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About JonathanJonathan Schor is the co-founder and CEO ofCodeMonkeyStudios, an EdTech company established in 2014.CodeMonkey provides an engaging platform that teaches children coding through game and project-based courses. Jonathan's inspiration for founding CodeMonkey stems from his early experiences teaching programming to children using computer games. He envisioned making computer science education accessible globally, with a product that teachers can use without fear and kids will enjoy tremendously.Under Jonathan's leadership,CodeMonkey has grown into a leading platform for K-12 coding and computer science education, bringing fun, knowledge, and opportunity into the lives of millions of learners around the world.About CodeMonkey:CodeMonkey is an AWARD-WINNING online platform that teaches kids real coding languages like CoffeeScript and Python. Children and teenagers learn block-based and text-based coding through an engaging game-like environment. Millions of CodeMonkey's students are now excited about coding! CodeMonkey does not require prior coding experience to teach and is designed for schools, clubs, and home use.Links for more information:https://www.codemonkey.com/https://www.codemonkey.com/courses/https://www.codemonkey.com/teachershttps://www.codemonkey.com/case-studies/About RachelleSubscribe to the podcast and my newsletter.Also, check out my blog and submit a guest blog.Contact me for speaking and training related to AI, AI and the law, Cybersecurity, SEL, STEM, and World Language Educator training for each of these topics as well! bit.ly/thriveineduPD.Interested in a sponsored podcast or collaboration, contact me for details!
Get stoked, jQuery 1.2 is here! Join Scott and Wes as they discuss jQuery Mobile, slicing PSD files, CSS rounded corners, CoffeeScript features, WordPress 2.3, and the rise of Skeuomorphism, shaping the landscape of web development this year. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:16 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 02:17 jQuery 1.2 released! 07:38 jQuery Mobile. 09:34 Skeuomorphism. 10:25 How do you slice up your .PSDs? Slicy By MacRabbit 12:34 Cufon, new font method. 14:06 CSS rounded corners. CSS3Please 15:17 Coda Tip. 16:48 Top 5 CoffeeScript Features. 18:44 Conference Talks to Spotlight. BatmanJS, your new favorite JavaScript superhero 20:35 WordPress 2.3! 21:15 PHP 5.2.0 PHP 5.2.0 Release Announcement 21:53 Sponsored by Media Temple. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott:X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads
Simon Lydell tells his origin story from Firefox power user to full-time Elm engineer. Then we talk about his work in the community building tools & contributing to core.Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: elmtown@logisticallyinc.com.Music by Jesse Moore.Recording date: 2023.10.09GuestSimon LydellShow notes[00:00:25] Sponsored by Logistically[00:00:56] Introducing SimonElm node-test-runnerlydell/elm-app-urlElm Radio 77 – elm-app-url with Simon Lydellelm-toolingElm Radio 22 – elm-tooling with Simon Lydellelm-watchElm Radio 65 – elm-watch with Simon Lydell[00:01:43] Origins in computing"My Contribution to the Left-Pad Incident with Simon Lydell" on the Software Unscripted podcastElm Town 66 – A gateway to scientific research with Chris Martin[00:09:08] From messing around with open-source to headhunted[00:14:37] Discovering Elm[00:17:24] Elm syntax as a CoffeeScript programmer[00:19:17] Contributing to big open-source projects early in career[00:22:02] From Elm meetup to full-time developer[00:25:08] Natural growth at Insurello[00:26:28] Pranking the designer[00:29:35] Vision document for elm-watchParcel[00:34:16] Different catalystselm-liveelm-go[00:40:53] elm-watch hot reloadingelm-watch issue about generating elm-watch.json instead of supporting glob directly[00:50:43] run-ptyrun-pty[00:55:51] Core contributionFree the npm package from third party dependencies[01:05:32] What's up with Simon these days?[01:07:41] PicksSimon's pickStrange PlanetJared's pickrun-pty
In this episode of Ruby for All, we start with a conversation about Julie's challenges in adjusting to a calendar migration, which leads to discussions about productivity tools, color-coding calendars, and the use of extensions like “Better Comments” for code organization. Andrew and Julie explore the purpose and potential pitfalls of code comments, share insights into work projects, including a significant rewrite, and even touch on the history of CoffeeScript in the coding world. Also, they discuss best practices for API response statuses, the effective use of tools like Postman and curl, and the role of practical experience in shaping a developer's understanding of best practices. Hit download now to hear more! [00:00:10] Julie mentions having issues concentrating at work due to a migration from Google Workspaces to Microsoft, with calendar issues. Andrew asks about her calendar system and whether she color codes it. [00:01:41] Since colors are so important to Andrew on calendars, he mentions an extension called “Better Comments” for color-coding comments in code. [00:03:15] Andrew discusses the purpose of comments, warning about deviations from conventions, and code readability, and Julie and Andrew talk about the problems with excessive comments and the importance of keeping comments up to date. [00:07:08] Julie wonders if Andrew adds links to comments or writes detailed PR reviews for reference. [00:07:53] What's up with Andrew? He mentions working on bug fixes and a recent launch at Podia, including a rewrite of their email system.[00:08:51] Andrew explains Trix, which was previously written in CoffeeScript but may have been ported to TypeScript. He also briefly discusses the history of CoffeeScript, its decline in popularity, and why he didn't like it when he was new to programming. [00:13:21] Julie asks about best practices for API response statuses, such as when to use “status ok” or “status created.” She also asks about the use of “Unprocessable Entity” as a status code and its meaning. Andrew talks about how Rails handles different response statuses and mentions that Rails implicitly handles certain errors.[00:15:58] Julie and Andrew discuss the importance of choosing the correct HTTP status codes for API responses. [00:16:44] Julie asks about handling different types of bad requests and whether Rails catches them. Andrew explains how to undo scaffolded code using “rails d” and suggests looking at Rails scaffold defaults for best practices.[00:18:50] Andrew explains what Postman is and describes it as an interface for sending API requests. He also talks about the VS extension code, Thunder Client. [00:20:26] Andrew explains the benefits of using curl and jq for API requests and JSON processing. [00:21:14] We hear an example of using curl and jq to retrieve specific data from a GitHub API endpoint. [00:22:15] Julie mentions using ChatGPT as a “rubber duck” to find answers to coding questions and appreciates how it exposes her to new concepts. [00:22:43] Andrew and Julie discuss the importance of focusing on a way to solve problems, especially for early career developers, rather than getting caught up in finding the “right” way. [00:24:26] Julie brings up Ruby for All Episode 46 that you should check out, where they discussed Single Tab Inheritance (STI).Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Sponsor:GoRailsLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. WebsiteBetter CommentsTrixLook up a Rails HTTP Status CodeThunder ClientjqPostmancurl (00:10) - Julie's concentration issues during a migration (01:41) - Andrew's use of "Better Comments" for code (03:15) - The purpose of comments in code (07:08) - Andrew's recent work and Podia launch (08:51) - Discussion of the Trix text editor and CoffeeScript (13:21) - Best practices for API response statuses (15:58) - Importance of choosing correct HTTP status codes (16:44) - Handling different types of bad requests in Rails (18:50) - Explanation of Postman and Thunder Client (20:26) - Benefits of using curl and jq for API requests (21:14) - Example of using curl and jq for GitHub API (22:15) - Using ChatGPT as a "rubber duck" for coding questions (22:43) - Focusing on problem-solving for early career developers (24:26) - Mention of Ruby for All Episode 46
Richard talks with Simon Lydell, a programmer whose open-source JavaScript work ended up contributing to what might be the most infamous package-related outage in programming history. In addition to talking about that story, they also talk about open source in general, breaking changes in general, and specific projects like CoffeeScript, Prettier, Elm, and Roc.
[00:07:35] Andrew shares a free gem idea for Juniors or people who've never built a gem before. [00:10:20] Jason brings up a previous episode with Konnor Rogers where they talked about migrating Podia off Webpacker, and the guys chat more about that.[00:17:56] Jason was looking something up for JavaScript and he tells us he couldn't get Google to give him any results that weren't for jQuery, and Chris talks about the interesting idea that Rails could sort of simplify Webpack with Webpacker, which they've done with jQuery, Prototype, and Scriptaculous.[00:20:35] We hear about why CoffeeScript was such a welcomed flavor of JavaScript.[00:22:23] Chris tells us what you can do using the railsassets.org site. [00:26:07] Andrew fills us in on his new podcast, Ruby for All, that he's co-hosting with Julie, that's aimed at providing something specifically for Junior Rails Developers or people getting into Rails. [00:27:49] We find out some things that have been difficult and things Andrew forgot about with starting a podcast. [00:31:57] In case you haven't listened to the first episode yet, Andrew explains the focus of the podcast which is full of honest conversations and advice. [00:38:50] Chris shares a George Jetson announcement and a great idea for a new gem name.Panelists:Jason CharnesChris OliverAndrew MasonSponsor:HoneybadgerLinks:Jason Charnes TwitterChris Oliver TwitterAndrew Mason TwitterRemote Ruby-Episode 189: Joined by Konnor RogersYou might not need jQueryRails AssetsRuby for All PodcastRuby for All Podcast TwitterRuby Radar NewsletterRuby Radar Twitter
Coverart of Brian Pollack Because You Need To Know. For over two decades Brian Pollack has led the way in Internet Technology Innovation.Brian is a published science fiction author, and has published articles in dozens of programming languages and technologies including Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Node.js, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, PHP, Azure, AWS, Cloud Computing, Collaboration Technology, Unity, C#, C, C++, Perl, PHP, Objective-C and a host of other languages.Brian's work has been nationally reviewed by major publications and has been interviewed for numerous journals for his opinion on technology. Millions of people all over the world interact with one or more of Brian's software solutions daily and have for years.Over a billion people a day touch code Brian created when they surf the web and countless people touch mobile code he has written or been part of. Ask me about it.
Web and Mobile App Development (Language Agnostic, and Based on Real-life experience!)
We love CoffeeScript. But, we used to love it a bit more in the past ;-) It's time to move on - to vanilla JavaScript, and to TypeScript. Here's how we are doing it. #projectmanagement Manage your projects on https://snowpal.com. Keep it simple.
Kolejny odcinek z serii GitHub Trending Repos. Punktem zapalnym naszej dyskusji jest repozytorium języka GoPlus. GoPlus to dialekt Go, który ma umożliwić inżynierom łatwiejsze wejście i działanie w świecie programowania. Nowy dialekt Go to tylko początek dyskusji na temat ewolucji języków programowania. Rozmawiamy na temat zmian w świecie JS patrząc na CoffeeScript & TypeScript. Mocno filozoficzne rozważania na początek tygodnia. Zapraszamy do wysłuchania odcinka.
Matheus Marsiglio é desenvolvedor de software e entusiasta de design. Está na área, profissionalmente, desde 2010 e já trabalhou com JavaScript, Ruby, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Clojure e ClojureScript. O Matheus também foi instrutor do Nanodegree de React da Udacity, instrutor no SENAI e durante a maioria da sua carreira trabalhou em startups desde em estágios bastante iniciais até lugares próximos de break even. Atualmente está na Runops tentando melhorar a vida de desenvolvedores de software e DevOps, enquanto leva uma vida dupla de ciclista e montador de bicicletas. Links Twitter do Matheus Livros Dicurso do Metodo e Ensaios Uma breve história da economia OsProgramadores Site do OsProgramadores Grupo do OsProgramadores no Telegram Canal do Youtube do OsProgramadores Twitter do Marcelo Pinheiro Edição do Episódio por: Thiago Costa Barbosa (thiagocostabarbosa@live.com)
SummaryTodd Gardner, creator of TrackJS and RequestMetrics tells me how the web runs on JavaScript why it is so important.DetailsWho he is, what he does. JavaScript and ECMA Script, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, transpilers; Blazor, WebAssembly; SliverLight and Flash. JavaScript on IoT. JavaScript on the backend; Bryan rants about using Json with C#. Parsing Json and the importance of strings. Why you should learn JavaScript; which JavaScript should I learn - Node, React, Angular, etc. Bryan talks about learning JavaScript. What NodeJs is; module dependency version hell. The unclear state of asynchronous programming in JavaScript; Todd clears things up, callback hell, promises, async/await. JavaScript is not a fad. How to learn JavaScript. Monitoring your website with RequestMetrics; measuring real user performance, not synthetic monitoring; privacy concerns.Support this podcast@toddhgardnerTodd's HomepageTrackJSRequest MetricsThe PluralSight Course on JavaScript that Bryan likedKyle Simpson - You Don't Know JSYou Don't Know JS - GitHub
Jason announces DHH is back on Twitter, but not back in the Unites States! So, where is he? The guys wonder when the next versions of Turbolinks and Stimulus will be released. Some other topics discussed on this episode are Rails API guides being updated, Webpacker documentation, importing Sprockets files into webpack, problems with webpack configs, CoffeeScript, problems with UJS and Rails Scaffolds, Turbolinks Render library, Cloudflare, and generating routes in madmin. Also, have you heard of security.txt? You can learn more about it here.
JavaScript Remote Conf 2020 May 13th to 15th - register now! Dave has been upgrading some of his Rails apps. Chuck has gone through several upgrades in his past work and is working on some apps that need the upgrade. Listen to 2 veteran Rails developers talk through the issues of upgrade from different versions of Rails to the latest version. Panel Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Sponsors Resolve Digital Springboard | $500 Scholarship Available for Candidates who Apply with Code "AISPRINGBOARD" "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! Links RailsDiff js2coffee 2.0 — convert JavaScript to CoffeeScript app/assets/config/manifest.js Picks Charles Max Wood: Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant RRU 104: How to Start a Side Hustle as a Programmer with Mani Vaya Devchat.tv Remote Conferences Devchat.tv Remote meetups Dave Kimura: Drifting Ruby - Discount Code: learnfromhome Follow Ruby Rogues on Twitter > @rubyrogues
JavaScript Remote Conf 2020 May 13th to 15th - register now! Dave has been upgrading some of his Rails apps. Chuck has gone through several upgrades in his past work and is working on some apps that need the upgrade. Listen to 2 veteran Rails developers talk through the issues of upgrade from different versions of Rails to the latest version. Panel Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Sponsors Resolve Digital Springboard | $500 Scholarship Available for Candidates who Apply with Code "AISPRINGBOARD" "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! Links RailsDiff js2coffee 2.0 — convert JavaScript to CoffeeScript app/assets/config/manifest.js Picks Charles Max Wood: Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant RRU 104: How to Start a Side Hustle as a Programmer with Mani Vaya Devchat.tv Remote Conferences Devchat.tv Remote meetups Dave Kimura: Drifting Ruby - Discount Code: learnfromhome Follow Ruby Rogues on Twitter > @rubyrogues
JavaScript Remote Conf 2020 May 13th to 15th - register now! Dave has been upgrading some of his Rails apps. Chuck has gone through several upgrades in his past work and is working on some apps that need the upgrade. Listen to 2 veteran Rails developers talk through the issues of upgrade from different versions of Rails to the latest version. Panel Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Sponsors Resolve Digital Springboard | $500 Scholarship Available for Candidates who Apply with Code "AISPRINGBOARD" "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! Links RailsDiff js2coffee 2.0 — convert JavaScript to CoffeeScript app/assets/config/manifest.js Picks Charles Max Wood: Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant RRU 104: How to Start a Side Hustle as a Programmer with Mani Vaya Devchat.tv Remote Conferences Devchat.tv Remote meetups Dave Kimura: Drifting Ruby - Discount Code: learnfromhome Follow Ruby Rogues on Twitter > @rubyrogues
Jared Palmer has been a guest on 3 different shows on Devchat.tv. He's talked to us about Formik, Razzle, and React. He's taking a break from consulting to build up Formik, Inc and tools for forms. He got started in programming by taking a programming class at Cornell on a lark and quickly transitioned out of Investment Banking after graduating from university. His first apps were custom lock screens for mobile phones. We then move through framer and CoffeeScript and eventually in to JavaScript and React. Host: Charles Max Wood Joined By Special Guest: Jared Palmer Sponsors G2i | Enjoy the luxuries of freelancing CacheFly ______________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ______________________________________ Links RRU 014: Razzle with Jared Palmer RRU 052: React Suspense with Jared Palmer Formik feat. Jared Palmer of The Palmer Group Picks Jared Palmer: Remote UI (Shopify) Charles Max Wood: The Man In the High Castle
Jared Palmer has been a guest on 3 different shows on Devchat.tv. He's talked to us about Formik, Razzle, and React. He's taking a break from consulting to build up Formik, Inc and tools for forms. He got started in programming by taking a programming class at Cornell on a lark and quickly transitioned out of Investment Banking after graduating from university. His first apps were custom lock screens for mobile phones. We then move through framer and CoffeeScript and eventually in to JavaScript and React. Host: Charles Max Wood Joined By Special Guest: Jared Palmer Sponsors G2i | Enjoy the luxuries of freelancing CacheFly ______________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ______________________________________ Links RRU 014: Razzle with Jared Palmer RRU 052: React Suspense with Jared Palmer Formik feat. Jared Palmer of The Palmer Group Picks Jared Palmer: Remote UI (Shopify) Charles Max Wood: The Man In the High Castle
Jared Palmer has been a guest on 3 different shows on Devchat.tv. He's talked to us about Formik, Razzle, and React. He's taking a break from consulting to build up Formik, Inc and tools for forms. He got started in programming by taking a programming class at Cornell on a lark and quickly transitioned out of Investment Banking after graduating from university. His first apps were custom lock screens for mobile phones. We then move through framer and CoffeeScript and eventually in to JavaScript and React. Host: Charles Max Wood Joined By Special Guest: Jared Palmer Sponsors G2i | Enjoy the luxuries of freelancing CacheFly ______________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ______________________________________ Links RRU 014: Razzle with Jared Palmer RRU 052: React Suspense with Jared Palmer Formik feat. Jared Palmer of The Palmer Group Picks Jared Palmer: Remote UI (Shopify) Charles Max Wood: The Man In the High Castle
Show Description****************Chris & Dave talk about Edge going Chrome, a bit of follow up from last episode about Virtual Machines, thoughts on designing a website to last, a question about Rails plus React, and a question about how to move from CoffeeScript to something current. Listen on Website →Links***** Goodreads: The Wizard and the Prophet […]
Topics include:- 1:46 – Exploring the React paradigm- 11:45 – How have your opinions on UI dev changed since starting Ember?- 16:00 – How React's render functions and Ember's templates both solve the same problem: how to restrict the rendering code that users write- 34:03 – JavaScript's multiparadigm approach: OOP + functional- 40:13 - Hooks and the importance of lifecycle entanglement- 46:15 – Do Hooks succeed in bringing the ideas of declarative rendering to our JavaScript code?- 53:58 – The ES module spec, ES imports, and ES modules vs. CJS modules- 1:04:55 – Are TypeScript users at risk of the same kinds of syntax collisions that CoffeeScript users once were?- 1:10:10 – TypeScript now doesn't ship unstable features. (e.g. Optional chaining is stage 3)- 1:15:35 – Yehuda's take on stage 0 through stage 4 ECMAScript proposals- 1:23:39 – What's missing from UI development? And the difference between paradigms and abstractions.- 1:31:00 – Ember's original sin was push-based reactivity. Pull-based is how programs work.- 1:40:30 – Ember needs a new lifecycle entanglement primitive, that borrows concepts from both Hooks and Ember Concurrency tasks- 1:57:07 – How do you feel about UI development in 2019? Links:- [No Silver Bullet](http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf), by Fred Books- [React Hook Pitfalls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIRcX2X7EUk), by Kent C. Dodds
This week, My Javascript Story welcomes Javan Makhmali,a Programmer at Basecamp from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Javan attended Community College to study Computer Science but then decided to work as a Freelancer developer. Javan and Charles debate whether having a 4-year college degree is better to become a developer and conclude that it depends on the person. Some people prefer a structured 4 year degree to feel ready for a full time jo and some people do better with bootcamps. Javan mentions he knows several people that switched careers after completing an 8 week bootcamp and that the industry was really flexible to accomodate both options. Charles and Javan then continue talking about Javan's journey as a developer and particularly his journey with Basecamp. Javan started out working with Ruby on Rails and after a couple of years applied for a job at Basecamp (then known as 37 Signals). Javan then started working with CoffeeScript which helped him understand working with JavaScript. Charles and Javan talk about the projects Javan is working on currently at Basecamp. Outside of work Javan, is a new parent and enjoys spending time with his daughter. He feels ever since he has become a parent, his work life balance has been better. Host: Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Javan Makhmali Links JSJ 376: Trix: A Rich Text Editor for Everyday Writing with Javan Makhmali Javan's Twitter Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Dev Ed Podcast Adventures in Blockchain CacheFly Picks Charles Max Wood: https://maxcoders.io/
This week, My Javascript Story welcomes Javan Makhmali,a Programmer at Basecamp from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Javan attended Community College to study Computer Science but then decided to work as a Freelancer developer. Javan and Charles debate whether having a 4-year college degree is better to become a developer and conclude that it depends on the person. Some people prefer a structured 4 year degree to feel ready for a full time jo and some people do better with bootcamps. Javan mentions he knows several people that switched careers after completing an 8 week bootcamp and that the industry was really flexible to accomodate both options. Charles and Javan then continue talking about Javan's journey as a developer and particularly his journey with Basecamp. Javan started out working with Ruby on Rails and after a couple of years applied for a job at Basecamp (then known as 37 Signals). Javan then started working with CoffeeScript which helped him understand working with JavaScript. Charles and Javan talk about the projects Javan is working on currently at Basecamp. Outside of work Javan, is a new parent and enjoys spending time with his daughter. He feels ever since he has become a parent, his work life balance has been better. Host: Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Javan Makhmali Links JSJ 376: Trix: A Rich Text Editor for Everyday Writing with Javan Makhmali Javan's Twitter Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Dev Ed Podcast Adventures in Blockchain CacheFly Picks Charles Max Wood: https://maxcoders.io/
This week, My Javascript Story welcomes Javan Makhmali,a Programmer at Basecamp from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Javan attended Community College to study Computer Science but then decided to work as a Freelancer developer. Javan and Charles debate whether having a 4-year college degree is better to become a developer and conclude that it depends on the person. Some people prefer a structured 4 year degree to feel ready for a full time jo and some people do better with bootcamps. Javan mentions he knows several people that switched careers after completing an 8 week bootcamp and that the industry was really flexible to accomodate both options. Charles and Javan then continue talking about Javan's journey as a developer and particularly his journey with Basecamp. Javan started out working with Ruby on Rails and after a couple of years applied for a job at Basecamp (then known as 37 Signals). Javan then started working with CoffeeScript which helped him understand working with JavaScript. Charles and Javan talk about the projects Javan is working on currently at Basecamp. Outside of work Javan, is a new parent and enjoys spending time with his daughter. He feels ever since he has become a parent, his work life balance has been better. Host: Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Javan Makhmali Links JSJ 376: Trix: A Rich Text Editor for Everyday Writing with Javan Makhmali Javan's Twitter Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Dev Ed Podcast Adventures in Blockchain CacheFly Picks Charles Max Wood: https://maxcoders.io/
stdout.fm 53번째 로그에서는 가계부의 끝판왕 후잉 개발 이야기를 나눴습니다. 참가자: @nacyo_t, @raccoonyy, @seapy 게스트: 후잉 개발자 흥반장 님 쇼노트 44bits 워크숍: 도커 깐 김에 배포까지 stdout.fm 정기 후원 - Patreon 후잉가계부(whooing) 2018 당근마켓 이삿날 - YouTube Intuit®: Official Site | Powering Financial Prosperity Budget Tracker & Planner | Free Online Money Management | Mint Ajax (programming) - Wikipedia 아이캐시하우스에서 오신 분들께 드리는 공지 - 후잉가계부(whooing) 클라우드 서비스 | 클라우드 컴퓨팅 솔루션| Amazon Web Services CoffeeScript React Native · A framework for building native apps using React 대한민국 대표 가계부 - http://가계부.kr 회계1 DEVONtechnologies | DEVONthink, professional document and information management for the Mac and iOS Best Note Taking App - Organize Your Notes with Evernote 인터페이스와 기능 추가 대한 개인적인 견해(흥반장) - whooing.com stderr_046.log: 복식부기 가계부 후잉 사용자 모임 (1) w/ ecleya | 개발자 팟캐스트 stdout.fm Whooing > API References > 후잉은 복식부기 가계부이자 자산 관리 도구이다 - 141: tweet overflow jQuery React – A JavaScript library for building user interfaces Laravel - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans CodeIgniter Web Framework ZEIT - The easiest way to deploy websites Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined Sublime Text - A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose Bear Shop: Wear Bear or be square. Bear - Notes for iPhone, iPad and Mac
פרק מספר 61 של באמפרס (377 למניין רברס עם פלטפורמה) - רן, אלון, ודותן מתאוששים מהבחירות (שוב) עם סקירה של טכנלוגיות ודברים מעניינים בשוק התוכנה הלוהט מהזמן האחרון, לפחות עד שיפורסמו התוצאות הרשמיות (ממשלת אחדות של React ו-Rust?! שמעתם את זה לראשונה כאן)רן - בלוג-פוסט מעניין שמגיע מ - Palo Alto Networks (שאחד ממייסדיה ישראלי) - השוואה של Security Features עבור Containers שונים - An Overview of Sandboxed Container Technologiesצעד אחורה לפני הצלילה - דוגמא נפוצה ל - Containers Technology זו Docker: טכנולוגיה שנחשבת פחות בטוחה מוירטואליזציה מלאה כיוון שכל ה- Containers משתמשים באותו Kernel, ואעפ”י שננקטים הרבה צעדים על מנת לבודד בין ה - Containers השונים, הבידוד אף פעם לא מוחלט ותמיד יש חשש מזליגה של מידע או השפעה מאחד לשני - בעיה קיימת, שרירה וידועה בעולם ה - Containers נכון להיום, וכל הזמן מחפשים עבורה פתרונות שונים.הבלוג-פוסט המדובר מציג את מה שנחשב כ - state of the art נכון להיום: מה הן ה -Containers Technologies הקיימות היום ואיזו רמה של בידוד נלקחת על מנת לספק רמה גבוהה יותר של Securityה - trade-off הקלאסי הוא Performance vs. Security.יש כאן תיאור של Use-cases שונים וגם תיאור הנדסי של איך כל טכנולוגיה עובדת, וזה מאוד מעניין.סקירה קצרה של מה שמתואר (אמ;לק) - לא טכנולוגית Containers (בתור התחלה . . . ) אבל נותנת מענה ל Use Case דומה - UniKernel: מעיין מערכת הפעלה שיש בה תוכנית אחת, למעשה - מערכת הפעלה שלמה שכל מה שהיא עושה זה להריץ את התוכנית שלכם (אם Zaphod Beeblebrox היה מתכנת וכו’); כיוון שכך - היא מאוד מוקשחת (כוללת רק את מה שהתוכנית שלכם צריכה - ולא יותר). כאמור - לא באמת Container אבל Use Case דומה - עם startup time מאוד קצר, מבנה מינימליסטי וכו’.מ-IBM מגיעה Container Technology בשם IBM Nabla - גם אם לא שמעתם על זה קודם (כאילו יש משהו של IBM שהוא לא AS400, Mainframe או משהו מהשכבה הגיאולוגית הזו כן שמעתם עליו), זה קיים - וברשימה.טכנולוגיה של Google בשם gVisor - טכנולוגיה שמשמשת את Google פנימית (וגם עבור App Engine לפני הרבה זמן), היום היא כבר מופיעה כקוד פתוח, ומהווה ברירת מחדל או משהו בסגנון עבור Kubernetes; מה שמעניין כאן הוא השימוש ב User-level Kernel - יש Kernel אבל ב - User level, כך שהוא לא משותף - אלא הרבה Kernels קטנים.יש את Amazon Firecracker - שעליו כבר דיברנו כמה פעמים (וגם כאן וכאן).וגם את OpenStack Kata - שגם עליו לא שמענו קודם (זאת אומרת - על OpenStack כן, Kata פחות - המושג עצמו מוסבר יפה ב - Phoenix Project).בסופו של דבר - סקירה מאוד יפה ומעמיקה מומלץ.אז בכל זאת TL;DR לאמ;לק? חלק מהטכנולוגיות ברמת בשלות גבוהה וחלק פחות; וכל אחת מהן לוקחת איזשהו Trade-off בין Performance ל - Security, וכל אחד צריך למצוא את המקום הנכון בשבילו - אין פתרון קסם אחד.יש גם טבלת סיכום בסוף המאמר, עם Features שונים כמו הפעלה דומה ל - Docker, האם הקוד פתוח (כן, כולם), וכו’ - יכול לעזור לבחור.בשורה התחתונה - אנחנו יודעים ש - Docker הכי פופלארי אם אתם בעניין של מיינסטרים (אפילו לא מופיע בסקירה . . . ), אבל גם סביר להניח שהוא הכי פחות בטוח (Secured), אז אם חשוב לכם Security כי למשל את מריצים workloads מגורמים שהם Un-trusted ואתם חייבים לשים לב; אם כל ה - workload שלכם פנימית אז הסכנה אולי פחות גדולה ועדיין מומלץ לשים לב ולמנוע מבעייה באחד ה - Containers לזלוג לאחרים.שורה תחתונה, שוב: ה - trade-off הקלאסי של Performance vs. Security, עם רמות בשלות שונות של הפלטפורמות השונות: gVisor ו - Firecracker ברמת בשלות גבוהה יחסית והשתיים האחרות פחות, אבל אף אחת לא פופלארית ברמה של Docker למשל.צריך לקחת בחשבון שלפעמים בענייני Security הדברים הכי פופלאריים הם גם הכי מסוכנים - אם מישהו מנסה Brut-force ויודע שרוב הסיכויים הם לנחות על Docker אז אולי ישקיע בזה יותר וזה סיכון.מצד אחד - אולי ככל שהפלטרפרומה יותר פופלארית כך היא תהווה מטרה יותר גדולה ל Hackers, ומצד שני - יותר עיניים יסתכלו עליה כך שיותר באגים ימצאו ואולי כך היא תהפוך ליותר קשיחה. מאזן אימה . . .הבוטים באים! AWS Chatbot: ChatOps for AWSאיפה נועםר?אז AWS פרסמו פלטרפורמה בשם AWS Chatbot, שיכולה להוות נדבך משמעותי ב - Chat-Ops על AWS.רגע - ChatOps?מדובר ביכולת לנהל סביבת Production דרך צ’אט - אם זה Deployment או Provisioning למכונות, Scale up או Scale down, ניטור (Monitoring) . . . הכל דרך צ’אט.שיטה מקובלת בכל מיני חברות, אחת המפורסמות היא GitHub.יתרונות - שקיפות: אף פעם לא עושים SSH לאיזשהו Server, הכל דרך צ’אט אז כולם רואים מה קורה, וגם יכולים ללמוד איך לעשות את זה בפעם הבאה לבד.ובחזרה לאייטם - AWS Chatbot, מאפשרת לממש ChatOps על AWS.רן השתמש (בקטנה) לצרכי עבודה - פונקציות Lambda שמדווחות על Events ב-AWS, או כאלה ש”מאזינות לצ’אט” ועושות פעולות על AWS, ויש גם דברים אחרים.זו פלטפורמה קצת יותר הוליסטית, שיכולה להוות נקודת התחלה די טובה, בהנחה שאתם עובדים תחת AWS ורוצים ChatOps.אז עכשיו רק חסר להוסיף את זה עם פקודות קוליות ל Alexa . . . רק לחבר לשירות Text to Speech שלהם (Polly) וזהו?תכל’ס - מה הסיכוי שזה כבר קיים? כל ה-Echo Devices גם ככה מקשיבים כל הזמן, אז אפשר להתחיל להרים מכונות כבר כשמתמעורר הדיון בפינת הקפה, ואז כשסוף כל סוף מגיעה הפקודה זה מוכן ממש מהר. נשאר רק לממש Delay קטן כדי למנוע חשדות ולהפחית Creepiness . . . אין על SkyNet.האם אפשר לשדר את כל הפקודות הקוליות בתדר שרק מכונות “שומעות”, ואז לעשות Hacking לכולם? בטח גם זה כבר קיים . . . מסביר מלא דברים.וברצינות (יחסית) - זה עובד רק על AWS או שניתן לבצע אינטגרציה עם מערכות אחרות?מה שהם מממשים עובד רק על AWS, עם ה - Backend של AWS - למשל EC2, ELB ,S3 וכאלה, אבל אפשר לקחת Design דומה, וקונספטואלית לעשות משהו דומה עבור פלטפורמה אחרת - וזה גם קיים -אחד הראשונים היה HUBOT של GitHub, והוא עדיין די פופלארי (על אף הרבה re-writes, במקור זה היה ב CoffeeScript, אבל יש מצב שיש כיום בעולם יותר מפתחי Cobol מ-CoffeeScript…)יש גם פלטפורמה חדשה שנכתבה ב-Go, עם השם הקליט joe…טרנד אחר שמתכתב עם זה הוא GitOps, אבל זה אולי לפעם אחרת.הכרזה של AWS על POP חדש בישראל - AWS CloudFront launches a POP in Israelלא פופ כזה . . . Point Of Presence - למעשה מדובר ב”קצה של ה-CDN” שנמצא בישראלגרם להתרגשות גדולה בקרב קהילת המפתחים בישראל (אלון בהדגמה חיה, פחות עובר בטקסט, דמיינו התרגשות).בסופו של דבר זה בסך הכל POP, ויכול קצת לזרז את הגישה ל-CDN של AWS, ואולי גם חישוביות במובן של Lambda@Edge, אבל כנראה שלא יותר מזה (חישוביות מוגבלת).ב-POP סטנדרטי של AWS יש CloudFront ו - Lambda@Edge (לא בכולם, כאן נראה שכן) - ודי זהו בגדול.מה הסיכוי שזה מתואם עם ההשקה של Amazon.com בישראל? אולי, אבל יש מצב שיותר קשור למכרזים ממשלתיים ש-AWS מתעניינת בהם (מול GCP ו-Azure בעיקר), ושכוללים בין השאר דרישה לתשתיות פיזיות בארץ, כך שאולי זה קשור כהכנה או משהו.אבל זה רק POP . . . פקידי הממשלה - שלא יעבדו עליכם! שוב . . . זה לא Storage וזה לא Compute - זו עדיין לא נוכחות “אמיתית”, אבל לפחות אנחנו על המפה ואנחנו נשארים במפה. הנה.בתיאוריה - יש את Lambda@Edge, אז ברמה התיאורטית אפשר “לעשות הכל” . . . זאת אומרת - רק דברים ש Lambda@Edge יכולה לעשות. יש מגבלות לעומת Lambda רגילה - שלחו גלויה אם אתם יודעים מה הן בדיוק (או בדקו ב Stack Overflow). בין הפותרים נכונה יוגרל פותר שלא ענה נכונה. או גלויה נוספת.ואם ב-AWS עסקינן - עוד הכרזה קטנה על Improved VPC networking for AWS Lambda functionsלמי שהתעסק על Functions ו-VPC יודע שהייתה בעיה בחיבור של Lambda עם VPC - כשה-Cold start עולה משמעותית יותר לאט (עד כדי 8-10 שניות, לעומת סדר גודל של עד שנייה אחת).יש לזה הרבה “תירוצים” של חיבורים ותשתיות וכו’עכשיו - נפתרה הבעיה, ובחיבור של Lambda עם VPC לא אמור להיות שינוי משמעותי ב-Cold start, שזה די מגניב כי זה הפריע לשימוש ב-Lambda במקרים מסויימים, למשל אם היה צריך להתחבר ל-Database שמאחורי VPC.האייטם הבא - GitHub: בהמשך להכרזה מלפני לא מעט זמן על GitHub Actions, אז GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositoriesהכרזה על Workflows, שזה בעצם CI/CD - בחינם עבור פרויקטים פומביים (Public).למעשה ניתן להשתמש עכשיו ב GitHub Actions על מנת להריץ CI, באותו אופן שבו יכולתם להריץ למשל CircleCI או Travis-CI וכו’.בכל מקרה - עכשיו זה מובנה בתוך GitHub וזה די נחמדרן כבר השתמש בזה בפרויקט (טיזר להמשך . . . )ה-Feature כולו עדיין ב-Beta, אבל אתם יכולים להגיש בקשה להתקבל ל-Beta (רן התקבל, רק אומרים).אז
Episode Summary Today’s guest Elia Schito has been a Ruby developer for 12+ years and works for Nebulab. During his career he looked for Ruby to JavaScript translators and found Opal. The panel discusses where Opal belongs within an app and when the compilation into JavaScript occurs. The main reason a person would want to use Opal is to avoid writing in JavaScript. Elia talks about the benefits of using Opal. One is that productivity is better in a language like Ruby. Also, if you’re working on a project that needs to get done quickly, it makes sense to use Opal so that your speed is not hindered. Elia talks about testing Opal with things like WebPacker and Hyperstack, and explains what Hyperstack is. Opal recently released a newer, bigger version, and Elia talks about the features of the new release. He details what kind of JavaScript it produces and how to hook it into your CICD, how to run it locally, and overall how to use the compiler. He talks about how to debug in Opal. He notes that during the development cycle in Opal, you can refresh your page and it will compile the Ruby code into JS, so if there are any errors you will see it immediately. Opal is compatible with other tools to check your code. In the future, Elia wants to increase the coverage of the core and standard library, and believes that Opal is a great way to increase your skills in Ruby and JavaScript. He talks about the general reception of Opal among users. Opal is a perfect fit for smaller teams or older fullstack developers, especially if you don’t have a frontend team Elia notes that Opal, much like anything else, is a matter of preference, and relates it to the past reliance on CoffeeScript. For developers who refuse to write in JavaScript, Opal is an excellent option. He talks about the speed of compiling ruby to JavaScript in Opal and how it supports keeping current with Rails versions and other frameworks. The panel asks if the Opal community made any inroads with DHH for making it part of the Rails stack proper and whether Opal wants to be integrated with Rails. Elia talks about some of Opal’s contributions to the Ruby Community. Elia talks about what generally happens if you choose to use Opal in a project. Opal is small, but you will have to make some tradeoffs. You have to call your standard library from Opal, but there are many ways to overcome that. The show concludes with Elia calling on the community to help him resurrect the Volt framework. Panelists Andrew Mason David Kimura Nate Hopkins With special guest: Elia Schito Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Cloud 66 - Pain Free Rails Deployments Try Cloud 66 Rails for FREE & get $66 free credits with promo code RubyRogues My Ruby Story Links Opal WebPacker Stimulus Hyperstack Capybara CoffeeScript Devise Clearwater Reactive Volt framework Nebulab Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter Picks David Kimura: AWS Organization Consolidated Billing Pingverse Nate Hopkins: Benjamin Moore paint Andrew Mason: Github Actions (beta) Elia Schito: Follow Elia on his website Explaining Postmodernism Texmate
Episode Summary Today’s guest Elia Schito has been a Ruby developer for 12+ years and works for Nebulab. During his career he looked for Ruby to JavaScript translators and found Opal. The panel discusses where Opal belongs within an app and when the compilation into JavaScript occurs. The main reason a person would want to use Opal is to avoid writing in JavaScript. Elia talks about the benefits of using Opal. One is that productivity is better in a language like Ruby. Also, if you’re working on a project that needs to get done quickly, it makes sense to use Opal so that your speed is not hindered. Elia talks about testing Opal with things like WebPacker and Hyperstack, and explains what Hyperstack is. Opal recently released a newer, bigger version, and Elia talks about the features of the new release. He details what kind of JavaScript it produces and how to hook it into your CICD, how to run it locally, and overall how to use the compiler. He talks about how to debug in Opal. He notes that during the development cycle in Opal, you can refresh your page and it will compile the Ruby code into JS, so if there are any errors you will see it immediately. Opal is compatible with other tools to check your code. In the future, Elia wants to increase the coverage of the core and standard library, and believes that Opal is a great way to increase your skills in Ruby and JavaScript. He talks about the general reception of Opal among users. Opal is a perfect fit for smaller teams or older fullstack developers, especially if you don’t have a frontend team Elia notes that Opal, much like anything else, is a matter of preference, and relates it to the past reliance on CoffeeScript. For developers who refuse to write in JavaScript, Opal is an excellent option. He talks about the speed of compiling ruby to JavaScript in Opal and how it supports keeping current with Rails versions and other frameworks. The panel asks if the Opal community made any inroads with DHH for making it part of the Rails stack proper and whether Opal wants to be integrated with Rails. Elia talks about some of Opal’s contributions to the Ruby Community. Elia talks about what generally happens if you choose to use Opal in a project. Opal is small, but you will have to make some tradeoffs. You have to call your standard library from Opal, but there are many ways to overcome that. The show concludes with Elia calling on the community to help him resurrect the Volt framework. Panelists Andrew Mason David Kimura Nate Hopkins With special guest: Elia Schito Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Cloud 66 - Pain Free Rails Deployments Try Cloud 66 Rails for FREE & get $66 free credits with promo code RubyRogues My Ruby Story Links Opal WebPacker Stimulus Hyperstack Capybara CoffeeScript Devise Clearwater Reactive Volt framework Nebulab Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter Picks David Kimura: AWS Organization Consolidated Billing Pingverse Nate Hopkins: Benjamin Moore paint Andrew Mason: Github Actions (beta) Elia Schito: Follow Elia on his website Explaining Postmodernism Texmate
Episode Summary Today’s guest Elia Schito has been a Ruby developer for 12+ years and works for Nebulab. During his career he looked for Ruby to JavaScript translators and found Opal. The panel discusses where Opal belongs within an app and when the compilation into JavaScript occurs. The main reason a person would want to use Opal is to avoid writing in JavaScript. Elia talks about the benefits of using Opal. One is that productivity is better in a language like Ruby. Also, if you’re working on a project that needs to get done quickly, it makes sense to use Opal so that your speed is not hindered. Elia talks about testing Opal with things like WebPacker and Hyperstack, and explains what Hyperstack is. Opal recently released a newer, bigger version, and Elia talks about the features of the new release. He details what kind of JavaScript it produces and how to hook it into your CICD, how to run it locally, and overall how to use the compiler. He talks about how to debug in Opal. He notes that during the development cycle in Opal, you can refresh your page and it will compile the Ruby code into JS, so if there are any errors you will see it immediately. Opal is compatible with other tools to check your code. In the future, Elia wants to increase the coverage of the core and standard library, and believes that Opal is a great way to increase your skills in Ruby and JavaScript. He talks about the general reception of Opal among users. Opal is a perfect fit for smaller teams or older fullstack developers, especially if you don’t have a frontend team Elia notes that Opal, much like anything else, is a matter of preference, and relates it to the past reliance on CoffeeScript. For developers who refuse to write in JavaScript, Opal is an excellent option. He talks about the speed of compiling ruby to JavaScript in Opal and how it supports keeping current with Rails versions and other frameworks. The panel asks if the Opal community made any inroads with DHH for making it part of the Rails stack proper and whether Opal wants to be integrated with Rails. Elia talks about some of Opal’s contributions to the Ruby Community. Elia talks about what generally happens if you choose to use Opal in a project. Opal is small, but you will have to make some tradeoffs. You have to call your standard library from Opal, but there are many ways to overcome that. The show concludes with Elia calling on the community to help him resurrect the Volt framework. Panelists Andrew Mason David Kimura Nate Hopkins With special guest: Elia Schito Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Cloud 66 - Pain Free Rails Deployments Try Cloud 66 Rails for FREE & get $66 free credits with promo code RubyRogues My Ruby Story Links Opal WebPacker Stimulus Hyperstack Capybara CoffeeScript Devise Clearwater Reactive Volt framework Nebulab Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter Picks David Kimura: AWS Organization Consolidated Billing Pingverse Nate Hopkins: Benjamin Moore paint Andrew Mason: Github Actions (beta) Elia Schito: Follow Elia on his website Explaining Postmodernism Texmate
Episode Summary Andrey Okonetchnikov is a specialist in frontend architecture and design systems. He runs his own consultancy and made the package lint-staged. Andrey has been in programming for 20 years and talks about his background, how he got into React, and why he started component-driven.io. Andrey has always been interested in design tools and design systems, it just wasn’t the right time because the right tools weren’t available. Since Andrey has been working in frameworks for 20 years and has watched them come and go, Lucas asks Andrey how he has seen the communication between developers and business owners evolve over that time. Andrey reflects on his first conference talk and believes that not much has changed, even if the tools have. His perfect interaction between developers and business owners would be codeless, and would instead draw his design on a napkin. This idea ties into Andrey’s ideas of creating things in primitives instead of wireframes. He relates his idea to the pattern philosophy of the building architect Christopher Alexander, the idea that specific design problems require specific solutions. He talks about since everything in React is a component, we can encapsulate a design decision into a component. Since the power of components is redistributing knowledge, the panel discusses how components promotes reusability, accessibility, and sustainability in code. However, Frankenstein components are the dark side of reusability. Andrey talks about the dynamic view of a design system that does reuse and how to make sure that it evolves cleanly. They discuss how much of can be planned in advance the first time you’re creating a component versus how much should you not try to think too far ahead and fix it when it comes up. They all agree that early abstraction can be almost as destructive as early optimization Panelists Leslie Cohn-Wein Thomas Aylott Lucas Reis With special guest: Andrey Okonetchnikov Sponsors Sustain Our Software Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan GitLab | Get 30% off tickets with the promo code: DEVCHATCOMMIT Links Lint-staged Component-driven.io Primitive Shape Up book Create prototype using AI : Airbnb test Monica Lent twitter Wireframe jQuery CoffeeScript Backbone.js Christopher Alexander Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter Picks Leslie Cohn Wein: Frontend Masters Intro to Vue course Gatsby.js glossary Thomas Aylott: Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott Lucas Reis: Shape Up book MIT open courseware Andrey Okonetchnikov: Components.ai
Episode Summary Andrey Okonetchnikov is a specialist in frontend architecture and design systems. He runs his own consultancy and made the package lint-staged. Andrey has been in programming for 20 years and talks about his background, how he got into React, and why he started component-driven.io. Andrey has always been interested in design tools and design systems, it just wasn’t the right time because the right tools weren’t available. Since Andrey has been working in frameworks for 20 years and has watched them come and go, Lucas asks Andrey how he has seen the communication between developers and business owners evolve over that time. Andrey reflects on his first conference talk and believes that not much has changed, even if the tools have. His perfect interaction between developers and business owners would be codeless, and would instead draw his design on a napkin. This idea ties into Andrey’s ideas of creating things in primitives instead of wireframes. He relates his idea to the pattern philosophy of the building architect Christopher Alexander, the idea that specific design problems require specific solutions. He talks about since everything in React is a component, we can encapsulate a design decision into a component. Since the power of components is redistributing knowledge, the panel discusses how components promotes reusability, accessibility, and sustainability in code. However, Frankenstein components are the dark side of reusability. Andrey talks about the dynamic view of a design system that does reuse and how to make sure that it evolves cleanly. They discuss how much of can be planned in advance the first time you’re creating a component versus how much should you not try to think too far ahead and fix it when it comes up. They all agree that early abstraction can be almost as destructive as early optimization Panelists Leslie Cohn-Wein Thomas Aylott Lucas Reis With special guest: Andrey Okonetchnikov Sponsors Sustain Our Software Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan GitLab | Get 30% off tickets with the promo code: DEVCHATCOMMIT Links Lint-staged Component-driven.io Primitive Shape Up book Create prototype using AI : Airbnb test Monica Lent twitter Wireframe jQuery CoffeeScript Backbone.js Christopher Alexander Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter Picks Leslie Cohn Wein: Frontend Masters Intro to Vue course Gatsby.js glossary Thomas Aylott: Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott Lucas Reis: Shape Up book MIT open courseware Andrey Okonetchnikov: Components.ai
Sponsors Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan CacheFly Host: Aaron Frost Joined By Special Guest: Craig Spence Episode Summary Craig Spence joins Aaron Frost at Angular Denver to share his journey as an Angular developer. After switching majors from Music to Multimedia Systems Engineering in university, Craig interned for Weta Digital and there he realized how powerful the web was. He then started working for Trade Me, an eBay like website in New Zealand where people buy and sell all kinds of things . There he worked in a team migrating the website from AngularJS to Angular. Craig shares his experiences and many crises they faced during this transition and explains how they resolved them. He currently works as a Senior Engineer at Spotify in Sweden. Links AiA 251: AngularJS to Angular Migration with Craig Spence Craig's LinkedIn Craig's Twitter Trade Me Spotify Angular Denver CoffeeScript
Sponsors Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan CacheFly Host: Aaron Frost Joined By Special Guest: Craig Spence Episode Summary Craig Spence joins Aaron Frost at Angular Denver to share his journey as an Angular developer. After switching majors from Music to Multimedia Systems Engineering in university, Craig interned for Weta Digital and there he realized how powerful the web was. He then started working for Trade Me, an eBay like website in New Zealand where people buy and sell all kinds of things . There he worked in a team migrating the website from AngularJS to Angular. Craig shares his experiences and many crises they faced during this transition and explains how they resolved them. He currently works as a Senior Engineer at Spotify in Sweden. Links AiA 251: AngularJS to Angular Migration with Craig Spence Craig's LinkedIn Craig's Twitter Trade Me Spotify Angular Denver CoffeeScript
Sponsors Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan CacheFly Host: Aaron Frost Joined By Special Guest: Craig Spence Episode Summary Craig Spence joins Aaron Frost at Angular Denver to share his journey as an Angular developer. After switching majors from Music to Multimedia Systems Engineering in university, Craig interned for Weta Digital and there he realized how powerful the web was. He then started working for Trade Me, an eBay like website in New Zealand where people buy and sell all kinds of things . There he worked in a team migrating the website from AngularJS to Angular. Craig shares his experiences and many crises they faced during this transition and explains how they resolved them. He currently works as a Senior Engineer at Spotify in Sweden. Links AiA 251: AngularJS to Angular Migration with Craig Spence Craig's LinkedIn Craig's Twitter Trade Me Spotify Angular Denver CoffeeScript
Sponsors Datadog Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free Panel Aimee Knight Chris Ferdinandi Christopher Beucheler AJ O’Neal With Special Guest: Javan Makhmali Episode Summary Today’s guest is Javan Makhmali, who works for Basecamp and helped develop Trix. Trix is a rich text editor for the web, made purposefully simple for everyday use instead of a full layout tool. Trix is not the same as Tiny MCE, and Javan discusses some of the differences. He talks about the benefits of using Trix over other native browser features for text editing. He talks about how Trix has simplified the work at Basecamp, especially when it came to crossing platforms. Javan talks more about how Trix differs from other text editors like Google Docs and contenteditable, how to tell if Trix is functioning correctly, and how it works with Markdown. The panel discusses more specific aspects of Trix, such as Exec command. One of the features of Trix is it is able to output consistently in all browsers and uses semantic, clean HTML instead of classnames. Javan talks about how Trix handles getting rid of the extraneous cruft of formatting when things are copy and pasted, the different layers of code, and the undo feature. He talks about whether or not there will be more features added to Trix. The panel discusses who could benefit from using Trix. The show finishes with Javan talking about Basecamp’s decision to make Trix open source and why they code in CoffeeScript. Links Trix Tiny MCE Contenteditable Markdown SVG HTML CoffeeScript Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter Picks Javan Makhmali: API for form submissions Chris Ferdinandi: CSS Grid Alex Russel Twitter thread How To Live a Vibrant Life with Early Stage Dementia AJ O’Neal: Mario and Chill Chip Tunes 4 Autism: Catharsis Toilet Auger Christopher Beucheler: Medium to Own blog Aimee Knight: Absolute Truth Unlearned as Junior Developer
Sponsors Datadog Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free Panel Aimee Knight Chris Ferdinandi Christopher Beucheler AJ O’Neal With Special Guest: Javan Makhmali Episode Summary Today’s guest is Javan Makhmali, who works for Basecamp and helped develop Trix. Trix is a rich text editor for the web, made purposefully simple for everyday use instead of a full layout tool. Trix is not the same as Tiny MCE, and Javan discusses some of the differences. He talks about the benefits of using Trix over other native browser features for text editing. He talks about how Trix has simplified the work at Basecamp, especially when it came to crossing platforms. Javan talks more about how Trix differs from other text editors like Google Docs and contenteditable, how to tell if Trix is functioning correctly, and how it works with Markdown. The panel discusses more specific aspects of Trix, such as Exec command. One of the features of Trix is it is able to output consistently in all browsers and uses semantic, clean HTML instead of classnames. Javan talks about how Trix handles getting rid of the extraneous cruft of formatting when things are copy and pasted, the different layers of code, and the undo feature. He talks about whether or not there will be more features added to Trix. The panel discusses who could benefit from using Trix. The show finishes with Javan talking about Basecamp’s decision to make Trix open source and why they code in CoffeeScript. Links Trix Tiny MCE Contenteditable Markdown SVG HTML CoffeeScript Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter Picks Javan Makhmali: API for form submissions Chris Ferdinandi: CSS Grid Alex Russel Twitter thread How To Live a Vibrant Life with Early Stage Dementia AJ O’Neal: Mario and Chill Chip Tunes 4 Autism: Catharsis Toilet Auger Christopher Beucheler: Medium to Own blog Aimee Knight: Absolute Truth Unlearned as Junior Developer
Sponsors Datadog Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free Panel Aimee Knight Chris Ferdinandi Christopher Beucheler AJ O’Neal With Special Guest: Javan Makhmali Episode Summary Today’s guest is Javan Makhmali, who works for Basecamp and helped develop Trix. Trix is a rich text editor for the web, made purposefully simple for everyday use instead of a full layout tool. Trix is not the same as Tiny MCE, and Javan discusses some of the differences. He talks about the benefits of using Trix over other native browser features for text editing. He talks about how Trix has simplified the work at Basecamp, especially when it came to crossing platforms. Javan talks more about how Trix differs from other text editors like Google Docs and contenteditable, how to tell if Trix is functioning correctly, and how it works with Markdown. The panel discusses more specific aspects of Trix, such as Exec command. One of the features of Trix is it is able to output consistently in all browsers and uses semantic, clean HTML instead of classnames. Javan talks about how Trix handles getting rid of the extraneous cruft of formatting when things are copy and pasted, the different layers of code, and the undo feature. He talks about whether or not there will be more features added to Trix. The panel discusses who could benefit from using Trix. The show finishes with Javan talking about Basecamp’s decision to make Trix open source and why they code in CoffeeScript. Links Trix Tiny MCE Contenteditable Markdown SVG HTML CoffeeScript Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter Picks Javan Makhmali: API for form submissions Chris Ferdinandi: CSS Grid Alex Russel Twitter thread How To Live a Vibrant Life with Early Stage Dementia AJ O’Neal: Mario and Chill Chip Tunes 4 Autism: Catharsis Toilet Auger Christopher Beucheler: Medium to Own blog Aimee Knight: Absolute Truth Unlearned as Junior Developer
Sponsors Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Linode offers $20 credit CacheFly Panel Joe Eames AJ O’Neal Episode Summary In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Joe Eames and AJ O’Neal talk about what TypeScript is, and their background and experiences with it. They discuss the different kinds of typed languages such as dynamic vs static, strong vs weak, implicit vs explicit casting and the reasons for selecting one type over the other. AJ shares his opinion on not preferring TypeScript in general, while Joe offers a counter perspective on liking it, and both give a number of reasons to support each argument. They talk about some final good and bad points about TypeScript and move on to picks. Links TypeScript CoffeeScript Follow JavaScript Jabber on Devchat.tv, Facebook and Twitter. Picks Joe Eames: Cypress What if your dev environment was a PWA?
Sponsors Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Linode offers $20 credit CacheFly Panel Joe Eames AJ O’Neal Episode Summary In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Joe Eames and AJ O’Neal talk about what TypeScript is, and their background and experiences with it. They discuss the different kinds of typed languages such as dynamic vs static, strong vs weak, implicit vs explicit casting and the reasons for selecting one type over the other. AJ shares his opinion on not preferring TypeScript in general, while Joe offers a counter perspective on liking it, and both give a number of reasons to support each argument. They talk about some final good and bad points about TypeScript and move on to picks. Links TypeScript CoffeeScript Follow JavaScript Jabber on Devchat.tv, Facebook and Twitter. Picks Joe Eames: Cypress What if your dev environment was a PWA?
The team discusses Tito and its architecture, from its early days using Rails and CoffeeScript, to it's current use of Rails with modern JS including Vue and custom elements. The post Episode 33: Rails and Vue with Tito's Paul Campbell appeared first on TalkScript.FM.
The team discusses Tito and its architecture, from its early days using Rails and CoffeeScript, to it's current use of Rails with modern JS including Vue and custom elements. The post Episode 33: Rails and Vue with Tito’s Paul Campbell appeared first on SitePen.
Добрый день уважаемые слушатели. Представляем новый выпуск подкаста RWpod. В этом выпуске: Ruby Ruby 2.4.2 Released и Roda 3.0.0 has been released Create a Filesystem with Ruby and FUSE, GraphQL and Performance in Rails и Polymorphic Associations (video) JavaScript Announcing CoffeeScript 2, Planning for Babel 7.0, How JavaScript works: memory management + how to handle 4 common memory leaks и On React and WordPress Build An Interactive Game of Thrones Map (Part I) - Node.js, PostGIS, and Redis, Electron: The Bad Parts и Jquery-punchcard - jquery plugin for creating GitHub Punchcard like graphs
Drew Covi: @drewcovi | about.me Show Notes: 01:04 - Honeywell User Experience (HUE) 05:00 - Deliverables 06:55 - Being a “Devsigner” 17:26 - Flash and Leading to Unique Skills 30:00 - Advice for People Straddling Roles 35:27 - Leveraging Design and Development Skills Together 39:41 - Embracing the Hardware Element 42:05 - Why the “Devsigner”? Resources: AOLpress CSS Beauty CSS Zen Garden Contribute Crave Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #76. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me is Elrick Ryan, also a developer at The Frontside. Hello. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Not much. Are you excited about today's topic? ELRICK: Very excited. CHARLES: Yeah. You got a personal stake in it because today, we have in the room, not only you but also two developers who are also designers or designers who are also developers. Our guest today is actually the first person who fit this description that I ever worked with. It was a great experience, a great collaboration and his name is Drew Covi. Drew is a senior supervisor of product design at HUE Studios in Golden Valley, Minnesota. DREW: Howdy. How are you doing? CHARLES: Good. Thanks for joining us. Now, you're going to have to explain to us two things, one, what is a super senior product designer and let's start off talking about HUE first. What exactly is HUE because I think it's a cool organization? DREW: I'm working with four people and I'm working on all sorts of brand new ideas. I think the greatest opportunity that I've had in my career at this company, Honeywell is just working with physical product and the digital space. It's a unique opportunity. Not all companies focus on both so it's really been a learning experience for me and working with a great group of creative individuals is also been a real privilege. They say that at the end of the day, the most important thing is other people that you work with and really the entire team here has been fantastic in welcoming me and letting me explore and grow as a developer and as a designer. It's been great so far. CHARLES: Fantastic. Working with that group was absolutely wonderful. What does HUE stand for? DREW: HUE is Honeywell User Experience. Our previous CEO, Dave Cote often called it 'huey' but it's just HUE, without the Jersey accent. I'm going to probably misrepresent but we have over eight to 10 studios throughout the world. Each one focuses on different businesses for the most part. The one here in Golden Valley tends to focus on homes and buildings technologies. The studio out of Seattle, actually tends to focus on, again I'm going to get the acronym wrong here but it's essentially worker safety in industrial safety. CHARLES: What is it that you all do at HUE? DREW: What we do here at the studio here in Golden Valley is we support various businesses throughout the homes and buildings technology space. About fall of last year, Honeywell went through a bit of a shift in their business and they used to do all automation control solutions. Last fall essentially, we saw that one large business that was headquartered and based out of Golden Valley, break into two areas of more direct focus. Out of Seattle, we have folks working on, I think I mentioned before but Seattle works on sensing and productivity solutions. We focus on homes and building space so we're both providing upfront research to understand what the customer needs. We're actually creating everything from very rough user flows to final UIs and we're also working with industrial designers to create final products. Those industrial designers work very closely with engineering. Honeywell has a long reputation of very strong engineering when it comes to the hardware space. We've prided ourselves on excellent instruments and excellent performance. One thing that very few people understand is that we don't just do thermostats. We're in the business of turbos. We're creating the turbos for your car. We're creating all sorts of HVAC equipment. We're also handling various safety equipment. All of these items need designing, not just for end users and consumers but they also need designing for the workers in the field. If we make a product that is more efficient, easier to use and in some cases, more attractive, not only it does lead to more sales, it leads to more efficient work forces that can work quicker essentially. You could get up on a roof and get off in record time. We're not just designing consumer products. We're actually focused on a lot of other items as well, with oftentimes very large returns on investment. CHARLES: In the work that you do and HUE does in general, it sounds like there might be a large software component. Digital design is kind of we know in the web space but then also a lot of industrial design of just how does this thing going to look, how is it going to feel, how is it going to persist, how durable is it going to be, how is it going to withstand usage. Would you get involved in that process? DREW: Usually, the entire organization gets involved with the process very early on. One of the other shifts that happen in the fall as we get involved less in the production and more on the actual marketing side, like marketing deciding what's going to be built. We're actually really at the beginning and understanding what problems need to be solved at first. As far as my practice and my skill set, we do get involved with all that discovery phase work but when it comes to actual deliverables, we oftentimes see our deliverables around the actual creation of understanding user interactions. We will take research from our user research in OVOC, which is an acronym for Observational Voice of the Customer and we'll take those learnings and translate them into whatever solution we decide to build as a team. My output is going to look like a user flow, something you build in OmniGraffle or Visio and then it can start there, which is in the physical space and then we'll actually revolve those concepts into wireframes as well. Wireframes that will then be handed off to other team members who specialize and focus on visual design. Basically, it's kind of a very hands on process from the very beginning to the very end. It's essentially just understanding everything from the physical to the digital. CHARLES: When we were working together, at least in your case, it doesn't stop there. You're actually doing a significant amount of the implementation as well. Let's explore how did you actually end up getting to that position where you were working through interactions, wireframes and workflows and then also, getting to actually build the product in the form of a complex single-page application. DREW: Sure. Absolutely. One of the components that I kind of brought here to the team was a bit of a deeper understanding of frontend web development. I'm often pulled into conversations here and there. In the case of the project that we were working on specifically, it was essentially kind of early days on that project. We had a product that was pretty old and need a lot of work and it was basically, need to be rebuilt. We hadn't seen a lot of single-page applications at that time. In my case, I actually had worked on a couple small projects in my previous job and we can get into that in a little bit, where my career path took me. But essentially, it was me trying to kind of pave the way and eventually have that work scale. It was kind of proving that it could be done, showing how it could be done and then getting other developers on board. My role here has oftentimes involved, basically becoming a liaison between our design teams and our development teams. Ultimately in this case like you mentioned, it did wind up in turning into code that ultimately got factored into production code. It was definitely a time where we were experimenting with what role we would play. I will say in full disclosure that more or less which we're trying to move towards, basically making better informed decisions but not playing as much of a role in actual production code writing. It's something that we want to help scale. I think we'll talk about that kind of role and how well it scales hopefully in a little bit here but ultimately, it kind of changed a little bit. I don't do as much code as I used to. CHARLES: Right but nevertheless, the skill is there. Don't sell yourself short. You weren't slapping together a bunch of jQuery plugins. You were standing up, basically a full stack system with a StubDeck background, then Node.JS. This is back in early days where there was a custom-build tooling. You were using CoffeeScript. There was a lot of exploration and clearly, there is a fierce curiosity which you are actually exploring and actively kind of skinning and moving into the development space, which doesn't happen until people achieve a certain level of comfort. Whether or not you're exercising those skills, I think they have served you well in terms of the things that you've been able to build but also acting in that liaison and understanding what's possible and stuff like that. Obviously, once I met you, you were already there. I'm curious in exploring that journey of coming up the design ladder but also coming up the development ladder too. Maybe we can talk about each one separately and then see how they intertwine. Let's start with the design side. How did you get into that? DREW: I can take you way, way back. I love to talk more about this in a little bit but I think we, as a generation, are kind of very unique in that. We were raised in the birth of the internet. Some of us are old enough to remember the early dial up days and I certainly was one of those. I grew up basically obsessed with drawing and art and painting. I was a designer and artist raised by an engineer, essentially. My dad didn't really have a lot of opportunities to explore his creative side to basically make a living. I want to say that although graphic design existed to a certain extent, there wasn't really the same blend of engineering skills required so he decided to take the tack of I'm going to become an engineer so I was raised in a household where he was building everything but he was also a talented artist. As a kid, I basically did a lot of advanced art classes. I'm kind of a nerd, pretty much a huge nerd. I dropped my entire tenure as a high school student. It was also kind of dawn of video games as well so we had computers coming of age. We had video games coming of age so I was raised looking at digital art effectively, 8-bit, super accessible. It's kind of so early on that it was something that I could actually fathom getting into and creating on my own. I never got to creating any games but I will say that by my late high school years, I was using a tool called AOLpress. For anybody who has ever heard of that, congratulations. You're one of the few. CHARLES: I've never heard of that. AOLpress, we're going to have to link to that in the show notes. ELRICK: I've never heard of that either. DREW: It's awesome. It's got a Wikipedia page. It's got hieroglyphs and stuff. They really went all out on this product. It's basically the precursor to the Dreamweaver. It was a very, very WYSIWYG. I'm sure you've heard of Microsoft FrontPage, maybe. It was basically a precursor to FrontPage, I would say. Same thing, those are the days of framesets and all of that. I was a kid in scouting at the time and I wanted to build a web page for the troops so I built one and put it out there. I kind of remember that moment where I was like, "I'm going to write something and put it on the internet and anybody can see it." That whole experience was just super exciting. I know that if anybody's following Kickstarter, there's one that was started called 'What Comes Next Is the Future.' It was made by Matt Braun and Matt Griffin and it really explored the birth of the web. I would recommend it on your listeners to want to really dive deep if you didn't live through it, check it out. It's a great, great film. All the regulars are there as you'd expect. Zeldman on there, talking about it amongst others. But if it were for the web, I don't know that I would be who I am or where I am today, just because it's such a unique platform. It's so open. It's so readily available. There's no barriers. I would say that I was just an arts student in high school that picked up AOLpress and then got addicted to the web. From there, it was kind of off to the races. In fact, I didn't even know that I could make a living as a graphic designer until late high school. I decided that I wanted to go to school for graphic design, went a year at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and at that point in time, it was pretty much all print design and then Flash. Flash took over in my second year and at that point in time, it was Flash and framesets and tables. There was no CSS for layout. It's very early days. It sounds like you might know what I'm talking about. Have you been there? ELRICK: Yeah. You know, they say everyone in the world has like a twin and I'm like, "Drew is like my technology twin." DREW: Yeah. When we were raised in that time and we had to hack it with framesets and whatever tool -- FrontPage or AOLpress -- you basically, from very early days, realized that you had to force this stuff to happen. It was not easy. There was no documentation and where there was documentation, you were grateful to have it. I remember when I was, probably just about to graduate and if I look back at my portfolio piece, it was definitely still Flash. It was Timeline-based Flash. I also think that in many ways the way the web evolved was perfect. As a designer, I was very comfortable in the Timeline tool. Before ActionScript 3.0 and before they went on object-oriented on us, it was super accessible. You could add little bits of code here and there and create animations. It kind of got you hooked. Then suddenly, I found myself needing to create full screen Flash applications and needing to actually write code. I actually having to say, "If I want this Flash experience to scale, then I need to calculate where things go. I can't just X-Y coordinate and done," so that's where I jumped off and started getting into CSS. CSS was kind of early days as well. Again, this is before iPhone. This is like people were using CSS but people didn't really think it was that important. It was actually kind of discouraged because everybody in the world was using Internet Explorer and why would you need to know CSS. It was unreliable for different browsers and Internet Explorer was the worst. I remember sitting in a Dreamweaver conference, when it was Macromedia had a conference and they showed a webpage and then they hit the print button and they said, "Does anybody here know how this happened?" because the layout had changed, everything looked better and different. It was perfect for print. I remember my hand shot up because they was like, "Nobody was really familiar yet with that print style sheets?" Incidentally, I don't think that people still are familiar with print style sheets but it was a time when finally people were starting to understand that style sheets were more than just a layout tool. You could change them for all these different form, factors and all these different platforms. It was a fun time to be coming up in this age. CHARLES: It sounds like one, CSS and two, Flash were actually kind of gateway drugs into the development world? DREW: Absolutely. CHARLES: We still have CSS, clearly but do you feel like Flash, despite what some people might think about it, it was a full virtual machine that was running. You could code on it with ActionScript. It's kind of like the JVM but only for running inside the browser. Do you feel like designers might not have that gateway available to them anymore or maybe is the web just as big of a gateway to move into that? DREW: Yeah, for sure. I certainly think, beyond a doubt that had it not been for Flash, we would see a lot less creativity in the space. I say that only because at the time, if we had just gone from tables and tried to slowly evolve things, we'd have a much different feel, I believe. Certainly, it's a gateway drug. We'll be in a different web today without it. Is it still required? Are there any equivalents? I've seen a number of drag and drop web UI on the web tools out there and many of them claim to create production quality code. It's certainly possible to get there without Flash. I think, it's certainly its time has passed but we do see tools like Sketch for instance. These are all very much screen-based design tools that seem to leverage a lot of the same web styles and the web approaches. I think we definitely have the tools there to replace Flash. But I think from my perspective, it would be very interesting to go back and imagine, would we have immersive full screen web experiences without that Flash? CHARLES: Yeah. I remember it being very much a topic of conversation, certainly at the beginning of each project or when you were going to implement a feature is, "Are we going to do this using Flash? Are we trying to do this with native HTML? Are we going to use EGADS or Java applet?" ELRICK: Oh, man. Java applets. CHARLES: That was a conversation that was had before the web eventually went out but I think when it was, everything was very, very static. I do think that Flash definitely set the expectation higher and forced the web to evolve so that it could be the natural choice in those conversations. ELRICK: The time when Flash was around, I called it the 'golden age of user interface' because you can literally build any user experience, any user interface with Flash that you could dream up. There was no limitations creatively in the world of Flash. Nowadays, we're kind of limited without box model but it's getting better year-by-year. DREW: It's interesting to me because before Flash really died out, we had these... Let's put it this way. I feel as though, for a long time the web was a very much like a poster site kind of approach. You would have tools that were pretty rough on the eyes, pretty hard to use and then like for certain films, you have these very high budget, fully immersive Flash experiences. For a blip, that did actually translate at some point into Canvas-based and then Three.JS, like 3D WebGL-based experiences in native HTML but I don't see a whole lot of that anymore. It seems as though, it kind of settled down and in many ways, I would say killing Flash kind of evolved the web from more of a presentational platform to more of a usability first platform. It was a bit of a double-edged sword. You could build anything you want like you said but there wasn't a framework to it. It wasn't really responsive and then certainly, when Steve Jobs decided he wasn't going to Flash an iPhone, that was the end of it. Essentially now, we have -- ELRICK: Steve Job dropped the hammer. CHARLES: That was the memo that was heard around the world, right? DREW: Yeah. CHARLES: I just realized that was like 10 years ago. DREW: Yeah, they're celebrating the anniversary for the last couple of months here. It's been a huge deal. CHARLES: There's probably listeners that never heard that memo but it's definitely worth a read. The memo obviously, that you guys are referring to is when Steve Jobs basically said that Flash would not be on iPhone or iPad, not now, not ever. That was the end of it. DREW: People often forget too that when it was first launched, there was no app store. He basically said point blank, "Anything you need to do on this phone, you should be able to do using the web, using native web coding," and Safari at that point in time is really paving the way to bringing those native APIs into the web. You had geolocation through web. In many ways, that too is a huge gateway drug. Suddenly, you start looking at the web, not as just like, "I could use this as a poster site or as an informational site or a new site. I can actually use this to get things done." They're actually treating this platform as a first-class citizen. That to me was super exciting. I don't know if it gets as much attention anymore in the days of Swift and the App Store but I will say that if your listeners do get a chance to check out the show I mentioned earlier, 'What Comes Next Is the Future,' they even dive deep into just how limiting the app store experience can be. At least with the web, you can create whatever you want to create and people seemed to go that you URL and install on their home screen. This is a feature that nobody uses from what I've seen but if you bookmark a web app on your home screen, you can have an icon, you can have a loading screen, you can have all this stuff and nobody really uses it for whatever reason. CHARLES: I think it's the install, it's getting the knowledge about the fact that you can do that. It's not widely disseminated. ELRICK: Yeah, I think its capabilities starting to come up now with people making progressive web apps. They're starting to utilize that being able to put icons on people screens and loading screen and splash and etcetera. CHARLES: Flash really was kind of the gateway into the development world. I'm curious what opportunities do you feel opened up as you started taking on more web technologies, more JavaScript, more CSS and mixing that with the design that you were doing? What unique skills/superpowers do you think that gave you, that made you, that helped you at that stage in your career? DREW: Yeah, for better or worse, it really was the opportunity to get a job first of all. I know that the job market has been in all sorts of flux in the last couple of decades but I would say 12 years ago, in 2005 when I was entering the workforce, graphic design was not necessarily a hot field. I can say with relative certainty that the majority of the people I graduate with, didn't necessarily make their way into graphic design as a profession. I would say probably maybe 30% to 40% actually wound up following their degrees. For the obvious reason at that time, we were starting to see digital replace print. It meant that I was able to get a job for one. It wasn't a dream job necessarily but I was basically a one-stop-shop. I was designing and developing websites as working for a company but in many ways, shapes and forms, I was kind of freelancing as things were. I had a very direct relationship with the clients that I worked with. It was basically churning out websites. If I recall correctly at the time the company wanted to essentially create a Domino's Pizza of the web where we could use CSS to essentially build the actual HTML once and then restyle it. This is actually was a time when a site called CSS Beauty was just coming of age, I think the site still exists but back then, if you want the CSS Beauty, it's big thing was you have one website and people could upload their own CSS and completely change the layout, completely change the look. CHARLES: Are you talking about CSS Zen Garden? DREW: Maybe that was it. There's two of them. CHARLES: I remember that one. DREW: CSS Zen Garden was one of them and I think CSS beauty was a clone maybe of Zen Garden for sure. Maybe you're right, Zen Garden was the one where you actually had a website and Beauty was just showcasing certain CSS sites. I think you're right. Zen Garden was the one. When they saw that, they're like, "Wow, business opportunity. We can build a whole site." We were using something called 'Cold Fusion' and... Oh, it will escape me now. I think it was called 'Contribute.' There's a product called 'Contribute' that Macromedia come up with that worked on Cold Fusion. It was basically a WordPress. You basically set up editable regions, you basically code the site once in that regard in the backend coding and then just rework CSS to create multiple sites. Actually, the opportunity to open up for me, that job was very squarely-focused around the benefits of leveraging CSS. Eventually, that grew tiring. I kind of wanted to get into the actual marketing and advertising space. From there, I started to just jump to the next job. I worked for a very, very small marketing agency. It was called 'Vetta-Zelo' at that time and we focused on lots more Flash, a little bit of CSS websites but mostly Flash Experiences and they actually used Flash in a lot of kiosks and physical spaces. I started to jump into that, understanding PHP, understanding databases because we would do things like we would install Flash Experience on little portable tablets that would then sync up survey responses to a web URL that it would then dump it into a database. About that time, I was always trying to teach myself how to get really deep into the backend of the stack. CHARLES: That was just to make sure that these Flash sites that you're developing would be scalable and more robust? Was that the natural next layer to dig down? DREW: Absolutely. At the end of the day, we wanted to have immersive Flash experiences and we wanted to have the content easy to update. I would build these really crude backend with text areas and they would update a database and then the Flash Experience would pull that in as content. In that way, we didn't have to go in and re-publish the Flash every time, essentially. It was a much more streamlined process. I think we even gave some of our clients the keys, gave them a login and password and they could change certain things. There's an outfit around here called 'Crave.' They are a restaurant in town and we built the website for them -- one of the earlier websites. When you have to do things like update times and menus and things like that, it became pretty essential to having some sort of a CMS behind it. It was all based on necessity, in other words. What you said is absolutely true. We had to evolve what we learned and I had to push what I did to lever on different needs. Throughout my career, I've been the guy who does web and design. One of the things about that is it's kind of a lonely place to be and find yourself in creative agencies, where the majority of skill sets are not in development and trying to explain what's going on or make commitments on timelines and deliver on them. Whenever a bug shows up, it's never really fully understood. It's also a challenge to manage expectations, certainly as a young professional at that point. CHARLES: Yeah, I would say, what would be some advice you would give to somebody who is straddling these roles at that early career stage where they're maybe working for creative agency and fulfilling these two roles but most of their surroundings is towards the design end. DREW: Yeah, I would say for the most part, just be upfront. If there's anything that's unknown, be upfront about it and explain. If you are early in your development career as a designer, do your homework before you committing any commitment certainly. I think it's always better to be upfront about these things than to try to over-promise and then scramble at the end. I will say that a lot of my career has been marked with the term code 'code cowboy' as a designer and teaching myself to code. It was a disparaging term, I guess. I didn't really necessarily take it that way but I think other developers are trying to use it in that way. CHARLES: [Singing to the tune of Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys] Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold... ELRICK: It's so true. DREW: You know, I'm not even embarrassed to say it because the truth of the matter is when you're a designer, you're used to just making a mess before you kind of landed on what you're done and what's right. The entire creative process is messy. I think it's inherent. If you're one of these designers turned devs and you basically just hack it until it comes together, that's kind of a natural flow from the creative process. Certainly, as you get more experienced, you want to reduce all that uncertainty and potential for error so you do learn to hone your craft, to use version control, to embrace a framework or embrace some model-view controller approach but none of that really existed in the early days of the web. I kind of came up in a time when you had to hack it. CHARLES: Well, there's a lot of learning that can happen when you're hacking and building things that are kind of ad hoc. As you go, you get to perceive firsthand the problems with them. Without perceiving those problems first, it's hard to really understand the solutions that the internet has come up with to deal with those complexities. DREW: I would say I was like a solo designer developer throughout the early years, because at 2010, I found my people in a local agency called 'Clockwork' and for the first time, I wasn't the only developer on staff. There was a whole team of developers. In fact, the shop was started as a development shop and they were making headway into the creative space and eventually, becoming full digital partners. But had it not been for my opportunities at Clockwork, I wouldn't have picked up my skill set as a backend coder. From the very beginning at Clockwork, they expected you to get your hands dirty and code and get your hands dirty in the terminal, honestly. Command line was required even in our design work. CHARLES: And this is all designers needed to be familiar with the terminal tools --? DREW: Correct. CHARLES: -- Basic coding? DREW: Yeah. Essentially, all of our work, whether it was creative or whether it was documents, were all managed in Subversion. As a part of onboarding, you basically learned how to use Subversion. There were some GUI tools for it but for the most part, it wasn't that steep of a learning curve. It was pretty easy to follow instructions and that was the second gateway drug, I would say. My first gateway drug, again was kind of coming up in the age of the web and getting into CSS and Flash. The second gateway drug was basically being required to learn command line and learning how to navigate a computer without a display. Had not been for that, I don't think my career would have taken the turns that it did. I basically got more into the IoT space. I had set up a home NAS server with Drobo FS, is what it was called at the time and it was just a really basic machine but by jumping into that, I could start to play around with UNIX and tools there. I started using home automation, playing with that and at some point in time, I made the jump from just web into the role that I play here at Honeywell, which is Internet of Things. We do a lot of Internet of Things. In fact, our latest tagline is 'the Power of Connected' so we've embraced it all the way down to our wood mark. It's becoming the new normal for most products so it's a good time to be at the center of all these different areas of expertise, to be in development, to be in IoT and to be in design. That's my path. That's my journey. I would kind of pick it up at a bunch of fortunate circumstances, honestly. ELRICK: Having these two skill sets: your design skills and your development skills, what do you believe that that gives you in terms of an advantage? Having these two skills set and being able to leverage these two? DREW: From my perspective, having both skill sets allows me to understand. I think the biggest challenge when working with large teams, particularly in this space or in any space is to really have a common level of understanding, stepping aside from a functional role and becoming more of a liaison between design development and to be honest with you, as we look beyond that, I took a three or four or five month course in business administration, actually. It was just a night class but I wanted to be able to speak to those needs as well. I think it really is becoming a translator. Serving as a translator between those items and then also being able to understand where the actual boundaries lie, there are a lot of very talented engineers and talented designers and sometimes opportunities are missed because, either timelines are pushing engineers to cut certain functionalities or certain features and there's a lot of pressure. Where we can lend a hand, where we can point to possible alternatives, I think that's where we really build cutting edge products. When we really know each domain, we can push those boundaries. That's where I'd enjoy bringing my skill set to the table. CHARLES: Yeah. I can second that. Having actually worked with you, I think one of the greatest things was the one just with the interactions that you were coming up with, were just really spot on. It wasn't ad hoc. It wasn't some -- ELRICK: Helter-skelter? CHARLES: Yeah, it wasn't helter-skelter. It wasn't some developer coming up with like, "Hey, this is what this looks like," Or, "This is some designer putting up pie in the sky stuff." It was, "I understand what's possible and I'm going to use that to design the best thing that can be possible." It made the designs very pleasant and some of them were just really fun, I think. Thinking especially like that, the hierarchical tree selector was one -- ELRICK: Yeah, that was fun. CHARLES: -- Which the implementation of that was just a joy. But then the second thing is being able to speak with you on the development challenges and really know that you understood that language. It really is being bilingual, I guess in the sense that I'm talking to you in French and you're talking to product owners in German or whatever. But because you're bilingual, the flow of information is as frictionless as possible. DREW: I will say that it was a real pleasure from our end working with your team as well because one of the trends in many businesses throughout the world today is embracing a lean and agile approach to product design development. One of the growth opportunities, I would say in any business is fully understanding how that process works, having the courage to be upfront about what can be accomplished in the time available. I think one of the other things is fully understanding those three pegs of the stool. There's always the budget, the time and then the features of any projects. I think that working with a team that understands that really changes the dynamic. I will say that it was equally a pleasure for us to work with your team because there was just a level of courage in being very forthright and very upfront about what do we need to get the job done? What has to happen? You made my job as a translator, essentially. CHARLES: We aim to please. ELRICK: Absolutely. DREW: Absolutely. The latest evolution of kind of where my career has taken us in the company is embracing the hardware element. We've talked a bit about the web and then how that evolved and then having to get comfortable of the command line and where that took place. I've always wanted to build. I've loved designing but I always want to build it and I want to put it out there. In the last six months actually, I finally decided that I would pull the Band-Aid off and jump into soldering hardware, writing what code I could and building actual physical hardware prototypes. I think the next step for anybody who likes to follow this maker trajectory, for a creative looking to become a maker or a developer looking to get into creative is just not stopping. There's always something there and we're also fortunate to live in a time when I can go on at Adafruit, pick up a kit of parts for under $100 and build something that's completely new. Then by the way, they have a full-on tutorial that takes you through every step of the process and gives you bits of code to get started so what's your excuse at that point? If you've got $100, then you can throw and toss into a hobby, pick up a soldering iron and go to town because there are videos, there's the documentation. Documentation is just everywhere now, where it was never there before. I think the next step for us is seeing how can we very early on show real physical world products to end users and get feedback. How we're taking design now is beyond the digital and into the physical. CHARLES: That's fascinating. I feel like there's this pendulum that swings through the tech industry of things moving from hardware to software and back again. We're in the middle of the swing towards the outside or towards the hardware again, like the distributed hardware versus the dumb terminals. It's distributed across a bunch of devices rather than concentrated on one super-powered desktop computer. The pendulum is going to swing in it but it's just always fascinated to see what the actual arc that it takes is going to be. This has been a fascinating conversation and the reason I wanted to have it and we were actually talking about this before the show started officially, why this topic of 'devsigner?' I think that it's a role that is emerging. I think it's still in the early days. I think that I went from three years ago having never really met this type of person to having met and worked with you. Now, I would say having met and worked with three people here at Frontside who fulfill that role and now knowing a couple professed devsigner or people who operate clearly in the design and the developer space on Twitter. I feel like it's this emerging career track that might not be fully understood or defined right now but clearly, there's something there so we wanted to explore that. I'm curious if we might be able to open up the discussion a little bit on what is the future of this role? What tasks will it be set to accomplish? When you're assembling your team, you say, "Get me one of those because we're going to need that." How is that going to be further refined and designed so that it scales as, perhaps an official career in one, two, five, 10 or 20 years? DREW: I can only speak to my experience in this area and I can say that for the most part, it is a very unique skill set and sometimes, it's hard to come but like you said, you're working now with three people. I think it's growing in prevalence. I believe that where coding was less common in the past, it's becoming so much more common now that it's almost like an expectation just like typing. It is an expectation now. People expect you know how to type. It's not a surprise that we're going to see more and more of these individuals. I would say that any design team out there could almost invariably benefit from having somebody with this skill set, somebody who can translate design concept into a working prototype. I've seen it manifest as a prototyping role, more or less just so that we can have a tangible deliverable for developers. I think it does depend on the team, certainly. If you have small teams with talented frontend developers, then certainly you can work in a lean and agile environment and make very quick iterative change. If you have very large design teams and very large development teams, I would say that having a frontend developer with the skill set in a creative team allows that communication to happen without routine phone calls and lots of meetings, essentially. It's a crystal clear example. I've see it manifest as a prototyping role because the expectation is this code will end up in production but some of the code may. The layout code may end up in production but the functional bits may not. That's not to say that the functionality isn't a part of the experience and that, designers don't care about how well an experience performs. But typically where many designers see the disconnect is in the presentation layer. Having somebody who can carry that over is usually something that is far smaller team can handle. Does that align with your experiences? CHARLES: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I would say that the compliment from having this person on your development team, if you're in mainline development mode or maybe you are a small team, even if it's a production system but you don't have full time design resources, this person can slice and dice the features and understand the hierarchy of interactions and being able to put together some wireframe, some very concrete goals and set those goals for the rest of the development team. But yet also understand what goals are achievable in the iteration. I think it works from the flipside as well. Maybe what we're seeing is the agile of the [inaudible] of everything. What we've seen over the past 15 years or 20 years, what has been the arc of my career is just seeing these feedback loops in every element of product development getting smaller and smaller and smaller. On the development side, we recognize this as being able to feedback loops and verification. Having your tests, you don't actually have to deploy your system to be able to get feedback about whether it works or have it be fully assembled to get feedback about whether it works. But then that manifests in terms of continuous integration and deployment. You're bringing down the feedback loop of getting this out in front of people versus these long deployment cycles that maybe you really have a release every year. It was hard to believe but that was the norm when I started. It was yearly, maybe even once every 18 months. It was not uncommon at all to have released cycles like that. Certainly, three months was very, very short but then those tight feedback loops can also manifest itself, internally in terms of team communication and I think having people who can make those feedback loops between the product and between the implementation, every time you shorten that feedback loop, you're unlocking an exponential amount of time. DREW: Yeah, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head when you talk about setting scope and understanding things as well. Strictly speaking from agile terminology, having a product or a role that can bridge those gaps is critical. I think that the best product owners that I've worked with have understood, have had an appreciation for design but also have had some degree of a development backend as well so they know how to make those critical decisions. In any sort of iterative or agile environment, you have to dice up these features and figure out which ones are going to ship when they're going to ship. I think, yeah you hit it right out of the park with that. Whether or not you can ever have a full-on team of just prototypers, I'm not as convinced that that's necessarily scalable. It seems like there's certainly a role for teams of developer that will break down features and then there's teams of creative as well. CHARLES: I think in terms of the person who would lead that team, this role definitely seems very well fit. DREW: Exactly. CHARLES: I think it's a great opportunity for someone who's looking for a leadership position in terms of developing and seeing products to market, which is kind of similar to what you're finding yourself in today or where you're headed towards, it sounds like. DREW: Yeah, for the most part. It seems like I do find myself in a number of calls in kind of bridging those gaps. It's certainly a different dynamic in the agile environment when work with hardware. That's something that I think we're still exploring and still understanding. Certainly, there are companies that do agile with hardware but there's a whole slew of different challenges. You're not just deploying anymore. You're actually building manufacturing understanding what needs to ship with what. I think the next evolution of our company's growth into this space is how do iteratively produce hardware. ELRICK: Interesting. CHARLES: You got to keep me posted. The next time we have you on the podcast, you're going to have it all figured out, you're going to be presenting your thesis, it's a conference talk upcoming, agile hardware. ELRICK: Yeah, that would be pretty interesting. DREW: Yeah, I'll let you know. CHARLES: In the first iteration, you just throw a bunch of boiling solder on the breadboard and see what works. "Okay, now, that didn't work." DREW: I'll be honest with you. The 3D printing is making lots of possibilities open up in that space but ultimately, you got to ship. We use 3D printing and now we are using these low-cost computers to really prototype real world experiences and near-to-final industrial design. We can do that. CHARLES: Drew, this sounds like you have the coolest job. ELRICK: I know, it sounds awesome. DREW: It become even more exciting than I had initially intended. It's fun times. I think, again we're living in a time when we can 3D print stuff and have it done within a couple of hours. What better time to embrace these technologies and this creative spirit. It's kind of all around us. Honestly, it's just being fortunate. CHARLES: Yeah. Fantastic. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Drew for coming on. DREW: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. CHARLES: It's an amazing place. It sounds like even more fun since we got to work with you. If anybody is out there and they're in the design space and they think that, "Oh, maybe I can't do development," or it's too hard. It's not. There's a lot of people out there who are doing it and experiencing lots of good benefits. I would say that the other thing is if you're a developer, you should think about looking into the design space, something that you might be interested in. I think it's probably less common that the vectors people move from development into design and not vice versa but there's nothing that says that it can't go that way. Mostly, it's because people just aren't doing and they think that that option is not available to them but clearly, it is and clearly, it's a valuable role. I think this role is going to only get more valuable in the future. DREW: I would second that thought and that notion. I give a quick shout out to Erin O'Neal. She's a former colleague of mine who's given a number of talks about that very topic -- backend developers caring about user experience, caring about the design. She's given some talks. You could probably find her on YouTube. Anybody who wants to talk about it, I'm all over the web as DrewCovi. I think I pretty much have that user name in every platform so if you Google me, you'll find me. CHARLES: We'll look for you. Obviously, you can find us at @TheFrontside on Twitter, TheFrontside on GitHub and feel free to drop us a line at Contact@Frontside.io. Thank you for listening everybody and we'll see you next week.
Philip Poots @pootsbook | GitHub Show Notes: 00:53 - What is Elm? 03:45 - The Essence of User Interface 07:59 - “Messages” 08:31 - Scalability 14:04 - Error Handling 18:47 - The Business Case 22:35 - Where is Elm on the curve of scalability? 28:36 - Learning From Elm 32:32 - “Whole Meal Solutions” Resources: Philip Poots: Elmber @ Wicked Good Ember 2016 Cycle.js Functional Reactive Programming Evan Czaplicki Test-driven Development (TDD) NoRedInk The Elm Mailing List Try Elm Elm Guide elmtutorial.org Elm For Beginners by James Moore Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 56. I am Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside. With me is Jeffrey Cherewaty, also a developer here at The Frontside. JEFFREY: Hey-o! CHARLES: We're going to be talking today with Philip Poots, who is a fantastic individual, who I have known over the Twitters, over the e-mails, interacted with at conferences, seen him speak on at least one occasion and today we're actually going to be talking about the thing that I saw him speak at Wicked Good Ember last June. It was actually one of my favorite talks from that conference. It was on Elm for Ember developers. Thank you very much for being on the show, Philip. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Elm is and how you came to find out about it and really kind of dive deeply into it? PHILIP: Yeah, sure. First of all, pleasure to be on the show. The Frontside is one of my favorite podcast, if not my favorite, given a cross-section of the Dadcast, the love of programming and balancing that with the business of programming. That's right, I'm an independent developer. I started off with Rails then got into the Ember quite early on. Last year, I think around January, that's when I started really investigating Elm in detail. It's actually a funny story how I came about because I was at Ember Amsterdam and it was a night where we had three members of the core team: we had Erik Bryn, he gave a talk, Alex Matchneer, gave a talk and Igor also came over because he's based in Europe. Alex always loves to investigate new things and one of the things he was getting into was Observables. I'd never heard about Observables at all so after the talk, I kind of pulled him aside and I asked him some very stupid questions. He was gracious enough to bear with me and to dive a little deeper into this stuff. Alex is kind of a quiet member of the core team, unless he's got his drum sticks but he's the guy that rewrote the [inaudible]. That was no mean feat because I got into Ember just before that moment and the way he managed to make that incredibly easy was fantastic so I kind of had an extra ear open to what he had to say. I went on this Observables talk. You know, you start off with React that was the framework that was using Observables the most. That brought me to Cycle.js -- CHARLES: Cycle.js? I haven't heard of that. Is Cycle.js a framework built on top of Observables? PHILIP: It is. There's a guy called André Staltz or André Medeiros but he uses Staltz as his name. It's largely based off the same principles as React. Cycle, basically one of his inspirations or at least one of the things which cycle is most like was the Elm architecture. He calls it Model-View-Intent. We have Model-View-Controller and Elm was model update view but essentially, the same principles. You know, I'm the kind of guy that likes to get stuck in, to go deep and where I started with Observables then I ended up at Elm. I started playing around with that, I started looking into it and I loved what I saw. The thing above all that really attracted me to it was the pure simplicity of what was going on. It was almost like they boiled down the UI paradigm to its essence and removed all the extra cruft and you just saw what you meant what you wanted and it gave you these, what I thought at the time, composable way to put things together. CHARLES: Can we unpack that just a little bit? I really love that idea of it boiled down to the essence of UI. I assume there are certain coordinating mechanisms that Elm employs. It's interesting to hear you say that Cycle.js has used Elm as an inspiration. I also understand that Redux is inspired also by the Elm architecture. I'm very curious, what are those kind of essential mechanics that drew your attention? PHILIP: I think you can look at it from two points of view. The first is, which I didn't actually learn until later but the first is essentially boiling down functional programming. You're decoupled, you're using functions and not only functional programming and there's a lot of arguments over this term but functional reactive programming. The idea of functional programming is stateless. Therefore, time is kind of the beast that you have to deal with. But FRP, then essentially boils time into the concept of values that can change over time so you have a reference to one value but in JavaScript that's an Observable. In Elm, in the beginning, when I was getting into it, that was signals. That's not all kind of hidden underneath so you don't really need to get over that conceptual hurdle anymore. Then the boiling down to the essence, I guess that's more from a code point of view with Ember. Especially at the beginning, there were a ton of different concepts that were thrown at you to begin with. It was billed as an MVC framework. It was sold as an MVC framework but you had helpers in there, you had components, you had views model controller. You had this cluster of things. You could see MVC in there but there were enough things surrounding it to kind of think, "Where does this piece of code go? Where does that piece of code go? Where should I do this?" CHARLES: There are a lot of blog posts trying to explain what exactly is the view, is the template the view? Is the controller the view? What's the difference between a view and a controller? PHILIP: The way I think about frameworks is they give you buckets to put your code. The buckets are kind of all connected together. I'm thinking at a really simplistic level. I need to write this feature, I need this bit of code, I need this bit of logic, where do I stick it? A framework says you should stick it here or you should stick it there. It's solves the need of having to think about the broader architecture and how things interact because those things have been solved for you. Now with Elm, it was just so straightforward to say, "This goes here: all the data, the model. It lives in this record, which is equivalent to a JavaScript object, we can say on a simple level. Anything you need to do with state, happens there. Then you've got the view and the view is simply a function, which takes that data structure and then you tell it how to render it to HTML and then all of the action, everything that happens in your application is also defined in one place in your update function. That's it, like no more than you need and no less than you need. CHARLES: Yeah, I love that. I feel like it is very much as 'data down, actions up' kind of boiled down to the essence. It's almost better at that paradigm than Ember is in itself, with having your view as just a function. Your state transition or your update is just a function. Then your model is just unadorned data. That's all it is. PHILIP: The type system as well in Elm, also made it really straightforward. My model is a record. That's it. My view is HTML in the beginning but then it moves to HTML, which contains messages. Essentially, I've got HTML and in the HTML, there are events or actions and those actions will send messages and really straight forward. Then the update function, I take in the current model, I take in the message and I decide via pattern matching what I want to do. There are a few extra bits and pieces around there but that's the essence of it. CHARLES: Now, when you say messages, I'm thinking this is a way of declaring what actions you will take when certain HTML elements, like events happen, like you declaratively mapping an event to the dispatch of an action. PHILIP: That's correct, with any extra data so a message is itself. Like the actions hash in Ember essentially and along with the parameters for that action, which would passing through the HTML. CHARLES: Some might argue that if something is simple to get something working, I can have a pure function that's a view, I can have a simple data structure which is my model. I can have a pure function which is my update or my state transition, how I change my data or affect changes to the model. Some might say, "That's very simple," but simple is great for simple cases. But then there's the question of scalability. As my application becomes more complex and has the interactions become more complex, does that simple paradigm actually scale? What has been your experience there? PHILIP: Straightforward answer -- it's a learning curve to scale. Why? Because it's so new and also because the things that you would have reached for in the past aren't available to you. When I think of Ember scaling, the scale is built into the framework. You need another component, you just add another component. You need another model, you add another model. There's a clear story or there's a clear way that you deliver a new feature. I think that's a fantastic aspect of Ember that you also say no. I can remember being at Wicked Good Ember and just realizing how many of the people that were speaking and how many of the people that I was talking to work for bigger companies -- Heroku Dashboard, you had LinkedIn and the fact that Ember scales across a large team size, it's a real testament to Ember, which is slightly different for the reason why I got into Ember. Also you know I had a few issues just on a side project with a friend, the pace of Elm's change meant that when you only have a limited time to devote to the project, then you don't want to be spending that time for going out where you should be in terms of the upgrade process, etcetera. That's a known path and I think that's a really clear advantage of Ember over Elm. The path in Elm is not as well-fleshed out and there's a bit of tension between Elm as a single page application and then Elm as an application that you stick on every page of your server generated app, for example. The main people who use Elm NoRedInk could employ Evan Czaplicki, the creator of Elm, there up at the minute is a Rails up. I think in Elm up for every page, I believe that certainly was the case, whether that's [inaudible], I don't know. It's not an area where it's like here's the path, go for it because the scalability of Elm, everyone came into Elm thinking, "I know react. I know Ember, the components system, 'data down, actions up'," and in React, you're really encouraged to make a component for the smallest thing on the page as a component. Then you have container components, you make your way out of the onion skin and hope you don't cry on the way. [Laughter] PHILIP: But the thing about Elm was everyone jumped in and tried to do it this way. I certainly got the impression when I was beginning that the Elm architecture was infinitely Nestable Russian dolls. It is in a way but the difficulty is then passing into component communication between parent and child and people had been figuring it on a weird ways with signals to do it but then became obsolete. The main encouragement is basically go so far with a single component that you can and then once you had problems, try not to create new components or new bits of UI but to extract the bits you need into modules. This is actually one of the things that really attracted me to Elm is that you're encouraged to lean on your programming skill set, rather than learning a whole new frameworks way of doing things so that the things that work in functional programming will work in Elm. But that's also a down side because all of a sudden, you have to exercise your programming chops. Let's be honest, a lot of the stuff we're building we're like gluing things together. We're not thinking up new architectures or ways of doing things. That's definitely a learning curve and that's definitely a struggle or something that I find difficult. CHARLES: Yeah, I feel like that touches a lot on the messages you get from the FP community. I know certainly in the interactions I've had with the Clojure community, they're very big on that and it's like, "Let's have very powerful primitives." They have that term 'decomplecting', like let's get at the core. It's like understand that essence so if we can compose and we can enable composition of these low level functions and allow you to compose the data, then you don't have to worry so much about everything else. There will be a way. I think the counterpoint to that is that you end up with a lot of different ways because there are a lot of different ways that you can compose a very small set of primitives. PHILIP: Yes, that's right. But I think one of the advantages of Elm over maybe other FP languages and this is where the similarity with Ember comes in as well. It tries very much to cement simple convention but not only by convention but actually baked into the language so people that are coming from more powerful functional programming languages often come to Elm and think, "Why can't I do that? Why do I have to write all this boilerplate code," and the reason is because then it's not going to be simple enough anymore for people to use it. Also the goal of Elm, which is this long term maintainability of large code bases, you kind of shoot yourself in the foot a bit just like you said, Charles. CHARLES: Yeah, I think that's actually a great point. It's actually one of the things that was most memorable, I think about your talk at Wicked Good was -- just a quick anecdote. I remember in 2007, when iPhone came out, I had an iPhone and my father in law came over from Finland and this is a guy who was a Nokia partisan. I mean, part of Finnish pride was everybody own -- JEFFREY: National phone of Finland. CHARLES: Yeah, exactly. Everybody owned the Nokia mobile phone. He came over, He visited me and I had an iPhone and he was like, "Can I see it?" He took it, he had the swipe to unlock and he swiped it and it unlocked and all the app icons just kind of came right into the screen and he was like, "I want one." [Laughter] CHARLES: That was all it took. I've never seen a sales process so utterly complete and so rapid in its realization. For me, I think that moment when I saw you talk was when you made a mistake like where you were trying to match against an improper attribute on the model inside the update function. The first thing that happened was that Elm caught it before you could even compile your program and the error was just beautiful. It put its finger right on and it's like you need to fix this right here so there's much tied up into that because I feel like it addresses a lot of the learning curve problems that we have in Ember. PHILIP: I don't think that's Ember specific -- CHARLES: No, it's not, it's -- PHILIP: That's the JavaScript thing, isn't it? CHARLES: Yeah. PHILIP: In many ways, I think of JavaScript as a very low level substrate. It's like sand, it's very granular and it's very hard to put together well without falling apart, whereas in Elm gives you bigger blocks, so to speak but it also defines a way through the type system where if you don't put those blocks together in the right way, it's going to tell you. That's why despite some of the ignorance of how best to do Elm apps, that's why people continue to use it because it gives them this delightful experience. CHARLES: Yeah, it was fantastic where when you fail, it picks you up, dust you off and sets you right back on the right track. I think one, that's just a freaking awesome feature and I think also two, the thing that struck me when I saw that was like, "Wow, this community has a different focus than other FP communities that I've come into contact with because I have encountered that exact same error message in Haskell and it left me puzzling and wondering what to do. It's like, "No instance for type class blah-blah-blah for class blah." Then if you're an experienced Haskeller, it does point right to the problem in the same way that like you've learn the parse Perl stack traces. You know, you see a Perl stack trace and you understand it. But they could have gone that way with Elm but the other thing that it demonstrated, it has kind of a different focus there. PHILIP: Absolutely and that really comes down to Evan Czaplicki, the creator of Elm. I was able to get over to London in October a couple of years ago or a year and a half ago now to do a workshop with him at the Code Mesh Conference. You know, just seeing him teach this stuff and saying go into this and talk about the things in a bit more detail, it was very clear. First of all that he'd had a negative experience picking up Haskell, I think it was and he just thought, it doesn't have to be this hard. The things aren't actually that hard. It's the way that we're explaining them that makes it hard. The things that are actually under the surface is really simple. He has a blanket ban on this kind of technical jargon. In the Elm community, he prefers to get things really straightforward names. I think he said to me that one of his thesis advisors or his university professor said, "Evan, that's what you get when you put a usability specialist into a programming language creator's shoes," that he does have this focus where he understands the benefits of static-type systems but he also deeply cares about the experience of not only picking up the language and learning it but also the day you solve it and that's something that just shines through. I think even if Elm never makes it into the pantheon of great programming languages like that in itself and the influence of that had already on other communities, this is fantastic. It's the tide that lifts all boats in many ways and we all benefit from that. JEFFREY: We kind of touch on this a little bit earlier. We've been talking about the ergonomics of being an engineer working with Elm or Ember. What about the business case? We've mentioned how Ember has prevent a scale fairly well in large organizations. What's Elm's path to being able to do that and where is the niche to that it fits in right now? PHILIP: I definitely think Ember comes out of Apple, I believe with sprite core. That's where it started and it's interesting to see that that's also where it's gone in terms of the focuses and making it easy to build these rich applications. I think also that Elm has a similar genesis in the sense that Evan, I believe he did an internship at Microsoft and one at Google and I think there's a conference talk as well from large JS or elm lock or something, millions of lines of code. It's definitely gunning for the CM area which is applications which are large and hairy and trying to make the maintainability a lot better by bringing the strengths of the static type system to bear and bring the simplicity that that enables. That means that the learning curve maybe is a little sharper at the beginning, in a similar way, also that Ember was and is. But then you should reach this point where the maintainability of the app outweighs the time spent in learning. I think about it a bit like test driven development. I remember back when I was doing Rails and DHH had baked TDD into the Rails itself and there was the years of the testing discussions whether to test all the time, test everything, 100% coverage or even full circle tests are a waste of time. but it's a similar philosophy in that if the tests are doing what they should be doing, which is giving you great feedback, the time it takes to get up to speed in testing, the time it takes to set up testing, the time it takes to write the tests, they pay off further down the line and that's not music to the ears of the people who want to get something into production immediately. But it's definitely music to the ears of people who will be spending a long time on maintenance in an application. That NoRedInk application is huge. They have millions of users. They've build software for teaching grammar and skills in the US and they talk all the time about the benefits of Elm. Mainly, in the sense of confidence, I have the confidence to go in and change this code. All of bits or majorities of our code bits, which are things that we've rather not like to touch. We kind of section them off. If a feature request comes in and instead of saying, "Yeah, we can do that," you try and slowly push it out the door. Elm is supposed to give you then the confidence to be able to go to any part of your code base and to change it without the fear that you're going to break something or break everything because the type system, the compiler will tell you, "You change this type, you change the signature of this function, here's where it's broken and as soon as you fix the compiler errors, functionally it works, you'd probably have a few tests to test the actual business logic of it." Probably not so with technical stuff but it's a huge time saver. That's where we want to be as developers and our relationship with our tools. We don't want to be fearing our tools. We don't want to be anxious every time we open our editor. We don't want to fear the feature requests coming in. We want to be in control of our environment and we want to be able to deliver the business value. I think that's certainly the promise of Elm. That's certainly where it wants to be. CHARLES: I love that. It sounds like that is where they want to shoot for is these big applications and they do want to scale massively. Let me ask the question then. Where is Elm do you think right now today on that curve of scalability? PHILIP: To put it in Ember terms, that's maybe the best way I can describe it. If anyone remembers the early days of Ember, I definitely feel that they're in 0.9 approaching one rather than later than that. One of the things as well, I think it's important to note is that Evan is not rushed. It just blew my mind when I heard him speak about it and it wasn't anything big or anything but just the whole kind of tenor of the conversation of the way he was teaching of how he was talking about Elm was so in contrast to the JavaScript type machine. In contrast to a new framework every month, he was like, "If Elm is going to be around in 10 years, then this is the decision that I'm going to make." In that sense, where is Elm in that journey. I'd say it's still pretty early on. I'd say also, Evan is really focused on use cases so if there's not a use case for something, there's no reason to add it. This is actually quite frustrating maybe for people who are coming out of JavaScript ecosystem and they think of a feature that they want and they submit a pull request and it just gets closed or it get set, is there use case for this? Why do you need it? Is this generalizable to everyone? Will it make sense to add this to the language? Can you do it in a library? Then figured out later, can you do it in JavaScript with port, instead of having to bring it into Elm? He's definitely building it very slowly but that may sound like a down side right now but the upside is we're going to come up with something at the end, hopefully that is battle-tested, that fits the use case and a good example of that was the URL handling at the navigation. It didn't live in Elm. Do we actually need it because he's building single page applications? Can you give me your experiences? There are a couple of libraries also built. Then the things from those libraries were then taken a little bit like Ember as well, where you use the add-on ecosystem to try new things and then things may get brought into core or make it kind of the official stamp of approval. But it's a lot slower and not as committee-based. Evan is the benevolent dictator for life. CHARLES: I really like that approach. I don't withhold my opinion from the benevolent dictator versus kind of the oligarchy that you see elsewhere. But I was thinking as you were describing it that maybe the framework really, and this is me, I'm kind of a little bit of a tree nerd, mostly in and around the trees that grow in central Texas but I love trees. Unfortunately, it sounds like oak or maybe redwood would have been like a more appropriate name because those are very slow growing, have a very hard wood, whereas in Elm, it's actually fairly short lived and has a softer wood. JEFFREY: And you also don't want cedar because that will come back and bite you -- highly allergic and toxic to humans. [Laughter] CHARLES: Right. Named Elm but slow growing hardwood that you can build a house out of. But I like that. It's so important to get things right the first time because that's where you realize exponential gains. Unfortunately, there is no substitute for exponential gains, rather than deep thought. At least that's been my experience. You can realize gigantic short term gains with taking cut corners but in terms of long term exponential, ultimately those will taper off. PHILIP: I think as well, what we've seen in Ember's experience is the decisions that you take to open up a private API or not to make something private. They limit you because all of a sudden, everyone starts using those APIs. A year down the line, you realize, "Oh, hang on. We don't want to design it in this way. We want to do it in that way," but given the commitment that Ember has to stability, you have to deal with that. Sometimes, the dealing with that actually takes more energy, more time, more effort in education, in actual code, in maintaining two branches, all of that kind of stuff then actually takes away from the time that you could have had to think up better solutions and it's a danger, you know? It's almost like as soon as you throw this into the water that it becomes firm. As soon as you throw it into the crowd, the crowd will take it and they will use it and your chance to change it or mold it will have gone. Evan talks a lot with language designers and at least I got that impression that he opens up channels of communication with people who've done this before and he thinks very deeply. He's not closed off to the idea of adding more powerful features to Elm but he would only do it when it's right to do it. It's not just is this feature right but is this the right time for this feature? That as well is just the kind of mind blowing like who thinks about this stuff, who cares about this stuff? CHARLES: Yeah, because certain features become accessible once other features are in place. I feel like it would have been as feasible to have an entire compiled language as an acceptable option before people started transpiling CoffeeScript and then with Babel, transpiling future versions of JavaScript back into JavaScript. If those intermediate steps happened, if CoffeeScript and Babel would have happened, would people be as receptive to things like Elm or things like PureScript? it's definitely there is kind of the zeitgeist of the development community really informs what features are even possible or appropriate tomorrow, even though they might have some ejectively sound qualities out to them. JEFFREY: They want to make sure they're not too far ahead of their time. CHARLES: Right, exactly. Folks got to be ready for it. Then the other thing that I wanted to ask was given the trajectory of where Elm is, some people are using it in production. You said it was around like a 0.9, 1.0. if we are actually quite happy with our current code bases, whether we're using Ember, whether using React, whether using some other framework, what are things that you can learn from Elm that you can bring home with you to your own town, wherever that is to use and make your own life better, as you develop code, to kind of increase that confidence, as you say? PHILIP: This is very relevant to my suggestion because in the past couple of months, I haven't had a chance to do any Elm but what I find is after kind of my deep dive, I've come out the other end and I feel like I've come out a better programmer. I feel like Elm is simple enough conceptually to learn quicker, faster, at least the basics more than maybe even to JavaScript framework. I think that the things that you will learn in that process are tremendously beneficial, even if you don't ever end up using Elm in a professional capacity. The thing I think that grabbed me most is because of the way the type system is, you have to deal with every error and this is something when writing Ruby or when writing Ember, you always focus on the happy path. Then once you've got the happy path in place, often the business will say, "That's done. Let's move on." Your better instincts say, "No, we haven't actually made this robust enough." But sometimes the value is also not the great in kind of shoring up all those cases. But what Elm does because of the way it's build is it forces you to deal with failure. The classic no runtime errors in production, the reason that is it may have taken you a bit longer to write your code in Elm. But you come out of it with a confidence that if something explodes, it's either something incredibly rare or it was JavaScript and not Elm. Just the forcing like, "How can I think better about how this code can fail," means a bit of extra mental effort when you do it in a language that's not Elm but it's definitely something that's worth doing, if you want to build good software. Another thing related to the failure stuff is maybe the idea of what's called an abstract data type or a union type or an enum, like the fact that you can encode different states in one object, that you deal with all of those states in a cohesive way. One of the things actually, I think it was Jack Franklin of JavaScript Playground who brought this back from Elm into Java Script was when you have a screen, you want to load some data via Ajax or Fetch, instead of just loading the page, sending off the request, getting the request back, deciding what to do with it, it's like, "Why don't we encode those states in our code." We have the waiting state, we have the find state but we have find but it was an error, we have find and it worked, we have find and it actually has no values. Instead of just dealing with those on the fly, if statements like why don't you create an object that encodes the states that your UI can be in and then you react and the UI will know what to do and you write the code to do that. But in some ways, at least to me that's a lot better than kind of hit and hope when we got an error. That's, "If do this, if do that, let's nest some callbacks or let's chance some promises." The sheer act of taking a step back and this is something Elm forces you to do because the way it is, like thinking about the domain and thinking about how best to model the domain. To be honest, it's probably just good programming practice but how often do we not do it? CHARLES: Absolutely. It seems so obvious, except it's only obvious when you're put into a system that you can't slide on it. What you're describing reminds me of this concept that I came across in the Haskell community. They talk about wholemeal solutions versus piecemeal solutions. Most of the time, they talk about wholemeal solutions as kind of finding the most general set of abstractions that solve a problem for all cases. But I hadn't applied it to this concept of that all the potential states kind of envisioning your application. As you execute your code, you'll only come across one state of the time but kind of thinking of your code as all of these sort of quantum states of your application existing at once and you need to account for them all and draw that whole picture. PHILIP: This is a really stupid analogy but I don't know if anyone's played Age of Empires or any other kind of war-based game where you have a map, you've got the fog of war and you can only see a few meters around you and you have to send out your scouts and you need to find them -- CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. PHILIP: -- Different tactics. You shore up your base and you concentrate on where you are, you send your scouts into the far ends of the map. In terms of seeking out of the unknown, I feel like Elm forces you to know the map where is when I'm programming in JavaScript or in Ruby, it's more like, "I'm here. I need to do this. I do it," and you don't necessarily force yourself to think of all the potential states or all the potential things that can happen, the events that can happen, whereas with Elm, if you don't have those, then it will tell you that those things in place. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah, I love that analogy. Like actually sent out your scouts to know the map. PHILIP: Yep and I think as a person, and this is maybe why it appeals to me it's like I like the feeling that I haven't left a stone unturned. I like shipping something that I'm confident in and I know it won't bite me or if it does bite me, it's purely because it was an unknown-unknown. It's like doing your due diligence. As I'm saying this, Elm is not the silver bullet. Elm is not the panacea. Elm will not solve all of your problems. But speaking in terms of contrast with JavaScript or Ruby and more dynamic languages than Elm, these are the things that happen. I think that kind of leads me on to another point which is Evan in the mailing list conversations and the decisions that he takes with Elm, I don't know if this are stages of maturity as a developer but you find your tool, you love it, it's the only thing that can do the job and then you realize other people are doing jobs pretty well, doing their other stuff, I guess each to their own. But I feel like there's another stage where it's like what are the tradeoffs involved in taking this decision or using this tool and what are the tradeoffs involved in taking this decision or using that tool. Just the way of thinking in terms of tradeoffs, instead of absolutes I find really, really valuable and that's definitely something that I've been able to apply and what are the benefits of this decision. Not only from a code point of view but from an organizational point of view, from a team point of view, from a long term point of view, from a short term point of view, having a wider arena to make those decisions, it has been really helpful for me, valuable on both side of them. CHARLES: I can see it. I believe you and I think we're coming to the end of our time here, I think I'm going to make the same recommendation that I made to everybody last week when we were talking with Toran about Redux and that is you should go out and you should try Elm. It's really easy to get started and it will guide you. The guides are excellent. The air handling is excellent and yes it is quirky and weird but it supports you. There's going to be some big functional programming boulders thrown at you but it gives you a [inaudible] to deal with them. JEFFREY: I think you need a suit of armor so we can stick with the Age of Empires metaphors. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah. Go out there, try it and experience the things that Philip is talking about because I feel like they are very real and they will have a good effect on you, whatever it is that you do the next day or the next week or the next month. PHILIP: They'll challenge the way you think, they'll give you new perspective and they'll give you a good counterpoint as well. You know, elm is not for everyone but only if you try it will you understand that. I think that's one of Evan and everyone in the Elm community is try it yourself. I'm not going to say Elm is right for you, Elm is right for your business. Rewrite everything in Elm, not at all, try it out, try it on a side project, try it to just having fun hacking around. If you do want to make the jump to using it in your company or whatever, don't take a decision to rewrite everything. Take one very small part of your app and do it in Elm and see how it goes. If you don't like it, you can take it out. If it works, you can build another small thing. This kind of gradual approach were far too quick to jump on a bandwagon: trash the old thing, do the new thing. Especially now, when we are building applications that are going to be maintained, when we are building applications that are going to be around for a few years, it's also just not feasible and sometimes it's not right. You just got to make that decision maturely rather than I want to use this or I want to use that, which can be tough. But ultimately, you want to deliver the value. Try Elm at Elm-lang.org/Try. You can try on the browser and see how you go. The official guide is really good. There's also Elm-Tutorial.org, which is kind of a complement to the official guide. Pragmatic Studio have released recently an updated course for learning Elm. James Moore at KnowThen.com. He has a couple of Elm courses, one is free introductory and then there's a paid course, which goes into deeper topics, whether text or whether video, whatever your thing is, there's resources available to get you to the point where you'll be able to make a decent decision. CHARLES: Well, fantastic. I'm certainly excited. I haven't dip my toes in Elm for a while and I'm actually, after this conversation pretty stoked to get it on again. I hope everybody else does. Thank you so much, Philip for coming on to the podcast. This was just a fantastic and enlightening conversation. PHILIP: Not at all. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. CHARLES: All right. That's it from The Frontside. Remember to get in touch with us at Frontside.io, if you're interested in UI that is engineered to make your 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.
Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeScript and TypeScript create abstractions over assembly language to make web applications more maintainable.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeScript and TypeScript create abstractions over assembly language to make web applications more maintainable.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Justin and Jason talk to Alex MacCaw, author of JavaScript Web Applications, The Little Book on CoffeeScript, Spine.js and a bunch of other cool stuff.
Justin and Jason discuss Scotty Jackson, the magical genius illustrator, why Justin is impressed by the Gooveshark UI, Jason's frustration with the design process, what it takes to be entry level rich, more on the downgrading of US debt, the ethical implications of Justin automating his Twitter feed, the Bloomberg Risk Takers profile of Elon Musk, an update on the Pluggio SEO strategy and affiliate marketing campaign, how markets are efficient if and only if P = NP, how the San Francisco police asked wireless providers to turn off their signals to prevent a protest, possible causes for the London riots and who should be held accountable, former Clinton and Bush counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke's accustation airing on ABC news about a CIA cover-up of 9/11, how Apple is stepping up to defend iOS devs against patent troll Lodsys, why Jason thinks losing weight is like doing a startup, adding TameJS to CoffeeScript, SafeCast, Jason's interview about high-frequency trading and the prospect of open-sourcing some Uber code.
Justin and Jason discuss the progress they've made so far on AnyFu, why Jason thinks Sweden smells like ice cream and his idea for yet another TV series, life lessons from the very wealthy and preschool's huge payoff, an update on Justin's outsourcing effort, Jason's idea for compiling compiling CoffeeScript to PHP, Justin's micro-depression about Pluggio and an update on the numbers, ideas on picking a designer and a design for AnyFu, what makes a good finisher and why women make teams smarter.
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