Chats with Kent C. Dodds

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Alex Anderson Creates Web-Based Spaceship Controls May 19, 2020

Show notes

Thorium is the software that space centers use for the computer controls and the flight director controls of simulated space ship experiences!

The cool thing about Thorium is that it's entirely web-based. Alex is using React to build Thorium and a 3D universe. The 3D universe is being driven by react-three-fiber by Paul Henschel, which is a fantastic piece of software.

Alex says that if you are privileged enough to have the time and the energy and the resources to be able to do side projects, that you should go for it. He believes side projects give you a lot of benefits outside of just the enjoyment of doing them.

Work-life balance is essential, though. There was a time where Alex just completely stopped working on it for about a month and a half. And that was necessary for him to be able to recenter, refocus, and get in a good place where he could be motivated and energized about it again.

Homework

Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down one thing you would like to accomplish and break it down into small and simple actions that can be done over time.

Resources

Guest: Alex Anderson

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Laurie Barth Chats With Kent About Growing Outside Of Your Comfort Zone Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Laurie has a tough time saying no, and she ends up trying a lot of different things, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Attempting to learn something new gives you the fresh perspective of a beginner starting from nothing. We get comfortable and take for granted the pieces of knowledge we have on our skills.

You have to find a balance, though. It's demotivating to feel dumb all of the time. You need to use the thing you learned for some time, so you advance beyond the beginner phase of the skill. If you jump from skill to skill too fast, you'll feel like you're going nowhere. Try to figure out everything that is contributing to your success that you don't have any experience in, and these are the areas where you'll probably want to dig deeper.

Homework

Try to do something outside of your comfort zone, and use that experience to help you learn how to empathize with those who are unfamiliar with the things that you already know.

Eve Porcello Chats With Kent About Sustainably Expanding Skills Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

A lot of times, when people are learning something new, they feel, "Oh, I have to learn this fast and my manager's counting on me to learn this," and everything's super stressful. As software engineers, we continually have to learn new things, and carrying that stress is tough on our mental health, so we must learn how to mitigate it.

Don't worry about being an expert. Try to be okay with being a beginner at something. You shouldn't expect more than that from yourself when you start learning something new.

It's essential to break your goal down into multiple steps so that it's not this vast, daunting leap that you have to take. Smaller steps of minor discomfort are a lot easier to cope with.

Homework

Think of one goal you have and take 10 minutes to break it down into smaller chunks

Resources

Guest: Eve Porcello

Twitter: @eveporcello
GitHub: @eveporcello

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Ken Wheeler Chats With Kent About Going For Challenging Opportunities Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Almost every demo Ken has done at a conference was wildly out of his league technologically. The deadline for the conference pushes him to grow rapidly. Conference-driven development. Elon Musk says, "If it's physically possible, then we can make it happen." Take stock of the situation and ask yourself what the reality of it is, is it possible? If so, then you can accomplish it.

It's not possible to take the second step or even the last step unless you've taken that first step. Finding a simple way to take that first step and just going for it is critical to becoming the person that you want to be.

Even to this day, Ken still is anxious to get on stage, but it's always awesome afterward. Some talks go well, and others don't, but even if it didn't go well, you still went up there and did it. The audience is rooting for you, and despite what you might think, the majority of them don't know the subject of your talk, and the few that do still want you to succeed.

Homework

Write down three things that you've been holding back on
Choose one of those things and write down the steps that you can take to accomplish that!

Resources

Principles in Action

Guest: Ken Wheeler

Twitter: @ken_wheeler
GitHub: @kenwheeler
Website: kenwheeler.github.io
SoundCloud: thekenwheeler

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Erik Rasmussen Chats With Kent About Maintaining Open-Source Libraries Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Erik built the Redux Form library to help manage form states in Redux. He decided to open-source Redux Form, and it exploded and became very, very popular.

People kept coming up to Erik with additional use cases, and the form library itself kept growing to the point where the bundle size got out of hand and saying yes to all the requests for features created a monster.

So Erik came up with his second form library "final-form." This time he created a plugin architecture to reduce the maintenance and make the library more capable of handling unconsidered use cases.

Erik talks about the key things that need to happen for a library to take off. First, it has to be documented well, and the motivation has to get explained clearly. Second, someone who has a following needs to love it and share it with people. Third, you've got to be there on the ground, ready to make quick fixes as people give them to you.

Homework

Release some open-source software!

Resources

Guest: Erik Rasmussen

Twitter: @erikras
GitHub: @erikras
Keybase: @erikras

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Angie Jones Chats With Kent About Automated Visual Testing Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Visual testing is like snapshot testing with images. So when your application is in the state that you want it to be in, you verify this as a human being, and then utilize tools to take a picture of your application in that state.

Visual testing isn't a new concept, but the technology was previously flaky. But now, Applitools is using AI and machine learning to be able only to detect the things that we care about as human beings.

Visual testing catches issues that your scripts won't detect, and Applitools is especially powerful at it. The processing gets offloaded onto the Applitools servers, and snapshots of your app are tested on multiple platforms so you can be confident that no visual bugs get created anywhere!

Homework

Go through Angie's Visual Testing Course: Automated Visual Testing: A Fast Path To Test Automation Success

Resources

Guest: Angie Jones

Twitter: @techgirl1908
GitHub: @angiejones
Website: angiejones.tech

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Nader Dabit Chats With Kent About Keeping An Optimistic Mindset Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

How do you stay optimistic when being bombarded with negativity every day? Nader reminds us that, statistically, we are living in the safest and most prosperous period in human history. Nader went through a lot of hardship growing up, and it caused him to assume the entire world was that way, but in reality, it wasn't. Try to maintain perspective, and remember that your experiences aren't reflective of the world as a whole.

The voice in your head talks about yourself in a way that you'd never treat another person. Be mindful of yourself and treat yourself with kindness; the way you talk about yourself can make a significant impact on your happiness.

Kent shares his experience with seeing a therapist for the last year and explains how therapy isn't something not just for people who are experiencing trauma or mental illness. Everyone can benefit from having a neutral third party that helps you talk through the problems you are experiencing in life, no matter how big or small.

Reducing the amount of media you consume can improve your headspace as well. That doesn't mean to turn a blind eye to any negativity. Instead, you should learn about the bad things that are happening within your sphere of influence. It doesn't do the world any good to take on pain from something that you have no control over. Your energy is better spent taking an active part in improving the parts of the world that you can influence.

Homework

For a week, take at least a minute or so daily and write one thing that you're optimistic about.

Resources

Guest: Nader Dabit

Twitter: @dabit3
GitHub: @dabit3
Website: naderdabit.me

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Kelly Vaughn Chats With Kent About Personal Finance Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Kelly got into personal finance while she was struggling financially in grad school. Your very first step to getting your money under control should be to know where your money is going. Sit down and look at the last three months of your bank statements and categorize your purchases.

Being able to visualize and measure where your money is going is a fantastic first step for people wanting to at least see if you could make some changes to the way that you're spending your money.

After you figure out where your money is going, your second step is to make a budget. Kelly uses the envelope system. Each category of spending gets an "envelope" of money, and once there's no more money from the envelope, you can't spend any more on that category.

Homework

Figure out where your money has been going the last three months
Create a budget using an app like You Need A Budget, a notebook, or a spreadsheet

Resources

Guest: Kelly Vaughn

Twitter: @kvlly
GitHub: @kellyvaughn
Website: kvlly.com

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Jen Luker Chats With Kent About Finding Inspiration From Anywhere Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Jen puts knitting before the fact that she is a senior software engineer when she defines who she is; this doesn't make her a worse engineer than someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes code.

With each new thing you learn, whether you're good or bad at it, you'll tend to discover something about it that teaches you something new. With everything Jen learns, she tries to bring it back into the ways she interacts with the world, whether that's through some art medium or programming.

Technological progress has been an evolving process of standing on the shoulders of giants, one after another, learning how to take something they'd seen before and applied it to some new technology or new problem they were working on at the moment.

The short version is that you can find inspiration virtually anywhere, and not to close off those points of inspiration just because you're focusing on a computing problem.

Homework

Watch at least one of the talks linked under resources!

Resources

TEDxBeaconStreet: Knitting is Coding; Lindiwe Matlali
TEDxRiga: Crocheting Hyperbolic Planes; Daina Taimina
TED: A delightful way to teach kids about computers; Linda Liukas

Guest: Jen Luker

Twitter: @knitcodemonkey
GitHub: @knitcodemonkey
Website: jenluker.com

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

Henry Zhu Chats With Kent About The Responsibilities Of A Maintainer Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

Henry Zhu's transition from a programing role to a more managerial role as Babel's maintainer has been hard. As programmers, we tend to value our work based on the number of commits or pushing features. When you are a manager, you're not writing much code anymore.

There's still an expectation that maintainers should be writing code. Still, maintainers also have to triage and merge things, release process, onboard, market, write documentation, test, make videos, and give talks. Because of all this, a maintainer's time is best spent figuring out how to get more people involved with a project.

To get people interested, the maintainer has to do the job of showing people what's possible. You have to be involved in the community, and you have to like it. At a fundamental level, open-source is about service, serving other people in the community, giving back, and not expecting anything in return.

Homework

Without writing code, do one thing to contribute to open source!

Resources

Guest: Henry Zhu

Twitter: @left_pad
GitHub: @hzoo

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Website: kentcdodds.com
Twitter: @kentcdodds
GitHub: @kentcdodds
YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
Epic React: epicreact.dev

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Guest: Alex Anderson

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Homework

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Guest: Laurie Barth

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Homework

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Guest: Eve Porcello

Host: Kent C. Dodds

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Guest: Ken Wheeler

Host: Kent C. Dodds

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Guest: Erik Rasmussen

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Homework

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Guest: Angie Jones

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Homework

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Guest: Nader Dabit

Host: Kent C. Dodds

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Guest: Kelly Vaughn

Host: Kent C. Dodds

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Guest: Jen Luker

Host: Kent C. Dodds

Homework

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Guest: Henry Zhu

Host: Kent C. Dodds

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