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About KatieKatie Sylor-Miller, Frontend Architect at Etsy, has a passion for design systems, web performance, accessibility, and frontend infrastructure. She co-authored the Design Systems Handbook to spread her love of reusable components to engineers and designers. She's spoken at conferences like Smashing Conf, PerfMatters Conf, JamStack Conf, JSConf US, and FrontendConf.ch (to name a few). Her website ohshitgit.com (and the swear-free version dangitgit.com) has helped millions of people worldwide get out of their Git messes, and has been translated into 23 different languages and counting.Links: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/ Design Systems Handbook: https://www.designbetter.co/design-systems-handbook Book of staff engineering stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RMSHYGG staffeng.com: https://staffeng.com ohshitgit.com: https://ohshitgit.com dangitgit.com: https://dangitgit.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Katie Sylor-Miller, who is a frontend architect at Etsy. Katie, thank you for joining me.Katie: Hi, Corey. Thanks for having me.Corey: So, I met you a long time ago—before anyone had ever heard of me and the world was happier for it—but since then you've done a lot of things. You're obviously a frontend architect at Etsy. You're a co-author of the Design Systems Handbook, and you were recently interviewed and included Will Larson's book of staff engineering stories that people are mostly familiar with at staffeng.com.Katie: Yeah.Corey: So, you've done a lot of writing; you've done some talking, but let's begin with the time that we met. To my understanding, it's the only time we've ever met in person. And this harkens back to the first half—as I recall—of 2016 at the frontend conference in Zurich.Katie: Yes, before either of us were known for anything. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. And it was, oh, great. And I wound up getting invited to speak at a frontend conference. And my response was, “Uh, okay. Zurich sounds lovely. I'm thrilled to do it. Do you understand who you're asking?”There are frontend folks—which, according to the worst people on the internet is the easiest form of programming; it isn't a real engineering job, and if that's your opinion, please stop listening to anything I do ever again—secondly, then there's the backend folks who write the API side of things and what the deep [unintelligible 00:02:03] and oh, that's the way of the future. And people look at me and they think, “Oh, you're a backend person,” if their frontend. If they're backend, they look at me and think, “Oh, you're a DevOps person.” Great. And if you're on the DevOps space, you look at me and think, “What is wrong with this person?” And that's mostly it.But I was actually invited to speak at a frontend conference. And the reason that they invited me at all—turns out wasn't a mistake—was that I was giving a talk that year called, “Terrible Ideas in Git,” which is the unifying force that ties all of those different specialties together by confusing the living hell out of us.Katie: Yes. [laugh].Corey: So, I gave a talk. I thought it was pretty decent. I've done some Twitter threads on similar themes. You did something actually useful that helps people and is more lasting—and right at that same conference, I believe, you were building slash kicking it off—ohshitgit.com.Katie: Yes. Yeah. It was—Corey: Which is amazing.Katie: Thank you. Yeah, it was shortly thereafter. I think the ideas were kind of starting to percolate at that conference. Because you know—yeah I was—Corey: Because someone gave a talk about Git. Oh, I'm absolutely stealing credit for your work.Katie: No, Corey—Corey: “Oh, yeah. You know, that was my idea.”Katie: [laugh].Corey: Five years from now, I'm going to call myself the founder of it, and you're just on the implementation details.Katie: I don't—nonononono—Corey: That's right. I'm going to D.C. Bro my way through all of this.Katie: [laugh]. No, no, no, no. See, my recollection is that my talk about being a team player and a frontend expert with a T-shape happened at exactly the same time as your talk about Git because I remember I wanted to go watch your talk because at the time, I absolutely hated Git. I was still kind of learning it. So yeah, so I don't think you really get any credit because I have never actually heard that talk that you gave. [laugh].Corey: A likely story.Katie: [laugh]. However, however, I will say—so, before I was up to give my talk, the emcee of the conference was teasing me, you know, in a very good-natured ribbing sort of way, he was teasing me about my blog being totally empty and having absolutely nothing in it. And I got on the plane home from Zurich, and I was starting to think, “Oh, okay. What are some things that I could blog about? What do I have to say that would be at all interesting or new to anyone else?”And like I think a lot of people do, I had a really hard time figuring out, okay, what can I say that's, maybe, different? And, I went back home, I went back to work, and at one point, I had this idea, I had this file that I had been keeping ever since I started learning Git and I call it, like, gitshit.txt. And hopefully, your listeners don't mind lots of swears because I'm probably going to swear quite a bit.Corey: No, no. I do want to point out, you're accessible to all folks: dangitgit.com, also works but doesn't have the internal rhyming mechanism which makes it, obviously, nowhere near where it needs to be.Katie: [laugh]. Well—Corey: It's sort of a Subversion to Git if you will.Katie: Yes, exactly.Corey: I—Subversion fans, don't yell at me.Katie: [laugh]. Anyways, so I remember I tweeted something like, “Oh, what about if I took this text file that I had,” where every time I got into a Git mess, I would go on to Stack Overflow—as you do—and I would Google and I—it was so hard. I couldn't find the words to find the answers to what I was trying to fix. Because one of the big problems with Git that we can talk about it a bit more in detail later is that Git doesn't describe workflows, Git describes internal plumbing commands and everything that it exposes in its API. So, I had a really hard time with it; I had a hard time learning it.And, you know, what I said, “Okay, well, maybe if I published on my blog about these Git tips that I had saved for myself.” And I remember I tweeted, and I got a handful of likes on the tweet, including from Eric Meyer, who is one of my big idols in the frontend world. He's one of the godfathers of modern CSS. And he liked my tweet, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Maybe this is a real thing. Maybe people will actually find this interesting.”And then I had this brilliant idea for this URL, ohshitgit.com, and it was available, and I bought it. And I swear to you, I think I spent two hours writing some HTML around my text file and publishing it up to my server. And I tweeted about it, and then I went to bed.And I kind of expected maybe half a dozen of my coworkers would get a little sensible chuckle out of it, and like, that would be the end of it. But I woke up the next morning and my Twitter had blown up; I was on the front page of Hacker News. I had coworkers pinging me being like, “Oh, my God, Katie, you're on Hacker News. This is insane.” And—Corey: Wait, wait, for a good thing, or the horrifying kind of thing because, Hacker News?Katie: Well, [laugh] as I have discovered with Hacker News, whenever my site ends up on Hacker News, the response is generally, like, a mix of, “Ha ha ha, this is great. This is funny,” and, “Oh, my God, somebody actually doesn't understand Git and needs this. Wow, people are really stupid.” Which I fundamentally disagree with and I'm sure that you fundamentally [laugh] disagree with as well.Corey: Oh, absolutely.Katie: Yeah. So—Corey: It's one of those, “Oh, Git confuses you. You know what that means? It means you're human.” It confuses everyone. The only question is, at what point does it escape your fragile mortal understanding? And if you are listening to this and you don't believe me, great. I'm easy to find, I will absolutely have that discussion with you in public because I promise, one of us is going to learn something.Katie: [laugh]. Awesome. I love—I hope that people take you up on that because—Corey: Oh, that would be an amazing live stream, wouldn't it?Katie: It would. It would because Git is one of those things that I think that people who don't understand it, look at it and think, “Gosh, you know, I must be stupid,” or, “I must not be cut out to be a developer,” or, “I must not know what I'm doing.” And I know that this is how people feel because that's exactly how I felt myself, even when I made ohshitgit.com, that became this big reference that everybody looks at to help them with Git, like, I still didn't understand it. I didn't get Git at all.And since then, I've kind of been forced because people started asking me all these questions, and, “Well, what about this? What about that?” And I was just like, “Uh… I don't know. Uh…” and I didn't like that feeling, so I did what, you know, obviously, anyone would do in my situation and I sent out a proposal to give a talk about Git at a conference. [laugh].And what that did is when my talk got accepted, I had to then go off and actually learn Git and understand how it works so that I could go and teach it to other people at this conference. But it ended up being great, I think because I found a lot of really awesome books. There's A Book Apart book called Git for Humans, which is incredibly good. There's a couple of websites like learngitbranching.com.There's a bunch more that I can't think of off the top of my head. But I went out and I sort of slowly but surely developed this mental model, internally, of how Git works. And I'm a visual thinker and I'm a visual learner, and so it's a very visual model. And for what it's worth, I think that was my biggest problem with Git was, like, I came from Microsoft .NET environment before that, and we used a program called TFS, Team Foundation Server, which is basically like a SVN or a CVS type source control system that was completely integrated into Visual Studio.So, it was completely visual; you could see everything happening in your IDE as you were doing it. And then making this switch to the command line, I just could not figure it out until I had this visual mental model. So yeah, so ever since then I've just been going around and trying to teach people about Git and teach people this visual mental model that I've developed, and the tips and the tricks that I've learned for navigating Git especially on the command line. And I give talks, I do full-day training workshops, I do training workshops at work. And it's become my thing now, which is flabbergasting [laugh] because I never intended [laugh] for—I didn't set out to go and be this Git expert or to be, quote-unquote, “Famous” for a given value of famous, for knowing stuff about Git. I'm a frontend engineer. There's still a piece of me that looks at it, and is like, “How on earth did this even happen to me?” So, yeah, I don't know. So, that's my Oh shit, Git!?! story. And now—Corey: It's a great one. It's—Katie: Thank you.Corey: Git is one of those weird things where the honest truth of were, “Terrible Ideas in Git”—my talk—came from was that I kept trying and failing to understand Git, and I realized, “How do I fix this? I know. I will give a talk about something.” That is what we know as a forcing function. If I'm not quite ready, they will not move the conference. I know because I checked.Katie: Yep. [laugh]Corey: And one in Zurich was not the first time I'd given it, but it was very clearly something that everyone had problems with. The first version of that talk would have absolutely killed it, if I'd been able to give it to the core Git maintainers. And all, you know, seven of those people would have absolutely loved it, and everyone else would have been incredibly confused. So, I took the opposite tack and said, “All right. How do I expand this to as broad an audience as possible?”And in one of the times I gave it, I said, “Look, I want to make sure it is accessible to everyone, not just people who are super deep into the weeds but also be able to explain Git to my mother.” And unlike virtually every other time where that, “Let me explain something to my mom.” And that is basically coded ageism and sexism built into one. In that case, it was because my mother was sitting in the front row and does not understand what Git is. And she got part of the talk and then did the supportive mother thing of, and as for the rest of it. “Oh, you're so well-spoken. You're so funny. And people seem to love it.” Like, “Did you enjoy my discussion of rebases?”Katie: [laugh].Corey: She says, “Just so good at talking. So, good.” And it was yeah.Katie: [laugh]. Oh, yeah. No, I, I—totally—I understand that. There's this book that I picked up when I was doing all of this research, and I'm looking over at my bookshelf, it's called Version Control with Git. It's an O'Reilly book.And if I remember correctly, it was written by somebody who actually worked at Git. And the way that they started to describe how Git works to people was, they talked about all kinds of deep internals of Unix, and correlated these pieces of the deep internals of Git to these deep Unix internals, which, at the time, makes sense because Git came out of the Unix kernel project as their source control methodology, but, like, really? Like, [laugh] this book, it says at the beginning, that it's supposed to teach people who are new to Git about how to use it. And it's like, well, the first assumption that they make is that you understand the 15 years' worth of history of the Linux kernel project and how Linux works under the hood. And it's like, you've got to be absolutely kidding me that this is how anyone could think, “Oh, this is the right way to teach people Git.”I mean, it's great now, going back in and rereading that book more recently, now that I've already got that understanding of how it works under the hood. This is giving me all of this detail, but for a new person or beginner, it's absolutely the wrong way to approach teaching Git.Corey: When I first sat down to learn Git myself it was in 2008, 2009, Scott Chacon from GitHub at the time wound up doing a multi-day training at the company I worked at the time. And it was very challenging. I'm not saying that he was a bad teacher by any stretch of the imagination, but back in those days, Git was a lot less user-friendly—[laugh] not that it's tremendously good at it now—and people didn't understand how to talk about it, how to teach it, et cetera. You go to GitHub or GitLab or any of the other sites that do this stuff, and there's a 15-step intro that you can learn in 15 minutes and someone who has never used Git before now knows the basics and is not likely to completely shatter things. They've gotten the minimum viable knowledge to get started down to a very repeatable, very robust thing. And that is no small feat. Teaching people effectively is super hard.Katie: It really is. And I totally agree with you that if you go to these providers that they've invested in improving the user experience and making things easier to learn. But I think there's still this problem of what happens when everything goes wrong? What happens if you make a mistake, or what happens if you commit a file on the wrong branch? Or what happens if you make a commit but you forgot to add one of the files you wanted to put in the commit?Or what happens if you want to undo something that you did in a previous commit? And I think these are things that are still really, for some reason, not well understood. And I think that's kind of why Oh Shit, Git!?! has fallen into this little niche corner of the Git world is because the focus is really like, “Oh, shit. I just made a mistake and I don't know what to do, and I don't know what terminology to even Google for to help me figure out how to fix this problem.” And I've come out and put these very simple, like, here: step one, step two, step three.And people might disagree or argue [laugh] with some of the commands and some of the orders, but really, the focus is, like, people have this idea in their head, I think, particularly at their jobs, that Git is this big, important thing and if you screw up, you can't fix it. When really a lot of helping people to become more familiar and comfortable with Git is about ensuring them that no, no, no, the whole point of Git is that just about everything can be undone, and just about everything is fixable, and here's how you do it. So, I still think that we have a long way to go when it comes to teaching Git.Corey: I would agree wholeheartedly. And I think that most people are not thinking about this from a position of educators, they're thinking about it from the position of engineering, and it's a weird combination of the two. You're not going to generally find someone who has no engineering experience to be able to explain things in a context that resonates with the people who will need to apply it. And on the other side, you're not going to find that engineers are great at explaining things without having specific experience in that space. There are exceptions, and they are incredibly rare and extremely valuable as a result. The ability to explain complex things simply is a gift.Katie: It really is.Corey: It's also a skill and you can get better at it, but a lot of folks just seem to never put the work in in the first place.Katie: Well, you know, it's quote-unquote, “soft skills.” So [laugh].Corey: Oh, God. They're hard as hell, so it's a terrible name.Katie: [laugh]. Yeah. Though I could not agree more, I think something that I really look at as a trait of a super senior engineer is that they are somebody who has intentionally worked on and practiced developing that skill of taking something that's a really complex technical concept, and understanding your audience, and having some empathy to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and figure out okay, how do I break this down and explain it to someone who maybe doesn't have all the context that I do? Because when you think about it, if you're working at a big company, and you're an engineer, and you want to, like, do the new hotness, cool thing, and you want to make Kubernetes the thing or whatever other buzzword term you want to use, in order to get that prioritized and on a team's backlog, you have to turn around and explain to a product person why it's important for product reasons, or what benefits is this going to bring to the organization as far as scalability, and reliability. And you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose goals are totally different than yours.Like, product people's goals are all around timelines, they're around costs, they're around things short-term versus long-term improvements. And if you can't put yourself into the shoes of that person, and figure out how to explain your cool hot tech thing to them, then you're never going to get your project off the ground. No one's ever going to approve it, nobody's going to give budget, nobody's going to put it in a team's backlog unless you have that skill.Corey: That's the hard part is that people tend to view advancement as an individual contributor or engineer purely through a lens of technical ability. And it's not. The higher you rise, the more your job involves talking to people, and the less it involves writing code in almost every case.Katie: One hundred percent. That's absolutely been my experience as an architect is that, gosh, I almost never write code these days. My entire job is basically writing docs, talking to people, meeting with people, trying to figure out, where, what is the left hand doing and what is the right hand doing so I can somehow create a bridge between them. You know, I'm trying to influence teams, and their approach, and the way that they think about writing software. And, yes there is a foundation of technical ability that has to be there.You have to have that knowledge and that experience, but at this point, it's like, my God—you know, I write more SQL as a frontend architect that I write HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript because I'm doing data analysis and [laugh] I'm doing—I'm trying to figure out what does the numbers tell us about the right thing to choose or the right way to go, or where are we having issues? And, yeah, I think that people's perceptions and the reality don't always match up when it comes to looking at the senior IC technical track.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. 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Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: At some level, you hear people talking about wanting to get promoted, and what they're really saying—and it doesn't seem that they realize this—is, “I love what I do, so I'm really trying to get promoted so I can do less of what I love and a lot more of things I hate.”Katie: [laugh]. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. [laugh]. In some ways, in some ways, I think that you've got to kind of learn to accept it. And there are some people, I think that once you get past the senior engineer, or maybe even the staff engineer, maybe they don't even want to go there because they don't want to do the kind of sales pitch, people person, data numbers pitching, trying to get people to agree with you on the right way forward is really hard, and I don't think it's for everyone. But I love it. [laugh]. I absolutely love it. It's been great for me. And I feel like it really—it plays to my strengths in a lot of ways.Corey: What I always found that worked for me, as far as getting folks on board with my vision of the world is, first, I feel like I have to grab their attention, and my way is humor. With the Git talk, I have to say giving that talk a few times made me pretty confident in it. And then I was invited to the frontend conference. And in hindsight, I really, really should have seen this coming, but I'm there, I'm speaking in the afternoon, I'm watching the morning talks, and the slides are all gorgeous.Katie: Yes. [laugh].Corey: And then looking at my own, and they are dogshit. Because this was before I had the sense to hire a designer to help with these things. It was effectively black Helvetica text on a white background. And I figured, “All right, this is a problem. I only have a few hours to go, what do I do?”And my answer was, “Well, I'm not going to suddenly become an amazing designer in the four hours I have.” So, I changed some of the text to Comic Sans because if you're doing something bad, do it worse, and then make it look intentional. It was a weird experience, and it was a successful talk in that no one knew what the hell to make of what I was doing. And it really got me thinking that this was the first time I'd spoken to an audience who was frontend, and it reminded me that the DevOps problems that I normally talked about, were usually fairly restricted to DevOps. But the things that everyone touches, like Git, for example, start to be things that resonate and break down walls and silos better than a given conference ever can. But talking instead about shared pain and shared frustrations.Katie: Yes. Yes. Everyone likes to know that they are not alone in the world, particularly folks who are maybe underrepresented minorities in tech and who are afraid to speak up and say, “Oh, I don't understand.” Or, “That doesn't make any sense to me,” because they're worried that they're already being taken not as seriously as their white, male counterparts. And I feel like something I really try to lean into as a very senior woman in a very male-dominated field is if I don't understand something, or if I have a question, or something doesn't make sense is I try to raise my hand and ask those questions and say, out loud, “Okay, I don't get this.”Because I can't even tell you, Corey, the number of times I've had somebody reach out to me after a meeting and say, “Thank you. I didn't understand it either.” Or, “I thought maybe I just didn't understand the problem space, or maybe I just wasn't smart enough to understand their explanation.” And having somebody who's very senior who folks look up to, to be able to say, “Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense.” Or, you know, I don't understand that explanation.Can you explain it a different way? It's so powerful and it unblocks people and it gives them this confidence that, hey, if that person up on stage, or leading this meeting, or writing this blog post doesn't get this either, maybe I'm not so stupid, or maybe I do deserve to be in this industry, or maybe it's not just me. And I really hope that more and more people can feel empowered to do that in their daily lives more. I think that's been something that has been a tremendous learning through all of this experience with Oh shit, Git!?!For me is the number of people that come up to me after conference talks, or tweet me, or send me a message, just saying, “Thank you. I thought I was alone. I thought I was the only one that didn't get this.” And knowing that not just am I not the only one, but that people are universally frustrated, and universally Git makes them want to swear all the time, I mean, that's the best compliments that I get is when folks come up to me and say, “Thank you, I thought I was alone.”Corey: That's one of the things that I find that is simultaneously the most encouraging and also the most galling. Every once in a while I will have some company reach out to me—over a Twitter thread or something—where I'm going through their product from a naive user perspective of, like, I'm not coming at this with 15 years of experience and instinct that feed into how I approach this, but instead the, I actually haven't used this product before. I'm not going to jump ahead and make assumptions that tend to be right. I'm going to follow the predictable user path flow. And they are very often times where, “Okay. I'm hitting something. I don't understand this. Why is it like this? This is not good.”And usually, companies are appreciative when I do stuff like that, but every once in a while, I'll get some dingus who will come in, and like, “I didn't appreciate the fact that you end up intentionally misinterpreting what we're saying.” And that's basically license for me to take the gloves off and say, “No, this was not me being intentionally dumb. Sure, I didn't apply a whole bunch of outside resources I could have to this, but it wasn't me intentionally failing to get the point. I did not understand this, and you're coming back to me now reinforces that you are too close to the problem. And, on some level, when your actual customers have problems with this, they are hearing an element of contempt from you.”Katie: Totally.Corey: “This is an opportunity to fix it and make it more approachable because spoiler, not a lot of people love paying money to something that makes them feel stupid.”Katie: [laugh]. See, Corey, I don't know. You say that you're not really a frontend person, but that is a very strong UX mindset. Like that—Corey: Oh, my frontend stuff is actually pretty awesome because as soon as I have to do something that even borders on frontend, I have the insight and I guess, willingness to do the smart thing, which is to immediately stop talking and pay someone who knows what they're doing.Katie: [laugh]. Thank you. On behalf of all frontend engineers everywhere, I applaud that, and I appreciate it.Corey: It comes down to specialty. I mean, again, it would also be sort of weird from my perspective, which is my entire corporate position is I fix the horrifying AWS bill. So, if you're struggling with the bill in various capacities, first, join basically everyone, but two, you're not alone so maybe hire someone who is an expert in this specific thing to come in and help you with it. And wouldn't it be a little hypocritical of me to go in and say, “Oh, yeah, but I'm just going to YOLO my way through this nonsense?”Katie: Mm-hm. [laugh]. Yeah, [laugh] I don't know we'll want to include this in the final recording, but I have a really hilarious story, actually, about Amazon. So—Corey: Oh, please. They listen to this and they love customer feedback.Katie: [laugh].Corey: I'm not being sarcastic. I'm very sincere here.Katie: Well, this is many, many, many years ago. I mean, probably, oh, gosh, this is probably eight years ago at this point. I was interviewing for a job at Amazon. It was a job to be a frontend engineer on the homepage team, which at the time, I was like, “Oh, my God, this is Amazon. This is such an honor. I'm so excited.”Corey: And you look at amazon.com's front page, and it's, “Oh, I can fix this. There's so much to fix here.”Katie: Yes.Corey: And then reality catches up if I might not be the first person in the world to have made that observation.Katie: [laugh].Corey: What's—Katie: Well—Corey: Going on in there?Katie: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what's going on. So, I think I did five different phone interviews. You know, before they invite you out to Seattle, there's—and again, this was eight years ago, so this was well before everyone was working at home. And in those five hours of phone interviews, I want you to make a guess at how many minutes we spent talking about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.Corey: I am so unfamiliar with the frontend world, I don't know what the right answer is for an interview, but it's either going to be all the time or none of it, based on the way you're framing it.Katie: Yes. [laugh]. It was basically, like, half an hour. So, when you are a frontend engineer, your job is to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And in five hours, I talked about that for probably half an hour.It was one small question and one small discussion, and all the rest of the time was algorithms, and data structures, and big O notation, and oh, gosh, I think they even did the whole, like, “I typed something into my browser, tell me what happens after I type a URL into my browser.” And I think that just told [laugh] me everything that I needed to know about how Amazon approached the frontend and why their website was such a hot mess was because they weren't actually hiring anyone with real frontend skills to work on the frontend. They were hiring backend people who probably—not to say that they weren't capable or didn't care, but I don't know. That's my favorite Amazon story that I have is trying to go work there, and they basically were like, “Yes, we want a frontend engineer.” And then they didn't actually ask about any frontend engineering skill sets in the job. They didn't offer me anyth—I don't think I got invited to go to Seattle, but I probably wouldn't have anyways.Corey: No. Having done it a couple of times now, again, I like the people I meet at Amazon very, very much. I want to be very clear on that. But some of their processes on the other hand, oh, my God. It shows that being a big company is clearly not necessarily a signal that you solved all of these problems. In some cases, you're basically just crashing through the problem space by sheer power of inertia.Katie: Yeah, definitely. I think you can see that when looking at their frontend. Harkening back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier is you don't go to Amazon and learn patterns of interaction that are applicable to every single site on the web. Amazon kind of expects that users are going to learn the Amazon way of shopping and that users are going to adjust how they navigate the web in order to accommodate Amazon. You know, people learn, “Oh, this is what I do on Amazon.” And then, you know, they're—Corey: Oh, that's the biggest problem with bad user experience is people feel dumb.Katie: Mm-hm.Corey: They don't think, “This company sucks at this thing.” They think, “I must not get it.” And I know this, and I am subject to it. I run into this problem all the time myself.Katie: Oh, yes.Corey: And that is a problem.Katie: Yeah. It's why I think, like you said earlier, it's so important when you work somewhere to figure out how do you get that distance between being a power user enough so that you can understand and appreciate what it's like for a regular user who's not a power user of your site. And what do they do? And UX researchers are amazing. A good UX researcher is worth absolutely their weight in gold because, I don't know if you've ever sat in on a UX session where the researcher is walking a user through completing a specific task on a website, but oh my God, it's painful.It's because [laugh] you just want to, you want to push them in the right direction, and you want to be like, “Oh, but what about in the upper right over there, that big orange button,” and you can't do that. You can't push people. You have to be very open-ended, you have to ask them questions. And every single time I've listened in on a UX research recording, or a call, I want to scream through the computer and be like, “Oh, my gosh. This is how you do it.”But, you know, you can't do that. So, [laugh] I think it's important to try to develop that kind of skill set on your own of, “Okay, if I didn't stare at this website every day, what would it be like for me to try to navigate? If I was using a keyboard for navigation or a screen reader instead of a mouse, what would my experience be like?” Having that empathy, and that ability to get outside of yourself is just really important to be a successful engineer on the web, I think.Corey: Yeah. And you really wish, on some level, that they would be able to articulate this as an industry. And I say ‘they,' I guess I'm speaking of about three companies in particular. I have a lot more sympathy for a small startup that is having problems with UX than I am for enormous companies who can basically hurl all the money at it. And maybe that's unfair, but I feel like, at some point of market dominance, it is beholden on you to set the shining example for how these things are going to work.I don't feel that way, necessarily about architecture on the backend. Sure, it can be a dangerous, scary tire fire, but that's not something your customers or users need to think about or worry about, as long as it is up from their perspective. UX is very much the opposite of that.Katie: Totally. And I think, working at a former startup, there's a tendency to really focus a lot on those backend problems. You know, you really look at, “Okay, we're going to nitpick every single RPC request. We're going to have all kinds of logging and monitoring about, okay, this is the time that it takes for a database API request to return.” And just the slightest movement and people freak out.But it's been a process that I've been working really hard on the last couple of years, to get folks to have that same kind of care and attention to the stuff that they ship to the frontend, especially for a lot of organizations that really focus on, “Well, we're a tech company,” it's easy to get into this, oh, engineering is all of these big hard systems problems, when really your customers don't care about all of that. Yes, ultimately, it does affect them because if your database calls are really, really slow, then it has an effect on how quickly the user gets a response back and we know that slow-performing websites, folks are more likely to abandon them. Not that it doesn't matter completely, but personally, I would really love it to see more universally around the industry that frontend is seen as this is the entirety of your product and if you get that wrong, then none of the rest of your architecture, or your infrastructure, or how great your DevOps is matters because you need customers to come to your site and buy things.Corey: It turns out that the relationship between customers coming to your site and buying things and the salaries engineering likes to command is sometimes attenuated in ways that potentially shouldn't be. These are interesting times, and it does help to remember the larger context of the work we do, but honestly, at some point, you wind up thinking about that all the time, and not the thing that you're brought in specifically to fix. These are weird times.Katie: Yes.Corey: Katie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about several things. Usually—it's weird. Normally, when someone says thank you for speaking to me about Git, there is no way that isn't a sarcastic—Katie: [laugh].Corey: —statement. But in this case, it is in fact genuine.Katie: Yes, I will bitch about Git until I am blue on the face, so I appreciate you having me on board to talk about it, Corey. Thank you.Corey: Of course. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Katie: They can find me at ohshitgit.com, or as you pointed out, the dangitgit.com swear-free version. As a little plug for the site, we now have had the site translated by volunteers in the community into 28 different languages. So, if English is not your first language, there's a really good chance you'll find a version of OSG—as I like to call it—that is in your language.Corey: Terrific. And we will, of course, put links to these wonderful things in the [show notes 00:39:16]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Katie: Thank you, Corey. It's been lovely to reconnect, and gosh, look at where we are now compared to where we were almost five years ago.Corey: I know. It's amazing how the world works.Katie: Really.Corey: Katie Sylor-Miller, frontend architect at Etsy. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment written in what is clearly your preferred user interface: raw XML.Katie: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Our final episode from JSConf US features interviews with Daniel Cousineau and Charlie Gerard around the theme of using JavaScript beyond the typical web site. The post Episode 49: Beyond JavaScript – Time Zones, Gesture Recognition appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

Our final episode from JSConf US features interviews with Daniel Cousineau and Charlie Gerard around the theme of using JavaScript beyond the typical web site. The post Episode 49: Beyond JavaScript – Time Zones, Gesture Recognition appeared first on SitePen.

The fifth episode of our 6-part series from JSConf US 2019 features interviews with David Whittaker and Suzie Grange around the theme of growth. The post Episode 48: Growth – Imposter Syndrome, Helping JavaScript Newcomers appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

The fifth episode of our 6-part series from JSConf US 2019 features interviews with David Whittaker and Suzie Grange around the theme of growth. The post Episode 48: Growth – Imposter Syndrome, Helping JavaScript Newcomers appeared first on SitePen.

In the fourth episode of our 6-part series recorded at JSConf US 2019, the team interviews Alexandra Sunderland, Sara Fecadu, and Florian Rival around the theme of backend services. The post Episode 47: Backends – SMS Browser, Streaming Audio & Game Engine appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

In the fourth episode of our 6-part series recorded at JSConf US 2019, the team interviews Alexandra Sunderland, Sara Fecadu, and Florian Rival around the theme of backend services. The post Episode 47: Backends – SMS Browser, Streaming Audio & Game Engine appeared first on SitePen.

In the third episode of our 6-part series recorded at JSConf US 2019, the team chats with Patricia Realini and Theodore Vorillas around the theme of access. The post Episode 46: Access – Libraries, Braille appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

In the third episode of our 6-part series recorded at JSConf US 2019, the team chats with Patricia Realini and Theodore Vorillas around the theme of access. The post Episode 46: Access – Libraries, Braille appeared first on SitePen.

Our second episode in the 6-part series from JSConf US 2019 features interviews with Lara Schenck, Adam Giese, and Luke Herrington around the theme of declarative code. The post Episode 45: Declaration – CSS, Music, Components appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

Our second episode in the 6-part series from JSConf US 2019 features interviews with Lara Schenck, Adam Giese, and Luke Herrington around the theme of declarative code. The post Episode 45: Declaration – CSS, Music, Components appeared first on SitePen.

In the first episode of our 6-part series from JSConf US 2019, we talk with Tierney Cyren and Peter Aitken around the theme of community. The post Episode 44: Community – Open Source, Call for Proposals appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

In the first episode of our 6-part series from JSConf US 2019, we talk with Tierney Cyren and Peter Aitken around the theme of community. The post Episode 44: Community – Open Source, Call for Proposals appeared first on SitePen.

Sponsors Triplebyte Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Clubhouse CacheFly Panel Aaron Frost AJ O’Neal Chris Ferdinandi Joe Eames Aimee Knight Charles Max Wood Joined by special guests: Hillel Wayne and Richard Feldman Episode Summary In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Hillel Wayne kicks off the podcast by giving a short background about his work, explains the concepts of formal methods and the popular npm package - event-stream, in brief. The panelists then dive into the recent event-stream attack and discuss it at length, focusing on different package managers and their vulnerabilities, as well as the security issues associated with them. They debate on whether paying open source developers for their work, thereby leading to an increase in contribution, would eventually help in improving security or not. They finally talk about what can be done to fix certain dependencies and susceptibilities to prevent further attacks and if there are any solutions that can make things both convenient and secure for users. Links STAMP model in accident investigation Hillel’s Twitter Hillel’s website Richard’s Twitter Stamping on Event-Stream Picks Joe Eames: Stuffed Fables Aimee Knight: SRE book - Google Lululemon leggings DVSR - Band Aaron Frost: JSConf US Chris Ferdinandi: Paws New England Vanilla JS Guides Charles Max Wood: Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones KSL Classifieds Upwork Richard Feldman: Elm in Action Sentinels of the Multiverse Hillel Wayne: Elm in the Spring Practical TLA+ Nina Chicago - Knitting Tomb Trader

Sponsors Triplebyte Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Clubhouse CacheFly Panel Aaron Frost AJ O’Neal Chris Ferdinandi Joe Eames Aimee Knight Charles Max Wood Joined by special guests: Hillel Wayne and Richard Feldman Episode Summary In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Hillel Wayne kicks off the podcast by giving a short background about his work, explains the concepts of formal methods and the popular npm package - event-stream, in brief. The panelists then dive into the recent event-stream attack and discuss it at length, focusing on different package managers and their vulnerabilities, as well as the security issues associated with them. They debate on whether paying open source developers for their work, thereby leading to an increase in contribution, would eventually help in improving security or not. They finally talk about what can be done to fix certain dependencies and susceptibilities to prevent further attacks and if there are any solutions that can make things both convenient and secure for users. Links STAMP model in accident investigation Hillel’s Twitter Hillel’s website Richard’s Twitter Stamping on Event-Stream Picks Joe Eames: Stuffed Fables Aimee Knight: SRE book - Google Lululemon leggings DVSR - Band Aaron Frost: JSConf US Chris Ferdinandi: Paws New England Vanilla JS Guides Charles Max Wood: Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones KSL Classifieds Upwork Richard Feldman: Elm in Action Sentinels of the Multiverse Hillel Wayne: Elm in the Spring Practical TLA+ Nina Chicago - Knitting Tomb Trader

Sponsors Triplebyte Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit Clubhouse CacheFly Panel Aaron Frost AJ O’Neal Chris Ferdinandi Joe Eames Aimee Knight Charles Max Wood Joined by special guests: Hillel Wayne and Richard Feldman Episode Summary In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Hillel Wayne kicks off the podcast by giving a short background about his work, explains the concepts of formal methods and the popular npm package - event-stream, in brief. The panelists then dive into the recent event-stream attack and discuss it at length, focusing on different package managers and their vulnerabilities, as well as the security issues associated with them. They debate on whether paying open source developers for their work, thereby leading to an increase in contribution, would eventually help in improving security or not. They finally talk about what can be done to fix certain dependencies and susceptibilities to prevent further attacks and if there are any solutions that can make things both convenient and secure for users. Links STAMP model in accident investigation Hillel’s Twitter Hillel’s website Richard’s Twitter Stamping on Event-Stream Picks Joe Eames: Stuffed Fables Aimee Knight: SRE book - Google Lululemon leggings DVSR - Band Aaron Frost: JSConf US Chris Ferdinandi: Paws New England Vanilla JS Guides Charles Max Wood: Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones KSL Classifieds Upwork Richard Feldman: Elm in Action Sentinels of the Multiverse Hillel Wayne: Elm in the Spring Practical TLA+ Nina Chicago - Knitting Tomb Trader

From smartphones to growing communities, the TalkScript team covers all the things in the final podcast from JSConf US 2018. The post Episode 20: Smartphone Symphony / Growing Communities (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

From smartphones to growing communities, the TalkScript team covers all the things in the final podcast from JSConf US 2018. The post Episode 20: Smartphone Symphony / Growing Communities (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on SitePen.

The team talks with Jeff Hoffer, Carrie Maxwell, and Hannah Howard at JSConf US about tao.js, civic hacking, and RxJS. The post Episode 19: tao.js / Civic Hacking / RxJS (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

The team talks with Jeff Hoffer, Carrie Maxwell, and Hannah Howard at JSConf US about tao.js, civic hacking, and RxJS. The post Episode 19: tao.js / Civic Hacking / RxJS (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on SitePen.

The TalkScript team continues the live-ish series at JSConf US with discussions about Ethics, ES6 in Practice, and Dynamic CSS. The post Episode 18: Ethics / ES6 in Practice / Dynamic CSS (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

The TalkScript team continues the live-ish series at JSConf US with discussions about Ethics, ES6 in Practice, and Dynamic CSS. The post Episode 18: Ethics / ES6 in Practice / Dynamic CSS (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on SitePen.

The team continues the live-ish from JSConf US series with Test Double's Justin Searls. Listen in for a lively discussion on presentations, vulnerability, and solving complex problems. The post Episode 17: Presentations, Vulnerability, and Solving Complex Problems with Justin Searls (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

The team continues the live-ish from JSConf US series with Test Double's Justin Searls. Listen in for a lively discussion on presentations, vulnerability, and solving complex problems. The post Episode 17: Presentations, Vulnerability, and Solving Complex Problems with Justin Searls (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on SitePen.

In the first episode from JSConf US 2018, the team talks with Neha Nivedita, Kristofer Baxter, and Kevin O'Neil about React and A11y, WorkerDOM, and overcoming challenges. The post Episode 16: React and A11y / WorkerDOM / Overcoming Challenges (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on TalkScript.FM.

In the first episode from JSConf US 2018, the team talks with Neha Nivedita, Kristofer Baxter, and Kevin O'Neil about React and A11y, WorkerDOM, and overcoming challenges. The post Episode 16: React and A11y / WorkerDOM / Overcoming Challenges (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on SitePen.

In this episode, Kristian Freeman tells us about ByteConf React: why he decided to start the conference, unique challenges of putting an online conference together, what he expects in terms of viewership and his hope for sponsors, and supporting speakers who haven't recorded videos or maybe haven't ever even given a talk before. ByteConf will take place on Friday, August 31, 2018! Grab your ticket! References: Twitter Facebook Twitch This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT: ROBERT: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode #108 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm Robert De Luca, the president here at Frontside and I'll be your episode host. Today, we're going to be discussing ByteConf, which is an online stream conference with Kristian Freeman. Kristian is a developer at Product Hunt. With me today as co-host is Wil Wilsman who is a software developer here at The Frontside. Before we jump into the discussion, I would like to make a little announcement. I'm going to be speaking at ByteConf and JSConf for BigTest. If you're interested in hearing about the next generation of UI testing for single page apps, you don't want to check that one out, I think. Without further ado, let's just jump into it. Hey Kristian, how are you doing? KRISTIAN: Hey. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. ROBERT: You recently just moved to Austin and you moved from LA. How's that thing going? KRISTIAN: It's actually going really good. We packed all our stuff up and drove all the way across the US. I guess that's not really across the whole US but it was a good move. I've been here for about two weeks or so and I'm really happy with it so far. I have a full office and recording space now, so it's glorious. I can actually sprawl out and have mikes and all kinds of other gear out. I'm very excited. WIL: Nice. Now, what is it you do at Product Hunt? KRISTIAN: I'm a software developer there, kind of full stack engineer. Product Hunt is architected basically as a Rails app in the backend and then, a React app in the frontend, so I'm doing React obviously and GraphQL stuff and then Rails on the backend. It's been really cool. It's a really neat product and there's a really cool community there as well, so I'm been very happy with the transition. I've been there since the beginning of the year, so February or so. ROBERT: That's awesome. Are those projects split so it's like the React app separate from the Rails apps or is it like a monolith? KRISTIAN: It's a good question. I am not sure if it's planned to be split up eventually but as it stands right now, it's actually all one big application. We just have kind of that classic frontend folder where everything is dropped in and that's React related. We have some interesting stuff around server side rendering and things like that. All of that stuff was kind of there before I started working at Product Hunt but it's been really interesting coming from my previous gig where it was just very straightforward Ruby on Rails and then React like it's a totally separate thing, like they weren't really related at all as working on a couple of different projects. Coming to this, it has been really interesting. It kind of gives me a better sense of what Rails projects might look like in 2018, if that makes sense. ROBERT: Right, yeah. Are you using like the webpacker gem? KRISTIAN: I don't. I mean, it's not old really, in terms of web projects overall than in terms of like a Rails app. It's still running on an older version. I think we're pretty homegrown set up. We're not using webpacker. We kind of set things up and run them as like two different processes and stuff like that. It's been really interesting. There is a bit of onboarding stuff that it took me a while because I came from doing, like I said, kind of standard Rail stuff and I would say that they are really kind of pushing what you can do with half Rails, half React set up. There's a bit of time of me kind of flailing around and figuring out what was going on but it's been really cool. I definitely feel like I leveled up in my understanding of how all that stuff can fit together over the last couple of months or so. ROBERT: That's awesome. You're running a conference, right? You're running an online-only conference for free and streamed on Twitch. That's pretty bold thing, right? That's a new concept. How do that come together? I guess before we even discuss that, what is ByteConf? KRISTIAN: I'll start with the synopsis of what it is and I can talk a little bit about history. It's actually a conference series. I have other events planned and the first of those is ByteConf React, which Robert is speaking at. It's a React in JavaScript conference that is streamed on twitch. If listeners aren't familiar with Twitch, it's a live streaming platform. Kind of the primary use for it is for gaming. There's a lot of people who will stream themselves playing like Fortnight or whatever other things. I usually just watch Fortnight. It is primarily for gaming and in the last couple of years, they've started doing this separate section called the creative section, where there is non-gaming stuff. I've watched people paint. I've watched people play guitar or take song requests on the stream and all kinds of interesting stuff. What I can say is the idea for the conference wasn't a thing that I just came up with on the spot. I actually attended a really small conference that was streamed on Twitch. It was a game development conference. I wish I could remember what it was called but it was really interesting. There wasn't too many people in the stream but I was impressed with the way that it was put together, especially for a topic like game development, which is I would say, I kind of took a stab at it last year and I found it to be pretty difficult to get into and fairly opaque in terms of understanding how to get started and then make that progression into a career. I watched it and I enjoyed the format of the conference but I didn't really get learned too much from it because it was just too kind of complicated, I think unless you already were in the field. I started thinking about that and I thought it was a really interesting model and I felt like web development in particular, would be a really neat way to approach that format because web development has, I think a reputation if you want to get into programming. I don't know if I would say, entirely approachable. There's still a learning curve and there is a lot of work that you have to put into it too to get like junior dev role somewhere but I thought it was really interesting. I thought it would be interesting to take that format and apply it. My background, besides doing straightforward full stack engineering, I've done some courses for Pluralsight. I've done some in-person technical training, so I had a background in teaching and I felt like it would be an interesting just to try it and see what would happen. So far, we're a couple of weeks out from the conference and honestly it's been pretty wild how many people are excited about the conference. I don't think I've ever done a project on my own, like a side project that has had people that just tweeting about it without me prompting it or anything like that. I saw something on YouTube today like a Spanish YouTuber who does tech news and he was talking about the conference. I don't know Spanish. I was curious and wanted to see what he's talking about but I couldn't really understand what he's saying but I saw the logo and I was like, "What? This is crazy." I'm really excited about it and I'm sure we'll kind of get into this but there's some really interesting implications and ways that this format, I think it will be a different approach to the usual tech conference format. I'm really excited about it and I think it's going to be really neat. ROBERT: It's awesome that it's free and available for anybody at any time. KRISTIAN: Right and a part of that, I think when I started thinking about it like, "Can I make it free? What are the implications of that?" I think that the main thing is that when it comes to running a conference, getting the location or whatever, I would say is probably by far, the most expensive component of that. For me, I'm a remote developer and there's a lot of people that I talk to day-to-day. I think a lot of kind of my audience and people that I know online are also working remotely, so for the conference to just be online, it wasn't too crazy of an idea for me because most of the interactions I've done in development stuff like that have been through the context of remote work. But also, for people who aren't remote workers, who are getting into the field or even just have a small interest in web development, I think it removes some barriers of being able to access this kind of stuff. You know, if we can look back at the future and say, "This sounds very ambitious," but kind of a democratizing force of anyone can view this content and get access to it regardless of their skill level or economic level or things like that. WIL: I frequent trips sometimes and I know this is obviously, a free conference but are you expecting any donations? KRISTIAN: That's a good question. That's kind of one of those things I haven't really figured out the best way to do yet. In Twitch, I think there's the concept like 'Bits.' Is that what they're called? They're like microdonations. I genuinely don't know how that's going to work out. I know the plan is to take the talks after the fact and get any kind of additional slides and stuff like that. We're doing a couple of pre-conference events that I can talk about. I guess I should plug those as well before we wrap up but the way that that's going to work, I am not quite sure because I would like to sell the packages after the fact and actually, being able to pay the speakers. But in terms of little of bits and stuff like that, I'm not actually sure. I'm genuinely curious how that's going to work out. I don't know if people will do that. I guess it just kind of depends on the audience. ROBERT: -- In my talk now. KRISTIAN: Yeah, give me Bits please. ROBERT: "I intended to write, don't move to the next slide." KRISTIAN: Yeah. I use Twitch every once in a while. I said, I generally just watch like one game on Twitch but I don't watch Twitch all day, every day. I think it'll be interesting to see because this is probably a different audience than, say the average Twitch user. It'll be really interesting to see how that shakes out. I don't really have a great answer for you there. WIL: Do you have any guests like a number of people that are going to be attending? I see on the ByteConf site, there are 1500 subscribers. KRISTIAN: That's a good question. I guess I can talk about this stuff that we have planned before the conference. We've been building an audience for really, it hasn't been that long. It's been like four or five months since I announced it. We're using kind of dogfooding a thing that I've worked on a Project Hunt, which is this Ship product, which is for collecting emails and sending out newsletters and stuff like that. ROBERT: I saw that get announced not too long ago. KRISTIAN: Yeah, it's really cool. I'm really happy with the product and they have some built-in promotional tools on the site, which is pretty neat. But we have, I think like 1500 people on the mailing list. I think, we have, the last I checked, about like 4200 followers on Twitter. It's hard to convert that like how many people are actually going to attend. What we are doing and this is like A, because I think it be interesting and B, to kind of gauge this, hopefully as best we can. We're going to be doing some preconference like 'Ask me anything' interviews with some of the speakers and I'm hoping I can get a better sense of how many people will actually start attending any of the events that happen. The way the Twitch works is you can follow and subscribe. You'll get a notification when a channel goes live. The first time that we go live will be tomorrow, actually and so, we'll see how many people will turn out and it should be interesting. But in terms of actual numbers, I genuinely am not sure. I would hope that a lot of people who are on the mailing list will be there but it's been pretty neat. I've already been hearing of people who are trying to setup like in-person events, viewing parties and stuff like that. I've tried to help coordinate that as best I can without taking over the limited amount of time I have before the conference actually happens. Also, people in Europe and vastly in different time zones are actually kind of grilling me about, "When can I watch this? Will you do every broadcast so I can actually attend this because I don't want to see the conference at two in the morning," and I'm like, "Yeah, I know. I understand that." We're kind of figuring out those details as well. Like I said, I very much consider this like the MVP of a longer term event series so I'm excited. I think it will end up building something that a lot of people will attend multiple times and hopefully, we can expose people to new stuff as that happens. ROBERT: You mentioned that somebody in Europe like wanting to know like, "When I can watch this?" which actually makes me wonder like that's one of the unique challenges that you have for an online-only conference because no one's going to be asking that question if the conference is in... I don't know, LA, right? Everybody knows where it's going to be because it's all co-located, so what are some other unique challenges that come with running an online conference? KRISTIAN: That's a great question. We don't have the explicit location and time that it starts to kind of point people to. In some ways, it's a positive thing. We have a lot of people who can attend that normally wouldn't be able to. They're excluded by price, location and stuff like that but there are some things that you, I think kind of give up when you do the online format instead. One of those is just being there at the conference and running into people that may be you know or having sponsors with booths set up, where you can make a connection in that way. Some of that, we're trying to solve by building an active community. We have a Discord server that we started a couple of weeks ago, where people are chatting about this kind of stuff. I really think of it as like there's probably many ways to solve this problem and I'm trying a couple of different ways to see what sticks. Building a community where people can continue to talk before the conference, obviously they already are doing that and then continue after the fact and build the kind of connections and relationships and community that would maybe happen organically or at least, have a chance to happen organically in an actual physical conference. Some of the stuff, I genuinely still trying to figure it out like how best to give people the sense that they are welcomed and I guess, kind of feel like they're part of a community of developers. I remember when I started the conference, one of the first things I thought about was when I first went to a conference in San Francisco that Heroku put on and I remember being there, I was very, very junior as a developer and I remember sitting there being like, "Whoa. This is probably the first time I've ever been in a room with a bunch of other hundreds and hundreds of developers," and it was real interesting. It's one of the first times that I was like, "I actually am for real, doing this. This is pretty cool." I'm trying to figure and imagine and we'll iterate on this in the future like how best to give people that experience. Maybe that means doing a couple of physical ByteConf events. I'm thinking about that definitely but also, how do we keep the original idea of the format but also, how people feel like they're part of a community. It's very much a work in progress. WIL: I could see a future where you have a physical, smaller conference but you still stream it on Twitch and everybody could still attend. KRISTIAN: Exactly, yeah. I think that's probably the format. ROBERT: That'd be rad. KRISTIAN: One of the things that I thought would be interesting would be to do some kind of and actually, I think about this before when I moved out to Austin, like doing some kind of West Coast tour where we go up the West Coast and do events, maybe every a couple of nights in a really small format. The same kind of conferencing they have people from that area, come and give a talk but still stream that on Twitch. It's kind of a hybrid approach that the people who are already part of the community can still attend but for people who want that physical experience, they can do that as well. ROBERT: That's awesome and if you did that, then you wouldn't necessarily lose the whole way track. One of the things that I really love about attending conference is like the talks are great but I usually always find those online afterwards. But what I can't find online afterwards is the communication and the talk that I have with people that are there. That's an interesting challenge to have, maybe you could have... I don't know, like not to tell you how or what to do, maybe like a channel in the Discord for a Hallway Track channel or something that encourages conversation, maybe outside of but in connection with the talk. But I would just say, maybe that's just one of the tradeoffs that you're willing to have for an online-only conference. There are a plethora of things that you just shed by not having it out at a physical location, like a bunch of cost for one and AV setup and worrying about people connecting and getting and presenting properly -- KRISTIAN: Via conference Wi-Fi. If they have problems, that will be their house Wi-Fi. ROBERT: Yeah, exactly. KRISTIAN: I totally agree. I think it's not the worst problem to have because we're in a lot of ways kind of simplifying and really, it's the kind of thing that we can iterate on over time. When I was talking about the European time zone thing, I may be sounded like I was bothered by people reaching out or whatever. It's actually quite the opposite. It's really exciting and I have actively kind of sought feedback out and been like, "How can I do this better? How can I communicate this decision or that decision?" or even help me make this decision so that it's best that I do whatever works best for the community and I expect that will, as the community grows, just be more and more a factor. I think that's the kind of thing that tying up like the Hallway Track or something like that. I'm confident that people will have opinions on that and they'll say like, "This is what would work for me best to feel like I'm part of this community," and we're going to definitely try those things and iterate on them. It's not the worst problem to have because there is really nowhere to go but up, in terms of how we do it well and stuff like that. ROBERT: Good problems to have. KRISTIAN: Yeah, exactly. ROBERT: All the talks are prerecorded, right? What have you done or have you done anything to help support people who haven't recorded a video for speakers? What are you doing to kind of ease speakers into this new style? KRISTIAN: Yeah, it's interesting because in terms of a speaking lineup, there is clearly, some people who have experience both as conference speakers, also in particular in this format. It's basically recording like a Screencast. It's more or less the same thing. It's slightly a different format, maybe condensed to a shorter, like an hour talk. There are some people: Kentcdodds, Tracy Lee, they're two of our keynote speakers, I guess you could say. They have a ton of experience. They're pretty much giving talks regularly all the time, so for them, this is this is no biggie. But there are a couple of people I've tried to, like in terms of once we got our CFP, our call-for-paper, we were accepting talks submissions and also getting information about the speakers themselves like, "What is your experience of speaking at conferences? Do you have any experience speaking at conferences?" What I thought would be in the spirit of the conference itself and kind of our ideals and even, I would say like the ethics of how we think about this kind of stuff, I do actually think about it in that term. We want to have speakers that represent that. You know, bringing anyone from any experience level, in any location and stuff like that and having them be able to attend the conference and also speak at the conference. There's a couple people that just don't have a ton of experience speaking at conferences or even keep doing this kind of Screencast format and so, for those people like kind of the silly one, I've just been reaching out to them like, "If you need any help on the stuff, let me know. I've done this a couple of times, at least the Screencast part of it, I have a ton of experience with them, so if you need help, let me know of that." Also, if someone needed it, we bought them a mike and a webcam and we sent it to them and be like, "Don't need to worry about that because that's potentially --" ROBERT: Woah, that's awesome. KRISTIAN: Yeah. That can be like an economic kind of thing to make people feel uncomfortable, like maybe, you can't afford a mike or something like that but we will cover you and no strings attached. That kind of stuff, I think is really important. I think, the kind of the main thing is we just want people to feel comfortable. There is no reason that because someone hasn't given a talk at a conference before, there's no reason they can't start. Everyone has something interesting to say, I think and everyone's experiences is really interesting and brings a perspective. Especially in the conference format, I think it will bring a perspective that you're not used to seeing at a conference. Not to say that the kind of perspective of people who are super experienced and things like that. As a developer, as a conference speaker, that's obviously really useful but it's also useful to see things from the perspective of someone who is just getting into the industry. I think that being able to amplify those voices is really interesting and exciting to me. I'm sure there's probably ways that we could do this better in the future but for now, it's been just kind of like supporting them whenever they need it and trying to be encouraging and then any kind of small things like buying a make or something, we can provide that. ROBERT: That's awesome. There are some tradeoffs you could make always with anything but it's almost, I want to say better, to give your first conference talk or one of your first conference talk in this way. I know I was really excited about it when I first heard about it because I get pretty nervous getting up in front of people. At JSConf, I don't know how many people. It kind of gives me anxiety but with ByteConf, it's pre-recorded so I have the ability to go back and polish everything that I want and I can remove those odds and things like, "Oh, wait. That didn't quite slow right. Let me fix that real quick," or, "I didn't really like what I said there. I can go back and fix it." It does come with the added complexity of like, "Now, I have to go and cut it together and make sure that there's this whole post-production aspect of it," but it makes me feel a lot better because I feel that I can deliver something that I feel really good about and I know because I've watched it six times and gone over it with a fine-tooth comb, you know? KRISTIAN: Right. One of the things that I am hoping that we can do in the future is in terms of the editing and stuff like that. If someone feels comfortable like really fine-tuning their talk and stuff like that and giving almost a finished product to us, we're happy to obviously accept that but for people who just don't have that ability or needs some help in refining, I don't want to say the quality of their talk but just kind of the delivery of it, we can definitely help with that. In terms of refining, say you're going to give the talk again in your case, I think it's really interesting also. We're trying to coordinate as with as many of the speakers as we can, kind of like time zone permitting and things like that, having them in the 'attending the conference,' or 'viewing the conference,' and also being available in the Twitch chat and not necessarily having an interview there but maybe, if something comes up or someone is like, "I don't get what this slide means," or something like that and that's both an opportunity for, we're not going to like pause the talk or anything but the speaker can be there to clarify and add that additional, I guess dimension of understanding of what's going on in the talk. I think it's actually really interesting. I'm really curious to see how it turned out. WIL: Yeah, I'm curious too because I [inaudible] with Twitch sometimes and most videos, like you mentioned before, you want like some small conference and it was a very small chat and a lot of Twitch, for me is interacting with the person that I'm watching, through the chat. It's interesting to me that it'll be pre-recorded but the speakers are still going to be interacting through the chat, so it's going to be real cool to see. KRISTIAN: Yeah, I'm trying to -- ROBERT: I'm pretty excited about that. KRISTIAN: Yeah and I hope that you would be interested in being mixed. I'm sure people will have questions about that kind of stuff. I've already talked to a couple of speakers and I'm trying to reach out individually and see how many people can be there for that because it's really interesting. In your case, if there's enough people to say like, "This part kind of confused me," or, "You lost me here," that's an opportunity for you to refine the talk and get really explicit timed feedback. I think if someone came to you after, say your JSConf talk and was like, "You know, there's this part that I don't really understand," like you don't have the immediate understanding of literally, at what point in the talk are they exactly talking about. I think that will be really interesting. That's -- ROBERT: That's absolutely could be bigger. KRISTIAN: Yeah and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. If you've ever been in Twitch chat before, it can get a little rowdy and I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage that because I have literally zero tolerance for whatever kind of the most toxic of Twitch chat as I have zero tolerance for that in the conference. I'm trying to figure out the best way to make that happen. But if you're a speaker and especially, it's your first time ever giving a talk or something, if you get that kind of feedback, hopefully it's delivered in a way that doesn't suck and we're going to try and mediate that as best as we can. That's a great opportunity for really effective improvement on your presentation style and stuff like that, so I'm really excited about that. ROBERT: It's actually interesting to think about is what kind of trolls you might run into and -- KRISTIAN: And you have people who are like, "Vue is better..." ROBERT: Yeah or any kind of cross-trolling that might happen. That'd be interesting to see how that plays out and how you might enforce that code of conduct. KRISTIAN: We definitely do have a code of conduct in Discord and so far, I'm happy that we haven't had to enforce that in any way or there hasn't been anyone that has brought the quality of the chat down. I've seen people answering questions about different open source projects and stuff like that. I think, Robert you wrote up a solution to someone's problem in the TypeScript channel or something. Did I see that? ROBERT: Yeah. KRISTIAN: Yeah, stuff like that is really cool. ROBERT: Someone who was asking how to do radio buttons in React and I was like, "I'll just write a quick code chain box example that kind of showing this." KRISTIAN: Yeah and if I could pick one long term goal of where I want to see the conference in the community in a year or two, I want to be able to scale that up to, say like 10x or 100x the amount of people but still keep that quality of conversation. I think that is really looking at producing a conference. That part, honestly isn't the most complicated part. It's if you can use Adobe Premiere, you can pretty much make a pre-recorded conference work. It's keeping that quality and making people feel like they are a community, especially for people who know that they want to be a web developer, maybe they have no idea where to go or how to start. If people can join the ByteConf community and feel like this is a good place, that you can call this place home, I guess online and learn in that way. That's kind of the larger goal. The conference is just one aspect of getting there. WIL: This is all very exciting. I'm looking forward to attending. KRISTIAN: Yeah. I am really looking forward to it as well. It's pretty wild that it's August, that it's actually happening soon. I'm really excited. It's going to be sweet. ROBERT: Yeah and I'm seriously working on my talk right now, to try and get it together. The cool thing that I found about that, I'm talking about BigTest and Wil is a person that's writing BigTest and he's the mastermind behind it. It'd be great to have him in there and answering any questions alongside with me as the talk goes on. I didn't even consider it before you said it. It is really powerful because I'm going to be introducing something that might be foreign to a lot of people, this testing style and how you do it in single page apps. There will be a question and I know I won't be able to cover everything and hit all the bases and make sure that's not confusing because it is a complicated topic. I'm going to do my best but the added benefit of me being able to clarify things on the spot is kind of mind blowing there. KRISTIAN: It's huge and I'm trying to figure out the best way to archive that kind of dimension of the conference. I'm really interested to see it tomorrow. We're doing an 'Ask me anything,' but I'll plug that at the end. It's going to be an interesting to see what the kind of ratio, like signal-to-noise is in the chat and if it's good, especially at the conference itself, if people are asking really good questions and that kind of stuff and the speakers are responding, that is a really valuable thing to try and save. I'm trying to figure out how to do that as well, even save the most requested questions or maybe the most detailed answers that the speakers have and making that available in some way, I think it would be really valuable to people. WIL: Yeah, for sure. ROBERT: The other thing I just have some of thought of too, with all this being pre-recorded, you are able to schedule this out pretty well. At a normal conference, if somebody had a 45-minute slide and they finished in, say 30, the conference organizers will then have to go and figure out what they're going to do with that spare time but with all pre-recorded, you can just kind of spot it together and have a plan going forward. KRISTIAN: I think most of the talks, I've kind of ask people to keep them around 45, 50 minutes and we'll have some space between the talks for people to continue to ask questions in the chat or I can plug things like the Discord server in those spaces and sponsorship infos and stuff like that. But I'm also constantly thinking of these little formatic conference allows so many different little things to be tested. One thing we're thinking about doing is like at noon, there's going to be a break, kind of a lunch break, but ideally and I need to start thinking this out, getting some lightning talk style things from people who submitted a talk and didn't get accepted or something that and those are -- ROBERT: Would those be live? KRISTIAN: That's a good question. ROBERT: Or pre-recorded? KRISTIAN: That's a great question. I think the thing with live is that I would have to figure out how to get people to hop onto the stream. That might be possible but I'm not quite sure. I think we'll probably do pre-recorded, kind of across the board for this one but there's all of these little opportunities to do interesting things with the format. One thing that, I will take you on kind of a journey here like where my mind goes and I think about stuff like this over the last year or two. This is going to seem like such a tangent but I'll tie it up, I promise. Over the last year or two, actually longer, it's probably the last couple of years, I was really into Anthony Bourdain and all of his shows and I was really interested in, again this is going to sound really bizarre but I was interested in taking that idea and applying it to conferences. For say, the keynote speakers, I was thinking like it would be cool actually to go and meet them wherever they're working and stuff like that and introduce them in that format and maybe even sit down with them and do an interview or do some kind of live coding with them and have that available as a bonus material to the conference itself. Maybe air some of it in-between talks as part of the preface for their talk. There's all these kind of interesting things. I think that one thing that always kind of bothered me about the developer world is, I guess I always feel like it's really hard to visualize how to get started as a developer and then what is the day in the life of a developer and what do you actually do. I think I've been really interested in this idea of giving people a holistic view of how to get into this industry and to show people. At least in my opinion, there is a lot of hype and maybe, not intentional but it makes a scene a lot more difficult than it really is. That takes a lot of time but there are a lot of people who probably have been, whether that's kind of the Steve Job's worship of tech people or this other thing that no one can be like them unless you're whatever, if that makes sense. Basically, everyone in this industry is just a normal person. Maybe, there are some crazy personalities out there who are really dominating or stuff like that but for the most part, I think especially in the web developer world, everyone is, at least in my perspective, very welcoming and just like normal people and I want the aspect of the community to be letting people into that world and say like, "This is not as impenetrable as you may think," and there's a lot of different ways to -- ROBERT: Amplify the kindness and amplify the welcoming. KRISTIAN: Exactly, yeah. ROBERT: I like it. You did mention like around lunch time, there would be a break. At other conference, they usually cater lunch. Is there anything offered for that or is it like go on and find your own lunch? KRISTIAN: That's actually a really interesting question. No, there isn't anything planned but now, I wonder if I should find a company that's like... Is that DoorDash? Is that grocery delivery, is that restaurant delivery? You know what I'm talking about like -- ROBERT: Restaurant delivery. KRISTIAN: -- Or something like that. It'd be cool to have a coupon like if they're React, they might want to sponsor the conference. That would be interesting. That's a super -- WIL: -- Delivery fee. KRISTIAN: Yeah, that would be super cool. ROBERT: It might be too late for that now since we're a couple of weeks out but some of those companies do used React or in the future, for the future of ByteConf series, like if it's a SwiftConf and I know you've mentioned that before, you might be able to be like, "We're doing a Swift online conference. You guys use Swift. Do you want to sponsor?" KRISTIAN: Yeah. I think there are so many opportunities to do really cool things. That's a really cool idea. I haven't thought about that before. I'm going to write that down. That's a very cool idea. ROBERT: Could you tell I've been thinking about like a ByteConf accessibility conference? Because I have. KRISTIAN: Yeah. Let's do it. For real, that would be sweet. The format, we can tweak it in so many ways. It's like a full-day conference plan but there's definitely the opportunity to do really small form, like just an evening or something like that, where you get a couple of people together. The way that I visualize it in the future is there are these longer conferences but also, it just be really neat to do kind of continuous -- WIL: Online meetup essentially. KRISTIAN: Yeah, like broadcasting. I don't want to say like a TV channel but like this place that we're going to be airing new stuff to the people who are working on and we're going to be airing old talks from conference and stuff like that and giving people a space to constantly be learning. ROBERT: You can do like a nightly techcast. "Tonight, in JavaScript news, there are 15 new frameworks." KRISTIAN: Yeah. The thing is like with Twitch, they've done a lot of tools recently that I've become kind of aware of as I'm trying to figure out the best way to broadcast the conference. They have a lot of stuff around scheduling and stuff now that actually gives us the opportunity to basically run, maybe not nightly but weekly or monthly thing without having to explicitly setup... I don't know if either of you've ever done Twitch streaming but you have this broadcast software that you have to run on your computer and stuff like that. They're working on tools to remove that aspect of it and really just make it almost like a YouTube competitor in some ways and maybe like a more live aspect. That's stuff is really interesting to me because that totally fits in with the kind of aspect of what we want to do but there's all kinds of other opportunities too. I know there are a growing number of people who are doing live programming streams and it would be really cool to be able to share our audience -- ROBERT: Coordinate that? KRISTIAN: -- And stuff like that, so I'm trying to figure that out as well. ROBERT: Are you familiar with the Ember community at all? KRISTIAN: I was familiar with the Ember community a couple years ago. It's actually is what I learned before I learned React but I think I'm pretty out of date now. ROBERT: One of the team members here at Frontside, Taras, he started something similar like that two years ago called Global Ember Meetup and it was just an online meetup that would happen at night and people would come on and give their talks. It was actually really cool because there's a lot of engagement from all across the world, which was super neat. I would love to see that idea to continue live on. KRISTIAN: I know for our mailing list, we have a sense of where people are located and this is the nature to advertise and stuff because I think our most of our audience is still in the US, Canada, UK and stuff like that but there is growing numbers of places like Africa and South America and stuff like that, where I'm not as exposed to that community but I would to make it available to all of those people. I genuinely just haven't been exposed to those communities as much and I would both like to understand the unique problems of being a web developer in those areas and also, do my best to adapt the format of the conference and stuff to those groups. I imagine that people are really excited about it but I think after the conferences, really one of a lot of the interesting stuff happens because we can take a look back and say, what could we have done better to include all kinds of groups that are historically disenfranchised from attending this kind of stuff, if that makes sense. ROBERT: Even for me, I really want to go to conferences that are in Europe but that's a big investment. It's like breaking down those barriers. I'm pretty privileged in that regard but for somebody that isn't, even just attending a conference inside the States or somewhere that even kind of close for them, just the price of the conference ticket puts them out, so I'm really excited about this idea. Why not leverage the web and make everybody available to learn in conferences and have access to that community. KRISTIAN: Yeah. I think I actually saw that Facebook just announced. They're doing another React Conference and it was interesting speaking of ticket prices, I think a lot of you were saying it was super expensive. I don't know what the exact number was, maybe you know but I actually had some people tweet like, "This is why I'm excited for my ByteConf," and I was like, "What?" WIL: That's awesome. ROBERT: I don't know what their prices but when Facebook throws ReactConf, you have to enter into a lottery. You wouldn't even actually get a chance to buy a ticket. You have to enter a chance into winning a ticket for you to buy. KRISTIAN: Yeah and that kind of stuff, I mean that won't get too deep into my politics in general but generally, that's the kind of thing that I am extremely allergic to. Even the idea of having a lottery and stuff like that, there's a lot of people who, to make the decision and say they have the opportunity to attend the conference, like if they say they get a lottery email like you have a ticket, there are some people who will be able to swing that on the spot and say, "I want to buy a ticket and start to book my flights and stuff or whatever," but there's a lot of people who that's going to be a thing they need to plan for a really long time. They don't have the opportunity to wait on the email and say, "Yes, I can go to this to what I'm being paid." That's just a different dimension of financial and I think the ticket was like $600 or something, maybe $700. It was expensive but there are much more expensive conferences. Especially, if you don't work at a company that covers your conference costs, like I am fortunate to the both places I've been at for a longer period of time like say, two plus years, have both sponsored conferences, they allowed any of their employees to go to conferences with some budget in the thousands of dollars every year and for someone to pay that, say they want to get into web development, that's a huge financial burden if you're working minimum wage or something like that. I feel like I sounds I just came down very hard on the React Conference but it's fine. It's cool that they're going to get really cool speakers and stuff like that but I think it's something. ROBERT: It's the job position of online-only versus co-located, right? There's talk there. KRISTIAN: Yeah and we talked earlier, maybe there's a hybrid approach of doing ByteConf physically, I think the one thing I will never compromise on in terms of how we put on the conference is like if we're going to do a physical thing, it needs to still be available for people who can't attend it. I think even at this point, the first conference hasn't quite happened yet but I do strongly believe that's already in the DNA of the idea and kind of ideals of the conferences I want to allow people to always attend, whatever we're doing, regardless of their situation. WIL: That's huge. I never attended a conference until last year when the company I'm currently working for, Frontside, paid for it. Before this, I had never been to a conference. It's awesome to see, they're like free [inaudible] by now. KRISTIAN: The conference I talked about earlier, the San Francisco one, I just straight up put that on a credit card, like I could not afford it. I did it because I guess I felt like -- ROBERT: That thing -- KRISTIAN: Yeah, exactly but there are people who just straight up can't do that. By that point, I was interning at a web development place but I still was basically getting paid like minimum wage. It was like under paid but I did it because I felt like it would be an investment. I didn't actually get a job from any one of that conference or anything like that, so who can say what the actual value of that was but it was important kind of in a motivational way but I don't ever want people to go into debt to go to ByteConf. That sucks. There's no way I'll allows them to do that. ROBERT: Yeah, because it's not only the conference ticket. Depending on what conference you're going to, I've seen as low as $150 and as high as $2000, just for the conference tickets and then you have to get your hotel for a week and fly out there and food. It quickly turns into a really expensive endeavor. KRISTIAN: It is in a lot of ways. I think for people who are fortunate in tech, it's somewhat of a vacation because you get to go somewhere. Usually, the tech conferences, I think are held in pretty cool locations, unless it's some kind of indie conf that doesn't have a lot of sponsorships or something like that. I went to a conference a couple of years ago that was at Disney World and it was very much a vacation. I went to the conference and I had a lot of fun. It was an Elixir Conference. I learned a lot of stuff there but after the conference was done, I went to like... I'm trying to think what it is called. It's like Downtown Disney, basically or whatever, so I went like -- ROBERT: Oh, they renamed it to Disney Springs. KRISTIAN: Oh, really? Disney Springs, wow. That sounds very -- ROBERT: Yeah, I [inaudible] for two years. KRISTIAN: Actually that does sound right. Coming from LA, I used to go Disneyland all the time. Even if the conference is just on a hotel or whatever, usually the area around it is pretty nice but that definitely limits a lot of people, unless you're fortunate enough to be making a tech salary or have a company that will cover that conference budget for you. ROBERT: We're sending two people to JSConf Hawaii. We were able to snag the early bird tickets which are so much cheaper. Then I was shocked that the hotel cost on Waikiki Beach was cheaper than my Portland hotel, so I'm actually super jealous and it was a super awesome vacation on the beach in Hawaii for less than what probably took for me to get to Portland. KRISTIAN: Is that where JSConf is? It's just in Portland? ROBERT: That's JSConf Hawaii. Portland was Chain React, so shout out to React Native Conference. The JSConf US one is in San Diego which is coming up in two weeks. Oh, my God. KRISTIAN: Nice. If you are a conference speaker and stuff, I think you get some stuff cover. I don't know. Every conference is different or whatever, so if you go in that format, if you go to conferences as a speaker, I think it's a little bit different situation but I can think of a lot of times that I looked at a conference and there's been a couple of talks that I found interesting but just the amount of money that I would spend to see one or two talks that really interested me, it wasn't worth it. ROBERT: At least ByteConf kind of shed that and absolutely drops the barrier of entry of to nothing. I mean, nothing mean you have to have an internet connection. KRISTIAN: Yeah but there's still a couple of things. This is why I'm trying to deal the rebroadcasting and making it available after the fact is there are some people who still can't take a day off and watch a full seven or eight-hour conference, so it's important to make it available after the fact too. I think I mentioned, I want to sell the conference talks with the slides and with the bonus materials and stuff after the fact. There's people that are actual, like practicing React developers who would feel fine paying like $30 for those or something and that way, we can hopefully, ideally, I hope I'm not totally speaking out of this to make totally go wrong but ideally, pay the speakers to some degree. That's another kind of aspect of it that I eventually would to do well in the future. But like you said, lowering the barrier to entry to literally as close to zero as we can get is what's really important to me. Then they feel everything else, we can work back up to something, putting on the really big conference events that a lot of other people are doing but still keep those ideals that we had from the first place. ROBERT: I love it. ByteConf sounds super awesome. I'm very excited to be selected to be a part of it. I really appreciate that. Is there anything else that you want to plug about ByteConf? KRISTIAN: Yeah. A couple of things, tomorrow depending on when this comes out, August 10th at 5 PM PST, we have our first 'Ask me anything' with Kyle Shevlin, who is a speaker at ByteConf React this year. It's just going to be Twitch.tv/ByteConf. If you're on the mailing list or you're in the Discord server or stuff like that, you probably already know about this but I will obviously tweet about it as well. A couple of other things. The 24th of August, we're actually doing and this hasn't been announced yet. This is the first time I'm talking about it. ROBERT: You heard it here first. KRISTIAN: Yay! We got an 'Ask me anything' with Kentcdodds, one of our keynote speakers. I'm very excited about that. That hasn't been announced yet but I imagine that's going to be really cool. I think people are going to be very into that. Finally of course, the conference itself. ByteConf React is August 31st. It's one day, starts at 9 AM PST. You should join the mailing list and follow us on Twitter. It's just at @ByteConf. You'll see a link to the mailing list there as well and you'll get some more information there but it starts at 9 AM. On Twitch, it's Twitch.tv/ByteConf. That's all you need to do to attend. I would love for people to follow us on Twitter and join the mailing list but if you are allergic to following the people on Twitter or getting emails, you don't have to do any of that. You can just find us that day on Twitch. We have some more things that we're probably going to announce as kind of preconference events in between now and then but those are kind of the two or I guess three, main things. Thank you for having me on. It's been really awesome. I think it's maybe the first time I've talked about the bigger picture stuff with the conference so it's been really cool to get to talk about that. I'm excited for your talk as well. I think it's going to be really neat. ROBERT: Awesome. Thank you for coming on. Like I said, I'm really excited for ByteConf. When I saw this pop up as an idea, I was all over it. I think I actually submitted the CFP before you officially announced that there was CFP. I'm like, "I'm in it. I'm going for it." KRISTIAN: One more thing, I think I didn't mention just kind of organically is that all of the CFP submissions are actually reviewed by people in the community. I'm really proud to say that the talks they have selected, including Robert's were generally, because people were just super interested in them. I think that's going to really show when we air the conference. People are going to be really excited about this stuff. It's going to be super cool. I'm beyond hyped. I'm extremely nervous, extremely hyped and it's going to be great. WIL: I'll also going to say that if you have an Amazon Prime account, you get a free Twitch subscription, so you can go ahead and subscribe to ByteConf on Twitch. KRISTIAN: Yes. That is very true. I should do a better job of plugging that. Oh, one more thing. I guess I should be a good podcast guest and also say like, if you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is Kristian Freeman, it's at @imkmf on Twitter. For the most part, I just tweet about ByteConf stuff and Product Hunt stuff and then get mad about politics sometimes but I should do a better job of plugging my stuff. Again, thank you for having me on this. This has been really, really great and I'm looking forward to seeing you both at the conference. ROBERT: Cool. Thank you Kristian. This is a great conversation. I'm really excited about it. We are the Frontside. We build software that you can stake your future on. If your team needs any help with single page app testing, accessibility especially in single page apps, I'm really, really open to helping anybody. If you or your team need help in that or leveling up, be sure to reach out. We're open to pair. We're open to start a new engagement, anything that kind of helps you and your team to move forward, we're super interested in. As always, you can reach out to us Info@Frontside.io for any feedback on the podcast and thank you Mandy for producing our podcast. Thanks everyone. Have a good day. WIL: Yup. Thanks guys. See you at ByteConf.

Mariko Kosaka さんをゲストに迎えて、JSConf EU, TC39, オープンソースとサステナビリティ、Coinhive などについて話しました。 Show Notes JSConf EU 2018 Eyeo Festival 25 de Abril Bridge User-Agent 家系図 SafariのUA文字列が固定されて固定されなくなったおはなし Twitter ‘smytes’ customers 10 Things I Regret About Node.js - Ryan Dahl - JSConf EU 2018 ry/deno: A secure TypeScript runtime on V8 propelml/propel: Differential Programming in JavaScript. TensorFlow.js Rollup Computer, build me an app - Rich Harris - JSConf EU 2018 Svelte • The magical disappearing UI framework webpack To push, or not to push?! - The future of HTTP/2 server push - Patrick Hamann - JSConf EU 2018 Rebuild: 154: Chinese Menu Selection (kazuho) Towards ever faster websites with early hints and priority hints HTTP2 Early Hints Living on the Edge with Fastly's Tyler McMullen スラスラ読める JavaScriptふりがなプログラミング Rebuild.fmの宮川氏がRubyまつもと氏に聞いた、Ruby開発の10の論点 SmooshGate FAQ Summary for the 64th meeting of Ecma TC39 Open source sustainability Between the Wires: An interview with Vue.js creator Evan You OpenCollective The Varnish Moral License — PHKs Bikeshed 矢文案件 Gratipay Pointer Events Coinhive設置で家宅捜索受けたデザイナー、経緯をブログ公開 Using Web Workers 警察庁　サイバー犯罪対策 Government Digital Service The HTTPS-Only Standard JSConf US 2018

The Internet is mad. iPhone silliness. Sadly DailyJS and JSConf US are coming to an end. Raquel will be at Strange Loop next week. Kahlil got a PR merged into Gulp. Workflow stuff. npm orgs, search, shrinkwrap and more. Cilantro tastes like soap/awesome.

What is Facebook's React.js project? When it was announced at JSConf US 2013 it met mixed reviews. One question that might enter your mind is...as developer today in 2015, do I really need to know another framework? The short answer is “yes”. In episode 31 “Building with React.js” we talk with Facebook developer and TC39 member, Sebastian Markbage (@sebmarkbage) on building apps with React, React Native, React Conf 2015, what's new in the framework, what the core concepts are, what the hype is all about, and much more.   Resources Sebastian Markbage: Minimal API Surface Area | JSConf EU 2014 -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8 React - https://github.com/facebook/react Sebastian's Github - https://github.com/sebmarkbage React blog - http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/ v.0.13.0 Beta update - http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/01/27/react-v0.13.0-beta-1.html Panelists   Erik Isaksen - UX Engineer at3Pillar Global Danny Blue - Front End Engineer at Deloitte Digital Nick Niemeir - JavaScript Agent Engineer at New Relic