Panel:


Aimee Knight
Charles Max Wood (DevChat TV)
Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston)
Cory House (Kansas City)
Joe Eames


Special Guests: Nicholas Zakas

In this episode, the panel talks with Nicholas Zakas who writes on his site, Human Who Codes. He is the creator of ESLint, also the author of several books, and he blogs, too. He was employed through Box and today he talks about ESLint in full detail! Check it out! 

Show Topics:

0:05 – Advertisement: KENDO UI

0:37 – Hello! The panel is...(Chuck introduces everyone).

1:04 – Nicholas who are you?

1:17 – Nicholas: Yeah it’s been about 5 years and then you invited me again, but I couldn’t come on to talk about ESLint back then. That’s probably what people know me most for at this point. I created ESLint and I kicked that off and now a great team of people is maintaining it.

1:58 – Chuck: What is it?

2:04 – It’s a Linter for JavaScript. It falls into the same category as JSLint. The purpose of ESLint is to help you find problems with your code. It has grown quite a bit since I’ve created it. It can help with bugs and enforcing style guides and other things.

2:53 – Where did it come from?

2:57 – Guest: The idea popped into my head when I worked at Pop. One of my teammates was working on a bug and at that time we were using...

Nothing was working and after investigating someone had written a JavaScript code that was using a native code to make an Ajax request. It wasn’t the best practice for the company at the time. For whatever reason the person was unaware of that. When using that native XML...there was a little bit of trickiness to it because it was a wrapper around the...

We used a library to work around those situations and add a line (a Linter) for all JavaScript files. It was a text file and when you tried to render code through the process it would run and run the normal expression and it would fail if any of the...matched.

I am not comfortable using normal expressions to write code for this. You could be matching in side of a string and it’s not a good way to be checking code for problems. I wanted to find a better way.

6:04 – Why did you choose to create a product vs. using other options out there?

6:15 – Guest: Both of those weren’t around. JSHint was pretty much the defector tool that everyone was using. My first thought was if JSHint could help with this problem?

I went back to look at JSHint and I saw that on their roadmap you could create your own rules, and I thought that’s what we need. Why would I build something new? I didn’t see anything on GitHub and didn’t see the status of that. I wanted to see what the plan was, and they weren’t going to get to it. I said that I really needed this tool and I thought it would be helpful to others, too.

8:04 – My history was only back when it was customizable.

8:13 – Aimee: It’s interesting to see that they are basing it on regular expressions.

8:32 – Guest: Interesting thing at Box was that there was...I am not sure but one of the engineers at Box wrote...

9:03 – Aimee: I was going to ask in your opinion what do you think ES Lint is the standard now?

9:16 – Guest: How easy it is to plug things in. That was always my goal because I wanted the tool not to be boxed in – in anyway.

The guest continues to talk about how pluggable ESLint is and the other features of this tool.

13:41 – One thing I like about ESLint is that it can be an educational tool for a team. Did you see that being an educational tool?

14:24 – Guest: How do you start introducing new things to a team that is running at full capacity? That is something that I’ve wondered throughout my career. As a result of that, I found that a new team there were some problems I the code base that were really hard to get resolved, because when one person recognizes it there isn’t a god way to share that information within a team in a non-confrontational way. It’s better to get angry at a tool rather than a person.

Guest goes into what this can teach people.