Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of My JavaScript Story. This week
we're talking to SAW Music podcast. Hey, folks, this is Charles Maxwood
and I just launched my book, Maxicoter'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 And yeah, do you want to just introduce yourself real quick,
let people know who you are and what you do? Yeah? Sure,
JavaScript developer basically out of India and the capital city of India to specific I've
been working as a sort of a full stack, mostly friend and focused developer
for the past four or five years. I started when I was in college
as a freelancer and I've been working full time for Around. We used Gotcha,
Yeah, we brought you on. We had you on react around up
in twenty eighteen. Yeah, and yeah. I liked talking to people,
just kind of getting people's story, like, Hey, you know where you're
from, how did you get into JavaScript? What do you do? You
know all that stuff. So I'm curious as we kind of dive into that.
How did you get into programming? That's kind of a pretty common story
from a lot of developers. You know, I was young and like,
oh, I like to play commuter games, wanted to hack around in some
of the games, picked up some interest, you know, created some mods
and stuff, started learning copy pasting code from here and there, and chose
to pursue that as my college degree. As soon I was in college,
went dorm room and wanted some extra money. Went looking for WordPress, started
learning php, did some WordPress projects from online, you know, stuff like
what was it back then, od esk or something like that. Up work
is it right now? There's some sites like that, some pretty picked up
some projects online, then started getting some friend and stuff. Didn't know JavaScript,
didn't understand anything about it, so started learning, went through some courses
online, free code camp and stuff. Right cool? So, yeah,
you you were doing WordPress and PHP. Why did you pick that just because
it was popular or because you thought you could work in it, or because
you really loved it or what? I wanted some quick books and everywhere I
searched online for some easy project like some maybe some some blogs, some website
where it was just some content and you re into some content and everybody wanted
it on WordPress. So started learning that right, didn't even start coding.
I just put some plugins and logged into the admin dashboard and boom, the
website was just up. So it was pretty easy to up. Right,
makes sense. Yeah, I've done a little bit of WordPress stuff, mostly
for my own projects, and yeah, I mean some of it's pretty straightforward,
you know, depending on what you're hacking into it, and then yeah,
some of it gets a little bit complicated if you're adding completely new features
to it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So so how did you make
the transition to JavaScript? You mentioned free code Camp, but yeah, so
I started learning JavaScript. I was posting a computer degree, but there wasn't
much you know, JavaScript there. It was mostly CEC plus plus and everything.
Yep. So yeah, I started learning JavaScript on my own, started
copy pasting code, started trying to learn jQuery, some bits of uh,
you know, dom manipulation, some drop down menu, some krausers or something
like that. What made you want to make the transition to JavaScript? So
I started getting projects where they would say, like I would get product.
I got a project for some merchant I sell out of UK and they wanted
me to make a canvas sort of graphical editor where you could put your logos
on T shirts and everything and then like you printed out and order. So
I googled and saw the canvas Steam of five canvas. You got to know
JavaScript to interact with it. That's that's when I started learning JavaScript, then
delve into like as soon as I started getting more Angler one was popular back
then, trying to learn Angler one made some one or two projects and that
then moved to React. Oh, I gotcha. So when you were picking
up JavaScript and you know, building out yeah, the T shirt app,
I mean, what was it that really drew you in that made you go,
you know what, this is what I really want to do? Well?
I think it was about the quick feedback loop. I guess, like
anything like nothing's wor working, just throwing a console log and just look at
it. What's what's happening there, what's the data that's coming which one is
undefined, and you know, work from there. Like it was, it
was pretty easy to approach, like just sling some console lugs. And I
think that the easiest part was for me was just add a file, add
a script tag or anything to HTM and you can start playing with it.
Immediately. And also there were so many online places where you don't even have
to set up your own any environment on your commutage jas being code pen and
just start hacking. Yeah makes sense. So yes, you get in.
You said you were doing jae query initially. Yeah. Yeah. How long
ago? Was this twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, fourteen December? Maybe December?
Yeah? So by then, I mean I think Angular and some of
the other frameworks were pretty well established. Trying to remember exactly when reacts started
to take off, but I think it was around then as well. So
yeah, I mean why jQuery. Was it just because you were working in
the WordPress world and that's what they were using or was there some other reason?
Yeah, because at the very start JavaScript I didn't quite understand much of
it, and I mostly copy pasted stuff from like different places, Like I
wanted to make some kind of dragon drop in a feature and just saw some
code jQuery, waste code online, copy pasted it, tweaked it around,
had to lun JavaScript aston as the tweaking wasn't working out. That was my
gateway stuff like jQuery, And then people were talking about anglers, so picked
the angler from the build some to do apps, right, you built some
to do apps? Yeah, so yeah, what did you like about Angular
moving from jQuery? I is the demo was pretty sleek, the home page
demo that everybody keeps talking about, the two way binding. When we first
saw it, it felt like magic at that moment. I was also looking
at react at that time, but kind of felt a little foreign to me
at that moment and didn't go and immediately stuck around with Angler for some months,
and I think then they dropped Angler too, but everybody was saying it
was backward incompatible, and that was true, and I thought, I don't
want like and everybody was saying Reactors the way and everything. I just tried
to learn it after the initial hiccup, maybe did a course on it or
something like this, consumed some videos on it, and then it's pretty good
experience. Stuck with it. Cool. So what kinds of things have you
built over the years? Mostly when I was in college and was in freelancing,
my belts and stuff like custom fiveways apps, mostly apps, custom stuff
like appointment booking for small clans, some custom CMS systems, build some with
next and gatsby recently, and then I think one of the biggest ones was
reactnative app. Built a reactative app with that was I think my first app
where I used reducts and stuff and enjoyed the startup. Early early stage startup
where I worked it was a fintech startup ward worked on Marnstack mostly so worked
there for a year and a after college, multiple fintech apps and reactnative app
that was used by a lot of low end devices and all that. So
optimizing for low end devices in India, you know, where the internet speed
and the rural areas are not that good, and thinking about those kind of
bottlenecks, uh, low end smartphones, building with something like reactnative, which
is pretty difficult if you know. So, Yeah, those kinds of chat
mostly, Yeah makes sense. I'm a little curious as you kind of moved
through all of these changes, did you have a mentor or any kind of
community meetups things like that. It seems like a lot of those are I
don't want to say they're easy to find, but I talk to people in
the US and it seems like in some cases they're easier to find than others.
And I'm curious what the community looks like in India. Yeah, the
community is there, it's it's I wouldn't say, I don't think it's as
vibrant as you guys have in US or even in Europe. Maybe it's more
like since I'm up in North India and in and around Delhi, it's more
vibrant or in Bangalore because that's where all the tech people are in India.
Okay, but we still have a lot of people here and I happen to
be fairly active in the meet up community, have given some talks, have
gone to many, so it's pretty good. Some pretty good people have The
community is great. Yeah, there's the React community is pretty active. I
think in terms of other ones I am not very sure about, but React
community is pretty good. Nice. So uh yeah, I mean, what
what is it that's keeping you in React right now? I think one of
the things that's keeping me in React right now is I've been lucky enough to
now have written two apps scratch with just from scratch with just to React hooks.
So so like when reactors came out, I really wanted to try out
reactors and production apps, but you know, you just can't rewrite existing apps
just because you want to try out react books. But I had been lucky
and we were starting new projects at the very just when React hoooks became came
into the stable release, so we decided to go with typescript and React toooks
for that app. And it was a good experience and like, how really
fun building staff building custom reactors when there weren't many there out there. Build
some custom stuff and that's pretty fun. And then moved on to some interesting
stuff with React. Like currently I'm at work, I'm working on a graphically
editor using React, which is so like currently I'm working at a at an
enterprise tech startup where we build solutions for enterprise ERP integrations. So there's there's
this so you can imagine it as a visual programming kind of editor, not
based graphically sort of editor for migrating data from systems to another and you can
drag and drop stuff and those kind of support like think DRYO for ERP integration
stuff. So that's pretty interesting, and building in a React has been a
like pretty good experience having and testing like how canvas can be used with React
customer renderers and stuff. Nice, what are you working on now? So
yeah, that that is my prime focus right now. That visulator at work,
and so yeah, that's that's the privy thing I'm working on and on
the side, actually, me and one of my very close friends friend,
we built a small dev community sort of blogging site called abl dot bio and
so we hack around there creating rich text editors and stuff that is also on
React. So it's pretty interesting. Again, That's that's what's going on right
now. Are you building applications with view JS, then you need to check
out the Views on View podcast. Every week we bring in a guest panelist
from the view community and talk about the interesting things being built with view or
the changes coming in its ecosystem. You can find it all at Views on
View. Gotcha. Now, I'm also just because we're in the middle of
this coronavirus thing, and I know some people are going to listen to it.
A lot of our listeners are in the US, and you know,
we're kind of focused on our own situation. But I'm a little curious,
what is the situation down there with all of this stuff. You know,
I'm assuming you've got people working from home and things too, But yeah,
like, yeah, we have everyone working from home here as far as I
know, and it's been the case for I think since the start of this
week. So a lot of the companies, like a lot of the tech
based companies like US, which already had you know, the distributed team architecture
setup, they went into work from home pretty early, I guess. And
we we didn't have too many cases at least not confirmed cases at the very
start, but it's now picked up as as of now, I think we
have more than two forty cases positive confirmed cases. So it's getting like the
people are getting paranoid now. People weren't taking it that seriously at the very
start, like we were saying, it's just a high, but it will
pass so pass over, like it won't come to India or something, I
don't know, some some you know stuff. But people are trying to take
it seriously now. And I think on Sunday we have government announced lockdowns starting
sort of. So is it that widespread? Is it showing up in areas
around you or are there any hotspots? Yeah, yeah, it's showing up
around here. We have like people have been instructed to not go out if
they don't need to avoid hospitals for you know, regular checkups, delay any
any work stuff or anything. You then just don't go out. That's that's
the common stuff, and just like I think you guys had an issue with
toilet paper selling out and stuff. Yeah, I don't understand why because it
doesn't really affect gastro intestinal. I mean, it's all respiratory from what I
understand. So but yeah, sold out a toilet paper in the grocery stores
and then yeah, and it was funny too because we were like, oh,
we don't need to go do that, and then we realized that we
were actually running out of toilet paper at home, and so yeah, so
I had to run down to the grocery store on Monday and wait in line
to get toilet paper. So, I mean, it's funny what people do
with this stuff. I don't understand exactly why it was toilet paper. But
I also I see a lot of people in a situation where they're they don't
have information and so they just go do what they think they have to.
So yeah, it's been the case as well. People have been talking about
random stuff like if you take garlic it won't infect you, or some stuff,
and people have been buying stuff like that. People have been holding masks
and sanitizers and everything. Anyway, we'll see where it all. We'll see
where it all ends up. But yeah, I've also been hearing some promising
things about the possibility of some drugs being effective at curing or preventing coronavirus.
So hopefully sooner rather than later everything kind of goes back to normal. Well,
yeah, because we are on the topic of coronavirus, I really forgot
to mention we actually, my colleagues and I were working on some stuff like
how we created open source website which instructed people as to how to handle the
coronavirus or testing procedures here, or what to do and what not to do
in India, a very specific website where you get instructions as to why to
get tested close to you, when should you get tested, what are the
government instructions around the whole thing. Maybe you'll be able to share it or
something. Yeah, definitely, if you have something interesting about this, I'm
happy to share it. So yeah, yeah, I like asking this question,
and so I'm curious to see what you say. But are there any
like themes or lessons that you've learned over the years that you want to share
with the audience as far as you know, your career and things like that.
One of the lessons I've learned is don't abstract stuff early because it comes
to buy to you back a bit later on, because if you abstract early,
it becomes like it doesn't fit most of the cases that are going to
come in the future. And I have been a bit better that we too
often and hopefully I've learned and don't do that much often these days. Also,
Yeah, like just look at the patterns that you look in your code
and create stuff, and like abstract only when you see multiple patterns coming up.
I think we talked about design patterns the last time I was on.
Yeah, we did. It was a while ago, but yeah, we
did good deal. Well, if people want to connect with you online,
is there a good place for them to do that? I think Twitter?
Twitter is the best place, I guess. And what's what's your Twitter handle?
It's funny, it's a dread. I had to spell it out.
Maybe, yeah, go ahead, spell it out and type it into the
chat so that we can get it in the show notes. Yeah. Sure,
So it's d r e n t h e R. Is there a
story behind that? Oh? Yeah. It was very big into mmrpgs when
I was in school, and this was my in game name. Everywhere in
World of Our Craft and everywhere I got you, so it's stuck with me.
Good deal. Was there anything else that we should know about you before
we go to picks? Uh No, that's that's pretty much a blog that
maybe we'll be coming out with some live streams and stuff and do graphical editors
stuff. So maybe follow me on Twitter and maybe i'll get the link.
Step. All right, well, let's go ahead and do some picks.
Now, it's been a while since you've been on the show, but picks
or just stuff that you're enjoying, stuff that you like. One thing that
my wife and I've been watching together lately is The Masked Singer. It's a
TV show and they have celebrities they dress up in costumes so you can't see
any part of them, and then they come out and sing and then they
get voted off the show basically, and that's been super fun. The last
one we watched was The Swan, which was Bella Thorne. She got voted
off, but the week before that, which my wife had heard who it
was, and so when I reacted to it, she just cracked up laughing.
It was Sarah Palin, who was a vice presidential candidate. Here in
the US. Yeah, yeah, and yeah. I mean she's a terrible
rapper, she can keep the rhythm. But anyway, it was hilarious because
you know, they're guessing all these people and I was like, oh,
they're right, it's t and then she turned around. I'm like, Nope,
it's not. But anyway, this super super funny. So if I
spoiled it for anyone, I'm sorry. But by the time this comes out,
it a little bit a few weeks, so I'm gonna pick that and
then I'm just gonna remind people about two other things that I've got going on.
One is the meetups. So I'm putting on some meetups for JavaScript,
Angular, React, view and Ruby developers. They are online, which means
that all of the virtual handshaking, hugs and fist bumps you want you can
do because you won't get anyone sick. I just talked to Dean Radcliffe and
I think he's gonna show up and do something about real time JavaScript stuff at
the first JavaScript meetup, and I'm working on lining folks up for some of
the other ones, so if you want to talk at those, I'm not
putting out like any kind of formal CFP, somebody comes with me, comes
to me with an idea that I like for a presentation, then we'll do
that. And then at the end we're just gonna I'm gonna do what I
can to rotate as many people through the live video chat as possible want to
be on there so that we can just chat right for a half hour or
so, and that way people can we can get some connection in the community
going on, and I'll probably set up either a Facebook group or a Slack
channel or something for those, but we'll see that's kind of where that is
that's at. And then go check out JAS remote comp for JavaScript Remote comp
JAS remote comp dot com. Seventy five dollars for tickets three days, about
twenty four talks and yeah, you know, if your conference got canceled,
you know, come hang out with us. I mean, that's really why
I'm doing it, and I'm trying to charge as little as possible and still
be able to make things run. So, you know, seventy five dollars
kind of where I landed. So there you go. How about you,
do you have some picks? Yeah? Sure, So lately I've been very
much into editors, both recue Sorry graphical and you know text editors on web.
So our pick this library's I think people would have heard of uh appro's
mirror for creating witch text editors. It's a sort of up. It's it's
by the same guy who created code Mirror m HM, so that it's a
pretty good place to start if you're looking to build UH advanced uh rich text
editor customizable. So yeah, that that will be my pick. Sounds good.
All right, Well, let's go ahead and wrap this up. Thanks
for coming and chatting with me for a half hour or so. It's always
interesting just to see where people are at and get a feel for people who
are in parts of the community that I don't get to see as often.
Thanks, thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem, we'll wrap this
one up, folks. Until next time. Max out bandwidth for this segment
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