Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of My JavaScript Story. This week
we're talking to Loyani Groner. I hope I got close on your name.
I'm really terrible at that. Do you want to introduce yourself real quick?
Remind people who you are? Sure? Well? First of all, thanks
for having me. I love the podcast, so it's a big owner for
me to participate in it. So my name is Loyania. As you mentioned,
I'm a software developer from Brazil living in Florida right now, uh huh,
and I have been working with technology for fourteen years, mostly in Java
and also on front end with some frameworks, and the latest framework that I'm
working on right now is with Angler Nice. When I'm building a new product,
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about G two I. Yeah, and you did an episode back in November
on Adventures Negular talking about creating content in Portuguese. That's correct, And so
your Portuguese is your native language, correct, that's right. But you live
in the US, so you've picked up English as well, yes, and
a little bit of Spanish. Oh wow, yeah, let's let's get three
of them in there. Why not four? Right now? I'm intimidated.
I only know two languages. So yeah, let's dive in and kind of
get your background a little bit. How did you get into programming? So
after I finished high school, so this is like a long time ago,
I had to pick a course in college. So in Brazil, the way
it works, whenever you go to college, you need to define your major
right away. So you can't go to college and pick some classes and then
after that you decide. So you have to go to computer science college or
you know, law school or medical school and things like that. So I
always liked mathematics and physics, so okay, I'm going to try to do
something in engineering. And from all of the engineering courses, the one that
I felt the most that was like a match was computer science, just for
the fact that I always like to use the computer. That was the only
thing, playing video games and stuff. So that's the reason that I decided
to go to to computer science computer science college. I didn't know anything about
programming. I had no idea what to expect from the from from the university.
And my first class was an algorithm class, and my professor was telling
us how to write an algorithm to peel a potato. So he was just
trying to use things from our day life and try to translate it to an
algorithm. So that was really interesting for me, as most of people whenever
they are trying to learn how to program. I had some difficulties. But
then after that, like after four or five months just training a lot,
it's when I actually started to enjoy writing programs. And that's how you know,
started nice. So can we assume you finished your CS degree, Yes,
I did okay, because I'm trying to create the story here, right
and just kind of get a feel for it. Okay, so you finish
your CS degree then what So when I was still in college, I got
my first job opportunity. I was in the second year, so it was
like a junior developer in Java, and that's when I also had my first
experience with JavaScript. Back then, Gmail was a thing, so ajax was
still the new hype in the front endow the good old days. Yep,
I remember that. Yeah, So we used to the bug with alerts on
the screen. You just put a lot of alerts, see which ones will
be displayed, and then you know exactly where your issue is on the code.
So I stayed two years on this company, so I had the experience
working with Java development and also a little bit with JavaScript, just playing JavaScript,
no frameworks Jake Querry don't think j Quarry even existed back then, so
it was pretty nice. And after that I had another job also as a
Java developer. That's when I also worked a little bit with JavaScript. Back
then, we were still using jsps on Java and a little bit of scriptlet,
and there was still a little bit of JavaScript just to make a few
things work on the screen with very basic stuff and on my third job.
This is when I was still living in Victoria, which is my hometown in
Brazil, and then I had an opportunity to move to San Paulo for a
new job, and that's when I actually started working more with front end and
j Quarry and other JavaScript frameworks such as the Sanchai XTJS. That was a
big thing back then as well. Oh Man, I had a contract working
on ExtJS and I personally didn't enjoy it, but some people were really young
ho about it. It's interesting that your career kind of followed a path of
both Java and JavaScript, right. A lot of people I talked to it's
well, I got into Java or Ruby or Python or this or that,
and then I got into web and then eventually something happened that kind of made
them follow that transition all the way into JavaScript. And it sounds like your
course has been more. You know that you're still doing Java and you're still
doing JavaScript, and so you're working full stack for lack of a better term.
Yeah, since the beginning, I've always worked with web projects and with
all the companies that I have worked with, they're all usually the task that
you are responsible to do the end to end the strains and also the back
end connecting to the database and everything. So very cool. So do you
feel like that's given you kind of a different background from a lot of other
Angular developers And what do you think the advantages are disadvant that are? I
think I think it's nice. I've always been curious to know how things work,
and I think that knowing how the back end works, whenever I'm coding
the front end or whenever I start coding the front end, I already know
the things that I have to do in order to be able to link my
front end to the back end. So the API. So I think that
gives a good background, especially when you are designing new APIs, and it's
a good thing that you can keep in mind all the optimizations that you'll need
to do on the back end to make sure that you are sending only what
you needed from the front front end and and virus versa. But if you're
also working in a team that it's in sync, if you only have from
front and developers and only have developers that are going to work on the back
end as well, if the team is in sync, I think you can
achieve basically do the same thing. It's just a matter how the team works,
right. I guess what I'm wondering too, is we run into a
lot of cases where people feel overwhelmed at all of the things that they have
to keep track of and try and learn and things like that, and so
I'm wondering, how do you stay up to date on all that stuff?
I personally think that it's impossible to know everything. It doesn't matter if you
are only a back end developer, only a front and developer, especially on
the front end right now that there are so many frameworks and so many libraries.
What I try to do is try I try to pick my topics,
know things that I'm interested in and take a look at that, maybe read
a tutorial, watch on YouTube videos, and then if I'm really interested in
the subject, then I try to read a book and deep dive into the
documentation and all that. But it's really it's really difficult, and sometimes I
have to pick exactly what topics that I would like to spend more time with,
and unfortunately I cannot spend like learn everything that I want to. There's
so many things out there, so just prioritize and then deal with that.
That makes sense. One other thing that I'm kind of curious is we progress
here, is at what point did you start documenting things, especially in Portuguese.
So I was still in college, so I've been blogging for eleven years,
eleven twelve years. So back in college, I used to work during
the day and then go to my classes at night. So that's very common
in Brazil, especially because they know people need to work to provide for themselves.
So I wish to work during day and go to college at night.
And right after I graduated, I had all that spare time at night.
So it was something new. You know, you spend three years of your
life just every single day with no vacations, working and then going to call
it night at night, and suddenly you have all that spare time. So
I started playing video games and then with a few months, I saw that
that was becoming an issue because I needed to do something that was more useful,
and that's when I decided to create a blog. And yeah, so
my first my first post series was about a few things that I've learned in
my first job. So I just decided to document what I was learning back
then, and it kind of like became a reference for me. So whenever
I needed to go back, I could go back to my blog and I
had that particular subject or topic over there. Right, Yeah, that's I
did some blogging early on. I mean, eventually I wound up doing podcasts,
but yeah, a lot of it back then was oh I ran into
this problem or I got this error things like that, and yeah, so
I put in and here's how I solved it, right, And sometimes it
was for me, and sometimes I found that that particular post was getting a
ton of traffic because it wasn't just me, right, it was Yeah,
it was other people on the internet. And so it's like, oh,
there are thousands of people that have the same thing go on. And one
thing that is nice that sometimes when I still have issues, I google it
and then I see a link It's from my blog. So oh, I
did that already, So I go back to that. I already knew that,
and now I'm gonna know it again. Yeap, very nice. So
yeah, so how did you wind up getting into JavaScript in I guess a
more serious way because it sounds like you were doing ajax and you were doing
jQuery, which is a place that I went through right with my career,
but I wasn't super serious about it. I was much more serious about the
back end technology. So when did the front end technology start to take a
more serious role in your career? So when I was working in my third
job, I started doing more full stack development like front end and back end
as well. And it's when I started working with EXGS. So I started
blogging about the XCGS. Back then, I was working for this company and
my manager was here in the US as well, so all the communication was
also in English, and I felt that I also needed to practice a little
bit more. So that's when I also started to blog in English. Gotcha.
And then after that, when I was posting all the tutorials about the
EXGS and also Java plus EXGS, I got an invite from Package Package Publishing
to write a book for them. Oh wow. And then I started taking
things more serious on the front and as well because I thought, I mean,
it was something that I really liked doing. And then suddenly I was
getting all this marketing and attention from the publisher and things got a little bit
serious. So it was nice, Right, what was your book about the
first one was about EXGS? Four. Okay, so it was just what's
new and then some tutorials as well explaining how things work around the framework.
Makes sense. Yeah, like I said before, ext wasn't my favorite framework
to work in, and so yeah that said, I mean, if you
really understood it, I'm sure you could do some pretty terrific stuff with it.
It was just different enough from what I had worked in to where yeah,
I was looking for something different. But you know, yeah, so
you have a book out, how did you wind up making the transition from
e XT over the Angular? So when I when I used to work with
the extra JS Sancha back then, they also released a mobile framework, Sancha
Touch, and I used to go to conferences and present talks about the topic,
you know, mobile development was into Touch and also XTGS. And a
friend of mine that was also in this conference he mentioned have you heard about
Ionic? And Ionic back then was in the alpha version, the first version,
so and Ionic was using angler JS. That's when I had my first
contact with angler JS andngler JAS was already very popular back then. But since
I was working with one framework, I didn't do the transition to work with
the more like HTML and JavaScript driven because Sanchez. You know, it's more
like object oriented and you basically work only with JavaScript NOWIGML. So I looked
up Ionic and I thought this is really nice because was also based on Cordova,
and it was when I started to learn a little bit about angler JS
as well, so I could also do a little bit of transitioning to Ionic.
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book. H So you were doing Onnest, you were doing mobile development a
little bit yeah, just some very simple projects. I got you it was
and that was all just for your personal interest, personal interest. And then
I started working as well. The company that I used to work for,
they had the needs as well to do some some web development and then becoming
like shipping to the to the stores as well the application, right, and
you stuck it out through Angular two. Yeah, So when they have announced
that they were releasing a new version, it's when it hit me. Okay,
so I have an opportunity here to learn a new technology and since the
beginning and then just follow all the trends uh huh, And eventually I knew
I was already working at my current company. So this is my app work
job. So the company that I'm currently working with, they have used Angler
JS as well. They have used xgs but also Angler JS. So when
they have released when Google released Angler version two, it hit me that this
can potentially be used here at work as well. So I'm just gonna try
and learn it before everyone does. And I really fell in love with the
framework. So it's been two or three years now since Angler is out.
Angler too is out. Yeah. Nice. So you're still at the same
company and you're still doing Angular there. Yes, now we have switched to
Angler two two and a half years or something, right, and you've been
blogging about Angular this entire time, blogging and also putting out some YouTube videos.
So when Angler version two was announced, there was no material in Portuguese,
only in English. And since I've always enjoyed just creating content as well
in putting out there, and nowadays my main platform is YouTube, I decided
to put out like a course, an Angler version two plus course in Portuguese
and go through each of the steps like a book, but in a video
view format. That's interesting. So you've transitioned now from blogging to YouTube.
Yes, I still blog sometimes, but not as often as before. So
what's your approach to doing YouTube videos? Then? I really I really like
to create videos of things that I'm learning, And as I mentioned, I
had this idea to do this like book format, but in video format,
like a really long course. So I have published one hundred and fifty videos
on Angler on YouTube. Oh wow, and just from creating a project with
the Angler cli to how to use IF and G four to routing, and
I tried to go through all the details and then publish one short video.
Usually maximum fifteen minutes. It's something that really needs that long and do something
more practical and showing how how to do that. It's mostly edatorial, right,
So what are you working on now? So now I am I'm trying
since I just completed this very long video course. It took me a little
bit more than two years publish all the videos. So right now I have
a few ideas to what published next. I want to do something that is
a little bit more like to end. There are a lot of topics that
I didn't cover in my original series, state management with NNGRX, which is
something that I really like as well, and a little bit more on Angler
material. I didn't cover Anglar material at all during the course of this is
something that I have a few people asking for and also in the course I
have covered mostly Angular. It's by itself, but you know, whenever we
are working on a project, it's never just Angler. It's usually Angular with
a backhand. We need something to connect to a database and have some business
logic and whatnot, So planning to covert that as well. So I'm gonna
pick a language. It's probably gonna be Java, since it's the one that
I have more experienced with but nat jas is also very interesting. So it's
something that it's very familiar to Angler, and it's also very familiar to Spring.
It's very the The source code looks very like. So if you get
a source code in SGS and a controller class, for example, and the
controller class written in Java Spring, it's almost the same thing. If you
hide the imports on the top of the page, it's basically the same code.
So oh interesting. I didn't realize it was so close to Spring.
I've heard a few people talk about how nice it is. Since I know
Angular, I can you know, I can do an SGS and so it's
interesting to hear that it's from familiar to people who are doing Spring. That's
really cool. So when can we expect to see some of those videos out?
Is that something that you're doing right now or is it something that is
coming soon or that's probably on the second semester. It is he er.
I have a few other projects. I'm working right now on a workshop for
a conference that I have on May, so that's consuming all my spare time
at the moment, But after that I'll start working on the on recording.
I already have all the idea laid out and the outline and stuff. But
I just need to get my hands on and record it and then edit and
then publish, right. And I find this all extremely inspiring and exciting,
right because and one of the things that I try to do with this show
is just show that hey, you know, Loyani and some of the other
folks out there, they're human beings, right, It's not like you have
superpowers, and so you can get three times done as much done as anyone
else. It's just that you're doing it right. You're you're driven to do
it, you're smart enough to do it, You're you know, you explain
things well, so you've got the skills to do it, so you just
do it. So let's say that somebody else is out there and they're thinking,
okay, you know that this sounds like something I can actually do,
right, This sounds approachable. You know. I try and do the same
thing with like podcasts, right and just explain to people, look, this
is you know, it's not it's not as hard as you think it is.
There are things to know, but it's not impossible. Right. So
if people are feeling like this is something they can do, how do they
start getting onto YouTube? And talking about angular and doing the kinds of things
that you're doing. What's your process look like when I started, because people
were asking me to create more content after I published the books. The books
were written in English, and then people okay, so you are Brazilian,
but you're publishing content in English. There are so many content out there in
English, and we need something more in Portuguese. And YouTube was really growing
back then. Okay, so let me try a new platform. So I
just got a software that records my screen screenflow for max screenflow. Yep,
I use that, and I used the microphone that came with my iPhone,
you know that the really Yeah, So I didn't have any special microphone or
things like that, so I just started very simple. So I needed a
software just to capture my screen, and then something that I could record my
voice, and I started with that. So you can start pretty simple.
You don't need any fancy equipment, at least for YouTube videos. Just start
with what you have and people will start watching your videos. Just do it
for fun, you know. I think it's really important that you have fun
doing all these things, because otherwise it can be it looks like work,
but it shouldn't look like work. You know, it's just you trying to
contribute and having fun and contribute to the community as well. I think this
is a really nice, a really nice thing that we have going on with
the technology community. You know, you have so many people posting materials and
publishing things. You can learn a new language for free on YouTube, and
I think this is what it's really nice. So if you want to just
get started, just go to a room, a quiet room, just prepare
your content and record and publish over there, and you know, start slow,
yep, and over time, over time. If you like it,
then you can start investing in a nice microphone, maybe buy a webcam,
you know, just improve a little bit. Uh huh makes sense. So
yeah, it's interesting too because you're talking about I'm putting together a course now
on how to do podcasts because people ask and yeah, it's like, this
is a microphone that you already have because it came with your iPhone, and
it's a decent mic. It's it's it's not the one that I would pick
long term, but yeah, you know, getting started, it's approachable,
and yeah, you just get in. You talk about what you're excited about
and talk about what you're you know what you're doing and things like that,
and then it grows into something else, and so yeah, it's exciting,
and yeah, people want the content, so they'll just keep coming. So
yeah, anyway, super exciting. Do you have any recommendations for things for
people to get, because developers tend to have at least some money that they
can spend on this. So if somebody had a few hundred dollars to spend
on getting kind of a starting YouTube set up, what would you recommend that
they pick up. I used My first nice microphone was a Blue Eddy,
So that's a microphone you can get for a hundred bucks and it's a nice
one as well. It's USB, so you don't need any other equipment.
Right now, I'm using one that I'm really liking it. It's the Road
Protest Protest or something like that with a it's a different microphone because it's not
USB, so it doesn't peak as many like background sound, so it's a
little bit nicer. I think it's also good for podcasts looking to start a
podcast. And I have a Scarlet interface as well, just to connect to
my computer, and that's basically it. It's something that I have invested on
the last couple of years. Nice, all right, we'll get links to
all that stuff in the show notes. In fact, if you can just
put in the like, the brand and the product, that would be awesome
in the chat. We'll make sure that we get links to those in the
show notes. Sure, we'll do awesome. If people want to reach out
to you and they're thinking, Okay, I want to do this in you
know, maybe they speak Japanese or Italian or whatever, and they're thinking,
okay, you know, I want to make content for those communities or just
in general. You know, people are thinking about getting into YouTube. Can
they reach out to you and ask you questions? And if if they can,
what's the best way to do that. Sure, I'm more active on
Twitter, so you can d M me on Twitter. My dms are open
and I'll be I'm very happy to share with you a few tips and how
would you get started? Nice? And what's your Twitter handle? It's at
loyani Oh okay, you want to spell that out for people. Okay,
it's Loyanie l O I A N E. Nice. All right. Well,
I'm going to move us into picks. Is there is there anything that
you want to shout out about or let people know about that you're really enjoying
these days technology related or can be non it can be anything. So recently
I started playing video games again, good for you. I ran from it.
Now I'm starting to go back and playing Word of our Craft, something
that I really like. It doesn't have an end, so you can play
whenever if you like it. It's online. And then yeah, some people
like it, some people don't. And also I'm really hooked into the Mandalorian.
Oh good show. Yeah baby, they're so cute. Yep. How
they managed to not have that spoiled before it even came out, I do
not know. They kept it a secret. It was really really good.
Yeah, they did a terrific job because it's like, what's in that little
thing? And then oh, oh wow? And of course I understand that
the guy that created it, he's like, it's not Yoda. We all
know that, but we don't know what to call it. So anyway,
I'm going to throw in some picks as well. This is a pick that
I've done on probably every other show, but this one just because of our
recording schedule for my Angular story. But it is the expanse and that's a
TV series. It was started by Sci Fi. Sci Fi canceled. It
made me very sad. Amazon Prime picked it up and that made me very
happy. So they just released season four and anyway, I'm really enjoying it.
I think I'm like two or three episodes in there. Yeah, it's
they're sticking pretty close to the book. So anyway, I've enjoyed that as
well. But I really really like what they're doing there, so I'm going
to pick that. The books are also terrific, so I'll pick the Expanse
books and then yeah, I think I'm going to shout out about the podcasting
course as well. It is in pre sales right now because the course is
not done. I'm planning on putting up just a few videos a week,
and I'll have office hours so that if I don't have a video up for
where you're stuck at yet, then you can ask and I can just walk
you through it on the video or on the live call. So if you're
interested in starting a podcast, and yeah, it's kind of topical to our
conversation, I'm going to go through equipment. I'm going to go through everything,
you know, growing it, monetizing it, the whole nine yards.
You can find it at podcast playbook dot Co. And so if you go
check that out, it'll all be there and you can go sign up for
the course and I'll walk you through how we do podcasts. I'll also be
covering because I've done solo podcast, interview podcasts, co hosted podcasts, and
panel podcasts, and so I'll walk you through the process of Okay, you
want to find a co host, Here's how you do it. Here's how
you set up your mic, Here's how you use your mic. Here's how
you find sponsors. Here's how you grow your audience. Here are some of
the tips and tricks to social media and SEO. Oh, I mean it's
not going to be comprehensive necessarily in se O and you know, those kinds
of things, but it'll give you the basics so you can get stuff out
there. So anyway, yeah, those are those are my picks. That's
cool. But yeah, so yeah, this has been a fun conversation.
Thank you for coming, Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, hopefully
we'll have you back. Find something to talk about, you know, beyond
creating content and Portuguese. But yeah, I'd love to have you back on
the show. So we'll figure that out and until next time max out everybody.
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