159: With Addy Osmani
Addy Osmani is an engineer at Google, where he works on Chrome & Polymer. Addy is also the creator of TodoMVC, @Yeoman, Web Starter Kit, and the author of JavaScript Design Patterns.
He joined us to talk frameworks, performance, JavaScript, and more.
Time Jump Links
- 15:48 What is the best way for someone to pursue a similar career at Google or elsewhere?
- 19:44 At what point you make the trade-off between additional bytes of file-size vs. an extra HTTP request. Basically, at what point does the extra HTTP request become worthwhile? 5kb, 10kb, 50kb?
- 33:55 I will be rebuilding our website and app dashboard soon, and instead of having a desktop version and a mobile version, I’m going have just 1 version which will support both. I would like to use a different set of js files for the smallest i.e.: mobile version, vs the desktop size or rather anything bigger then the mobile version which in my case would be 320px. I’ve seen examples of people using JavaScript to import script tags, but how would you guys go about this?
- 40:58 I am so frustrated with the current state of JavaScript. I feel like there are so many libraries and tools that the language is getting over saturated. Because of this over saturation there are now conflicting best practices. For example, if we want to use requireJS and concatenate all of our libraries together, then we cannot use a CDN fallback for those libraries. So, do we do AMD or CDN?
- 45:35 I’ve recently begun diving into the MEAN stack, and so far, have really enjoyed it. Coming from a LAMP stack background, it's been a pretty big huge mindset shift, but the idea of running a server on JavaScript is both too terrifying and too intriguing to pass up. What do you guys think about the MEAN stack?
- 50:55 As a front and back end developer I often find myself Googling pretty much anything from a CSS to PHP. For example, today I searched for "SASS Parent Selectors" and "Equal height columns in CSS." I often think that I'm just good at searching the web and not so much at development, am I overreacting or do other developers run into this situation?
- 53:42 Can you explain what "The tiniest yet most powerful JS utility ever" is all about?
- 56:12 The NYTimes is describing some of the technology they used for their re-design. Including a paragraph about responsiveness and breakpoints called 'A smarter layout'. They decided to go for CSS classes set via JavaScript to switch the layout. So like Modernizr-is-taking-care-of-mediaqueries-ish-kinda-way. What do you think about this approach?
Links
- JavaScript Design Patterns
- Backbone
- Sproutcore
- Todo MVC
- DevTools: State Of The Union 2015 by Addy Osmani
- Authoring Critical Above-the-Fold CSS
- Window.outerWidth
- MEAN Stack
- The tiniest yet most powerful JS utility ever
- 140 Bytes
- The Technology Behind the NYTimes.com Redesign
- JSJabber Podcast: New York Times
- Responsive Web Design Podcast: Vox Media