We talked about how she chose this particular EV and why she went electric in the first place. She explains the two screens and what information goes where and why, and also holds it over me that her car actually has dedicated dials for temperature and the radio. We talk about the backup cameras, how well the cruise control with lane steering works, and how weird the door handles are.

Cheyenne is a joy to talk to as she's funny and well informed at the same time.

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart takes us down memory lane to 102 episodes ago when he first introduced us to the concept of test-driven development. He explains why back then he taught us how to use QUnit for our TDD work, and why it's no longer in favor with him. It's not just the advancements in technology like ES6, but it's also because QUnit makes it terribly hard to write tests and to interpret what you've written when you've been away from it for a while. He walks us through his criteria for picking a new TDD tool, and why he chose Jest for the job.

He then walks us through a worked example of how to write some simple tests on a module and of course, explains how Jest does its job running our tests. I liked it, even though my head hurt during a bit of it!

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond perfectly straddles the line between Programming By Stealth and Lite. While it's definitely a nerdy discussion topic, Bart Busschots is really just telling a story. He starts by explaining how he ended up a computer scientist essentially by accident, and tells us about a fantastic CS professor he had who inspired him through an assignment about a game called 8 Queens. He tells these stories as a way to explain that when I used the Terminal and `egrep` to help me solve the game Wordle a few weeks ago, it wasn't really cheating. I think whether you're a programmer or not, you'll enjoy hearing Bart explain why.

Bart's shownotes can be found at pbs.bartificer.net/...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots finishes firming up our foundation on a few more things before we meet Jest, which will be the Test Driven Development (TDD) environment we'll be learning next time.

He explains in some adorable examples involving a parrot (named Polly of course) how getters can be used to construct short but powerful syntaxes that seem quite counterintuitive at first glance. These are heavily used by Jest, and without learning about them, they would simply look like magic. He said some purists may see this syntax as an abuse of getters but it's a pretty slick method that yields very readable APIs.

The second thing he teaches us is that functions can actually return functions. That sounds like opening a hole in the space-time continuum but it's actually quite logical and useful as Bart explains the usefulness of this really well. No parrots involved, but lots of pancakes and waffles in his examples.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

This week's guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is the Wizard Alec Johnson. Alec is the host of the YouTube channel Take One Tech. He creates amazing how-to guides on tools such as Stream Deck, Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, Ecamm Live, and many basic features of the Mac operating systems. When I found his video tutorials, I started devouring them I was learning so much. I asked Alec if he’d come on the show to talk about _how_ he creates these amazing tutorials because they’re unique in the style and quality of the content.

We talk about the gear he uses, and more importantly his software setup that allows him to create 30-minute video tutorials in _one take_. Even after learning how he automates with Keyboard Maestro and Stream Deck, I still believe he's a wizard that he can create such smooth video tutorials with relatively few mistakes, all in one take. Get this, in one take he has created 100 videos in 100 days! His next goal is 365 videos in 365 days. This is why I introduced him as the wizard Alec Johnson.

Since he's a video guy, we decided to have him record the interview for his YouTube channel as well, so if you'd rather watch instead of listen you can do that. There are a few times in the conversation where he demonstrates a little bit of what he's describing so there is an advantage to watching the video. As always though, I made sure to keep adding color commentary to what I was watching so you won't miss anything in the audio.

You can connect with Alec and find all of his content at takeonetech.io

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through some review in order to prepare us to begin our journey into test driven development (TDD) with the tool Jest which he's chosen for our TDD. He clears up some confusion on the difference between `npm install` and `npm ci`, and then he gives us more guidance on when to use which JSDoc tags, especially when documenting plain objects. He gives us a refresher on the different ways of defining functions, and especially arrow functions which are heavily used by Jest. Jest also uses function chaining heavily so he reminds us of how that works as well.

Even if you remember all of this and had it all clear in your head (I most definitely did _not_) it's great to have all of this content in one post as reference.

The next installment will continue firming up our foundation with some new concepts that are heavily used by Jest.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

In this final Programming By Stealth and final Chit Chat Across the Pond for 2021, Bart teaches us how to manage our documentation in JSDoc. As any good programmer, he insists on automating as much as he possibly can. He starts by showing us each step that we have to do at the command line, and methodically puts together a JSDoc configuration file that runs scripts and helps create documentation directories, and installs plugins.

Even better he helps us to configure JSDoc so that it will alert us if we make a mistake in our inline or block tags, since JSDoc by default just ignores those mistakes. Finally we walk through three different themes for our documentation and we actually choose one for the XKPASSWD project and he shows us how we can even modify the theme. It all has to do with Bart preferring blue over purple.

It's great fun, and really gives us the tool we need now to get ready for the next step. You can follow along with Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes pbs.bartificer.net.

Adam Engst, publisher of the long-running Internet-based email newsletter, TidBITS joins us on Chit Chat Across the Pond to talk about an article he wrote for TidBITS about the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking.

Adam starts our conversation by taking us into the WABAC machine to learn about Project Xanadu which was the vision of Ted Nelson to link all information bidirectionally. Working off that foundational vision he explains that a group of developers and tech visionaries have created the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking as a way to encourage the concept of linking as much information as we can within and between apps and operating systems. At the link to the Manifesto, you can learn more about the originators, the vision, and the technical requirements for making this work. Adam even gives us a call to action at the end if we'd like to see this future realized.

I told Adam at the end of the conversation that I knew it was a great talk because my cheeks hurt from smiling talking to him.

This week's Chit Chat Across the Pond is another installment of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots. In our last installment, Bart explained why good documentation matters to ourselves and to other developers who want to use our code, and he also explained that using an automatic document generator like JSDoc could help make it easier for us to write good documentation and to keep it up to date more easily.

In this week's installment, he starts to show us how to actually write JSDoc comments in line with our code. He explains the different elements of JSDoc comments and demonstrates how his own doc comments evolve as he figures out what he's trying to do. I really enjoyed this installment and his example is perfect for us nerds.

I highly recommend you follow along in Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

In late October, Facebook announced that The Facebook Company was name to Meta. A little bit later, Mark Zuckerberg published a video where he described his vision of the future metaverse. I haven't been following this too closely but it seems to be turning into something I might want to understand. I asked Tom Merritt, host of Daily Tech News Show and many other fine shows, to come on Chit Chat to try to make sense of these two things for us.

We talk about what the name change for Facebook really means and what it probably doesn't mean (is it just like Google becoming part of Alphabet?) Then Tom explains the vision of what the metaverse is expected to be. I thought it was a fascinating explanation and I learned a lot from talking to Tom.

During the conversation, Tom references his show Know a Little More where he explains complex technical topics in a short form, deep dive format. He talks in Chit Chat about NFTs and Blockchain, but suggests listening to his episodes on those topics if you want to, well, know a little more.

If you'd like all to find of Tom's podcasts, and the books he's written, you can find all of his work at tommerritt.com.