Software Engineering Daily

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Software Engineering Daily episodes

March 04, 2016Socket.IO and Realtime Applications with Guillermo Rauch
“Events provide a very nice organization over persistent connections and that’s why we chose them. We think they’re also a very fundamental way of thinking about systems.”
Socket.io enables realtime bidirectional communication. But what does “realtime” actually mean? Today’s guest is Guillermo Rauch, the creator of Socket.IO, a widely used technology for client server communication. We discuss the nature of real-time apps like Uber and Google Docs, and talk about the API and usage of Socket.IO.
Questions
What is your definition of the term “realtime” and why do you disagree with the way it’s been applied to web applications?
Is realtime more dependent on the user’s perception of speed, rather than the application’s actual performance?
How did you arrive at the conclusion that the server should push data to clients as the central source of truth?
What are some typical problems developers encounter when they’re dealing with connectivity issues?
What are the important consequences of TCP that we should keep in mind as we are building real-time applications?
How does Socket.IO work?
What are the challenges to maintaining a persistent client-server connection, and how does Socket.IO achieve this?
Links
Google Acquires Writely
Etherpad
7 Principles of Rich Web Applications
Pure UI
Socket.IO
Guillermo’s page
The Future of Real-Time with Guillermo Rauch
Micro
The post Socket.IO and Realtime Applications with Guillermo Rauch appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
45 min
February 17, 2016Web Accessibility with Nic Steenhout
“But the bottom line is, accessibility is actually a challenge for coders, and I’ve yet to meet a coder that doesn’t like a good challenge.”
Disabled individuals account for over a billion people worldwide. This represents the world’s largest minority on the Web, with $220 billion in discretionary spending power in the United States alone. Yet, the accessible web is more than a financial issue – it is also a moral issue, and it is crucial that we make the web accessible to ensure an equitable information platform.
Today’s guest Nic Steenhout joins us to explain how to develop software with accessibility in mind. At the upcoming Fluent Conference, he will be giving a talk entitled Don’t turn off that JavaScript just yet, referencing JavaScript’s history of causing accessibility problems. If you want to win a free ticket to Fluent, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily.
Nic Steenhout is a software engineer and an accessibility consultant at Simply Accessible.
Questions
What is accessibility engineering?
Why is accessibility so important for developers to focus on?
What are the steps companies are taking to improve the accessibility of their products?
How did you get involved in the field of accessibility?
How have accessibility solutions evolved since the 90’s?
How did your life change after you began using a wheelchair?
What is something counterintuitive you have learned about accessibility?
Links
Simply Accessible: accessibility training, support, and testing
Modals (pop ups)
Screen reader
Accessibility Engineering with Léonie Watson
Nic’s personal page
The post Web Accessibility with Nic Steenhout appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
52 min
February 16, 2016Reactive Programming with Matthew Podwysocki
“The model-view-intent architecture is really cool and innovative – it’s basically combining the technologies of observables with the virtual DOM, and you’ve got this whole new paradigm of thinking.”
Reactive programming emphasizes writing code that is readily responsive to events. It is an increasingly popular paradigm with highly interactive websites like Netflix. It draws on the value of functional programming calls like map, reduce, and flatmap.
Matt joins us today to chat about reactive programming, the observer pattern, and his thoughts on where the future is going. If you are a fan of functional programming or JavaScript, you will enjoy this show. Matt is also speaking at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference. If you want to win a free ticket to the conference, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily.
Matt Podwysocki is the author ReactiveX JS and a software engineer at Microsoft.
Questions
What’s wrong with the approach of using callbacks and events to solve problems in JavaScript?
What is reactive programming?
What types of asynchrony problems does Netflix have to deal with?
How can we broadly think about the challenges asynchronous applications face?
Why can we think of events as collections?
In what ways has the observer pattern been implemented incorrectly in the past?
What is it like to participate in an open source project with so many big, influential players?
What’s the future of ReactiveX?
Links
Observable
Reactive programming
Node Streams: How do they work?
ReactiveX
Observer Pattern
Gang of Four Patterns
Iterator pattern
Cycle.js
Model-view-intent
Cortana
Jafar Husain
Matt on Twitter
The post Reactive Programming with Matthew Podwysocki appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
54 min
February 15, 2016npm with Laurie Voss
“Node doesn’t have dependency hell – JavaScript absolutely does.”
Node.js powers an increasing number of applications in the modern web. As node’s popularity grew, npm evolved in parallel as its default package manager and it has become a robust system for sharing and developing node programs. Yet today, npm is growing beyond its roots, and poised to become a generalized framework for all kinds of workflows within web development.
Laurie will be giving a talk at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference. If you want to win a free ticket to the conference, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily.
Laurie Voss is the CTO of npm, Inc.
Questions
What is special about node and npm?
Was the vision from the beginning for npm to evolve into more than a package manager?
What is useful for a developer to know about semantic versioning?
What is a JavaScript runtime, and why would you consider Node to be a runtime?
Why does JavaScript need a package manager?
What does the company npm do?
Where do you see web development going in the future?
Links
Laurie’s talk at Fluent
npm
Node.js
Shrinkwrap
greenkeeper
Dr. Frankenstyle
Node.js at PayPal
Laurie on Twitter
The post npm with Laurie Voss appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
53 min
February 12, 2016Code Cartoons with Lin Clark
“So much writing about tech is cheerleading – really being enthusiastic and throwing around words that don’t necessarily mean the things that people think they mean.”
Lin Clark is today’s guest on Software Engineering Daily, and she joins Jeff to talk about Code Cartoons, a webcomic that explains Facebook’s open source projects like Flux and Relay with the same elegance and creativity as XKCD. Lin explains why cartoons can be a surprisingly effective way to introduce technologies to people without the fuss and intimidation of written tutorials or documentation.
At the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference, Lin Clark will be speaking about Code Cartoons and the technologies that have sprung up around React JS. Software Engineering Daily is giving away a free ticket to the Fluent 2016 conference, which takes place on March 8-10 in San Francisco. If you want to be entered to win this free ticket, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily.
Lin Clark is the creator of Code Cartoons, and a Senior Developer Tools Engineer at Mozilla.
Questions
Why did you initially focus on React when you started Code Cartoons?
What is the canonical problem between models and views in traditional architectures?
What is the “action creator” character?
How should we think about the store relative to the idea of a database?
Are people aggressively adopting React and Redux?
What are the similarities and differences between working with the React OSS community, versus working on Mozilla OSS?
What do you see as the future of React?
Links
Code Cartoons
Lin’s talk at Fluent
Redux
The IT crowd
Falcor
XKCD
Lin’s personal page
The post Code Cartoons with Lin Clark appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
48 min
February 11, 2016Web Development in a Post-browser World with Jonathan Stark
“The smart phone itself is turned into the browser.”
Prepare for the post-browser world, says today’s guest Jonathan Stark. We are moving beyond the browser, into a world where the web is consumed by a variety of front ends.
Jonathan is a speaker at the upcoming O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, and you can win a free ticket to the conference. To be entered into a random drawing for that ticket, send us a tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily between now and February 22nd. Include the hashtag #fluentconf and and tag us @software_daily to make sure we can see your tweet.
Fluent is a conference about the web platform–which certainly includes the browser, but also mobile apps, VR experiences, and smart objects connected to the web. In today’s episode, Jeff and Jonathan explore what adjustments developers should make in this post-browser world.
Jonathan Stark is a mobile consultant who helps consumer brands thrive in the post-PC era.
Questions
How does mobile’s growth relative to desktop impact front-end developers?
Is it better to have lots of depth and specialization as an engineer, or to have more breadth?
What are the skills that developers can work on that will never go out of style?
What are your thoughts on the open internet and net neutrality debates?
How do you work with large companies to implement the technological pivots they’re trying to make?
What is interesting that you think will manifest in the digital landscape in the next few years?
Links
Jonathan’s personal page
Jonathan’s talk at Fluent
Google AMP Project
Verge article on ad blockers
Amazon Echo
Atwood’s Law
The post Web Development in a Post-browser World with Jonathan Stark appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
1 hr 1 min
December 29, 2015VueJS with Evan You
“When you have different goals – it’s impossible to say ‘we have the best practices for doing everything’. Because the web is just so versatile.”
Vue.js is a lightweight front-end JavaScript framework that makes it simple to begin prototyping and building web interfaces. Vue.js provides a flexible API for MVVM data bindings, and can serve as an alternative to other front-end frameworks like Angular and React.
Evan You is the creator of Vue and a core developer at Meteor.
Questions
What is unique about rapid prototyping in web development?
What are the workflow pains of using React?
How does the MVVM architecture work?
Could you go into Angular’s issues of scalability?
Is one-way data binding superior to two-way data binding?
As the Vue ecosystem develops will there be an analog to the flux architecture?
What are some best practices for building an application with Vue?
Links
Vue.js: a (re)introduction
First Week of Launching Vue.js
Evan on Twitter
Sponsors
Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired.
Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit.
The post VueJS with Evan You appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
51 min
December 22, 2015The Future of JavaScript with Eric Elliott
“I think that anybody who’s not using universal JavaScript is wasting a ton of time and a ton of money, and it’s just a silly thing to do.”
Eric Elliott is a JavaScript advocate, and the author of Programming JavaScript Applications. He is also an entrepreneur tackling social issues including homelessness and inequality in the tech industry.
Questions
Why will not knowing programming be akin to illiteracy in the future?
Does it suffice to know how code works, or is it important for people to kno how to write code?
Why do you love JavaScript?
What are the best practices for learning full-stack JavaScript?
What is timeless about JavaScript?
Why don’t we have a JavaScript OS yet?
Links
Time Travel Debugging
Eric’s new book
Learn JS with Eric Elliott
CheerioJS
Enzyme
Programming Literacy
JSHomes
Sponsors
Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired.
Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit.
The post The Future of JavaScript with Eric Elliott appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
1 hr 1 min
December 21, 2015JavaScript on Hardware with Kelsey Breseman
“Part of the point of Tessel is that it just works – you don’t have to worry about it. Much in the way that you would throw your app up on Heroku.”
Tessel is an open-source microcontroller that is programmable in JavaScript and compatible with Node.js.
Kelsey Breseman is a hardware engineer and Steering Committee Member on the Tessel Project.
Questions
What is the origin story of Tessel?
Tessel runs JavaScript – why is this an advantage?
Is there anything about hardware development that makes it inherently more complex than web development?
Why is the event-driven paradigm useful on hardware?
How has the Node community and npm been influential in the development and design of Tessel?
What are some Tessel modules built by users that have surprised you?
What would the world look like if hardware were as easy to prototype as software?
Links
Tessel
Hands on Hardware Workshop with Tessel
Major League Hacking
Kelsey on Twitter
Sponsors
Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired.
Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit.
The post JavaScript on Hardware with Kelsey Breseman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
54 min
December 09, 2015Javascript: The Bad Parts with John K. Paul
“I have no expectation nor would this be realistic, that any one framework will ever win out.”
John K. Paul is an engineering manager and speaker, who has given several talks on Javascript, including JavaScript, the Real Bad Parts. He is the CTO of InRhythm and also an organizer of NYCHTML5.
Questions
Why do people get so wrapped up in the hype of the Virtual DOM?
Why is React functional?
What is your history of working with JavaScript?
What do you think about Elm going towards the future?
What are the challenges when working with large organizations from the point of view as a consultancy?
What’s the software engineering ethos of NYC like?
Where are we going with the next generation of web applications?
Links
John K. Paul – Why is React “functional”?
Javascript: The Real Bad Parts
What Is Hoisting, Really?
InRhythm
John on Twitter
Sponsors
Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired.
Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit.
The post Javascript: The Bad Parts with John K. Paul appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
58 min

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