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**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I would imagine... He did this song, it was to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, but he did it at NodeConf and it was all about different modules in Node.js and stuff. The a-weema-weh part was "async-oh-eight, async-oh-eight", so now whenever anybody says Async 0.8 I just think of a-weema-we... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. In the jungle... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Shoutout to Ben. The RealTimeConf soundtrack was awesome! I think that we're good with this topic now... |
**Rachel White:** Yes. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna talk about getting new people into Node.js. Stay tuned! |
**Rachel White:** Getting new people into JavaScript! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Sorry... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I was like "Node.js... What?!" |
**Break:** \[18:02\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! We're gonna talk a little bit about getting new people into JavaScript. Why don't you take it away, Rachel? |
**Rachel White:** Alright, so this is something that people will come up and ask me a lot about at conferences that aren't necessarily JavaScript-focused... They just basically don't know where to start, especially with how we spoke about JavaScript fatigue and a bunch of other things... |
There's just so many places to start from, and where should someone start? Should they use React, should they learn React before they learn anything else? Should they pay attention to j.Query at all? Should they learn Ember or Angular, or whatever? |
I guess that's what we're gonna talk about, and I'm gonna say "No" to all of that... Learn vanilla... \[laughs\] Only because I wish that's what I would have done... Which I kind of did, but I kind of just learned pieces of everything, and then mashed it all together. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But how far do you take this? I literally learned Assembler and then C and then Perl... You can go way, way down the stack, so what is vanilla-- |
**Alex Sexton:** I actually learned hardware logic gates, and then I learned Assembler, or then I learned binary... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Oh, god... |
**Rachel White:** I guess that depends on what your goal is. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[20:06\] I know, so how far do you go...? Like, even in vanilla JavaScript, what does vanilla JavaScript mean? Do you learn only raw DOM calls, or are you allowed to use j.Query when you're learning JavaScript? |
**Rachel White:** Well, I guess that depends on -- I mean, I've had jobs where they've gotten mad if we used j.Query, and then I've had jobs where it was like "Use j.Query if you would like to use j.Query." I guess it depends on if you wanna focus on frontend, if you wanna focus on backend, if you wanna do full stack, ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And where does some of the tooling fit in though, right? Babel is not vanilla JavaScript, you are compiling it down... But you're also technically kinda using a newer version of the language, so does that count as extra stuff that you're learning and not vanilla? |
**Rachel White:** You mean like somebody going in and understanding ES6 syntax, and stuff like that? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Like, should they start there, or should they start without that tooling, in your opinion? |
**Rachel White:** I don't know... That's a hard question. I can only speak from what I struggle with as somebody that definitely still does not understand algorithms or anything like that... I'm pretty much just solely good with DOM manipulation stuff, frontend strictly, and obviously Node and Node robotics... But I'm ... |
I think the JavaScript 30 course that Wes Bos just came out with is pretty decent... It gives you a small exercise every day, and you are slowly building up the -- I guess it wouldn't be muscle memory, but the repetition of common things that you would use in JavaScript, like for loops and stuff like that to understand... |
**Alex Sexton:** I think that the question is a little bit loaded, because it's like "Should you start with libraries or should you start vanilla?", but I look at it a lot like music, or something like that. There are people who when they're four start taking lessons and then they learn all the fundamentals and they pr... |
It's actually much more important that you're just doing it in a way that you know you'll keep staying motivated than it is the actual path that you take. I disagree that if I showed you a book of algorithms before you got into NodeBots that you'd be like "Oh, that's something I'm interested in." It's the fact that you... |
**Rachel White:** True. And I think that this conversation is unique to people that don't necessarily come from a CS background, too... Well, from my perspective, at least. I'm speaking of self-taught, self-driven people that don't have that fundamental basis of "What is computing?" If you're coming from that backgroun... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[23:58\] Right. And just like in music, people who aren't classically trained always have these weird, interesting -- like, if you master the fundamentals enough, you can do weird, interesting things because you understand why they're weird and interesting... But also, the people who are self-taught, ... |
It's totally possible to break out of those two molds, but I think that that follows somewhat pretty closely into development, just like any creative endeavor. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** A while back I got thrown into a couple situations where it was like, "Oh, get these teenagers interested in programming", and the thing that we figured out to do was not try to show them code or anything like that... It was like pull up their Facebook page - this is how long ago this was; kids still... |
They're not gonna learn entirely to program that way, but it is something that will capture their interest long enough for them to go "Oh, now I should really dive into this" or "I still don't care." Some of them still aren't gonna care. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I totally agree with that. I don't think that people should just be explicitly exposed to chunks of code and be like "This is programming!" If there's a project that you have an attainable goal in -- and I think this applies to anything, not just programming... If you have a tangible - or intang... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. The resource that I keep pointing people at that are new to programming is Free Code Camp, because it is sort of broken out into these structured lessons that you can go through. You basically get a certificate, and the way that they test you out of the certificate is that you actually work on ... |
These people break it all up in the project management side, so that all these people learning how to program can bite off pieces of it and get certified. It's really cool, it's a nice mix of good course material and some real world practice, as well. |
**Rachel White:** I have also heard pretty good things that seem like along the same lines of Free Code Camp, about Codecademy's intro to JavaScript course. I haven't taken it myself, but I've seen that it gives you those incremental steps of working on different concepts as you go through. I also really like Mozilla's... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I think that the best way to get into JavaScript is to continuously do things that interest you, and the rest kind of follows. If you go about it the other way... I think once you get old enough and disappointed enough -- age is only barely related to this, but I find that now that I'm older, ... |
\[28:34\] But I think the most important thing you can do is make sure that you're not gonna lose interest, because that's the biggest barrier, I think, to learning programming - there are plenty of people who want to, and certainly it's difficult and we can make things easier in tooling and documentation and all that ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good comparison actually, like diets... A lot of people try diets and don't stick with them indefinitely. |
**Alex Sexton:** Right. |
**Rachel White:** Are you sub-tweeting me? \[laughter\] There's one other resource that I love to recommend to people... Rebecca Murphy has this really awesome repository -- this is like, once you've got all the basics down and you are more involved in understanding JavaScript, it's a whole entire repository that's bui... |
**Alex Sexton:** It's a little dated at this point, right? It's like five years old... |
**Rachel White:** It was updated within the past year, but that might have been... |
**Alex Sexton:** It's like, links to the Mocha project was switched to the new URL to Mocha... It's actually pretty good, but just know that if you just into like a React codebase, they're not gonna use any of these specific tools, but all the ideas are gonna be roughly the same, and a lot of it is just like the syntax... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We sort of skimmed over this, but I think the motivation that people have for learning programming is really big. We tend to always talk about this in terms of like getting a job, and that one of the reasons why we wanna teach programming to a bunch of people is so they can get better jobs, which is ... |
Now a lot of the result of some of these tools is that View Source isn't a good onboard into programming anymore... So what are the places that there is still this level of customization that you can do and this level of playing around that you can do? |
One of the things I love about NodeBots is that it's still just so basic. You sit down and you just wire up a few things together and it's really simple; you can see how it works, and you can see a result immediately. But what else is like that out there? |
**Rachel White:** I would say the places that have popped up in order for you to do code exploration, like CodePen, now Glitch, JSFiddle, those kinds of things... In the past I've used CodePen to be like -- you can type in a keyword, so I'll be like "I'll type in Glitch", (no relation to the other site that we were tal... |
That's probably the closest that I've found that feels the same way viewing source would be, because I definitely used to do that a lot, too. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[32:44\] Yeah... My only issue with those things is that they're still one step between a Normy and that. In order to get to CodePen to search for something, you have to know CodePen exists and you have to know that you want to look for those things in order to learn how to program them, whereas the w... |
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