egghead.io developer chats

Keith Peters joins us today to talk about his experiences with experimenting with code and math, the transition from Flash to Go, woodworking and blacksmithing, and getting books published.Keith talks to us a bit about multi trochoids; they're what happens when you take a circle and roll it around something, like a spirograph. He was inspired to do this project by Sodaplay, a site back in the flash days that had stuff you could hook up to various engines.What language did Keith use to write his multi trochoid experiments? Initially, Keith wrote it in Go, but he wanted to put it out on the web and make it interactive, so he ported it to Javascript.Back in the 90s Keith worked with Flash, when Flash left he moved over to Javascript and using the html5 canvas. Javascript is great if you want it live on the web but for still images and animations it was a pain in the neck, so Keith tried out Rust, Python, and finally settling on Go.Keith is into some non-coding hobbies like woodworking and knife making, Joel has even bought some of his knives. It started when Keith wanted to build an arcade cabinet, he bought tools and got into learning how to use them. Keith has found a lot of crossover with working with his hands and building things with code, both of them can be boiled down to learning a technology to create things and solve problems.Finally, Keith explains the pros and cons of going through a publisher to get your book out. He says that self-publishing is easier than ever, but a publisher provides you with a lot of assistance with editing, marketing, artwork, and a healthy dose of pressure.Transcript"Learning and Experimenting with Physical and Digital Mediums with Keith Peters" TranscriptResources:Trochoid Experimentsplayingwithchaos.netKeith Peters:TwitterGithubWebsiteJohn Lindquist:TwitterWebsite

Dave Smith is on the Alexa Team at Amazon, he hosts the Soft Skills Engineering podcast and headed up the recent Utah JS Conference.Recently Dave asked on Twitter "on a scale of 1 - 10 in difficulty how would you rate the task of writing a function that iterates over a list of strings and returns the top 10?" This sparked up a lot of good, and most people rated it a 2-3 until people started asking "wait, is this question in an interview context? In that case, it's a solid 10." Dave talks about how the external stresses of an interview can turn even a "simple" question into a very stressful and challenging experience.The topic of interview "red flags" comes up, and Dave explains how the biggest one is refusing to answer a question. He says that even if you don't have an answer to something try to follow up with more questions and have humility, you are there to present yourself. Dave also says not to make up or guess at something if you don't know the answer, try to ask them to rephrase the question and give the angle of your own understanding.Dave has his own excellent podcast with his co-host Jamison Dance called Soft Skills Engineering, check it out in the link below.Transcript"Success and Failure in the Interview Process with Dave Smith" TranscriptResources:Soft Skills Engineering PodcastUtah JS ConferenceDave Smith:LinkedInGithubTwitterMediumJohn Lindquist:TwitterWebsite

Today we are joined by Eve Porcello, who teaches Javascript, React, and GraphQL with Moon Highway. She is also the author of the books Learning React and Learning GraphQL.Eve explains her process in preparing her conference presentations and how she uses techniques she learned in her theatre and improv background to really bring something professional and engaging to the stage.Why is GraphQL blowing up recently? Eve says she believes it's because people realize that are a lot of clients that need data and they only need to load the smallest amount of data that's necessary.Everyone always says to have a project app to learn something new but what do you even build if you have "no good ideas"? Eve talks about what makes a good learning project. Keep the scope really small. Some variant of a to-do app is a great project.Finally, Eve talks about her work with the High Fives Foundation. High Fives works with injured extreme sports athletes to help them pay for the high health care costs of an injury.Transcript"Eve Porcello on GraphQL" TranscriptResources:Moon HighwayEve Porcello - Everything You Need to Know About GraphQL in 3 ComponentsLearning GraphQLGatsbyHigh Fives FoundationEve Porcello:GithubTwitterMediumO'ReillyJoel Hooks:TwitterWebsite

Jason Lengstorf is a developer on the GatsbyJS team.Jason didn't start his career even remotely in the tech field. He was a musician.Jason's band didn't have much money, so he learned design to make merch, learned some markup to edit their myspace, eventually learned to build a website for them, then learned backend so his bandmates could upload images and post things.Jason talks about Gatsby's plans to compete with the more seamless WordPress model. He also talks about gatsby's differences from WordPress and the use cases for each service.One of Gatsby's strengths is how good it is for learning Javascript and React, you can quickly go from the command line to getting stuff on the screen in two minutes, much like create-react-app, the differences is that with Gatsby you get a data layer and a good deployment story.Finally, they talk about what it's like to manage a repo that has 964 contributors, 5500 commits, and 936 issues. It was more chaotic in the early days, but they have brought on some people who are helping manage it and are defining better processes.If you are interested in learning Gatsby, they have recently put much work into revamping their official tutorials.Check them out hereTranscript"Jason Lengstorf on GatsbyJS" TranscriptTopics:His early musical aspirations that lead to his career as a developerGatsby's goals in creating an agnostic unified data layer.The differences between Gatsby and other static site generatorsGatsby 2 and its many performance upgradesManaging a large and active repositoryResources:GatsbyGatsby on TwitterGatsby TutorialsNetlifyJason Lengstorf:WebsiteTwitterGithubJohn Lindquist:TwitterWebsite

On this episode, I get the chance to speak with Lynne Tye, the creator of Key Values, a place for Software Developers to find a company that fits their values beyond just what tech stack they use or salary they provide.Lynn has had a diverse career and only started coding in 2015. Once she cut her teeth freelancing, she realized it was hard to find the right company to work with. When job listings and recruiters proved unhelpful, the idea for Key Values was born.Tune in to hear us talk about finding the right company culture, work/life balance and why it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, and the value of hands-on involvement.Transcript"Lynne Tye, founder of keyvalues.com" TranscriptTopics:Weighing the importance of your timeWhat does work/life balance mean to youWhat it takes to launch your projectWhy loving what you do is so importantTaking investment moneyAmbition and expectations with yourselfLynne’s previous career path vs. her current oneFiguring out what works for you in your educationStarting a business when you just started to programResources:Key ValuesIndie HackersApprenticeship PatternsHackers and PaintersfreeCodeCampNathan Barry - Authority30x500Lynne TyePersonal TwitterKey Values TwitterJoel Hooks:TwitterWebsite

Jen Luker is a software engineer at Formidable Labs Inc. She has worked as a full-stack developer using PHP, Javascript, and CSS, but has a particular fondness for frontend technologies.Today, we discuss the issue of accessibility and how focusing on making websites and software more accessible should be a constant consideration, particularly since it taps into an underserved market. Tune in to hear on discussion on this vital and fascinating topic.Transcript"Jen Luker, a11y champion" TranscriptTopics:The Internet and accessibilityHow loading times affect accessibilityHow accessibility helps everyoneMissing out on business by not being accessibleThe importance of making accessibility a regular part of the conversationQuotes:“One of the benefits of incorporating a lot of these accessibility features is that they end up helping everyone.” -Jen Luker“Only about one in ten websites, according to an audit that DQ did, is accessible.” -Jen LukerResources:Formidable Labs Inc.Deque aXeJen Luker:WebsiteTwitterGithubJoel Hooks:TwitterWebsite

Shawn "swyx" Wang is an infinite builder, dual-class CFA, and Developer. Shawn currently works for Netlify.Tune in to hear Shawn talk about what it means to be an infinite learner and builder and how he uses this approach to further his career.Transcript"swyx (Shawn Wang) on infinite building" TranscriptTopics:Infinite learningInfinite buildingJavascript fatigueEngagementFighting feelings of inadequacyQuotes:“I changed myself from a financial career...I thought that was a stable thing...I realized that I needed to move on from that…” -Shawn Wang“You should learn just in time, not just in case.” -Shawn Wang“If you actively write stuff and put stuff out...that you are interested in, guess what? People come and engage with you…” -Shawn WangShawn Wang:eggheadWebsiteTwitterJoel Hooks:TwitterWebsite

Henry Zhu is currently a steward for Babel, and today he'll be discussing the management and lifestyle side of working on an open source project full-time.The financial side to open source is interesting. Henry talks about where he gets his money and how he can be financially independent while still working on open source full time. Most of the money comes from donations through Open Collective and Patreon. A lot of the donations come from users, but corporations do donate as well. Henry also discusses the stability of it, and how the NPR model of asking for donations can lead to uncertainty about the next month.Henry says he's enjoying the management and marketing side of being a steward about as much as he enjoys coding. It's a side that people don't often think about with open source. This side of it includes a lot of marketing and interacting with the greater community, as well as the other maintainers and contributors to babel.How does Henry handle all this responsibility when there is no one above him telling him when to take a break, or when to go on vacation? Henry and Joel talk about having a positive "selfishness", and taking care of yourself so that the project can prosper. If you want to be doing it for years you have to make sure that you don't burn out.Transcript"Henry Zhu, Maintainer of Babel" TranscriptResources:BabelThe Power of HabitYou Are What You LoveTiny HabitsKai DavisHenry Zhu:TwitterWebsiteGithubPatreonOpen CollectiveJoel Hooks:TwitterWebsite

Today we are joined by Phil Pluchthun, creator of the programming font Dank Mono and core contributor to the styled-components library. Phil will be talking about his work in design and programming, styled components, the process of making a font, and finally some advice to anyone who wants to make a font of their own.So what are styled components? It's a new component-based CSS and Jest library. It's all about using these small styled components that you put in instead of HTML. It's nice because you don't have to create a whole new component that renders for some simple styling.Phil talks about as a developer he's always been in a role where he's had to work closely with designers and provide feedback for them. Over time he started to work more with design projects, and as he worked for small startups without a lead design, he found himself filling that role.Dank Mono is Phil's first font, He's always enjoyed typography, and as he's gone along it starting turning out better than he thought. When he started, he just wanted to make some ligatures for Operator Mono, but there were some terms in there that would prevent him from ever being able to share it.In the beginning, Phil was doing every letter from scratch. He started with an h because it has an excellent shape that can be reused with many letters. Halfway through he learned that Glyphs app supports components, so he had to start over after a week!Phil encourages anyone who is not entirely satisfied with the fonts available to think about what they'd want to change. He recommends to start with Glyphs app and watch and read its related talks and tutorials and to start with a single letter to see how you like it!Transcript"Phil Pluckthun, Creator of Dank Mono" TranscriptResources:Dank MonoGlyphsPhil Pluckthun:TwitterGithubMedium BlogJohn Lindquist:TwitterWebsite

We are joined by Ives Hoorne, a developer at Catawiki and creator of code sandbox. Today he talks about how he began writing code, how Minecraft modding made him love it, his interest in the company Catawiki and how he taught himself web development to work there, and finally the future for his projects.Ives began coding at 11 years old. He was fascinated by secret languages, so he and his friend made a program in Visual Basic that would jumble text and another that would decipher the text. They would send these to each other as public facebook messages. It fell off after this project for awhile. After a few years, Ives got back into it when Minecraft came around, and he started writing mods for it.The success and popularity of Code Sandbox made Ives happy. He enjoys how it became popular and how some of the bigger names such as Dan Abramov started talking about it. Though Ives discussions about how this positive feedback caused him to attach his self-worth to the project, and how he had to let that go so he wouldn't be hurt by snarky feedback and other forms of negativity related to his project.There were a couple of surprises in the development of Code Sandbox. Code Sandbox stores all files and directories in their Postgres database. When they fork Code Sandbox, they copy all the files, directories, and sandboxes over. Ives thought this wouldn't scale but somehow they now have 400k sandboxes, and the database is only four gigabytes! One of the negative surprises was when there was an error in the sandbox when someone tries to share their sandbox, the preview service would try over and over again to take a snapshot. The following month their hosting bill was a dozen times the price as it usually was!Ives' first experience speaking at a conference was much better than he expected. When he was presenting, he noticed that he was talking with a bunch of people who were willing to listen to him. It was such a cool experience for him that he now loves speaking at conferences for him. Ives says he wants to start talking about things besides Code Sandbox, such as UI driven development for example. He says that it can be greatly improved, npm installing is still manually typing npm install package-name. He says that this can be made much better by being able to search for dependencies and directly add them with a single click.Finally, Ives talks about his plans for Code Sandbox. He plans on adding a dashboard because currently, it's very cumbersome to navigate to your sandbox. The dashboard will give you the ability to put sandboxes in directories organizing them that way. They are also managing offline support. Finally, they are adding team support so multiple people can all work on a sandbox at once.Transcript"Ives Van Hoorne, creator of CodeSandbox" TranscriptResources:Code SandboxcatawikiIves Van Hoorne:GithubWebsiteTwitterJohn Lindquist:TwitterWebsite