No plans right now. I'm focused on v5 of my React course yet and more beginners' materials. I'd recommend anything from Brian Lonsdorf, Kyle Simpson's deeper JS topics, Bianca Gandolfo, Will Sentance's JS Hard Parts, and the rest of the course catalog on frontendmasters.com

Developer advocates draw on past experiences as engineers and the tools their companies offer to help people solve their own problems. I use my experience at Netflix and my knowledge of Azure to help people understand how Azure Functions can help them iterate faster.

Most good dev advcoates will have a lot of technical experience solving the same sorts of problem that much of the industry is also trying to solve. The dev advocate will do more technical writing, public speaking, and consulting as part of their role than a developer will do typically. So if your ambition to do speaking, writing, and consulting then a dev advocate role will be perfect for you.

I do! I love it! I'm expecting in 2019 to use it more and hope to get it into Azure more.

I consider the pupper slobber to be a badge of love and therefore never wash my face. It's how I keep my youthful glow.

Niki also makes me sleep in the other room.

My two loves, for anyone curious: https://www.instagram.com/p/2rfhwrpss6/

I did have a gap in my skills. I've done a bit of operations stuff but never a lot. I had to learn a lot quickly about the operations side of things, learning things like Kubernetes, Docker, and all the Azure offerings fairly quickly. I love it. I love someone else paying me to learn cool stuff. I'd do this in my free time anyway.

I fix it by building random weird projects. Often I'll take the dumbest startup idea I can think of in three minutes and try to build it. It's fun!

Big fan. I think GraphQL is going to continue to catch on. It yields control of data fetching from the back end team having to build new APIs for every new page to the front end team that they can request the bare minimum they need to get a page running. I find it to be more of an organizational and human win than a tech win.

We all release terrible code all the time! Check out this hot garbage:

• https://github.com/btholt/googlePop
• https://github.com/btholt/fucina
• https://github.com/btholt/generator-mdpress

Just release it. Most people would love to help you and understand that clean code takes time and multiple people to get right. And screw everyone else.

Oh man, I wish I had a good idea for it. OSS maintainers deserve more than they get. I think Open Collective and Patreon are great platforms so that maintainers can recoup costs and have some people like Henry Zhou can go full time on projects like Babel.

We, companies like Microsoft, need to donate more. And I think that'll go a long way too. I'd love to see more companies like Formidable give employees 20% time to go work on OSS. That'd be amazing too.

We're at least a few years away before WebAssembly is really available for us to reliably use. Browsers just have to catch up. We'll be shipping unprefixed CSS grid before we're shipping WebAssembly.

That being said, I'm excited to see what we can do with WebAssembly. I expect it to add new people to the frontend community through projects like Blazor and the Go compiler targeting WebAssembly and I think learning from other communities is always a good thing.

I expect we as JS devs will still write code much the same way with perhaps a handful of heavy-load modules being doing seamlessly in the background via WebAssembly (like making PDFs or TensorFlow.js). On the whole I think the coming revolution with WebAssembly will be porting things like Unity, Unreal, AutoCAD, and other traditionally desktop applications into the web. This will democratize the web even further, letting people in developing countries have access to the same sorts of cool stuff we just take advantage of.

This morning. Writing a plugin pack for Visual Studio Code! (as suggested to me by @Sarah Drasner)

• Azure Static Sites just became generally available!
• I think Azure Durable Functions are a wonderful new paradigm for writing Azure Functions.
• Azure Front Door is going to make setting up complicated infrastructure super easy.
• I'm stoked Azure Pipelines is now free to open source projects.

That's off the top of my head.

My two favorite projects are Node.js and Babel. I love what they do and the humans that work on them.

The one that deserves more attention is YOUR favorite project that you use a lot. You should open issues, help them triage their own issues, respond to Stack Overflow questions, and maybe write some code for it too.

I include myself in that. I'm guilt tripping myself.

Hey Mahaveer!

I think the first thing to say is that it's hard. I don't think it's not going to be hard. It's hard to enter someone else's mindset and try to understand what their intent was when they expressed that code.

My process (which may not be the best one) is generally I try to get the project to build and to get the tests to pass first. Once there, I try to pick off a seemingly simple issue to try and figure out or at least understand better. I'll try to find the tests that test that part of the code and read the tests. The tests let you know how the code is intended to work. If it's a bug, I'll write a test case that captures what is broken. I'll then open a PR with just the test case. At the very least, you'll help the core devs by helping them see what's broken. If I understand it enough, I'll try to fix the bug too.

One piece at a time. Learn by being task driven. Don't try to boil the whole ocean at once.

1. Visual Studio Code. I used it before I was at MSFT but I just love it. Amazing for writing code, managing Azure stuff, and staying organized.

2. I love Kaleidoscope for doing git diffs and merge conflicts.

3. Firefox Stable for browsing the Interwebs.

4. I write my articles in MacDown for a simple markdown based editor

5. Spotify 24/7

6. I have a little Microsoft Surface Go that I travel with now. Great for watching videos, writing a little Node.js and playing old games like Dungeon Keeper II.

7. iTerm2 w/ fish. I usually work with bash since I teach a lot but man I love fish shell.

8. Dank Mono font and @Sarah Drasner's Night Owl theme for VSCode.

1. Google Calendar / Outlook. I use the former for personal stuff and the latter for work stuff. If it's not on my calendar I won't get it done. I have no memory anymore.

2. Focus (focusapp,io) If I need to be super-heads-down to get something out the door right now, I'll use Focus. I work for 50 minutes and then pause for 8 minutes. I've also found recently that if I listen to music via records that by the time one side has finished I'm ready for a break.

3. Visual Studio Code. Spending time getting familiar with your editor just helps you fly when you're working instead of hunting for shortcuts. Invest time in your tools.

4. Way too much paper. I write a lot of sticky notes. I tried to keep it in Google Keep but I just need to write stuff down.

It is a long journey! The shortened version is that I started working at LinkedIn post-Netflix and didn't really enjoy the work I was doing. I was going to move to another team internally but then I saw @Sarah Drasner at a conference in Tel Aviv and she convinced me to transfer to Microsoft proper to be a cloud advocate with her. Best decision ever. I love this job.

Hey Sky!

1. Build it! Use something like Azure Storage to host video objects and build a site to stream that video from Storage to a front end. I always learn best by building dumb, pointless websites to learn cool new tech.

2. I see the future of the cloud in containers and serverless. I love containers because I build multiple services, have something like Kubernetes glue it all together and ship it off to the cloud without me having to understand too much what's going on at a lower level. Particularly tools like Helm and Draft are helping container n00bs be productive quickly.

I think serverless is going to continue to grow because it allows full stack devs to be able to be truly full stack and ship powerful features without the full support of an ops team. It allows devs to focus on what makes their business unique and less on administrating app servers. I expect that serverless is going to wending its way into every company's stack.

1. Similar to answer one, I build a lot of pointless stuff to learn new tech. I recently built an inventory tracking system to get a better grasp on Azure Event Grid and Azure Logic Apps. For cloud stuff, Microsoft Learn is great for Azure stuff and I've heard good things about acloud.guru for general cloud stuff. For front end, I love frontendmasters.com because they have a mantra of having one high quality course for each subject which is why I continue to teach my material there. For back end material, the limited amount I've taught myself has been either docs or some courses from Pluralsight.

1. Always bet on JS. It's a super productive language that's just getting better. It has a lower barrier to entry which means it's welcoming to newbies and people from other languages while still having higher level constructs like closures, first class functions, and generators which allow for beautiful abstractions. I think JS will be here for decades to come.
2. GraphQL is great. I think we'll see it continue to expand across companies and be more common going forward. Microsoft is indeed using it in production.

Hey Dani!

I think you're on the best track right now: just write code. As devs, we're bombarded all day with people that want us to write code for them. Jem Young put it best when he said it's like asking people to listen to your mix tape.

Instead, your best bet is just to get something working. People will see that and want to contribute to it. I'd say organize via GitHub, even if it's a bit annoying, because people can look at what you're doing, what you're planning on doing, and contribute directly to that.

Beyond that, you just have to be a @Sean Larkin: just talk about it all the time. Apply to conferences, meetups, and just talk about what you're learning by doing it. People will be drawn to that and want to contribute.

Good luck friend! Looks awesome!

1. I wasn't here when Satya Nadella took over so I can't tell you from my own experience but everyone tells me that it's a much nicer place to work now.
2. I have no insight into what that side of the company does. Sorry. :( You know more than I do.