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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots starts building out one more tool in our toolbox: shell scripts. Bart starts with the basics explaining how to tell our little scripts which shell to run using the shebang line, the structure of shell scripts, commenting, assigning, and using variables, and how to write strings without having to escape every space and unusual character. Throughout the installment, Bart refers back to things we learned in Taming the Terminal podcast and tutorial. If you haven't listened to or read this series, you can download the book Helma helped us to produce using the Apple Books Store, or access it in a beautiful HTML version at [ttt.bartificer.net/...](https://ttt.bartificer.net/book.html), both of which have the audio of the podcast embedded within. You can find even more formats at [podfeet.com/tttbook](https://www.podfeet.com/blog/download-ttt-book/). Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_01_07

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart officially kicks off the XKPasswdJS project. This is what we've all been waiting for! As I said to Bart at the end of our recording, we're no longer fixing to make a plan, we _have_ a plan. The shownotes for this episode point to the README file for the GitHub project. Bart explains n the podcast that we'll have a project skeleton phase where Bart will define the code that has to be ported from Perl to JavaScript, and he'll build the guidelines that will help us work as a team of contributors. This means things like a style guide, automated scripts to build the project, and configuration files for the tooling. He has a vision that we'll work on the direct port next, with no enhancements and I tried to get him to take a dollar bet on whether that goal will be achieved, but he didn't fall for it. After that, we'll go into maintenance mode. It's a fun episode because we're finally moving forward after learning all of the tools we'll need to make the project a success! You can find Bart's shownotes that point to the README at pbs.bartificer.net. I'm having a bit of trouble with the transcripts but by the time you read this, you _might_ be able to read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2022_12_10

In the last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart taught us all about UML class diagrams for documenting the structure of our code. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to use the ASCII diagramming tool Mermaid to make our class diagrams. The advantage of Mermaid over a graphical tool to make our diagrams is that we'll be able to use Git to do version control for them. I think the most important part of this installment was when we learned that we shouldn't ever cuddle the mermaid. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Bart and I are back from summer vacation to kick back into gear on Programming By Stealth. As you may remember, we've been learning all of the tools we'll need to rewrite, test, and document Bart's password generation library xkpasswd from perl to JavaScript. In order to start the rewrite, we need to understand the structure of the code we're going to write, and instead of writing up a long text requirements document, we're going to use a standard software diagramming language called UML Diagrams. In particular, we're going to be using UML Class Diagrams. Bart will probably do most of the diagramming himself as he dusts off decades-old code but we need to learn how to read UML Class Diagrams ourselves, so it will be another tool in our toolbelt. Most podcasts would stick to everyday examples, but not here at the Podfeet Podcasts. Instead, Bart will teach us some Particle Physics along the way and you get that for free with this installment of Programming By Stealth. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In the past few episodes of Programming By Stealth, Bart has been walking us through worked examples to demonstrate how to roll up a web app using Webpack. These worked examples have been contrived to show how to perform the task. This week in a Tidbit episode, Bart walks us through how he tried using the skills he's been teaching us to roll up his [this-ti.me](https://this-ti.me) web app. It's a real-world test of the technologies and it allowed him to describe some of the pitfalls he fell into (though they were few and far between). It also gave him a chance to exercise the Webpack documentation, which happily turned out to be very good. There's no heavy lifting in this episode and no work to do to follow along. Instead, sit back and relax while you listen to Bart give advice on how to approach this task in your own code. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. [audio mp3="https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2022_09_17.mp3"] mp3 download

In our last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart started teaching us how to bundle an app/website using our bundler of choice, Webpack. The app/website he's creating for us is very simplified but is intended to allow us to exercise every one of the kinds of things we'd want to bundle. This week we finish all of the tools he wanted to teach us to bundle. In PBS 138, after explaining to us why we would want to do this, and initializing things, he taught us to import a pure JavaScript library with jQuery as an example, and a pure CSS library with basic Bootstrap as the example. In this week's show, we learn how to install and use Mustache for templating in a Webpack world. The process is quite a bit different from how we originally learned to implement Mustache in Programming By Stealth. Then we learn how Bootstrap 5 now lets us import just what we need (instead of all of Bootstrap). We need some fancy icons so Bart teaches us about Bootstrap icons which he now favors for free icons over Font Awesome. Our web app wouldn't be complete if we didn't have a fun font, so we learn to import free web fonts from Fontsource all with Webpack. Like the first half of the Webpack worked example, Bart's process of doing repetitive actions but for different reasons definitely helped cement the concepts for me.

We're back in the saddle after a summer of "PBS Adjacent" installments. Our last real PBS was learning how to use Webpack to bundle a JavaScript library for sharing with the world. That was cool, but a lot of us want to use Webpack to bundle a web app we've written ourselves to include all of the libraries we're using. We also want to have an easier way to reduce dependency on having an Internet connection. We also want an easier way to keep our bundle of libraries up to date. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to do all that with NPM and Webpack. I really enjoyed this episode because he used a worked example to show us how it all works, rather than talking only about the theory. The repetitive steps for each library really helped me to understand the process. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

I'm about to go on vacation where I suspect I'll have little to no Internet to play with. It would be really cool if I could use any downtime (like on the 11-hour plane flight) to do some programming. Unfortunately, our code is often filled with references to content delivery networks to get needed libraries like jQuery and Bootstrap. While on my walk on Friday I was mentally preparing a post for our PBS Slack community to ask them how I can modify my code so that it doesn't require the Internet to function. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw Bart's topic for this week's Programming By Stealth - it's all about how to do exactly what I wanted. He covers how to prepare your computer for departure, how it's important to clone any repos you might want to reference, and most importantly how to localize your dependencies and then what to undo when you return home. It was exactly everything I needed to know and I hope it helps you too whenever you disconnect from the Net but still want to play with your code. You can read Bart's fabulous shownotes for this installment at [pbs.bartificer.net/...](https://pbs.bartificer.net/tidbit5)

We have one more thing to learn as we gear up to actually start writing modern code for Bart's HSXKPasswd tool. The last piece of our tool kit is a bundler. In this installment Bart teaches what problems bundlers solve, and he explains why he chose the bundler Webpack for our project. After learning about Webpack, Bart takes us through a worked example, bundling the Joiner module we've been working on through this part of the series. When we're done, we'll have an ES6 bundle and a Universal Module Defnition (UMD) bundle to cover both modern and more legacy needs. In the episode you'll hear me say that the exercise hit errors, and after the show we diagnosed the problem and fixed the shownotes so have no worries about that! You can, as always, find Bart's fabulous show note tutorial for this installment at pbs.bartificer.net/...It's Showtime

Over the past few months, podfeet.com went through a period of really poor performance. My site hadn't been snappy in the last few years with page loads of up to 6 seconds, but it hit a tipping point where it was taking in excess of 40 seconds for pages to load. William Reveal and Bart migrated the services behind podfeet.com that improved performance to where most pages load in less than a quarter of a second. In this Programming By Stealth adjacent episode, Bart wanted to walk through the structure of what makes up a web server, what a web server does, what all of the components are, and then walk us through how these things have changed in the nearly 17 years podfeet.com has been around. As we continue our journey in Programming By Stealth we are moving from the client-side to the server-side, so this lesson is quite relevant to helping our fellow learners understand what's behind the next steps we'll be taking. There's no homework in this episode but it's also challenging to keep the pieces straight in your head so get ready for a fun and instructive "Tidbit". You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this Programming By Stealth adjacent installment labeled Tidbits 3 of Y, Bart Busschots talks to us about the dangers of using other people's code in your code, and the danger of not using other people's code. He explains this seeming dichotomy and gives us ways to approach the problem taking a middle ground. He helps us think about how to choose whether to use other's code and whose code to use, and even how to ensure it's kept up to date with security patches. It's definitely a philosophical installment and it was triggered by a recent event where a developer maliciously broke his own code, impacting a lot of developers. It's actually sort of a success story of open source which I didn't expect. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Bart Busschots taught us the basics of Jest last time for our Test Driven Development environment. This week we learn to group our tests using the `describe()` function in Jest. Grouping tests with describe does more than eliminate the need to comment our code, it also provides more useful output from our tests and scopes what happens inside. As Bart describes it, we climb "Mount Jest" at one point as he explains how we can also loop our tests (instead of repeating code as we did last time) using `describe.each()()`. It's a little head bending with arrays of arrays and functions of functions but it sounds worse to describe than it actually is to read and create. He then describes ways to run certain setup and tear down functions before and after our tests are run and why we might need to do that. Finally, we get the last cool thing we'll need to understand about Jest, and that's how to use the `.only` and `.skip` modifiers on our tests so that we can focus on individual tests while we're chasing bugs. For the first time in a long time, he even gives us an optional challenge to flex these new Jest muscles. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart takes us down memory lane to 102 episodes ago when he first introduced us to the concept of test-driven development. He explains why back then he taught us how to use QUnit for our TDD work, and why it's no longer in favor with him. It's not just the advancements in technology like ES6, but it's also because QUnit makes it terribly hard to write tests and to interpret what you've written when you've been away from it for a while. He walks us through his criteria for picking a new TDD tool, and why he chose Jest for the job. He then walks us through a worked example of how to write some simple tests on a module and of course, explains how Jest does its job running our tests. I liked it, even though my head hurt during a bit of it! You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond perfectly straddles the line between Programming By Stealth and Lite. While it's definitely a nerdy discussion topic, Bart Busschots is really just telling a story. He starts by explaining how he ended up a computer scientist essentially by accident, and tells us about a fantastic CS professor he had who inspired him through an assignment about a game called 8 Queens. He tells these stories as a way to explain that when I used the Terminal and `egrep` to help me solve the game Wordle a few weeks ago, it wasn't really cheating. I think whether you're a programmer or not, you'll enjoy hearing Bart explain why. Bart's shownotes can be found at pbs.bartificer.net/...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots finishes firming up our foundation on a few more things before we meet Jest, which will be the Test Driven Development (TDD) environment we'll be learning next time. He explains in some adorable examples involving a parrot (named Polly of course) how getters can be used to construct short but powerful syntaxes that seem quite counterintuitive at first glance. These are heavily used by Jest, and without learning about them, they would simply look like magic. He said some purists may see this syntax as an abuse of getters but it's a pretty slick method that yields very readable APIs. The second thing he teaches us is that functions can actually return functions. That sounds like opening a hole in the space-time continuum but it's actually quite logical and useful as Bart explains the usefulness of this really well. No parrots involved, but lots of pancakes and waffles in his examples. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through some review in order to prepare us to begin our journey into test driven development (TDD) with the tool Jest which he's chosen for our TDD. He clears up some confusion on the difference between `npm install` and `npm ci`, and then he gives us more guidance on when to use which JSDoc tags, especially when documenting plain objects. He gives us a refresher on the different ways of defining functions, and especially arrow functions which are heavily used by Jest. Jest also uses function chaining heavily so he reminds us of how that works as well. Even if you remember all of this and had it all clear in your head (I most definitely did _not_) it's great to have all of this content in one post as reference. The next installment will continue firming up our foundation with some new concepts that are heavily used by Jest. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

In this final Programming By Stealth and final Chit Chat Across the Pond for 2021, Bart teaches us how to manage our documentation in JSDoc. As any good programmer, he insists on automating as much as he possibly can. He starts by showing us each step that we have to do at the command line, and methodically puts together a JSDoc configuration file that runs scripts and helps create documentation directories, and installs plugins. Even better he helps us to configure JSDoc so that it will alert us if we make a mistake in our inline or block tags, since JSDoc by default just ignores those mistakes. Finally we walk through three different themes for our documentation and we actually choose one for the XKPASSWD project and he shows us how we can even modify the theme. It all has to do with Bart preferring blue over purple. It's great fun, and really gives us the tool we need now to get ready for the next step. You can follow along with Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes pbs.bartificer.net.

In our last installment, Bart explained why good documentation matters to ourselves and to other developers who want to use our code, and he also explained that using an automatic document generator like JSDoc could help make it easier for us to write good documentation and to keep it up to date more easily. In this week's installment, he starts to show us how to actually write JSDoc comments in line with our code. He explains the different elements of JSDoc comments and demonstrates how his own doc comments evolve as he figures out what he's trying to do. I really enjoyed this installment and his example is perfect for us nerds. I highly recommend you follow along in Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

As we embark on our journey to create a JavaScript module for the strong, memorable password generating service XKPASSWD, Bart explains the importance of creating good documentation. That sounds super annoying and tedious, and it is, so Bart explains why a good documentation generator will be our friend. He outlines the two distinctly different users of our documentation: those of us who will be helping to create the code itself as part of the community project, but also for the people who will be users of our JavaScript module. Those users will be interested in how to take the module and embed it into a web page to generate passwords, or to create an Alfred scheme and more. These two different users will have different requirements, and yet our documentation generator can fill both needs without unnecessary extra work. This isn't the sexiest topic, but Bart does convince me that the tools will help us to have the rigor to do it and not let our human instincts take over and allow our documentation to get out of date. You can find Bart's fabulous shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

Bart Busschots had a vision that certain things we would learn in Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth would be taught by guest lecturers. I thought he was bananas that this would work, but Helma Van der Linden, also known as Helma from the Netherlands stepped up to teach us about coding linters, and specifically ESLint. In this installment she explains what linters are, and why they're useful. Even though she's not technically fond of them, she believes in linters because of what they can do for a coding team. Once she sells that idea, she walks us through how to install ESLint inside the development environment VSCode. From there she explains style guides, and shows us how to install and use the very popular airbnb style guide. She gives us tips on usage and even how to override the linter's demands. I think it was incredibly courageous to fill Bart's shoes, and she did a fantastic job both in the podcast and in the detailed written show notes over at bartificer.net