Programming By Stealth

Latest Episodes:

PBS 137 of X — Bundling a Library with Webpack Apr 17, 2022

Show notes

We have one more thing to learn as we gear up to actually start writing modern code for Bart's HSXKPasswd tool. The last piece of our tool kit is a bundler. In this installment Bart teaches what problems bundlers solve, and he explains why he chose the bundler Webpack for our project. After learning about Webpack, Bart takes us through a worked example, bundling the Joiner module we've been working on through this part of the series. When we're done, we'll have an ES6 bundle and a Universal Module Defnition (UMD) bundle to cover both modern and more legacy needs. In the episode you'll hear me say that the exercise hit errors, and after the show we diagnosed the problem and fixed the shownotes so have no worries about that!

You can, as always, find Bart's fabulous show note tutorial for this installment at pbs.bartificer.net/...It's Showtime

PBS Tibit 4 of Y — Rethinking a Web App – from Web Server to Cloud Stack Apr 01, 2022

Show notes

Over the past few months, podfeet.com went through a period of really poor performance. My site hadn't been snappy in the last few years with page loads of up to 6 seconds, but it hit a tipping point where it was taking in excess of 40 seconds for pages to load. William Reveal and Bart migrated the services behind podfeet.com that improved performance to where most pages load in less than a quarter of a second.

In this Programming By Stealth adjacent episode, Bart wanted to walk through the structure of what makes up a web server, what a web server does, what all of the components are, and then walk us through how these things have changed in the nearly 17 years podfeet.com has been around. As we continue our journey in Programming By Stealth we are moving from the client-side to the server-side, so this lesson is quite relevant to helping our fellow learners understand what's behind the next steps we'll be taking.

There's no homework in this episode but it's also challenging to keep the pieces straight in your head so get ready for a fun and instructive "Tidbit".

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

PBS Tidbit 3 of Y Mar 19, 2022

Show notes

In this Programming By Stealth adjacent installment labeled Tidbits 3 of Y, Bart Busschots talks to us about the dangers of using other people's code in your code, and the danger of not using other people's code. He explains this seeming dichotomy and gives us ways to approach the problem taking a middle ground. He helps us think about how to choose whether to use other's code and whose code to use, and even how to ensure it's kept up to date with security patches. It's definitely a philosophical installment and it was triggered by a recent event where a developer maliciously broke his own code, impacting a lot of developers. It's actually sort of a success story of open source which I didn't expect.

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

PBS 136 of X — More Jesting Mar 05, 2022

Show notes

Bart Busschots taught us the basics of Jest last time for our Test Driven Development environment. This week we learn to group our tests using the `describe()` function in Jest. Grouping tests with describe does more than eliminate the need to comment our code, it also provides more useful output from our tests and scopes what happens inside.

As Bart describes it, we climb "Mount Jest" at one point as he explains how we can also loop our tests (instead of repeating code as we did last time) using `describe.each()()`. It's a little head bending with arrays of arrays and functions of functions but it sounds worse to describe than it actually is to read and create.

He then describes ways to run certain setup and tear down functions before and after our tests are run and why we might need to do that.

Finally, we get the last cool thing we'll need to understand about Jest, and that's how to use the `.only` and `.skip` modifiers on our tests so that we can focus on individual tests while we're chasing bugs.

For the first time in a long time, he even gives us an optional challenge to flex these new Jest muscles.

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

PBS 135 of X – Introducing Jest (and re-Introducing Test Driven Development & Unit Testing) Feb 19, 2022

Show notes

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart takes us down memory lane to 102 episodes ago when he first introduced us to the concept of test-driven development. He explains why back then he taught us how to use QUnit for our TDD work, and why it's no longer in favor with him. It's not just the advancements in technology like ES6, but it's also because QUnit makes it terribly hard to write tests and to interpret what you've written when you've been away from it for a while. He walks us through his criteria for picking a new TDD tool, and why he chose Jest for the job.

He then walks us through a worked example of how to write some simple tests on a module and of course, explains how Jest does its job running our tests. I liked it, even though my head hurt during a bit of it!

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

PBS Tibit2 – It's Ok to Play a Different Game! Feb 06, 2022

Show notes

This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond perfectly straddles the line between Programming By Stealth and Lite. While it's definitely a nerdy discussion topic, Bart Busschots is really just telling a story. He starts by explaining how he ended up a computer scientist essentially by accident, and tells us about a fantastic CS professor he had who inspired him through an assignment about a game called 8 Queens. He tells these stories as a way to explain that when I used the Terminal and `egrep` to help me solve the game Wordle a few weeks ago, it wasn't really cheating. I think whether you're a programmer or not, you'll enjoy hearing Bart explain why.

Bart's shownotes can be found at pbs.bartificer.net/...

PBS 134 of X — Firming up our Foundations (2 of 2) Jan 22, 2022

Show notes

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots finishes firming up our foundation on a few more things before we meet Jest, which will be the Test Driven Development (TDD) environment we'll be learning next time.

He explains in some adorable examples involving a parrot (named Polly of course) how getters can be used to construct short but powerful syntaxes that seem quite counterintuitive at first glance. These are heavily used by Jest, and without learning about them, they would simply look like magic. He said some purists may see this syntax as an abuse of getters but it's a pretty slick method that yields very readable APIs.

The second thing he teaches us is that functions can actually return functions. That sounds like opening a hole in the space-time continuum but it's actually quite logical and useful as Bart explains the usefulness of this really well. No parrots involved, but lots of pancakes and waffles in his examples.

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

PBS 133 of X – Firming up our Foundations (1 of 2) Jan 10, 2022

Show notes

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through some review in order to prepare us to begin our journey into test driven development (TDD) with the tool Jest which he's chosen for our TDD. He clears up some confusion on the difference between `npm install` and `npm ci`, and then he gives us more guidance on when to use which JSDoc tags, especially when documenting plain objects. He gives us a refresher on the different ways of defining functions, and especially arrow functions which are heavily used by Jest. Jest also uses function chaining heavily so he reminds us of how that works as well.

Even if you remember all of this and had it all clear in your head (I most definitely did _not_) it's great to have all of this content in one post as reference.

The next installment will continue firming up our foundation with some new concepts that are heavily used by Jest.

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

PBS 132 of X — Managing JSDoc Dec 21, 2021

Show notes

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.

PBS 131 of X – Introducing JSDoc Dec 13, 2021

Show notes

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

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