es

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

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

AJ O'Neal

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

AJ

Corey

Ben

Aaron

Issac




es

MJS 052: Jeremy Likness

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Jeremy Likness

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks

Charles

Jeremy




es

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

Panel:

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

Joe

AJ

Orta




es

JSJ 306: The Framework Summit with Joe Eames

Panel:

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Cory

Aimee

Joe

AJ




es

MJS 055: Johannes Schickling

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Johannes Schickling

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks

Charles

Johannes




es

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

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Evan Hahn

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks:

Charles

Evan




es

MJS 062: Zachary Kessin

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Zachary Kessin

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Picks

Charles

Zach




es

JSJ 317: Prisma with Johannes Schickling

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • AJ O’Neal

Special Guests: Johannes Schickling

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

AJ

Johannes




es

JSJ 320: Error Tracking and Troubleshooting Workflows with David Cramer LIVE at Microsoft Build

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • Alyssa Nicholl
  • Ward Bell

Special Guests: David Cramer

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

  • Socks as Swag

David




es

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Vesa Juvonen

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

Vesa




es

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

Panel:

  • Charles Max Wood
  • AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Kurt Mackey

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Charles

AJ

Kurt




es

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

Panel:

  • Aimee Knight
  • Joe Eames
  • AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Jeremy Fairbank

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Joe

Jeremy




es

MJS 075: Jeff Escalante

Show notes coming shortly!




es

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

Panel:

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

Special Guests: Valeri Karpov 

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

Show Topics:

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

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

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

3:57 – Chuck asks a question.

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

8:53 – AJ makes comments.

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

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

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

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

12:55 – Implementing Complex Business Logic.

15:50 – Val discusses his new e-book.

17:08 – Question from Aimee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26:01 – Val answers the question.

26:32 – Building a webserver with Python

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

36:40 – Facebook’s Regenerator

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

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

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

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

42:09 – Windows Scripting Host

42:56 – Val used Rhino in the past.

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

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

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

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

49:20 – Let’s go to Aimee’s Picks!

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

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

54:53 – Val talks about Promises Finally.

59:20 – Picks

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Aimee

AJ

Val




es

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

Panel:

Special Guests: Vitali Zaidman

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

Show Topics:

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

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

2:46 – Chuck asks Vitali a question.

3:03 – Vitali’s answer.

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

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

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

4:43 – Joe: I use Angular, primarily.

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

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

8:22 – Vitali: Check out my article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14:51: Vitali answers the above question.

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

15:56 – Panelist: I agree with this.

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

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

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

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

17:33 – Question to Vitali by Panelist.

17:55 – Vitali answers the question.

18:30 – Panelist makes additional comments.

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

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

19:38 – Panelist makes comments.

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

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

21:05 – Aimee makes comments.

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

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

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

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

23:37 – Vitali chimes in.

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

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

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

26:19 – Advertisement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31:17 – Did you edit and review?

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

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

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

He continues this conversation from here on out.

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

34:16 – Vitali chimes-in. 

34:38 – Chuck. 

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

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

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

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

40:30 – Vitali comments on this great question.

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

41:29 – Vitali talks about this topic.

42:14 – Let’s go to picks!

42:14 – Advertisement.

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Chuck

Vitali




es

JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint” with Nicholas Zakas

Panel:

Special Guests: Nicholas Zakas

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

Show Topics:

0:05 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

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

1:04 – Nicholas who are you?

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

1:58 – Chuck: What is it?

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

2:53 – Where did it come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest goes into what this can teach people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30:07 – Advertisement – Sentry!

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

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

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

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

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

35:16 – Do you run Premier?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please save your money!

Lyme disease is spread through tick bites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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es

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

Panel:

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

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

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

Show Topics:

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

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

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

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

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

7:49 – Aimee: I heard that, too.

7:59 – Guest.

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

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

8:49 – Panel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(The Guest continues diving into his answer.)

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

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

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

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

31:33 – Advertisement: Sentry.io

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

32:40 – Chuck: Kind of.

32:50 – Guest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

39:22 – Chuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

48:00 – (Guest continues.)

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

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

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

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

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

Essentially you can hook up microstates to a fire hose.

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

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

52:20 – Chuck: Anything else?

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

53:03 – Chuck: Let’s do some picks!

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

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es

MJS 086: James Adams

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: James Adams

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with James Adams who is a web and a full stack developer who currently resides in Melbourne, Australia. Chuck and James talk about James’ background, current projects, JavaScript, Ruby, Meetups, and much more! Check out today’s episode to hear all of the details.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:55 – Chuck: Welcome to My Java Script story! You are the 4th person I have talk to today. I have only talked to one person in the U.S. Other people were from Denmark, Tennessee (USA), and Bulgaria.

1:39 – Guest: I am in Australia!

1:48 – Chuck: I try to open it up for different times and different locations. I started making my own program. I want one tool to manage my podcast company.

2:20 – Guest.

2:26 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please!

2:33 – Guest: I have been working in JavaScript for 2 years now, and I just FOUND it. I could have been put anywhere but working with a large company. I discovered React.js. I went to study Math and Chemistry originally.

3:24 – Chuck: What was it – why did you change from mathematics to programming?

3:38 – Guest: I like solving problems and that has been true my whole life.

4:25 – Chuck: I identify with that – you’re right – for me, it’s more tangible and it’s neat to see something being built.

White line on a black floor is mentioned.

5:30 – Guest: I had a great education, but seems like the education in the U.S. is more fun. We didn’t get to program and stuff like that.

5:51 – Chuck: My experience was that I got to do really interesting things in High School.

6:20 – Guest: I think you reap benefits by diving into one topic.

6:36 – Chuck: We were building little circuits that were turning on/off LED. We then went to building robots and then computer chips. How did you get into JavaScript?

7:01 – Guest: We didn’t touch JavaScript until my 3rd year. I went to a school in Jerusalem for a while.

9:05 – Chuck: How did you get your first programming job?

9:10 – Guest: I wasn’t really applying – I thought I would travel for a year or so. It was weird I didn’t think I had to apply to jobs right away. I applied to a few jobs, and my friend started sharing my resume around and I ended up doing some contract work for that company. I used RUBY for that team.

10:18 – Chuck: First few jobs I got were through the “spray-and-pray” method. The best jobs I got are because I KNEW somebody.

10:30 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth.

11:31 – Guest mentions networking.

11:41 – Chuck: What have you done with JavaScript that you are especially proud of?

11:45 – Guest.

13:43 – Chuck: I didn’t know that honestly. I never really thought of integrating React Native into a native app.

14:00 – Guest: Yeah, it’s really cool. I didn’t think about it before either!

14:24 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

14:28 – Guest: Actually, I am working on some integration with different parties. Now we are routing everything back to the backend.

15:46 – Chuck: I think I have heard of Pro...

15:52 – Guest: Yeah, they are located in the U.S.

16:01 – Chuck: Every community/country is different, but what is it like to be a programmer in Melbourne, Australia?

16:16 – Guest: It’s cool and I think it has a way to go. We have a React Meetup.

16:55 – Chuck: Sounds like you have a healthy community down there. So in Denmark if you get away from the bigger cities then you have a harder time finding a community in the rural areas.

17:30 – Guest: Do you spend more time online?

17:50 – Chuck: Yeah, I don’t know. I live in Utah. It is hard because there is a community North in Logan, UT.

18:13 – Guest: You have 5-6 main cities in Australia. We don’t have medium-sized cities. In the U.S. you have a mixture out there.

18:42 – Chuck talks about the population throughout Utah.

19:03 – Guest asks a question to Chuck.

19:09 – Chuck: Yes, Facebook is putting in Data Center about 20 minutes away from my house. They have built satellite offices here. The startup scene is picking up, too.

19:49 – Chuck: We are fairly large land wise. We can spread-out more.

20:07 – Guest talks about the population density in Australia vs. U.S.

20:20 – Chuck: It’s interesting to see what the differences are.

If you are in a community that HAS a tech community you are set.

20:39 – Guest: I find it really interesting.

21:25 – Guest: Humans are a funny species – you can put out your hand, shake it, and you start talking.

21:45 – Chuck talks about the tech hubs in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in U.S.

22:17 – Guest: Yeah, if you aren’t interested than you aren’t interested.

22:28 – Chuck.

22:37 – Guest.

22:53 – Chuck: Join the mailing list, get involved and there are online groups, too.

23:11 – Guest: I really didn’t get into functional programming at first. I got to talk about this at a React Meetup.

24:25 – Chuck: The logic is the same.

24:32 – Guest: You put these functions together and there you go!

24:40 – Chuck: Go ahead.

24:48 – The guest is talking about React’s integrations.

24:56 – Chuck: Anything that is shared and put in some functional component, hook it up, and that’s it. Picks!

25:09 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

29:55 – Guest: Shout-out to my mentors. I am really blessed to have these mentors in my life and I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for them. Lucas is one of them who work with Prettier.

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es

JSJ 341: Testing in JavaScript with Gil Tayar

Panel:

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

Special Guest: Gil Tayar

In this episode, the panel talks with Gil Tayar who is currently residing in Tel Aviv and is a software engineer. He is currently the Senior Architect at Applitools in Israel. The panel and the guest talk about the different types of tests and when/how one is to use a certain test in a particular situation. They also mention Node, React, Selenium, Puppeteer, and much more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:35 – Chuck: Our panel is AJ, Aimee, myself – and our special guest is Gil Tayar. Tell us why you are famous!

1:13 – Gil talks about where he resides and his background. 

2:27 – Chuck: What is the landscape like now with testing and testing tools now?

2:39 – Guest: There is a huge renaissance with the JavaScript community. Testing has moved forward in the frontend and backend. Today we have lots of testing tools.  We can do frontend testing that wasn’t possible 5 years ago. The major change was React.

The guest talks about Node, React, tools, and more!

4:17 – Aimee: I advocate for tests and testing. There is a grey area though...how do you treat that? If you have to get something into production, but it’s not THE thing to get into production, does that fall into product or...what?

5:02 – Guest: We decided to test everything in the beginning. We actually cam through and did that and since then I don’t think I can use the right code without testing. There are a lot of different situations, though, to consider.

The guest gives hypothetical situations that people could face.

6:27 – Aimee.

6:32 – Guest: The horror to changing code without tests, I don’t know, I haven’t done that for a while. You write with fear in your heart. Your design is driven by fear, and not what you think is right. In the beginning don’t write those tests, but...

7:22 – Aimee: I totally agree and I could go on and on and on.

7:42 – Panel: I want to do tests when I know they will create value. I don’t want to do it b/c it’s a mundane thing. Secondly, I find that some times I am in a situation where I cannot write the test b/c I would have to know the business logic is correct. I am in this discovery mode of what is the business logic? I am not just building your app.

I guess I just need advice in this area, I guess.

8:55 – Guest gives advice to panelist’s question. He mentions how there are two schools of thought.

10:20 – Guest: Don’t mock too much.

10:54 – Panel: Are unit tests the easiest? I just reach for unit testing b/c it helps me code faster. But 90% of my code is NOT that.

11:18 – Guest: Exactly! Most of our test is glue – gluing together a bunch of different stuff! Those are best tested as a medium-sized integration suite.

12:39 – Panel: That seems like a lot of work, though! I loathe the database stuff b/c they don’t map cleanly. I hate this database stuff.

13:06 – Guest: I agree, but don’t knock the database, but knock the level above the database.

13:49 – Guest: Yes, it takes time! Building the script and the testing tools, but when you have it then adding to it is zero time. Once you are in the air it’s smooth sailing.

14:17 – Panel: I guess I can see that. I like to do the dumb-way the first time. I am not clear on the transition.

14:47 – Guest: Write the code, and then write the tests.

The guest gives a hypothetical situation on how/when to test in a certain situation.

16:25 – Panel: Can you talk about that more, please?

16:50 – Guest: Don’t have the same unit – do browser and business logic stuff separated. The real business logic stuff needs to be above that level. First principle is separation of concerns.

18:04 – Panel talks about dependency interjection and asks a question.

18:27 – Guest: What I am talking about very, very light inter-dependency interjection.

19:19 – Panel: You have a main function and you are doing requires in the main function. You are passing the pieces of that into the components that need it.

19:44 – Guest: I only do it when it’s necessary; it’s not a religion for me. I do it only for those layers that I know will need to be mocked; like database layers, etc.

20:09 – Panel.

20:19 – Guest: It’s taken me 80 years to figure out, but I have made plenty of mistakes a long the way. A test should run for 2-5 minutes max for package.

20:53 – Panel: What if you have a really messy legacy system? How do you recommend going into that? Do you write tests for things that you think needs to get tested?

21:39 – Guest answers the question and mentions Selenium!

24:27 – Panel: I like that approach.

24:35 – Chuck: When you say integration test what do you mean?

24:44 – Guest: Integration tests aren’t usually talked about. For most people it’s tests that test the database level against the database. For me, the integration tests are taking a set of classes as they are in the application and testing them together w/o the...so they can run in millisecond time.

26:54 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

27:52 – Chuck: How much do the tools matter?

28:01 – Guest: The revolutions matter. Whether you use Jasmine or Mocha or whatever I don’t think it matters. The tests matter not the tools.

28:39 – Aimee: Yes and no. I think some tools are outdated.

28:50 – Guest: I got a lot of flack about my blog where I talk about Cypress versus Selenium. I will never use Jasmine. In the end it’s the

29:29 – Aimee: I am curious would you be willing to expand on what the Selenium folks were saying about Puppeteer and others may not provide?

29:54 – Guest: Cypress was built for frontend developers. They don’t care about cross browser, and they tested in Chrome. Most browsers are typically the same. Selenium was built with the QA mindset – end to end tests that we need to do cross browser.

The guest continues with this topic.

30:54 – Aimee mentions Cypress.

31:08 – Guest: My guessing is that their priority is not there. I kind of agree with them.

31:21 – Aimee: I think they are focusing on mobile more.

31:24 – Guest: I think cross browser testing is less of an issue now. There is one area that is important it’s the visual area! It’s important to test visually across these different browsers.

32:32 – Guest: Selenium is a Swiss knife – it can do everything.

33:32 – Chuck: I am thinking about different topics to talk about. I haven’t used Puppeteer. What’s that about?

33:49 – Guest: Puppeteer is much more like Selenium. The reason why it’s great is b/c Puppeteer will always be Google Chrome.

35:42 – Chuck: When should you be running your tests? I like to use some unit tests when I am doing my development but how do you break that down?

36:06 – Guest.

38:30 – Chuck: You run tests against production?

38:45 – Guest: Don’t run tests against production...let me clarify!

39:14 – Chuck.

39:21 – Guest: When I am talking about integration testing in the backend...

40:37 – Chuck asks a question.

40:47 – Guest: I am constantly running between frontend and backend.

I didn’t know how to run tests for frontend. I had to invent a new thing and I “invented” the package JS DONG. It’s an implementation of Dong in Node. I found out that I wasn’t the only one and that there were others out there, too.

43:14 – Chuck: Nice! You talked in the prep docs that you urged a new frontend developer to not run the app in the browser for 2 months?

43:25 – Guest: Yeah, I found out that she was running the application...she said she knew how to write tests. I wanted her to see it my way and it probably was a radical train-of-thought, and that was this...

44:40 – Guest: Frontend is so visual.

45:12 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

45:16 – Guest: I am working with Applitools and I was impressed with what they were doing.

The guest goes into further detail.

46:08 – Guest: Those screenshots are never the same.

48:36 – Panel: It’s...comparing the output to the static site to the...

48:50 – Guest: Yes, that static site – if you have 30 pages in your app – most of those are the same. We have this trick where we don’t upload it again and again. Uploading the whole static site is usually very quick. The second thing is we don’t wait for the results. We don’t wait for the whole rendering and we continue with the tests.

50:28 – Guest: I am working mostly (right now) in backend.

50:40 – Chuck: Anything else? Picks!

50:57 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

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Picks:

Aimee

AJ

Charles

Gil




es

JSJ 343: The Power of Progressive Enhancement with Andy Bell

Panel:

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

Special Guest: Andy Bell

In this episode, the panel talks with Andy Bell who is an independent designer and developer who uses React, Vue, and Node. Today, the panelists and the guest talk about the power of progressive enhancements. Check it out!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:34 – Chuck: Hi! Our panel is AJ, Aimee, Chris, myself and my new show is coming out in a few weeks, which is called the DevRev! It helps you with developer’s freedom! I am super excited. Our guest is Andy Bell. Introduce yourself, please.

2:00 – Guest: I am an independent designer and developer out in the U.K.

2:17 – Chuck: You wrote things about Vanilla.js. I am foreshadowing a few things and let’s talk about the power and progressive enhancement.

2:43 – The guest gives us definitions of power and progressive enhancements. He describes how it works.

3:10 – Chuck: I’ve heard that people would turn off JavaScript b/c it was security concern and then your progressive enhancement would make it work w/o JavaScript. I am sure there’s more than that?

3:28 – The guest talks about JavaScript, dependencies, among other things.

4:40 – Chuck: Your post did make that very clear I think. I am thinking I don’t even know where to start with this. Are people using the 6th version? How far back or what are we talking about here?

5:09 – Guest: You can go really far back and make it work w/o CSS.

5:49 – Chris: I am a big advocate of progressive enhancement – the pushback I get these days is that there is a divide; between the broadband era and AOL dialup. Are there compelling reasons why progressive enhancements even matter?

6:48 – Guest.

8:05 – Panel: My family lives out in the boonies. I am aware of 50% of American don’t have fast Internet. People don’t have access to fast browsers but I don’t think they are key metric users.

8:47 – Guest: It totally depends on what you need it for. It doesn’t matter if these people are paying or not.

9:31 – Chris: Assuming I have a commute on the trail and it goes through a spotty section. In a scenario that it’s dependent on the JS...are we talking about 2 different things here?

10:14 – Panelist chimes-in.

10:36 – Chris: I can take advantage of it even if I cannot afford a new machine.

10:55 – Panel: Where would this really matter to you?

11:05 – Chris: I do have a nice new laptop.

11:12 – Chuck: I had to hike up to the hill (near the house) to make a call and the connection was really poor (in OK). It’s not the norm but it can happen.

11:37 – Chris: Or how about the All Trails app when I am on the trail.

11:52 – Guest.

12:40 – Chris: I can remember at the time that the desktop sites it was popular to have...

Chris: Most of those sites were inaccessible to me.

13:17 – Guest.

13:51 – Chuck: First-world countries will have a good connection and it’s not a big deal. If you are thinking though about your customers and where they live? Is that fair? I am thinking that my customers need to be able to access the podcast – what would you suggest? What are the things that you’d make sure is accessible to them.

14:31 – Guest: I like to pick on the minimum viable experience? I think to read the transcript is important than the audio (MP3).

15:47 – Chuck.

15:52 – Guest: It’s a lot easier with Vue b/c you don’t’ have to set aside rendering.

17:13 – AJ: I am thinking: that there is a way to start developing progressively and probably cheaper and easier to the person who is developing. If it saves us a buck and helps then we take action.

17:49 – Guest: It’s much easier if you start that way and if you enhance the feature itself.

18:38 – AJ: Let me ask: what are the situations where I wouldn’t / shouldn’t worry about progressive enhancements?

18:57 – Guest answers the question.

19:42 – AJ: I want people to feel motivated in a place WHERE to start. Something like a blog needs Java for comments.

Hamburger menu is mentioned, too.

20:20 – Guest.

21:05 – Chris: Can we talk about code?

21:16 – Aimee: This is the direction I wanted to go. What do you mean by that – building your applications progressively?

Aimee refers to his blog.

21:44 – Guest.

22:13 – Chuck: I use stock overflow!

22:20 – Guest.

22:24 – Chuck: I mean that’s what Chris uses!

22:33 – Guest (continues).

23:42 – Aimee.

23:54 – Chris.

24:09 – Chris

24:16 – Chris: Andy what do you think about that?

24:22 – Guest: Yes, that’s good.

24:35 – Chris: Where it falls apart is the resistance to progressive enhancements that it means that your approach has to be boring?

25:03 – Guest answers the question.

The guest mentions modern CSS and modern JavaScript are mentioned along with tooling.

25:50 – Chuck: My issue is that when we talk about this (progressive enhancement) lowest common denominator and some user at some level (slow network) and then they can access it. Then the next level (better access) can access it. I start at the bottom and then go up. Then when they say progressive enhancement I get lost. Should I scrap it and then start over or what?

26:57 – Guest: If it’s feasible do it and then set a timeline up.

27:42 – Chuck: You are saying yes do it a layer at a time – but my question is HOW? What parts can I pair back? Are there guidelines to say: do this first and then how to test?

28:18 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

29:20 – Guest: Think about the user flow. What does the user want to do at THIS point? Do you need to work out the actual dependencies?

30:31 – Chuck: Is there a list of those capabilities somewhere? So these users can use it this way and these users can use it that way?

30:50 – Guest answers the question.

31:03 – Guest: You can pick out the big things.

31:30 – Chuck: I am using this feature in the browser...

31:41 – Guest.

31:46 – Chris: I think this differently than you Andy – I’ve stopped caring if a browser supports something new. I am fine using CSS grid and if your browser doesn’t support it then I don’t have a problem with that. I get hung up on, though if this fails can they still get the content? If they have no access to these – what should they be able to do?

Note: “Cutting the Mustard Test” is mentioned.

33:37 – Guest.

33:44 – Chuck: Knowing your users and if it becomes a problem then I will figure it out.

34:00 – Chris: I couldn’t spare the time to make it happen right now b/c I am a one-man shop.

34:20 – Chuck and Chris go back-and-forth.

34:36 –Chris: Check out links below for my product.

34:54 – AJ: A lot of these things are in the name: progressive.

36:20 – Guest.

38:51 – Chris: Say that they haven’t looked at it all before. Do you mind talking about these things and what the heck is a web component?

39:14 – The guest gives us his definition of what a web component is.

40:02 – Chuck: Most recent episode in Angular about web components, but that was a few years ago. See links below for that episode.

40:25 – Aimee.

40:31 – Guest: Yes, it’s a lot like working in Vue and web components. The concepts are very similar.

41:22 – Chris: Can someone please give us an example? A literal slideshow example?

41:45 – Guest answers the question.

45:07 – Chris.

45:12 – Guest: It’s a framework that just happens to use web components and stuff to help.

45:54 – Chuck: Yeah they make it easier (Palmer). Yeah there is a crossover with Palmer team and other teams. I can say that b/c I have talked with people from both teams. Anything else?

46:39 – Chuck: Where do they go to learn more?

46:49 – Guest: Check out the Club! And my Twitter! (See links below.)

47:33 – Chuck: I want to shout-out about DevLifts that has $19 a month to help you with physical goals. Or you can get the premium slot! It’s terrific stuff. Sign-up with DEVCHAT code but there is a limited number of slots and there is a deadline, too. Just try it! They have a podcast, too!

49:16 – Aimee: Yeah, I’m on their podcast soon!

49:30 – Chuck: Picks!

END – Advertisement: CacheFly!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Aimee

Chris

AJ

Charles

Andy




es

JSJ 346: Azure Pipelines with Ed Thomson LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

Sponsors:

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Ed Thomson

In this episode, the Charles speaks with Ed Thomson who is a Program Manager at Azure through Microsoft, Developer, and Open Source Maintainer. Ed and Chuck discuss in full detail about Azure DevOps! Check out today’s episode to hear its new features and other exciting news!

Show Topics:

0:59 – Live at Microsoft Ignite

1:03 – Ed: Hi! I am a Program Manager at Azure.

1:28 – Rewind 2 episodes to hear more about Azure DevOps!

1:51 – Ed: One of the moves from Pipelines to DevOps – they could still adopt Pipelines. Now that they are separate services – it’s great.

2:38 – Chuck talks about features he does and doesn’t use.

2:54 – Ed.

3:00 – Chuck: Repos and Pipelines. I am going to dive right in. Let’s talk about Repos. Microsoft just acquired GitHub.

3:18 – Ed: Technically we have not officially acquired GitHub.

3:34 – Chuck: It’s not done. It’s the end of September now.

3:55 – Ed: They will remain the same thing for a while. GitHub is the home for open source. Repos – we use it in Microsoft. Repositories are huge. There are 4,000 engineers working in these repositories. Everyone works in his or her own little area, and you have to work together. You have to do all this engineering to get there. We bit a tool and it basically if you run clone...

Ed continues to talk about this topic. He is talking about One Drive and these repositories.

6:28 – Ed: We aren’t going to be mixing and matching. I used to work through GitHub. It’s exciting to see those people work close to me.

6:54 – Chuck.

6:59 – Ed: It has come a long way.

7:07 – Chuck: Beyond the FSF are we talking about other features or?

7:21 – Ed: We have unique features. We have branch policies. You can require that people do pole request. You have to use pole request and your CI has to pass and things like that. I think there is a lot of richness in our auditing. We have enterprise focus. At its core it still is Git. We can all interoperate.

8:17 – Chuck.

8:37 – Ed: You just can’t set it up with Apache. You have to figure it out.

8:51 – Chuck: The method of pushing and pulling.

9:06 – Chuck: You can try DevOps for free up to 5 users and unlimited private repos. People are interested in this because GitHub makes you pay for that.

9:38 – Ed and Chuck continue to talk.

9:50 – Ed: Pipelines is the most interesting thing we are working on. We have revamped the entire experience. Build and release. It’s easy to get started. We have a visual designer. Super helpful – super straightforward. Releases once your code is built – get it out to production say for example Azure. It’s the important thing to get your code out there.

10:55 – Chuck: How can someone start with this?

11:00 – Ed: Depends on where your repository is. It will look at your code. “Oh, I know what that is, I know how to build that!” Maybe everyone isn’t doing everything with JavaScript. If you are using DotNet then it will know.

12:05 – Chuck: What if I am using both a backend and a frontend?

12:11 – Ed: One repository? That’s when you will have to do a little hand packing on the...

There are different opportunities there. If you have a bash script that does it for you. If not, then you can orchestrate it. Reduce the time it takes. If it’s an open source project; there’s 2 – what are you going to do with the other 8? You’d be surprised – people try to sneak that in there.

13:30 – Chuck: It seems like continuous integration isn’t a whole lot complicated.

13:39 – Ed: I am a simple guy that’s how I do it. You can do advanced stuff, though. The Cake Build system – they are doing some crazy things. We have got Windows, Lennox, and others. Are you building for Raspberries Pies, then okay, do this...

It’s not just running a script.

15:00 – Chuck: People do get pretty complicated if they want. It can get complicated. Who knows?

15:26 – Chuck:  How much work do you have to do to set-up a Pipeline like that?

15:37 – Ed answers the question in detail.

16:03 – Chuck asks a question.

16:12 – Ed: Now this is where it gets contentious. If one fails...

Our default task out of the box...

16:56 – Chuck: If you want 2 steps you can (like me who is crazy).

17:05 – Ed: Yes, I want to see if it failed.

17:17 – Chuck: Dude, writing code is hard. Once you have it built and tested – continuous deployment.

17:33 – Ed: It’s very easy. It’s super straightforward, it doesn’t have to be Azure (although I hope it is!).

Ed continues this conversation.

18:43 – Chuck: And it just pulls it?

18:49 – Ed: Don’t poke holes into your firewall. We do give you a lot of flexibility

19:04 – Chuck: VPN credentials?

19:10 – Ed: Just run the...

19:25 – Chuck comments.

19:36 – Ed: ...Take that Zip...

20:02 – Ed: Once the planets are finely aligned then...it will just pull from it.

20:25 – Chuck: I host my stuff on Digital Ocean.

20:46 – Ed: It’s been awhile since I played with...

20:55 – Chuck.

20:59 – Ed and Chuck go back and forth with different situations and hypothetical situations.

21:10 – Ed: What is Phoenix?

21:20 – Chuck explains it.

21:25 – Ed: Here is what we probably don’t have is a lot of ERLANG support.

22:41 – Advertisement.

23:31 – Chuck: Let’s just say it’s a possibility. We took the strip down node and...

23:49 – Ed: I think it’s going to happen.

23:55 – Ed: Exactly.

24:02 – Chuck: Testing against Azure services. So, it’s one thing to run on my machine but it’s another thing when other things connect nicely with an Azure set-up. Does it connect natively once it’s in the Azure cloud?

24:35 – Ed: It should, but there are so many services, so I don’t want to say that everything is identical. We will say yes with an asterisk.

25:07 – Chuck: With continuous deployment...

25:41 – Ed: As an example: I have a CD Pipeline for my website. Every time I merge into master...

Ed continues this hypothetical situation with full details. Check it out!

27:03 – Chuck: You probably can do just about anything – deploy by Tweet!

27:15 – Ed: You can stop the deployment if people on Twitter start complaining.

27:40 – Chuck: That is awesome! IF it is something you care about – and if it’s worth the time – then why not? If you don’t have to think about it then great. I have mentioned this before: Am I solving interesting problems? What projects do I want to work on? What kinds of contributions do I really want to contribute to open source?

That’s the thing – if you have all these tools that are set-up then your process, how do you work on what, and remove the pain points then you can just write code so people can use! That’s the power of this – because it catches the bug before I have to catch it – then that saves me time.

30:08 – Ed: That’s the dream of computers is that the computers are supposed to make OUR lives easier. IF we can do that and catch those bugs before you catch it then you are saving time. Finding bugs as quickly as possible it avoids downtime and messy deployments.

31:03 – Chuck: Then you can use time for coding style and other things.

I can take mental shortcuts.

31:37 – Ed: The other thing you can do is avoiding security problems. If a static code analysis tool catches an integer overflow then...

32:30 – Chuck adds his comments.

Chuck: You can set your policy to block it or ignore it. Then you are running these tools to run security. There are third-party tools that do security analysis on your code. Do you integrate with those?

33:00 – Ed: Yep. My favorite is WhiteSource. It knows all of the open source and third-party tools. It can scan your code and...

34:05 – Chuck: It works with a lot of languages.

34:14 – Ed.

34:25 – Chuck: A lot of JavaScript developers are getting into mobile development, like Ionic, and others. You have all these systems out there for different stages for writing for mobile. Android, windows Phone, Blackberry...

35:04 – Ed: Let’s throw out Blackberry builds. We will ignore it.

Mac OS dies a fine job. That’s why we have all of those.

35:29 – Chuck: But I want to run my tests, too!

35:36 – Ed: I really like to use App Center. It is ultimately incredible to see all the tests you can run.

36:29 – Chuck: The deployment is different, though, right?

36:40 – Ed: I have a friend who clicks a button in...

Azure DevOps.

37:00 – Chuck: I like to remind people that this isn’t a new product.

37:15 – Ed: Yes, Azure DevOps.

37:24 – Chuck: Any new features that are coming out?

37:27 – Ed: We took a little break, but...

37:47 – Ed: We will pick back up once Ignite is over. We have a timeline on our website when we expect to launch some new features, and some are secret, so keep checking out the website.

39:07 – Chuck: What is the interplay between Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code? Because they have plugins for freaking everything. I am sure there is something there that...

39:30 – Ed: I am a VI guy and I’m like 90% sure there is something there.

You are an eMac’s guy?

The way I think about it is through Git right out of the box.

Yes, I think there are better things out there for integration. I know we have a lot of great things in Visual Code, because I worked with it.

40:45 – Chuck: Yes, people can look for extensions and see what the capabilities are.

Chuck talks about code editor and tools. 

41:28 – Ed: ... we have been pulling that out as quickly as possible.

We do have IE extensions, I am sure there is something for VS Code – but it’s not where I want to spend my time.

42:02 – Chuck: Yes, sure.

42:07 – Ed: But everyone is different – they won’t work the way that I work. So there’s that.

42:30 – Ed: That Chuck.

42:36 – Chuck: Where do people get news?

42:42 – Ed: Go to here!

42:54 – Chuck: Where do people find you?

43:00 – Ed: Twitter!

43:07 – Chuck: Let’s do Picks!

43:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!

Links:

Picks:

Ed




es

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

Sponsors

Panel

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Aimee Knight

  • Joe Eames

  • Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

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

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

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

Links

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

Aimee Knight:

Joe Eames:

  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix

Charles Max Wood:

  • Getting up early

  • John Sonmez Kanbanflow video

  • Drip

James Shore:




es

JSJ 350: JavaScript Jabber Celebrates Episode 350!

Sponsors

Panel:

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks:

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

AJ O’Neal

Aimee Knight

Aaron Frost

Chris Ferdinandi

Tim Caswell




es

MJS 093: Ben Lesh

Sponsors

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Ben Lesh, RxJS Lead and senior software engineer at Google.

Ben studied to be an illustrator in Columbus College of Art & Design, but upon graduation he realized he wanted to work in web development. Ben thinks having an interest in problem solving was a key factor on his journey in becoming a developer.

For his first programming job, he applied to a position and when he didn’t hear back he kept calling them until they gave him an opportunity. He then worked as a consultant at several other positions before he was offered a job at Netflix where he became the development lead for RxJS 5. Ben then switched over to Google’s Angular team. He is currently working on Angular Ivy at Google.

Ben then talks about the projects he has worked on that he is proud of. In his journey as a developer, Ben believes that the take-away lesson is asking lots of questions. He himself had no formal programming training and he got to where he is today by asking sometimes embarrassingly simple questions.

Links




es

MJS 097: Charles Lowell

Sponsors

Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest:  Charles Lowell

Episode Summary

In this episode of My Ruby Story, Charles hosts Charles Lowell, founder and  developer at The Frontside Software based in Austin, TX.

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

Links

Picks

Charles Lowell:

Charles Max Wood:




es

JSJ 355: Progressive Web Apps with Aaron Gustafson LIVE at Microsoft Ignite

Sponsors

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by special guest: Aaron Gustafson

Episode Summary 

This episode of JavaScript Jabber comes to you live from Microsoft Ignite. Charles Max Wood talks to Aaron Gustafson who has been a Web Developer for more than 20 years and is also the Editor in Chief at “A List Apart”. Aaron gives a brief background on his work in the web community, explains to listeners how web standardization has evolved over time, where Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) come from, where and how can they be installed, differences between them and regular websites and their advantages. They then delve into more technical details about service workers, factors affecting the boot up time of JavaScript apps, best practices and features that are available with PWAs. 

Aaron mentions some resources people can use to learn about PWAs, talks about how every website can benefit from being a PWA, new features being introduced and the PWA vs Electron comparison. In the end, they also talk about life in general, that understanding what people have gone through and empathizing with them is important, as well as not making judgements based on people’s background, gender, race, health issues and so on.

Links

Picks

Aaron Gustafson:

Charles Max Wood:




es

JSJ 356: Build Websites Like It's 2005 with Keith Cirkel

Sponsors

Panel

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

Joined by special guest: Keith Cirkel

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Keith Cirkel, Senior Application Engineer at GitHub, briefly explains the projects he is working with and moves on to the recent changes done by GitHub to their website, including the decision to remove jQuery, and not choosing a popular framework such as React or Vue. He talks about some problems in using Internet Explorer 11, how these GitHub changes can help with certain browser compatibility issues, and a few challenges the team had to face during the redesigning process.

The panelists then discuss event delegation, performance considerations, Polyfill.io and web components. Keith gives some insight into accessibility and they talk about related user concerns.

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JSJ 357: Event-Stream & Package Vulnerabilities with Richard Feldman and Hillel Wayne

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Panel

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

Joined by special guests: Hillel Wayne and Richard Feldman

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Hillel Wayne kicks off the podcast by giving a short background about his work, explains the concepts of formal methods and the popular npm package - event-stream, in brief. The panelists then dive into the recent event-stream attack and discuss it at length, focusing on different package managers and their vulnerabilities, as well as the security issues associated with them. They debate on whether paying open source developers for their work, thereby leading to an increase in contribution, would eventually help in improving security or not. They finally talk about what can be done to fix certain dependencies and susceptibilities to prevent further attacks and if there are any solutions that can make things both convenient and secure for users.

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MJS 100: Joe Eames

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Joe Eames

Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Joe Eames, CEO of Thinkster.io and organizer of many different conferences, two of which are the AngularJS conference, ng-conf, and the WordPress developer conference, LoopConf.

Joe is a front end web developer and an educator. He has authored over 10 Pluralsight.com courses. He is also a panelist on the JavaScript Jabber podcast and the Adventures in Angular podcast on DevChat.TV.

Joe talks about his passion project, being on the organization team of Framework Summit, a two-day conference focused on all front end JavaScript frameworks, the first of which was held in Utah in October 2018. It was a great success and he and the rest of the organization team will be looking to repeat it in January of 2020.

Another conference Joe was involved in organizing was React Conf 2018 which took place in October in Henderson, Nevada. He is in the process of organizing the React Conf 2019 with the rest of the organization team.

Aside from organizing conferences Joe’s second passion is education. He has started up a podcast called Dev Ed Podcast.

Joe has recently become the CEO of Thinkster.io. Thinkster.io is a unique platform where learners can really master web development with a lot of hands on training. Joe wants developers to be able to learn how to “generate” solutions to problems. He explains the concept of “interleaving” while learning a subject which helps students retain more and learn faster.

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

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Panel

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Anatoliy Zaslavskiy

Summary

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

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AJ O’Neal

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Anatoliy Zaslavskiy

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JSJ 360: Evolutionary Design with James Shore

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Panel

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

Joined by special guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

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

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

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

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Aimee Knight:

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Chronicles of Crime board game




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JSJ 362: Accessibility with Chris DeMars

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  • Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

  • Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

  • Aimee Knight

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Joe Eames

Joined by Special Guest: Chris DeMars

Episode Summary

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

 

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

 

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

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Aimee Knight:

Chris Ferdinandi:

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JSJ 363: Practical JAMstack and Serverless with Gareth McCumskey

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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.

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Charles Max Wood:

  • Join the mailing list
  • Watch out for new podcasts
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MJS 109: James Shore

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined By Special Guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

James Shore, the author of the book, “The Art of Agile Development” and a thought leader in the Agile software development community, talks about his journey in Agile development. James and Charles discuss how Agile has transformed software development process and the traits that a good software developer should have. James talks about his contributions to the developer community, his CSS testing tool quixote and the Agile Fluency Project.

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JSJ 368: TypeScript - Good or Bad

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Panel

  • Joe Eames

  • AJ O’Neal

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Joe Eames and AJ O’Neal talk about what TypeScript is, and their background and experiences with it. They discuss the different kinds of typed languages such as dynamic vs static, strong vs weak, implicit vs explicit casting and the reasons for selecting one type over the other. AJ shares his opinion on not preferring TypeScript in general, while Joe offers a counter perspective on liking it, and both give a number of reasons to support each argument. They talk about some final good and bad points about TypeScript and move on to picks.

Links

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Picks

Joe Eames:

AJ O’Neal:

 




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

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Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Colby Tresness

Episode Summary

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

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

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MAS 082: James Daniels and Alex Okrushko




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

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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.

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Christopher Buecheler:

  • Tip - Take some time off once in a while

Aimee Knight:

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

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Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Jessica Deen

Episode Summary

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

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

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JSJ BONUS EPISODE: Observables and RxJS Live with Aaron Frost

JSJ BONUS EPISODE: Observables and RxJS Live with Aaron Frost

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

Episode Number: bonus

Duration: 29:35

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

 

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Aaron Frost

Episode Summary

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

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

Sponsors

Panel

  • Aimee Knight

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • Joe Eames

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Charles Max Wood

With Special Guests: Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington

Episode Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Charles Max Wood

Episode Summary

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

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

Sponsors

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

Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Joe Eames

  • Aimee Knight

With Special Guest: Evan Weaver

Episode Summary

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

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Joe Eames:

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JSJ 389: What Makes a 10x Engineer?

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Panel

  • Charles Max Wood

Episode Summary

In today’s show, Chuck talks about the recent tweet thread about 10x engineers. He goes through each of the points in the tweet and talks about each of them in turn. There are only two points he sort of agrees with, and believes the rest to be absolute garbage. One of the issues with this tweet is that it doesn’t define what a 10x engineer is. Defining a 10x engineer is difficult because it is also impossible to measure a truly average engineer because there are many factors that play into measuring productivity. Chuck turns the discussion to what a 10x engineer is to him and how to find one. A 10x engineer is dependent on the organization that they are a part of, because they are not simply found, they are made. When a 10x engineer is added to a team, the productivity of the entire team increases. Employers have to consider firstly what you need in your team and how a person would fit in. You want to avoid changing the entire culture of your organization. Consider also that a 10x engineer may be hired as a 2x engineer, but it is the employer that turns them into a 10x engineer. Overall, Chuck believes these tweets are asinine because it’s impossible to measure what makes a 10x engineer in the first place, and hiring a person that fits the attributes in the list would be toxic to your company. 

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MJS 124: Daniel Gruesso

This episode of My JavaScript Story is coming to you live from OSCON. Joining Charles Max Wood is Daniel Gruesso from GitLab to talk about developing in the Open Source and the Developer Report.

GitLab works with an open core model, Daniel talks about the trade - offs of having code open to public, the first of which is having everything up-to-date so any contributions made will work with the latest version. Daniel calls this the "bus-factor" where if one of the team members gets hit by a bus, the rest of the team will have everything to work with.

They then talk about the GitLab 2019 Global Developer Report results. One of the most interesting results of this survey with over 4,000 respondents, was that remote teams outperformed on site teams. This ties into the current Twitter discussion about "10x Performing Engineers". Remote teams are able to work on their own most productive hours and are not disturbed by their teammates when they are doing dedicated work on a deadline. Also remote teams by nature have to be more conscious of security.

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Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Daniel Gruesso

Links




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JSJ 397: Design Systems with Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

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

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

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

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

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

 

Panelists

  • Chris Ferdinandi

  • Aimee Knight

  • Steve Emmerich

With special guest: Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

Sponsors

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Aimee Knight:

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JSJ 411: Unit Testing Jest with Daniel Caldas

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

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JSJ 415: Progressive Web Apps with Maximiliano Firtman

Maximiliano Firtman is a mobile web developer from Buenos Ares, Argentina. He has been a developer for 24 years and his most recent focus has been on progressive web apps, or PWAs. Steve and Max reflect on the technologies they were using when they first got started in web development and talk about their experience with mobile development. One area that Max emphasized was bringing the web into the mobile space. They discuss the progression of web access on mobile and some of the available tools. Max notes that responsible design has a very high cost in web performance for mobile devices, which requires unique approaches. They discuss some of the issues with latency in mobile, even on 4G. The solution to this latency is PWAs.

Progressive web apps are a set of best practices to create web apps that are installable. They can work offline at high speeds on several operating systems. Once installed, it looks like any other app on the system. Max delves into more details on how it works. He talks about how the resources for your application are managed. He assures listeners that it’s just a website that’s using a new API, they’re not changing the way the web works, and that when that API is there, the app can be installed. It will also generally use your default browser. Steve and Max discuss how local data is stored with PWAs. To write PWAs, you can use Angular, React, JavaScript, or Vue, and it’s a pretty transparent process. Max talks about some common tools used for local storage and some of the PWAs he’s worked on in the past. The benefit of using PWAs is that they generally run faster than regular web apps. To get started, Max advises listeners to install one and start exploring.

Panelists

  • Steve Edwards

Guest

  • Maximiliano Firtman

Sponsors

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JSJ 417: Serverless with Microsoft Azure with Burke Holland

Burke Holland works for Microsoft on the Azure team in developer relations. He starts the show talking about how he got started in serverless. He’s careful to note that just because things are marketed as serverless doesn’t always make them so. In order for something to be serverless, it must be sufficiently abstracted in terms of technology, only require payment for what is used, and infinitely scalable. He talks about the statelessness of serverless, and the panel discusses what it means to be stateless. Burke reminds listeners that serverless is not for long-lived operations, but there are features in serverless providers that can help you get around this. Burke talks about how writing serverless code differs from standard or previous coding approaches and practices. He advises that serverless functions are best kept small, and talks about how to fit them in with other kinds of APIs. 

The panelists talk about the multi-cloud and why people would want to be on multiple cloud servers. Burke talks about what Microsoft has done with Serverless Frameworks to accomplish multi-cloud compatibility. The JavaScript experts discuss the advantages and disadvantages of picking JavaScript over other languages, and Burke talks about why he prefers TypeScript and the Easy-Off feature. They talk about speed on a serverless platform, especially concerning the cold start time, which Azure is relentlessly trying to lower. He does talk about some things that can be done to decrease load time and about premium functions. The panel discusses how to debug serverless functions and tools that are available, such as the Azure Functions extension. 

They talk about ways to set up more secure functions to keep things from racking up charges. Burke talks about some things Microsoft does internally to control cloud costs, such as sending monthly reports with reminders to delete and using tools like Azure Reaper to delete short-lived projects. Azure can also put spending caps on subscriptions, but when you hit that cap you can’t serve any more requests. Burke concludes by saying that most of the time, going serverless is a lower-cost way to improve productivity, and because it’s event-driven, it allows you to tie into things that you’re already doing in the cloud. Serverless almost always justifies itself from an ease of use point of view and a cost point of view. 

Panelists

  • Aimee Knight

  • Steve Edwards

  • Dan Shapir

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Charles Max Wood

Guest

  • Burke Holland

Sponsors

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

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es

JSJ 418: Security Scary Stories and How to Avoid Them with Kevin A McGrail

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber the panel interviews security expert, Kevin A. McGrail. He starts by explaining what security frameworks and what they do. The panel wonders how to know if your developers are capable of self-auditing your security or if you need help. Kevin shares recommendations for companies to look at to answer that question. 

Aimee Knight explains the hell she has been in making changes to be compliant with CCPA. The panel considers how policies like this complicate security, are nearly impossible to be compliant with and how they can be weaponized. They discuss the need for technical people to be involved in writing these laws. 

Kevin explains how you can know how secure your systems actually are. He shares the culture of security first he tries to instill in the companies he trains. He also trains them on how to think like a bad guy and explains how this helps developers become security first developers. The panel discusses how scams have evolved and how the same scams are still being run. They consider the importance of automated training and teaching developers to do it right the first time.

Finally, they consider the different ways of authentication, passwords, passphrases, sim card, biometrics. Kevin warns against oversharing or announcing vacations. The panel discusses real-world tactics bad guys use. Kevin explains what he trains people to do and look out for to increase security with both social engineering and technical expertise. 

Panelists

  • Aimee Knight

  • AJ O’Neal

  • Charles Max Wood

  • Dan Shappir

  • Steve Edwards

Guest

  • Kevin A McGrail

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

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