Egghead.io Developer Chats

Today our guests and host talk about what pushed them to start living healthier lifestyles and what they are doing to maintain it. Leonard was 280 pounds when he was 23 at his heaviest, Taylor was 19 and 287 pounds, and John was 320 pounds.Leonard made a change due to having health issues with his heart, he got on P90x and after a year of it moved on to much better things, this got him to a muscular 190. John began because he failed a breathing test and only had 50% lung capacity, he got it into his head that he was a healthy person now and started using the elliptical and not eating junk food. Taylor was turning 20 as a milestone and decided to make a change by kicking soda, going vegetarian, riding his bike, and walking around more. His goal was never to get a six pack but just to live a healthier life.It has been five years since Leonard's initial push to get fit. He says that the most significant thing has been finding a sustainable diet and exercise program that he can do for the rest of his life, well i

We are joined by Brian Vaughn. Brian is on Facebook's Core React Team. He also contributes to a lot of open source products in the javascript space.While Brian went to college to study Graphic Design, he ended up transitioning into programming. During college, he did a lot of graphic design consulting work, as a way to pay his way through school. Eventually, he agreed to create a website for a client and found that programming was a much better fit.Brian built react-virtualized during his time he spent at Treasure Data. The company is really into open source, and many of his team members had projects out there. When they were writing the console, they used Facebook's fixed data table.However, it did not have the features that they wanted. So Brian volunteered and built what would be the first version of react-virtualized.The exposure he got from sharing react-virtualized with the community is what landed him the job on the React Core Team. A developer's success tends to come from sharing the cool thing they b

John Lindquist asks Evan You when exactly did he become a developer? Evan talks about how the whole thing was a gradual process with no definite "I'm a developer now!" moment. Evan had a degree in art and art history, but he was finding it hard to find work. So Evan went back to school and enrolled in a design and technology program where everyone was forced to learn to code, this is where he first learned Javascript and found great enjoyment in using it.Google's Chrome experiments are what drove Evan to learn Javascript on a deeper level. Evan landed a job at Google Creative Labs after he created and put a portfolio of his prototypes out there once he thought himself to be good at programming. Google Creative Labs were looking for someone who could bring in design and build cool things quickly, they contacted Evan, and things sort of just fell together.Google Creative Labs was where Evan first started his work on Vue. As the project grew, the team started to use Angular 1. it had too many features that they

Today Joel catches up with Iheanyi Ekechukwu. Iheanyi is a Product Engineer currently working at DigitalOcean. He previously worked at IBM on Watson. They also talk about Iheanyi's education, stack, and side projectsIheanyi started out majoring in Computer Engineering, but switched to Computer Science after he figured out hardware just wasn't for him. He now lives and works in Brooklyn and spends most of his time coding (though he always brings his design skills to the table).Iheanyi's design comes from a dual degree program at Notre Dame, the college where he graduated. He noticed a lot of subpar interfaces coming from pure programmers, and he was frustrated with that, so he took his school's opportunity to learn design and apply it to his work. Even if he isn't a designer, he uses his skills daily to communicate with designers and make whatever he works on that much better.Iheanyi started using Ember back during college. He was frustrated by his school's class search interface, and he set out to improve it.

Joel interviews Michel Weststrate, author of Mobx and his new library, Immer. Today they get into the power of Immer, its early success on Github, common mistakes in state management, and what is next for Mobx.Immer is a light-weight, immutable state-management tool. Michel talks with Joel about some of its capabilities. Immer takes an object and a function and can track all the changes made to that object, it then gives you back the original object and a mutated copy. Immer can replace reducers, Michel calls them "producer" functions as they "produce" the new state.Joel then asks Michel "what makes state management so hard for people and are they overcomplicating it?" This question leads to Michel explaining that people don't think enough about the structure of their state enough up front. When you talk about state, there are three distinct concepts, values, references, and identities. However, people tend to only think of state purely as data. "You have to think about what is going to store it and what is g

John Lindquist speaks with Jack Doyle, the creator of Greensock. They discuss many things including the motivation behind the creation of Greensock, managing GSAP forums, and how he transitioned from Flash to Javascript.Jack didn’t initially create Greensock to be a monetized business, but rather a helpful tool for other developers. He was working at an ad firm doing animation work, and it was there that he found the inspiration to create Greensock.The Robert Penner easing equations were like magic for Jack. Such simple equations that could create such cool effects were terrific. He talks about how he doesn't consider himself a math wiz in the slightest. The visual feedback that animation gives with the equations however really help him solidify the concepts.Jack's success turning his side project into a successful business is genuinely impressive. It was a stressful time for him; he was working for the agency still at the time. People don't feel safe with a product that might lose support any day, so he goes

John Lindquist interviews Sarah Drasner, a senior cloud developer over at Microsoft and a Vue core team member. She is also known for making super cool animations. Today they discuss what got her from an art background to a full-time developer, resistance to change, why Vue is terrific, and the GreenSock animation platform (GSAP).Sarah's background was very unusual for a developer. She graduated with a major in printmaking and became a scientific illustrator for a nature museum. She relates drawing to program in that it's just a series of formalized steps. Many people say they can't draw, but if they just opened up and learned the process they would become technically proficient in drawing!Sarah also talks about how awesome GSAP is. Through benchmarking, she found that GSAP performed even better than native technologies when working with SVGs. She then gets into MorphSVG, and how it lets you transition between two SVGs and all sorts of things to create transitions.Finally, she discusses how she stays motivate

Joel Hooks interviews Andre Staltz, an open-source hacker, and creator of Cycle.js. Andre quit his job to become an open-source hacker and now spends 30% of his time on open-source development and 40% on the Scuttlebutt project.Today they discuss the current web's stagnation, the vision of the peer to peer web, and what André is doing to reach that goal. They'll also discuss things that are more in Javascript land, such as Cycle.js and the callbag spec.Scuttlebutt is a web protocol, like HTTP. It's like a vast array of JSON objects that sync between two computers whenever they are both on the same network; this enables data to never reach an outside server, a true peer to peer network! Andre goes into his work on the project and why he believes it is necessary for the future of the web.But what is the peer to peer web and why is it better/different than the internet as we know it? Andre says that we are reaching a point where innovation is beginning to stagnate, where it is just enough to have Google, Amazon,

John Lindquist, co-founder of egghead.io, interviews Michael Jackson, co-creator of the react-router library, and co-founder of React Training. Michael discusses his experiences with running a massively popular repo with a relatively small code-base, pioneering of new features, and the future of CDN based importing.Michael gets into the early days of the react-router repo, and what he had to do to steward the library. "In open-source, you are not just coding all day." It's mostly management, with it being a relatively small code-base that had a lot of users created a situation where you had to have excellent communication and a lot of deliberateness with what you change.React is just Javascript, meaning that it enables multiple solutions and allows innovation within the library. It also means that there will be some discourse in the direction that things should go. Michael also discusses how to keep an open dialogue with the React community, even though doing so may pose some challenges.Michael is extremely e

John Lindquist interviews Ben Clinkinbeard, a veteran developer and egghead instructor. He currently works as a consultant, focusing on data visualization. Ben discusses his career path, the benefits of having a mentor, and the importance of Data Driven Documents.Ben talks about how he worked on a multi-year project for the Colorado Department of Education where he was visualizing aggregate standardized testing data. He discusses his experience there and how it left a long lasting enjoyment of the craft. He also talks about why he chose D3 for his data visualization work, and how he feels that it's the best option in the JS space.A lot of companies have D3 as a "nice to have" but not many devs have that skill. There is a lot of demand but not enough supply. Seeing this, Ben created a screencast for egghead as our very first instructor! His interest in info-products sparked and he talks about his experience and the challenges he faced building his email course and then a full-fledged D3 and SVG book.Transcript

John Lindquist has a conversation with the Mark Shust, an expert with Git and Docker. They talk about the 12-factor style of building an application and why devs should have a standard method.Often developers don’t have a standard process with git. Mark talks about the gitflow workflow, a way of working with features and managing how that feature gets merged into the code base.Though due to working with so many branches gitflow has its complexities. So, Mark trimmed it down and created a new workflow he calls git ship, which is gitflow without the development and hotfix branches.Before Docker, Mark was running through a dependency hell. Though with Docker Mark was just able to deploy an image and not have to worry about anything. Docker is like a VM but without all the memory overhead! You can even deploy as many images as you want at a time. You can run Postgres, Node servers, and also use entirely different languages in each image!Check out Mark’s course which covers all mentioned topics, Build a Twelve-Fac

John talks with Juri Strumpflohner, an industry expert and angular trainer; and Rob Wormald, an Angular core development team member, getting into how Angular has evolved with the 2.0 release, powerful new features, their favorite libraries, and where the future is taking it.Angular has gotten much better under the hood. Rob talks about how the Angular team is working on really improving the code while still keeping the public API stable. He also talks about the team's ongoing debate on where to improve the code. Faster? Smaller? Currently, the team has chosen to work on making it smaller and has improved the bundle size of Angular.One of the new things about Angular that people are most excited about is the Elements and CLI Schematics libraries. Juri talks about how Elements opens up a "whole new world," allowing people not to have to resolve the same problems over and over again by letting them create reusable angular components.One of the hardest things to learn with Angular was the design and architecture

Kent C. Dodds, a leading React expert, speaks with John Lindquist and Joel Hooks, the co-founders of egghead, about how React is a fantastic technology to learn for both newcomers to programming and Javascript grey-beards alike.Kent talks about how great componentizing your code is. No longer are you going in and writing HTML for all your pages, you are now writing powerful and useful javascript components.The concepts that React got built upon don't just apply to React code. Joel talks about how he taught the React style of componentized code, but using Angular in the workshops he has run.Kent and Joel also discuss the importance of ES6. There are still new Javascript tutorials that are get written in ES5, Joel explains why this is shortsighted. The future of Javascript is moving to ES6. Not only that but ES6 is an excellent improvement over ES5.New and powerful features can be leveraged with it, spread syntax, arrow functions, modules. These features are the direction Javascript is moving.So check it out. L

Joel Hooks co-founder of egghead.io, interviews Dan Abramov, co-author of Redux. They discuss the "Redux phenomenon" and the notion of improving the developer experience.Dan's Redux course has been the most popular course on egghead.io for years. What caused Redux to blow up as it did? Dan is here today to talk about the problems he faced that inspired him to write this framework, and all the experiences he had that led to it.Joel and Dan talk about how quickly functional programming concepts pushed their way into the mainstream. When they were younger object oriented was how you programmed, Gang of Four was like their bible. However, Dan talks about the problems he was facing and how they inspired him to create Redux.Dan's belief that user experience starts with the developer also inspired Redux. The notion that a developer should suffer is silly. Having a tool that is a joy to use and allows a programmer just to create things is invaluable.The frustration of getting started with React was enormous. You had

Will Button and Miller Hooks, two experienced Python developers, have a conversation about the differences between Python and Javascript, and what that means to a new programmer.Python is downright awesome for a beginner, due to it being more readable and there not being a mountain of frameworks that all seem like completely separate languages. Not only that but there are amazing tools that enable a beginner to just jump right in and create.Python is learnable to the point that even people outside of software development are using it as a tool to automate annoying manual tasks. Scripting away all the hard repetitive tasks at work until everyone thinks they are some kind of wizard.One of the tools mentioned in the podcast is the wonderful Cookiecutter Django. A great tool for beginners who don't want to deal with a million installs and an array of different skills just to get a project deployed.The other tool mentioned, The Jupyter Notebook, gets python up and running right in your browser. Inline code and ric

In this episode John sits down to talk to Paul Frend and Brian Lonsdorf (aka Dr Boolean) about functional programming, and its practical use cases on the job. Paul has released a new course on egghead.io covering the topic of transducers that is the spark for this conversation.Transducers are a a useful pattern that can deliver performance and readability, but are often misunderstood or obscure to many programmers. Along with transducers you'll learn more about monoids, folds, lenses and so much more.Transcript"Functional JavaScript with Paul Frend and Brian Lonsdorf (Dr Boolean)" TranscriptResourcesProfessor Frisby Introduces Composable Functional JavaScriptQuickly Transforming Data with Transducersflunc opticspartial.lensesBrian LonsdorfTwitterGithubegghead.ioPaul FrendTwitterGithubegghead.ioJohn LindquistTwitteregghead.ioGithubWebsite

Two leading TypeScript experts, Marius Schulz and Basarat Ali Syed, discuss their initial reactions and excitement for TypeScript and how it has evolved and earned their trust over the years. TypeScript has been the main focus of many of their products and trainings and they’ve gained their expertise by closely following the project and digging deep into the TypeScript compiler code. As TypeScript continues to improve with features, tooling, and performance they share their opinions on what they’re most looking forward to in the near future.Transcript"Using TypeScript with Basarat and Marius Schulz" TranscriptResourcesAdvanced Static Types with TypeScriptMarius SchulzTwitterGithubWebsiteBasaratTwitterGithubWebsiteJohn LindquistTwitteregghead.ioGithubWebsite