Hey everybody, thanks for coming to another episode of My Angular Story. I'm
the host Aaron Frost and as our guests today we have Zama Khan, Mohammed
Zama Khan and if you've been he's been on a couple podcasts recently. But
go ahead, Muhammad, ahead and introduce yourself. Hi, guys, this
is Zamakhan Muhammad. I'm a software architect and I'm also an open source contributor
to some of the open source projects in related to Angler modules and stuff,
and also write some technical blog posts and uh just recently also authored a book.
This episode is sponsored by centriy dot io. Recently, I came across
a great tool for tracking and monitoring problems in my apps. Then I asked
them if they wanted to sponsor the show and allow me to share my experience
with you. Century provides a terrific interface for keeping track of what's going on
with my app. It also tracks releases so I can tell if what I
deployed makes things better or worse. They give full stack traces and as much
information as possible about the situation when the error occurred to help you track down
the errors. Plus one thing I love. You can customize the context provided
by Century, so if you're looking for specific information about the request, you
can provide it. It automatically scrubs passwords and secure information, and you can
customize the scrubbing as well. Finally, it has a user feedback system built
in that you can use to get information from your users. Oh and I
also love that they support open source to the point where they actually open source
centry. If you want to self host it, use the code dev chat
at Century dot io to get two months free on Century small plan. That's
code dev chat at Century dot io. Yeah, how long you been a
developer? Seven years? But I was in web development, Like I had
interest in web development from day before that. I started like diabbing into web
programming in my bachelor's degree way back like ten years ago, just playing with
some dream tools and just just doing some photoshop at Hope after Effects, playing
with all these different tools from Adobe and just getting interested in webdom and overall
cool. So I feel like I know so much about you because we just
did a podcast you you dabble an open source and your father right, yes,
yes, and you you're an author, which means you're a glutton for
punishment. Because you like to do big, big, long efforts. So
that's awesome. How's your book selles going? Like, how's how is how's
the book going? Like people receiving it? Well, yeah, I have
got a lot of good reviews, but yeah, the sales report is yet
to come to me. Like I think the publishers actually submitted like every three
months, so I'm still waiting for it. It's just like a couple of
months that went by. Yeah, so I'm like behind them, like provide
me, Like I'm behind them to provide me promo code for like everyone listening
here, but like they just moved to a new platform. It seems like
an e commerce platform and they still figuring out how to get the promo code
stuff working. So right, right, Yeah, so you're still like,
look, you're still not one hundred percent sure how the sales are going.
Yeah, I'm not sure. Like you just have to wait for another like
a month probably to get it. Cool, So any more books coming or
you're done then for a while. Yeah, I'm thinking maybe I should be
going into like video creation, like maybe Egghead videos maybe or something sort of
like that, maybe where I have you know, content prepared and create like
high quality videos and submit them. Have you have you heard of thinkster Dio?
Yeah, that you should. You should talk to Joe at Thinster.
I know he'd be he'd probably be really interested in having someone with your experience.
I'm thinking of doing something in denselflow Dodgas, which is like a neo
platform. So yeah, something like that would be really great. Like,
yeah, thankful. I think it's from He's just I don't remember his name.
You just named him right from Yah jo James? Yeah, yeah,
Joames is like super and like in plural side videos. Yeah, he is
great. He's my hero. I love the guy. Shout out to Joe
Eames. If you don't follow Joames, go follow him on Twitter at Joames
and and uh, feel free to tweet at him and make up some fact
that I said about him. See if we can't see if we can't get
Joe some tweets with some weird random facts that I made for those listening.
Your book is about nine different angular projects, and each project is approaches something
different. Is that true? Yes? So basically what I do is I
take every single different concept that we can build, like I take like I
start with basic flash game application, which doesn't require any uh, you know
routing or any like it requires form like a small form, so just just
a simple application like that and then going to routing and then just leave the
flash game right now, like it uses different component library, et cetera.
But then when I go into a new chapter, I use a new component
library, and I started started from scratch so that people get not only how
to develop an Angler, but also see what are the different tools and different
component libraries available that they can use and what are the differences between them,
and then look for it. Like from there, I go into PW application
and then I use Angler material, I use Bootstrap, I use Velma,
I use Momentum UI, which is a UI framework from Cisco. I use
Clarity Design, which is from a component library from VMware. So just trying
to use a lot of things like with this component librari is. You also
have to write less CSS in your application, which is also good for me
because I don't want to put more CSS code in the book to show oh
yeah, you can style this by using this style. I don't have a
library about yeah, So just using destroying the users different component libraries and different
concepts that they can create using Angler. Do you cover like service side rendering
at all or yeah, suicide rendering native script application. I also at the
end also touch on testing as well as how to create competent libraries and publish
them on NPM, so that I mean it's really I would like push people
if they are creating any competent libraries in their company to open source it,
like it really helps not just their company, like by getting stuff done from
like a lot of open source developers will help you maintain it and then also
it will be good for your organization or it could be used for any other
application. Like when I started at Cisco, we were using this internal momentum
UI library and it used to be called collab UI library and then once we
open source it, like now when I left them, they open sourced it,
and so I still go there and help them out like if I need
to. And they have packages in Angular, React View and a lot of
different things just one component library with different frameworks, so yeah, I help
them in Angular a bit, and yeah, like just go out there do
some stuff and help others. Yeah, that's crazy. You're still involved.
Kind of speaks to your level of dedication. That's awesome that you a fun
fact yeah. I've been working less on Angular projects, like on applications for
almost about two and a half years because I'm involved in React projects more so.
What I like to do is I try to see what's good and React
community and try to bring that in Angler community. For example, React community
has this JSX accessibility lending rules and it helps people to keep their applications accessibility
maintained, like it doesn't allow you to break some accessibility, some small level
accessibility features. And I liked that about it, and then I tweeted about
it Minco and Vassin about oh, what do we have an Angler community for
this? Is there something that I can create or is there something that we
can do here? And they said, yeah, you can do probably in
cordializer. I like what certilizer. I thought, it's just for typescript.
How can we like check types and validate stuff in our template? And they
said that it's possible. Would you love to contribute it to it? And
I was like, okay, let me go ahead and try it, and
then I contributed like ten different rules related to accessibility. I wrote a blog
post on web web dot dev slash Angler and also wrote a recent blog post
on angler block about access building accessibility in Angler applications isn't web dot dev,
isn't web dev? Isn't that Google's website? Yeah? That is? And
you go do the guest blog there. Yeah, all thanks to Minco.
Yeah. He comes up and says, oh, would you write this blog
post for webdo dev? Do you want to write it for Angler? Bloy?
And I'm like, what hell? Yes, that's awesome. Hey,
folks, this is Charles Maxwood and I just launched my book, The Maxicoters
Guy 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 Guy Defining Your Dream Developer
Job. Have a good one, max Out. Yeah, dude, Minco
is one of the nicest people ever, right right right right? Oh he's
so He's so nice and so helpful. I really really really like Ninko.
I liked, I mean ever since before he joined the Angry team. He's
been one of the nicest, easiest people to work with. So I'm a
big Ninco fan. So just so we can kind of get to know you
better. Where are you from, I'm basically from India, Uh, the
south end and out of India. Basically, I'm a Hyderabadhi. So we
have a unique style of speaking Urdu and Hindi and people know us by saying
how and naco and so like you won't to understand it. Those are like
those are like slang words to refer to someone from Hyderabady. It's like yes
and no, but in a very hidera Badi style, like a South Indian
style. And whenever people hear us talking, and if they hear those words,
they will be like, Okay, this guy is a Hyderabadi. So
yeah, I'm from there. I came for masters, uh, studied from
University of Texas at Arlington. Stayed in Texas for the whole Like after master,
I just stayed in Texas. Didn't move to any other place maybe in
future, I don't know, but currently in Texas and loving Texas. Cool.
So you're in the Dallas area. Yes, that's awesome. Are you?
Are you? Do you like American football? Are you Dallas Cowboys fan?
No? Okay, no, all right, I thought i'd check.
So all right? Cool? You you your recent dad? Recent? Like
your baby six months? Six months? Man? So you're going through the
baby sleeping Okay, no, not at all. Yeah, he sleeps like
Max photo was. Okay, that's I mean, I can understand how how
fair my wife is and how she is dealing with all of that. Yeah,
it's a lot of work for sure. Being the dad has a lot
of work. That's the fact. Mom's mom definitely has the harder job.
Yeah, hottest. With my wife and I I don't even pretend. I
mean, I know she has a much much harder job than I. Like,
sometimes we'll be like talking to people and she'll be like, no,
I just stay home with the kids, And I'm like, I just like,
like as if it was easy, Like I couldn't do it. It's
it's not a thing that I could do for a little. My wife's definitely
tough as nails. She does a job I could never do. Yeah,
I might never be able to do that. Like she is like up at
night, she like the whole day she has to take care. Yeah,
it's a huge Yeah. Shout out to the mom's you're a mom, you're
killing it. Good job your dad the MoMA mom's hard. No, but
being a dad's hard too. It's it's uh, it's hard to get out
and like get really emotionally and mentally buried in your work, and then sometimes
it's hard to come up for air and still be a good dad. So
uh, it's it's something I constantly try and focus on a battle with as
well, make sure I'm not too too much work, because I mean,
my kids are getting old, I mean not old. I have a fourteen
year old, she's my oldest all the way down to a one year old,
and so, uh, there's different stages in life. The older they
get, the more involved have to be homework, science fair projects, classes,
coaching their teams and stuff. So yeah, that's cool man. So
me and you we almost we almost if we ever see each other, we
have to fight, right because we have competing open source projects right right,
and people are joining like I saw Julie joining with his library, and then
we have domas having a different library well solving kind of like different problems.
Yeah, but yeah, like having a very good, strong community, Like
yeah, it's always good. We should, uh, we should merge ours
and then beat Eerie and beat Thomas and by by Tom as you're talking about
Thomas Strahan, right, Thomas, Yes, Thomas Thomas is you know that
guy is smart. We did a podcast with him and I didn't really know
him, but after that podcast, I walked away thinking, this is a
smart guy. All right, right, really smart guy. Maybe we should
uh, we should merge ours and then we'll just go out and we'll just
be better than Arry and better than Thomas, and then we have to fight
when we see each other. We can just be friends. But yeah,
so what else? What else about you talk to us? Like tell if
you were going to say, hey, this is who I am. So
yeah, even though I did my master's and commuter science, I consider myself
more of a self taught developer just because we don't learn we're programming and our
masters or bachelor's like it's it's it's up to the students to learn and and
implement those projects in there in the classes. Right, So never learned web
programming like dowstrip or anything. So I think that is where something has to
be done, like on a university and a college level, where we can
teach students about what web programming can do, like it's it's so much,
so many applications can be built using it. And nowadays you see that everything
needs child script like IoT like wild devices and everything. Yeah, seriously,
And I think, yeah, that's where something is lacked, and if if
the community can do something there, like I know, like there are a
lot of good and gy girls and a lot of different organizations looking for getting
students into development. But if we don't get it from the universities and the
colleges and the high schools, then I have saying it it would be a
lot difficult for us, because if it gets through university schools and everyone educated
about web programming, that would be much easier for people to get in in
it. Yeah. I agree. It's so interesting, right, It's like
when I I love UI development just because when I cold, I can see
something on the screen. Yeah, besides just watching in the terminal Yeah td
D, Yeah exactly, that's funny. Are you a TDD guy. I'm
not much of a t SO anything that has to do with t I don't
do much of SO testing altogether. Just because I come from QUA, so
I started it should be more into that. Then. Well, here's the
problem is in q A, I realize how stupid developers are, and so
I learned one of the one of the things I learned that I can't learn
is never to never trust the developer, and so it's hard for me to
like trust the quality of the software to the people who are at least qualified
to test it. So I don't know. I mean, it's hard for
me to unlearn. It's hard for me to learn other people's like I know
they swear by it, but I learned a tough lesson as a cure person.
So anyway, Yeah, So to start with, I started at so
I was once I did my master's, let me go back. Actually,
once I did my bachelors, I knew that web programming was there. I
knew web programming, but I didn't like people around me always made me feel
like web programming is not for like, like it's not like a professional job.
It's just like a very low level kind of a role. So so
I was looking for something professional, and I was looking into networking, and
I did some networking courses, did my CCN examination and all that Cisco certifications.
But then I never had love for it because it's like when you do
networking, it's like you just have like black screen and then you code in
it. It was not for me. So when I came to for masters
here in US, I thought to do my masters in networking society since I
did my certifications and stuff, and I saw that no one cared about my
certification and I didn't like they went into very low level networking programming. So
I also what I did is I also took up software development together. So
I was doing networking as was software development. And I love software development much
more. And what I wanted to do is I want So I wanted to
look for a job, and everyone said, okay, Java is something that
you should look for and target for. And I was looking for Java jobs.
But suddenly I interviewed for AT and T as a consultant. They were
more interested for web programming than Java development. And that's why I call myself
as accidental web programmer. Like I was interviewing for Java, but then I
ended up as a web developer. AT and T was like a great experience
for me, even though the project was shared. I mean, what was
good for us back then was we started from j Querry. Right right now,
no one is looking for a person who has jQuery knowledge. Maybe a
few positions might, but working for a big organization like AT and T and
starting with jQuery and then going to backbone, not actually from jQuery we used.
We were using STML and jQuery, and then we moved added handlebars,
and then we moved to Backbone and then angler JS. So so we should
be thankful that we got the whole taste of what we're programming is and we
understand as a whole. But for a new person who is coming in,
it's really difficult for him to just getting into Angular and learning types, crap,
learning, confidence design and the whole services and everything. So education is
really important, and I think people focus into frameworks a lot than just education
of the whole tam CSS. I feel like people bash CSS a lot.
I don't know. I don't know about you, but I love CSS sometimes
like when I do CSS, I don't I'm not like, oh, I
don't know, I why it's not working because I understand CSS. Yeah,
so because we have that experience, we used to support IE eight browsers,
so it's it's not a big deal by using Flexbox with such a great support
right now, it's it's much better than what it used to be. Yeah.
Yeah, so education is really important. And yes, being a self
taught developer, it's like difficult, but it takes time half some mentor or
something and I agree. I agree. Adventures in Angler is a dev chat
dot tv production made in partnership with hero Devs. Hero Devs is a group
of Angular experts who can help your team code like true developer heroes. If
your team needs an Angular expert, reach out to Aaron at hero dot dev
today. How many I mean I run into a lot of developers. How
many developers do you think are self taught? I feel like, especially web
programmers, I think majority of them are. Yeah, it seems like there's
quite a few, except like nowadays, boot camps are teaching it, which
is great, but I still feel like boot camps are a bit expensive than
they are supposed to be. I feel like boot camp still falls into this
self taught category because boot camps only three months maybe four, you still have
to teach yourself a lot like they basically have there. That is good,
yeah, but it's more of a more of a self teaching. Yeah,
I would still throw boot camps into the self thought just because you didn't go
to school for four years. You know, you went to school for four
months and then you had to learn the rest on your own. So yeah,
I uh, I dropped out of college. I was going for computer
science. But oh wow, I'm gonna drop out. Oh that's great,
you're from the great Bill Gades and that category. No, because I mean
I took more school than the boot camp people, did you know? Like
the boot camp people, they they took four months. I took. I
took like a year and a half of college maybe two years. It actually
took me like three and a half years to do because I hadn't I had
my children, that hous, My afternoons were all really busy. But I
feel like there's a lot of people who who are definitely self taught and kind
of follow in that category, right, Like it feels like majority. But
yeah, you do get some essential basics stuff from engineering, but I don't
know how how you would relate it to your hard work that you put while
learning yourself Like yeah, yeah, it also helps you, like I mean
learning from different concept from database, like knowing relational database also helps you to
grow. But at the end, it's your your efforts that will shine.
Yeah, I agree. Well cool, Uh I when am I going to
meet you? Are you coming in g comp? I'm deciding to for sure?
Like are you boss? Yeah? For sure? Yeah, hopefully because
it'd be fun to hang out with you world. Are you are you?
Are you traveling around giving me talks this year? Not traveling anywhere? Yeah,
So basically I don't know if you saw my talks or not. But
people disagree. But I feel like my communications skills are really like I when
I talk in conferences, I like try to search for words while talking,
and I don't feel a lot confident. I also told this to others and
they were like, no, no, no, no, no, you
should go and stay at conferences. But yeah, I just tried to.
I just started like talking at meetups, and I'm just trying to like bring
that confidence in myself first of all, and then slowly go into like conferences.
But but apart from talking, I can still I should be going to
conferences. You should. You should definitely be going. But starting with meet
upsets where I started, I think that's where a lot of us start speaking.
So I think it's good to get out there and teach what you know.
And you clearly know a lot, so you should get out there and
share that as much as you can, all right, And I mean,
for what it's worth, I think you're a fantastic speaker, Like just in
this conversation. In the conversation we're having, and on the other podcast we
had, you do a great job at explaining your ideas and stuff. So
I think whatever's holding you back. Another fun fact, I don't know if
we should talk about it or not, but I did fail my gd exam
GD Yeah, I tried it. I passed my first interview but then failed
the next one. But that's probably just because you didn't have enough community stuff
right right, Like my book wasn't published. Yeah, I knew I was
trying a bit too early then, but yeah, hopefully that our books out,
you give more talks and meetups, do some blogs, do some podcasts.
You've done three podcasts and I've seen in the last few months. Anyway,
I did one yesterday for angler air Anngie Houston was one. Yeah.
I don't consider though, I don't know if we should consider them a podcast
or Yeah. You did the adventage in Angular, now you're doing this one
too. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, you just try again in like
a few months, you'll be ready to go. I also started a JavaScript
meetup group here in Dallas called called JavaScript Dallas, and just one of the
events happened, So I'm like I have to schedule another one for next month,
and you know, trying to do some some open like meetup stuff there,
right right right, what's cool? Yeah, dude, with you with
that stuff on your resume, next time you interview, you'll be fine.
But it's just the requirements, that's right. They just can't let everyone in.
But it sounds like you went a little too early. Maybe you should
have waited a few months because it sounds like you're ready about now. So
all right, what's cool? Man? Well, if anyone wants to reach
out with you, reach out to you, have any questions, needs any
help. What's the best way to get hold of there? Just do npx
Mohammad Zamarkhan in your node in your terminal, npx Mohammad Zamakhan. It is
h M a kh and you should get all the information about me and links
for Twitter, LinkedIn and other cool things. So is there some MPM package
other called Mohammad ama Khan. Yes, if you install that, it just
prints out to screen. Yeah, it's just doing it using NPX And yeah,
it runs that node script and prints out the whole information. Oh that's
awesome man. Yeah, I saw that Thomas doing it, so I was
like, Okay, I can do that too. Let's let's get the inspiration
from others. I like that. I like that a lot. All right,
Well, if so, if anyone wants to reach out to you,
go ahead and MPX Mohammed amecan and he'll give you the He'll get that.
That should give you the information you need to to get a hold of them.
Cool. I like that. All right, let's move on to the
picks. I I'm kind of drawing blanks on picks. So I don't know
if you've watched Chrome Deaf Submit like which happened this week. Yeah, did
you happen to watch it? Like it has? I watched some of it.
What did you see that you liked? I loved Audio's money is adaptive
loading and yeah that was exciting. And some other Pedo Bluey advancements like how
to share videos and photos and to your PW applications which was never there before.
Like so many different features were enabled using this PWA and a lot of
these things are in experimental, but I feel like confidently contact speaker and stuff
coming to PW I will help pws in a long run, right right right,
Just bridging that gap, because I mean I know, like native applications
have barcode scandras and stuff like I mean, which cannot be done in p
w as currently, but hopefully they are all coming in and hopefully web programming
should be enough for creating applications for mobiles and stuff in the future. Yeah.
Cool, Well that's our pick then our pick audist talk from the Chrume
Dev Summit. I get to the end of the week sometimes and I've done
three podcasts and I run out of pick. So you're our pick team.
We're done picks today. Well cool. If anyone needs to get ahold of
us, you can find us on Twitter. Mohammed Zama, thanks for coming
on the show. It's always good to chat with you. I hope I'm
going to meet you soon. So thanks Frosty, thanks for inviting me for
this short session casual to talk. Yeah, and to the listeners, I'll
say thanks for coming and getting to know Zama a little better and we will
see you next time. Thank you. Bandwidth for this segment is provided by
cash Flve, the world's fastest CDN. Deliver your content fast with cash Live.
Visit c A c h E f l Y dot com to learn more.