JavaScript Jabber

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Gareth McCumskey

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Gareth McCumskey who is a senior web developer for RunwaySale! They talk about Gareth’s background, current projects and his family. Check out today’s episode to hear all about it and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:53 – Chuck: Hey everyone! Welcome! We are talking today with Gareth McCumseky!

1:05 – Gareth: Hi!

1:22 – Chuck: Are you from Cape Town, Africa? (Guest: Yes!)

1:35 – Gareth and Chuck talk about his name, Gareth, and why it’s popular. 

1:49 – Chuck: I am in my late 40’s. You were here for JSJ’s Episode 291! It’s still a hot topic and probably should revisit that topic.

2:20 – Guest: Yes!

2:30 – Chuck: It’s interesting. We had a long talk about it and people should go listen to it!

2:45 – Guest: I am a backend developer for the most part.

3:03 – Chuck: Yeah I started off as an ops guy. It probably hurt me.

3:21 – Guest: Yeah, if you poke it a certain way.

3:29 – Chuck: Let’s talk about YOU! How did you get into programming?

3:39 – Guest: South Africa is a different culture to grow-up in vs. U.S. and other places. I remember the computer that my father had back in the day. He led me drive his car about 1km away and I was about 11 years old. We would take home the computer from his office – played around with it during the weekend – and put it back into his office Monday morning. This was way before the Internet. I was fiddling with it for sure.

The guest talks about BASIC.

6:20 – Chuck: How did you transfer from building BASIC apps to JavaScript apps?

6:30 – Guest: Yeah that’s a good story. When I was 19 years old...I went to college and studied geology and tried to run an IT business on the side. I started to build things for HTML and CSS and build things for the Web.

The guest goes into-detail about his background!

9:26 – Chuck: Yeah, jQuery was so awesome!

9:34 – Guest: Yeah today I am working on an app that uses jQuery! You get used to it, and it’s pretty powerful (jQuery) for what it is/what it does! It has neat tricks.

10:11 – Chuck: I’ve started a site with it b/c it was easy.

10:19 – Guest: Sometimes you don’t need the full out thing. Maybe you just need to load a page here and there, and that’s it.

10:39 – Chuck: It’s a different world – definitely!

10:48 – Guest: Yeah in 2015/2016 is when I picked up JavaScript again. It was b/c around that time we were expecting our first child and that’s where we wanted to be to raise her.

Guest: We use webpack.js now. It opened my eyes to see how powerful JavaScript is!

12:10 – Chuck talks about Node.js.

12:21 – Guest: Even today, I got into AWS Cognito!

13:45 – Chuck: You say that your problems are unique – and from the business end I want something that I can resolve quickly. Your solution sounds good. I don’t like messing around with the headaches from Node and others.

14:22 – Guest: Yeah that’s the biggest selling point that I’ve had.

15:47 – Chuck: How did you get into serverless?

15:49 – Guest: Funny experience. I am not the expert and I only write the backend stuff.

Guest: At the time, we wanted to improve the reliability of the machine and the site itself. He said to try serverless.com. At the time I wasn’t impressed but then when he suggested it – I took the recommendation more seriously. My company that I work for now...

17:39 – Chuck: What else are you working on?

17:45 – Guest: Some local projects – dining service that refunds you. You pay for a subscription, but find a cheaper way to spend money when you are eating out. It’s called: GOING OUT.

Guest: My 3-year-old daughter and my wife is expecting our second child.

18:56 – Chuck and Gareth talk about family and their children.

22:17 – Chuck: Picks!

22:29 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

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Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Nicholas Zakas

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Nicholas Zakas who is a blogger, author, and software engineer. Nicholas’ website is titled, Human Who Codes – check it out! You can find him on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn among other social media platforms. Today, Nicholas and Chuck talk about Nicholas’ background, JavaScript, and current projects.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:00 – Chuck: Welcome! Give us a background, please, Nicholas!

1:14 – Guest: I am probably best known for making ESLint and I have written a bunch of books, too! (See links below.)

1:36 – Chuck: JSJ 336 and JSJ 075 episodes are the two past episodes we’ve had you on! (See links below.) Let’s go back and how did you get into programming?

1:58 – Guest: I think the first was written in BASIC, which was on a Laser computer. It was a cheaper knockoff version. I think I was into middle school when I got into BASIC. Then when I got into high school I did this computer project, which was the first time someone else used one of my programs.

4:02 – Chuck: Was it all in BASIC or something else?

4:13 – Guest: Just BASIC, but then transferred to something else when we got our first PC.

5:13 – Chuck: How did you get to use JavaScript?

5:18 – Guest: 1996 was my freshman year in college. Netscape 3 got into popularity around this time. I had decided that I wanted to setup a webpage to stay in-touch with high school friends who were going into different directions.

I got annoyed with how static the [web] pages were. At the time, there was no CSS and the only thing you could change was the source of an image (on webpages).

On the you could do...

8:35 – Chuck: You get into JavaScript and at what point did you become a prolific operator and author?

8:52 – Guest: It was not an overnight thing. It definitely was fueled by my own curiosity. The web was so new (when I was in college) that I had to explore on my own. I probably killed a few trees when I was in college. Printing off anything and everything I could to learn about this stuff!

10:03 – Guest (continues): Professors would ask ME how to do this or that on the departmental website. When I was graduating from college I knew that I was excited about the WEB. I got a first job w/o having to interview.

12:32 – Guest (continues): I got so deep into JavaScript!

13:30 – Guest (continued): They couldn’t figure out what I had done. That’s when I got more into designing JavaScript APIs. About 8 months after graduating from college I was unemployed. I had extra time on my hands. I was worried that I was going to forget the cool stuff that I just developed there. I went over the code and writing for myself how I had constructed it. My goal was to have an expandable tree. This is the design process that I went through. This is the API that I came up with so you can insert and how I went about implementing it. At some point, I was on a discussion with my former colleagues: remember that JavaScript tree thing I wrote – I wrote a description of how I did it. Someone said: Hey this is really good and you should get this published somewhere. Huh! I guess I could do that. I went to websites who were publishing articles on JavaScript. I went to submit the article to one of them. I think it was DevX or WebReference.

18:03 – Guest: A book is a compilation of different articles?! I can do that. I wanted to write a book that would fill in that next step that was missing. I didn’t know what the book was going to be, and I decided to start writing. Once I’ve had enough content I would take a step back and see what it was about. (Check out Nicholas’ books here!)

19:01 – Chuck: Oh you can turn this into a book!

19:10 – Guest: There was very little that I had planned out ahead of time. Anything that happened to me that was exciting had stumbled into my lap!

19:37 – Chuck: That’s how I felt about podcasting – it fell into my lap/life!

19:50 – Chuck: Listeners – check out the past episodes with Nicholas, please. Nicholas, what are you proud of?

20:10 – Guest: In 2006, I was at Yahoo and started off with My Yahoo Team. This was the first time that I was exposed to a massive amount of JavaScript in a single web application.

26:21 – Chuck: Can you talk about your health issues? People would definitely benefit from your example and your story.

26:44 – Guest: I think it is something important for people to understand.

The guest talks about Lyme Disease.

35:49 – Chuck: Yep taking care of yourself is important!

36:00 – Guest: Yes to enjoy time with friends and explore other hobbies. Help yourself to de-stress is important. Cognitive work is very draining. When you aren’t getting the right amount of sleep your body is going to get stressed out. Take the time to do nonsense things. You need to let your brain unwind! I love these adult coloring books that they have!

38:07 – Chuck: I love to take a drive up the canyon.

38:12 – Guest.

38:24 – Chuck: Yeah to focus on ourselves is important.

38:36 – Guest: Your body will make it a point to say: pay attention to me! Your body goes into flight or fight mode and your systems shut-off, which of course is not good. You don’t want your body to stay in that state.

New parents get sick frequently with newborns, because they aren’t getting enough sleep.

41:08 – Guest: Get some R&R!

41:20 – Chuck: This is great, but I have another call! Let’s do some Picks!

41:35 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

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Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Rob Eisenberg

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Rob Eisenberg who is a principal software engineer at InVision, and is the creator of Caliburn.Micro, Durandal, and Aurelia. Today, they talk about Rob’s past and current projects among other things.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:40 – Chuck: Our special guest is Rob Eisenberg. We’ve had you on Adventures on Angular (09 and 80), JavaScript Jabber, and others like Episode 203.

2:36 – Rob: That was over the period of 4 years all of those podcasts. I am getting older.

2:50 – Chuck: Anything that you’ve done that you want to talk about?

3:04 – Rob: I am known for opensource work over the years. Maybe we can talk about my progression through that over the years.

3:25 – Chuck: How did you get into this field?

3:29 – Rob: When I was 8 years old my dad wanted to buy a computer. We went to Sears and we bought our first computer. You’d buy the disk drive and the keyboard looking unit. You could by a monitor, we didn’t, but we used a black and white TV for our monitor. Later we bought the colored monitor and printer. That’s where my fascination started. We set up the computer in my bedroom. We played games. I got intrigued that you could write code to make different games.

It was just magical for me. As being an adult engineer I am trying to go back to that moment to recapture that magical moment for me. It was a great creative outlet. That’s how I first started. I started learning about Q basic and other flavors of Basic. Then I heard about C! I remember you could do anything with C. I went to the library and there wasn’t the Internet, yet. There were 3 books about C and read it and re-read it. I didn’t have any connections nor a compiler. When I first learned C I didn’t have a compiler. I learned how to learn the codes on notebook paper, but as a kid this is what I first started doing. I actually saved some of this stuff and I have it lying around somewhere. I was big into adventure games. That’s when I moved on C++ and printed out my source code! It’s so crazy to talk about it but at the time that’s what I did as a kid. In JHS there was one other kid that geeked-out about it with me. It was a ton of fun.

Then it was an intense hobby of mine. Then at the end of HS I had 2 loves: computers and percussion. I was composing for music, too. I had to decide between music or coding. I decided to go with music. It was the best decision I ever made because I studied music composition. When you are composing for dozens of instruments to play one unified thing. Every pitch, every rhythm, and it all works together. Why this note and why that rhythm? There is an artistic side to this and academia, too. The end result is that music is enjoyed by humans; same for software.

I did 2 degrees in music and then started my Master’s in Music. I then realized I love computers, too, how can I put these two together? I read some things on audio programming, and it stepped me back into programming. At this time, I was working in music education and trying to compose music for gamming. Someone said look at this program called C#! I don’t know cause...how can you get any better than C++?!

In 2003 – I saw a book: teach yourself C# in 24 hours. I read it and I was enthralled with how neat this was! I was building some Windows applications through C#. I thought it was crazy that there was so much change from when I was in college.

17:00 – Chuck: You start making this transition to web? What roped you in?

17:25 – Rob: I realized the power of this, not completely roped in just, yet. Microsoft was working (around this time) with...

19:45 – (Continued from Rob): When Silver Light died that’s when I looked at the web. I said forget this native platform. I came back to JavaScript for the 2nd time – and said I am going to learn this language with the same intensity as I learned C++ and C#. I started working with Durandal.

21:45 – Charles: Yeah, I remember when you worked with the router and stuff like that. You were on the core team.

21:53 – Rob: The work I did on that was inspired by screen activation patterns.

23:41 – Rob (continued): I work with InVision now.

24:14 – Charles: I remember you were on the Angular team and then you transitioned – what was that like?

24:33 – Rob comments.

25:28 – Rob (continued): I have been doing opensource for about 13 years. I almost burned myself a few times and almost went bankrupt a few times. The question is how to be involved, but run the race without getting burned-out. It’s a marathon not a sprint.

These libraries are huge assets. Thank God I didn’t go bankrupt but became very close.

The more popular something if there are more varieties and people not everyone is so pleasant. It’s okay to disagree. Now what are the different opinions and what works well for your team and project? It’s important to stay to your core and vision. Why would you pick THIS over THAT?

It’s a fun and exciting time if you are

28:41 – Charles: What are you

28:47 – Rob: InVision and InVision studio. It’s a tool for designing screens. I work on that during the day and during the night I work on Aurelia.

30:43 – Chuck: I am pretty sure that we have had people from InVision on a show before.

31:03 – Rob comments.

Rob: How we all work together.

31:20 – What is coming in with Aurelia next?

31:24 – Rob: We are trying to work with as much backwards compatibility as we can. So you don’t see a lot of the framework code in your app code. It’s less intrusive. We are trying next, can we keep the same language, the same levels, and such but change the implementation under the hood. You don’t learn anything new. You don’t have new things to learn. But how it’s implemented it’s smaller, faster, and more efficient. We have made the framework more pluggable to the compiler-level. It’s fully supported and super accessible.

Frameworks will come and go – this is my belief is that you invest in the standards of the web. We are taking that up a notch. Unobtrusiveness is the next thing we want to do. 

We’ve always had great performance and now taking it to the next level. We are doing a lot around documentation. To help people understand what the architectural decisions are and why? We are taking it to the next level from our core. It’s coming along swimmingly so I am really excited. We’ve already got 90% test coverage and over 40,000 tests.

37:33 – Chuck: Let’s get you on JavaScript Jabber!

38:19 – Chuck: Where can people find you?

38:22 – Twitter, and everywhere else. Blog!

39:17 – Chuck: Picks?

39:23 – Rob dives in!

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Charles

• Aimee Knight
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Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: James Adams

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

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

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

1:39 – Guest: I am in Australia!

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

2:20 – Guest.

2:26 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please!

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

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

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

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

White line on a black floor is mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:31 – Guest mentions networking.

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

11:45 – Guest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19:03 – Guest asks a question to Chuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22:28 – Chuck.

22:37 – Guest.

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

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

24:25 – Chuck: The logic is the same.

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

24:40 – Chuck: Go ahead.

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

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

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

END – Cache Fly

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

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• Aimee Knight
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• Joe Eames
• Charles Max Wood
• Chris Ferdinandi

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Chris McKnight

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Chris McKnight who is a software developer who knows Angular, Ruby, Node.js, and iOS. He went to college at Louisiana State University and graduated with a computer science degree from LSU. They talk about Chris’ background, past/current projects, among other things. Check out today’s episode to hear the panel talk about JavaScript, Angular, C and C++, Node, React, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:12 – Chuck: Hello! Introduce yourself, please!

1:15 – Guest: I am a software engineer outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I work for a medium consultancy company. I know JavaScript, Angular, NativeScript, and JS, too.

1:41 – Chuck: Cool! Tell us your story and how you got into programming?

2:00 – Guest: I was a really big nerd in high school and grew up in Louisiana, USA. There was one other person in the school that knew what I was talking about. I was learning C++ and Visual Studio in 2003. That was really back in the day and Microsoft Foundation class was a thing. I moved onto PHP and started working for a company in Baton Rouge after graduating college. I have a computer science degree with a secondary discipline in mathematics. I graduated from LSU and got a job offer before I graduated. Doing some part-time work for them b/c they were swamped. I was writing PHP and they said that they used jQuery a lot.

4:47 – Chuck: You got started and you said you used C and C++, why those languages?

5:05 – Guest: I did a little bit of Java, but it was the “new kid on the block.” I wanted to get into a program that was user-friendlier.

6:21 – Chuck: I took C and C++ classes in college. Eventually I did Ruby on Rails. I totally understand why you went that way.

6:44 – Guest: I picked-up Rails, because a company (that I worked for at the time) used it. I usually reached for jQuery among other options.

7:31 – Chuck: When did you start taking JavaScript seriously?

7:40 – Guest: 2012-2013. Frustrations of not using JavaScript as good as I could. For jQuery you have to call when you have an issue. Then you run into all of these bugs, and...

9:18 – Chuck: It sounds like it was more out of necessity.

9:30 – Guest: Yep, exactly. Those pain points have been reduced b/c I have been using Type Script and Angular and now version 6 and version 7. You try to call a number method on a string and vice versa, and app development time.

10:03 – Chuck: ...it has a process running with it.

10:13 – Guest: Catching a lot of those easy mistakes (bugs) and it’s a 5-10 minute fix. It takes a lot of that away. Sometimes you can say: I want to ignore it.

Or it doesn’t give you runtime guarantees.

Some other libraries out there have been on the forefront of fixing those problems. REST TYPE is an example of that.

11:39 – Chuck: When I talk to people about JavaScript a lot of times I get basically that they are saying: I started doing more things in Node or React – I fell in love with the language. Your reasons for starting JavaScript are because “I hated running into these problems.” Did you start loving to work in JavaScript?

12:11 – Guest: I did start loving it but it took a while. I could write a short amount of code and then at the end I get a result.

Another thing that bothers me is FILTER. What does it return? It’s actually FIND and FIND INDEX and you use the pattern of filter and run this expression and give me index zero.

14:16 – Chuck: What work have you done that you are proud of?

14:20 – Guest: I started a new job last month; beforehand I worked at a mortgage company. I was proud of the Angular application and applications that I worked on. 

16:55 – Chuck: How did you get into Angular?

17:00 – Guest: Interesting story. October of 2016 – at this time I was all against Angular. However someone came to me and said we have to...

At the time I wasn’t impressed with the language. I learned about Angular at the time, though, and learned through Egghead. I learned a lot in 2 days, and I got pretty decent at it. I was writing Angular applications pretty quickly, and it made sense to me.

20:53 – Chuck: I am a fan of the CLI b/c that’s what we have in Rails. It’s really nice. What are you working on these days?

21:13 – Guest: Less on Angular b/c of the new job. I will do Angular on my free time. I work on Angular at nighttime. I build some things in React these past few weeks.

23:07 – Chuck: Any part of your experience that could help people?

23:17 – Guest: Learn what’s happening under the hood of libraries such as jQuery. Explore and find resources to help you. Keep learning and keep at it. Tools are so god now – such as Prettier and Lint – they will tell me “you don’t want to do this.” Use the tooling and learn the fundamentals. Also, use Babel! Those are my tips of advice.

25:55 – Chuck: That’s solid. Yes, the fundamentals and the poly-fills will fill in the gaps. So now it’s: what do I want to stack on top of this? Once you know the fundamentals.

26:55 – Guest: Learn what the frameworks and libraries are doing.

Don’t get overwhelmed. That’s my advice.

28:16 – Chuck: Where can people find you?

28:24 – Guest: GitHub and Twitter. I’ve been working on a website, but not ready, yet.

29:08 – Chuck: Picks!

29:15 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

35:45 – Cache Fly

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