Electron and Desktop App Engineering with Shelley Vohr

Electron is a framework for building cross platform desktop applications using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It allows developers to package web apps with a native like experience by bundling them with a Chromium browser and a Node. Js runtime. Electron is widely used for apps like Versus Code, Discord, and Slack because it enables a single code base to run on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Shelley Voor is a principal software engineer at Microsoft where she works on Electron. She joins the podcast with Josh Goldberg to talk about her work on the Electron project. This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg, an independent full time open source developer. Josh works on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem, most notably TypeScript eslint, the tooling that enables eslint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh is also the author of The O'Reilly Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and a live code streamer on Twitch. Find Josh on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and .com as Joshua K. Goldberg. Shelley, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Hello. Thank you for having me. Oh, well, thanks for coming on. We're really excited. You've been around on GitHub and in the web dev and c plus plus space for quite a while. Your name pops up on a lot of commits on GitHub. But before we get into all that in Electron, can you tell us who you are, how you got into coding? Yeah. Absolutely. So I, as a kid, was always pretty interested in the way that stuff worked. So I really liked programming my calculator when I was in high school. And then when I got my first computer, I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how it works, what I could get it to do, different ways that I could get it to not work. And then at a certain point, I realized that there was such a thing as programming languages that can interface with, Mac. And basically, you know, felt like the horizons opened up as soon as I realized that I can make computers work in new and novel ways that I actually wanted to beyond just how they worked. Could I make it, like, work within the bounds of what I thought existed? And then spent a bit of time doing that. I took a couple of computer science classes in high school and then realized pretty quickly that it was a career that I wanted. I basically see software engineering as, I don't know, basically just being able to solve fun, interesting puzzles that challenge the way that I see things, challenge my brain. And yeah. That sounds great. Was it by any chance a TI 84 calculator that you were programming? Was indeed. Yes. It was classic. Okay. So out of high school, you were taking software engineering as a career track. What was your first job experience? So after freshman year of …