JavaScript Jabber

Justin’s discovery of conditional statements and methods on a classic TI­82 was his first taste of programming. With a little guidance, he soon learned to program games on the TI­82 and then later moved onto bigger and better mediums like C and QBasic.

While studying Computer Science, Justin finds out that professors often have grunt work, and although they may not pay well now, sometimes they can in time lead to loads of experience and maybe even a bigger job. After 4 years of working on websites and writing documentation, he gets his first real job at Accenture.

Accenture, while giving him a great chance to make some impressive projects, provoked Justin to see the efficiency in sharing code. Justin and a college friend get together to work on a project to build a platform that…builds. Although their project was unsuccessful, the tools they started to create for the project had plenty of potential.

Justin talks about the Ajaxian blog and conference. Ten years ago, the Ajaxian blog was one of the best online resources for Javascript news. Justin was running low on funds and struggling and as his “last desperate gasp” he heads to the Ajaxian conference with his head shaved. Leaving only “Javascript MVC” shaped out of his hair. This stunt gets him remembered by many of the important attendees and also scores him his big break with a consulting job with T­-Mobile. Two to Three weeks later, Justin had a stroke. Justin talks about how incredible the timing was.

Justin talks about starting with JSJunction and modeling after it. Their first steps were to add a model layer as well as Event Delegation. Javascript MVC reflects some of Ruby on Rails. Justin worked with Peter Svensson from Dojo, with a methodology that at the time seemed crazy. Justin reminisces when Steve Jobs “Killed” Flash with HTML5 and CSS.

Justin talks about how the T­-Mobile job meant that he would need an official business. Originally dubbing it JupiterIT. Justin found that MVC was too encompassing and that programmers enjoyed a sense of creativity. By pulling Javascript MVC’s tools apart and creating single frameworks from the tools, Justin then created tools like CanJS and DoneJS.

As the CEO of Bitovi, Justin has less time to program as before. Working with Open Source, development is a mix between contributors and full time employees. The majority being the employees. Justin talks about not having a sales force and focusing on their product to drive sales. Mainly, long term cost of ownership and the ability for the framework to last, working hard to make sure that clients that have committed to Javascript MVC years ago still have a relevant use for the framework.

With the emergence of HTTP2 and Push, Justin talks about working on and exploring different ways for streaming/server side rendering. Justin describes one of the experiments with building an empty skeletons, javascript assets, but also pushing instructions on how to mutate the page to the client. Before the javascript payload is fully loaded, the page starts to mutate. Allowing for optimal performance on slower connections, fantastic for mobile. Problems they are looking at for the future include things like different ways that CDNs can work with HTTP2 and Push. Justin has also worked with using Fetch to enable streaming by building tools around that. He suggests that HTTP2 and Push will maybe bring a renaissance in the developer world.

Additional to his other work, Justin is working on a generic parsing project. Similar to BISON or JISON. Designed for simple parsing at faster speeds. He describes how to compiles to the code that parses your code. Working in runtime.

We don’t know what the future is going to be for code, so packaging the framework into separate repos allows for better scheduling and a better way to manage long term. Updating a segment of a framework can sometimes break another segment if having it all happen together.

Newbie Remote Conf 2017

JSJ 265 Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao on Visual Studio CodeThis episode is live at the Microsoft Build 2017 with Charles Max Wood and AJ O’Neal. We have Wade Anderson and Ramya Rao from the Visual Studio Code Team at Microsoft. Tune in and learn more about what’s new with Visual Studio Code![00:01:20] – Introduction to Ramya Rao and Wade AndersonRamya Rao and Wade Anderson are in the Visual Studio Code Team at Microsoft.Questions for Wade and Ramya[00:02:00] – Elevator Pitch for Visual Studio CodeOur vision on Visual Studio Code is to take what was best out of the IDE world (Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc.) and bring what was best from the lightweight editor world (Sublime Text, Notepad++, Atom) and merge those two together. We wanted the lightweight features from text editors and the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio and Eclipse. We did general availability last year. We’ve been stable for a year. Additionally, this is Visual Studio Code for Mac, Windows, or Linux. It’s also built in Electron.[00:03:45] – What are your roles on the team? Do you have particular parts that each of you work on?Wade’s title is a Program Manager. He does more non-developer things but Ramya is an engineer on the team so she gets a lot more coding that Wade does. Everybody has a key area to own but nothing stops them to go into another area. We try to share knowledge between people but we always have that one key owner that you always go to.Ramya is a recent addition to the team. She started out maintaining the Go extension, maintaining and adding features. She’s slowly branching out to the Emmet features of the product.[00:05:30] What is Emmet?Emmet, or Zen Coding, is a must-have tool for you. You can write, say abbreviations and that expands to really huge HTML to update tags, rename tags, etc. That is one of the features of Emmet and Sergey actually wrote the library. We have an in built integration in the product. I [Ramya] am currently working on that.[00:06:28] Does Visual Studio Code make it easy to go to the parts that I need to customize on an HTML?In that case, we have a multi-cursor software in Visual Studio Code, as well. You could place your cursor in different positions, and then, simultaneously edit things.[00:07:42] Is Emmet an extension or does it come with Visual Studio Code?Right now, it’s in Built. If you want to know more about Emmet features, you can to emmet.io. That has all the documentation that you need to learn about Emmet features. In Visual Studio Code right now, we’re looking at making into an extension. We pull it out of the main code and maybe more people can contribute and make it even more better.[00:08:21] – What’s new in Visual Studio Code?One of our main pillars for this year is to improve performance of the product. We’ve grown a larger team so we’re adding a lot more features every month. Last few months has been, “How can we get some stability on the issues coming in while making sure we’re reducing our tech load?” We really keep to those core principles that we started with at the beginning, which was, we want a fast, lightweight editor.We built a few extensions that we call key map extensions. They are just a mapping of key bindings that you learned in Sublime Text. You don’t have to re-learn any key bindings in Visual Studio Code.We also build this Welcome page where you can flip through and see features really briefly. In that Welcome page, one of the key things is an interactive playground where you can play with existing code in different sections. Additionally, as we’ve mentioned, we also put multi-cursor features.Another thing is workbench naming. You can change the theme of Visual Studio Code but it will be restricted to the editor and not the rest of the workbench.[00:13:40] – Do you know how Xterm.js works as it was one of the features that you’ve added in Visual Studio Code?Daniel’s another engineer that’s here with us today. He was the largest contributor to the Xterm.js project. He built the integrated terminal for Visual Studio code so I can’t speak to the internals of how that works.[00:14:12] – Are we going to start seeing Visual Studio Code integrated into web experiences with other Microsoft products?That’s actually where we started. We were Monaco editor where you get this cloud-based editing experience. We’re getting people to use it but we’re only getting people who were already using Microsoft products.  When electron came out, we saw an opportunity of, “Hey, can we port this  Monaco editor to Electron and we could then, run it on Mac and Linux.”[00:19:45] – What are the performance things that you’ve done?One thing that we did recently was adding an ability to calculate the start time for Visual Studio Code? That’s one of our full steps to get more information from the user-side. How can you get a profile of what things are running? Which part of the process took much time?We also need to identify what are the things people are doing that’s causing the editor slow down. An example is when you open a large file and things get laggy.Another exercise we did was we looked at all of our extension API’s to see which one of those could be a malicious extension.The difference between VS Code and Atom is that, we ask questions like, “Are we using good data structures? Are we managing our memory properly? Are we removing stuff we don’t need anymore?” That just comes down to all those little things you learn from basic textbooks that have been around for decades about how to write good code. That’s what we have been doing and that’s what we’ll continue to try to do, to try and improve the performance.[00:25:55] – Do you have problem on the desktop? Are all the modules just load at once?We definitely don’t load everything at once. Different parts of the editor is loaded differently. When you do the Require, we don’t do it at first load. We do it when we notice that the user wants to use Emmet. We don’t try to load all the library at the beginning and delay the whole process.We try to lazy load as much as possible, even the extensions. We have a separate process called extension host that takes care of loading all the extensions. Whether the extensions are completed loading or not, that does not stop you from typing in a file. Simple actions shouldn’t be bugged down by fancy actions.[00:28:25] – What’s coming next for Visual Studio Code?Every month, when we plan our iteration, we create iteration draft plan. We put it out there for people to see. Performance and helping people get started are probably the top two for us. You can look at github.com/Microsoft/vscode, look for the label ‘iteration plan draft.’ So that’s the current work that we’re doing that month.Another feature is the multi-root workspace where you can open multiple folders. When you look at the issues and sort by most comments, multi-root is the number one. The second one that is little paper cuts around formatting and auto-intending – just things that make your code prettier.PicksAJ O’neal

• Breath on the Wild
• Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge

Charles Max Wood

• Boom Beach
• Bluetick.io
• Emacs key binding extension for Visual Studio Code

Wade Anderson

• Kindle Paperwhite
•  Twitter @waderyan_

Ramya Rao

• Open source
• Twitter @ramyanexus

Special Guests: Ramya Rao and Wade Anderson.

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This episode features Moving from Node.js to .NET and Raygun.io with John-Daniel Trask. John-Daniel is the Co-founder and CEO of Raygun, a software intelligence platform for web and mobile. He's been programming for many years, and is originally from New Zealand. Tune in and learn what prompted them to move to the .NET framework!Special Guest: John-Daniel Trask.

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Join AJ, Aimee, and Joe as they discuss Mozilla Firefox Developer Tools with Jason Laster. Jason just started working at Mozilla since March. But even before that, he has been working on Chrome's dev tool extension called Marionette. That's when he discovered that the browser is an open source that anyone can play with. Now, he is working on a new debugger in Firefox. Tune in!Special Guest: Jason Laster.

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On today's episode, Charles, Aimee, and Cory discuss HTTP 2 with Surma. Alongside being part of the Chrome DevRel Team for Google, Surma works on different web app performance. He is also engaged in HTTP 2, interaction, UX, and spec work. Stay tuned to discover what HTTP 2 can do for you!Special Guest: Surma.

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