A Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast Interview with Kyle Simpson, Author of Functional-Light JavaScript: Balanced, Pragmatic FP in JavaScript

Len: Hi, I'm Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast, I'll be interviewing Kyle Simpson. Kyle is an open web evangelist, popular speaker, writer and JavaScript teacher. He has written a number of books on programming. And you can find some of his courses for developers on Pluralsite, and on frontendmasters.com. As we record this interview, it is Kyle Simpson Week, which means all of Kyle's courses are free through December 4th. We're going to try to get this podcast out in record time, so you can hear about this. In fact, I believe Kyle is joining me fresh from a live Q&A with some Frontend Masters members. So, I wanted to say a special thanks for doing this on a little bit of short notice.

Kyle is the author of a number of books published by O'Reilly, and he just recently launched his latest book on Leanpub, Functional-Light JavaScript: Balanced, Pragmatic FP in JavaScript was released on Monday. I is focused on setting out a unique bottom-up, pragmatic approach to explaining fundamental concepts from functional programming - while avoiding unnecessarily heavy terminology, and in some cases, the mathematical notation that can maybe get in the way of achieving practical learning goals in a book like this.

In this interview, we're going to talk about Kyle's career, his professional interests, his book, and at the end, we'll talk a little bit about his experience self-publishing.

So thank you Kyle for being on the Frontmatter Podcast.

Kyle: Thank you very much for having me, I'm excited to be here.

Len: I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up, and how you first became interested in computers and software?

Kyle: I'm based in Austin, Texas right now, but I'm originally from Oklahoma. How I got into programming was, at the age of 11 - so this is back around 1990-ish, way, way back - I was over at a friend's house, and his dad was a programmer. He was working on some stuff in the den, and my friend and I walked in, and we're just kind of curious, looking over his shoulder.

His dad saw our curiosity, and he said, "Hold on a moment." And he click, click, clicked for just a moment, and all of a sudden, the screen went blue. And this - being 1990, this is pre-Windows, this is way back in the days of DOS - the blue screen went blank with blue, and then a grey box [appeared] in the middle that had my name in it. I was absolutely fascinated by the fact that in just a few moments, he was able to make the computer do whatever he wanted.

I got interested in programming from that moment, and started trying to learn. This was pre-internet, so learning meant my parents buying me used computer programming books from book stores. I tried to cobble together some sort of crazy understanding of programming.

I went through high school, and started doing some side contract work in programming. And I got into college, and did some more of that.

After college, I went into software development as a career. So one of those rare [cases] that, from a young, early age, I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and I actually stuck with it, and I still do that to this day.

I was a developer for about 15 years professionally, until about five years ago when I was thinking about how I could make a bigger impact on the software developer community. I'd done open source projects for a long time, but I really wanted to give back in a bigger and more meaningful, lasting way. I got a break actually, through Frontend Masters. The founder of Frontend Masters, Mark, called me up one day. We didn't know each other, but he called me up and said, "Have you ever thought about teaching?"

I was sort of taken aback, because I'd done some of that in other areas of my life, but never professionally. And so he spent a couple of weeks coaxing me and coaching me. He convinced me to go try it. And so a little over five years ago, I gave my first course as a JavaScript teacher, and immediately fell in love with that, and realised that that was what I was meant to do. I wish I had learned it a lot earlier. But I figured out that that was what my passion and calling was.

So I became a full time teacher, and that, to this day, is still what I do. I travel around teaching - primarily corporate, onsite workshops in JavaScript - at various companies all over the world. Along the way, I also started writing about the things that I was learning, because people would ask me, "Hey, do you have instructor notes for your classes?" And I thought, "Oh well I guess I'll write some stuff down." And blog posts turned into longer form things, which naturally led to writing books.

I have published a number of books with O'Reilly, which is a big tech book publisher. Most notably, I have a six-book series with them called, "You don't know JS" , which is probably how I'm most well-known these days.

I had a great relationship with them. But as I started thinking about the next book that I wanted to do afterwards, I started realising that I wanted to have a little bit more control over the distribution channels and what kinds of deals that I could do. And that's what led me to start exploring self-publishing.

Len: I've got a lot of questions to ask you about that later on, including about your crowd sourcing campaign.

But before we move on, one of the sort of unofficial themes of this podcast, because so many Leanpub authors that I interview are into software, is: if you could start over now, or if you were giving advice to someone like yourself, who was starting out now, would you formally study computer science in university?

I just wanted to frame this a little bit, because often I don't have much of a frame for it, but in your case, you've done so much teaching, and you published a blog post a little while ago about a lot of the problems with ed tech solutions, even the ones that have had lots of venture capital funding - and also the dissatisfaction that a lot of developers feel, even at a time when they have more resources than ever available. And you self-started something called DevGo. So, I wanted to give you the opportunity to frame a response to the computer science question in that richer context.

Kyle: I'll break that down. The first question, the first layer of the question is, if I could tell myself, from so long ago, whether I should go into computer science or not. If I really could tell myself - to be totally honest, I'd tell myself to go into computer science, but I'd tell myself to leave high school early. Because when I graduated high school and went into CS, this was late 90s, tt was during the dotcom boom. And my high school counsellors were like, "Computer science is the thing. You'll make $100,000 right out of college." And I got all excited, and went and studied CS.

And midway through my junior year, in the early 2000s, is when the dotcom crash started to happen. I realised that I had missed the boat by about a year, a year and a half. And so if I had anything that I could do differently, it'd be, figure out how to get out of high school quicker, get into CS. Maybe I could've cashed in on the boom before the bust. But anyway, I would still tell myself to do CS, and I'll explain why.

I definitely believe that there is a difference between programming and software engineering. That phrase, "software engineering," gets thrown around a lot. I think people have lots of different meanings by it. But I have a way that I frame the difference be