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Panel: Eric Berry Dave Kimura Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Vladimir Dem In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Vladimir Dem who is a Ruby developer and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Today, the panelists and guest talk about cables, concurrency, and Ruby. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Hello! The panel today is Eric, Dave, Nate, and myself! Our guest is Vlad! 1:30 – Guest: My name is Vladimir, but people call me Vlad. I have been writing Ruby since 2013 for about 4.5 years. Before that I was a PHP, JavaScript developer among other languages. I am mostly Erlang and Ruby now. 2:29 – Panel asks Vlad a question. 3:29 – Guest: Yeah something like that. I call it a different server b/c we still use the code base but we do not do anything related to web sockets and connections. 4:20 – Panel: If you wanted to take a normal action cables setup what steps would you have to go through to convert that over to also use the anycable server? 5:21 – Guest answers the question. 7:31 – Chuck: This sounds complicated and a bit of work. When I look at this I think: I have a tiny app is it worth it? When does it become worth it? 7:52 – Guest: Definitely not for the tiny app. 8:50 – Panel: You use it when it makes sense. Overcomplicating your infrastructure doesn’t make sense. 9:27 – Guest: That’s the idea. 10:28 – Panel. 11:05 – Guest: The question really is how many connections you have and how long-lived they are? 13:09 – Panel: If I move my project over to anycable how much new code am I going to have to write? 13:28 – Guest answers the question. 15:52 – Panel: What’s the update been like for anycable and how many users use anycable? 16:05 – Guest: I really don’t have statistics. I hear people at conferences say that they use anycable, but no real statistics right now. I would like to know these numbers, but no idea. 16:30 – Panel: ...is that the time to consider using anycable? 17:05 – Guest: That’s a good point to make. 18:44 – Panel: How is the initial handshake time with anycable? Is there any difference with anycable in that sense? 19:05 – Guest answers the question. 22:49 – Chuck: Can you define a couple of terms for me? I am hearing terms like: concurrency and real time and others? 23:00 – Guest: Good point. What is real time? The guest continues to define these terms. 28:10 – Fresh Books! 29:10 – Chuck: Ruby 3 is supposed to solve some of these problems. Can you talk about some of those? 29:46 – Guest: Interesting question and I’ve been asked about this before. 35:14 – Panel: Did you say there was some activity around trying to reduce the memory consumption for thread? 35:25 – Guest answers the question. 36:14 – Panel: Vlad, you are spread from backend to fronted and you’ve mentioned Phoenix Live Vue. Can I pick your brain about it? 36:39 – Guest answers the question. 38:48 – Panel: It seems like one of the core tenants is empowering small teams to compete with larger teams. I have high hopes to keep small teams competitive. 39:50 – Guest: Yes, that’s the idea of Rails and Ruby itself to build something and try something and perhaps fail. 40:57 – Panelist mentions Erlang, anycable, and concurrency. 41:14 – Guest: We are working on administration functionality and we want to build something fast. 44:40 – Panel: That’s the interesting thing about turbo links cause I think it was a marketing fail. You have to invest time to learn how to use it and how to use it properly. 45:44 – Guest: I don’t have a good guide for turbo links. 46:00 – Chuck: Anything else we want to talk about? 46:10 – Guest: Two more things I want to mention. 54:02 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 54:35 – Picks! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show Angular DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Faye-Websocket-Ruby Anycable EMx 020 Episode Entreprogrammers: Episode 248 Socketry The Rails Doctrine Walmart: Invisible Glass Bose Wireless Headphones Netflix: Newsies / Broadway musical KanbanFlow Advent of Code Heroku Deployment Guest’s Twitter Guest’s Dev.to Guest’s GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Dave Invisible Glass Eric Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones   Nate The Rails Doctrine Newsies Charles Kanban Flow EntreProgrammers The pomodoro technique masterhunt.com/devchat Vlad Advent of Code Any Cable

Panel: Eric Berry Dave Kimura Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Vladimir Dem In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Vladimir Dem who is a Ruby developer and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Today, the panelists and guest talk about cables, concurrency, and Ruby. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Hello! The panel today is Eric, Dave, Nate, and myself! Our guest is Vlad! 1:30 – Guest: My name is Vladimir, but people call me Vlad. I have been writing Ruby since 2013 for about 4.5 years. Before that I was a PHP, JavaScript developer among other languages. I am mostly Erlang and Ruby now. 2:29 – Panel asks Vlad a question. 3:29 – Guest: Yeah something like that. I call it a different server b/c we still use the code base but we do not do anything related to web sockets and connections. 4:20 – Panel: If you wanted to take a normal action cables setup what steps would you have to go through to convert that over to also use the anycable server? 5:21 – Guest answers the question. 7:31 – Chuck: This sounds complicated and a bit of work. When I look at this I think: I have a tiny app is it worth it? When does it become worth it? 7:52 – Guest: Definitely not for the tiny app. 8:50 – Panel: You use it when it makes sense. Overcomplicating your infrastructure doesn’t make sense. 9:27 – Guest: That’s the idea. 10:28 – Panel. 11:05 – Guest: The question really is how many connections you have and how long-lived they are? 13:09 – Panel: If I move my project over to anycable how much new code am I going to have to write? 13:28 – Guest answers the question. 15:52 – Panel: What’s the update been like for anycable and how many users use anycable? 16:05 – Guest: I really don’t have statistics. I hear people at conferences say that they use anycable, but no real statistics right now. I would like to know these numbers, but no idea. 16:30 – Panel: ...is that the time to consider using anycable? 17:05 – Guest: That’s a good point to make. 18:44 – Panel: How is the initial handshake time with anycable? Is there any difference with anycable in that sense? 19:05 – Guest answers the question. 22:49 – Chuck: Can you define a couple of terms for me? I am hearing terms like: concurrency and real time and others? 23:00 – Guest: Good point. What is real time? The guest continues to define these terms. 28:10 – Fresh Books! 29:10 – Chuck: Ruby 3 is supposed to solve some of these problems. Can you talk about some of those? 29:46 – Guest: Interesting question and I’ve been asked about this before. 35:14 – Panel: Did you say there was some activity around trying to reduce the memory consumption for thread? 35:25 – Guest answers the question. 36:14 – Panel: Vlad, you are spread from backend to fronted and you’ve mentioned Phoenix Live Vue. Can I pick your brain about it? 36:39 – Guest answers the question. 38:48 – Panel: It seems like one of the core tenants is empowering small teams to compete with larger teams. I have high hopes to keep small teams competitive. 39:50 – Guest: Yes, that’s the idea of Rails and Ruby itself to build something and try something and perhaps fail. 40:57 – Panelist mentions Erlang, anycable, and concurrency. 41:14 – Guest: We are working on administration functionality and we want to build something fast. 44:40 – Panel: That’s the interesting thing about turbo links cause I think it was a marketing fail. You have to invest time to learn how to use it and how to use it properly. 45:44 – Guest: I don’t have a good guide for turbo links. 46:00 – Chuck: Anything else we want to talk about? 46:10 – Guest: Two more things I want to mention. 54:02 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 54:35 – Picks! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show Angular DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Faye-Websocket-Ruby Anycable EMx 020 Episode Entreprogrammers: Episode 248 Socketry The Rails Doctrine Walmart: Invisible Glass Bose Wireless Headphones Netflix: Newsies / Broadway musical KanbanFlow Advent of Code Heroku Deployment Guest’s Twitter Guest’s Dev.to Guest’s GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Dave Invisible Glass Eric Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones   Nate The Rails Doctrine Newsies Charles Kanban Flow EntreProgrammers The pomodoro technique masterhunt.com/devchat Vlad Advent of Code Any Cable

Panel: Eric Berry Dave Kimura Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Vladimir Dem In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Vladimir Dem who is a Ruby developer and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Today, the panelists and guest talk about cables, concurrency, and Ruby. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Hello! The panel today is Eric, Dave, Nate, and myself! Our guest is Vlad! 1:30 – Guest: My name is Vladimir, but people call me Vlad. I have been writing Ruby since 2013 for about 4.5 years. Before that I was a PHP, JavaScript developer among other languages. I am mostly Erlang and Ruby now. 2:29 – Panel asks Vlad a question. 3:29 – Guest: Yeah something like that. I call it a different server b/c we still use the code base but we do not do anything related to web sockets and connections. 4:20 – Panel: If you wanted to take a normal action cables setup what steps would you have to go through to convert that over to also use the anycable server? 5:21 – Guest answers the question. 7:31 – Chuck: This sounds complicated and a bit of work. When I look at this I think: I have a tiny app is it worth it? When does it become worth it? 7:52 – Guest: Definitely not for the tiny app. 8:50 – Panel: You use it when it makes sense. Overcomplicating your infrastructure doesn’t make sense. 9:27 – Guest: That’s the idea. 10:28 – Panel. 11:05 – Guest: The question really is how many connections you have and how long-lived they are? 13:09 – Panel: If I move my project over to anycable how much new code am I going to have to write? 13:28 – Guest answers the question. 15:52 – Panel: What’s the update been like for anycable and how many users use anycable? 16:05 – Guest: I really don’t have statistics. I hear people at conferences say that they use anycable, but no real statistics right now. I would like to know these numbers, but no idea. 16:30 – Panel: ...is that the time to consider using anycable? 17:05 – Guest: That’s a good point to make. 18:44 – Panel: How is the initial handshake time with anycable? Is there any difference with anycable in that sense? 19:05 – Guest answers the question. 22:49 – Chuck: Can you define a couple of terms for me? I am hearing terms like: concurrency and real time and others? 23:00 – Guest: Good point. What is real time? The guest continues to define these terms. 28:10 – Fresh Books! 29:10 – Chuck: Ruby 3 is supposed to solve some of these problems. Can you talk about some of those? 29:46 – Guest: Interesting question and I’ve been asked about this before. 35:14 – Panel: Did you say there was some activity around trying to reduce the memory consumption for thread? 35:25 – Guest answers the question. 36:14 – Panel: Vlad, you are spread from backend to fronted and you’ve mentioned Phoenix Live Vue. Can I pick your brain about it? 36:39 – Guest answers the question. 38:48 – Panel: It seems like one of the core tenants is empowering small teams to compete with larger teams. I have high hopes to keep small teams competitive. 39:50 – Guest: Yes, that’s the idea of Rails and Ruby itself to build something and try something and perhaps fail. 40:57 – Panelist mentions Erlang, anycable, and concurrency. 41:14 – Guest: We are working on administration functionality and we want to build something fast. 44:40 – Panel: That’s the interesting thing about turbo links cause I think it was a marketing fail. You have to invest time to learn how to use it and how to use it properly. 45:44 – Guest: I don’t have a good guide for turbo links. 46:00 – Chuck: Anything else we want to talk about? 46:10 – Guest: Two more things I want to mention. 54:02 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 54:35 – Picks! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show Angular DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Faye-Websocket-Ruby Anycable EMx 020 Episode Entreprogrammers: Episode 248 Socketry The Rails Doctrine Walmart: Invisible Glass Bose Wireless Headphones Netflix: Newsies / Broadway musical KanbanFlow Advent of Code Heroku Deployment Guest’s Twitter Guest’s Dev.to Guest’s GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Dave Invisible Glass Eric Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones   Nate The Rails Doctrine Newsies Charles Kanban Flow EntreProgrammers The pomodoro technique masterhunt.com/devchat Vlad Advent of Code Any Cable

Panel: Eric Berry Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself! 1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that! 1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal. 2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal? 2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are... 4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice! 4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure. 5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you? 5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby. 6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time. 7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it. 7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it. 8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework? 8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with... 10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB. 11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does! The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more! 14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky... 15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast! 15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers? 15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like! 16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using... 16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix. 18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work. 18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to... 19:28 – Panel. 19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it. 19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber? 20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us. The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky. 21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more of a pack! 23:23 – Panel: It sounds like Lucky is inspired by Elm – right? 23:32 – Guest: Yeah, I think so. The guest dives into this topic of Elm and Lucky! 24:35 – Panel: How much does the types feel like it’s getting in your way? How explicit is it? When I came to Ruby it was a breath of fresh air. I am a bit reluctant to go back to those days. 25:25 – Guest: I think Lucky does a happy medium. It doesn’t infer instant variables. I like the... 26:28 – Panel: I learned Java very early on in my computer science career. 27:00 – Guest. 27:10 – Panel: “Crystal...it’s not Java!” That should be your slogan! 27:20 – Fresh Books! 28:25 – Panel: A lot of people are moving to Elixir community. Do you see people moving from Ruby to Lucky and Crystal? How does Lucky compare to Phoenix? 28:55 – Guest: Good question! 29:10 – The guest talks about bamboo – see links below!! 29: 29 – Guest: Sure Ruby is fast but sometimes you spend more time on it then you would want to. 31:08 – Guest: Blessing and curse that Crystal looks so much like Ruby. That’s what I thought at first: why would I want to learn this if it’s so similar to Ruby. BUT there are so many benefits to Crystal vs. Ruby. 31:48 – Guest talks about Lucky catching the bugs. 32:00 – Panel: I wonder if that happened with Groovy and Rails? 32:21 – They go back-and-forth. 32:28 – Panel: Thoughtbot has always been on the forefront of Ruby. Can you talk about Thoughbot please? (See links below for Thoughtbot!) 33:15 – Guest: Great question. It’s hard to tell b/c there are different offices. I would say Ruby is our main thing. Ruby is the most mature thing that we use in-terms of web development. Guest: Actually – Rails is pretty nice! 34:54 – Panel: We went through the same thing with CodeFund! I wrote it initially in Python and then I wrote it in Elixir and it became so complex. Now we are moving everything back to Ruby and it’s been a fantastic decision.  36:30 – Chuck: You are talking about the sustainability of open source but there are benefits throughout the company right? There are tons of tangible benefits of doing it, especially when it’s your Friday schedule. You can level-up on things that could help you. I know a lot of companies cannot afford it if they are trying to hustle. 37:42 – Guest: It’s totally not charity through Thoughtbot. It’s a huge help for hiring new people. I know they are okay with letting me work on Lucky b/c it’s bringing on new developers and a good marketing tool, and finally recruiting! 39:07 – Chuck: Yeah, I have been talking about developer freedom and that’s what I am addressing through the DevRev show! It’s my new podcast show. We talk with Chris on Elixir Mix. It lends that credibility if they need to save our bacon. 40:02 – Panel: What’s your goal with Lucky? 40:11 – Guest: I would love to get it to the point where Thoughtbot could start a project and default to Lucky! Start a project and not resting every gem and be confident with launching it. 41:36 – Panelist asks a question. 41:45 – Guest: It’s not 1.0 and that means that the API will break with every release. I think that’s good to tweak stuff but that turns companies off, though. 42:40 – Chuck: Another thing that helps with adoption is Twitter used Rails to build their initial version. This blah, blah company uses important stuff and they are using Crystal and whatnot then that’s good! It sounds like you are waiting for social proof. 43:23 – Guest: Is the next Twitter going to even know about Crystal? 43:40 – Chuck: It literally only takes one enthusiast! 43:52 – Guest. 44:11 – Demo of Flickr Search is mentioned here! 45:13 – Panel: Is there something out there that you could POINT someone to? 45:27 – Guest: Not, yet. I built a small site with it! It is opensource and you can look at it. I want to show people a good example of what Lucky can do! 45:57 – Panel: You have very good docs and I am a visual learner. When I learned Rails I learned on my own and not through school. 46:20 – Panelist asks a question. 46:48 – Guest: What a huge advantage Lucky has through the Thoughtbot platform! Now that platform is kind of dried up. In terms of getting people excited it needs that killer app and they can see that it’s fast and killer! I think it takes a lot of time and finding time to do it so that’s tricky. It’s changing a lot when there is so much change. Getting Lucky to a 1.0 state so people can do videos and make apps. The hard part thing is that Lucky has to be 1.0 when Crystal is 1.0. The Lucky community is great b/c it’s encouraging and to respond in a very kind way. When you are starting something that’s new can be scary. We try to help out as much as we can and we are open and kind about it. 49:13 – Panel: “Paul is nice so Lucky is nice!” 49:19 – Guest: Everyone is super kind. It had to be short and simple. We in the dev community are very lucky – usually great pay/benefits and more w/o a college degree. What another field can you do that?! 51:00 – Panel: Great message and you need to push that! 51:10 – Panel: You were on a past podcast and you talked about how you are donating each month! Panel: Opensource maintainers are getting burned out and you want to support that. 51:40 – Guest: I think opensource sustainability what others need to do to make it sustainable. If you have the means to give we can be apart of that, too. It would be nice if companies did that. If it helps Crystal I am happy. 52:17 – Panel: I have a question about Crystal. 52:52 – Guest: Ruby right now you can do C sections right now. 53:01 – Panel. 53:10 – Guest: I don’t think so – it may but I would guess that you could do it but I don’t know how easy it would be. Note: Rust and C are mentioned. 53:37 – Panel comments. 53:46 – Guest: One thing I would say is to check-out the Lucky docs. We are happy to help! 54:10 – Panel: This is a favorite episode of mine! Both of today’s guests have been my favorite! 54:23 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Webpacker-Cli Amber Lucky The Lucky Philosophy The Bike Shed Thoughtbot CodeFund Lucky: Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal... “Crystal is not Ruby Part 1” GitHub: Bamboo Ex_Machina Dialyxir Crystal Mastery Samsung T5 Carbon Copy Cloner iMazing Awesome-Lucky Paul Smith GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Samsung SSD Carbon Copy Cloner Application Eric iMazing HEIC Converter Charles Mastodon Andrew Upcase by Thoughtbot Awesome Lucky Paul Tailwind CSS Phoenix Live HTML Chris McCord Elixir Mix Episodes with Chris McCord

Panel: Eric Berry Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself! 1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that! 1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal. 2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal? 2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are... 4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice! 4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure. 5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you? 5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby. 6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time. 7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it. 7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it. 8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework? 8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with... 10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB. 11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does! The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more! 14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky... 15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast! 15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers? 15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like! 16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using... 16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix. 18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work. 18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to... 19:28 – Panel. 19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it. 19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber? 20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us. The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky. 21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more of a pack! 23:23 – Panel: It sounds like Lucky is inspired by Elm – right? 23:32 – Guest: Yeah, I think so. The guest dives into this topic of Elm and Lucky! 24:35 – Panel: How much does the types feel like it’s getting in your way? How explicit is it? When I came to Ruby it was a breath of fresh air. I am a bit reluctant to go back to those days. 25:25 – Guest: I think Lucky does a happy medium. It doesn’t infer instant variables. I like the... 26:28 – Panel: I learned Java very early on in my computer science career. 27:00 – Guest. 27:10 – Panel: “Crystal...it’s not Java!” That should be your slogan! 27:20 – Fresh Books! 28:25 – Panel: A lot of people are moving to Elixir community. Do you see people moving from Ruby to Lucky and Crystal? How does Lucky compare to Phoenix? 28:55 – Guest: Good question! 29:10 – The guest talks about bamboo – see links below!! 29: 29 – Guest: Sure Ruby is fast but sometimes you spend more time on it then you would want to. 31:08 – Guest: Blessing and curse that Crystal looks so much like Ruby. That’s what I thought at first: why would I want to learn this if it’s so similar to Ruby. BUT there are so many benefits to Crystal vs. Ruby. 31:48 – Guest talks about Lucky catching the bugs. 32:00 – Panel: I wonder if that happened with Groovy and Rails? 32:21 – They go back-and-forth. 32:28 – Panel: Thoughtbot has always been on the forefront of Ruby. Can you talk about Thoughbot please? (See links below for Thoughtbot!) 33:15 – Guest: Great question. It’s hard to tell b/c there are different offices. I would say Ruby is our main thing. Ruby is the most mature thing that we use in-terms of web development. Guest: Actually – Rails is pretty nice! 34:54 – Panel: We went through the same thing with CodeFund! I wrote it initially in Python and then I wrote it in Elixir and it became so complex. Now we are moving everything back to Ruby and it’s been a fantastic decision.  36:30 – Chuck: You are talking about the sustainability of open source but there are benefits throughout the company right? There are tons of tangible benefits of doing it, especially when it’s your Friday schedule. You can level-up on things that could help you. I know a lot of companies cannot afford it if they are trying to hustle. 37:42 – Guest: It’s totally not charity through Thoughtbot. It’s a huge help for hiring new people. I know they are okay with letting me work on Lucky b/c it’s bringing on new developers and a good marketing tool, and finally recruiting! 39:07 – Chuck: Yeah, I have been talking about developer freedom and that’s what I am addressing through the DevRev show! It’s my new podcast show. We talk with Chris on Elixir Mix. It lends that credibility if they need to save our bacon. 40:02 – Panel: What’s your goal with Lucky? 40:11 – Guest: I would love to get it to the point where Thoughtbot could start a project and default to Lucky! Start a project and not resting every gem and be confident with launching it. 41:36 – Panelist asks a question. 41:45 – Guest: It’s not 1.0 and that means that the API will break with every release. I think that’s good to tweak stuff but that turns companies off, though. 42:40 – Chuck: Another thing that helps with adoption is Twitter used Rails to build their initial version. This blah, blah company uses important stuff and they are using Crystal and whatnot then that’s good! It sounds like you are waiting for social proof. 43:23 – Guest: Is the next Twitter going to even know about Crystal? 43:40 – Chuck: It literally only takes one enthusiast! 43:52 – Guest. 44:11 – Demo of Flickr Search is mentioned here! 45:13 – Panel: Is there something out there that you could POINT someone to? 45:27 – Guest: Not, yet. I built a small site with it! It is opensource and you can look at it. I want to show people a good example of what Lucky can do! 45:57 – Panel: You have very good docs and I am a visual learner. When I learned Rails I learned on my own and not through school. 46:20 – Panelist asks a question. 46:48 – Guest: What a huge advantage Lucky has through the Thoughtbot platform! Now that platform is kind of dried up. In terms of getting people excited it needs that killer app and they can see that it’s fast and killer! I think it takes a lot of time and finding time to do it so that’s tricky. It’s changing a lot when there is so much change. Getting Lucky to a 1.0 state so people can do videos and make apps. The hard part thing is that Lucky has to be 1.0 when Crystal is 1.0. The Lucky community is great b/c it’s encouraging and to respond in a very kind way. When you are starting something that’s new can be scary. We try to help out as much as we can and we are open and kind about it. 49:13 – Panel: “Paul is nice so Lucky is nice!” 49:19 – Guest: Everyone is super kind. It had to be short and simple. We in the dev community are very lucky – usually great pay/benefits and more w/o a college degree. What another field can you do that?! 51:00 – Panel: Great message and you need to push that! 51:10 – Panel: You were on a past podcast and you talked about how you are donating each month! Panel: Opensource maintainers are getting burned out and you want to support that. 51:40 – Guest: I think opensource sustainability what others need to do to make it sustainable. If you have the means to give we can be apart of that, too. It would be nice if companies did that. If it helps Crystal I am happy. 52:17 – Panel: I have a question about Crystal. 52:52 – Guest: Ruby right now you can do C sections right now. 53:01 – Panel. 53:10 – Guest: I don’t think so – it may but I would guess that you could do it but I don’t know how easy it would be. Note: Rust and C are mentioned. 53:37 – Panel comments. 53:46 – Guest: One thing I would say is to check-out the Lucky docs. We are happy to help! 54:10 – Panel: This is a favorite episode of mine! Both of today’s guests have been my favorite! 54:23 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Webpacker-Cli Amber Lucky The Lucky Philosophy The Bike Shed Thoughtbot CodeFund Lucky: Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal... “Crystal is not Ruby Part 1” GitHub: Bamboo Ex_Machina Dialyxir Crystal Mastery Samsung T5 Carbon Copy Cloner iMazing Awesome-Lucky Paul Smith GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Samsung SSD Carbon Copy Cloner Application Eric iMazing HEIC Converter Charles Mastodon Andrew Upcase by Thoughtbot Awesome Lucky Paul Tailwind CSS Phoenix Live HTML Chris McCord Elixir Mix Episodes with Chris McCord

Panel: Charles Max Wood Joe Eames John Papa Alyssa Nicoll Special Guest:  Michael Giambalvo In this episode, Chuck talks with special guest Michael Giambalvo who is an author of the book titled, “Testing Angular Applications.” This book can be purchased through Amazon, Manning Publications, among other sites, too. The panelists and the guest talk about different types of tests, such as end-to-end testing and unit testing. They also talk about Angular, Java, Mocha, Test Café, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:53 – Chuck: Our panel is John Papa, Joe Eames, Alyssa Nicoll, and myself. My new show is the DevRev – check it out, please! 1:26 – Guest: I am a contributing author to our new book, which is about Angular. 1:56 – Chuck: How is it like to write with multiple people? 2:04 – Guest: Yep it’s hard b/c we are in different areas. Back in the 2.0 days, Jesse was writing a book. He was talking about typescript and components. Craig made friends with Jesse and they were talking about the book he was writing. Then we all jumped in to get in finished. We all had areas that we were specialists in! 3:21 – Alyssa: If you break it up that makes sense. 3:31 – Guest. 3:40 – Panel: Pick different words and go around the room. 3:51 – Panel: You write the first ½ of a sentence and then you write the other ½ of the sentence! 4:10 – Guest: You have these big word documents and go back-and-forth. 4:36 – Alyssa: Editing and then pass it back-and-forth – how does that work? 4:46 – Guest: It’s like 8 pass backs-and-forth. 5:35 – Guest: The editing was the main issue – it took forever! 5:50 – Chuck: We were going to co-author a book and we didn’t. Chuck: If you could break down the book in 4 core topics what would they be? Elevator pitch? What is the starting knowledge? 6:18 – Guest: We expect you to know Angular Intro and that’s it! 6:43 – Chuck: What are the principles? 6:50 – Guest: We talk about the testing component. We highlight the benefits of using Angular vs. Angular.js. That shows up in the book a lot. It’s very example driven. 7:28 – Chuck: We have been talking about testing quite a bit on the show lately. 8:22 – Chuck: Do you see people using the testing in regards to the pyramid? 8:33 – Guest: I am not a huge fan of the pyramid. Some questions I ask are: Does it run quickly? Is it reliable? To give you some background I work on Google Club Platform. 10:21 – The guest talks about “Page Level Integration Tests.” 11:31 – Alyssa. 11:50 – Chuck: After your explanation after writing your book I’m sure it’s a breeze now. Knowing these tests and having the confidence is great. 12:13 – Guest: Tools like Cypress is very helpful. Web Driver Testing, too. 12:43 – Chuck: Where do people start? What do you recommend? Do they start at Protractor or do they come down to unit tests? 13:02 – Guest: Finding the balance is important. 14:30 – Chuck: Check out a past episode that we’ve done. 14:40 – Panel asks a question about tools such as Test Café and Cypress. 14:50 – Guest: I really don’t know Test Café. There is a long story in how all of these fit together. The guest talks about Selenium, Cypress, Safari, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Puppeteer! 19:24 – Chuck: Does it work in Electron as well, too? 19:26 – Guest: Good question but I don’t know the answer. 19:39 – Chuck: Maybe a listener could write a comment and tell us. 19:43 – Panel: I’ve used Protractor for many years. I like the explanation that you just gave. The great thing about Protractor is that you can... 20:29 – Guest: We wanted to explain the difficulty of Protractor in this book. Guest: You have this test running in Node but then you have your app running in the browser. You have these 2 different run times. You might have to run them separately and there is tons of complexity. 21:15 – Panel: As I am coding you have this visual browser on one side, and then on the other side you have... 22:22 – Guest asks the panelists a question. 22:32 – Panel: I have only used it for a few months and a few several apps but haven’t had those issues, yet. 22:55 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Test Café at all. 23:05 – Alyssa: Is the book online? 23:13 – Guest: It’s available through Manning Publications and Amazon. I think we have some codes to giveaway! 23:34 – Chuck: Yeah, we are working on those codes and giveaways. We have mentioned about 5 or 6 tools – are you worried about your book going out of date? 24:05 – Guest: Sure that is something we are worried about. When editing took a long time to get through that was one of my thoughts. The guest talks about Selenium, control flow, Protractor, 25:45 – Guest (continues): These new features were coming out while the book was coming out – so there’s that. What’s this thing about control flow and why this matters to you, etc. We were able to add that into the book, which is good. We were able to get those instructions out there. Books have a delay to them. 26:47 – Chuck: We talked about this in JavaScript Jabber. This guest talked about this and he is from Big Nerd Ranch. At what point do you have this breaking point: This isn’t a good fit for Test Café or Selenium BUT a good fit for Mocha or Jest? 27:27 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 28:04 – Guest: Do you have a reason why you would switch testing tools? 28:12 – Chuck. 28:41 – Guest: That’s the tradeoff as you move down the ladder. 29:43 – Panel: If you want to trigger an action that isn’t triggerable? 29:50 – Guest answers the question. 30:07 – Panel. 30:20 – Chuck. 30:33 – Guest: You can access code. Usually something in a workflow will make it happen. You have to fall back on some type of UI sort of thing. It’s almost like doing Tetris! I’ve never had to directly call something. I am not the best one to answer that. 31:16 – Panel: It’s like a weird mix of tests. 31:29 – Panelist is talking about unit testing and other tests. 31:55 – Chuck asks a question. 32:02 – Guest: It depends on the scale of your project. 32:28 – Chuck: Do you guys use a test coverage tool or on the side of: everything should run and then test if there is a bug. 32:43 – Guest: Coverage isn’t the full story. 33:26 – Panel: You said you weren’t a fan of the testing pyramid – can you explain why? 33:43 – Guest: I think it turns too much prescriptive. Guest: I think there are bigger concerns out there and the test pyramid is an over-simplification. 35:22 – Panel: What’s the difference between fast and slow testing? 35:28 – Guest: It really depends on your level of knowledge. If your test suite runs more than twenty minutes to an hour that is probably too slow! 36:03 – Alyssa. 36:09 – Chuck. 36:16 – Alyssa: There is no way that 20 minutes equals that! 36:26 – Guest: 20 minutes is the extreme limit.  36:51 – Chuck. 37:11 – Panel: Any new Twitter news on Trump? 37:21 – Panelist talks about test suites! 37:40 – Panelists and guests go back-and-forth. 38:11 – Chuck: Do you have any recommendations for the unit testing? Keeping it small or not so much? 38:29 – Guest: Think: What is this test asking? Don’t write tests that won’t fail if some other tests could have caught them. 39:04 – Alyssa: That’s smart! 39:09 – Guest continues. 39:28 – Chuck: What else to jump on? Chuck: Do you write your tests in typescript or in Java? 39:48 – Guest answers the question. He mentions Python, typescript, and more! 40:17 – Alyssa. 40:22 – Guest continues. 40:46 – Alyssa: How many people worked on that project? 40:50 – Guest: 2 or 3 framework engineers who did the tooling. About 20 people total for tooling to make sure everything worked. 41:18 – Panelist asks a question. 41:22 – Guest: About 20 minutes! 42:35 – Guest wants to talk about the topic: end-to-end testing! 44:59 – Chuck: Let’s do picks! 45:09 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular JavaScript Python React Cypress Puppeteer – GitHub Protractor Test Mocha.js Selenium C# GitHub: testcafe Istanbul “Protractor: A New Hope” – YouTube Video – Michael Giambalvo & Craig Nishina Book: “Testing Angular Applications” – Manning Publications Michael’s GitHub Michael’s Twitter Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Cache Fly Picks: Alyssa Fantastic Beasts Joe Skyward War of the Spider Queen Luxur - board game Testing Angular with Cypress.io Space Cadets Sonar Family Charles The DevRev Podcast Gary Vee Audio Experience Michael Scale Captain Sonar

Panel: Charles Max Wood Joe Eames John Papa Alyssa Nicoll Special Guest:  Michael Giambalvo In this episode, Chuck talks with special guest Michael Giambalvo who is an author of the book titled, “Testing Angular Applications.” This book can be purchased through Amazon, Manning Publications, among other sites, too. The panelists and the guest talk about different types of tests, such as end-to-end testing and unit testing. They also talk about Angular, Java, Mocha, Test Café, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:53 – Chuck: Our panel is John Papa, Joe Eames, Alyssa Nicoll, and myself. My new show is the DevRev – check it out, please! 1:26 – Guest: I am a contributing author to our new book, which is about Angular. 1:56 – Chuck: How is it like to write with multiple people? 2:04 – Guest: Yep it’s hard b/c we are in different areas. Back in the 2.0 days, Jesse was writing a book. He was talking about typescript and components. Craig made friends with Jesse and they were talking about the book he was writing. Then we all jumped in to get in finished. We all had areas that we were specialists in! 3:21 – Alyssa: If you break it up that makes sense. 3:31 – Guest. 3:40 – Panel: Pick different words and go around the room. 3:51 – Panel: You write the first ½ of a sentence and then you write the other ½ of the sentence! 4:10 – Guest: You have these big word documents and go back-and-forth. 4:36 – Alyssa: Editing and then pass it back-and-forth – how does that work? 4:46 – Guest: It’s like 8 pass backs-and-forth. 5:35 – Guest: The editing was the main issue – it took forever! 5:50 – Chuck: We were going to co-author a book and we didn’t. Chuck: If you could break down the book in 4 core topics what would they be? Elevator pitch? What is the starting knowledge? 6:18 – Guest: We expect you to know Angular Intro and that’s it! 6:43 – Chuck: What are the principles? 6:50 – Guest: We talk about the testing component. We highlight the benefits of using Angular vs. Angular.js. That shows up in the book a lot. It’s very example driven. 7:28 – Chuck: We have been talking about testing quite a bit on the show lately. 8:22 – Chuck: Do you see people using the testing in regards to the pyramid? 8:33 – Guest: I am not a huge fan of the pyramid. Some questions I ask are: Does it run quickly? Is it reliable? To give you some background I work on Google Club Platform. 10:21 – The guest talks about “Page Level Integration Tests.” 11:31 – Alyssa. 11:50 – Chuck: After your explanation after writing your book I’m sure it’s a breeze now. Knowing these tests and having the confidence is great. 12:13 – Guest: Tools like Cypress is very helpful. Web Driver Testing, too. 12:43 – Chuck: Where do people start? What do you recommend? Do they start at Protractor or do they come down to unit tests? 13:02 – Guest: Finding the balance is important. 14:30 – Chuck: Check out a past episode that we’ve done. 14:40 – Panel asks a question about tools such as Test Café and Cypress. 14:50 – Guest: I really don’t know Test Café. There is a long story in how all of these fit together. The guest talks about Selenium, Cypress, Safari, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Puppeteer! 19:24 – Chuck: Does it work in Electron as well, too? 19:26 – Guest: Good question but I don’t know the answer. 19:39 – Chuck: Maybe a listener could write a comment and tell us. 19:43 – Panel: I’ve used Protractor for many years. I like the explanation that you just gave. The great thing about Protractor is that you can... 20:29 – Guest: We wanted to explain the difficulty of Protractor in this book. Guest: You have this test running in Node but then you have your app running in the browser. You have these 2 different run times. You might have to run them separately and there is tons of complexity. 21:15 – Panel: As I am coding you have this visual browser on one side, and then on the other side you have... 22:22 – Guest asks the panelists a question. 22:32 – Panel: I have only used it for a few months and a few several apps but haven’t had those issues, yet. 22:55 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Test Café at all. 23:05 – Alyssa: Is the book online? 23:13 – Guest: It’s available through Manning Publications and Amazon. I think we have some codes to giveaway! 23:34 – Chuck: Yeah, we are working on those codes and giveaways. We have mentioned about 5 or 6 tools – are you worried about your book going out of date? 24:05 – Guest: Sure that is something we are worried about. When editing took a long time to get through that was one of my thoughts. The guest talks about Selenium, control flow, Protractor, 25:45 – Guest (continues): These new features were coming out while the book was coming out – so there’s that. What’s this thing about control flow and why this matters to you, etc. We were able to add that into the book, which is good. We were able to get those instructions out there. Books have a delay to them. 26:47 – Chuck: We talked about this in JavaScript Jabber. This guest talked about this and he is from Big Nerd Ranch. At what point do you have this breaking point: This isn’t a good fit for Test Café or Selenium BUT a good fit for Mocha or Jest? 27:27 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 28:04 – Guest: Do you have a reason why you would switch testing tools? 28:12 – Chuck. 28:41 – Guest: That’s the tradeoff as you move down the ladder. 29:43 – Panel: If you want to trigger an action that isn’t triggerable? 29:50 – Guest answers the question. 30:07 – Panel. 30:20 – Chuck. 30:33 – Guest: You can access code. Usually something in a workflow will make it happen. You have to fall back on some type of UI sort of thing. It’s almost like doing Tetris! I’ve never had to directly call something. I am not the best one to answer that. 31:16 – Panel: It’s like a weird mix of tests. 31:29 – Panelist is talking about unit testing and other tests. 31:55 – Chuck asks a question. 32:02 – Guest: It depends on the scale of your project. 32:28 – Chuck: Do you guys use a test coverage tool or on the side of: everything should run and then test if there is a bug. 32:43 – Guest: Coverage isn’t the full story. 33:26 – Panel: You said you weren’t a fan of the testing pyramid – can you explain why? 33:43 – Guest: I think it turns too much prescriptive. Guest: I think there are bigger concerns out there and the test pyramid is an over-simplification. 35:22 – Panel: What’s the difference between fast and slow testing? 35:28 – Guest: It really depends on your level of knowledge. If your test suite runs more than twenty minutes to an hour that is probably too slow! 36:03 – Alyssa. 36:09 – Chuck. 36:16 – Alyssa: There is no way that 20 minutes equals that! 36:26 – Guest: 20 minutes is the extreme limit.  36:51 – Chuck. 37:11 – Panel: Any new Twitter news on Trump? 37:21 – Panelist talks about test suites! 37:40 – Panelists and guests go back-and-forth. 38:11 – Chuck: Do you have any recommendations for the unit testing? Keeping it small or not so much? 38:29 – Guest: Think: What is this test asking? Don’t write tests that won’t fail if some other tests could have caught them. 39:04 – Alyssa: That’s smart! 39:09 – Guest continues. 39:28 – Chuck: What else to jump on? Chuck: Do you write your tests in typescript or in Java? 39:48 – Guest answers the question. He mentions Python, typescript, and more! 40:17 – Alyssa. 40:22 – Guest continues. 40:46 – Alyssa: How many people worked on that project? 40:50 – Guest: 2 or 3 framework engineers who did the tooling. About 20 people total for tooling to make sure everything worked. 41:18 – Panelist asks a question. 41:22 – Guest: About 20 minutes! 42:35 – Guest wants to talk about the topic: end-to-end testing! 44:59 – Chuck: Let’s do picks! 45:09 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular JavaScript Python React Cypress Puppeteer – GitHub Protractor Test Mocha.js Selenium C# GitHub: testcafe Istanbul “Protractor: A New Hope” – YouTube Video – Michael Giambalvo & Craig Nishina Book: “Testing Angular Applications” – Manning Publications Michael’s GitHub Michael’s Twitter Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Cache Fly Picks: Alyssa Fantastic Beasts Joe Skyward War of the Spider Queen Luxur - board game Testing Angular with Cypress.io Space Cadets Sonar Family Charles The DevRev Podcast Gary Vee Audio Experience Michael Scale Captain Sonar

Panel: Eric Berry Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself! 1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that! 1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal. 2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal? 2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are... 4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice! 4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure. 5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you? 5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby. 6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time. 7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it. 7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it. 8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework? 8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with... 10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB. 11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does! The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more! 14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky... 15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast! 15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers? 15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like! 16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using... 16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix. 18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work. 18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to... 19:28 – Panel. 19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it. 19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber? 20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us. The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky. 21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more of a pack! 23:23 – Panel: It sounds like Lucky is inspired by Elm – right? 23:32 – Guest: Yeah, I think so. The guest dives into this topic of Elm and Lucky! 24:35 – Panel: How much does the types feel like it’s getting in your way? How explicit is it? When I came to Ruby it was a breath of fresh air. I am a bit reluctant to go back to those days. 25:25 – Guest: I think Lucky does a happy medium. It doesn’t infer instant variables. I like the... 26:28 – Panel: I learned Java very early on in my computer science career. 27:00 – Guest. 27:10 – Panel: “Crystal...it’s not Java!” That should be your slogan! 27:20 – Fresh Books! 28:25 – Panel: A lot of people are moving to Elixir community. Do you see people moving from Ruby to Lucky and Crystal? How does Lucky compare to Phoenix? 28:55 – Guest: Good question! 29:10 – The guest talks about bamboo – see links below!! 29: 29 – Guest: Sure Ruby is fast but sometimes you spend more time on it then you would want to. 31:08 – Guest: Blessing and curse that Crystal looks so much like Ruby. That’s what I thought at first: why would I want to learn this if it’s so similar to Ruby. BUT there are so many benefits to Crystal vs. Ruby. 31:48 – Guest talks about Lucky catching the bugs. 32:00 – Panel: I wonder if that happened with Groovy and Rails? 32:21 – They go back-and-forth. 32:28 – Panel: Thoughtbot has always been on the forefront of Ruby. Can you talk about Thoughbot please? (See links below for Thoughtbot!) 33:15 – Guest: Great question. It’s hard to tell b/c there are different offices. I would say Ruby is our main thing. Ruby is the most mature thing that we use in-terms of web development. Guest: Actually – Rails is pretty nice! 34:54 – Panel: We went through the same thing with CodeFund! I wrote it initially in Python and then I wrote it in Elixir and it became so complex. Now we are moving everything back to Ruby and it’s been a fantastic decision.  36:30 – Chuck: You are talking about the sustainability of open source but there are benefits throughout the company right? There are tons of tangible benefits of doing it, especially when it’s your Friday schedule. You can level-up on things that could help you. I know a lot of companies cannot afford it if they are trying to hustle. 37:42 – Guest: It’s totally not charity through Thoughtbot. It’s a huge help for hiring new people. I know they are okay with letting me work on Lucky b/c it’s bringing on new developers and a good marketing tool, and finally recruiting! 39:07 – Chuck: Yeah, I have been talking about developer freedom and that’s what I am addressing through the DevRev show! It’s my new podcast show. We talk with Chris on Elixir Mix. It lends that credibility if they need to save our bacon. 40:02 – Panel: What’s your goal with Lucky? 40:11 – Guest: I would love to get it to the point where Thoughtbot could start a project and default to Lucky! Start a project and not resting every gem and be confident with launching it. 41:36 – Panelist asks a question. 41:45 – Guest: It’s not 1.0 and that means that the API will break with every release. I think that’s good to tweak stuff but that turns companies off, though. 42:40 – Chuck: Another thing that helps with adoption is Twitter used Rails to build their initial version. This blah, blah company uses important stuff and they are using Crystal and whatnot then that’s good! It sounds like you are waiting for social proof. 43:23 – Guest: Is the next Twitter going to even know about Crystal? 43:40 – Chuck: It literally only takes one enthusiast! 43:52 – Guest. 44:11 – Demo of Flickr Search is mentioned here! 45:13 – Panel: Is there something out there that you could POINT someone to? 45:27 – Guest: Not, yet. I built a small site with it! It is opensource and you can look at it. I want to show people a good example of what Lucky can do! 45:57 – Panel: You have very good docs and I am a visual learner. When I learned Rails I learned on my own and not through school. 46:20 – Panelist asks a question. 46:48 – Guest: What a huge advantage Lucky has through the Thoughtbot platform! Now that platform is kind of dried up. In terms of getting people excited it needs that killer app and they can see that it’s fast and killer! I think it takes a lot of time and finding time to do it so that’s tricky. It’s changing a lot when there is so much change. Getting Lucky to a 1.0 state so people can do videos and make apps. The hard part thing is that Lucky has to be 1.0 when Crystal is 1.0. The Lucky community is great b/c it’s encouraging and to respond in a very kind way. When you are starting something that’s new can be scary. We try to help out as much as we can and we are open and kind about it. 49:13 – Panel: “Paul is nice so Lucky is nice!” 49:19 – Guest: Everyone is super kind. It had to be short and simple. We in the dev community are very lucky – usually great pay/benefits and more w/o a college degree. What another field can you do that?! 51:00 – Panel: Great message and you need to push that! 51:10 – Panel: You were on a past podcast and you talked about how you are donating each month! Panel: Opensource maintainers are getting burned out and you want to support that. 51:40 – Guest: I think opensource sustainability what others need to do to make it sustainable. If you have the means to give we can be apart of that, too. It would be nice if companies did that. If it helps Crystal I am happy. 52:17 – Panel: I have a question about Crystal. 52:52 – Guest: Ruby right now you can do C sections right now. 53:01 – Panel. 53:10 – Guest: I don’t think so – it may but I would guess that you could do it but I don’t know how easy it would be. Note: Rust and C are mentioned. 53:37 – Panel comments. 53:46 – Guest: One thing I would say is to check-out the Lucky docs. We are happy to help! 54:10 – Panel: This is a favorite episode of mine! Both of today’s guests have been my favorite! 54:23 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course The DevRev Podcast Show DevChat TV Ruby Elixir Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React Jest.io Mocha.js Webpacker-Cli Amber Lucky The Lucky Philosophy The Bike Shed Thoughtbot CodeFund Lucky: Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal... “Crystal is not Ruby Part 1” GitHub: Bamboo Ex_Machina Dialyxir Crystal Mastery Samsung T5 Carbon Copy Cloner iMazing Awesome-Lucky Paul Smith GitHub Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Samsung SSD Carbon Copy Cloner Application Eric iMazing HEIC Converter Charles Mastodon Andrew Upcase by Thoughtbot Awesome Lucky Paul Tailwind CSS Phoenix Live HTML Chris McCord Elixir Mix Episodes with Chris McCord

Panel: Charles Max Wood Joe Eames John Papa Alyssa Nicoll Special Guest:  Michael Giambalvo In this episode, Chuck talks with special guest Michael Giambalvo who is an author of the book titled, “Testing Angular Applications.” This book can be purchased through Amazon, Manning Publications, among other sites, too. The panelists and the guest talk about different types of tests, such as end-to-end testing and unit testing. They also talk about Angular, Java, Mocha, Test Café, and much more! Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:53 – Chuck: Our panel is John Papa, Joe Eames, Alyssa Nicoll, and myself. My new show is the DevRev – check it out, please! 1:26 – Guest: I am a contributing author to our new book, which is about Angular. 1:56 – Chuck: How is it like to write with multiple people? 2:04 – Guest: Yep it’s hard b/c we are in different areas. Back in the 2.0 days, Jesse was writing a book. He was talking about typescript and components. Craig made friends with Jesse and they were talking about the book he was writing. Then we all jumped in to get in finished. We all had areas that we were specialists in! 3:21 – Alyssa: If you break it up that makes sense. 3:31 – Guest. 3:40 – Panel: Pick different words and go around the room. 3:51 – Panel: You write the first ½ of a sentence and then you write the other ½ of the sentence! 4:10 – Guest: You have these big word documents and go back-and-forth. 4:36 – Alyssa: Editing and then pass it back-and-forth – how does that work? 4:46 – Guest: It’s like 8 pass backs-and-forth. 5:35 – Guest: The editing was the main issue – it took forever! 5:50 – Chuck: We were going to co-author a book and we didn’t. Chuck: If you could break down the book in 4 core topics what would they be? Elevator pitch? What is the starting knowledge? 6:18 – Guest: We expect you to know Angular Intro and that’s it! 6:43 – Chuck: What are the principles? 6:50 – Guest: We talk about the testing component. We highlight the benefits of using Angular vs. Angular.js. That shows up in the book a lot. It’s very example driven. 7:28 – Chuck: We have been talking about testing quite a bit on the show lately. 8:22 – Chuck: Do you see people using the testing in regards to the pyramid? 8:33 – Guest: I am not a huge fan of the pyramid. Some questions I ask are: Does it run quickly? Is it reliable? To give you some background I work on Google Club Platform. 10:21 – The guest talks about “Page Level Integration Tests.” 11:31 – Alyssa. 11:50 – Chuck: After your explanation after writing your book I’m sure it’s a breeze now. Knowing these tests and having the confidence is great. 12:13 – Guest: Tools like Cypress is very helpful. Web Driver Testing, too. 12:43 – Chuck: Where do people start? What do you recommend? Do they start at Protractor or do they come down to unit tests? 13:02 – Guest: Finding the balance is important. 14:30 – Chuck: Check out a past episode that we’ve done. 14:40 – Panel asks a question about tools such as Test Café and Cypress. 14:50 – Guest: I really don’t know Test Café. There is a long story in how all of these fit together. The guest talks about Selenium, Cypress, Safari, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Puppeteer! 19:24 – Chuck: Does it work in Electron as well, too? 19:26 – Guest: Good question but I don’t know the answer. 19:39 – Chuck: Maybe a listener could write a comment and tell us. 19:43 – Panel: I’ve used Protractor for many years. I like the explanation that you just gave. The great thing about Protractor is that you can... 20:29 – Guest: We wanted to explain the difficulty of Protractor in this book. Guest: You have this test running in Node but then you have your app running in the browser. You have these 2 different run times. You might have to run them separately and there is tons of complexity. 21:15 – Panel: As I am coding you have this visual browser on one side, and then on the other side you have... 22:22 – Guest asks the panelists a question. 22:32 – Panel: I have only used it for a few months and a few several apps but haven’t had those issues, yet. 22:55 – Guest: I haven’t heard of Test Café at all. 23:05 – Alyssa: Is the book online? 23:13 – Guest: It’s available through Manning Publications and Amazon. I think we have some codes to giveaway! 23:34 – Chuck: Yeah, we are working on those codes and giveaways. We have mentioned about 5 or 6 tools – are you worried about your book going out of date? 24:05 – Guest: Sure that is something we are worried about. When editing took a long time to get through that was one of my thoughts. The guest talks about Selenium, control flow, Protractor, 25:45 – Guest (continues): These new features were coming out while the book was coming out – so there’s that. What’s this thing about control flow and why this matters to you, etc. We were able to add that into the book, which is good. We were able to get those instructions out there. Books have a delay to them. 26:47 – Chuck: We talked about this in JavaScript Jabber. This guest talked about this and he is from Big Nerd Ranch. At what point do you have this breaking point: This isn’t a good fit for Test Café or Selenium BUT a good fit for Mocha or Jest? 27:27 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 28:04 – Guest: Do you have a reason why you would switch testing tools? 28:12 – Chuck. 28:41 – Guest: That’s the tradeoff as you move down the ladder. 29:43 – Panel: If you want to trigger an action that isn’t triggerable? 29:50 – Guest answers the question. 30:07 – Panel. 30:20 – Chuck. 30:33 – Guest: You can access code. Usually something in a workflow will make it happen. You have to fall back on some type of UI sort of thing. It’s almost like doing Tetris! I’ve never had to directly call something. I am not the best one to answer that. 31:16 – Panel: It’s like a weird mix of tests. 31:29 – Panelist is talking about unit testing and other tests. 31:55 – Chuck asks a question. 32:02 – Guest: It depends on the scale of your project. 32:28 – Chuck: Do you guys use a test coverage tool or on the side of: everything should run and then test if there is a bug. 32:43 – Guest: Coverage isn’t the full story. 33:26 – Panel: You said you weren’t a fan of the testing pyramid – can you explain why? 33:43 – Guest: I think it turns too much prescriptive. Guest: I think there are bigger concerns out there and the test pyramid is an over-simplification. 35:22 – Panel: What’s the difference between fast and slow testing? 35:28 – Guest: It really depends on your level of knowledge. If your test suite runs more than twenty minutes to an hour that is probably too slow! 36:03 – Alyssa. 36:09 – Chuck. 36:16 – Alyssa: There is no way that 20 minutes equals that! 36:26 – Guest: 20 minutes is the extreme limit.  36:51 – Chuck. 37:11 – Panel: Any new Twitter news on Trump? 37:21 – Panelist talks about test suites! 37:40 – Panelists and guests go back-and-forth. 38:11 – Chuck: Do you have any recommendations for the unit testing? Keeping it small or not so much? 38:29 – Guest: Think: What is this test asking? Don’t write tests that won’t fail if some other tests could have caught them. 39:04 – Alyssa: That’s smart! 39:09 – Guest continues. 39:28 – Chuck: What else to jump on? Chuck: Do you write your tests in typescript or in Java? 39:48 – Guest answers the question. He mentions Python, typescript, and more! 40:17 – Alyssa. 40:22 – Guest continues. 40:46 – Alyssa: How many people worked on that project? 40:50 – Guest: 2 or 3 framework engineers who did the tooling. About 20 people total for tooling to make sure everything worked. 41:18 – Panelist asks a question. 41:22 – Guest: About 20 minutes! 42:35 – Guest wants to talk about the topic: end-to-end testing! 44:59 – Chuck: Let’s do picks! 45:09 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular JavaScript Python React Cypress Puppeteer – GitHub Protractor Test Mocha.js Selenium C# GitHub: testcafe Istanbul “Protractor: A New Hope” – YouTube Video – Michael Giambalvo & Craig Nishina Book: “Testing Angular Applications” – Manning Publications Michael’s GitHub Michael’s Twitter Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Cache Fly Picks: Alyssa Fantastic Beasts Joe Skyward War of the Spider Queen Luxur - board game Testing Angular with Cypress.io Space Cadets Sonar Family Charles The DevRev Podcast Gary Vee Audio Experience Michael Scale Captain Sonar

Panel: AJ O’Neal Joe Eames Jesse Sanders Special Guest: Sean Hunter In this episode, the panel talks with Sean Hunter who is a software developer, speaker, rock climber, and author of “Aurelia in Action” published by Manning Publications! Today, the panelists and Sean talk about Aurelia and other frameworks. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:38 – Joe: Hello! Our panelists are AJ, Jesse, myself, and our special guest is Sean Hunter (from Australia)! What have you been doing with your life and what is your favorite movie? 1:45 – Guest talks about Vegemite! 2:20 – Guest: I was in the UK and started using Aurelia, which I will talk about today. I have done some talks throughout UK about Aurelia. Also, the past year moved back to Australia had a baby son and it’s been a busy year. Writing a book and being a new parent has been hard. 3:22 – Panel: Tell us the history of Aurelia, please? 3:31 – Panel: Is it like jQuery, React, Vue or what? 3:44 – Guest: Elevator pitch – Aurelia is a single-page app framework! It’s most similar to Vue out of those frameworks; also, similarities to Ember.js. 4:30 – Guest goes into detail about Aurelia. 6:15 – Panel: It sounds like convention over configuration. 6:42 – Guest: Yes that is correct. 7:21 – Panel: Sounds like there is a build-step to it. 7:39 – Guest: There is a build-step you are correct. You will use Webpack in the background. 9:57 – The guest talks about data binding among other things. 10:30 – Guest: You will have your app component and other levels, too. 10:37 – Panel: I am new to Aurelia and so I’m fresh to this. Why Aurelia over the other frameworks? Is there a CLI to help? 11:29 – Guest: Let me start with WHY Aurelia and not the other frameworks. The style that you are using when building the applications is important for your needs. In terms of bundling there is a CUI and that is a way that I prefer to start my projects. Do you want to use CSS or Webpack or...? It’s almost a wizard process! You guys have any questions about the CLI? 14:43 – Panel: Thanks! I was wondering what is actually occurring there? 15:25 – Guest: Good question. Basically it’s that Aurelia has some built-in conventions. Looking at the convention tells Aurelia to pick the Vue model by name. If I need to tell the framework more information then... 17:46 – Panel: I think that for people who are familiar with one or more framework then where on that spectrum would Aurelia fall? 18:20 – Guest: It’s not that opinionated as Ember.js. 19:09 – Panel: Talking about being opinionated – what are some good examples of the choices that you have and how that leads you down a certain path? Any more examples that you can give us?  19:38 – Guest: The main conventions are what I’ve talked about already. I can’t think of more conventions off the top of my head. There are more examples in my book. 20:02 – Panel: Your book? 20:10 – Guest: Yep. 20:13 – Panel. 20:20 – Guest.  21:58 – Panel: Why would I NOT pick Aurelia? 22:19 – Guest: If you are from a React world and you like having things contained in a single-file then Aurelia would fight you. If you want a big company backing then Aurelia isn’t for you. The guest goes into more reasons why or why not one would or wouldn’t want to use Aurelia. 24:24 – Panel: I think the best sell point is the downplay! 24:34 – Guest: Good point. What does the roadmap look like for Aurelia’s team? 25:00 – Guest: Typically, what happens in the Aurelia framework is that data binding (or router) gets pushed by the core team. They are the ones that produce the roadmap and look forward to the framework. The core team is working on the NEXT version of the framework, which is lighter, easier to use, and additional features. It’s proposed to be out for release next year. 26:36 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 27:34 – Panel: I am going to take down the CLI down and see what it does. I am looking at it and seeing how to teach someone to use it. I am using AU, new command, and it says no Aurelia found. I am stuck. 28:06 – Guest: What you would do is specify the project name that you are trying to create and that should create it for you.  28:40 – Panel. 28:45 – Panel. 28:50 – Panel: Stand up on your desk and say: does anyone know anything about computers?! 29:05 – Panelists go back-and-forth. 29:13 – Panel: What frameworks have you used in the past? 29:17 – Guest: I was using single-paged apps back in 2010. 31:10 – Panel: Tell us about the performance of Aurelia? 31:17 – Guest: I was looking at the benchmarks all the time. Last time I looked the performance was comparable. Performances can me measured in a number of different of ways. The guest talks about a dashboard screen that 20 charts or something like that. He didn’t notice any delays getting to the client. 33:29 – Panel: I heard you say the word “observables.” 33:39 – Guest answers the question. 35:30 – Guest: I am not a Redux expert, so I really can’t say. It has similar actions like Redux but the differences I really can’t say. 36:11 – Panel: We really want experts in everything! (Laughs.) 36:25 – Panelist talks about a colleagues’ talk at a conference. He says that he things are doing too much with SPAs. They have their place but we are trying to bundle 8-9 different applications but instead look at them as... What are your thoughts of having multiple SPAs? 37:17 – Guest. 39:08 – Guest: I wonder what your opinions are? What about the splitting approach? 39:22 – Panel: I haven’t looked at it, yet. I am curious, though. I have been developing in GO lately. 40:20 – Guest: I think people can go too far and making it too complex. You don’t want to make the code that complex. 40:45 – Panel: Yeah when the code is “clean” but difficult to discover that’s not good. 41:15 – Guest: I agree when you start repeating yourself then it makes it more difficult. 41:35 – Panel: Chris and I are anti-framework. We prefer to start from a fresh palette and see if a framework can fit into that fresh palette. When you start with a certain framework you are starting with certain configurations set-in-place.  42:48 – Joe: I like my frameworks and I think you are crazy! 43:05 – Panel. 43:11 – Joe: I have a love affair with all frameworks. 43:19 – Panel: I think I am somewhere in the middle. 43:49 – Panel: I don’t think frameworks are all bad but I want to say that it’s smart to not make it too complex upfront. Learn and grow. 44:28 – Guest: I think a good example of that is jQuery, right? 45:10 – Panelist talks about C++, jQuery, among other things. 45:34 – Guest: Frameworks kind of push the limits. 46:08 – Panelist talks about JavaScript, frameworks, and others. 47:04 – Panel: It seems simple to setup routes – anything to help with the lazy way to setup? 47:35 – Guest answers question. 48:37 – Panel: How do we manage complexity and how does messaging work between components? 48:54 – Guest: The simple scenario is that you can follow a simple pattern, which is (came out of Ember community) and that is...Data Down & Actions Up! 50:45 – Guest mentions that Aurelia website! 51:00 – Panel: That sounds great! Sounds like the pattern can be plugged in easily into Aurelia. 51:17 – Picks! 51:20 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! END – Advertisement: CacheFly! Links: JavaScript React Redux Webpack Elixir Ember.js Vue GO jQuery Node.js Puppeteer Cypress Utah JS 2018 – Justin McMurdie’s Talk Aurelia Sean Hunter’s Book! Sean Hunter’s Twitter Sean Hunter’s Website Sean Hunter’s GitHub Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry CacheFly Picks: Joe React Conf. Endless Quest AJ Extreme Ownership GO Language Harry’s and Flamingo Jesse Sanders The Miracle Morning React Hooks Apple Products Sean Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work Discount Code for Aurelia in Action -  hunterpc (40% off Aurelia in Action, all formats) Apple Watch

Panel: AJ O’Neal Joe Eames Jesse Sanders Special Guest: Sean Hunter In this episode, the panel talks with Sean Hunter who is a software developer, speaker, rock climber, and author of “Aurelia in Action” published by Manning Publications! Today, the panelists and Sean talk about Aurelia and other frameworks. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:38 – Joe: Hello! Our panelists are AJ, Jesse, myself, and our special guest is Sean Hunter (from Australia)! What have you been doing with your life and what is your favorite movie? 1:45 – Guest talks about Vegemite! 2:20 – Guest: I was in the UK and started using Aurelia, which I will talk about today. I have done some talks throughout UK about Aurelia. Also, the past year moved back to Australia had a baby son and it’s been a busy year. Writing a book and being a new parent has been hard. 3:22 – Panel: Tell us the history of Aurelia, please? 3:31 – Panel: Is it like jQuery, React, Vue or what? 3:44 – Guest: Elevator pitch – Aurelia is a single-page app framework! It’s most similar to Vue out of those frameworks; also, similarities to Ember.js. 4:30 – Guest goes into detail about Aurelia. 6:15 – Panel: It sounds like convention over configuration. 6:42 – Guest: Yes that is correct. 7:21 – Panel: Sounds like there is a build-step to it. 7:39 – Guest: There is a build-step you are correct. You will use Webpack in the background. 9:57 – The guest talks about data binding among other things. 10:30 – Guest: You will have your app component and other levels, too. 10:37 – Panel: I am new to Aurelia and so I’m fresh to this. Why Aurelia over the other frameworks? Is there a CLI to help? 11:29 – Guest: Let me start with WHY Aurelia and not the other frameworks. The style that you are using when building the applications is important for your needs. In terms of bundling there is a CUI and that is a way that I prefer to start my projects. Do you want to use CSS or Webpack or...? It’s almost a wizard process! You guys have any questions about the CLI? 14:43 – Panel: Thanks! I was wondering what is actually occurring there? 15:25 – Guest: Good question. Basically it’s that Aurelia has some built-in conventions. Looking at the convention tells Aurelia to pick the Vue model by name. If I need to tell the framework more information then... 17:46 – Panel: I think that for people who are familiar with one or more framework then where on that spectrum would Aurelia fall? 18:20 – Guest: It’s not that opinionated as Ember.js. 19:09 – Panel: Talking about being opinionated – what are some good examples of the choices that you have and how that leads you down a certain path? Any more examples that you can give us?  19:38 – Guest: The main conventions are what I’ve talked about already. I can’t think of more conventions off the top of my head. There are more examples in my book. 20:02 – Panel: Your book? 20:10 – Guest: Yep. 20:13 – Panel. 20:20 – Guest.  21:58 – Panel: Why would I NOT pick Aurelia? 22:19 – Guest: If you are from a React world and you like having things contained in a single-file then Aurelia would fight you. If you want a big company backing then Aurelia isn’t for you. The guest goes into more reasons why or why not one would or wouldn’t want to use Aurelia. 24:24 – Panel: I think the best sell point is the downplay! 24:34 – Guest: Good point. What does the roadmap look like for Aurelia’s team? 25:00 – Guest: Typically, what happens in the Aurelia framework is that data binding (or router) gets pushed by the core team. They are the ones that produce the roadmap and look forward to the framework. The core team is working on the NEXT version of the framework, which is lighter, easier to use, and additional features. It’s proposed to be out for release next year. 26:36 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 27:34 – Panel: I am going to take down the CLI down and see what it does. I am looking at it and seeing how to teach someone to use it. I am using AU, new command, and it says no Aurelia found. I am stuck. 28:06 – Guest: What you would do is specify the project name that you are trying to create and that should create it for you.  28:40 – Panel. 28:45 – Panel. 28:50 – Panel: Stand up on your desk and say: does anyone know anything about computers?! 29:05 – Panelists go back-and-forth. 29:13 – Panel: What frameworks have you used in the past? 29:17 – Guest: I was using single-paged apps back in 2010. 31:10 – Panel: Tell us about the performance of Aurelia? 31:17 – Guest: I was looking at the benchmarks all the time. Last time I looked the performance was comparable. Performances can me measured in a number of different of ways. The guest talks about a dashboard screen that 20 charts or something like that. He didn’t notice any delays getting to the client. 33:29 – Panel: I heard you say the word “observables.” 33:39 – Guest answers the question. 35:30 – Guest: I am not a Redux expert, so I really can’t say. It has similar actions like Redux but the differences I really can’t say. 36:11 – Panel: We really want experts in everything! (Laughs.) 36:25 – Panelist talks about a colleagues’ talk at a conference. He says that he things are doing too much with SPAs. They have their place but we are trying to bundle 8-9 different applications but instead look at them as... What are your thoughts of having multiple SPAs? 37:17 – Guest. 39:08 – Guest: I wonder what your opinions are? What about the splitting approach? 39:22 – Panel: I haven’t looked at it, yet. I am curious, though. I have been developing in GO lately. 40:20 – Guest: I think people can go too far and making it too complex. You don’t want to make the code that complex. 40:45 – Panel: Yeah when the code is “clean” but difficult to discover that’s not good. 41:15 – Guest: I agree when you start repeating yourself then it makes it more difficult. 41:35 – Panel: Chris and I are anti-framework. We prefer to start from a fresh palette and see if a framework can fit into that fresh palette. When you start with a certain framework you are starting with certain configurations set-in-place.  42:48 – Joe: I like my frameworks and I think you are crazy! 43:05 – Panel. 43:11 – Joe: I have a love affair with all frameworks. 43:19 – Panel: I think I am somewhere in the middle. 43:49 – Panel: I don’t think frameworks are all bad but I want to say that it’s smart to not make it too complex upfront. Learn and grow. 44:28 – Guest: I think a good example of that is jQuery, right? 45:10 – Panelist talks about C++, jQuery, among other things. 45:34 – Guest: Frameworks kind of push the limits. 46:08 – Panelist talks about JavaScript, frameworks, and others. 47:04 – Panel: It seems simple to setup routes – anything to help with the lazy way to setup? 47:35 – Guest answers question. 48:37 – Panel: How do we manage complexity and how does messaging work between components? 48:54 – Guest: The simple scenario is that you can follow a simple pattern, which is (came out of Ember community) and that is...Data Down & Actions Up! 50:45 – Guest mentions that Aurelia website! 51:00 – Panel: That sounds great! Sounds like the pattern can be plugged in easily into Aurelia. 51:17 – Picks! 51:20 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! END – Advertisement: CacheFly! Links: JavaScript React Redux Webpack Elixir Ember.js Vue GO jQuery Node.js Puppeteer Cypress Utah JS 2018 – Justin McMurdie’s Talk Aurelia Sean Hunter’s Book! Sean Hunter’s Twitter Sean Hunter’s Website Sean Hunter’s GitHub Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry CacheFly Picks: Joe React Conf. Endless Quest AJ Extreme Ownership GO Language Harry’s and Flamingo Jesse Sanders The Miracle Morning React Hooks Apple Products Sean Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work Discount Code for Aurelia in Action -  hunterpc (40% off Aurelia in Action, all formats) Apple Watch

Panel: AJ O’Neal Joe Eames Jesse Sanders Special Guest: Sean Hunter In this episode, the panel talks with Sean Hunter who is a software developer, speaker, rock climber, and author of “Aurelia in Action” published by Manning Publications! Today, the panelists and Sean talk about Aurelia and other frameworks. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:38 – Joe: Hello! Our panelists are AJ, Jesse, myself, and our special guest is Sean Hunter (from Australia)! What have you been doing with your life and what is your favorite movie? 1:45 – Guest talks about Vegemite! 2:20 – Guest: I was in the UK and started using Aurelia, which I will talk about today. I have done some talks throughout UK about Aurelia. Also, the past year moved back to Australia had a baby son and it’s been a busy year. Writing a book and being a new parent has been hard. 3:22 – Panel: Tell us the history of Aurelia, please? 3:31 – Panel: Is it like jQuery, React, Vue or what? 3:44 – Guest: Elevator pitch – Aurelia is a single-page app framework! It’s most similar to Vue out of those frameworks; also, similarities to Ember.js. 4:30 – Guest goes into detail about Aurelia. 6:15 – Panel: It sounds like convention over configuration. 6:42 – Guest: Yes that is correct. 7:21 – Panel: Sounds like there is a build-step to it. 7:39 – Guest: There is a build-step you are correct. You will use Webpack in the background. 9:57 – The guest talks about data binding among other things. 10:30 – Guest: You will have your app component and other levels, too. 10:37 – Panel: I am new to Aurelia and so I’m fresh to this. Why Aurelia over the other frameworks? Is there a CLI to help? 11:29 – Guest: Let me start with WHY Aurelia and not the other frameworks. The style that you are using when building the applications is important for your needs. In terms of bundling there is a CUI and that is a way that I prefer to start my projects. Do you want to use CSS or Webpack or...? It’s almost a wizard process! You guys have any questions about the CLI? 14:43 – Panel: Thanks! I was wondering what is actually occurring there? 15:25 – Guest: Good question. Basically it’s that Aurelia has some built-in conventions. Looking at the convention tells Aurelia to pick the Vue model by name. If I need to tell the framework more information then... 17:46 – Panel: I think that for people who are familiar with one or more framework then where on that spectrum would Aurelia fall? 18:20 – Guest: It’s not that opinionated as Ember.js. 19:09 – Panel: Talking about being opinionated – what are some good examples of the choices that you have and how that leads you down a certain path? Any more examples that you can give us?  19:38 – Guest: The main conventions are what I’ve talked about already. I can’t think of more conventions off the top of my head. There are more examples in my book. 20:02 – Panel: Your book? 20:10 – Guest: Yep. 20:13 – Panel. 20:20 – Guest.  21:58 – Panel: Why would I NOT pick Aurelia? 22:19 – Guest: If you are from a React world and you like having things contained in a single-file then Aurelia would fight you. If you want a big company backing then Aurelia isn’t for you. The guest goes into more reasons why or why not one would or wouldn’t want to use Aurelia. 24:24 – Panel: I think the best sell point is the downplay! 24:34 – Guest: Good point. What does the roadmap look like for Aurelia’s team? 25:00 – Guest: Typically, what happens in the Aurelia framework is that data binding (or router) gets pushed by the core team. They are the ones that produce the roadmap and look forward to the framework. The core team is working on the NEXT version of the framework, which is lighter, easier to use, and additional features. It’s proposed to be out for release next year. 26:36 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 27:34 – Panel: I am going to take down the CLI down and see what it does. I am looking at it and seeing how to teach someone to use it. I am using AU, new command, and it says no Aurelia found. I am stuck. 28:06 – Guest: What you would do is specify the project name that you are trying to create and that should create it for you.  28:40 – Panel. 28:45 – Panel. 28:50 – Panel: Stand up on your desk and say: does anyone know anything about computers?! 29:05 – Panelists go back-and-forth. 29:13 – Panel: What frameworks have you used in the past? 29:17 – Guest: I was using single-paged apps back in 2010. 31:10 – Panel: Tell us about the performance of Aurelia? 31:17 – Guest: I was looking at the benchmarks all the time. Last time I looked the performance was comparable. Performances can me measured in a number of different of ways. The guest talks about a dashboard screen that 20 charts or something like that. He didn’t notice any delays getting to the client. 33:29 – Panel: I heard you say the word “observables.” 33:39 – Guest answers the question. 35:30 – Guest: I am not a Redux expert, so I really can’t say. It has similar actions like Redux but the differences I really can’t say. 36:11 – Panel: We really want experts in everything! (Laughs.) 36:25 – Panelist talks about a colleagues’ talk at a conference. He says that he things are doing too much with SPAs. They have their place but we are trying to bundle 8-9 different applications but instead look at them as... What are your thoughts of having multiple SPAs? 37:17 – Guest. 39:08 – Guest: I wonder what your opinions are? What about the splitting approach? 39:22 – Panel: I haven’t looked at it, yet. I am curious, though. I have been developing in GO lately. 40:20 – Guest: I think people can go too far and making it too complex. You don’t want to make the code that complex. 40:45 – Panel: Yeah when the code is “clean” but difficult to discover that’s not good. 41:15 – Guest: I agree when you start repeating yourself then it makes it more difficult. 41:35 – Panel: Chris and I are anti-framework. We prefer to start from a fresh palette and see if a framework can fit into that fresh palette. When you start with a certain framework you are starting with certain configurations set-in-place.  42:48 – Joe: I like my frameworks and I think you are crazy! 43:05 – Panel. 43:11 – Joe: I have a love affair with all frameworks. 43:19 – Panel: I think I am somewhere in the middle. 43:49 – Panel: I don’t think frameworks are all bad but I want to say that it’s smart to not make it too complex upfront. Learn and grow. 44:28 – Guest: I think a good example of that is jQuery, right? 45:10 – Panelist talks about C++, jQuery, among other things. 45:34 – Guest: Frameworks kind of push the limits. 46:08 – Panelist talks about JavaScript, frameworks, and others. 47:04 – Panel: It seems simple to setup routes – anything to help with the lazy way to setup? 47:35 – Guest answers question. 48:37 – Panel: How do we manage complexity and how does messaging work between components? 48:54 – Guest: The simple scenario is that you can follow a simple pattern, which is (came out of Ember community) and that is...Data Down & Actions Up! 50:45 – Guest mentions that Aurelia website! 51:00 – Panel: That sounds great! Sounds like the pattern can be plugged in easily into Aurelia. 51:17 – Picks! 51:20 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! END – Advertisement: CacheFly! Links: JavaScript React Redux Webpack Elixir Ember.js Vue GO jQuery Node.js Puppeteer Cypress Utah JS 2018 – Justin McMurdie’s Talk Aurelia Sean Hunter’s Book! Sean Hunter’s Twitter Sean Hunter’s Website Sean Hunter’s GitHub Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry CacheFly Picks: Joe React Conf. Endless Quest AJ Extreme Ownership GO Language Harry’s and Flamingo Jesse Sanders The Miracle Morning React Hooks Apple Products Sean Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work Discount Code for Aurelia in Action -  hunterpc (40% off Aurelia in Action, all formats) Apple Watch

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Joe Eames Charles Max Wood Chris Ferdinandi Special Guest: Julian Fahrer In this episode, the panel talks with Julian Fahrer who is an online educator and software engineer in San Francisco, California (USA). The panel and the guest talk about containers, tooling, Docker, Kubernetes, and more. Check out today’s episode! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 1:00 – Chuck: We have today Julian. Julian, please tell us why you are famous? 1:10 – Julian (Guest): I am a software engineer in San Francisco. 1:35 – Chuck: We had you on Elixir Mix before – so here you are! Give us a brief introduction – tell us about the 1:56 – Julian: About 11 hours. You can get it done in about 1 week. It’s a lot to learn. It’s a new paradigm, and I think that’s why people like it. 2:22 – Aimee: How did you dive into Docker? I feel that is like backend space? 2:35 – Julian: I am a full stack engineer and I have been in backend, too. 3:10 – Aimee: I know that someone has been in-charge of our Dev Ops process until the first job I’ve had. When there is a problem in the deployment, I want to unblock myself and not wait for someone else. I think it’s a valuable topic. Why Docker over the other options? 3:58 – Julian: Let’s talk about what Docker is first? 4:12 – Chuck. 4:23 – Julian: Containers are a technology for us to run applications in isolation from each other. Julian talks in-detail about what contains are, what they do, he gives examples, and more. Check it out here! 5:27 – Chuck: Makes sense to me. I think it’s interesting that you are talking about the dependencies. Because of the way the Docker works it’s consistent across all of your applications. 5:59 – Julian. Yes, exactly. Julian talks about containers some more! 6:56 – Chuck asks a question about the container, Docker, and others. 7:03 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about your company’s running operating system, and what you want to use – basically everything runs in the container... 7:30 – Chuck: This short-circuits a lot of it. 7:46 – Guest. 8:00 – Chuck: People will use Docker if your employer mandates it. Is there a learning curve and how do you adapt it within the person’s company? 8:25 – Guest. 8:52 – Aimee: We are using it, too. 8:57 – Guest: Awesome! 9:03 – Aimee: The only downfall is that if you have people who are NOT familiar with it – then it’s a black box for us. We can’t troubleshoot it ourselves. I want to be able to unblock from our end w/o having to go to someone else. That’s my only issue I’ve been having. 10:03 – Guest: I want to see that tooling to be honest. 10:12 – Aimee: Can you talk about how Civil and Docker work together? 10:19 – Guest: Yes! Julian answers the question. 10:56 – Chuck: How much work it is to get a Docker file to get up and running? How much work would it take? 11:18 – Guest: For the development side in about an hour or two – this is if you understand it already. Putting it into production that’s a different story b/c there is a million different ways to do it. It’s hard to put a time on that. 12:24 – Chuck: Let’s assume they have the basic knowledge (they get how server setup takes place) is this something you could figure out in a day or so? 12:47 – Guest: If you have touched Docker then you can do it in a day; if never then not really. 13:02 – Guest: There might be some stones you will fall over. 13:39 – Panel: The part of the learning curve would be... 13:52 – Guest: The idea behind the container is that the container should be disposable. You could throw it away and then start a new one and it’s fresh and clean. Guest continues with his answer. 15:20 – Chuck: I have seen people do this with their database engine. If you need to upgrade your database then they grab their container... 15:55 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about setting it up - its provided in the container and... 16:09 – Chuck asks a question. 16:17 – Guest: For production, I would go with a hosted database like RJS, Azure, or other options. Guest continues. 17:13 – Chuck. 17:20 – Guest: If it dies then you need to... 17:30 – Chuck: We talked about an idea of these containers being something you can hand around in your development team. Chuck asks a question. 17:50 – Guest answers the question. He talks about tooling, containers, web frontend, and more. 18:48 – Guest asks Aimee a question: Are you using Compost? 18:50 – Aimee: I don’t know b/c that is a black box for us. I don’t know much about our Docker setup. 19:00 – Guest to Aimee: Can I ask you some questions? 19:14 – Guest is giving Aimee some hypothetical situations and asks what their process is like. 19:32 – Aimee answers the question. 20:11 – Guest: You have customizing tooling to be able to do x, y, and z. 20:25 – Aimee: They have hit a wall, but it’s frustrating. Our frontend and our backend are different. We are getting 500’s and it’s a black box for us. It’s the way that ops have it setup. I hate having to go to them for them to unblock us. 21:07 – Chuck: I have been hearing about Kubernetes. When will you start to see that it pays off to use it? 21:20 – Guest answers the question. 22:17 – If I have a simple app on a few different machines and front end and job servers I may not need Kubernetes. But if I have a lot of things that it depends on then I will need it? 22:35 – Guest: Yes. 22:40 – Chuck: What are the steps to using it? 22:45 – Guest: Step #1 you install it. The guest goes through the different steps to use Docker. 25:23 – Aimee: It makes sense that your UI and your database don’t live in the same container, but what about your API and your database should that be separate? 25:40 – Guest: Yes they should be separate. 26:09 – Chuck: What has your experience been with Docker – AJ or Chris? 26:17 – Panel: I have used a little bit at work and so far it’s been a black box for me. I like the IDEA of it, but I probably need to take Julian’s course to learn more about it! (Aimee agrees!) One thing I would love (from your perspective, Julian) – if I wanted to get started with this (and say I have not worked with containers before) where would I start? 28:22 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 29:20 – Guest: Good question. You don’t have to be an expert (to use Docker), but you have to be comfortable with the command line, though. 30:17 – Panel: Is there a dummy practice within your course? 30:27 – Julian: We run our own web server and... 30:44 – Panel: I need to check out your course! 31:04 – Guest: It is some time investment, but it’s saved me so much time already so it makes it really worth it. 31:38 – Panel: You are a version behind on Ruby. 31:46 – Guest: ...I just want to make code and not worry about that. 32:04 – Chuck: Updating your server – you would update Ruby and reinstall your gems and hope that they were all up-to-date. Now you don’t have to do it that way anymore. 32:37 – Guest: You know it will behave the same way. 32:48 – Guest: I have some experience with Docker. I understand its value. I guess I will share my frustrations. Not in Docker itself, but the fact that there is a need for Docker... 35:06 – Chuck. 35:12 – Panel: We need someone to come up with... 35:40 – Panel: It’s not standard JavaScript. 35:51 – Chuck: One question: How do you setup multiple stages of Docker? 36:12 – Guest: The recommended way is to have the same Docker file used in the development sate and through to production. So that way it’s the same image. 37:00 – Panel: ...you must do your entire configuration via the environmental variables. 37:29 – Chuck asks a question. 37:36 – Panel: If you are using Heroku or Circle CI...there is a page... 38:11 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth. 39:17 – Chuck: Gottcha. 39:18 – Guest. 39:52 – Chuck: I have seen systems that have hyberized things like using Chef Solo and... You do your basic setup then use Chef Solo – that doesn’t’ make sense to me. Have you seen people use this setup before? 40:20 – Guest: I guess I wouldn’t do it. 40:30 – Chuck. 40:36 – Guest: Only reason I would do that is that it works across many different platforms. If it makes your setup easier then go for it. 41:14 – Chuck: Docker Hub – I want to mention that. How robust is that? Can you put private images up there? 41:38 – Guest: You can go TOTALLY nuts with it. You could have private and public images. Also, your own version. Under the hood it’s called container registry. Yeah, you can change images, too. 42:22 – Chuck: Should I use container registry or a CI system to build the Docker system and use it somewhere else? 42:35 – Guest. 43:24 – Chuck: Where can people find your Docker course? 43:30 – Guest: LEARN DOCKER ONLINE! We are restructuring the prices. Make sure to check it out. 44:05 – Chuck: Picks! Where can people find you online? 44:14 – Guest: Twitter! eBook – Rails and Docker! Code Tails IO! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Circle CI Twitter – Circle CI Heroku Surge.sh Kubernetes.io Berg Design Rian Rietveld PickleJS Soft Cover.io Ebook – boilerplate EMx 010 Episode with Julian Fahrer Learn Docker Indie Hacker – Julian Fahrer LinkedIn – Julian Fahrer GitHub – Julian Fahrer Twitter – Julian Fahrer Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly   Picks: AJ Zermatt Resort Heber Area Aimee Surge.sh Chris BergDesign React, WP, and a11y gomakethings.com Joe Docker Videos by Dan Wahlin Rock Climbing/Indoor Rock Climbing Charles Extreme Ownership - Book Playing DND Julian PickleJS Postive Intelligence

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Joe Eames Charles Max Wood Chris Ferdinandi Special Guest: Julian Fahrer In this episode, the panel talks with Julian Fahrer who is an online educator and software engineer in San Francisco, California (USA). The panel and the guest talk about containers, tooling, Docker, Kubernetes, and more. Check out today’s episode! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 1:00 – Chuck: We have today Julian. Julian, please tell us why you are famous? 1:10 – Julian (Guest): I am a software engineer in San Francisco. 1:35 – Chuck: We had you on Elixir Mix before – so here you are! Give us a brief introduction – tell us about the 1:56 – Julian: About 11 hours. You can get it done in about 1 week. It’s a lot to learn. It’s a new paradigm, and I think that’s why people like it. 2:22 – Aimee: How did you dive into Docker? I feel that is like backend space? 2:35 – Julian: I am a full stack engineer and I have been in backend, too. 3:10 – Aimee: I know that someone has been in-charge of our Dev Ops process until the first job I’ve had. When there is a problem in the deployment, I want to unblock myself and not wait for someone else. I think it’s a valuable topic. Why Docker over the other options? 3:58 – Julian: Let’s talk about what Docker is first? 4:12 – Chuck. 4:23 – Julian: Containers are a technology for us to run applications in isolation from each other. Julian talks in-detail about what contains are, what they do, he gives examples, and more. Check it out here! 5:27 – Chuck: Makes sense to me. I think it’s interesting that you are talking about the dependencies. Because of the way the Docker works it’s consistent across all of your applications. 5:59 – Julian. Yes, exactly. Julian talks about containers some more! 6:56 – Chuck asks a question about the container, Docker, and others. 7:03 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about your company’s running operating system, and what you want to use – basically everything runs in the container... 7:30 – Chuck: This short-circuits a lot of it. 7:46 – Guest. 8:00 – Chuck: People will use Docker if your employer mandates it. Is there a learning curve and how do you adapt it within the person’s company? 8:25 – Guest. 8:52 – Aimee: We are using it, too. 8:57 – Guest: Awesome! 9:03 – Aimee: The only downfall is that if you have people who are NOT familiar with it – then it’s a black box for us. We can’t troubleshoot it ourselves. I want to be able to unblock from our end w/o having to go to someone else. That’s my only issue I’ve been having. 10:03 – Guest: I want to see that tooling to be honest. 10:12 – Aimee: Can you talk about how Civil and Docker work together? 10:19 – Guest: Yes! Julian answers the question. 10:56 – Chuck: How much work it is to get a Docker file to get up and running? How much work would it take? 11:18 – Guest: For the development side in about an hour or two – this is if you understand it already. Putting it into production that’s a different story b/c there is a million different ways to do it. It’s hard to put a time on that. 12:24 – Chuck: Let’s assume they have the basic knowledge (they get how server setup takes place) is this something you could figure out in a day or so? 12:47 – Guest: If you have touched Docker then you can do it in a day; if never then not really. 13:02 – Guest: There might be some stones you will fall over. 13:39 – Panel: The part of the learning curve would be... 13:52 – Guest: The idea behind the container is that the container should be disposable. You could throw it away and then start a new one and it’s fresh and clean. Guest continues with his answer. 15:20 – Chuck: I have seen people do this with their database engine. If you need to upgrade your database then they grab their container... 15:55 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about setting it up - its provided in the container and... 16:09 – Chuck asks a question. 16:17 – Guest: For production, I would go with a hosted database like RJS, Azure, or other options. Guest continues. 17:13 – Chuck. 17:20 – Guest: If it dies then you need to... 17:30 – Chuck: We talked about an idea of these containers being something you can hand around in your development team. Chuck asks a question. 17:50 – Guest answers the question. He talks about tooling, containers, web frontend, and more. 18:48 – Guest asks Aimee a question: Are you using Compost? 18:50 – Aimee: I don’t know b/c that is a black box for us. I don’t know much about our Docker setup. 19:00 – Guest to Aimee: Can I ask you some questions? 19:14 – Guest is giving Aimee some hypothetical situations and asks what their process is like. 19:32 – Aimee answers the question. 20:11 – Guest: You have customizing tooling to be able to do x, y, and z. 20:25 – Aimee: They have hit a wall, but it’s frustrating. Our frontend and our backend are different. We are getting 500’s and it’s a black box for us. It’s the way that ops have it setup. I hate having to go to them for them to unblock us. 21:07 – Chuck: I have been hearing about Kubernetes. When will you start to see that it pays off to use it? 21:20 – Guest answers the question. 22:17 – If I have a simple app on a few different machines and front end and job servers I may not need Kubernetes. But if I have a lot of things that it depends on then I will need it? 22:35 – Guest: Yes. 22:40 – Chuck: What are the steps to using it? 22:45 – Guest: Step #1 you install it. The guest goes through the different steps to use Docker. 25:23 – Aimee: It makes sense that your UI and your database don’t live in the same container, but what about your API and your database should that be separate? 25:40 – Guest: Yes they should be separate. 26:09 – Chuck: What has your experience been with Docker – AJ or Chris? 26:17 – Panel: I have used a little bit at work and so far it’s been a black box for me. I like the IDEA of it, but I probably need to take Julian’s course to learn more about it! (Aimee agrees!) One thing I would love (from your perspective, Julian) – if I wanted to get started with this (and say I have not worked with containers before) where would I start? 28:22 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 29:20 – Guest: Good question. You don’t have to be an expert (to use Docker), but you have to be comfortable with the command line, though. 30:17 – Panel: Is there a dummy practice within your course? 30:27 – Julian: We run our own web server and... 30:44 – Panel: I need to check out your course! 31:04 – Guest: It is some time investment, but it’s saved me so much time already so it makes it really worth it. 31:38 – Panel: You are a version behind on Ruby. 31:46 – Guest: ...I just want to make code and not worry about that. 32:04 – Chuck: Updating your server – you would update Ruby and reinstall your gems and hope that they were all up-to-date. Now you don’t have to do it that way anymore. 32:37 – Guest: You know it will behave the same way. 32:48 – Guest: I have some experience with Docker. I understand its value. I guess I will share my frustrations. Not in Docker itself, but the fact that there is a need for Docker... 35:06 – Chuck. 35:12 – Panel: We need someone to come up with... 35:40 – Panel: It’s not standard JavaScript. 35:51 – Chuck: One question: How do you setup multiple stages of Docker? 36:12 – Guest: The recommended way is to have the same Docker file used in the development sate and through to production. So that way it’s the same image. 37:00 – Panel: ...you must do your entire configuration via the environmental variables. 37:29 – Chuck asks a question. 37:36 – Panel: If you are using Heroku or Circle CI...there is a page... 38:11 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth. 39:17 – Chuck: Gottcha. 39:18 – Guest. 39:52 – Chuck: I have seen systems that have hyberized things like using Chef Solo and... You do your basic setup then use Chef Solo – that doesn’t’ make sense to me. Have you seen people use this setup before? 40:20 – Guest: I guess I wouldn’t do it. 40:30 – Chuck. 40:36 – Guest: Only reason I would do that is that it works across many different platforms. If it makes your setup easier then go for it. 41:14 – Chuck: Docker Hub – I want to mention that. How robust is that? Can you put private images up there? 41:38 – Guest: You can go TOTALLY nuts with it. You could have private and public images. Also, your own version. Under the hood it’s called container registry. Yeah, you can change images, too. 42:22 – Chuck: Should I use container registry or a CI system to build the Docker system and use it somewhere else? 42:35 – Guest. 43:24 – Chuck: Where can people find your Docker course? 43:30 – Guest: LEARN DOCKER ONLINE! We are restructuring the prices. Make sure to check it out. 44:05 – Chuck: Picks! Where can people find you online? 44:14 – Guest: Twitter! eBook – Rails and Docker! Code Tails IO! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Circle CI Twitter – Circle CI Heroku Surge.sh Kubernetes.io Berg Design Rian Rietveld PickleJS Soft Cover.io Ebook – boilerplate EMx 010 Episode with Julian Fahrer Learn Docker Indie Hacker – Julian Fahrer LinkedIn – Julian Fahrer GitHub – Julian Fahrer Twitter – Julian Fahrer Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly   Picks: AJ Zermatt Resort Heber Area Aimee Surge.sh Chris BergDesign React, WP, and a11y gomakethings.com Joe Docker Videos by Dan Wahlin Rock Climbing/Indoor Rock Climbing Charles Extreme Ownership - Book Playing DND Julian PickleJS Postive Intelligence

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Joe Eames Charles Max Wood Chris Ferdinandi Special Guest: Julian Fahrer In this episode, the panel talks with Julian Fahrer who is an online educator and software engineer in San Francisco, California (USA). The panel and the guest talk about containers, tooling, Docker, Kubernetes, and more. Check out today’s episode! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 1:00 – Chuck: We have today Julian. Julian, please tell us why you are famous? 1:10 – Julian (Guest): I am a software engineer in San Francisco. 1:35 – Chuck: We had you on Elixir Mix before – so here you are! Give us a brief introduction – tell us about the 1:56 – Julian: About 11 hours. You can get it done in about 1 week. It’s a lot to learn. It’s a new paradigm, and I think that’s why people like it. 2:22 – Aimee: How did you dive into Docker? I feel that is like backend space? 2:35 – Julian: I am a full stack engineer and I have been in backend, too. 3:10 – Aimee: I know that someone has been in-charge of our Dev Ops process until the first job I’ve had. When there is a problem in the deployment, I want to unblock myself and not wait for someone else. I think it’s a valuable topic. Why Docker over the other options? 3:58 – Julian: Let’s talk about what Docker is first? 4:12 – Chuck. 4:23 – Julian: Containers are a technology for us to run applications in isolation from each other. Julian talks in-detail about what contains are, what they do, he gives examples, and more. Check it out here! 5:27 – Chuck: Makes sense to me. I think it’s interesting that you are talking about the dependencies. Because of the way the Docker works it’s consistent across all of your applications. 5:59 – Julian. Yes, exactly. Julian talks about containers some more! 6:56 – Chuck asks a question about the container, Docker, and others. 7:03 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about your company’s running operating system, and what you want to use – basically everything runs in the container... 7:30 – Chuck: This short-circuits a lot of it. 7:46 – Guest. 8:00 – Chuck: People will use Docker if your employer mandates it. Is there a learning curve and how do you adapt it within the person’s company? 8:25 – Guest. 8:52 – Aimee: We are using it, too. 8:57 – Guest: Awesome! 9:03 – Aimee: The only downfall is that if you have people who are NOT familiar with it – then it’s a black box for us. We can’t troubleshoot it ourselves. I want to be able to unblock from our end w/o having to go to someone else. That’s my only issue I’ve been having. 10:03 – Guest: I want to see that tooling to be honest. 10:12 – Aimee: Can you talk about how Civil and Docker work together? 10:19 – Guest: Yes! Julian answers the question. 10:56 – Chuck: How much work it is to get a Docker file to get up and running? How much work would it take? 11:18 – Guest: For the development side in about an hour or two – this is if you understand it already. Putting it into production that’s a different story b/c there is a million different ways to do it. It’s hard to put a time on that. 12:24 – Chuck: Let’s assume they have the basic knowledge (they get how server setup takes place) is this something you could figure out in a day or so? 12:47 – Guest: If you have touched Docker then you can do it in a day; if never then not really. 13:02 – Guest: There might be some stones you will fall over. 13:39 – Panel: The part of the learning curve would be... 13:52 – Guest: The idea behind the container is that the container should be disposable. You could throw it away and then start a new one and it’s fresh and clean. Guest continues with his answer. 15:20 – Chuck: I have seen people do this with their database engine. If you need to upgrade your database then they grab their container... 15:55 – Guest: You don’t have to worry about setting it up - its provided in the container and... 16:09 – Chuck asks a question. 16:17 – Guest: For production, I would go with a hosted database like RJS, Azure, or other options. Guest continues. 17:13 – Chuck. 17:20 – Guest: If it dies then you need to... 17:30 – Chuck: We talked about an idea of these containers being something you can hand around in your development team. Chuck asks a question. 17:50 – Guest answers the question. He talks about tooling, containers, web frontend, and more. 18:48 – Guest asks Aimee a question: Are you using Compost? 18:50 – Aimee: I don’t know b/c that is a black box for us. I don’t know much about our Docker setup. 19:00 – Guest to Aimee: Can I ask you some questions? 19:14 – Guest is giving Aimee some hypothetical situations and asks what their process is like. 19:32 – Aimee answers the question. 20:11 – Guest: You have customizing tooling to be able to do x, y, and z. 20:25 – Aimee: They have hit a wall, but it’s frustrating. Our frontend and our backend are different. We are getting 500’s and it’s a black box for us. It’s the way that ops have it setup. I hate having to go to them for them to unblock us. 21:07 – Chuck: I have been hearing about Kubernetes. When will you start to see that it pays off to use it? 21:20 – Guest answers the question. 22:17 – If I have a simple app on a few different machines and front end and job servers I may not need Kubernetes. But if I have a lot of things that it depends on then I will need it? 22:35 – Guest: Yes. 22:40 – Chuck: What are the steps to using it? 22:45 – Guest: Step #1 you install it. The guest goes through the different steps to use Docker. 25:23 – Aimee: It makes sense that your UI and your database don’t live in the same container, but what about your API and your database should that be separate? 25:40 – Guest: Yes they should be separate. 26:09 – Chuck: What has your experience been with Docker – AJ or Chris? 26:17 – Panel: I have used a little bit at work and so far it’s been a black box for me. I like the IDEA of it, but I probably need to take Julian’s course to learn more about it! (Aimee agrees!) One thing I would love (from your perspective, Julian) – if I wanted to get started with this (and say I have not worked with containers before) where would I start? 28:22 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 29:20 – Guest: Good question. You don’t have to be an expert (to use Docker), but you have to be comfortable with the command line, though. 30:17 – Panel: Is there a dummy practice within your course? 30:27 – Julian: We run our own web server and... 30:44 – Panel: I need to check out your course! 31:04 – Guest: It is some time investment, but it’s saved me so much time already so it makes it really worth it. 31:38 – Panel: You are a version behind on Ruby. 31:46 – Guest: ...I just want to make code and not worry about that. 32:04 – Chuck: Updating your server – you would update Ruby and reinstall your gems and hope that they were all up-to-date. Now you don’t have to do it that way anymore. 32:37 – Guest: You know it will behave the same way. 32:48 – Guest: I have some experience with Docker. I understand its value. I guess I will share my frustrations. Not in Docker itself, but the fact that there is a need for Docker... 35:06 – Chuck. 35:12 – Panel: We need someone to come up with... 35:40 – Panel: It’s not standard JavaScript. 35:51 – Chuck: One question: How do you setup multiple stages of Docker? 36:12 – Guest: The recommended way is to have the same Docker file used in the development sate and through to production. So that way it’s the same image. 37:00 – Panel: ...you must do your entire configuration via the environmental variables. 37:29 – Chuck asks a question. 37:36 – Panel: If you are using Heroku or Circle CI...there is a page... 38:11 – Guest and Chuck go back-and-forth. 39:17 – Chuck: Gottcha. 39:18 – Guest. 39:52 – Chuck: I have seen systems that have hyberized things like using Chef Solo and... You do your basic setup then use Chef Solo – that doesn’t’ make sense to me. Have you seen people use this setup before? 40:20 – Guest: I guess I wouldn’t do it. 40:30 – Chuck. 40:36 – Guest: Only reason I would do that is that it works across many different platforms. If it makes your setup easier then go for it. 41:14 – Chuck: Docker Hub – I want to mention that. How robust is that? Can you put private images up there? 41:38 – Guest: You can go TOTALLY nuts with it. You could have private and public images. Also, your own version. Under the hood it’s called container registry. Yeah, you can change images, too. 42:22 – Chuck: Should I use container registry or a CI system to build the Docker system and use it somewhere else? 42:35 – Guest. 43:24 – Chuck: Where can people find your Docker course? 43:30 – Guest: LEARN DOCKER ONLINE! We are restructuring the prices. Make sure to check it out. 44:05 – Chuck: Picks! Where can people find you online? 44:14 – Guest: Twitter! eBook – Rails and Docker! Code Tails IO! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Circle CI Twitter – Circle CI Heroku Surge.sh Kubernetes.io Berg Design Rian Rietveld PickleJS Soft Cover.io Ebook – boilerplate EMx 010 Episode with Julian Fahrer Learn Docker Indie Hacker – Julian Fahrer LinkedIn – Julian Fahrer GitHub – Julian Fahrer Twitter – Julian Fahrer Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly   Picks: AJ Zermatt Resort Heber Area Aimee Surge.sh Chris BergDesign React, WP, and a11y gomakethings.com Joe Docker Videos by Dan Wahlin Rock Climbing/Indoor Rock Climbing Charles Extreme Ownership - Book Playing DND Julian PickleJS Postive Intelligence

Dr. Sheila Gephart. Photo courtesy of Dr. Sheila Gephart. Episode 8 features Dr. Sheila Gephart, neonatal nurse scientist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing. During this episode, Dr. Gephart provides a comprehensive overview of GutCheckNEC, a first-of-its-kind, 10-item risk assessment that she developed for the early detection of NEC in premature infants. She discusses: * Her transition from bedside nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit to her development of GutCheckNEC—what she calls a “real-time, early warning score for NEC,”* The 10 risk factors that make up GutCheckNEC, their associated symptoms, and how risk is communicated,* The development of NEC Zero, an intervention that has evolved out of the Unit NEC rate component of GutCheckNEC,* The strength of evidence for the use of probiotics in the prevention of NEC, and* The importance of shared decision making in the NICU. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 8 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Sheila Gephart, neonatal nurse scientist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing, who developed a first-of-its-kind, 10-item risk assessment for the early detection of NEC in premature infants called GutCheckNEC. During our conversation, she will discuss in varying degrees: Her transition from bedside nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit to her development of GutCheckNEC—what she calls a “real-time, early warning score for NEC,” The 10 risk factors that make up the acronym GutCheck and their associated symptoms How risk is communicated, The significance of the Unit NEC rate component in GutCheckNEC, and how that led her to develop the NEC Zero Intervention, The strength of evidence for the use of probiotics in the prevention of NEC, and The importance of shared decision making in the NICU. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. Hi, welcome to the show. This is my guest, Dr. Sheila Gephart. She is a neonatal nurse scientist from the University of Arizona College of Nursing. Hi, Sheila, how are you? DR. SHEILA GEPHART, GUEST: Good, thank you, Stephanie! STEPHANIE: Thank you! So, we have had more than one person mention you on our show in previous episodes, so I’m thrilled to have you join me today and would love to let you talk a little bit about your background and how you got involved with Necrotizing Enterocolitis. DR. GEPHART: Well, I am very thankful to be asked to be on the broadcast today, and I will tell you that I started my interest in Necrotizing Enterocolitis risk understanding when I was a bedside nurse. I have been a nurse since 1997, and I worked in the neonatal intensive care unit as a bedside nurse taking care of babies, and many of them were really convalescing. They were doing well, but then we had a subset of babies, or a clump of babies, that all developed this horrible disease within about three weeks. And now I know the clustering of NEC is very common, or not common, but it does happen. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: But then I didn’t really understand a whole lot about the disease, but I was very concerned because I realized that we had been concerned about these babies, as nurses, for hours to days before the actual diagnosis of NEC was made. So what happened at that point was I had the role of getting into the data for our NICU. I collected the data and reported the data for a large registry called the Vermont Oxford Network. And so I was focused on looking at the baby’s case and looking at the research and looking at the data, and I realized that there was a constellation of risk factors that kind of coalesced for these kids, that all of these things seemed to snowball with these babies who developed NEC, and we really had no context for talking to physicians to communicate why we were concerned. We were using terms like something’s not right with this baby, and from there, it really launched me into the next five years of understanding more about NEC risk. STEPHANIE: Okay. And can you talk to me a little bit about the protocol – I think it’s a protocol -- that you’ve developed called GutCheckNEC and how you got from starting to look at the data to compiling and understanding this set of risk factors? DR. GEPHART: Sure, I’m happy to talk about GutCheckNEC. So, being a bedside nurse, sometimes I would work in the middle of the night, and I needed a strategy for putting things together so I could remember them. And when I thought about NEC, I thought about well, we just need to check the gut. So GutCheck was kind of how it organized these risk factors, and I wrote GutCheck in a line straight down, and I remember one day I was at a delivery, and it was about three in the morning and it was taking a while for the baby to be born. And I was trying to understand all of the research that I had been reading about NEC risk and so what I did was I write GutCheck straight down on a napkin and horizontally for each letter I wrote the risk factor that was associated with that letter, and so that helped me organize what I was reading in the literature. But really it started out as just wanting to develop a risk assessment so nurses could really know what the risk factors were, physicians could know what the risk factors were, but then also put the symptoms in the context of what was going on with the baby. So that’s where I started, but then I went into a Ph.D. program, and in science you have to be very systematic. And so my literature review was the systematic beginning. But then what I did was I asked neonatal NEC experts how relevant they thought the different risk factors were to actually developing NEC. So I asked them to rate the relevance, and we went through three rounds of surveys to determine if we had the right list of risk factors, so that was very useful. We got rid of some, we kept most of them and added a few. And then, the next step was I got a very large dataset from a group of neonatal practices here in the US called The Pediatrics Medical Group, and I built, this is research speak, but I will tell you that I threw all of the risk factors into a statistical model to see what fell out as the most important, and the way statistical models work is that they keep the most important things that account for most of the explanation for what you’re looking at, and they get rid of everything that’s not quite so important. STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: So we went from like 33 risk factors down to essentially ten risk factors for GutCheckNEC. And then we tested it to see if it actually discriminated or told the difference between the kids that got NEC and the ones who didn’t, and it showed pretty good discrimination, or separation of groups, for the kids who had the most severe NEC compared to those who didn’t get NEC at all. STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: So that was the work we did, and now we’re taking this ten item tool and we’re trying to combine it with clinical science so that we can really have a real time early warning score for NEC. STEPHANIE: Great. Can you sort of go down the list just for parents that might be listening or family members if they’re seeing any of these risk factors? DR. GEPHART: Sure, I’d be happy to do that. The items that we kept in GutCheckNEC, like I said, there are two versions. There’s the one before the statistical modeling and then there is the one after, and the one that’s before is actually more comprehensive. And if you think about just writing GutCheck down linearly, you think for G, you’ve got growth restricted, so they’re born really small for gestational age, you’ve got gestational age. Those are the main ones that I always thought of with the G. And then with U, the one item that the experts recommended adding was the unit NEC rate, because infants who are in units with high NEC rates are more likely to get NEC, and so I didn’t understand that finding. I’ll talk about that in a minute, about the unit NEC rate. T, if you talk about T, transfusion. There is an association that we see in lots of studies with transfusion and NEC. We don’t see any evidence of causation, but the studies aren’t designed to show us that, so there is a temporal relationship or a time based relationship between transfusion and the most severe NEC. That said, there is a lot of babies who get transfusions and don’t get NEC. So that’s what makes it hard. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: What else goes with T? I’m going to stick to the final version, okay, as we think through the acronym. And then for C, signs of infection, so chorioamnionitis is when mom has a really bad uterine infection prior to the baby being born. Some preterm moms have this because—we don’t know exactly why they have this, but chorioamnionitis, particularly if it’s invasive, if it’s really severe, that is a risk factor. Also cardiac kids are going to be more at risk, so if you think of the C, kids who have had heart disease or heart malformations, particularly those that are low oxygenation kinds of defects… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..and there are some more for C but I don’t recall exactly what those were right now, but I’m just going to stick—oh, culture proven infection. That also goes with C. So if babies have had sepsis, particularly more than once, which sometimes these really early babies do get multiple bouts of infection, that is a risk factor. So that stayed in my model long term. Enteral feeding is definitely a risk factor that all babies are hopefully exposed to because we want them to be fed. That I understand a lot more now about the details of enteral feeding, and that particularly if the enteral feeding is formula, that is very important. We know formula is a high risk factor. There is a whole slew of argument about cow’s milk based fortifiers that go with that as well, so there is some argument about how extensive of a risk factor that is, but formula and enteral feedings certainly. And then the H, I skipped the H. That would be hypotension treated with medicines to bring that blood pressure up. So hypotension is low blood pressure. A lot of preemies have episodes of low blood pressure, but we know that the most sick are going to be hemodynamically unstable which means that their ability to regulate their blood pressure and keep their heart rate within a good level is not quite as solid as a kid who doesn’t have those light fluctuations, so that was a risk factor that did stay. Also race. Race stayed. The experts did not think that race was a risk factor, and they were pretty, if you remember the stages that we used to develop GutCheckNEC, we asked experts about how relevant they thought these risk factors were and they really didn’t think race was relevant. But it was so strong in the model, I couldn’t get rid of it. So if a baby is either black or Hispanic, that puts them at higher risk. Now, the reason for that we think, we don’t really know exactly why that stayed in the model, however, we know that black babies are very much less likely to get human milk… STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: ..than white babies, and that is something we can fix. So that’s really important. As I went through these risk factors that are in GutCheckNEC, I started to separate in my mind what’s modifiable, which is what of these can we do something about and what is non-modifiable? And what I saw really was quite a few of these things were modifiable that stayed in GutCheckNEC. You can do a query online for GutCheckNEC and it will pop up the actual, you’ll be able to find GutCheckNEC in the literature. It’s published so anybody can find it. But the thing that was so interesting to me, and I’m probably going to go off a little bit here, is that the NICU NEC rate consumed a huge amount of the variants in this tool which means that if we were to say that these items explained an infant’s risk for NEC. The NICU NEC rate explains three times as much as gestational age, three times as much as transfusion. So it was so important, and what we saw in the sample, we had 284 NICUs in the sample that we used to build GutCheckNEC and to verify it, of those 284 NICUs, we saw huge variance in NEC rates. So that was pretty concerning, and it wasn’t something that I went into the research expecting or looking for really even because I had read 70 papers about NEC risk, and invariably, they would start with Necrotizing Enterocolitis is a disease that we have very few answers for. We don’t really know why it occurs, but we know that premature babies are at risk and that is the most consistent risk factor across studies. So prematurity. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Everybody blamed it on prematurity and low birth rate, and very few said anything about—oh, and we know, actually we have about six large studies from 20 years ago that show that unit NEC rate is consistently an issue. So that is something that I didn’t expect to find, but I found, and then I was able to go back into the literature and find other studies that verified it. STEPHANIE: Excellent. That’s a phenomenal amount of information, and I think that’s really great for parents going into the NICU to have in their minds. DR. GEPHART: And I think, I apologize to the parents for throwing out all these terms, but I know that you’re smart, and you can handle it. Okay, I’m just going to give you credit, because if you’re NICU parents, you’re super savvy, and you know how to find information. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: But one of the things we were really concerned about with NEC is how we communicate risk to parents and how parents are really the eyes and ears of understanding what’s going on with that baby just like the nurses are. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: And they are really better situated, honestly, to be able to identify the trends in their own kid, because that’s all they’re worried about. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: They’re not worried about the delivery down the hallway or all these other things, they are the expert. So one thing I’ve been working on trying to frame this message for parents as partners on the team looking for signs of any kind of complication and I think if they know to speak up. To keep track and to speak up if things don’t seem right, and I’ve heard many physicians actually say that it’s the parents indication of concern that will make them stop, and think slower, about what’s going on with that baby. So either the nurses concern or the parents concern, because often the physician, as excellent as they are, may not be right at that bedside… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..at that moment when something is changing. STEPHANIE: Right. Right And we did have an experience between Morgan’s surgeries where there was a concern in the NICU, and I can’t even remember who had mentioned it at rounds of attempting to give him—I don’t know if it was formula or breast milk—but giving him something that the surgeon had previously not agreed to—and it was a whole day of me trying to get in contact with the surgeon and making sure that nobody did anything until the surgeon had said yes or no. And he called me back from outside of the surgical room and said if anything like this happens, call me, I will call you back. So we definitely found that the doctors are very receptive, and especially when you raise an alarm, and to give people concrete things to look at for their babies I think is a wonderful tool. So thank you for sharing this. DR. GEPHART: Absolutely! And I can say that within the next few weeks, probably by the time this podcast is released, our website will be active, and on that website are parent materials that we’ve created that are designed to help them. Anyone can download these parent materials, they can use them in their NICU, and they are basically pamphlets to talk about things to watch for, what you can do to prevent NEC, and what the signs are, and a little bit about what happens afterwards. Because you know the first-hand experience of how different your life is… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..coordinating care for a child who’s had NEC. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So the long term impacts of dealing with life after NEC, I know Laura Martin was on the broadcast… STEPHANIE: Yes. DR. GEPHART: ..recently… STEPHANIE: Yes. DR. GEPHART: ..and her story has been such an important part of my development as a nurse scientist. Think beyond just the NICU stay, to think about how NEC impacts these kids forever. STEPHANIE: Right, right, and we’ve been very lucky that Morgan has had (knock on wood) minimal residual effects. We see a little bit, but I mean, I looked at Laura’s story and they are doing a phenomenal job with him. He is a miracle. DR. GEPHART: Yeah, Joseph is pretty awesome. I haven’t had the chance to meet him in person yet, but Laura and I collaborated to write up his story, and that paper is going to be coming out in the next couple weeks in Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing, and it is a testament to his resilience. STEPHANIE: Right. Hers too and her husband’s and the family’s. DR. GEPHART: It’s pretty awesome. STEPHANIE: Definitely send me those links and we can certainly share that with everyone—direct links in the show episode notes. So I’ll ask you, now that GutCheckNEC is I’ll say standardized if that’s a correct term, is there anything that you’re looking towards in your research moving forward from GutCheckNEC? DR. GEPHART: Well, that’s a great question, and GutCheckNEC is a risk assessment, it’s a tool. It fits on one page. We’ve just gone through a process where we’ve added to it a structured communication protocol, so if a NICU wanted to use GutCheckNEC, we would have them complete a request form, and on one side is GutCheckNEC, and on the other side is the structured communication form, which also clues the nurses, the parents for which signs and symptoms to look for and how to communicate it. So that’s easy. So that’s where GutCheckNEC is going. We’re also trying to combine it with clinical science right now, so that’s the analysis I’m working on right now, and I’ve worked with a great collaborator, Sherry Fleiner from the Inner Health to do that work. But beyond that, one of the things with research, you do a project and then you have these findings and then there is something that just kind of nabs at you and it doesn’t fit like you expected it to. And for us, that was the unit NEC rate component of GutCheckNEC that carried so much weight in the score, and it demonstrated across the 284 NICUs how variable NEC rates can be. So what we did next is we asked the question, well, why are they different? Why are the NEC rates different? And what if we did something to try to standardize prevention care? So there are a couple of main things that prevent NEC. One is human milk—very, very important starting with colostrum for oral care. The other thing is standardized feeding protocols, stewarding antibiotics, and I can kind of get into more detail there, and then there is a lot of controversy about transfusions. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So those components, those four things plus a strategy for early recognition, we’ve put those components into an intervention we call NEC Zero, and the name of it is designed to convey that we’re hoping to get NEC to zero rate. Now, this is an audacious goal. But why set goals if they’re not crazy? This is an audacious goal, but it was not my idea. There was an editor for Journal of Perinatology, his name is Jonathan Swanson, and he wrote a paper the year that I finished my dissertation, so I think that was in 2012, it might have been 2013, and the title of that paper was “Can We Get NEC to Zero”? And if you ask scientists this and clinicians this, you will hear a lot of concern that this is an audacious goal. Like of course, we’re not going to get NEC to zero, we don’t even know what causes it. However, we do know some things that consistently reduce the risk for NEC. So human milk is, like I said, those five components, but human milk is so primary. So now we’re trying to put those interventions together, make them implementable so that people in the NICU in Delaware could implement them with the same consistency and clarity that people in Texas could do. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So that bundle of practices is NEC Zero. So the process for NEC Zero right now where we’re at in the project is that we’ve gone through kind of an expert process of refining the recommendations. So we’ve gone through that, we need to publish that, but we’ve got them. We had a really great expert group of almost 20 people, and four of those people were parents. Laura Martin was on that group. So we’ve got the recommendations, now we’re trying to break those recommendations into implementable steps, and we’re creating tool kit products to go with the NEC Zero intervention. So pieces of that are— GutCheckNEC is definitely a primary component of that. Frankly, GutCheckNEC has the least strong evidence of any of the components in the tool kit. But it’s something that is actionable, it’s something that we can use to monitor, and we know that monitoring and evaluation is a key component of implementation success for anything. So that’s where we’re at right now is we’re working on NEC Zero. STEPHANIE: Great, that sounds excellent. Do you have a projection of when people might see this? You said you’re looking to get it published, or the first stages of it getting published? DR. GEPHART: Right. We’re working on refining the recommendations really in terms of publishing any sort of a recommendation list or a guideline. They carry much more weight if you have the authority of a professional organization behind them. So our strategy right now is to try to link up with some professional organizations and see if we can get some endorsements for them. So if any of your listeners are prominent members of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Neonatal Nursing, The Academy for Breastfeeding Medicine—any of those groups would be excellent proponents. So we have the recommendations, we have some parent products that will be available, like I said, within a few weeks once our website gets done, and the other pieces of it being available, I will say that we’re testing it right now. So with the testing, there are two things we’re doing. We have the recommendations, we’re asking experts to kind of assign relative importance to the different parts of the intervention, and that score, we’re creating a ten point score for the NEC Zero adherence score, and that’s almost done. And then we’re going to look at relationships between adoption of NEC Zero practices and NEC rates, because we really don’t have a great evidence body for understanding why NEC rates differ so much NICU to NICU. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So this is kind of an effort to add to that body of evidence of understanding why are they different. We don’t know what we’ll find, that’s the beauty of research is you start with a hypothesis, you get your data, you test your hypothesis, and you see how it turns out. STEPHANIE: Excellent. This is great work, Sheila. I mean, it sounds like it’s really sort of simple, but I’m sure it’s not. DR. GEPHART: That’s right! It does kind of sound simple, doesn’t it? STEPHANIE: Or that it maybe should be simple. Hopefully it will be simple, but it sounds like parents in the NICU could really take this information and be able to be confident in their monitoring of their children and really confident in voicing any concerns that they see. DR. GEPHART: Right. STEPHANIE: So I think it’s great. DR. GEPHART: The challenge is that really statistically you’re not going to have a lot of kids get NEC. Even in a high rate NICU, you’re going to have a lot of babies who don’t get it, and a few babies who do. But the outcomes can be so devastating for those few babies. So the simple part is really important, and the other question is do the interventions of NEC Zero affect other outcomes? And really, the answer is yes, because interventions are things like human milk standardized feeding protocols, antibiotic stewardship—those things are good for any baby— STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Any baby! So the good thing is that any NICU clinician can implement those things with relative confidence. Now, the big wildcard here that people don’t agree to consistently is holding feeding during transfusion. So that piece is a little bit controversial, actually it’s a lot controversial right now, but that component—the health system I’m working with has already adopted a practice to do that, so that is part of our bundle, and we’re going to keep it that way, but as we get into the literature about transfusions and NEC, it is somewhat controversial, and the evidence is not really conclusive. STEPHANIE: Right. We actually had an episode with a Dr. Hussain from Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, and in his conversation about transfusion associated NEC, he had mentioned GutCheckNEC. So it does seem to sort of all circle around. DR. GEPHART: It does, and the thing with GutCheckNEC is that transfusions is a risk factor. So in our structured communications protocol, which is coupled with GutCheckNEC, understanding the context of if a baby has been transfused in the last 48 hours, that’s a trigger. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So those two pieces put together do heighten our awareness of what a baby could be at risk for. STEPHANIE: This was a really great conversation, Sheila. I really appreciate you sharing all of this. A lot of this, even though I have done a lot of research myself is pretty new in this context to me. So I think it really sort of simplifies some really complicated information. So I appreciate you sharing this with us. DR. GEPHART: Well, it’s been my pleasure and honor to try to simplify things. I have to do that for my own brain. I will say that this is an audacious goal. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: People look at me cross eyed when I say NEC Zero. They think what are you talking about? Is that possible? But I will tell you that there are a handful of NICUs across the country who are getting to zero with their NEC rates, and they are models. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: The things they consistently do are they prioritize human milk feeding, it is critical, they use standardized feeding protocols, they start feedings early with trophic feedings, which is just small feedings, and they generally have a fairly specific approach to handling transfusions and feeding. So those things are very important. But the human milk is essential. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. So before we wrap up, is there anything else with regard to NEC or your research moving forward that you would like to share? DR. GEPHART: I appreciate that offer. I would like to just emphasize how we do have evidence. We have pretty good evidence about things that prevent NEC. Now, does that mean that we’re going to prevent every single case of NEC? I don’t know that yet. STEPHANIE: Right DR. GEPHART: But we have pretty good evidence, and one of the things that’s pretty controversial in our country right now is the use of probiotics. I don’t know if any of your experts have gotten into that realm yet, but- STEPHANIE: We’ve touched on it and they’ve sort of said the same thing you did that it is sort of a controversial topic because if I’m saying this correctly, the FDA regulations and the procedures around that, but I know in other countries that they have seen reduced rates of NEC with probiotics. DR. GEPHART: Right, right, and that is one thing that I would say is certainly controversial. There is one of the NICUs that I’m aware of that uses probiotics. They’ve been at zero for like six years. One of the issues we have, I’ve spent a lot of time lately understanding the strength of evidence for all of these components that prevent NEC, we don’t have randomized control trial evidence for most of them. But we have 24 randomized control trials that show a decreased risk for NEC with probiotics—thousands of babies—thousands, and even some people will say the preparations are different in these different studies, there is a recent study that actually pulled the results from just a certain type of probiotic and they still showed benefit. So the issue here we have in the United States is that probiotics are marketed as a food product. And so as a food product, their regulation is different with the FDA than as a medicine. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: However, I think parents should know this, frankly. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: I think this is one of those opportunities for shared decision making in the NICU where a physician, a nurse practitioner could bring up this issue with parents to say hey, look, we have this opportunity to give your baby probiotics and this is what is available, this is the evidence, this is the risk. See, this is shared decision making. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: You go and you have a test, your physician or nurse practitioner would say this is how you have to decide what’s important, but I think NICU parents are very, very smart people, and I think we’re at the point in the United States where it is time to open up the conversation about probiotics to make it a joint decision versus an “oh, we’re just not going to do it”. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Because we have such strong evidence, it’s just that most of those studies were not done in the US. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: However, there are many things that have been developed in other countries that we can adopt. The other issue is a standard formulation, a safe, standard formulation. There was a case of sepsis a few years ago that was very concerning—that’s severe widespread infection in a premature baby. That is the risk. So that’s what the clinician would say to the parent. But it’s very, very small risk if you look at all of the benefits. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m not going to pretend we should be using probiotics, but I do think that parents need to start asking for them. They need to start asking why are we not using them… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..because we have such strong evidence. So we have actually stronger evidence for probiotics than we do for antenatal steroids or Surfactant. Those are common, important, consistently delivered interventions for NICU babies. But you have risks, and that’s the issue. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So we’re at a place for decision making. STEPHANIE: Right. And actually ironically, or maybe not ironically, I know that my boys did get probiotics, and that was five years ago that they were born. DR. GEPHART: That is ironic. STEPHANIE: We had an anomaly with Morgan. Nobody can sort of figure out why he got NEC when he did, but we did do all of the sort of standard care practices, probably even advanced practices for five years ago, and we had one that got it and one that didn’t. So…but knowing now what I have learned is they were doing the very best practices at the hospital where my sons were born. So I think we were at the right place at the right time and had the best outcomes that we could hope for. DR. GEPHART: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Did you feel like with Morgan that they were able to recognize it pretty fast and act? STEPHANIE: I really think they did. I think that is probably the key that saved his life because he developed NEC at four days old and had really only had two trophic feeds, and it was colostrum. DR. GEPHART: Okay. STEPHANIE: Actually after the conversation that I had with Dr. Hussein, I went back and looked and he did not have a blood transfusion within that timeframe, so he sort of, it’s my understanding he’s just sort of an anomaly, but that’s why we’re looking to the researchers to piece together all of these things. That’s sort of what drives me is he doesn’t easily fit into something that could have, should have, would have, maybe been different and that seems to be the riddle that’s NEC. DR. GEPHART: Sure. There’s an analogy for this it’s called, a wicked problem, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that term, but you were at my talk when we were in Connecticut,… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..and I talked about the wicked problem and how it’s like a forest fire, it’s not easily solved. There’s a lot of pieces to it,… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: …and I think NEC is really the neonatal wicked problem. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m so glad that Morgan got care so quickly and got such excellent care. And that’s the thing is that clinicians, physicians, dieticians, lactation consultants, nurses, nurse practitioners, they want to do the absolute best for your baby. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Nobody has ill will. This is a team effort, but they’re human, and that’s the thing with wicked problems… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..is that you have humans operating in these complex systems, and trying to deal with things and what we know with solving wicked problems, like forest fires, it’s a combination of boots on the ground, and standard protocol. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So it’s the strength and protection of both approaches that really is effective, maybe not taking away completely the wicked problem, but at least confronting it. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m so glad that Morgan got such great care. STEPHANIE: Thank you. We are too. We are too. And like I said, I think it goes to show that I’ve heard multifactorial used and all kinds of big words with regard to NEC, and just knowing that there are researchers out there like yourself who are trying to distill this information and simplify it for parents and practitioners as well that this is one of the ways that I think we will get to zero NEC. That’s our goal as well. So I really appreciate you talking to me today, and would love to talk to you again, and any of these links when the website is up, would love to share. So thank you! DR. GEPHART: Absolutely. It would be my honor to share those. It’s been fun to be with you. STEPHANIE: Thank you. You too. Direct links to more information about the GutCheckNEC can be found in this episode’s show notes. In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Gephart. Simply put, information is power. I believe that a risk assessment like GutCheckNEC can empower parents in the NICU by distilling complex medical information, and presenting it in a simplified, and actionable way. Morgan was diagnosed with NEC at four days old. My husband and I were still in shock, and hadn’t even begun to come to terms with our twin sons’ unexpected and traumatic birth, when Morgan was transferred to another hospital and underwent emergency surgery. In the days and weeks that followed, I diligently called two NICUs every morning after rounds for updates on our two babies. I took copious notes to share with my husband on weight gains, Oxygen levels, and whatever else each nurse made mention of during the phone calls. And during our daily visits, we spoke with each baby’s nurse personally about all of the day’s happenings. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about prematurity and NEC. And if we were in the same situation today, I would have a lot more questions to ask about all areas of our babies care. In retrospect, I realize we didn’t know what questions to ask. We took our lead from the nurses, and we looked to them to tell us what we needed to know. GutCheckNEC presents parents the opportunity to learn what questions to ask about NEC. Objectively. And, proactively. And, it can help open up the dialogue between parents and caregivers in advance of potential crisis. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org/donate. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional Information You can make a donation directly to Dr. Gephart’s research in NEC at the University of Arizona College of Nursing by visiting https://www2.uafoundation.org/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=341 You can become a donor to the College of Nursing by visiting http://www.nursing.arizona.edu/giving/leave-your-legacy Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. Please consult a local physician or other health care professional for your specific health care and/or medical needs or concerns. The Podcast series does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals, brand names, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm, or corporation name is for the information and education of the viewing public, and the mention of any of the above on the Site does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund.

Dr. Martin Lee. Photo courtesy of Prolacta Bioscience. Episode 4 features Dr. Martin Lee, Vice President of Clinical Research and Development at Prolacta Bioscience. During this episode, Dr. Lee provides a comprehensive overview of a 100% or exclusive human milk diet in the prevention of NEC in extremely premature babies, those weighing less than 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) and who have the greatest risk for developing the disease. He discusses: * His transition from the blood industry to Prolacta, which developed of the world’s first human milk-based human milk fortifier * What constitutes a 100% or exclusive human milk diet * The clinical evidence showing a 70% reduction in NEC, an 8-fold reduction in surgical NEC, and a 4-fold reduction in mortality through the use of exclusive human milk diet * The importance of safety in the breast milk industry, including Prolacta’s rigorous product testing and donor safety profiles which parallel blood industry standards. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 4 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Martin Lee, Vice President of Clinical Research and Development at Prolacta Bioscience, which “creates specialty formulations made from human milk for the nutritional needs of premature infants in neonatal intensive care units.” Last October (2014), while attending the annual Preemie Parent Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I had the pleasure of meeting Prolacta’s Chief Executive Officer Scott Elster. During our conversation, I was invited on a tour of the company. A few weeks later, along with a group of representatives from various preemie organizations throughout the country, I flew out California to tour Prolacta’s human milk processing facility, and to learn more about the people and research behind the company. I was highly impressed by all aspects of Prolacta from the manufacturing plant itself to the rigorous testing their products undergo throughout their processing. Even more impressive to me is the fact that everyone that we met at Prolacta has a personal connection to prematurity. The CEO himself is the parent of twins born prematurely. And, I was shocked to learn that one of the key reasons the company was formed, and their products developed, was to reduce the incidence Necrotizing Enterocolitis. The company’s reason for existing is the prevention of NEC. And the research presented to us by Dr. Lee was stunning. So when we began producing this series, it was only fitting to invite Dr. Lee to share the benefits of an exclusive human milk diet to premature infants and the clinical research supporting its use. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. This is Dr. Martin Lee from Prolacta Bioscience. And I’m so glad you could be with me here today. How are you? MARTIN LEE, GUEST: Good. How are you doing Stephanie? STEPHANIE: Good, good. So in previous podcasts, we’ve talked to doctors that are attending neonatologists and researchers. So I would like to give you the opportunity to give a little bit of your background and how you got involved with research in NEC. DR. LEE: OK. Absolutely. Well, I spent probably most of my career doing clinical research with various types of pharmaceutical and biotech products. I started with a company you’ve probably heard of called Baxter approximately 35 years ago, and I spent a good number of years working with them. And how that’s relevant to our discussion today is I was working with their group that manufactures blood products, and obviously blood is a significant human fluid, has many of the same issues with regards to safety that we have with breast milk. And so I learned a lot about some of the testing that needs to be done, some of the safety factors that we need to consider. And then I would say about 15 years ago, I met someone who was talking about forming a company who basically wanted to bring breast milk and breast milk products to premature infants so that they would have the benefit of receiving 100% human milk diet, particularly the smallest of the small premature infants. So together we started the company Prolacta. And the whole idea of course in starting the company was to put it‚…I think the most important thing was to put it on a firm clinical scientific basis. And that meant doing really important well-designed clinical trials to evaluate the most important morbidities like NEC, in particular, and even mortality in premature infants, infants certainly that had a high risk of both of those consequences of prematurity. STEPHANIE: OK. Maybe not all of the people that will be listening fully understand…what is an exclusively human milk-based diet? Can you get into that a little bit? DR. LEE: Absolutely. So obviously we know‚…we meaning pretty much the world understands that the best thing a newborn baby can be fed is mother’s milk. And for term babies, that is obviously going to be sufficient. They’re born at the right time and usually at a sufficient weight and mother’s milk has all the good things in it that help the baby to grow, help their immune system to develop, help their organs to develop, importantly it helps their brain to grow at the right rate. But a premature baby by definition is born too soon. And we specialize‚…the work that we’ve done at Prolacta,…specializes in the infants that are born as much as 27 weeks or 12 weeks premature so 27 weeks since the time of gestation. When those babies are born, they have a lot of problems obviously because they’ve come out of the womb way too early. And one of the things that of course they are is way too small. The average baby that we’ve studied in our research trials is less than a thousand grams. That’s around two pounds. Now most people know that the average baby is 6-7-8 pounds. And so they’re born so small that what happens is that mother’s milk which of course comes in when the baby’s born‚…nature didn’t intend mother’s milk to be able to feed these type of babies. This is an unfortunate consequence of something that happened with the mother, something that‚…injury, genetics, whatever it is that would cause a baby to be born premature, the milk comes in, but it cannot feed that baby well enough. And what I mean by that is the baby needs to grow. He needs to grow a lot. The baby needs to have their immune system protected by the mom’s milk, and so on and so forth. So obviously we always talk about mother’s milk being the thing for a newborn baby. It’s not enough for these premature infants. So what they need is what we call a fortifier, something with a little extra kick to the baby. And there are fortifiers that have been on the market for a long time. They’re made by the formula companies. And naturally these fortifiers are made from cow’s milk. And cow’s milk is not the best thing for a premature infant. It may not be the best thing for babies in general, but besides the point, it’s certainly not the best thing for a premature infant. So when we’re talking about 100% or exclusive human milk diet, we’re talking about mom’s milk; we’re talking about a fortifier which is necessary for the baby to grow and to be protected from infection and so on and so forth. That comes from human milk. And what Prolacta did was develop the world’s first human-milk human milk fortifier. And in fact, it sounds like a mouthful because when we talk about human milk fortifier, general people realize or may not realize that that’s a cow’s milk-based fortifier. We make the one from human milk. So that’s what we mean by 100% diet. And then one other thing just to add to that, Stephanie, is sometimes mom’s milk doesn’t come in enough or the baby wants it or needs to eat more, get more milk, so then there’s donor milk involved too. And that’s another aspect of the 100% diet. And of course donor milk is coming from other moms, which again provides the additional nutrition that the baby needs. And there you have the entire spectrum of what we mean by 100% human milk diet. STEPHANIE: OK. Thank you. Yeah, I know that there’s probably a bit of confusion amongst parents new to the NICU that human milk fortifier is a fortifier put into human milk, and not necessarily made with human milk. So I know that that does tend to cause a little confusion. DR. LEE: Right. STEPHANIE: So thank you for clarifying that. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: So I guess I’ll ask you to go into a little bit of the research because I find it fascinating. As you know, we were out to your facility in November and I thought that this is a fabulous company. I was not aware of it when our babies were in the NICU and I will just make a tiny note that I know you’ve got significant statistics showing the benefit of human milk and exclusive human milk. Unfortunately for Morgan, he fell in to that other small percentage that I did pump. But he developed NEC so rapidly at four days old being born at 28 weeks. At four days old he developed NEC and I don’t think he had two feedings. So there are babies that get it even when all attempts are made to have an exclusive human milk diet. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: And I also know that my other son, Shaymus, his milk was fortified, and to be honest, I’m sure it probably wasn’t with an exclusive human milk fortifier. So just some things to sort of give everyone background. And again, that was, you know, four years ago, 2010-2011. DR. LEE: Sure. I hope…I assume they’re doing OK today, right? STEPHANIE: Yes, yes. Everybody’s doing very well today… DR. LEE: Excellent. Excellent. STEPHANIE: which I think is why I’m so personally‚…my personal opinion is that your products are wonderful and, you know, things being what they were then versus now, I would definitely advocate for 100% human milk diet and advocate for this if I was a parent in the NICU now. So I think it’s great to get this information out to people. DR. LEE: Sure. Absolutely. So your question concerned the type of studies we did. Well, as I said to begin our conversation, we recognized that the only way that people‚…the medical community, both neonatologists, nurses, lactation people‚…would appreciate and realize the importance of what 100% human milk diet does and helps as far as the baby is concerned is to do proper research. As I said earlier, my experience is in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries where doing formal randomized controlled all the kinds of bells and whistles that need to be done when you need to license a drug or a biologic for marketing in this country and other places in the world as well. That’s standard stuff. So when we set out to do these studies, we said what we’re doing here is just as important, just as the need for rigor has to be here as it would be in any other kind of situation where you’re testing a new medical intervention. And that’s what this is. So we decided right off the bat we would get together the best of the best as far as the neonatologists in this country are concerned, and we brought them together and we set up a protocol. And basically the protocol was based on a very simple premise. It is 100% human milk diet better than feeding a baby mom’s milk fortifying then with standard human milk fortifier and then if all else fails or at least maybe not be sufficient than using formula. That’s standard practice for premature infants in this country. It was in 2007 when we started this trial and to a large extent it still is today. So it’s 100% human milk diet standard of care which includes cow’s milk based fortifier and formula. Babies in this study were randomized which is‚…you know, it’s a fairly simple term, but just to make sure everybody understands what I mean by that, the decision when a parent agreed to have their baby be participating in the study which group they get into, the Prolacta or the 100% diet versus standard of care was essentially a coin flip, not literally of course, but that’s the basis. Now why do you do that? Because that’s the best way to design studies. It provides an unbiased approach to making the decision of treatment of nutritional treatment, taking it out of the hands of anybody and putting it in the hands of strictly chance. So you randomize babies. There was a sufficient number of babies in the first study we did. There was over 200 babies that were randomized and I think it was 12 centers around the country. And what we were looking for in this study was whether or not they develop NEC and that was the most significant endpoint of the study. There were other things that we looked at. We looked at how much parenteral nutrition they received. We looked at other things. We looked at sepsis. We looked at‚…which is essentially bacterial infection that circulates in the bloodstream. We looked at hospital days. We looked at days on a respirator/ventilator and so on and so forth. But the main endpoint in this study was Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Now, the babies, by the way, that we used in this study or the babies that constituted the population of the study were babies under 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) down to 500 grams (1 pound 1 ounce). Very simple reason for that. I think many of the people listening will know that there’s a classification of premature infancy called very low birth weight. And that’s babies under 1500 grams (3 pounds 4.91 ounces). But we said, you know, we want to get the babies that have the highest risk of NEC. So we didn’t use, if you will, the heaviest babies in that weight category because they have, it turns out, the lowest risk of NEC out of all very low birth weight babies. So we took away that 1250-gram group. We also didn’t go below 500 grams because unfortunately, babies born less than 500 grams which is really about a pound or less have unfortunately not a high chance of either succeeding in life really and survival or they have a lot of other problems that make it very difficult to evaluate then. So it was 500 to 1250. That’s basically, I think, the most important aspect. And like I said, they were randomized. We followed them for a period of 90 days, maximum 90 days. Babies could have gotten off the study earlier if they got on to mostly oral nutrition which of course hopefully babies all do because they start off with what’s called parenteral nutrition which means they get their feed essentially through intravenous feeding. They then transition off of that onto enteral feeding which is typically a tube that goes either through their nose or directly through their mouth into their stomach. And that’s called enteral feeding. And then they go to oral feeding. So babies who are on for 90 days or if they got to oral feeding sooner, then they were off the study. Very simply, just to summarize what constitutes a fairly complex study to manage, we found a magnificent reduction in Necrotizing Enterocolitis. The babies in the standard of care group had a NEC rate of about 16%. Or put simply, that one in every six babies develop NEC that got some sort of cow’s milk protein or cow’s milk diet. The babies who got 100% diet was less than 6%. That 16 to 6 is about 70% reduction, and that is phenomenal. We’ve had some of the really very famous neonatologists told us that they don’t see‚…you don’t see that kind of reduction with really any intervention that they’re used to seeing. You just don’t see that. You see incremental things. But now all of a sudden we cut NEC by 70% by doing this. And it even gets more impressive when you consider that the majority of babies or at least half the babies who develop NEC have to go on to have surgery. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: And that is a really serious consequence not only just from the fact that a premature infant has to go on to major surgery and they take out part of their digestive tract. But even worse, they have a reasonably high mortality rate. So in this study, the rate of NEC surgery of all those babies that were in the two groups, it was at 11% in the standard of care arm and only just over 1% in the Prolacta arm. We reduced the rate of NEC surgery by eight fold, I mean just an incredible difference. Virtually wiped out NEC surgery in this study. STEPHANIE: That’s amazing. DR. LEE: Yeah. I mean, we expected to see something really good. We didn’t expect‚…I guess you could say well we should have expected‚…but it was beyond our expectations, wildest dreams to show this kind of effect. Now a lot of people have looked at this data and said well that’s interesting, and maybe that’s real. But can you‚…you know, can you do it again? And the answer is yeah. We did it again because that first study that I just described, these were only babies who were getting‚… which are most babies‚… who were getting some breast milk from their mom. But there are a small cohort of‚… I don’t know quite what the percentage is in this country, but there’s a percentage of babies who don’t get any breast milk. There’s various reasons. Mom is sick. Mom’s not available. So on and so forth. So we also did a second study in which we only treated babies or fed babies who had to get their nutrition either one of two ways. Since breast milk wasn’t available, they got formula. Soon as they were able to get enteral feeding, in other words the tube feeding, they got formula. That’s one group. The 100% arm, same thing, except here, instead of getting mom’s milk, they got donor milk, and then they got the fortified. So it was a real stark comparison. Only human milk, only formula. And it was a very small study. It was only‚…that first study, I don’t know if I mentioned or made clear, that was a 200-baby study. Pretty big study. STEPHANIE: Yes. Um-hmm. DR LEE: This study was only 53 babies partly because it was very, very hard to find these babies. I mean, we would sign up a mom, they would agree to put their baby on, and then they realized gee, I really want to feed my baby. I really want to give them breast milk. And of course, that’s fine. That’s great. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR LEE: But they can’t participate in the study. STEPHANIE: Right. DR LEE: So we had a hard time finding. But we eventually did it. Took us three years to find 53 babies, but we did, and you know what? We found the same significant difference, particularly in the surgical NEC. There were‚…in the control arm, there were 24 babies, and four of them had to go on to surgery for NEC. That’s one in six. So about 16%. In the Prolacta arm, in the 100% milk arm, nothing, no surgeries, nothing. One case in NEC overall, but no surgery. So that turned out to be wow. That’s the kicker. Two separate studies, two different classes of babies, breast milk, no breast milk, doesn’t matter. When you give a baby that’s born premature like this, this weight category, less than 1250 grams, and you feed them with only human milk, they’re going to do better. And it even turns out when you start putting all the data together an extra‚…I hate to call it a bonus‚…but an extra important key outcome was that mortality was reduced. Mortality fortunately in this baby population is pretty low. It’s about 8% overall because of the prematurity, of course. We reduced that to 2%. So a four-fold reduction in mortality. So now when you put it all together, what do you have? You have prevention of the major morbidity‚…that is NEC‚…of prematurity, and you prevent mortality. And how can you really ask for anything more from a nutritional approach to these really fragile infants. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. No, I totally agree. And as I said before, my personal opinion, you know, as the mother of a surgical NEC survivor, I would advocate for this if we had to do it again. It’s definitely phenomenal. DR. LEE: Yeah, it’s almost this kind of effect you would expect to see if this was a pharmaceutical breakthrough or some new wonder drug or some sort of biotechnologically-produced intervention. But all it is is feeding the babies properly. I mean it’s such a fundamentally sound, logical‚…this is what nature wanted these babies to get. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR. LEE: Babies should get human milk, nothing else. STEPHANIE: Now you had mentioned previously the difference between donor milk and then your human milk nutritional products. Can you‚…when I hear conversations, I sort of always think it’s like comparing apples and oranges. You know, it’s almost two different things. So can you clarify what the difference is with donor milk and your products? DR. LEE: Well, again, I’m sorry to be maybe not entirely clear. We make a donor milk product. Essentially, all our products are made from donor milk, both the fortifier, of course, and we make a simple donor milk product that is formulated to have 20 calories per ounce which is what doctors and nurses and dieticians believe they’re giving the baby when they feed the baby either mom’s milk or milk from another person. So donor milk is essentially the equivalent of mom’s milk other than the fact, of course, it comes from another mom. But however‚…and in fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said the best thing for a baby is mom’s milk. But if mom’s milk is not available, then donor milk is good. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: But the problem, of course, and one of the I guess you could say‚…I’m trying to think of the right word. Bad things that people associate with donor milk is well it comes from somebody else, and how do I know that person is the right person to provide milk for my baby? And that’s one of the key things that we had at the center of what we did at Prolacta from the beginning, which was to have a safety profile that was beyond reproach. I mean, we do things as far as testing the moms, testing the milk, that nobody else who ever handles breast milk does pure and simple. I’ll give you some examples. One of the things that I thought of very early on is because, again, remember I told you I came from the blood industry and they test blood and they test donors obviously every which way you can think of. But there’s one additional problem that donors who provide milk have in a sense that blood donors don’t. When you take blood from a donor, you’re seeing the person and it’s blood coming out of their vein and it’s coming right into a bag and you know whose it is. But a milk donor, she donates at home, pumps at home, puts it into containers, and then sends it wherever the donor, the milk bank, might be. In our case, it’s here at Prolacta. They’ll send it to us, and here’s the problem. How do we know it’s that person’s milk? STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: How do we know it’s the person who we screened and did all the blood testing on to start with, that it’s her milk. So we do something very, very unique. We actually have the mom provide a DNA sample, they do a little cheek swab, they put a little stick essentially in there, and scrape off a little tissue from inside their cheek, send it to us so we have a profile. Now she sends us her milk, and when she sends us her milk, we can actually match it up. And now we know it’s that safe mom’s milk, all right? Now you might ask what’s the point? I mean what self-respecting individual is going to send somebody else’s milk to you? And the answer is nobody, for the most part I can say almost universally, will do that intentionally. But there are mistakes. I mean one of the things we’ve seen is moms that are lactating, sometimes there’s a couple of women in a neighborhood, and they’re all doing the same thing. And somebody’s freezer will become full with milk, and they’ll say to their neighbor, “Can I put my milk in your freezer?” And they said, “Sure, no problem.” And she’s got her own milk in there. And then they go to ship milk and lo and behold, there’s somebody else’s in there. We love that‚…we love the moms, but we have to be sure that every mom that donates is a mom that’s free of all of the nasty things that could be in blood because those things could be in milk as well like AIDS and hepatitis and syphilis and all those kinds of things that we should be concerned about. Even as an adult you certainly want to get blood from someone like that. You certainly don’t want to give that to this fragile premature infant. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR. LEE: So going back to your original question about what we do versus donor milk, that’s all one in the same, I think you could safely say. Everything is based on the concept of donors and the milk that they provide and the safety of that milk supply being tested from any way you can think of so that every product that’s made from human milk is as safe as possible based on all of the different protocols that are used. And that includes other things besides DNA testing. It includes drug testing; it includes testing for whether the mom smokes because they may tell you they don’t smoke, but we’ve seen that instance where there’s byproducts of nicotine in the milk, and that’s not good for a baby. So we do that kind of testing. It’s just a laundry list of things to make that as safe as possible. STEPHANIE: Right. And I guess‚…I’m sorry‚…I guess to clarify my original question, I was speaking specifically about your fortifiers versus human milk. If you could explain a little bit the difference of that‚…I mean this was a very good‚…I can’t think of the word‚…a very good deviation, but yeah. When I was saying apples and oranges, I meant donor milk versus fortifier. DR. LEE: OK. I’m sorry. STEPHANIE: No, that’s OK. DR. LEE: The fortifier essentially‚…if you want to keep it very simple, the fortifier is just very concentrated milk. STEPHANIE: OK. DR. LEE: So essentially, what you do to make the fortifier is you take milk, you filter it to get rid of a lot of the fluid so that you concentrate the protein, you concentrate some of the other important nutrients in there. And that way the baby can get extra, like we say, protein, extra other nutrients in a very, very small volume. So for example, in our typical fortifier which we call Prolact +4, if you add that to mother’s milk in a ratio 80% mother’s milk to 20% fortifier, assuming mother’s milk is about 20 calories per ounce, you’re going to add 4 additional calories for that baby in that small volume which is a lot. So then we can actually do even more than that. We can do a +6, six calories, we can do +8 and even +10. That kind of product is for the babies that are the most fluid restricted. They can get 30 calories per ounce in the same volume that milk that originally was 20 calories per ounce was. So that’s really important for those babies, for example, that have heart defects who can’t take in a lot of fluid or babies for whatever reason are fluid restricted. STEPHANIE: OK. Thank you. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was‚… I think it’s important for parents and family members that might be in the NICU to be able to have a conversation with their doctor and fully understand what’s being given to their baby and be able to ask the right questions. So would there be anything else that you would want to add if you were talking to a parent who’s got a baby in the NICU right now for them to be able to advocate best practices for their baby? DR. LEE: I think that the simple issue for a parent under these circumstances is to ask the doctor based on all of the evidence that’s out there, clinical evidence,…and that’s how doctors make decisions. We talk about evidence-based medicine. This is based on the best evidence that the doctor is aware of, what’s the best way to feed my baby? And having said that, you know, the evidence that we’ve discussed here today is for those smallest of the small. For a larger baby, this is not necessarily‚…it’s not that it’s wrong. It may not be necessary, but when you’re dealing with the smallest babies and the ones that are struggling to survive and grow and thrive and get to where you want all babies to get to, to childhood and so on, then you have to ask the doctor the question what is the best way that our baby can get out of that NICU, that Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and get home and be with his or her parents. That’s really, I think, the fundamental question. And the doctors should be able to answer that question based on the evidence that exists for the diet that the baby should be fed. STEPHANIE: Right. Thank you. Yeah, I think this is a really great conversation for any parent in the NICU, especially those, like you said, the smallest that are at the highest risk for developing NEC and as you said, other issues as well. And it’s‚…it can only be a benefit in my opinion. DR. LEE: Absolutely. And just to add to that, they should also ask the question‚…because there are other sources of nutrition, and there are other places from which milk can be attained we know about, for instance, women sharing milk on the Internet, milk sharing sites. You’ve got to be extremely careful. You’ve got to ask the question not only what’s best for my baby from the point of view of effectiveness, but also what’s the safest for my baby. And you want to be sure that the source, where that milk is coming from, where those products are coming from, comes from a place where you can say everything possible based on modern technology has been done to protect that milk, protect the safety of that milk. And I think that’s really critical. I think there was a story the other day‚…I forget which show, where it came up in one newspaper or another‚…about‚…oh, I know what it was. It was an article that was published that basically looked at milk samples. They actually collected milk on one of these sharing sites, and they found a large percentage of them had nicotine in the milk, had other things, other bad things that you don’t want a baby to have in that milk. So you’ve really got to ask that question what’s the best? What’s the safest for my baby as well? STEPHANIE: Right. Right. And Prolacta has provided us some material, some reference materials for sharing. So I will say that we’re going to be posting those on our website and will have them in the show notes as well. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. If there’s anything else at all that you would like to add, please feel free. DR. LEE: Well, I just want to thank you for the opportunity to let obviously the parents out there know that we’re here for one very, very simple reason. I mean I know it may sound kind of corny, but we said from the day we opened the doors at Prolacta that we’re here to save babies, and I think we’ve done our job in that regard. And we’ve proven that that’s the case. So I’m really‚…I’ve worked, as you heard me say, for 35 years doing clinical and medical research, and I’m very, very proud to say that this is, I think, my best story to tell out of all that long career. STEPHANIE: Right. And as I said, I was out in the facility, took the tour in November, and we were very impressed with your company. And like I said, if I had to do it all over again, I would certainly be asking these questions and in my opinion, I think this is a phenomenal company. And your rigor in testing and your facility are top notch. So thank you. LEE: Well, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that, and it means an awful lot to me and to obviously everybody that works at Prolacta. STEPHANIE: Right. So thank you for joining us. And hopefully we’ll talk again soon. LEE: Alright. Thanks so much, Steph. STEPHANIE: In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Lee. Recently, I’ve seen a lot written about the use of donor milk, human milk products, and the emerging breast milk industry. Often times, the opinions expressed about Prolacta are solely related to cost: the expensive of Prolacta’s products versus those coming from nonprofit donor milk banks. In my opinion, the cost of using Prolacta’s human milk-based human milk fortifier far outweighs the potential risks of not using it, and any discussion about cost needs to be framed within the context of total cost of care. As Dr. Lee mentioned, Prolacta’s human milk-based nutritional products are intended for extremely premature infants who weigh less than 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) at birth. My son Morgan weighed 2 pounds 5.5 ounces at birth; my son Shaymus weighed 2 pounds 7 ounces. Prolacta openly shares that the typical cost of using their human milk-based human milk fortifier for these babies is $10,000. That, however, is only a fraction of Morgan’s and Shaymus’ total cost of care. Each of whose exceeded $1 million. In actual numbers, the cost of an exclusive human milk diet using Prolacta’s human milk-based human milk fortifier would have been less than one percent of Morgan’s total cost of care, and less than one percent of Shaymus’ total cost of care. And while Morgan’s case shows that no current preventative strategy for NEC is 100% effective, research shows that access to, and the use of, an exclusive human milk diet significantly reduces the risk of NEC in the majority of extremely premature infants. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional resources: Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. What Is Necrotizing Enterocolitis? N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2015. Print. Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. 100% Human Milk: The Best Nutrition. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. Nutrition for Premature Babies. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Prolacta Bioscience. Premature Babies: What to Expect. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. Please consult a local physician or other health care professional for your specific health care and/or medical needs or concerns. The Podcast series does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals, brand names, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm, or corporation name is for the information and education of the viewing public, and the mention of any of the above on the Site does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund.