JSJ 339: Node.js In Motion Live Video Course from Manning with PJ Evans

JavaScript Jabber - Un pódcast de Charles M Wood - Martes

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Panel:

Aimee Knight
AJ O’Neal
Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: PJ Evans

In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more?

1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course.

2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about.

2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.

2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node?

3:20 – Aimee.

3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course!

4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the...

4:13 – Chuck.

4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell.

4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node!

5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess.

5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is?

5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right?

They are arguing about how to implement it.

6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are!

6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there.

7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it.

7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it?

Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard?

7:38 – PJ.

8:11 – Panel.

8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though!

8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please.

8:30 – PJ.

8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it.

9:05 – PJ.

9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side?

9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak.

9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are.

9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak.

9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from...

Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea.

10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!”

10:52 – Panel.

11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well.

11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users...

11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS.

Chuck asks two questions.

12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled.

13:22 – Chuck: What are those things?

13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics.

15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do.

15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space.

16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE.

17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more.

18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs.

Aimee mentions Vanilla Node.

18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM.

19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io

20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug.

20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE.

20:56 – Aimee.

21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch.

22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level.

22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working.

23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were.

24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend.

24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended.

No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions...

To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly.

25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that...

26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly.

There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article!

28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article.

28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now.

29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday.

29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course.

29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck?

30:00 – PJ answers the question.

30:23 – Aimee.

30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days.

31:20 – Aimee.

32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight.

32:18 – Aimee.

32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for...

32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to?

33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals.

It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course.

34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node?

34:38 – PJ answers the question.

PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms.

35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other?

35:31 – PJ answers the question.

PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge.

36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express.

Google Classroom and Google Calendar.

39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below.

40:09 – Node can be used all over the place!

40:16 - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space.

40:31 – PJ: Yep!

40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you?

40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog!

41:04 – Picks!

41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job!

Links: