Podcasts about Browserify

Brian Douglas is the CEO of OpenSauced which helps enterprises discover the best engineers in Open Source. Victoria and Will talk to Brian about meeting as many developers as possible, setting goals, and keeping himself accountable, and what makes a successful open source project. OpenSauced (https://opensauced.pizza/) Follow OpenSauced on Twitter (https://twitter.com/saucedopen), GitHub (https://github.com/open-sauced), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/opensauced/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/opensauced), Discord (https://discord.com/invite/U2peSNf23P), and Dev.to (https://dev.to/opensauced). Follow Brian Douglas on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/bdougieYO), or visit his website (https://b.dougie.dev/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for joining and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn join our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through user research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team members you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please join us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your host, Will WILL. And with us today is Brian Douglas, CEO of OpenSauced, helping enterprises discover best engineers in open source. Brian, thank you for joining us today. BRIAN: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast. VICTORIA: Just tell us a little bit more about OpenSauced. BRIAN: Yeah, it's opensauced.pizza is the URL. So I always point that out because it's easy to found. WILL: I love it. BRIAN: And OpenSauced is a platform for engineers to find their next contributions and enterprises to discover the best engineers doing open-source, so... VICTORIA: Right. So maybe tell me what led you to start this company? BRIAN: Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, if you don't mind, I'll start further back. I graduated college in 2008 during the financial crisis with a finance degree. And what I learned pretty quickly is, like, if you don't know anybody in finance, it's a little hard to get a job in a bad market. So I took a sales role instead, mainly because I just wanted to learn. I was very much introverted. I wanted to learn how to talk to people, and have conversation, and communicate. So I did that four years and then got my MBA. And then started learning how to code while building an app, which is...I mentioned before we hit record I learned about this podcast around that time, which is, like, very serendipitous to be on this podcast years later. But, fast forward, OpenSauced, like, because of the whole networking aspect of how I got my job in sales and how I was able to do sales when I learned how to engineer, I knew the connection to open source, or how I learned how to code was, like, a wealth of information. So I made it my career goal to meet as many developers as possible. And then, I was working at this company called Netlify. I was employee number three there. And my role was to basically be a front-end engineer, but where I was actually getting more adoption to the product by doing open source. Like, every time I'd do an open-source contribution, I'd add a Netlify deploy preview manually in my PR. And that would give the maintainer enough juice to review the PR sooner. And I was doing a lot of open-source contribution at the time. So I wanted to build a tool to maintain, like, all the PRs I had opened in-flight that I needed to respond back to or...because back in, like, 2016, notifications on GitHub they weren't the greatest. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: So I built a tool just to keep up to date on what I had opened and how I can communicate back with the maintainer. And saw a need...actually, I didn't see the need. I used this thing myself, and then in 2020, I started live streaming myself, building more features on top of this, like, CRM tool, and had a few people ask, "Hey, can you add a login to this? I'd love to use this, too, with my own database and stuff like that." So I did that. I added login. And I say database, like, we actually originally started with no database. We used GitHub Issues as a tracking mechanism for tracking repos and conversations. We've since moved away from that because, now, obviously, GitHub's got way more advanced in how notifications work. But the sort of ethos of the project still lives today, and what we have in the open-source platform. So that's, like, the long tale of how we got to where we are today. And then, I spoke at GitHub Universe on OpenSauced back in 2017. And from that talk, I had GitHub employees reach out to me and ask me to work at GitHub. So I accepted, and I worked at GitHub for almost five years, sort of putting OpenSauced to the side up until last year, decided to go ahead and pursue it again. And at that point, decided to make it a company. VICTORIA: What a cool story. There are so many things in there that I want to follow up on. I'm sure, Will, you also are like -- [laughs] WILL: [laughs] Yes. VICTORIA: I have so many questions. [laughs] WILL: Wow, that's amazing just hearing the story from you [laughs] got a four-year degree in finance, 2008 happened, no job, very hard to get a job because of who you know. And then you go and changed directions to start learning to code. And I love how it's kind of guided your path to where you are here right now. Like, who knows? But would you have been the CEO of OpenSauced if 2008 would have never happened? So it's amazing to see it. So, I guess, because I love the idea of OpenSauced...because I am that developer that wants to get into open source, but it is hard. It is hard to find the issues that you can work on. It's hard to get into the community to do that. So, if you can just explain to me a little bit more as from there, and we can do it from the enterprise portion later. But, as far as a user: a developer, what does it look like for me to use OpenSauced as a developer? BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. And that's a great question, too, as well. It's funny how serendipitous the story is today, but when I was living it, it was like, oh, man, I'm never going to get a job. [laughter] Or I'm never going to learn how to code. And I think anybody listening who might be where I was ten years ago, I just want to preface, like, your story is like a guided path through experiences. And every experience is like an opportunity for that sort of one piece of, like, the sort of stepping stone to move on to, like, CEO of whatever your next startup is or senior engineer, or staff engineer, whatever it is. But, to answer your question, Will, we built a Discord, and the Discord itself is how we sort of discovered this sort of onboard ramp into open source. So today, if you sign up to OpenSauced, again, opensauced.pizza, you connect to your GitHub account, and you get on-boarded into a flow to ask a couple questions. So, like, what languages are you interested in? And then, what time zone are you in? And the reason for those two things is, one because we're going to do recommendations for projects pretty soon. Everything is open source, so you can literally see the issues that are open about recommendations; happy to take contributions and feedback on it. And then time zone is because communication is pretty key. So, like, if someone is not awake when I see their PR, I have an expectation of, like, cool, I'll write a response, and I'll wait for them to wake up and respond back to that. So the goal there is there's a lot of projects on GitHub, like, 372 million repos is the number off the top of my head. They literally announce this stuff, and they share the data. But of those repos, only 225,000 have more than five contributors. Understanding what you're looking to accomplish first out of doing open source to either share knowledge, or gain knowledge, to get exposure, to get a job, or just to enhance your current job by go try something that's not in the roadmap of what you're working on. Eventually, we'll start asking those questions around, like, what type of contributor that you want to be, so we can start recommending those types of projects. But I mentioned that 225,000 repo number because there are a lot of projects that don't have five contributors that could use their second contributor, or third, fourth. And my recommendation is always find up-and-coming, like, growth-stage projects. A lot of people want to contribute to React. You had mentioned you did React, Will. That's a really big lift to go contribute upstream to a project maintained and supported by millions of enterprises around the world. But there are tons of projects that go trending every week that have no documentation, that have no README, that have no structure and are just getting off the ground. Like, those are the best projects that we try to showcase. So, like, that's hot.opensauced.pizza is our sort of up-and-coming project list. And the way that works is like projects that are trending based on our open-source community; we surface those there. There's a lot of work we have to do on that project. That was, like, a Hack Week project we did a couple of years ago as a community. But the basis of that is they're looking to build our recommendation engine off that. So, step one is find a project that is welcoming, that needs some work done, and then find the path in. So the path usually is going to be your CONTRIBUTING.md, which is like established projects will have this. But if you don't find a CONTRIBUTING.md, but you find a project you want to use, chances are you could build that CONTRIBUTING.md and ask the question, so, like, hey, how would I contribute? Like, how can I be supportive? Actually, I did this talk a couple of years ago at Juneteenth Conf. It was a remote conference on Juneteenth, which a bunch of Black Engineers we all gave our technical expertise sponsored by Microsoft. And I was talking about the idea of open-source hospitality. The best thing you could do is be that sort of hospitable person, either you're a maintainer or a first-time contributor. Like, be that person to set it up for the next person behind you. And the idea of hospitality, you go to a hotel. Like, you know where the towels are. Like, you know where the soaps are. Like, you know exactly where everything is all the time. And, in open source, like, if we could set up our projects in a very similar fashion, like, not franchise them in a way like the Hilton or Marriott, but set the expectation that there is a way to source information and to interact and operate, so... VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I love, [laughs] like, hot.opensauced.pizza. That's hilarious. And I love how you have used humor to...even though it's a very serious product, we're making it more friendly and more hospitable like you're saying. And I like how you said, you know, the journey is cool looking back on it, but it was really hard to go through it. And now you're this wonderful speaker and a CEO. But you said that you weren't actually good at talking to people at first. And you specifically sought to get better at that skill. So I wonder if you would share more about that, how that's impacted your career, and why that's important as a developer to have those communication skills. BRIAN: Yeah, it's like...I have a twin brother since birth, basically. And my twin brother is very extroverted. Like, he actually used to wait tables in college. It was like he was the person that would make you feel very special as a server. Like, he's the type of person that kind of lights up the room when you walk in. His name is Brock. My entire life growing up, I was always Brock's brother. And it's like, oh, you're Brock's brother. And it's like, yeah, I'm Brock's brother. And I'm more of a person, like, if you meet me in person, like, I'm very much reserved. I'm sort of reading the room, waiting for my point to jump in. And I made it a point for me to, like, have enough comfort to speak on a podcast or speak at a conference because I knew that skill set would be valuable. Because I definitely had, in my sales career, definitely got overlooked for a lot of opportunity because folks thought, oh, I don't think Brian could do it. So coming into tech and seeing that when every time I went to a meet up...because meetups also are places where I cut my teeth and got to learn about the industry and the community. They always needed someone to speak. So I was, like, oh, there's an opportunity. I can leverage this opportunity of them always looking for speakers and me always wanting to share knowledge and learn something new to do talks. So my first-ever conference talk was in San Francisco. And I had learned React Native, but prior to React Native, I had learned Objective-C. And then, in between Objective-C and React Native, I learned Swift because React Native and Swift came out the same year. Well, React Native went public, open source, the same year as Swift. So it was like a really interesting year back in; I think it was 2017 where...actually, it might have been 2016. But, anyway, everything came out at the same time. And I was learning iOS development. So I made it a point for me to give a talk. But my pet peeve for giving talks is, a lot of times, people just go directly into the code, and there's, like, no connection to a story, or why do I care about this? So I always bring storytelling into my conversations and talks. So, like, that talk about Swift, and Objective-C, and React Native, I made the comparison of, like...it was the same year that Kanye West took the mic from Taylor Swift at the VMAs or whatever the award show was. And the correlation was React Native took the mic away from Swift because it built similar interactions for JavaScript developers to understand and build iOS applications that was not like Ionic or RubyMine or...I forgot the Ruby one. But, anyway, what I'm getting at is, I just wanted to bring story to this because usually what happens is like, you see cool things, but you never remember what the name is. You try to find that REPL again, or you try to figure out who that speaker is. And it's usually hard to find it after the fact. So, like, my goal was always to make it memorable, which is why I go by Bdougie because Bdougie is easier to Google than Brian Douglas. Shout out to Brian Douglas, who's based in Ireland who does system engineering, and has a great YouTube channel. Like, I want to be memorable. And I want to make it easy for folks to find me after. So, while at GitHub, when I was developing all this sort of like Kanye West-type speaking and stuff like that, well, literally, I would use Kanye West years ago as the example to understand storytelling. I no longer use Kanye West. I'm now a Beyoncé advocate. [laughter] So I use Beyoncé instead. But I guess what I'm getting at is, like, I just had a goal. And I knew if I could teach myself to code...and it was about 17 weeks it took me from zero to ship a Ruby on Rails app. And I felt confident enough to talk about it. I knew basically anything I could just accomplish just by putting some effort and consistency behind it. So that's the...sorry, that was a little more long-winded than expected. But I just keep accountable and set goals for myself and try to achieve enough to feel proud about at the end of the year. WILL: Yeah. It's so funny because I recently had a similar situation. At thoughtbot, we try to engage with the community, and one of the ways was writing a blog post. I've never been a writer. It just hasn't been my thing. But I was telling my boss, I was like, I'm going to do that to get outside my comfort zone and to really stretch myself. And at the same time, I was like, why a blog post? Like, I don't know, it doesn't really make sense why a blog post. Well, when I started writing the blog post, I was like, oh, you have to really know, one, what you're talking about in order to write about it. And so I had to really do some research, really had to study it. And I finished it last week. And then, now, looking back over the last couple of months it took me to write that blog post, I'm like, wow, I feel stretched. But I feel really good, and I feel really good about the topic that I did. So that's interesting that you went through that process to stretch yourself and to grow and even learning to code and get to that point. So talking about...you were at Netlify, and then you worked at GitHub. And then you're at your current one OpenSauced. How have Netlify and GitHub, the work that you did there, how has it prepared you for your position right now? BRIAN: You know, actually, that's a great question. I don't know how much thought I put into that. Like, Netlify prepared me because it gave me an opportunity. So I was employee number three, but I had a sales background. And so I got to be an engineer, but they kept always trying to ask me like, you know, business questions and strategy. And, like, I pitched them a 30-60-90 in my interview of, like, what's the growth strategy of Netlify, like day zero when I start? And I go into way more detail in other content. But that prepared me because I got to see how startups work, being so early. I got to see that startup go from seed-funded, just closed their seed round to get their series B is when I left. At GitHub, I got to see what it looked like at a bigger company, which, like, it doesn't matter how big or small you are, like, there's always chaos. Like, GitHub was, like, so much chaos, and there was a lot of good that was happening but a lot of uncertainty at the time I joined in 2018. And then, nine months later, Microsoft acquired GitHub. So then I got to learn stability and what it looks like to...for personal reasons, I always had a budget but never had extra money, even years into my engineering career. And that taught me what it looks like when success meets career. With that being said, like, the problem that I'm solving, I got to learn firsthand while being at Netlify and getting adoption and traction through open source. And then going to GitHub and seeing every single other company that looked at GitHub as a solution to their open-source collaborations and interactions. And then also seeing that there was a hole in just understanding, like, how do you survive? How do you sustain yourself as your career but also your open-source project? Like, a lot of folks want to know, like, what success looks like for open source. Like, how do you get on the trending algorithm? Like, how do you get noticed? It's more than just pushing to GitHub and hoping for the best. There are, like, other things that happen for projects to be successful. And for us to choose the next in the future technologies, it really comes down to community, marketing, and then resources. And those three things end up making projects successful. With OpenSauced, we're working to help inflate some storytelling and add some of those resources to open-source projects. VICTORIA: Great. So you were able to really get, like, the full vision of what it could be if you had a product that became successful and stable, and you knew you wanted to build it on open source. So I love that you really just...you had this problem, and that's what you built the product around. And that ended up becoming the business. What was surprising for you in those early discovery phases with OpenSauced when you were first thinking of building it? BRIAN: I guess what's really surprising is we're not, like, crazy traction today. But we've done a pretty good job of getting, like, 2,000 developers to sign up to it since December. And then the conversations with enterprises so far just by the sheer...like, basically, what was surprising is if you use proper sales technique and you're early stage as a startup, so, like, not necessarily hire salespeople, but as a founder or as a stakeholder, just go talk to your future customers and your users. Everyone says it, but that's actually super valuable. And I think in the same vein of open source, folks they see projects die on the vine, but then you see projects succeed. And I think it also comes down to how often the maintainer of the project is talking to the contributors and the users and also that distinction as well. There are folks who want to contribute code to the codebase, but then there are folks who want to use the codebase. And, like, how do you interact between the two? And how do you cross the chasm for those folks as well? And, a lot of times, it's just fascinating just, like, just by trying, and just by showing up, that's half. It's all cliché stuff, like, I could say, but it's all true. Like, showing up is, like, it's, like, step one. Just show up, do the thing, do the work. And then talk to people is, like, step two. And it's hard to say, like, okay, yeah, because we are not a multibillion-dollar company, like, we're just getting started. So I can't say, like, yeah, we're super successful. But we've survived the year. And we've survived the year based on those two steps, the showing up and then talking to people. Because a lot of times, we could get lost in the sauce, per se, of just shipping code and never talking to anybody and never coming up for air. And I think what I learned, going back to what I learned from GitHub and Netlify, is talking to people and getting that feedback loop going is the best thing you could do for any product. Any early project, any feature you're working on, talk to people about it and see if it's actually valuable for somebody that after you ship it, something will happen. WILL: You're talking about communication is a big thing for a successful project. Have you noticed any other trends that make a successful open-source project? BRIAN: Yeah, that's...Any other trends? Yeah. I mean, AI, [laughs] just kidding. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: No, I mean, but it also it is true, like, having a trend not sort of following the herd, but catching the herd earlier is extremely valuable. Like, at Netlify, we caught the trend of React. So, basically, Netlify built essentially GitHub Pages but a product and a company. And that was, like, the original project of Netlify. It's expanded so much further from that. But at that time, when I joined, I joined three months before Create React App was developed. So, like, it was a CLI tool to build React apps easy. And, prior to that, React was, like, super complicated to get up and running. Like, you had to know Webpack. You had to know, Babel. You had to make all that glue happen together. And then there wasn't an easy process to go host it somewhere. So the prevalence of build tools like Grunt, and Gulp, and Browserify, they all made it easier to build a static output from React. And that trend is what took Netlify to where it is today. It's like, people needed a place to deploy these static applications. GitHub Pages was like the solution for a lot of folks. Because Heroku, like, why pay $7 for something you could host on S3 for free? But the challenge was S3 it requires way more thought in how you host and take it down and deploy, and then it becomes like a Kubernetes nightmare. So the trend there was, like, people just wanted to have a better developer experience. When it comes to, like, open source, the developer experience in JavaScript has improved so much more. But folks are now looking at the next thing like a Zig, or a Rust, or all these other new languages and server renderings and stuff like that. So I guess when I take a step back, when I look at how I chose things I wanted to work on, and communities I wanted to hang out in...before committing to React...I'm based out here in Oakland, so San Francisco, basically. By seeing the sheer number of RSVPs to the React meetup, it made me confident that React would be something I should pay attention to. When you look at the RSVPs of now all these AI meetups that are happening in San Francisco, like, every single weekend is a hackathon. Highly confident that if you're engineering today, you probably want to know what embeddings are and know how OpenAI works. Not that you necessarily have to build AI stuff, but it is going to be the thing that people are going to be using. So just like we had to learn build tools, and servers, and CDNs prior, now it's all trivial stuff that you can sort of use Cloudflare for free. Like, AI is going to be very similar, and it's probably going to happen much quicker. But, in the time being, the trend right now is, like, you should probably understand whatever the players are in that space so that way you're able to talk confidently about it. WILL: That's really good advice, yep. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And, you know, in my role as Managing Director of Mission Control, or, like, DevOps, SRE platform, I spend a lot of time looking at trends, more on the engineering side. So I think my question is, [laughs] as someone who hires people to work on open-source projects, and who actively maintains and contributes to open-source projects, what should I be thinking about how to use OpenSauced as in my role? BRIAN: For hiring and sourcing skilled folks, we're actually working on a tool right now to make it more discoverable. So, today, when you onboard as an individual developer, you can check a box in your settings to say, like, if you want to collaborate with other folks, you have to opt into it. So if you want to be discovered on OpenSauced, it's in the settings. We'll probably expose that and share more about that in the future, like, in the next month or so. But for, in particular, our user flow today for folks looking to find other people to contribute alongside their project is, you add your project to what we call an Insight Page. You click on the tab on the top and create a page with your project. And then, you can see contributions in your project in the last 30 days. And then you can also add other projects like your project, so you can see who else is contributing. So, that way, you can start discovering folks who are making contributions consistently and start to get some stories of, like, if they're interested in collaborating, they'll check that box; if they're not, the box won't be checked. But at least you know the sort of scope of the ecosystem. As an individual developer, we have the onboarding flow, but then we also have highlights. So, eventually, we'll do recommendations to get you to make contributions. But, for now, if you're already making contributions, you can highlight the contributions you've made so that way, you're more discoverable on the platform. And the highlights are very much like a LinkedIn post or a tweet. You just drop in a PR, and then we'll either generate that description for you, or you write a description: I did a thing. This is what it was. This was the experience. And then, now you're attached to the project through not just a code contribution but also a discovery mechanism, which is a highlight. And then, eventually, we'll start doing blog posts, and guides, and stuff like that, as they're written. Like, if you want to attribute your career, and your journey to your participation to, like, documentation updates and stuff like that, those will also be highlights coming soon. WILL: I love, love, love that. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoff WILL: I hear you saying that you have some things that's coming soon. In a high, high level, what are some of the things that you have coming? And what does success look like, six months, a year? What does that look like? Because it sounds like you have some really good ideas that you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. So, like, six months to the end of the year, what we want to do is actually start getting more deeper insights to what's happening in open source. What we're doing right now is building the individual developer profile and experience so that way, they're able to be discovered, find projects to work on. And then what's next is there are tons of enterprises and companies that are maintaining open-source projects, SDKs. And what we're seeing right now is we're seeing massive layoffs happening currently in the industry. So like, as of today, I think Facebook laid off 4,000 people, ESPN laid off, like, 7,000 Disney employees as well. And some of those employees are around the Disney+ place. It's a lot of technical engineering stuff. So I guess what I'm getting at is there...we want to be able to see the trends of places that activity is happening and start recommending people to that. But also, we want to give an opportunity for folks who...companies...sorry, I'm avoiding trying to name specific companies because nothing is in contract yet. But certain companies, like, you, don't think of as an open-source powerhouse. So, like, a company we're now talking to right now is walgreens.com. And Walgreens they have tech. They've got open source that they participated. But they're not thought of as a place like, oh, I want to go work at Walgreens and go work on some cloud infrastructure stuff. So, how does Walgreens get exposure? And, like, hey, we're involved in the kubectl, and the Kubernetes platform and stuff like that, like, be aware that there's opportunity here. So we're going to start driving that connection to folks. So, as you develop your career doing open source, you can also be noticed, and folks can reach out to you. And also, I want to stand on the notion of open source is not for everybody. But I also want to point out, like, my entire career in open source has not been nights and weekends. It's always been finding a company that supports my interest to do open-source at work. Part of my story is, like, I was getting an MBA. My first kid, who's nine years old now he, was born 11 weeks early. And he's the reason why I built an app because I wanted to build an app to solve a pain point that I had, and ended up building that in 17 weeks. And that turned into opportunity. So I guess what I'm getting at is, like, folks being laid off right now, you might have some extra free time. You might be submitting like 100 applications a day. Consider taking that down to 50 applications a day, and then try to contribute to a couple of open-source projects a month. So that way, there's some more story to be shared as you're in the job market. VICTORIA: I love that you created that app when you had your son and you had that need. And for developers wanting to get noticed and wanting to get their next leg up or maybe even negotiate for higher salaries, what's the traditional way people do that now to kind of highlight themselves? BRIAN: The traditional way what people are doing is they're tweeting. They're speaking at conferences. They're sharing their stories. It's like zero to I'm an influencer in the open-source space. There's no real clear guide and steps to get to that point, which is why we have highlights today. Like, we want to make it low effort for folks to write 200 characters about something they contributed to. We're actually working on something to generate pull request descriptions because I think that's another missed opportunity. Like, when you open a PR in an open-source project, and it says no description added, like, that's a missed opportunity. Like, there's an opportunity for you to share what you've learned, what Stack Overflow questions you looked at, like, how you got to the problem, and why this is the right solution. All should be in the pull request description. And then that pull request should be in your cover letter for your resume so that people can go back and say, "Oh, wow, you did some real work." I can go see the history of your contributions because perhaps the job you got let go from you only worked in private repos. You couldn't really showcase your skills. That now gives you a competitive edge. And I guess when I look into this, like, going back to my original onboard ramp into engineering, I graduated with a finance degree with no network. I had one internship at an insurance company, but that wasn't enough. Like, everyone who I interned with, like, the guy who got a job at the internship, like, his dad was a client, was a big client at that firm. And another guy he worked at a golf course, and he'd be the caddy for all these big finance folks where I went to school. So, once I learned that there's an opportunity to get a job by just knowing people, that changed my entire path. Like, when I got to sales, like, oh, or when I got to engineering, I just knew go and meet people. Go have conversations. Go to meetups. What I'm trying to do with OpenSauced is make that step closer for folks, so they could look up and be like, you know, I've made all these contributions, or I don't know where to start. Let me just look at people who I know and follow in the industry and see where they're contributing, and make that connection. So, like, we've kind of closed that gap without the need of, again, you don't need 100,000 Twitter followers to get noticed. Just make some contributions or show up and ask questions. And, hopefully, that's the first step to establishing your career. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds great for both people who are looking to get hired, but also, as someone who hires people, [laughter] I know that there's a lot of amazing developers who are never going to do a conference talk, or they're not going to post on Twitter. So I love that that's available, and that's something you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, it's just coming out of my own pain of, like, I was saying, like, looking at the story now, it sounds great. [laughs] But part of that story was like, hey, I was getting severely underpaid as an engineer in San Francisco, living in a one-bedroom apartment with two kids. Like, all that part of the story is like nothing I dwell on. But it's like, all that opportunity and knowledge-sharing that I ended up benefiting from, it's like what I constantly try to give. I pay it forward with folks. And I'm more than happy to talk with folks on Twitter and in OpenSauced Discord and other places because I think there's a lot of opportunity in open source. And if anybody's willing to listen, I'm willing to show them the path. WILL: I'm so glad you brought that up because this is one of my favorite questions I ask on the podcast: So, knowing where you're at right now and your story, you've gone the ups, the downs, all of it. If you can go back in time and know what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning? BRIAN: Honestly, I would say write it down. Like, one thing that I did is I did a blog post, and that's part of the reason why I was able to find my first job in engineering is I started a blog, which was really for myself to learn what I did yesterday. I tell everyone who I mentor it takes two hours every time you want to sit and learn something new because one hour is to remember what you did yesterday, and then one hour is to do something new. And so, I usually write it down and then make it a blog post just to solve that problem. I wish I did more with that, like, you know, wrote a book, or created a YouTube channel, or something because all that knowledge and that sort of sharing is actually what got me to level up faster. I was asked by one of my close friends, like, "Hey, how do you do it? How do you accomplish everything you've done in the last, like, 9-10 years?" And I didn't know what the answer was then. But the answer today for my friend, and I'll share this with them, is it's because I wrote it down. I was able to go back and see what I did. And then, at the end of six months, I was able to go back six months and see what I did. It's like the idea of relativity with, like, Einstein. Relativity is the idea of motion and the perception. Like, if you're in a train, it feels like you're just going slow. But you might be going 100 miles per hour, but you don't feel that. And when you're going on your journey, you could be going 100 miles per hour, but you're thinking, oh, man, I failed yesterday. I could have solved a problem. But yeah, you solved six problems while trying to solve for one. It's that situation. So advice for myself, in the beginning, write it down and then share it way more than I did when I started. Because a lot of the stuff I'm like, even in this conversation, I'm thinking, oh yeah, this, this, and this. And I never shared that before, and I wish I did. So yeah. WILL: I love that. Because yeah, I feel like that's development, like, you have some weeks that you're shipping out multiple features. And then other weeks, you're like, I barely got one out, or I barely fixed this one bug that I've been trying to...struggling with the last couple of weeks. So yeah, I like that advice. Write it down. And remember where you've been, remember. I just love the example you used, too, because it does seem like I haven't made any movement. But when you look back, you're like, no, you actually made a lot of movement. And you were very successful with what you did. So that's great advice. VICTORIA: I sometimes write things, and then I go back maybe six months later and read them. And I'm like, who wrote this? [laughter] I don't remember learning this stuff. Oh yeah, I guess I did, right, yeah. [laughs] No, that's so cool. What questions do you have for us, Brian? BRIAN: I'm curious in, like, how do thoughtbot folks stay up to date? Like, what does your involvement in open source look like today? VICTORIA: Yeah, so we are known for being active maintainers of a lot of very popular Ruby on Rails gems. So we're a consulting agency. So we're able to structure our time with our clients so that we can build in what we call investment days, which is typically Fridays, so that people can contribute to open-source projects. They can write blog posts. They can do trainings. And so that gives us the structure to be able to actually allow our employees to contribute to open source, and it's a huge part of our business as well. So if you have a Ruby on Rails project, you're probably using one of our gems. [laughs] And so, when there's other crises or other things happening in an organization, and they want to bring in an expert, they know that that's who thoughtbot is. Of course, we've expanded, and we do React, and now we're doing platform engineering. And we have some open-source TerraForm modules that we use to migrate people onto AWS and operate at that enterprise level with a mix of managed products from AWS as well. And that continues to be, like, how we talk to people [laughs] and get that buzzword out there is, like, okay, there's this cool open-source project. Like, one I'm excited about now is OpenTelemetry. And so we're digging into that and figuring out how we can contribute. And can we make a big impact here? And that just opens the door to conversations in a way that is less salesy, right? [laughs] And people know us as the contributors and maintainers, and that creates a level of trust that goes a long way. And also, it really speaks to how we operate as a company as well, where the code is open and when we give it back to the customers, it's not. Some organizations will build stuff and then never give it to you. [laughs] BRIAN: Yeah. So it sounds like folks at thoughtbot could probably benefit from things like OpenSauced for discoverability. And I get a lot of conversation around in OpenSauced as like, how do I get connected to maintainer of X or maintainer of Y? And the first step is like, how do I even know who the maintainer is? Because when you go to GitHub, you could sort this by last commit date, which not a lot of people know. You can sort the contributors by most frequently and stuff like that. But it's challenging to find out who to reach out to when it comes to packages, especially when people move on. Like, someone created a thing. They have tons of commits. And then they look like they're the number one committer for the past ten years, but they left five years ago. Those are things that we're trying to make more discoverable to solve that problem. But then, going into that thoughtbot thing, is like being able to reach out to thoughtbot and be like, oh, who can I reach out to about this gem? And, say, I have an idea, or we have an issue; how can we get unblocked because we're using this in our product? And I imagine with consulting, there's an opportunity to say, hey thoughtbot...which, honestly, at Netlify, we used thoughtbot to solve some harder problems for us. We were just like, yeah, we don't have the bandwidth to go down this path. Let's go to consulting to unblock us in this arena. VICTORIA: Right. And that was really important to me in making the decision to join thoughtbot last year is that it was built around open source. And that ethos really spoke to me as, like, this is a place where I want to work. [laughs] And you can think of, like, if you're looking for vendors, like, oh, I want to work with people who have that same ethos. So yeah, OpenSauced seems like a really cool product. I'd be curious about how we can leverage it more at thoughtbot. BRIAN: We just shipped a feature called Teams, which it's self-explanatory. But, basically, when you build an insight page, you're able to build a team to help the discover process of what's happening in contributions. You get details and reporting on OpenSauced. The goal is basically to unblock teams who are involved in open source together and make it more discoverable for folks who want to find maintainers and collaborate with them. VICTORIA: Will, I know we're running close on time. But I had one more question about what you said around making open source more hospitable. And, you know, you mentioned going to Juneteenth Conf. And I'm curious if you have a perspective on if open source is equitably accessible to everyone or if there are things we can be doing as a community to be more inclusive. BRIAN: Yeah, it's a great question. So the first answer is quick, it's no. The reason why it's no is because we have to admit [laughs] where there are inequitable situations. And as much as we want to set this up of, like, I want to say that there's opportunity for everyone to contribute based on no matter where their background, but just by your time zone, makes it inequitable of, like, whether you can contribute to open source. Because if you look at the data and zoom out, most open source happens in the West Coast U.S., so from San Francisco to Seattle. Like, majority of contributions are there. There are reasons for that. Like, California has a very, very expressive clause of like where you can contribute. And, technically, your employer can block you on doing open-source contributions. Unless you sign...like, at Apple, you sign away your rights to be able to do that in your employee offer letter. Sorry, [laughs] not to be a dig against Apple. Apple buy lots of open source. But what I'm getting at is that the opportunity is there, but it's the awareness thing. I'm part of an organization called DevColor. It's an organization of Black engineers in tech. We have squads and monthly meetings where we just talk about our career, and growth, and stuff like that. And I attribute a lot of that interactions to my success is, like, talking to other folks who are years ahead of me and have a lot more experience. But I say this because the majority of the folks that I interact with at DevColor they don't do open source because they all...to be a Black engineer at a level of like senior engineer at Netlify, or a staff engineer, or a manager...sorry, I meant, like, Netflix but Netlify too. You basically had a career path of, like, you probably went to school at a decent engineering school, or you figured out how to get a job at Facebook or Google. And, like, that's pretty much it. And, like, this is a blanket statement. I totally understand there are outliers. But the majority of the folks I interact with at DevColor they have a job. They have a great job. And they're doing the thing, and they're being very successful. But there's less community interaction. And that's what DevColor exists for is to encourage that community interaction and participation. So, at the end of the day, like, there's opportunity to make it more equitable. So things like, every time there's a release cut for a major open-source project, why not go to Black Girls CODE and have them build something with it? And, again, very specific, like, React 19 that's currently being tested, why not go to all these other underrepresented organizations and partner with them to show them how to use this project? Because the assumption is everyone in open source, you got to be senior enough to participate, or if it's too hot, get out of the kitchen. But if we set up a place for people to interact and level up, in three or four years from now, you'll see the open-source ecosystem of that project be completely different as far as diversity. But it takes that investment to have that onboard ramp to even have that connection or conversation about testing early releases with underrepresented groups in engineering. That's where we have to start, and that's what we're trying to do at OpenSauced. We want to make that connection. I have a whole plan for it. I'll share in a blog post. I also mentioned that a lot of these thoughts are on our blog as well. I've been writing blog posts around these conversations. So opensauced.pizza/blog if you're interested. VICTORIA: Very cool. Thank you for that. WILL: I'm just processing on the whole conversation. It has just been great. VICTORIA: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing with us. And I wonder, do you have any final takeaways for our listeners today, Brian? BRIAN: Yeah, final takeaways. Like, if anything at all resonated in this conversation, please reach out, bdougie on GitHub. I'm pretty active with my notifications. So if you @ mention me in a random project, I'll probably jump back in and respond to you. But also Twitter @bdougieYO. And then, I mentioned our blog. We also have a newsletter. So, if you're interested in any of this OpenSauced journey, please join us there, and keep in touch. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me @will23larry This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Brian Douglas.

Luca Casonato is the tech lead for Deno Deploy and a TC39 delegate. Deno is a JavaScript runtime from the original creator of NodeJS, Ryan Dahl. Topics covered: What's a JavaScript runtime How V8 is used Why Deno was created The W3C WinterCG for server-side JavaScript Why it's difficult to ship new features in Node The benefits of web standards Creating an all-inclusive toolset like Rust and Go Deno's node compatibility layer Use cases for WebAssembly Benefits and implementation of Deno Deploy Reasons to deploy on the edge What's coming next Luca Luca Casonato @lcasdev Deno Homepage Deploy Showcase Subhosting Fresh web framework The anatomy of an Isolate Cloud Deno Users Netlify Edge Functions Deno at Slack GitHub Flat Data Shopify Oxygen Other related links Cache Web API V8 (JavaScript and WebAssembly engine) TC39 (JavaScript specification group) Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group (WinterCG) Cloudflare Workers (Deno Deploy competitor) How Cloudflare KV works CockroachDB (Distributed database) XKCD Standards Comic Transcript You can help edit this transcript on GitHub. [00:00:07] Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Luca Casonato. He's a member of the Deno Core team and a TC 39 Delegate. [00:00:06] Luca: Hey, thanks for having me. What's a runtime? [00:00:07] Jeremy: So today we're gonna talk about Deno, and on the website it says, Deno is a runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. So I thought we could start with defining what a runtime is. [00:00:21] Luca: Yeah, that's a great question. I think this question actually comes up a lot. It's, it's like sometimes we also define Deno as a headless browser, or I don't know, a, a JavaScript script execution tool. what actually defines runtime? I, I think what makes a runtime a runtime is that it is a, it's implemented in native code. It cannot be self-hosted. Like you cannot self-host a JavaScript runtime. and it executes JavaScript or TypeScript or some other scripting language, without relying on, well, yeah, I guess it's the self-hosting thing. Like it's, it's essentially a, a JavaScript execution engine, which is not self-hosted. So yeah, it, it maybe has IO bindings, but it doesn't necessarily need to like, it. Maybe it allows you to read the, from the file system or, or make network calls. Um, but it doesn't necessarily have to. It's, I think the, the primary definition is something which can execute JavaScript without already being written in JavaScript. How V8 and JavaScript runtimes are related [00:01:20] Jeremy: And when we hear about JavaScript run times, whether it's Deno or Node or Bun, or anything else, we also hear about it in the context of v8. Could you explain the relationship between V8 and a JavaScript run time? [00:01:36] Luca: Yeah. So V8 and, and JavaScript core and Spider Monkey, these are all JavaScript engines. So these are the low level virtual machines that can execute or that can parse your JavaScript code. turn it into byte code, maybe turn it into, compiled machine code, and then execute that code. But these engines, Do not implement any IO functions. They do not. They implement the JavaScript spec as is written. and then they provide extension hooks for, they call these host environments, um, like environments that embed these engines to provide custom functionalities to essentially poke out of the sandbox, out of the, out of the virtual machine. Um, and this is used in browsers. Like browsers have, have these engines built in. This is where they originated from. Um, and then they poke holes into this, um, sandbox virtual machine to do things like, I don't know, writing to the dom or, or console logging or making fetch calls and all these kinds of things. And what a runtime essentially does, a JavaScript runtime is it takes one of these engines and. It then provides its own set of host APIs, like essentially its own set of holes. It pokes into the sandbox. and depending on what the runtime is trying to do, um, the weight will do. This is gonna be different and, and the sort of API that is ultimately exposed to the end user is going to be different. For example, if you compare Deno and node, like node is very loosey goosey, about how it pokes holds into the sandbox, it sort of just pokes them everywhere. And this makes it difficult to enforce things like, runtime permissions for example. Whereas Deno is much more strict about how it, um, pokes holds into its sandbox. Like everything is either a web API or it's behind in this Deno name space, which means that it's, it's really easy to find, um, places where, where you're poking out of the sandbox. and really you can also compare these to browsers. Like browsers are also JavaScript run times. Um, they're just not headless. JavaScript run times, but JavaScript run times that also have a ui. and. . Yeah. Like there, there's, there's a whole Bunch of different kinds of JavaScript run times, and I think we're also seeing a lot more like embedded JavaScript run times. Like for example, if you've used React Native before, you, you may be using Hermes as a, um, JavaScript engine in your Android app, which is like a custom JavaScript engine written just for, for, for React native. Um, and this also is embedded within a, like react native run time, which is specific to React native. so it's also possible to have run times, for example, that are, that can be where the, where the back backing engine can be exchanged, which is kind of cool. [00:04:08] Jeremy: So it sounds like V8's role, one way to look at it is it can execute JavaScript code, but only pure functions. I suppose you [00:04:19] Luca: Pretty much. Yep. [00:04:21] Jeremy: Do anything that doesn't interact with IO so you think about browsers, you were mentioning you need to interact with a DOM or if you're writing a server side application, you probably need to receive or make HTTP requests, that sort of thing. And all of that is not handled by v8. That has to be handled by an external runtime. [00:04:43] Luca: Exactly Like, like one, one. There's, there's like some exceptions to this. For example, JavaScript technically has some IO built in with, within its standard library, like math, random. It's like random number. Generation is technically an IO operation, so, Technically V8 has some IO built in, right? And like getting the current date from the user, that's also technically IO So, like there, there's some very limited edge cases. It's, it's not that it's purely pure, but V8 for example, has a flag to turn it completely deterministic. which means that it really is completely pure. And this is not something which run times usually have. This is something like the feature of an engine because the engine is like so low level that it can essentially, there's so little IO that it's very easy to make deterministic where a runtime higher level, um, has, has io, um, much more difficult to make deterministic. [00:05:39] Jeremy: And, and for things like when you're working with JavaScript, there's, uh, asynchronous programming [00:05:46] Luca: mm-hmm. Concurrent JavaScript execution [00:05:47] Jeremy: So you have concurrency and things like that. Is that a part of V8 or is that the responsibility of the run time? [00:05:54] Luca: That's a great question. So there's multiple parts to this. There's the part, um, there, there's JavaScript promises, um, and sort of concurrent Java or well, yes, concurrent JavaScript execution, which is sort of handled by v8, like v8. You can in, in pure v8, you can create a promise, and you can execute some code within that promise. But without IO there's actually no way to defer time, uh, which means that in with pure v8, you can either, you can create a promise. Which executes right now. Or you can create a promise that never executes, but you can't create a promise that executes in 10 seconds because there's no way to measure 10 seconds asynchronously. What run times do is they add something called an event loop on top of this, um, on top of the base engine and that event loop, for example, like a very simple event loop, for example, might have a timer in it, which every second looks at if there's a timer schedule to run within that second. And if it does, if, if that timer exists, it'll go call out to V8 and say, you can now execute that promise. but V8 is still the one that's keeping track of, of like which promises exist, and the code that is meant to be invoked when they resolve all that kind of thing. Um, but the underlying infrastructure that actually invokes which promises get resolved at what point in time, like the asynchronous, asynchronous IO is what this is called. This is driven by the event loop, um, which is implemented by around time. So Deno, for example, it uses, Tokio for its event loop. This is a, um, an event loop written in Rust. it's very popular in the Rust ecosystem. Um, node uses libuv. This is a relatively popular runtime or, or event loop, um, implementation for c uh, plus plus. And, uh, libuv was written for Node. Tokio was not written for Deno. But um, yeah, Chrome has its own event loop implementation. Bun has its own event loop implementation. [00:07:50] Jeremy: So we, we might go a little bit more into that later, but I think what we should probably go into now is why make Deno, because you have Node that's, uh, currently very popular. The co-creator of Deno, to my understanding, actually created Node. So maybe you could explain to our audience what was missing or what was wrong with Node, where they decided I need to create, a new runtime. Why create a new runtime? (standards compliance) [00:08:20] Luca: Yeah. So the, the primary point of concern here was that node was slowly diverging from browser standards with no real path to, to, to, re converging. Um, like there was nothing that was pushing node in the direction of standards compliance and there was nothing, that was like sort of forcing node to innovate. and we really saw this because in the time between, I don't know, 2015, 2018, like Node was slowly working on esm while browsers had already shipped ESM for like three years. , um, node did not have fetch. Node hasn't had, or node only at, got fetch last year. Right? six, seven years after browsers got fetch. Node's stream implementation is still very divergent from, from standard web streams. Node was very reliant on callbacks. It still is, um, like promises in many places of the Node API are, are an afterthought, which makes sense because Node was created in a time before promises existed. Um, but there was really nothing that was pushing Node forward, right? Like nobody was actively investing in, in, in improving the API of Node to be more standards compliant. And so what we really needed was a new like Greenfield project, which could demonstrate that actually writing a new server side run. Is A viable, and b is totally doable with an API that is more standards combined. Like essentially you can write a browser, like a headless browser and have that be an excellent to use JavaScript runtime, right? And then there was some things that were I on top of that, like a TypeScript support because TypeScript was incredibly, or is still incredibly popular. even more so than it was four years ago when, when Deno was created or envisioned, um, this permission system like Node really poked holes into the V8 sandbox very early on with, with like, it's gonna be very difficult for Node to ever, ever, uh, reconcile this, this. Especially cuz the, some, some of the APIs that it, that it exposes are just so incredibly low level that like, I don't know, you can mutate random memory within your process. Um, which like if you want to have a, a secure sandbox like that just doesn't work. Um, it's not compatible. So there was really needed to be a place where you could explore this, um, direction and, and see if it worked. And Deno was that. Deno still is that, and I think Deno has outgrown that now into something which is much more usable as, as like a production ready runtime. And many people do use it, in production. And now Deno is on the path of slowly converging back with Node, um, in from both directions. Like Node is slowly becoming more standards compliant. and depending on who you ask this was, this was done because of Deno and some people said it would had already been going on and Deno just accelerated it. but that's not really relevant because the point is that like Node is becoming more standard compliant and, and the other direction is Deno is becoming more node compliant. Like Deno is implementing node compatibility layers that allow you to run code that was originally written for the node ecosystem in the standards compliant run time. so through those two directions, the, the run times are sort of, um, going back towards each other. I don't think they'll ever merge. but we're, we're, we're getting to a point here pretty soon, I think, where it doesn't really matter what runtime you write for, um, because you'll be able to write code written for one runtime in the other runtime relatively easily. [00:12:03] Jeremy: If you're saying the two are becoming closer to one another, becoming closer to the web standard that runs in the browser, if you're talking to someone who's currently developing in node, what's the incentive for them to switch to Deno versus using Node and then hope that eventually they'll kind of meet in the middle. [00:12:26] Luca: Yeah, so I think, like Deno is a lot more than just a runtime, right? Like a runtime executes JavaScript, Deno executes JavaScript, it executes type script. But Deno is so much more than that. Like Deno has a built-in format, or it has a built-in linter. It has a built-in testing framework, a built-in benching framework. It has a built-in Bundler, it, it like can create self-hosted, um, executables. yeah, like Bundle your code and the Deno executable into a single executable that you can trip off to someone. Um, it has a dependency analyzer. It has editor integrations. it has, Yeah. Like I could go on for hours, (laughs) about all of the auxiliary tooling that's inside of Deno, that's not a JavaScript runtime. And also Deno as a JavaScript runtime is just more standards compliant than any of the other servers at Runtimes right now. So if, if you're really looking for something which is standards complaint, which is gonna like live on forever, then it's, you know, like you cannot kill off the Fetch API ever. The Fetch API is going to live forever because Chrome supports it. Um, and the same goes for local storage and, and like, I don't know, the Blob API and all these other web APIs like they, they have shipped and browsers, which means that they will be supported until the end of time. and yeah, maybe Node has also reached that with its api probably to some extent. but yeah, don't underestimate the power of like 3 billion Chrome users. that would scream immediately if the Fetch API stopped working Right? [00:13:50] Jeremy: Yeah, I, I think maybe what it sounds like also is that because you're using the API that's used in the browser places where you deploy JavaScript applications in the future, you would hope that those would all settle on using that same API so that if you were using Deno, you could host it at different places and not worry about, do I need to use a special API maybe that you would in node? WinterCG (W3C group for server side JavaScript) [00:14:21] Luca: Yeah, exactly. And this is actually something which we're specifically working towards. So, I don't know if you've, you've heard of WinterCG? It's a, it's a community group at the W3C that, um, CloudFlare and, and Deno and some others including Shopify, have started last year. Um, we're essentially, we're trying to standardize the concept of what a server side JavaScript runtime is and what APIs it needs to have available to be standards compliant. Um, and essentially making this portability sort of written down somewhere and like write down exactly what code you can write and expect to be portable. And we can see like that all of the big, all of the big players that are involved in, in, um, building JavaScript run times right now are, are actively, engaged with us at WinterCG and are actively building towards this future. So I would expect that any code that you write today, which runs. in Deno, runs in CloudFlare, workers runs on Netlify Edge functions, runs on Vercel's Edge, runtime, runs on Shopify Oxygen, is going to run on the other four. Um, of, of those within the next couple years here, like I think the APIs of these is gonna converge to be essentially the same. there's obviously gonna always be some, some nuances. Um, like, I don't know, Chrome and Firefox and Safari don't perfectly have the same API everywhere, right? Like Chrome has some web Bluetooth capabilities that Safari doesn't, or Firefox has some, I don't know, non-standard extensions to the error object, which none of the other runtimes do. But overall you can expect these front times to mostly be aligned. yeah, and I, I think that's, that's really, really, really excellent and that, that's I think really one of the reasons why one should really consider, like building for, for this standard runtime because it, it just guarantees that you'll be able to host this somewhere in five years time and 10 years time, with, with very little effort. Like even if Deno goes under or CloudFlare goes under, or, I don't know, nobody decides to maintain node anymore. It'll be easy to, to run somewhere else. And also I expect that the big cloud vendors will ultimately, um, provide, manage offerings for, for the standards compliant JavaScript on time as well. Is Node part of WinterCG? [00:16:36] Jeremy: And this WinterCG group is Node a part of that as well? [00:16:41] Luca: Um, yes, we've invited Node, um, to join, um, due to the complexities of how node's, internal decision making system works. Node is not officially a member of WinterCG. Um, there is some individual members of the node, um, technical steering committee, which are participating. for example, um, James m Snell is, is the co-chair, is my co-chair on, on WinterCG. He also works at CloudFlare. He's also a node, um, TSC member, Mateo Colina, who has been, um, instrumental to getting fetch landed in Node, um, is also actively involved. So Node is involved, but because Node is node and and node's decision making process works the way it does, node is not officially listed anywhere as as a member. but yeah, they're involved and maybe they'll be a member at some point. But, yeah, let's. , see (laughs) [00:17:34] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and it, so it, it sounds like you're thinking that's more of a, a governance or a organizational aspect of note than it is a, a technical limitation. Is that right? [00:17:47] Luca: Yeah. I obviously can't speak for the node technical steering committee, but I know that there's a significant chunk of the node technical steering committee that is, very favorable towards, uh, standards compliance. but parts of the Node technical steering committee are also not, they are either indifferent or are actively, I dunno if they're still actively working against this, but have actively worked against standards compliance in the past. And because the node governance structure is very, yeah, is, is so, so open and let's, um, and let's, let's all these voices be heard, um, that just means that decision making processes within Node can take so long, like. . This is also why the fetch API took eight years to ship. Like this was not a technical problem. and it is also not a technical problem. That Node does not have URL pattern support or, the file global or, um, that the web crypto API was not on this, on the global object until like late last year, right? Like, these are not technical problems, these are decision making problems. Um, and yeah, that was also part of the reason why we started Deno as, as like a separate thing, because like you can try to innovate node, from the inside, but innovating node from the inside is very slow, very tedious, and requires a lot of fighting. And sometimes just showing somebody, from the outside like, look, this is the bright future you could have, makes them more inclined to do something. Why it takes so long to ship new features in Node [00:19:17] Jeremy: Do, do you have a sense for, you gave the example of fetch taking eight years to, to get into node. Do you, do you have a sense of what the typical objection is to, to something like that? Like I, I understand there's a lot of people involved, but why would somebody say, I, I don't want this [00:19:35] Luca: Yeah. So for, for fetch specifically, there was a, there was many different kinds of concerns. Um, one of the, I, I can maybe list two of them. One of them was for example, that the fetch API is not a good API and as such, node should not have it. which is sort of. missing the point of, because it's a standard API, how good or bad the API is is much less relevant because if you can share the API, you can also share a wrapper that's written around the api. Right? and then the other concern was, node does need fetch because Node already has an HTTP API. Um, so, so these are both kind of examples of, of concerns that people had for a long time, which it took a long time to either convince these people or, or to, push the change through anyway. and this is also the case for, for other things like, for example, web, crypto, um, like why do we need web crypto? We already have node crypto, or why do we need yet another streams? Implementation node already has four different streams implementations. Like, why do we need web streams? and the, the. Like, I don't know if you know this XKCD of, there's 14 competing standards. so let's write a 15th standard, to unify them all. And then at the end we just have 15 competing standards. Um, so I think this is also the kind of concern that people were concerned about, but I, I think what we've seen here is that this is really not a concern that one needs to have because it ends up that, or it turns out in the end that if you implement web APIs, people will use web APIs and will use web APIs only for their new code. it takes a while, but we're seeing this with ESM versus require like new code written with require much less common than it was two years ago. And, new code now using like Xhr, whatever it's called, form request or. You know, the one, I mean, compared to using Fetch, like nobody uses that name. Everybody uses Fetch. Um, and like in Node, if you write a little script, like you're gonna use Fetch, you're not gonna use like Nodes, htp, dot get API or whatever. and we're gonna see the same thing with Readable Stream. We're gonna see the same thing with Web Crypto. We're gonna see, see the same thing with Blob. I think one of the big ones where, where Node is still, I, I, I don't think this is one that's ever gonna get solved, is the, the Buffer global and Node. like we have the Uint8, this Uint8 global, um, and like all the run times including browsers, um, and Buffer is like a super set of that, but it's in global scope. So it, it's sort of this non-standard extension of unit eight array that people in node like to use and it's not compatible with anything else. Um, but because it's so easy to get at, people use it anyway. So those are, those are also kind of problems that, that we'll have to deal with eventually. And maybe that means that at some point the buffer global gets deprecated and I don't know, probably can never get removed. But, um, yeah, these are kinds of conversations that the no TSE is going have to have internally in, I don't know, maybe five years. Write once, have it run on any hosting platform [00:22:37] Jeremy: Yeah, so at a high level, What's shipped in the browser, it went through the ECMAScript approval process. People got it into the browser. Once it's in the browser, probably never going away. And because of that, it's safe to build on top of that for these, these server run times because it's never going away from the browser. And so everybody can kind of use it into the future and not worry about it. Yeah. [00:23:05] Luca: Exactly. Yeah. And that's, and that's excluding the benefit that also if you have code that you can write once and use in both the browser and the server side around time, like that's really nice. Um, like that, that's the other benefit. [00:23:18] Jeremy: Yeah. I think that's really powerful. And that right now, when someone's looking at running something in CloudFlare workers versus running something in the browser versus running something in. it's, I think a lot of people make the assumption it's just JavaScript, so I can use it as is. But it, it, there are at least currently, differences in what APIs are available to you. [00:23:43] Luca: Yep. Yep. Why bundle so many things into Deno? [00:23:46] Jeremy: Earlier you were talking about how Deno is more than just the runtime. It has a linter, formatter, file watcher there, there's all sorts of stuff in there. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit to the, the reasoning behind that [00:24:00] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:24:01] Jeremy: Having them all be separate things. [00:24:04] Luca: Yeah, so the, the reasoning here is essentially if you look at other modern run time or mo other modern languages, like Rust is a great example. Go is a great example. Even though Go was designed around the same time as Node, it has a lot of these same tools built in. And what it really shows is that if the ecosystem converges, like is essentially forced to converge on a single set of built-in tooling, a that built-in tooling becomes really, really excellent because everybody's using it. And also, it means that if you open any project written by any go developer, any, any rest developer, and you look at the tests, you immediately understand how the test framework works and you immediately understand how the assertions work. Um, and you immediately understand how the build system works and you immediately understand how the dependency imports work. And you immediately understand like, I wanna run this project and I wanna restart it when my file changes. Like, you immediately know how to do that because it's the same everywhere. Um, and this kind of feeling of having to learn one tool and then being able to use all of the projects, like being able to con contribute to open source when you're moving jobs, whatever, like between personal projects that you haven't touched in two years, you know, like being able to learn this once and then use it everywhere is such an incredibly powerful tool. Like, people don't appreciate this until they've used a runtime or, or, or language which provides this to them. Like, you can go to any go developer and ask them if they would like. There, there's this, there's this saying in the Go ecosystem, um, that Go FMT is nobody's favorite, but, or, uh, wait, no, I don't remember what the, how the saying goes, but the saying essentially implies that the way that go FMT formats code, maybe not everybody likes, but everybody loves go F M T anyway, because it just makes everything look the same. And like, you can read your friend's code, your, your colleagues code, your new jobs code, the same way that you did your code from two years ago. And that's such an incredibly powerful feeling. especially if it's like well integrated into your IDE you clone a repository, open that repository, and like your testing panel on the left hand side just populates with all the tests, and you can click on them and run them. And if an assertion fails, it's like the standard output format that you're already familiar with. And it's, it's, it's a really great feeling. and if you don't believe me, just go try it out and, and then you will believe me, (laughs) [00:26:25] Jeremy: Yeah. No, I, I'm totally with you. I, I think it's interesting because with JavaScript in particular, it feels like the default in the community is the opposite, right? There's so many different ways. Uh, there are so many different build tools and testing frameworks and, formatters, and it's very different than, like you were mentioning, a go or a Rust that are more recent languages where they just include that, all Bundled in. Yeah. [00:26:57] Luca: Yeah, and I, I think you can see this as well in, in the time that average JavaScript developer spends configuring their tooling compared to a rest developer. Like if I write Rust, I write Rust, like all day, every day. and I spend maybe two, 3% of my time configuring Rust tooling like. Doing dependency imports, opening a new project, creating a format or config file, I don't know, deleting the build directory, stuff like that. Like that's, that's essentially what it means for me to configure my rest tooling. Whereas if you compare this to like a front-end JavaScript project, like you have to deal with making sure that your React version is compatible with your React on version, it's compatible with your next version is compatible with your ve version is compatible with your whatever version, right? this, this is all not automatic. Making sure that you use the right, like as, as a front end developer, you developer. You don't have just NPM installed, no. You have NPM installed, you have yarn installed, you have PNPM installed. You probably have like, Bun installed. And, and, and I don't know to use any of these, you need to have corepack enabled in Node and like you need to have all of their global bin directories symlinked into your or, or, or, uh, included in your path. And then if you install something and you wanna update it, you don't know, did I install it with yarn? Did I install it with N pNPM? Like this is, uh, significant complexity and you, you tend to spend a lot of time dealing with dependencies and dealing with package management and dealing with like tooling configuration, setting up esent, setting up prettier. and I, I think that like, especially Prettier, for example, really showed, was, was one of the first things in the JavaScript ecosystem, which was like, no, we're not gonna give you a config where you, that you can spend like six hours configuring, it's gonna be like seven options and here you go. And everybody used it because, Nobody likes configuring things. It turns out, um, and even though there's always the people that say, oh, well, I won't use your tool unless, like, we, we get this all the time. Like, I'm not gonna use Deno FMT because I can't, I don't know, remove the semicolons or, or use single quotes or change my tab width to 16. Right? Like, wait until all of your coworkers are gonna scream at you because you set the tab width to 16 and then see what they change it to. And then you'll see that it's actually the exact default that, everybody uses. So it'll, it'll take a couple more years. But I think we're also gonna get there, uh, like Node is starting to implement a, a test runner. and I, I think over time we're also gonna converge on, on, on, on like some standard build tools. Like I think ve, for example, is a great example of this, like, Doing a front end project nowadays. Um, like building new front end tooling that's not built on Vite Yeah. Don't like, Vite's it's become the standard and I think we're gonna see that in a lot more places. We should settle on what tools to use [00:29:52] Jeremy: Yeah, though I, I think it's, it's tricky, right? Because you have so many people with their existing projects. You have people who are starting new projects and they're just searching the internet for what they should use. So you're, you're gonna have people on web pack, you're gonna have people on Vite, I guess now there's gonna be Turbo pack, I think is another one that's [00:30:15] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:30:16] Jeremy: There's, there's, there's all these different choices, right? And I, I think it's, it's hard to, to really settle on one, I guess, [00:30:26] Luca: Yeah, [00:30:27] Jeremy: uh, yeah. [00:30:27] Luca: like I, I, I think this is, this is in my personal opinion also failure of the Node Technical Steering committee, for the longest time to not decide that yes, we're going to bless this as the standard format for Node, and this is the standard package manager for Node. And they did, they sort of did, like, they, for example, node Blessed NPM as the standard, package manager for N for for node. But it didn't innovate on npm. Like no, the tech nodes, tech technical steering committee did not force NPM to innovate NPMs, a private company ultimately bought by GitHub and they had full control over how the NPM cli, um, evolved and nobody forced NPM to, to make sure that package install times are six times faster than they were. Three years ago, like nobody did that. so it didn't happen. And I think this is, this is really a failure of, of the, the, the, yeah, the no technical steering committee and also the wider JavaScript ecosystem of not being persistent enough with, with like focus on performance, focus on user experience, and, and focus on simplicity. Like things got so out of hand and I'm happy we're going in the right direction now, but, yeah, it was terrible for some time. (laughs) Node compatibility layer [00:31:41] Jeremy: I wanna talk a little bit about how we've been talking about Deno in the context of you just using Deno using its own standard library, but just recently last year you added a compatibility shim where people are able to use node libraries in Deno. [00:32:01] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:32:01] Jeremy: And I wonder if you could talk to, like earlier you had mentioned that Deno has, a different permissions model. on the website it mentions that Deno's HTTP server is two times faster than node in a Hello World example. And I'm wondering what kind of benefits people will still get from Deno if they choose to use packages from Node. [00:32:27] Luca: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, so I think a, again, this is sort of a like, so just to clarify what we actually implemented, like what we have is we have support for you to import NPM packages. Um, so you can import any NPM package from NPM, from your type script or JavaScript ECMAScript module, um, that you have, you already have for your Deno code. Um, and we will under the hood, make sure that is installed somewhere in some directory globally. Like PNPM does. There's no local node modules folder you have to deal with. There's no package of Jason you have to deal with. Um, and there's no, uh, package. Jason, like versioning things you need to deal with. Like what you do is you do import cowsay from NPM colon cowsay at one, and that will import cowsay with like the semver tag one. Um, and it'll like do the sim resolution the same way node does, or the same way NPM does rather. And what you get from that is that essentially it gives you like this backdoor to a callout to all of the existing node code that Isri been written, right? Like you cannot expect that Deno developers, write like, I don't know. There was this time when Deno did not really have that many, third party modules yet. It was very early on, and I don't know the, you either, if you wanted to connect to Postgres and there was no Postgres driver available, then the solution was to write your own Postgres driver. And that is obviously not great. Um, (laughs) . So the better solution here is to let users for these packages where there's no Deno native or, or, or web native or standard native, um, package for this yet that is importable with url. Um, specifiers, you can import this from npm. Uh, so it's sort of this like backdoor into the existing NPM ecosystem. And we explicitly, for example, don't allow you to, create a package.json file or, import bare node specifiers because we don't, we, we want to stay standards compliant here. Um, but to make this work effectively, we need to give you this little back door. Um, and inside of this back door. All hell is like, or like everything is terrible inside there, right? Like inside there you can do bare specifiers and inside there you can like, uh, there's package.json and there's crazy node resolution and underscore underscore DIRNAME and common js. And like all of that stuff is supported inside of this backdoor to make all the NPM packages work. But on the outside it's exposed as this nice, ESM only, NPM specifiers. and the, the reason you would want to use this over, like just using node directly is because again, like you wanna use TypeScript, no config, like necessary. You want to use, you wanna have a formatter you wanna have a linter, you wanna have tooling that like does testing and benchmarking and compiling or whatever. All of that's built in. You wanna run this on the edge, like close to your users and like 30 different, 35 different, uh, points of presence. Um, it's like, Okay, push it to your git repository. Go to this website, click a button two times, and it's running in 35 data centers. like this is, this is the kind of ex like developer experience that you can, you do not get. You, I will argue that you cannot get with Node right now. Like even if you're using something like ts-node, it is not possible to get the same level of developer experience that you do with Deno. And the, the, the same like speed at which you can iterate, iterate on your projects, like create new projects, iterate on them is like incredibly fast in Deno. Like, I can open a, a, a folder on my computer, create a single file, may not ts, put some code in there and then call Deno Run may not. And that's it. Like I don't, I did not need to do NPM install I did not need to do NPM init -y and remove the license and version fields and from, from the generated package.json and like set private to true and whatever else, right? It just all works out of the box. And I think that's, that's what a lot of people come to deno for and, and then ultimately stay for. And also, yeah, standards compliance. So, um, things you build in Deno now are gonna work in five, 10 years, with no hassle. Node shims and testing [00:36:39] Jeremy: And so with this compatibility layer or this, this shim, is it where the node code is calling out to node APIs and you're replacing those with Deno compatible equivalents? [00:36:54] Luca: Yeah, exactly. Like for example, we have a shim in place that shims out the node crypto API on top of the web crypto api. Like sort of, some, some people may be familiar with this in the form of, um, Browserify shims. if anybody still remembers those, it's essentially. , your front end tooling, you were able to import from like node crypto in your front end projects and then behind the scenes your web packs or your browser replies or whatever would take that import from node crypto and would replace it with like the shim that was essentially exposed the same APIs node crypto, but under the hood, wasn't implemented with native calls, but was implemented on top of web crypto, or implemented in user land even. And Deno does something similar. there's a couple edge cases of APIs that there's, where, where we do not expose the underlying thing that we shim to, to end users, outside of the node shim. So like there's some, some APIs that I don't know if I have a good example, like node nextTick for example. Um, like to properly be able to shim node nextTick, you need to like implement this within the event loop in the runtime. and. , you don't need this in Deno, because Deno, you use the web standard queueMicrotask to, to do this kind of thing. but to be able to shim it correctly and run node applications correctly, we need to have this sort of like backdoor into some ugly APIs, um, which, which natively integrate in the runtime, but, yeah, like allow, allow this node code to run. [00:38:21] Jeremy: A, anytime you're replacing a component with a, a shim, I think there's concerns about additional bugs or changes in behavior that can be introduced. Is that something that you're seeing and, and how are you accounting for that? [00:38:38] Luca: Yeah, that's, that's an excellent question. So this is actually a, a great concern that we have all the time. And it's not just even introducing bugs, sometimes it's removing bugs. Like sometimes there's bugs in the node standard library which are there, and people are relying on these bugs to be there for the applications to function correctly. And we've seen this a lot, and then we implement this and we implement from scratch and we don't make that same bug. And then the test fails or then the application fails. So what we do is, um, we actually run node's test suite against Deno's Shim layer. So Node has a very extensive test suite for its own standard library, and we can run this suite against, against our shims to find things like this. And there's still edge cases, obviously, which node, like there was, maybe there's a bug which node was not even aware of existing. Um, where maybe this, like it's is, it's now standard, it's now like intended behavior because somebody relies on it, right? Like the second somebody relies on, on some non-standard or some buggy behavior, it becomes intended. Um, but maybe there was no test that explicitly tests for this behavior. Um, so in that case we'll add our own tests to, to ensure that. But overall we can already catch a lot of these by just testing, against, against node's tests. And then the other thing is we run a lot of real code, like we'll try run Prisma and we'll try run Vite and we'll try run NextJS and we'll try run like, I don't know, a bunch of other things that people throw at us and, check that they work and they work and there's no bugs. Then we did our job well and our shims are implemented correctly. Um, and then there's obviously always the edge cases where somebody did something absolutely crazy that nobody thought possible. and then they'll open an issue on the Deno repo and we scratch our heads for three days and then we'll fix it. And then in the next release there'll be a new bug that we added to make the compatibility with node better. so yeah, but I, yeah. Running tests is the, is the main thing running nodes test. Performance should be equal or better [00:40:32] Jeremy: Are there performance implications? If someone is running an Express App or an NextJS app in Deno, will they get any benefits from the Deno runtime and performance? [00:40:45] Luca: Yeah. It's actually, there is performance implications and they're usually. The opposite of what people think they are. Like, usually when you think of performance implications, it's always a negative thing, right? It's always okay. Like you, it's like a compromise. like the shim layer must be slower than the real node, right? It's not like we can run express faster than node can run, express. and obviously not everything is faster in Deno than it is in node, and not everything is faster in node than it is in Deno. It's dependent on the api, dependent on, on what each team decided to optimize. Um, and this also extends to other run times. Like you can always cherry pick results, like, I don't know, um, to, to make your runtime look faster in certain benchmarks. but overall, what really matters is that you do not like, the first important step for for good node compatibility is to make sure that if somebody runs your code or runs their node code in Deno or your other run type or whatever, It performs at least the same. and then anything on top of that great cherry on top. Perfect. but make sure the baselines is at least the same. And I think, yeah, we have very few APIs where we behave, where we, where, where like there's a significant performance degradation in Deno compared to Node. Um, and like we're actively working on these things. like Deno is not a, a, a project that's done, right? Like we have, I think at this point, like 15 or 16 or 17 engineers working on Deno, spanning across all of our different projects. And like, we have a whole team that's dedicated to performance, um, and a whole team that's dedicated node compatibility. so like these things get addressed and, and we make patch releases every week and a minor release every four weeks. so yeah, it's, it's not a standstill. It's, uh, constantly improving. What should go into the standard library? [00:42:27] Jeremy: Uh, something that kind of makes Deno stand out as it's standard library. There's a lot more in there than there is in in the node one. [00:42:38] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:42:39] Jeremy: Uh, I wonder if you could speak to how you make decisions on what should go into it. [00:42:46] Luca: Yeah, so early on it was easier. Early on, the, the decision making process was essentially, is this something that a top 100 or top 1000 NPM library implements? And if it is, let's include it. and the decision making is still short of based on that. But right now we've already implemented most of the low hanging fruit. So things that we implement now are, have, have discussion around them whether we should implement them. And we have a process where, well we have a whole team of engineers on our side and we also have community members that, that will review prs and, and, and make comments. Open issues and, and review those issues, to sort of discuss the pros and cons of adding any certain new api. And sometimes it's also that somebody opens an issue that's like, I want, for example, I want an API to, to concatenate two unit data arrays together, which is something you can really easily do node with buffer dot con cat, like the scary buffer thing. and there's no standards way of doing that right now. So we have to have a little utility function that does that. But in parallel, we're thinking about, okay, how do we propose, an addition to the web standards now that makes it easy to concatenate iterates in the web standards, right? yeah, there's a lot to it. Um, but it's, it's really, um, it's all open, like all of our, all of our discussions for, for, additions to the standard library and things like that. It's all, all, uh, public on GitHub and the GitHub issues and GitHub discussions and GitHub prs. Um, so yeah, that's, that's where we do that. [00:44:18] Jeremy: Yeah, cuz to give an example, I was a little surprised to see that there is support for markdown front matter built into the standard library. But when you describe it as we look at the top a hundred thousand packages, are people looking at markdown? Are they looking at front matter? I, I'm sure there's a fair amount that are so that that makes sense. [00:44:41] Luca: Yeah, like it sometimes, like that one specifically was driven by, like, our team was just building a lot of like little blog pages and things like that. And every time it was either you roll your own front matter part or you look for one, which has like a subtle bug here and the other one has a subtle bug there and really not satisfactory with any of them. So, we, we roll that into the standard library. We add good test coverage for it good, add good documentation for it, and then it's like just a resource that people can rely on. Um, and you don't, you then don't have to make the choice of like, do I use this library to do my front meta parsing or the other library? No, you just use the one that's in the standard library. It's, it's also part of this like user experience thing, right? Like it's just a much nicer user experience, not having to make a choice, about stuff like that. Like completely inconsequential stuff. Like which library do we use to do front matter parsing? (laughs) [00:45:32] Jeremy: yeah. I mean, I think when, when that stuff is not there, then I think the temptation is to go, okay, let me see what node modules there are that will let me parse the front matter. Right. And then it, it sounds like probably ideally you want people to lean more on what's either in the standard library or what's native to the Deno ecosystem. Yeah. [00:46:00] Luca: Yeah. Like the, the, one of the big benefits is that the Deno Standard Library is implemented on top of web standards, right? Like it's, it's implemented on top of these standard APIs. so for example, there's node front matter libraries which do not run in the browser because the browser does not have the buffer global. maybe it's a nice library to do front matter pricing with, but. , you choose it and then three days later you decide that actually this code also needs to run in the browser, and then you need to go switch your front matter library. Um, so, so those are also kind of reasons why we may include something in Strand Library, like maybe there's even really good module already to do something. Um, but if there's certain reliance on specific node features that, um, we would like that library to also be compatible with, with, with web standards, we'll, uh, we might include in the standard library, like for example, YAML Parser, um, or the YAML Parser in the standard library is, is a fork of, uh, of the node YAML module. and it's, it's essentially that, but cleaned up and, and made to use more standard APIs rather than, um, node built-ins. [00:47:00] Jeremy: Yeah, it kind of reminds me a little bit of when you're writing a front end application, sometimes you'll use node packages to do certain things and they won't work unless you have a compatibility shim where the browser can make use of certain node APIs. And if you use the APIs that are built into the browser already, then you won't, you won't need to deal with that sort of thing. [00:47:26] Luca: Yeah. Also like less Bundled size, right? Like if you don't have to shim that, that's less, less code you have to ship to the client. WebAssembly use cases [00:47:33] Jeremy: Another thing I've seen with Deno is it supports running web assembly. [00:47:40] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:47:40] Jeremy: So you can export functions and call them from type script. I was curious if you've seen practical uses of this in production within the context of Deno. [00:47:53] Luca: Yeah. there's actually a Bunch of, of really practical use cases, so probably the most executed bit of web assembly inside of Deno right now is actually yes, build like, yes, build has a web assembly, build like yeses. Build is something that's written and go. You have the choice of either running. Um, natively in machine code as, as like an ELF process on, on Linux or on on Windows or whatever. Or you can use the web assembly build and then it runs in web assembly. And the web assembly build is maybe 50% slower than the, uh, native build, but that is still significantly faster than roll up or, or, or, or I don't know, whatever else people use nowadays to do JavaScript Bun, I don't know. I, I just use es build always, um, So, um, for example, the Deno website, is running on Deno Deploy. And Deno Deploy does not allow you to run Subprocesses because it's, it's like this edge run time, which, uh, has certain security permissions that it's, that are not granted, one of them being sub-processes. So it needs to execute ES build. And the way it executes es build is by running them inside a web assembly. Um, because web assembly is secure, web assembly is, is something which is part of the JavaScript sandbox. It's inside the JavaScript sandbox. It doesn't poke any holes out. Um, so it's, it's able to run within, within like very strict security context. . Um, and then other examples are, I don't know, you want to have a HTML sanitizer, which is actually built on the real HTML par in a browser. we, we have an hdml sanitizer called com or, uh, ammonia, I don't remember. There's, there's an HTML sanitizer library on denoland slash x, which is built on the html parser from Firefox. Uh, which like ensures essentially that your html, like if you do HTML sanitization, you need to make sure your HTML par is correct, because if it's not, you might like, your browser might parse some HTML one way and your sanitizer pauses it another way and then it doesn't sanitize everything correctly. Um, so there's this like the Firefox HTML parser compiled to web assembly. Um, you can use that to. HTML sanitization, or the Deno documentation generation tool, for example. Uh, Deno Doc, there's a web assembly built for it that allows you to programmatically, like generate documentation for, for your type script modules. Um, yeah, and, and also like, you know, deno fmt is available as a WebAssembly module for programmatic access and a Bunch of other internal Deno, programs as well. Like, or, uh, like components, not programs. [00:50:20] Jeremy: What are some of the current limitations of web assembly and Deno for, for example, from web assembly, can I make HTTP requests? Can I read files? That sort of thing. [00:50:34] Luca: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So web assembly, like when you spawn as web assembly, um, they're called instances, WebAssembly instances. It runs inside of the same vm, like the same, V8 isolate is what they're called, but. it does not have it, it's like a completely fresh sandbox, sort of, in the sense that I told you that between a runtime and like an engine essentially implements no IO calls, right? And a runtime does, like a runtime, pokes holds into the, the, the engine. web assembly by default works the same way that there is no holes poked into its sandbox. So you have to explicitly poke some holes. Uh, if you want to do HTTP calls, for example, when, when you create web assembly instance, it gives you, or you can give it something called imports, uh, which are essentially JavaScript function bindings, which you can call from within the web assembly. And you can use those function bindings to do anything you can from JavaScript. You just have to pass them through explicitly. and. . Yeah. Depending on how you write your web assembly, like if you write it in Rust, for example, the tooling is very nice and you can just call some JavaScript code from your Rust, and then the build system will automatically make sure that the right function bindings are passed through with the right names. And like, you don't have to deal with anything. and if you're writing go, it's slightly more complicated. And if you're writing like raw web assembly, like, like the web assembly, text format and compiling that to a binary, then like you have to do everything yourself. Right? It's, it's sort of the difference between writing C and writing JavaScript. Like, yeah. What level of abstraction do you want? It's definitely possible though, and that's for limitations. it, the same limitations as, as existing browsers apply. like the web assembly support in Deno is equivalent to the web assembly support in Chrome. so you can do, uh, many things like multi-threading and, and stuff like that already. but especially around, shared mutable memory, um, and having access to that memory from JavaScript. That's something which is a real difficulty with web assembly right now. yeah, growing web assembly memory is also rather difficult right now. There's, there's a, there's a couple inherent limitations right now with web assembly itself. Um, but those, those will be worked out over time. And, and Deno is like very up to date with the version of, of the standard, it, it implements, um, through v8. Like we're, we're, we're up to date with Chrome Beta essentially all the time. So, um, yeah. Any, anything you see in, in, in Chrome beta is gonna be in Deno already. Deno Deploy [00:52:58] Jeremy: So you talked a little bit about this before, the Deno team, they have their own, hosting. Platform called Deno Deploy. So I wonder if you could explain what that is. [00:53:12] Luca: Yeah, so Deno has this really nice, this really nice concept of permissions which allow you to, sorry, I'm gonna start somewhere slightly, slightly unrelated. Maybe it sounds like it's unrelated, but you'll see in a second. It's not unrelated. Um, Deno has this really nice permission system which allows you to sandbox Deno programs to only allow them to do certain operations. For example, in Deno, by default, if you try to open a file, it'll air out and say you don't have read permissions to read this file. And then what you do is you specify dash, dash allow read um, maybe you have to give it. they can either specify, allow, read, and then it'll grant to read access to the entire file system. Or you can explicitly specify files or folders or, any number of things. Same goes for right permissions, same goes for network permissions. Um, same goes for running subprocesses, all these kind of things. And by limiting your permissions just a little bit. Like, for example, by just disabling sub-processes and foreign function interface, but allowing everything else, allowing reeds and allowing network access and all that kind of stuff. we can run Deno programs in a way that is significantly more cost effective to you as the end user than, and, and like we can cold start them much faster than, like you may be able to with a, with a more conventional container based, uh, system. So what, what do you, what Deno Deploy is, is a way to run JavaScript or Deno Code, on our data centers all across the world with very little latency. like you can write some JavaScript code which execute, which serves HTTP requests deploy that to our platform, and then we'll make sure to spin that code up all across the world and have your users be able to access it through some URL or, or, or some, um, custom domain or something like that. and this is some, this is very similar to CloudFlare workers, for example. Um, and it's like Netlify Edge functions is built on top of Deno Deploy. Like Netlify Edge functions is implemented on top of Deno Deploy, um, through our sub hosting product. yeah, essentially Deno Deploy is, is, um, yeah, a cloud hosting service for JavaScript, um, which allows you to execute arbitrary JavaScript. and there there's a couple, like different directions we're going there. One is like more end user focused, where like you link your GitHub repository and. Like, we'll, we'll have a nice experience like you do with Netlify and Versace, that word like your commits automatically get deployed and you get preview deployments and all that kind of thing. for your backend code though, rather than for your front end websites. Although you could also write front-end websites and you know, obviously, and the other direction is more like business focused. Like you're writing a SaaS application and you want to allow the user to customize, the check like you're writing a SaaS application that provides users with the ability to write their own online store. Um, and you want to give them some ability to customize the checkout experience in some way. So you give them a little like text editor that they can type some JavaScript into. And then when, when your SaaS application needs to hit this code path, it sends a request to us with the code, we'll execute that code for you in a secure way. In a secure sandbox. You can like tell us you, this code only has access to like my API server and no other networks to like prevent data exfiltration, for example. and then you do, you can have all this like super customizable, code in inside of your, your SaaS application without having to deal with any of the operational complexities of scaling arbitrary code execution, or even just doing arbitrary code execution, right? Like it's, this is a very difficult problem and give it to someone else and we deal with it and you just get the benefits. yeah, that's Deno Deploy, and it's built by the same team that builds the Deno cli. So, um, all the, all of your favorite, like Deno cli, or, or Deno APIs are available in there. It's just as web standard is Deno, like you have fetch available, you have blob available, you have web crypto available, that kind of thing. yeah. Running code in V8 isolates [00:56:58] Jeremy: So when someone ships you their, their code and you run it, you mentioned that the, the cold start time is very low. Um, how, how is the code being run? Are people getting their own process? It sounds like it's not, uh, using containers. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about how that works. [00:57:20] Luca: Yeah, yeah, I can, I can give a high level overview of how it works. So, the way it works is that we essentially have a pool of, of Deno processes ready. Well, it's not quite Deno processes, it's not the same Deno CLI that you download. It's like a modified version of the Deno CLI based on the same infrastructure, that we have spun up across all of our different regions across the world, uh, across all of our different data centers. And then when we get a request, we'll route that request, um, the first time we get request for that, that we call them deployments, that like code, right? We'll take one of these idle Deno processes and will assign that code to run in that process, and then that process can go serve the requests. and these process, they're, they're, they're isolated and they're, you. it's essentially a V8 isolate. Um, and it's a very, very slim, it's like, it's a much, much, much slimmer version of the Deno cli essentially. Uh, which the only thing it can do is JavaScript execution and like, it can't even execute type script, for example, like type script is we pre-process it up front to make the the cold start faster. and then what we do is if you don't get a request for some amount of. , we'll, uh, spin down that, um, that isolate and, uh, we'll spin up a new idle one in its place. And then, um, if you get another request, I don't know, an hour later for that same deployment, we'll assign it to a new isolate. And yeah, that's a cold start, right? Uh, if you have an isolate which receives, or a, a deployment rather, which receives a Bunch of traffic, like let's say you receive a hundred requests per second, we can send a Bunch of that traffic to the same isolate. Um, and we'll make sure that if, that one isolate isn't able to handle that load, we'll spin it out over multiple isolates and we'll, we'll sort of load balance for you. Um, and we'll make sure to always send to the, to the point of present that's closest to, to the user making the request. So they get very minimal latency. and they get we, we've these like layers of load balancing in place and, and, and. I'm glossing over a Bunch of like security related things here about how these, these processes are actually isolated and how we monitor to ensure that you don't break out of these processes. And for example, Deno Deploy does, it looks like you have a file system cuz you can read files from the file system. But in reality, Deno Deploy does not have a file system. Like the file system is a global virtual file system. which is, is, uh, yeah, implemented completely differently than it is in Deno cli. But as an end user you don't have to care about that because the only thing you care about is that it has the exact same API as the Deno cli and you can run your code locally and if it works there, it's also gonna work in deploy. yeah, so that's, that's, that's kind of. High level of Deno Deploy. If, if any of this sounds interesting to anyone, by the way, uh, we're like very actively hiring on, on Deno Deploy. I happen to be the, the tech lead for, for a Deno Deploy product. So I'm, I'm always looking for engineers, to, to join our ranks and, and build cool distributed systems. Deno.com/jobs. [01:00:15] Jeremy: for people who aren't familiar with the isolates, are these each run in their own processes, or do you have a single process and that has a whole Bunch of isolates inside it? [01:00:28] Luca: in, in the general case, you can say that we run, uh, one isolate per process. but there's many asterisks on that. Um, because, it's, it's very complicated. I'll just say it's very complicated. Uh, in, in the general case though, it's, it's one isolate per process. Yeah. Configuring permissions [01:00:45] Jeremy: And then you touched a little bit on the permissions system. Like you gave the example of somebody could have a website where they let their users give them code to execute. how does it look in terms of specifying what permissions people have? Like, is that a configuration file? Are those flags you pass in? What, what does that look? [01:01:08] Luca: Yeah. So, so that product is called sub hosting. It's, um, slightly different from our end user platform. Um, it's essentially a service that allows you to, like, you email us, well, we'll send you a, um, onboard you, and then what you can do is you can send HTTP requests to a certain end point with a, authentication token and. a reference to some code to execute. And then what we'll do is, we'll, um, when we receive that HTTP request, we'll fetch the code, it's spin up and isolate, execute the code. execute the code. We serve the request, return you the response, um, and then we'll pipe logs to you and, and stuff like that. and the, and, and part of that is also when we, when we pull the, um, the, the code for to spin up the isolate, that code doesn't just include the code that we're executing, but also includes things like permissions, and, and various other, we call this isolate configuration. Um, you can inspect, this is all public. we have public docs for this at Deno.com/subhosting. I think. Yes, Deno.com/subhosting. [01:02:08] Jeremy: And is that built on top of something that's a part of the public Deno project, the open source part? Or is this specific to this sub hosting

Les bundlers (générateur de bundle), on les utilise au quotidien. Ils sont indispensables dans les outils des développeurs front et ils ont beaucoup évolué. Nous passons en revue les principaux bundlers les plus utilisés et surtout nous parlons des nouvelles générations de bundler. Pourquoi on utilise des bundlers : Limiter les requêtes, minifier et éviter de polluer le scope global (window). Avoir un code plus propre découpé en module. Et une réutilisation du code. Avant les bundlers: Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE). (function foo() { return bar; })(); Plugin jQuery qui s'appelait à travers jQuery (function ( $ ) { $.fn.greenify = function() { this.css( "color", "green" ); return this; }; }( jQuery )); Les principaux types de modules : CommonJS: require('..'); module.exports = ...; - AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition): ```js define(['dep1', 'dep2'], function (dep1, dep2) { //Define the module value by returning a value. return function () {}; }); UMD (Universal Module Definition): (function (root, factory) { if (typeof define === "function" && define.amd) { define(["jquery", "underscore"], factory); } else if (typeof exports === "object") { module.exports = factory(require("jquery"), require("underscore")); } else { root.Requester = factory(root.$, root._); } }(this, function ($, _) { // this is where I defined my module implementation var Requester = { // ... }; return Requester; })); ESM (EcmaScript Modules): compatibilité 92% https://caniuse.com/es6-module import toto from ...; export default ...; Browserify (js + plugin pour autre fichier) première release en 2011. Uniquement JS. Permettait de créer des modules avec require/module.exports: http://browserify.org/ Brunch (js, css, etc..) simple, peu de config, skeleton: https://brunch.io/ Webpack (js, css, ...): https://webpack.js.org/ Rollup: Top pour faire des packages. Capable de compiler en differents types (CommonJs, AMD, IIFE) https://rollupjs.org/guide/en/ Nouvelle génération de bundler Snowpack: En mode dev, pas de bundle. Recharge uniquement le fichier modifié. En production, par défaut, il fait une optimisation optionnelle, mais on est toujours sur du ESM. On peut ajouter des plugins (webpack, Rollup) pour faire un seul fichier. https://www.snowpack.dev/ Rome: https://github.com/rome/tools Vite: Fais beaucoup de choses "out of the box”. Le mode dev est en ESM. Divise en 2 modules: le code source de l'app et les dépendances. Il prébundle les dépendances, car elles changent peu lors du dev. Le code source est en ESM. Fais un bundle (sans ESBuild mais avec Rollup) pour la production pour le moment. https://vitejs.dev/ ESBuild (Go) vraiment jeune pas encore prêt pour la production. Par contre extrêmement rapide et très prometteur. https://esbuild.github.io/ WMR: https://github.com/preactjs/wmr Podcast présenté par : Alexandre Duval @xlanex6 Patrick Faramaz @PatrickFaramaz

Wir tauchen ein in die Welt der Module Bundler und beschäftigen uns hauptsächlich mit webpack. Wie setzen wir es in unseren Produkten ein, was waren Hürden, die uns auf dem Weg begegnet sind und welche Plugins und Loader sind für uns unersetzlich? Endlich waren wir mal wieder in gewohnter Runde im heimischen Konferenzraum beisammen und konnten so auch Feedback von euch beantworten und mit ein paar Themen aufräumen. Leider hat diese Folge auch etwas Trauriges: Unser Podcast-Papa Mario verlässt Lotum und versucht sich an einem eigenen Unternehmen. Dafür wünschen wir ihm alles erdenklich Gute! Toll, zu was du diesen Podcast gemacht hast! Unsere liebsten Plugins: URL-Loader Bundle-Analyzer Einfach HTML-Dateien erstellen mit diesem Plugin Picks of the Day Sebi: redis ebook Mario: Augen lasern Fabi: Mobilfunk-Werbung Schreibt uns! Schickt uns eure Themenwünsche und euer Feedback. podcast@programmier.bar Folgt uns! Bleibt auf dem Laufenden über zukünftige Folgen und Meetups und beteiligt euch an Community-Diskussionen. Twitter Instagram Facebook Meetup YouTube Erfahrt hier, wann das nächste Meetup in unserem Office in Bad Nauheim stattfindet. Meetup Musik: Hanimo 

Panel: Charles Max Wood Chris Fritz Erik Hanchett Divya Sasidharan Special Guests: Hassan Djirdeh In this episode of Views on Vue, the panelists discuss state management with Vue.js with Hassan Djirdeh. Hassan is a front-end engineer developer based out of Toronto, Canada and works for the ecommerce company Shopify as his full-time job. In his free-time he does anything and everything related to Vue and has also recently helped publish a book called Fullstack Vue. They talk about Vue CLI 3.0, state management patterns, his talk The Importance of State Management in Vue, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Hassan intro Vue Recently started using the Vue CLI 3.0 How is Vue CLI 3.0 different from 2.0? More obvious to understand what people need for their application Vuex and Vue Router Great way to get things started What if you’re using a configuration from Vue CLI 2.0? Webpack or Browserify Making things easier and better for new Vue developers Further configuring your projects Have you found anything you haven’t been able to configure with Vue CLI 3? Git integration Vuex Modules Linting Can you create your own templates with the CLI? How much should the CLI tool walk the developer through the process? Integrating ESLint into a project Runtime errors Pre-commit hook The Importance of State Management in Vue – Hassan’s Talk And much, much more! Links: Shopify Fullstack Vue Vue CLI 3.0 Vue Vuex Vue Router Webpack Browserify Vuex Modules The Importance of State Management in Vue – Hassan’s Talk ESLint Hassan’s Medium Hassan’s GitHub @djirdehh hassandjirdeh.com Sponsors: Kendo UI FreshBooks Picks: Charles GDPR Solo Movie   Chris Sarah Drasner Repo - loldash Jean-Claude Van Johnson Dark Primer Erik Wallabyjs.com Divya Gatsby.js SmooshGate blog Hassan Avengers: Infinity War Lambda School

Panel: Charles Max Wood Chris Fritz Erik Hanchett Divya Sasidharan Special Guests: Hassan Djirdeh In this episode of Views on Vue, the panelists discuss state management with Vue.js with Hassan Djirdeh. Hassan is a front-end engineer developer based out of Toronto, Canada and works for the ecommerce company Shopify as his full-time job. In his free-time he does anything and everything related to Vue and has also recently helped publish a book called Fullstack Vue. They talk about Vue CLI 3.0, state management patterns, his talk The Importance of State Management in Vue, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Hassan intro Vue Recently started using the Vue CLI 3.0 How is Vue CLI 3.0 different from 2.0? More obvious to understand what people need for their application Vuex and Vue Router Great way to get things started What if you’re using a configuration from Vue CLI 2.0? Webpack or Browserify Making things easier and better for new Vue developers Further configuring your projects Have you found anything you haven’t been able to configure with Vue CLI 3? Git integration Vuex Modules Linting Can you create your own templates with the CLI? How much should the CLI tool walk the developer through the process? Integrating ESLint into a project Runtime errors Pre-commit hook The Importance of State Management in Vue – Hassan’s Talk And much, much more! Links: Shopify Fullstack Vue Vue CLI 3.0 Vue Vuex Vue Router Webpack Browserify Vuex Modules The Importance of State Management in Vue – Hassan’s Talk ESLint Hassan’s Medium Hassan’s GitHub @djirdehh hassandjirdeh.com Sponsors: Kendo UI FreshBooks Picks: Charles GDPR Solo Movie   Chris Sarah Drasner Repo - loldash Jean-Claude Van Johnson Dark Primer Erik Wallabyjs.com Divya Gatsby.js SmooshGate blog Hassan Avengers: Infinity War Lambda School

Toran Billups: @toranb | GitHub | Blog Toran Billips joined us for an insightful conversation regarding glimmer-redux: Predictable state management for Glimmer apps. Resources: Glimmer Redux Demystified Talk from Tom Dale on glimmer internals (contrast with Preact made in this talk) ember-redux Glimmer progress report that mentions the migration to Glimmer 0.8 (Big Changes) Blog post following EmberConf 2017 that announced GlimmerJS (for the Ember dev) The Frontside Podcast 086: Routing in Ember with Alex Matchneer An ember-rideshare Blog Post A Rollup plugin for glimmer-redux RollupJS Transcript ELRICK: Hello and welcome to another Frontside Podcast, Episode 89. My name is Elrick Ryan, a developer here at the Frontside. I'm joined by Wil Wilsman, another developer here at the Frontside. Wil, how are you doing? WIL: I'm good. How are you? ELRICK: I'm great, man. I'm excited for this podcast that we have coming up here. Today we are fortunate to have with us a podcast elite member now, Mr Toran Billups. Toran, how are you doing? TORAN: Oh, man. I joined the elite platinum club or something? ELRICK: Yes, you are in the platinum club right now. I think this is probably what? Your third or fourth episode by now? TORAN: Oh, yeah. I think the fourth. ELRICK: Oh, yeah. You're in the elite club right now. You are a Midwest programmer and I hear there is a difference between a Silicon Valley programmer and a Midwest programmer. Could you tell us about what the difference is? Because it's the first time I've heard anything about this. TORAN: Admittedly, I stole this from a very popular developer, Justin Searls who spoke at length one time on a podcast, not too different in this one about his experiences in consulting for companies, who are more in the startup phase or a company that you'll find in Silicon Valley that is mostly just trying to test an idea and get to market, versus his experience for finance or insurance companies based out of the Midwest. I like that idea because my experiences have taught me. I'm a little bit happier when I'm working for companies that are interested in quality or attributes of quality and view the software longevity as mission-critical versus a software that is really just a byproduct of an interesting idea and if we validate that idea in a market, we can always rewrite the software later. Midwest, I guess the short version is we care about the work we're doing and we understand that rewrites are difficult, if ever possible. ELRICK: Interesting, so the Midwest seems to be concerned with long term goals. TORAN: Yeah, I think sustainable -- ELRICK: Sustainable software, at least. TORAN: Yep. ELRICK: Today, you are joining us to not only talk about the Midwest and the beautiful Midwest programmers. You're here to talk about Glimmer Redux. TORAN: Glimmer Redux is a little library I wrote, I think last month. I should start off by asking you guys if you're familiar with a Glimmer JS or if you've heard of that. ELRICK: I've heard of Glimmer JS. I haven't had an opportunity to play around or mess around with it yet. I don't know if that's good or bad because I'm just really busy but I really want to get into it. Wil, what about yourself? WIL: I've read through the docs but I haven't played with it at all. It looks really nice. TORAN: I think the joke that was off the air last time I was on, Wil you might remember this. You're on that podcast with Charles. I said something like, "I'm not young enough to actually be working with Glimmer," and I felt that way for a long time because one thing you should know is it's a pre-1.0 and if you guys have ever worked in a pre-1.0 ecosystem, myself the biggest experience I have to draw from is really pre-1.0 Ember and there were some big changes before 1.0. You can imagine back to that throwaway comment about being very young, there was actually a big change in Glimmer itself recently where they decided to... I don't know if the right word is Pascal Case but they've literally gone away from that 'dasharized' components. It used to have 'foo-bar' and in your template, you would actually see lower case of 'foo-bar' and now that would just be all uppercase. Well, not all uppercase but 'FooBar' and no dash, which is a big change recently. WIL: So a class case, kind of like React or JSX. TORAN: Yeah, exactly. They have a great blog post. Actually, we can reference that in the show notes, about some of these big changes in that release. It was Glimmer 0.8 so it's still, it's making its way to the 1.0 but I got interested in this really for two reasons in the last couple of months. The first was, if you actually go build something with Glimmer -- and this is my experience -- is for the novice programmer just taking a look at it, it's really just a way to use web components to build an application. There's no routing. There's no opinions, really. There's no services like you have in Ember or contexts like you have in React. The first challenge you run up against is when you get beyond a single component or two components and suddenly, you need to share some state across this application. How do you do that? If you guys have some experience, I know the Frontside, with React, if you're not using MobX or Redux or something like that, a lot of times you'll see this pattern where you're actually passing a piece of state through the entire tree or the shared state through a big part of the component tree. Of course, that becomes painful as the application gets to a certain size. One of the things I thought about is if I was to build a real application, the one in mind that was certainly not built yet because I'm not using Glimmer at work but I always think about the ember-rideshare. I know you guys had Alex Matchneer, recently talking about routing and Alex mentions in that episode this challenge for the Ember router today, to be reactive to server-sent events. In the case, imagine you have an Uber or a Lyft app and after the ride is over, the server wants to send an event, maybe and then the app needs to react to that event -- sending you maybe to a new route or sending you back to the map to pick a new ride. The gist of the ride share app is, and Alex, of course I would reference anyone to that podcast, he does a lot better job describing the routing challenges and those are a little bit out of scope for this discussion, but imagine you're going to build an app that ambitious and you're going to build a Lyft in Glimmer. What I found was missing is really what we take for granted in Ember, which is the Ember Service and that is like a singleton or an object that allows you to have a piece of state and then share that state around by injecting that service in only the components that need to reach up and grab that shared state. Redux, which I know your audience is pretty familiar with but a quick recap, Redux is just kind of a global JavaScript object that has state and there's often a library that lets you connect to that state so you can use it in your various components. Glimmer Redux is no different than that, actually. It just allows you, instead of having to create maybe one global JavaScript object and kind of pass it down the hierarchy, you can instead just connect the components that need to be aware of Redux. The ones that don't, of course they just don't connect. ELRICK: I know that you had a hand or build ember-redux and now you build Glimmer Redux. Were there any challenges between building those two different add-ons into two different ecosystems? TORAN: I should take one minor step back because that question is a great segue. I didn't want to touch on the second motivation for Glimmer Redux, which is actually really closely related here and that is, of course I did write ember-redux so with every open source project, there's a little selfish motivation here. I imagine last year when Glimmer was announced at EmberConf that there would be a story from Glimmer to Ember. The idea being you're a small startup, you just want to get your web application going, you don't necessarily like all the big conventions or you just don't think you need all of Ember when you get started but six months down the road, you're suddenly looking at tree shaking and lazy loading with engines and you're thinking, "I wish we had that." Realistically speaking, like today what would a transition for a Glimmer shop to Ember be. Honestly, I think it's tough without a library like Glimmer Redux. Of course, I wrote this with pretty much a mere of the connect API. If people were to check out the ReadMe of Glimmer Redux and ember-redux and you looked at a connected or redux-aware component in both of those cases, the best case scenario is the only difference would be in the import. Instead of import connect from a Glimmer Redux, you would be import connect from ember-redux. Everything else underneath, all the ecosystem of Redux that you can use and both are completely compatible. In fact, if you were to move, imagine you Ember new and you're thinking, "I got to move my Glimmer ride-share to ember-rideshare. Since Redux does a good job in encapsulating all of the state transformations in vanilla JavaScript, you don't have to really worry about the differences between a number object and not having Ember object. After you did Ember new, essentially you would copy over your components. For the most part, they're still template-driven. A lot of handlebars and a lot of TypeScript to JavaScript is the biggest mismatch you would have between Glimmer and coming over to Ember, of course but there is Ember CLI TypeScript or Ember TypeScript, I think. Long story short, you essentially copy the directories of your reducers or middleware from your Glimmer app over to Ember and there should be no changes necessary at all. ELRICK: I know that is the dream that you touched on, I think they phrase it as 'NPM installing your way up to Ember.' In your perspective, do you think that is going to be a thing? Is it going to get there? What are your feelings on that? TORAN: I would definitely be in trouble if I didn't say upfront that I'm not on the Ember core team. Sometimes, people get that confused for some reason but I don't speak for the core team and I'm not really privy to anything. But I do think that the core team has this in mind that there will be a set of NPM installable modules that eventually land you the full set of tools and abstractions that we see in Ember today. A big one that I'd hit on earlier is services. What will services or the Glimmer 0.5 version of services look like when it lands and what about routing and those sort of things? This was really my personal take on how could I make that migration right now without asking permission from the core team. In a Glimmer Redux, I think honestly it offers a good 80% of that. You still have the routing issue, which is a little challenging and you have the TypeScript issue, which you just have to be aware of some of the limitations of using TypeScript in Ember. ELRICK: That's an excellent point that you made because when people outside of the core team take it upon themselves to then try to implement different things around the ecosystem, that can then be motivation or an example for people outside of the core team to see like, "This is a possible solution to a goal we're trying to reach." Kudos to you. TORAN: Back to your original question about 15 minutes ago, what was different about the ecosystems writing ember-redux the add-on and Glimmer Redux, which is... I don't really even want to call it an add-on. I kind of label it as a Glimmer library but to your point just a second ago, when I got interested and saying, "I wrote Glimmer Redux, now I want to share it so other Glimmer authors don't need to copy/paste this file," and the first resistance I hit up on is there really is no Glimmer library or Glimmer add-on. You could write an Ember add-on because if you guys get into Glimmer, you'll find this as well. There are certain hooks that are used in the Glimmer build process where Ember add-ons like Ember CLI SASS can be used from Glimmer. But the challenge I had using an Ember add-on, of course is that this wasn't an Ember component or anything Ember related. It needed to really be test driven from a Glimmer apps. Really, if you went to NPM installers, what you're pulling in is effectively my Glimmer app that also exports publicly this connect function, which is not necessarily you're leading, maybe anything to core team that could happen. A big reason for that as well and one of the challenges building this, is that Glimmer right now, after to try to emulate my 'quasi-success' in doing this, is really bring your own build system, to actually share a Glimmer components or internals like this connect API that Glimmer components can use. What I mean by that is on the website, one of the challenges I faced was -- this isn't a knock against the core team, this is just my honest experiences -- when I read the Glimmer JS docs and it says right in the installing guide, "Glimmer uses Ember CLI, this battle-tested command line interface from the Ember project." Now, pause right there because again, not to beat up on the Ember core team or anything but assuming in that one sentence that they're using Ember app, what I noticed when I opened the Ember CLI build file is the project was actually a Glimmer app. Now, I did a little bit of digging here and I think this is validated, at least back when I worked on Glimmer Redux last month, that Glimmer app is not like inheriting or pulling in a bunch of shared code from Ember app. It's actually a completely separate build tool. As part of this process, I actually for the first time had to go through and learn Rollup and understand how the Broccoli process is kicked off, how both Rollup and Babel are used to build this and then how to apply some convention. If you guys are familiar with Ember, you have this add-on directory and an app directory. The guidance from the Ember team is around how to structure add-ons. Of course, you write all of your kind of private-ish or add-on code in the add-on directory and then whatever you think will be public, you export from the app directory and that sort of merges it into the tree when the application is built. People are allowed to use your code but then also, they can override that code. One of the challenges here is if I wanted that exact same API and I want people to make this migration from Glimmer to Ember using Redux, I had to actually invent that convention so I wrote a Rollup plugin and it's all listed in the docs here. One of the strange things people who are checking out Glimmer Redux hit me with first is, "I see a Yarn installed Glimmer Redux but then second step is installing this Rollup plugin. What's the deal?" I think it is because most people assume the Ember CLI you're using is identical and somehow, I should have written an Ember CLI add-on for this. I think that was the biggest learning curve and people should just be aware of that. If you're interested in sharing code right now, there is really not a baked story and that's okay. It allows people to innovate. Of course, the innovator's dilemma being that, I don't really know without [inaudible] some migrating RFC or getting involved with the core team, how to make that thing. I ultimately just hope the core team improves this and I'm sure they will but for right now, I don't really want to wait around for it. ELRICK: Got you. What is Rollup, for people that are not familiar with what Rollup is? I'm sure everyone is probably familiar with Babel by now because it's used everywhere but what is Rollup? TORAN: Embarrassingly, I don't know the technical... But I would say the role that you can see, if you actually step through the node process as your Glimmer app is being built, is it helps really condense the overall build size. What I see is it's essentially traversing like Browserify in some ways. This is, again just my primitive look but it traverses all the imports you have and it tries to pull in the bare minimum to keep the bundle size as small as possible. ELRICK: Toran, you have had a lot of experience with Redux and Redux is now being used in several different software platforms, I guess or software areas like Vue and they probably even have in Angular now. They have it in Ember and React. Redux is kind of spreading its wings and it seeds across every ecosystem. Do you feel that Redux has reached a state where people are just satisfied with the current state of Redux or do you think that people are going to be then, looking to build another abstraction on top of Redux? Do you have any thoughts on that? TORAN: The fact that Redux is so simple has allowed it to become so ubiquitous. I heard someone say this term the other today, which is like, 'ubiquity over consistency,' and that I think describes the both the growth of Redux and why it is kind of de facto for data management across all ecosystems. I think there's two camps that I hear about and I'm curious if you guys see this in your consulting work but there is certainly, the developer see this ubiquity but no consistency and see chaos in their experiences. I can totally relate to this. There are development shops I've seen where one team goes this direction because there's no strict guidance goes another and then when those teams meet up for a project in 12 months, they look at each other and the apps are, of course nothing alike, which is a big problem that Ember tries to solve. My biggest question here really is kind of curving us slightly back to the Glimmer story. If I can reframe your question, Ember is traditionally very big on convention and I think a lot of the community that is still in Ember today in large part is because of this convention, these guide rails about the community has set up but Glimmer being this NPM install your way to Ember, I think along the way, there's going to be either a new set of users that are coming just for the winds of the Glimmer VM and they happen to find themselves, not necessarily in love with some restrictions or opinions that would come with a migration directly to Ember and I'm curious if the Glimmer community that will show up for that is mostly Ember backed, meaning that they want to slowly build with RFC as a process that the entire community uses and there's one solution like we end up with often an Ember. If a community evolves more experimentally like you saw in React, where there was, of course Redux but then there was MobX and then there was various little wares for Redux that different teams would try out and eventually, there was no one proven way but there was always at the heart of it, Redux with some extensions or other add-ons around it that got teams to where they are today. I'm curious to see where this Redux, especially with the Glimmer influence, will end up. WIL: You touched on a little, I think one of the, maybe not a problem necessarily but one of the biggest barriers in Redux and React and maybe Glimmer -- I'm not sure -- is that it's almost too loose without any opinions at all so it kind of gives developers the freedom to mess things up big time. What's your opinion on that with Glimmer, like Glimmer is headed toward this NPM install? Is it too loose? TORAN: I guess that's the question, I wish we both had the answer to. It's funny. It's a double-edged sword. If it's loose, it seems like somebody is going to go create a mess but at the same time, if it's loose on the surface, it often seems like it has less surface area and as a result, a lower learning curve. React is a good example where most people, I think have gone to React or at least in my experience, I like React because it was so simple and there wasn't a huge amount of things to learn. There wasn't this full ecosystem, at least out of the gate but of course, what you find the moment you want to join a team or go build something ambitious is that you've got to make a bunch of decisions and that is certainly the calling card of Ember. What makes Ember special is they've settled on a handful of those decisions. I think ideally, I'd like to see the community in Glimmer check out Redux, get an idea of what problem it actually solves for them and if it is useful, then find a set of middleware or extensions from the wider ecosystem that actually solve the problems they face. Back to this Glimmer rideshare example, I think one thing that stands in the way as I play around with that is just a very basic routing story. Even if that is as simple as I have a component that I'll just call it route, what hooks in this Glimmer component are correct to fetch data. In the Ember ecosystem, we have a very special route object, essentially who has a set of hooks that are known for handling the asynchronous stuff in our Ember apps but there isn't anything like that yet, in Glimmer which is the next stumbling block for me to actually go build something big. I'm kind of messing around with the idea of this reactive router built out of Glimmer components but until that's actually kind of surface, mostly just spit balling here. ELRICK: With flexibility comes a lot of power but then there's also the case where our flexibility could lead to chaos. But being that something as flexible, it allows you to adapt it to whatever your particular needs are -- you know, the 'special snowflake' as everyone ends up being. Because Ember has been around for a while now and has proven itself and its battle-tested in a lot of areas, now as NPM install in our way from Glimmer up to Ember, do you think that they'll be able to then, extract some of those hardened pieces of Ember out of Ember and then give us a solution inside of the Glimmer ecosystem based off of the Ember ecosystem? Then not have so many varying different opinions or different packages or add-ons or libraries that you may need to pull from that you may just have like a set of Glimmer-approved libraries or add-ons to use to then, get your way up to this full Ember app. Do you think that that's a road they're taking? Or a possible road? TORAN: Yeah, I think for sure. A lot of the talk right now if you're in the Glimmer channel on Slack in the Ember community, I think the next big step here is having the ability to take a Glimmer component as it exists today and use that, extrapolate from there and the plan is to prove out things in a more experimental ecosystem as pre-1.0 Glimmer ecosystem. As they become more solid, we essentially just adopt them and then use them as a first class. In Ember actually, this isn't true but I envision a world where in the months ahead, we're essentially using Glimmer components in Ember so I'm already challenging myself with how would a library or add-on author help people make this progression from Glimmer to Ember if they don't do something like I've done here with Glimmer Redux because eventually, there will be this shared component world, at least in the middle ground, where Ember has both Ember components and Glimmer components. I think it's a road yet to be traveled and that's what I'm excited to be on the podcast and get people talking about building libraries for Glimmer, just because there is not a cow path or a paved road for you right now. I think if you learn just a little bit of Rollup or you dive in and take a look at the DI system built in a Glimmer right now, there is a lot you can actually do with it. I know there are certainly big named add-on authors already checking it out in preparation for such a migration. WIL: Besides the whole Rollup process, was there any other friction points in integrating Redux with Glimmer? TORAN: One that I want to call out but it is, I believe still Rollup related. It's mostly a PSA, to warn people. If you are building one of these little libraries like I talked about with Glimmer and you're going to do a Yarn link, which means that you're going to just work locally and not really publish to NPM until you're done, be aware that if you're Yarn linking and then going over to another project to test this Glimmer library, then you'll actually get temporarily two copies of Glimmer. In fact, that is how this Rollup plugin I wrote -- sort of 'bring your own build' for Glimmer -- became essential as I was like, "I'm getting two copies of the Glimmer component," so what was happening is example, I was playing with this connect API, it was always calling into the wrong Glimmer code so the code that I was expecting in my add-on was never firing. We come to find out when you're not doing Yarn link or you're not working locally, this isn't a problem. Actually, Tom Dale reached out and helped me a little bit later because my first version of the Rollup plugin had this little hack in there that said essentially, "I'm going to mask away this duplicate Glimmer problem," and it turns out it's not a problem. If you are working locally, be aware that you will have this problem as my guess. ELRICK: What gets you most excited using Glimmer? Are there any specific features or things within Glimmer to get you most excited? I guess the second question would be, what do you think Glimmer is going to unlock for the future of app development in Ember? TORAN: I think the first thing I get excited about was visible in this talk that Tom Dale gave a couple weeks ago. I'll try and dig that up for the show notes where he show the advantages of Glimmer over the competition today. The big thing that just blew me away was some of the advantages over, even Preact, which I was kind of surprised that a lot of times there's this rivalry for performance especially between React and Angular and Ember but no one ever really talks about Preact, which is known in a lot of ways as the thinner, lighter-weight React, if I'm not completely wrong. I'm sure somebody is going to be table flip on that definition. But my view was that if you were really performance-hungry, you could check out Preact, which was for performance reasons there was a smaller bundle size so you're just actually shipping less JavaScript, which means they're parsing less JavaScript and Tom went directly after this library in his talk and just showed a very interesting point at the end. I don't want to spoil it for people but let's just say, it appears to show Glimmer as just an order of magnitude better as a primitive for building web components. I think that is the big draw and how will that make Ember better. I think, mostly in the same way that I just described, where we'll essentially get a component for free in Ember that is just a better performing primitive for the web. ELRICK: I'm not too familiar with the guts of Glimmer but from what I understand, Glimmer compiles down and it has some opcodes that then compile down to binary. Is that correct? TORAN: Yeah, I think there is a binary format that they're shipping or they will soon be shipping. If you're really interested in the technical details of that, I'll definitely be sure you check out this talk from Tom because now the real magic behind this is they essentially boil it down to the ability to compile these templates down to 'byte code,' as they call it and Tom has a really funny part in his talk where he says, "You know, it's not a marketing term, this byte code word," and it becomes true because later in the talk, you hear that, essentially the Glimmer VM or the big value add of Glimmers VM is that you're just feeding it with byte code until the next 16 millisecond buffer comes up to paint, in which case you just pause and that allows, I think as he describes, less jank or allows less freezing up that main thread because you're releasing control back to the UI every 16 milliseconds, essentially. ELRICK: Yesterday, there was a meet up with a lot of the Ember core team. Ed Faulkner had made a point that since Glimmer compiled down to byte code that then is not too far of a stretch to then use that with something like Web Assembly, that with then give Glimmer an extreme performance boost. He sets up Glimmer to be used in what can be potentially the future of the web, which is Web Assembly, which I thought was really interesting and it kind of blew my mind to think, "Oh, yeah. That is true since it compiled down to byte code and Web Assembly compiles down to that." We can get that performance boost in that Glimmer is forward thinking in a sense. TORAN: Yeah, man. I totally agree. One of the things I honestly value about the Ember core team is they're very both tactical and visionary at the same time, where in the short term, they're doing things to accomplish real pain points we have but without anyone really realizing it, they're also setting up the stage to solve huge problems that we're all going to face in six, 12, 18 months. I definitely appreciate and love the work these guys are doing. They should hear about it. Obviously, this is all open source and most of this time is gifted, just given away so I really appreciate the core team. WIL: Speaking of performance, we know that the Ember has a run loop and basically, most of these libraries have some sort of loop that determines when they should batch things together or render things to the screen. Does the Glimmer have this concept? What do they take advantage of to make it as performant as you say? TORAN: Yeah, that's actually a really good question and I'm probably minimally equipped to answer it but the short version of it is there is no equivalent run loop for batching work that I've seen inside of Glimmer. Instead, you're more directly interacting with request animation frame, which we miss directly from Mozilla here but requests animation frame tells the browser you [inaudible] browser call specific function to update an animation before the next repaint. Where does this come in for Glimmer? Essentially when you call set or you decide to change a property that Glimmer is listening to and if anyone was not familiar with Glimmer, you designate this by using the tracked attribute. The tracked attribute, when you change a value, it fires this 'set property did change' and behind the scenes, 'set property did change,' if you are familiar with Ember, in my mind is close to 'notify property change,' which is what happens when you do Ember.set. If you've ever actually change something in Ember behind the scenes, there is a notify property change event fired and then we queue that work and it's a similar-ish process except that there is no run loop. What we do is we just call schedule rerender, I think in Glimmer and that just fires off request animation frame to try and rerender within that 16 millisecond window before the next repaint. WIL: From my understanding, the request animation frame is Glimmer's run loop essentially. TORAN: I think I saw actually a discussion between someone at Ember core kind of saying in the public channel that, if you're using Embers run loop, the equivalent-ish today would be request animation frame but the point came up that there's really no way to have a different set of cues because Ember itself has many different cues in the run loop and request animation frame, as far as I know really is just one function with a single callback, where you try and fit in as much work before that repaint as you can. I don't think there's prioritization that you would get in the Ember run loop. But at the same time, I'm not sure if that's actually a requirement. I don't think request animation frame was as mature as it is today back when backburner, which is behind the scenes of what Ember run loop is using, was built years ago. ELRICK: Since Glimmer is using requests animation frame and not the Ember run loop, is it going to continue to use requests animation frame in the future or they're going to develop like a run loop equivalency for Glimmer? TORAN: That's definitely out of my depth. I know from looking inside the code, the rerender work essentially calls like a 'begin,' to say begin doing your work, which I believe is like the reconciliation type work if you have a React background, I believe. I don't know what decides to end that. If the request animation frame is truly saying, "We're at the 16 millisecond budget and we're going to quit feeding the Glimmer VM byte code instructions now because we need to go back and paint." I would guess that that is the high level narrative but I actually don't know the implementation details. ELRICK: Since Glimmer is pre-1.0, it's a place for you to experiment, try out new things, really exciting area to play around in. What kind applications do you see people building today using Glimmer and what's the good application that's a good fit for Glimmer right now for you to experiment with? TORAN: The big application that I've seen that exists is being built with Glimmer in its current form is the Glimmer Playground. The Glimmer Playground is an area to go mess around with Glimmer, if you've never used it or you just want to go [inaudible] with the basics. As far as what is an ideal application, honestly I think we're at a point where we need to push the bounds of what a purely component based library can do. I think if you could come up with some kind of basic routing story and have a mechanism to share state and bubble events, whether that's Redux or some kind of home grown service layer at some point. That would allow you, in my opinion to build just about anything. The only caveat that you're going to be missing is a ton of opinions and you're going to be paving new grounds so just be aware that happy path for any pre-1.0 is be aware that they could change anything, anytime. But that shouldn't really restrict you from making a hobby project out of it. Back to your original question, I would say building any app that you're okay to go back and rework, not necessarily reinventing Facebook or something like that with it at this moment but at the same time, it would be great if someone did in a hobby way because we need to see some of the constraints and challenges. I got playing around with it myself and noticing if I'm going to build anything with Glimmer, I've got to have a way to share state and bubble events up to the single atom at the top that allows me to share all state. I think without some experimentation, we just won't know what apps are possible. ELRICK: You've been talking a lot about Glimmer today and using Glimmer. Since Glimmer is pre-1.0, are there any limitations that people should be aware of when they're going to be going into building a new Glimmer app? TORAN: For Glimmer Redux specifically, one of the challenges that people would see and they should know about if they're going to use this little Glimmer library, is that it doesn't yet allow you to write reducers in TypeScript, which would be a little counterintuitive because if you get into Glimmer, you'll notice the big differences -- everything is in TypeScript and not JavaScript. Luckily though, I think this is really just a build tool decision. Truthfully, the spike version of this that I have where you can use TypeScript, it doesn't require any change to the Glimmer Redux library at all. In fact it's completely unchanged. The difference here is that the Rollup plugin I use needs to see a change. It's kind of weird in that way, back to my point earlier where you kind of bring your own build chain and one of the things I don't like right now, which is the reason I haven't published this TypeScript version of it is that I'm actually doing a TypeScript compile of all the reducers or middleware in the Rollup plugin. With the mass confusion right now between Broccoli, Rollup and Babel, I just don't feel really great about it. Mostly because I have not truly been in the guts of the Glimmer app build tool or the application pipeline yet and I want to be a bit more educated there before ship something, back to being a Midwest developer here. I just don't feel good about shipping something and say, "Oops, we got it wrong." I take a lot of time and I also take a lot of pride in what I am shipping so I want to have a really good story about TypeScript. It does make for a little bit of a weird experience: bouncing between Glimmer components written TypeScript and flipping back to reducer file written in JavaScript. just be aware of it and at the same time, I didn't want to completely halt shipping it because again, I think we need to actually build apps with this and a concession here being that, of course you have to write reducers in JavaScript was still enough for me personally to get some value out of building Glimmer apps and honestly, it got me building them sooner. WIL: Is there a way to use Glimmer Redux without the Rollup? Can we import something into our Glimmer app to use it or this Rollup is required? TORAN: Yeah, that's a great point. You can omit the Rollup plugin entirely. What that results in is you'll have to do some hand wiring yourself. One of the upsides or one of the benefits of this Rollup plugin that I wrote is this conventionally provides a store and redux-thunk, kind of like a happy path for people who are just not familiar with wiring up their own Redux store. If you forego this plugin, you just have to do that yourself. You may actually have to do some kind of Rollup hacking in your Glimmer app, which is the thing I want to avoid. The one in particular that I know you'd have to do is there is a Node ENV that is looking for a production setting in Redux so the first thing you have to do is use a Rollup replace plugin to replace Node ENV with Ember ENV. If you can't do that, you actually get an error in just trying to stand up your Glimmer app with Redux. ELRICK: Toran, are you giving any talks or have any books or anything that you want to get out there and talk about? TORAN: I'm not actually on speaking circuit right now. I am certainly, probably like you guys are, thrown a talk or two together for the EmberConf proposals that are now out. I think they're open until November 21st. If anyone is thinking about submitting a talk to EmberConf, this should be in next March. Now is the time to get those in and I certainly have one out there but I've got one, off the top of my head that I would certainly like to find some time and submit that's related to Glimmer. ELRICK: Cool. We had a wonderful podcast today. We touched on Glimmer Redux and Glimmer and I want to thank Toran for coming on. Thank you, Toran. TORAN: Thanks for having me, guys. The fifth time I have to be on, I don't know if that will be in 2017, though. ELRICK: Yeah, we're going to bring you back for a fifth time and I would also like to thank Wil for coming on the podcast as well. Wil, thank you. WIL: Thanks for having us, Elrick. ELRICK: Anytime. Toran, if people want to reach you, is there a particular place on Twitter or anything that people can reach out to you or email or anything? TORAN: Yeah, at GitHub, I got my email out there but also on Twitter, of course. You can reply me there. If you have a question specifically about Glimmer Redux, of course you can got to GitHub and throw an issue up there or hit me in the Redux channel on the Ember Community Slack. ELRICK: Thank you all once again for listening. This is the Frontside signing off and if you want to reach out, you can always hit us up at the Frontside.io and we always want to hear about your new project that you're working on. Thank you for listening and that's peace from the Frontside. WIL: Everybody have a good Thanksgiving!

In this episode, we are joined by Laurie Voss, the COO and former CTO at npm. Npm, also known as Node Package Manager has been an important tool in the JavaScript community and has helped engineers share their code. In today’s episode, we’ll be discussing how we leverage npm and find out what we can expect from npm 5. Laurie also teaches us some cool tricks that exist in the npm cli. Items mentioned in the episode: Node, npm, Ruby, Python, Java, Back End Happy Hour, CommonJS, CocoaPods, Stack Overflow, Github, Babel, Webpack, Closure Compiler, Rollup, Browserify, Yarn, npm Enterprise, Left-pad, Express, Google, Monster Cable, Gold Apple Watch, I am rich, Semver.org Guests: Laurie Voss - @seldo Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Augustus Yuan - @augburto Jem Young - @JemYoung Derrick Showers - @derrickshowers Mars Jullian - @marsjosephine Picks: Laurie Voss - npm 5 Laurie Voss - Slides.com Laurie Voss - Next.js Ryan Burgess - Moment Lens Ryan Burgess - Lin Clark - A Cartoon into Fiber - React Conf 2017 Ryan Burgess - The Founder Augustus Yuan - Deco IDE Augustus Yuan - Mocktails Mixer by Deeplocal Jem Young - Aviation Jem Young - Music to Draw To: Satellite Derrick Showers - How I built this podcast Derrick Showers - Containers podcast Derrick Showers - Jackbox TV Mars Jullian - Spotify Mood playlists Mars Jullian - SkyGuru

Websites have gotten a lot more complicated over the years. What happened to static HTML? In this episode we’re joined by Harry Wolff, the creator of Reptar, to talk about leveraging build tools to create static generated sites. We talk about the pros and cons of leveraging a static site generator for a website. We also discuss some of the tools available to help you get started. Items mentioned in the episode: Reptar, MongoDB, Github, Jekyll, Dropbox, Wordpress, Markdown, Atom, AWS, Express, Restify, FTP, React, Webpack, Medium, Gist, Highlight JS, Prisim, Yarn, npm, Facebook, Rugrats, Ghost, Metalsmith, Segment, Hugo, Go, Hexo, Markdown-it, YAML, Joi, Redux, StaticGen, Gatsby JS, Nunjucks, Browserify, Less, Sass, Babel, ES2015, Async await, Graph QL, Relay, Closure, Handlebars Guests: Harry Wolff - @hswolff Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Augustus Yuan - @augburto Jem Young - @JemYoung Derrick Showers - @derrickshowers Brian Holt - @holtbt Stacy London - @stacylondoner Picks: Harry Wolff - Node 7.6 Harry Wolff - Legion Harry Wolff - Calvin Harris - Slide Harry Wolff - Reptar Ryan Burgess - CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap Ryan Burgess - ZippGo Augustus Yuan - Metasmoke Augustus Yuan - Open Source Guides Jem Young - Ultimate Beast Master Jem Young - Shibesbot Derrick Showers - Distiller Derrick Showers - Pac-man Multiplayer Brian Holt - Home Brewing Beer Stacy London - Webpackbin Stacy London - Arthur Russell - Home Away From Home (Andy Stott Refix)

Episode 005: JavaScript: Islands, Sprinkles, and Frameworks Follow us on Twitter! @techdoneright (http://www.twitter.com/tech_done_right) or leave us a review on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-done-right/id1195695341)! Summary Dave Copleand (@davetron5000 (http://www.twitter.com/davetron5000)) and Zach Briggs (@theotherzach (http://www.twitter.com/theotherzach)) join Noel Rappin (@noelrap (http://www.twitter.com/noelrap)) for a Tech Done Right discussion of JavaScript practices. When does it makes sense to build single page JavaScript app? How can your JavaScript and Rails interact? Is it an island of interactivity or a sprinkle of JavaScript? Which frameworks are handling community management well (hint: not Angular)? And how do you test any of this? Guests Dave Copeland (https://twitter.com/davetron5000): Author of Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap (https://pragprog.com/book/dcbang/rails-angular-postgres-and-bootstrap) Zach Briggs (https://twitter.com/TheOtherZach): JavaScript Practice Lead at Table XI (http://www.tablexi.com/) Show Notes 02:15 - Reasons to Build a Single-Page App (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application) - Conway’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law) 09:37 - The Ease of Building Web Over Single-Page Apps 11:30 - Tooling; Navigating Good Choices vs Bad Choices 14:31 - Setup - Bower (https://bower.io/) - webpack (https://webpack.github.io/) - Browserify (http://browserify.org/) - Broccoli (http://broccolijs.com/) - Yarn (https://yarnpkg.com) - The Asset Pipeline (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html) 16:30 - Combining a Rails App and a JavaScript App 18:34 - AngularJS; 1 vs 2 - Angular (https://angularjs.org) - React (https://facebook.github.io/react/) - Vue.js (https://vuejs.org/) 33:05 - Testing - jasmine-rails gem (https://github.com/searls/jasmine-rails) - Test Double (http://testdouble.com/) 35:35 - TypeScript (https://www.typescriptlang.org/) - Elm (http://elm-lang.org/) Tips & Resources: Dave: Check out Test Double (http://testdouble.com/). Zach: As a developer, don’t feel forced into choosing between a single-page app and a non-single-page app on the first day of development. There are infinite points in between when it comes to interactivity. Noel: Read about frameworkless JavaScript in Noel’s book Master Space and Time With JavaScript (http://www.noelrappin.com/mstwjs/). Special Guests: Dave Copeland and Zach Briggs.

Toran Billups @toranb | GitHub | Blog Show Notes: 02:23 - Ember 2.0; Data Down, Actions Up 08:28 - redux and State 16:39 - Dispatching Actions/Patterns 24:00 - Components and Routing 31:00 - ember-redux and Cloning the react-redux API 35:22 - Hot Reloading 41:22 - Audience 47:02 - Motivation 50:25 - Building Component Trees Resources: Toran Billups: Test-Driven Development By Example @ EmberConf 2015 Dan Abramov: Live React: Hot Reloading with Time Travel @ react-europe 2015 react-redux Charles Lowell: Immutability is for UI, You and I @ EmberConf 2016 redux-thunk Ryan Toronto: Safety of the herd EmberMap: Component side effects Functional Programming Browserify More Toran Billups Talks Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody. Welcome to The Frontside Podcast. This is Episode 55. We're broadcasting and everybody's here in Austin, although we're still remote. I am here with a really special panel today. There's me, which makes it special by default. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at The Frontside. I'm also here with Robert De Luca, who also develops JavaScript codes at The Frontside and we have today [drum roll sound] -- I'm really, really going to work that drumroll -- Toran Billups. What's up, man? TORAN: Hey, man. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. CHARLES: Toran is with us today and he's going to be talking about a lot of things. He's going to be talking about today mostly about Redux and his efforts to meld Redux and make it useful within the Ember community. But first, if you have not heard of Toran, I think the first time we'd interacted over email, Slack briefly but then when I really, really saw you for the first time was at EmberConf, I think in 2015 and he just gave the most amazing talk on Test Driven Development and really kind of the focus on you can set up your acceptance tests from the outside into really define that behavior and set out that firm shell and then actually build your application from the outside in. You've really kind of been talking about that message. We like to have people on here who all about walking the walk. That's certainly the first thing that I've noticed that you were doing in the community but then more recently, you've been playing with Redux. Not playing with Redux, actually making a concerted effort to bring this kind of pattern into Ember. I just wanted to start out, how did you jump onto that track? TORAN: Some months after EmberConf in 2015, as you mentioned that talk was not only, probably the most well-rehearsed talk I've ever given but definitely the most well-received. I got a lot of people excited and really gave me a lot of opportunities that weren't there before that was also believe in that keynote in 2015 as when Ember 2.0 was announced. The interesting part of Ember 2.0, of course was we were using it, and it was called Ember 1.13, which actually made it really great. At the time, I was very much excited about the stability that offered. Other folks were not as much as interested in that idea or those values, in the JavaScript community so it's really exciting. Yet at the same time, there was this new mantra that was being talked about more that I knew nothing about. It was this 'data down, actions up' idea. I still remember as much as the stability was awesome, I also started to doubt not Ember core in particular but the ideas that were being espoused by other folks around the Ember core team because I didn't really understand the value. For instance, if I had the tree of components back then in early Ember 1.13 or 2.0 days and I had an Ember model or some kind of Ember object at the bottom of this tree, why would I not just do Ember.set. I remember, actually you may recall conversations you had with people at EmberConf around that time but there was actually varying definitions of what 'data down, actions up' meant to different people and actually never met the same thing to anyone. It was funny enough. Because of that, it sort of drove this fear in me that I didn't know what I was talking about. I was consulting at the time so I wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about as you probably should. You guys are in that business so you know what I mean. Because of that doubt, eventually I sort of become apathetic to really trying to understand better what 'data down, actions up' meant or how components should be constructed and really what the wider impacts of Ember 2.0 meant. Because of that, I just found myself, not really loving learning. I felt like everything else in learning was a hyped up thing that would never happen or a hyped up thing that I didn't really understand or didn't make sense in the context of Ember at that time so I just kind of floated by. Everybody has their ebb and flows in the journey of excitement or not. For me, this was just the down moment. One of the things, like an analogy to this is when you lose your hunger in real life, you'd be very much like losing your hunger for learning. There's this interesting hormone that your body produces when you're actually physically hungry that kind of gives you the physical symptoms like your stomach cramps that tells your brain probably should eat somewhere. When those things aren't happening or that hormones not being produced, it's often because you've quit eating yourself. If you've ever gone on a fast or something weird like that on day three, your body quits secreting this hormone so you just sort of or not hungry at all, which is kind of weird. The same sort of thing was happening to me. If you ask a doctor or a physician, "What's the first thing I should do? I'm not hungry anymore." They'll tell you, "You just start eating." But I'm not hungry now so the same thing applied in my life and I think the first step really is just eat anyway. In this case, it was just learn something anyway even if you're not in love with learning right now. Eventually, your body will start producing this hormone, in the hunger example and for me, I just sort of got back in the flow and what came from this was a routine, which is really the second part of how you get your hunger back, not just eating once a day. I was eating three meals a day or more, especially if you haven't been eating. For me, I just set aside an hour a day, in addition to consulting work and things that would get me interested in loving learning again. The third component to this was trying something different. At the time, of course I was just doing Ember, I pretty much had done Ember since 2012 like some of you guys and I feel like there wasn't a lot of new. There was patterns and ideas but there was anything really challenging me. That's when I sort of looked around at the React community and I had done some React in the early days when I was super hyped up but I still feel vaguely different. Not that it's jQuery or any way but I didn't feel like this fully encompass single page out framework. The reasons I got into Ember very early on were that I wanted to build rich single page apps. If you guys remember from the early React days, that also wasn't really the messaging with React and maybe today with View. In fact, that's kind of one of the benefits or they speak to in those communities about why you use React because you don't have to use it for your whole app. You could kind of piecemeal it in, which totally cool. You got to see it out with Ember too. But in my mind, I just wanted to build a rich JavaScript lines that could compete with the iPhone or the iPhone apps that were popular in that day. Through this process, I started looking at React and really just kind of get back into it again, get going again. I wasn't really in love with it but I needed to try something outside of the realm I was used to. As part of that, I noticed there was this talk by Dan Abramov, I think he works for Facebook now, big in the React community, of course and he gave this talk at a conference in Europe that introduced Redux. What's funny, if you find out or dive deeper into that story is he actually pitched the talk, not really having built any of this and just thought, "This sounds like a great idea," and then of course the talk was accepted. Like most, he delivered on that promise and made a great talk. There are definitely courage folks to check out and I should link it to you here. We can show noted that, I'm sure. That talk make me excited mostly because there was a lot of whiz-bang. If you guys remember any great talk you've ever seen, the talk even that I gave at EmberConf that you mentioned, Charles the thing that blew people away was this very end moment that, of course I had produced to be a great moment. In the same way, Dan during this talk introduced some new ideas or new to the JavaScript community. One of those was the tooling that can change when the state doesn't change in your application. That got me sort of piqued my interest, in part because I was actually big test driven guy and I thought, "I won't use any of this stuff. It just seems cool. It's a gimmick. Tester development is how you really build app." If anything I thought to disprove it by getting involved and learning a little bit more but what I instantly found was the simplicity of data changes rerender. That sounds very high level, of course but it was almost just that simple, instead of being like how does this change to an object in my array, bubble out through notifications on the Ember side and notify the Ember change detection to rerender. Well, I'm not entirely sure so when I was start debugging that, I noticed a lot of framework code between me and the rerender. It's that's how Ember is, right? When I boiled that down in jQuery with vanilla Redux, not even using React at all, I was like, "Wow, there's just a call back. I wonder why I haven't been doing this." CHARLES: As a single callback for a global state? TORAN: Correct. CHARLES: So there's no call back for every single path in your tree. You just used that one call back? TORAN: I'll fill in for Rob here. I know he's jumping at it. You should probably define a Redux is. He's really good at asking that question. Redux in this case, for me is just a global JavaScript object to use to hydrate your templates. They'll give you some big spiel about state container, if you go check out the website. But for me and in this context of being on an Ember-centric sort of podcast, we already use this idea in Ember today. If you're just feeding your templates from some high level service, it's a very similar idea in that Redux is just a single service. In the Ember case, especially you can talk about the add-on, I maintain later, but really it's just a service with a single object that will help you populate all of your components. ROBERT: Yeah, I love Redux. I actually sort of coming into the Redux world, probably to about six to eight months ago and it was around the same thing like exploring React stuff. I share similar opinions to you as nobody really can define 'data down, actions up'. I also think that 'data down, actions up' cannot just live in the component. In a lot of the Ember apps I worked on, there's times where I'll be looking up to get a new state and it comes in from the side and something's mutating, something that I have no idea why and where it was mutated and Redux does a really good job at helping you manage what changes and why it changed. CHARLES: I have a question too. When you're actually using Redux, you said you got a single tree that you used to hydrate your templates. In the context of Ember, where do you maintain that single object? I assume you have one store, one instance of your Redux state per application? TORAN: Correct. There's just a service like you imagine in the Ember data service and that holds on to really just an identity map or a single graph object that will let you pass or pull that in by injecting the service into your components if you want to do that or your route then just asking for that state. CHARLES: Because I think that for a lot of people in the Ember community certainly, when I was kind of grappling with these ideas, the idea of having a single global object as your state seems so counterintuitive, so going to go against everything that we learned, that you have to decompose a problem into its component parts. Obviously, Redux has an answer for that so how does that work? How do you decompose that state into saying, "I'm just interested in this kind of local state." How does local state work in Redux? TORAN: I should define local state is state specific to the component. It doesn't need to bleed up and has no value at the global level. CHARLES: Usually, I got two components. Let's say, I want to store both of their states in the Redux store. Obviously, component one is not interested in seeing any state that's not related to it so it's only interested in its own state and it's not interested in any of the surrounding context. How does that work? How do you connect a single component or connect a route to the store? TORAN: There's really just a simple method on Redux -- the Redux store itself, which it says, "Give me the state." What may not sound great at first is that it say, "I will give you all the state and that is your job to pull from that or map three attributes from that whole tree into my component." Then by side effect if you're using our add-on or if you don't React-Redux, you actually subscribe then to call backs on any of those changes so if something were to be bumped, then your component is given the opportunity to rerender during that call back. CHARLES: Now, in terms of Ember-Redux, that kind plumbing is hidden from you. You don't actually have to explicitly map that state. You can say, "I want to connect this component into the Redux store," and you're just off to the races. ROBERT: Is there a mapStateToProps or... I don't know what that would be called in Ember-land. TORAN: That brings about interesting point. I literally copied this API that you guys are probably looked at from the readme from this very popular project in React called React-Redux. The word that you're using, Charles is this word connect. Actually, I like that word because that's how I think about it. I want to connect the components to the single source of truth and then respond by rerendering when something changes. The API is actually very similar on what you said, Rob. In fact, the set of mapStateToProps is just map states to computed, which is very much the same idea so instead of really defining the component like you might normally, this is where it gets a little weird for your classic Ember developer, you actually just write two functions and really only one is require. The first one is what you're hinting at Charles, which is I want to pull from the state a set of properties and as you mentioned, the plumbing is sort of hidden, magically those are actually created as CPs or Computed Properties on your component so you can go to your HPS file, your handlebars template and say, "Oh, I took number from the global state and I'm just going to map it in this function and now I can go to my handlebars template and number," and there it is. Every time you bump number up or down, you'll get a rerun in your callback and the HPS will update. The other function, as sort of glossed over is really just for your closure actions. If you would like to ask the store to do something and saying, "I would actually like to increment the number," then you can fire an action and the second block just does also additional magic, which just maps a closure action by letting you get this dispatched keyword. Dispatch in a Redux context is just, "I'm going to send an action," and you can think of it almost in vanilla JavaScript terms as, "I have an event. Someone will handle this event and I'm just going to throw it up." ROBERT: It makes its way to reducer then from there, right? TORAN: Correct. We haven't talked too much about that process. The reducer really says, "I'm going to be given a state or the initial state, if you haven't done this yet," which would be maybe in the number scenario. I'm going to start with zero as a sensible default and then I'm going to have an action, whether that's add or subtract in this simple example and in add, I'm just going to take the state coming in, even if it starts out at zero and then do something, transform it to a new state. Actually the important word here is that -- I know you guys are big in the functional world, functional programming and that's the word actually got me interested and really excited about programming again as well, in the most perfect sense -- a pure function, which just means that there are no side effects. There's no mutation or changing of the state that comes in when you do it correctly. In this case, actually instead of mutating something I'm actually returning to number two or to number one and you're like, "Now, we have both zero and one in kind of a timeline." If you think about this almost as the realistic stories, we're just kind of kicking a pointer to a new block of state. Every single time you come to reducer, we still have the old state and we can still walk backwards, which is how the time travel debugging works as we just flip the pointer back in time. As you guys have talked about and I think, Charles you mentioned last year in EmberConf, the immutability story has of course a whole slew of great properties that come with it and those we haven't even obviously talked about. But hopefully I gave people a broad overview of what the reducer does. In its most simplest form, state comes and action returns a new state. ROBERT: Yeah, in Charles's talk and his research, I got to sit next to him and watched him do that actually kind of shaped a lot of my thinking and hunger, if we want to keep that going towards doing like something that's immutable and state management in Ember. I would like to thank you, Toran for building that add-on and spearheading Redux because Redux is pretty awesome for state management. CHARLES: By the way, you did in that call out the analogy for hunger. I really, really, really like that. It's an important tidbit not to miss is that when you are feeling those kind of doldrums of development. I know I was actually ironically feeling that about the same time in 2015, feeling of in a funk because I feel like there was a lot of stuff coming down the pipe like with 'data down, actions up' but no good examples of where we've actually seen this in practice. I think Redux is an actual implementation of 'data down, actions up' so I think it's fantastic that you were able to go and seek inspiration there like, "We've got this message of the way things that ought to be doing with the applications ought to be built." But we don't actually have any concrete examples that we can look to. I think the Redux actually is almost the most pure version of that 'data down, actions up'. I guess my next question is given that you've got this global store, you've got a way to connect components. I assume there are other ways to dispatch actions from within your Ember application like what are the patterns that you're seeing emerge around this? We've talked about how you would use them in components. Suppose my tree of components gets pretty complex, how do I manage that to kind of the passing of data down? Do parent components play any role in the data that their subcomponents see? Is each component connecting directly to the store? I'm just kind of curious where that balance lies and how things are kind of playing out? TORAN: There's really two points in your bigger question. One that I was going to try out of you but then you kept going. That was really around side effects. How do you actually dispatch or make changes, requests changes and see the flow and we could talk about that really starts out briefly with a Promise based approach. With Redux, most people don't know but it's basically like asynchronous flow. Dispatch would normally be like asynchronous action where you're sort of blocking and then doing, transform and getting it back. In the simplest ways, you see there is this tool or this add-on, Redux-thunk, which you can use Promises now and async will still work as if it were synchronous essentially by firing dispatch up and letting your reducer do the work. I think that is a great introductory because especially as Ember developers, we've got a lot of experience with Promises so this is just the same thing. In most of the demos I've done and if you check out the read me, there's like a full Yelp Clone example. It's using this approach because it's a little bit more familiar to most folks. CHARLES: Just to clarify what would happen there is you're essentially getting a new state transition when every Promise resolves or rejects. If it's rejects, that's a state transition. If it resolves, that's a state transition. The next Promise that resolves is another state transition. Is that fair to say? TORAN: Assuming you want to alter and use that top level state, of course you could reject or resolve and just not even bother with the top level store. We kind of skipped over some of the benefits and we could just roll back to that briefly. Why would you use top level stores at all? You mentioned earlier and it kind of seems counterintuitive. This is basic global variable. That's what we're talking about. In the Ember example, I think it's actually sort of not weird because if you guys, your Ember data in its earlier form or even today, it really very much is that. We have this one cache of objects related or otherwise and we pass those around. They are a global object or almost like a global variable. The downside of that in my experience has been that is truly mutable and actually everything is driven by mutating those and then having callbacks or denotify property change drive your template updates. That is not the process with Redux, of course. It feels more explicit, where I can actually go look up kind of a tree or look up table of actions and see exactly what's going to happen. Then also to your second half of the question, which is like how was the components wired up? How do they map? I actually uses an interesting pattern which isn't specific to Ember-Redux or Redux, which is to create a seam in my components now where I have truly HTML CSS components. Separating those from the components and know about the data and the closure action story. Forgetting Redux for a moment and all of this actually made my regular Ember much better because I started to produce this component that would connect to a Ember data store, provide closure actions to send up in the most pure 'data down, actions up' sense and then I would connect it using the yield block, which credits to you and other folks at EmberConf that you, Charles kind of talked me into this because I was a espousing this idea but I didn't really understand that I would actually nest within this parent, the HTML component that would just be handed the properties to render. When we do this, again it still is I think a better pattern even if you're not using Redux but when we did it and I when I started with Redux, the only thing that really gets me in hot water is when people see this and they're like, "Oh, so this is the first thing that comes down from the routed controllers template. Then there's always this brief moment of like, "I'm not sure what to say. I don't want to predict the future and I'm not trying to be Mr Routable Components here." But for me, most of my controller templates are just a landing page for the component tree to begin. Again, that's not me trying to hacking the route or anything to say, "I want to use this controller as a routed to component. I think eventually when that RFC lands, this will look different, anyway so I'm not trying to have people do things really outside of the Ember ecosystem or outside of the norm." But from there, I feel like still just landing into a component, allows you this composition which is supposed is the real value of the components structure. They are too primitive to build pages and then eventually full apps. ROBERT: So if we want to drop parallel, it's container versus presentation components, right? TORAN: Yes and that of course, again stolen from, not me probably stolen from someone else in the 70s. But you know, Dan Abramov is accredited to bringing that idea about in React. Actually I like the idea because let's pretend I had done this pattern in 2013. Now, it's using Ember data or simple store or Erik Bryn's Ember model, something like that. Then eventually, the community start shifting to something else. It could be MobX, it could be Redux and whatever the case, I could just very easily swap out those connected components that have no HTML CSS. The data source changes and all the presentation components do not know. They do not change. There is actually an iterable story to refactor through, an update like that normally is kind of a [inaudible]. If you have ever done PHP in the early days or at least my PHP experience in 1999 -- no offense to PHP today -- was that everything was so stuck together or so couple that I could never refactor anything out of it. Of course, you probably do this in a consulting space as I have, where he first thing on a messy project is actually making those scenes in the application anyway to allow you to upgrade incrementally. This process is just more of an upfront thought and I don't think it's really taken hold than it needs to in the Ember community. It's just something I was experimenting with and I'm finding a lot of value because I think the connection of the data source is a different activity than HTML. ROBERT: I think it also holds a lot of value. CHARLES: I think it holds a lot of value. I think there's a dawning awareness of this. In your comment, I actually thought of two blog posts for EmberMap, which I was just reading this morning. One was talking about kind of the safety of the herd and don't worry so much about controllers versus radical components like use your controllers, use your components. Don't worry about it too much. It'll get sorted out. I definitely agree with that. Although, you definitely want to experiment when you're experiencing particular pain around something. But then, the next thing which I think came out yesterday was talking about basically components for managing side effects, which I think is an unfortunate name because I think side effects is a tainted word. But basically, the idea is having presentation components and container components and the container components are responsible for managing the state. I think that idea is valuable in of itself and I hope that it takes root. I think that's something that you're doing, something that we're doing and as people kind of realize it, it does take root, just kind of by virtue of its own value. Let me summarize if I understand it correctly. As part of these job, you've got these container components and their job is, I like the term that you used, creating a seam. Their job in the Redux world is to take a slice of that global state. You have these components whose responsibility is taking a slice of that global state and presenting that global state to HTML CSS aka presentation components that lie underneath them. Is that a fair assessment? Then if that's so, I've got a second part to that. I just want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly. For components that are further downstream on that tree, do you ever switch back to data containers like you switch between data components and presentation components and then back to data components and then to presentation components and kind of back and forth and back and forth on down the tree? Or do you mostly see it as one-kind of container component on top and then presentation components all the way down? TORAN: It's a great question. I think that still needs a fair bit of experience in the Ember community because the patterns I pulled from the source code I read a lot is mostly from the React ecosystem. Because of that, there's a very split view or a different view in that community on routing. We may share some of those views in Ember but I think for the most part, we assume routing actually and that's one of the tricky part to answer your question. This is a broad statement so I'm likely wrong in every context but I don't love to be creating these data components that don't get routed to if I can help it. I'm sure there are situations that have been really complex, places where you just have to make, no route here because I don't want change the URL for instance and I'm just going to make this thing like a routed to component with no URL to get me here. But for the most part, I treat the entry point to this route and when I land on this route at this time, it's appropriate to ask for the data likely coming from the model hook in the route. In fact, all that's still the same. That's also where it's a little weird. If you've ever seen a full component tree in a React app, they may not have a router at all. In that situation I think, Redux was in particular even better because you don't have to pass from the top app component, the same props or the same data all the way down that tree. In fact, if you read documentation about why Redux in the React ecosystem they'll say, "It gives you this place where we can create a little shim and then ask for the data down here in the [inaudible] mode. You don't have to pass it from the app to that, to that." I see those benefits but in Ember we don't really get as much from that. In fact, they still tell people who challenged the global state idea that not everything maybe should be a global state but you give up some things by doing that. The first one I would say, which I think is the most valuable for anyone doing vanilla Ember with Ember data or someone experimenting with React or Redux. Or the case I'm most interested in, the audience I'm after which is Redux in Ember, which is do you actually need to have that state in one place. The prime example of this that is the greatest use case is master detail. What I mean by that is you have a list of things and when someone drills into one of those, you can also see that at the same time. There's really two choices you can make here. One is I'm going to have two separate data sources to feed two separate components so the list will go get its data and then the detail won't even use that data at all. Just go get its own data. In that case, you may up against a problem where you need to synchronize at some point and here's the tradeoff. Either synchronize the two separate states or you have a single source of truth. That's a real benefit I think of Redux for the most part. It's like the broad, "Do I want deterministic rendering?" We've all heard the joke about the Facebook nav bar that's like, "You have one message," and you're like, "No, I just answered it down here." Well, that's a different component so the joke is like, "Oh, Redux must be working. We have one up here but I've already read the message." You know? Someone obviously is in charge of synchronizing in those sort of examples. Maybe not just doing it well or they run up against an issue synchronizing that. My experience doing back end development, colors this for me. What I rather have three databases and they kind of synchronize the state across them or I rather have the one postgres or SQL server database that is the source of truth so that when I render something to a customer, I can guarantee that it's not in a transition to be synchronized. It is the source of truth. CHARLES: Right, I really like that and I think the point that I take from that is that, and again this speaks to people who might be internally reacting to this idea of a global state is that you actually do have a global state always in your UI, whether you acknowledge it or not. It's composed of all the other distributed states that are sprinkled around your application so if you take an approach like Redux, you're kind of acknowledging that upfront that at any given time, I do in fact have a global state. I might as well deal with that explicitly. That's kind of a key innovation. I also like what you said too about kind of treating the router in Ember really leaning on the router as a good way to partition your data or drill down into a sub-piece of that global state. Inside Ember-Redux, are there explicit hooks for dealing with the Redux store inside your routes? TORAN: Yeah, that's that one that gets me the most trouble. When I see a blog post and memes that are all about the herd lately, can't help but feel like they're pointed directly at me because of some of these new ideas. CHARLES: Toran, I'm just telling you. This is a safe space. We believe in innovation here. You're okay. TORAN: Yeah. CHARLES: Let me add-on that. I didn't mean that as a knock to you. I do think they call this out of the end of the blog post. I think acting in concert with the community for the most part, actually fosters innovations and an innovative journeys like the one on which you're currently embarked because you don't have to worry about CLI tools and you don't have to worry about this. You can focus on the problem of like how does an Ember application work with a global atom as its state. TORAN: That is the idea. I mean the route is interesting. I have a little helper to your point, Charles if you've seen some of the docs or any of the examples. There is a little helper for routes and all it really does is provide dispatch as an argument. For instance, a lot of times I just want a model to be a regular function and dispatch to be an argument so I can return a Promise or do some Generator stuff as a side effect. In that way, I sort of create a shorthand which is just really simple. It allows me to say [inaudible] model and then have dispatch as an argument and run my code then just providing that to this special little helper. It's a functional type helper called route and what it does behind the scenes is it injects the Redux service for me, which is again something you can do by hand. If you really just don't like that or you want to be more in the herd, you can just have a regular route, inject the service and then get dispatched from that service and use it. ROBERT: It looks like you just dropped the version 2.0, like three hours ago. I would like to ask, we heard about your journey like you were feeling like you weren't hungry for learning. I want to know more about where you actually sat down and wanted to write this add-on on and why you chose to clone the React-Redux API and what took you on that path? TORAN: Yeah, that's a good question. Back to benefits or the reasons I got excited about, of course I mentioned during the talk that Dan Abramov did. There was some interesting dev tools. First of which was this thing Time Travel Debugging which it allows you to sort of move backwards in time and pretend as if actions and mutations or what looked like mutations that never occurred. That was very interesting. I wasn't really sure of the value, especially at the time. I told you guys around 2015, I was consulting which lucky me, I was doing Greenfield. Thankfully, I was working with a really great team and some great people, built an amazing product. I don't really understand the pain of this. For the most part Ember-set was doing its job and I didn't really have a lot of interest in learning this. But as I got more into it, also started a full time job last year, I pretty much just fix bugs for a year. Anyone who's been on one side of the fence or the other knows that the bug fixing side will sort of expose, maybe the weaknesses of the application or patterns or choices made. For me, that was really mutation or shared mutable stake aka the root of all evil. If you've ever looked at your Elm ClojureScript, Elm next is the same vein where immutability is very much there. Charles, of course gave his talk on immutability and trying to get people interested in that or more interested in the Ember community. That was really all I wanted to do to your point, Rob was provide really an outlet for people to use this and I wanted to keep the messaging away from the things I didn't like, which I think was actually something I screwed up to be fair early on. I think I was very vocal in the microcosm that I would talk to people about like, "These are the things I don't like about Ember," or I would use the word 'Ember the good parts' plus 'Ember the bad parts' and I was told not to say that anymore on the Slack channel. Once I started getting too much needed feedback -- I don't want to be negative about it -- I changed my messaging and as part of that, you mentioned Rob I basically cargo-culted or copied this API from React-Redux called connect and excluding the brief route helper that I mentioned, Charles a minute ago, the real idea here is you just call disconnect function with two other functions: mapping state and closure actions. Everything else becomes then vanilla JavaScript in this reducer function we talked about briefly where I have state coming in and I need to transform it into a new state. One interesting benefit of that -- I wasn't overly critical about until I really saw the difference is that -- I'm no longer using the Ember object. I'm not doing Ember.get and set, which immediately start to open the door some time last year for TypeScripts interest. I'm actually not a super type friendly person. I sort of left Objective C and C# and Java in my background and have like this Vietnam experience when people ask me about types. But I do understand one very critical fact that I can't dispute about types is that there are more information for the next programmer than you have without them. Again, my experience this last 12 months has been, as a maintenance programmer, I need more information. Tests are great when they're there but they also don't provide the interface or all the information about those and certainly the compiler may help as well. I don't know yet. I'm not doing any TypeScript. What I started notice is also more functional programming and maybe just not in our core yet but also things I wanted to steal from other ecosystems because I also found is very interesting. I started to study functional programming. I know like nothing about it, of course. I don't think anyone does because I can't describe a monad without getting in trouble or being wrong. For me, the real value is the separation of the data structure and the function. I'm preaching to the choir here but that was so much like an interesting idea to me and actually spurred on some of the further patterns or adoption of those in my work in Ember-Redux because this presentation and container component idea was really that I was separating the data structure from the function of the view. I think you mentioned this in your talk at EmberConf where the actual HTMLbars template is really just a function that has data in, HTML out. I started to internalize that and think about that and what were the properties I got from that, as well as I enjoyed functional programming. Some other great benefits that we've already touched on briefly are just how much more of this I felt explicit, not that Ember-set is inherently implicit but when you do a Ember-set for mutation to chase down every single place in a complex system to determine why they something render this way? It does feel a little more implicit than something like React-Redux with this connect function where I was like, "Wow," when I was doing React. Especially, I was like, "I bet I could just put a breakpoint at every connection so when that callback happens, I can know exactly what action spurred on this new callback to rerender," and that was something that was very new and interesting. Then of course, falling out of all this was another hyped tooling thing that I thought was really cool, not explicit to Redux, again but it got me interested because that's hot reloading. All hot reloading of CSS and Ember CLI, which I've never done design work which I'm not good at. But I do write some CSS or hack-on it when friends show me what to write. Then writing HTML was a separate experience. Once you wrote the CSS, you would hot reload in that course, what do you do every time you change CSS, you also change HTML, which would incur a full-page reload with a live reload tool, if you're familiar with that in Ember CLI. This tooling allowed the Redux store itself because it's stored the state, allow me to really throw the component away in the page without refreshing it and then providing a new one and just go rerender because the state was instantly mapped in and then rerendered. I actually did a demo sometime last year and like, "I'm going to build a star rating component and here it is with live reload. Here it is with hot reload. I'm not going to make a decision about which one is better. You decide," and overwhelmingly people were like, "This is a much nicer feedback loop to make HTML and CSS changes in real time." ROBERT: Agreed. Let's pedal back the hot module reloading because that is pure awesomeness. But that has a little bit of setup they have to do and changing your application. I remember we were talking about this. When you did that demo, I remember this. But there's a little bit they have to do to make your components stateless. They have to come down from the Redux store. TORAN: Correct and this actually still applies if you are, I think using Ember data as well, as you just can't pull the state to reload it anything local, which may go against what you're trying to do with your component. ROBERT: Right. That's cool but I do want to highlight a little bit something that was cool about the Redux dev tools as with all the state that you have since it's in a centrally managed place, you can take your state and then play it back over the top of something like if it did live reload and it'll just pop you right back down to where you were when you were debugging. When that page refresh happens, if you're not doing hot module reloading, you still won't lose all your state which is really cool. You just play it right back down on top and you're exactly where you were before. It's almost like you would throw a specific test that puts you into that state that you're trying to debug. TORAN: Yes, it's like git rebase. It lets me pull off my state, replay the new component function and then drop my changes on top of it and see it all viewed together. ROBERT: Yeah, I think that's massively powerful. CHARLES: Yeah, it is fantastic and that's where you get into that power. I can get on my immutability soapbox. But it turns out that as programmers, we deal in information and not throwing information away, not just flushing it down the toilet is hugely powerful. I think the thing that's so fantastic is that Redux takes this concept and then all of the tools to leverage it are there for you. I think that it is something that is missing from the Ember development story and people don't realize that it's missing, that we have all these wonderful tools, we have this conventional way of building our applications, of deploying our applications, of rendering our applications, of marshalling the data in our applications in the form of routes. But what we're lacking is this unified atomically based state management solution. I think that, Toran it's been fantastic that you have pioneered this and trying to bring what I see as a glaring gap in the developer experience to the community. I'm curious then to ask you what do you see as the future. You know, 2.0 just dropped and there's this need. I feel very strongly that Ember 3.0, 4.0 or Ember 'dot future' at some point should have a unified state management solution. How do you see the road that you're on intersecting with that future if it does in fact exist? ROBERT: Also how can I help or how can we help? TORAN: Just real brief before I dive into some of those questions. I just want to mention that 2.0, as awesome as that sounds, of course I dropped that this morning just so we could say that on podcast, really. We've had a beta in the works for Ember. The only change really, if you're like, "I just got into an Ember-Redux last week. Is it all garbage?" No, this isn't Ryan Florence 2.0 -- it was a joke for any [inaudible] router folks in here. Actually, just us removing Browserify because if you are familiar with Browserify in the Ember ecosystem, talk to Robert Jackson or Stef Penner, folks familiar with that in Broccoli, they'll tell you that one of the harder things to optimize and although, it created a great entry point to how do I use Redux? Boom! Ember Browserify, install Redux, I'm done. If you've ever seen an [inaudible] in Ember that has 'npm:', you're using Ember Browserify to pull in, either a common JS module or some kind of node module and use that in the Ember ecosystem without an additional shim. Now, what we found or learned was that bigger teams that are using this, paid a little bit of a cost and not just cold rebuilds. I'm talking hot rebuilds because Browserify just isn't friendly to get those to be optimized, I guess is the word, so we removed it completely or just use some smaller simpler shims. You actually get the performance improvements hopefully -- ROBERT: That is awesome. TORAN: -- Which is big win. Back to your question, Charles. The audience that's intended, of course is a little different than most people like me to talk about. In fact, the API itself, I think was a bit rejected. You're sort of asking like, "What does this mean in the future?" I don't really feel that the traditional Ember audience has picked up around with it because of something that's missing. You said the 'C word' earlier so convention is certainly still missing from this and even in the React ecosystem, they're just barely thinking about, "Look at all this great stuff we can do with one-way data flow and immutability and functional programming," but guess what we're giving up. No one's really come around with this perfect pattern and conventionalized it as Ember did in its early days so there's a lot of churn, I wouldn't say overly so much that you're not going to getting work done but more than the average Ember developer is aware of. My audience is actually not the average Ember developer, which may be bad for what you're asking about, Charles. Instead, it's actually the person who maybe has done React and maybe Redux or Backbone in the last two years. They love some of those patterns. They're not in love with the Ember-object because of getting set. Maybe they love TypeScript and they say, "I want to use this in Ember." They joined a new company that's a little larger than the startup they'd been on the last two years and they are using Ember. They love a lot of Ember but they would also like to use some of the predictable state patterns that you get with Redux. As well as maybe the dev tooling, things like that so they have adopted this. I feel like that really is the new audience that I aim to please or I'm falling in line with, which is a little bit outside. I feel like there's room for some fragmentation and a good beat up on me for that because when the realities of this herd conversation that we're kind of talking around a little bit is that the herd is great until something innovative needs to happen. Innovation, obviously takes some risk and I feel like that's sort of what I did last year and said, "Here's some interesting ideas. I have not shipped Facebook with it yet so let's just check this out." Of course, Ember add-ons are a great way to enable someone to try a new idea. But I think most people got into it, saw this funky connect thing and they're like, "What the heck is this?" It's a function and returns a component. All right, that's not doing that so most people bailed out. But I do hope people still and I know great folks at LinkedIn, Chris [inaudible], of course. We chat occasionally. Mostly he just tells me what I'm doing wrong. Shout out for Chris. But he knows a lot more about some of the stuff than I do and I think he is fully aware of the values that are in Redux that are great and then working hard, of course during his full time gig to apply these to Ember data and hopefully these do make their way in naturally. I just wanted to be a bit more radical. I don't want to wait around and I wasn't really involved in the Ember data project. My own fault there but I think if nothing else, the ideas will come out of it because the developers want this. Whether you're the audience I'm talking about, which is a React developer from two years ago, you're in Ember, you're eventually going to really understand and want this and then those 'data down, action up' ideas that were pretty unclear to me in 2015, will be very clear. In fact, if anyone seen or heard of this Project MobX, which is like an alternative in a way, popularity-wise to React ecosystem. It kind of looks like Ember in a way where you get sort of some more magic and what I found quickly in playing around MobX is that you can very much fall into the shared mutable state problems. The interesting part about MobX is you can opt into a strict 'data down, actions up' approach. But if you don't have the Ember battle scars like we do, you're just going to come in and say, "What's less work?" Just like in Ember when I can do a set in the [inaudible] node, why would I do 'data down, actions up' and that's the transition I want to see folks make. Hopefully they learn something from that. CHARLES: Right, I agree with you. Although, I think the time has definitely come, I think the term 'herd-mentality' is an unfortunate one. I prefer to think of it as like a pack. If you travel as a pack, you can bring down moose that are bigger than you are individually. But every once in a while, like a gigantic moose with laser horns shows up and then what are you going to do? If you're hunting as a pack, you have to introduce new things because I like that analogy a little bit better than a herd because the job of the herd is just to not get eaten, where is the pack has this idea of these entities that have to stick together. They're hunting and they're tackling different problems as they come but sharing in the benefits. But I think that there has to be room for innovation inside that herd/pack-mentality, whatever you choose. I do think this idea needs to be introduced so what I would say is that if you're listening to this podcast, you should actually go and you should try and use Toran's add-on and you should try and build something with it so that if you have opinions about how it should fit into Ember, then we can hear them. It sounds like you're taking a minimalist approach, you're emulating patterns that are proven to work in the React community so kind of enabling that seed cross-pollination right there. I would say go build something with it, experience what it's like to have your state as a single atom, experience what it's like to have incredible development tools that come along with that. I think that if you're in the Ember community today, you need to go build something with React, you need to go build something with Redux and you actually have made it one step easier to do. You don't even have to leave Ember to do that. You can build something of node with production quality code using Redux and you can experience what it's like. That's my challenge, I think to the Ember community. Go try it, go experience it because you'll come back, I think like I did. You'll come back with superpowers just from having tried that. ROBERT: Managing state becomes so easy. TORAN: Yes. I want to jump in briefly and just cover one point that we haven't talked about that's very controversial so why not drop it at the end here. I think, Rob you might have asked about it earlier and I just didn't feel brave enough to talk about it at that time. But you guys keep going back to this idea and I have to talk about a little bit too. One of the motivations is I live in Iowa. I work in Texas. Thankfully, this great company, Q2 employs me and I don't know why I'm being paid. I'm lucky to be writing JavaScript for money, probably we all are. But in the Ember local community that I'm in, a very little folks writing Ember and that was even years ago. I was like the only voice in the middle of the Midwest screaming and then folks in Minnesota would tell me that wasn't true so I went up there and did a conference as well. But for the most part, I looked around the job market too and thought, "It be really great if I understand some of the more JavaScript-centric parts of building web apps today," and when I looked at Redux functional programming, the way the reducer worked and structured, the way to React-Redux project was structured and thought, "I bet I could emulate that an Ember," such that I could actually and I believe this is to be true, that if you were in a React-Redux project or even an Angular like ‘ngRedux', which is a very similar connect binding, you could copy a whole directory of your reducer code, which is all vanilla JavaScript. If you're doing generators, which we didn't talk about but if you're doing you know any additional side effects, you copy all that vanilla JavaScript, drop it into your Ember app and it all works because it doesn't matter if it's in React or Ember or even Angular, even View if View has some connect API like this. We all share this common API that is just give me the functions that enumerate over the data and return new states of the data and call back to rerender. There's something really powerful about that but the tradeoff being there are not a lot of strong conventions, Charles that I have adopted. That's kind of what I'm cautioning here a little bit is that I'm still also just watching the other communities to see what eventually turns out not. This is going to be am Ember add-on and I don't care what everyone else is doing. This is my vision because really my vision was to make a drop in for anyone already doing Redux on any platform. CHARLES: You know, to the point, there's a pack that extends beyond the Ember community and it sounds like you're also leveraging and being a part of that. TORAN: There's an interesting idea about the hunger thing, which just tied us in and there's where the fourth thing that a doctor will tell you to get your hunger back is go experience eating with other people. There's actually a statistic that when you sit down to eat with someone else or many people, you're likely going to eat 44% more food than you did on your own. That's just, I guess a statistic that's true. I just made it up for this podcast. No, I think it's true. If that is the case, then I think that very much translates to programming as well where when I'm developing code with other folks and I'm on like the React channel and we're just talking about vanilla JavaScript, it doesn't have to be me being an Ember developer anymore, which has been a large part of what's blocked me from being, I think an asset in my local community in the broader JavaScript community. At large is every time I get a conversation it's like, "I have to do it the Ember way," and that's changing actually. The Ember has credit a lot of deprecation if you guys have seen or follow the RCs and other just Ember upgrade deprecation. We're kind of getting away from being Ember and writing just more JavaScript and even maybe sometime this year beginning ES6 classes, instead of Ember object extend. I think Ember is heading in that direction. I just went there, rather rapidly because I also was again experiencing vanilla JavaScript with other communities, View and React. ROBERT: I think we're walking on this very similar path. I'm following your footsteps right now, it sounds like. TORAN: My last point which was that third bullet about building component trees, it didn't sound like either of you guys really contest that and I'm friends with, obviously Chris Freeman, formerly The Frontside and Chris tells me, "You're trying to build full component trees once you're injected at the route level and you're not doing like a ton of HTML in your controller HPS files." Is that true? CHARLES: We treat our controller basically as a component. Sometimes, we'll be like, "This is the controller and if we ever use it in more than one place, we'll take out its component." We're not super dogmatic but we definitely see the clear separation of the route is for maintaining the data and everything else is just one tree of components just below that. ROBERT: The more I think about it though, I'm so conflicted because I really like routes in Ember and they do a lot for you. I like having the data be maintained in one spot but I don't know a single store with Redux maintaining that and using like Redux-thunk or Redux-saga. I got some exploring to do. CHARLES: I don't think those are mutually exclusive propositions. That's what you were saying at the beginning, right Toran? You still do all of your data munching in the route. There's two kind of subjects that I wanted to broach briefly, although I don't think brief is possible with them is actions, like how we talked about data down, we talked about where you draw the seams in your application, where you're loading your data, where you're mapping it to your components and having that separation into your presentation components. We didn't get to talk about reducers so much and how you map. You touched on it like the mechanics but suppose I have a to-do list and I want to delete an item and I've got some button to delete an item, that's down my component tree. How do I map that action back up to the store? I don't know if we actually have time to cover that because it is meaty-meaty subject. ROBERT: Redux part two? TORAN: Yeah, we have to follow up because really that is a little bit more of an advanced segment not that folks shouldn't hear about it. But one thing that's a radical shift, Charles that we would have to go into and talk about, which is controversial as well as most folks want to operate in one structure, one dictionary not in the array. Then immediately, everything flips to being a Lodash operation. I didn't really use Lodash at all until I got into this. You guys probably actually are smart folks to do. But for me, this store is not in array now. When I'm doing array operations like remove or filter, I'm actually operating with Lodash on an object to produce those new states and most of it is just learning the Lodash operators because I didn't actually know them so the Yelp Clone that I have out there is a very simplistic look at using Lodash with Ember. But it accomplishes some of that. Then also, the secondary piece that would also consume a ton of time that we should go into but maybe not today is switching from Thunk to Generators with Saga and then maybe even observables with RxJS, which seems like possibly the future. Those all sounds cool but I think they're going to blow the heck out of scope on this thing. CHARLES: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming by Toran. As always, our conversations are too big to fit into a single podcast. I really want to have you on again. There are so many things that we haven't even touched on. We haven't touched on the subtleties of how action dispatching works. We haven't touched on using Ember-data -- I'm just [inaudible] out there and say it. With Redux, we haven't open that can of worms and who doesn't want to just sift through a can of worms on a podcast? We are going to have you on again. I am positive of that. ROBERT: We're going to paint that bike shed. CHARLES: Yeah, we're going to paint that bike shed. It's a bike shed that needs to be painted. It's something that the community, I think needs to face head on. Thank you so much for coming by and talking with us about Ember-Redux. Everybody, go and check it out. Toran, you've got some talks coming up, if you want to mention those real quick. TORAN: Yeah, I just wanted to plug. There's possibly going to be a talk, we're still lining up the official date with the Washington DC Ember Meetup sometime in April. I planning out to fly out there actually and give this talk on Ember-Redux. I want to thank just publicly the RSA team for kind of helping sponsor me to fly out and check it out. As well as give a more in-depth talk on Ember-Redux in the Meetup setting. CHARLES: Fantastic. If you're in the area, be sure to go check that out. If not, watch it on video and then unrelated Ember-Redux, if you haven't watched Toran's EmberConf talk on Outside-In development. TORAN: That's out actually global Ember Meetup, I think. CHARLES: Okay, that one. Actually, just go watch all Toran's talks. The thing that I didn't mention at the beginning of the podcast is that you do a lot of live coding, which is just makes my bowels freeze when I think about doing it. You just pull it off so effortlessly so it's definitely, definitely worth a watch. With that we, will take it out. We'll see you guys later. That's it from The Frontside. Remember to get in touch with us at Frontside.io. If you're interested in UI, that's engineered to make UX dreams come true.

Jamison Dance: @jergason | Blog | GitHub | Fivestack | Soft Skills Engineering Podcast | React Rally Show Notes: 00:58 - The Elm Programming Language 01:36 - Who should try Elm? What is the attraction? 03:09 - Scaling an App Across a Team; Conventions 06:19 - Routing 07:48 - Writing Tests 09:38 - Jumping Into Elm from a Component-based Framework 12:20 - Tooling 17:28 - Productivity 19:21 - The Elm Community 25:13 - Could Elm Replace JavaScript? 28:28 - Lessons Learned from Elm to Write Better JavaScript 33:45 - The Elm Syntax 35:49 - Checking Out New Languages and Communities 37:31 - Data Modeling Resources: Elm Packages elm-format Evan Czaplicki: Let's Be Mainstream! User-focused Design in Elm The Elm Guide Elm on Slack The Elm Tutorial Jamison Dance: Rethinking All Practices: Building Applications in Elm @ React.js Conf 2016 Transcript: ALEX: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 49. I am your host, Alex Ford, developer at The Frontside. With me as well is Chris Freeman. Chris, do you want to introduce yourself? CHRIS: Hi, everybody. I'm Chris. I'm also a developer at The Frontside. ALEX: We have a really special guest for today. I'm really excited. Jamison Dance is with us. JAMISON: Hello. ALEX: Jamison runs Fivestack Software Consulting Company, hosts Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, organizes React Rally Conf, and spells 'array.length' incorrectly sometimes. Is this true? JAMISON: It is true, yeah. I think I have a special ESLint plugin to yell at me now when I do that or something. But that has caused some pain in my life. CHRIS: Oh, that was very brave. Thank you. ALEX: We're going to be talking Elm today and writing better JavaScript with Elm. This is really exciting for me. I've gotten the chance to dive into the Elm tutorial a little bit, which is an absolutely beautiful tutorial if you haven't checked it out yet. JAMISON: Yeah, Elm is a programming language that runs in the browser and compiles down to JavaScript. It's a pure statically-typed programming language, which if that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry. The take away for you is that Elm tries really hard to make it easy to write programs that don't crash and are easier to refactor and easier to work on and maintain, basically. CHRIS: And Elm is a language in of itself but it is pretty specifically intended for front-end development. Is that correct? JAMISON: Right now, there are some long term plans, but yeah. For now, it's front-end for building UIs and applications in the browser. ALEX: I heard about Elm. When should I check it out? Who do you see jumping into this language? JAMISON: I think it's aimed at people that want to build robust applications which is so vague, it sounds meaningless. Maybe I talk about what attracted me to it. The two things where I was interested in functional programming -- that's kind of like the technical language wonk, like geeky side of it. But the other side is I've worked for a while in some fairly large JavaScript applications and I've seen the nightmares that I can create for myself In just building something that works and is just really hard to work on. So the idea of a language that's focused on keeping your productivity high as the application skills and as the team skills was really attractive to me. Like the bio says, if I spell array.length wrong, sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't, then my program breaks. Elm has a compiler that runs on all your code and basically, make sure that your code cannot crash. You could still have bugs and you can still just make your code do the wrong thing but it helps eliminate whole categories of errors. It just makes them impossible to create in Elm. If you're interested in functional programming or if you're interested in just building stuff that is easy to work with, like this kind of this curve of productivity over time where some environments and some languages start out really high, it's really easy to build something fast at the beginning and then maintaining it is just really hard so the productivity drops over time. Elm is trying to kind of flatten that out so your productivity stays high throughout the lifetime of your application. CHRIS: I actually have a question about that. I'm planning on bringing this up later but you gave me such a good segue that I feel compelled. You mentioned that one of the things that is nice about Elm-type system is that it helps scale an app, especially when it comes to a team. My experience there are kind of true different facets to what scaling an app across a team looks like. One is the categories of bugs that something like [inaudible] compiler helps you catch. But the other is, and this is totally coming from the fact that I use Ember every single day, that conventions also help scale across a team. I'm curious like what I've looked at with Elm, it looks like they definitely have the type system there and error messages there to help quite a bit. But I haven't seen conventions arising yet in terms of a lot of things, about how you build a front-end application. I'm curious, is it that those conventions are there and just haven't found them yet or they're still very much in development? Or is that not even really a goal for Elm in the same way that it might be nothing like Ember or Angular. JAMISON: You mentioned first the kinds of bugs that the compiler will help you catch. I want to talk about that really quickly. If people aren't familiar with what a compiler or type system will do at build time, it checks all of your code to make sure that all of the variables and inputs and outputs from functions match up. So you say this function takes in an 'int' and returns a string and it will go find everywhere that calls that function and make sure that they're always passing in an 'int' and return it, so that it always return a string. It kind of does that throughout the whole flow of the program. It eliminates those kind of areas where you just get the interface wrong. The program is huge. You don't remember all the inputs to a function so you just like passing an object when it expects a string or something and then later on it will explode. You don't get those errors with Elm which is the first kind of thing you're talking about. You mentioned that conventions and I'm not on the Elm core team or whatever. I don't have any special insight but my experience is Elm very much wants to create strong conventions around how you build applications. The Elm architecture is kind of a way to build front-end applications that is basically baked into the language. There isn't like a UI framework for Elm. It is Elm. That to me is a huge point on the strong convention side. There isn't like an Elm fatigue because there isn't a choice between a hundred different UI frameworks in Elm. Some patterns around how you build apps this small, I think are still being established but I think there are strong conventions already and the trend of the Elm community is towards picking strong conventions. You'll see Evan, the creator of the language, He'll talk about how he wants to have one really good library instead of 15 overlapping libraries of varying quality to solve the same problem. Elm has conventions already. The places where it doesn't have strong conventions are I think places that will get filled in but the goal is to pick up the language and you get everything you need to build an application attached to it that's all kind of figured out for you. CHRIS: It's been interesting you mentioned the thing about it's better to have one good library, rather than 15 libraries of varying quality. I've seen that a little bit in practice. One of the things that I started looking for pretty early on when I was messing with Elm was what client-side routing look like. There are a couple of different routing libraries. But if you look at them, you can see that they're actually kind of this progression, like you can see how they have built on each other and they're kind of like building up the stack of abstractions toward one final solution. It's very interesting because it's not like those other libraries that are still there. If you really wanted to use just a regular URL parser and build your own, you could. But you can also see this development towards something that anyone could take off the shelf and start using. JAMISON: Yeah, and Elm has been around, I think it was 2011 when it first started. But really, Elm as like a popular thing that people hear about and use in production is only a couple of year's old maybe. There are still some things that are evolving like that. I think you're right that they're evolving towards convention instead of, in my mind JavaScript values, the proliferation of tons of different ideas and just wild exploration. Elm seems like it values a little more consensus and aligning the community behind one solution. I think it's happening, if it's not there yet, it'll get there, I guess. ALEX: I have a question about writing test in Elm and how that feels different than writing tests in JavaScript because the way I find myself writing tests right now is I understand the language to be fragile and I understand some frameworks have some fragility because of that language so I find myself writing really strong tests that are easy to break. I imagine that maybe in Elm, that's a little bit different with this very strong convention that you're talking about. JAMISON: Yes, some of it is around not having to be as defensive in your testing. If you wanted to get really, really down in the nitty-gritty in JavaScript, there are just an incredible array of different inputs you would have to test to make sure someone doesn't pass in like [inaudible] to this function where you think it's an array or whatever, like you just don't have to write any of those tests because the compiler catches that. We haven't talked about purity at all and this concept in functional programming where your functions can't cause side effects. They can't just go make a network request or write to disc or console.log like right in the middle. The functions take an input and return an output. You can do that in JavaScript. You can write your functions that way but because that feature is built into the language, it's the only way to write functions in Elm which makes it really easy to test functions because you just pass them stuff and you check what they return. In my experience, that makes them easier to test. You still build UIs and you still make network requests so you still construct some HTML at some point in your program. You can if you want to test that the HTML looks right or that elements have certain classes and stuff. But I guess what I'm saying is the tests feel like they're testing the behavior more than the edge cases when I write tests in them just because the compiler eliminates a bunch of weird edge cases you don't have to worry about. ALEX: Coming from a component-based JavaScript framework, what is going to be my experience jumping into Elm? How is that going to feel different for me? JAMISON: That's a great question. Myself and almost everyone I've seen get started in Elm that comes from something based around components that the instinct is to create components in Elm for everything. You have a select box in Ember or React or whatever and you wrap it in components. You can just reuse it everywhere. In Elm, if you try to do that, you will hate it and think Elm is broken and horrible and just sucks. It's because the Elm architecture comes with, I guess, you could call it boilerplate, there's some work you have to do to build a component that can do IO and respond to events and stuff. That work is... I don't know, maybe like a dozen lines of code. Then there's some work to wire those components up together, that's maybe a couple more lines of code. So if you have like 300 components in your Elm application, you'll have... I don't know, like thousands of lines that just wiring stuff together code which won't really buy you that much because in my experience, using components is an attempt to make things understandable and isolate concerns. You get a lot of that from having peer functions and having a strong a static-type system. In Elm, you end up making a lot wider components, instead of having this deep tree of lots of components nested inside of each other. You'll have a much flatter but wider tree. That took a while to get used to but I think it makes sense for the language now. You can still create reusable things but you focus more on creating reusable functions instead of creating components that are black boxes, that you kind of package up and pass around. You can still do reuse but it's a little bit different than reuse in a component-based framework. This is a thing. I would say, in the last year, there's been a lot more discussion on blogposts and screencasts and stuff on a year ago, a couple of people were talking about it but there weren't really lots of great examples of this and now, I think, even the Elm Guide has some examples of reuse without components. ALEX: Yes. One of my favorite things about component-based JavaScript is because I've learned to test them so well. Even though, sometimes they can turn into a configuration ball, I've been able to make them very reliable, even if they are deeply nested so going away from that scares me. JAMISON: Yeah, it totally scared me. It felt wrong and weird and bad. But now, it doesn't. I don't know, I'm used to it, I guess, and I still write a lot of JavaScript. It's not that hard switching back and forth between those two mental models but I definitely had to develop a different mental model when writing Elm code. CHRIS: I'm interested in talking about some of the tooling. I know Elm has a lot of tooling. They have elm-reactor and they have the compiler. But I think I know that you also do the kind of dip into some of the JavaScript tooling if you are getting into bigger Elm application. You're probably still going to need something like a Webpack or Browserify, I guess. I'm curious what's your experience with that has been? JAMISON: You can definitely just write an Elm application and then compile it into this JavaScript file then drop that in a script tag on your page and it will all work. The complexity can get very low. If you want to do more advanced stuff like talking to JavaScript, You can still do all that without any additional tooling, if you would like. If you have a lot of dependencies in your JavaScript or you have a large JavaScript application or code base that you want to integrate with Elm, then you can use something like Webpack or Browserify. In my experience, it's no more painful than Webpack or Browserify. All the rest of that stuff already is. I don't know, there's an Elm Webpack plugin that will run the Elm compiler and allow you to import your Elm application into JavaScript file and I think there are similar stuff for Browserify and some of the other module bundlers. I don't think there's anything radically new on the Elm side as far as bundling up your application or anything like that. It just kind of works like you expect. The places where, I think Elm tooling is cool in ways that I haven't seen that much in JavaScript are in the Elm package manager. If you are building a package yourself, it has automatic semantic versioning built in so they have a type system. They can detect when your interfaces change automatically. If you try and release a version that you change the interface and you don't bump the version, they will like yell at you because that's a breaking change. There's some cool stuff around that that you get with the language having a static-type system. The debugger is a new thing as of a couple of weeks ago. That's built into the language. You might have seen similar stuff in other frameworks but it's all kind of extra add-ons. In Elm, because it has kind of a framework built into the language, they can also build in a debugger for that framework in the language. You can enable debug mode, pull up an application, click around, do a bunch of stuff, and then it'll record a log of all those actions and you can scroll back through them and jump to any point in that timeline to reload the state of the application to that point. You can export that log to a JSON file and then kind of send that around, have someone load that log in, and it'll get your application back into the same state. It's a really good for creating bug reports. You click some button 15 times and then it breaks -- do that, export the logs, send that to someone else. Instead of having to follow all the steps, they can just load your state and then figure out what's broken about that. I think that there are some tooling advances that are enabled by both the language itself, like the static type system and also the focus on strong conventions and frameworks built into the language. Does that makes sense? CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely. As you were talking, I thought about was that some tooling that you lean a lot on in JavaScript is kind of rendered unnecessary by the error messages in Elm. All of the things that you may bring in an extra tool to catch in JavaScript when in Elm will just tell you when it compiles and it will give you this just unbelievably friendly, informative, and easy to diagnosed error message that tells you like, "This is the exact line where this happened. Maybe you mean to do this instead," because it can make all sorts of inferences about, like what you probably meant to do based on the type signature you gave to a function or something. I could see that going a long way toward making a subset of tools just unnecessary in Elm. JAMISON: Yeah, a lot of tooling around JavaScript has sprung up to address... I don't know, not weaknesses but areas where people have identified JavaScript needs a little help now. If that's passive aggressive enough way to say it. The language is 20 years old. It was created way before people were building giant, million line code bases in it. But Elm is much younger and has the benefit of a lot of history and hindsight. It turns out you can avoid a lot of tools if you eliminate their need. I have had that weird feeling where I'm building a JavaScript project and it feels like I'm flying a 747. There's a thousand switches everywhere. I'm like powering up a bunch of different things. It feels like I'm being really productive because I'm configuring ESLint in Webpack, in Flow, and all these different tools. Then I go to Elm and I just start typing and it feels like I'm less productive but I've just skipped so many steps. It is a different feeling. ALEX: Would you say that maybe you feel so productive in JavaScript because it has such a strong community, with so many examples and so much shared code? Elm being a younger community, and this is strictly an assumption, may not be at that maturity level where you can share code and have that particular level of productivity. JAMISON: Yes. There are definitely third party libraries in Elm. There's probably a few orders of magnitude difference in the community sizes between Elm and JavaScript. There are just way more people writing JavaScript. The likelihood that someone will have ended up at your weird feature that you need for some random program is probably a little higher. There are some numbers differences. In my experience, the people that are really into Elm right now enjoy solving their own problems because it does feel like they're a little bit more of your own problems to solve. It's a tradeoff. I was going to say, if you value 100% focus on building business features, JavaScript might be better but I don't necessarily think that's the case. Using a bunch of third party code comes with a cost and some of that cost is you have to understand the API and some of it is you have to kind of take some responsibility for knowing where it breaks down. In Elm, I think that responsibility is lessened by the language because the API is a lot easier to understand when you can look at the types that the API creates and uses. It's a lot harder for it to just break your stuff. I think you could make the argument that even though there's a giant repository of JavaScript code out there, a lot of it might not be great for your program. But if you're using Elm, the smaller amount of code that is out there already could be easier to use and help you even more productive. ALEX: I would like to try to segue into the Elm community now and what that looks like? What is this Elm community? How do you get involved, say, I'm coming from JavaScript or any language and I love it? Maybe my work doesn't use Elm just yet but how can I contribute? How can I continue to write more Elm code for not just my specific use cases? JAMISON: I think my favorite thing about the Elm community is its focus on friendliness and learnability. I call it 'ruthless focus'. They are aggressively committed to building a language that is easy for people to pick up. If you are coming to Elm for the first time, you're pulling your hair out because it looks totally different from JavaScript. That might not make any sense to you. But a lot of the ideas that Elm has come from other languages like Haskell or ML languages and those languages, I would say, are proudly hard to get into. It's like a badge of honor to learn Haskell and then you like bleed to do it and then you enter this elite club where you got to talk about monoids all day. Elm is like a strong negative reaction against that, like they want this to be a language that people can learn and get some of the benefit. Because there are cool things in languages like Haskell so the goal is to take some of those cool things and other cool things from other places too. But put them in a package that is easy for people to pick up without devoting their life to an arcane branch of mathematics. I think they do a really good job of that. I've done Haskell pretty hard a few times and I'll bounce off it some more. I don't feel confused about Elm at all in anyway. In Elm, it's not like I'm some genius that can pick it up. It's that they have eliminated a lot of complexity and made it friendly and easy to learn. I think that carries over into the community. They're really interested in helping people who are new to functional programming or are new to programming in general. They're also just nice. if there's an Elm Slack channel that you hang out in and like any internet chat channel, sometimes people will get a little testy and in the Elm one, they're so good at defusing situations, calming people down, like apologizing, and like being human beings. You don't see a lot of rage-y arguments where people say mean things about each other. I've been really impressed with that. I want to talk a little bit more about what the community is like and then maybe talk about how to get into it, if that's okay. I would say the community is -- I know, it's evenly split but it seems fairly evenly split between people coming from JavaScript's who don't have any functional programming experience and people coming from functional programming who don't have any UI experience. It's interesting seeing those two very different groups come together and they're both attracted to Elm for different reasons and they kind of pull it a little bit in different ways. But it makes an interesting group of people to be around because you learn a lot of cool UI stuff, a lot of cool functional programming stuff. ALEX: Sounds like a recipe for success, really. JAMISON: Yeah. I think if they can make functional programming not have the snootiness that it has sometimes in genders and people, then I think functional programming is great technically. I think the culture around it can be just obnoxious. So I think if Elm can take the good things without the bad things, that's amazing and that's kind of what it's trying to do. As far as getting into the Elm community, are you talking about writing open source or contributing to open source or just where they hang out? ALEX: Yeah, I was talking about contributing to open source but maybe Elm is just a better community for a certain style of contribution and maybe that looks like a blogpost and a coding example of how to do something yourself. JAMISON: Like any new technology, there are definitely in the kind of evangelism phase. If you do write a blogpost that says nice things about Elm, there's like a horde of people that will swarm all over it because they like people to say nice things about Elm. There's a bunch of people like writing books, doing screencast, speaking on it, introducing people to it, and that's well received very well. I think there's at least one podcast on Elm already. So all that to say that I think the community receives kind of education and I guess, you can call it evangelism stuff very well and they're excited about that. If you are interested in contributing to open source, you can actually go to Package.Elm-Lang.org and you can see all of the Elm third party libraries and they all have these GitHub for the backing of its package manager. They all have source links right there. You can just find any random library and get to its source. I think the community is pretty open to contributions from people. If you want to see Elm source code and contribute to it, they're very open to that. This is kind of a culture shock to me coming from other communities where you can't just like show up, submit a patch to Elm core, and then have a discussion, and get it accepted or rejected. They're not super open to direct code level contributions. They would prefer more use case feedback, discussion, and suggestions. Then the core team will take all these feedback in, think about it, come up with a plan, and then implement it, instead of take a lot of little patches from people. Some of the core libraries are a little bit harder to directly contribute code to but they are very open. If you try and use it, you run into something that doesn't work the way you expected and you can create a small example that demonstrates that. They're super open to discussions about that to influence the direction of the API. CHRIS: I think over the course of JavaScript and front-end development, there has been kind of waves of abstraction over JavaScript. There were just libraries and there were things like backbone and then it kind of moved into doing something like CoffeeScript or TypeScript and a couple others where the idea is -- ALEX: Good old Objective-J. CHRIS: Yeah, exactly. You might be transpiling down a JavaScript but there are still very much a clear link between something like CoffeeScript and JavaScript. Elm seems like it is one of a new batch of approaches where we're actually going to just sidestep JavaScript almost entirely. Like it is going to be like JVM bytecode or a browser and we're going to build an entirely new language on top of that. I know there's also a bit like ClojureScript, Scala.js, and PureScript and I'm curious, do you think that is going to be a continuing trend that front-end development is going to land on a mainstream solution that might not actually be JavaScript at all? Or do you see it as eventually circling back and pulling a lot of these features into JavaScript itself? JAMISON: I don't think that front-end development will be Elm in like five years or whatever. I don't think it's going to replace JavaScript at all. I think it might definitely influence tooling libraries or the language itself. The Elm architecture looks a lot like Redux because the Redux author read Elm and they're like, that's cool and then they wrote it in JavaScript. There are other places where like time-travelling debugging. I believe the JavaScript thing came from the Elm time-travelling debugger as well. There are cases where it has influenced JavaScript's already and I think that will continue to happen. Flow is a gradual-type system. You can lay it on top of JavaScript and they have done a lot of work on their error messages influenced by Elm. It's super cool to see all those influences back into the JavaScript community as a whole. I think there are classes of people who are more interested in doing some sprinkling of JavaScript on to pages. They might not even be like programmers really. They're kind of like designers who do a little bit of coding and I don't know if Elm makes sense for that kind of role where you just need to add a little bit of interaction. You can do that but it doesn't seem like a thing that group would focus on. It's just really hard to change the world. I write a lot of JavaScript so I'm bias but it feels like it's the most popular language in the world and being the most popular Language in the world is not a thing that's easily overthrown. But I think it will grow, like programming will look more like Elm does just in general in the future and I think JavaScript will as well. But I also think Elm will continue to grow. There's a lot of excitement about it and there's not a ton of people bouncing hard off of it. There's some people they're looking at it and they're like, "Eh, not yet." Some people just look at it and hate it. But from people that use it, I don't see a lot of those people dropping out. I've seen most of them sticking around. I think the trend is definitely -- Elm will grow. But I don't know if that will take over the world. ALEX: Then what lessons are developers bringing back to say and to write better JavaScript? JAMISON: I think a lot of people are learning about types and data modeling. If you learn programming through JavaScript, the idea that there's this defined shape that your data has and some tool will help you make sure that your data always looks like that is kind of like strange and foreign. I think a lot of people are learning that there's value in that. If you grew up in the MongoDB / Angular world like everything is schema-less, you just kind of slam some JavaScript objects everywhere, it all works, then it breaks, and you don't know why and you need to track it down. But I think seeing the value and thinking a little bit more clearly about what your data looks like and then forcing that through tooling is one lesson. That is taking a little bit more root in JavaScript. All the stuff around functional programming in JavaScript is like achieved buzzword status by now. But there is definitely still some education happening around how it's easier to test peer functions, how they're easier to understand and reuse, and how it's good to write them. I think Elm will continue to push that. Some of it though is there are some ideas you can take from Elm but it's just so much easier to use them to their fullest potential in a language and environment built around those ideas. You can kind of like cram a type system on to JavaScript. It's still really easy to get around and it does not model side effects at all. The elm type system modeled side effects so it helps you reason about where my program can talk to a network, where it can do things that are going to take a while to come back, and kind of sandbox those things into a place where you expect them, instead of have them sprinkled all over your program. CHRIS: I definitely feel that uncanny valley of trying to bring FP -- functional programming -- things back into JavaScript when it comes to pattern matching. That's something that in Elm or Elixir or any number of more functional languages. Pattern matching enables a lot of these higher level patterns that don't always translate super great back to JavaScript land. JAMISON: Yeah, the uncanny valley is a great way to put it. There are a lot of things that you can do that will lead to better JavaScript. But you always have to take the environment that you're working in into consideration. There are just some things you can't do or some things that are going to be more pain than they're worth to do. On the other hand, it is kind of nice to just type console.log wherever you want or type like '$.getJSON' or whatever. The added security that Elm brings comes at a cost of locking you down a little bit and that can be a little frustrating to people sometimes. But I think the payoff is worth it. ALEX: A side story. About six months ago, I tried to get into the Haskell programming book. That's currently being worked on. That's because I want to learn some functional programming lessons, maybe bring them back into my JavaScript, or just learn something new. It's useful to learn a new language and bring it back to your work. Of this 1300 page book, I got just past Chapter 2 and I was in a Haskell book club like everybody held each other accountable to finish this book. I did not make it. I could not figure out how to bring any of these lessons back into my code which is what I wanted to do here. Elm takes that functional programming concept and says, "We're applying it to UI right away." There's no, "How do I apply this? How do I side step this?" No, you're doing it immediately. Really, you're getting me excited to jump back into this tutorial and learn it and check out the community, just to be able to bring this back to my day to day and bring those lessons and do it. JAMISON: Yeah, the first time I tried to learn Haskell, I learned that I could sort an array of integers in memory and that was it. That was as far as my Haskell skills took me so I definitely feel you there. In Haskell, they'll tell you it's a research language so they have a lot of reasons why it kind of works the way it does and learning it takes the pathway it does. Elm is definitely not a research language. It's trying to be incredibly pragmatic so you build UIs. In the guide, that's how they teach you the language. It's the stuff you normally build. Thank you for bringing that up. I think, it's a thing that they focus on. I'm glad you picked it out. ALEX: Yeah, at the learning curve is the syntax but you're still solving those same problems. If you're coming from UI, you already have that context. That is probably the majority of the hard work -- it's solving problems that are meaningful to you. JAMISON: Yeah, for me the syntax, I had learned enough Haskell that the syntax wasn't hard -- how to make HTTP requests and do site-affecting things like that. It was the hang up for me but Elm, there is a way to do it and they show you and that's how you do everything and it all works the same way and it's fairly easy to understand. I don't want to call it easy because that makes people that struggle to feel that but they put a lot of work into making that both robust so it won't break your program and also learnable. CHRIS: One thing I would love to mention about the syntax, I have learned a number of languages, I guess and the Elm syntax was definitely one that threw me the most and it put me off for, I guess it wasn't so much just the syntax, it was the syntax combined with how people do things that I would call more like style choices. JAMISON: The formatting? CHRIS: Yeah, Elm formats things in weird ways. Except that there is a tool called 'elm-format'. Once I've discovered that it has a really great editor integration for a lot of editors, it effectively remove that problem because I discovered that I can essentially write garbage basically in my editor and I can say that anything will make it look beautiful. It's fantastic. It removes such a big barrier for me when I was trying to learn it. JAMISON: Yeah, elm-format, there were some great debates about it while it was being created but now that it exists, it's awesome. Speaking a little bit more of tooling, Elm comes out with new releases of the language with some backwards and compatible changes. But along with that, they release a tool to upgrade your Elm code automatically. It's not perfect and it won't run on 100%. It won't fix everything but with most projects, it fixes everything. Again, the benefit of having such a strict language is there's tools that will just upgrade all your stuff for you. That's pretty awesome. It lowers the cost of evolving the language because they can keep adding new things and changing things without just leaving the community in the dust like we've seen in some other stuff. That's kind of an Ember-ish thing, I guess. Ember has the whole stability... What is it? Something without stagnation? Stability without stagnation? CHRIS: Stability without stagnation. JAMISON: Where you just get all these free upgrades that are really easy to opt into and Elm has that same philosophy. ALEX: What made you decide to check out Elm, to check out this community? Do you like to jump into new languages, new communities, and poke around and see what sticks? Or is there something that attracted you to Elm in particular. JAMISON: Yes to both of those. I do poke around in a lot of new languages. I have a good friend, Sean Hess who's really into functional programming and he's a Haskell true believer. I am not but he is, so he teaches me stuff by Haskell. I think, he told me about it. I might be misremembering though. It might have been just some random blogpost or podcast somebody did a few years ago. But I was already excited about new languages and functional programming and I had tried to learn Haskell and bounced off so the idea of a functional programming language that takes some good ideas from Haskell, that runs in the browser that's new. It was like all the shiny things that I look for altogether in one thing. I tried it and I liked it. I, also was really impressed by Evan Czaplicki, He's the creator of Elm. His philosophy around creating a language and the goals he wanted to accomplish with it. There's a really good talk he gave and called 'Let's be mainstream' which talks about some of the stuff we talked about around if functional programming is pure statically-typed functional programming is so amazing and it has all these people that love it and swear it's the only way to write software, why no one does it? Why the number of people use it is so small? His thesis is basically because the languages that do this are kind of user hostile so he's trying to make it a user friendly, the one that takes all those ideas. I just really liked that philosophy. CHRIS: I want to go back to something that you mentioned a little bit ago and that was data modeling because that is definitely something that I noticed being extremely helpful, any time I'm using a statically-typed language. It is very much something that I brought with me back to JavaScript. But I was wondering, Maybe you could talk a little bit more in depth about what data modeling really means in terms of Elm, the type system, the record type, and that kind of stuff. JAMISON: Yeah, if you've worked with statically-typed languages like Java or C++ or something, you might have an idea of things like classes as a way to model data where you create a class and you say it has all these fields on it. I think, in the Elm type system, I'm going to say it's a lot better than those languages because it has a lot less ceremony and it is a lot more powerful. Elm has type inference which means you don't have to declare the type of everything. It can just figure it out from a lot of places. That's the thing that makes your code a lot friendlier to write. To model data in Elm, there are two main ways to do that. One is with these record types that you mentioned, Chris. You basically declare an object that has a certain shape like I'll make a type called 'user' and it has a user ID and a hash password and... I don't know, a list of my favorite cats or whatever. Then you can just refer to that user type in function arguments or in return types or anything like that. In Elm, because you created that type, it knows that these are all the fields it has. If you try to access a field that's not on there, it'll yell at you because you're doing something that won't work. Because you have to think through all of the different fields that are on your types, it forces you to do a little bit more. It's kind of like the other side of TDD instead of writing test first. You have to think about your data first. You could call it type-driven development, I guess. CHRIS: That's awesome. JAMISON: In my experience, that's helpful. In the same way, TDD is, right? It helps you to do a little bit of design first. Think about how you're going to interact with the program in some way. Instead of writing tests, you're thinking what data do I need here. They also have these things that you could call them -- there are a bunch of different names for them: algebraic data types, I guess. Some people call them tagged unions. They're kind of like enums where you say this type can take any of these finite list of values. But instead of an enum being like an integer, like it is in some languages with a fancy name wrapped around it, the enum types can contain other value. You can say... what's a good example for this? You could say a user is either an authenticated user with a user record inside it or an unauthenticated user. Then when you're using that type in your program, you check, "Is this user type the authenticated user?" Then, if so it has this user field inside of it that you can pluck out and use. Or, "Is it an unauthenticated user?" Those two different things, the super enums, the algebraic data types plus the record types are really powerful for modeling what data looks like in the real world. I haven't run into that many issues where it's been hard to do something I want to do with just those two concepts. Type systems are hard to explain over the air but hopefully, that helped a little bit. ALEX: I thought that was great. CHRIS: I think a good example of the algebraic data type thing is looking at messages in Elm versus actions in Redux. If our listeners are familiar with those, they are very, very, very similar at a high level. But in Redux, you just have string then you do a switch statement or something and you match on some strings. You hope that you synced everything up correctly. JAMISON: Yeah, you say, "This action has a message and then has a payload that looks like this." See if it match against the message and then hope that the payload somebody sent actually looks like you expect it to look. CHRIS: Yeah, whereas in Elm, you can actually say, "My message type is a union of all of these different things," and now, Elm knows exactly what you're saying and you can't accidentally send the wrong payload to the wrong update function or something. It's one of the cases where I found that there's a very, very clear similarity in JavaScript and it highlights, I think a lot of the nice features that Elm brings to that equation. JAMISON: Yeah and there's even more strictness around that, like you have to handle every message type in Elm. So if you say, "This function takes in a message and does something with it," and then you check against what kind of message it is, you have to check every case or Elm won't compile because they don't want you to just blindly miss something, I guess. But in Redux, you could just happily forget a thing in your case statement and then you send a message and it doesn't do anything and then you have to kind of trace through it and debug why that's happening. There's just more helpful stability stuff built in. CHRIS: Cool. I am so incredibly happy with how this podcast went. I'm just excited to start coding and start getting into Elm. I think people and developers maybe at an inflection point with JavaScript and just going and checking out something else that they can immediately apply back to their day to day. I think, it's so incredibly valuable and something that I'm going to be looking to explore very certain. JAMISON: The value pitch is pretty strong because everyone that's written JavaScript has just written code that breaks when things get passed around that they don't expect. I do that all the time and Elm makes that impossible. You can break it in other ways but you just eliminate this class of errors that plagues your existence in JavaScript. If you want to experience that life, check out Elm. It's got a lot of other good things too but just writing code that does not crashes is a pretty strong pitch, I think. ALEX: Jamison, are there any resources that you might recommend for someone who wants to get started with Elm? JAMISON: Somebody mentioned the guide a few times. Everyone says that about every language, check out the official tutorial or whatever, and they have wildly varying quality. The Elm guide is the thing that worked a ton on. It's pretty good, I think and geared towards people that have no knowledge of Elm, no knowledge of functional programming stuff. That's a Guide.Elm-lang.org. Then there's a Slack channel. If you just go to Elm-lang.org, it will have links to the Slack channel and there are lots of helpful friendly people there. I think those are the two best resources because with those, you can find all the other stuff. CHRIS: There's also another one that I really like to mention which is the elm tutorial. I think, it's Elm-tutorial.org. I found it to be a really great compliment to the official Elm Guide. I think it walks through a little more in building a full app where the Elm Guide kind of touches on a bunch of different related topics. But they're not necessarily one narrative. The Elm tutorial did a really good job of tying all that together for me. JAMISON: Yeah and this is been around for a long time and has kept it up through the evolution of the language. This is good stuff. ALEX: Jamison, thank you for coming on the Frontside Podcast. We really appreciated talking to you. JAMISON: Thanks for having me. ALEX: If you love Jamison's voice, you should check out his React Conf talk from 2016 also about Elm. It's a wonderful talk. Go check that out as well. JAMISON: Thank you. Can I pitch my other stuff too? Is that kosher? ALEX: You can absolutely pitch it. CHRIS: Soft skills engineering! JAMISON: Yeah, I do a podcast called Soft Skills Engineering with my friend Dave Smith where we talk about all of the non-technical stuff in writing code. It's like you [inaudible], you can submit questions, and we answer them. If you're interested in talking about building software together, you should talk to the Frontside first. But after that, you can find me at Fivestack.computer. That's where my consultancy lives. Consults is maybe a strong way of describing it. That's like saying the three toddlers standing on top of each other in a trench coat is like an adult. But if you want to work together, then check that out. ALEX: Great. All right. That wraps it up for us. Thank you very much for listening and we'll talk to you next week.

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Descripcion del programa En el front-end cada seis meses aparece un nuevo framework o librería y creemos que va a camabiarlo todo. Por ello en este episodio hemos invitado a Miguel, CTO de Redradix en el que hablamos de su visión del panorama actual. Le pregunto por multitud de metodologías, tecnologías y buenas prácticas que se usan en nuestro día a día para saber que es lo mejor en cada situación y su punto de vista. Si no te asusta este contínuo cambio este es tu programa. ¡A disfrutar se ha dicho! Encuesta para pedir Feedback Posibles topics, entrevistados y duración del programa Recomendaciones Preguntas rápidas: Miguel Martín Quién me ha inspirado: Elon Musk Recomiéndanos un recurso: MDN Recomiéndanos a un invitado: Elías Alonso ¿Qué tema te gustaría que tratásemos?: Internet of Things Contacta con: Miguel Martín Twitter Github Contacto de Redradix Links del programa BEM SMACSS OOCSS Grid Layout Flex Layout LESS Sass Stylus Hammer CodeKit Atomic Design Bootstrap WordPress Fundation jQuery Backbone Ember Angular React ES6 (no oficial) Bluebird Flux React Redux Babel Grunt Gulp NPM Bower Browserify JSPM Jasmine Mocha Karma Sinon Chai Istanbul Nightwatch AirbnbJS Frameworks de JavaScript Recomendaciones de Nacho State of JavaScript Front-end Event Alistapart Recent Conference Talks Worth Watching Must-Watch CSS Must-Watch JavaScript Contacta con el programa Web de WeCodeSign Twitter de WeCodeSign eMail de WeCodeSign Web de Ignacio Villanueva Twitter de Ignacio Villanueva

We talk about Snapchat, what is it good for? How do you use it? This might be Henning's last show from Germany. Jessica Lorde explained Electron on Hanselminutes. Maciej Cegłowski talks morality in tech. Kahlil ditches Browserify for Webpack. Trello made an app for Slack.

In this episode, the crew talks discusses Laracon, Elixir, Browserify, Webpack, the NBA finals, and Red Rising. Ryan Singer Twitter Ryan Singer Full Stack Radio Sandi metz twitter / site Sandi Metz - POODR (Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby) Sandi Metz - 99 bottles of OOP Laravel News: Laravel 5.3 Matt Stauffer: Laravel 5.3 Laracasts Community Page Issues for Laravel Docs Some sample open source laravel apps: Symposium / Gistlog / Giscus / Cachet (got others? tweet us at @laravelpodcast and we'll add more)

Kahlil is back and has HUGE news! NASA is using node. We speculate about why Samsung bought Joyent. We talk about politics a bit and what to do about gun violence. Kahlil gives a shoutout to Browserify and Raquel gives us an update on her React learnings.

We'll talk about modules and module loaders! Everything from AMD to common.js and spend a bit of time going over Browserify and Webpack.

02:07 - K. Scott Allen Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog 02:32 - Package Managers, Package Managers vs Module Loaders 06:09 - Getting Modules, Loading Modules, and Bundling Modules Browserify webpack jspm.io 11:06 - Exploring ^ These Options 12:27 - Performance, Maintenance, and Tooling Support systemjs 23:08 - HTTP/2 28:16 - webpack vs jspm.io Aurelia Configuration Getting Started 45:30 - Angular 2 46:42 - Community 50:44 - Evaluating New or Upcoming Frameworks Picks Learn everything you can about upcoming features of JavaScript: TypeScript, ES-whatever, etc. (John) TV Fool (Chuck) Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans (Chuck) The Wire (Scott)

02:07 - K. Scott Allen Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog 02:32 - Package Managers, Package Managers vs Module Loaders 06:09 - Getting Modules, Loading Modules, and Bundling Modules Browserify webpack jspm.io 11:06 - Exploring ^ These Options 12:27 - Performance, Maintenance, and Tooling Support systemjs 23:08 - HTTP/2 28:16 - webpack vs jspm.io Aurelia Configuration Getting Started 45:30 - Angular 2 46:42 - Community 50:44 - Evaluating New or Upcoming Frameworks Picks Learn everything you can about upcoming features of JavaScript: TypeScript, ES-whatever, etc. (John) TV Fool (Chuck) Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans (Chuck) The Wire (Scott)

02:07 - K. Scott Allen Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog 02:32 - Package Managers, Package Managers vs Module Loaders 06:09 - Getting Modules, Loading Modules, and Bundling Modules Browserify webpack jspm.io 11:06 - Exploring ^ These Options 12:27 - Performance, Maintenance, and Tooling Support systemjs 23:08 - HTTP/2 28:16 - webpack vs jspm.io Aurelia Configuration Getting Started 45:30 - Angular 2 46:42 - Community 50:44 - Evaluating New or Upcoming Frameworks Picks Learn everything you can about upcoming features of JavaScript: TypeScript, ES-whatever, etc. (John) TV Fool (Chuck) Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans (Chuck) The Wire (Scott)

Kahlil declares Raquel a Podlebrity and explains what that means. We then discuss the pending deletion of Raquel's Wikipedia page and learn about Browserify and several of the related *ify modules such as Uglifyify. Henning confesses that he is not entirely over vim. In closing we discuss the various static site hosting options out there.

本期由 Terry 和 袁滚滚 一起主持， 邀请到了 Vue.js 的作者 尤小右, 聊聊前端框架开发背后的故事。 这一期我们将聊到非常多前端框架和技术，大家也可以听到小右同学对各种前端框架和技术的点评，如果你正愁如何选择你的前端工具栈, 我相信这一期将会对你有非常大的帮助。(涉及到的技术包含 Knockout, BackboneJS, Spine, Marionette, AngularJS, Ember, Ractive.js, React, Flux, webpack, Karma， Jasmine 等等等等) Meteor Parsons School of Design Clojure Colgate University ActionScript Zachary Lieberman openframeworks three.js Google Creative Lab Google Data Arts Team Aaron Koblin Chrome Experiments Dependency injection Object.defineProperty() Knockout Backbone.js Spine AngularJS Marionette MVVM Glimmer Ractive React React Virtual DOM shouldComponentUpdate (React) Flux Immutable JS CommonJS substack Browserify webpack Babel CoffeeScript TypeScript Jasmine Mocha Karma Selenium CasperJS PhantomJS Nightwatch.js Sauce Labs BrowserStack DailyJS Laravel Laracasts Processing TasteJS Avalon 尤小右 知乎 Relay Ember FastBoot react-server-example 功夫熊 硬派健身 硬派健身 － 知乎专栏 Python China 青城 Theme BTW: 录制中途，突然楼上开始敲东西，虽然后期做了一些处理， 但是可能还是略有影响，但并无大碍，希望大家多多饱含. 小右口误更正： 小右到达美国的时间是 05 年 Typescript 是有类型推导的 Special Guests: 尤小右 and 袁滚滚.

Check out RailsClips!   02:24 - Ben Drucker Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog EAZE Eaze MD Ben Drucker: Modular Angular: Apps that Scale @ ng-vegas 2015 03:00 - What is meant by “Angular apps that scale”? 04:54 - Tools Browserify AMD RequireJS 06:25 - Ben’s Background in Scalability 09:28 - “Scalability” and “Scaling” 14:00 - Team Size 14:53 - EAZE 17:00 - The EAZE Architecture Eaze MD 21:17 - What You Should Be Doing to Scale (Tips) Documentation API Answers the Right Questions for the UI Versioning Strategy 23:45 - Managing Scale (Monitoring Load) 26:58 - Server-side: Data Storage 28:58 - Client-side Dependency Injection Naming Collision and Conventions Build Process 37:24 - Ben's GitHub Repos and Open Source Picks Robots on the Line (Joe) Saint Petersburg, Russia (Katya) The Man Who Saw America: Looking back with Robert Frank, the most influential photographer alive (Ward) Paracord (Chuck) Soto Pocket Torch (Chuck) Shyp (Ben)

Check out RailsClips!   02:24 - Ben Drucker Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog EAZE Eaze MD Ben Drucker: Modular Angular: Apps that Scale @ ng-vegas 2015 03:00 - What is meant by “Angular apps that scale”? 04:54 - Tools Browserify AMD RequireJS 06:25 - Ben’s Background in Scalability 09:28 - “Scalability” and “Scaling” 14:00 - Team Size 14:53 - EAZE 17:00 - The EAZE Architecture Eaze MD 21:17 - What You Should Be Doing to Scale (Tips) Documentation API Answers the Right Questions for the UI Versioning Strategy 23:45 - Managing Scale (Monitoring Load) 26:58 - Server-side: Data Storage 28:58 - Client-side Dependency Injection Naming Collision and Conventions Build Process 37:24 - Ben's GitHub Repos and Open Source Picks Robots on the Line (Joe) Saint Petersburg, Russia (Katya) The Man Who Saw America: Looking back with Robert Frank, the most influential photographer alive (Ward) Paracord (Chuck) Soto Pocket Torch (Chuck) Shyp (Ben)

Check out RailsClips!   02:24 - Ben Drucker Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog EAZE Eaze MD Ben Drucker: Modular Angular: Apps that Scale @ ng-vegas 2015 03:00 - What is meant by “Angular apps that scale”? 04:54 - Tools Browserify AMD RequireJS 06:25 - Ben’s Background in Scalability 09:28 - “Scalability” and “Scaling” 14:00 - Team Size 14:53 - EAZE 17:00 - The EAZE Architecture Eaze MD 21:17 - What You Should Be Doing to Scale (Tips) Documentation API Answers the Right Questions for the UI Versioning Strategy 23:45 - Managing Scale (Monitoring Load) 26:58 - Server-side: Data Storage 28:58 - Client-side Dependency Injection Naming Collision and Conventions Build Process 37:24 - Ben's GitHub Repos and Open Source Picks Robots on the Line (Joe) Saint Petersburg, Russia (Katya) The Man Who Saw America: Looking back with Robert Frank, the most influential photographer alive (Ward) Paracord (Chuck) Soto Pocket Torch (Chuck) Shyp (Ben)

Angular 2 Forms - We'll be joined by Victor Savkin who is leading the development on Angular 2 Forms. He'll give us the low-down on what we need to know about forms in Angular 2. It's pretty different from Angular 1, so this is definitely a show you do not want to miss. Guest: Victor Savkin Panelists: Aimee Knight, PatrictJS, and Jeff Whelpley Picks/Tips: Victor - Onirim Card Game, Reading CS Papers (article) Kent - React Podcast Episode 2: Webpack vs. Browserify, Snap CI (and my blog post on Continuous Delivery) Aimee - NomadJS Patrick - Angular 2 Server Rendering, RxJS, FalcorJS Jeff - angular-formly, AngularU Angular Air is a video podcast all about Angular hosted by egghead.io instructor Kent C. Dodds. Please visit the Angular Air website (http://angular-air.com) to see upcoming and past episodes. Also be sure to follow Angular Air on Twitter and Google+ to stay up to date with future episodes. Also, all episodes are on the YouTube channel as well. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/angularair/support

Get your Ruby Remote Conf tickets and check out the @rubyremoteconf Twitter feed for exciting updates about the conference.   02:22 - Spike Brehm Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Airbnb @airbnb @airbnbnerds 03:07 - rendr Isomorphic JavaScript Single-Page Application Routes and Controllers 06:24 - Why the back and forth between server-side and client-side applications? Rendering Content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Spike Brehm: Building Isomorphic Apps @ JSConf.Asia 2014 (Video) Spike Brehm: Building Isomorphic Apps @ JSConf.Asia 2014 (Slides) Spike Brehm: The Evolution of Airbnb's Frontend Caching 20:28 - Tools That Help Browserify webpack set-cookie 22:21 - Why do this? Who gets statically and dynamically rendered pages? Airbnb Mobile Hydration React Virtual DOM Diffing Delegation 30:26 - DOM and String-based Templating Handlebars.js Express.js Mounting 33:11 - Use Cases Meteor Asana 36:08 - Why does Isomorphic JavaScript get so much hate? Charlie Robbins: Scaling Isomorphic Javascript Code Michael Jackson: Universal JavaScript Picks The Paleolithic Diet (Aimee) Programming Throwdown (Aimee) Listen to other people’s views (Chuck) AJ O'Neal: Access web pages through your home network via SSH (AJ) AJ O'Neal: Reverse VPN: turn any private device into public cloud server (AJ) Alt (Spike) Tame Impala (Spike)

Get your Ruby Remote Conf tickets and check out the @rubyremoteconf Twitter feed for exciting updates about the conference.   02:22 - Spike Brehm Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Airbnb @airbnb @airbnbnerds 03:07 - rendr Isomorphic JavaScript Single-Page Application Routes and Controllers 06:24 - Why the back and forth between server-side and client-side applications? Rendering Content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Spike Brehm: Building Isomorphic Apps @ JSConf.Asia 2014 (Video) Spike Brehm: Building Isomorphic Apps @ JSConf.Asia 2014 (Slides) Spike Brehm: The Evolution of Airbnb's Frontend Caching 20:28 - Tools That Help Browserify webpack set-cookie 22:21 - Why do this? Who gets statically and dynamically rendered pages? Airbnb Mobile Hydration React Virtual DOM Diffing Delegation 30:26 - DOM and String-based Templating Handlebars.js Express.js Mounting 33:11 - Use Cases Meteor Asana 36:08 - Why does Isomorphic JavaScript get so much hate? Charlie Robbins: Scaling Isomorphic Javascript Code Michael Jackson: Universal JavaScript Picks The Paleolithic Diet (Aimee) Programming Throwdown (Aimee) Listen to other people’s views (Chuck) AJ O'Neal: Access web pages through your home network via SSH (AJ) AJ O'Neal: Reverse VPN: turn any private device into public cloud server (AJ) Alt (Spike) Tame Impala (Spike)

Get your Ruby Remote Conf tickets and check out the @rubyremoteconf Twitter feed for exciting updates about the conference.   02:22 - Spike Brehm Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Airbnb @airbnb @airbnbnerds 03:07 - rendr Isomorphic JavaScript Single-Page Application Routes and Controllers 06:24 - Why the back and forth between server-side and client-side applications? Rendering Content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Spike Brehm: Building Isomorphic Apps @ JSConf.Asia 2014 (Video) Spike Brehm: Building Isomorphic Apps @ JSConf.Asia 2014 (Slides) Spike Brehm: The Evolution of Airbnb's Frontend Caching 20:28 - Tools That Help Browserify webpack set-cookie 22:21 - Why do this? Who gets statically and dynamically rendered pages? Airbnb Mobile Hydration React Virtual DOM Diffing Delegation 30:26 - DOM and String-based Templating Handlebars.js Express.js Mounting 33:11 - Use Cases Meteor Asana 36:08 - Why does Isomorphic JavaScript get so much hate? Charlie Robbins: Scaling Isomorphic Javascript Code Michael Jackson: Universal JavaScript Picks The Paleolithic Diet (Aimee) Programming Throwdown (Aimee) Listen to other people’s views (Chuck) AJ O'Neal: Access web pages through your home network via SSH (AJ) AJ O'Neal: Reverse VPN: turn any private device into public cloud server (AJ) Alt (Spike) Tame Impala (Spike)

02:37 - Dave Thomas Introduction Twitter Blog The Pragmatic Bookshelf 04:17 - How Dave Got Started in Programming 06:34 - Tools and Constraints “An Enthusiast’s Problem”? Is the focus on tools a form of cargo culting? Leadism Over Chosen Technologies and Its’ Effect on Innovation Switching Tools and Making Excuses 19:29 - Limerence Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love by Dorothy Tennov Irrational Interest and Defensiveness 28:54 - Ruby = Happiness: Does it Hurt? 31:00 - Tools and Falling in Love with Tools Fear of Falling Behind; Fear of Irrelevancy Different Tools for Different Contexts 35:08 - When Do You Learn? When Do You Train? (Not Falling Behind) 38:01 - Choosing Similar Tools and Technologies vs Choosing Different Tools and Technologies Gulp => Grunt => Browserify Example Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt 43:36 - Relationships and Identities 46:08 - Looking Forward vs Looking Back (Knowing Your History) Resources, Curriculum: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson (SICP) Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce    The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth (Series) Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) Brainstorming Example 01:01:48 - Is the rampant use of social media hindering the learning of big ideas? Self-Curation = Key 01:08:15 - How You Learn a Language / Decide You Like a Language Sudoku Solver Markdown Parser Picks Slack (Dave) Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Dave) Philly Emerging Tech Conference  (Dave)  

02:37 - Dave Thomas Introduction Twitter Blog The Pragmatic Bookshelf 04:17 - How Dave Got Started in Programming 06:34 - Tools and Constraints “An Enthusiast’s Problem”? Is the focus on tools a form of cargo culting? Leadism Over Chosen Technologies and Its’ Effect on Innovation Switching Tools and Making Excuses 19:29 - Limerence Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love by Dorothy Tennov Irrational Interest and Defensiveness 28:54 - Ruby = Happiness: Does it Hurt? 31:00 - Tools and Falling in Love with Tools Fear of Falling Behind; Fear of Irrelevancy Different Tools for Different Contexts 35:08 - When Do You Learn? When Do You Train? (Not Falling Behind) 38:01 - Choosing Similar Tools and Technologies vs Choosing Different Tools and Technologies Gulp => Grunt => Browserify Example Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt 43:36 - Relationships and Identities 46:08 - Looking Forward vs Looking Back (Knowing Your History) Resources, Curriculum: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson (SICP) Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce    The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth (Series) Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) Brainstorming Example 01:01:48 - Is the rampant use of social media hindering the learning of big ideas? Self-Curation = Key 01:08:15 - How You Learn a Language / Decide You Like a Language Sudoku Solver Markdown Parser Picks Slack (Dave) Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Dave) Philly Emerging Tech Conference  (Dave)  

02:37 - Dave Thomas Introduction Twitter Blog The Pragmatic Bookshelf 04:17 - How Dave Got Started in Programming 06:34 - Tools and Constraints “An Enthusiast’s Problem”? Is the focus on tools a form of cargo culting? Leadism Over Chosen Technologies and Its’ Effect on Innovation Switching Tools and Making Excuses 19:29 - Limerence Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love by Dorothy Tennov Irrational Interest and Defensiveness 28:54 - Ruby = Happiness: Does it Hurt? 31:00 - Tools and Falling in Love with Tools Fear of Falling Behind; Fear of Irrelevancy Different Tools for Different Contexts 35:08 - When Do You Learn? When Do You Train? (Not Falling Behind) 38:01 - Choosing Similar Tools and Technologies vs Choosing Different Tools and Technologies Gulp => Grunt => Browserify Example Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt 43:36 - Relationships and Identities 46:08 - Looking Forward vs Looking Back (Knowing Your History) Resources, Curriculum: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson (SICP) Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce    The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth (Series) Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) Brainstorming Example 01:01:48 - Is the rampant use of social media hindering the learning of big ideas? Self-Curation = Key 01:08:15 - How You Learn a Language / Decide You Like a Language Sudoku Solver Markdown Parser Picks Slack (Dave) Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Dave) Philly Emerging Tech Conference  (Dave)  

In this episode, the crew discusses PHP 7, Browserify, and their favorite Mac applications.

Ryo Nakamuraさん、mizchiさんと、Square, Node.js, CoffeeScript, Amazon Echo などについて話しました。 Show Notes JRuby at Square OkHttp Kochiku: CI for long test suites #8 AltJS | mozaic.fm CoffeeScript Browserify Ring : Shortcut Everything. iOS 8: Hey Siri! Amazon Echo Amazon Dash

Panel Tom Dale (twitter github blog Tilde Inc.) James Halliday (twitter github substack.net) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Tim Caswell (twitter github howtonode.org) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:52 - James Halliday Introduction browserify 02:37 - Tom Dale Introduction iCloud Ember.js Big Data & Hadoop 04:47 - Specialized vs Monolithic github.com/tildeio Idiology Micro Libraries 14:13 - Learning Frameworks 18:04 - Making things modular 25:23 - Picking the right tool for the job 27:44 - voxel.js & emberjs emberjs / packages BPM - Browser Package Manager NPM - Node Packaged Modules testling-ci Backbone.js 38:19 - Module Systems CommonJS 41:14 - Cloud9 Use Case 43:54 - Bugs jQuery Source Code Picks jQuery 2.0 (Merrick) ECMAScript 6 Module Definition (Merrick) AMD (Merrick) Yiruma (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Miracle Berry Tablets (AJ) The Ubuntu You Deserve (AJ) Bravemule (Jamison) RealtimeConf Europe (Tim) visionmedia / cpm (Tim) Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie Miller (Chuck) Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing? [Infographic] (Chuck) testling-ci (James) voxel.js (James) CAMPJS (James) Discourse (Tom) Williams-Sonoma 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set (Tom) The Best Simple Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen (Tom) Next Week Why Javascript is Hard Transcript JAMISON:  You can curse but we will just edit it out and replace it with fart noises. TOM:  I’ll be providing plenty of my own. [Laughter] JAMISON:  Okay, good. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK:  Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have AJ O’Neal. AJ:  Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you not even live! CHUCK:  [Laughs] Alright, Jamison Dance. JAMISON:  Hi guys, it’s tough to follow that. CHUCK:  Merrick Christensen. MERRICK:  Hey. CHUCK:  Joe Eames. JOE:  Howdy! CHUCK:  Tim Caswell. TIM:  Hello. CHUCK:  I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. And this week, we have two guests. The first one is Tom Dale. TOM:  Hey, thanks for having me. CHUCK:  The other is James Halliday. JAMES:  Yep. Hello. CHUCK:  Welcome to the show, guys. We were having a conversation a while back, I don’t remember if it was during another episode or after another episode. But we were having a discussion over code complexity and having like small simple libraries or small simple sets of functionality versus large monolithic sets of functionality, and how to approach those and when they’re appropriate. So, we brought you guys on to help us explore this because you're experts, right? TOM:  I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of the situation, but we can certainly fumble our way through something. [Laughter] CHUCK:  Alright. So, why don’t you guys, real quick, just kind of introduce yourselves? Give us a little background on what your experience is so that we know which questions to ask you guys. James, why don’t you start? I know you’ve been on the show before. JAMES:  Hello. I suppose I wrote Browserify which is relevant here. It’s a common JS style, bundler packager thing that just uses NPM. And I have a bunch of other libraries. And I really like doing data development as just a bunch of little modules put together. They are all published completely independently on NPM. I think I’m up to like 230-ish some odd modules on NPM now. So, I’ve been doing that and I really like that style.

Panel Tom Dale (twitter github blog Tilde Inc.) James Halliday (twitter github substack.net) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Tim Caswell (twitter github howtonode.org) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:52 - James Halliday Introduction browserify 02:37 - Tom Dale Introduction iCloud Ember.js Big Data & Hadoop 04:47 - Specialized vs Monolithic github.com/tildeio Idiology Micro Libraries 14:13 - Learning Frameworks 18:04 - Making things modular 25:23 - Picking the right tool for the job 27:44 - voxel.js & emberjs emberjs / packages BPM - Browser Package Manager NPM - Node Packaged Modules testling-ci Backbone.js 38:19 - Module Systems CommonJS 41:14 - Cloud9 Use Case 43:54 - Bugs jQuery Source Code Picks jQuery 2.0 (Merrick) ECMAScript 6 Module Definition (Merrick) AMD (Merrick) Yiruma (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Miracle Berry Tablets (AJ) The Ubuntu You Deserve (AJ) Bravemule (Jamison) RealtimeConf Europe (Tim) visionmedia / cpm (Tim) Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie Miller (Chuck) Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing? [Infographic] (Chuck) testling-ci (James) voxel.js (James) CAMPJS (James) Discourse (Tom) Williams-Sonoma 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set (Tom) The Best Simple Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen (Tom) Next Week Why Javascript is Hard Transcript JAMISON:  You can curse but we will just edit it out and replace it with fart noises. TOM:  I’ll be providing plenty of my own. [Laughter] JAMISON:  Okay, good. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK:  Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have AJ O’Neal. AJ:  Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you not even live! CHUCK:  [Laughs] Alright, Jamison Dance. JAMISON:  Hi guys, it’s tough to follow that. CHUCK:  Merrick Christensen. MERRICK:  Hey. CHUCK:  Joe Eames. JOE:  Howdy! CHUCK:  Tim Caswell. TIM:  Hello. CHUCK:  I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. And this week, we have two guests. The first one is Tom Dale. TOM:  Hey, thanks for having me. CHUCK:  The other is James Halliday. JAMES:  Yep. Hello. CHUCK:  Welcome to the show, guys. We were having a conversation a while back, I don’t remember if it was during another episode or after another episode. But we were having a discussion over code complexity and having like small simple libraries or small simple sets of functionality versus large monolithic sets of functionality, and how to approach those and when they’re appropriate. So, we brought you guys on to help us explore this because you're experts, right? TOM:  I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of the situation, but we can certainly fumble our way through something. [Laughter] CHUCK:  Alright. So, why don’t you guys, real quick, just kind of introduce yourselves? Give us a little background on what your experience is so that we know which questions to ask you guys. James, why don’t you start? I know you’ve been on the show before. JAMES:  Hello. I suppose I wrote Browserify which is relevant here. It’s a common JS style, bundler packager thing that just uses NPM. And I have a bunch of other libraries. And I really like doing data development as just a bunch of little modules put together. They are all published completely independently on NPM. I think I’m up to like 230-ish some odd modules on NPM now. So, I’ve been doing that and I really like that style.

Panel Tom Dale (twitter github blog Tilde Inc.) James Halliday (twitter github substack.net) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Tim Caswell (twitter github howtonode.org) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:52 - James Halliday Introduction browserify 02:37 - Tom Dale Introduction iCloud Ember.js Big Data & Hadoop 04:47 - Specialized vs Monolithic github.com/tildeio Idiology Micro Libraries 14:13 - Learning Frameworks 18:04 - Making things modular 25:23 - Picking the right tool for the job 27:44 - voxel.js & emberjs emberjs / packages BPM - Browser Package Manager NPM - Node Packaged Modules testling-ci Backbone.js 38:19 - Module Systems CommonJS 41:14 - Cloud9 Use Case 43:54 - Bugs jQuery Source Code Picks jQuery 2.0 (Merrick) ECMAScript 6 Module Definition (Merrick) AMD (Merrick) Yiruma (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Miracle Berry Tablets (AJ) The Ubuntu You Deserve (AJ) Bravemule (Jamison) RealtimeConf Europe (Tim) visionmedia / cpm (Tim) Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie Miller (Chuck) Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing? [Infographic] (Chuck) testling-ci (James) voxel.js (James) CAMPJS (James) Discourse (Tom) Williams-Sonoma 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set (Tom) The Best Simple Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen (Tom) Next Week Why Javascript is Hard Transcript JAMISON:  You can curse but we will just edit it out and replace it with fart noises. TOM:  I’ll be providing plenty of my own. [Laughter] JAMISON:  Okay, good. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK:  Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have AJ O’Neal. AJ:  Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you not even live! CHUCK:  [Laughs] Alright, Jamison Dance. JAMISON:  Hi guys, it’s tough to follow that. CHUCK:  Merrick Christensen. MERRICK:  Hey. CHUCK:  Joe Eames. JOE:  Howdy! CHUCK:  Tim Caswell. TIM:  Hello. CHUCK:  I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. And this week, we have two guests. The first one is Tom Dale. TOM:  Hey, thanks for having me. CHUCK:  The other is James Halliday. JAMES:  Yep. Hello. CHUCK:  Welcome to the show, guys. We were having a conversation a while back, I don’t remember if it was during another episode or after another episode. But we were having a discussion over code complexity and having like small simple libraries or small simple sets of functionality versus large monolithic sets of functionality, and how to approach those and when they’re appropriate. So, we brought you guys on to help us explore this because you're experts, right? TOM:  I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of the situation, but we can certainly fumble our way through something. [Laughter] CHUCK:  Alright. So, why don’t you guys, real quick, just kind of introduce yourselves? Give us a little background on what your experience is so that we know which questions to ask you guys. James, why don’t you start? I know you’ve been on the show before. JAMES:  Hello. I suppose I wrote Browserify which is relevant here. It’s a common JS style, bundler packager thing that just uses NPM. And I have a bunch of other libraries. And I really like doing data development as just a bunch of little modules put together. They are all published completely independently on NPM. I think I’m up to like 230-ish some odd modules on NPM now. So, I’ve been doing that and I really like that style.

The panelists talk Browserify with James Halliday.

The panelists talk Browserify with James Halliday.

The panelists talk Browserify with James Halliday.