JavaScript Jabber celebrates its 400th episode with former host Dave Smith and some other familiar voices. Each of the panelists talks about what they’ve been up to. Dave hasn’t been on the show for 3 years, but he and Jameson Dance have started a podcast called Soft Skills Engineering where they answer questions about the non-technical side of engineering. When he left the show he was the director of engineering on Hire View, and currently he works for Amazon on Alexa.

Christopher Buecheler has been on several JSJ, RRU, and MJS episodes. His time is divided between contracting for startups and his own company closebrace.com, a tutorial and resource site for JavaScript developers. Dan Shapir has also been on JSJ as a guest, and is currently works for Wix doing performance tech. He enjoys speaking at conferences, such as JS Camp in Bucharest, Romania and the YGLF conference. Steve Edwards was previously on MJS 078. He started on Drupal in the PHP world, switched to JavaScript, and then a few years ago he started looking at Vue. Now he does Vue fulltime for ImageWare Systems.

As for Charles, his primary focus is the podcasts, since DevChat.tv produces around 20 episodes per week. 5 new shows were started in July, and he talks about some of the challenges that that brought. One of his most popular shows recently was JSJ 389: What makes a 10x Engineer? This helped him realize that he wants to help teach people how to be a successful engineer, so he’s working on launching a new show about it.

The panelists share some of their favorite JSJ episodes. They discuss the tendency of JSJ to get early access to these fascinating people when the conversation was just beginning, such as the inventor of Redux Dan Abramov, before their rise to stardom. The talk about the rise in popularity of podcasting in general. They agree that even though JavaScript is evolving and changing quickly, it’s still helpful to listen to old episodes.

Charles talks about the influence JavaScript Jabber has had on other podcasts. It has spawned several spinoffs, including My JavaScript Story. He’s had several hosts start their own DevChat.tv shows based off JavaScript Jabber, including Adventures in Angular and The DevEd Podcast. JavaScript Jabber has also been the inspiration for other podcasts that aren’t part of DevChat.tv. There aren’t many podcast companies that produce as many shows as they do and they’re developing their own tools. DevChat.tv moved off of WordPress and is in the process of moving over to Podwrench. Charles talks about all the new shows that have been launched, and his view on ‘competing’ podcasts. Charles is also considering doing an audio drama that happens in a programming office, so if you would like to write and/or voice that show, he invites you to contact him.

The show concludes with the panel talking about the projects they’ve been working on that they want listeners to check out. Christopher invites listeners to check out closebrace.com. He also has plans to write a short ebook on unit testing with jest, considered doing his own podcast, and invites people to check out his fiction books on his website. Dan talks about his involvement with Wix, a drag and drop website service, that recently released a technology called Corvid which lets you write JS into the website you build with Wix. This means you can design your user interface using Wix, but then automate it, add events functionality, etc. Dan is also going to be at the Chrome Dev Summit conference. Dave invites listeners to check out the Soft Skills Engineering podcast, and Charles invites listeners to subscribe to his new site maxcoders.io.

Panelists

Dan Shapir
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JSJ 400: The Influence of JavaScript Jabber

JavaScript Jabber