Brian Holt on learning JavaScript and understanding how to scale a website

In this episode of the O’Reilly Podcast, I sat down with Brian Holt, a senior cloud developer at Microsoft. Holt will be teaching a training course, “A Complete Introduction to React” and hosting a session “10 KB or bust: The delicate power of webpack and Babel” at the O’Reilly Fluent Conference in June. In this episode, we discuss the winding road to finding your way in the software industry, new changes to React, and optimizing the end user experience.

Discussion points:

• Finding your way in the software industry: It’s winding road to become a technologist and Brian’s path was set by his older brother and writing games in code.
• What’s new in React: Major recent changes to React means that as a trainer, Brian keeps a very close eye on updates and rollouts. You’ll want to pay attention to the shift from React 15 to 16 and expect big changes for React 16.3, which will feature the fiber architecture.
• Embrace your tools and systems: It’s critical to learn the entire ecosystem for React and JavaScript. But it can feel like moving from a beginner to expert is the most daunting part of learning JavaScript. There’s hope yet as the community starts looking at the learning path for new JavaScript developers.
• Knowing your audience and focusing on performance: The end user experience is very different these days—applications are bigger and you don’t want to limit your audience to only high-speed internet users. Some folks travel with limited data, some live with it every day. How do we build a more accessible, inclusive web?