Programming By Stealth

Bart has been noticing that there are a few key features in JavaScript that haven't ever really congealed for me and is circling back in hopes of firming them up. The other reason he's going over these topics is that new options have been created since we first covered them. The first of these subjects is objects as dictionaries. I confessed to him recently that I've never successfully done a for loop on my own yet, so we slow down a bit during that part but we speed up again into what are actually more challenging topics. We had a lot of fun doing this episode (even when I was stuck!)

At the end of the show I suggested a palate cleanser, which is a feature of his Security Bits segment he does for the NosillaCast. I found an awesome tweet by developer Sarah Dresner (@sarah_edo: "Apparently the only cure for jetlag is to make SVG animations of farting rhinos with the new @greensock API 💨". Of course I had to follow that link, and it was awesome. It is literally an SVG file of an adorable little rhino trotting along and tooting. After Bart and I got off the air we took advantage of the fact that she'd posted the farting rhino on codepen.io so we view the html, css and JavaScript to see how she did it. I know this is silly but that's what makes it so awesome.

Bart finishes up our first exploration of Bootstrap 4 with a look at one its most versatile components, the so-called Card. This is one of those components that’s so generic it’s hard to describe, but once you learn about it you’ll start seeing it all over the web. Cards really are ubiquitous!

We're back after a summer hiatus (where Bart was working too hard) with a new installment where we attempt to dust off Allison's brain and learn about two new promise-related keywords, async and await. Both of these keywords were actually added to the core JavaScript language, so this doesn't happen that often.

With async and await, we can actually get away from doing promise chains and create much more readable code while still being able to control parallel and in series tasks. Bart had to drag me along a bit in this one but I saw the beauty of it when we were done.

Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes can be found at PBS 82 of X — Async & Await : Bart Busschots.

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to use Promises, with a capital P to get promises when we already know the value we want to supply. That sounds funny but it will make sense in context. Then he shows us how we can control parallelization of promises using Promise.all(). It's a very sensible lesson, and not brain bendy at all. (I really like those.)

Bart Busschots (successfully) explains the concept of JavaScript promise chains. It's a rough ride because of the subject itself, but he gets us there through his care and detail in explaining the concepts and of course his great examples. When he's done, you'll know how to chain promises together, you'll understand what data is passed through, and you'll understand why he says, "Don't have unhandled rejections, it's just not nice."

Bart has been _promising_ us Promises for ages now and he finally fulfills his promise by explaining thenables. Promises are a tool to get us out of "callback hell", which we experienced a while back. I think he made us suffer through that so we'd appreciate Promises. In this episode he shows us the beauty and elegance of the concept but leaves us wanting more. Bart spent a lot of time trying to get the shownotes and his narrative to take this rather abstract concept and make it concrete, and I think he did a grand job of it.

Bart's amazing tutorial shownotes are available at bartbusschots.ie/...

Bart Busschots and I both had a great time doing the challenge this week. In this week's installment Bart takes us through his homework not in a detailed step-by-step method, but rather he goes through some major structural ways he created his code. He digs deep enough to explain why but it's a great lesson on building code that's easier to debug and more fun to write. I got to be the tester of his code, and as I suggested improvements he decided he needed to use Bootstrap Popovers. He walks us through how they work and I have to say they're really slick. Then he introduces us to a super intuitive JavaScript library called is.js that solves will simplify our code. I asked Bart if he could back up 2 weeks and show me is.js BEFORE I did last week's homework!

As always, Bart's awesome tutorial shownotes are available bartbusschots.ie/....