Panel: Charles Max Wood
Guest: Nicholas Zakas
This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Nicholas Zakas who is a blogger, author, and software engineer. Nicholas’ website is titled, Human Who Codes – check it out! You can find him on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn among other social media platforms. Today, Nicholas and Chuck talk about Nicholas’ background, JavaScript, and current projects.
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!
1:00 – Chuck: Welcome! Give us a background, please, Nicholas!
1:14 – Guest: I am probably best known for making ESLint and I have written a bunch of books, too! (See links below.)
1:36 – Chuck: JSJ 336 and JSJ 075 episodes are the two past episodes we’ve had you on! (See links below.) Let’s go back and how did you get into programming?
1:58 – Guest: I think the first was written in BASIC, which was on a Laser computer. It was a cheaper knockoff version. I think I was into middle school when I got into BASIC. Then when I got into high school I did this computer project, which was the first time someone else used one of my programs.
4:02 – Chuck: Was it all in BASIC or something else?
4:13 – Guest: Just BASIC, but then transferred to something else when we got our first PC.
5:13 – Chuck: How did you get to use JavaScript?
5:18 – Guest: 1996 was my freshman year in college. Netscape 3 got into popularity around this time. I had decided that I wanted to setup a webpage to stay in-touch with high school friends who were going into different directions.
I got annoyed with how static the [web] pages were. At the time, there was no CSS and the only thing you could change was the source of an image (on webpages).
On the you could do...
8:35 – Chuck: You get into JavaScript and at what point did you become a prolific operator and author?
8:52 – Guest: It was not an overnight thing. It definitely was fueled by my own curiosity. The web was so new (when I was in college) that I had to explore on my own. I probably killed a few trees when I was in college. Printing off anything and everything I could to learn about this stuff!
10:03 – Guest (continues): Professors would ask ME how to do this or that on the departmental website. When I was graduating from college I knew that I was excited about the WEB. I got a first job w/o having to interview.
12:32 – Guest (continues): I got so deep into JavaScript!
13:30 – Guest (continued): They couldn’t figure out what I had done. That’s when I got more into designing JavaScript APIs. About 8 months after graduating from college I was unemployed. I had extra time on my hands. I was worried that I was going to forget the cool stuff that I just developed there. I went over the code and writing for myself how I had constructed it. My goal was to have an expandable tree. This is the design process that I went through. This is the API that I came up with so you can insert and how I