JavaScript Jabber

• Aimee Knight
• AJ O’Neal
• Charles Max Wood

• JavaScript
• jQuery

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Henry Zhu

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Henry Zhu who is working full-time on Babel! They discuss Henry’s background, past/current projects, Babel, and Henry’s new podcast. Check-out today’s episode to hear more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

1:00 – Chuck: Today we are talking with Henry Zhu! You are the maintainer of Babel – and we have had you on the show before. Anything else?

1:25 – Henry: I used to work with Adobe and now live in NY.

1:44 – Chuck: Episode 321 we talked to you and you released Babel 7. Tell us about Babel, please.

2:01 – Henry: It’s a translator for programming languages and it’s a compiler. It only translates JavaScript to JavaScript. You would do this because you don’t know what your users’ are using. It’s an accessibility thing as well.

3:08 – Chuck: Later, we will dive into this some more. Let’s back-up: how did you get into programming?

3:22 – Henry: I think I was in middle school and I partnered with a friend for science class and we made a flash animation about earthquakes. Both of my parents worked in the field, too. They never really encouraged me to do it, but here I am.

4:07 – Chuck: How did you get into Java?

4:11 – Henry: I made some games and made a Chinese card game. Then in college I went to a bunch of Hackathons. In college I didn’t major into computer science, but I took a bunch of classes for fun. I learned about Bootstrap and did a bunch of things with that.

5:12 – Chuck: How did you settle on JavaScript?

5:28 – Henry: It was my experience – you don’t have to download anything. You can just open things up in the console and it’s easy to share. I think I like the visual part of it and their UI.

6;07 – Chuck: At some point you ran across Babel – how did you get into that?

6:17 – Henry: After college I wanted to do software. I threw out my degree of industrial engineering. I tried to apply to Google and other top companies. I applied to various places and picked something that was local. I met Jonathan Neal and he got me into open source. Through that, I wanted to contribute to Angular, but it was hard for me. Then I found a small issue with a linting error. After that I made 30 commits to Angular. I added a space here and there. JSES is the next thing I got involved with. There is one file for the rule itself and one for the test and another for the docs. I contributed there and it was easy. I am from Georgia and a year in I get an email through Adobe. They asked if I wanted to work through Enhance in Adobe. I moved to NY and started working here. I found JS LINT, and found out about Babel JS LINT. And that’s how I found about Babel.

9:24 – Chuck: Was Sebastian still running the project at the time?

9:33 – Henry.

10:53 – Chuck: It seems like when I talk with people that you are the LEAD on Babel?

11:07 – Henry: I guess so, because I am spending the most time on it. I also quit the job to work on it. However, I want people to know that there are other people out there to give you help, too.

11:45 – Chuck: Sebastian didn’t say: this is the guy that is the lead now. But how did that crystalize?

12:12 – Henry: I think it happened by accident. I stumbled across it. By people stepping down they stepped down a while ago and others were helping and making changes. It was weird because Sebastian was going to come back.

It’s hard when you know that the person before had gotten burnt-out.

14:28 – Chuck: What is it like to go fulltime on an open source project and how do you go about it?

14:34 – Henry: I don’t want to claim that you have to do it my way. Maybe every project is different. Maybe the focus is money. That is a basic issue. If your project is more of a service, then direct it towards that. I feel weird if I made Babel a service. For me it feels like an infrastructure thing I didn’t want to do that.

I think people want to do open source fulltime, but there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

16:38 – Chuck.

16:50 – Guest.

16:53 – Henry.

16:55 – Chuck: How do you pay the bills?

17:00 – Henry: Unlike Kickstarter, Patreon is to help donate money to people who are contributing content.

If you want to donate a lot then we can tweak it.

19:06 – Chuck: Is there something in particular that you’re proud of?

19:16 – Henry: I worked on JS ES – I was a core team member of that. Going through the process of merging them together was quite interesting. I could write a whole blog post about that. There are a lot of egos and people involved. There are various projects.

Something that I have been thinking about...

20:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

20:58 – Henry: We released 7 a while ago and 7.1. Not sure what we are going to do next. Trying to figure out what’s important and to figure out what we want to work on. I have been thinking long-term; for example how do we get reviewers, among other things. I can spend a lot of time fixing bugs, but that is just short-term. I want to invest ways to get more people in. There is a lot of initiatives but maybe we can do something new. Maybe pair with local universities. Maybe do a local Meetup? Learning to be okay with not releasing as often. I don’t want to put fires out all day. Trying to prioritize is important.

23:17 – Chuck.

23:2 – Henry: Twitter and other platforms.

23:37 – Chuck: Picks!

23:38 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

24:45 – Picks.

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Henry

Charles

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Christine Legge

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Christine Legge who is a computer software engineer who works for Google in New York. Previous employment includes Axiom Zen, and Vizzion, Inc. She and Chuck talk about her background, past and current projects, and her future goals.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:07 – Hello!

1:10 – Chuck: You were on Episode 328 in the past. Tell us about yourself!

1:24 – Christine: I started working with Google about 2 weeks ago. In the past I worked in Vancouver, Canada.

2:05 – Chuck: Let’s start with how you got into programming?

2:14 – Christine: When I was in HS I wasn’t interested at all into computers. I wanted to do applied math in Toronto Canada for college. For engineering you have to take an introduction to programming in the 1st year. I had a 4-hour computer science course in the morning and I dreaded it. I dropped out 3 months later b/c I didn’t like the program. Surprisingly, enough, I did like the computer science course. I went back to Vancouver and I said to my parents that I wanted an office job. I went to the YMCA center and wanted to be hired. The man there asked if I had any interest in data entering, and I started working for him. I worked 4 hours a week with him where he taught me C+. I decided to go back to school for it.

5:37 – Chuck: What did you like about it?

5:43 – Christine: I liked the problem solving part of it. I like how you can break things down. The technology doesn’t interest me that much, but I like the problem-solving aspect. The guy wasn’t that up-to-date with the newest technologies either.

6:53 – Chuck: You have a 4-year degree in computer science.

7:05 – Yes that and statistics, too.

7:13 – Chuck: I was going to say “nerd.”

How do you go from desktop applications to web apps?

7:25 – Christine: I worked with a company part-time and fulltime depending on the year/season.

I didn’t know what web development was but I thought that THAT was computer science. I thought that if I knew how to do web development then I was going to be good to go. This company asked: What do you want to do? And I answered that I wanted to do web development b/c I thought that’s what I was lacking. I basically got thrown into it. I didn’t understand anything at all. It took me to write one line of CSS and it took 4 hours.

10:35 – Why did JavaScript attract you more so than C# or other languages that you’ve used?

10:43 – It’s simpler and you don’t need a lot of setup; from top to bottom. I am working in typescript, I like it even more, but I like how Java is more free to do what you want. I like functional programming in JavaScript. I like the big community for Java, and there are tons of applications for it. I really like how flexible the language is. You can do functional and oriented or you can combine the two. You aren’t constrained.

12:00 – Chuck: You get in, you work through JavaScript, were you only doing backend?

12:14 – Christine: Yep, backend.

13:00 –Chuck: I know you talked at the conference, and what are you most proud of?

13:14 – Christine: To be honest, no. My mentor (Pablo) at the last company – he wrote a book about D3. He started learning and writing the book. To me that I had thought that all these people are experts from the get go. I realized that everyone has to start somewhere to eventually become an expert. I do want to make an impact even outside of my job. I don’t have anything new that I’ve been working on. It’s a goal for me within the next couple of months.

15:30 – Chuck: I understand that.

15:36 – Christine: I haven’t found that balance, yet. When I gave that talk during Developer Week I was moving and stressed out. “I am NEVER doing this again!” It was over and it was very rewarding. People gave good feedback, and I would like to do that again.

16:56 – Chuck: People have different experience with that kind of stuff. People are interested in different things. So you’ve been working on moving and all that stuff right? What would you like to dive back into?

17:32 – Christine: Yes we are using Angular 2 and typescript and a Reactive Library. Angular is interesting to me. I would like to dive into the dependency injection in Angular. I really like typescript.

19:24 – Chuck: Have you looked at resources?

19:39 – Christine: I read the documentation so far. Like for React I just read the documentation but I haven’t found a central source just, yet. Not a single source. The docs are okay to get started but I haven’t found that they were enough.

20:50 – Chuck: This is about your story. I worked through the Tour of Heroes, and that helped me with Angular. It’s in the Angular Documentation.

21:23 – Christine: When you are starting at a new job I want to make sure I’m settled-in. And now I want to start thinking at a high-level of how these things work. I think the cool thing working here is that you can talk to the people who are working on Angular and get some insight that way.

22:27 – Chuck: People are usually very approachable.

22:34 – Christine: Yes, I agree. To be apart of the communities people want you to use their stuff.

22:48 – Chuck: Do you have another talk in mind when you are ready to give your next talk?

22:59 – Christine: Not sure. I have one thing on my list right now and that’s it.

23:42 – Chuck: I haven’t looked at RJX documentation but I think it’s pretty easy to pick-up. Ben who is the main developer RJX joined the team last year.

24:04 – Christine: It’s a lot of promises. When I figure it out that’s how something would work if it were a promise then I can usually get there.

24:25 – Chuck: Yeah.

24:38 – Christine: I kind of want to make connections in the office rather than me trying to do myself. I don’t want to waste time. Working on those connections would be good.

25:20 – Chuck: Let’s do some picks!

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

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Christine

• Aimee Knight
• Charles Max Wood
• Joe Eames
• AJ O’Neil
• Chris Ferdinandi 

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Benjamin Hong

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Benjamin Hong who is a Senior UI Developer at Politico where he lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He has worked with other companies including Treehouse, Element 84, and Udacity. Charles and Benjamin talk about his past and current projects, and how it’s different working for the government vs. working for a business. Check it out!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:06 – Chuck: Tell us a brief introduction, please.

1:23 – Ben: I am a lead frontend developer at Politico.

1:43 – Chuck: It’s an area that can affect everyone. How did you get into developing?

1:52: Ben: I had everything you can think of to develop at first.

2:10 – Chuck: For me it was a TI90 calculator!

2:18 – Chuck: Was it somebody or something that pushed you towards this area?

2:32 – Ben: I wanted to change something with the theme, Googled it, and it went from there, and the Marquis Tag.

2:51 – Chuck: And the Blink Tag! The goodies. So you got the he HTML book – and what website did you build that was your first big project?

3:07 – Ben: It was fiddling around, but it was fortune cookie universe.

3:20 – Chuck: You will have to recreate it!

3:27 – Ben: I think this was 1993/1995 timeframe.

3:40 – Chuck: Yep, me too same time frame. If you had something move on your website it was so cool. You went to building...

4:02 – Ben: JavaScript was a roadblock for me. There was nobody to correct me. I had a JavaScript book and it was a massive failure.

4:33 – Chuck: You took a break and you came back?

4:40 – Ben: Oh – people will PAY you to do this?!

4:54 – Chuck: Did you go to college?

5:01 – Ben: Yes, I have a Master’s in a different field. I was always a tech junkie. I just wanted to put things together.

5:20 – Chuck: Take us through your journey through JS?

5:30 – Ben: I started off with the jQuery piece of it. I needed Java, and it took me awhile to wrap my head around it at first. Through the trial and process of trying to get into Angular and React, too.

6:19 – Chuck: Did you play with Backbone, Knockout, or Ember?

6:32 – Ben: I did do SOME Ember and some Knockout. Those were my first interactions.

6:49 – Chuck: What got you into the profession? How did you get from your Master’s to being a tech guy?

7:14 – Ben: From the Master’s field I learned a lot about human experience, and anted to breed the two together. Also, consulting and helping to build things, too.

7:44 – Charles: What was the career change like?

7:53 – Ben: I went to the federal government at first around the recession – it was good having a stable job. I was bored, though. While I was working for the government I was trying to get my foot in the door. From there I have been building my way up.

8:30 – Ben: I was working on Medicare.gov and then later...

8:46 – Charles: We won’t use the word “disaster”!

What is it like to work for the government?

9:20 – Ben: Yep. The federal government is a different area because they are stake holders. They were about WHO owned the content, and who do we have to talk to get something approved. It was not product oriented like a business. I made my transition to Politico, because I wanted to find solutions and diversify the problems I was having.

10:31 – Chuck: Have you been there from the beginning?

10:39 – Ben answers the question.

Ben: They were looking for frontend developers

10:54 – Chuck: You are the lead there now. What was that like with the transition?

11:08 – Ben talks about the beginnings stages of his time with Politico and the current situation. He talks about the different problems, challenges, and etc.

11:36 – Chuck: Do you consider yourself a news organization or?

11:47 – Ben: We have Politico Pro, too. I have been working with this site more so. There are updates about campaign and voting data. People will pay a fee.

12:25 – Chuck: Do they pain themselves as leaning one way or another or nonpartisan?

12:38 – Ben: We are objective and nonpartisan.

12:51 – Chuck: I know, I was hesitant to ask. What’s the mission of the company and into what you do?

13:09 – Ben: The projects get dumped to us and we are about solving the problems. What is the best route for solving it? I had to help pioneer the new framework into the tech staff is one of my roles.

13:48 – Chuck: What’s your tech stack?

13:55 – Ben: JavaScript and Vue.js. We are experimenting with other software, too.

14:16 – Chuck: We should get you talking about Vue on the other show!

Are you working at home?

14:32 – Ben answers the question.

Ben: One thing I am helping with Meetup. Community outreach is important and I’m apart of that.

15:09 – Chuck: Yep, it’s interesting to see various fields into the tech world. I am not one of those liberal arts majors, I do have a computer science degree. It’s interesting to see the different perspectives. How little it is for someone to be able to dive-in right away.

What are you working on?

16:09 – Ben: Meetup population and helping with the work at Politico.

16:27 – Chuck: Reusable components. Are those opensource or only internal?

16:41 – Ben: They are now opensource but we are seeing which portions can be opensource or not.

17:01 – Chuck: Different companies have come out and offered their opensource.

Where do they find you?

17:20 – BenCodeZen! They are more than welcome to message me.

17:36 – Chuck: Any advice on newbies to this field?

17:46 – Ben: Attending those meetings and making those connections.

18:18 – Chuck: I have been writing a book on HOW to get a job as a coder. That’s the same advice that I am giving, too.

18:46 – Chuck: Picks!

18:51 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Ben

• Aimee Knight
• Charles Max Wood (DevChat TV)
• Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston)
• Cory House (Kansas City)
• Joe Eames

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Christiané Heiligers

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Dr. Christiané Heiligers who is new to the industry. Her background is in physics where she has her Ph.D. in the field. Listen to today’s episode to hear her background, experience with the different programs/languages, and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Beginning – Advertisement: Code Badges!

1:07 – Christiané: Hello!

1:17 – Chuck: I like hearing people’s stories from our community. Tell us where you come from and who you are?

1:33 – Christiané: I am from South Africa, and have been in the US for 2 years now. My formal training is in physics. I have been a researcher with lab coats and test tubes. Through immigration, which took 2 years. I couldn’t be still, and started learning code on my own. I enjoyed the art. I had to use Python, and then I was hooked. I enjoyed the functional programming and other things. I had some experience with Ruby on Rails. I enjoy development because its problem solving, methodically approach, and uses your creative side, too. My preference is a Mac, need the Internet and decided to go to camps and take courses.

I snagged a job a week before I graduated!

4:36 – Chuck: your journey, thus far. You said that you couldn’t be idle – so why code?

4:53 – Guest: The UK is cold you don’t want to do anything outside! From South American I couldn’t stand the cold. I kept busy indoors – hint the code. You can’t get bored – frontend or backend.

5:28 – Chuck: Can you give us background on the Grace Hopper Academy.

5:40 – Guest: Sure! It’s based in NY City.

6:26 – Chuck: Did you move somewhere or was it remote?

6:30 – Guest: I had to live somewhere e

6:51 – Chuck: Where did you

6:55 – Guest: NY City. There were 16 of us in the course.

7:14 – Chuck: Why did you feel like you had to go to coding school?

7:25 – Guest: I am impatient with myself. The home-life you ask yourself: “Am I doing the right thing? Am I going in the right direction?” I wanted to go and pick up some skills.

7:56 – Chuck: You go through Grace Hopper – is this how you got into JavaScript?

8:11 – Guest: I didn’t know a line of JavaScript.

I did my application code line in Ruby.

My husband has been in software development my whole life.

9:16 – Chuck: What have you done with JavaScript since learning it?

9:24 – Guest: Some card playing games for my nieces in South Africa.

10:50 – Guest: Stack Overflow is wonderful.

11:05 – Chuck.

11:11 – Guest: I wasn’t actively contributing, but I did...

11:30 – Chuck: What is it like being a prof

11:37 – Guest: It’s addictive. When I am writing code in the frontend / backend side. It’s always learning.

12:11 – Chuck: What’s next for you?

12:18 – Guest: I would love to continue this journey. Maybe into the DevOps, but my passion happens with React. The Hapi Framework.

13:10 – Guest: The community is wonderful to work with – everyone is very helpful.

13:22 – Chuck: People are usually talking about Express and not Hapi.js.

13:35 – Guest: I have some contact names you can call.

13:43 – Guest: I am working on a few small projects right now. Some Angular sites that need assistance. Helping out where I can. It’s a small team that I am working with. There is only a few of us.

14:31 – Chuck: Usually people stick with one. What’s your experience using the different frameworks?

14:40 – Guest: It’s an eye-opener! React vs. Angular.

15:07 – Chuck: How can people find you?

15:14 – Guest: LinkedIn, Twitter, Tallwave, etc.

15:37 – Chuck: Picks!

15:40 – Advertisement!

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Christiané Heiligers

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Ely Lucas

This week on My JavaScirpt Story, Charles speaks with Ely Lucas who is a software developer. He loves technologies and mobile technologies among other things. Let’s listen to today’s episode where Chuck and Ely talk about Ionic, Angular, React and many other topics! Check it out!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:33 – Hello!

1:40 Chuck: Give us a background on who you are, and tell us how famous you are!

2:31 – Chuck: What do you do with Ionic?

2:40 – Ely answers the question.

3:51 – Chuck: How did you get into your field?

3:55 – Ely: When I was a kid and played with video games. Later on I got into web development, like my website. Then I got into a professional-level of developing.

Ely goes into detail about how his passion for developing began and developed.

6:30 – Chuck: Yeah, I’ve talked with people who have gotten into video games, then got into software development.

7:01 – Ely: Someday I would like to develop games.

7:12 – Chuck: Yes, web developing is awesome.

Chuck asks Ely another question.

7:25 – Ely answers the question and mentions web controls.

9:17 – Ely: I thought Ajax was easier.

9:38 – Chuck: When I got into web development jQuery was sort of new. It made things a lot easier.

9:58 – Ely: A lot of people like to sneer at jQuery now, but back in the day it was IT.

10:28 – Chuck: How did you get into Ionic?

10:43 – Ely: I got a fulltime gig working on Ionic; I like the framework. I saw a job application and sent in my résumé. Two days later I got a callback and was amazed. They were hiring remotely. The team liked me and started over a year ago.

11:46 – Chuck asks a question.

11:54 – Ely answers the question.

13:20 – Chuck: Why Ionic?

13:35 – Ely: It was based off of Angular.

15:17 – Chuck: You mentioned...what has the transition been like?

15:32 – Ely talks about past programs he has worked with. He taught React in the early React days.

16:37 – Ely: I have a deep appreciation on React now.

17:09 – Chuck: I like seeing the process that people go through.

17:24 – Ely continues the conversation.

Ely: It is interesting to see the learning process that people go through to arrive in the same place.

18:18 – Chuck: Redux is a good example of this. Anyway, this is near the end of our time.

18:39 – Chuck: Anything else you want to talk about?

18:48 – Ely: Yes, I have been involved in the Denver community. Check us out.

Links:

Sponsors:

Picks:

Charles

Ely