Jeremy Fairbank, the author of “Programming Elm” (Pragmatic Programmers), visits Elm Town to talk about his new book and how it teaches Elm, and about writing tech books in general.

Thank you to our sponsors, Ellie, Culture Amp and Joel Clermont.

Special thanks to Xavier Ho (@Xavier_Ho) for editing and production of this episode!

Recording date: 4 May 2019

Guests

• Jeremy Fairbank (@elpapapollo)

Show Notes

00:00:00 Introduction

• Programming Elm (website)
• Programming Elm (book)
• Test Double

00:00:51 Sponsors

• Ellie
• Culture Amp
• Joel Clermont

00:02:16 How Jeremy got started in Elm and writing books

• Solving the Boolean Identity Crisis (elm-conf 2017)
• Toward a Better Front End Architecture: Elm (Codemash 2017)

00:05:55 Elm as a hobby, writing things polished enough for yourself

00:07:46 Using Elm in Production and client stories

• Richard Feldman’s elm-spa-example

00:10:55 Experience as a technical book writer

00:13:16 Teaching patterns progressively

00:16:00 Writing hard chapters as Elm 0.19 comes out

00:17:53 Writing books assuming reader has no Internet

00:20:25 Test driven development and type systems

00:24:40 Writing is lonely / thank you Emily

00:27:27 Editor relationship and learning from them

00:29:18 Deciding where the end goal should be for a beginner's book

00:31:34 Sequel or cookbook for the Elm community

• elm-css
• elm-ui

00:34:01 Modelling transition states

00:35:13 Ports and subscriptions / web sockets chapter

00:39:46 Fuzzing and testing

00:42:25 Thank you, good bye and how to get the book