This course has been updated! We now recommend you take the Complete Intro to Web Development, v3 course.
Transcript from the "Teacher Introduction" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Brian Holt: So who am I? I'm that guy, if you couldn't tell [LAUGH]. This is me having a Belgian beer with my wife in Paris. My name is Brian Holt.
>> Brian Holt: I currently, at this moment in time, work at Microsoft. I'm a cloud developer advocate, which means that my job is to convince people that putting your stuff on Microsoft Cloud is okay.
[00:00:24] [LAUGH] Actually, the last lesson will be us putting stuff into Microsoft Cloud, so you can actually see how that works.
>> Brian Holt: I do a lot of traveling, which is good and bad. I just moved to Seattle maybe eight weeks ago, and I've only been home for six days.
[00:00:44] [LAUGH] Which is awesome, cuz I get to be in places like this, but I also don't know where I live. [LAUGH] But it's awesome. So yeah, I currently live in Seattle. I just moved there from San Francisco. I'm on a podcast called Frontend Happy Hour, which is pretty fun.
[00:01:02] It's literally just us drinking and talking about Javascript, which is my two favorite things. Previously, I worked at LinkedIn, Netflix, Reddit, and a couple of other smaller companies when I lived in Salt Lake City. My biggest passions are people and experiences. So, that's why I love to travel.
[00:01:23] Anytime that I can be, I try to be traveling. What else? I have a little dog named Luna, she's adorable. [LAUGH] And please catch up with me on social networks. I posted all the ones that I use there. Again, I just wanna give another shout out to Frontend Masters.
[00:01:44] I love to teach, it's one of my greatest passions. It's not something I can fully totally make a living at, this point in time, so that's why I still have my other job, which I really do like as well. I like teaching because it forces you to distill your knowledge down to something like crystal that you can actually explain to someone.
[00:02:03] And then it forces you to acknowledge the gaps in your own knowledge. For me to truly master something, I have to teach it to someone else. These courses take a ton of time to prepare. So that's why I'm actually really grateful to Frontend Masters. They give me deadlines and incentive to finish these workshops.
[00:02:22] So that's really, really great. And they also encourage me to open source all material. So that even if people can't afford to watch the videos, they can still have the website and materials. And that's something that Frontend Masters has really encouraged me to do. So super, super grateful to all of them.
[00:02:39] And cool, last thing, I did this last night. I got a bunch of people to tweet encouraging things to you while you're learning these courses. And so at the bottom of every page is an encouraging tweet for you to keep going, which I thought was, I don't know, really cool.
[00:02:57] And there's actually some really cool people in here that have tweeted. Other Frontend Masters like Kentsey Dodd is in there and Sarah Drasner and Richard Feldman. And they're all in there encouraging you to keep going and learning stuff. So if you need a little boost, just check that out.
[00:03:14] Okay, does anyone have any questions before we get started?
>> Brian Holt: Yeah.
>> Speaker 2: Can you speak just briefly on, I'm always confused about how you can fark something and mess with it and then call it your own code? Where is that line between where you just stole something and where you can use it for your own personal gain?
[00:03:38]
>> Brian Holt: That's a really good question, and that's actually a good question to answer I think right now. Because there's a ton of code in here that I wrote that I absolutely want you to steal. [LAUGH] Please take everything that I've written, this is all creative common license. So we are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
[00:03:58] I didn't create JavaScript. I didn't create the assembly that's underneath it. I didn't create the processes that are underneath it. So we are all in some way borrow or stealing from someone else. Some of us, and I would say most of us that I know in the community, are actually really enthused that anyone would want to use our code.
[00:04:15] I find it quite flattering that someone actually cares that I wrote something. [LAUGH] So, I think the answer is like, where is the ethical line? I think as long as you're acknowledging that I'm using this code. This person wrote this code and you're not presenting it as if like I wrote this code.
[00:04:39] Then I think you're okay, almost always. But you should always follow the license. All the code that you're gonna see is licensed in some way or another. And if it's MIT licensed, which is the most common one, it means that you can literally take their code and then say this is mine and I wrote it.
[00:04:55] And that's actually okay. I mean, don't do that. But you could, right? So I mean, it's what's ethical and what's legal. If it feels weird, then maybe don't. But just follow your heart. Nah, I'm just kidding. [LAUGH] Yeah, no, most people want you to use their code.
>> Speaker 2: Okay, I'm just wondering, yeah, cuz I come from a background in school where if you copy the letter A from somebody else's homework, you're gonna fail.
[00:05:21]
>> Brian Holt: Yeah,
>> Brian Holt: It's definitely not like this. The open source world, the programming world is very much about sharing.
>> Brian Holt: Yeah,
>> Brian Holt: Good question.