Programming By Stealth

In the early days of Programming By Stealth, Bart tried to explain JavaScript classes, objects and instances. He talked about it in Installment 17 before ES6, and then took another run at it in installments 27-31. But it never felt to Bart like he had explained it in a way that made it clear.

In installment 94, Bart finally nails it. I told him the shownotes for this installment might be the best he's ever done. Everything he explains is clear and concise, the examples are superb, and we get to say Hoonyaker a lot. Instead of being frustrated and confused, I was smiling through all of it because I finally get it. I also told him that I feel far less stupid than I did before because I always thought it was my failing that I didn't get it. I enjoyed this so much I drew Bart a picture of what he'd taught and he said I nailed it!

You can find these legendary shownotes at [pbs.bartificer.net/pbs94](https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs94).

CCATP #630 for March 14, 2020, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week our guest is Bart Busschots with PBS 92 of X in which he walks us through his solution to the assignment from PBS 89 to create a grid of currency conversions.

He doesn't go through his code line by line, but rather gives us the big picture of his process. Most of the time he spent on the solution was actually in refactoring his code because he decided to preload the data rather than fetching it repeatedly on-demand. I loved it when he referred to his original work as "Organically-grown Weasley-kind of code".

He also explains how he used both coercion and assertion to do his error handling and why. Eventually he got to start working on the grid and he walks us through how he cracked that problem. It was great fun as always and we have a new, six-week challenge to build a world clock.

You can find his full tutorial shownotes and download his solution at [pbs.bartificer.net/pbs92](https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs92)

This week our guest is Bart Busschots with an installment of something he's calling Programming By Stealth-adjacent. It's not part of the regular series of Programming By Stealth, and yet it's not technically very "light" in terms of the chit chatting. Since neither podcast is the right place for it, I've decided to put it in both podcast feeds to be wrong twice.

Bart walks us through how to create Quick Actions with Automator (also known as Services) to do some simple but very useful text manipulations using a smidge of JavaScript. Even if you don't want to write these Quick Actions yourself, you can download his services from his Github repo where he's put them up as open source: https://github.com/bbusschots/macos-quickaction-text.

You can see how Bart created this in his blog post at [www.bartbusschots.ie/...](https://www.bartbusschots.ie/s/2020/03/06/macos-quick-actions-for-text/)

Bart's tutorial for this episode are available at [pbs.bartificer.net/...](https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs91.html)

Hope you enjoyed getting the little extra Tidbits episode this week. In this installment Bart continues our on-going mini-series looking at each of the proverbial hats JavaScript objects wear. Bart explains the concept of JavaScript wrapper objects that allow you to access properties of otherwise property-less primitives. It's pretty magical and I only got lost for a little while as we brushed the cobwebs off my memories of prototypes and such.

Bart's shownotes for this episode can be found at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs90

Bart explains how alert listener @lbutlr on Twitter found a mistake in Bart's math and he walks through how he figured out what was wrong and what we can all learn from it. Bart's explanation can be found here:

bartbusschots.ie/...

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains his new plan for both the content of PBS and the way the shownotes are created and presented to you. Bart has noticed that because we put a challenge solution and new content into the same show, the solution gets short changed. That's a shame because there is so much he can teach by explaining the "whys" behind his design of his solutions.

The new plan is to have the challenge solutions be standalone shows, and then the new content will be standalone shows as well. We'll be having more time to do our challenges with this new plan as well. I'm excited about this new plan because I've enjoyed the extra time we've had with our currency converter challenge, allowing us to enhance our solutions and be more creative.

Bart is also completely rearchitecting all of his web presence, including his Programming By Stealth show notes. His new online presence will be at his site, bartficier.net and PBS will now be at pbs.bartificer.net. That link is actually to a GitHub page. I know that sounds crazy and Bart is going to tell us more about it, but it will allow him time to be much more creative and spend less time faffing about as a system admin.

With all that said, you can find the shownotes to this week's installment at [pbs.bartificer.net/...](https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs89.html)

Bart is nearing the end of his mini-series recapping al of the different hats JavaScript objects wear, doing a lot of redux to cement the concepts that have been spread over so many lessons. He takes a really interesting approach this week to his teaching. He explains a concept and then instead of having a contrived example, he shows us exactly how that concept works in action in his homework solution from PBS 85. His solution to the homework assignment is, of course, beautiful and elegant. Beautiful he gives credit to Bootstrap, elegant he would probably give credit to jQuery.

I am really enjoying these redux segments because they cement things that were still wobbly, or perhaps even gone from my memory. Each time through I'm finding I understand how to even categorize the information in my brain. I explained to Bart that I think he's actually changing the way my brain is wired now.

I'm not going to lie, this episode of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots was a bit head bendy. Bart explains JavaScript Iterator Objects and Generator functions but without his excellent examples I'm certain I would never have been able to get the concepts to even slightly congeal in my brain. Iterator Objects and Generator functions are some of the joys of ES6 and have great value.

That value is demonstrated in the succinctness of the code Bart writes for us to create a Fibonacci series in a beautiful web form. That work, by the way, is a bonus challenge if you're done with your homework from the previous episodes. As you listen along, if you hear us yelling "spoiler alert" and making alarming noises, that's when Bart's solution to the challenge is about to be described. It's a rare instance where I actually let you have one chapter mark in Programming By Stealth so you'll be able to jump back to the solution after you're done with your own solution.