John Papa

Setting up debugging can be a chore. It can make you feel like console.log isn't so bad after all. Right? While I enjoy a good console.log as much as anyone, I'd much rather debug with zero configuration of my app. Wouldn't you? Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) has changed the game on Node.js debugging. There is a feature called Node: Auto Attach (you can learn more about it here in the docs). Or keep reading - this will only take a minute. When you enable this feature, you can run your node app from a command line, from an npm script, or from a tool that runs one of those. Just make sure you add the...

I love a good editor. All of the great tooling, intellisense, auto-complete and all of the goodness and efficiency. Intelligent tooling is a huge part of what makes our day fun. Don't you agree? For example, when I open Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) and it recognizes the file type I am editing, it lights up all of the relevant tooling features. Typescript, JavaScript, docker files, Vue files … it all works great! Sometimes we have to load an extension to make some of these light up (e.g. Vue files with the Vetur extension). So you can understand it makes me sad when I open a file and I get zero help from the tool. No color coding of...

John, Ward, and Dan Wahlin talk with Tracy Lee about her experience as on the RxJS core team. Tracy discusses where she sees RxJS used in real-world apps and shares tips on using RxJS that you don't want to miss. Listen to this week's episode of Real Talk JavaScript. Tweet Real Talk JavaScript is available on all the major podcast channels, every Tuesday morning! Please follow us at @realtalkjs on Twitter...

You build your Node.js apps to work first and foremost on your computer. You know it’s important that apps also work everywhere they need to run. This could be on your colleagues’ computers, internal company servers, cloud servers, or inside of a container (maybe using Docker). Enter environment variables. I have been a closet sketch-noter for a while now. I decided to start sharing them more. You can see the sketch-note I created for this post, as an illustrated guide to using environment variables. Environment variables are a fundamental part of developing with Node.js, allowing your app to behave differently based on the environment you want them to run in. Wherever your app needs configuration, you use...

John, Ward, and Dan Wahlin talk with Maxim Salnikov about his experience as a Progressive Web Apps PWA expert. Maxim discusses what they are and when he uses them, along with browser support, and how he uses service workers. Maxim shares a lot of tips on building and debugging PWAs that you don't want to miss in this week's episode of Real Talk JavaScript. Tweet Real Talk JavaScript is available on all the major podcast channels, every Tuesday morning! Please follow us at @realtalkjs on Twitter...