046 JSJ Staying Current

by woody2shoes on February 8, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:47 — 41.0MB)

Panel

Discussion

03:19 – The Future of JavaScript and ES6

10:18 – Getting News about JavaScript

12:43 – Blogs

17:02 – Filtering

23:21 – The Community

27:33 – Podcasts and Videos

35:53 – More Blogs

36:16 – Conferences

Picks

Next Week

Monolithic vs Modular Design w/ Tom Dale and James Halliday

Transcript

AJ: I ate a lot of pickle chips this morning.

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[This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.]

CHUCK:  Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 46 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have Joe Eames.

JOE: Howdy!

CHUCK: We have Merrick Christensen.

MERRICK: Hey guys!

CHUCK: AJ O’Neal.

AJ: I was informed that I’m not actually live.

CHUCK: [laughs] Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. And real quick I just want to mention…I know that most of the people who listen to this show are JavaScript developers, but if you’re interested in learning Ruby on Rails, then I’m going to be teaching a course. It starts in March and you basically get unlimited access to me during the course, access of forms. It’s going to be online live training and then coding and Q&A. So if you’re interested in that, go to railsrampup.com and sign up.

AJ: Now what is “unlimited” mean when you talk about access to you?

MERRICK: [scoffs] Come on, man!

CHUCK: [laughs] If I’m awake, I’m probably available to answer to all your questions.

MERRICK: Do panelists get discounts?

CHUCK: If you’re interested, I can probably work something out.

JOE: Interesting.

CHUCK: In fact, I’m offering a discount for anyone who listens to the podcast. If you go and sign up and you enter the coupon code podcast, it’ll give you $200 off.

MERRICK: Oh nice! Nice!

AJ: Panelists only get $50 off, though.

CHUCK: That’s right. It’s like my dad when he graduated from demo school, his cousin came up to him and said “So, do we get a family discount?” and he says “Yeah, I’ll charge you 50% more”.

MERRICK: [laughs] No, kidding! That’s the vice working with family.

CHUCK: That’s so true.

MERRICK: We know that all too well in the tech in this show. When people ask me “hey, can you fix my computer?” I’m like “what is a computer?” [laughter] like “what are you talking about?”

CHUCK: Oh I sent an email to all my brothers and sisters and that basically said “unless you are responsible for conceiving either myself or my wife, you don’t get free tech support anymore”.

MERRICK: [laughs] That’s awesome!

AJ: Nice! The truth.

CHUCK: Yeah. And I have 9 brothers and sisters so I literally cut out like a whole bunch of free loaders by doing that.

MERRICK: That’s awesome.

CHUCK: Yeah. So my sister, she’ll babysit for me and then I’ll help her with her computer. So anyway, this week we’re going to be talking about staying up to date, probably on JavaScript, but I think this is a general enough topic towards pretty much any tech topic. It seems like there’s a lot of information out there; a lot of video stuff that I like hear about and passing, but I don’t really know what it all means and I don’t really know where to go find out about it. And so I’m going to ask a couple of questions just from where I’m coming from and then you guys can kind of tell me where to go to get the information.

MERRICK: Beautiful.

CHUCK: One of the things that I keep hearing about is like ES6 or ES7 or some of the features in upcoming versions of JavaScript or ECMAScript. And I know that there’s a mailing list, I don’t remember what it’s called, but there’s a mailing list where they discuss this stuff. But are there any other good places to really explain what this means? What these things are?

MERRICK: Sure. So one of the biggest things I’d recommend, the mailing list, I mean if you’re strong and hard and you’re resilient, definitely the mailing list by all means. But for the rest of us, follow ES-discuss on Twitter. It’s from by Domenic Denicola. We had him on the podcast talk about promises, but essentially at Twitter account to give you bite size, consumable discussions about what’s going on with the ECMAScript committee. So I’ve really enjoyed that.

The other thing is there’s a project on GitHub called “6″, I think. And it’s essentially a transpile language by a guy named Matthew Rob. And it’s essentially a transpiler from ECMAScript 6 into radio of JavaScript and it is awesome to be able to play with the new syntax and it feels kind of like you’re consuming a library at that point. Kind of like you write CoffeeScript but you’re running a “6″ command and lets you boil with some of the newer stuff.

AJ: So, I was kind of thinking since you brought up the topic of like ES 6 harmony and stuff, wouldn’t it be valuable to explain why it’s valuable right now to be up to date on the next release of JavaScript rather than just waiting until it has its official approved release?

CHUCK: Yes, that would be definitely interesting especially since for the most part the people that I deal with, they’re only dealing with it on the web and they only really care in so far as it impacts their web application and knowing what’s coming down the pike. They don’t even know why that impacts them.

MERRICK: Sure. So I would say it’s always key to know what’s coming down the pipe line. A lot of the reason because it’ll manic your code more of future proof, but also it keeps it not boring. Like knowing that you’re facing a problem in a language and knowing the language is going to a dress-up problem is just an exciting thing always for me as a developer. And knowing how the language is going to resolve it gives you a really good idea of how you can resolve it now.

For example, if I know that in the future I’m going to be able to use for each MapReduce etcetera, which you can in most process now, but this was the case when ECMAScript file was bro wink, you would use underscores forEach MapReduce or your own polyfill or whatever. So it gives you a good idea of how to align yourself with the paradigm of the language so your code is less awkward, I guess.

JOE: I think there’s also another reason except that (it) unite us, even though ES 6 is just right now is in proposal stage, right?

AJ: And they’re still talking about it all the time.

JOE: Yeah. So even though it’s not necessarily released thing, that was user implementing pieces all the time. So sometimes, especially if you’re doing an ECMAScript, you’re limited to a specific browser, you can actually use pieces of it today.

MERRICK: Oh yeah! I mean if you’re going to talk about that, a lot of the ideas in ECMAScript to CXR are pulled pretty shamelessly from CoffeeScript, which is great!

JOE: I didn’t know that.

MERRICK: Yeah! Like the fat arrow, the structuring. I mean there’s a field that features that. I think rest parameters come from CoffeeScript’s slots, interpolation of strings, and some of them are just general programming concepts. But Brendan Eich pretty shamelessly said like “Yeah, there’s a lot of things the CoffeeScript has been a test bed for”.

So the point is this, a lot of these language features you can actually use today. For example, if you use TypeScript, you’re going to be able to use ECMAScript 6′s class syntax for getting classes in JavaScript or you can be able to use their modules, which are transpiled to AMD modules. TypeScript is aiming to be able to support all the ECMAScript 6 features that are doable in a transpiler. And so consequently, a lot of the stuff is relevant today. If you want to use these libraries, you’re going to have to use the transpiler like “6″ or TypeScript, but you can use them.

AJ: And there’s also for node JS, there’s the one ES 6 transpiler by Google, I think. I don’t recall the name of it right now, do you know?

MERRICK: I think it’s “6″, that’s what I’ve been talking about. But if we’re going to talk about — I’m sorry?

AJ: I was just going to say, so you can npm install a couple of node modules that you can write ES 6 and then just run it normally, just have it part of your stack of software.

MERRICK: Yeah. And node, you can actually run with certain harmony flags turned on. So when you kick up node, there’s a bunch of flags you can pass in for V8 options to essentially enable certain harmony features, which is really cool!

CHUCK: Yeah that’s really cool. The thing is this, I think as things move ahead with things like node JS, I mean their version compatibilities that you may run into, but with the browser it seems like a lot of times they are wasting make it just backward compatible. But the nice thing is or the thing that comes to me the most is you’re talking about like the forEach features or the looping features, some of these other things that are going to come in to ECMAScript 6, they really make your code easier to deal with and more expressive. And so if you have something that can backfill that compatibility to older browsers, then it’s not so much that you can do things in ECMAScript 6 that you couldn’t before, but it just makes the code easier to handle. And that makes your life better. Does that make sense?

MERRICK: Oh it totally does! And that’s what I love about what these guys are doing as designer of the language about the way it’s being used. They’re not like doing a bunch of crazy one off things that aren’t relevant; they’re like all going to make things more consumable in the way the JavaScript is used today.

Just on that topic about other things you can do to stay up to date on ECMAScript 6 is follow Brendan Eich on Twitter, he’s a guy that created JavaScripts. Follow Rick Waldron, he’s on the TC39 committee; and he does Johnny-Five as well, which is like Robots with JavaScript.

Those two guys do a lot of ban turned — whenever people have problems with ECMAScript 6 or whatever, they’ll reach out to those guys and complain, and they’ll respond as wonderful people like they are.

CHUCK: Alright, cool! So another question I have is, it seems like you guys are pretty hip to some of the new cool libraries that are coming on the scene for JavaScript. I think some of that is probably because you’re using it more frequently and more in-depth than I am on a regular basis. But I wonder, where do you get news about cool and interesting things that are going on in the JavaScript community? New libraries, and stuff like that.

AJ: So I found a whole league of people on Twitter, and I found that Twitter is excellent for that. However, it can also burn you out pretty quickly, at least for me. I find that my burnout is quality up to the amount of time I spend on Twitter.

[laughter]

Like I can watch them rise in parallel. But obviously falling like some of the bigger players on Twitter, like Derek Bailey is behind Marionette, vision media, he did like Express, and stylist, and pretty much everything on node. Substack, Max Ogden, following these kinds of people on Twitter would just give you a whole glimpse into that world. But maybe you’ll get a little bit burnt out like I do. It’s not enough to stop me, but if you do, sign up for Peter Cooper’s JavaScript weekly and you’ll get a newsletter in your inbox every week and it got sections where like — these are libraries that came out; these are the popular articles. And he does an excellent job aggregating the latest in JavaScript, in the JS Weekly newsletter. So sign up for that. I don’t get any kickback or any like that for mentioning it, I just think it’s an awesome newsletter.

JOE: Yeah, totally awesome! In addition to that newsletter, he’s also got newletters for CSS and he’s got a different one for HTML5.

CHUCK: Yeah. I love Peter stuff. He does such a great job with a lot of that stuff.

AJ: Yeah, he does. And also like following Badass_js on Twitter, that’s kind of like an aggregate of interesting things in JavaScript, Seb Ly if you’re interested in creative kind of JS like visualizations. I’m dropping a lot of names, but these guys are all very much worth following and keeping track of Seb Ly does of creative JS, which is really interesting work. Like if you can’t tell, Twitter is kind of a staple for me in terms of keeping up, but it definitely burns me out. So those newsletters are nice.

JOE: Yeah.

CHUCK: Are there any blogs or anything that you guys read?

AJ: Dan Alden, he does grunt JS. He did — I’ve noticed I was talking fast, so I’m trying to slow down intentionally so I’m afraid I will sound stoned or anything like that now — but, Dan Alden’s blog is awesome. Primarily because he always takes things from an angle like he doesn’t hear what everyone else is talking about, like he’s just trying to solve the problem with his own head. He takes a lot of like comment conceptions like about the single variable principle. He comes up them from a very pragmatic stand point, and I really really like that.

James Burke, he’s like one of my heroes. Honestly, his blog is really interesting if you’re interested in modules and JavaScript modules. Los Techies, which is Derek Bailey’s blog, is really interesting if you’re interested in backbone, etcetera. What do you think, Joe?

JOE: One of my favorite blogs to follow, started when I was doing .net development, but I’ve continued to follow it, it’s alvinashcraft.com, and that will be in the show notes. It’s actually a .net sent work; it’s just a daily list of links of interesting news, articles, stories about programming, and it’s centered around .net. But because the level has become so popular, a fairly significant portion of the links are just the generic web JavaScript type of things. I have noting to do with .net by itself. And I find that he stays pretty up to date on interesting news stuff so I get a lot of links to interesting articles, cool new things, and I’m just glancing at today’s. One of the very first link I see under web development is how Howler.js: a Cross Browser JavaScript Audio Playback Library Supporting Audio Sprites. So right off the bat, in very first think, it’s just a very generic JavaScripts, so I always scan his blog and just go through and look for the generic JavaScript type links or interesting old file like TypeLinks.

MERRICK: Yeah. Like generically speaking The Changelog, I’m sure you guys have seen it because it’s on GitHub’s homepage, but that is one of the coolest blogs. Like I find so many tools just like different things like Powerline for Vim, that is one of my favorite lines, just different things like that. And it gives you a overview of open source, but they do it in a way that’s very practical for no matter what technical thing you’re interested in the rest of the changelog. And I definitely would recommend following their reader sort of RSS feed.

And, it’s a shame to not mention Reddit. I gotta mention Reddit like our Javascript. People propose interesting libraries and they get voted up or down, etcetera. So our programming, just different Reddit rooms, stay away from hacker news unless you like the cynicism and depression that follows always as for me. Like I read hacker news and I want to go cut myself like it’s just so depressing [laughs].

AJ: Yeah. Go away!

MERRICK: Hacker news is like be going to new YouTube comments.

AJ: Yup. I’m a little more conservative with the time I spend on blogs. So what I found to be most effective is to follow @jergason and @iammerrick and when they retweet something, it’s normally the best of the best.

[laughter]

MERRICK: [laughs] Thank you. Yeah @jergason is awesome, actually.

AJ: Yeah. And that’s truthful like I really do that. Like I wait for one of you two guys to retweet it before I go out and look at it because I just, I like learning new things, but I don’t want to learn all the things.

MERRICK: Thanks, man! I appreciate that. I spend a good amount of time filtering stuff. Like I get very burned out because of it, though. Sometimes, I can get very exhausted with all the new stuff that comes out because JavaScript is not a slow pace right now, which I love. I love that, but I honestly get really depressed to how mean people are to other people. It’s just kind of like “Oh, man! Like everybody’s just trying to get by, man!” [laughs]

[laughter]

CHUCK: That’s kind of the next question that I was going to head toward was, basically filtering the things that you care about. It’s hard for me sometimes to look at like the title or even the summary. I have something on JavaScript Weekly or one of these other services – Reddit, and really know if it’s something that I want to spend my time on. And since I’m so busy, it’s really hard for me to –

AJ: Totally!

CHUCK: Yeah. So, I’m curious as to how you decide what is relevant to you?

AJ: Unfortunately, I have this mental problem where I feel like everything everywhere is relevant to me. And if I don’t look into it, then I’m worthless human being. So I’m probably not the best person to ask that because I can be obsessive about this stuff.

JOE: I like to pick topics that are of interest to me when I — anything that’s about Angular TypeScript, or Craftsmanship, all lead about, most of the stuff about any of the MVC frameworks I’ll read about. So I like to pick topics that right off the bat interesting. So for example, that howler thing on automeo, that’s not terribly interesting to me so I wouldn’t jump right on that. But anything’s that are I like to click through and just let one at the size of what it is. Is it a short little article? If it’s a short little article then hey, even if I waste a little bit of my time, then reading 4 paragraphs is not that much of a waste. So might be worth it if it’s a short article to queue it up. You also have to have your queuing technology for –

MERRICK: Yeah Read It Later, is my hero. I used to use Instapaper until Read It Later became free, and it’s just awesome. You just find an article, use your Read It Later, and it start saves it for you for later. And also saves it in a beautiful format.

One of the things, too, if you really don’t want to dig through stuff, it doesn’t take a whole lot of pattern matching to see the same stuff popping up over and over and over again. Like good stuff has a way of bubbling to the top, or I should say interesting stuff. And so if you follow the right blogs, and you follow the right people on Twitter, you’ll start to see things that go away and things that definitely just keep kind of getting mentioned. And those are the interesting things! Those are things that, at least for me, like I want to. Like I constantly am seeing demos, and those demos will be using three.js, and it’s like “that project has substance”. I mean it’s not something you hear talked about a lot in JavaScript because let’s face it, we’re all unfortunately spending a lot of time with divs’ and paragraphs’ tags in CSS, you know what I mean? Like the unfortunate plight of what development. We’re not all able to do awesome stuff with 3D programming, but 3D has substance. I mean if you’ll look at that, that project is amazing! Like it is amazing. If you want to go learn about just like computer science, it’s just an amazing deed of work, and it keeps coming up.

AJ: And I think that imply something else that’s important to understand and that is: if you don’t spend an hour in a day keeping up to date, that’s not a problem, right? You don’t need to worry about missing something because if it’s only mentioned once, it’s probably not worth your time, unless your thing is you want to stay up on everything. But if you’re busy, you only have a few hours a week or even a few minutes a week to stay up on something, find to subscribe to people on Twitter, think your favorite blogs, whatever. When you get that time, go through them, scan through them and see, get a general feeling for what you see, and then the next time you do it if you see something that popped up again and the next time again, hey that’s not an indication whether you do it every day or you do it once a month.

MERRICK: The trouble with Twitter is that it’s just so full of noise.

CHUCK: Oh yeah!

MERRICK: So much discussion about, I’m not saying people don’t [inaudible] and talk about this stuff by any means, but from my perspective I don’t care for it. But what like politics and like atheism versus religion, etcetera, like I’m totally okay to people who want to talk about that stuff, but it certainly deludes a lot of this stuff in terms of staying up to date. I think there’s room for someone and perhaps it exists. Hit me on Twitter if it does because I would love to use it. But the tool that essentially just leverages the links you click often to and things that you spend more time looking at etcetera to just generate a score and guess what’s relevant to you just to use in some sort of machine learning. You know what I mean? Aggregate in those kinds of things. Because if there was like a “remove noise” button in Twitter, I would love it. Because some of my favorite follows, like people that I love to follow, are also the most noisy when it comes to that other stuff. Like they constantly trying to pick fights or whatever.

[crosstalk]

CHUCK: Yeah that’s interesting.

AJ: Yeah on that note, you’ll have to check out Jamison’s machine learning in JavaScript presentation. He actually had the same idea for doing Reddit, any ready little thing to train it.

MERRICK: That’s awesome! So if you could do that with all of your feeds, like here’s my Google reader, here’s Twitter, here’s Reddit, show me what’s relevant, and it could figure out things that are popping up a lot, etcetera, it’ll going to be really interesting thing to use.

CHUCK: I wonder how you would implement something like that, though. Would you just build like a chrome extension or something so that when you click on it, it’s like “okay you’re in Twitter”. So whatever app you use for Twitter and then it’s “you click on this link” so generally, things tweeted by this person or on this website or have these keywords…

MERRICK: Yeah that would actually be — I mean I liked the idea of a chrome extension because then people don’t have to leave what they’re using. But obviously the simple and straightforward way is to give them a UI, like an aggregate UI.

CHUCK: Right.

MERRICK: And you would know exactly what they’re clicking on, exactly what they’re closing. Because if you close, you’re going to remove scores and things like that. But –

JOE: But yeah, Twitter does have tons and tons analyze.

MERRICK: It does. Like I keep my Twitter account open since we were talking and I fry seem like 40 tweets. And I’m not following that many people, less than 300 people, which is not a lot compared to some people.

AJ: I think another really good way to keep up to date is through the actual face to face community, meaning generally you have to see the developers you work with or user groups you attend.

CHUCK: Oh you mean like the user groups that I haven’t been to for a few months?

AJ: Those are be the ones.

CHUCK: Yeah I haven’t seen you guys in a while, have I?

[crosstalk]

AJ: I forget what you look like.

MERRICK: Those are definitely key particularly because they at a human element to fail to feel so not human.

JOE: Right.

MERRICK: Like I know it also contributes to my burnout is that people don’t act the same on the internet as they do in person. And there’s something about meeting with people in person, that’s just wholly refreshing.

The other thing that I really like is Airbnb’s meetups, like their online meetups, and Airbnb does a great job of like getting good people. For example tomorrow, I think, we’re going to have Isaac from [inaudible] on node.js, he’s going to talk about the next version of node. But those are just awesome like — I don’t know, they’re just great in terms of really solid contents from a video perspective.

Another blog that would be a shame not to mention, I’m sorry, is Addy Osmani’s. Like he’s interesting because he is not so much focused on web development and he’s more focused on application development.

AJ: Yeah.

MERRICK: Design patterns, those kinds of things.

AJ: He’s a very connected individual..

MERRICK: He is.

AJ: He’s obviously doing a lot of filtering…

MERRICK: Yeah he does. He does a lot of filtering and he does a great job for it. And he also takes a distinct content, and he makes it more consumable for the masses. He’s definitely popular because of that. He takes somewhat complex content, and he makes it beautiful, and he makes it more consumable. Like a lot of his stuff is not like novel, they’re not like his ideas. I hope that’s uninsulting to say that because maybe they are and I’ve missed them behind doors meanings, but a lot of his stuff is like (I mean a lot of it is novel), but a lot of it is him taking other people’s work and really made it applicable, impractical.

AJ: Yeah. Absolutely. As it is amongst really…good for that. So one of the things that I think is also valuable is to watch the email discussions that go on over a user group so like Utah JS.

MERRICK: Definitely.

AJ: Their discussions are really useful; I also belong to the Utah Software Craftsmanship User Group. And I was just thinking about this, there’s a lot of user groups out there that are having very interesting discussions. You don’t have to live in the state and physically attend the meetings to join their email lists and be part of their user group online and still get to see the conversations that are being held. And unlike Twitter, there’s a lot less noise; should there might be noise, it’s about “hey, where are we having the meetup?” or things like that. But then, they’re also discussing some things that’s very interesting, and it’s widely applicable. It’s not just for the people that happen to live where that user group meets.

MERRICK: That’s very true.

AJ: So beside the Utah JS and Utah Software Craftsmanship User Groups, I’m not sure what other user groups would be a great ones to join.

MERRICK: Everyone has their own will (where) they want. And honestly, they’re probably stronger than Utah JS in some cases.

AJ: But not as good as quality. Definitely Utah JS has got the top for quality.

MERRICK: Oh yeah. Is this some gang wars about?

[laughter]

CHUCK: [laughs] There you go. We have a premium list for Ruby Rogues so that’s not necessarily localized around a location, it’s actually kind of centers around the podcast. And we really have some of the best discussions on there about, not just Ruby, but about programming in general. And it’s really just amazing. So yeah, those list definitely payoff and it’s funny because the more expertise you pull in, the more interesting people you’re able to get on those lists. You really do get some interesting and powerful things going on.

MERRICK: That’s awesome.

CHUCK: I have to back you up on that. Because it’s really really cool. One other area that I get a lot of value from, not necessarily in JavaScript in particular, but in some of the other areas as podcasts, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Are there any podcast you guys listen to besides the show that help you kind of stay up on top of things?

MERRICK: I listen to “The Changelog”.

CHUCK: The Changelog? That’s a good one. That one with Wynn Netherland?

MERRICK: Honestly, I’m not sure the names. I mean who knows who’s on podcast, right?

CHUCK: Yeah I think it’s Wynn and Adamson, buddy.

MERRICK: Okay.

AJ: So I don’t really listen to podcast very often, but what I do like to check out is Yahoo Theater. That’s where the Douglas Crockford videos are hosted and David Glass videos, and lots of video series.

Also, Google Tech Talks. Wherever Google has a conference, and then just sporadically throughout the year, Google releases videos on their Tech Talk channel. And I’ve gotten a lot of education just by going on YouTube, going to the Google Tech Talk’s channel and searching for JavaScript or HTML or whatever, and that’s the format that really works great for me. When I was a student, I would use the Firefox Digger DownloadHelper Extension to download the videos and get them on my iPod and then I just listen and watch these as I walk to school, walked across campus.

MERRICK: Yeah that’s awesome. On that note, “coursera” is amazing. Like it’s just amazing; I love stuff like that. Coursera.org, it’s a bunch of free high-level educational courses on really interesting content like algorithms, machine learning…

JOE: Scala, Functional Programming…

MERRICK: Scala, I love that. Functional Programming Principles; you’ll find them on a huge Scala fan, boy! I’m a wannabe Scala user in JavaScript world.

CHUCK: So are there any other good places for video then? Sounds like you guys have kind of moved into the video realm…

JOE: One of my favorite video places is infokey.com. Their stuff is more centered around craftsmanship and agile, as a concept. There are a few, in fact right now, there is the one that’s Jeremy Ashke –

MERRICK: Ashkenas.

JOE: Ashkenas, there we go. Thank you. Jeremy Ashkenas made a presentation about AVC frameworks, I don’t have the exact title of it, but they’re not always very tech-specific. All been times, they’re just selling about general and agile, or scaling, or something, but I find a lot of interesting talks there. And you can download the video as just an audio file instead and just listen to it as a podcast so that’s really a cool feature.

MERRICK: Yeah, that’s awesome. I mean this isn’t on video, but trying to do research and just release like a blog post, you will learn a ton from that primarily because people will not not keep themselves quiet if you do something wrong. So I love that. Like I wrote an article on dependency injection with like AngularJS-style dependency injection, and one of the creators of AngularJS kind of corrected me on one of my points, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And he did in a way I was very educational. For me, kind of embarassing, but not totally like he was awesome! And I find that when you do that kind of stuff, when you release projects, etcetera, people will give you ideas that you would not have otherwise had, or they correct misconceptions that are fine-knit. You know what I mean?

Like you look at Dave Herman, one of the smartest guys out there, in my opinion. He’s just brilliant. You take his example about how he got called out on core ring when he should have called it partial application. That’s a knit pick, but the guy wrote a book to get reminded of that. You know what I mean? So like trying to be a creator and not a consumer has been something to a) has helped me be a lot happier as a person, like just trying to create something, but also like it’s been way more beneficial than just consuming all the time.

So be a creator, not a consumer, and I think it’ll make the world more awesome and you’ll stay up to date a lot better because you’re creating what’s up to date. I mean that’s just the way that I’ve been looking at it and I’ve really enjoyed it.

JOE: There’s a very interesting, and this isn’t necessarily specifically related to video, but there’s a lot of video on here. There was an article from Smashing Magazine called “Talks” to help you become a better friend and engineer in 2013. And from that, one of the talks that jump right out of me that I, it was just a slides unfortunately, it was called “How to Stay Up to Date on Web Technology”, and I’ll put those two links in the show notes. But there’s a lot of places to aggregate different talks, and you can go through and just watch the talks or the slides, and there might be video, there might be articles, or whatever. But that was a pretty interesting one and led me to, I don’t know, tens of hours of research that I could do.

MERRICK: Yeah that was by Chris Square, I think. And he does a great job of aggregating and filtering content for people.

AJ: Absolutely.

CHUCK: Nice. So one other area that we can talk about, we’ve talked about this before on the show –

AJ: Hey yo Chuck!

CHUCK: Yeah?

AJ: Before you do that, I really didn’t get to hear what podcast you like to listen to.

CHUCK: So the podcast that I listen to about programming are mostly related to either Ruby or just programming in general. I listen to all of the podcast that I’m actually on. On top of that, there is a premium podcast called “Ruby Toppest” that I watch that has more to do with Ruby. I do listen to the JavaScript Show on ocassion when they’re producing it, which they haven’t done for a while. And I really like things like the Wide Teams podcast, which is talking about remote teams and remote working, stuff like that. And then I listen to a lot of — Oh I also have Emacs Rocks!, which I don’t think has been updated in a while, either. But I’ve picked up Emacs and so that’s kind of what I’ve been doing there.

I don’t have great stuff on JavaScript. I used to listen to the yayQuery Podcast, but Paul Irish isn’t doing it anymore, so…

JOE: You know Paul Irish and Addy Osmani are doing the show they published on their Google+ feeds and I can’t remember what the name of that show is.

MERRICK: Yeah Google+ is turning out to be a really great source of awesome content, I found.

CHUCK: Yeah especially with their communities, their ‘new communities’ feature. You can get some really interesting discussions going there.

AJ: Yeah, for sure.

CHUCK: Yeah most of the time, if I’m trying to figure out a particular technology, I’ll just go to the website and read the documentation or work through a problem in it. But that doesn’t necessarily keep me up to date; that’s more just a learning process for me. And this is been really kind of an opportunity thing for me because I know where to go for things like Ruby, but I didn’t always know where to go for things related to JavaScripts, so this is all been really helpful for me.

MERRICK: I hope so. I’m open to if anyone wants to hit me up on the Internet, too. Like I’m dying to find more places, more interesting content, more stuff of substance, too, overly.

CHUCK: Yeah. In fact, if you have kind of a secret sauce or some place that we haven’t mentioned on the show, by all means just tweet at JSJabber and let us know what they are and I’ll try to retweet those out so that everybody else can see them as well.

JOE: Right. The name of that show that Addy Osmani and Paul Irish do is called “The Breakpoint”.

MERRICK: That’s right. And they do a lot of developer tooling discussion which is really cool.

JOE: Yeah.

CHUCK: Is it in iTunes? Do you know?

JOE: I don’t know. It’s videos on Google+, so –

MERRICK: Aren’t there on YouTube? The videos of themselves..

JOE: Yeah.

CHUCK: The Breakpoint?

JOE: The Breakpoint. And if you’ve either add or follow or go to Addy Osmani’s Google+ page, or I assume Paul Irish’s as well I just happen to find it really quickly here through Addy Osmani, then you can find it. Or just — I’m sure if you Google ‘The Breakpoint’ and Addy Osmani and Paul Irish, you’ll find it.

CHUCK: Yeah. I don’t see it in iTunes. I would love for them to put it in iTunes. Anyway –

AJ: A few other awesome blogs, “HTML5 Rocks” is great. Like they do a lot of stuff on new APIs you can play with. I love that. And then there was “Brendan”, which is Brendan Eich’s blog. Joh Resig’s blog, he’s starting to update it again as promised; he’s the guy that created jQuery. And “NodeUp” is actually a really interesting podcast that I listen to as well, if you’re interested in Node.js.

CHUCK: Awesome. What about conferences? We talked about attending the conferences, but do a lot of the conferences publish videos of the talks that were given at their conferences?

MERRICK: Yeah totally. I have lots of great point to bring up conferences, they’re pretty — Conferences are just invaluable, they’re awesome, man! And in JavaScript, we have tons of options.

AJ: Yeah. I’ve heard it on the Merrick Christensen’s spoke cascading JS and they publish that already. Yes?

MERRICK: [laughs] Yeah they publish all of them. That was a great conference, too. Obviously, JSConf, NodeConf, also as of HTML Conferences, Rich Internet Conf, and there’s so many conferences! And I think it’ll be really interesting to maybe set up a poll or something and see what our listeners are attending.

AJ: Right. Does JSConf can publish their conferences and some stuff?

[crosstalk]

MERRICK: Man, we may not have a lot of podcasts, but we have a ton of conferences.

AJ: Yeah. And if you’re a conference organizer and you’re not recording with the intention of publishing your sessions and it hasn’t happen yet, please change your mind.

MERRICK: Why are you being so selfish?

[Chuck laughs]

JOE: Guarantee, it will not increase your subscribership because you don’t publish the sessions.

CHUCK: Yeah. Alright well, are there any other avenues that we haven’t explored here for places to go?

MERRICK: We touched on Reddit, we touched on Podcast, we touched on Twitter, touched on videos –

AJ: Divine inspiration?

CHUCK: [laughs] Is there anyway that you guys aggregate all of this? Or do you like sometimes go look at the Twitter, and sometimes go look at the feed reader, or –

[crosstalk]

MERRICK: I’m always doing all of that, all the time.

CHUCK: So you’re looking at all of the different places that you aggregated?

MERRICK: Unfortunately, yeah. Like I use the Twitter for the client. I use reader, it’s beautiful app. And then like I said, like all of it, I end up finally into that [inaudible] readability, which as talking about earlier, it’s kind of like Instapaper.

CHUCK: It’s readitlater.com?

MERRICK: Readability.com. Read It Later is the same kind of service. Any of those kinds of service, they kind of just store stuff. I’ll just try to have link to Readability, yeah. But I end up putting stuff in there for when I actually have time to really dive down into something and you consume it, which is great. Because when you’re just going through stuff, you don’t have time to really digest it.

JOE: Get a tablet. If don’t have much money, buy a cheap android tablet. And then sink your stuff with Read It Later and Readability and read it when you got time.

MERRICK: It’s awesome. It’s really enjoyable.

CHUCK: Alright, cool. Well, I think we’re getting pretty close to needing to end this show, so we’ll move on to the picks. Joe, what are your picks?

JOE: So let’s see, I’m going to pick 2 things. I played this game called “Sherlock Holmes”, and I guess it’s actually been out for a little while, but it was really fun! It’s a board game, although it doesn’t play like any board game I’ve ever played before. You can only play it 10 times because it has only 10 mysteries, but every time you play it takes about an hour for as to about an hour and a half the first time. But you go through and you’re supposed to be trying to solve a mystery that Sherlock Holmes is also trying to solve. You actually get to go through kind of a booklet with clues. And for every clue that you look like, you lose points. Because you’re trying to solve it in the least number of clues possible to solve the mystery. And take about an hour, it was really fun! Had a really good time playing that.

And so my second pick is going to be on the iPad. I just picked up a game, it’s might and magic. I think it’s called “Clash” or “Crash”, I don’t remember exactly. But it’s a really cool iOS game, might and magic game, and that was really well-done. There’s a lot of really really casual oriented iOS games that it really have any depth to them especially if you’re actually or as pretty serious gamer. And so this is actually has a lot more depth than your typical iOS or mobile game. So I’m going to pick that one as well.

CHUCK: Alright, cool. Alright Merrick go ahead, what are your picks?

MERRICK: So I’m ashamed that I haven’t picked this one before, and it’s “Diet Coke”. I love diet coke, so much. Particularly citrus like a little bit of lime and lemon in there. [making a sound] Just amazing.

And then the other one is Noah Gunderson, I’m going to go to see his show tomorrow. And I’m just looking forward to his acoustic music. And the third one is Anis Mojgani, he’s a poet. Both of those guys just create beautiful things, and I love it. So those are my picks.

CHUCK: Awesome.

AJ: I need to make a public apology to the jQuery community at large. I want to appreciate Merrick for calling me out of my crap last podcast.

MERRICK: Thank you! Was it the exceptions?

AJ: I was never able to [inaudible]

MERRICK: Oh, my gosh!

AJ: The problem that I thought I was having so either I imagined it..

MERRICK: I feel so redeemed…so redeemed..

AJ: Or whatever…

[Chuck laugs]

AJ: Yeah! So it does swallows…

[crosstalk]

AJ: But the exceptions, I was not able to reproduce to swallow another exceptions.

[crosstalk]

AJ: So if it ever existed as a problem, which I can’t confirm that it did, it certainly doesn’t exist now. That was that. That was just in my head. Potentially. So as penance for that [inaudible] I wrote a little article on how to load jQuery anywhere using a bookmarklet, and so I’ll pick that as penance to the jQuery community.

And then also just for fun, for those of you that are using Ubuntu, I created a script that installs all the things that you could have got and installed out of the box but didn’t. And so I’ll pick that. Those were my selfish picks, except Merrick. I picked him for calling me out of that crap and that was –

MERRICK: Thank you!

AJ: That was purely altruistic.

[laughter]

MERRICK: That was! I was very humbled, thank you!

CHUCK: Awesome. Alright, so I have a couple of picks. The first pick is, well one of the fans of the Ruby Rogues Podcast sent all of the Rogues a $20 Gift Certificate to thinkgeek. And so I went through thinkgeek and — some of the stuff is fun, some of the stuff is funny, some of the stuff is in poor taste, and I was looking through it and there really wasn’t anything that I was looking at that I had to have, except one thing that I eventually found. So if you’re a “Doctor Who” fan, you probably recognize this sound [alarm sound].

[Merrick laughs]

I have a sonic screwdriver, which is the doctor’s tool for doing all the –

JOE: Chuck, if I had to start from you, I think I just lost it.

CHUCK: [laughs] It is such a funny show! Oh, my gosh! Anyway, so this is the “11th doctor’s sonic screwdriver”, and it pops out [popping sound] and it has buttons on it to make the noises so [alarm sound] if I ever have to hack computers on anything, then I have a sonic screwdriver to do that with. But anyway, I’m a huge fan of the show and I just thought it was fun. I wasn’t getting anything too serious.

The other pick that I want to pick is something that — I think I picked the Powermat before and I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I’m going to pick it again if I haven’t picked it before. And that is, I got an iPhone, it’s kind of a juice pack or battery pack that you can just throw on to the powermat and it will charge on its own. And there have been a few times where I forgot to charge my phone, and so I’ll just pull it off. It has the 30-pin connector so I have to use an adapter to charge my phone with it, but man, it charges the whole thing up; it charges that pretty darn fast. And then I can just carry my phone around of my pocket and not worry about it. So those are my picks this week. And we’ll go ahead and wrap up the show, thank you for listening, and we’ll catch you all next week!

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bugzbrown 5 pts

AJ, in your defense about the jQuery exception problem...

My developers had a similar problem in an project.

We had a anchor point link that was loading content via ajax, that was working fine, then we added two simple jquery changes to the script, $('title').html('Link title goes here'); and $('html, body').animate... (to scroll the doc up to the top of the page)

What happens when you do that is that for most browsers it will work seamlessly, but in IE8, we were getting an exception on line six thousand or what not on the jquery library...

My developers were flipping out until, using IEs crappy debugging tool and some old-school "alert-style-debugging" I managed to identify that jQuery was losing itself in the $('title').html()

When we removed this line, everything worked OK.

I've just reproduced this again to make sure it happens and you can rest to know that you were not going absolutely crazy, this kind of crap does happen.

 

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roblevintennis 5 pts

Wow, great round up guys! Some of the stuff/places I'd already heard from, but this set of links and resources should be made in to a gist or something - thanks for sharing guys!

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