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I was interested in computers as a kid, but we never really had the finances to have a PC at the house, so for me computers was all about the public library, and I would read those old programming magazines where they had basic programs... But I would just kind of like read them and imagine what they did; it's a tragic... |
Later, when I was in college, I was 22 years old or something, I was at my buddy's house and his younger brother - his name is Karl - was doing something on the computer and he had some text open in a text editor (it was like notepad.exe) and I said "Hey, what are you doing? That looks interesting." So he was a total b... |
**Alex Sexton:** I was on MyTeenOpenDiary at one point, I believe... \[laughter\] |
**Mike Taylor:** That sounds .. \[laughter\] I'm gonna go look for those blog posts. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. |
**Mike Taylor:** And so out of spite I went to the library and I checked out a book on like HTML 3.2 - I don't even think they had 4.0.1 or whatever - and I taught myself how to make web pages, just kind of as a hobby; I thought it was fun. |
**Alex Sexton:** It was a challenge from Karl... "Don't tell me what I can't do." |
**Mike Taylor:** You kid! It was spite-driven development. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[32:08\] Exactly. |
**Mike Taylor:** So later in grad school at NYU I needed a way to earn money to pay rent during the summer months; I had a fellowship which paid me $3/day to live in New York City. We were mostly covered for the academic year, and I ended up with some internships and some freelance stuff... And just kind of really self... |
Honestly, Chris Coyier (css-tricks.com) taught me CSS. That was like my go-to resource. SitePen had some amazing books and tools, and then as I got more interested in it, I got to audit a few classes at NYU. I took a Ruby on Rails class, and had no idea what I was doing. |
I remember the very first assignment was like "SSH into this box and put your contact details in a file. That's homework number one." I remember sitting there in my office, in my little grad student office, trying to google what the heck SSH was... \[laughter\] It took me hours to figure that out. It was pretty painful... |
**Alex Sexton:** A part of my computer science degree was linguistics. Do you ever find that it's a useful thing in the language parts of programming itself? |
**Mike Taylor:** I think so. I was just thinking about this the other day... What's that thing called that Facebook just came out with, that is like a... |
**Alex Sexton:** Prepack? |
**Mike Taylor:** Yes, thank you. So Prepack - I was looking at that... It uses Babel - I don't know how you pronounce that. |
**Alex Sexton:** It depends... If you're Canadian, like Wes, it's Babel \[baybel\]. If you're normal, then it's Babel \[babble\]. |
**Wes Bos:** That's offensive to Canadians... \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Mike, explain what that is, just since it is pretty relevant news... Prepack. |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, so Prepack is basically something that simplifies your code. It takes Babel, and what that does is it creates an AST, which is an abstract syntax tree... So it will go through and understand what's the structure and the operations that your code is trying to do, at this kind of like abstract, won... |
So what Prepack is trying to do is -- if you go to their homepage, one of the examples they give is like you've got this really complex recursive function trying to get like a Fibonacci sequence, and you're gonna call it, and it's gonna recurs like 27 times. The end result of that function is just the number, like 32,0... |
So Prepack will go through and it will do that operation for you beforehand, so the code you actually have to ship to the user is literally like VarX=20, or VarX=30,000, or whatever it is; so you're reducing the computation that has to happen on the client, and also the size of the file you have to send. |
Long story short, I was thinking about this... I've spent years in college in syntax classes, and our homework was basically like "Here's a sentence. Now write an AST for this sentence using Chomsky's minimalist syntax, whatever... So it was a lot of drawing trees and doing grammar transformation, so I think that logic... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[36:14\] That's nifty. I guess it sounds weird, but you were talking about Prepack, and we're talking a little bit about news... There was a thing that came out this week called Interface Lovers, Ekechukwu is a friend of the podcast, Iheanyi is a dev out of New York. It's InterfaceLovers.com. It's int... |
I think we may land a plane and go into another break here, but we'll be back with some more from Wes after this, since he's a little bit too polite to interrupt Mike and I. |
**Mike Taylor:** I talk way too much. \[laughter\] |
**Break:** \[37:14\] |
**Alex Sexton:** And we're back! Wes, you work quite a bit on education, almost entirely, we've decided... We've talked a little bit about education on this podcast, but you weren't here, so I'd like to get your take on -- explain the things that you've put out in the past, and sell it or do whatever you need to do her... |
For the record, Mike, Wes and I all go back to the days of the jQuery IRC channel from 2009-2010 area. We were all helpers in that channel back when that was cool, and we know each other from conferences. So before Wes became massively famous and successful doing tutorials, I knew him as a person who helped newbs in th... |
**Wes Bos:** Yeah. Or I was asking for help myself. What a nightmare! Already! Work! |
**Mike Taylor:** Nobody knows. |
**Wes Bos:** Nobody knows. |
**Alex Sexton:** So tell us a little bit about the stuff you've been putting out, and I'll ask you some more questions about techniques and stuff. |
**Wes Bos:** So I've got maybe six or seven different courses, all surrounding different web development. My two biggest ones that are paid are ES6.io and ReactForBeginners.com. I'm just on the brink - probably by the time you heard this it will be out... I'm gonna launch a series called Learn Node. |
So just series that are approachable, they're real-world based, they're project-based, they're fun, they don't really put you to sleep... Just tutorials learning how to attack new technologies that are on the web, and how to implement them into your own world. |
Another one -- I've got a whole bunch of free ones, as well. I've got more free ones than paid ones. My biggest one is JavaScript 30, which is essentially just like, from teaching I generally get a lot of questions from people, like "Wes, how do I get better? What do I need to do in order to get better?" Well, the answ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Program bore. |
**Wes Bos:** \[40:12\] Yeah, program bore. And they're like, "Well thanks, but that doesn't help me, because I don't know what to build." I was lucky enough that I'm always curious and I always have ideas of stuff I wanna build, but some people are not that way, or they're just sort of sitting there and they need someb... |
It's totally all over the place - it's from webcam stuff, to speech detection, to creating speech, to just doing basic DOM stuff, understanding how event listeners work, and clicks, and ES6 and what not... And people seem to really like it, because it's just a great way of -- I don't know, it's kind of a neat way to le... |
**Alex Sexton:** Get a lot of surface area |
**Wes Bos:** Yeah, just to put your time in and get towards that -- 10,000 hours is what they say you need? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Malcolm Gladwell probably needs a few more citations for that, but it seems like a pretty good general idea. The React For Beginners course - I personally purchased that. I kind of knew React and have been using it at work for a while, but I had never done an official read of the docs or read of ... |
The reality was that, but it was still extremely helpful. I definitely encourage -- not even just this... Like, certainly go buy Wes's React For Beginners course even if you're not a beginner in React and you just wanna make sure you have the holes in your knowledge built... But for other things, too. |
I've brought it up a few times with the Redux Egghead.io thing that Dan Abramov did. I've been using Redux for months, or a month, or something like that at that point, and I listened and I was like, "Oh, this is really cool, kind of breaking it down and going back to basics", now that I had jumped into it. |
But sometimes it's hard for certain personality types to start directly on a tutorial; you kind of have to jump in and use it, and then be like "Okay, I'm not smart enough to just use this", but that's enough motivation to go learn the tutorial side of things. So I definitely appreciated that tutorial. |
The other thing that is interesting is that React kind of moves quickly. How do you handle the fact that context changes, or the version numbers change? What's the strategy there? |
**Wes Bos:** Generally, it's just a lot of re-recording, because React moves so quickly... It's sort of a blessing and a curse of doing it. I've re-recorded it twice now. |
**Alex Sexton:** The whole thing? |
**Wes Bos:** Yeah. |
**Mike Taylor:** Wow. |
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