Web Perspectives

Is .NET still a thing? Has it caught up with other full-stack frameworks like NEXT, NUXT, SvelteKit, and Remix? Philip Young comes on the show, drawing from his 10+ years' experience as yoga practitioner and software developer to give us the inside scoop on .NET and mindfulness.

How can web developers improve their documentation skills? How important is it for software development businesses to hire technical writers as opposed to offloading the responsibility to web developers? Mitch Willis, long-time technical writer, joins us to explore the reasons to hire a technical writer specialist, for both large and small teams.

What's life like as a digital nomad? What are the pros and cons of living abroad in digital nomad cities like Bali and Chengdu? How much sense does it make to pack our bags and work remotely as a web developer, given that most jobs allow remote work? Ryan Hnetka, a long-time working nomad with over 20 years of experience as a digital nomad, gives us the lowdown on the ins and outs of the digital nomad lifestyle.

"One more thing".  We always have one more thing to do in software development -- whether our customer asks us for one more feature, or we task ourselves with going beyond the requirements, the challenge remains: how much is enough?

What is overengineering?  How do we know when our software is ready to launch?  When customers can always come back to us with more work -- one more thing -- when do we know when to stop adding more features?  How can we reduce scope creep in our projects while still overdelivering?  Does it even make sense to overdeliver?  What "one more thing"s make sense as developers, and what does overengineering even look like?

What is technical debt in software development, and how do we manage it?  Does it make sense to try to avoid technical debt or to accept it with open arms and consider it a core part of software development?  How do we approach adding more tools to our front-end stacks?

What strategies work best for debugging websites and web applications?  What tools and processes do we use to find the sources of bugs?  Topics include:

• Front-end frameworks and view libraries
• Debugging browser extension bugs
• Reading bugs and understanding customer bug reports
• Differentiating between a feature and a bug
• Typescript as a debugging tool with TSNode

What is a state manager? Does it make web development more complicated, or are they worth the pain? Mike and Sean take a look at state managers like VueX, Redux, Redux Saga, MobX, and ember data to find out how much more cruft and configuration they add to existing projects. If we choose to not use state managers, what can we do to future-proof our careers? What is the future of web development? Is web web development essential work?

• How can we manage state in web applications? State managers?
• What makes the web tick? Servers? Should you learn to run servers? What about hypervisors like Proxmox?
• WebAR: what is it, and what are its applications?
• TypeScript: where does it fit in? Is it worth learning?
• Bluetooth: why does it suck?
• Is Javascript terrible, or is it due for a replacement? Dead languages like Cobal, Pascal, etc.
• How can we support open-source projects and the libraries we use?

What's it like to be a front-end web developer as a female in the current web development industry? What struggles do women in tech face when applying for jobs? Justine Matsala, female mentor and Senior React Developer at Logitech takes us through the ins and outs of what it means today to be a female (and all other genders on the spectrum) in the web development industry. What can we do to encourage gender diversity in the workplace -- part 1

What do developers need to know about "e-commerce" to start an online business?  Banner ads?  Google Ads?  Facebook Pixel?  How many images in a product page?  Chat boxes, popup modals, or an overly technical specifications section?  How can web dvelopers leverage Shopify's templates to quickly create online stores?  Kray Mitchell from Shopify tells us the best way to structure e-commerce websites for developers and how Shopify compares to other platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, and Joomla.

Introducing the host, Sean G!  Background, education, how Sean got into web development.  How did Sean get into web development?  Sean's philosophy on passion and passionate onboarding for teams.  How did web perspectives come to be?

Founder of Calgary web development meetup Pixels, Tony Grimes discusses the future of web development bootcamps and in-person meetups amidst the raging pandemic.  How to grow your web development career in a world of digital "meetups".  What does the future of in-person meetups look like?  Does it sill make sense to take a web bootcamp in 2021?

Pixels YYC:

https://discord.gg/EyFxsYPs

Pixels & Pints Meetup (Calgary)

https://www.meetup.com/pxandpints/

Scott Gerlach discusses what Web Security means and how to automate API security vulnerability discovery through his DAST platform, StackHawk.

• Homebrewing: API by day; IPA by night 😜
• What does web security even mean for the front-end web developer?  How much responsibility do we have in ensuring security?  CSP?  What about NPM packages we don't maintain?
• How do large businesses deal with security breaches?  How much should we prioritize web security teams, especially when budgeting is thin?  What about small teams and startups?
• What does DAST offer that SCA (static code analysis) doesn't?  Why opt for DAST if we already have useful tools to perform SCA testing?

What does it mean to write "simple" code, and what suggestions can we give to emerging front-end developers?  How much should coding standards bog us down when we just want to get an idea out there?  How much of front-end web development is just muscle memory as opposed to giving ourselves freedom of expression in our code?  With a wealth of tools shoved down our throats with modern build pipelines and CI, how can we keep it simple?

What does the devOps role mean in today's competitive industry of cloud providers, serverless, and Jamstack.  Why should businesses consider hiring a devOps engineer when they easily rely on third-party providers like AWS, Azure, and Netlify, and Google Cloud?  What does devOps even mean in an industry when we can easily spin up full stacks in a matter of seconds using npm scripts and CLI tools like create-react-app and vue cli, affording us everything we already need as full-stack developers from development environments to staging and to production?  Has full-stack development replaced the need for devOps?

A deep, meta look at how we can rework the interview process to favour candidate honesty and vulnerability. How to uncover underlying talent and passion during , and to allow candidates to be vulnerable. How can we learn, both as interviewers, and as candidates, from our past interviews to best allow applicants to showcase their talent? How do we enable candidates to open up about their passions during an interview? All this, and more, in this hour long finale on interviews.

We know the six underlying steps to display competence in an interview. but what about the mindset?  How can we best answer targeted interview questions?  How much is oversharing?  What qualities do interviewers prefer in web developer candidates?  How do the best candidates answer interview questions?  How much does experience actually matter?

With the easing of restrictions, post-pandemic, surrounding office work, what does the future of remote work look like?  How has the industry changed now that most developers work remotely?  More importantly, how can we effectively manage semi-distributed teams in a partly remote workplace while still gaining the benefits of in-person work.  All this and more in this two-hour special of Web Perspectives.

What is an API?  Why did our company choose to go with GraphQL over JSON:API?  The differences between the JSON:API specification and the GraphQL specification; how GraphQL goes against the grain of web standards and why it does this; how RESTful is more of a buzzword.  What the future of HTTP/3 looks like.  HTTP emoji status codes?

What makes a web page work?  How do browsers work?  What constraints have tools imposed on us?  A primer and review on HTML and what makes an HTML document.  How going back to the basics can make the differences between a customer bouncing from your web page and staying.