL Server on a server to SQL Server on the cloud. Moving from hosted MongoDB to CosmosDB.

You can also use any images on DockerHub.

[40:06] Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Whether you're using a private registry or cloud registry. When you publish a new image, it'll use a webhook to pull the custom image and deploy it. Or to run it through Continuous Integration and then deploy it without any human interaction.

Chuck mentions the case when you haven't logged into a server for a while, there's a huge backlog of system updates. Updating your container definitions makes upkeep automatic.

[42:02] Process files and workers with PM2 format

You can set up instances to run across cores with the PM2 definitions. You can also make it run various types of workers on different containers.

Why did you use PM2? What other uses are there for this kind of setup?

You can tell it which processes to start up on boot. You can also have it restart processes when a file is changed, for example, with a config file you can have it restart the processes that run off that config file.

[45:38] How to get started

Getting started with Node

docs.microsoft.com

Trial account with a few hundred dollars in Azure credit.

Michael's Links

• michaelcrump.net
• @mbcrump
• github.com/mbcrump

Jeremy's Links

• bit.ly/coderblog
• @jeremylikness
• github/jeremylikness

Picks

Aimee

• Having a little bit of mindfulness while waiting on code and tests to run.

Joe

• Ozark on Netflix
• Star Wars: Rogue One

Chuck

• Travelers on Netflix

Jeremy

• Ozark filming in Woodstock, GA
• Autonomous Smart Desk
• LED light strips

Michael

• Conference Call Bingo
• Life (Movie)
• Get Out (Movie)

Tweet this Episode

John-Daniel Trask is the CEO and developer at Raygun.io.

JD and Chuck talk in this episode about learning to program as a kid, the arc of JD's career, and entrepreneurship.

Links:

• 154 JSJ Raygun.io Error Reporting and Workflow with John-Daniel Trask
• JSJ 263 Moving from Node.js to .NET and Raygun.io with John-Daniel Trask
• C
• C++
• Delphi
• NetScape Navigator
• VBScript
• JQuery
• Mindscape
• Raygun.io
• CoffeeScript
• Visual Studio
• Scott Hanselman on Dark Matter Developers
• Tensorflow
• Stripe
• @traskjd

Picks:

JD:

• Keygen.sh
• Octopus Deploy
• JavaScript x86

Chuck:

• The Miracle Morning
• Meditations App
• Vision Board App
• LootCrate
• Game of Thrones Journal
• Zelda Theme Journal

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

• thinkster.io
• https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-code-ide-for-angular-react-7d09348497f4
• @stackblitz 
• stackblitz.com

Picks

Amy

• Promises Series by Andrew Del Prete
• Crossfit 

Joe

• Wholesome Meme
• Sara Cooper

Charles

• Pivotal Tracker 
• MatterMost 
• asana.com
• Zapier

Eric 

• realworld.io 
• David East 

Albert 

• thinkster.io
• Thing Explainer

Panel:

Amy Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Nick Disabato

In this episode, Java Script Jabbers talk with Nick Disabato. Nick is a newbie to JavaScript Jabber. Nick is the founder of Draft, an interaction design agency where he does research driven A/B testing of E-commerce business.

This is a practical episode for those who are running a business and doing marketing for the products and services. Nick talks about A/B testing for a number scenarios within the company, such as for websites, funnels, and various marketing mechanisms. Nick further goes into how this helps companies strategically increase revenue by changing things such as websites design or building funnels.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Testing of changes of Copy, Websites, etc.
• What does it mean of changes, Tools, Framework, Plugins, etc
• Does it matter what tools you use? Framework that works within your stack
• How do make we company money
• Researching for the next test
• Testing for conversion rate to decide which design to go implement - Variant
• Responsibility for the designs
• Feature and getting pay for the service
• Learn more about the resources and Copy Hackers
• Large organization or developers, or a QA department
• Optimization teams
• Usability tests and coming up with A/B tests
• Expertise
• Why should be care?
• And much more!

Links:

Draft

Nick Disabato

@nickd

ConversionXL

AB Testing Manual

Wider Funnels 

Copy Hackers

Picks:

Amiee

• Nodevember 

Charles

• Mike Gehard 
• Admin LTE

Nick

• HotJar.com

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Kye Hohenberger

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers speak with Kye Hohenberger. Kye is a developer and co-founder of Side Way. One of Kye’s most notable works and library is Emotion, a CSS and JS library.

Kye talks about what CSS and JS library is about in the context of the Emotion library system. Kye discusses why this is practical for the writing process, in comparison to other types of tools that do similar jobs. Kye explains the how this tool reduces the number of lines of code and is compact and clearer.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is a CSS and JS library?
• Controlling CSS with JS, what does this solve?
• Style bugs
• What kind of styling are you using vs. complex styles?
• Media query
• A more declarative style
• Using Sass
• Where do you see people using this?
• Class names and you can apply to anything
• How Emotion works!
• Style tags
• Object styles
• What are some of the problems you are solving
• React Emotion - dynamic styles
• How does this compare to other style components?
• Glamor Styles
• How do you test something like this?
• Just Glamor React with Emotion
• Can people use the Babel plugin
• Pure flag and function calls
• And much more!

Links:

• Emotion.sh
• Emotion-js/emotion
• emotion.now.sh
• @TKH44

Picks:

Amiee

• Article on Medium
• Antibiotics and Steroids
• RX Bars 

Charles

• Disney Emoji Blitz 
• How To Get A Job  -  JavaScriptJabber.com

Kye

• Styled System
• Face Paint
• Aussie Bites 

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:

• https://www.ng-book.com/
• http://www.newline.co.bw/
• The History of Money
• @Auser
• Stack.io

Picks:

Amiee

• Article -  Learn Block Chain by Building One
• The Source Bar

Charles

• Microsoft Connect - Meet up at 7pm
• Stranger Thing Season 2

AJ

• Spice Labels and Spice Jars
• Marriage

Ari

• Moving to NYC
• Learn Block Chain by Building One

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

Joe Eames

Special Guests: 

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Dirk Hohndel about Open Source Software. Dirk is the Chief Open Source Officer at VMWare and has been working with open source for over 20 years. Dirk duties as the Chief Open Source Officer is to engage with the open source community and help promote the development between the community, companies, and customers.

Dirk provides historical facts about open sources to current processes. The discussion covers vision and technological advances with languages, security, and worries of using open source software, view/consumption and burnout on maintaining a project. This is a great episode to learn about more different avenues of Open Source.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What does the Chief Open Source Officer do?
• What is really different and has stayed the same in open source?
• Technological advances
• Good engineering and looking ahead or forward
• 100 million lines of code running a car…
• This is in everything..
• Production environments
• Security
• Bugs in the software and the security issues
• Scaling and paying attention
• Where should we be worried about open source
• Notation and data sets
• Write maintainable software
• How does VMWare think about open source?
• View and Consumption of open source
• The burnout of open source projects - how to resolve this abandonment
• To much work to maintain open source  - not a money issue
• Scaling the team workload not the money
• Contribution and giving back
• Companies who do and don’t welcome open source
• What to do to make a project open source?
• Adopting an API
• And much more!

Links:

• @_drikhh
• VMWare
• Drikhh - everywhere!
• https://github.com/dirkhh

Picks:

Aimee

• De Contact 
• Dodow 

Dirk

• Track This Critical Thinking

Charles

• Nicholas Zakas - Books 

Corey

• Fun Fun Function Show

Joe

• Dice Forge
• Concept of empathy

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:

• @garethmcc
• @expatexplore
• gareth.mccumskey.com
• https://github.com/garethmcc
• serverless.com

Picks:

Aimee

• Serverless Architectures 
• NG-BE Conference 

AJ

• Documentary on Enron
• Hard Thing about Hard Things 

Charles

• Serverless Framework
• The Storm Light Achieves 
• Avengers: Infinity War

Gareth

• Building MicroServices 
• Skeptics Guide To The Universe Podcast
• Expate Explore 

Joe 

• Wonder -  Movie
• Gloom In Space - Board Game 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Kirill Gavrylyuk

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Kirill

• Shared Debugging with VS Code - Keynote

Charles

• USB Powered Monitor on Amazon 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kitson Kelly

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kitson Kelly. Kitson is a return guest, previously on JavaScript Jabber 277. Kitson is the CTO at SitePen, and has been working and maintaining Dojo 2 for the last couple years.

Kitson talks about his journey as a developer. First, sparking his interest with old Atari games and getting his first computer in his early years.  Kitson talks about his education background and introduction to computers in high school and hang out with other in the same programming niche. Kitson talks about his challenges not having a degree in computer science, but still very successful as a developer after climbing the corporate latter.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Atari Games and old first computer
• Hangout with the computer nerds
• Community college
• No actual formal computer science degree
• Tech Support and Self Taught
• Challenges with not degree
• Climbing the latter
• Troubles even with a degree
• Is a degree in computer science really needed?
• Experience verses degree
• Working with other people is important
• Getting into JavaScript and Dojo
• What kept you working in JavaScript
• How do you get to being CTO and SitePen?
• What are you most proud of with the work on Dojo
• Contributions
• Side Projects  - Dojo 2
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://github.com/kitsonk
• Kistson Kelly
• https://www.sitepen.com
• https://dojo.io

Picks:

Kitson

• SVG 
• Noun Project

Charles

• adminlte.io
• Ruby on Rails, Jquery
• podwrench.com

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Nishant Thacker

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Nishant Thacker. Nishant is the technical product manager for all things big data at Microsoft. Nishant mentions the many new technologies and announcements he is in-charge of at Microsoft.

Nishant is on the show to talk about Big Data and gives advice on how to process data and acquire deep insight of your customers. This is a great episode to understand the development of data systems that are the backbone of some marketing tools.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Processing Metrics
• Processing into report and usable information
• Data lake
• Collecting data points
• Creating and maintaining the data lake in its raw form
• Scale up engines and limits
• Commodity machines and leverage
• Big data means to scale out
• Specialized engines for audio and video files
• How to have a cohesive report?
• Writing and Querying across data
• Storing raw data and retrieve data
• Data cluster
• What does the data box look like?
• And much more!

Links:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishantthacker
• @nishantthacker

Picks:

Nishant

• Robot I

Charles

• Zoom H6
• Shure SM 58
• Lavalier Mics

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kassandra Perch

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kassandra Perch. Kassandra is a return guest from JavaScript Jabber episode 197. Kassandra is a developer relations engineer for IOpipe, that does AWS Lambda monitoring and visibility in the server-less space. 

Kassandra talks about her journey into program through game sharks or programming game cartridges. Also, furthering her interest in programming was taking computer science courses in college, and getting a part-time job in the technology field during college while networking. Kassandra shares her favorite contributions to javascript and open source projects. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming? Game Sharks
• Game Cartridges
• Austin Meetup Group and JavaScript
• Working in the open source community 
• College courses
• Contributions - Nodebotanist 
• Interest in education  and being autistic 
• Child of a teacher 
• Serving the community 
• Helping people with projects 
• IOT - Internet of Things
• Building Robots
• Serverless 
• What are you working on now? 
• AVR Girl
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://www.iopipe.com
• https://github.com/nodebotanist
• https://github.com/noopkat/avrgirl
• http://johnny-five.io
• IOpipe

Picks

Kassandra

• Sue Hitten
• Johnny 5 
• Serverless Framework 

Charles 

• VS Code Azure pluggin 
• Serverless Framework
• Amanda Silver interview 
• More VS Code Interviews on Dev Chat TV

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nick Disabato

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Nick Disabato. Nick is a return guest how was recent on JavaScript Jabber episode 283   talking about AB testing. Also, Nick is an interaction designer from Chicago and runs a consultancy called Draft, who do research AB testing for online stores to increase conversion rate without increase ad spend. Nick talks about his current work, and his journey into programming, more on testing, and contributions to the JavaScript Community.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How much programming do you do day today?
• Programming activities
• Interacting with programmers to deliver products
• What was your introduction to programmer
• Logo - Turtle
• Cue Basic
• How did that get you to where you are today?
• Did not want to be a mathematician
• Never been to art school?
• Being a creative person but not visual
• Describe the creative, design, position you are in.
• Wire Frames
• Verbal communication
• Web development, etc.
• Front facing pages
• How did you get into JavaScript and how much do you have to know?
• Where are the bottlenecks?
• Which framework is the best?
• What are you working on now?
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://draft.nu
• https://nickd.org/bio/
• draftsletters.com
• @nickd

Picks

Charles

• Dash Pro 
• convo.com

Nick

• Visual Web Optimizer 
• Designing for Accessibility 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

AJ O'Neal

Special Guests: Kitson Kelly

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk with Kitson Kelly about evaluating web frameworks. Kitson is currently in Australia working for ThoughtWorks as a principle technologist. He has written many articles on frameworks and urges that people don’t get stuck on one framework in their programming. He talks about how using only frameworks that you know could hurt you in the long run. This episode is great for understanding when to use certain JavaScript frameworks and how branching out from what is comfortable might make your job easier.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Articles on web frameworks
• How do you pick a JavaScript framework to use?
• The framework depends on your changing needs
• Recommending less popular frameworks
• Angular, Ember, React
• React vs Redux
• Certain domains with different frameworks?
• Each framework takes a different approach
• How to decide which framework to use?
• Only give it a couple days to see if your app works with the framework
• Is it ever appropriate to not use a certain framework?
• Frameworks are there to make your job easier
• Don’t be afraid to try new frameworks
• Choose a framework that will “be there tomorrow”
• What is the future for frameworks?
• Experiment and be honest with what you need
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Linode
• ThoughtWorks
• Kendo UI
• LootCrate
• @KitsonK
• Kitson’s GitHub

Picks:

Charles

• Facebook
• The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moore
• Google Drive for Business

Aimee

• Would College Students Retain More If Professors Dialed Back The Pace?
• URL to PDF Converter
• CSS History

AJ

• Tylenol Cold and Flu Severe

Kitson

• Microsoft Azure
• Zype

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Jeremy Likness

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Jeremy Likness. Jeremy works for Microsoft currently and first got into programming when he was kept home while having a sunburn and taught himself how to type in a program into his family’s TI-99 4A computer and then later moved on to the Commodore 64. They stress the fact that you can be a successful programmer, no matter your background and they talk about the pros and cons of being a cloud developer advocate.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you first get into programming?
• How much Microsoft is in the different programming aspects
• Cloud developer advocates
• Azure
• TI-99 4A and Commodore 64
• C and C+
• You don’t have to go the traditional route to be a programmer
• Having a CS major is not the only way
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Discovered the internet in college
• Career focused on Web apps
• jQuery
• Backbone.js
• Hands-on career with the code
• He did consulting for 10 years
• Linux
• How has your earning changed?
• His biggest fear was getting out of touch with the realities of day-to-day programming
• Pros and cons of being a cloud developer advocate
• Community, Content, and Connection with engineering
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Microsoft Cloud developer advocates
• Azure
• JavaScript
• jQuery
• Backbone.js
• Linux
• @JeremyLikness
• Jeremy’s Blog

Picks

Charles

• BusyCal

Jeremy

• Dwitter.net
• Hello World: The Film
• Node.js documentation on Azure

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Cory House
• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• AJ O'Neal

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about the Framework Summit. It was the brainchild of Merrick Christensen. This summit includes talks on multiple different frameworks all in a two-day conference, which allows you to get exposed to new frameworks while still learning more about the framework your job requires you to use. Another goal of the conference is that it will be able to open people’s eyes up to the different frameworks available to them and show that no one framework is superior to another.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is the Framework Summit?
• The framework you use plays a huge role in your programming
• For people who want to learn about more than one framework
• Allows you to explore
• The format of the conference
• Park City, Utah in October 2018
• Helps you answer which framework should you use?
• Goal is to open people’s eyes up to other frameworks
• Decrease internet arguments over which framework is better
• Fluent Conference
• Get to have conversation with other people who work in your framework
• Making connections
• React Rally Talk Evan Czaplicki
• The context matters
• Being able to deep dive into the different frameworks
• Using frameworks in conjunction with one another
• Have you seen “religionist” themes in programming frameworks?
• Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• Some people will never look beyond their frameworks
• If it’s working, why would you mess with it?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• React Dev Summit
• JS Dev Summit
• Framework Summit
• Angular
• React
• Ember
• JavaScript
• Fluent Conference
• React Rally Talk Evan Czaplicki
• Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• @FrameworkSummit

Picks:

Charles

• Parked Out By the Lake Dustin Christensen
• DevChat.tv
• Newspaper by Themeforest

Cory

• Quokka

Aimee

• Republic of Tea – Apple Cider Vinegar Tea
• The Way of Testivus

Joe

• Evan Czaplicki Talk

AJ

• Dinosaurs
• Cough Syrup by Young the Giant

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Johannes Schickling

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Johannes Schickling. Johannes is the CEO and Co-Founder of GraphCool and works a lot on Prisma. He first got into programming when he started online gaming and would build websites for gaming competitions. He then started getting into creating websites, then single page apps, and has never looked back since. He also gives an origin story for GraphCool and the creation of Prisma. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Johannes intro
• How did you first get into programming?
• Always been interested in technology
• PHP to JavaScript
• Creating single page apps
• Self-taught
• The problem-solving aspect keeps people coming back to programming
• Always enjoyed math and physics
• Programmers make up such a diverse community
• How did you find JavaScript?
• Has used a wide range of front-end frameworks
• Node
• WebAssembly
• Opal
• What drew you into doing single page apps?
• Like the long-term flexibility of single page apps
• Don’t have to worry about the back-end right off the bat
• GraphQL
• What have you done in JavaScript that you are most proud of?
• Open source tooling
• GraphCool origin story
• What are you working on now?
• Prisma
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript
• GraphCool
• Prisma
• PHP
• Node
• WebAssembly
• Opal
• GraphQL
• @_Schickling
• @GraphCool
• GraphCool Blog

Picks

Charles

• PopSocket
• DevChat.tv/YouTube

Johannes

• Gatsby
• GraphQL Europe
• GraphQL Day

Panel:

• Joe Eames
• Cory House
• Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Ben Clinkinbeard

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk about D3.js with Ben Clinkinbeard. D3.js is a JavaScript library that has you use declarative code to tell it what you want and then it figures out all of the browser inconsistencies and creates the notes for you. He talks about the two main concepts behind D3, scales and selections, which once you understand make D3 a lot more user friendly. He then touches on SPGs and discusses his Learn D3 in 5 Days course.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What is D3.js?
• Stands for Data Driven Documents
• JavaScript
• How much of the learning curve is attributed to learning D3?
• SPG
• 2 main concepts behind D3: scales and selections
• Is learning about SPGs a prerequisite to leaning D3?
• How serious are you talking when saying idiosyncrasies?
• SPG tag
• Understanding positioning in SPG
• Positions with CSS transforms
• Are you required to use SPG?
• Not required to use SPG with D3
• Canvas
• SPG is vector based
• SPG utility function
• Responseivefy
• Learn D3 in 5 Days course
• Is there and overlap with D3 and React?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• D3.js
• JavaScript
• Responsivefy
• Learn D3 in 5 Days course
• React
• @bclinkinbeard
• Ben’s GitHub

Picks:

Cory

• React cheat sheet
• “Why software engineers disagree about everything” by Haseeb Qureshi

Joe Eames

• “JavaScript vs. TypeScript vs. ReasonML” by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Aimee

• “How To Use Technical Debt In Your Favor”
• Neuroscience News Twitter

Ben

• ComLink

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: David Luecke

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with David Luecke. David currently works for Bullish Ventures, which is a company that builds APIs and mobile web applications for clients using their open source tools. He first got into programming when he got his first computer and started programming using Delphi with Pascal. They also touch on how he first got into JavaScript, Feathers JS, and what he is working on now.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• David intro
• How did you first get into programming?
• Tinkered a lot with electronics as a child
• Delphi with Pascal
• Planned on doing an apprenticeship computer programming
• Went to University and got a CS degree
• How critical do you think a CS degree is?
• Having a CS degree helps you to pick up things faster
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Did some website development in the beginning of his career
• Java
• Dojo and JavaScript MVC
• Works a lot with React Native now
• What products have you worked on that you’re proud of?
• Feathers JS
• How did you come around to creating this?
• In-server architecture idea at university
• What are you working on now?
• mySam
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Bullish Ventures
• Pascal
• JavaScript
• Dojo
• JavaScript MVC
• React Native
• Feathers JS
• mySam
• David’s GitHub
• @daffl
• David’s Medium

Picks

Charles

• Merge Cube
• Primo
• Octagon Augmented Reality Cards
• CES

David

• Idieyoudie.com
• How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us by Roger McNamee

Panel:

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

Special Guests: Greg Kushto

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• Force 3
• Greg’s LinkedIn
• @Greg_Kushto
• Greg’s BLog

Picks:

Charles

• HaveIBeenPwned.com
• Plural Sight
• Elixir podcast coming soon
• NG conf
• MicroConf
• RubyHack
• Microsoft Build

Cory

• Plop
• VS code sync plugin

Aimee

• Awesome Proposals GitHub

AJ O’Neal

• Fluffy Pancakes
• The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Greg

• StormCast

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:

• Linode.com/MyAngularStory
• Webflow
• Squarespace
• Wix
• Framework Summit
• @iamMerrick
• MerrickChristensen.com
•  

Picks:

Merrick

• Sho Baraka
• Grid Critters
• Flex Zombies
• Charles
• Fresh Books
• Lyft
• Game Vice
• Audio-Technica 2100

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:

• You Don’t Know JS
• Functional-Light JavaScript
• JavaScript
• Kyle’s GitHub
• @getify

Picks:

Aimee

• What Does Code Readability Mean?
• @FunctionalKnox
• HTTP 203 Podcast

AJ

• IKEA

Joe

• Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker
• Workshops in general

Kyle

• GDPR
• The start-up’s guide to the GDPR
• Hatch
• Fluent Conf

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kyle Simpson

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kyle Simpson. Kyle is most well-known for being the writer of You Don’t Know JS. He first got into programming because his friend’s dad was a programmer and he was hooked by the software side of computers. He grew up writing games with QBasic and Turbo Pascal and then in his teens did some client projects. He was very much a self-taught programmer and ended up sticking with it into his career today. They talk about what led him to JavaScript and what he is doing currently.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Kyle intro
• You Don’t Know JS
• How did you first get into programming?
• Dad’s friend was a programmer
• Dad built computers
• Wrote games with QBasic and Turbo Pascal
• Some client projects in teen years
• Very much self-taught programmer
• CS degree in college
• First professional job at a biotech company
• Do you feel people need to get a CS degree these days?
• Grateful for his degree
• What engineering taught him
• Striving to understand why and how things work
• Don’t need a CS degree but you do need a certain mindset
• Valuable but not necessary
• What led you to JavaScript?
• Web Portal at his college
• What made you want to deepen your knowledge of JS?
• What are you working on now?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• You Don’t Know JS
• JavaScript
• Kyle’s GitHub
• Functional-Light JavaScript
• @getify
• Kyle on Front-end masters

Picks

Charles

• Template Weeks
• Working Out

Kyle

• Fluent Conf
• Node RSA

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Zachary Kessin

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Zachary Kessin. Zach is a web developer who has written Programming HTML5 Applications and Building Web Applications with Erlang. Currently, he works a lot with functional programming. He first got into programming because his mother used to write in Lisp and he earned his first computer by begging his relatives to help pitch in to get him one when he was seven. They talk about what led him to Erlang and Elm, why he wanted to be a programmer from a young age, and what he is most proud of in his career.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 57
• JavaScript Jabber Episode 169
• Zach intro
• Elm and Erlang
• How did you first get into programming?
• Mother was writing Lisp when he was a kid
• RadioShack color computer
• Mother taught him Basic
• Pascal and AP Computer Science
• Studied CS originally in college and then switches to Physics
• First web app written in Pearl 4
• Did PHP for a living for a while and hated it
• Elm saves him time and effort
• What was it that made you want to program from a young age?
• Don’t be afraid to jump into programming at a late age
• Elm error messages
• Writes fewer tests in Elm code that JS code
• What are you most proud of?
• Loves mentoring
• Making a difference in the community
• It’s not just about the code, it’s about the people
• What are you doing now?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 57
• JavaScript Jabber Episode 169
• Programming HTML5 Applications
• Building Web Applications with Erlang
• Elm
• Erlang
• Lisp
• Zach’s GitHub
• @zkessin
• Zach’s YouTube
• Zach’s LinkedIn

Picks

Charles

• Masterbuilt Smoker
• Crock-Pot

Zach

• If you like a book, tell the author!
• How to Get a Meeting with Anyone by Stu Heinecke
• 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline

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:

• JSJ Episode 257
• MJS Episode 055
• GraphCool
• Prisma
• GraphQL
• Apollo Client
• Relay
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• @schickling
• Johannes’ GitHub
• Schickling.me
• Prisma Slack

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Linode
• FreshBooks

Picks:

Charles

• Audible
• The 5 Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman
• Facebook Backyard Homesteader Groups
• CharlesMaxWood.com
• Sling TV
• Roku Express

AJ

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Johannes

• Figma
• Netlify Functions
• GraphQL Europe

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:

• Azure
• Microsoft Build
• VSTS
• @orizhr
• Ori’s GitHub
• Gopi’s GitHub
• @gopinach

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Linode
• FreshBooks

Picks:

Charles

• .NET Rocks!
• Shure SM58 Microphone
• Zoom H6

Ori

• Fitbit
• Pacific Northwest Hiking

Gopinath

• Seattle, WA

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:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 137
• &yet
• How did you first get into programming?
• Liked computers as a child but didn’t want to spend his life on it originally
• Studied Business in college
• Create house touring video company
• Adobe ColdFusion
• How were you exposed to JavaScript?
• Gig as a ColdFusion developer
• jQTouch, jQuery, and Django
• Interested in building app-like experiences
• What have you done with JavaScript that you are proud of?
• Want to push the web into an app-like space
• Helped to create Ampersand.js
• Wrote Human JavaScript
• Created Simple WebRTC
• Promote web as an application platform
• What are you working on now?
• Redux and React
• New book: Human Redux
• Independent consulting
• Speedy.gift
• Redux-bundler
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 137
• JavaScript Jabber
• &yet
• JavaScript
• jQTouch
• jQuery
• Django
• Human JavaScript
• Ampersand.js
• Simple WebRTC
• Human Redux
• Redux
• React
• Speedy.gift
• Redux-bundler
• Henrik’s GitHub
• Joreteg.com
• @HenrikJoreteg

Sponsors:

• Loot Crate
• FreshBooks

Picks

Charles

• Hogwarts Battle
• React Dev Summit
• JS Dev Summit
• Newspaper Theme on Themeforest
• Get a Coder Job Course

Henrik

• Preact
• Parcel.js
• Rollup.js
• Space repetition systems
• Anki

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Alyssa Nicholl
• Ward Bell

Special Guests: David Cramer

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists talk to David Cramer about error tracking and troubleshooting workflows. David is the founder and CEO of Sentry, and is a software engineer by trade. He started this project about a decade ago and it was created because he had customers telling him that things were broken and it was hard to help them fix it. They talk about what Sentry is, errors, workflow management, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• David intro
• Founder and CEO of Sentry
• What is Sentry?
• Working with PHP
• De-bugger for production
• Focus on workflow
• Goal of Sentry
• Triaging the problem
• Workflow management
• Sentry started off as an open-source side project
• Instrumentation for JavaScript
• Ember, Angular, and npm
• Got their start in Python
• Logs
• Totally open-source
• Most compatible with run-time
• Can work with any language
• Deep contexts
• Determining the root cause
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Sentry
• JavaScript
• Ember
• Angular
• npm
• Python
• Sentry’s GitHub
• @getsentry
• David’s GitHub
• David’s Website
• @zeeg

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• FreshBooks
• Loot Crate

Picks:

Charles

• Socks as Swag

David

• VS Code
• Kubernetes

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Kye Hohenberger

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kye Hohenberger. Kye is a senior front-end engineer at Gremlin, where they do chaos as a service and break your stuff on purpose so that you can fix it and it hopefully won’t happen again. He also created the Emotion library, which is a CSS-in-JS library. He first got into programming because his Grandpa was always working on computers and Kye was curious about how they worked. They talk about how he got into JavaScript, what he's built in JavaScript that he’s proud of, what he’s working on now, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 286
• Kye intro
• Works at Gremlin as a front-end engineer
• How did you first get into programming?
• Always had a burning curiosity for computers
• Worked on HTML first
• Worked with flash in High School
• Tried to major in Computer Science and dropped out of it
• Job in IT
• Wordpress maintenance
• Hooked on wanting to learn more
• Python with Django
• What was it that caught your attention?
• How did you get into JavaScript?
• Job at cPanel
• What led you to build something like Emotion?
• Didn’t like having to use the Sass compiler
• What problem were you trying to solve?
• Have you worked on anything else in JavaScript that you’re proud of?
• What are you working on now?
• APIs from Java to Node
• Wrote Qordoba apps for 2 years
• What made you switch from Angular to React?
• Learning WebPack
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 286
• Emotion
• Wordpress
• Python
• Django
• JavaScript
• cPanel
• Sass
• Node
• Angular
• React
• WebPack
• @tkh44
• Kye’s GitHub
• Kye’s Medium

Sponsors:

• Loot Crate
• FreshBooks

Picks

Charles

• Home Depot Tool Rentals
• Framework Summit
• Podcast Movement

Kye

• The Console Log
• Brian Holt on Frontend Masters
• Emotion Team

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:

• Fly.io
• JavaScript
• Ghost
• Gatsby
• React
• @flydotio
• @mrkurt
• Kurt at ARS Technica
• Kurt’s GitHub

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Charles

• GitLab

AJ

• Gitea
• Black Panther

Kurt

• Packet.net
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Joe Eames
• Aimee Knight

Special Guests: Kent Beck

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Kent Beck. Kent left Facebook 4 months ago after working for them for 7 years and is now self-unemployed so that he can decompress from the stressful environment that he was a part of for so long. He now travels, writes, creates art, thinks up crazy programming ideas, and is taking a breather.  They talk about what he did at Facebook, what his coaching engagement sessions consisted of, and the importance of taking time for yourself sometimes. They also touch on what he has learned from his experience coaching, how to create a healthy environment within the workplace, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Kent intro/update
• Ruby Rogues Episode 23
• Worked at Facebook for 7 years
• What were you doing at Facebook?
• Unique culture at Facebook
• His strengths as a developer didn’t match with the organization’s
• Coaching developers
• TDD and Patterns
• Advantages as an old engineer
• What did coaching engagement consist of?
• Takes time to build trust
• Discharging shame
• Need permission to take care of what you need to
• Being at your best so you can do your best work
• Vacation in place
• What have you learned in your time working with people?
• The nice thing about coaching
• Everyone is different
• How do we create a healthy environment within the workplace?
• Mentor in Ward Cunningham
• What is it costing us?
• Why did you decide to leave?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Ruby Rogues Episode 23
• @KentBeck
• kentbeck.com
• Kent’s GitHub

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Charles

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• Crucial Accountability by Kerry Patterson

Aimee

• n-back

Joe

• Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck

Kent

• The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker
• Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday

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!

Links:

• Test Double
• His talk - Practical Functional Programming
• Elm
• Elixir
• F#
• @elpapapollo
• jeremyfairbank.com
• Jeremy’s GitHub
• Jeremy’s YouTube

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Aimee

• American Dollar
• Force with lease

AJ

• Superfight

Joe

• The 2018 Web Developer Roadmap by Brandon Morelli
• Svelte

Jeremy

• Programming Elm
• The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Connect.Tech

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Joe Eames

Special Guests: AJ O'Neal

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to AJ O'Neal about Greenlock and LetsEncrypt. LetsEncrypt is a brand name and is the first of its kind in automated SSL and Greenlock does what Certbot does in a more simplified form. They talk about what led him to create Greenlock, compare Greenlock to Certbot, and what it’s like to use Greenlock. They also touch on Greenlock-express, how they make Greenlock better, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Greenlock and LetsEncrypt overview
• LetsEncrypt is free to get your certificate
• Why Charles uses LetsEncrypt
• Wildcard domains
• Certbot
• Why he originally created Greenlock
• Working towards home servers
• Wanted to get HTTP on small devices
• Manages a certificate directory
• Greenlock VS Certbot
• Greenlock can work stand alone
• The best use case for Greenlock
• Excited about how people are using his tool
• What is it like to use Greenlock?
• Working on a desktop client
• Greenlock-express
• Acme servers
• CAA record
• Making Greenlock better by knowing how people are using it
• Using Greenlock-express
• Let's Encrypt v2 Step by Step by AJ
• And much, much more!

Links:

• LetsEncrypt
• Greenlock
• Certbot
• Greenlock-express
• Acme servers
• Let's Encrypt v2 Step by Step by AJ
• @coolaj86
• coolaj86.com
• AJ’s Git
• Greenlock.js Screencast Series
• Greenlock.js Patreon

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Charles

• Take some time off

AJ

• OverClocked Records

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:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 273
• 2 Frugal Dudes Podcast
• DOS for Dummies
• jQuery
• JavaScript
• Knockout
• Ember
• Backbone
• Vue
• React
• @2frugaldudes
• @1kevgriff
• kevgriffin.com
• Kevin’s Twitch
• Swift Kick

Sponsors:

• Code Badges
• Digital Ocean

Picks

Charles

• The Expanse

Kevin

• Twitch – His twitch

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:

• JavaScript
• Valeri Karpov’s GitHub
• Valeri Karpov’s Twitter
• Valeri Karpov’s LinkedIn
• New E-Book: Mastering Async/Await
• Node
• Python
• Windows Scripting Host
• Facebook’s Regenerator
• Rhino

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean
•  

Picks:

Charles

• YouTube Video “IKEA” by Coulton
• Conference
• Amazon Prime Day

Aimee

• Blog Post Article

AJ

• IKEA
• https://ppl.family

Val

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/serve
• http://bit.ly/ultimate-skiing
• http://asyncawait.net/jsjabber
• New E-Book: Mastering Async/Await

Panel:

• Aimee Knight
• Joe Eames
• Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Ethan Brown

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

Show Topics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6:15 – Ethan answers the question.

7:17 – Panelist chimes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15:37 – Ethan: Machine Learning...

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

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

18:18 – Chuck and panel chime in.

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

18:54 – Panel: Functional programming?

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

Ethan: I love Elm.

21:49 – Panelists talks about Elm.

*The topic diverts slightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

38:04 – Panel shares a personal story.

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

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

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

39:51 – Panel: Immutability?

40:00 – Ethan talks about this topic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

45:55 – Panel: 7 times – good rule.

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

46:27 – Just like cars.

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

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

47:14 – Dilbert cartoons – check it out.

47:55 – GREAT QUOTE about life lessons.

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

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

48:51 – Ethan answers question.

51:17 – Panel chimes in.

52:01 – Picks!

Links:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• React
• Elixir
• Elm
• Vue
• Automerge - GITHUB
• Functional – Light JavaScript
• Lego’s Massive Cloud City Star Wars
• Lego Shop
• The Traveler’s Gift – Book
• Jocks Rule, Nerds Drool by Jennifer Wright
• 2ality – JavaScript and more
• Cooper Press
• Book – Ethan Brown
• O’Reilly Community – Ethan Brown’s Bio
• Ethan Brown’s Twitter

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean
• Cache Fly
•  

Picks:

Aimee

• Pettier

Joe

• Lego - Star Wars Betrayal at Cloud City
• Functional-Light JavaScript

Charles

• The Traveler’s Gift
• The Shack
• The Expanse

Ethan

• Jocks Rule, Nerd Drool
• JavaScipt Blog by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
• Cooper Press

Panel:

• Aimee Knight
• Charles Max Wood (DevChat TV)
• Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston)
• Cory House (Kansas City)
• Joe Eames

Special Guests: Nicholas Zakas

In this episode, the panel talks with Nicholas Zakas who writes on his site, Human Who Codes. He is the creator of ESLint, also the author of several books, and he blogs, too. He was employed through Box and today he talks about ESLint in full detail! Check it out! 

Show Topics:

0:05 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:37 – Hello! The panel is...(Chuck introduces everyone).

1:04 – Nicholas who are you?

1:17 – Nicholas: Yeah it’s been about 5 years and then you invited me again, but I couldn’t come on to talk about ESLint back then. That’s probably what people know me most for at this point. I created ESLint and I kicked that off and now a great team of people is maintaining it.

1:58 – Chuck: What is it?

2:04 – It’s a Linter for JavaScript. It falls into the same category as JSLint. The purpose of ESLint is to help you find problems with your code. It has grown quite a bit since I’ve created it. It can help with bugs and enforcing style guides and other things.

2:53 – Where did it come from?

2:57 – Guest: The idea popped into my head when I worked at Pop. One of my teammates was working on a bug and at that time we were using...

Nothing was working and after investigating someone had written a JavaScript code that was using a native code to make an Ajax request. It wasn’t the best practice for the company at the time. For whatever reason the person was unaware of that. When using that native XML...there was a little bit of trickiness to it because it was a wrapper around the...

We used a library to work around those situations and add a line (a Linter) for all JavaScript files. It was a text file and when you tried to render code through the process it would run and run the normal expression and it would fail if any of the...matched.

I am not comfortable using normal expressions to write code for this. You could be matching in side of a string and it’s not a good way to be checking code for problems. I wanted to find a better way.

6:04 – Why did you choose to create a product vs. using other options out there?

6:15 – Guest: Both of those weren’t around. JSHint was pretty much the defector tool that everyone was using. My first thought was if JSHint could help with this problem?

I went back to look at JSHint and I saw that on their roadmap you could create your own rules, and I thought that’s what we need. Why would I build something new? I didn’t see anything on GitHub and didn’t see the status of that. I wanted to see what the plan was, and they weren’t going to get to it. I said that I really needed this tool and I thought it would be helpful to others, too.

8:04 – My history was only back when it was customizable.

8:13 – Aimee: It’s interesting to see that they are basing it on regular expressions.

8:32 – Guest: Interesting thing at Box was that there was...I am not sure but one of the engineers at Box wrote...

9:03 – Aimee: I was going to ask in your opinion what do you think ES Lint is the standard now?

9:16 – Guest: How easy it is to plug things in. That was always my goal because I wanted the tool not to be boxed in – in anyway.

The guest continues to talk about how pluggable ESLint is and the other features of this tool.

13:41 – One thing I like about ESLint is that it can be an educational tool for a team. Did you see that being an educational tool?

14:24 – Guest: How do you start introducing new things to a team that is running at full capacity? That is something that I’ve wondered throughout my career. As a result of that, I found that a new team there were some problems I the code base that were really hard to get resolved, because when one person recognizes it there isn’t a god way to share that information within a team in a non-confrontational way. It’s better to get angry at a tool rather than a person.

Guest goes into what this can teach people.

18:07 – Panelist: I am not surprised. Is there a best practice to get a team to start with ESLint?

Do you get the whole team in a room and show them the options or take the best guess and turn it on?

18:34 – Guest: The thing I recommend is that first and foremost get ESLint in your system with zero rules on. It starts that mindset into your development process. We can do something to automatically check...

Get Syntax checking and you will se improvements on the number of bugs that are getting out of production. I recommend using the default the ESLint configuration. This has all of the things that we have found that are most likely errors and runtime errors vs. syntax errors. You can go through with those and sometimes it is easier to run that check with...

Using those ESLint rules will clean up a lot of problems that you didn’t know you had with your code. There are too many problems with those rules. I recommend instead of turning them off then put the severity to warning and not error. That is something we started with in the beginning. We turned on as many rules as we could and it drove people crazy. They didn’t feel like when they were committing to a file why should I be...

The idea with the different scenario levels you don’t’ want to turn off rules so people don’t know there is a problem. There can be a rule on so people will know that there is a problem, but...

Doing that alone will give you a lot of benefit in using ESLint. How do you decide as a team on the rules that are maybe not for finding errors but for stylistic in error? Do we use four spaces, semi-colons, etc. To figure that out I am a big component on finding a pre-existing style guide and adapting it. Get everyone to agree.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to stylistic preferences. It really is just getting everyone to do the same thing. I think it was Crawford that said: Whether you drive on the right side of the left side of the road – it doesn’t matter as long as everyone is dong the same thing. I agree with that and it applies to style guides. It can get heated but for the best thing for the team is stick with a guide and work together.

24:36 – Aimee: I can go through the options to pick one of the style guides out there and then it will automatically create my configuration for me is helpful. Question: If you had to pick 2 or 3 rules that you are super helpful what would they be?

25:30 – Guest: To touch briefly on indentation. Whether you like four spaces or whether you are wild and like tabs, I think the indent rule is very helpful. Just for wiping out and eliminating that discussion through your team. Have your editor setup however they want but on the pre-hook...

But my favorite rules I tend to lean towards the ones that saved me.

The Guest goes through his favorite rules with ESLint. Check it out!

26:51 – Guest mentions his second favorite rule, here!

28:24 – Guest mentions his third favorite rule, here!

29:03 – Guest mentions the rule that makes him giggle a lot, here!

30:07 – Advertisement – Sentry!

31:22 – What is your take on running Fix? Does it make sense to run Fix?

32:00 – Guest: It depends and the idea behind Fix is the idea of doing a one time (at the start) fix everything that it can find wrong b/c I don’t want to do it by hand. It morphed into a more of a tool that people are using all the time. I too have mixed feelings about it. I think the greatest value you get out of Fix is that when you first install it or when you enable a new rule. I think in those situations you get a lot of value out of Fix. I think that when people were getting aggressive with their code styles it took us down a path where we...

As a pre-commit hook it could be to fix things and part of the built system you wouldn’t want...

People are probably wondering: Why doesn’t ESLint doesn’t fix all the time?

It can be a team decision: do you want to run Fix at the point that the developer is writing the code, do you want to use Fix as running it as a build when you are bundling? It really seems more of a personal preference. I am on the fence about it. Even though I am leaning more towards...

35:16 – Do you run Premier?

35:20 – Guest: No I don’t. I don’t have anything against Premier but I think Prettier uses a very interesting space.

37:50 – Chuck: What is next for ESLint and what is next for you?

37:55 – Guest: Well, to be honest I am not sure what is next for ESLint. I haven’t been involved with keeping it maintained for the last few years. I do help out with feedback with decisions. But in general the ESLint the direction is that let’s add tings that help people avoid language hazards and make sure that ESLint is still pluggable. Lastly, that we will be there to help people and the community. There is this virtuosic cycle and tools like Babble and then tools like ESLint introducing rules adapting new rules and features better.

For myself, and the future, I haven’t been involved with ESLint because I am focusing on my health. I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease and it meant that I needed to focus on my health. That’s why, too, I wasn’t able to join a few years ago. I am doing better but I am a few years away for working fulltime and writing books and blogging, again. The trajectory is upward. I want to stress that you need to take care of yourself.

There is interesting stuff that we are doing and I love it, but make sure you take care of yourself! If you don’t have your health then nothing will really matter. I want to encourage you all to take care of yourselves better. This industry can take a toll on your body b/c it is high-stressed. If you are stressed your immune system will shut down. For a lot of us we are working too much and there isn’t an off-switch. I would like to encourage people to examine their life and their time.

When you take time to turn off your analytic brain, and work on your creative brain then the pathways will connect better.

Please save your money!

Lyme disease is spread through tick bites.

44:30 – Aimee: Thank you for sharing that!

44:38 – Chuck: It’s encouraging to me that you are still trying to come back even after this disease. I think we take things for granted sometimes. You can’t always count on things going the way you want it to go.

45:19 – Guest: What happened to me was I left work and one Friday afternoon I had a normal weekend. My health was on the decline, and I rested all weekend. And Monday I couldn’t get out of bed. That started this whole period where I stopped leaving the house completely. That’s how quickly things can change for you. I harp on people a lot to save their money. If I didn’t have savings there would be a very different end to my story. I want to encourage people to save.

46:33 – Chuck: I think on that note let’s go to picks. Where can people find you?

46:45 – Guest: My blog is Human Who Codes.

47:10 – Chuck: Anything people can do to help you? Check out his books you won’t regret it!

47:33 – Guest: Buying books is always helpful. I would say that if you can spend some time contributing to ESLint that is always a great help. Anything you can do to help them will help me. I want to make sure that those folks are happy, healthy and productive. For me, personally, I love when people Tweet at me and say HI! I love hearing other people’s stories of how they have overcome past diseases or illnesses. If you want to send monetary gifts – donate to a wonderful organization that helps children with Lyme disease. I would encourage you to support if you feel inclined.

50:49 – Chuck: We appreciate it, and I appreciate you being so open about your personal story.

51:11 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

Links:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• React
• Elixir
• Elm
• Vue
• GitHub – Prettier
• GitHub – Premier
• Lyme Light Foundation
• Inclusive Components
• ESLint – Disallow Specific Imports
• State of JS
• Learn JavaScript
• Book: Total Recall
• Goodbye Redux
• YouTube Channel – Sideways
• Human Who Codes – Nicholas Zakas
• Nicholas’ Books
• Nicholas’ Twitter
• Nicholas’ GitHub
• Nicholas’ LinkedIn

Sponsors:

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

Picks:

Aimee

• Technical debt
• Professional JavaScript for Web Developers

Chris

• Inclusive Components Blog
• CSS Cascade
• JS Jabber - code

Cory

• No Restricted Imports
• State of JS
• Total Recall

Charles

• My JavaScript Story

Joe

• Thought bubbles...
• Goodbye Redux
• Sideways Channel

Nicholas

• The Brain that Changes Its Self
• Ghost Boy
• Tip - Turn off your Wi-Fi before Bed

Panel:

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

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

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

Show Topics:

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

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

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

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

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

7:49 – Aimee: I heard that, too.

7:59 – Guest.

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

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

8:49 – Panel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(The Guest continues diving into his answer.)

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

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

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

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

31:33 – Advertisement: Sentry.io

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

32:40 – Chuck: Kind of.

32:50 – Guest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

39:22 – Chuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

48:00 – (Guest continues.)

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

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

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

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

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

Essentially you can hook up microstates to a fire hose.

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

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

52:20 – Chuck: Anything else?

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

53:03 – Chuck: Let’s do some picks!

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

Links:

• Kendo UI
• Frontside
• Redux
• Microstates
• Microstates with React
• Taras Mankovski’s Twitter
• Taras Mankovski’s GitHub
• Taras Mankovski’s LinkedIn
• Taras Mankovski’s Frontside Bio
• Charles Lowell’s Twitter
• Charles Lowell’s GitHub
• Charles Lowell’s Frontside Bio
• Schedule Once
• Ruby on Rails
• Angular
• Get A Coder Job
• YouTube Talks
• Email: cowboyd@frontside.io
• Working with State Machines
• Twitch TV
• BigTest
• Close Brace
• REEF
• The Developer Experience
• YouTube Video

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry.io – 2 months free – DEVCHAT/code
• Get A Coder Job

Picks:

Aimee

• ShopTalk Episode 327
• Professional JavaScript for Web Developers
• Technical Debt
• Stripe

Taras

• Twitch Channel
• Big Test
• Frontside

Charles Lowell

• Chalkboards
• Sargent Art Chalk

Chris

• Close Brace
• LaCroix Water
• Chris’s Git Hub

Joe

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

AJ

• UtahJS Conf
• Start with Why
• The Rust Book
• VanillaJS w/ Chris
• Zero to One

Charles

• Podwrench.com -  beta
• getacoderjob.com

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Chris McKnight

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Chris McKnight who is a software developer who knows Angular, Ruby, Node.js, and iOS. He went to college at Louisiana State University and graduated with a computer science degree from LSU. They talk about Chris’ background, past/current projects, among other things. Check out today’s episode to hear the panel talk about JavaScript, Angular, C and C++, Node, React, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:12 – Chuck: Hello! Introduce yourself, please!

1:15 – Guest: I am a software engineer outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I work for a medium consultancy company. I know JavaScript, Angular, NativeScript, and JS, too.

1:41 – Chuck: Cool! Tell us your story and how you got into programming?

2:00 – Guest: I was a really big nerd in high school and grew up in Louisiana, USA. There was one other person in the school that knew what I was talking about. I was learning C++ and Visual Studio in 2003. That was really back in the day and Microsoft Foundation class was a thing. I moved onto PHP and started working for a company in Baton Rouge after graduating college. I have a computer science degree with a secondary discipline in mathematics. I graduated from LSU and got a job offer before I graduated. Doing some part-time work for them b/c they were swamped. I was writing PHP and they said that they used jQuery a lot.

4:47 – Chuck: You got started and you said you used C and C++, why those languages?

5:05 – Guest: I did a little bit of Java, but it was the “new kid on the block.” I wanted to get into a program that was user-friendlier.

6:21 – Chuck: I took C and C++ classes in college. Eventually I did Ruby on Rails. I totally understand why you went that way.

6:44 – Guest: I picked-up Rails, because a company (that I worked for at the time) used it. I usually reached for jQuery among other options.

7:31 – Chuck: When did you start taking JavaScript seriously?

7:40 – Guest: 2012-2013. Frustrations of not using JavaScript as good as I could. For jQuery you have to call when you have an issue. Then you run into all of these bugs, and...

9:18 – Chuck: It sounds like it was more out of necessity.

9:30 – Guest: Yep, exactly. Those pain points have been reduced b/c I have been using Type Script and Angular and now version 6 and version 7. You try to call a number method on a string and vice versa, and app development time.

10:03 – Chuck: ...it has a process running with it.

10:13 – Guest: Catching a lot of those easy mistakes (bugs) and it’s a 5-10 minute fix. It takes a lot of that away. Sometimes you can say: I want to ignore it.

Or it doesn’t give you runtime guarantees.

Some other libraries out there have been on the forefront of fixing those problems. REST TYPE is an example of that.

11:39 – Chuck: When I talk to people about JavaScript a lot of times I get basically that they are saying: I started doing more things in Node or React – I fell in love with the language. Your reasons for starting JavaScript are because “I hated running into these problems.” Did you start loving to work in JavaScript?

12:11 – Guest: I did start loving it but it took a while. I could write a short amount of code and then at the end I get a result.

Another thing that bothers me is FILTER. What does it return? It’s actually FIND and FIND INDEX and you use the pattern of filter and run this expression and give me index zero.

14:16 – Chuck: What work have you done that you are proud of?

14:20 – Guest: I started a new job last month; beforehand I worked at a mortgage company. I was proud of the Angular application and applications that I worked on. 

16:55 – Chuck: How did you get into Angular?

17:00 – Guest: Interesting story. October of 2016 – at this time I was all against Angular. However someone came to me and said we have to...

At the time I wasn’t impressed with the language. I learned about Angular at the time, though, and learned through Egghead. I learned a lot in 2 days, and I got pretty decent at it. I was writing Angular applications pretty quickly, and it made sense to me.

20:53 – Chuck: I am a fan of the CLI b/c that’s what we have in Rails. It’s really nice. What are you working on these days?

21:13 – Guest: Less on Angular b/c of the new job. I will do Angular on my free time. I work on Angular at nighttime. I build some things in React these past few weeks.

23:07 – Chuck: Any part of your experience that could help people?

23:17 – Guest: Learn what’s happening under the hood of libraries such as jQuery. Explore and find resources to help you. Keep learning and keep at it. Tools are so god now – such as Prettier and Lint – they will tell me “you don’t want to do this.” Use the tooling and learn the fundamentals. Also, use Babel! Those are my tips of advice.

25:55 – Chuck: That’s solid. Yes, the fundamentals and the poly-fills will fill in the gaps. So now it’s: what do I want to stack on top of this? Once you know the fundamentals.

26:55 – Guest: Learn what the frameworks and libraries are doing.

Don’t get overwhelmed. That’s my advice.

28:16 – Chuck: Where can people find you?

28:24 – Guest: GitHub and Twitter. I’ve been working on a website, but not ready, yet.

29:08 – Chuck: Picks!

29:15 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

35:45 – Cache Fly

Links:

• React
• Angular
• Vue.js
• JavaScript
• Ember
• Elm
• jQuery
• Node
• Find and Find Index
• NativeScript
• Lint
• Babel
• Prettier
• Christopher’s GitHub
• Christopher’s Twitter

Sponsors:

• Cache Fly
• Get A Coder Job
• Fresh Books

Picks:

Chris

• Angular Explorer
• VS Code
• Finance – Staying out of Debt – Swish App

Chuck

• Discord
• DomiNations

Panel:

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

Special Guest: Julian Fahrer

In this episode, the panel talks with Julian Fahrer who is an online educator and software engineer in San Francisco, California (USA). The panel and the guest talk about containers, tooling, Docker, Kubernetes, and more. Check out today’s episode!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

1:00 – Chuck: We have today Julian. Julian, please tell us why you are famous?

1:10 – Julian (Guest): I am a software engineer in San Francisco.

1:35 – Chuck: We had you on Elixir Mix before – so here you are! Give us a brief introduction – tell us about the

1:56 – Julian: About 11 hours. You can get it done in about 1 week. It’s a lot to learn. It’s a new paradigm, and I think that’s why people like it.

2:22 – Aimee: How did you dive into Docker? I feel that is like backend space?

2:35 – Julian: I am a full stack engineer and I have been in backend, too.

3:10 – Aimee: I know that someone has been in-charge of our Dev Ops process until the first job I’ve had. When there is a problem in the deployment, I want to unblock myself and not wait for someone else. I think it’s a valuable topic. Why Docker over the other options?

3:58 – Julian: Let’s talk about what Docker is first?

4:12 – Chuck.

4:23 – Julian: Containers are a technology for us to run applications in isolation from each other.

Julian talks in-detail about what contains are, what they do, he gives examples, and more. Check it out here!

5:27 – Chuck: Makes sense to me. I think it’s interesting that you are talking about the dependencies. Because of the way the Docker works it’s consistent across all of your applications.

5:59 – Julian. Yes, exactly.

Julian talks about containers some more!

6:56 – Chuck asks a question about the container, Docker, and others.

7:03 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about your company’s running operating system, and what you want to use – basically everything runs in the container...

7:30 – Chuck: This short-circuits a lot of it.

7:46 – Guest.

8:00 – Chuck: People will use Docker if your employer mandates it. Is there a learning curve and how do you adapt it within the person’s company?

8:25 – Guest.

8:52 – Aimee: We are using it, too.

8:57 – Guest: Awesome!

9:03 – Aimee: The only downfall is that if you have people who are NOT familiar with it – then it’s a black box for us. We can’t troubleshoot it ourselves. I want to be able to unblock from our end w/o having to go to someone else. That’s my only issue I’ve been having.

10:03 – Guest: I want to see that tooling to be honest.

10:12 – Aimee: Can you talk about how Civil and Docker work together?

10:19 – Guest: Yes!

Julian answers the question.

10:56 – Chuck: How much work it is to get a Docker file to get up and running? How much work would it take?

11:18 – Guest: For the development side in about an hour or two – this is if you understand it already. Putting it into production that’s a different story b/c there is a million different ways to do it. It’s hard to put a time on that.

12:24 – Chuck: Let’s assume they have the basic knowledge (they get how server setup takes place) is this something you could figure out in a day or so?

12:47 – Guest: If you have touched Docker then you can do it in a day; if never then not really.

13:02 – Guest: There might be some stones you will fall over.

13:39 – Panel: The part of the learning curve would be...

13:52 – Guest: The idea behind the container is that the container should be disposable. You could throw it away and then start a new one and it’s fresh and clean.

Guest continues with his answer.

15:20 – Chuck: I have seen people do this with their database engine. If you need to upgrade your database then they grab their container...

15:55 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about setting it up - its provided in the container and...

16:09 – Chuck asks a question.

16:17 – Guest: For production, I would go with a hosted database like RJS, Azure, or other options.

Guest continues.

17:13 – Chuck.

17:20 – Guest: If it dies then you need to...

17:30 – Chuck: We talked about an idea of these containers being something you can hand around in your development team.

Chuck asks a question.

17:50 – Guest answers the question. He talks about tooling, containers, web frontend, and more.

18:48 – Guest asks Aimee a question: Are you using Compost?

18:50 – Aimee: I don’t know b/c that is a black box for us. I don’t know much about our Docker setup.

19:00 – Guest to Aimee: Can I ask you some questions?

19:14 – Guest is giving Aimee some hypothetical situations and asks what their process is like.

19:32 – Aimee answers the question.

20:11 – Guest: You have customizing tooling to be able to do x, y, and z.

20:25 – Aimee: They have hit a wall, but it’s frustrating. Our frontend and our backend are different. We are getting 500’s and it’s a black box for us. It’s the way that ops have it setup. I hate having to go to them for them to unblock us.

21:07 – Chuck: I have been hearing about Kubernetes. When will you start to see that it pays off to use it?

21:20 – Guest answers the question.

22:17 – If I have a simple app on a few different machines and front end and job servers I may not need Kubernetes. But if I have a lot of things that it depends on then I will need it?

22:35 – Guest: Yes.

22:40 – Chuck: What are the steps to using it?

22:45 – Guest: Step #1 you install it.

The guest goes through the different steps to use Docker.

25:23 – Aimee: It makes sense that your UI and your database don’t live in the same container, but what about your API and your database should that be separate?

25:40 – Guest: Yes they should be separate.

26:09 – Chuck: What has your experience been with Docker – AJ or Chris?

26:17 – Panel: I have used a little bit at work and so far it’s been a black box for me. I like the IDEA of it, but I probably need to take Julian’s course to learn more about it! (Aimee agrees!)

One thing I would love (from your perspective, Julian) – if I wanted to get started with this (and say I have not worked with containers before) where would I start?

28:22 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

29:20 – Guest: Good question. You don’t have to be an expert (to use Docker), but you have to be comfortable with the command line, though.

30:17 – Panel: Is there a dummy practice within your course?

30:27 – Julian: We run our own web server and...

30:44 – Panel: I need to check out your course!

31:04 – Guest: It is some time investment, but it’s saved me so much time already so it makes it really worth it.

31:38 – Panel: You are a version behind on Ruby.

31:46 – Guest: ...I just want to make code and not worry about that.

32:04 – Chuck: Updating your server – you would update Ruby and reinstall your gems and hope that they were all up-to-date. Now you don’t have to do it that way anymore.

32:37 – Guest: You know it will behave the same way.

32:48 – Guest: I have some experience with Docker. I understand its value. I guess I will share my frustrations. Not in Docker itself, but the fact that there is a need for Docker...

35:06 – Chuck.

35:12 – Panel: We need someone to come up with...

35:40 – Panel: It’s not standard JavaScript.

35:51 – Chuck: One question: How do you setup multiple stages of Docker?

36:12 – Guest: The recommended way is to have the same Docker file used in the development sate and through to production. So that way it’s the same image.

37:00 – Panel: ...you must do your entire configuration via the environmental variables.

37:29 – Chuck asks a question.

37:36 – Panel: If you are using Heroku or Circle CI...there is a page...

38:11 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth.

39:17 – Chuck: Gottcha.

39:18 – Guest.

39:52 – Chuck: I have seen systems that have hyberized things like using Chef Solo and...

You do your basic setup then use Chef Solo – that doesn’t’ make sense to me. Have you seen people use this setup before?

40:20 – Guest: I guess I wouldn’t do it.

40:30 – Chuck.

40:36 – Guest: Only reason I would do that is that it works across many different platforms. If it makes your setup easier then go for it.

41:14 – Chuck: Docker Hub – I want to mention that. How robust is that? Can you put private images up there?

41:38 – Guest: You can go TOTALLY nuts with it. You could have private and public images. Also, your own version. Under the hood it’s called container registry. Yeah, you can change images, too.

42:22 – Chuck: Should I use container registry or a CI system to build the Docker system and use it somewhere else?

42:35 – Guest.

43:24 – Chuck: Where can people find your Docker course?

43:30 – Guest: LEARN DOCKER ONLINE! We are restructuring the prices. Make sure to check it out.

44:05 – Chuck: Picks! Where can people find you online?

44:14 – Guest: Twitter! eBook – Rails and Docker! Code Tails IO!

Links:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• React
• Elixir
• Elm
• Vue
• ESLint
• Node.js
• Circle CI
• Twitter – Circle CI
• Heroku
• Surge.sh
• Kubernetes.io
• Berg Design
• Rian Rietveld
• PickleJS
• Soft Cover.io
• Ebook – boilerplate
• EMx 010 Episode with Julian Fahrer
• Learn Docker
• Indie Hacker – Julian Fahrer
• LinkedIn – Julian Fahrer
• GitHub – Julian Fahrer
• Twitter – Julian Fahrer

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Cache Fly
•  

Picks:

AJ

• Zermatt Resort
• Heber Area

Aimee

• Surge.sh

Chris

• BergDesign
• React, WP, and a11y
• gomakethings.com

Joe

• Docker Videos by Dan Wahlin
• Rock Climbing/Indoor Rock Climbing

Charles

• Extreme Ownership - Book
• Playing DND

Julian

• PickleJS
• Postive Intelligence