Friday, September 4, 2015

A Plug for the JavaScript Jabber Podcast

By RCPanos

This is a quick plug for a very well-produced podcast on all things Front-end Engineering.  Although its named “JavaScript Jabber”, the team addresses many other topics that are related to producing great code such as testing, agile development, team dynamics, HTML5 and wild concepts like “Working from home.”  (I am a bit of a fan of said concept in moderation)

The format is simply a handful of accomplished software engineers (generally of BYU fame) interviewing an area expert.  Some of the guests are very heavy hitters, particularly their Robin Williams of frequent guests: Yehuda Katz. The key reason I enjoy their model is that the show is a discussion and not a lecture.

The other strength of this show is that the de facto host (Charles Max Wood) is a highly skilled full stack developer that has NOT made JavaScript his focus and his common side-kicks (Jamison Dance and AJ O’Neal) are of similar technological leadership ilk.  I believe this brings a lot of intelligent questions to the show as they all have the expertise to discuss costs and benefits.  They also simply aren’t afraid to look ignorant.  The team occasionally even gives some pushback to the experts.  Effectively, they represent listeners of many different skill levels and get to the key information out quickly.

This excellent podcast also heavily portrays a concept that I think many people overlook in our industry: Opposing viewpoints.  It’s unfortunate, but many intelligent software engineers think in terms of “the right way” or “the wrong way” when in reality there are trade-offs to many acceptable solutions.  I especially loved to hear a demigod of design decisions (Nicholas C. Zakas) assert that in some cases, all sorts of coding practices are acceptable as long as the whole team generally follows the same set of practices.

So when you are commuting or exercising, I appeal to my fellow developers to engage in a form of hyper- multi-tasking by listening to this show.  You will set yourself apart at your work place by learning a lot more than the latest buzzwords.  After listening to an episode, you should be able to speak to the tradeoffs for a given technology so that you can contribute to future design discussions.  As this insight would normally take days (if not months) of your own time to establish, this is 40-50minutes of time well spent.

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