My JavaScript Story

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Kitson Kelly This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Kitson Kelly. Kitson is a return guest, previously on JavaScript Jabber 277. Kitson is the CTO at SitePen, and has been working and maintaining Dojo 2 for the last couple years. Kitson talks about his journey as a developer. First, sparking his interest with old Atari games and getting his first computer in his early years.  Kitson talks about his education background and introduction to computers in high school and hang out with other in the same programming niche. Kitson talks about his challenges not having a degree in computer science, but still very successful as a developer after climbing the corporate latter. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Atari Games and old first computer
• Hangout with the computer nerds
• Community college
• No actual formal computer science degree
• Tech Support and Self Taught
• Challenges with not degree
• Climbing the latter
• Troubles even with a degree
• Is a degree in computer science really needed?
• Experience verses degree
• Working with other people is important
• Getting into JavaScript and Dojo
• What kept you working in JavaScript
• How do you get to being CTO and SitePen?
• What are you most proud of with the work on Dojo
• Contributions
• Side Projects  - Dojo 2
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• https://github.com/kitsonk
• Kistson Kelly
• https://www.sitepen.com
• https://dojo.io

Picks: Kitson

• SVG 
• Noun Project

Charles

• adminlte.io
• Ruby on Rails, Jquery
• podwrench.com

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Tyler Renelle This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Tyler Renelle. Tyler is a contractor and developer who has worked in many web technologies like Angular, Rails, React and much more! Tyler is a return guest, previously on Adventure in Angular and JavaScript Jabber talking Ionic and Machine learning. Tyler has recently expanded his work beyond JavaScript and is on the show to talk his interest in AI or Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. Furthermore, Tyler talks about his early journey as a game developer, web developer, and work with some content management systems, and more recently, his development in various technologies. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Writing games out of college
• Studies computer science in college
• Did web development to pay for college working with PHP and ASP
• Content management
• Working with various technologies
• Working with React, is this it?
• Problems React has solved with web apps
• What is the next big innovation?
• View
• Creating Podcasts
• Machine Learning
• Specialized application of AI
• NLP
• Never use his computer science degree as a web developer
• You don’t study code to be a developer
• AI and machine learn is based on Computer Science
• Tensor Flow
• Data Skeptic - podcast
• Performance
• Graphics cards
• Philosophy of Consciousness
• The subjective experience
• Job displacement phenomenon
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• http://ocdevel.com
• http://ocdevel.com/podcasts/machine-learning
• Tensor Flow
• Data Skeptic - podcast
• https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/jsj-278-machine-learning-tyler-renelle
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/lefnire

Picks Tyler

• The Great Courses 

Charles

• CES
• Email beforehand and set up an appointment
• VRBO.com
• Autonomous.ai

MJS 038: Peter Cooper Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Peter Cooper This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Peter Cooper. Peter was one the original panelist on Ruby Rogues and JavaScript Jabber. Currently, Peter runs several weekly new letters on JS, Ruby, Go, React, etc. Peter talks about his journey as a programmer, which started at an early age tinkering with his father’s computer at home. Peter describes the beginning as a hobby until he learned the skills to being programming on many platforms. Peter talks about how he learn Ruby and JavaScript, and in early stages of noodling or learning code. Lastly, Peter talks about his contributions to the community and giving back. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• How did you get into programming?
• Playing with computers at an early age
• Computers were a hobby, rather than a career builder then
• Being heavily into to anything can become your career, age does not matter
• Finding the skill or passion in programming
• Natural ability to see and make sense of code
• UseNet
• AJax
• Directness
• Blogging 
• New Letters
• rubyflow.com
• What is the ultimate goal of the new letters?
• Contributions
• Helping host podcasts
• Current work?
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• http://peterc.org
• https://rubyweekly.com
• https://github.com/peterc/
• Cooper Press

Picks Peter

• Litmus
• Cheap Gaming consoles on eBay
• Jason Scott of archive.org

Charles

• Hyper Drive
• J5
• Dash Pro In-Ear Headphones

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Nader Dabit This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Nader Dabit. Nader is a familiar guest on JavaScript Jabber, talking about the state of React Native. Nader is the host of React Native Radio, another podcast on the Dev Chat TV network. Nader is a React Native trainer that does consulting and workshops in major cities in the US. Nader dives into his background and how he began his journey as a developer. Interestingly, Nader became successful as a developer without any formal training, but, by only learning to code on the job. This is a great episode to learn specific ways to build a career without formal training, and how to present yourself for the job. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• React Native Radio and the React Native world
• React Training and pop up workshops
• How Nader got into programming
• Learning HTML and Web Development
• E-commerce, WordPress
• Nader talks about getting his first job
• Positioning  yourself as a developer for success
• Specialization
• Presenting yourself for the job
• How Nader learn to do JavaScript
• Learning a viable option
• Ionic
• What is it about React Native that interest you?
• React Native In Action - Book!
• React Native Elements 
• Sharing Content
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• React Native In Action
• reactnative.training
• https://github.com/react-native-training
• Ideas anyone?

Picks Nader

• Audio Book- A Guide To the Good Life 

Charles

• The Way of Kings
• Scratching your own itch!

Panel:  Charles Max Wood Guest: Ryan Glover This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Ryan Glover, Ryan is the COO of Clever Beagle. Clever Beagle is a company that helps people create their first products and begin selling to their customers. Clever Beagle uses platforms like  Meteor JS, Node JS, and React to provide frameworks for help build applications. Ryan describes their business as a technical therapist for bringing ideas to fruition. Ryan shares his journey into programming by learning to build websites with Geocities. Thereafter, Ryan had began his self-taught journey with programming after learning he did not like his college major. Ryan talks about his contribution to the JS community, his website called Meteor Chef designed to help newbies learn to build with Meteor JS. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Learning Geocites
• Becoming a Self Taught programmer
• Freelancing
• Building WordPress websites and learning JS
• By trade a  being a designer
• Building with JavaScript
• Learning about Meteor on Hacker News in 2013
• Sacha Greif 
• Apollo
• Raw Node JS
• Understanding Webpack?
• Gearheads vs. Builders
• Boilerplates
• and much, much more!

Links: 

• Sacha Greif
• Clever Beagle
• https://www.meteor.com
• https://themeteorchef.com/info/about
• https://cleverbeagle.com/subcribe
• @rglover
• ryanglover.net

Picks Ryan

• Halt and Catch Fire
• Sacha Greif State of JavaScript
• Tom Coleman

Charles

• React Developer Summit
• JavaScript Developer Summit
• How To Find A Job Course 
• Stranger Things Season 2
• moviepass.com

Tweet this Episode John-Daniel Trask is the CEO and developer at Raygun.io. JD and Chuck talk in this episode about learning to program as a kid, the arc of JD's career, and entrepreneurship. Links:

• 154 JSJ Raygun.io Error Reporting and Workflow with John-Daniel Trask
• JSJ 263 Moving from Node.js to .NET and Raygun.io with John-Daniel Trask
• C
• C++
• Delphi
• NetScape Navigator
• VBScript
• JQuery
• Mindscape
• Raygun.io
• CoffeeScript
• Visual Studio
• Scott Hanselman on Dark Matter Developers
• Tensorflow
• Stripe
• @traskjd

Picks: JD:

• Keygen.sh
• Octopus Deploy
• JavaScript x86

Chuck:

• The Miracle Morning
• Meditations App
• Vision Board App
• LootCrate
• Game of Thrones Journal
• Zelda Theme Journal

Tweet this Episode MJS 034: John-David Dalton Today’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with John-David Dalton. JD talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community like Lo-Dash, Sandboxed Native, etc. Listen to learn more about JD! [01:15] – Introduction to JD JD has been on JavaScript Jabber. He talked about Lo-Dash. [02:00] – How did you get into programming? First website This was when JD was a junior in high school. Then, he got involved with a flight squadron for a World War 1 online game. They needed a website so he created a GeoCities website for them. That’s what got him into JavaScript. He’d have to enhance the page with mouseover effects - cursor trail, etc. JavaScript From there, JD started created a Dr. Wiley little-animated bot that would say random things in a little speech bubble with the HTML on your page like a widget. He also passed an assignment turning a web page into an English class paper. He used to spend his lunch breaks learning JavaScript and programming. He also created a little Mario game engine – Mario 1 with movable blocks that you could click and drag and Mario could jump over it. That was back with the document.layers and Netscape Navigator. Animation JD wanted to be an animator in animation so he started getting into macro media flash. That led him to ActionScript, which was another ECMAScript-based language. He took a break from JavaScript and did ActionScript and flash animations for a while as his day job too. PHP and JavaScript JD started learning PHP and they needed to create a web app that got him right back into JavaScript in 2005. That was when AJAX was coined and that’s when Prototype JS came up. He was reading AJAX blog posts back then because that was the place to find all of your JavaScript news. JS Specification JD remembers being really intimidated by JavaScript libraries so he started reading the JavaScript specification. It got him into a deeper understanding of why the language does what it does and realized that there’s actually a document that he could go to and look up exactly why things do what they do. [06:45] – What was it about JavaScript? JD has been tinkering with programming languages but what he liked about ActionScript at the time was it is so powerful. You could create games with it or you could script during animations. He eventually created a tool that was a Game Genie for flash games that you could get these decompilers that would show you the variables in the game, and then, you could use JavaScript to manipulate the variables in the flash game. He created a tool that could, for example, change your lives to infinite life, grow your character or access hidden characters that they don’t actually put in the game but they have the animations for it. JD was led to a page on the web archive called Layer 51 or Proto 51. That was a web page that had a lot of JavaScript or ActionScript snippets. There were things for extending the built-in prototypes - adding array methods or string methods or regex methods. That was how JavaScript became appealing to him. He has been doing JavaScript for almost 20 years. PHP also made him appreciate JavaScript more because, at the time, you couldn’t have that interface. [09:30] – Lo-Dash, Sandboxed Native, Microsoft Lo-Dash Eventually, JD grew to respect jQuery because I became a library author. jQuery is the example of how to create a successful library. It’s almost on 90% of the Internet. He likes that right now but before, he was a hardcore Prototype fanboy. He didn’t like new tools either. He liked augmenting prototypes but over time, he realized that augmenting prototypes wasn’t so great whenever you wanted to include other code on your page because it would have conflict and collisions. Later on, he took Prototype, forked it, and he made it faster and support more things, which is essentially what he did with Lo-Dash. Sandboxed Native JD created something called Sandboxed Native, which got him into talking on conferences. Sandboxed Native extends the prototypes for the built-ins for your current frame. It would import new built-ins so you got a new array constructor, a new date constructor, a new regex, or a new string. It wouldn’t collide or step on the built-ins of the current page. Microsoft After that, JD ended up transitioning to performance and benchmarking. That landed him his Microsoft job a couple years later. Picks John-David Dalton

• JS Foundation
• Sonarwhal
• Twitter / Github: @jdalton

Charles Max Wood

• Aaron Walker
• Interview Valet

MJS 033: Dylan Schiemann Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Dylan Schiemann. Dylan talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community to what JavaScript is back in 2004. Listen to learn more about Dylan! [01:10] – Introduction to Dylan Schiemann Dylan was on episode 62 of JavaScript Jabber, which was about 4 years ago. We had him on to talk about the Dojo Toolkit. [02:00] – How did you get into programming? When Dylan was 7 or 8 years old, he and his father took basic programming class together. In Junior high, probably mid-1980’s, he received his first Commodore 64 computer. He picked up the Programmer’s Reference Guide, toppled on Assembly, and tried to write data to a tape drive. It got updated to a floppy drive. And then in high school, he took some Pascal classes. He learned the basics - ranging from BASIC, Pascal, and to Assembly. [03:00] – How did you get into JavaScript? As an undergraduate, Dylan studied Chemistry and Mathematics. He did some basic HTML and discovered the web roughly when he was a junior year in college. And then, he went to graduate school and studied Physical Chemistry at UCLA. He was studying the topology and reality of quasi-two-dimensional phone. If you imagine a bunch of beer bubbles at the top of a glass, and you spin it around really quickly, you watch how the bubbles rearrange as force is applied to it. He wanted to put his experiments on the web so he started learning this new language that had just been invented called JavaScript. So, he dropped out of graduate school a few years later. Eight years after that point in time, it was possible to show his experiments with Dojo and SVG. [04:25] – How did you get into Dojo and the other technologies? SitePen Right after grad school, Dylan helped start a company called SitePen. That let him really learn how JavaScript works. He started doing some consulting work. And he started working with Alex Russell, who had a project called netWindows at the time, which is a predecessor to any JavaScript framework that most people have worked with. Dojo Dylan got together and decided to create a next generation version of the HTML toolkit, which ended up becoming Dojo back in 2004. Things that they created back then are now part of the language - asynchronous patterns such as Promises, or even modules, widgets, which led to the web components pack. Over the years, they’ve built on that and done various utilities for testing and optimizing applications. [06:20] – Ideas that stood the test of time A lot of the things that Dylan and his team did in Dojo were on the right path but first versions ended up iterating before they’ve met their way into the language. Other things are timing. They were there very early and but to tell people in 2005 and 2006 that you need to architect the front-end application met some confusion of why you would want to do that. According to him, they never created Dojo to say that they want to create the world’s leading framework. [07:45] – JavaScript Dylan no longer answers the question of, “Oh, JavaScript, you mean, Java?” The expectations of 2004 were the hope of making something that might work in a browser. The expectation today is we are competing against every platform and trying to create the best possible software in the world, and do it in a way that’s distributable everywhere in the browser. The capabilities have grown. There are audio, video and real-time capabilities. They were ways to do those things but they were brutal and fragile. And now, we have real engineering solutions to many of those things but there are still going to be ways to do this. There were few people who are interested in this and maybe this wasn’t even their day job. But now, literally hundreds and thousands of engineers who write code in JavaScript every day. Picks Dylan Schiemann

• JavaScript user groups
• JavaScript conferences
• SeattleJS
• Phoenix TypeScript Meet-up
• London HalfStack

Charles Max Wood

• Focuster
• BusyCal
• Asana
• Trello

MJS 032: Feross Aboukhadijeh Today's episode is a My JavaScript Story with Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross talked about his contributions to the JavaScript community to the decentralized web. Listen to learn more about Mike! [01:00] – Introduction to Feross Aboukhadijeh Feross was on episode 155 and he talked about Webtorrent. It was 2 years ago. [01:35] – How did you get into programming? Toddler Feross has always been interested in computers and technology. His mom told him a story about how when he was a toddler, he was always watching people whenever they’re using technology – the television, the microwave, or the VCR. She said that he’s trying to imitate what he saw. HTML and Web proxies According to Feross, he became seriously interested when he was in middle school when he learned about HTML and wanted to make a personal site. In high school, there was this class that you could take. It’s a tech team where they went around and fixed teachers’ computers because they were understaffed. Some of the computers have administrator privileges turned on for the student accounts as well because some of the software that was required for certain classes needed it. The computers always had viruses on them because people would install first-person shooters and play during class time. They actually have school-wide filtering system so students can’t access certain sites. One of the categories they blocked was downloading sites. In order to even do their job, they have to figure out web proxies to get around the filters. He ended up setting up one of those on his own server. First website Feross’ real programming experience was PHP. It was in his junior year of high school. He bought a book in Barnes & Noble about PHP and MySQL. He wanted to build a site to host his favorite flash animations. That project was a database-driven website where people can segment their flash animations and soundboards, prank phone calls, and other internet humor. The site was called freetoflash. That was the first website that he built. [07:10] – How did you get into JavaScript? Feross thinks JavaScript is one of those languages that you don’t actually really bother to sit down and learn. There weren’t any good resources. According to him, He really didn’t know JavaScript until he started a company right after he graduated from college. He started taking JavaScript seriously because he was learning Node.js and realized that you can build real things from it. The start-up is called PeerCDN. They’re trying to make a content delivery network that would work in the browser using WebRTC. The idea is you would add a script tag to your website and then we would try to find other people visiting your site that already has the content that you want, you’ll fetch it from them over a peer-to-peer connection to save on your hosting build to reduce your CDN bill. That was a big Node application. It also has intense front-end component. He started learning about NPM, how you build things with microservices, and how do you deploy a JavaScript application. That was in 2013. [09:35] – Webtorrent Feross has been trying to transition Webtorrent into a distributed contribution model. It’s always been something that he would give out commit rights. If someone makes a good contribution, he’ll just add them to the Github for it. He recently made it into an organization on Github. He’s hoping to make it something that’s not completely dependent on him in order for it to continue existing. He’s going to be involved with it for the foreseeable future but he’s also trying to do new projects as well besides that. The good news is Webtorrent is mostly done in some sense. It works well. There are bugs. But if you use Webtorrent, especially if you use the desktop application to torrent things, it’s really polished and works nicely. Picks Feross Aboukhadijeh

• Decentralized web
• Dat Project
• Beaker Project
• IPFS
• Secure Scuttlebutt
• Patchwork
• Brave
• Twitter: @WebTorrentApp
• Twitter: @feross

Charles Max Wood

• Let’s Encrypt
• Digital Ocean

MJS 031: Mike Hostetler 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! [00:50] – Introduction to Mike Hostetler Mike was on episode 133 which was like 2.5 years ago. [01:45] – How did you get into programming? 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. [05:30] – How did you wind up doing JavaScript? 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. [09:20] – Contributions with JavaScript 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. [11:50] – JQuery challenges and experiences 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. [21:00] – How to pick frameworks 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. [23:40] – Role in Sails and Trails 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. [24:25] – Best ways to contribute 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. [26:45] – What are you working on now? 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]. Picks Mike Hostetler

• App: OmniFocus
• App: Sleep Cycle
• App: Life Cycle
• Zapier
• Twitter: @mikehostetler
• Mike-hostetler.com

Charles Max Wood

• Talk: Setting up and Contributing to Open-source Projects by Kent C. Dodds
• JavaScript Jabber Slack

•