My Angular Story 015 Danny Blue

On today’s episode we have a My Angular Story with Danny Blue. Danny is a Google Developer Expert for web technologies. In this episode we hear the story about how Danny first started coding, a method suggestion for picking a frameworks, and how vocabulary is vital for a new programmer to learn. It’s a good one, stay tuned.


How did you get into programming?

Didn’t get started until college. In school he was under the impression that you had to be a math genius to be a programmer. Didn’t even try until college. He wish he would have taken more in College. His first dive into code was ActionScript 2. He was offered a class that taught how to make Flash games and he took the class and made a few games, which he mentions were most likely awful. His game was an infinite runner with a robot. It taught him the basics like loops and storing variables.In his class he realized that as long as he understood some of the key concepts, he would be able to handle it.Soon he went out and just bought a book and after experiencing the code in action he got hooked.

Managing memory in C

Danny’s friend tried to teach him how to build a checkers game in C. He remembers the pains of manually managing memory. His feedback on malloc is that it’s one of his favorite words because it rolls off the tongue. Charles talks about how in college he had to design systems in VSDL with transistors and silicon.

How do you get from that to JavaScript Development

First job was at a swimming pool manufacturing company’s marketing department in West Virginia. He worked a lot in Dreamweaver until a man that started after him decided they were going to write all the markup and CSS by hand. From that Danny learned how websites were put together. He talks about a contact form that they wanted to animate. He knew that he could figure it out. He would use code snippets to figure out and build the animation. He started to do more and more JavaScript and teaching himself as much as he could. He did the CodeSchool JavaScript Road Trip. The first few episodes ease you into JavaScript and helps you learn where things lives. From that point he became obsessed with building things with JavaScript. Charles talks about how CodeSchool wasn’t around when he started. Modern code seem to be more complicated but it can be learned best by breaking it down into smaller bites. CodeSchool is good for that. Getting your start or foothold is the hardest part.

It’s easy to skip over fundamentals.

Charles talks about how that things like CLI came second nature for him and sometimes instructors dismiss that new students may get hung up on those sort of fundamental concepts and tools. Danny adds that there had been times where he would read articles on sites like StackOverflow that would be explaining something but even the baseline instructions has information in it that can something someone has skipped. Little pieces of information can really help pull things together. He talks about the dissociation that can happen for someone who only learned JavaScript and doesn’t know what CLI is and how hard it would be to explain the difference between JavaScript running in the browser and Node, or explaining what a package manager is, then a package , etc. Many people come into it not understanding any of it. He can remember copying commands into a terminal but not understanding what was going on.

For learning JavaScript from a basic level, what do you suggest?

Finding the beginner tutorials for stuff. CodeSchool is good, Code Academy as well. Do those first. Don’t skip it assuming you know too much to do them. After that just make something. From there you will figure out stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t. Twitter is a great resource for finding helpful people. Being in the environment helps to get exposed to the information. Mainly just write code. Charles mentions that people have grown to understand the concepts and lingo of web development by just