An Introduction to Vue.js with Developer and Author Erik Hanchett (S7E4)

This episode was transcribed with the help of an AI transcription tool. Please forgive any typos.

Laurence Bradford 0:00
Hey and thank you for tuning in to the Learn to Code With Me Podcast. I’m your host Laurence Bradford.

If you’re listening to this episode between June 22 and June 26 of 2020, then you’re in luck. You have a chance to get 33 amazing tech products basically for the price of one, during the annual Learn to Code With Me tech toolbox sale. Over two dozen top-notch creators have come together to offer their courses and ebooks on a ton of different topics within the tech space. Your chance to get this bundle ends Friday June 26th at midnight eastern time, so don’t wait too long!

Learn more about our annual bundle sale at learntocodewith.me/toolbox2020

And now for our guest today — Erik Hanchett, who is a bundle product contributor. His course in the bundle will help you build your own replica of Twitter using Vue.js — a popular JavaScript framework that many companies use.

Erik is a senior software engineer at an insurance technology company in Reno, Nevada. He’s also a tech author, YouTuber, podcast co-host, and blogger.

Even though Erik has a traditional computer science degree, his path wasn’t very traditional. He took a break from college after a couple of semesters, took a job in tech support for a few years, and then went back to finish his degree.

And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today: his journey to becoming a senior software engineer, why having a CS degree doesn’t mean you don’t have to teach yourself to code, why he recommends learning the Vue.js framework, and more.

Alright — let’s get into it! Enjoy the interview with Erik Hanchett.

Laurence Bradford 2:12
Hey, Erik, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Erik Hanchett 2:16
Thanks, Lawrence. Good to be here.

Laurence Bradford 2:19
So to get things going, I would love to hear a bit about you and your experience how you first got into programming. And if you don't mind, could you also tell us where you live? And just like what your like current situation is like?

Erik Hanchett 2:33
Sure, yeah. I live in Reno, Nevada. I'm a software developer. I work for a company here in town, sort of an insurance company called Saturday where we do workers compensation insurance. I'm at home right now because of the whole COVID thing. Everyone in our company is working from home, which that's quite a different experience. I was working from an office and I kind of got into programming when I was young when I was really back in high school. was the first time I jumped into being a developer I started creating, if you can believe it, I'm dating myself a little bit. I created websites and put them up on on different free hosting platforms. geo cities was one of them. I also had like a MySpace page. So things like that sort of is kind of how I started.

Unknown Speaker 3:22
Awesome. And did you go to college to study computer science, or did you go to college at all?

Erik Hanchett 3:30
Yeah, yeah. So I went to college, in the 2000s. Yep. I went to college. I started off about my college journey is probably like some people listening here. I started college right after high school, but then I dropped out and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life. I was working tech support for quite a while. But I decided at some point that I wanted to, to get back into college and one of the reasons why and I think we're Gonna, we're going to touch on this later on the interview is just because the job market at that time wasn't that great. And really, it things have changed. It's was more difficult at that point to actually get into development without a college degree. So I had dropped out I had troubles finding a developer job was just a high school education, you know, back then, this was early 2000s. There wasn't a Free Code Camp. YouTube didn't come around until I think 2004 2005. So there was very few resources out there for self taught developers for there was no coding boot camps back then. I mean, pretty much if you wanted to teach yourself how to become a developer, you had to go to the local library and check out books and just study those, or there was some communities and IRC channels and things like that you might be able to get hold of but there wasn't as much resources there was today. So being a young person back then, you know, I thought my chances of breaking into the industry especially in a town like Reno, where There's not a ton of opportunities and all the opportunities out there require. Most of them blatantly said on the job application that they prefer a computer science degree. And if not a master's degree, I thought I thought it would be a difficult road ahead to kind of break into the profession without a computer science degree.

Laurence Bradford 5:18
Got it? So you say early 2000s. Was that after the.com bubble, which was in 2001. I feel like I'm doing like a history course. So it was shortly after that.

Erik Hanchett 5:31
Yeah, yeah, you're right. So so I had graduated from high school in 1999. And then, right after that kind of the.com bust was around 2001. So the job market was, was pretty terrible back then. Anyways, so just trying to find a job after the.com bust was was not good and having no education other than high school education and no experience made it even more difficult. So I ended up just working mostly in tech support during that time. I think I've entered the job market in bad times, both times because when I graduated college was just at the height of the housing crisis bubble. And it popped soon as I graduated, and then there was like another lol and people hiring tech workers. And I think, sadly, from what I've seen now it sounds like we're going through another one right now with with COVID. We're hoping that the economy bounces back the next few months. Maybe this is like a time capsule for people to hear from two years from now, or whenever they end up listening to this. But as of right now, you know, we're hoping that it doesn't become another recession.

Laurence Bradford 6:35
Yeah, I was something on social media. And it was about the students that are graduating college or high school now I can't figure out that the years in my head, but whatever group they were talking about, I guess it must be high school because they would have been born around 911 I think and now they're graduating high school. So they were born in like a tumultuous time. They're graduating high school, obviously in tumultuous time with the Coronavirus and not you know, maybe even being mobile to college like a campus in the fall and also for people who get graduating college right now, and entering the job market. Obviously, it's not yet the best time like it's affecting so many aspects of the world. It's, it's crazy. But circling back to your story, so you went back to school, I guess maybe around like 2004 and then you act you've got like, a bachelor's or Yeah, bachelor's in computer science. And then you wrap that up around 2008.

Erik Hanchett 7:36
Right, yeah, I, I kind of took a break off of high school. And I did one semester school dropped out of college. And during those years, there was a lot of working a tech support a lot of playing video games and MMOs and not really super focused on my career at that time, kind of living life. But then I decided to go back to school Yep, in 2004 and really 2000 In 2004, and Yep, and then then graduated around that time, and just kind of buckled down during that time, during college, working about a 10 to 20 hour job, then going to school full time just working on my studies. And one thing with the computer science curriculum at my college was that it's in probably like many other colleges out there, it was heavily focused on theory. And there was quite a bit of math and physics. So those are kind of difficult topics for someone that was not very good in math and physics in high school. So I needed to kind of take extra work to get through those classes. I mean, computer science degree isn't one of those ones that typically it's hard to just skate through it. I mean, those classes are can be difficult. So it was definitely a challenge for me, is one of the reasons I kind of dropped out the first time because I realized all the work that would need but then when I got focused, I just started working really hard and I understand Thinking back that it was the only kind of the only path that I thought was was available for me at the time and, and I'm glad now that there's there's many other ways for people to get into this industry.

Laurence Bradford 9:15
Yeah, for sure. And when you left that program, what was your first job like? out the gate? I know you said you graduated that not an ideal time in the economy with the housing crisis going on around 2008 did it take you a while to find a job? Did you land something relatively quick?

Erik Hanchett 9:36
Yeah, it's it was I remember back then it was. It was definitely more difficult to to land that first job even with someone who had a college degree and a computer science degree. I remember going on many applying for many jobs, talking to many hiring managers. Some of them I would get to the actual phase of actually being on site and some of them I wouldn't even get past The sending in the resume. I remember one interview I did it was I don't want to call out the company's name, but it was an all day interview. It was like a 45 minute drive from my house. And I remember getting to the interview at ATM. I'm young, this fresh college grad, really wanting to try to impress them. And they got me into a room with 10 other engineers and I started getting peppered with questions. I remember going in and having to do a whiteboarding interview for one group. The next hour, they brought another group in had to do another whiteboarding interview. And then I remember like not doing great. I felt like I didn't do that great in those first two interviews, and then having lunch with the team. And everyone on the team was talking around me, but no one was talking to me. So it felt like yeah, this isn't going very well and then at the end, like having to meet the HR and another department, and it was just like a draining experience. Then after that full day interview. They ghosted me. I never got a call back. So I had an email the person that I knew. And they had said, Oh, yeah, we just found someone else we'd like more sorry, thank you for applying. And that's it. Just remember, like having exhausting interviews like that back then. It was a lot of a lot of work.

Laurence Bradford 11:17
Wow, that's wild. And I feel like when you were telling that story, I just like had a memory come to me from early on in my tech days, which was this was probably 2013 2014. So after after you but still from 2020 a decent amount of time ago. So the experience you just described reminds me of a very like old school IT company, or just like a more of an old school sort of company because I feel like nowadays, tech interviews are not like that. But the experience is sort of triggered for me was, I won't name the company either, but there was an old it's still around. It's a few thousand people and it's like an it kind of consulting company. But they do stuff with computer programming. And they do a lot of different stuff. The company's privately run, it's a few thousand people even. And it is like a successful company. But it's definitely old school at the way it's run and operated. And maybe there's a better word to use. Like, it's not like a modern company like Google. And I remember, I wasn't even like properly interviewing there. But I knew someone who worked there who was kind of higher up it was a friend of my parents started going to a whole store here. But the point I just want to give context into this. And he would, you know, he was he had worked there for 20 years. So he was again higher up. And he allowed me to kind of do part of their interview process for programmers, even though it wasn't like fully interviewing the kind of a way to help me get experienced basically, I totally forgot about this until you mentioned this, but I remember one part of that, this kind of like mock interview, let's say was doing this written exam. Have you ever had to do this and it was I think it was called the computer aptitude something exam It was literally like the it was like an SAE it was timed. You couldn't use a calculator and it was like pencil paper. There was an HR person there watching me and I it was like an SAE and lo and behold I actually did really well on it like which is shocking because I didn't do well on the CTS or I didn't I took the GRP before when I thought I was going to go to grad school I didn't do well on that either. But it this this kind of computer aptitude test which was all like logic and problem solving. It's like it was like an essay t I actually did well on but it was so nerve racking and I wasn't even really interviewing I was just doing like a mock thing. Anyhow, that's just triggered that memory for me.

Erik Hanchett 13:44
Yeah, it that's how it that's how it was back then. I think nowadays and I have gone through some interviews in the last few years. It feels like it's a little bit more lacks, but just depends on the company if you're if you're interviewing for one of these large thing companies like Facebook, alphabet, Google, Apple, you might have this one day all day interview where you have multiple rounds of whiteboarding, maybe a test to I remember talking to a friend that worked for a large phone company and for a senior engineer role and he had architecture questions he had. He had whiteboarding. He had a test like you're saying, it's, it's crazy how in our industry that I don't know if it's like this for doctors or lawyers or anything else. Like they don't send them in all day. tests were all day interviews where they test them on knowledge that they've learned in college and but that's kind of the way we do it here and in, in our, in our world.

Laurence Bradford 14:42
Yeah, the other thing that and I don't have a computer science degree, but from other people I've spoken to who have them is it probably depends on where you go to school. But I've heard that there's a lot of things that computer science degree like doesn't teach you or even talk about that you need to know When you get into the real work world, so things may be like Scrum or using like JIRA, or other kinds of tools, like, you know, the software management tools that are very industry standard, but like never talked about in a classroom.

Erik Hanchett 15:15
Yeah, I mean, the computer science curriculum varies between colleges. And there's also ones that are like computer engineering or computer architecture. I mean, there's a few, several, I guess, you could say, depending on your college and curriculum that are kind of in like Computer Space. I know the traditional computer science curriculum that I go through that I went through was more a lot of theory, a lot of mathematics. Like I said, I had some sciences and in there too, and the computer classes I mean, usually you would have one every, every semester you have two or one or two and then while you get when you get farther down to your guess third year, fourth year or or junior, senior year, depending on where you are in the world, those those classes. You tend to have more of your kind of core or your mandatory classes you need to graduate. And some of them do touch on. Some of those topics are talking about sometimes their electives. Like we had a grad student teach a class on version control, which is typically something that you wouldn't learn in a computer science curriculum, but maybe it's an elective that you can learn. And then our last class, we had, we had to do like the waterfall methods. So we had to write up requirements, like we were in a real job, and we had to do user stories. And this is before JIRA, and Basecamp. Were as popular as they are today. So it just depends on the curriculum, but for the most part, you're not going to learn everything that you would learn on the job. So it's more of like teaching us a theory and some things and then usually, programs will pick one or two languages to teach you sometimes I can MIT, I believe they teach a lot of stuff in Python. My program was moving from c++ to Java. And then I know that there's some programs that do web development as their curriculum. But it's few and far between. I think it's still more more of these other languages because it's easier to teach like something like c++ or Java, because then you can also teach things like object oriented programming, and some of these other things. You definitely will not learn everything you need for a day to day job, though. So you're not going to learn probably all the version control, you're probably not going to learn the details of the scrum, you're probably if your curriculum does teach web development, it's probably pretty rare. So you're going to have to learn a lot of those things by yourself.

Laurence Bradford 17:39
Yeah, definitely. So switching gears a little bit. You have a podcast called self taught or not, which by the way, I love that name. That's really that's really catchy. And you talk to different people about how they broke into the tech industry. And I was wondering now in 2020, obviously a lot has changed since you got into tech head. Since I first started started, you know, teaching myself how to code A lot has changed as well. What do you think, is the best route for someone to go? Whether they're if they're weighing, like a CS degree, or maybe a coding boot camp or just teaching themselves fully?

Erik Hanchett 18:18
I don't think you're gonna like this answer, but I guess it depends, like many things else else in life. So it definitely depends on where you are. So like, had said earlier in this interview, there wasn't a whole lot of choices for me in the early 2000s to kind of break into development. Now there is a lot more choices we have. And you've interviewed a lot of boot camp grads, you've entered people that like run boot camps. So obviously a lot of people listening to this podcast are familiar with the kind of the boot camp way of going things course there's the self taught. So really, it really depends on where you're coming from, and and who you are. To to determine that, I still think, and I've really seen a shift in the last probably, I don't know, 10 years, where in the past, everybody said, Oh, you want to get into computers, you want to get into programming, you know, you should go to college. And you should get a degree and probably a computer science degree, and then you can join everyone else. But in the last, probably three or four years, I've seen definitely a shift where people are recommending people not to go to college, where I've seen maybe it's my own bubble. I don't know if you've seen this Lawrence, but it's feels like a lot of people are recommending people not not to go into this field, or not to go into the traditional way, a lot of people saying, you know, I've been heard as much as people on Twitter saying, we shouldn't gatekeeper like employers should gatekeeper prospective candidates who don't have computer science degrees, like computer science degrees or a college degree. Shouldn't be a shouldn't be any kind of rubric to judge someone for a job. Like I've seen people like go on rants on that. I think that's going a little bit too far. In my personal opinion, I think those of us who have gotten college degrees or a computer science degree, that should be one of many, many pieces that employers use to determine if they want to hire you or not. Obviously, if you're very self motivated, and you've gone the self taught route, and you've have a portfolio, and you could show that you can do the work. You know, employers should take that into consideration, too. I'm fact I've done some hiring at companies. I've worked. I've interviewed developers and I kind of look at who they are today and I do look at their past and who Brett they worked at, but I don't necessarily have to say they have to have a computer science degree. So going back to your original question, I would say the depends part would be Are you someone that could be Would you be able to be motivated enough to teach yourself how to program are you going to be willing to work your regular probably job and then come I'm home and work another three or four hours to learn programming. Are you able to put yourself out there, create a GitHub account, create a portfolio without any help? Are you gonna be able to just use online resources like the video courses like Free Code Camp, or people like me, like watch my youtube channel? Or watch this podcast to kind of get tips and tricks and that's the type of person that would be maybe good for the self taught route. You can look at your past like, Are you one of those people in school that was, like an overachiever? Like you would go home. And you would just learn a topic inside and out. Maybe if that's like the type of person you are, like you've taken you can take one kernel of an idea and you can just run with it without any supervision. Maybe the self taught route route is good for you. And now I think self taught is probably the hardest of all the routes because it's, it's you're not just facing just being able to have the self discipline to do it. You're gonna also have to face the fact that once you start looking for jobs, there is Do a lot of jobs out there that won't give you the time of day if you don't have some sort of certification or degree or some experience. So it's definitely gonna be kind of the hard route. I've heard of self taught developers who've had to send out literally hundreds of resumes before even getting one interview. And that's really disheartening. So if you're the right type of person, you're willing to, to, to put it out there maybe that's the right route. Now, if you're Are you need a little bit more structure, then then self taught boot camp, or excuse me, boot camp, or maybe a traditional degree is a better for you, because then you kind of get that kind of guardrails to help you along the way you get the mentorship, you get the people to be around you, you're in kind of a group with other people. And fortunately, that does cost money. Typically, Boot Camps cost thousands of dollars. And we all know that a traditional education could be lots of money, too. So it also probably depends on your financial situation. Can you afford a four year college also, if you're later in life, if you're maybe married and have kids that's probably A lot more difficult to go back to school than it would be maybe a boot camps a better option at that point. So that's kind of a long winded answer.

Laurence Bradford 23:08
Yeah, no, but I mean, it was a great answer. And I totally agree like it 100% depends on so many factors of the kind of person you are your financial situation, your life situation, as you just said, Some folks can't just go to a four year college because they're, you know, a breadwinner or one of the main income earners of the household and they have people relying on them and they, you know, can't just go back to college, right? It's just not an option. But it is great that now in 2020, and beyond, there are so many different options for people like there are these like also hybrid kind of boot camps. I think of them as where it's not as expensive as like a full blown boot camp, but maybe it is like $200 a month or something about that and it will have a bit more hand holding than just being fully self taught. But as you As you said, it's like totally possible whichever route you go on there just going to be different. I want to switch back though, to your own experience. Because now like, so you've been in tech for quite some time. You have a popular YouTube channel where you put out a lot of videos, by the way, like Congratulations, I was looking at that just the other day. And I remember I use YouTube a lot but more so for like personal like things are things I'm looking up not for, like coding kind of videos, but I went to your YouTube channel and I swear the last time I looked at it, it was like 1000 subscribers now it's like how much I mean by the time by time this airs will be even more but it's like 50,000 or 60 or something like that.

Erik Hanchett 24:42
Yeah, nearly 60,000 it's been a kind of a labor of love last a couple years just putting it out there to almost just on a whim when I started on that's a whole other story. But it was just been fun the last couple years, interacting with people kind of building that audience up. It definitely wasn't an overnight success. I had put a lot of effort in to it to get to where it is now and I'm hoping to grow it even further in the months and years to come.

Laurence Bradford 25:07
Yeah, that's awesome. So I okay, this is kind of like a selfish question, but I feel like so you really took to video obviously, right? Because I know you you've write books and you do other things too. But is video like your favorite platform to kind of create on or should say media? Sorry, I said media, which is a medium because it's not really a video isn't really a platform, but yes, are your favorite medium to create on?

Erik Hanchett 25:31
Yeah, it's I kind of went back and forth. When I started getting serious about my career after I graduated college, I did a I did a few things. And I went and started blogging at first, and actually probably around the same time your blog started or maybe a little bit earlier, but I like blogging, but it felt like it took so much time to put my thoughts in into words and to express something as some some of these really technical Kind of tutorials. And I found that at first video was super scary. So what what ended up happening is, I'll just do a quick two minute version of what happened. After I went to college I got, I graduated and I got a number of jobs, but actually started getting bored at one of my jobs. And I went back and got a, an MBA a master's in business. And the Masters in Business had a class of personal branding class. And it required us to create a blog and to do YouTube videos. And I found that after a while, the blogging was becoming very tedious doing two or three blogs a week, you know, 1000 to 2000 words at times. It was just making making a tremendous amount of time, but if I could jump on a camera, it was it felt at first really, really hard. I was really scared and nervous to put my face and and to talk to a camera for five to 10 minutes. It's the nervous we're getting to me But after I did that, probably for, I don't know, a dozen times maybe it took 12 or 13 times I got a lot more comfortable. And I could knock out a video explaining a topic on on some sort of tutorial something I wanted to teach much quicker than it took to write. Write it out in a tutorial. And then since then I've just been I've kind of stopped blogging and then just focus more on the video.

Laurence Bradford 27:23
Yeah, I feel like everyone has something that they prefer if they're like a creator and you know, there's all these different mediums we can we can pick from and I, I'm like the opposite of you. I think maybe I just love writing. I just never got that into video. I think well, you said there's some nerves involved and also I find like video editing, very tedious, but I know a bunch of other people that have the opposite. They would so much rather create a video and edit it and put it out on a topic than writing something. So I guess you know, everyone is just different, how they like to communicate and how they like to create, but I just want to congratulate you On your success the channel because, yeah, that's amazing. And you said when you started your blog, yeah, we first connected a really long time ago. And like years ago, like, really early on when I started learning to code with me and I can't I started my site, technically, I guess in April 2014. But the first year was a lot of figuring things out. So I'm not sure I have a feeling we connected though. Probably around that first year, I would guess of me having the site. But yeah, anyhow, to watch you create the YouTube channel and have it grow so much, because you You made me really start publishing to your programming one, just a few years ago, right, like, it wasn't back in 2014 that you were actively posting or publishing on there.

Erik Hanchett 28:43
Yeah, you're right. Yeah, it was more I got serious in like 2017 and I had a few videos in there in 2016, maybe one in 2015. But it's really more 2017 when I got serious about doing video and before then I was mostly just blogging every every now and then. And having fun with that it's it's there's a whole other discussion about, like, how do you build an audience and personal branding and what that can do for your career? And I was all into that back then.

Laurence Bradford 29:13
Yeah, yeah. And another thing you've done is you've published books. Could you list some of those off? And you? And you, actually, you talk about them? Yeah.

Erik Hanchett 29:22
No, yeah, no problem. So while I was blogging, I got really into this JavaScript framework called Ember j. s, which is a kind of the lesser known of the popular JavaScript framework slash libraries out today. Most people have heard of react and probably view j. s. At least people in the tech scene, I tell people about these and they have like, I have no idea what react is. What is that? I have no idea what view is like, those are libraries and frameworks for us web developers. This is funny. Hopefully everybody listening knows what those are. But Ember is kind of like used to be more popular back then. But it's still a great framework. It's still going on today. And I was writing and blogging about it a lot. And I got approached by a publisher. And this is One really cool thing. And I'm sure lots of you've been, probably have a few publishers that you've talked to throughout the years, as well. So once you start putting yourself out there, and you start writing and talking to people, like people will find doing this publisher from packt Publishing found me and they wanted me to do do a book. And so I spent CATIA, probably a year just writing a book with them working with an editor and publishing it and it was a great experience I found that it was also a good way to you talk about loving writing, I'd like writing a lot too and just being able to work with editor and flat finding out Oh, yeah, I'm not I should probably write more like this. And this is some things that I'm doing wrong. It really helped me improve my writing and, and it was kind of a fun experience. And also now I get to have published author after my name, which is cool and something actually brag about it on my YouTube channel. I did go back after to kind of finish the story. After I did that book a couple years later, I started doing a lot of videos on Vue. js, which is also a favorite of mine of JavaScript framework. And I got approached by another publisher, this time Manning, which I really respect them, they really high quality books that have a very high standard when they publish books, unlike some other publishers out there. So it was kind of a grueling year and a half of writing this book, I must have done like 100 revisions on some of my chapters. But I produced a book I'm really proud of at the end, and I was able to publish that in 2018.

Laurence Bradford 31:44
Wow, like a year and a half to write a book that is, I know it takes a while to write books like for any topic, but it's funny because things change so much in technology. How is it writing a book when things rapidly change so fast?

Erik Hanchett 32:00
Yeah, it's it was difficult actually, in the book publishing process is pretty complicated. But I'll simplify it to say that when you get to near the end of the book, there's a number of people that review your book like professional tech reviewers, I guess you could call them. And so they knew the technology just as well as me if not better, and they would bring up things like hey, this just changed here, this just changed here or, or I think you can explain this better or this, this chapter could be better. And that is a big thing with Manning that they have these points in the process of writing your book where they have professionals come in and review your book and give you suggestions. So throughout writing the book, I would have to go back to previous chapters and just make tweaks and changes usually the the language or the framework. In this case, Vue JS didn't change that much from the time I started to the time ended. I think I went from two dot owed 2.6 like it did have a few revisions and there was some newer things added but wasn't like deprecating, they didn't have a like right now we're in the middle of. For those of you in the view world, we're in the middle of transitioning from view to to view three. And that's a bigger transition. But luckily, in the year and a half, I was writing the book, there was only minor changes, and I was able to make sure that I got those incorporated into the book. And it even to this day, even though it was published in 2018, I still recommend the book to people that are learning wanting to learn Vue js, just because the core concepts are all the same. Some of the things have been some of the toolings a little different, but they haven't deprecated the core of what view is and that's what the book really taught. And that's also one thing when you're writing a book is just to focus on things that aren't likely to change as much.

Laurence Bradford 33:43
Could you talk a bit about Vue JS kind of backtracking here, because you are taking part in our 2020 bundle and Vue JS that's like the topic of the course that you are generously providing and I would love to just learn more Meet the listeners learn more about it like how it's used and why you like it so much.

Erik Hanchett 34:06
Yeah, Vue. js is something I started teaching and learning a few years ago. And it's, it's near dear to my heart. It's, it was created by Evan you. He used to work at Google. And he, this is probably back in the angular one days. And he wanted just a more flexible kind of lighter, faster framework to create web applications for and kind of view was the genesis of that. And there was a few betas and then it was released. And now it's up to just about view three right now. So it's if for those who in the audience, you may have heard of react js, which I hinted about earlier before. So it's kind of a competitor to react and something called Angular. It's I think, out of all the different frameworks. The way I like to think of view is it's probably the easiest to kind of get started with when you when you're first starting to learn web development. It doesn't take a whole lot of learning, you don't have to know a whole lot of JavaScript to use things called these things called directives, which you put directly into what we call our template where we have our HTML. And it's just really easy to compose these apps. It's also called the progressive framework, because you can kind of start off with just adding it to any sort of web application by just adding in a script tag at the top of your app. And you can use it really easily. It's lightweight. Or you can use something fully featured like view COI, which is tooling that allows you to create a fully functional view app. So I was kind of really drawn to that. Because of the simplicity of the ease of getting started, it's really easy to get your whole team up and running on view really quickly, rather than some other frameworks where you might need to know a little bit more JavaScript to get up and running. And it has as this kind of elegant way of putting everything together in a single file component where there's still some separation of concerns between your Your JavaScript but and but your HTML isn't inside your JavaScript like, like react is and your CSS but they're all in the same file. And it also has just a really great community behind it. You know, I've gone to a few view comps, and I've talked to a lot of people in the community. And there's a lot of people out there that are willing to help each other out. And there's just so much resources to I see, like dozens of articles every week coming out teaching different concepts on view, my me included. So that's kind of a short answer to some of it.

Laurence Bradford 36:34
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. And I would also love to hear and especially for for people listening. Is this the kind of framework someone who works as a front end developer could be using like, is that usually the job role that would be using that?

Erik Hanchett 36:48
Yep, yep, you're right. Yeah. So this would, this is a front end, single page application front end framework, that you can use to create your front end applications with

Laurence Bradford 37:01
Awesome. And then Are there any, like companies or organizations or anything that are well known that use that use it?

Erik Hanchett 37:10
Well, I was just at a view comp in March, and I was just talking to a few companies that were using it. So for example, apple, there was a team from Apple that was there, one of their divisions was using it. And they were kind of soaking in all the information. I remember talking to people from Wikimedia. So the people that are behind Wikipedia, they have some of their apps or some of their websites have Vue JS in the background. So you may have heard of them. Get lab is a really big company that handles your version control. They're kind of a competitor to GitHub, they have it Microsoft natla phi, I mean, the list goes on. So there's a lot of big companies that are using it. And a lot of smaller companies to

Laurence Bradford 37:57
who's the founder of get lab. I am so Bad. I feel like I've interviewed him before even on the show. And it was a few seasons ago. So it was early on in the company. If he's still there, if you don't know, it's fine. I'm gonna look it up later. I'm gonna make a note to myself to look it up because if he was we'll definitely include a link to that. It's it's funny because and I'm sure you're like this with like YouTube videos when you create so many and especially over the years. I don't know how some podcasts get like some podcasts I listened to. They are so faster like oh, Episode, back in 2016. I had so and so on the show. Like I really remember that. I think they must have a spreadsheet next to them with everything printed out because I'm like, my brain I can only recall so much information. You know, I interviewed so in 2017 I don't know maybe I don't know, maybe I just don't have good memory with that kind of stuff. But anyhow, making notes I think I think we did have him on the show. But Okay, awesome. That's great. And then is that like the primary thing that you're teaching nowadays, so whether it's like blog or podcast, or I know you have courses as well. Is it all around view?

Erik Hanchett 39:04
Yeah. Oh, to go back and get lab, they're definitely one of the companies that have really bought into view. I think everywhere in their company, they have view inside and out in some larger companies like Facebook or Apple, they'll probably have like, a couple of different divisions using view and then the rest are using react or Angular. So it does, it does change up to go back to your to your question of what I like to teach or what I'm teaching right now. Yes, view is definitely kind of my favorite. And the the topic that I teach the most, not just in my YouTube channel, but also the courses that I create. So there's there's actually a pretty large ecosystem of view technologies out there. So I've teach everything from Vue js, the core concepts to get started to things there's something called knucks j s, which is kind of a universal or service. Side rendered version of uJs. It's a framework on top of view that does a couple different things than view does. There's grid sum, which is kind of like a headless way to connect to CMS is. So I kind of teach everything in the view ecosystem. But that's not i'm not limited to view I definitely deep dive into especially on my podcast and occasionally on my YouTube channel, just career advice for software developers. I also I don't like to be just to do view too. Sometimes I look at some back end technologies I do node there's something called Dino that just came out which is sort of like know that I've been doing videos on so I kind of bounced around with but I guess you could say mostly view is kind of the core what what I want to work on and teach.

Laurence Bradford 40:49
Awesome. Well, we're running out of time, unfortunately, because I have other questions I want to ask but you know, it is what it is right? But I would love if we could just Leave on you giving advice to people listening who are where you were years ago, and they're just starting out and they're trying to figure out what to do like, what Yeah, what advice do you have for them?

Erik Hanchett 41:13
I would say find a community that you can connect with. So if it's the Learn to Code With Me community, which is great, or if it's Free Code Camp, or if it's my community at, you know, if you follow my YouTube channels, or if it's Brad Trevor See, I mean, he is also a big YouTuber. I mean, just find a community that you really connect with, that you can get involved with, that can help push you along, that can help you answer your questions, I can give you advice that can get you motivated. You know, you'll find your tribe, find your people and then just start doing more than just saying, so you have to not just watch all the content, but actually try to apply some of those concepts that you're learning. So if you're watching it If you join Free Code Camp, make sure you're doing the lessons, make sure you're you're doing the work. If you kind of join in my community, make sure you watch some of my videos, but then try to do it yourself. And you know, I'd love to hear from leaving the comments like, Hey, I tried what you did, and it worked, or I made a different version of it. So I would just say device for people listening that trying to get into it, find your community, and then try to limit the information that you get, and just try to make sure you're actually creating, not just listening and because it can be it's funny, this tech industry that we're in, especially YouTube, there's definitely an entertainment value to just watching people code. I mean, there's First off, there's some very, very entertaining developers out there, that it's just fun to watch even though you may never learn anything, or may never actually do it. But I think you have to kind of take the next step and, and actually create things.

Laurence Bradford 42:53
Awesome. Well, that's great advice to end this conversation on. Thank you again for taking the time to coming on. The show today and sharing all this where can people find you online?

Erik Hanchett 43:05
Sure, yeah, you can find me on a few different places. I'd say Twitter is a good one. So at erikCH, ErikCH on Twitter. Or you can go to my YouTube channel, just go to Erik dot video. And then I also have a website at programwitherik.com.

Laurence Bradford 43:24
Awesome. Thanks so much again.

Erik Hanchett 43:27
Thank you.

Laurence Bradford 43:29
Thanks for listening today! If you missed anything from this interview with Erik or would like a recap, you can find the show notes at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you’re listening to this episode in the future, simply click the search icon in the upper navigation and search for the guest’s name.

As I mentioned at the start of this episode, if you’re listening to this interview the week that it airs — we’re in the midst of our annual tech bundle sale — AKA The Ultimate Tech Career Toolbox.

We do this sale once a year and it is a HUGE deal.

For this week only you can get access to 33 different technical online courses and books. Together, these courses would cost you $4,206. However, for this week, you can snag them for a fraction of the cost. Specifically you can get them for 94% off.

This bundle is perfect for beginners and intermediate folks alike. Whether you’ve never written a line of code before, or you’ve already mastered the basics and are ready to learn more, these courses and books will help you level up.

With the Ultimate Tech Career Toolbox, you’ll learn…
All kinds of web development languages, including front-end, back-end, and full stack
How to build your own web and mobile applications
Which in-demand tech career might excite you, like machine learning, DevOps, or cybersecurity
How to use your tech skills to kick off a freelancing career or get hired at a dream job
And more!

As a buyer from last year’s bundle sale says: "This bundle was a once in a lifetime deal that will help me chase my dream of becoming a freelancer and a competent programmer. I knew it would help me get the momentum I needed to get more into coding and launch my career.”

Also, this year we’re donating a portion of our sales to All Star Code, which is an organization that trains young black and Latino men in coding and professional development. Their goal is to close wealth, income, and opportunity gaps by educating and supporting a new generation of innovators in tech. And we’re so excited to be supporting their cause!

Our special bundle sale ends this Friday, June 26th, at midnight Eastern Time. Find out more at: learntocodewith.me/toolbox2020

Again the URL is learntocodewith.me/toolbox2020

All right, I'll see you next week.