Gil Tayar is a principal software engineer at Microsoft, developer advocate, and conference speaker.

Gil's contributions to the Node.js ecosystem include adding support for ECMASC

modules and Node.js to Mocha and Testable. He joins the show to talk about his history

and software engineering, mono repos versus polypos, the state of JavaScript, and more.

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 ES Slint,

the tooling that enables ES Slint 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 dot com as Joshua K. Goldberg.

Gil, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. How's it going?

Good. Thank you, Josh. Thank you for having me.

I'm very excited about this. You've been around in the industry for a little while.

You've had your hands in quite a few areas like at Microsoft and Wix and No.js.

But could you tell us just to start, how did you get into the wonderful world of software development?

Well, the age of 13, I'm Jewish, so Bar Mitzvah, and I asked my parents for a PC.

At that time, it was the ultimate in PCs was a ZX81 with 1K of RAM, which I upgraded to 16K, and I learned basic that way. From there on to Turbo Pascal on an Apple 2,

where I worked on the wonderful ID by Andes Heffsfeld,

who is still one of the luminaries of the software industry.

And now we're both working in the same company, Microsoft,

and then the Army.

I joined the Army as a software engineer. I did a software engineering course there.

...