Programming By Stealth

In this final Programming By Stealth and final Chit Chat Across the Pond for 2021, Bart teaches us how to manage our documentation in JSDoc. As any good programmer, he insists on automating as much as he possibly can. He starts by showing us each step that we have to do at the command line, and methodically puts together a JSDoc configuration file that runs scripts and helps create documentation directories, and installs plugins.

Even better he helps us to configure JSDoc so that it will alert us if we make a mistake in our inline or block tags, since JSDoc by default just ignores those mistakes. Finally we walk through three different themes for our documentation and we actually choose one for the XKPASSWD project and he shows us how we can even modify the theme. It all has to do with Bart preferring blue over purple.

It's great fun, and really gives us the tool we need now to get ready for the next step. You can follow along with Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes pbs.bartificer.net.

In our last installment, Bart explained why good documentation matters to ourselves and to other developers who want to use our code, and he also explained that using an automatic document generator like JSDoc could help make it easier for us to write good documentation and to keep it up to date more easily.

In this week's installment, he starts to show us how to actually write JSDoc comments in line with our code. He explains the different elements of JSDoc comments and demonstrates how his own doc comments evolve as he figures out what he's trying to do. I really enjoyed this installment and his example is perfect for us nerds.

I highly recommend you follow along in Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

As we embark on our journey to create a JavaScript module for the strong, memorable password generating service XKPASSWD, Bart explains the importance of creating good documentation. That sounds super annoying and tedious, and it is, so Bart explains why a good documentation generator will be our friend. He outlines the two distinctly different users of our documentation: those of us who will be helping to create the code itself as part of the community project, but also for the people who will be users of our JavaScript module. Those users will be interested in how to take the module and embed it into a web page to generate passwords, or to create an Alfred scheme and more. These two different users will have different requirements, and yet our documentation generator can fill both needs without unnecessary extra work. This isn't the sexiest topic, but Bart does convince me that the tools will help us to have the rigor to do it and not let our human instincts take over and allow our documentation to get out of date.

You can find Bart's fabulous shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

Bart Busschots had a vision that certain things we would learn in Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth would be taught by guest lecturers. I thought he was bananas that this would work, but Helma Van der Linden, also known as Helma from the Netherlands stepped up to teach us about coding linters, and specifically ESLint.

In this installment she explains what linters are, and why they're useful. Even though she's not technically fond of them, she believes in linters because of what they can do for a coding team. Once she sells that idea, she walks us through how to install ESLint inside the development environment VSCode. From there she explains style guides, and shows us how to install and use the very popular airbnb style guide. She gives us tips on usage and even how to override the linter's demands.

I think it was incredibly courageous to fill Bart's shoes, and she did a fantastic job both in the podcast and in the detailed written show notes over at bartificer.net

This installment of Programming By Stealth could probably have been two segments but all of us are itching to get moving quickly so we decided to power through. In the first part of the installment, Bart introduces us to JavaScript modules by giving us a bit of a history lesson on how they've evolved. If you're brand new to modules, this will be interesting but not essential. If you have history with them though, you'll definitely need to pay close attention to understand what's changed.

Then Bart gets into the details of how modules work. He explains how JavaScript modules export variables, functions, and classes and how there are named exports and default exports and how the syntax differs. What fun would learning about exports be if he didn't tell us how to import variables, functions and classes into our code for when we use these modules? We also learn about module specifiers to make it all go.

Finally, Bart takes us through three worked examples where he creates some JavaScript modules that exercise everything we just learned.

It's a long episode but as always, Bart's excellent show notes at pbs.bartificer.net

As we launch full steam into Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots introduces us to the Node Package Manager and Node itself. Unlike our mini-series within a series for Git and Chezmoi, Bart isn't going to do an exhaustive walk through NPM and Node. Instead he's going to teach use what we need as we go along. In order for that to make any sense at all, in this installment, he explain to us at a high level Node and NPM are, and what problems they solve.

This lesson isn't all theory though, we actually get to use Node and NPM to build a tiny, self-contained JavaScript app. I had great fun in this installment and Bart's always fabulous tutorial shownotes are particularly well-written this time. You can find them over at pbs.bartificer.net/...

At episode 700! of Chit Chat Across the Pond we take Programming By Stealth into what Bart is calling Phase 2. We've learned a great deal about the client side of programming and we're now going to move to the server side of the web. As Bart described Phase 2, I realized that it's as though we've finished out undergraduate work in computer science, and we're entering graduate school.

That observation is not based on the concepts being harder, but rather because we are going to work as a collective to help our professor on a project that's near and dear to his heart. Bart created the fabulous web-based password creation tool at xkpasswd.net many years ago, in fact so long ago that it's on a very creaky set of tools that have been deprecated and the entire service will die if it doesn't move onto modern tools.

This will be a great excuse for us to learn to work on the new tools as Bart is forced to learn them and at the same time we will be enlisted to help him with the development of the new and improved xkpasswd.

I was really excited as I listened to Bart lay out the future of the next 100 or so episodes and everything we're going to learn. Whether you've been working alongside the rest of the listeners since Programming By Stealth 1, or whether you're a seasoned programmer who'd like to learn the new tools like Bootstrap 5 and PHP 8, I think you'll have great fun with the next phase of Programming By Stealth.

You can find Bart's strategic plan for Phase 2 laid out at bartificer.net

In this final episode of Programming By Stealth before we launch into the back end of web development with PHP, Bart finishes his miniseries on Chezmoi to manage dot files. In this installment he teaches us how to effectively manage our dot files on multiple computers using templating to ensure that the correct settings end up on every computer.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

Bart has been really excited to teach this next installment of Programming By Stealth where we really dig into learning about Chezmoi templates, including learning functions and arguments, how to declare variables, looping over arrays, and learning the `sprig` utility functions to extend Chezmoi. I thought he was going to jump out of his chair he was so happy to teach pipelines which are a grand way of embedding function statements in a way that is very human-readable.

This is our penultimate installment on Chezmoi, where next time we'll be learning how to manage our dot files across multiple computers where not everything is the same between computers, but much of it is.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes to follow along at pbs.bartificer.net/...

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on how to use the open source tool Chezmoi to manage our dot files, those hidden configuration files on our Macs. In this installment, Bart teaches us how nearly effortless it is to sync our Chezmoi-managed dot files up to a private repo on GitHub. Seriously, it's like 2 steps.

Bart then teaches us how Chezmoi supports templating. When Bart started to describe it, I said, "Oh! It's just like mail merge in Microsoft Office!" He laughed, and said he hoped I would say that.

With Chezmoi, let's say you have your email address in a bunch of your dot files, and you need to change it to a different address. If you use Chezmoi's templating feature, you can create one file with your email address and in every dot file you reference that address, and only have to change it in one place. Bart walks us through a couple of worked examples to help us see exactly how it works and get a little practice.

The next episode of Programming By Stealth will end this mini-series within a series, and if Bart's work manages to finally slow down to where he can get some good thinking time, we should start up learning about PHP shortly after that.

As always you can read along with Bart's spectacular tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...