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

On today's episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood welcomes Mark Nadal. Mark  runs GUN, an open source fire-based. He loves open source community that's why he focuses on it. On this, he shares how he got into the world of programming, and we'll find out how he feels about doing it. Tune in to MJS 002 My JS Story Mark Nadal.

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, Joe Eames, and Aimee Knight discuss Loading and Optimizing Web Applications with Sam Saccone and Jeff Cross. Tune in to their interesting talk, and learn how you can improve user experience and performance with better loading!

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, Aimee Knight, Cory House, and Charles Max Wood discuss Gomix with Daniel X Moore. Daniel is a Software Developer at Fog Creek Software, and has been in the industry for 10 years. Their company currently offers an amazingly convenient way to build apps. Tune in to learn about it!

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

On this week's episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood interviews Bob Zeidman. Bob focuses on software forensics, but he also does consultations whenever he sells the intellectual property of a startup. He was on episode 238 and talked about intellectual property and software forensics. How did his life navigate towards programming? 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[33:07] It’s the little things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

Mikael on Twitter and GitHub Arunesh on Twitter Anna on Twitter

Picks

AJ

Overclocked Remix Super Mario RPG Window to The Stars

Amiee

Blogpost RisingStack on Node 8
2 Frugal Dudes

Charles

Homeland
House of Cards

Joe

Shimmer Lake

Mikael

Blake2b-wasm

Aremesh

Current Nightly News

JSJ 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

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!

MJS 027 Chris Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:12:02] Having fun at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much Angular have you worked on yourself?

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Chris

Mountain Dew Pitch Black
The Expanse Series on SciFi
Application Insights

Charles

Wheel of Time
Coolage
Dog Company
Data Dog

Links

Twitter
GitHub

JSJ 272: Functional Programming and ClojureScript with Eric Normand

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

[00:1:14] Introduction to Eric Normand

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

[00:02:22] Address that quickly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Aimee:

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

Eric

• Steven King, On Writing 
• Youtube Channel: Tested  

Charles

• Ionic Framework

Links

• Purely Functional TV 
• Blog 
• Building Composable Abstractions 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:14:30] Best Way to Save 

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

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

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

Kevin follows Dave Ramsey’s advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:39:00] Put Your Money Somewhere

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

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

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

[00:47:08] Why index funds?

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

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

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

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

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

Picks

Cory

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

Aimee

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

Charles

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

Sean

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

Kevin

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

Links

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

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 275: Zones in Node with Austin McDaniel

The panel for this week on JavaScript Jabber is Cory House, Aimee Knight, and Charles Max Wood. They speak with special guest Austin McDaniel about Zones in Node. Tune in to learn more about this topic!

[00:01:11] Introduction to Austin

Austin has worked in JavaScript for the past ten years. He currently works in Angular development and is a panelist on Angular Air. He has spent most of his career doing work in front-end development but has recently begun working with back-end development. With his move to back-end work he has incorporated front-end ideas with Angular into a back-end concept.

[00:02:00] The Way it Works

NodeJS is an event loop. There is no way to scope the context of a call stack. So for example, Austin makes a Node request to a server and wants to track the life cycle of that Node request. Once deep in the scope, or deep in the code, it is not easy to get the unique id. Maybe he wants to get the user from Passport JS. Other languages – Python, Java – have a concept called thread local storage. They can associate context with the thread and throughout the life cycle of that request, he can retrieve that context.

There is a TC39 proposal for zones. A zone allows you to do what was just described. They can create new zones and associate data with them. Zones can also associate unique ids for requests and can associate the user so they can see who requested later in the stack. Zones also allow to scope and create a context. And then it allows scoping requests and capturing contacts all the way down.

[00:05:40] Zone Uses

One way Zone is being used is to capture stack traces, and associating unique ids with the requests. If there is an error, then Zone can capture a stack request and associate that back to the request that happened. Otherwise, the error would be vague.

Zones are a TC39 proposal. Because it is still a proposal people are unsure how they can use it. Zones are not a new concept. Austin first saw Zones being used back when Angular 2 was first conceived. If an event happened and they wanted to isolate a component and create a scope for it, they used Zones to do so. Not a huge fan of how it worked out (quirky). He used the same library that Angular uses in his backend. It is a specific implementation for Node. Monkey patches all of the functions and creates a scope and passes it down to your functions, which does a good job capturing the information.

[00:08:40] Is installing the library all you need to get this started?

Yes, go to npminstallzone.js and install the library. There is a middler function for kla. To fork the zone, typing zone.current. This takes the Zone you are in and creates a new isolated Zone for that fork. A name can then be created for the Zone so it can be associated back with a call stack and assigned properties. Later, any properties can be retrieved no matter what level you are at.

[00:09:50] So did you create the Zone library or did Google?

The Google team created the Zone library. It was introduced in 2014 with Angular 2. It is currently used in front-end development.

[00:10:12] Is the TC39 proposal based on the Zone library?

While Austin has a feeling that the TC39 proposal came out of the Zone library, he cannot say for sure.

[00:10:39] What stage is the proposal in right now?

Zone is in Stage Zero right now. Zone JS is the most popular version because of its forced adoption to Angular. He recommends people use the Angular version because it is the most tested as it has a high number of people using it for front-end development.

[00:11:50] Is there an easy way to copy the information from one thread to another?

Yes. The best way would probably be to manually copy the information. Forking it may also work.

[00:14:18] Is Stage Zero where someone is still looking to put it in or is it imminent?

Austin believes that since it is actually in a stage, it means it is going to happen eventually but could be wrong. He assumes that it is going to be similar to the version that is out now. Aimee read that Stage Zero is the implementation stage where developers are gathering input about the product. Austin says that this basically means, “Implementation may vary. Enter at your own risk.”

[00:16:21] If I’m using New Relic, is it using Zone JS under the hood?

Austin is unsure but there something like that has to be done if profiling is being used. There has to be a way that you insert yourself in between calls. Zone is doing that while providing context, but probably not using Zone JS. There is a similar implementation to tracing and inserting logging in between all calls and timeouts.

[00:17:22] What are the nuances? Why isn’t everybody doing this?

Zone is still new in the JavaScript world, meaning everyone has a ton of ideas about what should be done. It can be frustrating to work with Zone in front-end development because it has to be manually learned. But in terms of implementation, only trying to create a context. Austin recommends Zone if people want to create direct contacts. The exception would be 100 lines of Zone traces because they can get difficult.

Another issue Austin has is Node’s native basic weight. Weight hooks are still up in the air. The team is currently waiting on the Node JS community to provide additional information so that they can finish. Context can get lost sometimes if the wrong language is used. He is using Typescript and doesn’t have that problem because it is straightforward.

[00:21:44:] Does this affect your ability to test your software at all?

No, there have not been any issues with testing. One thing to accommodate for is if you are expecting certain contexts to be present you have to mock for those in the tests. After that happens, the tests should have no problems.

Picks

Cory:

• Apple AirPods

Aimee:​

• Blackmill
• Understanding Zones

Charles:

• Classical Reading Playlist on Amazon
• Building stairs for his dad
• Angular Dev Summit 

Austin:

• NGRX Library Redux 

Links

• Twitter
• GitHub

MJS 032: Feross Aboukhadijeh

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

[01:00] – Introduction to Feross Aboukhadijeh

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

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

Toddler

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

HTML and Web proxies

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

First website

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

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

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

[09:35] – Webtorrent

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

Picks

Feross Aboukhadijeh

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

Charles Max Wood

• Let’s Encrypt
• Digital Ocean

JSJ 277: Dojo 2 with Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly

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

[00:02:03] Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

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

[00:02:22] Introduction to Kitson 

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

[00:02:43] Elevator Pitch for Dojo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call out to Angular 4 vs Angular 2.

[00:12:44] AMD Modules

Why use AMD instead of ES6 modules?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For package builds and CI, Grunt is used.

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

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

Internationalization in Angular 2 or 4 seems unfinished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sitepen Blog series on picking a framework

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

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

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

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

Theming systems is another selling point for Dojo.

[00:34:10] Ending the framework wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:49:08] Testing

They've got intern.

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

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

The Dojo CLI uses intern as the default test framework.

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

Dojo Links

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

Picks

Cory

• Amateur vs Professional

Aimee

• DevFest Florida (use code 'jsjabber')

Chuck

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

Dylan

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

Kitson

• Dunbar Number

MJS 033: Dylan Schiemann

Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Dylan Schiemann. Dylan talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community to what JavaScript is back in 2004. Listen to learn more about Dylan!

[01:10] – Introduction to Dylan Schiemann

Dylan was on episode 62 of JavaScript Jabber, which was about 4 years ago. We had him on to talk about the Dojo Toolkit.

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

When Dylan was 7 or 8 years old, he and his father took basic programming class together. In Junior high, probably mid-1980’s, he received his first Commodore 64 computer. He picked up the Programmer’s Reference Guide, toppled on Assembly, and tried to write data to a tape drive. It got updated to a floppy drive. And then in high school, he took some Pascal classes. He learned the basics - ranging from BASIC, Pascal, and to Assembly.

[03:00] – How did you get into JavaScript?

As an undergraduate, Dylan studied Chemistry and Mathematics. He did some basic HTML and discovered the web roughly when he was a junior year in college. And then, he went to graduate school and studied Physical Chemistry at UCLA. He was studying the topology and reality of quasi-two-dimensional phone. If you imagine a bunch of beer bubbles at the top of a glass, and you spin it around really quickly, you watch how the bubbles rearrange as force is applied to it. He wanted to put his experiments on the web so he started learning this new language that had just been invented called JavaScript. So, he dropped out of graduate school a few years later. Eight years after that point in time, it was possible to show his experiments with Dojo and SVG.

[04:25] – How did you get into Dojo and the other technologies?

SitePen

Right after grad school, Dylan helped start a company called SitePen. That let him really learn how JavaScript works. He started doing some consulting work. And he started working with Alex Russell, who had a project called netWindows at the time, which is a predecessor to any JavaScript framework that most people have worked with.

Dojo

Dylan got together and decided to create a next generation version of the HTML toolkit, which ended up becoming Dojo back in 2004. Things that they created back then are now part of the language - asynchronous patterns such as Promises, or even modules, widgets, which led to the web components pack. Over the years, they’ve built on that and done various utilities for testing and optimizing applications.

[06:20] – Ideas that stood the test of time

A lot of the things that Dylan and his team did in Dojo were on the right path but first versions ended up iterating before they’ve met their way into the language. Other things are timing. They were there very early and but to tell people in 2005 and 2006 that you need to architect the front-end application met some confusion of why you would want to do that. According to him, they never created Dojo to say that they want to create the world’s leading framework.

[07:45] – JavaScript

Dylan no longer answers the question of, “Oh, JavaScript, you mean, Java?”

The expectations of 2004 were the hope of making something that might work in a browser. The expectation today is we are competing against every platform and trying to create the best possible software in the world, and do it in a way that’s distributable everywhere in the browser. The capabilities have grown. There are audio, video and real-time capabilities. They were ways to do those things but they were brutal and fragile. And now, we have real engineering solutions to many of those things but there are still going to be ways to do this. There were few people who are interested in this and maybe this wasn’t even their day job. But now, literally hundreds and thousands of engineers who write code in JavaScript every day.

Picks

Dylan Schiemann

• JavaScript user groups
• JavaScript conferences
• SeattleJS
• Phoenix TypeScript Meet-up
• London HalfStack

Charles Max Wood

• Focuster
• BusyCal
• Asana
• Trello

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

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

[00:37] Michael Crump Introduction

Michael is on the developer experience team for Azure.

[00:52] Jeremy Likness Introduction

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

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

They're focused on building documentation and creating great experiences

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

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

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

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

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

You don't have to be an operations expert.

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

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

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

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

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

[12:04] Web Apps on Linux

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

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

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

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

You can also scale across multiple datacenters around the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[19:12] Supported Runtimes

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

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

Web Apps on Linux is build on Docker.

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

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

At certain levels, there's automatic scaling.

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

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

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

You can also pull logs across all systems.

You can also use SSH in the browser

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

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

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

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

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

[28:28] How should you manage state?

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

[30:34] CosmosDB (was DocumentDB)

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

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

[34:14] Third Party Logging Management Apps

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

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

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

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

You can also use any images on DockerHub.

[40:06] Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

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

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

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

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

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

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

[45:38] How to get started

Getting started with Node

docs.microsoft.com

Trial account with a few hundred dollars in Azure credit.

Michael's Links

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

Jeremy's Links

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

Picks

Aimee

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

Joe

• Ozark on Netflix
• Star Wars: Rogue One

Chuck

• Travelers on Netflix

Jeremy

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

Michael

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

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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

Tweet this Episode

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

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

Links:

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

Picks:

JD:

• Keygen.sh
• Octopus Deploy
• JavaScript x86

Chuck:

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

Panel:

Joe 

Amy 

Charles 

Special Guests: 

Eric Simmons 

Albert Pai

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links

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

Picks

Amy

• Promises Series by Andrew Del Prete
• Crossfit 

Joe

• Wholesome Meme
• Sara Cooper

Charles

• Pivotal Tracker 
• MatterMost 
• asana.com
• Zapier

Eric 

• realworld.io 
• David East 

Albert 

• thinkster.io
• Thing Explainer

Panel:

Amy Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Nick Disabato

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

Draft

Nick Disabato

@nickd

ConversionXL

AB Testing Manual

Wider Funnels 

Copy Hackers

Picks:

Amiee

• Nodevember 

Charles

• Mike Gehard 
• Admin LTE

Nick

• HotJar.com

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

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

Panel:

Amiee Knight

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Kye Hohenberger

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Amiee

• Article on Medium
• Antibiotics and Steroids
• RX Bars 

Charles

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

Kye

• Styled System
• Face Paint
• Aussie Bites 

Panel:

Aimee Knight

AJ O’Neal

Charles Max Wood

Special Guests: 

Ari Lerner

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

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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

Links:

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

Picks:

Amiee

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

Charles

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

AJ

• Spice Labels and Spice Jars
• Marriage

Ari

• Moving to NYC
• Learn Block Chain by Building One

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

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

Guest: Nader Dabit

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Nader Dabit. Nader is a familiar guest on JavaScript Jabber, talking about the state of React Native. Nader is the host of React Native Radio, another podcast on the Dev Chat TV network. Nader is a React Native trainer that does consulting and workshops in major cities in the US.

Nader dives into his background and how he began his journey as a developer. Interestingly, Nader became successful as a developer without any formal training, but, by only learning to code on the job. This is a great episode to learn specific ways to build a career without formal training, and how to present yourself for the job.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• React Native Radio and the React Native world
• React Training and pop up workshops
• How Nader got into programming
• Learning HTML and Web Development
• E-commerce, WordPress
• Nader talks about getting his first job
• Positioning  yourself as a developer for success
• Specialization
• Presenting yourself for the job
• How Nader learn to do JavaScript
• Learning a viable option
• Ionic
• What is it about React Native that interest you?
• React Native In Action - Book!
• React Native Elements 
• Sharing Content
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• React Native In Action
• reactnative.training
• https://github.com/react-native-training
• Ideas anyone?

Picks

Nader

• Audio Book- A Guide To the Good Life 

Charles

• The Way of Kings
• Scratching your own itch!