Addy Osmoni is an engineer at Google, where he works on Chrome & Polymer. Addy is also the creator of TodoMVC, @Yeoman, Web Starter Kit, and the author of JavaScript Design Patterns.

He joined us to talk frameworks, performance, JavaScript, and more.

We talked about (roughly in order):

Q & A:

15:48 What is the best way for someone to pursue a similar career at Google or elsewhere?

19:44 At what point you make the trade-off between additional bytes of file-size vs. an extra HTTP request. Basically, at what point does the extra HTTP request become worthwhile? 5kb, 10kb, 50kb?

33:55 I will be rebuilding our website and app dashboard soon, and instead of having a desktop version and a mobile version, I’m going have just 1 version which will support both. I would like to use a different set of js files for the smallest i.e.: mobile version, vs the desktop size or rather anything bigger then the mobile version which in my case would be 320px. I’ve seen examples of people using JavaScript to import script tags, but how would you guys go about this?

40:58 I am so frustrated with the current state of JavaScript. I feel like there are so many libraries and tools that the language is getting over saturated. Because of this over saturation there are now conflicting best practices. For example, if we want to use requireJS and concatenate all of our libraries together, then we cannot use a CDN fallback for those libraries. So, do we do AMD or CDN?

45:35 I’ve recently begun diving into the MEAN stack, and so far, have really enjoyed it. Coming from a LAMP stack background, it’s been a pretty big huge mindset shift, but the idea of running a server on JavaScript is both too terrifying and too intriguing to pass up. What do you guys think about the MEAN stack?

50:55 As a front and back end developer I often find myself Googling pretty much anything from a CSS to PHP. For example, today I searched for “SASS Parent Selectors” and “Equal height columns in CSS.” I often think that I’m just good at searching the web and not so much at development, am I overreacting or do other developers run into this situation?

53:42 Can you explain what “The tiniest yet most powerful JS utility ever” is all about?

56:12 The NYTimes is describing some of the technology they used for their re-design. Including a paragraph about responsiveness and breakpoints called ‘A smarter layout’. They decided to go for CSS classes set via JavaScript to switch the layout. So like Modernizr-is-taking-care-of-mediaqueries-ish-kinda-way. What do you think about this approach?

Sponsors:

18:00 One Month – One Month is an online video learning platform with a simple premise: What if you could learn anything in One Month?

One Month students learn to code by building real websites and apps, growth hacking their businesses and websites, and building payment systems and security solutions.

One Month’s courses are the easiest way to learn new tech skills including: Ruby on Rails, Python, HTML & CSS, iOS Development with Swift, Content Marketing, Growth Hacking, and More!

Enroll now @ onemonth.com/shoptalk and get 25% OFF your first month.

44:17 E4H – Front End Summit – As the web changes for the better, so do our tools. While keeping on top of industry changes is part of the job, fighting our tools that can help us do our job faster and better shouldn’t be. In this special FrontEnd Summit, we deep dive into tools–some common like text editors and some relatively new to the scene like Grunt and Sketch–to see how they can help stay on top of cutting edge.

Environments for Humans brings together some of the Web’s most notable experts in for an all-new, one-day only online conference, the FrontEnd Summit 2015! Bring the experts to your desktop June 2nd from 9AM to 4PM (CT).

Purchase your tickets now and get 20% off by using coupon code SHOPTALK!

Show Links:

Addy Osman[...]