Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Jia Li

This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Jia Li who is a passionate programmer, a Zone.js guy, and a full-stack developer at Sylabs.io. Chuck and Jia talk about Zone.js, Jia’s background, and the current projects that Jia is working on right now. Check out today’s episode!

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:51 – Chuck: You were on the past AiA Episode 210. Why are you famous?

1:04 – Jia: I have been working on Angular JS for 4 years, and I am from China. I have been working on Zone.js for the past 2½ years. I basically handle everything with Zone.js. That kind of makes me famous in the community.

1:50 – Chuck: It’s the library that...

1:58 – Jia: Yes that is correct.

2:19 – Chuck: Let’s rollback a little bit and talk about your journey into programming?

2:32 – Jia: My major is not Computer Science it’s Communication. My first job, my classmate introduced me to a company that had 5 employees, which was a software company. About 15 years ago, back in China, they were using old software. The founder is using new technologies. So this is cool. That’s how I entered into the development world.

4:15 – Chuck asks a question.

4:22 – Jia: My focus, at the time, was the frontend.

5:10 – Chuck: How did you get into Angular?

5:12 – Angular, React, and jQuery are mentioned by Jia.

6:20 – Jia: We did a big project for 1½ years with a huge team of 500 people. We used...to build the applications.

6:51 – Chuck: How was the transition from Angular to Angular 2?

6:58 – Jia: At first the company had some reservations b/c everything is new.

8:17 – Chuck: You have contributed to Zone.js. People think that they have to be a genius in order to contribute. How did you start contributing to it?

8:44 – Jia: Between Angular 1 to Angular 2 was about a few months in-between.

9:28 – Jia: We get a request from the client and get a certain zone. Each request is managed.

12:12 – Chuck: This is a project that is used across thousands of Angular applications. And here we are talking about your journey to this open-source. You started off with a bug fix and this leads to helping with code, and finally you are one of the major contributors now! People think they cannot contribute to open-source b/c they aren’t a “genius.” They think that they “aren’t that good.”

13:16 – Jia: I never thought I could do it – meaning contributing to open-source work. I thought you had to have very strong coding skills, but it’s really just starting with the first step. True, you need to start with the code, but you don’t have to have a very strong background. I didn’t have (at the time) a strong JavaScript background, and look...I was able to do it! If you really love it – you can contribute to it.

15:11 – Chuck: You fixed a bug b/c you were using it. There is a difference between people writing it vs. people who are using it. You were fixing a bug b/c you were actually using it. “It should work this way under these circumstances.” If you are using the library then you will find those bugs.

16:35 – Jia: Yes, exactly. Some people are using Zone.js, but they don’t know what it does.

17:24 – Chuck: What are you currently working on now and/or what are you proud of?

17:29 – Jia: I am still working on the Zone.js project. I just changed my job a few months ago. I am starting a startup company to help with technological solutions. I am working (right now) on frontend. It’s very interesting to do some Cloud stuff.

18:50 – Chuck: Where can we find you?

18:55 – Jia.

20:50 – Chuck: What social media platforms do you use?

21:00 – Jia: Twitter! Blog!

24:20 – Chuck: Let’s go to Picks!

24:26 – Fresh Books!

25:30 – Picks

END – CacheFly

Charles

Jia