J.C. Hiatt put together the conference MagnoliaJS in the town of Jackson, Missouri to help his community and combat the growing problem of brain drain in his state. MagnoliaJS is not only for his community, but it was put together with the help of it too. J.C. put it together, publically by using Github issues, blogging, and posting about it on Twitter. The community responds well when you are genuine and trying to do something good, and bringing them in and giving them a sense of ownership is w...
Jul 08, 2019•18 min•Ep. 47
What do we do when all of our needs are met when we are making seventy-five thousand plus a year, working for a company with some prestige, have a home, and don't have to worry about food. Jason Lengstorf wrestled with this after the company he was contracting with didn't have anything for him to do, but kept him around. New goals have to be set, and growth still has to happen. Jason discovered that what he wanted was to help other people grow in their personal and professional lives. To help ot...
Jun 01, 2019•38 min•Ep. 46
Teaching provides a learner with more information, but the information isn't the only thing that is required to teach effectively. Doing is almost just as essential as the information itself for the learner to solidify what was taught. Creating an effective learning path is challenging, and we tend to start from what we know and take it from there. Janelle challenges the tendency to start from our knowledge, and instead, we should start from where we want our learners to end up being and work ba...
May 17, 2019•30 min•Ep. 45
Jen Looper, developer advocate and the founder of Vue Vixens, didn't study software development in college, she has a Ph.D. in French Literature. Her degree might seem unrelated, but it strengthened her ability to explain complex ideas as well as her overall communication abilities, skills that are essential for her role as a developer advocate. These skills also come into play in her work building the Vue Vixens community, which now has over 20+ chapters all over the world! The workshop has bee...
May 14, 2019•32 min•Ep. 44
There's a kind of "black box" mystery that surrounds illustrators and programmers, to someone who isn't one their skills seem like a form of magic, but to someone who is these skills are just the tools that they've been learning to use through time and hard work. Maggie is the course logo illustrator at egghead.io, and she has the challenge of turning the concepts being taught in the course into something more visually concrete. The challenge isn't necessarily the drawing, but the research that ...
May 03, 2019•31 min•Ep. 43
JavaScript fatigue is a topic that has been trending for a while now. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the constant influx of new technology, but it's also thrilling to learn the latest cool new thing! Stacey Mulcahy discusses how she embraces this deluge of technology by being a generalist, allowing her to make connections with more people than she would have if she specialized in one thing. Stacy is a Maker, a kind of tech-based DIYer and inventor. Creativity is, of course, important for the ...
Apr 29, 2019•33 min•Ep. 42
Web development is a fantastic field where people, for little to no money, can self-teach everything you need to make a career, and it's amazing, right? That doesn't mean that there isn't a time cost though, it isn't easy, but the internet has an overwhelming amount of information that you can use to teach yourself. Authors who write this free content are the life-blood of the internet and provide an invaluable service to countless people. However, in the sea of information, it's easy for your c...
Mar 28, 2019•33 min•Ep. 41
Marcy Sutton is the Head of Learning at GatsbyJS, but what does that mean? One of Gatsby's core focuses is the community, and a part of that is making the experience with Gatsby as friendly as possible. A large part of making Gatsby friendly is having excellent documentation, so that learning and debugging experiences would be smooth. So the learning experience is smooth but what is Gatsby's potential on the web? Marcy talks about how Gatsby has the potential to make a huge impact. Currently Wor...
Mar 15, 2019•39 min•Ep. 40
Sara Vieira, developer advocate and professional maker of dumb shit, talks through why she does her weird experiments on the internet. Sometimes it is out of need, but honestly a lot of the time it is a random thing that she thinks of or something that someone says that brings up the idea, and she just has to make it. A lot of it is out of boredom, and also procrastination from other projects that she just doesn't want to do. Sara calls herself a lazy developer, but that doesn't mean she isn't w...
Mar 12, 2019•43 min•Ep. 39
Today we are joined by Ali Spittel, a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at dev.to, who speaks with us about: The skills she gained from a developer teaching job How she kept up on her coding skills without writting production code by doing daily code challenges Why she began to blog and how she made a habit out of it Blogging on a platform vs having your own website Using visual feedback to teach beginners to code Involving herself in the local developer community Transcript "Developing Y...
Feb 22, 2019•28 min•Ep. 38
Today we are joined by Chris Biscardi where we discuss: Learning in public and him live-streaming open-source development Gatsby as a PWA generator and its potential to become the dominant force on the internet MDX's power and its potential of replacing markdown as the default content type Chris' project, MNTNR, and the assistance it'll provide to open-source maintainers. Transcript "The Changes Gatsby and Mdx Are Making to the Internet - with Chris Biscardi" Transcript Resources: MNTNR Systems ...
Feb 15, 2019•24 min•Ep. 37
Lindsey Kopacz, web-developer and accessibility blogger, joins us today to discuss: The positives that being authentic and public with your emotional state provides. Her blog and the excellent dev.to community The business value of accessibility Accessibility in a sense that isn't limited to people with physical disabilities Transcript "Championing a11y and Being Authentic - with Lindsey Kopacz" Transcript Resources: dev.to Lindsey Kopacz: Twitter a11ywithlindsey.com Joel Hooks Twitter Website...
Feb 05, 2019•31 min•Ep. 36
Tae'lur Alexis, self taught programmer and founder of CodeEveryday, talks to us about: Figuring out that software was what she wanted to do Learning to code from scratch on the modern web. How front-end development was appealing as a beginner due to visual feedback and opportunity to be creative How social media was key to her success in landing a job as a self-taught developer The CodeNewbie and 100DaysOfCode communities on twitter and the roles they play in supporting developers Setting up rea...
Jan 25, 2019•39 min•Ep. 35
Josh Doody, the author of Fearless Salary Negotiation, joins us today to discuss: What you need to look out for to stay ahead in the industry How to find leverage despite the information asymmetry between the employer and the job candidate Why questions on what your current salary is or what you'd like it to be boxes you out of opportunities The best way to put in the work towards a promotion. Tradeoffs of working for a startup versus a big tech company Equity in the salary negotiation, and how ...
Jan 07, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 34
Tania Rascia works as a web developer full time. However, just a few years ago she was working as a professional chef. How and why did she make such a dramatic career switch? It isn't uncommon for culinary professionals to realize that they don't want to spend the rest of their life doing it. It is a very demanding job and isn't sustainable if passion isn't there. So, having always been interested in computers and making websites, Tania decided to make the transition into programming as a profes...
Dec 12, 2018•29 min•Ep. 33
Today Angie Jones, a master inventor and automated testing engineer, speaks with us about what a master inventor is and what it took to receive that title, what testing automation is, having parallel between testers and developers, what developers can be doing to build more testable apps, and finally how modern web development has complicated automated testing. Angie talks about some common problems when it comes to testing. The test team is often separate from the developer team, and it leads t...
Dec 08, 2018•35 min•Ep. 32
Diana Rodriguez, Worldwide Community Organizer for the Vue Vixens Initiative, joins us today to talk about her early experiences with development as a child, her transition into a becoming a full-time professional and her work with getting women from communities all over the world involved with programming! In the days of yore, gathering programming knowledge wasn't easy, the community was exclusive, and the books were expensive. The only ways to learn were through college, expensive books, or a...
Nov 30, 2018•23 min•Ep. 30
Julia Evans, is a zine author and software engineer at Stripe. She joins us to talk about teaching specifics as opposed to high-level overviews, using zines to show that things that sound hard aren't hard in practice, the longevity of Julia's zine empire, and the impact that monetizing her zines had on her audience and the way she approaches working on them. Julia writes zines, short tutorials in comic form for software developers. She recently starting monetizing them, it had an impact on her a...
Nov 20, 2018•27 min•Ep. 31
Joel and Brian Lonsdorf discuss the pain and growth of learning, math as a source of truth, dispelling that idea that you need to be a wizard to enter the functional programming space, and finally how you can start including functional concepts in your day to day work. There's a reason that mathematicians tend to be the best functional programmers. The theories and patterns directly apply, it has truth and purity. It's powerful, almost powerful enough to describe everything, so what makes people...
Nov 02, 2018•31 min•Ep. 29
Today we are joined by Jem Young, a senior software engineer over at Netflix. Jem is here to discuss his programming philosophy and how it is an extension of himself, how engineers should have the freedom to have ideas and veto things, the difference passion makes, and being informed about the libraries that you include in your code and if they are actually needed. Netflix's homepage got 50% faster when Today Edwards had the idea of not shipping React to the client. All event handling was done w...
Oct 19, 2018•27 min•Ep. 28
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 hi...
Oct 05, 2018•17 min•Ep. 27
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 ...
Sep 28, 2018•25 min•Ep. 26
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 n...
Sep 21, 2018•25 min•Ep. 25
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 f...
Sep 14, 2018•23 min•Ep. 24
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 f...
Aug 29, 2018•50 min•Ep. 23
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" Transcr...
Aug 22, 2018•28 min•Ep. 22
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" Transcript Topics: Infinite learning Infinite building Javascript fatigue Engagement Fighting feelings of inadequacy Quotes: “I changed myself from a financial career...I thought that was a stable thing...
Aug 15, 2018•37 min•Ep. 21
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 d...
Jul 30, 2018•56 min•Ep. 20
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 becau...
Jul 13, 2018•27 min•Ep. 19
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. The...
Jun 27, 2018•18 min•Ep. 18
