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...