A lot of times, when people are learning something new, they feel, "Oh, I have to learn this fast and my manager's counting on me to learn this," and everything's super stressful. As software engineers, we continually have to learn new things, and carrying that stress is tough on our mental health, so we must learn how to mitigate it. Don't worry about being an expert. Try to be okay with being a beginner at something. You shouldn't expect more than that from yourself when you start learning som...
Nov 27, 2019•31 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Almost every demo Ken has done at a conference was wildly out of his league technologically. The deadline for the conference pushes him to grow rapidly. Conference-driven development. Elon Musk says, "If it's physically possible, then we can make it happen." Take stock of the situation and ask yourself what the reality of it is, is it possible? If so, then you can accomplish it. It's not possible to take the second step or even the last step unless you've taken that first step. Finding a simple ...
Nov 27, 2019•32 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Erik built the Redux Form library to help manage form states in Redux. He decided to open-source Redux Form, and it exploded and became very, very popular. People kept coming up to Erik with additional use cases, and the form library itself kept growing to the point where the bundle size got out of hand and saying yes to all the requests for features created a monster. So Erik came up with his second form library "final-form." This time he created a plugin architecture to reduce the maintenance ...
Nov 27, 2019•37 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Visual testing is like snapshot testing with images. So when your application is in the state that you want it to be in, you verify this as a human being, and then utilize tools to take a picture of your application in that state. Visual testing isn't a new concept, but the technology was previously flaky. But now, Applitools is using AI and machine learning to be able only to detect the things that we care about as human beings. Visual testing catches issues that your scripts won't detect, and ...
Nov 27, 2019•30 min•Season 2Ep. 8
How do you stay optimistic when being bombarded with negativity every day? Nader reminds us that, statistically, we are living in the safest and most prosperous period in human history. Nader went through a lot of hardship growing up, and it caused him to assume the entire world was that way, but in reality, it wasn't. Try to maintain perspective, and remember that your experiences aren't reflective of the world as a whole. The voice in your head talks about yourself in a way that you'd never tr...
Nov 27, 2019•28 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Kelly got into personal finance while she was struggling financially in grad school. Your very first step to getting your money under control should be to know where your money is going. Sit down and look at the last three months of your bank statements and categorize your purchases. Being able to visualize and measure where your money is going is a fantastic first step for people wanting to at least see if you could make some changes to the way that you're spending your money. After you figure ...
Nov 27, 2019•27 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Jen puts knitting before the fact that she is a senior software engineer when she defines who she is; this doesn't make her a worse engineer than someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes code. With each new thing you learn, whether you're good or bad at it, you'll tend to discover something about it that teaches you something new. With everything Jen learns, she tries to bring it back into the ways she interacts with the world, whether that's through some art medium or programming. Technological p...
Nov 27, 2019•29 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Henry Zhu's transition from a programing role to a more managerial role as Babel's maintainer has been hard. As programmers, we tend to value our work based on the number of commits or pushing features. When you are a manager, you're not writing much code anymore. There's still an expectation that maintainers should be writing code. Still, maintainers also have to triage and merge things, release process, onboard, market, write documentation, test, make videos, and give talks. Because of all thi...
Nov 27, 2019•33 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Jenn has been working with React since 0.13. She has a background in creative writing, and it melded well with React. One of her big early mistakes with React was focusing too hard on making components reusable. When you try to make your component one-hundred percent reusable, you end up with a massive stack of props. In our effort to make things reusable, we end up making it harder for ourselves and others. Sometimes it even makes sense to duplicate the component, change its name, and add your ...
Nov 27, 2019•30 min•Season 2Ep. 3
We're all really busy but we are also ambitious and have goals, but a lot of the time those goals aren't defined so well. It's important that our goals are well defined and manageable, we're hard on ourselves when we aren't making progress towards them. You want to expend your energy on the things that are providing you with value, and when you expend your energy beating yourself up, it's worse than wasted energy because it's energy directed at making life worse for you. Bianca started Code and ...
Nov 27, 2019•33 min•Season 2Ep. 2
When Lindsey started, she didn't know what accessibility even meant. She would see that there was an "accessibility error" and fix it, but she didn't understand why she was fixing it. A11y clicked for her when she realized that the point of accessibility was to make the web usable for people with disabilities. Code, at its core, is about people, and it allows people to use and purchase products. Ultimately we code to make people's lives better, and if you aren't making your site accessible, then...
Nov 27, 2019•31 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Shirley Wu has been freelancer since 2016, creating data visualizations for her clients. In this episode, Shirley talks about the four projects that had the most significant impact on her. In 2017 Shirley created an interactive visualization of the musical, Hamilton. It blew up on the internet. It was the first time a project of her's had a significant response. It made her realize that code could be beautiful, colorful, and inspiring. The audience might not remember the figures or the writeup, ...
Aug 05, 2019•40 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Suz started streaming because she wanted to show people that hardware coding is just like regular everyday coding, it's just for smaller, dumber computers. It's been two and a half years since she started streaming and her reasons have changed since then. Suz has a community of fourteen thousand that gathers around her stream now. Despite her now much busier schedule these days this community motivates her to keep coming back and getting open source work done. Suz talks about how you need to be ...
Aug 05, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 13
You can learn in private, or you can learn in public. 99% of developers work and learn privately in the shadows, so why shouldn't you? Something magical happened when Shawn started creating resources and sharing what he learned in public. More advanced people began to help him by correcting him when he was wrong. By learning publically, he was able to both teach and learn at the same time! "You can learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego." If you keep your identity small...
Aug 05, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Getting involved in the world of open-source isn't trivial, especially when we are new to this industry and don't a lot of technical experience. Those of us with the privilege of knowledge and expertise should lend it to others. Lift others, and one day they may do the same. Scott Hanselman talks about how he isn't a "transactional networker," he doesn't keep score or expect something in return for helping others. Living this way is freeing and fulfilling, even if at times you get burned by some...
Aug 05, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 11
When something is easy for us, it more than likely is just familiar to us. It's easy to forget how challenging it was to learn what we know. When we tell someone who is still learning that something is easy, it diminishes the accomplishment of learning something new. People who are good at things put in the time and the practice to get where they are, there isn't a shortcut to experience. We can gain experience by building things. But what do you build? In this episode, Sara Vieira talks about h...
Aug 05, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Peggy Rayzis is the engineering manager at Apollo, where she leads the developer experience team. Peggy talks about how Apollo touches every layer of development. There are a lot of ways that you can implement GraphQL in your application. It's incredibly flexible. You can even have GraphQL running entirely on the front-end! Peggy recommends that you implement it in your existing application by creating a GraphQL layer that sits between your front-end and underlying services. Why would it be wort...
Aug 05, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Lin Clark and Till Schneidereit from Mozilla discuss where WebAssembly came from and where it's going. WebAssembly was inspired by asm.js, a subset of JavaScript that could be compiled from a language such as C++. WebAssembly can take the idea further since it doesn't have the same limitations that JavaScript does. Lin and Till talk about why even a front-end developer would use WebAssembly, which leads to a discussion on one of the primary use cases of WebAssembly, performance optimization. The...
Aug 05, 2019•36 min•Season 1Ep. 8
It's challenging to sustain open source projects, a lot of time and energy is poured in without any compensation in return. Eric Berry created CodeFund to give developers who are finding it difficult to justify putting their time into open source projects a means to get compensated. Open source today is not the same as it was five years ago. Ninety-six percent of all web apps are using open source. The web relies on it. Sixty-five percent of all projects have only one or two maintainers, and the...
Aug 05, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Emma Bostian launched codingcoach.io , a free, open-source project that connects mentees with mentors. Emma discusses how she launched Coding Coach before she had a real database. It's better to have your product out there than to sit on it until it's perfect, you can always iterate. Mentoring doesn't just help others, you improve your teaching skills, and it also just looks good to be a mentor. Mentees should respect a mentor's time since they are doing it for free. When asking someone to be yo...
Aug 05, 2019•31 min•Season 1Ep. 6
In this episode, David Khourshid gives the rundown on how finite state machines can make your app more testable, more resilient to bugs, and easier to refactor. David's initial interest in finite state machines stemmed from his background in music. With music, there is a universal notation that crosses genre boundaries. David thought what if there could be music notation for logic? Well, it ends up people have been trying to figure this out for the last thirty years. A finite state machine can o...
Aug 05, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 5
What's next for React? In this second interview with Dan Abramov React's direction is discussed along with overviews of exciting new features. Dan gives a great rundown these incoming features. React suspense is going to provide a baked-in solution for the problems that async data fetching causes with component rendering, and concurrent mode is bringing non-blocking rendering. Further insight is provided into what problems sparked the need for these new features and why they were the chosen impl...
Aug 05, 2019•52 min•Season 1Ep. 4
In this episode, Kent and Dan talk about the ways in which you'll have to reconstruct your mental model of how React works in order to get the hang of hooks, and how hooks more closely align with React's intended model. React has made multiple attempts at figuring out a way to share state between components. Mixins, higher-order components, render props, and now hooks. Dan Abramov walks through what went right and what went wrong with each of the implementations prior to hooks. None of these imp...
Aug 05, 2019•45 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Cassidy Williams is an engineer at Codepen. In the last five years, Cassidy has worked for five companies. She had left each on her terms as she learned through experience what she wanted and didn't want. Figuring out what you like and what you don't like is critical for ending up somewhere that you're happy with, Cassidy calls this establishing your personal brand. The term "personal brand" has negative connotations to it, it seems unauthentic, but really what it means is figuring out who you a...
Aug 05, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In this episode, Ali Spittel, a software engineer and developer advocate at Dev.to, joins us to talk about how excellent teaching can be for not only the people who are learning from you but also for developing your skills and your career. Teaching is one of the best ways we can teach ourselves something. It requires you to build an understanding of the subject matter strong enough to explain the material to other people and answer questions. "At some point, you tell a computer what to do, and i...
Aug 05, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 1
