On today's episode, Aimee Knight, AJ O'Neal, Cory House, Joe Eames, and Charles Max Wood discuss Azure with Jonathan Carter. Jonathan has been working at Microsoft for 10 years. He currently focuses on Node.js and Azure. Tune in to learn how you can use Azure in building applications and services.

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

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

On this week's episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood interviews Adam Baldwin. Adam is the team lead at Lift Security and founder and organizer of the Node Security Project (NSP). He appeared on episode 89, and talked about NSP in 2013. Learn more about what he's passionate about and how his life navigated towards programming. Tune in!

On this week's episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood interviews Alex Russell. Alex is a software engineer on the Chrome team. He focuses on designing new features and running their standards work. He appeared as a guest on episode 87, where he talked about TC39. Tune in to his story!

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

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

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

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

Questions for Wade and Ramya

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:30] What is Emmet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

AJ O’neal

• Breath on the Wild
• Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge

Charles Max Wood

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

Wade Anderson

• Kindle Paperwhite
•  Twitter @waderyan_

Ramya Rao

• Open source
• Twitter @ramyanexus

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 272: Functional Programming and ClojureScript with Eric Normand

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

[00:1:14] Introduction to Eric Normand

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

[00:02:22] Address that quickly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Aimee:

• The Hidden Cost of Abstraction 
• What Functional Language Should I Learn 

Eric

• Steven King, On Writing 
• Youtube Channel: Tested  

Charles

• Ionic Framework

Links

• Purely Functional TV 
• Blog 
• Building Composable Abstractions 

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

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MJS 034: John-David Dalton

Today’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with John-David Dalton. JD talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community like Lo-Dash, Sandboxed Native, etc. Listen to learn more about JD!

[01:15] – Introduction to JD

JD has been on JavaScript Jabber. He talked about Lo-Dash.

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

First website

This was when JD was a junior in high school. Then, he got involved with a flight squadron for a World War 1 online game. They needed a website so he created a GeoCities website for them. That’s what got him into JavaScript. He’d have to enhance the page with mouseover effects - cursor trail, etc.

JavaScript

From there, JD started created a Dr. Wiley little-animated bot that would say random things in a little speech bubble with the HTML on your page like a widget. He also passed an assignment turning a web page into an English class paper. He used to spend his lunch breaks learning JavaScript and programming. He also created a little Mario game engine – Mario 1 with movable blocks that you could click and drag and Mario could jump over it. That was back with the document.layers and Netscape Navigator.

Animation

JD wanted to be an animator in animation so he started getting into macro media flash. That led him to ActionScript, which was another ECMAScript-based language. He took a break from JavaScript and did ActionScript and flash animations for a while as his day job too.

PHP and JavaScript

JD started learning PHP and they needed to create a web app that got him right back into JavaScript in 2005. That was when AJAX was coined and that’s when Prototype JS came up. He was reading AJAX blog posts back then because that was the place to find all of your JavaScript news.

JS Specification

JD remembers being really intimidated by JavaScript libraries so he started reading the JavaScript specification. It got him into a deeper understanding of why the language does what it does and realized that there’s actually a document that he could go to and look up exactly why things do what they do.

[06:45] – What was it about JavaScript?

JD has been tinkering with programming languages but what he liked about ActionScript at the time was it is so powerful. You could create games with it or you could script during animations. He eventually created a tool that was a Game Genie for flash games that you could get these decompilers that would show you the variables in the game, and then, you could use JavaScript to manipulate the variables in the flash game. He created a tool that could, for example, change your lives to infinite life, grow your character or access hidden characters that they don’t actually put in the game but they have the animations for it.

JD was led to a page on the web archive called Layer 51 or Proto 51. That was a web page that had a lot of JavaScript or ActionScript snippets. There were things for extending the built-in prototypes - adding array methods or string methods or regex methods. That was how JavaScript became appealing to him. He has been doing JavaScript for almost 20 years. PHP also made him appreciate JavaScript more because, at the time, you couldn’t have that interface.

[09:30] – Lo-Dash, Sandboxed Native, Microsoft

Lo-Dash

Eventually, JD grew to respect jQuery because I became a library author. jQuery is the example of how to create a successful library. It’s almost on 90% of the Internet. He likes that right now but before, he was a hardcore Prototype fanboy. He didn’t like new tools either. He liked augmenting prototypes but over time, he realized that augmenting prototypes wasn’t so great whenever you wanted to include other code on your page because it would have conflict and collisions. Later on, he took Prototype, forked it, and he made it faster and support more things, which is essentially what he did with Lo-Dash.

Sandboxed Native

JD created something called Sandboxed Native, which got him into talking on conferences. Sandboxed Native extends the prototypes for the built-ins for your current frame. It would import new built-ins so you got a new array constructor, a new date constructor, a new regex, or a new string. It wouldn’t collide or step on the built-ins of the current page.

Microsoft

After that, JD ended up transitioning to performance and benchmarking. That landed him his Microsoft job a couple years later.

Picks

John-David Dalton

• JS Foundation
• Sonarwhal
• Twitter / Github: @jdalton

Charles Max Wood

• Aaron Walker
• Interview Valet

Tweet this Episode

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

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

This episode dives in detail into:

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

Links:

• Lodash
• ES Module Loader for Node
• Node
• CommonJS
• Babel
• TypeScript
• FlowType
• Microsoft
• ESM Blog Post
• Meteor
• Reify
• ESM Spec
• PhantomJS
• zlib module in Node
• AWS Lambda
• NPM
• Webpack
• Rollup
• John-David Dalton on Twitter

Picks:

Cory:

• Trending Developer Skills
• The Devops Handbook

Aimee:

• Nodevember
• ES Modules in Node Today (blog post)
• Dating is Dead

Aaron:

• Ready Player One trailer breakdown
• Jim Jefferies  Show
• I Can't Make This Up by Kevin Hart
• Work with Aaron at SaltStack

Chuck:

• Angular Dev Summit
• ZohoCRM
• Working on Cars - Therapeutic working with your hands doing physical work

John:

• TC39 Proposal for Optional Chaining
• ToyBox 3D Printer

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:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

JC Hiatt

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

@jchiatt

@devlifts

devlifts.io

Picks:

Amiee

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

Charles

• Gunnar blue blockers 
• Flux
• ReactDevSummit.com
• JSDevSummit.com
•  

JC

• American Vandal
• Confession Tapes 
• Qalo
• https://lodash.com

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Chris Dias

PJ Meyer

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Chris

• Pizza

PJ

• Deli

Charles

• Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Special Guests: Adam Baldwin

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• Node Security 
• Lift Security
• https://github.com/evilpacket
• @nodesecurity
• @liftsecurity
• @adam_baldwin

Picks:

Adam

• Key Base
• Have I been Pwned?

Charles

• Nettie Pot 
• convo.com

AJ

• This Episode with Adam Baldwin
• Free the Future of Radical Price
• Made In America Sam Walton
• Sonic - VGM Album

Joe

• Pych - Movie
• NG Conf
• Why We Don’t Suck

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:

• 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

Special Guests: Matt Hernandez and Amanda Silver

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• Visual Studio
• VS Code
• Azure
• Live Share
• Azure Cosmos DB
• Microsoft Build
• Azure App Service
• Amanda’s GitHub
• @amandaksilver
• Matt’s GitHub
• @fiveisprime

Picks:

Charles

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

Matt

• The Customer-Driven Playbook by Travis Lowdermilk
• The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey
• Yes, And by Kelly Leonard
• Digital Marketing For Dummies by Ryan Deiss
• Ed Gets His Power Back Kickstarter

Amanda

• Microsoft Quantum Development Kit for Visual Studio Code
• Iggy Peck, Architect
• Tek by Patrick McDonnell

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Rachel MacFarlane and Matt Bierner

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• Visual Studio Code
• JavaScript
• TypeScript
• Dart
• VS Code GitHub
• @Code
• VS Code Insiders
• Docker extension
• Azure extension
• Rachel’s GitHub
• Matt’s GitHub
• MattBierner.com
• @mattbierner

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Linode
• FreshBooks

Picks:

Charles

• Orphan Black
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Fishing

Rachel

• GitLens

Matt

• The Bronx Warriors

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:

• Joe Eames
• Aimee Knight
• AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Tom Dale

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• Ember
• LinkedIn
• JavaScript
• Backbone
• Python
• @tomdale
• tomdale.net
• Tom’s GitHub

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Joe

• Framework Summit
• Jayne
• React sent Evan You a cake

Aimee

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

AJ

• James Veitch

Tom

• JavaScript Tech Talk
• Drake’s Ties
• Melissa Watson Ellis at Hall Madden

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

Show notes coming shortly!

Panel: 

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

Special Guests: Christine Legge

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• Ramda
• Lodash
• Underscore
• ZenHub
• Redux
• React
• Erlang
• DrRacket
• @leggechr
• Chirstine’s GitHub

Sponsors

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean

Picks:

Charles

• Home Depot Tool Rental
• Podcast Movement
• CES
• VRBO

Aimee

• Apple Cider Vinegar
• Jeremy Fairbank Talk – Practical Functional Programming

AJ

• Goat’s Milk

Joe

• Topgolf
• Framework Summit

Christine

• Dan Mangan
• Reply All Podcast

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:

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

Special Guests: Vitali Zaidman

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

Show Topics:

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

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

2:46 – Chuck asks Vitali a question.

3:03 – Vitali’s answer.

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

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

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

4:43 – Joe: I use Angular, primarily.

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

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

8:22 – Vitali: Check out my article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14:51: Vitali answers the above question.

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

15:56 – Panelist: I agree with this.

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

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

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

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

17:33 – Question to Vitali by Panelist.

17:55 – Vitali answers the question.

18:30 – Panelist makes additional comments.

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

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

19:38 – Panelist makes comments.

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

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

21:05 – Aimee makes comments.

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

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

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

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

23:37 – Vitali chimes in.

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

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

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

26:19 – Advertisement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31:17 – Did you edit and review?

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

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

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

He continues this conversation from here on out.

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

34:16 – Vitali chimes-in. 

34:38 – Chuck. 

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

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

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

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

40:30 – Vitali comments on this great question.

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

41:29 – Vitali talks about this topic.

42:14 – Let’s go to picks!

42:14 – Advertisement.

Links:

• Vitali Zaidman’s Facebook
• Vitali Zaidman’s Medium
• Vitali Zaidman’s GitHub
• Vitali Zaidman’s NPM
• Vitali Zaidman’s LinkedIn
• Vitali Zaidman’s Medium Article
• JavaScript
• Brutalist Web Design
• Jasmine
• Cypress
• React
• jQuery
• Jest
• Protractor – end to end testing for Angular
• Test Café
• Intern
• Sinon
• XKCD

Sponsors:

• Kendo UI
• Sentry
• Digital Ocean
• Cache Fly

Picks:

AJ O’Neal

• Continuous from last week’s episode: Crossing the Chasm – New Technologies from Niche to General Adaptation.
• Go Lang

Joe Eames

• Board Game: Rajas of the Ganges
• Framework Summit Conference in Utah
• React Conference

Aimee Knight

• Hacker News – “Does Software Understand Complexity” via Michael Feathers
• Cream City Code

Chuck

• E-Book: How do I get a job?
• Express VPN

Vitali

• Book: The Square and The Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson
• My article!

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: A.J. O’Neal

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:23 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please.

1:27 – AJ: I brief introduction: I am a quirky guy who is ADD and I love to figure out why/how things work. I like self-hosting or owning things in technology.

2:00 – Chuck: Where do you work now?

2:02 – AJ: I work in UTAH at Big Squid!

3:29 – AJ: I have my own company, too!

3:41 – Chuck: Yeah we’ve talked about that before. Where can we go?

3:54: AJ: We have 2 products that are both Node. Greenlock for Node.js is one of them! The other one is Telebit.

5:44 – Chuck: This interview is all about your background. How did you get into programming?

6:04 – AJ: I was in middle school but before that my grandmother was a secretary at the Pentagon. She worked on getting people paid and she wrote a program to assist these paychecks to be printed with fewer errors. Because of that she had a computer at home. I remember playing games on her computer.

The guest talks about his background in more detail.

15:21 – Chuck: No it’s interesting! I’ve done a couple hundred interviews and they all say either: I went to school for it OR I did it for my free time. It’s interesting to see the similarities!

16:00 – AJ: Yep that’s pretty much how I got into it! I went on a church service mission to Albania and really didn’t do any computer work during those 2 years.

19:39 – Chuck: You went to BYU and your mission trip. A lot of that stuff I can relate to and identify with b/c I went to BYU and went on missions trip, too! And then you got into Ruby and that’s how we met was through Ruby!

20:25 – AJ: Yep that’s it. Then that’s when I learned about Node, too. There was a guy with a funny hate – do you remember that? (No.)

21:03 – Chuck: Maybe?

21:07 – AJ continues.

27:53 – Chuck: What made you make the transition? People come into and out of different technologies all the time.

28:18 – AJ: Yeah it started with me with jQuery!

Rails has layers upon layers upon layers.

AJ talks about different technologies their similarities/differences and mentions: JavaScript, Rails, Python, Node, Ruby, and much more.

31:05 – Chuck: Node went out of their way on certain platforms that Rails didn’t prioritize.

31:11 – AJ continues to talk about different technologies and platforms.

33:00 – Chuck: You get into Node and then at what point does this idea of a home-server and Node and everything start to come together? How much of this do you want to talk bout? At one point did they start to gel?

33:33 – AJ: It’s been a very long process and started back in high school. It started with me trying to think: How do I get this picture on my phone to my mom? I thought of uploading it to Flickr or could I do this or that? What about sending it to someone in China?

39:57 – Chuck.

40:01 – AJ continues and talks about libraries and certificate standards.

42:00 – AJ continues with the topic: certificates.

42:44 – Chuck: I am going to go to PICKS! Where can people find you?

42:55 – AJ: Twitter! Blog! GitHub! Anywhere!

43:55 – Chuck: Picks!

43:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

Links:

• React
• Angular
• JavaScript
• Webpack.js
• Serverless
• jQuery
• Node
• AJ’s Twitter
• Chuck’s Twitter

Sponsors:

• Cache Fly
• Get A Coder Job
• Fresh Books

Picks:

A.J.

• JC Penny!
• Stafford Shirts
• Express for Men
• Chris Ferdinandi’s GOMAKETHINGS. COM

Chuck

• Wordpress – Plugin KingSumo
• Getdrip.com
• Softcover.io

Sponsors

• KendoUI

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

• Clubhouse

Panel

• AJ O’Neal

• Aimee Knight

• Joe Eames

• Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

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

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

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

Links

• Agile

• Scrum

• Waterfall

• Feature Driven Development

• Extreme Programming (XP)

• Jira

• Bamboo

• Confluence

• Atlassian stack

• Cowboy

• Mock objects

• Grows Method by Andy Hunt

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

• Origin by Dan Brown

• Searching

Aimee Knight:

• Hacker News Interview Questions Thread.

Joe Eames:

• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix

Charles Max Wood:

• Getting up early

• John Sonmez Kanbanflow video

• Drip

James Shore:

• Lost in Space on Netflix

• Star Citizen PC game

• Jame’s Agile book online

Sponsors:

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Brady Gaster

In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics.

Links:

• Vue
• jQuery
• Angular
• C#
• Chuck’s Twitter
• SignalR
• SignalR’s Twitter
• GitHub SignalR
• Socket.io
• Node-SASS
• ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client
• SignalR.net
• Real Talk JavaScript
• Parcel
• Brady Gaster’s Twitter
• Brady Gaster’s GitHub
• Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn

Picks:

Brady

• Team on General Session
• Korg
• SeaHawks
• Brady’s kids
• Logictech spot light
• AirPods

Charles

• Express VPN
• Hyper Drive
• J5 ports and SD card readers
• Podwrench

Sponsors

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan
• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus
• Clubhouse
• CacheFly

Host: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Vitali Zaidman

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles hosts Vitali Zaidman, Technical Lead at WellDone Software Solutions. He is also the author of the popular blog piece: “An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2019”.

Vitali has been writing code since he was 13 years old. After completing his military service, he attended The Open University of Israel where he took computer science courses. He picked JavaScript not knowing that it was going to be so popular.

He has been working for WellDone Software Solutions since he was a student where he has had the chance to work in many different projects. Vitali feels in order to keep up with technology it is important to work in different projects.

Vitali talks about projects he has worked on that he is proud of, one of which is his library at https://github.com/welldone-software/why-did-you-render

Links

• JSJ 331: An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2018 with Vitali Zaidman
• https://www.facebook.com/vzaidman
• https://twitter.com/vzaidman
• https://github.com/vzaidman
• https://medium.com/@vzaidman
• https://bitsrc.io/vzaidman
• https://www.welldone-software.com/
• https://www.powtoon.com/home/?

Picks

Vitali Zaidman:

• https://www.testim.io/
• https://applitools.com/
• An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2019 by Vitali Zaidman
• https://github.com/welldone-software/why-did-you-render

Charles Max Wood:

• https://www.vrbo.com/
• https://paradehomes.com/web/
• https://www.tripit.com/web
• Player's Handbook Dungeons & Dragons Core Rule Book

Sponsors

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

Panel

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

Joined by Special guest: Nicholas Zakas

Summary

Nicholas Zakas discusses the overuse of JavaScript and the underuse of HTML and CSS. The panel contemplates the talk Nicholas Zakas gave 6 years ago about this very same topic and how this is still a problem in the development community. Nicholas expounds on the negative effects overusing Javascript has on web applications and the things that using HTML and CSS do really well. The panel talks about the need for simplicity and using the right tool to build applications. Nicholas recommends the methods he uses to build greenfield applications and to improve existing applications.

Links

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li4Y0E_x8zE
• https://www.slideshare.net/nzakas/enough-withthejavascriptalready
• https://twitter.com/slicknet
• https://humanwhocodes.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber
• https://twitter.com/JSJabber

Picks

Chris Ferdinandi:

• The Umbrella Academy Official Trailer
• https://github.com/features/actions

AJ O’Neal:

• Jurassic Park
• Terminator 2
• E6000 adhesive

Aimee Knight:

• https://www.reebok.com/us/reebok-legacy-lifter/BD4730.html
• https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation

Charles Max Wood:

• https://podfestexpo.com/
• http://charlesmaxwood.com/
• https://www.11ty.io/
• https://www.netlify.com/

Joe Eames:

• https://www.mysteryscenemag.com/blog-article/5905-tom-straw-the-author-behind-castle
• Richard Castle books
• https://vanillajslist.com/

Nicholas Zakas:

• The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• https://opencollective.com/eslint

Sponsors

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

Panel

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

Joined by Special Guest: Gareth McCumskey

Summary

Gareth McCumskey introduces JAMstack and serverless. He goes into great detail on how it works. Aimee Knight and Aaron Frost voice their concerns about going serverless. Aimee thinks it feels dirty. Aaron has concerns about the code, is it actually easier, what use cases would he use it for, and does it actually save money. Gareth addresses these concerns and the rest of the panel considers the positive and negatives of using JAMstack and serverless. Charles Max Wood asks for specific use cases; Gareth supplies many uses cases and the benefits that each of these cases.

Links

• http://herodev.com/
• https://thinkster.io/
• https://jamstack.org/
• https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch
• https://expatexplore.com/
• https://serverless.com/
• https://www.cloud66.com/
• https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
• https://twitter.com/garethmcc
• https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber
• https://twitter.com/JSJabber

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Join the mailing list
• Watch out for new podcasts
• Send me defunct podcasts you love chuck@devchat.tv

Aimee Knight:

• Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management.
• Quest Nutrition Protein Bars

AJ O’Neal:

• Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy by Nobuo Uematsu
• Legend Of Zelda Concert 2018 Original Soundtrack by Never Land Orchestra  
• How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier  

Aaron Frost:

• The Go-Giver, Expanded Edition: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

Gareth McCumskey:

• https://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/
• Steam Play on Linux

Joe Eames:

• Expanding your horizons
• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages
• Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks: Languages That Are Shaping the Future
• https://elm-lang.org/

Sponsors

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

Panel

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

Joined by special guest: Mikeal Rogers

Episode Summary

This episode of JavaScript Jabber starts with Mikeal Rogers introducing himself and his work in brief. Charles clarifies that he wants to focus this show on some beginner content such as node.js basics, so Mikeal gives some historical background on the concept, elaborates on its modern usage and features and explains what “streams” are, for listeners who are starting to get into JavaScript. The panelists then discuss how languages like Go and Python compare to node.js in terms of growth and individual learning curves. Mikeal answers questions about alternate CLIs, package management, Pika, import maps and their effect on node.js, and on learning JavaScript in general. Chris, Charles and AJ also chip in with their experiences in teaching modern JS to new learners and its difficulty level in comparison to other frameworks. They wrap up the episode with picks.

Links

• Mikeal on Twitter
• Mikeal on GitHub

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

Picks

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Artifact Conference

Aimee Knight:

• A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There
• Programming: doing it more vs doing it better

Mikeal Rogers:

• The Future of the Web – CascadiaJS 2018
• Brave Browser

Charles Max Wood:

• Podwrench

Sponsors

• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus

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

• CacheFly

Panel

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

Joined by special guest: Dan Shappir

Episode Summary

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

Links

• Dan’s Twitter
• Dan’s GitHub
• SSR
• WeakMap

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

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

• Tip - Take some time off once in a while

Aimee Knight:

• Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

AJ O’Neal:

• Fatherhood!

Joe Eames:

• Tiny Towns

• The Goldbergs

Charles Max Wood:

• EverywhereJS

• Christopher Buecheler’s books

• Get a Coder Job - Publishing soon!

Dan Shappir:

• Quora

• Corvid by Wix

• You Gotta Love Frontend Conferences

Sponsors

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

• CacheFly

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined By Special Guest: Noam Rosenthal

Episode Summary

Noam has recently started offering his services and experiences independently after 20 hands-on years in the software industry. His most recent position was as a Software Architect working on the Wix Editor at Wix, an Israeli cloud-based web development platform.

Noam was first introduced to programming at the age of seven when he started creating games in Pascal language. He then went onto learn HTML. Charles and Noam talk about how the programming community has changed over the years and how it is a lot easier to access knowledge today. On how to improve as a developer, Noam recommends not staying in the comfort zone of the job description and doing as many volunteer projects as possible.

Noam is also a musician and he plays base in Lost Highways music band. When he isn't coding he is busy producing the songs for their new upcoming album with his band.

Links

• Noam's LinkedIn

• Noam's Twitter

• Noam's Medium

• Rack

• Rust Language

• TensorFlow

• Shadertoy

• Lost Highways

• Ultimate Guitar Tabs

• https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber

• https://twitter.com/JSJabber

• https://www.facebook.com/DevChattv

Picks

Noam Rosenthal:

• For developers working with JavaScript - learn another language such as Rust Language

• TensorFlow

• Shadertoy

• Learn to play an instrument

• Ultimate Guitar Tabs

• Do volunteer projects and do not stay in the comfort zone of work

Charles Max Wood:

• Cibola Burn

• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work Book by John M. Gottman and Nan Silver

• OBS: Open Broadcaster Software

Sponsors

•  Datadog

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

Panel

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• Christopher Beucheler

• AJ O’Neal

With Special Guest: Javan Makhmali

Episode Summary

Today’s guest is Javan Makhmali, who works for Basecamp and helped develop Trix. Trix is a rich text editor for the web, made purposefully simple for everyday use instead of a full layout tool. Trix is not the same as Tiny MCE, and Javan discusses some of the differences. He talks about the benefits of using Trix over other native browser features for text editing. He talks about how Trix has simplified the work at Basecamp, especially when it came to crossing platforms. Javan talks more about how Trix differs from other text editors like Google Docs and contenteditable, how to tell if Trix is functioning correctly, and how it works with Markdown.

The panel discusses more specific aspects of Trix, such as Exec command. One of the features of Trix is it is able to output consistently in all browsers and uses semantic, clean HTML instead of classnames. Javan talks about how Trix handles getting rid of the extraneous cruft of formatting when things are copy and pasted, the different layers of code, and the undo feature. He talks about whether or not there will be more features added to Trix. The panel discusses who could benefit from using Trix. The show finishes with Javan talking about Basecamp’s decision to make Trix open source and why they code in CoffeeScript. 

Links

• Trix

• Tiny MCE

• Contenteditable

• Markdown

• SVG

• HTML

• CoffeeScript

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Javan Makhmali:

• API for form submissions

Chris Ferdinandi:

• CSS Grid

• Alex Russel Twitter thread

• How To Live a Vibrant Life with Early Stage Dementia

AJ O’Neal:

• Mario and Chill

• Chip Tunes 4 Autism: Catharsis

• Toilet Auger

Christopher Beucheler: 

• Medium to Own blog

Aimee Knight:

• Absolute Truth Unlearned as Junior Developer

Sponsors

• Datadog  

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

Panel

• Aimee Knight

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

With Special Guest: Rene Rubalcava

Episode Summary

Rene is a software developer for ESRI and works in spatial and mapping software. ESRI has been around since 1969 and has seen their work explode since they shifted to providing address and location services. Rene talks about how he thinks about location and mapping when building software around it and things that he has to approach in unique ways. The panel discusses some of their past experiences with location software. Some of the most difficult aspects of this software is changing time zones for data and actually mapping the Earth, since it is not flat nor a perfect sphere. Rene talks about the different models used for mapping the Earth.

Most mapping systems use the same algorithm as Google maps, so Rene talks about some of the specific features of ArcGIS, including the ability to finding a point within a polygon. Rene talks about what routing is, its importance, and how it is being optimized with ArcGIS, such as being able to add private streets into a regular street network.

The panel discusses how the prevalence of smartphones has changed mapping and GPS and some of their concerns with privacy and location mapping. One thing ESRI is very careful about is not storing private information. Rene talks about the kinds of things he has seen people doing with the mapping and location data provided by ArcGIS, including a Smart Mapping feature for developers, mapping planets, indoor routing, and 3D models. 

Links

• Webricate 

• Esri

• ArcGIS

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Rene Rubalcava:

• Old Man’s War series

• Always Be My Maybe

• Rene’s website

AJ O’Neal:

• INTL

• Colorful

• Time zones in Postgress

• Time zones in JavaScript

Aimee Knight:

• Advice to Less Experienced Developers

Charles Max Wood:

• Heber Half Marathon

• Netlify CMS

• Villainous

• Firefox

Sponsors

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

• RxJS Live

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• Christopher Beucheler

• AJ O’Neal

With Special Guest: John Somnez

Episode Summary

John is the founder of Bulldog Mindset andSimple Programmer, which teaches software developers soft skills, and the author of a couple books. He specializes in creating a personal brand and marketing. He addresses the rumors of him leaving software development and gives an introduction to marketing yourself as a software developer and its importance. The panel discusses their experience with consulting and how marketing themselves has paid off. John talks about the importance of having soft skills. In his opinion, the most important soft skills for programmers are communication, persuasion and influence, people skills and charisma. He talks about highlight those soft skills. The truth is, more and more people are hiring for people skills rather than technical skills. The panel discusses more about the importance of people skills.

John talks about ways to build your personal brand. One of the easiest ways is blogging but he talks about other methods like podcasts YouTube, writing books, and others. A key to building a personal brand is choosing something that you can become the best at, no matter how small it is. The panel shares their experiences of what things have gotten them attention and notoriety and talk about how other influential programmers got famous. They talk about interacting with central platforms like Medium and Github. Building a personal brand for software developers is the same as any other personal brand, such as having a consistent message, consistent logos and color schemes, and repeated exposure). Most people in the software world aren’t willing to do what’s necessary to build a personal brand, so it makes you stand out when you do it. John talks about the importance of controlling your image so that companies want to hire you. John gives a brief overview of his course How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer. 

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

Links

• John Somnez’s books

• Data Grid Girl

• Follow JavaScript Jabber on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• To Sell is Human

• How to Win Friends and Influence People

John Somnez:

• Follow John at bulldogmindset.com and simpleprogrammer.com

• The Little Book of Stoicism

• Training Peaks

Christopher Beucheler:

• Strasborg, France

AJ O’Neal

• Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy

• Parallels

• Cam Slide

Sponsors

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

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

With Special Guest: Anatoliy Zaslavskiy

Episode Summary

Anatoliy Zaslavsky works for Hover, made framework called Pickle.js, and has been on JavaScript Jabber before. Today Chuck and Anatloliy are talking about the importance of mental health. Anatoliy has Bipolar Disorder, and he talks about what it is and his experience with it and how his manic and depressive episodes have affected him. Thankfully, his employers at Hover have been extremely supportive. Chuck and Anatoliy talk about what people should do when they are suffering from a mental illness so that they can do the things they love again. Some of the best ways of coping with mental health issues are to keep a lifeline out to friends and family, go to a professional therapist, stay on a consistent exercise and sleep pattern, and stay away from substances. They talk about how to support someone that is suffering from a mental illness. 

Anatoliy talks about some of the symptoms and behavioral changes he has during both manic and depressive episodes and how it has affected him in the workplace. Mental health issues are almost always accompanied by changes in behavior, and Chuck and Anatoliy talk about ways to approach a person about their behavior. Anatoliy gives advice on how to work with your employer while you are suffering from a mental illness. For mental illnesses that aren’t as dramatic as Bipolar Disorder, Anatoliy talks about coping mechanisms such as staying away from triggers, knowing what motivates you and communicating it to your employer, and other practices that have helped him. He talks about some of his triggers and how it has affected his work, both for the better and worse.

 Finding out what helps you cope and what triggers you is often trial and error, but it can help to talk to other people in your field who struggle with the same mental health issues. Anatoliy talks about the pros and cons of working from home or in an office when you have a mental illness. They finish by talking about a few other points on mental health and resources for those suffering from a mental illness to get the help they need. 

Links

• Bipolar disorder

• Pickle.js 

• Ketamine therapy

• Ruby Rogues ep. 142: Depression and Mental Illness with Greg Bauges

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

• NAMI

• DBS Alliance

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• ExpressVPN

Anatoliy Zaslavskiy:

• Contact Anatoliy at toli@toliycodes.com

• Visit his website tolicodes.com

• Misu app (in beta)

Sponsors

• Adventures in Blockchain

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

• My Ruby Story

Panel

• Aimee Knight 

• Chris Buecheler

• AJ O’Neal

With Special Guest: Brian Lonsdorf

Episode Summary

Brian Lonsdorf works for Salesforce, specializes in functional programming, and wrote a book called Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming. Brian talks about when he got into functional programming and when in their career others should be exposed to it. He talks about the fundamental tenets of functional programming (static mathematical functions), how it differs from object oriented programming, and how to manipulate data in a functional environment. The panel wonders if it is possible to use functional and object oriented programming together and discuss the functional core imperative shell. Brian talks about what is ‘super functional’ and why JavaScript isn’t, but includes methods for making it work. He shares some of the trade-offs he’s found while doing functional programming. Brian defines a monad and goes over some of the common questions he gets about functional programming, such as how to model an app using functional programming. The show concludes with Brian talking about some of the work he’s been doing in AI and machine learning. 

Links

• Promise

• Functional core, imperative shell

• RxJs

• Monad

• Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Aimee Knight:

• After The Burial (band)

Chris Buecheler:

• Minecraft in JavaScript

AJ O’Neal:

• Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen

• Greenlock v3 campaign

Brian Lonsdorf:

• Follow Brian @drboolean

• Chris Penner Comonads

Episode Summary

Adam Leventhal is the CEO and cofounder of Transposit. Transposit was born from the desire to build a way for developers to work with lots of different APIs, take authentication and pagination off the table, and let developers focus on the problems they’re trying to solve. Transposit is a serverless platform that’s free and gives you a combination of SQL or JavaScript to start playing with your API.

Since interacting with API data securely can be difficult, the panel discusses how Transposit might replace the personally built tools and how does it compare to JAMstack. They talk about some common things that people do wrong with security. 

Transposit is often used as the full backend, and Adam shares how that works. There is a list of APIs that Transposit can talk to, and you can build your own connector. You can also work with JavaScript and SQL simultaneously. 

Chris Ferdinandi asks some more specific questions about how Transposit can work with email lists. Adam clarifies the difference between connectors and apps in Transposit. He delves into more detail on what makes it work under the hood. 

There are some 450,000 Stack applications but the majority have one user because they built it to communicate specifically with their API. The panel discusses how Transposit can help with this. Since Transposit is still in startup mode, it is free for now, and can connect to any public facing API. Adam talks about their decision not to make it open source and gives more details on where the authentications occur. The show wraps up with the panel talking about the pros of going serverless

Panelists

• Chris Ferdinandi

• Christopher Buecheler

With special guest: Adam Leventhal 

Sponsors

• Adventures in .NET

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

• Elixer Mix

Links

• Transposit

• SQL

• JAMstack

• OpenAPI

• Swagger

• YAML

• MailChimp

• React Redux

• Converting a string into Markup with Vanilla JS

• How to create a map of DOM nodes with Vanilla JS

• Custom events in Internet Explorer with Vanilla JS

• DOM diffing with Vanilla JS part 1

• DOM diffing with Vanilla JS part 2

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Christopher Buecheler:

• Manchester Orchestra

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Reef

• Elizabeth Warren

Adam Leventhal:

• Hamilton the biography

• Antler

• Follow Adam on Twitter @ahl

Valeri Karpov is a maintainer on Mongoose, has started a few companies, and works for a company called Booster Fuels. Today’s topic debugging with Async/Await. The panel talks about some of the challenges of debugging with Async. AJ, however, has never encountered the same problems, so he shares his debugging method. 

Valeri differentiates between .catch vs try...catch, and talks about why he prefers .catch. There are two ways to handle all errors in an async function without leading to an unhandled promise rejection. The first is to wrap the entire body of the async function in a try...catch, has some limitations. Calling an async function always returns a promise, so the other approach is calling .catch on the promise to handle any errors that occur in that function body. One of the key differences is if you return a promise within an async function, and that return promise is wrapped in a try...catch, the catch block won’t get called if that promise is rejected, whereas if you call .catch on the promise that the function returns, you’ll actually catch that error. There are rare instances where this can get tricky and unintuitive, such as where you have to call new promise and have resolve and reject, and you can get unexpected behavior.

The panel discusses Valeri’s current favorite JS interview question, which is,  “Given a stream, implement a function called ‘stream to promise’ that, given a stream, returns a promise that resolves to the concatenation of all the data chunks emitted by the stream, or rejects if the stream emits an error event.” It’s really simple to get this qustion right, and really simple to get it wrong, and the difference can be catastrophic. AJ cautions listeners to never use the data event except in the cases Val was talking about, only use the readable event.

The conversation turns to the function of a readable event. Since data always pushes data, when you get a readable event, it’s up to you to call read inside the function handler, and then you get back a chunk of data, call read again and again until the read returns null. When you use readable, you are in control and you avoid piling functions into RAM. In addition, the right function will return true or false to let you know if the buffer is full or not. This is a way to mix imperative style into a stream.

The next discussion topics are the differences between imperative style and reactive style and how a waits and promises work in a normal four loop. A wait suspends the execution of a function until the promise is resolved. Does a wait actually stop the loop or is it just transpiling like a promise and it doesn’t stop the loop. AJ wrote a module called Batch Async to be not as greedy as promise.all but not as limited as other options.

The JavaScript panelists talk about different async iterators they’ve used, such as Babel. They discuss the merits of Babel, especially since baseline Android phones (which a significant portion of the population of the world uses) run UC Browser that doesn’t support Babel, and so a significant chunk of the population of the world. On the other hand, if you want to target a large audience, you need to use Babel.

Since frameworks in general don’t handle async very well, the panel discusses ways to mitigate this. They talk about different frameworks like Vue, React, and Express and how they support async functions. They discuss why there is no way for you to actually cancel an async option in an actual case, how complex canceling is, and what you are really trying to solve for in the cancellation process. 

Canceling something is a complex problem. Valeri talks about his one case where he had a specific bug that required non-generic engineering to solve, and cancelling actually solved something. When AJ has come across cancellation issues, it’s very specific to that use case. The rest of the panelists talk about their experiences with having to cancel something. 

Finally, they talk about their experience with async generator functions. A generator is a function that lets you enter into the function later. This makes sense for very large or long running data sets, but when you have a bounded items, don’t complicate your code this way. When an async generator function yields, you explicitly need to call next in order for it to pick up again. If you don’t call ‘next’, it’s essentially cancelled. Remember that object.keys and object.values are your friends. 

Panelists

• Christopher Buecheler

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Valeri Karpov

Sponsors

• The DevEd Podcast

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

• Adventures in DevOps

Links

• Mongoose

• Express 5

• Node Streams

• Pull Streams

• Masteringjs.io

• MongoDB

• Babel

• HTML

• Webpack

• Vue

• Express

• RxJS

• Console.log

• Json.stringify

• Batchasync.js

• How to Write Batch Async Functions

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

• Ethan Garofolo YouTube

Christopher Buecheler:

• Functional Design Patterns for Express.js

Charles Max Wood:

• Microsoft Ignite

• Maxcoders.io

Valeri Karpov:

• Follow Valeri on Twitter @code_barbarian and Github @vkarpov15

• Masteringjs.io

• Jurassic Park: A Novel

Tanmai is one of the founders at Hasura. Hasura gives you instant graphQL APIs on top of a Postgres database. The eventual idea is to make data access secure and easy. Tanmai explains the challenges of doing this in the cloud. He talks about some of the difficulties with the tooling around using GraphQL and its bias towards working well with a monolith. Since GraphQL is basically a shared type system that describes your API, that means all your types need to be in the same code base. This is at odds with the folks who want to do microservices and serverless functions, because since their API is split across multiple services they have different types, and forcing these types to work together defeats the purpose of using microservices. Also, storing state across requests doesn’t work well with serverless and cloud native stuff. In short, learning to live without state is one of the general challenges with going serverless. 

This is where Hasura comes into play, and Tanmai explains how it works. Hasura is metadata driven, and each instance of the server can leverage multiple calls and exhibit a high amount of concurrency. It’s designed to be a little more CPU bound than memory bound, which means that configuring auto scaling on it is very easy and allows you to utilize the elasticity of cloud native applications. Tanmai clarifies his usage of the word ‘cloud native’, by which he means microservices. He explains that when you have a metadata based engine, this metadata has a language that allows you to bring to bring in types from multiple upstream microservices, and create a coherent graphQL API on top of that. Hasura is a middle man between the microservices and the consumer that converts multiple types into a single coherent graphQL API.

Next, Tanmai explains how Hasura handles data fetching and a high volume of requests. They also invented PostgresQL, RLS-like semantics within Hasura. He explains the process for merging your microservices into a single graphQL interface. Back on data fetching, Tanmai explains that when the product is an app, preventing an overabundance of queries becomes easier because during one of the staging processes that they have, they extract all of the queries that the app is actually making, and in the production version it only allows the queries that it has seen before. Hasura is focused on both the public interface and private use cases, though private is slightly better supported. 

Tanmai talks about the customizations available with Hasura. Hasura supports two layers. One is an aliasing layer that lets you rename tables, columns, etc as exposed by PostgresQL. The other is a computer column, so that you can add computer columns so you can extend the type that you get from a data model, and then you can point that to something that you derive. 

The panelist discusses the common conception of why it is a bad idea to expose the data models to the frontend folks directly. They discuss the trend of ‘dumbing down’ available tooling to appeal to junior developers, at the cost of making the backend more complicated. They talk about some of the issues that come from this, and the importance of tooling to solve this concern. 

Finally, Tanmai talks about the reasons to use Hasura over other products. There are 2 technologies that help with integrating arbitrary data sources. First is authorization grammar, their version of RLS that can extend to any system of types and relationships, The second is the data wrapper, part of the compiler that compiles from the graphQL metadata AST to the actual SQL AST. That is a generic interface, so anyone can come in and plug in a Haskell module that has that interface and implement a backend compiler for a native query language. This allows us to plug in other sources and stitch microservices together. The show concludes with Tanmai talking about their choice to use Haskell to make Hasura. 

Panelists

• AJ O’Neal

• Dan Shapir

• Steve Edwards

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Tanmai Gopal

Sponsors

• Adventures in DevOps

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

• The Dev Ed Podcast

Links

• Hasura

• Haskell

• Node.js

• Cloud Native

• Microservices 

• PostGraphile 

• Postgres 

• PostgresQL RLS

• Swagger

• JAMstack

• Soap

• Rest

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

• The Economic Singularity

• Capital Cities

• GameCube Homebrew

Dan Shapir:

• Romania

• JSCamp

Steve Edwards:

• Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders

Charles Max Wood:

• Maxcoders.io

• TripIt

• St. George Marathon

• VO2 Max app

Tanmai Gopal: 

• Follow Tanmai on Twitter @tanmaigo

• Broken Earth Trilogy

• The Three-Body Problem

• graphQL Asia

Vitali Zaidman is a full stack developer who works for WellDone Software Solutions and is currently working on a SEO project. Today’s show is about SEO for developers. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which helps your website appear higher on search engines.

 SEO has changed a lot in the past 10 years. It has become much more regulated, and the “dirty tricks” of the past will actually penalize you, so it is important to do it properly. Today the best way to promote yourself on Google besides making good content is for developers to optimize the content, make it small, operational, secure, accessible, and operate on mobile. Much of it goes back to using semantic HTML since Google looks at it before looking at the structure of your website, how valuable it is, and how users interact with it. Having good semantics helps Google determine how valuable it is, so semantic HTML should be a top priority. Semantic HTML can also make your site more accessible to users, which will in turn give you a larger audience. 

The panel talks about some of the challenges of SEO faced by companies. While bigger companies have the privilege of dedicated SEO teams, small companies often lack these specialists. Thankfully, Google has made their guidelines for SEO very accessible and gives you a lot of tools to track your optimization. The panel talks about different methods of SEO, such as including FAQ at the bottom of the web page, optimizing page speed, and image optimization. Structured data like questions and answers enriches the data that is shown for users on the search results page. To score your website’s SEO, Google released the tool PageSpeed Insights, which will assign your website a performance score. 

Google uses two main tools to track a website’s SEO. First, they use real field data. If you opt in to ‘help improve Chrome’s features and performance’ when you install Chrome, it tracks how fast websites load on your Chrome, and they collect this information to understand how webpages load. It is required that your website has a certain amount of visitors to be tracked and added to the database. Second, Google has their own devices that will check your website. Currently, they are using a Moto G4 to test for mobile access, and a slow internet connection. Because of this, it is pretty easy to get a good score on desktop, but difficult to get a good score on mobile. The technology that drives all this is called Lighthouse. 

Overall, performance is the main thing users look for, so aim for good performance and fast websites. The panel discusses the correlation between performance and SEO. For example, Fox News and CNN are two of the top search results for ‘news’, but they have a dismal Google PSI score. They conclude that performance shouldn’t be ignored, but be careful about directly correlating performance and SEO. They also caution against getting obsessed over certain aspects of SEO by themselves. 

Panelists

• Dan Shapir

• Aimee Knight

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Vitali Zaidman

Sponsors

• Tidelift

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

• Elixir Mix

Links

• SEO

• JSON

• Google Webmaster guidelines

• Google PageSpeed Insights

• Chrome CrUX

• Lighthouse

• Here's How the Google Speed Update Will Impact Your Site

• SEO for Developers - A Quick Overview

• Google Quality Guidelines

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Aimee Knight:

• Spotify CLI

Dan Shapir:

• Chrome Dev Summit 2019

• Dan Shapir on Twitter

• The Anubis Gates

Charles Max Wood:

• St. George Marathon

Vitali Zaidman: 

• Vitali’s website

• Arzamas Academy

• Follow Vitali on Medium and Twitter

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Charles talks about the new direction he has for the company. He wants  to drive people to the point that they have the skills that make people want to hire and work with them, to teach them how to ‘Max out’. Today the panel the skills that developers need to progress in their careers: social skills. 

The panel talks about their observations from work that the people who advanced and grow in their career were the ones with social skills, not necessarily with technical skills. The company wants to get stuff done, and if your social skills are getting in the way of projects getting done because you can’t work with others, you are not that useful to the company, and you will be stuck in the lower ranks while others who may not have the same technical skills will rise in the ranks because they are pleasant to work with. Mani talks about his personal experience getting laid off for lacking these soft skills. But then he read the book 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green, realized his shortcomings, and started to apply just one lesson from the book. Within 6 months, he was promoted.

Mani delves deeper into the first lesson taught in 48 Laws of Power, Never Outshine the Master. Fundamentally, this means that you don’t try to prove in meetings how good you are, or that they’re wrong, or that you think that you are better than them. The more you the aforementioned things, the less likely you will be to get promoted or trusted. Mani talks about how he used to do these things and how it cost him multiple jobs. When he put this lesson into practice, he changed his methods and the boss started to like him, leading to his promotion 6 months later. The panel discusses this lesson and what benefits can come from it. 

Mani shares another lesson that he learned through the story of a friend trying to get him to invest in his business. After Mani refused to invest multiple times, his friend stopped asking him to invest, but instead asked him for business advice. Eventually, Mani invested in the business because when he saw that his friend was influenced by his advice, it engendered trust between them. The panel agrees that if you want to influence someone, you have to be influenced by them. It is important to treat someone as a person rather than an asset or wallet, and ensure them that their investment is not their end goal. One of the most fundamental social skills that you must be able to like people, because other people can smell manipulation. 

The panel transitions to talking about the paradoxical nature of social skills and that they are often the opposite of what you think will work in a situation. Unfortunately, there will always be difficult people to work with. To illustrate how to work with difficult people, Mani shares the story of how Gengis Khan was convinced not to destroy a city of artists and engineers by his advisor, Yelu Chucai. Gengis Khan agreed because Yelu Chucai was able to structure his plea in a way that would also benefit Gengis Khan. 

The conversation shifts to how to conduct an interview to see if a candidate will fit into your team culture. First, you must know what you’re looking for and understand your team culture, and then ask for stories of when they accomplished something in the interview. If every story is all about how they did something and they don’t include other people, then that may indicate their self-centeredness. They discuss the Ben Franklin Effect. 

For those listeners wondering where to begin with all this self improvement, Mani has read over 2,000 books on business and offers a course on his website, 2000books.com. Mani has teamed up with JavaScript Jabber to offer a special deal to the listeners of this podcast. To get lifetime access to Mani’s courses at a 40% discount, follow the links below. 

Panelists

• Steve Edwards

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Mani Vaya

Sponsors

• React Native Radio

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

• React Round Up

Links

• 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green

• The 360 Degree Leader by John C. Maxwell

• The Ben Franklin Effect

• javascriptjabber.com/social and 2000books.com 

  • 40% off for the first 200 people

  • Coupon code: Jabber

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Steve Edwards:

• Rex Chapman

Charles Max Wood:

• BombBomb

• IndieHackers.com 

• Stolen bike prank

Mani Vaya: 

• How I Built This by NPR

• As a Man Thinketh

This week, My Javascript Story welcomes Javan Makhmali,a Programmer at Basecamp from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Javan attended Community College to study Computer Science but then decided to work as a Freelancer developer. Javan and Charles debate whether having a 4-year college degree is better to become a developer and conclude that it depends on the person. Some people prefer a structured 4 year degree to feel ready for a full time jo and some people do better with bootcamps. Javan mentions he knows several people that switched careers after completing an 8 week bootcamp and that the industry was really flexible to accomodate both options.

Charles and Javan then continue talking about Javan's journey as a developer and particularly his journey with Basecamp. Javan started out working with Ruby on Rails and after a couple of years applied for a job at Basecamp (then known as 37 Signals). Javan then started working with CoffeeScript which helped him understand working with JavaScript.

Charles and Javan talk about the projects Javan is working on currently at Basecamp. Outside of work Javan, is a new parent and enjoys spending time with his daughter. He feels ever since he has become a parent, his work life balance has been better.

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest:  Javan Makhmali

Links

• JSJ 376: Trix: A Rich Text Editor for Everyday Writing with Javan Makhmali

• Javan's Twitter

Sponsors

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

• Dev Ed Podcast

• Adventures in Blockchain

• CacheFly

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• https://maxcoders.io/

Daniel Caldas is calling from Singapore. He currently works as a software engineer for Zendesk and has also worked in Portugal and Germany. He has worked primarily on the frontend with Node and JavaScript. He talks about his experience testing JavaScript, how he got started with Jest, and why he likes it. Daniel finds Jest very easy to use and straightforward. He likes that  Jest has a single reference page for documentation. He feels that Jest is largely complete out of the box and has only made a small add on to get rid of Boilerplate in some tests.

Daniel explains what a snapshot, how they work, and why he prefers fixtures over factories. He gives tips on how to set up your tests so that they are easy to follow. He finds it helps to structure your scenarios in the fixture description. He talks about gotchas in Jest. While Jest is largely easy to use, Jest has been around for a while and breaking changes do happen. It’s important to check what version your code base is using. While there are a lot of free sources around Jest online, he advises listeners to stick as close to the official documentation as possible, or to people associated with Jest, and to read recent stuff. As for conventions, Jest has pretty much everything out of the box and the built in conventions make it easy to navigate any project that uses Jest.

Daniel talks about some of the features available in Jest, converting observables into promises, and tricks he has used to make tests easier to put together. He talks about his method for keeping his mocks and stubs straight. He advises listeners to have some organizational rules, such as starting the imports alphabetically, and to always follow those rules. He talks about how he runs tests and what environments he uses. While Jest is normally used for unit testing, Daniel has also used it for end to end tests, and he talks about his experience with an open source project doing both types in Jest. Daniel concludes the show by advising listeners starting with JavaScript and frontend, don’t think too much about the library you’re going to use because you’ll probably end up using Jest. It’s more important to have unit tests and a proper testing framework at the beginning than anything else. He also invites listeners to check out his open source work on Github.

Panelists

• Aimee Knight

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

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Guest

• Danile Caldas

Sponsors

• Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

Links

• Zendesk

• Jest

• React

• Babel

• ESLint

• Async/Await

• Cypress

• React-d3-graph

• Unrevealed tips for unit testing with Jest

Picks

Aimee Knight:

• The Difference Between Fault Tolerance, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery

AJ O’Neal:

• Rubin Report with Lindsay Shepherd

Charles Max Wood:

• White Christmas

• Holiday Inn

Daniel Caldas:

• Home Alone

Adam dives into how to document your application using OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) and then how to generate great documentation for your API's using Redoc. He gives us the history of Redoc, breaks down the process for building API documentation, and understanding the OpenAPI specification.

Panelists

• Aimee Knight

• Dan Shappir

• AJ ONeal

• Steve Edwards

Guest

• Adam Altman

Sponsors

• G2i

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Links

• https://twitter.com/redocly

• Https://Redoc.ly

• https://www.facebook.com/redocly

Picks

Steve Edwards:

• https://wesbos.com/announcing-my-css-grid-course/

• https://flexbox.io/

Aimee Knight:

• https://github.com/ErikCH/DevYouTubeList

Dan Shappir:

• Old Kingdom Book Series

AJ O’Neal:

• Final Fantasy VII and VIII (Physical Copy, English) on Play Asia

Adam Altman:

• concepts.app