Panel:

Sia Karamalegos
Lucas Reis

Special Guests: Jordan Eldredge

In this episode, the React Round Up panelists talk to Jordan Eldredge about his project Webamp. Jordan’s first introduction to programming had to do with music which led him to work both as a singer to now being an engineer. They talk about how common it is for programmers to have diverse backgrounds, especially in front-end developers, what Webamp and Winamp are, and what he originally wrote Webamp in. they also touch on his inspiration for creating this project, his journey in creating Webamp, and more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Jordan intro
Studied music (opera) in college
Forced himself to learn PHP and MySQL
Common in front-end developing to have people with diverse backgrounds
Why do you think it’s so common to have diverse backgrounds?
Front-end web development is very young
Self-taught developers
What is Webamp?
Reimplementation of Winamp in JavaScript
What is Winamp?
What did you originally write Webamp in?
What was the inspiration for creating Webamp?
CSS Sprites
Wanting to recreate Winamp skins
jQuery originally
Rewrote in “vanilla” JavaScript
The process of learning real JavaScript
Managing transitions VS managing state
React with Redux
Do you believe your struggle with “vanilla” JS made you more aware of what React really brings?
You Might Not Need Redux by Dan Abramov
How did you deal with the audio API?
The thing he loves about side-projects
Not having a deadline
Using a Redux middleware
And much, much more!

Links:

Webamp
MySQL
Winamp
JavaScript
jQuery
React
Redux
You Might Not Need Redux by Dan Abramov
Jordaneldredge.com
@captbaritone
Jordan’s GitHub

Sponsors

Kendo UI
Digital Ocean
FreshBooks

Picks:

Sia

Google Docs

Lucas

Timing App

Jordan

@winampskins
Inspiring Online
WACUP