Hey everybody, thanks for coming to another episode of My Angular Story. I'm your host Aaron Frost, and today as a guest, we've got David Cooper. David, go ahead and say hi, Hey everybody. We've got so Dave. You're you. You're in London, but you sound like you're Australian. Yeah, there's a little bit of an accent still there. I moved to London about four years ago and yep, I'm slowly losing that accent, which, yeah, it's a bit heartbreaking. Yeah, you don't want to
lose you don't want to lose your accent. No, I'm sure I'm due to go out there in April. I'm sure i'll get it back pretty quickly. Yeah, it should. I'm imagining you'll just like roll right into it. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Century dot Io. Recently I came across a great tool for tracking monitoring problems in my apps. Then I asked them if they wanted to sponsor the show and allow me to share my experience
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code dev chat at century dot io. So I speak Spanish, and I kind of I'm like this weird. I kind of adopt the accident of whatever country I'm in. So, if I'm in Mexico, and here's the one thing I always speak with like Mexican slang terms, because that's where I learned was when I lived in Mexico. Yep. But if I go to if I'm speaking with people from like Columbia or Argentina, I just kind of adopt their accidents. So it's kind of I kind of feel you on that front.
You know. It's it's a very cool thing how that actually works. But it's also very annoying because whenever I talk to anyone from back home, they're like, oh, you sound English now, and I'm like, that's the first thing that everyone says. Yeah, yeah, So I when I lived in Mexico, people when I came home. I lived there for two years. When I came home, people were like, dude, you speak English with like like, you sound like a Latino, but I definitely don't
look Latino, and so people people thought that was funny. But yeah, I know how you feel, man, I felt it. I felt it before. So dig you're you're an Angular developer. That's why we're on the podcast. Yep, how long you've been working with Angler? So I've been working with Anguila for a little while now. I guess the first time that
I was sort of introduced to it was a really long time ago. I'm not sure what version of it would have been, but it was when I was at my second job, so it might have been like seven years ago
or something like that. Back back in Australia. Yeah, yeah, back in Perth in Australia, and I was working an Internet services provider and one of the one of the guys there had started building like a sort of like a c I CD server back before well when when I guess, when the only thing available was probably Jenkins or whatever that sort of people had heard of or years and he'd started and it was like back when like people were making
the switch from like SPN or CBS to GET and he'd started building a front end for it. And you know, back I think we were using jQuery mainly, or maybe not even jQuery, and he showed everyone this being this thing angular and it was talking about two way binding and all of this stuff, and everyone's like minds were blown, and I guess like back then it
was just some sort of like magical black box. And then I sort of I tried understanding that and tried this is like I was still pretty new to web development in general then, so a lot of it was like magical and didn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me. And then when I got my next job, I oh, maybe it was a job after that, I can't quite remember. I moved to Sydney, and I remember the job. The job ad was sort of talking about, you know,
you need angular JAS experience. I didn't really have that much angular Jas experience, so I remember. I remember I flew into Sydney the day before the interview and I caught up with a friend and I thought, it's all right, I'll go and have some drinks with my friend and back in the hotel room, I'll just quickly whip up a little a little world, and I'm sure that I can I can get my way through this interview. And ended up having about ten too many drinks and sort of drunkenly coding some stuff up
in my hotel room that night before the interview. And it turned out that the thing that i'd built whilst in the state I was in was almost identical to the question that they like, the sort of tech tests that they'd given me in the interview. It was like a little little thing where you put in a GitHub user name and it would like render out like some statistics about
a GitHub account or whatever. So it was one of the luckiest and most ridiculous things that I think I've encountered in my in my career, but it paid off. And ever since then, I guess I've loved it. I mean I've sort of dabbled with pretty much all of this. I'm guessing you got the job. Yeah, yeah I did. So. Yeah, you're just at home messing around with this thing, and you just happened to demo up what they were about to ask you the next in your interviews. So
it sounds like you probably killed your interview like you did ask them. Yeah, yeah, I remember they they sort of gave me this question. I think they I think they're gonna quite a long time, but I think the guys that asked me the question, they sort of said, all right, we'll come back in a couple of hours and see what you see what you can do. And I remember messaging my mate that I was out with the night before, being like, you never guess what just happened. So yeah,
so I knowed that that was. That was really cool. That was That was a really eye opening experience. Actually that job, it was all sorts of crazy stuff. Having to that was sort of like my first Angular job. But also I had to I had to write very performance code there for the for the job that I was doing, So that was really cool. A bit of a bit of a sort of jump in the deep ense sort of experience, right right, right? So, uh huh, that's
interesting. I don't think I've ever had that happen where I was like perfectly prepared for the interview. Yeah, it's never happened to me since. So, so how long did it I'm guessing it didn't take you the two hours or did it take you to No. I just I just smashed it out.
I think at the very beginning I said to that, I said to them that I'd done something very similar the night before, and I think I demoed it off to them and then they sort of just left me to it to sort of polish it up, and I just had to to refactor some things and tweak some things. Huh. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it worked out pretty good. Yeah, that's awesome. That's so funny. I
wonder how many of the listeners have had that happen to me before. I mean, I know plenty of them will have been in the scenario that I've been in, which is I didn't nail the interview, like I totally mess it up. But I'm sure I'm sure others have. I have experienced something a bit a bit more like you, So i'd be interested. Tweet at us. I want to hear about it. Yeah, I definitely want to
hear about it. If you ever nailed your interview because you practiced something the night before the exact thing they about to ask you, I guess, yes, I guess tweet out at me. I want to hear so. So yeah, all right, so you started seven years ago. It sounds like six years ago you started bugger around with either and you're still using it. Yeah, So I use I use a few different things. I guess in my day to day job, like where I'm currently working, there's there's a
little bit of everything floating around there. Like I've been at this job for about three years now, and when I started, there's actually quite a lot
of angular jas still floating around. And it was actually quite interesting because that year I went to an Angular connect and I remember during the keynote, I can't remember who was doing the keynote that year, but there was sort of like talking about I don't know why, version of it might have been just when Angular two just came out, and they were talking about like, you know, everyone's thinking that, everyone the crowd's thinking, Yeah, Okay,
well, these Google guys, they must be all using the latest and greatest, and I think at the time they still had about seventy five percent Angular JA in the code bases and sort of talking about their plans to migrate across and so that was like it was quite interesting, like hearing about that and then seeing what was happening in my work. And then over time we've we've refactored a lot of applications, either to the latest version of Angular or going
from angular JAS to Angular or maybe something's moved across to React. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if you have to censor out anytime someone says react on this podcast, or they didn't just yeah, I think you said the word, then they don't know what happened. Yeah, it's probably preferable to say the F word over that accident. We're going to believe that both excellent now we I mean, React make saying you're better, so we oh, yeah, absolutely, I mean you could go on about that for days.
But yeah, no, they've definitely helped each other so much. I mean, the state of web frameworks these days, like any any web framework that's still being maintained at the moment, is like absolutely incredible to work with. Like it's yeah, it's such The web development space is just such a such an an amazing sort of space to be working in now that it was like five years ago, which isn't a lot of time, like to have passed
them. So much has changed, you know, everything's everything's using timescript now as well, which is like the best thing ever. Yeah, so it's like it's very very cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Hey, folks, this is Charles Maxwood, and I just launched my book, The Maxicoder's Guide Defining Your Dream Developer Job. It's up on Amazon. We self published it. I would love your support if you want to go check it out, you can find it there, The Maxicoter's Guide Defining Your Dream Developer Job.
Have a good one, max out. Yeah. I mean I look at Angular and you know, I compare it as a framework to you know, like reactor View, and I think that I see advantages in a lot of them. But Angular Angular heavily heavy, heavy, angler's heavy opinions towards you will use type script is such a massive like all right, I like Anger a little bit more than the rest because it's and then they also like really really push you to use our xcs, and for me, our EXS is
the greatest technology on the web right now. So I'm like, I look at those two opinions of Angular, and they really really forced me to be like, yeah, Anglars, I like Angular the most by far, Like Angular is fantastic. Yeah, but it's it's it's largely do because I absolutely love type scripts and I absolutely love our exers. Yeah. Yeah, it's
just the whole like reactive programming and observables and all of that. It's like you look at it now and you're sort of you know, that's obviously sort of what you go to way of thinking about solving problems and structuring, like how how you're going to how you're going to do these things, And like you look back and be like a couple of years ago that you'd never thought like that. You're sort of like grabbing your hair, being like, why
on earth wasn't this always available? Why wasn't this always just a thing? Yeah? Yeah, Like I look at observables and and I'm like, wait, how did promises survive so long? Like it's insane. Not that promises aren't good, it's just that observables are so much more superior. Yeah, it's just so much neater promises are single use? How and observables? How did single use promises last for so long? That's my question? Is it just seems intense? Yeah, so so yeah, anyway, keep going.
Yeah, I was just going to say, I think that like one of the biggest things is it's it's taken I guess the front end community so much longer to think of solving problems in functional terms like that's now like become being
such a big thing in the front end space. But it definitely wasn't like that, Like everything was so oo based, like you're thinking, like when just like people trying to write classes in like ES five and having like anything that way, you had to mess around with prototypes and inheritance and stuff like that, and it's just like it's so gross to think that people used to work like that. But you know, once again, like that was only
a few years ago. It really wasn't that long ago that people were thinking like that, and really we are oh yeah yeah. Yeah. So one thing you know, when we talk when we say reactive programming, I think people if you don't know what that means, you really get lost at when when we say what is reactive? And I think it makes people feel like, ah, I'm not smart enough, and I think it makes them shy away a little bit from the conversation because they're like, I don't know what
it is, so I can't talk about it. So I've focused a lot of reasons on trying to teach the reactive piece of Angular and just the concept of reactive programming, because I feel like it's such an important thing. And uh, in teaching that, I mean, when you learn our ex tell me, tell me if this happened to you, you basically write your code differently once you understand it. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, and sorry,
go ahead. Oh, just like I think the the thing that just like springs to mind, like sort of bringing this back to Angular as well, is making a HGTP request yep, Like just the even just doing that, like subscribing to that observable. And I think that there's there's quite a lot even just doing that is quite a learning curve, and there's so many like
different concepts if you've never come across that before. I still remember when it was first introduced to me, and I just remember reading like the r XJS documentation, which is absolutely amazing, but it's so much in maation to absorb. It's so like it's so much to take in, and then it's so much. It's so like it takes such a long time, and it's quite a process. Like think of term, think of things in terms of like
like reactive programming, or think of things in terms of observables. It like sort of reminds me of when like things like map and filter and reduce are sort of introduced to you and you need to move away from like mutable data structures and using for loops for everything, and then eventually one day it just clicks and you start thinking of terms. You start thinking of things in terms of those you know, mapping and filtering and all of that. Yeah,
I uh so, like it's I try. It's it's hard to help people like get get across that initial like aha moment, right, Yeah. And I struggled teaching it because it was so hard for me that I'm like, oh man, how do I teach this? This thing that was so hard for me? And I've come up in my mind of this a way that it makes sense to me, but I don't think it makes sense that other people, like like when you when you say, hey, declarative coding versus
imperative coding. Those two words largely don't have any significance to most people,
like they certainly did it to me. But once I understood what RX did to my programming style, I was like, oh, I now just declare things I don't actually I don't actually write much more like my click candlers are are nothing more than just setting variables, like I don't actually do ahtps in my click handler, you know, I just say, hey, put this into that abservable, and then the abserable that was already declared like freaks out
and does all this stuff. Right. Yeah, So so like trying to help people understand, Hey, your code before our X you wrote declarative code and or sorry, imperative code, and afterwards you're gonna write declarative getting them over that hurdle? What does that mean? Though? It feels scary to say you're going to code differently, but like you are going to go differently, right yeah, and there's no look back exactly, and then that the
thing you won't look back once it happens. Yeah, yeah, as soon as as soon as you have the light bulb moment, that's it you're you, you'll be subscribed to that sort of way of thinking for good. Yeah. So uh so have you what kind of what kind of unique experiences have you had around and either like if you have you worked with open source and you given toxic conferences, are you doing blogs like talk to us about Hey,
who's Dave? Who's Dave? That's a very very deep question. Well, I guess like stuff I've been doing in the community just in general over like the last few years and all of that. I as soon as I moved to London, I started doing as much talking at like meetups around London and Bristol because of my work has an office in Bristol, so I do a bit of travel there, so there's a couple of meetups there. So
I love I love doing public speaking. And then this year I just did my my first step of conference talk actually, which was at Angular Connect, which is yeah, yeah, which was pretty awesome. It was a pretty I guess, like for a first sort of conference talk, it was a pretty big stage. Yeah, it's crazy. You went from zero to connect
that's big. Yeah. I absolutely loved it. I was so nervous because I was talking in the slightly smaller room, and there was there was a deep dive talk going on in the other room at the same time as me, and I thought, well, that's it. I'm going to give about four people turn up to my room because people love a deep dive talk,
like they're my favorite types of talks as well. And but I think I had a full room when I was doing it, and it was it was really really exciting, And it was just after my my baby was just born, so my fiance and baby were there as well, and pulled them up on stage to embarrass them. So that was really really cool. So yeah, I've slutely that and I just I just submitted CFP for m G COMF for the next year. Yeah, so yeah, that's that's really exciting as
well. And then around like I guess open source and stuff, I created a data mocking library called data marks, which is what I spoke about the topic of data mocking at Angular Connect and that's got a bit of traction and I'm sort of that's starting to ramp up as well, Like that's getting I think it's up to maybe about four four thousand downloads a month or something like that, which I'm really happy with. What is this that's four thousand downloads
a month. So so it just gives you a way of through your It's a code config that you specify a bunch of endpoints in your application that you want to mock out, and so it's just matched on the endpoint name and you can do a regular expression against that and then you can just specify what you want the response to be and then in your code it won't actually it'll just intercept the hate GTP calls and give back canned responses. So would this
be for like testing or what would this be for? So this is I guess and that's the biggest question that I get around it as well. And this is the thing that I'm most passionate about, which is it's not for
testing, it's but actually doing local development. So when if you're developing a feature or trying to reproduce a bug, or you know, just trying to make a general improvement on your application, rather than connecting out to you know, either a production environment or a UAT environment or whatever, where you're actually touching real data in databases and and things immediately become unpredictable. Or maybe you
know, you don't really want to be mutating someone's actual data. This this allows you to completely circumvent that you don't need any sort of like network connection and you can It's really it means that as well as that you don't need to rely on an endpoint existing to be able to develop your your features.
So whether that's whether it's you having to write that endpoint yourself, or if you're relying on a back end engineer or just some other engineer to write that endpoint for you, you can still crack on and and and you know, write your features, fix your bugs without without needing those endpoints to be available all the time. Adventures and Angler is a dev chat dot tv production made in partnership with hero Devs. Hero Devs is a group of Angular experts who
can help your team code like true developer heroes. If your team needs an
Angular expert, reach out to Aaron at hero deav today. So it sounds to me like it would be a really good teaching tool as well, Like if I was going to give a workshop and I wanted people to practice using Angular and making HTTP calls, they could and they wouldn't actually have to send up the back end though, So it'd make my MPM install much lighter, like they wouldn't have to you know, run a local host or whatever to get data going, or I wouldn't have to have like a you know,
an easy two running that would serve everybody, like I could just do some in browser memories and stuff. Absolutely, I think I actually think that the Angular Cli I'd love to see it provide some sort of mocking solution so to achieve the same thing, like so that you can just say, hey, Angular ci a cli, spin up this application and provide a flag to tell it to give you some like give you the ability to to mock data out, and then you can immediately begin doing feature work. So what's the name
of this package. It's called data marks. It's on NPM data mars. Yeah, data Dashmarks, And yeah, I absolutely love it. I love all things testing and mocking and all of that, because I think it's just a space that everyone everyone is sort of being stuck in the same frame of mind of how we do these sorts of things, and I think this changes it up a little bit, just in the way that we think about things like it isn't absolutely necessary to be using real data or or you know,
a shared environment database or anything like that. Because I think that a lot of the time, bad things have real potential to happen. Like if you're touching live data, then if you make any sort of right operation to anything, you know, you could be you could be impacting a customer or a user. Or if you're using a shared environment, like a shared development environment,
you know, someone else might be relying. You know, if you've just pulled up a customer and you've just change their I don't know their address or whatever, and someone else is relying on that to be in a particular state, I think that that that's definitely like a really a big one.
And then I guess, like the other the biggest well not the biggest thing, but one of the biggest things is that if I say to you know, I could say to anyone with their applications, you know, bring me up a customer that I don't know, if it's like a banking application, bring me up a customer that has three accounts, two of them are in credit, one of them is in debt, and you know their their latest credit card payment is late or whatever, Like I don't want to have to
go and mess around in a database, and you know, like force a customer to be in that particular state. I'd rather just have some solution that I can just say. You know, in data marks, there's the concept of a scenario and you could just like say, scenario two accounts good, one account bad, and then you can define what the responses look like for that. Mm hmm yeah, super quick and yeah, I absolutely love it. But I would say that considering I'm the guy that wrote it. But
it's I think it's I just think it's a very cool idea. That is a cool idea. Well, that's awesome. I love seeing people with with open source levers like that. I can't find it. I was looking while you're talking. I think Ward Bell wrote something very similar. I think I think it's like in browser back end or I can't remember. I can't remember what you call it, but I feel like Devakata has done some trainings with with something like this before. So I have a very love the idea.
I love the idea of people having ways to not have a back end, whether it's for development or for teaching. I love that as an option. So I've just painted link to it in the chat there. Actually cool. Yeah, so we'll have we'll have a we'll have a linked in the show notes. If anyone who wants to go check it out, well cool. So is there any last Is there anything else that you'd like? Hey, if I was going to say one thing about me, this is what I
would say. I just to help people get to know I guess one like, I'm definitely one of those people that is more on the cowboys side of things. I love just having an idea or hearing an idea and immediately just start start to get code down, start to build things out, iterate on things. It's just I just I guess I'm probably a little bit hyperactive in that sense. I just love to do things, get things done, you know, make mistakes quickly. And I think that's it also makes things really
fun. Rather than standing around whiteboards all day trying to over architect things, just get it done. And I I love. I guess the other thing. I just love to I love to talk to people about any anything to do with software or web development or anything like that. It's it's I think it's just so much fun. Cool. If if people out there want to get a hold of you, or they want to ask you some questions, what's the easiest way for for them to get a hold of you. You
can get a hold of me on Twitter. I think my Twitter handle is Dave Wright's codes or or you can get me on email as well. That's probably a good place, Dave at Davecooper dot org. It's a pretty good way of getting in contact with me. But yeah, that's that. Those are probably the two places. Yeah, Dave rights codes at Dave Rights codes spelled just like it sounds. I found well cool. Yeah, so if you want to, if you have any questions, feel free to to reach
out to to Dave. All right, so Dave, we're gonna move on to the last the kind of closing port from the podcast. It's called the Picks. You get to pick uh, something that you really like and that you want to share with with other people. So I'm going to do a pick. It doesn't have to be related to programming. It can be if you want it to be, though, So I'm going to pick Uh. I've picked it recently, but it happened again, so I'm going to pick
it again. Yep. There's this television show It's been on for years, Like a lot of millennials think, like wow, that's still on. It's called It's called Survivor, and I love Survivor. I can't I can't get enough a survivor I had one of my friends went on a few years ago, and I was already an addict, but ever since I've been more of an addict. I just lost like eighty pounds because I really, really I don't want to die. That's why I lost the light. But ancillary goal
was I want to go tryal for Survivor. I think I could. I think I can kill it. Anyway. This season though, this this this season that is currently playing in the States is uh, it's got some really
strong social messaging, Like Survivors never really had strong social messaging. Like once in a while there will be talk of like an all girls alliance and how women are powerful, right, But but other than that specific scenario, there's not a lot of social messaging and insight Survivor, right, And they don't really call out, hey, why do why do black people get voted out first? Like that? That sucks? Why does that? Why does that
continue to happen season after season? Right? Yeah, well, this season they're talking about those things and it's not necessarily the show owners. It's the contestants on the Island. They just got like a really good cluster of people and they're talking about these things that are like impactful, and like I watched these shows with my kids and like I get like chills, and a couple of times I've even like teared up a little bit and my kids are like,
what's the matter? I'm like, that was just a really good message, you know what they're teaching. So I'm gonna pick because this season, two things that I really care about have crossed into an interest they've intersected, which is I really like Survivor and I really care about equality and people treating each other excellently, and so it's the two things that kind of crossed over. So I'm going to pick again Survivor. So that's my pick is Survivor.
Hey you got any picks? Bro oh man? This is This is a really a really tough one. But I'm sure people struggle a bit with this one. I guess something that something that I I'm really really interesting. I guess Okay, this will be this will be a pretty nerdy one. Okay. Back in Australia, I used to I used to run We started up a company and then I sold it and people always ask you know,
what company, what company did you start up? And I always have to start it off with it sounds a lot more dodgy than it is, which then makes it sound even dodgier than that. But it was. It was a company that we bought and sold locksmithing suppliers, and then people sometimes asked, what's a locksmithings supply and I'm talking about like lock picks and tools like that. Basically, we saw me and this other guy that started it.
We just saw that there were no real like retailers of lock picking stuff in Australia, and the stuff that you could get was really really like cheap, flimsy. It was. It was really poor quality stuff. And so we decided that we would see if we can strike up some wholesale agreements with some of the sort of more reputable manufacturers, and we sort of got that started out, and we just sunk a little bit of cash into the company each just to get things going, and it took off really, really well.
And one of the things that we would always get when we would talk to people about this sort of thing is, you know, they'd always say, oh, don't you know that's illegal? And you know why, would you be supplying, you know, things that I was supplying tools to help criminals, you know, break into places, to which that we always had to sort of say, well, actually, in Australia, it's not illegal to buy our own those things. But the other thing as well is that it
isn't it isn't really criminals that are using these things. It's either locksmith professionals. Yeah, yeah, there's professionals. But the thing that I want to pick here is the it's actually the lock sport community, which is like it's a competitive lock picking, which is a really really cool thing, and the
communities around it in Australia are massive. You know, they hold these big competitions, you know where you've got to like sort of they have they have all sorts of like I guess you call them events where you know you have to you know, pick x amount of locks in the fastest amount of time, or there's just a really hard lock and whoever can do it first.
So those sorts of things, and it's like a super it's a super nerdy thing, but I think it's just like a really cool thing that people if you if you're interested in in I guess the mechanics of how locks work and the different types of locks and all of that. I'd implore people to see if they do have a local locksport community, and if they don't, maybe even try and start on themselves. Nice. Nice, So what if some people wanted to check it out? Where would they go? Check kind of
check out to learn more about this? It depends where they are. I'd probably check out meetup. Meetup usually have some stuff. It really depends where you are in the world. Like, there'll be different Some countries have like a more like foreign base. Some of them are just based on be talk and all of that. So I just have a little Google, have a look on made up. I'm sure that you'll be able to find something. Okay, so check it out, become a locksmithy. It'll be fun.
That's the pick, all right, Dave, thanks for coming on. I'm glad I got a chance to chat with you and meet you. If you're a friend of Ed, I'm glad that we're friends. I would say I'm gonna say good luck on the on the Energie comf talk picsh you know, only a small fraction of an amount of people that make it picked. So I will say good luck because Thank you very much, Mom, thanks for
having me. But as far as just being good in the community, I appreciate it and thanks for thanks for coming on, thanks so much, and to the listeners, I'll say thanks for thanks for being a part of this and we'll catch you next time. Peace. Bandwidth for this segment is provided by cash fly, the world's fastest CDN. Deliver your content fast with cash Fly. Visit c A c H E f l Y dot com to learn more. Se