What’s Next for Let’s Code JavaScript Season 5?

July 1st, 2015|Comments|Permalink

We’re getting close to the end of Let’s Code JavaScript’s latest season! There’s several options for what we do next. If you’re a subscriber, former subscriber, or interested observer, I’d like your feedback.

The Live Channel

The Live channel is Let’s Code JavaScript’s flagship series. With over 300 episodes and dozens of hours of video, we’re able to get into a level of depth and nuance that isn’t possible with simple tutorials.

To date, we’ve had four seasons:

What should we do for Season 5? As always, everything we do will be test-driven.

  • Responsive Design: Design for multiple device sizes, more in-depth CSS code design, handling window size changes in JavaScript, more CSS testing work.

  • Deployment and DevOps: Continuous deployment, performance optimization, monitoring, scaling, reliability, and so forth.

  • Real-Time Web: Communicating between front-end and back-end, dealing with network issues, synchronizing multiple users, handling race conditions, reliability tradeoffs, and so forth.

  • Persistence and Databases: Interfacing with a database from Node.js, refactoring database schema, testing and maintainability, design issues and object-relational mapping, etc.

Of these, I’m leaning toward Real-Time Web. It’s a nice change of pace from what we’ve done so far and it will raise a lot of interesting code design questions. It also makes sense, from a product perspective, to do that before persistence.

Which of these would you like to see next? Or would you like something else entirely? Place your vote in the comments.

The Monthly Specials

The monthly specials are one of my favorite aspects of the site. It’s my chance to cover topics that don’t fit into the ongoing story of the Recorded Live series.

We recently finished a huge set of series on front-end frameworks (React, AngularJS, Ember.js) and I’ve just launched the new How To channel with a beginner-focused season. This channel isn’t just for beginners, though: each season stands alone. A future season could cover a topic for more advanced developers, such as testing and design with AJAX.

Specials come in three channels:

When the current How To season is done, what would you like to see next?

  • Another How To Season: There’s many topics we could cover: databases, AJAX, Node, React, more.

  • More Front-End Frameworks: We’ve only scratched the surface. I’m a bit sick of them, but if the demand is there, I’ll do it. I’ve had requests for Knockout, Backbone, Polymer, and more.

  • Other Lab Topics: An in-depth look at ES2015 changes might be useful. Static typing tools are growing in popularity, with TypeScript and Flow both looking interesting. There’s lots of other tools we could cover, too.

  • Lessons Learned Improvements: The current Lessons Learned episodes are getting a bit long in the tooth. I’d love to update and reorganize them. There’s some topics that we’ve covered that don’t have Lessons Learned videos yet, too, such as Selenium and CSS testing.

Which of these options is most exciting to you? Do you have another idea? Place your vote in the comments.

Site Improvements

I spend nearly all my time on producing content and other “keep the lights on” activities, but I can always replace a monthly special with a site update project. Is that something you’d want? Possibilities include:

  • Episode Tracking: Keep track of which episodes you’ve watched. This is one of my most commonly-requested features.

  • Episode RSS: An RSS feed just for new videos.

  • Online Account Management: I take care of most account-related needs manually. I’m very responsive to requests, but it might be nice to have more self-service options.

  • Site Liveness: There’s various ways I can make the site more convenient to use. The most requested feature is to allow switching to the comments tab without interrupting the video.

  • Video Player Updates: Keyboard shortcuts and playback speed controls would be nice.

  • Search/Tags: All together, there’s over 350 episodes on the site, and dozens of blog entries too. A tag system would make it easier to find and cross-reference content.

Are any of these worth delaying a special? Is there anything else you’d like to see?

Tell Me What You Think

I want to hear from you! If I don’t get feedback, I’ll just have to fall back to my childhood dream: 24/7 He-Man Marathon. Don’t make me do it.

  • What should we focus on for Season 5 of the Live channel?
  • What specials should come next?
  • Which site improvements could take the place of a special?

Thanks for your help!

I’m James Shore, host of Let’s Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, a screencast series focused on rigorous & professional web development. If you liked this essay, share the URL! You can find more of my writing at jamesshore.com.

comments powered by Disqus