JavaScript Jabber

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JSJ 415: Progressive Web Apps with Maximiliano Firtman Jan 07, 2020

Show notes

Maximiliano Firtman is a mobile web developer from Buenos Ares, Argentina. He has been a developer for 24 years and his most recent focus has been on progressive web apps, or PWAs. Steve and Max reflect on the technologies they were using when they first got started in web development and talk about their experience with mobile development. One area that Max emphasized was bringing the web into the mobile space. They discuss the progression of web access on mobile and some of the available tools. Max notes that responsible design has a very high cost in web performance for mobile devices, which requires unique approaches. They discuss some of the issues with latency in mobile, even on 4G. The solution to this latency is PWAs.Progressive web apps are a set of best practices to create web apps that are installable. They can work offline at high speeds on several operating systems. Once installed, it looks like any other app on the system. Max delves into more details on how it works. He talks about how the resources for your application are managed. He assures listeners that it’s just a website that’s using a new API, they’re not changing the way the web works, and that when that API is there, the app can be installed. It will also generally use your default browser. Steve and Max discuss how local data is stored with PWAs. To write PWAs, you can use Angular, React, JavaScript, or Vue, and it’s a pretty transparent process. Max talks about some common tools used for local storage and some of the PWAs he’s worked on in the past. The benefit of using PWAs is that they generally run faster than regular web apps. To get started, Max advises listeners to install one and start exploring.Panelists

Steve Edwards

Guest

Maximiliano Firtman

Sponsors

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The Club

Maximiliano Firtman:

Llama
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Special Guest: Maximiliano Firtman.
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JSJ 414: JavaScript Jabber Still at RxJs Live Dec 31, 2019

Show notes

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber Charles Max Wood continues interviewing speakers at RxJS Live. First, he interviews Mike Ryan and Sam Julien. They gave a talk about Groupby, a little known operator. They overview the common problems other mapping operators have and how Groupby addresses these problems. The discuss with Charles where these types of operators are most commonly used and use an analogy to explain the different mapping operators. Next, Charles talks to Tracy Lee. Her talk defines and explains the top twenty operators people should use. In her talk, she shows real-world use cases and warns against gotchas. Tracy and Charles explain that you don’t need to know all 60 operators, most people only need about 5-10 to function. She advises people to know the difference between the different types of operators. Tracy ends her interview by explaining her desire to inspire women and people of minority groups. She and Charles share their passion for diversity and giving everyone the chance to do what they love. Dean Radcliffe speaks with Charles next and discusses his talk about making React Forms reactive. They discuss binding observables in React and how Dean used this in his business. He shares how he got inspired for this talk and how he uses RxJS in his everyday work. The final interview is with Joe Eames, CEO of Thinkster. Joe spoke about error handling. He explains how he struggled with this as did many others so he did a deep dive to find answers to share. In his talk, he covers what error handling is and what it is used for. Joe outlines where most people get lost when it comes to error handling. He also shares the three strategies used in error handling, Retry, Catch and Rethrow and, Catch and Replace. Charles shares his admiration for the Thinkster teaching approach. Joe explains what Thinkster is about and what makes them special. He also talks about The DevEd podcast. Panelists

Charles Max Wood

Guests

Mike Ryan
Sam Julien
Tracy Lee
Dean Radcliffe
Joe Eames

Sponsors

ABOUT YOU |aboutyou.com/apply
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CacheFly

____________________________________________________________
"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today!
___________________________________________________________ Links

Special Guests: Joe Eames, Mike Ryan, Sam Julien, and Tracy Lee.
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JSJ 413: JavaScript Jabber at RxJs Live Dec 24, 2019

Show notes

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber Charles Max Wood does interviews at RxJS Live. His first interview is with Hannah Howard at RxJS Live about her talk. Hannah is really enthusiastic about RxJS especially when it comes to frontend development. Her talk is about how to architect full-scale apps with RxJS. Hannah gives a brief summary of her talk. Charles having met Hanna previously at Code Beam asks her how functional programming and reactive programming work together in her mind. Hannah describes how she sees programming. Charles’s next interview is with Ben Lesh, a core team member of RxJS. Ben has been working on RxJS for the last four years. In his talk, he shares the future of RxJs, the timeline for versions 7 and 8. With Charles, he discusses his work on RxJS and the adoption of RxJS. Next, Charles interviews Sam Julien and Kim Maida. They gave a talk together covering the common problems developers have when learning RxJS. In the talk, they share tips for those learning RxJS. Charles wonders what inspired them to give this talk. Both share experiences where they encouraged someone to use RxJS but the learning curve was to steep. They discuss the future of RxJS adoptions and resources. Finally, Charles interviews Kim alone about her second talk about RxJS and state management. She explains to Charles that many state management libraries are built on RxJS and that it is possible to roll out your own state management solution with RxJS. They discuss why there are so many different state management libraries. Kim shares advice for those looking to roll out their own solutions.Panelists

Charles Max Wood

Guests

Hannah Howard
Ben Lesch
Sam Julien
Kim Maida

Sponsors

ABOUT YOU | aboutyou.com/apply
Sentry use the code "devchat" for 2 months free on Sentry's small plan

Links

Special Guests: Ben Lesh, Hannah Howard, Kim Maida, and Sam Julien.
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JSJ 412: Svelte and Sapper with Svelte Master Dec 17, 2019

Show notes

Noah, a.k.a. Svelte Master, is from Indiana and recently moved to San Francisco. He has been given title Computational Linguist by SoundHound. He starts the show by talking about his Youtube channel all about Svelte. Svelte is a JavaScript framework similar to React and Vue. When you write components, Svelte will compile it into Vanilla JS, CSS, or HTML, and create a small bundle that will be sent to the client. Svelte is a ‘disappearing framework’, so your bundles come out as DOM APIs and there is no Svelte in the end result. Because the Svelte framework doesn’t send with the bundle, bundle sizes are significantly smaller, and it runs on all browsers. Noah shares some Svelte’s performance statistics. Sapper is a companion technology to Svelte that gives you server side rendering, routing, code splitting, and other features. Noah talks about how to write plugins for Svelte and embedding components. One main difference between Svelte and other frameworks is that it lacks a virtual DOM. This is because since it is just compiling down to JavaScript and the framework is not sent with the package, it doesn’t need a virtual DOM and instead updates as things change. Noah talks more about how this works. Some of Svelte Master’s favorite things about Svelte is that you write less code, especially unnecessary code, and state management is simple. He talks about how routing is handled through other tools like Sapper. The panel talks about methods for testing a Svelte app, adding Svelte components into a website, and pulling in third party libraries. They discuss whether there are things that you can’t do with Svelte that would require React or Vue. The show ends with Noah talking about what the future holds for Svelte and how to get started with it. Panelists

Steve Edwards
Charles Max Wood

**To receive your 40% OFF coupon for Manning Publications (good for all our products in all formats) visit us on Facebook - click on "Send A Message"and type "YES"**Guest

Noah (Svelte Master)

Sponsors

Hasura.io
Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

____________________________________________________________> "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ____________________________________________________________Links

PicksSteve Edwards:

The Court Jester

Charles Max Wood:

Daniel Caldas:

WaniKani

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JSJ 411: Unit Testing Jest with Daniel Caldas Dec 10, 2019

Show notes

Daniel Caldas is calling from Singapore. He currently works as a software engineer for Zendesk and has also worked in Portugal and Germany. He has worked primarily on the frontend with Node and JavaScript. He talks about his experience testing JavaScript, how he got started with Jest, and why he likes it. Daniel finds Jest very easy to use and straightforward. He likes that Jest has a single reference page for documentation. He feels that Jest is largely complete out of the box and has only made a small add on to get rid of Boilerplate in some tests.Daniel explains what a snapshot, how they work, and why he prefers fixtures over factories. He gives tips on how to set up your tests so that they are easy to follow. He finds it helps to structure your scenarios in the fixture description. He talks about gotchas in Jest. While Jest is largely easy to use, Jest has been around for a while and breaking changes do happen. It’s important to check what version your code base is using. While there are a lot of free sources around Jest online, he advises listeners to stick as close to the official documentation as possible, or to people associated with Jest, and to read recent stuff. As for conventions, Jest has pretty much everything out of the box and the built in conventions make it easy to navigate any project that uses Jest.Daniel talks about some of the features available in Jest, converting observables into promises, and tricks he has used to make tests easier to put together. He talks about his method for keeping his mocks and stubs straight. He advises listeners to have some organizational rules, such as starting the imports alphabetically, and to always follow those rules. He talks about how he runs tests and what environments he uses. While Jest is normally used for unit testing, Daniel has also used it for end to end tests, and he talks about his experience with an open source project doing both types in Jest. Daniel concludes the show by advising listeners starting with JavaScript and frontend, don’t think too much about the library you’re going to use because you’ll probably end up using Jest. It’s more important to have unit tests and a proper testing framework at the beginning than anything else. He also invites listeners to check out his open source work on Github.Panelists

Aimee Knight
AJ O’Neal
Charles Max Wood

**To receive your 40% OFF coupon for Manning Publications (good for all our products in all formats) visit us on Facebook - click on "Send A Message"and type "YES"**Guest

Danile Caldas

Sponsors

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Links

PicksAimee Knight:

The Difference Between Fault Tolerance, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery

AJ O’Neal:

Rubin Report with Lindsay Shepherd

Charles Max Wood:

Daniel Caldas:

Home Alone

Special Guest: Daniel Caldas.
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JSJ 410: Iterating on Open Source Dec 03, 2019

Show notes

Today the panel is discussing iterating on open source projects. Aimee and AJ recall a conversation they had in the past on this subject and AJ talks about some of his experience iterating with open source. AJ believes that we have an obligation to capture the value of what you create so that we can reinvest and create more value, though he admits that making money in open source is a unique challenge because donations only really work if you have a project that gets billions of downloads a month. As your project grows, it has to change in order to survive, and eventually you will need to get financial support from your project. The panel agrees that some of the main issues with iterating in open source are maintaining the code and getting feedback from users, financial backing, and roadmapping and integrations.The panel discusses their methods for getting feedback from their users. This feedback is valuable because it can show you things that you missed. They acknowledge that there can be conflicts of interest between those who only use the project and those who financially support it, and you have to make a choice. Unfortunately, someone is probably going to be inconvenienced no matter what choice you make. When making these decisions, you have to consider who it helps, who it frustrates, and who it may cause problems for. The panelists talk about different ways they’ve handled making these decisions in the past. The JavaScript experts talk about the importance of having data on your user base in order to make good choices for your users. They talk about different methods for notifying your users of upcoming changes and how it will affect compatibility, and some of the challenges with communicating with your users. AJ talks about an iteration he thought was a good idea but that a lot of people hated and how he noticed that the new users liked it but the old users did not. They panel agrees that people in general don’t like change. AJ talks about what he learned from this experience. Another common issue is integrating with other services. Integrating with cloud services, or at least giving people the option to integrate gives you an opportunity to reach more people and maintain the project long term. AJ gives some final thoughts to close the show, namely that most projects never go anywhere, and that’s ok. If you’ve got something that starts going somewhere, think early on about how you can better serve the community and remember that these people are mostly grateful and semi-willing to support you. He believes that if you are helping people create value, you deserve to see the fruits of your labor. He advises listeners to stay true to your open source ideals, think about your users perspective, and that the earlier you can think about this and make these choices, the better it is for your project
Panelists

Aimee Knight
Steve Edwards
AJ O’Neal
Charles Max Wood

**To receive your 40% OFF coupon for Manning Publications (good for all our products in all formats) visit us on Facebook - click on "Send A Message"and type "YES"**Sponsors

Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

Links

PicksAimee Knight:

Debug Like a Ninja

Steve Edwards:

Jack Ryan

AJ O’Neal:

Why I, as a black man, attend KKK meetings

Charles Max Wood:

JSJ 409: Swagger and Open API with Josh Ponelat Nov 26, 2019

Show notes

Today the panel discusses the difference between Swagger and Open API with Josh Ponelat. Josh details the difference between the two. Swagger is a set of protocols around describing restful APIs. Swagger was taken over by a company called SmartBear, who donated the donated the specification to the Open Linux Foundation, and that became the Open API. Swagger is the tooling surrounding these specifications. Open API is a standardized way to describe a restful API in a YAML file. Once you’ve got a YAML file to describe your API, you can use tooling like Swagger to leverage that and take it to the next level. Using the Open API process is useful for situations where you already have an API in place, but want to codify and document it so that it’s controlled. Then going forward, you won’t introduce contradictions and it remains consistent because it’s documented in a YAML file. The process leaves room for enhancement in the future as well. Josh talks about some of the benefits of standardizing your API and some of the use cases besides tooling. A standardized API can help show developers how to use your API, SDKs, and service stubs by knowing your API is consistent in style. This makes it easier to find breaking changes and more. Josh talks more about Swagger, a finite set of tooling around Open API, most of which are open source. He talks about other tools that test APIs and do linting on YAML files. Some of the companies that use Open API include Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Josh talks about how Amazon implements Open API.Josh talks about the book he’s writing, Designing APIs with Swagger and Open API. The book goes over describing APIs today, how to design APIs without writing code first, and how to get the most out of the system. The show concludes with Josh talking about the power of consistency and writing things down on paper. He discusses where implications that the standardization of APIs has on the text industry. Panelists

Dan Shapir
Charles Max Wood

Guest

Josh Ponelat

**To receive your the 40% OFF coupon for Manning Publications (good for all our products in all formats) visit us at Facebook - click on "Send A Message"and type "YES"**Sponsors

Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

Links

PicksDan Shapir

Saga of Pliocene Exile

Charles Max Wood

Josh Ponelat

Special Guest: Josh Ponelat.
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The MaxCoders Guide To Finding Your Dream Developer Job Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is available on Amazon. Get your copy here today only for $2.99!
Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/javascript-jabber/donations
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JSJ 408: Reading Source Code with Carl Mungazi Nov 19, 2019

Show notes

Carl Mungazi is a frontend developer at Limejump in London. He is a former journalist and switched to programming in 2016. Today the panel is discussing the benefits of reading source code. Carl began reading source code because he came into programming late and from a different field. His first project was with Mithril, and he read the source code and documentation to help him understand it. The panelists discuss how reading the source code has helped them and others to improve their coding. They compare reading and understanding source code to learning a foreign language, and discuss different methods. Carl gives some suggestions for reading source code effectively. He advises people to be patient and step through the code. Accept that you will probably take a wrong path at some point or another, but the more you read, the more you will see patterns in how libraries are structured. He also encourages listeners to approach the authors, as they are often happy to lend a hand. Reading source code is an active approach of stepping through, debugging, putting in break points, checking the stack, and so forth. It’s also important to do outside research. Since he has been reading source code, Carl has come to prefer plain JavaScript and libraries with as little code as possible. The panel discusses the benefits of small, simple libraries. Carl gives examples of techniques that he learned from reading a library source code and how he applied it to his own coding style. Reading source code has made him more careful about mixing logic and UI, and now he separates them. He also is more confident in seeing a problem, going to a preexisting library, and just importing the fix for that problem rather than the whole library. Reading source code is really about understanding the code you use in your project. It may slow you down, but you’ll be thankful in the long term because it will help you solve future bugs more efficiently. Carl talks more about his debugging process. He still relies on a debugger, but reading a library helps you to see patterns and guess the output of a function. These patterns persist in other libraries as well. Once you can guess correctly what will happen, you go back to reading the code and find instances where the output is unexpected, and fix it. Carl’s closing thoughts are that through reading source code, he has learned that although code is used differently in each library, they are all written in the same language, and therefore interrelated. This gave him more confidence in reading code because they’re all fundamentally the same. When a bug is discovered, he encourages listeners to look at the source code before googling a solution. Panelists

AJ O’Neal
Dan Shapir
Steve Edwards
Charles Max Wood

Guest

Carl Mungazi

Sponsors

Hasura.io
Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
Adventures in Angular

Links

PicksAJ O’Neal

Dan Shapir

Programming Pearls book
Lord of Light

Steve Edwards

Jabra Elite 65T

Charles Max Wood

Carl Mungazi

Follow Carl @CarlMungazi and carlmungazi.com
EcmaScript Spec
HTML 5.2
Snarky Puppy

Special Guest: Carl Mungazi.
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JSJ 407: Reactive JavaScript and Storybook with Dean Radcliffe Nov 12, 2019

Show notes

Dean is a developer from Chicago and was previously on React Round Up 083. Today he has come over to JavaScript Jabber to talk about reactive programming and Storybook. Reactive programming is the opposite of imperative programming, where it will change exactly when needed instead of change only when told to. Reactivity existed long before React, and Dean talks about his history with reactive programming. He illustrates this difference by talking about Trello and Jira. In Trello, as you move cards from swimlane to another swimlane, everyone on the board sees those changes right away. In Jira, if you have 11 tabs open, and you update data in one tab, probably 10 of your tabs are stale now and you might have to refresh. Reactive programming is the difference between Trello and Jira.The panel discusses why reactive JavaScript is not more widely used. People now tend to look for more focused tools to solve a particular part of the problem than an all in one tool like Meteor.js. Dean talks about the problems that Storybook solves. Storybook has hot reloading environments in frontend components, so you don’t need the backend to run. Storybook also allows you to create a catalogue of UI states. JC and Dean talk about how Storybook could create opportunities for collaboration between engineers and designers. They discuss some causes of breakage that automation could help solve, such as styles not being applied properly and internationalization issues. Dean shares how to solve some network issues, such as having operators in RxJs. RxJs is useful for overlapping calls because it was built with cancelability from the beginning. Dean talks about his tool Storybook Animate, which allows you to see what the user sees. Storybook is an actively updated product, and Dean talks about how to get started with it. The show concludes with Dean talking about some things coming down the pipe and how he is actively involved in looking for good general solutions to help people write bulletproof code. Panelists

JC Hiatt

With special guest: Dean RadcliffeSponsors

Hasura, Inc.
Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan
Adventures in Angular

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood will be out on November 20th on Amazon. Get your copy on that date only for $1. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Links

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