This episode was recorded live from The Microsoft Build Conference 2016. In this episode we chatted with Rob Wormald of the Angular Core team at Google about Angular. You can follow him on Twitter, or check out what he’s done over on GitHub.

Picks

• Visual Studio Code (Rob)
• Service Workers (Rob)
• Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin from .NETRocks (Chuck)

Check out Newbie Remote Conf!

02:44 - What it Takes to Learn JavaScript in 2016

04:03 - Resources: Then vs Now

09:42 - Are there prerequisites? Should you have experience?

20:34 - Choosing What to Learn

• The iPhreaks Show Episode #153: Using Mobile Devices to Manage Diabetes with Scott Hanselman

28:19 - Deciding What to Learn Next

31:19 - Keeping Up: Obligations As a Developer

34:22 - Deciding What to Learn Next (Cont’d)

42:01 - Recommendations

• You-Dont-Know-JS
• gulp.js
• webpack
• The Little Schemer
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

Picks

• accidentally nonblocking (Jamison)
• choo (Jamison)
• Web Rebels (Jamison)
• React Rally (Jamison)
• Grab The Gold (Aimee)
• node-for-beginners (Aimee)
• Procrastinate On Purpose by Rory Vaden (Chuck)
• Newbie Remote Conf (Chuck)
• Get A Coder Job (Chuck)

02:25 - Kyle Simpson Introduction

• Twitter
• GitHub
• Blog
• “Getify”
• You-Dont-Know-JS
• [Pluralsight] Advanced JavaScript by Kyle Simpson

04:43 - Development => Teaching

• Front End Masters

16:20 - Inheritance and Delegation

29:40 - Evolving a Language

36:23 - Cohersion

• Weak Typing, Dynamic Typing
• The Politics of JavaScript by Angus Croll

50:37 - Performance

• The Width Keyword

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

Picks

• Adam Tornhill: Code, Crime, Complexity: Analyzing software with forensic psychology @ TEDxTrondheim (Aimee)
• Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs by Adam Tornhill (Aimee)
• Planet Money Episode 704: Open Office (Jamison)
• Zooko's Triangle (Jamison)
• The Barkley Marathons (Jamison)
• React Rally (Jamison)
• X-Men: Apocalypse (Joe)
• America's Got Talent (Joe)
• Overwatch (Joe)
• Stack (Kyle)
• Jeremy Keith: A web for everyone (Kyle)
• Jeremy Keith: Regressive Web Apps (Kyle)

This episode was recorded live from The Microsoft Build Conference 2016. In this episode we chatted with Wade Anderson of Microsoft about Visual Studio Code. You can follow him on Twitter, or check out what he’s done over on GitHub.

Picks

• Parks and Recreation (Wade)
• VidAngel (Wade)

A special thanks again goes out to Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin from .NETRocks for putting this podcast series together! You rock!

React Remote Conf and Angular Remote Conf

03:18 - Dennis Ushakov Introduction

• Twitter
• GitHub
• JetBrains
  • JetBrains Issue Tracker
• WebStorm
  • @WebStormIDE  

03:54 - Writing an IDE in Java

• YouTrack
• TeamCity  

04:50 - Specs

05:43 - WebStorm Defined

• Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

06:19 - IDEs vs Text Editors

08:31 - Building an IDE

• Language Support
• External Tool Support
• Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)

13:00 - Code Reuse

15:07 - Prioritizing Features

17:11 - Why is IDE tooling important?

• “Code is read a lot more than it’s written.”

19:57 - Refactorings

• The Dynamic Nature of JavaScript
• TypeScript-specific Refactorings

23:35 - Next Versions of Webstorm

• Early Access Program

25:07 - Framework Support; Usage Data

28:12 - Other Technology and Framework Support

31:12 - Working for JetBrains

32:17 - Release Cycles and Procedures

• Early Access Program

34:39 - Java Source Code Contribution

• Kotlin

Picks

• Jesse Kriss: Human scale technology (Jamison)
• React Rally (Jamison)
• Vote (Chuck)
• Transmit (Chuck)
• Steam Squad (Dennis)
• Ergobaby Four Position 360 Baby Carrier (Dennis)

Code-sharing between mobile and web apps with React Native

Using native code and Javascript

What to know about developing with React Native

The importance of tooling

Live and hot-reloading

Updating your app on the fly

Possible difficulties faced by transitioning to React Native

Bridging between native API’s and React Native

Writing apps in Swift or React Native

The future of React Native

How to start a React Native project

Resources:

Frontend Masters

Hired.com

Rollbar

Microsoft Code Push

React Native Radio Episode 8

Tadeu Zagallo’s Website

00:50 Intro to guests Donovan Brown and Jordan Matthiesen

1:14 Javascript and Devops

3:49 Node JS and integrating with extensions

11:16 Learning Javascript coming from another language

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

• Visualstudio.com
• Donovanbrown.com

25:10 Visual Studio Code and mobile development

• Apache Cordova open source project

31:45 TypeScript and tooling

33:03 Unit test tools and methods

38:39 ARM devices and integration

QUOTES:

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

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

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

PICKS:

Veridian Dynamics (AJ)

Jabberwocky Video (AJ)

Hard Rock Cafe - Atlanta (Charles)

CES (Charles)

3D printers (Donovan)

High-Yield Vegetable Gardening (Jordan)

taco.visualstudio.com

Jordan on Twitter @jmatthiesen

Visualstudio.com

Donovanbrown.com

Donovan on Twitter @donovanbrown

SPONSORS:

Front End Masters

Hired.com

TOPICS:

4:00 Things that make web development more difficult

7:40 The developer experience with Angular

10:40 How cognitive cost affects the user experience

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

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

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

34:00 Node updates

QUOTES:

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

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

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

PICKS:

Death Note Anime Show

JS Remote Conference

The Alloy of Law Book by Brandon Sanderson

Zig Zigler Books on Audible

Mr. Robot TV Show

RESOURCES & CONTACT INFO:

Mads on Twitter

Mads’ Website

00:55 - Introducing Jerome Hardaway

• Vets Who Code
• Ruby Rogues Podcast
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram

02:10 - Spouses and dependants of Vets Who Code

06:55 - Accepting and rejecting applicants

10:10 - The GI Bill

• Operation Code
• Dreamforce

15:45 - Military language and coding

18:20 - PTSD, trauma, and coding

21:10 - Moving past the veteran stigma

25:45 - Military backgrounds as an asset for jobs

30:45 - The future of Vets Who Code

32:35 - How much does it cost to be part of the program?

• General Assembly

36:15 - Is it easier or harder for Vets to get hired?

39:15 - Stories and memories

42:30 - Contributing to Vets Who Code

• Contact hello@vetswhocode.io to become a mentor
• Donate: https://vetswhocode.kindful.com/
• SwearJar
• Hiring managers please contact Jerome@vetswhocode.io

Picks:

Soft Skills Engineering Podcast (Dave)

Soft Skills Engineering Twitter (Dave)

Awesome Algorithms Github list (Aimee)

“The Churn” blog post by Bob Martin (Aimee)

The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington (Charles)

Vets Who Code (Jerome)

Practical Javascript (Jerome)

Previous Episodes with Visual Studio Code’s Team:

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

JSJ Episode 221, Visual Studio Code with Wade Anderson

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

• Visual Studio Code’s Twitter
• VS Code Github
• Chris Dias’ Twitter
• Chris Dias’ Github

3:42 - Confusion with Javascript versus separate languages

7:15 - Choosing your tools carefully

8:20 - Integrated shell and docker extensions

12:05 - Agar.io Extensions and extension packs

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

18:20 - Using Github Issues and resolving user complaints

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

23:10 - Microsoft and VS legacy

27:00 - Man hours and project development

31:30 - The Visual Studio default experience

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

39:20 - Community versus developer views of VS Code

41:40 - Using Electron

44:00 - Updating the system

44:50 - How is Visual Code written?

48:00 - The future of Visual Code Studios

• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues

Picks:

Don McMillan (AJ)

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

Daplie (AJ)

Facebook feed blocker plug-in (Charles)

Tab Wrangler (Charles)

Smart Things (Chris)

Wood Pizza Ovens (Chis)

PJ Mark, Chris’ friend and marketer (Chris)

1:15 - Introducing Maria Naggaga

• .NET
• Twitter

2:32 - .NET new developers

3:55 - NYC Microsoft bootcamp

6:25 - Building a community of .NET programmers

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

9:30 - Getting started with .NET

15:50 - The power of asking questions

22:45 - Recruiting new programmers to the industry

• @bitchwhocodes
• Seattle.rb

37:00 - Javascript and C#

48:30 - Running .NET on Raspberry Pi

Picks:

Super Cartography Bros album by OverClocked ReMix (AJ)

Daplie (AJ)

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

The Eventual Millionaire (Charles)

Devchat Conferences (Charles)

15- Minute Calls (Charles)

Codeland Conference (Maria)

March by Congressman John Lewis (Maria)

Microsoft Virtual Academy (Maria)

1:05 - Introducing Sam Guckenheimer

• Twitter
• Microsoft Devops

2:45 - Continuous integration with Visual Studio

4:15 - Visual Studio on Macs

• Download link

5:55 - Is Visual Studio just for C#?

• Chris Dias JSJ Episode

8:45 - Container support and the Cloud

14:20 - Docker and Visual Studio

17:40 - Communicating with multiple services

24:15 - Talking to clients about change and working with transformation

33:00 - Telemetry and collecting data

37:50 - Xamarin forms

47:50 - Deployment with changed endpoints

Picks:

Daplie Wefunder (AJ)

Unroll.Me (Charles)

Focused Inbox on Outlook (Sam)

WhiteSource (Sam)

The Girl On The Train (Sam)

The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre (Sam)

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood, AJ O'neal, Joe Eames, and Aimee Knight discuss Building a Development Environment with Cory House. Pluralsight recently added a course on this. Tune in to know more!

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood, Joe Eames, and Tracy Lee discuss Reactive Programming and RxJS with Ben Lesh. Ben works at Netflix and also has a side job for Rx Workshop with Tracy. He is the lead author of RxJS 5. Tune in to learn more about RxJS!

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood and Aimee Knight discuss InfoSec for Web Developers with Kim Carter. Kim is a senior software engineer/architect, an information security professional, and the founder of binarymist.io. He is currently working on his book called Holistic InfoSec for Web Developers. Tune in to learn more on what his book is all about.

On today's episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood welcomes Dennis Ushakov. Dennis is a team lead of WebStorm and RubyMine at JetBrains. Tune in to My JS Story Dennis Ushakov to learn more about his programming experience in Java and JavaScript.

Javascript Jabber is hosted this week by Joe Eames, Aimee Knight, AJ O'Neal, Cory House, Charles Max Wood and their special guest Bowden Kelly. Bowden is a program manager at Microsoft and he shares some insight into the new features in Visual Studio 2017 RTM with Bowden Kelly.

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

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

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

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Charles and Aimee discuss Development in a Public Institution with Shawn Clabough. Shawn is a developer and developer manager at Washington State University. He works with the research office, and has been in the industry for 20 years. Tune in to this exciting episode!

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

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

Join AJ, Aimee, and Joe as they discuss Mozilla Firefox Developer Tools with Jason Laster. Jason just started working at Mozilla since March. But even before that, he has been working on Chrome's dev tool extension called Marionette. That's when he discovered that the browser is an open source that anyone can play with. Now, he is working on a new debugger in Firefox. Tune in!

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

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio Code

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

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

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

Questions for Wade and Ramya

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:30] What is Emmet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

AJ O’neal

• Breath on the Wild
• Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge

Charles Max Wood

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

Wade Anderson

• Kindle Paperwhite
•  Twitter @waderyan_

Ramya Rao

• Open source
• Twitter @ramyanexus

My JS Story 023 Laurie Voss

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

How did you get into programming?

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

How did you go from web development to hardcore Javascript?

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

What do you do at NPM Inc?

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

What do you think is your biggest contributions to NPM?

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

How did you get involved?

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

How did you get to being profitable?

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

What are you working on now?

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

Anything else?

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

Picks

Laurie

Zite and NextJS
Slides.com

Charles

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

Links

Twitter
NPM Organizations
NPM Enterprise

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

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

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

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

Questions for Tristan and Sean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:33:15] – How about testing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:52:00] – The App Model

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

Picks

AJ O'Neal

• Lithium

Charles Max Wood

• Miracle Morning by Hal Erod
• Clean Code by Uncle Bob Martin
• Ketogenic diet

Tristan Davis

• Amazon Echo
• Microbiome

Sean Laberee

• Running
• Garmin watch

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

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

[00:01:35] – Overview

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

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

[00:04:50] – Browser support issue

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

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

[00:07:50] – Polymer

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

[00:14:20] – Standards are dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:36:00] – Reusable components

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

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

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

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

[00:47:45] – Mobile to web crossover

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

[00:50:00] – Challenge

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

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

Picks

Cory House

• Creating Reusable React Components on Pluralsight
• Ted Talk: Why You Should Define your Fears Instead of Your Goals by Tim Ferriss

Joe Eames

• UI-Router
• Persistence

Aimee Knight

• Ask HN: People who completed a boot camp 3+ years ago, what are you doing now?
• NgAtlanta

Charles Max Wood

• Upwork.com

JSJ 269 Reusable React and JavaScript Components with Cory House

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

[00:01:35] – Overview

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

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

[00:04:50] – Browser support issue

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

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

[00:07:50] – Polymer

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

[00:14:20] – Standards are dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:36:00] – Reusable components

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

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

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

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

[00:47:45] – Mobile to web crossover

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

[00:50:00] – Challenge

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

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

Picks

Cory House

• Creating Reusable React Components on Pluralsight
• Ted Talk: Why You Should Define your Fears Instead of Your Goals by Tim Ferriss

Joe Eames

• UI-Router
• Persistence

Aimee Knight

• Ask HN: People who completed a boot camp 3+ years ago, what are you doing now?
• NgAtlanta

Charles Max Wood

• Upwork.com

MJS 025: Helen V. Holmes

This episode features a My JavaScript story with Helen V. Holmes. Helen has never before been a guest on the show. She is both a designer and front-end programmer who previously worked for Mozilla. In January, she started her own freelancing business. Listen to Charles Max Wood and Helen discuss how she got into programming, what made her decide to open a freelance business, and more!

How did you get into programming?

Helen started by making themes for herself and friends in LiveJournal using other people's CSS themes. Once she got to college she realized that although this wasn't a career, it was an aspect of a career. She then majored in graphic design, going on to do internships in both front-end development and design. Since college, she has gone back and forth between front-end development and design work.

How long ago was that?

Helen graduated college in 2013.

Did you graduate in computer science?

Helen did not even minor in computer science. At the time, she was focused on making stuff. The computer science major was too heavily focused on theory. She did take a couple of classes in it, but the graphic design major was more focused on building prototypes. Her graphic design major didn't teach her how to do anything - she said that you're on your own, and you have to figure out how to show off your ideas. The major appealed to her at the time because of that reason. Now Helen thinks majoring in computer science would have been really helpful for her career.

Charles points out that you don't have to have a computer science degree to do this work. Helen agrees; it can be wasted on you if you don't have the right enthusiasm to learn everything. Both say that you can get the education you want through self-education. Helen explains that so much of successful programming is good communication - this can be learned in college, while the specifics of how to code can be learned later.

How do you get from a graphic design major to "serious programming?"

Helen doesn't know how serious the programming she does is now. Her first real job was at Capital One as a front-end developer on their design team. She was doing prototypes and communicating between the design and production/engineering teams. She realized that nobody knew how to write JavaScript when trying to communicate between the two teams, so she decided that she should learn. A lot of the engineers came to the same realization at the same time. She started to write React as she was leaving Capital One. Everyone was trying to improve his or her JavaScript chops at the same time.

Did you get into Angular or React at Capital One?

When she first started at Capital One everyone was writing Angular. She wrote a lot of Angular in the beginning of her work. Most of the prototypes could be solved with React. Near the end of her time, she started using a lot of React.

What do you see is the difference between Angular and React?

Angular solves a lot more problems than React. It brings logic to the client side. React is only about solving visual problems. That's why it appealed to Helen. The design team she worked with was all about solving visual problems.

Why did you choose the front end?

Helen mainly chose it because she was a graphic design major. She believes that because the web is so accessible that it is the easiest thing. She also thinks the front end is fun.

How'd you wind up at Mozilla?

She met James Long through a mutual friend. Once they met, he thought she'd be a good addition to their team. He told her why it'd be a good switch for her - they were doing React work and they were looking for someone to understand problems that engineers go through.

What do they use React on?

She was on the browser team. The front-end of the developer tools was a JavaScript application that wasn't Angular. They were working on moving it to become a more documented framework. They wanted to use Redux and React. The team was converting it panel by panel.

What made you decide you were going to go freelance?

Helen had been missing things that she had done in college such as branding and illustration work. She had done some illustration work while at Firefox. She ultimately wanted to do a variety of different things instead of just product work. What gave her courage to go into freelance work was that James Long was also going freelance at the same time, so she thought that she was in good company. She also is related to a lawyer, so it wasn't as scary filing the paperwork because she had someone to ask for help during the process.

What contributions do you feel like you've made to the JavaScript community?

Helen believes that the highest impact work she has done has been on the Firefox browser. She didn't write a lot of code, but feels like what she did write is being used by a lot of people. She is most proud of the CSS grid because she says that it is exciting for people who do layout stuff on the web.

What are you working on now?

Helen started her own business at the beginning of the year. She is figuring out how she wants her skills to grow and with what kind of clients she wants to work. She has a lot of side projects, one being what she calls an art project. She is translating JPEG to Pixel art. She is taking NeoPixels, which are little programmable LEDs, and taking a matrix of values and displaying them on a sight board.

With everything that's out there in JavaScript, how do you keep current?

Helen answers that she doesn't. She tries to stay current with the tools she is using, which is React. She doesn’t try to be good at everything because she is also a designer, so she says that she has to pick and choose what she stays current on. Charles says that is what he tells people to do. There is so much out there that there is no way that anyone is going to stay current on everything. He says to keep current on what you are doing specifically.

Picks         

Helen:

• Wonder Woman http://wonderwomanfilm.com
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Charles:

• JavaScript Jabber Slack Room https://devchat.tv/javascript-jabber-slack
• Monthly Webinars  https://devchat.tv/webinars
• Angular Remote Conf https://devchat.tv/conferences/angular-remote-conf-2017

Links

• Helen V Holmes Twitter https://twitter.com/helenvholmes

JSJ 270 The Complete Software Developers Career Guide with John Sonmez

This episode features a panel of Joe Eames, AJ O’Neal, as well as host Charles Maxwell. Special guest John Sonmez runs the website SimpleProgrammer.com that is focused on personal development for software developers. He works on career development and improving the non-technical life aspects of software developers. Today’s episode focuses on John’s new book The Complete Software Developers Career Guide.

Did the book start out being 700 pages?

No. My goal was 200,000 words. During the editing process a lot of questions came up, so pages were added. There were side sections called “Hey John” to answer questions that added 150 pages.

Is this book aimed at beginners?

It should be valuable for three types of software developers: beginner, intermediate, and senior developers looking to advance their career. The book is broken up into five sections, which build upon each other. These sections are: - How to get started as a software developer - How to get a job and negotiate salary - The technical skills needed to know to be a software developer - How to work as a software developer - How to advance in career

Is it more a reference book, not intended to read front to back?

The book could be read either way. It is written in small chapters. Most people will read it start to finish, but it is written so that you can pick what you’re interested in and each chapter still makes sense by itself.

Where did you come up with the idea for the book?

It was a combination of things. At the time I wanted new blog posts, a new product, and a new book. So I thought, “What if I wrote a book that could release chapters as blog posts and could be a product later on?” I also wanted to capture everything I learned about software development and put it on paper so that didn’t lose it.

What did people feel like they were missing (from Soft Skills) that you made sure went into this book?

All the questions that people would ask were about career advice. People would ask things regarding: - How do I learn programming? - What programming language should I learn? - Problems with co-workers and boss - Dress code

What do you think is the most practical advice from the book for someone just getting started?

John thinks that the most important thing to tell people is to come up with a plan on how you’re going to become educated in software development. And then to decide what you’re going to pursue. People need to define what they want to be. After that is done, go backwards and come up with a plan in order to get there. If you set a plan, you’ll learn faster and become a valuable asset to a team. Charles agrees that this is how to stay current in the job force.

What skills do you actually need to have as a developer?

Section 3 of the book answers this question. There was some frustration when beginning as a software developer, so put this list together in the book. - Programming language that you know - Source control understanding - Basic testing - Continuous integration and build systems - What kinds of development (web, mobile, back end) - Databases - Sequel

Were any of those surprises to you?

Maybe DevOps because today’s software developers need to, but I didn’t need to starting out. We weren’t involved in production. Today’s software developers need to understand it because they will be involved in those steps.

What do you think is the importance of learning build tools and frameworks, etc. verses learning the basics?

Build tools and frameworks need to be understood in order to understand how your piece fits into the bigger picture. It is important to understand as much as you can of what’s out there. The basics aren’t going to change so you should have an in depth knowledge of them. Problems will always be solved the same way. John wants people to have as few “unknown unknowns” as possible. That way they won’t be lost and can focus on more timeless things.

What do you think about the virtues of self-taught verses boot camp verses University?

This is the first question many developers have so it is addressed it in the book. If you can find a good coding boot camp, John personally thinks that’s the best way. He would spend money on boot camp because it is a full immersion. But while there, you need to work as hard as possible to soak up knowledge. After a boot camp, then you can go back and fill in your computer science knowledge. This could be through part time college classes or even by self-teaching.

Is the classic computer science stuff important?

John was mostly self-taught; he only went to college for a year. He realized that he needed to go back and learn computer science stuff. Doesn’t think that there is a need to have background in computer science, but that it can be a time saver.

A lot of people get into web development and learn React or Angular but don’t learn fundamentals of JavaScript. Is that a big mistake?

John believes that it is a mistake to not fully understand what you’re doing. Knowing the function first, knowing React, is a good approach. Then you can go back and learn JavaScript and understand more. He states that if you don’t learn the basics, you will be stunted and possibly solve things wrong. Joe agrees with JavaScript, but not so much with things algorithms. He states that it never helped him once he went back and learned it. John suggests the book Algorithms to Live By – teaches how to apply algorithms to real life.

Is there one question you get asked more than anything else you have the answer to in the book?

The most interesting question is regarding contract verses salary employment and how to compare them. It should all be evaluated based on monetary value. Salary jobs look good because of benefits. But when looking at pay divided by the hours of work, usually a salary job is lower paid. This is because people usually work longer hours at salary jobs without being paid for it.

What’s the best place for people to pick up the book?

simpleprogrammer.com/careerguide and it will be sold on Amazon. The book will be 99 cents on kindle – want it to be the best selling software development book ever.

Picks

Joe

Wonder Woman

AJ

The Alchemist

Charles

Artificial Intelligence with Python

John

Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Apple Airpods

Links

Simple Programmer Youtube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft also reviews and approves plugins.

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

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

SharePoint Developer Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

SharePoint is layers of data and scopes.

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

Picks

Charles Max Wood

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

AJ O'Neal

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

Mike Ammerlaan

• Super hot VR on Oculus Rift

Vesa Juvonen

• Family

A big thanks to Microsoft, DotNetRocks, and Build!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:14:30] Best Way to Save 

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

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

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

Kevin follows Dave Ramsey’s advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:39:00] Put Your Money Somewhere

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

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

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

[00:47:08] Why index funds?

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Cory

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

Aimee

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

Charles

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

Sean

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

Kevin

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

Links

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

JSJ 274 Amazon Voice Services and Echo Skills with Terrance Smith

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

[01:00] – Introduction to Terrance Smith

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

[01:30] – Amazon Voice Service

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

[04:35] – Capabilities

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

[05:50] – Skills Kit

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

[07:00] – Steps for programming

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

[10:55] – Boilerplates for AWS Lambda

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

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

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

[12:35] – Machine learning

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

[16:40] – Amazon Echo Show

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

[27:20] – Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

[33:10] – Monetization

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Joe Eames

• Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak

Aimee Knight

• Conference: React Rally
• Pancakes

Charles Max Wood

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

Terrance Smith

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

JSJ 276: Vue.js with Maximilian Schwarzmüller         

This episode of JavaScript Jabber features panelists AJ O’Neal, Aimee Knight, and Charles Max Wood. They talk with special guest Maximilian Schwarzmüller about Vue.js. Tune in to find out more!

[00:02:21] Introduction to Maximilian

Maximilian lives in Germany and is a self-taught web developer. He mostly teaches web development on Udemy and his YouTube channel. Vue.js is just one topic that he teaches. He enjoys teaching and passing on information to other web developers: he believes it is the best thing you can do.

[00:03:10] What other courses do you teach?

He tries to cover basic web development topics. On Udemy Maximilian teaches Angular and generic JavaScript courses. He also teaches courses on Angular and Node.js. On his YouTube channel he teaches more back-end development and Node.js courses.

[00:04:00] Elevator Pitch for Vue.js

Vue.js is a new framework that is popular because it is similar to React but also has Angular features. It is easier to learn than React: not everything is in JavaScript and JXS is not included. It is more also flexible and has better performance than Angular 1. Vue.js is easier than Angular 2 both to learn and master. It is still a JavaScript framework, where developers build single page applications or drop in existing applications to enhance views, control parts of a page with JavaScript, get rid of jQuery, and have an easier time creating applications.

[00:05:10] What are some challenges people run into as they learn it?

If developers are brand new to Vue.js, getting started is easy. It has one thing that a lot of frameworks lack which is awesome documentation. Vuejs.org has a comprehension guide that makes getting started simple. There is a general idea that developers still need to learn of how to structure the app, which is similar to React. Developers have to learn how to build components which is used to build the application. The build template is where everything is controlled with Vue.js. JavaScript code is used as well as template syntax.

[00:06:27] So you build the template and then tell it how each part is supposed to behave with JavaScript?

Yes. To get started use Vue instances, which are JavaScript objects, control parts of the page and it is marked by an id on an HTML element. Then, write a Vue template, which is basically HTML code where extra features can be used to easily output a variable. It makes it much easier to control via Vue instance. Then add a code, add a method which changes the property of Vue instance. It works together and is easy to build up templates and control your page with Vue.

[00:11:12] Vue’s Advantages

That depends on the application. Vue.js is easier to learn, which is an advantage when trying to get new developers. The documentation on the website is excellent, which helps when learning the language. Vue also has it’s own single team that develops it’s products, such as the Vue Router and Vue X. It has better performance, but for extremely big projects Angular 4 may be better.

[00:13:38] Does Vue have routing in it?

Vue.js has its own router. The core Vue team develops it, which is a different package that is downloaded separately. The advantage to this is that if you don’t need the router, then you don’t have it in your bundle but can easily add it. Once it is added it integrates nicely.

[00:14:16] How does the Vue router compare to the React router?

The Vue router offers the same features as the React router: nested routes, passing parameters, route guards, etc. The Vue router integrates nicely into the Vue package. It also injects into every component you have and is very simple. All that has to be done is just to execute one line of code and then the router is in the project.

[00:17:10] How often is Vue.js upgraded and how hard is it to keep up?

Vue.js only has two versions. Upgrading from Vue 1 to Vue 2 is easy. The base syntax and framework is still the same, you just need to adjust and move on. Since Vue 2 they released bigger upgrades. There so far haven’t been any issues upgrading, they have added new features, and still use the old code.

[00:19:09] What is the feature with Vue as far as adoption goes?

It is hard to predict but there are indicators that Vue.js has a good future. Vue.js probably will not overtake Angular but it is becoming important for companies in Asia, which is an important market. They have developed an Ionic version of Vue.js. There has also been an ongoing trend on GitHub.

[00:21:20] Why do we keep having new frameworks and versions?

The language of JavaScript itself is seeing rapid development. New features have been added, new web technologies developed, etc. One reason is that developers do more on the web. They want easier ways of building applications. There is no perfect framework so there has to be tradeoffs between the frameworks. There is no perfect solution for every application so need a framework for every application.

[00:23:16] What is left undone in Vue.js?

It is complete as far as something can be complete. Developers are working on service rendering to improve search engine optimization and initial rendering performance. They are also working on progress web app support.

[00:28:02] What drives the way that Vue grows?

There is simplicity in their documentation. While the documentation is simple, the framework is also easy to learn. Maximilian believes that the reason Vue.js took off is because the documentation and framework work together nicely.

[00:31:19] What is going to keep Vue around?

The support is not based on corporation, but there is an Asian company that is developing a framework that uses Vue to with their own product. Because of this, can draw an assumption that they will keep Vue.js around. Vue.js also has a strong community and core team, giving it a good support system.

[00:34:15] What are people using if they want to use Native Apps but they want to use Vue?

They are having a hard time right now. Frameworks for Quasar and Weex are in the early stages. A Vue.js app needs to be built but there are packages that are working in that direction.

[00:37:25] How do you structure your Udemy courses and what do you think of that as a whole?

Maximilian started teaching Udemy courses about one and a half years ago. He really enjoys teaching. Each course follows a similar pattern. He starts with a rough topic, researches the topic to see what is in demand, and builds a course around projects. He then fits all the things he wants to teach into the project, plans the course curriculum, records and edits the lecture videos, and then finally releases the course.

[00:39:22] What do you get the most questions about with your Vue course?

Questions are mixed. Students dive into the course quickly but then pause. Most questions are about the basics. They usually have something to do with the first few sections of the course or setup problems.

Picks         

AJ:

• Broke Eatery 
• Dream Dinners

Aimee:

• Julie Evans blog 
• Nodevember

Charles:

• The Ketogenic Diet
• 2 Keto Dudes Podcast 

Max:

• Nuxt.js Framework 
• Slack “Chat with yourself” Channel

Links

• Onsen UI for Vue
• Twitter
• Youtube
• https://academind.com/
• Utemy Vue.js Course 

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MJS 034: John-David Dalton

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

[01:15] – Introduction to JD

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

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

First website

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

JavaScript

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

Animation

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

PHP and JavaScript

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

JS Specification

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

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

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

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

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

Lo-Dash

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

Sandboxed Native

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

Microsoft

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

Picks

John-David Dalton

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

Charles Max Wood

• Aaron Walker
• Interview Valet

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

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

This episode dives in detail into:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Cory:

• Trending Developer Skills
• The Devops Handbook

Aimee:

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

Aaron:

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

Chuck:

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

John:

• TC39 Proposal for Optional Chaining
• ToyBox 3D Printer

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Joe Eames

Special Guests: 

Matthew Creager and Peter Cho

In this episode, JavaScript Jabbers speak with Matthew Ceager and Peter Cho. Matthew and Peter are part of the team at Manifold. Manifold is a marketplace for developer services. Matthew takes care of growth and relations, and Peter oversee products at Manifold.

The panel discusses with Peter and Matthew what Manifold does and the benefits of a Cloud Service. Matthew gives perspective on how developers can get their cloud product on the market compared to open source.  Further discussion goes into how this will help the developer to get their products or services turned into a business quicker and save time  Also learn about when it is the ideal time to move to cloud services vs. running a server yourself.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Different kinds of definition of Cloud Services
• Anything you would rely on as a third party service
• What is the cloud service ecosystem - Services that connect to an application
• Independent market place -  because it is difficult to turn a product into a business
• Where are people using cloud services or running their own server
• Spinning up a version of it is easier.
• Time verses doing it yourself?
• Experts running the services
• Focusing on your product instead of managing the server and such
• Where does the data live and who has access to that?
• Lock In’s?
• Tourist - Credentials management
• How do I get this setup? Command Line or register online
• And much more!

Links:

Manifold

https://github.com/mattcreager

@manifoldco

@etcpeter

@matt_creager

blog.manifold.com

Picks:

Amiee

• Ryan McDermott

Charles

• GitLab 
• AdminLTE

Joe

• What You Can’t Say

Matt

• Star Trek
• Puppeteer

Peter

• Player Unknown Battle Ground 
• Sourdough   by Robin Sloan

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

JC Hiatt

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

@jchiatt

@devlifts

devlifts.io

Picks:

Amiee

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

Charles

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

JC

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

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Charles does a solo episode talking about entrepreneurship and the topic/course on “How to Get a Job.” This is an informative episode for those looking for a job as a developer and how to prepare your resume for your career search. Charles covers the core pieces of the course and specific areas of tailoring your credentials for the job you want to acquire.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How do I get a great job? Companies are only hiring Senior Devs.
• Your selling point as a Jr. Dev.
• Framing your experience for the companies to better see your experience.
• I don’t want a ( this kind of boss)
• Feeling like you are making a difference in your job.
• Who do you want to work for, with, where, and how, etc?
• Working in a facility or remotely. What do you want?
• Check out the meet-up places or workplaces (WeWork), Glassdoor
• Check out the people who work that these companies, LinkedIn.
• Check out company’s Slack rooms, forum, etc. to make connections
• Visit the companies personally
• Look into contacting the Meetup Organizers
• Building rapport
• Resume mistakes - how to properly format it so it is skim-able
• Top 3 bullet points and tailor you resume for each job
• Unnecessary material in your resume - again tailor to the company
• Important material to include on your resume, contributions on projects
• The cover letter - How to do this correctly with a personal touch
• What to do when you get the interview - the offer!
• And much more!

Links:

• devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job-full-accessfull-access
• WeWork
• Expert Salary Negotiation

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Amanda Silver

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• @amandaksilver
•  

Picks:

Amanda

• Visual Studio Live Share
• Instinct of learning technology

Charles

• Visual Studio Live Share
• AI

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ryan Glover

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Glover, Ryan is the COO of Clever Beagle. Clever Beagle is a company that helps people create their first products and begin selling to their customers. Clever Beagle uses platforms like  Meteor JS, Node JS, and React to provide frameworks for help build applications.

Ryan describes their business as a technical therapist for bringing ideas to fruition. Ryan shares his journey into programming by learning to build websites with Geocities. Thereafter, Ryan had began his self-taught journey with programming after learning he did not like his college major. Ryan talks about his contribution to the JS community, his website called Meteor Chef designed to help newbies learn to build with Meteor JS.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Learning Geocites
• Becoming a Self Taught programmer
• Freelancing
• Building WordPress websites and learning JS
• By trade a  being a designer
• Building with JavaScript
• Learning about Meteor on Hacker News in 2013
• Sacha Greif 
• Apollo
• Raw Node JS
• Understanding Webpack?
• Gearheads vs. Builders
• Boilerplates
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• Sacha Greif
• Clever Beagle
• https://www.meteor.com
• https://themeteorchef.com/info/about
• https://cleverbeagle.com/subcribe
• @rglover
• ryanglover.net

Picks

Ryan

• Halt and Catch Fire
• Sacha Greif State of JavaScript
• Tom Coleman

Charles

• React Developer Summit
• JavaScript Developer Summit
• How To Find A Job Course 
• Stranger Things Season 2
• moviepass.com

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Chris Dias

PJ Meyer

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Chris

• Pizza

PJ

• Deli

Charles

• Coupon Pass for tourist in NYC

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Aimee Knight

Corey House

Joe Eames

Special Guests: 

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Aimee

• De Contact 
• Dodow 

Dirk

• Track This Critical Thinking

Charles

• Nicholas Zakas - Books 

Corey

• Fun Fun Function Show

Joe

• Dice Forge
• Concept of empathy

Panel:

Charles Max Wood 

Aimee Knight

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames 

Special Guests: Gareth McCumskey

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Aimee

• Serverless Architectures 
• NG-BE Conference 

AJ

• Documentary on Enron
• Hard Thing about Hard Things 

Charles

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

Gareth

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

Joe 

• Wonder -  Movie
• Gloom In Space - Board Game 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: Kirill Gavrylyuk

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Kirill

• Shared Debugging with VS Code - Keynote

Charles

• USB Powered Monitor on Amazon 

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood 

Cory House

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight  

Special Guests: Ryan Glover

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber panelist speak with Ryan Glover. Ryan is on JavaScript Jabber to talks about Entrepreneurship as a developer.  Ryan runs Clever Beagle in Chicago Illinois. Clever Beagle is a mentorship company that helps people build their first software Product. Ryan and the panel discuss the many roads of entrepreneurship, startup business ideas, servicing and teaching the community, how to’s, and psychological challenges, hiring, seeing your ideas through to the end, and privilege. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How do you get started as an entrepreneur? 
• Clever Beagle
• The Meteor Chef
• Where are people getting stuck on the builds? 
• Fear, unknowns
• Simple, but not easy 
• Drive and ability to step into the unknown
• Survival of the fittest
• Hire before you are already 
• Losing your marbles
• Starting on a smaller scale
• How do I know my idea is going to work? 
• Book - Brick by Brick
• Multiple lines of business
• Managing a portfolio of business 
• Revenue streams 
• Marketing 
• Quitter
• When do I quit? 
• 6-12 months of cash before you quit
• Making mistakes in entrepreneurship?
• Be a reader and study
• Go out a read books! 
• Experiential not taught 
• Luck and Privilege
• Video - Life of Privilege Explained in a $100 Race
• Procrastinate on Purpose
• And much more! 

Links:

• Clever Beagle 
• The Meteor Chef
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryangglover
• http://www.ryanglover.net
• Brick by Brick
• Quitter
• Procrastinate on Purpose
• Do Thing That Don’t Scale
• @rglover

Picks:

Cory

• The Power of Moments
• The 50th Law

Charles

• ReactDevSummit.com
• Indiegogo for Dev Chat
• .NetRocks

Aimee

• Life of Privilege Explained in a $100 Race

Joe

• Everybody Lies
• Murder on the Orient Express
•  

Ryan

• Turning Pro - Steven Pressfield series
• The Power of Beliefs in Business

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Cory House

Joe Eames

Aimee Knight

Special Guests: John Papa

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

• https://johnpapa.net
• Vue.js  with TypeScript
• A Look at Angular Along Side Vue
• @john_papa
• https://github.com/johnpapa

Picks:

Corey

• cypress.io

Charles

• E Myth Revisited
• Profit First 
• Dunkirk

Aimee

• Crucial Conversations 
• Ripple or XRP

Joe

• The Greatest Showman
• Better Late Then Never
• Vue
• 7 Languages In 7 Weeks  - Book

John

• Jumanji 2017
• Emotional Intelligence

Panel: 

Charles Max Wood

Guest: Donovan Brown

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Donovan Brown. Donovan is a principle DevOps Manager at Microsoft. Donovan talks about his journey into programming starting in the 8th grade with Cue Basic to college and writing games in Cue Basic. Donovan talks about different avenues of programming and working independently, and being entrepreneurial, and finally getting a call from Microsoft. Donovan tells many great high energy stories and shares his enthusiasm in his career in DevOps. This is a great episode to hear the possibilities in the programming and developer world.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• 8th grade Cue Basic
• Computer Math  Cue Basic
• Selling notes  -  Chemistry class
• Board Game creation
• Teach yourself C in 21 days
• Change majors
• Work at Compaq Computers and go promoted as a software engineer
• Independent, then into Dev Ops
• Notion Solutions
• Ending up in Microsoft doing DevOps
• Hot Topic  - Dev Opts  - Release
• BrianKellerVM
• Demos
• DevOps and the Process
• Visual Studio and people
• Pain Points
• Programmers - Permission to do your job?
• JQuery
• Yeoman Generator 
• Power Shell Plugin
• Open source and Contributions to the community
• DevOps Interviews Podcast
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• http://donovanbrown.com
• https://github.com/DarqueWarrior
• @DonovanBrown
• DevOps Interviews Podcast 

Picks

Donovan

• Visual Studio Code 

Charles

• Installing Windows 10 
• Docker Support for Windows