Forem: John Munsch

I've been building software for 40 years. But I want you to tell me about dev in 1986...

John Munsch — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:19:01 +0000

It's 2026 and I started professional software development in 1986 when I took a Summer internship at Tandy Computers in Fort Worth, TX after my junior year at Rice. I worked for them again for a few weeks over Christmas break and started full time there the next year.

Now, as we all go through a series of huge changes in our jobs, I thought it would be fun if you would tell me what software development was like 40 years ago. Don't research it, don't go look at my AMA from years ago, just go with your gut.

What tools did we use? What did we develop on, machine wise? What was storage like? How did we learn everything we needed to know about languages, libraries, etc.? Communication? Languages used? And, I still had another year at school, how did we build software at school and turn in assignments?

I got this idea when I watched a story the other day about a teacher who was getting married and she asked her students to give her advice for her wedding and her married life going forward. The advice ranged from thought provoking and sweet to hilarious.

The difference here is that I can wait a few days for the submissions to all come in and I can actually tell you what it was like then.

Revisiting Mastodon for Devs

John Munsch — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 22:30:46 +0000

There was a thread about Mastodon instances for devs back in 2018 but at least one of the mentioned servers (toot.cafe) seems to not be a thing anymore. Is mastodon.technology the place for front-end, back-end, full-stack folks or are there better choices?

Embedded Storage for Node.js Part 2

John Munsch — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:33:57 +0000

In the follow up to Tuesday's video, I cover the MongoDB version of the authentication code (it only differs by maybe 20 lines from the NeDB version), show a TingoDB version since it's more up-to-date than NeDB, and highlight some resources for learning and using MongoDB like their free University courses, and their Atlas cloud platform.

I also discuss a few other databases you can quickly embed in your projects like LevelDB and PouchDB that don't happen to look just like MongoDB.

Embedded Storage for Your Node.js Projects

John Munsch — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:12:25 +0000

Sometimes you want to throw together a site quickly and setting up another storage server and connecting to it seems too expensive, too time consuming, or you've used up all your free clusters at MongoDB Atlas 😀.

Everybody needs a quick and dirty storage solution available to pull out for those cases. In this video I build a simple authentication system using NeDB (which looks a lot like MongoDB) and show how I built it by starting with Mocha/Chai unit tests.

In the next video I'll show how almost all of the code I wrote works just as well with MongoDB, giving you a natural growth path for when your side project becomes popular.

Search and Filtering Without Tears (Parts 1 & 2)

John Munsch — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 17:35:56 +0000

In the two videos I released this week (I publish every Tues and Thurs) I talk about search and filtering of the data you ship to the front-end in your web apps. Even if you're shipping a lot of data to the user's browser these days, there's no reason why building search and filtering has to be hard to write, nor does it have to be slow. In about 30 minutes, I'll show you how to do it right.

Notes: Wow. Building up a YouTube channel is super hard :) But you probably knew that already. I'm making great strides on getting enough viewing time to hit YouTube's requirements of 4000 watched minutes within a year. I won't have a problem hitting that. But they also require 1000 subscribers before they will monetize your channel and I'm no where near that. So please like and subscribe if you enjoy what I produce.

Thanks,
John

As We May Think - My New YouTube Channel for Mentoring and Teaching

John Munsch — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 16:06:19 +0000

For the past month I’ve been working to start a YouTube channel to teach programming and to mentor developers. It's emphasis is JavaScript (front and back-end), HTML, and CSS. It was a soft launch (I only told the family and the people I work with) because I wanted to build up some videos. In particular, I wanted to get my first mentoring video out (which just posted this morning). I’m sure it’s not my best, most polished video, but it does represent what I want to do by starting this.

So this is it, this is my real launch. I’m posting this to Dev.to to solicit comments, hopefully acquire a bunch of subscribers and views, and to see if I can find developers who want or need mentoring.

A lot of tech channels on YouTube seem to pursue the flavor of the month. Whatever tech is hot is what they are all about. Often they don't explain why you would or wouldn't care about using a given thing. They just teach you how to use it without explaining why. I’m hoping to connect to developers, especially any who feel like they don’t have anybody to mentor them, to answer questions, provide guidance, and share anything I can. Then share the results of those sessions with others to provide a resource. If one person has a question or a problem, likely many others have that exact same issue.

I’ve done video courses in the past for a publisher and that was definitely a mixed bag. Sometimes it was great, sometimes it wasn’t, but I’m committed to doing this for the long haul. I look forward to working with new developers on a one on one basis and sharing that with others. I often think that the biggest gap beginners have is understanding that “X” is a big deal but not understanding what “X” does or whether they would ever need to use it.

The Shows I’ve Done Thus Far

ES6 Map and Set In Less Than 15 Minutes
Hosting and a Domain Name for Your Site In Less Than 20 Minutes
DevCrate 001 - Connecting Your Apps to IFTTT (If This Then That) - I think this is a fun one because I show how you can connect your application to almost anything via IFTTT.com
ScorePad Coding Part 1
Web Components Part 1 - Demonstrates quickly setting up Storybook for Web Components
Web Components Part 2 - Shows what writing some fairly complicated Vanilla JS is like
Mentoring Jonathan Part 1 - My first mentoring video and there will be a follow up video later this week to talk about the Express example I used in the video and a second video with Jonathan will likely appear next week

Mentoring

If you’re at all interested in having someone you can ask questions of and don’t mind me recording the session so I can share it with others, please consider filling out the form below:

Mentoring Contact Info

In particular I want to encourage people of any sex, any race, any ethnicity, any anything to fill it out. I want this channel to be more open and more representative of the broader group of people who want to develop software and not just a narrow subset.

Thank you so much for your time. - John

Comparison of cold starts for different serverless providers

John Munsch — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:39:27 +0000

Interesting article which compares how long different functions-as-a-service back-ends perform when starting up a server to handle a function request after a long idle period with no calls: https://mikhail.io/2018/08/serverless-cold-start-war/

Comparisons are done not only between AWS, Google, and Azure, but also looking at different languages for the functions, different memory requirements and even different numbers of packages for JavaScript functions. Good comparison!

I have been a professional developer for 31 years and I'm 53 now, Ask Me Anything!

John Munsch — Thu, 31 May 2018 18:13:15 +0000

I've been a professional developer since I graduated in 1987. I am currently the lead for a team of five (including myself) doing front-end development on SaaS software (official title is Application Architect). Apparently, at 53 and still up-to-date and still developing I've become a novelty :)

Ask away...

Chrome 66 (and a Delayed Chrome 65 Update)

John Munsch — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:57:52 +0000

Chrome 66 - What's New in DevTools

And the same again in text form:

What's New In DevTools (Chrome 66) | Web | Google Developers

Chrome 65

Or, if you prefer words:

# JSConf 2018 (Asia, Iceland, and AU)

John Munsch — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:59:48 +0000

JavaScript conferences are coming fast and furious lately. Playlists of the videos for Asia, Iceland, and Australia are all available now!

Particularly interesting to me are:

Shazron Abdullah: Serverless Apps With Node.JS In Openwhisk And Adobe I/O Runtime - I find functions as a service (FaaS) particularly interesting and any solution that doesn't tie me to a particular vendor doubly so
Arun Michael Dsouza: Houdini - What lies ahead - The idea of being able to make changes to CSS and plug into its process the same way we can now do with the Shadow DOM and custom elements to extend the capabilities of HTML is major
Any talk related to accessibility - This is currently a big weak spot for me and one I need to fix

# ES2016, ES2017, and ES2018 Examples

John Munsch — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:56:09 +0000

This nifty article provides examples of using all the post ES2015 features which you hear a lot less about: Here are examples of everything new in ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018

You might be wondering, "What's the support for these features? In fact, what's the support for ES2015 these days?" If you do think that, then don't forget about the Kangax compatability table: ECMAScript 2016+ compatibility table

Or, if you want to know about Node.js support for all of it: Node.js ES2015/ES6, ES2016 and ES2017 support

And a natural companion to that info is this article about three possible upcoming changes to JavaScript: Here are three upcoming changes to JavaScript that you’ll love

BTW, if you like the first of those, "optional chaining," and you already use Lodash, it has that feature in its _.get() function.

Chrome 64 DevTools video and blog post about browser changes

John Munsch — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 21:58:24 +0000

It's coming up on time for a new Chrome release again and there's a video up for the new DevTools features. A lot of them are conveniences to make it just a nicer environment to work in (for example, automatic grouping and new filtering operations for console messages):
Chrome 64 - What's New in DevTools

And here's the corresponding video for browser feature changes: Chrome 64 - What's New