egghead.io developer chats

Marisa Morby is a professional product manager. A common question she gets is "what's the difference between a product manager and a project manager?" There's a lot of overlap, but the difference is a product manager has to understand what needs to get done and why and be able to communicate that, and the project manager makes sure that everything stays on the rails and results in a cohesive produ...

When you are a consultant, you can't just learn a framework and then choose a place to work that uses it. Your clients will have their own needs and constraints that you're going to have to adapt to serve your client well. The constant learning can feel like a freefall. Constantly feeling dumb is panic-inducing. There's this trough of despair in software, where you swing between feeling like a gen...

There are a few options for those trying to start a career in web development, teach yourself, join a bootcamp, or go to college. Veni chose the college route, she got a master's degree in computer science, which is awesome, but it didn't fully prepare her for web development. Computer science is primarily theory and it doesn't really prepare you for the engineering side of the job. There are only...

You don't have to be passionate about code to have a successful career as a developer. Pariss Athena talks about how it isn't the code itself that motivates her to get better at understanding it. It's what being good at code provides that drives her. The financial freedom code gives Athena enables her to give more to the people and communities that are important to her. Success to her is freedom a...

Vue has a reputation of being the most beginner-friendly framework, but that didn't just happen by accident. The Vue CLI is an excellent example. New developers often struggle with using the terminal and remembering all the commands. The Vue CLI provides a visual interface for the developer to generate a project. By making it easier for newcomers to make Vue projects, they've reduced the barriers...

J.C. Hiatt put together the conference MagnoliaJS in the town of Jackson, Missouri to help his community and combat the growing problem of brain drain in his state. MagnoliaJS is not only for his community, but it was put together with the help of it too. J.C. put it together, publically by using Github issues, blogging, and posting about it on Twitter. The community responds well when you are gen...

What do we do when all of our needs are met when we are making seventy-five thousand plus a year, working for a company with some prestige, have a home, and don't have to worry about food. Jason Lengstorf wrestled with this after the company he was contracting with didn't have anything for him to do, but kept him around. New goals have to be set, and growth still has to happen. Jason discovered th...

Teaching provides a learner with more information, but the information isn't the only thing that is required to teach effectively. Doing is almost just as essential as the information itself for the learner to solidify what was taught. Creating an effective learning path is challenging, and we tend to start from what we know and take it from there. Janelle challenges the tendency to start from our...

Jen Looper, developer advocate and the founder of Vue Vixens, didn't study software development in college, she has a Ph. D. in French Literature. Her degree might seem unrelated, but it strengthened her ability to explain complex ideas as well as her overall communication abilities, skills that are essential for her role as a developer advocate. These skills also come into play in her work buildi...

There's a kind of "black box" mystery that surrounds illustrators and programmers, to someone who isn't one their skills seem like a form of magic, but to someone who is these skills are just the tools that they've been learning to use through time and hard work. Maggie is the course logo illustrator at egghead.io, and she has the challenge of turning the concepts being taught in the course into s...

JavaScript fatigue is a topic that has been trending for a while now. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the constant influx of new technology, but it's also thrilling to learn the latest cool new thing! Stacey Mulcahy discusses how she embraces this deluge of technology by being a generalist, allowing her to make connections with more people than she would have if she specialized in one thing. Sta...

Web development is a fantastic field where people, for little to no money, can self-teach everything you need to make a career, and it's amazing, right? That doesn't mean that there isn't a time cost though, it isn't easy, but the internet has an overwhelming amount of information that you can use to teach yourself. Authors who write this free content are the life-blood of the internet and provide...

Marcy Sutton is the Head of Learning at GatsbyJS, but what does that mean? One of Gatsby's core focuses is the community, and a part of that is making the experience with Gatsby as friendly as possible. A large part of making Gatsby friendly is having excellent documentation, so that learning and debugging experiences would be smooth. So the learning experience is smooth but what is Gatsby's poten...

Sara Vieira, developer advocate and professional maker of dumb shit, talks through why she does her weird experiments on the internet. Sometimes it is out of need, but honestly a lot of the time it is a random thing that she thinks of or something that someone says that brings up the idea, and she just has to make it. A lot of it is out of boredom, and also procrastination from other projects that...

Today we are joined by Ali Spittel, a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at dev.to, who speaks with us about: The skills she gained from a developer teaching job How she kept up on her coding skills without writting production code by doing daily code challenges Why she began to blog and how she made a habit out of it Blogging on a platform vs having your own website Using visual feedback to...

Today we are joined by Chris Biscardi where we discuss: Learning in public and him live-streaming open-source development Gatsby as a PWA generator and its potential to become the dominant force on the internet MDX's power and its potential of replacing markdown as the default content type Chris' project, MNTNR, and the assistance it'll provide to open-source maintainers. Transcript "The Changes G...

Lindsey Kopacz, web-developer and accessibility blogger, joins us today to discuss: The positives that being authentic and public with your emotional state provides. Her blog and the excellent dev.to community The business value of accessibility Accessibility in a sense that isn't limited to people with physical disabilities Transcript "Championing a11y and Being Authentic - with Lindsey Kopacz" T...

Tae'lur Alexis, self taught programmer and founder of CodeEveryday, talks to us about: Figuring out that software was what she wanted to do Learning to code from scratch on the modern web. How front-end development was appealing as a beginner due to visual feedback and opportunity to be creative How social media was key to her success in landing a job as a self-taught developer The CodeNewbie and...

Josh Doody, the author of Fearless Salary Negotiation, joins us today to discuss: What you need to look out for to stay ahead in the industry How to find leverage despite the information asymmetry between the employer and the job candidate Why questions on what your current salary is or what you'd like it to be boxes you out of opportunities The best way to put in the work towards a promotion. Tra...

Tania Rascia works as a web developer full time. However, just a few years ago she was working as a professional chef. How and why did she make such a dramatic career switch? It isn't uncommon for culinary professionals to realize that they don't want to spend the rest of their life doing it. It is a very demanding job and isn't sustainable if passion isn't there. So, having always been interested...

Today Angie Jones, a master inventor and automated testing engineer, speaks with us about what a master inventor is and what it took to receive that title, what testing automation is, having parallel between testers and developers, what developers can be doing to build more testable apps, and finally how modern web development has complicated automated testing. Angie talks about some common proble...

Diana Rodriguez, Worldwide Community Organizer for the Vue Vixens Initiative, joins us today to talk about her early experiences with development as a child, her transition into a becoming a full-time professional and her work with getting women from communities all over the world involved with programming! In the days of yore, gathering programming knowledge wasn't easy, the community was exclusi...

Julia Evans, is a zine author and software engineer at Stripe. She joins us to talk about teaching specifics as opposed to high-level overviews, using zines to show that things that sound hard aren't hard in practice, the longevity of Julia's zine empire, and the impact that monetizing her zines had on her audience and the way she approaches working on them. Julia writes zines, short tutorials in...

Joel and Brian Lonsdorf discuss the pain and growth of learning, math as a source of truth, dispelling that idea that you need to be a wizard to enter the functional programming space, and finally how you can start including functional concepts in your day to day work. There's a reason that mathematicians tend to be the best functional programmers. The theories and patterns directly apply, it has...

Today we are joined by Jem Young, a senior software engineer over at Netflix. Jem is here to discuss his programming philosophy and how it is an extension of himself, how engineers should have the freedom to have ideas and veto things, the difference passion makes, and being informed about the libraries that you include in your code and if they are actually needed. Netflix's homepage got 50% faste...