JavaScript Jabber

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

Mike was on episode 133 which was like 2.5 years ago.

First computer

Mike got their first computer when he was 5 or 6 years old. 286 IBM Clone had a command prompt that he spent several years trying to figure out how to code with it until he stumbled on a few basic books at their local public library in junior high. He began teaching himself how to code with QBasic and Borland C++. He, then, found the internet early high school and downloaded the Mosaic browser. He started coding HTML and early JavaScript, late 90’s. Then, he went off to college to get a Computer Science degree.

First job

When Mike was late high school, he decided that he knew enough coding that he was going to try to get a job. He ended up finding web development companies in the phone book and calling each one of them, trying to explain that his 16-year-old self could help them code and build websites. He ended up landing a job and was paid minimum wage to build HTML sites - a lot of 1x1 pixels transparent gifs, coding HTML by hand and notepad. Then, he ended up working for that company for his first couple of years of college as well.

After college, the job that Mike landed was spent on learning Microsoft technologies and then half on the open-source side of learning the LAMP stack. At that time, it required hand-coding JavaScript. His next role is building a custom mapping application which was a single page application that heavily relied upon JavaScript. This was client-side object-oriented. There were no frameworks but it was enough script to build a URL that called a custom CGI to render the map. So, he immediately jumped in and started using the early JavaScript frameworks and prototypes.

The role that Mike was in next was building a touchscreen capable device. They needed custom plug-ins to provide the highlight focus effect around the button. He needed to write a plugin to do that and jQuery has just been released. So, he stripped all the prototype code, throw JQuery in there, and then, write a plug-in to navigate this interface by keyboard.

jQuery

Mike’s first participation was on the JQuery project. If you ever use the JQuery plug-ins site, the old site, that was his contribution. He ended up running infrastructure for JQuery for several years. JQuery launched his business career. He switched into an entrepreneur around 2009. Since then, he’s contributed in numerous ways through speaking, leading training, and writing articles. He was a co-author of the JQuery Cookbook.

Node.js

As Node began to get more popular, Mike switched his attention to Node and found passion around the Sails.js project. It was a Node framework that made it easy to build Express-powered apps with Node and limit a lot of the convention over configuration elements of the Sails framework. That morphed into ES6 rewrite of Sails called the Trails framework. Currently, he is an organizer of the Chicago Node.js Meetup and he’s a contributor to the Trails framework.

jQuery 1.4

Mike and the team made community’s problems their problems so the gravity of what they were working didn’t hit them very much until jQuery 1.4. They had an online conference. They all recorded talks and they’re releasing a talk a day for jQuery that will be going to accommodate the 1.4 release. He remembered that he was setting up, managing the servers, and was doing some last-minute configuration. Then, John had tweeted that 1.4 was ready, pointing to jQuery.com. The web server just ground to a halt as he saw the traffic come in off a tweet.

Open-source community

Mike remain friends with a lot of them. According to Mike, they were just normal people who made a choice to lean in, contribute, where those contributions ended up becoming popular. Looking forward, he said that he’s going to continue to contribute to the open-source community. He wants to help the junior developer that is learning ES6 for the first time and is solving a syntax error. From Mike’s perspective, technologies come in waves. jQuery was a wave but jQuery’s wave focuses its energy into JavaScript’s wave. Certain people catch a contribution wave. React is on the upswing. Node is in an interesting spot because they’ve been on the upswing for many years but there’s new work that could be done. He said that had a shot to be at the forefront of the wave and got to see it.

Advice

For anybody else that maybe listening, find a spot where there’s new ground that you can contribute to and just dive in and do what you can to solve a problem to make it better. You’ll catch your wave.

Node frameworks

There was a Reddit thread about Node frameworks in 2017 that listed out all the possible frameworks. The classic answer is to use the right tool for the right job but Mike’s answer is: Node has grown so big that different frameworks are built to different people on the learning curve of Node. The other thing that Node has done is they have this culture of really running away from any Monolithic one-size-fits-all solution. The community of Node has made sure that they make space for an incredible diversity of solutions and frameworks.

Antipattern

The anti-pattern is: what is the best framework of 2017. That’s the wrong question in the Node culture. Look at your team, look at your project, what framework can you be most productive in and what framework can you contribute back into the community with? That is one of the key reasons that Node itself has remained and continued to grow in popularity.

Mike’s not contributing to the Sails project at the moment. He has been focusing on the Trails project. He has written a couple of Trails packs or the equivalent of plug-ins, messed around with GraphQL. He is also helping answer questions in the Gitter chat – small ways.

Stack Overflow

Go on to Stack Overflow. Subscribe to tags where you can answer questions. Every answer on Stack Overflow is a contribution. Go, watch, subscribe to the issue queues for the projects that you use. Just even sharing your experience with how you solve a problem, there is somebody that you could reach down to and answer their questions that take their burden off.

Gitter

Get involved in the Gitter chat. Listen, watch, stand on the sidelines, and see what’s going on how the community works.

Pull request

The next step, if you see a problem, submit a pull request, listen to see what the roadmap is, and see what you can contribute.

Infrastructure

A lot of projects need help in infrastructure in their build scripts to produce better-written code. You can document for them. If you wait for the next sexy thing to do, you’ll never get there. Be humble.

Fun

Remember that open-source is fun. If it becomes a drag, you are doing it wrong. Look for the opportunities that are aligned with what you do so it’s a fun, happy experience.

Raise Marketplace

Currently, Mike is taking on a new role as Director of Front-end Engineering at Raise Marketplace. It is a marketplace start-up in Chicago. His focus is rebuilding the front-end of Raise on a micro service Node.js in Go service architecture. They have also been listed to help some folks at Google in the web performance team. They are always hiring. If you are looking for a remote role for a start-up. Feel free to reach out to him on Twitter or on Raise.

ModernWeb

Mike’s side-project now is a website called ModernWeb.com, where they help connect companies with teams of software developers and tell the stories of those software projects. A lot of developers are great at writing code but are terrible at telling the awesome things that we do. So, ModernWeb exists to tell the stories of development. The great side effect is companies want to work with you when you tell your stories. They help complete that circle. Go over to ModernWeb.com and you can contact them through the website or you can drop him an email at [email protected].

Mike Hostetler

Charles Max Wood

• Apple AirPods

• Blackmill
• Understanding Zones

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

• NGRX Library Redux 

• Twitter
• GitHub

This episode is a My JavaScript Story featuring Mike North. Tune in to learn more about how Mike started his journey as a developer in JavaScript!

[00:01:15] Introduction to Mike

Mike has a Frontend Masters Series for Ember 2 and has two other courses that help developers stand out from the software perspective.

[00:02:45] How did you get into programming?

Mike describes that he has taken a non-linear path to get to where he is now. He started programming as a teenager. He was laying dry wall with a construction company when he was 15 or 16. At the end of the job, he built a training app for the company in order to decrease their paperwork. Mike states that the programming work he does day-to-day he only learned two or three years ago.

[00:04:13] Is that due to things changing so quickly?

Mike’s role and passion keeps evolving. People pick what is important to them. A goal of his is to always stay learning; he enjoys having a deep understanding of topics. He enjoys using brand new skills and calls himself a “perpetual beginner.” Mike is always talking about something that he has just figured out how to do.

[00:05:20] How do you approach keeping current?

Mike thinks that it is impossible to keep up with everything. It is a full time job to keep track of everything. Developers don’t need to spend so much time going through information. He goes to teams once every quarter and helps them absorb the information in a distilled way so they do not have to filter through stuff such as what frameworks are worth paying attention to. This condenses the information and frees them from having to learn everything. Instead, they are able to focus on their product.

[00:08:27] How did you get into JavaScript and web development?

When Mike entered college, he was going into mechanical engineering and did not want to write code. He thought it was boring. When he began getting into code, it was because he could use it to solve real world problems. When he first started, he wrote engineering simulation code for Formula One racecars. When the iPhone came out, it gave him clarity that he wanted to work with that. He began to work with jQuery Mobile. He liked doing this enough that he ran a consultancy at night. He ran projects that he had no previous experience with in order to learn skills that would help him make JavaScript his full-time job.

[00:13:29] Where does Ember fit in with all of this?

When Mike started working at Yahoo, he became very familiar with Ember. Ember allowed employees to treat engineers as resources towards the larger goal of building and merging all apps together instead of having separate pockets of different technology everywhere. There were only a few Ember experts at the time, so Mike took advantage and spent a lot of time to gain expertise with the framework.

[00:16:50] What kinds of contributions do you feel like you’ve made to the JavaScript community?

Mike believes the way he has contributed to the community has evolved over time. In the past, he wrote libraries and worked with issues in the framework itself. The impact he has now is representing newcomers to a technology. He does workshops at conferences. He loves teaching and enabling people.

[00:19:07] How do you structure the learning to make it that it is approachable for people? How do you address both audiences?

As far as newcomers to programming, there is an alarming statistic of companies hiring computer programmers at 400% of the rate at which CS majors can graduate. The demand for software engineers exceeds the ability to educate conventionality. This means companies have to take people seriously that were educated via boot camps. There is a lot of material for new beginners. For people who are established programmers but new to specific technologies, there is a huge gap of material. Video courses, tutorials, and books should be made more accessible for these people. Mike also believes it is the job of a senior engineer to spend time teaching people.

Books, tutorials, and trainings that scrape the surface disappoint Mike. This has informed the techniques he uses to teach during his workshops. Students spend 50% of their time solving problems. His students are given code tests and spend time working how to solve problems. It takes a long time to build his curriculum but it is his main focus right now.

Picks

Mike:

Charles

• Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak

• Conference: React Rally
• Pancakes

• Conference: Angular Dev Summit
• Conference: React Dev Summit
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

• Language: Elm
• Youtube channel: The School of Life
• Game: Night in the Woods
• Hacker Ferret Software
• Hackerferret.com

On this episode, we have another My JavaScript Story, our guest is Matt Creager. Matt works for Manifold. He's here with us today to tell us his story. Stay tuned!

[01:00] – Introduction to Matt Creager

Matt works for an interesting company called Manifold. They sponsored the show.

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

Before Matt fell in love with programming, he was in love with technology. They bought his first computer. It was a Gateway 2000 and he got access to the internet around the same time. He spent all of his time on that computer because they were moving around so much. That became the way that he stayed in touch with people. He remembers taking it apart and formatting the hard drive accidentally.

His uncle has been in the IT industry since he was a kid too. Matt was always associating him with spending time with his computer programming, a role model, and stabilizer in his life. He was switching tapes. And then, his cousin decided that he was going to start scripting his character’s actions in a game that they were playing. And now, looking back, it was some combination of Lua and C++. He started taking his cousin’s scripts apart to automate his own character in the game. He was 13 or 14.

The first programming book that he bought was a result of not being able to figure out how to get his character what it wants to do. It was one of the C++ bibles. And then, he became active in the forums around the scripting language. He was sharing the scripts and he started to realize that he can harvest stuff in the game and sell it for real cash.

Matt never considered himself technical and never considered programming a career. He was just translating CPU and RAM for people who were shopping for computers. And then, he wanted people to measure theirs so he built tools that took the data they had in an office and turn them into reports. When the manager started using that, it became a nationwide program and suddenly, he was on the map. He was leading a team.

When Blackberry started a technical interview, he realized that he has the answers to these questions. Initially, he was just a Technical Issues Manager. He had a Data Science team and that team was responsible for identifying and prioritizing issues. They were using Node 0.4, very early version of Node. And then, he discovered Angular and dived head first to the Angular community.

[13:10] – BlackBerry got Matt to JavaScript

Matt looked at Node because he was trying to figure out how he could do real time analytics. He wanted these dashboards that data scientists are looking at. That was the stepping stone into JavaScript.

[15:30] – Hackathon

On the side, a couple of local companies started to run hackathons. Matt was going to hackathons all the time. Then, he ended up of hopping from BlackBerry to becoming a full time front-end developer at a start-up.

Matt was talking with one of the organizers at LA Hacks. She was telling him that the reason why people are going to these hackathons is because they want to win and they want to put that fact on their resumes. In his day, that was not hackathons were like. The prizes can act as a negative incentive. They really work hard for the prizes. Sometimes they actually end up becoming more creative as a result because they know they need to use this specific combination of API’s.

[18:45] – Contributions to JavaScript community

When Matt joined GoInstant, it was very early days of RTC. Web sockets are new at that point. You’re probably more familiar with Firebase. In the early days, GoInstant and Firebase are competing for the same developers. They’re working on the same problems. The tools that they are building were real time synchronization between the state you have on the client and the state you have on the server. A lot of those that they build, open-source tools, they went with GoInstant to Salesforce. But they inspired the libraries and a lot of it is probably on the same code base that you now see in libraries that pretty much does the same things with Firebase.

And then, most recently, Matt and the team built Torus. They realized that if they are going to be building smaller applications, going to start to use more cloud services, more services tailored towards developers, and going to manage a lot more credential, a lot of credentials that need to be secured and shared with the teammates, they needed to take those credentials and put them on applications wherever they are running, whether that’s a Docker container or Heroku. That’s his most recent open-source project.

[20:50] – What are you working on now?

Manifold is their latest project. They’re trying to build a market place for developer services. It’s been 3 months. They moved from Torus to building Manifold earlier this year. The official launch hasn’t happened yet. That’s hopefully to come earlier this year – September. If it’s something that you want to try out and experiment with, there is a coupon for My JS. Give it a try before they launch a $25 credit that they can use to provision a logging instance, monitoring, or database. You can use it with any type of services that you might need to build your app.

Picks

Matt Creager

Charles Max Wood

In this episode we have another JavaScript Story, this time our guest is Zach Kessin. Zach is a Developer and consultant. On the server side he works with Erlang and Elixir. On the front end he works on Elm. He also also written a few books for O’Reilly and a video course for Manning available sometime in the fall. He was a guest on episode 57 and is here with us today to tell us his story. Stay tuned!

Zack tells the story about how when he was 7 he asked his mother for a computer. She agreed that if he paid for half of it somehow, then she would help him get it. He Gathered his half by calling relatives and gathering funds. His mom taught him Basic and Logo. He also learned Pascal. While in University he picked up the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and loved it. He talks about remembering writing a HTML forum but not knowing how to submit entries. After college he started working.

Charles adds that if you’re tenacious enough to call your family members to find funding to buy a computer to learn, then you probably have the drive it takes to be a programmer. Charles and Zack talk about how in the 80s it was rare to have access to a computer, and now homes have multiple computers throughout. The resources are more readily available now with the internet. If you’re looking to get into development, there are plenty of great resources.

Zach starts explaining by telling how he get into JavaScript before the internet really existed. His first JavaScript program exposure was a loan calculator at a bank. Early on the only thing you could do was validate forms, but over time it grew. He started working for a company writing php. He felt like it wasn’t as functional or elegant as he was hoping for. He found various languages and landed on Erlang. Erland was designed to work for programming telephone switches. Due to phone services nature, It handles high scale, high reliability, has to be upgraded on the fly, etc. Zach talks about how server programming looks very similar to phone line programming. Zach adds that a few years ago he wanted work on some front end and after looking around finally he learned about Elm. He says that he is always looking for what’s new and useful.

Charles points out that it’s very interesting out about how functional programming has played out. He mentions that many JavaScript programmers use functional style programming to help with speed or efficiency. He adds that a fully functional programming language is very interesting and could be helpful. Zach talks about how learning new languages helps adjust the way we think.

Charles starts off with mentioning Zach’s podcast that was called Mostly Erlang. Zach adds that he has wrote two books for O’ Reilly, one on HTML5 and Erlang. He has done some blogging and is creating a video course called Startup Elm. He mentions that he spends most of his time teaching. He admires people who write libraries and sustains them over years, but it isn’t something he sees himself getting into. He adds that having the libraries are useless unless you have someone to communicate about it and teach it. Charles mentions that contributions come in various ways and the community needs those sort of teachers. Zach mentions that he often speaks at conferences and meet ups. Public speaking can be a great way to progress your career. Charles brings up the idea of “Sweeping the dojo floor”. He was introduced to this idea by Dave Hoover. Sweeping the dojo floor means that you’ve got enough experience to talk about the topic, but maybe not fully contribute and so you do things like document code, or write articles and outreach for the topic. Talks can lead to work. You can easily find research papers and do talks on that. Zach adds that sometimes in a community, you see the same speakers over and over and new speakers are needed. Zach also mentions that there are plenty of opportunities to do talks in something other than english.

Zach talks about the list of things he is working on. Starting with Startup Elm and it’s live course that will be happening in October. He is also working on a SaSS product for Instagram marketers called SquareTarget. He adds that he has a day job as well.

Intrepid Large Format Camera Kickstarter

Toast Masters

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.

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

• Steven King, On Writing 
• Youtube Channel: Tested  

• Ionic Framework

• Purely Functional TV 
• Blog 
• Building Composable Abstractions 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mountain Dew Pitch Black

Wheel of Time

Twitter

• Dashboards
• Mini Applications
• Scheduling and Time Tracking
• Document Storage
• Source code repositories

• 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.

• 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.

• Super hot VR on Oculus Rift

• Family