In today's episode, I talk to Paul Straw and Sean Washington from Does Not Compute, the newest member of the Spec family. Today's episode is sponsored by Hired! Go to Hired.com/developertea to get started today!
In today's episode, I talk to Paul Straw and Sean Washington from Does Not Compute, the newest member of the Spec family.
Mentioned in today's episode:
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Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and today is the second part of my interview with Paul and Sean. They are the hosts of a brand new show on spec.fm called Does Not Compute. If you missed the first part of the interview, make sure you go back and listen to that first. You can always subscribe to Developer Tea in iTunes and whatever podcasting app that you choose to use. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode and thank you to today's sponsor, Hired.com. If you are a developer or a designer that is looking for a job, Hired should be where you begin your journey. Hired.com, we'll talk more about them later on in the show. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Now let's get to the rest of the interview with Paul and Sean from Does Not Compute. I wanted to talk to you guys about ES6. I'd love to know what you think about ES6. What are your favorite parts? What are your favorites of the new spec and maybe things that you don't like about it? I have something that I don't really like about it, but I want to hear from you guys first. Paul, I'll let you field this first. I don't think Sean or myself have really used ES6 a ton. Octopus as a whole is a ... We're actually a coffee script shop, which will probably draw a bit of hate, but that's all right. ES6 to me is interesting. ES6, ES7, the whole thing to me is kind of interesting because a lot of the people who really strongly advocate for it are also really against things like coffee script. But at the same time, they say, oh, you need Babel or whatever. You need something to transpile it from ES6 into ES5 compatible code. So that to me, at least, feels like ... Yeah. Yeah. Coffee script has provided for years really well. And not to say there's anything ... ES6 is inherently bad or it'll never be useful, but right now, if you need to support a wide range of browsers, I think that it's not necessarily ... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. well i actually have a little bit of experience with es6 i've messed with react native a little bit as well and i i guess i can only say this because of my previous experience with coffee script in that when i'm using es6 i just want to write coffee script and i guess i can say the same thing when i'm writing regular javascript es5 i just want his coffee script um but i do honestly i mean i just like i'm a fan of progress and improvement right and so there's a lot of things in es6 that are coming out like arrow functions for example that you know people are taking advantage of and i think i think that's great you know i think that progress is good so you know i'm all for it you know it's interesting because i have taken some flack from people when i talk about coffee script because they say things like oh well you have to transpile you know and but then i'm thinking well you're using babel anyway so you're doing the same thing right um but i think at the end of the day you know someone's if you're if you're productive with es6 go for it you know i'm cheering you on i'm productive with coffee script so sure and i guess so that's really my opinion wrapped up as well like if you like coffee script that's fine like don't let anybody tell you that you're wrong for liking coffee script the reality is there's going to be a compiler for coffee script for the foreseeable future so what you are learning about coffee script is not going to be moot all of the time a sudden. And a lot of the stuff in CoffeeScript actually maps pretty decently to ES6. So whenever ES6 becomes standardized and a critical mass of people are using it, then the transpiler is just going to transpile to ES6 and it's not a big deal. You know, it's totally fine. I personally, I never got over onto the CoffeeScript train, even though a lot of logical people said that I should. And looking back, I probably should have because, you know, it just protects you in a lot of different ways from writing stupid stuff in JavaScript. Yeah, it does. It does. It really does. But I never, I never did that. When ES6 stuff started coming out and I started seeing like tail call optimization and, you know, all the other little stuff that eventually is going to actually make a difference in, you know, how JavaScript works in the browser, like for real JavaScript, not just, you know, compiled JavaScript or transpile. JavaScript rather. That got really interesting to me. I think for a lot of people who are coming from writing JavaScript, that ES6 is going to be really attractive, right? Because I'm not used to the white space. I'm not used to some of the other, you know, little pieces of CoffeeScript. Now I will say this, if you are a Ruby developer and or a Python developer, then you're going to have a much easier time with, with, with CoffeeScript than someone who isn't, who doesn't have experience with those languages. I think, what would you guys say about that? I think that's completely true. But also for me personally, I was pretty much just a JavaScript developer at the time when I initially picked up CoffeeScript. I was sort of an early adopter there. And for me, a lot of the stuff, what's really interesting to me is that a lot of the stuff that CoffeeScript has provided since the beginning, you know, the arrows and the, the triple quotes for, essentially what amounts to template strings and just all that sort of stuff that the question mark, the, the question mark operator, all that stuff. It's like a lot of that has been copied over to ES6. And I think that's really interesting because I'm super excited to see what Coffee ends up doing next. Cause I feel like it's almost an indicator of what's going to come to mainstream JavaScript a few years after that. Yeah, I agree. I think some of these, you know, pre-compile languages, like even if you jump over to CSS stuff, SAS or less, some of this stuff has made an impact in some way on the spec for future stuff in like in core, in CSS core. For example, we're going to get nested stuff eventually in CSS because of most likely because we've seen it kind of proven in these other pre-compiled languages. We've seen it, the model has just been proven over and over by, large companies adopting these pre-compiled languages and using them with pretty decent success. Totally. Cool. So we know where we stand on, on CoffeeScript versus ES6, I think. I do think that, that JavaScript is a very important and increasingly important language. I talked to Eric Elliott on the show a few weeks back and I mean, we talked about JavaScript pretty much the whole time. But I think JavaScript is kind of one of those base level languages now, whereas that used to, well, I won't, I won't go so far as to say that, but I do think that JavaScript is going to be a fundamental language and a lot more universities will probably pick it up in the, in the coming years because it is, it is now becoming kind of that available everywhere language. Yeah. It's something that any new programmer kind of almost needs to know JavaScript. I mean, I don't know if you've heard of JavaScript at this point, just because it is so ubiquitous. It's just, it's everywhere and you can, I mean, you can use it on the client, you can use it on the server. It's getting faster and faster every day. And it's just, it's just something that if you learn JavaScript, you're, it's like, you're not going to be sad that you learned JavaScript. Yeah. It's not time wasted. Right. And, and some of the syntax is really so close to other stuff that you're, I mean, once you leave JavaScript, it'll be like you've, already learned parts of other languages. I think that's one of the great things about programming. And that's something that I tell everybody. Anytime I'm, you know, helping a person who's new to programming or whatever, or even, you know, a moderately experienced person, it's like, should I learn this language? It doesn't, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and learn it because all of the skills, 90% of the skills that you're going to learn from that language are completely portable. When you understand the concept of objects, it doesn't matter if somebody calls it something else. It doesn't matter if somebody calls it a table in a different language or if somebody calls it a hash or whatever, like you kind of get that. And there are semantic differences, but overall picking up one language is kind of like picking up 20 to 30% of every language. Yeah, I agree. An interesting thing about JavaScript is that you can practice different paradigms in JavaScript. And that's, I think that's the biggest difference between languages is, you know, what is the underlying paradigm? For this particular language, for example, Ruby is a class oriented language with inheritance and metaprogramming. Whereas JavaScript, you have like, you can do functional, or you can do completely declarative, or you can do, you know, something kind of like classical inheritance, or you can do prototypical, I never know what the word is. Anyway, prototypes, you can do inheritance through prototypes in JavaScript. There's, there are. There are many different things that you can implement in JavaScript that you can't necessarily, you know, I can't really practice functions in, or functional programming in Ruby as cleanly as I could in JavaScript. All right, guys, we're going to take a quick sponsor break and talk about Hired.com, today's sponsor. Hired is the place to go if you are looking for a job as a designer or a developer. They source companies around the world that are looking for people to fill positions for equity, for salary. Designers and developers, you get the offer up front. 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Well, I'm going to go ahead and get to the last questions I always ask my interviewees, and I'll ask you both at the same time, and then you can take turns answering. All right. So if you could give any advice to pretty much all programmers, regardless of their age or their experience level, what advice would you give? Looking back at it now, I guess one of my answers would be don't let people bully you into it. Don't let people bully you. Don't let people bully you. Don't let people bully you. Don't let people bully you. Don't let people bully you. Don't let people bully you. Don't let people bully you. uh i feel you know hanging out in a couple different slacks the obviously the spec slack and the slash rocket slack i see people asking questions like what should i use or what tools should i use and then i see a barrage of answers and people basically saying if you don't use this you're incorrect or you're doing it wrong uh which i think is not helpful at all and so if you're new to programming you're learning and there's something you're interested in like if react looks cool to you then that's awesome obviously i mean you should learn javascript first but you know don't let people push you around and in those decisions obviously you should find some people that you look up to and you allow them to speak into your programming life but don't just jump on the every every trend that comes across because trends they come and they go but the underlying concept concepts of programming and javascript like the basics they will always be there that's great that's that's kind of just good life advice like don't don't let people you bullying into don't let people bully you into thinking a certain thing yeah that's good um for for me i think it would be go make a blog like whether and i guess this is a this isn't for completely new people but if you're just trying just starting out trying to learn back end stuff go make a blog if you've been programming for 15 years go make a blog because the blog that will come out of somebody who's been programming ruby for a month and the blog that will come out of somebody who's been programming programming a bunch of different languages for 10 20 years those are going to be two completely different products and that's one of the really cool things because you can make a blog as simple or as complex as you want and that's just such a cool project because you know you have user authentication you you have you know you have the permalinks you have to deal with you have image uploading and processing there's there's relationships yeah there's so many different things that you can get out of a blog i think it's one of the most flexible models as it were for a thing to make it it just scales so well for different skill levels absolutely it's especially true if you have a multi-user blog that's when things get really interesting when you have multi-authors right totally yeah and and somebody who's brand new they don't need to think about that it's just going to be their personal blog but if you're a really good programmer and add add in multiple users add in permission levels add in different types of post add in all all that stuff but it fits to what you're going to need to do and if you don't like the word blog for that if that sounds too reductive to you then call it a publishing platform as it turns out that is still a very big thing on the web so you know whatever you want to call it blog is kind of the canonical term for it but some people think that that's like too easy of a project it's not i can go ahead and tell you it's not i've built a lot of these things and they have unique problems in every single case i'm learning something yeah it can be anything from the simplest to the most simple to the most project to the most complex absolutely i mean the vox the vox media team they have their chorus platform that they have a bunch of developers on who work on it full-time yeah so if you think that's easy right right and if you want to you know if you if you're maybe comfortable with your backend shops and you want to work on your phone and shops build a blog with the wordpress api maybe or make your own api in the rails api or with rails api and use react or view or probably use view and build a you know build you know build that and then you can do that and then you can do that like adam simpson just built his blog using react in the wordpress native or the wordpress api and at first i was like why would you do that but then i was thinking about it and it makes sense because you know he wanted to learn something and it's a personal project and you know there's a server there's content that you need to pull from it's just like a perfect way to learn okay so uh the second question and this is the last question before we we sign off for the day uh the second question is what do you wish people would ask you about more often that's a that's a really good question and i've never been asked that before actually i i think i've got an answer go for it anything i i feel like there's such a big it's kind of a big problem in programming um and the technology industry as a whole is like people feeling like they're dumb if they ask some question and and i don't think that's the case at all there are so many people and sean and i actually talked about this in an upcoming episode of uh of does not compute but there's not people in the tech industry really want to help especially people who hang out in the slack channel for spec or the slack channel for um for um slash rocket slash rocket yeah that those people are there because they want to help you learn they're there because they want to like hang out and just talk about cool things and just explain stuff so just ask whatever this community is generally really friendly and if someone's not there they're not then they're a jerk anyway so forget them but there are so many people out there who really do just want to help you that's that's very that's very true and to kind of piggyback on that i find that so paul and i basically look at each other because our desks are facing opposite directions and so a lot of times i'll lean over and i'll just start talking at him and i'm not necessarily trying to communicate to him um i i'm talking at him and as i'm talking at him or asking him questions i actually find the solution and i'm like okay i'm gonna ask him a question and i'm looking for uh and so i find that by asking questions you learn by learning how to frame your questions rather you actually can find you can come up with a solution a lot faster rubber ducky you're the one yeah yeah but you know like wait what paul said ask ask any questions there are no dumb questions and if people say there are dumb questions then ignore them uh it's all relative anyway right absolutely you know so just just go and ask so how i learned you know was just to ask a question and then i'd be like okay i'm gonna ask a question and then i'd be like just by asking people i had paul as a skype contact for a year and i messaged him incessantly for a year and it turned into a job you know so just just ask anybody and if you don't know who to ask hit me and paul up hit jonathan up you know anyone spec just ask us any questions we will always want to answer them absolutely yeah please come and join us or if you want to be in the spec slack by the way uh spec.fm slash slack that will be in the show notes of course which you can find at spec.fm but at the end of the show notes you can find me at paul and i'll see you in at that point you would probably just click the big slack logo that you see on spec but uh we would love to have you join us there are over a thousand people in that in that slack community now guys it's pretty incredible isn't it it's amazing yeah it grew so fast yeah it did it did i'm so glad that you guys are going to be a part of spec it is so exciting for me uh to see another uh set of really smart awesome developer people who are doing podcasts and they're doing it with me on spec. That's really cool. We're just happy to be a part, you know, the spec is doing some really, really great stuff. And I've, you know, I've been consuming specs, uh, products for a while now. So for, for me, it's kind of a, wow, what, what just happened sort of deal, but we're, you know, we're, we're, we're very happy to be a part. It's exciting. Uh, when is, when is the first episode officially? Tuesday the 13th. So this coming Tuesday. So it will have been out by the time that this episode airs. So if you are listening to this, make sure you go to spec.fm. Actually, it will be right there available for you. Uh, of course they will be on iTunes and all those other providers that you already use developer T on and go and subscribe, do this right now. I'm going to, I'm going to be a little bit greedy for them because they won't be greedy here. I don't know. Would you guys be, I guess you guys probably wouldn't be greedy. I'm going to tell you to go and subscribe to does not compute right now in whatever podcasting app that you use so that you can get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to you don't miss a single episode of Paul and Sean. You guys enjoy their voices just as much as I do. I'm sure this has been super fun, Jonathan. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on the show guys. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer T my interview with Paul and Sean from does not compute the latest addition to the spec family. You can join us and talk to all of us in Slack and our Slack community. You can find us at spec.fm slash slash. Slack sign up and, uh, and you can discuss just about anything you want to. We each, each of the shows has its own room and we talk about the show. We talk about, you know, even programming issues and problems and, uh, I'm in there. And so are Paul and Sean. We have a great time there. So go and check it out. Spec.fm slash Slack. Don't forget to subscribe to does not compute in whatever podcasting app that you use and subscribe to developer T while you're at it. You won't miss any episodes of either. Show that would be great for us and great for you. Wouldn't it? So make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use to does not compute and developer T. Thank you for listening to today's episode and thank you to hired.com. Today's awesome sponsor. If you are looking for a job as a designer or a developer, and you want a $4,000 bonus instead of a $2,000 bonus, go to the show notes at spec.fm, click on the link for a hired, and it will take you to a special room. And you can get a free version of hired.com that will double your bonus. Check it out. Hired.com. Thank you again to hired. Thank you again to Paul and Sean, and thank you to you for listening to developer T and until next time, enjoy your tea.