Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of my JavaScript Story. This week
i'm talking to Wayne Hagen. Usually i'm like, today, were on this
episode of JavaScript Jabber or blah blah blah, or sometimes I'll just tell you
how we met. In this case, Wayne reached out because I had been
talking on JavaScript Jabber mentioned that I was curious where people were coming from getting
into JavaScript these days. And incidentally, funny enough, two days ago on
JavaScript Jabber recording schedule, not the production schedule. Right, it's not out
yet and it probably won't be for several weeks. We talked to somebody going
through a bootcamp, but Wayne, your experience is a little different from that,
and I really am curious as far as all of this goes. You
know, yeah, what's it like getting into the industry today? So let's
talk a little bit about your background date, like, you know, what
you've done before, and then we can talk about why you decided to get
in and what you did in order to learn. Hey, folks, this
is Charles Maxwood and I just launched my book, The Max Coder 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 Definding your Dream developer job. Have a
good one, max out. So what is your background? So basically,
I've been in the collision repair industry for fifteen years. My way up as
a journeyman painter. And it's kind of funny because I wasn't even never even
planned to be working on cars. When I got out of high school,
I told myself I never want to work on cars. I actually had aspirations
to be a three D animeter, but that kind of changed, among other
things that had to do with the community college I was at and what they
could provide. I've been married for about eleven years now, I got three
daughters, nine, seven and three. Wow your schedules no joke? Then
no, And I commute about an hour fifteen hour thirty minutes to work huh
one way every day, and then I work about a ten to eleven hour
day, so my time to teach myself something new is very thin. And
then the free time I do have on the weekends, I try not to
take it up with my extracurriculars because I got family to take care of,
you know, So I've been taking my laptop with me to work and spending
about a half hour forty minutes coding if somebody's not talking to me in the
break room, and then just little chances I have here and there when I
get home or on the weekend. So it's been a slow journey, but
it's given me a pretty big challenge to kind of be intentional about what I
try to learn, because I don't want to waste my time learning the wrong
thing. So that's kind of where frameworks and libraries and modules all that foreign
language to meet. Early up front, it was like do I need to
learn this or you know, I could. I might jump right into react
because that's what everybody's talking about, But then I could just be get myself
way worse off just launching myself if I didn't learn the basics. So it
took me a little while to kind of figure out what I need to learn.
Yeah, did you tell us what prompted this change? Like, did
you meet somebody or in your cooper? Actually? Yeah, So I've actually
been looking to get out of my industry for a few years now, and
my aspirations aren't It always changes because going through this journey, the last probably
four months of learning coding has got me really interested in it. It's kind
of exciting, first time in fifteen years to realize there's more out there for
me. Potentally, I just keep following this, but my wife and I
have always wanted to open a coffee shop for quite a long time now,
since we got married, and then just a few years ago. I actually,
you know, you get caught up in your career and don't make time
for yourself to do hobbies and stuff. But like I kind of started tinkering
and playing around again, got myself a three D printer, started doing like
RC model airplanes and stuff like that. Oh no, I'm jealous. I've
wanted one of those time. Oh yeah, well it's a lot more approachable
now, yeah it is. But yeah, like I kind of raised them
apprentices to kind of take a load off my back, uh, where they
could pick up part of the burden. It works. I started get more
free time at home at the time, and so I started investing my hobbies
and in myself for my own sanity, and it was just refreshing to kind
of get that feeling of like being that nerdy teamker a guy that I always
was that I hadn't really spent time to do in a long time, and
that kind of influenced me and inspired me in Like this idea of building our
coffee shop with a maker space in mind came to fruition. Yeah, So
I've been following the maker movement for a while now, and like that's just
been kind of my passion. Like I follow like tested dot com with Adam
Savage and all that, a lot several other maker channels and stuff like that.
You know, even people in that community they say, like coding is
making too. You're making new things that are useful to everyday people all the
time. Sometimes they're creative, sometimes they're just a practical application. So this
just fit right in. But I hadn't really considered what I wanted to use
with it. I've always had ideas for apps and stuff. But what prompted
me to jump into it at this point? So at work, we're a
big company, the shop I'm at, we do like one and a half
million sales on auto repair a month. But like they have this whiteboard that
they have up behind our production desk where every the service writer that meets with
the customer and writes the sheets for us they go and write the cars that
are going that day, like who the bodyman is, who the painter is?
Doesn't need an alignment? Does it need to? When you put in
hands all this stuff, and it's like far away from their desk, it's
far away from everybody else, but it's like managements. They just want them
to go out there and write on it all the time and update it.
I just looked at it. I was like, that looks like a big
waste of time. It would be a lot more useful if they had like
a big TV up there with a spreadsheet or something like that where they could
just fill it in from their computer, right if they could check it on
their phone, you know, eventually like you can get data from that too
if you save all of it and see how production really works out. So
that kind of prompted me to want to make an application like that, just
to see if I could do it. So initially I went on Google.
I started like looking for like clips of code to see if I could cobble
it together, and I found out really quick that that just doesn't work.
So that led me to figure out, like what I really need to do
to figure out how to make this and I came across because like i'd heard
about one thing I did know about. I've been aware, I've kind of
followed I'm into tech a lot, so like i'd followed what Mozilla tried to
do with their fire os, the idea of like just web apps being available
to anyone. You don't have to have an app or a specific device that
works. So I had a friend that got way into that. Yeah,
so I just like the idea of like a web app. It sounded like
a better approach to building something, except especially for somebody starting out. So
yeah, I just I kind of as I started kind of trying to figure
out what I needed to build an app, it got bigger and bigger and
bigger. As I was like looking into I was like, okay, so
I've always heard about JavaScript. I kind of looked into that. I was
like, Okay, well, that doesn't look like it fits all my needs
because you need I realized you need HTML and CSS because that's the stuff you
see. JavaScript's the stuff that makes it interactive where I can click a button.
But then I was like, oh crap, Like now I need something
that it goes to like a database or whatever that is. And the assumption
is the database is the same thing as a server, And then I find
out more it's like you need a language. You need to learn some kind
of language that builds or talks to a server. Then there's I'm still kind
of in that part of learning right now. Like it sounds like there's also
modules or frameworks for the server to talk to the database. So how did
you decide which of all of these things to learn? Right? I mean,
yeah, And it's just just to give you a little bit of context,
because I talk to a lot of people that aren't new and they have
the same problem, right, you know, it's not just you. I
mean even if they've dialed in and they're like, you know what, I'm
a React guy or I'm an Angular gal or whatever. Right, it's you
know, it just boils down to you know, Okay, so you get
into React, let's say, and then there's reducts and mob X and just
managing state with whatever you have and you know, and that's just state management,
and it's what do I put in the store and what don't I put
in the store? And how do I test it? And how you know,
how do I make a performance blog? You know, it goes on
and on and on. You know, you're talking about the top crust of
this rabbit hole, right. So yeah, as a new person, and
it seems like this guy's the limit to right. There are plenty of angular
jobs, or plenty of React jobs, or plenty of you jobs. There
are plenty of mobile jobs or whatever, right, and so it's not like
picking one is going to necessarily severely limit your options. So how did you
pick? Put some notes down for this, But I would just I started
going on YouTube and kind of seeing what people were saying about it. And
then I came across a video by a guy named Andy Darah watt Derowitz I
think, and he had a video called My Story of being a Self Taught
Programmer an Invention a book in the head first series by O'Reilly and I think
he said it was the HTML and CSS book and it was just a good
starting place for him. And so I was like, you know what,
it sounds like that's kind of what everybody's going to be working with when they
jump into this. So I'm going to learn. I'm gonna do that first.
So I took my HTML CSS book from the head first series. I
started in October where in March or in April now, So that took me
about a month to complete, and I tried to take advantage of being curious
while I was going through the book, like got to a certain point I
was like, Okay, I'm starting to get this. So I went to
my wife's photography page that she made in square space, and I was like
halfway through the book, and I'm just going to try to replicate this page
with what I know right now. And so, like I open up the
source code and it's like, you know, three hundred and fifty kilobytes for
a page that has a background and a little bit of text. I'm like,
I don't know why this is all here. Kind of in retrospect,
I imagine that's just framework stuff that's built in the squarespace or whatever. But
like I was able to kind of replicate that page in like six six kilby
HTML file, and so that was kind of fun. And I kind of
just did that as I went through the book. I kind of gave myself
little challenges to replicate pages that I've seen across the Internet. And then I
got into the head first JavaScript book because why not stick to the public sure,
and the series that cam to be jelling with me. I think I'm
still muted, You're still talking, You're still learning the fundamentals there, right,
you know. Yeah, JavaScript is still kind of that base level stuff,
just like h C, MEL and CSS. So I like that.
Can I just back up for a second, though, because I love the
idea of replicating something that's out there, right, because you know it can
be done, you know if you've gotten it right, because it looks the
same or acts the same. So how did you decide? I mean,
you mentioned your wife's squarespace, and that's kind of an obvious pick, right
because it's something you're familiar with. But what were some of the other things
you picked and and why did you pick those as things you wanted to replicate.
I didn't do many. Some of them were over still over my head
because that was the very beginning of it was I was starting to do.
But like again, like I said, I go to testing dot com a
lot. That's a page that they just had. It's kind of a blog
style website. They just post videos from YouTube, So I was just trying
to replicate format and stuff like that. I started like building my own blog.
I haven't published it yet, but like I've been kind of playing with
that. I would get on My kids would hop in on my lap or
next to me on the couch sometimes and want to build their own website because
they want to do what dad's doing. So my middle girl, Addie,
we built her a little website called ADDIE's Robot Roller Unicorn with just a big
old stock photo of a unicorn on the background and some text on it and
just however she wanted the pont to look. And then we put together another
website with the little squshy toys for my oldest daughter, right, and so
it was just like a little activity for us that gave me a chance to
do something like not replicate something, but kind of play around with formatting,
like kind of figure out what heck is flex or this grid thing that everybody's
talking about. I should do that, honestly, I should do that.
Yeah. So yeah, and then I got I finally started kind of towards
the end of November, I started the JavaScript book. That one took a
lot longer because I would take a multiple week break just to kind of work.
I'd get just enough in my tool chest where i'd start like working on
that app idea I had for work, and then i'd kind of get to
where I couldn't do much more. I'd keep going in the book. That
was a really good exercise for me, because as I progressed through the JavaScript
book, I'd see where I was being inefficient in the code I'd written for
that app, and I'd go back and revise it and kind of get past
perspective on Like in a way, I think that the book I actually was
using was Yes five book, maybe not Yes six even I think it was
written in like twenty fourteen. Well, yes five. I'd still work alone.
Yeah, so either way, Like some of those syntax look a little
older to what I was seeing on what's the website everybody goes to for to
check their coding and ask questions a stack overflow. That was another interesting experience
for me because sometimes you go to stack overflow and there'd be these because I'm
learning vanilla JavaScript, and you see like percentage signs and pound signs and dollar
signs. I'm like, what's this? People are mentioning jQuery or something,
and some of the syntax they're saying like this is from a framework or something,
and I'm like, I don't know how to use that, but yeah,
that it was just a good exercise as I went through that book and
kept revising my code for that app, and I'd see myself cutting out like
twenty thirty lines of code sometimes just to build it. I even't had a
timer built in at one time for where like a cell would gradually meter across
from zero to one hundred percent when a car was getting ready to be delivered.
And that was an interesting thing because I listened to I can't remember which
podcast, but they were talking about how complex time is encoding and the UPTS
format but how important it was, and I was like, that sounds like
a legit thing to kind of work on. Because when you take an input
from a form, you don't get that it kind of gives you a partial
string. So I had to kind of create a function that would complete the
string so that it could be used again later. And that was an interesting
I still don't know how I did it. I'd have to go back and
look at it. But that was just a good challenge. It was kind
of my first satisfying challenges to kind of work at. It felt like I
was kind of doing something unique. Probably wasn't, but it just felt like
it. I'm a little curious, you know, talking through some of these.
Were you reading through the books while you were working on some of these?
Yeah? Or did you? Cause I talked to Eric Kritchlow who on
the Clean Coders podcast, and he he mentioned that the way he picked stuff
up is he basically reads the book front to back and then just goes and
gets to work, and so I was curious what your Yeah, your method
was different than that. It was just kind of going through it. Like
again, I was just excited to like be jumping into it. I remember
the first time, like it really clicked for me and it was really exciting.
I'm on a Beginner's Web of dev group on Facebook and I just went
on there, like I just went on there and just said and like it's
kind of dumb, but just like this simple thing. I was going through
my book and they had us like kind of deviating on this one thing over
and over again, and I just was in the console on Firefox or whatever
and wrote up a quick function so I don't have to retype that code over
and over and over again. And I just naturally it was the first time.
I just at the back of my head, I just wrote function it
wasn't thinking about it, and I was like that was that was pretty exciting
for me. It was just something simple, but it kind of just I
was like, Okay, that click, that gel, that kind of makes
sense. I'm not like druggling with this now I understand what the function is.
So yeah. I completed the job a script book in January I think,
and then I just took some time kind of playing around with my app.
More was kind of busy with work. I was trying to figure out
why I'm waiting for you to pick a team. I know, so I
haven't gotten there yet. So and this is the thing for me, like
I still don't know if like this is going to be my career, you
know, like I'm kind of playing oh yeah, you know, And I
hope it doesn't feel like I'm wasting your time. No, it's not,
because you know, it's this perspective too. I mean, I'm not sure
this is going to be my career, is okay? So what things might
make you because we have this conversation usually it's about like women and minorities,
but you know a lot of other people and this might get me in trouble
saying it. But what I find is that a lot of the folks,
whether they're a minority or not, they're people, right, And a lot
of the reasons that people fall out are people issues, not necessarily women issues
or minority issues. So if we see the places where we leak people in
our pipeline, then maybe it's like, oh, well, if we made
sure that Wayne and other people understood this thing right, then maybe they'd be
more likely to come into the community. Or maybe if we solved this particular
issue with development, or maybe it's a perception thing, right, But yeah,
I'm curious. So, yeah, it's not a waste of time.
It's an interesting perspective on the on the industry, and oh where might we
have a leaky issue and and maybe you wouldn't be happy here, and so
maybe it's just not a good foot anyway, you know, any of those
I would love to just kind of get perspective on so that you're not wasting
time. It's fine. Oh yeah, So like I said, like you
know, our real goal for my family is to build this business that we
kind of dream of. But like I said, Earl and that's the Maker
Coffee space. Yeah, and I love that idea. By the way,
yeah, because I like, I've found my greatest passion is teaching people.
It's been like my pleasure for the last six or seven years as a journeyman,
raising up apprentice technicians right so that they can make a career of themselves,
be able to support their families, and just I just love the idea
of like teaching somebody the right way to do something and be happy about the
quality of their work and know that they're putting something out there that is good
and something to be proud of. And like I said, like, it's
kind of funny. I've been hearing it for years, like because I just
approached my job so different. Like in my trade, it's you know,
they're a lot of these guys are gear heads stuff like that. We need
people like that too in the world. So yeah, but it's funny because
I've always told people like I find that artists make the best painters because it's
it's kind of an art into itself. And then I was talking to my
boss, who was my new boss at the time two years ago, because
they kind of made me the point person for training new apprentices in the company,
and he's like Wayne, Wayne, and like, you don't think like
an artist, you think like an engineer, right, And I'd never thought
of that before, but it totally made sense because like when I would do
art in high school and stuff like, I'd be so meticulous and a perfectionist
about things. I'm like that in my job. Most of these people,
like part of the painting job is tinting colors to match each car because they're
all a little off, whether it's being mismatched from the factory or it's in
died back in the sign or something. But like a lot of these guys,
they just kind of go do these toner banks, because a color is
made up of many individual toners, right, just kind of like drip drip,
glob glob and make the color match. But once it's matched, like
it's good for that time. But I and a few people a number of
other people do it, but it's not very common. I use math to
tint, so I'm like, okay, I need about half a percent of
this red to change this color this way, might need to leave out twenty
percent of this make it match or add this. I'm very mathematical about it.
And then I keep my sprayouts and with all the notations on so I
can index them later for more use and share that. And I actually,
at my last job, I kept every note document for every car I did,
so I could go back and look at the RO number for a specific
car from three years ago and tell them exactly what I sprayed on it.
I could share it with another technician that might be having a problem with that.
And that's like another app idea I have is like like kind of a
social network for painters where they can go online and jure color matches that they
found. People could vote on them and like follow painters that they feel are
good color matches. It's like, I'm really passionate about making communication and things
better for the industry. I'm leaving and so like I kind of want to
leave that behind before I go. So it's it's like another motivation, but
kind of I got a little off track there. But like I said earlier,
like coating is making in a way, I'm the same way I need
that recipe, right, So yeah, so yeah, so like coding is
making in a way, and so like I I would love to offer at
least a glimpse into this world at our maker space too. You know.
It's like right now I'm actually on my Python. I'm learning Python right now,
and because I know we don't have a show for that, I know,
but you know, that was the I'm working on it. I'm working
on it, you know. I got myself into this and I'm kind of
like committed to finishing it. But part of I realized, like, I'm
making myself the full stack app technically, I think, but it's like I
did HTMLCSS, I did the JavaScript thing. Now I need a way to
store the data that's not going to disappear the second I refreshed the website,
and so like that was kind of the next step that was tough for me.
It is like i'd heard about my SQL. I kind of fiddled with
it at the beginning, but I didn't know what I was doing, and
the user interface for that was just like felt god awful to me. But
now that I'm kind of playing around in the command prompt or whatever, and
it makes a little more sense just now that I'm actually doing the coding part.
But it's like, Okay, there's my SCUO. I hear about like
nons well, Mango dB sounded kind of nice to me because I'd learned the
objects oriented programming in JavaScript, so I kind of leaned towards that, but
I'd heard about NOJS Python. I wasn't really interested in Java or c or
whatever it like. So it was kind of like between those two to learn
to do a back end, and I was trying to figure out how I
wanted to go about that. You know, I just learned JavaScript basics,
so as I'm approaching trying to figure out what I want to do about the
beck ends, I'm like, Okay, it sounds like I need to learn
another aspect of vobscript called node. And to me, I'm like, is
this what people call a framework or a library? Nope, or I don't
know, but it's like, in a way, it kind of sounded like
what Angular or react is. You know, it's just is it just different
syntax that can be applied a little different. So like that was tough for
me. Plus I kind of liked the idea of Python just because we wanted
to do this makerspace and if I want to do projects with like kids and
families and stuff that could be applied towards like Raspberry Pie projects and stuff.
So I was like, you know, I'm just going to try that.
It might be a little tougher because it's something brand new, but I'm just
going to do that. So that's kind of what I've been into the last
month. I've been going through that book. I've been learning last they're doing
my sqol and that book, and it's it's not as bad as I had
thought, you know. I'm starting to kind of grass the whole idea of
this little bits of all the aspects of the stack. And it's still a
little overwhelming, but like I'm kind of getting the idea. But like I'm
really committed to like finishing something because that's what's driven me to like not stop.
So I really want to finish one of these apps. Even if it's
not it never goes into production, you know. So that's been like my
biggest motivator. A couple of years ago, I put out a survey asking
people what topics they wanted us to cover on depchat dot tv, and I
got two overwhelming responses. One what's from the JavaScript community they wanted to React
show, and the other one was from the Ruby community and they wanted an
Elixir show. So we started both. The React Show though is React Round
Up, and every week we bring in people from the React community and we
have conversations with them about React, about the community, about open source,
about what goes into React, how to build React apps, and what's going
on and changing in the React community. So if you're looking to keep current
on the current React ecosystem and what's going on and React, you definitely need
to be checking out React Roundup. You can find it at react round up
dot com. Nice. So, yeah, so it sounds like you're learning
Python now. I mean, where are you at with all of this?
So you want to expand on that? So, yeah, I'm just curious
as far as so you feel like you've got your hands around JavaScript for the
most part, You've got a reasonably good handle on Python, but you're still
learning more. Yeah, you know, what where do you where do you
end up as far as all of this goes, Like where are you now?
And yeah, where do you see this going in the end? So
I kind of have a time limit limit on myself too, because like we're
planning to sell our house soon and move to Tennessee to start our business in
June when the kids' school year is over. But the way things are going
right now, yeah, that might be a thing. The housing market is
basically shut down, so I might have a little more time on my hands,
yes, but right now I feel like I can't implement anything into the
wild. I could probably get my blog up soon, but part of what
I'm trying to figure out right now, as well as get community, I
have nobody to like, ounce ideas off of or talk to. That's kind
of one of the other challenges I had was, you know, like,
where do I joined the Facebook group, but half of the people are just
marketing their own teaching websites. They and the other people are beginners. On
that group. I hear people talk about meetups, but nobody ever talks about
how you find a meetup. Oh, you want me to tell you how
to find a meet up? I have no idea. I will happily do
that. And it's funny too, because I've coached some people on finding jobs,
and I tell them to go to the meetups because you'll meet people in
your area that have jobs. Yeah, typically, and so the idea is
then you make friends who might be able to you get a job. I
know that's not exactly what you're aiming at, but yeah, for people who
are finding jobs, that's one of the first things I tell them to do.
So I'm also gonna preface this by saying a lot of times I tell
people to go do this, and then they say, there's no way,
There's no way there's one in my area because I don't live in a big
city. And what I found is that even some of the areas that are
not big city have code groups. Right. Some of them are more general,
and some of them are very focused on specific technologies like JavaScript. And
if there is one that's focused on the technology, it's most likely either Java,
dot net or JavaScript. So just putting that out there. Yeah,
so the Python is making inroads now. So anyway, you go to meetup
dot com and you do a search, you can look you know, within
like fifty miles of your ZIP code, I think is the way that it
works, and then it'll list it all out and so you can put in
the topic that you're interested in having a meetup group for and it'll find them
for you. So so anyway, it's it's relatively easy process, and then
you can go join them and see when their next meetings are and if they
don't have any meetings coming up. Of course, we're talking in the middle
of this coronavirus pandemic where nobody is meeting up, right, so you have
that going. But if you got on and you know, during normal times
and you saw, you know what, there's there's no meet up a lot
of times. What you can do is you can reach out to the organizers
and say, hey, look, I noticed sart to any meetups coming up,
I'd like to organize one. And then, you know, all you
really have to do then is find somebody to speak and get it on the
calendar and people will show up and there you go. Now you have your
meetup group and somebody else did the work of gathering all those people together in
one place so you could reach out to them and say, hey, we're
getting together. You also have to find a place to meet. I guess
that's the other thing. But you know, if it's a smallish group,
you know, less than fifty people, you can probably just say hey,
let's all go to this restaurant or this coffee shop or something. If it's
bigger than that, then yeah, start looking around at other companies or look
at their past meetings and see where they've met in the past and see if
you can line that up. But I mean, that's it. That's the
hole long and the short of it now within the JavaScript space, I'm also
organizing some virtual meetups because of the coronavirus. I'll probably keep them going afterwards
as long as people want to come to them. But yeah, so you
can find those at devchat, dot tv, slash meetups and I'm doing one
at four pm mountain time on Monday as we speak, so this will probably
come out later than that, so you can go see when the next one
is. But I'm also doing them for view, React, Angular and Ruby,
so you know, keep an eye out for that. And I'm also
doing one in the morning mountain time, like nine am mountain time on Thursdays
and for the same groups. Except what that does is it puts it in
the afternoon evening for like Europe, Israel, Middle East Africa time zones,
so those folks, because the ones in the afternoon or evening here in the
middle of the night for those people. Yeah. So and then if you're
in Asia or something, those times will put it like in the morning your
time, depending on where you're at. So anyway, so that's another thing
that I'm doing. So if you want to sign up for those, you
can then Yeah, that's kind of where we're at. And I'm just inviting
past guests from JavaScript Jabber or whatever to speak at those so or some of
our hosts. You go, Yeah, the meetup dot com is by far
the easiest way to go. Another place you can look if you're curious,
is for Google developer groups, and Google has their own website for that,
and so you can go south there's one of those in your area. Well,
I live in the Bay Area right now, so I'm sure that,
oh you've got too hard, You've got it, You've got your pick man
in the area, They've got a ton of them. What's funny is is
like out here, I live near Salt Lake City, so you know,
not a big city really, I mean maybe a million people in the metro
area, maybe a million five along the whole Wassat Front which is basically from
Ogden to Provo. And you know, we have we have a whole bunch
of meetup groups here. And they tend to have like one in Salt Lake,
one in Utah County, which is where I live, which is the
county south of Salt Lake, but it's rather populated around Provo, and then
they usually have another one up around Ogden or even up in Logan, which
is a small college town up in northern Utah, and they have those for
all of those, and then some of them even have two. In Salt
Lake. They have one in like South Salt Lake, the south half of
the valley, and another one downtown. So okay, you know you have
good options here. But I mean I've looked on meetup for Bay Area and
they've got i mean, just ridiculous numbers of them. Seattle is the same
way, and so is Los Angeles. I found. Yeah, and I
just I never was aware of the meetup East Coast. East Coast. You're
probably you probably have good options in a lot of the bigger cities. One
of the not as big cities that surprised me as far as the number of
meetups they have is Orlando, Florida. Because Orlando everyone's heard of it because
of like Disney World and stuff, but it is not really that big a
city, and they have a ton of tech stuff going on there too.
So but yeah, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia I think has a bunch.
New York City has a ton, and they've they've got as much going on,
you know, down in Jersey as they do up in New York City.
So you've got great options there. I know that there are other groups
that meet, like in Raleigh or Charlotte, North Carolina, and so yeah,
you know, it's you know a lot of good stuff in Nashville.
Austin has a ton because it's becoming a tech hub. So I mean,
yeah, you may have to drive a little bit, but yeah, you
can probably find something within reasonable drive of where you live. So yeah,
and we're planning to move near Nashville anyway, so it sounds like that's a
good hug for that as well. Yeah, I know a lot of people
in Nashville, so anyway, so yeah, so anyway, good options there.
I'm curious, you know, as we kind of wrap this up,
are there other things that I can answer for you. I know that we're
over time already, I think one of the biggest things, and you kind
of said at the beginning most people that are in it already are struggling to
figure out too. But I still quite can't quite wrap my head around what
the difference between frameworks, libraries, modules, web components are like. In
my mind, it they're like either plug ins or like I'm kind of getting
a sense for what a module is with Python it. It's a completely different
style of coding. So like, I, yeah, that's that's kind of
been the barrier for me. Like part of me just wants to stick to
Vanilla because like, I don't know, if I'm going to go down a
rabbit hole, that's just not going to be something I'm gonna I'm gonna use,
yeah when something else would have been better for me? So what And
this is completely my opinion, but in my experience, let's let's take it
down to kind of the basic level. You usually have something like a platform
or a language implementation. I kind of think of them the same way.
So like no js is an example of that, right where it's a okay,
it's a JavaScript implementation that runs on your computer. Each of the browser
JavaScript implementations I also think of as platforms because they all have an engine behind
them that are built into the browsers. Right, So Python has a bunch
of those. There's kind of I guess the basic I don't know what they
call it over there because I'm not as steeped in their jargon, but you
know, so they have the basic Python implementation that you just install. It's
written in seerc plus plus and then there's like iron Python which connects into the
Windows run times, and you've got I think there's a Java, Java,
Java JAVM implementation of Python and right, so you can run any of those
platform worms to run Python and then basically talking for a job script, it's
like the V eight engine or something like that. Yeah, V eight engine
is it's sort of a platform because it has its own API exposed API layer.
But the V eight engine is part of Chrome, and so when you
run it in Chrome or when you run it in Node, because Node is
written with V eight. You know, then what you're doing is you're you're
running it on whatever platform actually you know, execute your code, gotcha.
But yeah, V eight is more of a language implementation, okay, And
then you've got frameworks, and frameworks I tend to think of there is so
it's a collection of libraries. And libraries are typically you know, a bunch
of code that does a theme, right, So it has a job.
Now, sometimes that job is big and it does a lot, and sometimes
that job is small and it doesn't do very much right, but it does
something important. So that's a library. And some of the libraries feel like
frameworks because they do so much stuff. But like the picture I had in
my head with what I think that is is basically a function call that does
all the work behind the scenes from me, I don't really know, I
need to know how it worked, but I just call the function from Yeah.
But some of them are organized into modules, which are collections of functions
basically, okay, and so you can pull in the module and then you
can call several you know, several of the functions in there that all do
jobs related to the overarching functionality that you're going to get from your library.
Okay. So the library is just, hey, here's a way to do
a thing in your app. Frameworks are more underpinnings for your app, right,
and so if you know, you talk about flask or in node,
you've got like express or Angular view and React and so with those typically what
you're going to do is you're going to pull in React and then you're going
to build the rest of your application on top of it. Okay, And
so it gives you essentially a way to build an application, where a library
gives you a way to accomplish a particular task within the application. Okay,
And then that component I saw when I mentioned earlier about my wife's squares square
space page. Like, I just pulled up the home page that had nothing
on it, and it was just had lines and lines of code in it.
Yeah, so that was probably just like a framework or it is.
I bet I'm betting, and I don't know this for sure, but I'm
betting that square space has its own framework that does you know, that builds
the page for you essentially, okay, And it may have some underpinnings on
React or view or Angular right, and then it just is more constrained because
it only has to do what squarespace does, you know, because it has
to support things in a reliable and predictable way, whereas Angular, React and
View are designed to get a lot of the minutia out of your way,
give you a way to organize your code, and then allow you to do
whatever you want on top of it, so they have to be rather flexible,
whereas square Space's use CAS is fairly constrained, and so their framework is
going to be much much more focused. And then components Components is a term
that's come up lately and especially in front end frameworks, and it's just a
collection of functionality essentially front to back. Usually it's just the UI layer,
but sometimes it encompasses some behavior on it as well, and that's usually implemented
in Angular react or View. I think Aurelia has picked up components though,
and I think some of the other frameworks Dojo, you know, that aren't
as widely used but are still out there. Ember is another one that comes
to mind, so they'll implement components, But I think components is very is
a term that's going to vary wildly depending on your framework and language. Okay,
and if you go into like React Native, you've got components and views,
and views is the term that the native devs use for a UI element,
and components is the way that React Native actually implements them, and so
sometimes it used interchangeably, and so it gets confusing too, depending on your
context. Gotcha. Yeah, the rest of those terms are pretty well defined
within software development, and so then it just you get into the gray areas
when you have a really really large library that tends to take over a lot
of your application, or you have a framework that is small and focused enough
to where you're only going to use it in certain parts of your application,
and so you can start thinking of it as a large library rather than a
small framework. And so that's that's kind of where you get into the gray
area. But React, View and Angular are pretty squarely in the framework space.
React is the only one that I would argue might be considered a library,
but then the React ecosystem has grown to kind of fill the framework niche,
gotcha. So the one thing with frameworks and libraries too that I don't
quite understand, as I have five minutes, Okay, I'm just letting you
know I have another call. Gotcha. Yeah, I'll just make this my
last question. And I might tie in ord press with that too, because
that's the word I hear thrown around a lot. But I imagine like a
framework or library, is that something that is posted, like that's something you
download, you host it with your website and it delivers it with your code,
or is that like hold from a different source so you can pull it
from a different source. You'll see some people pull it from a CDN which
has got content delivery network, and what they do is they make sure that
frequently accessed stuff is in a cash In other words, it's just quickly accessible,
and so you'll see people accessing from like JSCDN or things like that.
And so you can pull some of that code in from there, but usually
it's going to be a framework like jQuery that can be pulled in on its
own, and then you'll have other stuff that calls into it. Most of
the bigger frameworks like Angular, View or React, they assume, now if
you can be pulled in the same way, you can actually pull it in
and then run it that way. React and Angular you cannot, and so
what you wind up doing is you pull it into your application, you build
all your stuff, and then you essentially run a build stuff that pulls out
all the stuff you're not using, compresses and condenses your JavaScript, and then
that's all served up with your website. All right, But either way,
it has to be served up with your website, you know, whether you're
hosting it or somebody else that's hosting it, because the browser, if it
doesn't get it off of a reference on your website, it won't load it,
and then you won't have it. Okay, Okay, that sounds good,
and then we're last one. Is I hear word press in some regards
it sounds like it's some people like it, other people like it's kind of
like I think from their past they regret using or something like that. What
exactly is wor it kind of sounds like a squarespace, but like where it's
it's kind of a UI, but it's got more down to the code kind
of deal, like a framework or libraries. Because I hear I'm talking about
plugins and stuff and building websites and with WordPress, what I don't quite understand
that either is that kind of a similar thing. So plugins are usually built
so so WordPress as an example, right, they actually have system and a
series a set of APIs for plug ins to take advantage of, and so
you know, and then they have a mechanism for installing them, and so
as long as they follow the rules, then you know, meaning we're going
to access these APIs to get our work done. And I can be stored
in this folder and can be run in this way, then you know,
I can be a plug in. But it yeah, it really just depends
on the framework for that for a plug in and how they define a plug
in. Those are generally the ways that you look at plug ins. Yeah,
okay, yeah, all right, well we don't even have time for
picks, so I'm going to this up. But yeah, unless you want
to just say Hey, go check this thing out. But other than that,
I would just say I just finished the season of The Card. Some
people like it, some people don't, but I enjoyed it. Yeah,
we watched it last night. Yeah, that last scene just got me.
And then I had a chance to go see Hamilton last month and that was
awesome. But I would definitely recommend the soundtrack and also the mixtape soundtrack.
Cool. I'm just gonna remind people to go check out jas remal COF.
It's going to be in May. I am picking speakers today. In fact,
I've already picked a bunch of them. I just need to let them
know. And yeah, so keep an eye out for that. This winds
up coming out, you know, or you listen to this after May fifteenth,
after the conference is over, I will be putting the videos up so
that you can pay to watch them for a few months, and then I
think eventually they'll wind up on YouTube. I haven't quite decided how I want
to do that. And then I'm putting on some other conferences. So if
you want to do iOS Rails React Native, those are ones that I'm looking
at right now. And then I've decided just talking to a whole bunch of
my friends in the podcasting space that I'm going to do a podcasting online conference,
so keep an eye out for those. We'll all be listed on dev
chat, dot tv, slash Conferences, and yeah. In the meantime,
max out everybody. Bandwidth for this segment is provided by cash fly, the
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