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In this episode of the Frontend Masters Podcast, host Marc Grabanski chats with Jon Kuperman, a seasoned developer, educator, and TC39 delegate. Jon shares insights into his journey from juggling enthusiast to JavaScript language contributor, his experiences at companies like Twitter, Brave, Adobe, and Bloomberg, and his passion for teaching and accessibility. He also dives into the complexities of evolving JavaScript, the challenges of browser development, and the future of reactive programming with signals. Tune in for a deep dive into the world of frontend development, open source, and the collaborative process behind shaping the future of JavaScript.Check out Jon's Frontend Masters courses here: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/jon-kuperman/Frontend Masters Online:Twitter: https://twitter.com/FrontendMastersLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/frontend-masters/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FrontendMastersInstagram: https://instagram.com/FrontendMastersAbout Us:Advance your skills with in-depth, modern front-end engineering courses — our 150+ high-quality courses and 18 curated learning paths will guide you from mid-level to senior developer! https://frontendmasters.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=home_link&utm_campaign=podcastepisode23
Myles is currently Product Lead for Developer Platform at Snowflake. Previously, he directed project management at GitHub, overseeing projects like GitHub Copilot Workspace for PRs, Codespaces, npm, and Packages. A key contributor to Ecma International and TC39, he has served for stretches as a Delegate, Co-Chair, and VP for the project. His contributions to TC39 coincided with his periods he worked for both Google and Microsoft, respectively. In addition to extensive experience driving security and standards improvement in open source initiatives and key development languages, Myles is an active and accomplished musician. Catch up with Myles and his work here: https://mylesborins.com/about.html. We are excited to have Myles as a guest on the show, so be sure to catch up with this episode and make a note that this episode is occurring one hour earlier than the typical livestream broadcast time.
In this episode, Surma talks about a presenation-maybe-soon-to-be-a-proposal "JS0", which explores the idea of splitting JavaScript into two specifications: JS0, focusing on security, performance and capabilties, implemented by engines; and JSSugar, focussing on developer productivity and syntactic sugar features implemented by build tools. Notes & Corrections: Yes, I know, people still do have to step through assembler. But I stand behind the essence of my point: The debug symbols for compiled languages feel very reliable. We should be able to at least match that reliability in JavaScript. Guy Bedford currently works at Fastly. Resources: Previous episode on Shared Structs The infamous slide deck OTMT episode on SourceMaps on source maps
In this episode, Surma talks about the Stage 2 proposal "JavaScript Struct", which introduces fixed-layout objects and the ability to share them between realms. Notes & Corrections from Shu: Surma was slightly wrong about why private fields were originally considered problematic for sharability. The problem occurs when a class can be evaluated multiple times: function makeClass() { return class MyClass { #priv; getPrivateField(instance) { return instance.#priv; } }; } const C1 = makeClass(); const C2 = makeClass(); const i1 = new C1(); const i2 = new C2(); // this throws! i1.getPrivateField(i2); This behavior makes it hard to compile private fields just as "slots" on an object, as clearly additional behavior is required. This is somewhat at odds with the goal of achieving a fixed layout. Also, launching is mid-2025 is very optimistic. Resources: SharedArrayBuffer Structs proposal Return overrides Records & Tuples proposal Surma's buffer-backed-object library for SharedArrayBuffer
Show DescriptionHow important is the DX of software vs how important is the person showing off the software, Douglas Crockford and JSON, remembering XML, trying to write better HTML for email, new TC39 proposal, workshopping t-shirts, and what do you do if you want a little bit of database on your website? Listen on Website →Links Web Unleashed 2024 - FITC New High Contrast Syntax Highlighting Themes – CodePen Douglas Crockford JSON JSON Feed Slow Horses JavaScript Compiler Proposal ECMAScript 2024 Updates Contentful Strapi Sanity Content System Heroku Cloudflare Turso Netlify Blobs bolt.new SponsorsBluehostFind unique domains, web hosting, and WordPress tools, all in one place. Empower your business or digital agency with Bluehost.
Kicking off the discussion is the release of Vue 3.5. Although it's not a major release, Vue 3.5 packs some great new features and optimizations like: reactivity system improvements (up to 56% less memory usage for apps than before), reactive prop destructuring stabilization (it's simpler to declare props with default values), and SSR improvements like lazy hydration for async components.RedwoodJS is also out with a new version, and 8.0 packs a wallop. It makes RedwoodJS the third framework to support React Server Components behind Next.js and Waku.The shadcn CLI has gotten an update as well where it can spin up a brand new Next.js app with shadcn and Tailwind configured and ready to go. Additionally, shadcn has integrated more tightly with Vercel's v0 AI code generator, and now every shadcn component is editable on v0, so users can customize the components in natural language and paste it into their apps afterwards. Pretty amazing!The TC39 Committee responsible for evaluating what new features get added to the JavaScript language has added a new intermediate step for proposals: step 2.7. By the time new proposals reach step 3, they must already have full test suites to support their implementation, and if, for any reason, they must go back to step 2 to rethink things, a lot of that work can be for naught.News:Paige - Vue 3.5 is outJack - RedwoodJS 8.0 and shadcn CLI updatesTJ - JavaScript Standard Gets an Extra StageList of ECMAScript proposals on GitHubBonus News:Laravel raises $57 million series ASSR benchmark wars update (author Matteo is the Fastify lead maintainer)What Makes Us Happy this Week:Paige - House of the Dragon season 2Jack - Raspberry Pi TJ - Linkin Park is back!Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.Front-end Fire websiteBlue Collar Coder on YouTubeBlue Collar Coder on DiscordReach out via emailTweet at us on X @front_end_fire
We've got a good show for you today! It's chock full of new build tools, better date handling in JavaScript, and SSR benchmarks to prove which framework is truly the fastest.The rust-ification of JavaScript build tools continues, as next generation build tool Rspack hits v1 and claims it's ready for primetime. Rspack boasts (almost) complete compatibility with the webpack API while also being 10x faster.JS dates are about to be fixed thanks to the new Temporal API proposal, which is currently in stage 3 of the TC39 process of adding new features to the JavaScript language.A new benchmark war has erupted online: this time benchmarking which JavaScript SSR frameworks are the fastest. Benchmarking results are dubious at best because everyone's application is different, and has different requirements, but this one got a lot of heat due to the author using an LLM to generate the code to run in these different frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, Fastify, etc). Finally, the CSS Survey 2024 is out now! Fill it out, be amazed at how much more there is to CSS than you previously thought, and write in Front-end Fire in the podcast section of the survey if you like our show. We greatly appreciate it!News:Paige - Rspack v1.0Jack - The SSR benchmark wars of 2024 beginTJ - Temporal Dates Coming to JavaScript and temporal polyfillBonus News:CSS Survey 2024 — write in Front-End Fire!What Makes Us Happy this Week:Paige - Photoroom photo editing appJack - 1password password managerTJ - Bench power supplyThanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire.Front-end Fire websiteBlue Collar Coder on YouTubeBlue Collar Coder on DiscordReach out via emailTweet at us on X @front_end_fire
It was teased in the last episode already and here it - Michael and Alex talk about the current hype in the front end development community: Signals. But if you as a Vue developer don't feel hyped around it and maybe even didn't hear much around it, fear no more - that is normal and will be explained in the episode too.Join the two Vue experts covering the history of Signals, what's behind the term and how they work in Vue.js and other major frameworks.And of course, the TC39 proposal to add Signals to the language itself wasn't forgotten either.Enjoy the episode! Chapters(00:00) - Welcome to DejaVue (01:06) - Signals and Reactivity (04:41) - Functional Programming (10:51) - Signals in Modern Frameworks (11:48) - How Signals look like in other Frameworks (14:20) - Signals in Vue (15:20) - Signals vs. refs? (17:51) - A Standard for Signals (21:54) - Benefits of Signals in the language (25:16) - Vue.JS DE Conf 2024 Links and Resources$10 off for Michael's Nuxt Tips Collection* with this link and the code DEJAVUE10% discount for the vue.js de Conf in Bonn, Germany* with code DEJAVUEDejaVue #E022 - Reactivity in VueHaskellOCamlElixirElmZodValibotSolid.jsBuilding solid-like Signals in Vue with shallowRefVue Docs on SignalsTC39 ProposalVueUseLinks marked with * are affiliate links. We get a small commission when you register for the service through our link. This helps us to keep the podcast running. We only include affiliate links for services mentioned in the episode or that we use ourselves.
In this episode, Brian LeRoux, co-founder of Begin.com, discusses the evolution and rise of serverless full stack development. Brian shares insights on the history and future of JavaScript, the benefits of serverless architecture, and how front-end developers can leverage these technologies to build scalable and maintainable applications. Links https://brian.io https://webdev.rip https://github.com/brianleroux https://www.npmjs.com/~brianleroux https://twitter.com/brianleroux https://indieweb.social/@brianleroux https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianleroux https://begin.com https://arc.codes https://enhance.dev We want to hear from you! How did you find us? Did you see us on Twitter? In a newsletter? Or maybe we were recommended by a friend? Let us know by sending an email to our producer, Emily, at emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com (mailto:emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com), or tweet at us at PodRocketPod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod). Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket provides AI-first session replay and analytics that surfaces the UX and technical issues impacting user experiences. Start understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at [LogRocket.com]. Try LogRocket for free today.(https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Brian LeRoux.
Adam and Dax both got hairdids, Adam learns how a tattoo is installed, why can't we be more productive while live streaming, bringing out our different personalities in different groups, open source drama, issues with TC39 and bureaucracy on the web, Dax's stamp of package approval, and discussing the State of JavaScript.Want to carry on the conversation? Join us in Discord.WinterCGTC39 - Specifying JavaScript.Bun — A fast all-in-one JavaScript runtimeState of JavaScriptTopics:(00:00) - Nailed it first try. Perfect. (01:06) - Adam and Dax get their hairdid (06:04) - Getting a tattoo is wild (09:20) - Keeping live streaming productive (15:01) - Do you have different personalities with different people? (21:34) - Open source drama (34:32) - Issues with TC39 (41:32) - Stamping packages as Good (47:44) - State of JavaScript survey
In this episode, they dive deep into the latest advancements in React with a special focus on the experimental React Compiler. Our guest speakers, Sathya Gunasekaran and Joe Savona, share their insights on how this cutting-edge tool aims to enhance performance and streamline development without disrupting existing code. They explore the goals of the React Compiler, including auto memoization, linting, and runtime optimizations, and how it plans to minimize unnecessary DOM updates. This is an in-depth discussion on subjects like referential equality, the complexities of memoization, API improvements for useEffect, and the compelling debate about whether React should introduce signals as a TC39 standard. Additionally, they discuss the potential transition for existing projects, the importance of community feedback, and the intriguing differences between React's approach to UI as a function of state versus the signal-based model.Stay tuned to learn about the future of React, the practical benefits of the new compiler, and the ongoing experiments that could shape how we write and optimize JavaScript with React.SocialsLinkedn: Sathya GunasekaranPicksAJ - webinstall.devDan - Godzilla Minus One (2023)Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/javascript-jabber--6102064/support.
In this episode, Surma shares what he learned while getting started with the Bevy Game engine, Entity Component Systems and why they might be useful for the Web. Jake rounds up the newest JavaScript language features that landed in TC39's Stage 3. Resources: Bevy Game Engine Bevy Rendering Pipeline Buffer-backed Objects, a library by Surma to store objects in ArrayBuffer Surma built Boids with Bevy: Tweet 1, Tweet 2 When should your alarm go off when daylight savings time kicks in? TC39 Stage 3 Proposals ShadowRealm style API on workers Our previous episode which covers JSON imports. The JSON spec. Pushing up the daisies.
Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what's cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform. We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Records, Tuples & Temporal. We round out this epic discussion with a look at cross-project standardization efforts like WinterCG, open source sustainability & how Bloomberg's open source program gives back in important projects in the web ecosystem.
Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what's cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform. We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Records, Tuples & Temporal. We round out this epic discussion with a look at cross-project standardization efforts like WinterCG, open source sustainability & how Bloomberg's open source program gives back in important projects in the web ecosystem.
Kent C. Dodds, a JavaScript engineer and teacher known for Epic Web Dev and the Remix web framework, reflects on his journey in tech, including his tenure at PayPal and his transition to full-time teaching. Kent's passion for teaching is a constant theme throughout. He transitioned from corporate roles to full-time education, capitalizing on his ability to explain complex concepts in an accessible manner. This transition was marked by the creation of successful online courses like "Testing JavaScript and Epic React," which have significantly influenced the web development community. An interesting aspect of Kent's career is his involvement with Remix, including his decision to leave Shopify (which acquired Remix) to return to teaching, which led to the development of his latest project, Epic Web Dev, an extensive and innovative web development course. This interview provides a comprehensive view of Kent C. Dodds's life and career, showcasing his professional achievements in web development and teaching, his personal life as a family man, and his unique upbringing in a large family. Epic Web (https://www.epicweb.dev/) Remix (https://remix.run/) Follow Kent C. Dodds on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentcdodds/) or X (https://twitter.com/kentcdodds). Visit his website at kentcdodds.com (https://kentcdodds.com/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Kent C. Dodds. Kent is a JavaScript engineer and teacher. He has recently released a massive workshop called epicweb.dev. And he is the father of four kids. Kent, thank you for joining me. KENT: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. WILL: Yeah. And it's an honor for me to have you. I am a huge fan. I think you're the one that taught me how to write tests and the importance of it. So, I'm excited to talk to you and just pick your brain and learn more about you. KENT: Oh, thank you. WILL: Yeah. So, I just want to start off just: who is Kent? What do you like to do? Tell us about your family, your hobbies, and things like that. KENT: Yeah, sure. So, you mentioned I'm the father of four kids. That is true. We are actually expecting our fifth child any day now. So, we are really excited to have our growing family. And when I'm not developing software or material for people to learn how to develop software, I'm spending time with my family. I do have some other hobbies and things, but I try to share those with my family as much as I can. So, it's starting to snow around here in Utah. And so, the mountains are starting to get white, and I look forward to going up there with my family to go skiing and snowboarding this season. During the summertime, I spend a lot of time on my one-wheel just riding around town and bring my kids with me when I can to ride bikes and stuff, too. So, that's sort of the personal side of my life. And then, professionally, I have been in this industry developing for the web professionally for over a decade. Yeah, web development has just worked out super well for me. I kind of focused in on JavaScript primarily. And when I graduated with a master's degree in Information Systems at Brigham Young University, I started working in the industry. I bounced around to a couple of different companies, most of them you don't know, but you'd probably be familiar with PayPal. I was there for a couple of years and then decided to go full-time on teaching, which I had been doing as, like, a part-time thing, or, like, on the side all those years. And yeah, when teaching was able to sustain my family's needs, then I just switched full-time. So, that was a couple of years ago that I did that. I think like, 2018 is when I did that. I took a 10-month break to help Remix get off the ground, the Remix web framework. They got acquired by Shopify. And so, I went back to full-time teaching, not that I don't like Shopify, but I felt like my work was done, and I could go back to teaching. So, that's what I'm doing now, full-time teacher. WILL: Wow. Yes, I definitely have questions around that. KENT: [laughs] Okay. WILL: So many. But I want to start back...you were saying you have four kids. What are their ages? KENT: Yeah, my oldest is 11, youngest right now is 6, and then we'll have our fifth one. So, all four of the kids are pretty close in age. And then my wife and I thought we were done. And then last December, we kind of decided, you know what? I don't think we're done. I kind of think we want to do another. So, here we go. We've got a larger gap between my youngest and the next child than we have between my oldest and the youngest child. WILL: [chuckles] KENT: So, we're, like, starting a new family, or [laughs] something. WILL: Yeah [laughs]. I just want to congratulate you on your fifth child. That's amazing. KENT: Thank you. WILL: Yeah. How are you feeling about that gap? KENT: Yeah, we were pretty intentional about having our kids close together because when you do that, they have built-in friends that are always around. And as they grow older, you can do the same sorts of things with them. So, like, earlier this year, we went to Disneyland, and they all had a great time. They're all at the good age for that. And so, they actually will remember things and everything. Yeah, we were pretty certain that four is a good number for us and everything. But yeah, we just started getting this nagging feeling we wanted another one. So, like, the fact that there's a big gap was definitely not in the plan. But I know a lot of people have big gaps in their families, and it's just fine. So, we're going to be okay; just it's going to change the dynamic and change some plans for us. But we're just super excited to have this next one. WILL: I totally understand what you mean by having them close together. So, I have three little ones, and my oldest and my youngest share the same exact birthday, so they're exactly three years apart. KENT: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's actually...that's fun. My current youngest and his next oldest brother are exactly two years apart. They share the same birthday, too [laughs]. WILL: Wow. You're the first one I've heard that their kids share a birthday. KENT: Yeah, I've got a sister who shares a birthday with her son. And I think we've got a couple of birthdays that are shared, but I also have 11 brothers and sisters [laughs]. And so, I have got a big family, lots of opportunity for shared birthdays in my family. WILL: Yeah, I was actually going to ask you about that. How was it? I think you're the 11th. So, you're the youngest of 11? KENT: I'm the second youngest. So, there are 12 of us total. I'm number 11. WILL: Okay, how was that growing up with that many siblings? KENT: I loved it. Being one of the youngest I didn't really...my experience was very different from my older siblings. Where my older siblings probably ended up doing a fair bit of babysitting and helping around the house in that way, I was the one being babysat. And so, like, by the time I got to be, like, a preteen, or whatever, lots of my siblings had already moved out. I was already an uncle by the time I was six. I vaguely remember all 12 of us being together, but most of my growing up was just every other year; I'd have another sibling move out of the house, which was kind of sad. But they'd always come back and visit. And now I just have an awesome relationship with every one of my family members. And I have something, like, 55 nieces and nephews or more. Yeah, getting all of us together every couple of years for reunions is really a special experience. It's a lot of fun. WILL: Yeah. My mom, she had 12 brothers and sisters. KENT: Whoa. WILL: And I honestly miss it because we used to get together all the time. I used to live a lot closer. Most of them are in Louisiana or around that area, and now I'm in South Florida, so I don't get to see them as often. But yeah, I used to love getting together. I had so many cousins, and we got in so much trouble...and it was -- KENT: [laughs] WILL: We loved it [laughs]. KENT: Yeah, that's wonderful. I love that. WILL: Yeah. Well, I want to start here, like, how did you get your start? Because I know...I was doing some research, and I saw that, at one point, you were an AV tech. You were a computer technician. You even did maintenance. Like, what was the early start of your career like, and how did you get into web dev? KENT: I've always been very interested in computers, my interest was largely video games. So, when I was younger, I had a friend who was a computer programmer or, like, would program stuff. We had visions of...I don't know if you're familiar with RuneScape, but it's this game that he used to play, and I would play a little bit. It was just a massive online multiplayer game. And so, we had visions of building one of those and having it just running in the background, making us money, as if that's how that works [laughter]. But he tried to teach me programming, and I just could not get it at all. And so I realized at some point that playing video games all the time wasn't the most productive use of my time on computers, and if I wanted my parents to allow me to be on computers, I needed to demonstrate that I could be productive in learning, and making things, and stuff. So, I started blogging and making videos and just, like, music videos. My friend, who was the programmer, he was into anime, or anime, as people incorrectly pronounce it. And [laughs] there was this website called amv.com or .org or something. It's Anime Music Videos. And so, we would watch these music videos. And I'd say, "I want to make a music video with Naruto." And so, I would make a bunch of music videos from the Naruto videos I downloaded, and that was a lot of fun. I also ran around with a camera to do that. And then, with the blog, I wrote a blog about Google and the stuff that Google was, like, doing because I just thought it was a fascinating company. I always wanted to work at Google. In the process of, like, writing the blog, I got exposed to CSS and HTML, but I really didn't do a whole lot of programming. I also did a little bit of Google Docs. Spreadsheets had some JavaScript macros-type things that you could do. So, I did a little bit of that, but I never really got too far into programming. Then I go to college, I'm thinking, you know what? I think I want to be a video editor. I really enjoy that. And so, my brother, who at the time was working at Micron, he did quality assurance on the memory they were making. So, he would build test automation, software and hardware for testing the memory they build. And so, he recommended that I go into electrical engineering. Because what he would say is, "If you understand computers at that foundational level, you can do anything with computers." And I'd say, "Well, I like computers. And if I go into video editing, I'm going to need to understand computers, too. So yeah, sure, let's let's do that." I was also kind of interested in 3D animation and stuff like that, too. Like, I wasn't very good at it, but I was kind of interested in that, too. So, I thought, like, having a really good foundation on computers would be a good thing for me. Well, I was only at school for a semester when I took a break to go on a mission for my church [inaudible 09:42] mission. And when I got back and started getting back into things, I took a math refresher course. That was, like, a half a credit. It wasn't really a big thing, but I did terrible in it. I did so bad. And it was about that time that I realized, you know what? I've been thinking my whole life that I'm good at math. And just thinking back, I have no idea why or any justification for why I thought I was good at math because in high school, I always struggled with it. I spent so much time with it. And in fact, my senior year, I somehow ended up with a free period of nothing else to do. I don't know how this happened. But, I used that free period to go to an extra edition of my calculus class. So, I was going to twice as much calculus working, like, crazy hard and thinking that I was good at this, and I superduper was not [laughter]. And so, after getting back from my mission and taking that refresher course, I was like, you know what? Math is a really important part of engineering, and I'm not good at it at all, obviously. And so, I've got to pivot to something else. Well, before my mission, as part of the engineering major, you needed to take some programming classes. So, there was a Java programming class that I took and a computer systems class that included a lot of programming. The computer systems was very low level, so we were doing zeros and ones. And I wrote a program in zeros and ones. All that it did was it would take input from the keyboard, and then spit that back out to you as output. That was what it did. But still, you know, many lines of zeros and ones and just, like, still, I can't believe I did that [laughter]. And then we upgraded from that to Assembly, and what a godsend that was [laughs], how wonderful Assembly was after working in machine code. But then we upgraded from that to C, and that's as far as that class went. And then, yeah, my Java class, we did a bunch of stuff. And I just remember thinking or really struggling to find any practicality to what we were doing. Like, in the Java class, we were implementing the link to list data structure. And I was like, I do not care about this. This does not make any sense. Why should I care? We were doing these transistor diagrams in the computer systems class. And why do I care about that? I do not care about this at all. Like, this is not an interesting thing for me. So, I was convinced computer programming was definitely not what I wanted to do. So, when I'm switching from electrical engineering, I'm thinking, well, what do I do? And my dad convinced me to try accounting. That was his profession. He was a certified public accountant. And so, I said, "Okay, I'll try that." I liked the first class, and so I switched my major to go into the business school for accounting. I needed to take the next accounting class, and I hated that so much. It was just dull and boring. And I'm so glad that I got out of that because [laughs] I can't imagine doing anything like that. WILL: [laughs] KENT: But as part of switching over to business school, I discovered information systems. What's really cool about that is that we were doing Excel spreadsheets and building web pages. But it was all, like, with a practical application of business and, like, solving business problems. And then, I was like, oh, okay, so I can do stuff with computers in a practical setting, and that's what got me really interested. So, I switched, finally, to information systems–made it into that program. And I was still not convinced I wanted to do programming. I just wanted to work with computers. What ended up happening is the same time I got into the information systems program, I got married to my wife, and then I got this part-time job at a company called the More Good Foundation. It's a non-profit organization. And one of my jobs was to rip DVDs and upload those videos to YouTube, and then also download videos from one site and upload those to YouTube as well. And so, I was doing a lot of stuff with YouTube and video stuff. And as part of my information systems class, I was taking another Java class. At that same time, I was like, you know, what I'm doing at work is super boring. Like, can you imagine your job is to put in a [inaudible 13:45] and then click a couple of buttons? And, like, it was so boring and error-prone, too. Like, okay, now I've got to type this out and, you know, I got to make sure it's the same, try and copy-paste as much as I can. And it was not fun. And so, I thought, well, I'm pretty sure there are pieces of this that I could automate. And so, with the knowledge that I was getting in my information systems programming class, that was another Java class, I decided to write a program that automated a bunch of my stuff. And so, I asked my boss, like, "Can I automate this with writing software?" And I'm so glad that they said I could. WILL: [laughs] KENT: Because by the end of it, I had built software that allowed me to do way more than I ever could have before. I ended up uploading thousands of videos to their YouTube channels, which would have taken years to do. And they ended up actually being so happy with me. They had me present to the board of directors when they were asking for more money [laughs] and stuff. And it was really awesome. But still, I was not interested in being a programmer. Programming, to me, was just a means to an end. WILL: Oh, wow. KENT: Yeah, I guess there was just something in me that was like, I am not a programmer. So, anyway, further into the program of information systems, I interned as a business intelligence engineer over that next summer, and I ended up staying on there. And while I was supposed to be a business intelligence engineer, I did learn a lot about SQL, and star schema, and denormalized databases to optimize for read speed and everything. I learned a lot about that. But I just kept finding myself in positions where I would use my programming experience to automate things that were problematic for us in the business realm. And this was all still Java. It was there that I finally realized, you know what? I think I actually do want to be a programmer. I actually really do enjoy this. And I like that it's practical, and it makes sense for me, so… WILL: What year was that? KENT: That would have been 2012. Then I got a new job where my job was actually to be a programmer at a company called Domo, where they do business intelligence, actually. So, it got my foot in the door a little bit since I was a business intelligence engineer already. I got hired on, actually, as a QA engineer doing automated testing, but I never really got into that. And they shifted me over pretty quick into helping with the web app. And that is when I discovered JavaScript, and the whole, like, everything flooded out from there. I was like, wow, I thought I liked programming, but I had no idea how fun it could be. Because I felt like the chains had been broken. I no longer have to write Java. I can write JavaScript, and this was just so much better. WILL: [laughs] KENT: And so, yeah, I was there for a year and a half before I finally graduated. And I took a little break to work at USAA for a summer internship. And when I came back, I had another year and then converted to full-time. And so, yeah, there's my more detail than you were probably looking for, story of how I got into programming [laughs]. WILL: No, I actually love it because like I said, I've used your software, your teachings, all that. And it's amazing to hear the story of how you got there. Because I feel like a lot of times, we just see the end result, but we don't know the struggle that you went through of even trying to find your way through what your purpose was, what you're trying to do. Because, at one point, you said you were trying to do accounting, then you were trying to do something else. So, it's amazing to see, like, when it clicked for you when you got into JavaScript, so that's amazing. KENT: Yeah, it is kind of funny to think, like, some people have the story of, like, I knew I wanted to be a programmer from the very beginning, and it's just kind of funny for me to think back and, like, I was pretty certain I didn't want to be a programmer. WILL: [laughs] KENT: Like, not only did I, like, lots of people will say, "I never really thought about it, and then I saw it, and it was great." But I had thought about it. And I saw it, and I thought it was awful [laughter]. And so, yeah, I'm really glad that it worked out the way it did, though, because programming has just been a really fun thing. Like, I feel so blessed to be doing something that I actually enjoy doing. Like so many of our ancestors, they would go to work because they cared about their family and they just wanted to feed their family. I'm so grateful to them for doing that. I am so lucky that I get to go to work to take care of my family, but also, I just love doing it. WILL: Yeah, I feel the same way, so yeah, totally agree. After you found out about JavaScript, when did you figure out that you want to teach JavaScript? What was that transition like? KENT: I've been teaching for my whole life. It's ingrained in my religion. Even as a kid, you know, I'd prepare a talk, a five-minute talk, and stand up in front of 30 of my peers. And even when you're an early teenager, you get into speaking in front of the entire congregation. It took a while before I got good enough at something, enough hubris to think that people would care about what I have to say -- WILL: [laughs] KENT: Outside of my religion where, like, they're sitting there, and I've been asked to speak, and so they're going to listen to me. And so, when I started getting pretty good at programming, I decided, hey, I want to teach this stuff that I'm learning. And so, when I was still at school and working at Domo, the business intelligence company, one of our co-workers, Dave Geddes, he put together a workshop to teach AngularJS because we were migrating from Backbone to Angular. And I asked him if I could use his workshop material to teach my classmates. This was, like, soon after ng-conf, the first ng-conf, which my co-workers at Domo actually put on. So, I wasn't involved in the organization, but I was very much present when it was being organized. I attended there and developed a relationship with Firebase with the people there. I was actually...they had a developer evangelist program, which they called Torchbearers or something. And actually, that was my idea to call them Torchbearers. I think they wanted to call us torches, and I'm like, that just doesn't make sense. WILL: [laughs] KENT: I developed a relationship with them. And I asked them, "Hey, I want to teach my classmates AngularJS. Would you be interested in sponsoring some pizza and stuff?" And they said, "Yeah, we'll send you stickers, and hot sauce, and [laughs] a bunch of..." Like, they sent us, like, headphones [laughs] and stuff. So, I was like, sweet. I taught my classmates AngularJS in a workshop, brought a bunch of pizza, and it was, you know, just an extracurricular thing. And actually, the recording is still on my YouTube channel, so if you want to go look at one of my early YouTube videos. I was very into publishing video online. So, if you are diligent, you'll be able to find some of my very early [laughter] videos from my teenage years. But anyway, so, yes, I've been teaching since the very beginning. As soon as I graduated from college, I started speaking at meetups. I'd never been to a meetup before, and I just saw, oh, they want a speaker. I can talk about something. WILL: Wow. KENT: And not realizing that, like, meetups are literally always looking for speakers. This wasn't some special occasion. WILL: [laughs] KENT: And one of the meetups I spoke at was recorded and put on YouTube. And the guy who started Egghead io, John Lindquist, he is local here in Utah. And he saw that I spoke at that meetup, but he wasn't able to attend. So, he watched the recording, and he thought it was pretty good. He thought I would do a good job turning that into a video course. And that first video course paid my mortgage. WILL: Wow. KENT: And I was blown away. This thing that I had been doing just kind of for fun speaking at meetups, and I realized, oh, I can actually, like, make some legit good money out of this. From there, I just started making more courses on the side after I put the kids to bed. My wife is like, "Hey, I love you, but I want you to stay away for now because I've just been with these tiny babies all day. WILL: [laughs] KENT: And I just need some alone time." WILL: Yes. KENT: And so, I was like, okay. WILL: [laughs] KENT: I'll just go and work on some courses. And so, I spent a lot of time for the next couple of years doing course material on the side. I reached out to Frontend Masters and just told them, "Hey, I've been doing courses for Egghead." I actually met Marc Grabanski at a conference a couple of years before. And so, we established a little bit of relationship. And I just said, "Hey, I want to come and teach there." So, I taught at Frontend Masters. I started putting on my own workshops at conferences. In fact, just a few months after graduating, I got accepted to speak at a conference. And only after I was accepted did I realize it was in Sweden [laughter]. I didn't think to look where in the world this conference was. So, that was my first international trip, actually, and I ended up speaking there. I gave, actually, two talks. One of them was a three-hour talk. WILL: Whoa. KENT: Which was, yeah, that was wild. WILL: [laughs] KENT: And then, yeah, I gave a two-day workshop for them. And then, I flew straight from there to Amsterdam to give another talk and also do a live in-person podcast, which I'd been running called ngAir, an Angular podcast. It just kept on building from there until finally, I created testingjavascript.com. And that was when I realized, oh, okay, so this isn't just a thing I can use to pay my mortgage, and that's nice. This is, like, a thing I can do full-time. Because I made more with Testing JavaScript than I made from my PayPal salary. WILL: Oh wow. KENT: I was like, oh, I don't need both of these things. I would rather work half as much one full-time job; that's what I want, one full-time job and make enough to take care of my family. And I prefer teaching. So, that's when I left PayPal was when I released Testing JavaScript. WILL: Wow. So, for me, I think so many times the imposter syndrome comes up whenever I want to teach or do things at the level you're saying you're doing. Because I love teaching. I love mentoring. I remember when I came into development, it was hard. I had to find the right person to help me mentor. So now, I almost made a vow to myself that if someone wants to learn and they're willing to put in the energy, I'm going to sit down however long it takes to help them because I remember how hard it was for me whenever I was doing it. So, you said in 2014, you were only a couple years doing development. How did you overcome impostor syndrome to stand in front of people, teach, go around the world, and give talks and podcasts? Like, how did you do that portion? KENT: Part of it is a certain level of hubris like I said. Like, you just have to be willing to believe that somebody's going to care. You know, the other part of it is, it's a secret to getting really, really good at something. They sometimes will say, like, those who can't do teach. That's total baloney because it requires a lot of being able to do to get you in a position where you can teach effectively. But the process of teaching makes you better at the process of doing as well. It's how you solidify your experience as a whatever. So, if you're a cook, you're really good at that; you will get better by teaching other people how to cook. There's an element of selfishness in what I do. I just want to get really, really good at this, and so I'm going to teach people so that I can. So yeah, I think there's got to be also, like, a little bit of thick skin, too, because people are going to maybe not like what you have to share or think that you're posing or whatever. Learn how to let that slide off you a little bit. But another thing is, like, as far as that's concerned, just being really honest about what your skill set is. So, if somebody asks me a question about GraphQL, I'm going to tell them, "Well, I did use GraphQL at PayPal, but I was pretty limited. And so, I don't have a lot of experience with that," and then I'll answer their question. And so, like, communicating your limitations of knowledge effectively and being okay being judged by people because they're going to judge you. It just is the way it is. So, you just have to learn how to cope well with that. There are definitely some times where I felt like I was in over my head on some subjects or I was involved in a conversation I had no business being there. I actually felt that a lot when I was sent as PayPal's delegate to the TC39 meetings. Wow, what am I doing here? I've only been in the industry for, like, two or three years at [laughter] that point. It takes a certain level of confidence in your own abilities. But also, like, being realistic about your inexperience as well, I think, is important too. WILL: Yeah, I know that you had a lot of success, and I want to cover that next. But were there any failures when you were doing those teaching moments? KENT: Years ago, Babel was still a new thing that everybody was using to compile their JavaScript with new syntax features down to JavaScript that the browser could run. There was ES Modules that was introduced, and lots of us were doing global window object stuff. And then we moved to, like, defining your dependencies with r.js or RequireJS. And then, there was CommonJS, and Universal Module Definition, and that sort of thing. So, ECMAScript modules were very exciting. Like, people were really interested in that. And so, Babel added support to it. It would compile from the module syntax down to whatever you wanted: CommonJS or...well, I'm pretty sure it could compile to RequireJS, but I compiled it to CommonJS. And so, there was a...yeah, I would say it's a bug in Babel at that time, where it would allow you to write your ES modules in a way that was not actually spec-compliant. It was incorrect. So, I would say export default some object, and then in another module, I would say import. And then, I'd select properties off of the object that I exported, that default I exported. That was allowed by Babel, but it is superduper, not how ECMAScript modules work. Well, the problem is that I taught, like, a ton of people how to use ECMAScript modules this way. And when I realized that I was mistaken, it was just, like, a knife to the heart because I was, like, I taught so many people this wrong thing. And so, I wrote a blog post about it. I gave a big, long talk titled “More Than You Want to Know About ECMAScript Modules,” where I talk about that with many other things as well. And so, yeah, just trying to do my part to make up for the mistake that I made. So yes, I definitely have had mistakes like that. There's also, like, the aspect that technology moves at a rapid pace. And so, I have old things that I would show people how to do, which they still work just as well as they worked back then. But I wouldn't recommend doing it that way because we have better ways now. For some people, the old way to do it is the only way they can do it based on the constraints they have and the tools that they're using and stuff. And so, it's not, like, it's not valuable at all. But it is a struggle to make sure that people understand that, like, this is the way that you do it if you have to do it this way, but, like, we've got better ways. WILL: I'm glad you shared that because it helps. And I love how you say it: when I make a mistake, I own up to it and let everyone know, "Hey, I made a mistake. Let's correct it and move on." So, I really like that. KENT: Yeah, 100%. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it's easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn't looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. WILL: I want to go back to what you were saying. When you left PayPal, you released Testing JavaScript. How did you come up with the idea to write a Testing JavaScript course? And, two, how long did it take to take off and be successful? KENT: That was a pretty special thing, honestly. In 2018, I had put together a bunch of workshops related to testing. There was this conference called Assert(js) that invited me to come, taught them. In the year prior, I went to Midwest JS and taught how to test React. I had this material about testing. I'd gotten into testing just because of open-source stuff. I didn't want to have to manually go through all my stuff again every time I wanted to check for breakages and stuff, so that got me into testing. And whatever I'm into is what I'm going to teach. So, I started teaching that testing. And then my friend, Ryan Florence, put together...he separated from Michael Jackson with React Training, and built his own thing called Workshop.me. He asked me to join up with him. And he would, like, put together these workshops for me, and I would just...my job was just to show up and teach. And so, I did that. I have a picture, actually, in this blog post, The 2010s Decade in Review, of me in front of 60 people at a two-day workshop at Trulia in San Francisco. WILL: Oh, wow. KENT: And this is where I was teaching my testing workshop. Well, what's interesting about that photo is that two weeks before that, I had gotten really frustrated with the tool that everybody uses or used at the time for testing React, and that was Enzyme. And so I was preparing this workshop or working on it. I had already delivered it a number of times, but I was working on it, improving it, as I always do [laughs] when I'm preparing. WILL: [laughs] KENT: I can never give the same workshop twice, I guess. And I was just so frustrated that Enzyme was so difficult to work with. And, like, I was going to prepare this document that said, "Here are all the things you should never do with Enzyme. Like, Enzyme encourages you to do these things; you should not do these things. And let me explain why." And I just hated that I needed a document like that. And so, I tweeted, "I'm seriously starting to think that I should make my own very small testing lib and drop Enzyme entirely. Most of Enzyme's features are not at all useful and many damaging to my test bases. I'd rather have something smaller that encourages better practices." And so, I tweeted that March 15th, 2018. I did that. I did exactly that. What I often do in my workshops is I try to build the abstraction that we're going to use so that you can use it better. So, I was, like, building Enzyme, and I realized the jump between what I had built, the little utilities that I had built as part of the workshop, from that to Enzyme was just a huge leap. And so, I thought, you know what? These utilities that I have built to teach Enzyme are actually really good. What if I just turned that into a testing utility? And that became Testing Library, which, fast forward to today, is the number one testing library for React. And it's recommended for testing React, and Vue, and Angular. The ideas that are in Testing Library got adopted by Playwright. If you're writing tests for anything in the browser, you are very likely using something that was either originally developed by me or inspired by the work that I did. And it all came from that testing workshop that I was working on. So, with that, I had not only that testing workshop; I had a number of other workshops around testing. And so I approached Joel Hooks from Egghead.io. I say, "Hey, I'm getting ready to record a bunch of Egghead courses. I've got, like, six or seven courses I want to do." And he'd seen my work before, you know, I was a very productive course creator. And he said, "Hey, how about we, you know, we've been thinking about doing this special thing. How about we make a website just dedicated to your courses?" And I said, "That sounds great." I was a little bit apprehensive because I knew that putting stuff on Egghead meant that I had, like, a built-in audience and everything that was on Egghead, so this would be really the first time of me just branching out with video material on my own. Because, otherwise, if it wasn't Egghead, it was Frontend Masters, and there was the built-in audience there. But yeah, we decided to go for it. And we released it in, I think, November. And it was that first week...which is always when you make the most is during the launch period. But that launch week, I made more than my PayPal salary for the entire year. And so, that was when I realized, oh, yeah, okay, let's go full-time on this because I don't need two PayPal salaries. I just need one. And then I can spend more time with my family and stuff. And especially as the kids are getting older, they're staying up later, and I want to hang out with them instead of with my computer at night [laughter], and so... WILL: I love how you explain that because I came in around 2018, 2019. And I remember Enzyme, and it was so confusing, so hard to work with, especially for, you know, a junior dev that's just trying to figure it out. And I remember Testing JavaScript and then using that library, and it was just so much easier to, like, grab whatever you needed to grab. Those utils made the biggest difference, and still today, they make a huge difference. So yes, I just resonate with what you're saying. That's amazing. KENT: Aw, thank you so much. WILL: Yeah. You did Testing JavaScript. And then what was your next course that you did? KENT: I quit PayPal, go full-time teaching. That first year, I actually did an update to Testing JavaScript. There were a couple of changes in Testing Library and other things that I needed to update it for. And then I started working on Epic React. So, while I was doing all this testing stuff, I was also very into React, creating a bunch of workshops around that. I was invited to speak all over the world to talk about React. And I had a couple of workshops already for React. So, I was invited to give workshops at these conferences about React. And so, I thought, you know, let's do this again, and we'll do it with React this time. The other thing was, I'd never really planned on being the testing guy. It just kind of happened, and I actually didn't really like it either. I wanted to be more broad than just testing. So, that kind of motivated me to say, hey, let's do something with React to be a little bit more broad. Yeah, so I worked on putting those workshops together and delivered them remotely. And then, yeah, COVID hit, and just really messed everything up [laughs] really bad. So, I had everything done on my end for Epic React by March of 2020, which is, like, immediately after COVID got started, in the U.S. at least. And so, yeah, then we actually didn't end up releasing Epic React until October that year, which, honestly [laughs], was a little bit frustrating for me because I was like, "Hey, guys, I have recorded all the videos and everything. Can we get this released?" But, like, that just was a really rough year for everybody. But yeah, so Egghead got the site put together. I did a bunch of interviews and stuff. And then we launched in October of 2020. That was way bigger than Testing JavaScript because Testing JavaScript was still very informed by my experience as an Egghead instructor, which, typically, the Egghead courses are, like, a video where watch me do this thing, and then you'll learn something and go apply it to your own stuff. And that's kind of what Testing JavaScript was built as. But as part of the update of Testing JavaScript in 2019, I added another workshop module called Testing Node Applications. And in that one, I decided, hey, typically, I would have a workshop version of my material and a course version. The workshop version had like instructions and exercises. And the course version was no instructions or anything. It was just, like, watch these videos. And it was just me doing the exercises. And with the update of Testing JavaScript, I added that Testing Node workshop, and I said, hey, what if we just, like, embrace the fact that these are exercises, and it's just, like, me recording the workshop? How I would deliver the workshop? And so, I tested that out, and that went really well. And so, I doubled down on that with Epic React. And I said, okay, now, this isn't just, like, watch these videos. This is a do the exercise and then watch me do the exercise. So, Epic React was not only a lot more material but the format of the material was more geared for retention and true practice and learning. And so, Epic React ended up doing much better than Testing JavaScript, and even still, is still doing a remarkable job as far as course material is concerned. And, like, so many people are getting a lot of really great knowledge from Epic React. So yeah, very gratifying to have that. WILL: Once again, I've used Epic React. It's taught me so many...stretched me. And I do like the format, so yes, I totally agree with that, yeah. The next thing, Remix, correct? KENT: Yeah. So, how I got into Remix, around the same time we finished recording Epic React videos, I was doing some other stuff kind of to keep content going and stuff while we were waiting to launch Epic React. And around that same time, my friend Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson––they were doing the React training thing. And so, we were technically competitors. Like I said, Ryan and I kind of joined forces temporarily for his Workshop Me thing, but that didn't end up working out very well. And Michael really wanted Ryan back, and so they got back together. And their React training business went way better than it had before. They were hiring people and all sorts of stuff. And then, a training business that focuses on in-person training just doesn't do very well when COVID comes around. And so, they ended up having to lay off everybody and tried to figure out, okay, now what are we going to do? Our income has gone overnight. This is a bit of a simplification. But they decided to build software and get paid for it like one does. So, they started building Remix. Ryan, actually, around that time, moved back to Utah. He and I would hang out sometimes, and he would share what he was working on with Michael. We would do, like, Zoom calls and stuff, too. I just got really excited about what they were working on. I could see the foundation was really solid, and I thought it was awesome. But I was still working on Epic React. I end up launching Epic React. He launches Remix the very next month as a developer preview thing. Yeah, it definitely...it looked a lot like current Remix in some ways but very, very different in lots of others. But I was super hooked on that. And so, I paid for the developer preview and started developing my website with it. And around the next year in August, I was getting close to finishing my website. My website is, like, pretty legit. If you haven't gone to kentcdodds.com. Yet, it is cooler than you think it is. There's a lot that goes into that website. So, I had a team help me with the product planning and getting illustrations and had somebody help me implement the designs and all that stuff. It was a pretty big project. And then, by August of 2021, Ryan and I were talking, and I said, "Hey, listen, I want to update Epic React to use Remix because I just think that is the best way to build React applications. But I have this little problem where Remix is a paid framework. That's just going to really reduce the number of people who are interested in learning what I have to teach. And on top of that, like, it just makes it difficult for people to test things out." And so, he, around that time, was like, "Hey, just hold off a little bit. We've got some announcements." And so, I think it was September when they announced that they'd raised VC money and they were going to make Remix open source. That was when Ryan said, "Hey, listen, Kent, I think that it's awesome you want to update Epic React to use Remix. But the problem is that Remix isn't even 1.0 yet. The community is super small. It needs a lot of help. If you release a course on Remix right now, then you're not going to get any attention because, like, nobody even knows what it is." So, part of me is like, yeah, that's true. But also, the other part of me is like, how do people find out what it is [laughs] unless there's, like, material about it? But he was right. And he said, "Listen, we've got a bunch of VC money. I've always wanted to work with you. How about we just hire you? And you can be a full-time teacher about Remix. But you don't have to charge anything. You just, like, make a bunch of stuff for free about Remix." I said, "That sounds great. But, you know, to make that worth my while because I'm really happy with what I'm doing with this teaching thing, like, I'm going to need a lot of Remix." And so, Michael Jackson was like, "How about we just make you a co-founder, and we give you a lot of Remix?" And I said, "Okay, let's do this." And so I jumped on board with them as a year-delayed co-founder. I guess that's pretty common. But, like, that felt kind of weird to me [laughs] to be called a co-founder. But yeah, so I joined up with them. I worked on documentation a little bit, mostly community building. I ran Remix Conf. Shopify was interested in what we were doing. And we were interested in what Shopify was doing because, at the time, they were working on Hydrogen, which was one of the early adopters of React Server Components. And, of course, everybody was interested in whether Remix was going to be adding support for server components. And Ryan put together a couple of experiments and found out that server components were nowhere near ready. And we could do better than server components could as of, you know, the time that he wrote the blog posts, like, two years ago. So, Hydrogen was working with server components. And I put us in touch with the Hydrogen team—I think it was me—to, like, talk with the Hydrogen team about, like, "Hey, how about instead of spending all this time building your own framework, you just build on top of Remix then you can, you know, make your Shopify starter projects just, like, a really thin layer on top of Remix and people will love it? And this is very important to us because we need to get users, especially really big and high profile users, so people will take us seriously." And so, we have this meeting. They fly a bunch of their people out to Salt Lake. They're asking us questions. We're asking them questions and saying, "Hey, listen, this is why server components are just not going to work out for you." Well, apparently, they didn't listen to us. It felt like they were just like, "No, we're highly invested in this. We've already sunk all this cost into this, but we're going to keep going." And they did end up shipping Hydrogen version 1 on top of server components, which I just thought was a big mistake. And it wasn't too long after that they came back and said, "Hey, we're kind of interested in having you guys join Shopify." So, right after Remix Conf, I go up into Michael's room at the hotel with Ryan. And they say, "Hey, listen, Kent, we're talking with Shopify about selling Remix and joining Shopify," and kind of bounced back and forth on whether we wanted to do it. All of us were just not sure. Because when I joined Remix, I was thinking, okay, we're going to build something, and it's going to be huge. This is going to be bigger than Vercel, like multibillion-dollar company. So, I really kind of struggled with thinking, hey, we're selling out. Like, we're just getting started here. So, Ryan and I ended up at RenderATL in Atlanta at that conference. We were both speaking there. And Ryan didn't fill out the right form. So, he actually didn't have a hotel room [laughs], and so he ended up staying in my room. I intentionally always get a double bedroom just in case somebody needs to stay with me because somebody did that for me once, and I just...it was really nice of them. So, I've always done that since. And so, I said, "Yeah, Ryan, you can stay with me." And so, we spent just a ton of time together. And this was all while we were trying to decide what to do with Shopify. And we had a lot of conversations about, like, what do we want for Remix in the future? And it was there that I realized, oh if I want to take this to, like, multi-billion dollar valuation, I've got to do things that I am not at all interested in doing. Like, you've got to build a business that is worth that much money and do business-related things. On top of all of that, to get any money out of it...because I just had a percentage of the company, not actually any money. There was no stock. So, the only way you can get money out of a situation like that is if you have a liquidation event like an IPO, which sounds, like, awful—I [laughs] would hate to go through an IP0—or you have to be bought. And if you're worth $2 billion, or 3, or whatever, who can buy you? There's almost nobody who can buy you at that valuation. Do you really want to outprice anybody that could possibly buy you? And then, on top of that, to get there, that's, like, a decade worth of your life of working really superduper hard to get to that point, and there's no guarantee. Ryan would always say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. He was saying Shopify is a bird in the hand, and we do not know what the future holds. And so, we were all finally convinced that, yeah, we want to sell, and so we decided, yeah, let's sell. And as the sale date grew closer, I was getting excited because I was like, oh, I can be back on the TC39 because Shopify is, like, I don't know if they're actually sending delegates to the TC39, but I'm sure that they would be interested if I ask them to, like, "Hey, let's be involved in the evolution of JavaScript." And I know they're on the Web Working Group. Like, they're on a bunch of different committees and stuff. And I just thought it'd be really cool to get involved in the web platform again. And then, on top of that, I just thought, you know what? I'll just spend all my time teaching Shopify developers how to use Remix. That sounds like a lot of fun. As things drew closer, I got more and more uneasy about that. And I thought, you know, I could probably do just as well for myself by going full-time teacher again. I've done this thing before. I just really like being a teacher and, like, having total control over everything that I do. And if I work at Shopify, they're going to tell me, "Hey, you need to, like, do this, and that, and the other." And I don't know if I want to go back to that. And so, I decided, this is awesome. Super, super good job, folks. I think I've done everything for you that you need me to do. I'm going to bail out. And so, yeah, Shopify wasn't super jazzed about that. But the deal went through anyway. And that's how I ended my time at Shopify. WILL: I love it. It's lining up perfectly because you say you left Shopify to go back doing more teaching. And then you released another course; that's Epic Web, correct? KENT: Right. That was the reason I left Shopify or I didn't join up with Shopify is because I wanted to work on Epic Web. In this 2010s blog post, one of the last things that I mention...toward the bottom, there's a section, KCD EDU, which is basically, like, I wanted to help someone go from zero to my level as an engineer in a single place where I teach just all of the things that I can teach to get somebody there. And so I wanted to call it KCD EDU, but I guess you have to be an accredited university to get that domain or something. But that was the idea. Erin Fox, back in 2020 she said, "I'm expecting you to announce your online Kent C. Dodds engineering bootcamp." And I replied, "I'm planning on doing this, no joke." So, I've been wanting to do this for a really long time. And so, leaving Remix was like, yeah, this is what I'm going to go do. I'm going to go build KCD EDU. And I was talking with Ryan at some point about, like, what I was planning on doing in the future. And something he said or something I said in that conversation made me realize, oh, shoot, I want to build Epic Web Dev. So, I've got Epic React. I don't want Epic Remix. I want people to, like, be web developers. Remix is just, like, an implementation detail. And so, I went and I was relieved to find that the domain was still available: epicweb.dev, and so I bought that. And so, I was always planning on, like, even while I was at Remix, eventually, I would leave Remix and go build Epic Web Dev. So, that's what I did. Starting in August, I decided, okay, how about this: I will build a legit real-world web application, and then I will use that to teach people how to build legit real-world web applications from start to finish. If it's included as, like, knowledge you would need to build this web app, then that's knowledge you need to be able to build a full-stack application. That was the idea. So, I started live streaming in, like, August or September, and I would live stream almost everyday development of this web app. So, people can go and watch those on my YouTube channel. I would livestream for, like, sometimes six hours at a time with breaks every 45 minutes. So, I'd just put it on a break slide, go for a quick walk, or take a drink, whatever, and then I would come back. And I would just, like, so much development and live streaming for a long time. Once I got, like, in a pretty good place with that, the app I was building was called Rocket Rental. It's like Airbnb for rocket ships. So, you could rent, like, your own rocket ship to other people to fly. So, it had to be, like, realistic enough that, like, you could relate it to whatever you were building but not realistic enough that people would actually think it was a real product [laughs]. I worked with Egghead again. They actually have a sister company now called Skill Recordings that's responsible for these types of products. And so, I was working with Skill Recordings on, like, they would get me designs. And then I would, like, work with other people to help implement some of those designs. And then, I started working on turning this stuff into workshops. And with Epic React, we have this workshop app that you run locally so that you can work in your own editor, in your own environment, and with your own editor plugins and all that stuff. I want you to practice the way that you're going to actually exercise that practice when you're done––when you're working at work. And so we have this workshop app with Epic React. Well, that was built with Create React app, very limited on what you could do. And so, I started working on a new workshop app that I just called KCD Shop, that was built with Remix. And so, now we've got a bunch of server-side stuff we can do. And this server side is running on your machine. And so, so much stuff that I can do with this thing. One of the big challenges with Epic React was that the video you watch is on epicreact.dev, but the exercises you run are on localhost. And so, you have to keep those things in sync. You'd see, okay, I'm in exercise one on the videos. Let me go find exercise one in the app and then find the file exercise one. So, you've got, like, three different things you've got to keep in sync. And so, with the workshop app for Epic Web, I said, how about we make it so that we can embed the video into the app? And so, you just have localhost running, and you see the video right above the instructions for the exercise. And so, you watch the video that kind of introduces the problem that you're going to be doing, and then you read the instructions. And then we can also make it so that we have links you can click or buttons you can click in the app that will open your editor exactly where you're supposed to go. So you don't have to keep anything in sync. You go to the app, and you watch the video. You read the instructions. You click this button. It opens your editor. And so, that's exactly what I did. And it's an amazing experience. It is phenomenal, not just for the workshop learners but for me, as a workshop developer, like, creating the workshop––it's just been phenomenal. Because, like, we also have this diff view where you can see the difference between your work in progress and the solution. So, if you get stuck, then it's very easy to see where you went wrong. It also means that we can build even very large applications as part of our workshop and our exercise where there are dozens or hundreds of files. And you don't have to worry about finding them because it'll tell you exactly which ones you need to be working in, so all sorts of really, really cool things. So, this workshop app––actually, took a lot of time and effort to build. But now that it's done, like, people are going through it now, and they're just loving it. So, I built the workshop app, I put the first workshop of Rocket Rental into this workshop app, and I delivered it. And I found out very quickly that a full application with all the bells and whistles you'd expect, like, tons of different routes and stuff, was just too much. Even with the workshop app, it was just really pretty difficult for people to gain enough context around what they were building to be effective. So, I was concerned about that. But then, around the same time, I started realizing that I had a marketing problem. And that is that with Testing JavaScript, people know that they're customers because they're like, I'm a JavaScript developer, and I know how to test––boom. I'm a Testing JavaScript customer. With Epic React, I join this company; they're using React; I need to know React, boom. I'm a customer of Epic React. But with something like Epic Web, it's just so broad that, like, yeah, I am a web developer. I just don't know if I'm a customer to Epic Web. Like, is Epic Web for only really advanced people, or is it only for really beginner people? Or is it only for people who are using this set of tools or... Like, it's just a very difficult thing to, like, identify with. And so I wanted to de-emphasize the fact that we used Remix because the fact is that you can walk away from this material and work in a Next.js app or a SvelteKit app and still use so much of the knowledge that you gained in that environment. So, I didn't want to focus on the fact that we're using any particular set of tools because the tools themselves I select them, not only because I think that they are really great tools but also because the knowledge you gain from these tools is very transferable. And I'm going to teach it in a way that's very transferable. That was the plan. But I still had this issue, like, I need people to be able to identify themselves as customers of this thing. So, what I decided to do through some, like, hints and inspiration from other people was how about I turn Rocket Rental into a much simpler app and make that a project starter? And while I was at Remix, actually, I directed the creation of this feature called Remix Stacks. It's basically the CLI allows you to create a Remix app based on a template. I said I can make a Remix Stack out of this, and I called it the Epic Stack. And so, just took all of the concepts that came from Rocket Rental; applied it to a much simpler app. It's just a note-taking app, but it has, like, all of the features that you would need to build in a typical application. So, it's got a database. It's got deployment, GitHub integration. So, you have GitHub Actions to run tests and stuff. It has the tests. It has authentication already implemented, and even two-factor auth, and third-party auth, and file upload, and, like, just tons and tons of stuff built in. And so, people can start a new project and ship that and have a lot of success, like, skip all the basic stuff. So, I presented that at Remix Conf. I wasn't working at Remix anymore, but they asked me to run Remix Conf again, so I did. And I told them, "If I'm running it this year, I'm going to select myself to speak." And I spoke and introduced the Epic Stack there. And then that was when I started to create the workshops based on the Epic Stack. And so, now it was no longer we're going to have workshops to build Rocket Rental; it was we're going to have workshops to build the Epic Stack, with the idea being that if you build the thing, you are able to use it better, like, still following the same pattern I did with Testing JavaScript where we build a framework first. Like, before you start using Jest, we're building Jest and same with Testing Library. We do the same thing with React. Before we bring in React, I teach you how to create DOM nodes yourself and render those to the page and all of that. And so, here with Epic Web, I'm going to teach you how to build the framework that you can use to build applications. So, that is what Epic Web is, it's effectively we're building the Epic Stack. In the process, you learn all about really basic things, like, how do you get styles onto the page all the way to really complex things like, how do you validate a user's email? Or how do you implement two-factor auth? Or how do you create a test database? So, you don't have to mock out the database, but you can still run your test in isolation. Around this time was when my wife and I were trying to become pregnant. And we got the news that we were expecting, and we were super excited. And so, I'm thinking, okay, I've got to ship this thing before the baby comes. Because who knows what happens after this baby comes? So, I am talking with Skill Recordings. I'm saying, "We've got to get this done by October." I think it was May. And so, I was thinking like, okay, I've probably got, like, maybe eight days worth of workshops here. And so, kind of outlined all of the workshops. Like, I know what needs to be included. I know what the end looks like because I've got the Epic Stack. The end is the Epic Stack. The beginning is, like, a brand new create Remix app creation right there. So, I know what the start and the end looks like. I kind of can figure out how much time I need to teach all of that. And I said, "Let's do eight days." And so, we got that scheduled and started selling tickets. And we sold out 30 tickets in just a couple of days, and that's what we originally planned for. I'm like, well, gosh, I can handle 80 people in a workshop. I've done that before, but that's about as far as I go. I don't really like going that much. In fact, online, especially, I only like to go up to, like, 40. But we said, "Hey, let's knock this out of the park." So, we doubled it, and we sold another 30 seats. And so, it was sold out before even the early bird sale was over. So, that was pretty encouraging. The problem was that I hadn't actually developed this material. I'd already given one workshop about testing with Rocket Rental, and I'd given one workshop about the fundamentals with Rocket Rental. But I hadn't done anything of the authentication or, the forms, or data modeling. Also, like, Epic Notes app is different from Rocket Rental. So, I got to rebuild those workshops. Like, the first workshop was going to start in, like, two weeks, maybe three weeks. And so, I'm working on these workshops. And I'm like, I've finished the first workshop, which was going to be a two-day workshop, and so I get that done. And so, that next week, I'm getting close to finished on the forms workshop, and then I start the workshops. And that was when I started to realize, oh, shoot, I am in huge trouble because I have to not only deliver two workshops a week, so that's two days a week that I'm not able to work on the workshops, really. And then also develop the material as I go, which I don't normally do this at all because I just don't like stressing myself out so much. But, like, I'd had this timeline put together, and I'm like, I need to ship this by October. For about five weeks, I worked 80 to 100 hours a week, maybe more, in a row to get those workshops created [laughs]. And I do not recommend this, and I will never do it again. I can tell you this now. I didn't tell anybody at the time because I was worried that people would think, well, geez, is that the type of product you create, like, you're just rushing through this stuff? But I can tell you this safely now because the results speak for themselves. Like, these people loved this stuff. They ate it up. It was so good. I won't do this again. It's not something that I typically do. But it worked. And, like, I put in a crazy amount of work to make this work. People loved it. And yeah, I'm really, really happy with that. The next step, though, so it was eight days' worth of workshops in four weeks. And I realized, as I almost always realize when I'm presenting workshops, that, like, oh my gosh, I have way more material than I have time for. So, by
In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk through new and proposed JavaScript APIs including ones related to regex, sourcemaps, structured clone, temporal, JSON modules, and more! Show Notes 00:10 Welcome 01:26 Syntax Brought to you by Sentry 02:55 RegExp Escaping Proposal tc39/proposal-regex-escaping: Proposal for investigating RegExp escaping for the ECMAScript standard 05:25 Intl.DurationFormat tc39/proposal-intl-duration-format 07:55 Standardized Sourcemaps tc39/source-map-rfc: RFCs for the source map debug format. 10:43 Structured Clone structuredClone() global function - Web APIs | MDN 12:54 Temporal Hasty Treat - Temporal Date Objects in JavaScript Tracking issue for syncing with IETF standardization work (req'd before implementers can ship unflagged) · Issue #1450 · tc39/proposal-temporal 20:59 FindLast and findLastIndex tc39/proposal-array-find-from-last: Proposal for Array.prototype.findLast and Array.prototype.findLastIndex. 22:27 JSON modules tc39/proposal-json-modules: Proposal to import JSON files as modules 24:46 Regex Modifiers RegExp Modifiers - June 2022.pptx - Microsoft PowerPoint Online 26:50 Array Grouping tc39/proposal-array-grouping: A proposal to make grouping of array items easier 30:48 Array Methods tc39/proposal-change-array-by-copy: Provides additional methods on Array.prototype and TypedArray.prototype to enable changes on the array by returning a new copy of it with the change. 6 or so New Approved and Proposed JavaScript APIs 32:12 Promise.withResolvers 35:08 Function.prototype.memo tc39/proposal-function-memo: A TC39 proposal for function memoization in the JavaScript language. 37:48 Node has a Proposed ESM Detection flag 39:54 Node has navigator.userAgent 41:29 Built in .env support 42:52 Permissions model & test runner continues to be worked on 44:06 HTML Web charts Proposal: Web Charts · Issue #9295 · whatwg/html 45:39 autopause Add autopause attribute to media elements to allow automatic pausing of media · Issue #9793 · whatwg/html 46:30 Meta Tag for AI generated content Proposal: Meta Tag for AI Generated Content · Issue #9479 · whatwg/html Schema.org - Schema.org Syntax × Sentry Swag Store – Syntax × Sentry Shop Syntax - A Tasty Treats Podcast for Web Developers. 50:13 Poster frame HTML Video Element: Proposal for adding [srcset] + [posterset] + [sizes] on video element as well [posterset] on source elements · Issue #9812 · whatwg/html 50:57 Popover invoker Popover does not know what triggered it · Issue #9111 · whatwg/html 51:25 Autocomplete on ‘contenteditable' Elements Autocomplete on ‘contenteditable' Elements · Issue #9065 · whatwg/html 52:17 Sick Picks Sick Picks Scott: Escaping Twin Flames cult documentary Wes: Lao Gan Ma spicy Chili Oil Shameless Plugs Scott: Sentry Wes: Wes Bos Courses Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads
Check out this week's podcast where I expose the not-so-secret TC39 committee and how much JavaScript you need to know before moving on to a framework like React or Angular or whatever.It's an opinionated break down of what you should study and how to test your knowledge to build a solid foundation.As a challenge that you will either find easy or incredibly difficult, check this out. I used to give this out to junior and not-so-junior developers as a test of their skills.All the best,BrianShameless PlugsParsitydev30Brian's LinkedIn
Go To Statement Considered Harmful is a solid classic entry in the X Considered Harmful metafiction genre, authored by renowned computer scientist and idiosyncratic grump, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. Surprisingly (given the impact it's had) this is a minuscule speck of a paper, lasting only 1-ish pages, and it even digresses several times from the main point. Fear not! Jimmy and I spend the entirety of these two podcast hours thoroughly analyzing the paper, wringing every last drop of insight from it, speaking directly to how programming ought to be reimagined from the molten venture capital core on up. Yes indeed, this is another episode in the fine tradition of Future of Coding where we stay faithfully close to the text, we leave the second-order implications alone, and there's nothing more than that. Nothing portended, nothing changed. Links => patreon.com/futureofcoding Hest, which Jimmy is convinced that I refuse to call by name, or even talk about. He's clearly mistaken — and yet, I feel his philosophical force on my hand even now. Conundrum considered harmful. "All Cretans are liars" doesn't have quite the ring of "dipping their breasts into the ripper", and is considered harmful. Dijkstra's The Humble Programmer considered harmful. Hoare's The Emperor's Old Clothes considered harmful. Letter O Considered Harmful considered harmful. “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful considered harmful! Scolds! James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher considered considered considered considered considered considered considered considered harmful. Proximity to Chomsky considered harmful. Interlisp, an early lisp featuring the ] super paren, considered harmful. The opening segment of the "I Want to Half-Believe" episode of Very Bad Wizards considered harmful. The Witness considered harmful to our show notes. Delimited Continuations considered harmful. Notation as a Tool of Thought by "Kenneth E. Iverson considered harmful." The Zen of Python considered a great honking idea. Chunky Bacon considered harmful. Copilot considered harmful. Charles Babbage's Bridgewater Treatises considered harmful. North & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica considered harmful. The Sailor's Chorus from Wagner's The Flying Dutchman considered harmful. PEP 8 considered harmful. There are dozens of us considered harmful. TC39 actually considered harmful. Bifunctors considered harmful. Chocolate Radiolab considered one of the only good radio shows, because it's pushing hard against the norms of its medium. UBI — consider it! Forking The Queen considered harmful. The Semantics of Graphical Languages, the paper about a visual formalism for visual programs, considered harmful. Music featured in this episode: Lemon Wagner Lu, Devine, William, Alex and Alex, Justin, Marcel, Peter, Matt, Blaine, Kevin, Nicki, Mae, Kate, Steve, Mitja, Philippa, Max, and everyone else who secretly said it like a swearword. Get in touch, ask questions, don't ask questions: Ivan: Mastodon • Email Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter DM us in the FoC Slack Support the show on Patreon https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/067See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
### Tematy Deno 1.37 - https://deno.com/blog/v1.37 Ladle 3.0 - https://ladle.dev/blog/ladle-v3/ Svelte 5: runes - https://svelte.dev/blog/runes Krytyka bun w kontekście yarn - https://dev.to/thejaredwilcurt/bun-hype-how-we-learned-nothing-from-yarn-2n3j Next 13.5 - https://nextjs.org/blog/next-13-5 Safari 17 - https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0/ Spotkanie TC39 - https://x.com/robpalmer2/status/1705657190004953142?s=20
JavaScript: Eine multiparadigmatische Skriptsprache mit einem schwachen dynamischen Ducktyping-System.Um die Sprache JavaScript kommt man im Web nicht mehr vorbei. Die meisten kennen sie durch Frameworks wie React, Angular, Vue.js, Next und Co. Doch wie viel weißt du über die Hintergründe und die Weiterentwicklung dieser Sprache?In dieser Episode geht es nicht um das nächste hippe JavaScript-Framework, sondern wir sprechen mit Peter Kröner darüber, wie JavaScript erfunden wurde, was ECMAScript ist, wie TypeScript in den Mix spielt, warum die Sprache so beliebt ist, wie neue Features den Weg in die Sprache finden, was das TC39 ist, über das Monopol im Browser, verschiedene JavaScript-Engines und viel mehr.Bonus: Wenn Hamburg im Süden liegt.**** Diese Episode wird gesponsert vom Open-Source Förderprogramm Media Tech Lab: Bewirb dich jetzt und erhalte bis zu 50.000€ Fördersumme für dein Open-Source Projekt https://www.media-lab.de/de/media-tech-labDas schnelle Feedback zur Episode:
In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about whether decorators are finally here, what the uses cases are for decorators, how to define a decorator, and what auto accessor is. Show Notes 00:25 Welcome 01:00 Are decorators finally here? TC39 proposal How this compares to other versions of decorators 06:47 What are use cases for decorators? 10:55 How do you define a decorator? 14:20 Auto Accessor on classes @loggged class C {} on fields class C { @logged x = 1; } Auto Accessor class C { accessor x = 1; } sugar for below class C { #x = 1; // # means private get x() { return this.#x; } set x(val) { this.#x = val; } } Can be decorated and decorator can return new get and set and init functions function logged(value, { kind, name }) { if (kind === "accessor") { let { get, set } = value; return { get() { console.log(`getting ${name}`); return get.call(this); }, set(val) { console.log(`setting ${name} to ${val}`); return set.call(this, val); }, init(initialValue) { console.log(`initializing ${name} with value ${initialValue}`); return initialValue; } }; } // ... } Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets Wes Bos on Bluesky Scott on Bluesky Syntax on Bluesky
Recorded at the Øredev 2022 developer conference, Fredrik chats with Michele Riva about writing a full-text search engine, maintaining 8% of all Node modules, going to one conference per week, refactoring, the value of a good algorithm, and a lot more. Michele highly recommends writing a full-text search engine. He created Lyra - later renamed Orama, and encourages writing your own in order to demystify subjects. Since the podcast was recorded, Michele has left his then employer Nearform and founded Oramasearch to focus on the search engine full time. We also discuss working for product companies versus consulting, versus open source. It’s more about differences between companies than anything else. Open source teaches you deal with more and more different people. Writing code is never just writing code. Should we worry about taking on too many dependencies? Michele is in favour of not fearing dependencies, but ensuring you understand how things important parts for your application work. Writing books is never convenient, but it can open many doors. When it comes to learning, there are areas where a whole level of tutorials are missing - where there is only really surface-level tutorial and perhaps deep papers, but nothing in between. Michele works quite a bit on bridging such gaps through his presentations. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Michele Michele’s Øredev 2023 presentations Nearform TC39 - the committee which evolves Javascript as a language Matteo Collina - worked at Nearform, works with the Node technical steering committee Lyra - the full-text search engine - has been renamed Orama Lucene Solr Elasticsearch Radix tree Prefix tree Inverted index Thoughtworks McKinsey Daniel Stenberg Curl Deno Express Fastify Turbopack Turborepo from Vercel Vercel Fast queue Refactoring Michele’s refactoring talk Real-world Next.js - Michele’s book Next.js Multitenancy Create React app Nuxt Vue Sveltekit TF-IDF - “term frequency–inverse document frequency” Cosine similarity Michele’s talk on building Lyra Explaining distributed systems like I’m five Are all programming languages in English? 4th dimension Prolog Velato - programming language using MIDI files as source code Titles For foreign people, it’s Mitch That kind of maintenance A very particular company A culture around open source software Now part of the 8% Nothing more than a radix tree One simple and common API Multiple ways of doing consultancy What you’re doing is hidden You can’t expect to change people A problem we definitely created ourselves Math or magic Writing books is never convenient Good for 90% of the use cases (When I can choose,) I choose computer science
Dan and Steve join this week's panelist episode to talk about the TC39. Dan starts off as he explains the stages of adding features to the ECMAScript language specification to be added to the JavaScript language.SponsorsChuck's Resume TemplateDeveloper Book Club Become a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs MembershipLinksTC39 processTC39 ECMAScript proposalsUpcoming Proposals for ECMAScript (PART 1) - JSJ 532Stage 3: using keywords for automatic resource disposal (objects with lifetime)(Sync) Iterator Helpers intent to shipSet methodsDecorators (for Aspect Oriented Programming for the separation of cross-cutting concerns, e.g. logging and serialization)ShadowRealmsStage 2: Async Iterator HelpersIterator.rangeStage 1: do expressionsSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/javascript-jabber/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Luca Casonato is the tech lead for Deno Deploy and a TC39 delegate. Deno is a JavaScript runtime from the original creator of NodeJS, Ryan Dahl. Topics covered: What's a JavaScript runtime How V8 is used Why Deno was created The W3C WinterCG for server-side JavaScript Why it's difficult to ship new features in Node The benefits of web standards Creating an all-inclusive toolset like Rust and Go Deno's node compatibility layer Use cases for WebAssembly Benefits and implementation of Deno Deploy Reasons to deploy on the edge What's coming next Luca Luca Casonato @lcasdev Deno Homepage Deploy Showcase Subhosting Fresh web framework The anatomy of an Isolate Cloud Deno Users Netlify Edge Functions Deno at Slack GitHub Flat Data Shopify Oxygen Other related links Cache Web API V8 (JavaScript and WebAssembly engine) TC39 (JavaScript specification group) Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group (WinterCG) Cloudflare Workers (Deno Deploy competitor) How Cloudflare KV works CockroachDB (Distributed database) XKCD Standards Comic Transcript You can help edit this transcript on GitHub. [00:00:07] Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Luca Casonato. He's a member of the Deno Core team and a TC 39 Delegate. [00:00:06] Luca: Hey, thanks for having me. What's a runtime? [00:00:07] Jeremy: So today we're gonna talk about Deno, and on the website it says, Deno is a runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. So I thought we could start with defining what a runtime is. [00:00:21] Luca: Yeah, that's a great question. I think this question actually comes up a lot. It's, it's like sometimes we also define Deno as a headless browser, or I don't know, a, a JavaScript script execution tool. what actually defines runtime? I, I think what makes a runtime a runtime is that it is a, it's implemented in native code. It cannot be self-hosted. Like you cannot self-host a JavaScript runtime. and it executes JavaScript or TypeScript or some other scripting language, without relying on, well, yeah, I guess it's the self-hosting thing. Like it's, it's essentially a, a JavaScript execution engine, which is not self-hosted. So yeah, it, it maybe has IO bindings, but it doesn't necessarily need to like, it. Maybe it allows you to read the, from the file system or, or make network calls. Um, but it doesn't necessarily have to. It's, I think the, the primary definition is something which can execute JavaScript without already being written in JavaScript. How V8 and JavaScript runtimes are related [00:01:20] Jeremy: And when we hear about JavaScript run times, whether it's Deno or Node or Bun, or anything else, we also hear about it in the context of v8. Could you explain the relationship between V8 and a JavaScript run time? [00:01:36] Luca: Yeah. So V8 and, and JavaScript core and Spider Monkey, these are all JavaScript engines. So these are the low level virtual machines that can execute or that can parse your JavaScript code. turn it into byte code, maybe turn it into, compiled machine code, and then execute that code. But these engines, Do not implement any IO functions. They do not. They implement the JavaScript spec as is written. and then they provide extension hooks for, they call these host environments, um, like environments that embed these engines to provide custom functionalities to essentially poke out of the sandbox, out of the, out of the virtual machine. Um, and this is used in browsers. Like browsers have, have these engines built in. This is where they originated from. Um, and then they poke holes into this, um, sandbox virtual machine to do things like, I don't know, writing to the dom or, or console logging or making fetch calls and all these kinds of things. And what a runtime essentially does, a JavaScript runtime is it takes one of these engines and. It then provides its own set of host APIs, like essentially its own set of holes. It pokes into the sandbox. and depending on what the runtime is trying to do, um, the weight will do. This is gonna be different and, and the sort of API that is ultimately exposed to the end user is going to be different. For example, if you compare Deno and node, like node is very loosey goosey, about how it pokes holds into the sandbox, it sort of just pokes them everywhere. And this makes it difficult to enforce things like, runtime permissions for example. Whereas Deno is much more strict about how it, um, pokes holds into its sandbox. Like everything is either a web API or it's behind in this Deno name space, which means that it's, it's really easy to find, um, places where, where you're poking out of the sandbox. and really you can also compare these to browsers. Like browsers are also JavaScript run times. Um, they're just not headless. JavaScript run times, but JavaScript run times that also have a ui. and. . Yeah. Like there, there's, there's a whole Bunch of different kinds of JavaScript run times, and I think we're also seeing a lot more like embedded JavaScript run times. Like for example, if you've used React Native before, you, you may be using Hermes as a, um, JavaScript engine in your Android app, which is like a custom JavaScript engine written just for, for, for React native. Um, and this also is embedded within a, like react native run time, which is specific to React native. so it's also possible to have run times, for example, that are, that can be where the, where the back backing engine can be exchanged, which is kind of cool. [00:04:08] Jeremy: So it sounds like V8's role, one way to look at it is it can execute JavaScript code, but only pure functions. I suppose you [00:04:19] Luca: Pretty much. Yep. [00:04:21] Jeremy: Do anything that doesn't interact with IO so you think about browsers, you were mentioning you need to interact with a DOM or if you're writing a server side application, you probably need to receive or make HTTP requests, that sort of thing. And all of that is not handled by v8. That has to be handled by an external runtime. [00:04:43] Luca: Exactly Like, like one, one. There's, there's like some exceptions to this. For example, JavaScript technically has some IO built in with, within its standard library, like math, random. It's like random number. Generation is technically an IO operation, so, Technically V8 has some IO built in, right? And like getting the current date from the user, that's also technically IO So, like there, there's some very limited edge cases. It's, it's not that it's purely pure, but V8 for example, has a flag to turn it completely deterministic. which means that it really is completely pure. And this is not something which run times usually have. This is something like the feature of an engine because the engine is like so low level that it can essentially, there's so little IO that it's very easy to make deterministic where a runtime higher level, um, has, has io, um, much more difficult to make deterministic. [00:05:39] Jeremy: And, and for things like when you're working with JavaScript, there's, uh, asynchronous programming [00:05:46] Luca: mm-hmm. Concurrent JavaScript execution [00:05:47] Jeremy: So you have concurrency and things like that. Is that a part of V8 or is that the responsibility of the run time? [00:05:54] Luca: That's a great question. So there's multiple parts to this. There's the part, um, there, there's JavaScript promises, um, and sort of concurrent Java or well, yes, concurrent JavaScript execution, which is sort of handled by v8, like v8. You can in, in pure v8, you can create a promise, and you can execute some code within that promise. But without IO there's actually no way to defer time, uh, which means that in with pure v8, you can either, you can create a promise. Which executes right now. Or you can create a promise that never executes, but you can't create a promise that executes in 10 seconds because there's no way to measure 10 seconds asynchronously. What run times do is they add something called an event loop on top of this, um, on top of the base engine and that event loop, for example, like a very simple event loop, for example, might have a timer in it, which every second looks at if there's a timer schedule to run within that second. And if it does, if, if that timer exists, it'll go call out to V8 and say, you can now execute that promise. but V8 is still the one that's keeping track of, of like which promises exist, and the code that is meant to be invoked when they resolve all that kind of thing. Um, but the underlying infrastructure that actually invokes which promises get resolved at what point in time, like the asynchronous, asynchronous IO is what this is called. This is driven by the event loop, um, which is implemented by around time. So Deno, for example, it uses, Tokio for its event loop. This is a, um, an event loop written in Rust. it's very popular in the Rust ecosystem. Um, node uses libuv. This is a relatively popular runtime or, or event loop, um, implementation for c uh, plus plus. And, uh, libuv was written for Node. Tokio was not written for Deno. But um, yeah, Chrome has its own event loop implementation. Bun has its own event loop implementation. [00:07:50] Jeremy: So we, we might go a little bit more into that later, but I think what we should probably go into now is why make Deno, because you have Node that's, uh, currently very popular. The co-creator of Deno, to my understanding, actually created Node. So maybe you could explain to our audience what was missing or what was wrong with Node, where they decided I need to create, a new runtime. Why create a new runtime? (standards compliance) [00:08:20] Luca: Yeah. So the, the primary point of concern here was that node was slowly diverging from browser standards with no real path to, to, to, re converging. Um, like there was nothing that was pushing node in the direction of standards compliance and there was nothing, that was like sort of forcing node to innovate. and we really saw this because in the time between, I don't know, 2015, 2018, like Node was slowly working on esm while browsers had already shipped ESM for like three years. , um, node did not have fetch. Node hasn't had, or node only at, got fetch last year. Right? six, seven years after browsers got fetch. Node's stream implementation is still very divergent from, from standard web streams. Node was very reliant on callbacks. It still is, um, like promises in many places of the Node API are, are an afterthought, which makes sense because Node was created in a time before promises existed. Um, but there was really nothing that was pushing Node forward, right? Like nobody was actively investing in, in, in improving the API of Node to be more standards compliant. And so what we really needed was a new like Greenfield project, which could demonstrate that actually writing a new server side run. Is A viable, and b is totally doable with an API that is more standards combined. Like essentially you can write a browser, like a headless browser and have that be an excellent to use JavaScript runtime, right? And then there was some things that were I on top of that, like a TypeScript support because TypeScript was incredibly, or is still incredibly popular. even more so than it was four years ago when, when Deno was created or envisioned, um, this permission system like Node really poked holes into the V8 sandbox very early on with, with like, it's gonna be very difficult for Node to ever, ever, uh, reconcile this, this. Especially cuz the, some, some of the APIs that it, that it exposes are just so incredibly low level that like, I don't know, you can mutate random memory within your process. Um, which like if you want to have a, a secure sandbox like that just doesn't work. Um, it's not compatible. So there was really needed to be a place where you could explore this, um, direction and, and see if it worked. And Deno was that. Deno still is that, and I think Deno has outgrown that now into something which is much more usable as, as like a production ready runtime. And many people do use it, in production. And now Deno is on the path of slowly converging back with Node, um, in from both directions. Like Node is slowly becoming more standards compliant. and depending on who you ask this was, this was done because of Deno and some people said it would had already been going on and Deno just accelerated it. but that's not really relevant because the point is that like Node is becoming more standard compliant and, and the other direction is Deno is becoming more node compliant. Like Deno is implementing node compatibility layers that allow you to run code that was originally written for the node ecosystem in the standards compliant run time. so through those two directions, the, the run times are sort of, um, going back towards each other. I don't think they'll ever merge. but we're, we're, we're getting to a point here pretty soon, I think, where it doesn't really matter what runtime you write for, um, because you'll be able to write code written for one runtime in the other runtime relatively easily. [00:12:03] Jeremy: If you're saying the two are becoming closer to one another, becoming closer to the web standard that runs in the browser, if you're talking to someone who's currently developing in node, what's the incentive for them to switch to Deno versus using Node and then hope that eventually they'll kind of meet in the middle. [00:12:26] Luca: Yeah, so I think, like Deno is a lot more than just a runtime, right? Like a runtime executes JavaScript, Deno executes JavaScript, it executes type script. But Deno is so much more than that. Like Deno has a built-in format, or it has a built-in linter. It has a built-in testing framework, a built-in benching framework. It has a built-in Bundler, it, it like can create self-hosted, um, executables. yeah, like Bundle your code and the Deno executable into a single executable that you can trip off to someone. Um, it has a dependency analyzer. It has editor integrations. it has, Yeah. Like I could go on for hours, (laughs) about all of the auxiliary tooling that's inside of Deno, that's not a JavaScript runtime. And also Deno as a JavaScript runtime is just more standards compliant than any of the other servers at Runtimes right now. So if, if you're really looking for something which is standards complaint, which is gonna like live on forever, then it's, you know, like you cannot kill off the Fetch API ever. The Fetch API is going to live forever because Chrome supports it. Um, and the same goes for local storage and, and like, I don't know, the Blob API and all these other web APIs like they, they have shipped and browsers, which means that they will be supported until the end of time. and yeah, maybe Node has also reached that with its api probably to some extent. but yeah, don't underestimate the power of like 3 billion Chrome users. that would scream immediately if the Fetch API stopped working Right? [00:13:50] Jeremy: Yeah, I, I think maybe what it sounds like also is that because you're using the API that's used in the browser places where you deploy JavaScript applications in the future, you would hope that those would all settle on using that same API so that if you were using Deno, you could host it at different places and not worry about, do I need to use a special API maybe that you would in node? WinterCG (W3C group for server side JavaScript) [00:14:21] Luca: Yeah, exactly. And this is actually something which we're specifically working towards. So, I don't know if you've, you've heard of WinterCG? It's a, it's a community group at the W3C that, um, CloudFlare and, and Deno and some others including Shopify, have started last year. Um, we're essentially, we're trying to standardize the concept of what a server side JavaScript runtime is and what APIs it needs to have available to be standards compliant. Um, and essentially making this portability sort of written down somewhere and like write down exactly what code you can write and expect to be portable. And we can see like that all of the big, all of the big players that are involved in, in, um, building JavaScript run times right now are, are actively, engaged with us at WinterCG and are actively building towards this future. So I would expect that any code that you write today, which runs. in Deno, runs in CloudFlare, workers runs on Netlify Edge functions, runs on Vercel's Edge, runtime, runs on Shopify Oxygen, is going to run on the other four. Um, of, of those within the next couple years here, like I think the APIs of these is gonna converge to be essentially the same. there's obviously gonna always be some, some nuances. Um, like, I don't know, Chrome and Firefox and Safari don't perfectly have the same API everywhere, right? Like Chrome has some web Bluetooth capabilities that Safari doesn't, or Firefox has some, I don't know, non-standard extensions to the error object, which none of the other runtimes do. But overall you can expect these front times to mostly be aligned. yeah, and I, I think that's, that's really, really, really excellent and that, that's I think really one of the reasons why one should really consider, like building for, for this standard runtime because it, it just guarantees that you'll be able to host this somewhere in five years time and 10 years time, with, with very little effort. Like even if Deno goes under or CloudFlare goes under, or, I don't know, nobody decides to maintain node anymore. It'll be easy to, to run somewhere else. And also I expect that the big cloud vendors will ultimately, um, provide, manage offerings for, for the standards compliant JavaScript on time as well. Is Node part of WinterCG? [00:16:36] Jeremy: And this WinterCG group is Node a part of that as well? [00:16:41] Luca: Um, yes, we've invited Node, um, to join, um, due to the complexities of how node's, internal decision making system works. Node is not officially a member of WinterCG. Um, there is some individual members of the node, um, technical steering committee, which are participating. for example, um, James m Snell is, is the co-chair, is my co-chair on, on WinterCG. He also works at CloudFlare. He's also a node, um, TSC member, Mateo Colina, who has been, um, instrumental to getting fetch landed in Node, um, is also actively involved. So Node is involved, but because Node is node and and node's decision making process works the way it does, node is not officially listed anywhere as as a member. but yeah, they're involved and maybe they'll be a member at some point. But, yeah, let's. , see (laughs) [00:17:34] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and it, so it, it sounds like you're thinking that's more of a, a governance or a organizational aspect of note than it is a, a technical limitation. Is that right? [00:17:47] Luca: Yeah. I obviously can't speak for the node technical steering committee, but I know that there's a significant chunk of the node technical steering committee that is, very favorable towards, uh, standards compliance. but parts of the Node technical steering committee are also not, they are either indifferent or are actively, I dunno if they're still actively working against this, but have actively worked against standards compliance in the past. And because the node governance structure is very, yeah, is, is so, so open and let's, um, and let's, let's all these voices be heard, um, that just means that decision making processes within Node can take so long, like. . This is also why the fetch API took eight years to ship. Like this was not a technical problem. and it is also not a technical problem. That Node does not have URL pattern support or, the file global or, um, that the web crypto API was not on this, on the global object until like late last year, right? Like, these are not technical problems, these are decision making problems. Um, and yeah, that was also part of the reason why we started Deno as, as like a separate thing, because like you can try to innovate node, from the inside, but innovating node from the inside is very slow, very tedious, and requires a lot of fighting. And sometimes just showing somebody, from the outside like, look, this is the bright future you could have, makes them more inclined to do something. Why it takes so long to ship new features in Node [00:19:17] Jeremy: Do, do you have a sense for, you gave the example of fetch taking eight years to, to get into node. Do you, do you have a sense of what the typical objection is to, to something like that? Like I, I understand there's a lot of people involved, but why would somebody say, I, I don't want this [00:19:35] Luca: Yeah. So for, for fetch specifically, there was a, there was many different kinds of concerns. Um, one of the, I, I can maybe list two of them. One of them was for example, that the fetch API is not a good API and as such, node should not have it. which is sort of. missing the point of, because it's a standard API, how good or bad the API is is much less relevant because if you can share the API, you can also share a wrapper that's written around the api. Right? and then the other concern was, node does need fetch because Node already has an HTTP API. Um, so, so these are both kind of examples of, of concerns that people had for a long time, which it took a long time to either convince these people or, or to, push the change through anyway. and this is also the case for, for other things like, for example, web, crypto, um, like why do we need web crypto? We already have node crypto, or why do we need yet another streams? Implementation node already has four different streams implementations. Like, why do we need web streams? and the, the. Like, I don't know if you know this XKCD of, there's 14 competing standards. so let's write a 15th standard, to unify them all. And then at the end we just have 15 competing standards. Um, so I think this is also the kind of concern that people were concerned about, but I, I think what we've seen here is that this is really not a concern that one needs to have because it ends up that, or it turns out in the end that if you implement web APIs, people will use web APIs and will use web APIs only for their new code. it takes a while, but we're seeing this with ESM versus require like new code written with require much less common than it was two years ago. And, new code now using like Xhr, whatever it's called, form request or. You know, the one, I mean, compared to using Fetch, like nobody uses that name. Everybody uses Fetch. Um, and like in Node, if you write a little script, like you're gonna use Fetch, you're not gonna use like Nodes, htp, dot get API or whatever. and we're gonna see the same thing with Readable Stream. We're gonna see the same thing with Web Crypto. We're gonna see, see the same thing with Blob. I think one of the big ones where, where Node is still, I, I, I don't think this is one that's ever gonna get solved, is the, the Buffer global and Node. like we have the Uint8, this Uint8 global, um, and like all the run times including browsers, um, and Buffer is like a super set of that, but it's in global scope. So it, it's sort of this non-standard extension of unit eight array that people in node like to use and it's not compatible with anything else. Um, but because it's so easy to get at, people use it anyway. So those are, those are also kind of problems that, that we'll have to deal with eventually. And maybe that means that at some point the buffer global gets deprecated and I don't know, probably can never get removed. But, um, yeah, these are kinds of conversations that the no TSE is going have to have internally in, I don't know, maybe five years. Write once, have it run on any hosting platform [00:22:37] Jeremy: Yeah, so at a high level, What's shipped in the browser, it went through the ECMAScript approval process. People got it into the browser. Once it's in the browser, probably never going away. And because of that, it's safe to build on top of that for these, these server run times because it's never going away from the browser. And so everybody can kind of use it into the future and not worry about it. Yeah. [00:23:05] Luca: Exactly. Yeah. And that's, and that's excluding the benefit that also if you have code that you can write once and use in both the browser and the server side around time, like that's really nice. Um, like that, that's the other benefit. [00:23:18] Jeremy: Yeah. I think that's really powerful. And that right now, when someone's looking at running something in CloudFlare workers versus running something in the browser versus running something in. it's, I think a lot of people make the assumption it's just JavaScript, so I can use it as is. But it, it, there are at least currently, differences in what APIs are available to you. [00:23:43] Luca: Yep. Yep. Why bundle so many things into Deno? [00:23:46] Jeremy: Earlier you were talking about how Deno is more than just the runtime. It has a linter, formatter, file watcher there, there's all sorts of stuff in there. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit to the, the reasoning behind that [00:24:00] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:24:01] Jeremy: Having them all be separate things. [00:24:04] Luca: Yeah, so the, the reasoning here is essentially if you look at other modern run time or mo other modern languages, like Rust is a great example. Go is a great example. Even though Go was designed around the same time as Node, it has a lot of these same tools built in. And what it really shows is that if the ecosystem converges, like is essentially forced to converge on a single set of built-in tooling, a that built-in tooling becomes really, really excellent because everybody's using it. And also, it means that if you open any project written by any go developer, any, any rest developer, and you look at the tests, you immediately understand how the test framework works and you immediately understand how the assertions work. Um, and you immediately understand how the build system works and you immediately understand how the dependency imports work. And you immediately understand like, I wanna run this project and I wanna restart it when my file changes. Like, you immediately know how to do that because it's the same everywhere. Um, and this kind of feeling of having to learn one tool and then being able to use all of the projects, like being able to con contribute to open source when you're moving jobs, whatever, like between personal projects that you haven't touched in two years, you know, like being able to learn this once and then use it everywhere is such an incredibly powerful tool. Like, people don't appreciate this until they've used a runtime or, or, or language which provides this to them. Like, you can go to any go developer and ask them if they would like. There, there's this, there's this saying in the Go ecosystem, um, that Go FMT is nobody's favorite, but, or, uh, wait, no, I don't remember what the, how the saying goes, but the saying essentially implies that the way that go FMT formats code, maybe not everybody likes, but everybody loves go F M T anyway, because it just makes everything look the same. And like, you can read your friend's code, your, your colleagues code, your new jobs code, the same way that you did your code from two years ago. And that's such an incredibly powerful feeling. especially if it's like well integrated into your IDE you clone a repository, open that repository, and like your testing panel on the left hand side just populates with all the tests, and you can click on them and run them. And if an assertion fails, it's like the standard output format that you're already familiar with. And it's, it's, it's a really great feeling. and if you don't believe me, just go try it out and, and then you will believe me, (laughs) [00:26:25] Jeremy: Yeah. No, I, I'm totally with you. I, I think it's interesting because with JavaScript in particular, it feels like the default in the community is the opposite, right? There's so many different ways. Uh, there are so many different build tools and testing frameworks and, formatters, and it's very different than, like you were mentioning, a go or a Rust that are more recent languages where they just include that, all Bundled in. Yeah. [00:26:57] Luca: Yeah, and I, I think you can see this as well in, in the time that average JavaScript developer spends configuring their tooling compared to a rest developer. Like if I write Rust, I write Rust, like all day, every day. and I spend maybe two, 3% of my time configuring Rust tooling like. Doing dependency imports, opening a new project, creating a format or config file, I don't know, deleting the build directory, stuff like that. Like that's, that's essentially what it means for me to configure my rest tooling. Whereas if you compare this to like a front-end JavaScript project, like you have to deal with making sure that your React version is compatible with your React on version, it's compatible with your next version is compatible with your ve version is compatible with your whatever version, right? this, this is all not automatic. Making sure that you use the right, like as, as a front end developer, you developer. You don't have just NPM installed, no. You have NPM installed, you have yarn installed, you have PNPM installed. You probably have like, Bun installed. And, and, and I don't know to use any of these, you need to have corepack enabled in Node and like you need to have all of their global bin directories symlinked into your or, or, or, uh, included in your path. And then if you install something and you wanna update it, you don't know, did I install it with yarn? Did I install it with N pNPM? Like this is, uh, significant complexity and you, you tend to spend a lot of time dealing with dependencies and dealing with package management and dealing with like tooling configuration, setting up esent, setting up prettier. and I, I think that like, especially Prettier, for example, really showed, was, was one of the first things in the JavaScript ecosystem, which was like, no, we're not gonna give you a config where you, that you can spend like six hours configuring, it's gonna be like seven options and here you go. And everybody used it because, Nobody likes configuring things. It turns out, um, and even though there's always the people that say, oh, well, I won't use your tool unless, like, we, we get this all the time. Like, I'm not gonna use Deno FMT because I can't, I don't know, remove the semicolons or, or use single quotes or change my tab width to 16. Right? Like, wait until all of your coworkers are gonna scream at you because you set the tab width to 16 and then see what they change it to. And then you'll see that it's actually the exact default that, everybody uses. So it'll, it'll take a couple more years. But I think we're also gonna get there, uh, like Node is starting to implement a, a test runner. and I, I think over time we're also gonna converge on, on, on, on like some standard build tools. Like I think ve, for example, is a great example of this, like, Doing a front end project nowadays. Um, like building new front end tooling that's not built on Vite Yeah. Don't like, Vite's it's become the standard and I think we're gonna see that in a lot more places. We should settle on what tools to use [00:29:52] Jeremy: Yeah, though I, I think it's, it's tricky, right? Because you have so many people with their existing projects. You have people who are starting new projects and they're just searching the internet for what they should use. So you're, you're gonna have people on web pack, you're gonna have people on Vite, I guess now there's gonna be Turbo pack, I think is another one that's [00:30:15] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:30:16] Jeremy: There's, there's, there's all these different choices, right? And I, I think it's, it's hard to, to really settle on one, I guess, [00:30:26] Luca: Yeah, [00:30:27] Jeremy: uh, yeah. [00:30:27] Luca: like I, I, I think this is, this is in my personal opinion also failure of the Node Technical Steering committee, for the longest time to not decide that yes, we're going to bless this as the standard format for Node, and this is the standard package manager for Node. And they did, they sort of did, like, they, for example, node Blessed NPM as the standard, package manager for N for for node. But it didn't innovate on npm. Like no, the tech nodes, tech technical steering committee did not force NPM to innovate NPMs, a private company ultimately bought by GitHub and they had full control over how the NPM cli, um, evolved and nobody forced NPM to, to make sure that package install times are six times faster than they were. Three years ago, like nobody did that. so it didn't happen. And I think this is, this is really a failure of, of the, the, the, yeah, the no technical steering committee and also the wider JavaScript ecosystem of not being persistent enough with, with like focus on performance, focus on user experience, and, and focus on simplicity. Like things got so out of hand and I'm happy we're going in the right direction now, but, yeah, it was terrible for some time. (laughs) Node compatibility layer [00:31:41] Jeremy: I wanna talk a little bit about how we've been talking about Deno in the context of you just using Deno using its own standard library, but just recently last year you added a compatibility shim where people are able to use node libraries in Deno. [00:32:01] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:32:01] Jeremy: And I wonder if you could talk to, like earlier you had mentioned that Deno has, a different permissions model. on the website it mentions that Deno's HTTP server is two times faster than node in a Hello World example. And I'm wondering what kind of benefits people will still get from Deno if they choose to use packages from Node. [00:32:27] Luca: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, so I think a, again, this is sort of a like, so just to clarify what we actually implemented, like what we have is we have support for you to import NPM packages. Um, so you can import any NPM package from NPM, from your type script or JavaScript ECMAScript module, um, that you have, you already have for your Deno code. Um, and we will under the hood, make sure that is installed somewhere in some directory globally. Like PNPM does. There's no local node modules folder you have to deal with. There's no package of Jason you have to deal with. Um, and there's no, uh, package. Jason, like versioning things you need to deal with. Like what you do is you do import cowsay from NPM colon cowsay at one, and that will import cowsay with like the semver tag one. Um, and it'll like do the sim resolution the same way node does, or the same way NPM does rather. And what you get from that is that essentially it gives you like this backdoor to a callout to all of the existing node code that Isri been written, right? Like you cannot expect that Deno developers, write like, I don't know. There was this time when Deno did not really have that many, third party modules yet. It was very early on, and I don't know the, you either, if you wanted to connect to Postgres and there was no Postgres driver available, then the solution was to write your own Postgres driver. And that is obviously not great. Um, (laughs) . So the better solution here is to let users for these packages where there's no Deno native or, or, or web native or standard native, um, package for this yet that is importable with url. Um, specifiers, you can import this from npm. Uh, so it's sort of this like backdoor into the existing NPM ecosystem. And we explicitly, for example, don't allow you to, create a package.json file or, import bare node specifiers because we don't, we, we want to stay standards compliant here. Um, but to make this work effectively, we need to give you this little back door. Um, and inside of this back door. All hell is like, or like everything is terrible inside there, right? Like inside there you can do bare specifiers and inside there you can like, uh, there's package.json and there's crazy node resolution and underscore underscore DIRNAME and common js. And like all of that stuff is supported inside of this backdoor to make all the NPM packages work. But on the outside it's exposed as this nice, ESM only, NPM specifiers. and the, the reason you would want to use this over, like just using node directly is because again, like you wanna use TypeScript, no config, like necessary. You want to use, you wanna have a formatter you wanna have a linter, you wanna have tooling that like does testing and benchmarking and compiling or whatever. All of that's built in. You wanna run this on the edge, like close to your users and like 30 different, 35 different, uh, points of presence. Um, it's like, Okay, push it to your git repository. Go to this website, click a button two times, and it's running in 35 data centers. like this is, this is the kind of ex like developer experience that you can, you do not get. You, I will argue that you cannot get with Node right now. Like even if you're using something like ts-node, it is not possible to get the same level of developer experience that you do with Deno. And the, the, the same like speed at which you can iterate, iterate on your projects, like create new projects, iterate on them is like incredibly fast in Deno. Like, I can open a, a, a folder on my computer, create a single file, may not ts, put some code in there and then call Deno Run may not. And that's it. Like I don't, I did not need to do NPM install I did not need to do NPM init -y and remove the license and version fields and from, from the generated package.json and like set private to true and whatever else, right? It just all works out of the box. And I think that's, that's what a lot of people come to deno for and, and then ultimately stay for. And also, yeah, standards compliance. So, um, things you build in Deno now are gonna work in five, 10 years, with no hassle. Node shims and testing [00:36:39] Jeremy: And so with this compatibility layer or this, this shim, is it where the node code is calling out to node APIs and you're replacing those with Deno compatible equivalents? [00:36:54] Luca: Yeah, exactly. Like for example, we have a shim in place that shims out the node crypto API on top of the web crypto api. Like sort of, some, some people may be familiar with this in the form of, um, Browserify shims. if anybody still remembers those, it's essentially. , your front end tooling, you were able to import from like node crypto in your front end projects and then behind the scenes your web packs or your browser replies or whatever would take that import from node crypto and would replace it with like the shim that was essentially exposed the same APIs node crypto, but under the hood, wasn't implemented with native calls, but was implemented on top of web crypto, or implemented in user land even. And Deno does something similar. there's a couple edge cases of APIs that there's, where, where we do not expose the underlying thing that we shim to, to end users, outside of the node shim. So like there's some, some APIs that I don't know if I have a good example, like node nextTick for example. Um, like to properly be able to shim node nextTick, you need to like implement this within the event loop in the runtime. and. , you don't need this in Deno, because Deno, you use the web standard queueMicrotask to, to do this kind of thing. but to be able to shim it correctly and run node applications correctly, we need to have this sort of like backdoor into some ugly APIs, um, which, which natively integrate in the runtime, but, yeah, like allow, allow this node code to run. [00:38:21] Jeremy: A, anytime you're replacing a component with a, a shim, I think there's concerns about additional bugs or changes in behavior that can be introduced. Is that something that you're seeing and, and how are you accounting for that? [00:38:38] Luca: Yeah, that's, that's an excellent question. So this is actually a, a great concern that we have all the time. And it's not just even introducing bugs, sometimes it's removing bugs. Like sometimes there's bugs in the node standard library which are there, and people are relying on these bugs to be there for the applications to function correctly. And we've seen this a lot, and then we implement this and we implement from scratch and we don't make that same bug. And then the test fails or then the application fails. So what we do is, um, we actually run node's test suite against Deno's Shim layer. So Node has a very extensive test suite for its own standard library, and we can run this suite against, against our shims to find things like this. And there's still edge cases, obviously, which node, like there was, maybe there's a bug which node was not even aware of existing. Um, where maybe this, like it's is, it's now standard, it's now like intended behavior because somebody relies on it, right? Like the second somebody relies on, on some non-standard or some buggy behavior, it becomes intended. Um, but maybe there was no test that explicitly tests for this behavior. Um, so in that case we'll add our own tests to, to ensure that. But overall we can already catch a lot of these by just testing, against, against node's tests. And then the other thing is we run a lot of real code, like we'll try run Prisma and we'll try run Vite and we'll try run NextJS and we'll try run like, I don't know, a bunch of other things that people throw at us and, check that they work and they work and there's no bugs. Then we did our job well and our shims are implemented correctly. Um, and then there's obviously always the edge cases where somebody did something absolutely crazy that nobody thought possible. and then they'll open an issue on the Deno repo and we scratch our heads for three days and then we'll fix it. And then in the next release there'll be a new bug that we added to make the compatibility with node better. so yeah, but I, yeah. Running tests is the, is the main thing running nodes test. Performance should be equal or better [00:40:32] Jeremy: Are there performance implications? If someone is running an Express App or an NextJS app in Deno, will they get any benefits from the Deno runtime and performance? [00:40:45] Luca: Yeah. It's actually, there is performance implications and they're usually. The opposite of what people think they are. Like, usually when you think of performance implications, it's always a negative thing, right? It's always okay. Like you, it's like a compromise. like the shim layer must be slower than the real node, right? It's not like we can run express faster than node can run, express. and obviously not everything is faster in Deno than it is in node, and not everything is faster in node than it is in Deno. It's dependent on the api, dependent on, on what each team decided to optimize. Um, and this also extends to other run times. Like you can always cherry pick results, like, I don't know, um, to, to make your runtime look faster in certain benchmarks. but overall, what really matters is that you do not like, the first important step for for good node compatibility is to make sure that if somebody runs your code or runs their node code in Deno or your other run type or whatever, It performs at least the same. and then anything on top of that great cherry on top. Perfect. but make sure the baselines is at least the same. And I think, yeah, we have very few APIs where we behave, where we, where, where like there's a significant performance degradation in Deno compared to Node. Um, and like we're actively working on these things. like Deno is not a, a, a project that's done, right? Like we have, I think at this point, like 15 or 16 or 17 engineers working on Deno, spanning across all of our different projects. And like, we have a whole team that's dedicated to performance, um, and a whole team that's dedicated node compatibility. so like these things get addressed and, and we make patch releases every week and a minor release every four weeks. so yeah, it's, it's not a standstill. It's, uh, constantly improving. What should go into the standard library? [00:42:27] Jeremy: Uh, something that kind of makes Deno stand out as it's standard library. There's a lot more in there than there is in in the node one. [00:42:38] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:42:39] Jeremy: Uh, I wonder if you could speak to how you make decisions on what should go into it. [00:42:46] Luca: Yeah, so early on it was easier. Early on, the, the decision making process was essentially, is this something that a top 100 or top 1000 NPM library implements? And if it is, let's include it. and the decision making is still short of based on that. But right now we've already implemented most of the low hanging fruit. So things that we implement now are, have, have discussion around them whether we should implement them. And we have a process where, well we have a whole team of engineers on our side and we also have community members that, that will review prs and, and, and make comments. Open issues and, and review those issues, to sort of discuss the pros and cons of adding any certain new api. And sometimes it's also that somebody opens an issue that's like, I want, for example, I want an API to, to concatenate two unit data arrays together, which is something you can really easily do node with buffer dot con cat, like the scary buffer thing. and there's no standards way of doing that right now. So we have to have a little utility function that does that. But in parallel, we're thinking about, okay, how do we propose, an addition to the web standards now that makes it easy to concatenate iterates in the web standards, right? yeah, there's a lot to it. Um, but it's, it's really, um, it's all open, like all of our, all of our discussions for, for, additions to the standard library and things like that. It's all, all, uh, public on GitHub and the GitHub issues and GitHub discussions and GitHub prs. Um, so yeah, that's, that's where we do that. [00:44:18] Jeremy: Yeah, cuz to give an example, I was a little surprised to see that there is support for markdown front matter built into the standard library. But when you describe it as we look at the top a hundred thousand packages, are people looking at markdown? Are they looking at front matter? I, I'm sure there's a fair amount that are so that that makes sense. [00:44:41] Luca: Yeah, like it sometimes, like that one specifically was driven by, like, our team was just building a lot of like little blog pages and things like that. And every time it was either you roll your own front matter part or you look for one, which has like a subtle bug here and the other one has a subtle bug there and really not satisfactory with any of them. So, we, we roll that into the standard library. We add good test coverage for it good, add good documentation for it, and then it's like just a resource that people can rely on. Um, and you don't, you then don't have to make the choice of like, do I use this library to do my front meta parsing or the other library? No, you just use the one that's in the standard library. It's, it's also part of this like user experience thing, right? Like it's just a much nicer user experience, not having to make a choice, about stuff like that. Like completely inconsequential stuff. Like which library do we use to do front matter parsing? (laughs) [00:45:32] Jeremy: yeah. I mean, I think when, when that stuff is not there, then I think the temptation is to go, okay, let me see what node modules there are that will let me parse the front matter. Right. And then it, it sounds like probably ideally you want people to lean more on what's either in the standard library or what's native to the Deno ecosystem. Yeah. [00:46:00] Luca: Yeah. Like the, the, one of the big benefits is that the Deno Standard Library is implemented on top of web standards, right? Like it's, it's implemented on top of these standard APIs. so for example, there's node front matter libraries which do not run in the browser because the browser does not have the buffer global. maybe it's a nice library to do front matter pricing with, but. , you choose it and then three days later you decide that actually this code also needs to run in the browser, and then you need to go switch your front matter library. Um, so, so those are also kind of reasons why we may include something in Strand Library, like maybe there's even really good module already to do something. Um, but if there's certain reliance on specific node features that, um, we would like that library to also be compatible with, with, with web standards, we'll, uh, we might include in the standard library, like for example, YAML Parser, um, or the YAML Parser in the standard library is, is a fork of, uh, of the node YAML module. and it's, it's essentially that, but cleaned up and, and made to use more standard APIs rather than, um, node built-ins. [00:47:00] Jeremy: Yeah, it kind of reminds me a little bit of when you're writing a front end application, sometimes you'll use node packages to do certain things and they won't work unless you have a compatibility shim where the browser can make use of certain node APIs. And if you use the APIs that are built into the browser already, then you won't, you won't need to deal with that sort of thing. [00:47:26] Luca: Yeah. Also like less Bundled size, right? Like if you don't have to shim that, that's less, less code you have to ship to the client. WebAssembly use cases [00:47:33] Jeremy: Another thing I've seen with Deno is it supports running web assembly. [00:47:40] Luca: Mm-hmm. [00:47:40] Jeremy: So you can export functions and call them from type script. I was curious if you've seen practical uses of this in production within the context of Deno. [00:47:53] Luca: Yeah. there's actually a Bunch of, of really practical use cases, so probably the most executed bit of web assembly inside of Deno right now is actually yes, build like, yes, build has a web assembly, build like yeses. Build is something that's written and go. You have the choice of either running. Um, natively in machine code as, as like an ELF process on, on Linux or on on Windows or whatever. Or you can use the web assembly build and then it runs in web assembly. And the web assembly build is maybe 50% slower than the, uh, native build, but that is still significantly faster than roll up or, or, or, or I don't know, whatever else people use nowadays to do JavaScript Bun, I don't know. I, I just use es build always, um, So, um, for example, the Deno website, is running on Deno Deploy. And Deno Deploy does not allow you to run Subprocesses because it's, it's like this edge run time, which, uh, has certain security permissions that it's, that are not granted, one of them being sub-processes. So it needs to execute ES build. And the way it executes es build is by running them inside a web assembly. Um, because web assembly is secure, web assembly is, is something which is part of the JavaScript sandbox. It's inside the JavaScript sandbox. It doesn't poke any holes out. Um, so it's, it's able to run within, within like very strict security context. . Um, and then other examples are, I don't know, you want to have a HTML sanitizer, which is actually built on the real HTML par in a browser. we, we have an hdml sanitizer called com or, uh, ammonia, I don't remember. There's, there's an HTML sanitizer library on denoland slash x, which is built on the html parser from Firefox. Uh, which like ensures essentially that your html, like if you do HTML sanitization, you need to make sure your HTML par is correct, because if it's not, you might like, your browser might parse some HTML one way and your sanitizer pauses it another way and then it doesn't sanitize everything correctly. Um, so there's this like the Firefox HTML parser compiled to web assembly. Um, you can use that to. HTML sanitization, or the Deno documentation generation tool, for example. Uh, Deno Doc, there's a web assembly built for it that allows you to programmatically, like generate documentation for, for your type script modules. Um, yeah, and, and also like, you know, deno fmt is available as a WebAssembly module for programmatic access and a Bunch of other internal Deno, programs as well. Like, or, uh, like components, not programs. [00:50:20] Jeremy: What are some of the current limitations of web assembly and Deno for, for example, from web assembly, can I make HTTP requests? Can I read files? That sort of thing. [00:50:34] Luca: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So web assembly, like when you spawn as web assembly, um, they're called instances, WebAssembly instances. It runs inside of the same vm, like the same, V8 isolate is what they're called, but. it does not have it, it's like a completely fresh sandbox, sort of, in the sense that I told you that between a runtime and like an engine essentially implements no IO calls, right? And a runtime does, like a runtime, pokes holds into the, the, the engine. web assembly by default works the same way that there is no holes poked into its sandbox. So you have to explicitly poke some holes. Uh, if you want to do HTTP calls, for example, when, when you create web assembly instance, it gives you, or you can give it something called imports, uh, which are essentially JavaScript function bindings, which you can call from within the web assembly. And you can use those function bindings to do anything you can from JavaScript. You just have to pass them through explicitly. and. . Yeah. Depending on how you write your web assembly, like if you write it in Rust, for example, the tooling is very nice and you can just call some JavaScript code from your Rust, and then the build system will automatically make sure that the right function bindings are passed through with the right names. And like, you don't have to deal with anything. and if you're writing go, it's slightly more complicated. And if you're writing like raw web assembly, like, like the web assembly, text format and compiling that to a binary, then like you have to do everything yourself. Right? It's, it's sort of the difference between writing C and writing JavaScript. Like, yeah. What level of abstraction do you want? It's definitely possible though, and that's for limitations. it, the same limitations as, as existing browsers apply. like the web assembly support in Deno is equivalent to the web assembly support in Chrome. so you can do, uh, many things like multi-threading and, and stuff like that already. but especially around, shared mutable memory, um, and having access to that memory from JavaScript. That's something which is a real difficulty with web assembly right now. yeah, growing web assembly memory is also rather difficult right now. There's, there's a, there's a couple inherent limitations right now with web assembly itself. Um, but those, those will be worked out over time. And, and Deno is like very up to date with the version of, of the standard, it, it implements, um, through v8. Like we're, we're, we're up to date with Chrome Beta essentially all the time. So, um, yeah. Any, anything you see in, in, in Chrome beta is gonna be in Deno already. Deno Deploy [00:52:58] Jeremy: So you talked a little bit about this before, the Deno team, they have their own, hosting. Platform called Deno Deploy. So I wonder if you could explain what that is. [00:53:12] Luca: Yeah, so Deno has this really nice, this really nice concept of permissions which allow you to, sorry, I'm gonna start somewhere slightly, slightly unrelated. Maybe it sounds like it's unrelated, but you'll see in a second. It's not unrelated. Um, Deno has this really nice permission system which allows you to sandbox Deno programs to only allow them to do certain operations. For example, in Deno, by default, if you try to open a file, it'll air out and say you don't have read permissions to read this file. And then what you do is you specify dash, dash allow read um, maybe you have to give it. they can either specify, allow, read, and then it'll grant to read access to the entire file system. Or you can explicitly specify files or folders or, any number of things. Same goes for right permissions, same goes for network permissions. Um, same goes for running subprocesses, all these kind of things. And by limiting your permissions just a little bit. Like, for example, by just disabling sub-processes and foreign function interface, but allowing everything else, allowing reeds and allowing network access and all that kind of stuff. we can run Deno programs in a way that is significantly more cost effective to you as the end user than, and, and like we can cold start them much faster than, like you may be able to with a, with a more conventional container based, uh, system. So what, what do you, what Deno Deploy is, is a way to run JavaScript or Deno Code, on our data centers all across the world with very little latency. like you can write some JavaScript code which execute, which serves HTTP requests deploy that to our platform, and then we'll make sure to spin that code up all across the world and have your users be able to access it through some URL or, or, or some, um, custom domain or something like that. and this is some, this is very similar to CloudFlare workers, for example. Um, and it's like Netlify Edge functions is built on top of Deno Deploy. Like Netlify Edge functions is implemented on top of Deno Deploy, um, through our sub hosting product. yeah, essentially Deno Deploy is, is, um, yeah, a cloud hosting service for JavaScript, um, which allows you to execute arbitrary JavaScript. and there there's a couple, like different directions we're going there. One is like more end user focused, where like you link your GitHub repository and. Like, we'll, we'll have a nice experience like you do with Netlify and Versace, that word like your commits automatically get deployed and you get preview deployments and all that kind of thing. for your backend code though, rather than for your front end websites. Although you could also write front-end websites and you know, obviously, and the other direction is more like business focused. Like you're writing a SaaS application and you want to allow the user to customize, the check like you're writing a SaaS application that provides users with the ability to write their own online store. Um, and you want to give them some ability to customize the checkout experience in some way. So you give them a little like text editor that they can type some JavaScript into. And then when, when your SaaS application needs to hit this code path, it sends a request to us with the code, we'll execute that code for you in a secure way. In a secure sandbox. You can like tell us you, this code only has access to like my API server and no other networks to like prevent data exfiltration, for example. and then you do, you can have all this like super customizable, code in inside of your, your SaaS application without having to deal with any of the operational complexities of scaling arbitrary code execution, or even just doing arbitrary code execution, right? Like it's, this is a very difficult problem and give it to someone else and we deal with it and you just get the benefits. yeah, that's Deno Deploy, and it's built by the same team that builds the Deno cli. So, um, all the, all of your favorite, like Deno cli, or, or Deno APIs are available in there. It's just as web standard is Deno, like you have fetch available, you have blob available, you have web crypto available, that kind of thing. yeah. Running code in V8 isolates [00:56:58] Jeremy: So when someone ships you their, their code and you run it, you mentioned that the, the cold start time is very low. Um, how, how is the code being run? Are people getting their own process? It sounds like it's not, uh, using containers. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about how that works. [00:57:20] Luca: Yeah, yeah, I can, I can give a high level overview of how it works. So, the way it works is that we essentially have a pool of, of Deno processes ready. Well, it's not quite Deno processes, it's not the same Deno CLI that you download. It's like a modified version of the Deno CLI based on the same infrastructure, that we have spun up across all of our different regions across the world, uh, across all of our different data centers. And then when we get a request, we'll route that request, um, the first time we get request for that, that we call them deployments, that like code, right? We'll take one of these idle Deno processes and will assign that code to run in that process, and then that process can go serve the requests. and these process, they're, they're, they're isolated and they're, you. it's essentially a V8 isolate. Um, and it's a very, very slim, it's like, it's a much, much, much slimmer version of the Deno cli essentially. Uh, which the only thing it can do is JavaScript execution and like, it can't even execute type script, for example, like type script is we pre-process it up front to make the the cold start faster. and then what we do is if you don't get a request for some amount of. , we'll, uh, spin down that, um, that isolate and, uh, we'll spin up a new idle one in its place. And then, um, if you get another request, I don't know, an hour later for that same deployment, we'll assign it to a new isolate. And yeah, that's a cold start, right? Uh, if you have an isolate which receives, or a, a deployment rather, which receives a Bunch of traffic, like let's say you receive a hundred requests per second, we can send a Bunch of that traffic to the same isolate. Um, and we'll make sure that if, that one isolate isn't able to handle that load, we'll spin it out over multiple isolates and we'll, we'll sort of load balance for you. Um, and we'll make sure to always send to the, to the point of present that's closest to, to the user making the request. So they get very minimal latency. and they get we, we've these like layers of load balancing in place and, and, and. I'm glossing over a Bunch of like security related things here about how these, these processes are actually isolated and how we monitor to ensure that you don't break out of these processes. And for example, Deno Deploy does, it looks like you have a file system cuz you can read files from the file system. But in reality, Deno Deploy does not have a file system. Like the file system is a global virtual file system. which is, is, uh, yeah, implemented completely differently than it is in Deno cli. But as an end user you don't have to care about that because the only thing you care about is that it has the exact same API as the Deno cli and you can run your code locally and if it works there, it's also gonna work in deploy. yeah, so that's, that's, that's kind of. High level of Deno Deploy. If, if any of this sounds interesting to anyone, by the way, uh, we're like very actively hiring on, on Deno Deploy. I happen to be the, the tech lead for, for a Deno Deploy product. So I'm, I'm always looking for engineers, to, to join our ranks and, and build cool distributed systems. Deno.com/jobs. [01:00:15] Jeremy: for people who aren't familiar with the isolates, are these each run in their own processes, or do you have a single process and that has a whole Bunch of isolates inside it? [01:00:28] Luca: in, in the general case, you can say that we run, uh, one isolate per process. but there's many asterisks on that. Um, because, it's, it's very complicated. I'll just say it's very complicated. Uh, in, in the general case though, it's, it's one isolate per process. Yeah. Configuring permissions [01:00:45] Jeremy: And then you touched a little bit on the permissions system. Like you gave the example of somebody could have a website where they let their users give them code to execute. how does it look in terms of specifying what permissions people have? Like, is that a configuration file? Are those flags you pass in? What, what does that look? [01:01:08] Luca: Yeah. So, so that product is called sub hosting. It's, um, slightly different from our end user platform. Um, it's essentially a service that allows you to, like, you email us, well, we'll send you a, um, onboard you, and then what you can do is you can send HTTP requests to a certain end point with a, authentication token and. a reference to some code to execute. And then what we'll do is, we'll, um, when we receive that HTTP request, we'll fetch the code, it's spin up and isolate, execute the code. execute the code. We serve the request, return you the response, um, and then we'll pipe logs to you and, and stuff like that. and the, and, and part of that is also when we, when we pull the, um, the, the code for to spin up the isolate, that code doesn't just include the code that we're executing, but also includes things like permissions, and, and various other, we call this isolate configuration. Um, you can inspect, this is all public. we have public docs for this at Deno.com/subhosting. I think. Yes, Deno.com/subhosting. [01:02:08] Jeremy: And is that built on top of something that's a part of the public Deno project, the open source part? Or is this specific to this sub hosting
Host Ken Rimple welcomes Chariot consultant and resident front-end expert Drew DeCarme to the show. The two talk TypeScript 5.0, specifying Javascript with the TC39, Qwik, and more. Host Notes Philly Emerging Tech is back for 2023! We’re back in-person, with a livestream ticket option as well. In-person seating is limited, so take advantage of ... Read More The post TechChat Tuesdays #58: A “Qwik” Front-End Episode with Drew DeCarme appeared first on Chariot Solutions.
話したネタ denoの話 Bun first impressions Node.js、Deno、Bunとは何か？ JavaScriptランタイムとは何か？ サーバーサイドJavaScript expressを利用してWebサーバーを立てるコードは、Node.js以外でも動くのか？ ECMAScript と ランタイム との関係は？ TC39 Node.js はどんな経緯で生まれてきた？ Rubyを書くタイミングと、JavaScriptを書くタイミングでのコンテキストスイッチ netv8 イベントループモデルとは何か？ ブロッキング処理、for文やJSON.parse() なぜ、Node.jsはここまで人気が出たのか？ V8(JavaScriptエンジン)とは何か？ JavaScriptCore Edge Workerとの相性の良さ JITコンパイラ Denoはどういう背景で生まれてきているのか？ モジュールを取り巻く課題 JSConf JP 訂正 冒頭で第81回と話しておりますが、82回の誤りです。 番組のスポンサーD.Node採用募集ページはこちら
Hang with Jerod, Nick & KBall while we discuss what's new & noteworthy in the web world. Cloudflare Turnstile, Linkify 4.0, TC39 updates, the Figma acquisition, Penpot, pay transparency, and more! We might even discuss TypeScript if Nick gets his way…
Hang with Jerod, Nick & KBall while we discuss what's new & noteworthy in the web world. Cloudflare Turnstile, Linkify 4.0, TC39 updates, the Figma acquisition, Penpot, pay transparency, and more! We might even discuss TypeScript if Nick gets his way…
We talk to TC39 Co-Chair, JavaScript Internationalization Co-Editor, and Node.js core collaborator, Ujjwal Sharma about what it's like to work on the TC39 committee, how it affects developers in their day-to-day, and how JavaScript is evolving in our multicore technical world. Links https://tc39.es https://twitter.com/ryzokuken https://github.com/ryzokuken https://ryzokuken.dev/ Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Ujjwal Sharma.
A Série TC39 evoluíu para JS Boladão! Mario e Willian discutem sobre a proposta que o próprio Willian está trabalhando pra apresentar ao plenário e também sobre os fundamentos de integráveis em JS.
Today we chat with Thomas Randolph from GitLab, to discuss his Top 10 list of the upcoming TC39 proposals. The list… Temporal Proposal Import Assertions JSON Modules Built-In Modules Observable Proposal Partial Application UUID Pipeline Operator Module Blocks Emitter Proposal +1 Records and Tuples +2 Reverse and Sort Methods on Arrays Sponsors Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/) Coaching | Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/coaching) Links Twitter: Thomas Randolph ( @rockerest ) (https://twitter.com/rockerest) JSJ 425: The Evolution of JavaScript (https://javascriptjabber.com/jsj-425-the-evolution-of-javascript) Temporal (https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/) import assertions (https://tc39.es/proposal-import-assertions/) JSON modules (https://tc39.es/proposal-json-modules/) The TC39 Process (https://tc39.es/process-document/) Observable (https://tc39.es/proposal-observable/) Partial Application for ECMAScript (https://tc39.es/proposal-partial-application/) ES pipe operator (2021) (https://tc39.es/proposal-pipeline-operator/) JavaScript Module Blocks (https://tc39.es/proposal-js-module-blocks/) Record & Tuple (https://tc39.es/proposal-record-tuple/) ECMAScript proposal "Change Array by copy": four new non-destructive Array methods (https://2ality.com/2022/04/change-array-by-copy.html) GitHub: tc39/proposals (https://github.com/tc39/proposals) JavaScript Jabber 19 April 2022 (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas O. Randolph (https://rdl.ph/) Picks Charles - The Last Battle (https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Last-Battle-Audiobook/B002UZJF22) Charles - GamePigeon (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gamepigeon/id1124197642) Dan - Star Trek: Picard (https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/star-trek-picard/) Dan - 103 Early Hints Dan - War in Ukraine Steve - Dad Jokes Steve - Rescinded mask mandates for travel Thomas - My notes to this episode (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (https://amzn.to/3Nifiw8) Thomas - What is Reactive Programming by Kevin Webber (https://blog.redelastic.com/what-is-reactive-programming-bc9fa7f4a7fc) Thomas - War in Ukraine Special Guest: Thomas Randolph.
Today we chat with Thomas Randolph from GitLab, to discuss his Top 10 list of the upcoming TC39 proposals. The list… Temporal Proposal Import Assertions JSON Modules Built-In Modules Observable Proposal Partial Application UUID Pipeline Operator Module Blocks Emitter Proposal +1 Records and Tuples +2 Reverse and Sort Methods on Arrays Sponsors Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/) Coaching | Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/coaching) Links Twitter: Thomas Randolph ( @rockerest ) (https://twitter.com/rockerest) JSJ 425: The Evolution of JavaScript (https://javascriptjabber.com/jsj-425-the-evolution-of-javascript) Temporal (https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/) import assertions (https://tc39.es/proposal-import-assertions/) JSON modules (https://tc39.es/proposal-json-modules/) The TC39 Process (https://tc39.es/process-document/) Observable (https://tc39.es/proposal-observable/) Partial Application for ECMAScript (https://tc39.es/proposal-partial-application/) ES pipe operator (2021) (https://tc39.es/proposal-pipeline-operator/) JavaScript Module Blocks (https://tc39.es/proposal-js-module-blocks/) Record & Tuple (https://tc39.es/proposal-record-tuple/) ECMAScript proposal "Change Array by copy": four new non-destructive Array methods (https://2ality.com/2022/04/change-array-by-copy.html) GitHub: tc39/proposals (https://github.com/tc39/proposals) JavaScript Jabber 19 April 2022 (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas O. Randolph (https://rdl.ph/) Picks Charles - The Last Battle (https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Last-Battle-Audiobook/B002UZJF22) Charles - GamePigeon (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gamepigeon/id1124197642) Dan - Star Trek: Picard (https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/star-trek-picard/) Dan - 103 Early Hints Dan - War in Ukraine Steve - Dad Jokes Steve - Rescinded mask mandates for travel Thomas - My notes to this episode (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (https://amzn.to/3Nifiw8) Thomas - What is Reactive Programming by Kevin Webber (https://blog.redelastic.com/what-is-reactive-programming-bc9fa7f4a7fc) Thomas - War in Ukraine Special Guest: Thomas Randolph.
Today we chat with Thomas Randolph from GitLab, to discuss his Top 10 list of the upcoming TC39 proposals. The list… Temporal Proposal Import Assertions JSON Modules Built-In Modules Observable Proposal Partial Application UUID Pipeline Operator Module Blocks Emitter Proposal +1 Records and Tuples +2 Reverse and Sort Methods on Arrays Sponsors Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/) Raygun | Click here to get started on your free 14-day trial (https://raygun.com/?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=jsjabber&utm_campaign=devchat&utm_content=homepage) Coaching | Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/coaching) Links Twitter: Thomas Randolph ( @rockerest ) (https://twitter.com/rockerest) JSJ 425: The Evolution of JavaScript (https://javascriptjabber.com/jsj-425-the-evolution-of-javascript) Temporal (https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/) import assertions (https://tc39.es/proposal-import-assertions/) JSON modules (https://tc39.es/proposal-json-modules/) The TC39 Process (https://tc39.es/process-document/) Observable (https://tc39.es/proposal-observable/) Partial Application for ECMAScript (https://tc39.es/proposal-partial-application/) ES pipe operator (2021) (https://tc39.es/proposal-pipeline-operator/) JavaScript Module Blocks (https://tc39.es/proposal-js-module-blocks/) Record & Tuple (https://tc39.es/proposal-record-tuple/) ECMAScript proposal "Change Array by copy": four new non-destructive Array methods (https://2ality.com/2022/04/change-array-by-copy.html) GitHub: tc39/proposals (https://github.com/tc39/proposals) JavaScript Jabber 19 April 2022 (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas O. Randolph (https://rdl.ph/) Picks Charles - The Last Battle (https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Last-Battle-Audiobook/B002UZJF22) Charles - GamePigeon (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gamepigeon/id1124197642) Dan - Star Trek: Picard (https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/star-trek-picard/) Dan - 103 Early Hints Dan - War in Ukraine Steve - Dad Jokes Steve - Rescinded mask mandates for travel Thomas - My notes to this episode (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (https://amzn.to/3Nifiw8) Thomas - What is Reactive Programming by Kevin Webber (https://blog.redelastic.com/what-is-reactive-programming-bc9fa7f4a7fc) Thomas - War in Ukraine Special Guest: Thomas Randolph.
Today we chat with Thomas Randolph from GitLab, to discuss his Top 10 list of the upcoming TC39 proposals. The list… Temporal Proposal Import Assertions JSON Modules Built-In Modules Observable Proposal Partial Application UUID Pipeline Operator Module Blocks Emitter Proposal +1 Records and Tuples +2 Reverse and Sort Methods on Arrays Sponsors Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/) Raygun | Click here to get started on your free 14-day trial (https://raygun.com/?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=jsjabber&utm_campaign=devchat&utm_content=homepage) Coaching | Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/coaching) Links Twitter: Thomas Randolph ( @rockerest ) (https://twitter.com/rockerest) JSJ 425: The Evolution of JavaScript (https://javascriptjabber.com/jsj-425-the-evolution-of-javascript) Temporal (https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/) import assertions (https://tc39.es/proposal-import-assertions/) JSON modules (https://tc39.es/proposal-json-modules/) The TC39 Process (https://tc39.es/process-document/) Observable (https://tc39.es/proposal-observable/) Partial Application for ECMAScript (https://tc39.es/proposal-partial-application/) ES pipe operator (2021) (https://tc39.es/proposal-pipeline-operator/) JavaScript Module Blocks (https://tc39.es/proposal-js-module-blocks/) Record & Tuple (https://tc39.es/proposal-record-tuple/) ECMAScript proposal "Change Array by copy": four new non-destructive Array methods (https://2ality.com/2022/04/change-array-by-copy.html) GitHub: tc39/proposals (https://github.com/tc39/proposals) JavaScript Jabber 19 April 2022 (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas O. Randolph (https://rdl.ph/) Picks Charles - The Last Battle (https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Last-Battle-Audiobook/B002UZJF22) Charles - GamePigeon (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gamepigeon/id1124197642) Dan - Star Trek: Picard (https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/star-trek-picard/) Dan - 103 Early Hints Dan - War in Ukraine Steve - Dad Jokes Steve - Rescinded mask mandates for travel Thomas - My notes to this episode (https://rockerest.notion.site/JavaScript-Jabber-19-April-2022-1badf36afe844532922888f5132a25f8) Thomas - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (https://amzn.to/3Nifiw8) Thomas - What is Reactive Programming by Kevin Webber (https://blog.redelastic.com/what-is-reactive-programming-bc9fa7f4a7fc) Thomas - War in Ukraine Special Guest: Thomas Randolph.
Como as redes sociais influenciam as discussões do plenário? No episódio de hoje, Mario Souto, Keit e Willian Martins discutem algumas das propostas que tiverem de uma forma ou de outra, influencia das redes sociais e outras propostas. E todos continuam com o objetivo de derreter cérebros.
In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about a proposal for type syntax in JavaScript. Linode - Sponsor Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit for listeners of Syntax. You can find all the details at linode.com/syntax. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/syntax and click on the “Create Free Account” button to get started. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Show Notes 00:25 Welcome 01:13 Sponsor: Sentry 02:03 Sponsor: Sentry 02:44 The proposal announced A proposal for type syntax in JavaScript Proposal types as comments 03:24 What are types? 08:33 Types as comments 10:51 Why not JS Doc? 13:39 What it looks like 19:02 Possible downsides 21:37 Why not define a type system for JS in TC39 instead? Why not define a type system for JS in TC39 instead? 22:41 The Proposal vs Typescript Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
Esse episódio é a parte 2 da série sobre TC39, Willian e Mario Souto continuam a discussão sobre os problemas, as proposta e mais propostas e que mais foi relevante no ultimo plenário. Seguindo com o objetivo de derreter cérebro.
Más nézőpontokból is körbejártuk a logolás témakörét - ezúttal nem a log4j2 sérülékenység mentén. Csatlakozik a DenoJS a TC39 munkacsoporthoz. Error first design pattern előnyei, hátrányai. Érdekes összefoglaló arról, hogyan válhatnak kontraproduktívvá a "best practice"-ek, mindezt a stackoverflow készítőitől. Résztvevők: EduRóka Deno joins TC39 Deno joins TC39 - https://deno.com/blog/deno-joins-tc39 Best practices can slow your application down 5 Best practices can slow your application down - https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/22/best-practices-can-slow-your-application-down/ Hallgasátok friss adások Google Podcasts - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaXZvb3guY29tL2VuL2RldnRhbGVzLXBvZGNhc3RfZmdfZjE1OTg1OTdfZmlsdHJvXzEueG1s Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/hu/podcast/devtales-podcast/id1386667284?mt=2 CastBox - https://castbox.fm/channel/DevTales-Podcast-id1295470 Pocket Casts - https://pca.st/podcast/5a10e180-5077-0136-fa7c-0fe84b59566d Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4fS3YtJknqn1gSKa4HqKAt YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5nbDGKvuSK9NwOIJOiiwnA RSS - https://devtales.shiwaforce.com/feed/podcast Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/devtales Twitter - https://twitter.com/_devtales Slack - https://devtalespodcast.slack.com Email - devtales@shiwaforce.com
Support us on Kofi! (https://ko-fi.com/C0C86NYJW) Design by committee usually has a bad connotation but when it comes to specifying JavaScript, making sure a new feature doesn't break the internet is just too big a task for one person. Today on the show we invite Mark Cohen to talk about what it is like being on the board of TC39, the institution which standardizes the JavaScript language under the ECMAScript specification. We kick things off with some history behind TC39 before diving right into some of the debates around how to implement new features within the committee and the larger JavaScript community. From there, Mark weighs in on the main goal of TC39, that of ensuring cross-browser functionality, talking about why it is such a challenging but necessary project. We also speak to Mark about their current focus of championing the move toward pattern matching in JavaScript, getting into some of the ideas being bounced around as far as syntax and all the possibilities this feature will enable. Our discussion doesn't end there though, as we pick Mark's brain about the processes the TC39 follows for seeing a proposal through from idea to implementation, and also hear about how they adhere to the ‘don't break the web' principle. So for all this and more on Enjoy the Vue, tune in today! Key Points From This Episode: Introducing Mark, their affinity for programming languages, and how they got involved with specifying JavaScript. The origins of JavaScript in the TC39 group created under Ecma International. The role of plenaries at TC39 and how the group comes to decisions via consensus. What the pipe operator is and the different sides in the debate for its syntax. Examples where big contributors to languages felt insulted by communities or decisions. Cool assignment operators like Python's walrus and Rust's turbofish. Whether ‘design by committee' is a bad thing in the case of JavaScript. Mark's perspective that the main goal of the committee is to ensure cross-browser functionality. How TC39 is preventing browser wars using the test 262 suite. The desire for pattern matching in JS and why Mark is championing this. How similar implementing pattern matching in JS would be to reusing switch statements. The intricacies of the syntax and keywords of JS pattern matching and what will be possible. Four phases of TC39 proposals and how they apply the ‘don't break the web' principle. The failed array.prototype.flatten project and what led to the ‘smooshed gate controversy'. Where to find Mark online. This week's picks! Tweetables: “The primary charter of the committee is to make sure that things work across browsers.” — @mpcsh_ (https://twitter.com/mpcsh_) [0:22:12] “Companies still want control of the web and control of the users of the web, right? But there's a lot more protection now. One of the big invisible ways that this happens is a tool that the committee maintains called test 262.” — @mpcsh_ (https://twitter.com/mpcsh_) [0:25:30] “I'm championing the pattern matching proposal.” — @mpcsh_ (https://twitter.com/mpcsh_) [0:27:29] “So that phrase, 'don't break the web' is a common refrain among the committee. It basically reflects our infinite backwards compatibility mandate.” — @mpcsh_ (https://twitter.com/mpcsh_) [0:46:33] Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: TC39 resources: TC39 Homepage/Spec (http://tc39.es) TC39 GitHub (https://github.com/tc39) TC39 Discourse (http://es.discourse.group) TC39 Matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#tc39-general:matrix.org) Proposals: Pattern matching (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pattern-matching) Temporal (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal) Record & tuple (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple) Pipeline operator (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator) Ecma International (https://www.ecma-international.org) test262 (https://github.com/tc39/test262), TC39 (GitHub) Walrus Operator (https://realpython.com/python-walrus-operator/) What is Rust's turbofish? (https://techblog.tonsser.com/posts/what-is-rusts-turbofish), David Pedersen State of JS (https://stateofjs.com) SmooshGate FAQs (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/03/smooshgate), Mathias Bynens Where to Find Mark Online: Twitter: @mpcsh_ (https://twitter.com/mpcsh_) Github: @mpcsh (https://mpc.sh) Blog/website: mpc.sh (https://mpc.sh) This weeks picks: Mark Cohen Headphones: ÆON 2 Noire (https://danclarkaudio.com/aeon-2-noir.html), Dan Clark Audio Crafting Interpreters (https://craftinginterpreters.com/), Bob Nystrom Baba Is You (https://hempuli.com/baba), Hempuli Oy, Arvi Teikari (PC, Switch, iPad, Android) The Fifty: Mt Stimson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yov6FzlAuoQ), Cody Townsend (YouTube) Alex My Awesome Jamstack Conf talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEDLKKLIkuU), Alex Riviere (Jamstack Conf 2021) Ari Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (https://bookshop.org/books/moosewood-restaurant-cooks-at-home-moosewood-restaurant-cooks-at-home/9780671679927), Moosewood Collective Oscar Slay the Spire (https://www.megacrit.com), MegaCrit (Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, Android) Tessa Dumpster Fire - This is Fine Vinyl Figure (https://100soft.shop/products/dumpster-fire-this-is-fine-vinyl-figure), 100% Soft x KC Green What's new in WSL 2 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versions#whats-new-in-wsl-2), Microsoft On Your Side, Nathan Fielder (This Hour Has 22 Minutes (https://www.cbc.ca/22minutes), CBC)
第 78 回のテーマは TC39 です。今回は Prettier のメンテなや Babel のコントリビュータをやりながら、 TC39 の新しいプロポーサルをそれらに実装する作業をしている @__sosukesuzuki をゲストにお呼びし、 Prettier/Babel のメンテナンスの話などを交え、 TC39 のウォッチの仕方や、気になる Proposal の話、 ES2021 の展望を議論しながら、今後の ES や TC39 について議論しました。 Show Note はこちら: https://mozaic.fm/episodes/78/tc39.html
Nicolò Ribaudo talks about his life as a math student, learning jQuery before JavaScript, doing oss on the side, his experiences in oss, doing an internship, participating in TC39, and some thoughts after three years of being on the team. (recorded in October). Transcript at https://podcast.babeljs.io/nicoloNicolò: https://twitter.com/NicoloRibaudoHenry: https://twitter.com/left_padSections: Intro This is just applied math Starting in open source Why Babel? What matters now? Open source and Internships Maintenance Boredom
Part 2 of our series on State Management in Angular focuses on the use of RxJS in order to leverage Observables, Subjects, and BehaviorSubjects in Angular applications.First, Aaron Frost and Jennifer Wadella talk through how RxJS is used by Angular developers to persist state in singleton services using Subjects. This is a common approach to implementing a single source of truth with the observable pattern in Angular. Another benefit of the approach is a path to implementing a state management library such as NgRx in an Angular application when necessary.Then, Ben Lesh joins Brian Love and the other panelists to share his story of how he personally got started on the RxJS project. One of the major drawbacks of using promises is a lack of a cancellation feature. While at Netflix, the team resolved this by using the Observable primitive. Ben also shares the story of how he was tasked with refactoring RxJS to follow the then-to-be approved TC39 proposal for the Observable primitive. We then learn from Ben about the current work that is being done by the RxJS core team and the future of RxJS.Finally, Ben drops some knowledge on a simple philosophy: if the code you write works, can be maintained, and is testable, then it's good code. The end.Show Notes: https://github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/blob/8dacf256be307ba3b8b2e9c94badb4b398e1ec47/docs_app/content/guide/glossary-and-semantics.md
> What is a breaking change about anyway?Fred Schott (@FredKSchott) joins Henry to have a discussion around the topic of breaking changes in programming. We chat about Snowpack and Babel's major versions, different vision means a new name (Rome), semver, RFCs, BDFLs, breaking changes as bug fixes, forking, and more (recorded in April)! Transcript at https://podcast.babeljs.io/breakingHeadings: Intro: What is a Breaking Change? What is Snowpack: V1 to V2 When is a Breaking Change Just a New Package? Re-Defining Semver? Famous Coder, Bruce Lee Commit: "fix stuff" On RFCs Project Vision: BDFLs and more On Removing Babel's TC39 Stage Presets Communicating Breaking Changes: React, Yarn, etc Are the Changes We Make Even Helpful? Different Vision, Different Name React 17, Babel 8? Rationalizing Breaking Changes as Bug Fixes Breaking Changes and Plugin Ecosystem Reverse Transforms for All Proposals Project Sustainability and Sponsorship Streaming Coding The Difficulty of Reaching Out Scaling Your Time, Managing Your Attention The Freedom of Contributors To Join and Leave The Value of Forking Platform Funding, Sponsorship "Babel Pika Fellowship"
Jason Miller and Henry Zhu do a follow up episode on the issues around running modern JavaScript for not just your own code, but rather your dependencies (what's in node_modules). Discussed are specific approaches by bundlers to change package.json fields like jsnext:main/module, general issues for library consumers and maintainers as well as browsers, and the hints of some ideas for the near and far future.Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/dependenciesJason: https://twitter.com/_developitHenry: https://twitter.com/left_padPodcast: http://podcast.babeljs.io
Jason Miller and Henry Zhu talk through a high level philosophy of transpilers (compilers), Babel's core mental model as the democratization of programming language design, and all nuances of the relationship between developers, TC39, browsers, tools. Let's look a the future of Babel.. through the future of preset-env with the newly released babel-preset-modules started by Jason!Transcript: https://podcast.babeljs.io/preset-envJason: https://twitter.com/_developitHenry: https://twitter.com/left_padPodcast: http://podcast.babeljs.io
Tracy Lee: @ladyleet | ladyleet.com Ben Lesh: @benlesh | medium.com/@benlesh Show Notes: 00:50 - What is This Dot? 03:26 - The RxJS 5.5.4 Release and Characterizing RxJS 05:14 - Observable 07:06 - Operators 09:52 - Learning RxJS 11:10 - Making RxJS Functional Programming Friendly 12:52 - Lettable Operators 15:14 - Pipeline Operators 21:33 - The Concept of Mappable 23:58 - Struggles While Learning RxJS 33:09 - Documentation 36:52 - Surprising Uses of Observables 40:27 - Weird Uses of RxJS 45:25 - Announcements: WHATWG to Include Observables and RxJS 6 Resources: this.media RxJS RX Workshop Ben Lesh: Hot vs Cold Observables learnrxjs.io RxMarbles Jewelbots Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 91. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. Joining me today on the podcast is Elrick Ryan. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's up? CHARLES: Not much. How are you doing? ELRICK: I'm great. Very excited to have these two folks on the podcast today. I feel like I know them… CHARLES: [Laughs] ELRICK: Very well, from Twitter. CHARLES: I feel like I know them well from Twitter, too. ELRICK: [Laughs] CHARLES: But I also feel like this is a fantastic company that is doing a lot of great stuff. ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: Also not in Twitter. It should be pointed out. We have with us Tracy Lee and Ben Lesh from This Dot company. TRACY: Hey. CHARLES: So first of all, why don't we start, for those who don't know, what exactly is This Dot? What is it that you all do and what are you hoping to accomplish? TRACY: This Dot was created about a year ago. And it was founded by myself and Taras who work on it full-time. And we have amazing people like Ben, who's also one of our co-founders, and really amazing mentors. A lot of our friends, when they refer to what we actually do, they like to call it celebrity consulting. [Laughter] TRACY: Which I think is hilarious. But it's basically core contributors of different frameworks and libraries who work with us and lend their time to mentor and consult with different companies. So, I think the beautiful part about what we're trying to do is bring together the web. And we sort of do that as well not only through consulting and trying to help people succeed, but also through This Dot Media where it's basically a big playground of JavaScripting all the things. Ben and I do Modern Web podcast together. We do RX Workshop which is RxJS training together. And Ben also has a full-time job at Google. CHARLES: What do they got you doing over there at Google? BEN: Well, I work on a project called Alkali which is an internal platform as a service built on top of Angular. That's my day job. CHARLES: So, you've been actually involved in all the major front-end frameworks, right, at some point? BEN: Yeah, yes. I got my start with Angular 1 or AngularJS now, when I was working as a web developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a company called Aesynt which was formerly McKesson Automation. And then I was noticed by Netflix who was starting to do some Angular 1 work and they hired me to come help them. And then they decided to do Ember which is fine. And I worked on a large Ember app there. Then I worked on a couple of large React apps at Netflix. And now I'm at Google building Angular apps. CHARLES: Alright. BEN: Which is Angular 5 now, I believe. CHARLES: So, you've come the full circle. BEN: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. CHARLES: [Chuckles] I have to imagine Angular's changed a lot since you were working on it the first time. BEN: Yeah. It was completely rewritten. TRACY: I feel like Angular's the new Ember. CHARLES: Angular is the new Ember? TRACY: [Laughs] BEN: You think? TRACY: Angular is the new Ember and Vue is the new AngularJS, is basically. [Laughs] CHARLES: Okay. [Laughter] CHARLES: What's the new React then? BEN: Preact would be the React. CHARLES: Preact? Okay, or is Glimmer… BEN: [Laughs] I'm just… CHARLES: Is Glimmer the new React? BEN: Oh, sure. [Laughs] CHARLES: It's important to keep these things straight in your head. BEN: Yeah, yeah. CHARLES: Saves on confusion. TRACY: Which came first? [Chuckles] BEN: Too late. I'm already confused. CHARLES: So now, before the show you were saying that you had just, literally just released RxJS, was it 5.5.4? BEN: That's right. That's right. The patch release, yeah. CHARLES: Okay. Am I also correct in understanding that RxJS has kind of come to very front and center position in Angular? Like they've built large portions of framework around it? BEN: Yeah, it's the only dependency for Angular. It is being used in a lot of official space for Angular. For example, Angular Material's Data Table uses observables which are coming from RxJS. They've got reactive forms. The router makes use of Observable. So, the integration started kind of small which HTTPClient being written around Observable. And it's grown from there as people seem to be grabbing on and enjoying more the React programming side of things. So, it's definitely the one framework that's really embraced reactive programming outside of say, Cycle.js or something like that. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, just to give a general background, how would you characterize RxJS? BEN: It's a library built around Observable. And Observable is a push-based primitive that gives you sets of events, really. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: So, that's like Lodash for events would be a good way to put it. You can take anything that you can get pushed at you, which is pretty much value type you can imagine, and wrap it in an observable and have it pushed out of the observable. And from there, you have a set of things that you can combine. And you can concatenate them, you can filter them, you can transform them, you can combine them with other sets, and so on. So, you've got this ability to query and manipulate in a declarative way, events. CHARLES: Now, Observable is also… So, when Jay was on the podcast we were talking about Redux observable. But there was outside of the context of RxJS, it was just observables were this standalone entity. But I understand that they actually came from the RxJS project. That was the progenitor of observables even though there's talk of maybe making them part of the JavaScript spec. BEN: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, RxJS as it stands is a reference implementation for what could land in JavaScript or what could even land in the DOM as far as an observable type. Observable itself is very primitive but RxJS has a lot of operators and optimizations and things written around Observable. That's the entire purpose of the library. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, what kind of value-adds does it provide on top of Observable? If Observable was the primitive, what are the combinators, so to speak? BEN: Oh, right. So, similar to what Lodash would add on top of say, an iterable or arrays, you would have the same sorts of things and more inside of RxJS. So, you've got zip which you would maybe have seen in Lodash or different means of combines. Of course, map and ‘merge map' which is like a flattening sort of operation. You can concatenate them together. But you also have these time-based things. You can do debouncing or throttling of events as they're coming over in observable and you create a new observable of that. So, the value-add is the ability to compose these primitive actions. You can take on an observable and make a new observable. We call it operators. And you can use those operators to build pretty much anything you can imagine as far as an app would go. CHARLES: So, do you find that most of the time all of the operators are contained right there inside RxJS? Or if you're going to be doing reactive programming, one of your tasks is going to be defining your own operators? BEN: No, pretty much everything you'd need will be defined within RxJS. There's 60 operators or so. CHARLES: Whoa, that's a lot. BEN: It's unlikely that someone's going to come up with one. And in fact, I would say the majority of those, probably 75% of those, you can create from the other 25%. So, some of the much more primitive operators could be used… TRACY: Which is sort of what Ben did in this last release, RxJS 5…. I don't know remember when you introduced the lettable operators but you… BEN: Yeah, 5.5. TRACY: Implemented [inaudible] operators. BEN: Yeah, so a good portion of them I started implementing in terms of other operators. CHARLES: Right. So, what was that? I didn't quite catch that, Tracy. You said that, what was the operator that was introduced? TRACY: So, in one of the latest releases of RxJS, one of the more significant releases where pipeable operators were introduced, what Ben did was he went ahead and implemented a lot of operators that were currently in the library in terms of other operators, which was able to give way to reduce the size of the library from, I think it was what, 30KB bundled, gzipped, and minified, to about 30KB, which was about 60 to 70% of the operators. Right, Ben? BEN: Yeah. So, the size reduction was in part that there's a lot of factors that went into the size reduction. It would be kind of hard to pin it down to a specific operator. But I know that some of the operators like the individual operators themselves, by reimplementing reduce which is the same as doing as scan and then take last, implementing it in terms of that is going to reduce the size of it probably 90% of that one particular file. So, there's a variety of things like that that have already started and that we're going to continue to do. We didn't do it with every operator that we could have. Some operators are very, very common and consequently we want them to be as optimized as possible. For example, map. You can implement map in terms of ‘merge map' but it would be very slow to do so. It might be smaller but it would be slower. We don't want that. So, there are certain areas we're always going to try to keep fairly a hot path to optimize them as much as possible. But in other spots like reduce which is less common and isn't usually considered to be a performance bottleneck, we can cut some corners. Or ‘to array' or other things like that. CHARLES: Mmhmm. TRACY: And I think another really interesting thing is a lot of people when learning RxJS, they… it's funny because we just gave an RX Workshop course this past weekend and the people that were there just were like, “Oh, we've heard of RxJS. We think it's a cool new thing. We have no plans to implement it in real life but let's just play around with it and let me learn it.” I think as people are starting to learn RxJS, one of the things that gets them really overwhelmed is this whole idea that they're having to learn a completely new language on top of JavaScript or what operators to use. And one of our friends, Brian Troncone who is on the Learning Team, the RxJS Learning Team, he pulled up the top 15 operators that were most commonly searched on his site. And some of them were ‘switch map', ‘merge map', ‘fork join', merge, et cetera. So, you can sort of tell that even though the library has quite a few… it's funny because Ben, I think the last RX Workshop you were using pairs and you had never used it before. BEN: Yeah. TRACY: So, it's always amusing for me how many people can be on the core team but have never implemented RxJS… CHARLES: [Laughs] TRACY: A certain way. BEN: Right. Right, right, right. CHARLES: You had said one of the recent releases was about making it more friendly for functional programming. Is that a subject that we can explore? Because using observables is already pretty FP-like. BEN: What it was before is we had dot chaining. So, you would do ‘dot map' and then call a method and then you get an observable back. And then you'd say ‘dot merge' and then you'd call a method on that, and so on and so forth. Now what you have is kind of a Ramda JS style pipe function that just takes a comma-separated list of other functions that are going to act upon the observable. So, it reads pretty much the same with a little more ceremony around it I guess. But the upside is that you can develop your operators as just higher-order functions. CHARLES: Right. And you don't have to do any monkey-patching of prototypes. BEN: Exactly, exactly. CHARLES: Because actually, okay, I see. This is actually pretty exciting, I think. Because we actually ran into this problem when we were using Redux Observable where we wanted to use some operators that were used by some library but we had to basically make a pull request upstream, or fork the upstream library to include the operators so that we could use them in our application. It was really weird. BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: The reason was because it was extending the observable prototype. BEN: Yeah. And there's so many… and that's one way to add that, is you extend the observable prototype and then you override lift so you return the same type of observable everywhere. And there are so many things that lettable operators solved for us. For example… CHARLES: So, lettable operators. So, that's the word that Tracy used and you just used it. What are lettable operators? BEN: Well, I've been trying to say pipeable and get that going instead of lettable. But basically there's an operator on RxJS that's been there forever called let. And let is an operator and what you do is you give it a function. And the function gives you the source observable and you're expected to return a new observable. And the idea is that you can then write a function elsewhere that you can then compose in as though it were an operator, anywhere you want, along with your other dot-chained operators. And the realization I had a few months ago was, “Well, why don't we just make all operators like this?” And then we can use functional programming to compose them with like a reduce or whatever. And that's exactly what the lettable operators are. And that's why I started calling them lettable operators. And I kind of regret it now, because so many people are saying it and it confuses new people. Because what in the world does lettable even mean? CHARLES: Right. [Laughs] BEN: So, they are pipeable operators or functional operators. But the point is that you have a higher-order function that returns a function of a specific shape. And that function shape is, it's a function that receives an observable and returns an observable, and that's it. So, basically it's a function that transforms an observable into a new observable. That's all an operator. That's all an operator's ever been. It's just this is in a different flavor. CHARLES: Now, I'm curious. Why does it do an observable into an observable and not a stream item into an observable? Because when you're actually chaining these things together, like with a map or with a ‘flat map' or all these things, you're actually getting an individual item and then returning an observable. Well, I guess in this case of a map you're getting an item and returning an item. But like… BEN: Right, but that's not what the entire operation is. So, you've got an operation you're performing whenever you say, if you're to just even dot-chain it, you'd say ‘observable dot map'. And when you say ‘dot map', it returns a new observable. And then you say ‘dot filter' and it returns another new observable. CHARLES: Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. BEN: So, this function just embodies that step. CHARLES: I see, I see. And isn't there some special… I feel like there's some proposal for some special JavaScript syntax to make this type of chaining? BEN: Yeah, yeah, the pipeline operator. CHARLES: Okay. BEN: I don't know. I think that's still at stage one. I don't know that it's got a lot of headway. My sources and friends that are in the TC39 seem to think that it doesn't have a lot of headway. But I really think it's important. Because if you look at… the problem is we're using a language where the most common use case is you have to build it, get the size as small as possible because you need to send it over the wire to the browser. And understandably, browsers don't want to implement every possible method they could on say, Array, right? CHARLES: Mmhmm, right. BEN: There's a proposal in for ‘flat map'. They could add zip to Array. They could add all sorts of interesting things to Array just by itself. And that's why Lodash exists, right? CHARLES: Right. BEN: Is because not everything is on Array. And then so, the onus is then put on the community to come up with these solutions and the community has to build libraries that have these constraints in size. And what stinks about that is then you have say, an older version of Lodash where you'd be like, “Okay, well it has 36 different functions in it and I'm only using 3 of them. And I have to ship them all to the browser.” CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And that's not what you want. So, then we have these other solutions around tree-shaking and this and that. And the real thing is what you want is you want to be able to compose things left to right and you want to be able to have these functions that you can use on a particular type in an ad hoc way. And there's been two proposals to try to address this. One was the ‘function bind' operator, CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: Which is colon colon. And what that did is it said, “You can use this function as a method, as though it were a method on an object. And we'll make sure that the ‘this' inside that function comes from the instance that's on the left-hand side of colon colon.” CHARLES: Right. BEN: That had a bunch of other problems. Like there's some real debate I guess on how they would tie that down to a specific type. So, that kind of fell dead in the water even though it had made some traction. And then the pipeline operator is different. And then what it says is, “Okay, whatever is on the…” And what it looks like is a pipe and a greater than right next to each other. And whatever's on the left-hand side of that operand gets passed as the first argument to the function on the right-hand side of that operand. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And so, what that means is for the pipeable operators, instead of having to use a pipe method on observable, you can just say, “instance of observable, pipeline operator and an operator, and then pipeline operator, and then the Rx operator, and then pipeline operator and the Rx operator, and so on.” And it would just be built-in. And the reason I think that JavaScript really needs it is that means that libraries like Lodash can be written in terms of simple functions and shipped piece-meal to the browser exactly as you need them. And people would just use the pipeline operator to use them, instead of having to wrap something in a big object so you can dot-chain things together or come up with your own functional pipe thing like RxJS had to. CHARLES: Right. Because it seems it happens again and again, right? Lodash, RxJS, jQuery. You just see this pattern of chaining, which is, you know… BEN: Yeah, yeah. People want chaining. People want left to right composition. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And it's problematic in a world where you want to shake off as much unused garbage as possible. And the only way to get dot chaining is by augmenting a prototype. There's all sorts of weird problems that can come with that. And so, the functional programming approach is one method. But then people look at it and they say, “Ooh, yuck. I've got to wrap things in a function named pipe. Wouldn't it be nicer if there was just some syntax to do this?” And yeah, it would be nicer. But I have less control over that. CHARLES: Right. But the other alternative is to have right to left function composition. BEN: Right, yeah. CHARLES: But there's not any special syntax for that, either. BEN: Not very readable. CHARLES: Yeah. BEN: So, you just wrap everything. And the innermost call is the first one and then you wrap it in another function and you wrap that in another function, and so on. Yeah, that's not [inaudible]. But I will say that the pipe function itself is pretty simple. It's basically a function that takes a rest of arguments that are all functions. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And so, you have this array of functions and you just reduce over it and call them. Well, you return a function. So, it's a higher function. You return a function that takes an argument then you reduce over the functions that came in as arguments and you call each one of them with whatever result was from the previous. CHARLES: Right. Like Tracy mentioned in the pre-show, I'm an aspiring student of functional programming. So, would this be kind of like a monoid here where you're mashing all these functions together? Is your empty value? I'm just going to throw it out there. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's my conjecture. BEN: Yes. Technically, it's a monoid because it wouldn't work unless it was a monoid. Because monoids, I believe the category theory I think for monoid is that monoids can be concatenated because they definitely have an end. CHARLES: Right. BEN: So, you would not be able to reduce over all those functions and build something with that, like that, unless it was a monoid. So yeah, the fact that there's reduction involved is a cue that it's a monoid. CHARLES: Woohoo! Alright. [Laughter] CHARLES: Have you found yourself wanting to apply some of these more “rigorous” formalisms that you find out there in the development of RxJS or is that just really a secondary concern? BEN: It's a secondary concern. It's not something that I like. It's something I think about from time to time, when really, debating any kind of heavy issue, sometimes it's helpful. But when it comes to teaching anybody anything, honestly the Haskell-isms and category theory names, all they do is just confuse people. And if you tell somebody something is a functor, they're like, “What?” And if you just say it's mappable, they're like, “Oh, okay. I can map that.” CHARLES: [Laughs] Right, right. BEN: And then the purists would be like, “But they're not the same thing.” And I would be like, “But the world doesn't care. I'm sorry.” CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of experiencing this debate myself. I'm not quite sure which side I fall on, because on the one hand it is arbitrary. Functor is a weird name. But I wish the concept of mappable existed. It does, but I feel like it would be handy if people… because there's literally five things that are super handy, right? Like mappable, if we could have a name for monoid. But it's like, really, you just need to think in terms of these five constructs for 99% of the stuff that you do. And so, I always wonder, where does that line lie? And how… mappable, is that really more accessible than functor? Or is that only because I was exposed to the concept of mapping for 10 years before I ever heard the F word. BEN: Yes, and yes. I mean, that's… CHARLES: [Laughs] BEN: Things that are more accessible are usually more accessible because of some pre-given knowledge, right? What works in JavaScript probably isn't going to work in Haskell or Scala or something, right? CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: If someone's a Java developer, certain idioms might not make sense to them that come from the JavaScript world. CHARLES: Right. But if I was learning like a student, I would think mappable, I'd be thinking like, I would literally be thinking like Google Maps or something like that. I don't know. BEN: Right, right. I mean, look at C#. C#, a mapping function is always going to be called select, right, because that's C#. That's their idiom for the same thing. CHARLES: Select? BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: Really? BEN: Yeah, select. So, they'll… CHARLES: Which in Ruby is like find. BEN: Yeah. there's select and then, what's the other one, ‘select many' or something like that. [Chuckles] BEN: So, that's C#. CHARLES: Oh, like it's select from SQL. Okay. BEN: Yeah, I think that's kind of where it came from because people had link and then they had link to SQL and then they're like, well I want to do this with regular code, with just using some more… less nuanced expressions. So, I want to be able to do method calls and chain those together. And so, you end up with select functions. And I think that that exists even in Rx.NET, although I haven't used Rx.NET. CHARLES: Hmm, okay. ELRICK: So, I know you do a lot of training with Rx. What are some of the concepts that people struggle with initially? TRACY: I think when we're teaching RX Workshop, a lot of the people sort of… I'll even see senior level people struggle with explaining it, is the difference between observables and observers and then wrapping their head around the idea that, “Hey, observables are just functions in JavaScript.” So, they're always thinking observables are going to do something for you. Actually, it's not just in Angular but also in React, but whenever someone's having issues with their Rx applications, it's usually something that they're like nesting observables or they're not subscribing to something or they've sort of hot-messed themselves into a tangle. And I'm sure you've debugged a bunch of this stuff before. The first thing I always ask people is, “Have you subscribed?” Or maybe they're using an Angular… they're using pipes async but they're also calling ‘dot subscribe' on their observable. BEN: Yeah. So, like in Angular they'll do both. Yeah. There's that. I think that, yeah, that relates to the problem of people not understanding that observables are really just functions. I keep saying that over and over again and people really don't seem to take it to heart for whatever reason. [Chuckles] BEN: But you get an observable and when you're chaining all those operators together, you're making another observable or whatever, observables don't do anything until you subscribe to them. They do nothing. CHARLES: Shouldn't they be called like subscribable? BEN: Yes. [Chuckles] BEN: They probably should. But we do hand them an observer. So, you are observing something. But the point being is that they don't do anything at all until you subscribe to them. And in that regard, they're like functions, where functions don't do anything unless you call them. So, what ends up happening with an observable is you subscribe to it. You give it an observer, three callbacks which are then coerced into an observer. And it takes that observer and it hands it to the body of this observable definition and literally has an observer inside of there. And then you basically execute that function synchronously and do things, whatever those things are, to set up some sort of observation. Maybe you spin up a WebSocket and tie into some events on it and call next on the observer to get values out of your observable. The point being that if you subscribe to an observable twice, it's the same thing as calling a function twice. And for some reason, people have a hard time with that. They think, if I subscribe to the observable twice, I've only called the function once. CHARLES: I experienced this confusion. And I remember the first time that that… like, I was playing with observables and the first time I actually discovered that, that it was actually calling my… now what do you call the function that you pass to the constructor that actually does, that calls next or that gets passed the observer? TRACY: [Inaudible] BEN: I like to call it an initialization function or something. But the official name from the TC39 proposal is subscriber function. CHARLES: Subscriber function. So, like… BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: I definitely remember it was one of those [makes explosion sound] mind-blowing moments when I realized when I call my subscribe method, the entire observable got run from the very beginning. But my intuition was that this is an object. It's got some shared state, like it's this quasar that I'm now observing and I'm seeing the flashes of light coming off of it. But it's still the same object. You think of it as having yeah, not as a function. Okay. No one ever described it to me as just a function. But I think I can see it now. ELRICK: Yeah, me neither. CHARLES: But yeah, you think of it in the same way that most people think of objects, as like, “I have this object. I have a reference to it.” Let observable equal new observable. It's a single thing. It's a single identity. And so, that's the thing that I'm observing. It's not that I'm invoking this observable to observe things. And I think that's, yeah, that's a subtle nuance there. I wish I had taken y'all's course, I guess is what I'm saying. ELRICK: Yeah. BEN: Yeah. Well, I've done a few talks on it. CHARLES: [Laughs] BEN: I always try to tell people, “It's just a function. It's just a function.” I think what happens to a lot of people too is there's the fact that it's an object. But I think what it is, is people's familiarity with promises does this. Because promises are always multicast. They are always “hot”. And the reason for this is because they're eager. So, by the time you have a promise, whatever is producing value to the promise has already started. And that means that they're inherently a multicast. CHARLES: Right. BEN: So, people are used to that behavior of, I can ‘then' off of this promise and it always means one thing. And it's like, yeah, because the one thing has nothing to do with the promise. It wasn't [Chuckles] CHARLES: Right. BEN: This promise is just an interface for you to view something that happened in the past, where an observable is more low-level than that and more simple than that. It just states, “I'm a function that you call. I'm going to be able to do anything a function can do. And by the way, you're giving me an observer and I'm going to do some stuff with that too and notify you via this observer that you handed me.” Because of that you could take an observable and close over something that had already started. Say you had a WebSocket that was already running. You could create a new observable and just like any function, close over that, externally create a WebSocket. And then everyone that subscribes to that observable is tying an observer to that same WebSocket. Then you're multicast. Then you're “hot”. ELRICK: [Inaudible] CHARLES: Right. So, I was going to say that's the distinction that Jay was talking about. He was talking about we're going to just talk about… he said at the very beginning, “We're just going to talk about hot observable.” ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: But even a hot observable is still theoretically evaluating every single time you subscribe. You're getting a new observable. You're evaluating that observable afresh each time. It just so happens that in the lexical scope of that observable subscriber function, there is this WebSocket? BEN: Yeah. So, it's the same thing. Imagine you wrote a function that when you called it created a new WebSocket and then… say, you wrote a new function that you gave an observer object to, right? An observer object has next, error, and complete. And in that function, when you called it, it created a new WebSocket and then it tied the ‘on message' and ‘on close' and whatever to your observer's next method and your observer's error message and so on. When you call that function, you would expect a new WebSocket to be created every single time. Now, let's just say alternately you create a WebSocket and then you write a new function that that function closes over that WebSocket. So, you reference the WebSocket that you externally created inside of your function. When you call that function, it's not going to create a new WebSocket every time. It's just closing over it, right? So, even though they both are basically doing the same thing, now the latter one of those two things is basically a hot observable and the former is a cold observable. Because one is multicast which is, “I'm sharing this one WebSocket with everybody,” and the other one is unicast which is, “I am going to create a new WebSocket for each person that calls me.” And that's the [inaudible] people have a hard time with. CHARLES: Right. But really, it's just a matter of scope. BEN: Yeah. The thing people have a hard time with, with observables, is not realizing that they're actually just functions. CHARLES: Yeah. I just think that maybe… see, when I hear things like multicast and unicast, that makes me think of shared state, whereas when you say it's just a matter of scope, well then I'm thinking more in terms of it being just a function. It just happens that this WebSocket was already [scoped]. BEN: Well, shared state is a matter of scope, right? CHARLES: Yes, it is. It is. Oh, sorry. Shared state associated with some object identity, right? BEN: Right. CHARLES: But again, again, it's just preconceptions, really. It's just me thinking that I've had to manage lists of listeners and have multicast observers and single-cast observers and having to manage those lists and call notify on all of them. And that's really not what's happening at all. BEN: Yeah. Well, I guess the real point is observables can have shared state or they could not have shared state. I think the most common version and the most composable version of them, they do not have any shared state. It's just one of those things where just like a function can have shared state or it could be pure, right? There's nothing wrong with either one of those two uses of a function. And there's nothing wrong with either one of those two uses of Observable. So, honest to god, that is the biggest stumbling block I think that I see people have. That and if I had to characterize it I would say fear and loathing over the number of operators. People are like… CHARLES: [Chuckles] BEN: And they really think because everyone's used to dealing with these frameworks where there's an idiomatic way to do everything, they think there's going to be an RxJS idiomatic way to do things. And that's just patently false. That's like saying there's an idiomatic way to use functions. There's not. Use it however it works. The end. It's not… CHARLES: Mmhmm, mmhmm. BEN: You don't have to use every operator in a specific way. You can use it however works for you and it's fine. ELRICK: I see that you guys are doing some fantastic work with your documentation. Was that part of RxJS 2.0 docs? TRACY: I was trying to inspire people to take on the docs initiative because I think when I was starting to learn RxJS I would get really frustrated with the docs. BEN: Yeah. TRACY: I think the docs are greatly documented but at the same time if you're not a senior developer who understands Rx already, then it's not really helpful. Because it provides more of a reference point that the guys can go back and look at, or girls. So anyways, after many attempts of trying to get somebody to lead the project I just decided to lead the project myself. [Laughter] TRACY: And try to get… the community is interesting because I think because the docs can be sometimes confusing… Brian Troncone created LearnRxJS.io. There's these other visualization projects like RxMarbles, RxViz, et cetera. And we just needed to stick everybody together. So, it's been a project that I think has been going on for the past two months or so. We have… it's just an Angular app so it's probably one of the most easiest projects to contribute to. I remember the first time I tried to contribute to the Ember docs. It literally took me an hour to sit there with a learning team, Ember Learning Team member and… actually, maybe it was two hours, just to figure out how the heck… like all the things I had to download to get my environment set up so that I could actually even contribute to the darn documentation. But with the Rx, the current RxJS docs right now is just an Angular app. You can pull it down. It's really easy. We even have people who are just working on accessibility, which is super cool, right? So, it's a very friendly place for beginners. BEN: I'm super pleased with all the people that have been working on that. Brian and everybody, especially on the accessibility front. Jen Luker [inaudible] came in and voluntarily… she's like the stopgap for all accessibility to make sure everything is accessible before we release. So, that's pretty exciting. TRACY: Yeah. ELRICK: Mmhmm. TRACY: So funny because when me and Jen started talking, she was talking about something and then I was like, “Oh my god, I'm so excited about the docs.” She's like, “I'm so excited, too! But I don't really know why I'm excited. But you're excited, so I'm excited. Why are you excited?” [Laughter] TRACY: I was like, “I don't know. But I'm excited, too!” [Chuckles] TRACY: And then all of a sudden we have accessibility. [Laughs] ELRICK: Mmhmm. Yeah, I saw some amazing screenshots. Has the new docs, have they been pushed up to the URL yet? TRACY: Nah, they are about to. We were… we want to do one more accessibility run-through before we publish it. And then we're going to document. We want to document the top 15 most viewed operators. But we should probably see that in the next two weeks or so, that the new docs will be… I mean, it'll say “Beta, beta, beta” all over everything. But actually also, some of our friends, [Dmitri] from [Valas] Software, he is working on the translation portion to make it really easy for people to translate the docs. CHARLES: Ah. TRACY: So, a lot of that came from the inspiration from the Vue.js docs. we're taking the versioning examples that Ember has done with their docs as inspiration to make sure that our versioning is really great. So, it's great that we can lend upon all the other amazing ideas in the industry. ELRICK: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Yeah, it's fantastic. I can't wait to see them. ELRICK: Yeah, me neither. The screenshots look amazing. I was like, “Wow. These are some fabulous documentation that's going to be coming out.” I can't wait. TRACY: Yeah. Thank you. CHARLES: Setting the bar. ELRICK: Really high. [Laughter] CHARLES: Actually, I'm curious. Because observables are so low-level, is there some use of them that… what's the use of them that you found most surprising? Or, “Whoa, this was a crazy hack.” BEN: The weirdest use of observables, there's been quite a few odd ones. One of the ones that I did one time that is maybe in RxJS's wheelhouse, it was just that RxJS already existed. So, I didn't want to pull in another transducer library, was using RxJS as a transducer. Basically… in Netflix we had a situation where we had these huge, huge arrays of very large objects. And if you try to take something like that and then map it and then filter it and then map it and then filter it, we're using Array map and filter, what ends up happening is you create all sorts of intermediary arrays in-memory. And then garbage collection has to come through and clean that up. And that locks your thread. And over time, we were experiencing slowness with this app. And it would just build up until eventually it ground to a halt. And I used RxJS because it was an available tool there to wrap these arrays in an observable and then perform operations on them step-by-step, the same map, filter, and so on. But when you do that, it doesn't create intermediary arrays because it passes each value along step to step instead of producing an entire array and then doing another step and producing an entire array, and so on. So… CHARLES: So, will you just… BEN: It saved garbage collection and it increased the performance of the app. But that's just in an extreme case. I would never do that with just regular arrays. If anything, it was because it was huge, huge arrays of very large objects. CHARLES: So, you would create an observable our of the array and then just feed each element into the observable one at a time? BEN: Well, no. If you say ‘observable from' and you give it an array, that's basically what it does. CHARLES: Okay. BEN: It loops over the array and nexts those values out of the array synchronously. CHARLES: I see, I see. BEN: So, it's like having a for loop and then inside of that for loop saying, “Apply the map. Apply the filter,” whatever, to each value as they're going through. But when you look at it, if you had array map, filter, reduce, it's literally just taking the first step and saying ‘observable from' and wrapping that array and then the rest of it's still the same. CHARLES: Right. Yeah. No, that's really cool. BEN: That was a weirder use of it. I've heard tell of other things where people used observables to do audio synchronization, which is pretty interesting. Because you have to be very precise with audio synchronization. So, hooking into some of the Web Audio APIs and that sort of thing. That's pretty interesting. The WebSocket multiplexing is something I did at Netflix that's a little bit avant-garde for observable use because you essentially have an observable that is your WebSocket. And then you create another observable that closes over that observable and sends messages over the WebSocket for what you're subscribed to and not subscribed to. And it enables you to very easily retry connections and these sorts of things. I did a whole talk on that. That one's pretty weird. CHARLES: Yeah. Man, I [inaudible] to see that. BEN: But in the general use case, you click a button, you make an AJAX request, and then you get that back and maybe you make another AJAX request. Or like drag and drop and these sorts of things where you're coordinating multiple events together, is the general use case. The non-weird use case for RxJS. Tracy does weird stuff with RxJS though. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah, what's some weird uses of RxJS? TRACY: I think my favorite thing to do right now is to figure out how many different IoT-related things I can make work with RxJS. So, how many random things can I connect to an application using that? BEN: Tracy's projects are the best. They're so good. [Laughter] TRACY: Well, Ben and I created an application where you can take pictures of things using the Google Image API and it'll spit back a set of puns for you. So, you take a picture of a banana, it'll give you banana puns. Or you can talk to it using the speech recognition API. My latest thing is I really want to figure out how to… I haven't figured out if Bluetooth Low Energy is actually enabled on Google Home Minis. But I want to get my Google Home Mini to say ‘booty'. [Inaudible] [Laughter] CHARLES: RxJS to the rescue. [Laughter] BEN: Oh, there was, you remember Ng-Cruise. We did Ng-Cruise and on there, Alex Castillo brought… TRACY: Oh, that was so cool. BEN: All sorts of interesting… you could read your brain waves. Or there was another one that was, what is it, the Microsoft, that band put around your wrist that would sense what direction your arm was in and whether or not your hand was flexed. And people… TRACY: Yeah, so you could flip through things. BEN: Yeah. And people were using reactive programming with that to do things like grab a ball on the screen. Or you could concentrate on an image and see if it went blurry or not. ELRICK: Well, for like, Minority Report. BEN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Literally, watching a machine read your mind with observables. That was pretty cool. That's got to be the weirdest. TRACY: Yeah, or we had somebody play the piano while they were wearing one of the brainwave… it's called the OpenBCI project is what it is. And what you can do is you can actually get the instructions to 3D print out your own headset and then buy the technology that allows you to read brain waves. And so with that, it's like… I mean, it was really awesome to watch her play the piano and just see how her brain waves were going super crazy. But there's also these really cool… I don't know if you guys have heard of Jewelbots, but they're these programmable friendship bracelets that are just little Arduino devices that light up. I have two of them. I haven't even opened them. CHARLES: [Laughs] TRACY: I've been waiting to play with them with you. I don't know what we're going to do, but I just want to send you lights. Flashing lights. [Laughter] TRACY: Morse code ask you questions about RxJS while you're working. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah. Critical bug. Toot-toot-toot-too-too-too-too-toot-toot. [Laughter] CHARLES: RxJS Justice League. TRACY: That would actually be really fun. [Laughter] TRACY: That would be really fun. I actually really want to do that. But… CHARLES: I'm sure the next time we talk, you will have. TRACY: [Laughs] Yes. Yes, yes, yes, I know. I know. we'll do it soon. We just need to find some time while we're not going crazy with conferences and stuff like that. CHARLES: So, before we head out, is there any upcoming events, talks, releases, anything that we ought to be, we or the listeners, ought to be aware of? TRACY: Yeah, so one of the things is that Ben and I this weekend actually just recorded the latest version of RX Workshop. So, if you want to learn all about the latest, latest, newest new, you can go ahead and take that course. We go through a lot of different things like multiplex WebSockets, building an application. Everywhere from the fundamentals to the more real world implementations of RxJS. BEN: Yeah. Even in the fundamentals area, we've had friends of ours that are definitely seasoned Rx veterans come to the workshop. And most of them ask the most questions while talking about the fundamentals. Because I tend to dig into, either deep into the internals or into the why's and how's thing. Why and how things work. Even when it comes to how to subscribe to an observable. Deep detailed information about what happens if you don't provide an error handler and certain cases and how that's going to change in upcoming versions, and why that's changing in upcoming versions, and what the TC39's thoughts are on that, and so on and so forth. So, I try to get into some deeper stuff and we have a lot of fun. And we tend to be a little goofier at the workshops from time to time than we were in this podcast. Tracy and I get silly when we're together. TRACY: It's very true. [Laughter] TRACY: But I think also, soon I think there are people that are going to be championing an Observable proposal on what [inaudible]. So, aside from the TC39 Observable proposal that's currently still at stage one, I don't know Ben if you want to talk a little bit about that. BEN: Oh, yeah. So, I've been involved in conversations with folks from Netflix and Google as well, Chrome team and TC39 members, about getting the WHATWG, the ‘what wig', they're a standards body similar to W3C, to include observables as part of the DOM. The post has not been made yet. But the post is going to be made soon as long as everybody's okay with it. And what it boils down to is the idea of using observables as part of event targets. An event target is the API we're all familiar with for ‘add event listener', ‘remove event listener'. So, pretty much anywhere you'd see those methods, there might also someday be an on method that would return an observable of events. So, it's really, really interesting thing because it would bring at least the primitives of reactive programming to the browser. And at the very least it would provide maybe a nicer API for people to subscribe to events coming from different DOM elements. Because ‘add event listener' and ‘remove event listener' are a little unergonomic at times, right? CHARLES: Yeah. They're the worst. BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: That's a very polite way of putting it. BEN: [Chuckles] So, that's one thing that's coming down the pipe. Other things, RxJS 6 is in the works. We recently tied off 5.5 in a stable branch. And master is now our alpha that we're working on. So, there's going to be a lot of refactoring and changes there, trying to make the library smaller and smaller. And trying to eliminate some of the footprints that maybe people had in previous versions. So, moving things around so people aren't importing stuff that were meant to be implementation details, reducing the size of the library, trying to eliminate some bloat, that sort of thing. I'm pretty excited about that. But that's going to be in alpha ongoing for a while. And then hopefully we'll be able to move into beta mid first quarter next year. And then when that'll be out of beta, who knows? It all depends on how well people like the beta and the alpha, right? CHARLES: Alright. Well, so if folks do want to follow up with y'all either in regards to the course or to upcoming releases or any of the other great stuff that's coming along, how would they get in touch with y'all? TRACY: You can find me on Twitter @ladyleet. But Ben is @BenLesh. RX Workshop is RXWorkshop.com. I think in January we're going to be doing state of JavaScript under This Dot Media again. So, that's where all the core contributors of different frameworks and libraries come together. So, we'll definitely be giving a state of RxJS at that time. And next year also Contributor Days will be happening. So, if you go to ContributorDays.com you can see the previous RxJS Contributor Days and figure out how to get involved. So, we're always open and happy and willing to teach everybody. And again, if you want to get involved it doesn't matter whether you have little experience or lots of experience. We are always willing to show you how you can play. BEN: Yeah. You can always find us on Twitter. And don't forget that if you don't find Tracy or I on Twitter, you can always message Jay Phelps on Twitter. That's important. @_JayPhelps. Really. TRACY: Yeah. [Laughter] BEN: You'll find us. CHARLES: [Chuckles] Look for Jay in the show notes. [Laughter] CHARLES: Alright. Well, thank you so much for all the stuff that y'all do, code and otherwise. And thank you so much Ben, thank you so much Tracy, for coming on the show. BEN: Thank you. CHARLES: Bye Elrick and bye everybody. If you want to reach out to us, you can always get in touch with us at @TheFrontside or send us an email at contact@frontside.io. Alright everybody, we'll see you next week.
Henry Zhu (@left_pad), a maintainer for Babel, sits down to discuss the ins and outs of what's happening with the worlds most used JavaScript compiler. Henry takes us through what Babel does, how Babel works and describes some of its many features, some you may not have known existed. Henry also explains the TC39 staging process and how that applies to Babel and discusses the risks of using stage 0-1 features in production. Visit the website for This Week in Web, resources & more: https://thewebplatformpodcast.com/147-next-generation-javascript-today-with-babel Follow The Web Platform podcast on Twitter for regular updates @TheWebPlatform.
John Boyd: LinkedIn Show Notes: 01:27 - Knocki 03:20 - The Device 06:19 - Complexity 08:44 - Software Distribution 14:01 - Allocating Memory 18:27 - Finding Hardware Hacking Libraries 22:01 - Updating and Diffing 24:06 - Migrations 26:51 - Decentralization of IoT 35:39 - Managing the Knocki Ecosystem 40:17 - Communication Standardization Resources: Malloc Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #81. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer and your podcast host-in-training here at the Frontside. With me today is Elrick Ryan. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, how are you doing Charles. Welcome back. CHARLES: Yeah, thank you. It's good to be back. Today we're going to be continuing the ongoing series that we've been doing intermittently on the Internet of Things. It's a really fascinating, almost to a person fascinated with here at the Frontside. Today, we have with us to talk about this, someone who's very, very knowledgeable on the subject, John Boyd, who I got an opportunity to talk with, I guess it was about a month ago and I wish that we had the podcast recording equipment there in the room because it was just a very, very well-versed engineer, exactly the person you want to be the CTO of your company, which is very lucky for Knocki, the company that he works for, because he is in fact the CTO there. Welcome to the show, John. Thanks for coming. JOHN: Yeah, thank you very much, Charles and I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to join the conversation this week. CHARLES: Yeah, why don't you start by what it is that you do at Knocki? Most of our audience comes from software and design and product management backgrounds. You've got a very strong hardware background. How does that play in to what you do at Knock? JOHN: Yes, certainly. As you previously mentioned, I'm CTO at a startup called Knocki, which you can mount onto any surface and turn that surface into a user interface. We're recently funded on Kickstarter so we're in the process of actually trying to develop this hardware but the central concept is any surface that you mount this on will now listen for touches and vibrations so you can say, mount it on a desk and tap three times on your desk and control your smart home around you. If you have smart speakers or TV, you can tap three times out of four times and control those devices with a really natural interioractive interface made out of anything in your home already. CHARLES: Tabletops, mirrors, I assume you've tested this on a lot of different services. JOHN: Yes, I'm sure we'll talk about that more a little bit later but the goal is to be able to turn any surface into user interface. That means if you really wild and you want to use it on the window, I recommend it. But we're thinking desks, walls, doors. It has a lot of applications for disabled and handicapped individuals. Think of a child or someone in a wheelchair that can't quite reach a light switch, if they have a Knocki mounted on the wall, they can still knock on the wall to control the lights. We feel like it adds a new level of user interface to people's lives that can be helpful. CHARLES: Definitely. Seeing the product and hearing you talk about it, I definitely got that impression. Now, the device that you actually brought into the office because you did come in and talk to us, like I said it was about a month ago but it was extremely tiny. In our explorations into the Internet of Things, we do things like control our lights from within the office. At least, we're trying to control our lights within the office. For us, we're using the standard kit. We've got Raspberry Pis that we're using, that are have access to a plug and they've got a full Linux install, just a really powerful processor and by comparison to the things that you were talking about, that's energy hog by comparison. We think of it as being very lightweight but if you're talking about making some small device, it's actually really, really wasteful of resources, so to speak. What is that transition that spectrum which you moved from these one-off hobbyist things where you're using high-powered equipment to these really custom devices? How do you make that transition? And what is the difference between the two? JOHN: Our devices are about the size of a hockey puck, which is much smaller if you can think of a Raspberry Pi. Pretty difficult to fit that inside of a hockey puck, especially when you want to start adding some sensors to detect knocks and taps on a surface. I don't hate or dislike the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black or any of those really quick SBCs that can get you started with IoT. But they have -- CHARLES: Acronym alert. What is an SBC? JOHN: SBC, single board computer. It's any of those credit cards size computers. CHARLES: Okay, great. So nothing against the SBCs like BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi. JOHN: Exactly. It's a great way to prototype ideas and get in a proof of concept out there and there are some cases where actually, they're great choices for a full-fledged product. A lot of cases in IoT, people are more concerned with things that you carry around with you so they have to be battery powered and you need to be a little bit more conscious about energy economy. You need to be very cost-effective with your components and it doesn't make sense to buy an expensive Raspberry Pi for each unit. CHARLES: Did you actually start with a Raspberry Pi, when you were developing this product or something that's like an SBC? JOHN: I actually went straight to a microcontroller dev kit. I started with Texas Instruments' CC3200 LaunchPad. It's a little bit lower level than SBC like the Raspberry Pi. It doesn't run Linux. The firmware I started off writing as a proof of concept was still embedded C bare metal software. CHARLES: How much complexity does that add? There's just a lot of nice things about having an operating system and being able to have your compilers, I guess you have a compiler tool chain, but having being able to install big programs like interpreters so that you can run Ruby and JavaScript on there. There's just nice things like scheduling. If you've got a bunch of processes running on this device, you don't have to worry about them, saying who's going to get what processor time. I assume that you're having to deal with all of that if you're writing the firmware by hand using C, right? JOHN: That's 100% true. There's definitely some great advantages to using a little more powerful system that can run a full Linux stack or full OS. As you mentioned, the design complexity is reduced a lot because you can import other people's code and you have a full operating system to handle most of the drivers in the system. You're right. There's a lot more complexity. We have to write all of that ourselves in C. But that's the fun part about it to me. I love getting down there and writing drivers that can communicate with accelerometers and set them up. As far as scheduling goes, for getting concurrent software running on your embedded system. There are RTOS's -- real-time operating system that can provide basic scheduling. For the brave, you don't even have to use that. You can use a lot of the embedded timers inside the microcontroller itself. But to answer your question, it is a lot more complex but one of the tradeoffs to get a device that small, beautiful and also has a battery life that can last many months or a year. CHARLES: Yeah, it almost sounds like the complexity but you're not going to save yourself any time prototyping it in tools that have all those things because you're essentially going to have to be rewriting your system from scratch, because those things are just a nonstarter if you want low profile devices. JOHN: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of rework would have to be done but those SBC systems are still very useful for prototyping the cloud side. Internet of Things is hardware and internet when it comes to building out your cloud interface. CHARLES: Yeah, that's definitely true. You're running a bunch of software on this device. The software that you've written, how do you actually distribute the software because we're very used to in our world, software distribution is not a problem. That's what made the web so popular. While we were willing to deal with really crappy tools on the web for a really, really, really long time, the distribution model was just so nice. You're also having to deal without that too when you're operating in the device space. But the challenges are still there. If you've got a bug on one of these things, how do you even detect it and how do you get a fix out there? JOHN: Obviously, any software is prone to bugs. Nobody writes a perfect code the first time. If you do, I'd love to hear about it. Obviously, one of the big concepts in IoT is security and to have a secure product, we need to be able to patch bugs as they arrived. A big really important feature in any good IoT product is the ability to remotely upgrade the firmware or send the patches as part of the maintainability that prevents big software bugs from turning your IoT product network into a botnet. A lot of our time is actually spent trying to make sure that our remote update capabilities are reliable, always functioning and globally distributed. You'd think this is an easy problem to solve but when you're working on a microcontroller that's not running an operating system, running bare metal code, things get a little bit more complicated when you want to make sure that any device anywhere in the world can install the next version of firmware reliably. CHARLES: Right. At any time there's a software update, it's always, it bugs me and then do I want to do this and it's always optional. There's none of that, right? It's just what a new version of the firmware goes out, boom! It goes out there. JOHN: You can design it in different ways. There are some great products out there. Apply the firmware update through the user's phone so you may open up your products application and it says, "There's an update available. Go update." That's definitely one way to do it but that's the problem if the user is not home and maybe they've set this device up in a guest house and they won't be home for six more months, then you have a device that could be vulnerable for six months, which is a long time in the world of software. CHARLES: Yeah, that's true. JOHN: To get around that, obviously our preferred solution is to have the device checked into our cloud servers to see if the device itself has updates available and then go through the download and update process that way, just to make sure even if the user is not home or never opens their mobile app, it will still get those critical security updates. CHARLES: Sounds hard. You're running a risk of bricking someone's device if that update doesn't go very well or it loses internet in the middle or power. JOHN: Very true, especially when you go towards a bare metal microcontroller with limited memory and limited processing capabilities, unreliable internet connection, a lot of work has to be done on the device side to make sure if something goes wrong during the firmware download process or installing the image correctly that it has a backup image. If you're downloading a new firmware upgrade and the download gets corrupted halfway through, make sure you have an old image that you can boot into. That's one part of it. The other part is detecting that it went bad if it gets past downloads in your image and then it reboot itself and tries to boot into it, how do you know that that image actually isn't behaving the way you want it to and then go ahead and revert back into that original stable version. CHARLES: I assume there's some key so that you can verify, not only that the image is not corrupt but it's a certified Knocki image that's coming down the wire? JOHN: Exactly. We signature verification, again something that I think anybody on the internet should be using when you download new software but make sure that the new firmware update was actually written by Knocki and you're not installing someone else's code. Another important factor is just please use HTTPS secure SSL connections to your server, then that reduces the possibility of someone taking over and giving you their own firmware image. But there are a lot of low power devices out there that are being used to make IoT products. These low power devices are important for many reasons but they have restrictions and sometimes, their security capabilities are limited. Maybe doing encryption on the device and actually are doing certificate verification. That's a costly operation. CHARLES: It sounds like there's a lot of cycles that that consumes. JOHN: Definitely. Most people try to make sure they have the resources to solve these problems but at the same time, there are a lot of developers out there that are cutting corners and that's where you get these big news stories about IoT products getting taken over. CHARLES: Along that vein, it's your reality but it constantly blows my mind that things that you're living without when you're programming for these devices like Knocki is do you have to write your own network stack? When you're doing these downloads, that's kind of like got it all. You've got the encryption piece that you've got to do to make sure that you're connecting over SSL so you've got to do the whole handshake and you've got to do the key exchange and the certificate verification and then the packets come in asynchronously so your message is arriving asynchronously in bits so the header is being assembled, now I've got the HTTP headers, now I can go ahead and get the body. There's a lot that happens for us when we're making a simple Ruby request. We're basically like resource.get. Boom! And it just comes to us fully assembled in memory. How much do you have to hand roll all of that? Are there libraries for doing it? How do you put that process together of just even downloading the image? JOHN: Fortunately, there are tons of open source freely available libraries for embedded C software that can help us solve these problems -- CHARLES: Is this like a genre of software like if I want to go look for these libraries, how I look for them? JOHN: In my example, all of our firmware is written in C or C++. Since we're working on a microcontroller with limited resources, it's important to look for libraries that don't use dynamic memory allocation. That's why it's a really big [inaudible]. Some software relies really heavily on that but -- CHARLES: When you say dynamic memory allocation, you're talking about like Malloc? JOHN: Exactly. CHARLES: You are basically are allocating memory on the heap. When you're doing for this, you basically want to do everything on the stack. Now, is that just because the instruction set of the processor doesn't support it or is it because it's just there be dragons like here there be dragons? JOHN: That particular scenario is actually just due to resource limitations. There's just not a lot of memory on our device. We do use Malloc in some cases but we have to be very careful about when we use it and make sure that it's always going to have the memory required or if it doesn't have the memory required, there's some fail safes involved. If you just use someone else's open source library and they're allocating memory left and right, they could end up causing issues on your embedded system. CHARLES: Right. Now, just a little bit of background for people who might not be fully familiar with Malloc, it's just when you're executing a program, you have this heap memory, which is where you store random stuff and then you have your stuff on like the call stack. Your variables that are on the call stack are in one place and then your just generic data structures that could be accessed from anywhere are in this thing called the heap. Our dynamic languages that we use like Ruby and JavaScript, the heap is hot stuff. Like everything gets allocated on the heap, that's why they consume these huge amounts of memory and then the things that are on the stack, really are just pointers that are referencing these big bags of data that are on the heap. But it sounds like you've got the exact opposite situation where you don't want to have big bags of memory that are just floating around in a heap and you want to do everything inside that stack. JOHN: Exactly. I couldn't have said it better. CHARLES: Anyway, you're looking for libraries that don't do that because it sounds like any time you want to allocate memory on the heap, that's going to be shared for the whole program, that space is very limited so you want to be very, very, very strict. You want to control that process. You don't want any other library that's doing it for you. Is that fair? JOHN: That's correct. That's also one specific example, dynamic memory allocation of the things that you want to make sure your other software libraries aren't going to be abusing. But in general, you need to make sure that any code that you're putting is compatible with your system. It doesn't have some special hardware requirement that your embedded system doesn't have. CHARLES: Right. For people who want to get into hardware hacking, is there some golden seal of approval like the people say like, "This library is great for embedded devices." Like I said, a lot of times when you're coming into it, you don't know what to look for so what you're really looking for is some expert or authority on the subject who can say, "This is good. This is not good." It is like, "Don't even look at this library because you're going to find something else because this is not embedded-friendly." JOHN: That's a good point. I wish there was a golden seal of approval or I wish I knew one, at least. Normally, most of our code that we uses are hosted on GitHub. Usually, we try to find software that was optimized from embedded systems and the author of that code will usually mention -- CHARLES: That [inaudible] me. JOHN: Exactly. This was designed for microcontrollers. ELRICK: I was going to ask if there's a golden standard when you're building these type of devices. Is there a checklist of things that if someone's going to build something similar that these are good things on your checklist that you should attempt to check off, if you're building this sort of device or want to build something similar. CHARLES: Now, you mean things like update and whatnot? ELRICK: Like updating or like how you were mentioning avoiding dynamic memory allocation. Anything, you can just shoot from the hip, like these are things that you should watch out for a lot of your battery power, you should look out for this or anything. JOHN: Yes. I definitely think the number one consideration that the biggest check box and [inaudible] before it goes out the door is going to be your security suite. Make sure your internet connections are encrypted: SSL, TLSL, that good stuff. Then as we hit on earlier, making sure that you always have a way of updating the device but don't use back doors. A lot of people think to update your device, you should put a back door access and you can go in and download updates that way. That's not the answer. ELRICK: That's like the back door that they were looking for in Apple like, "Do you guys have a backdoor to get into your device?" No. JOHN: No. That can be a controversial conversation. CHARLES: Yeah, or they're like, "Come on, really. It's okay. You can show us the backdoor." No, there is no backdoor. "I know you have to say that. Blink-blink." ELRICK: That's an interesting problem that you guys are solving on how to update these devices. You guys are essentially hand rolling or developing custom software to do that. JOHN: Again fortunately, we're using a Texas Instruments SSC system on a chip. They provide some core functionality, some core drivers that really help us out. For example, they provide a special bootloader that can really assist with a lot of the firmware download back up framework image checking, that sort of functionality. We don't have to write it all by scratch but we do have to write the logic to make sure that the device does check for updates and it doesn't forget to check in and talk to us. ELRICK: On the cloud side, do you guys have to write any custom software to do diffing, to make sure like -- Oh, do you diffing? Or do you just update everything all complete, like once you're updating, you're going to get a brand new update or do you diff and say, "You only need this." JOHN: Since we're working on the system that we're using, it just requires a fully-compiled image that gets installed by the bootloader. We can't really send just a patch to one part of the firmware, if that's what you're asking. CHARLES: But I assume there must be some state that's on the Knocki itself. Just even the credentials for the local Wi-Fi network, what devices it's connected to, part of the system is updating and part of it is not, I assume but how do you make sure that that state is compatible with the new firmware? JOHN: Yeah, that's another great point to keep in mind. The way we keep most of, we call it nonvolatile memory, every time the device reboot, it's going to forget about everything that was stored in RAM so we need to have somewhere in nonvolatile to store these things. We have a file system on the device that we can create files with different device configurations, algorithm, settings, Wi-Fi credentials, that sort of stuff. CHARLES: That file system, is that anything that we would even be familiar with like ZFS or is it just a custom file system that you've written or that you found on GitHub. JOHN: No, fortunately this is just a standard FAT file system. We do have some creature comforts there but that's not necessarily the norm. CHARLES: You heard it here. Is that FAT16? JOHN: No, it's FAT32. CHARLES: FAT32, described as creature comfort. JOHN: Yeah, we have a different perspective of creature comfort. CHARLES: There's a couple of things because immediately, what this brings to mind is for people who are familiar with Ruby on Rails, they have this concept of migrations, where you're migrating the schema of your database and as you have to transform the data from one format to the other, you're running these migrations. One of the things that's nice about that is if, let's say I have some system that is at Version 1, but let's say, I have one of the devices that hasn't taken an update, it starts at Version 1 and it needs to go to like Version 100. But you could have 10 format changes in between there. Is there a way to handle that case where you're basically incrementally applying a bunch of transforms? JOHN: Yes. That's another great point. We take this on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, being a small relatively simple system, there's not a whole lot of state data to keep track of. But to handle that situation, we've written are own OTA server-side software that manages the devices sending updates -- CHARLES: Acronym alert, OTA? JOHN: I'm sorry, yeah. Another acronym, OTA -- over the air updates. That's our slang for remotely sending firmware updates. CHARLES: Sorry to interrupt. It's just we have to unpack acronyms. JOHN: No, I'm sorry. I use a lot of jargons here. CHARLES: You know what? The thing is, so do I and I just never even notice it. JOHN: To handle that scenario, the way we handle it, our cloud knows what devices are out there and what firmware updates we've sent out to it. Furthermore, when the device checks in with the cloud and ask, "Do I have an update available?" It also tells the cloud, "By the way, I'm running Version 1.0." The cloud knows, if it's on Version 1.0, there's going to be some incremental changes that need to be made before we get to that last update and we can apply those changes incrementally. CHARLES: I see. I feel like we've touched on so many of these concepts that are universal to development but only projected into the hardware space. We've talked about dynamic allocation of memory and data migrations and it sounds like what you're describing in a way with OTAs is continuous delivery, where you have some way of automatically pushing out an update and all the stuff that's involved in that. It's just really cool to hear to view through such a vastly different lens than what we're used to. ELRICK: We've been talking a lot about communication between devices and back to the cloud in things of that nature. Does that play into the conversation around decentralization of IoT infrastructure and what does decentralization of IoT even mean? JOHN: Decentralization as a new methodology or ideology that a lot of people are adopting, I shouldn't say new. It's been around forever but the idea is from a high level, looking at the internet, most of the internet is access through some central, server is hosted on you name it -- XYZ cloud hosting provider. The way you do your URL DNS resolution that goes through centralized DNS servers that say, "You want to look at Netflix?" Netflix is stored over here on this AWS server farm. Decentralization, the idea is we don't necessarily need to talk to this DNS server and talk to AWS just to get content from specific providers. If you look at IoT for example, a lot of times in our case, we want to tap three times on the table and then later on, it will do the cloud, send the message and then turn on your Philips Hue light bulb in the living room. It would be great if the message could just go directly from Knocki to the Philips Hue light bulb, rather than going to our cloud, on some centralized hosting provider, then to Philip Hue's cloud, on their provider then out to the Philips Hue light bulb. Those are some of the really popular technologies that's a lot of people are talking about that really take advantage of the concept of decentralization. But it does -- CHARLES: Let me understand because why these would be necessary. When I get why it's compelling, if I want to have my Knocki talking directly to my Philips Hue light bulb without getting your servers involved, without getting Hue's servers involved, it seems like it's going to be a lot faster and just a lot more robust. There's just less links in the chain but it presents its own problems, like on both ends of the conversation between the Knocki and the Philips Hue, how do they agree that this is sanctioned by a user? That's just leaps out. That's a hard problem to solve. ELRICK: That you use some sort of like public-private key type of encryption to say, "It's me. Am I allowed to do this?" CHARLES: How do you decentralize that? JOHN: Well, I'd like to preface this by saying I'm not an expert on that particular subject but the goal is, if you're familiar with the bit torrent protocol and how it keeps track of a lot of different peers on a network using distributed hash tables, the idea is if you know at least one other person on the network, that person can say, "There's some other people that you may be interested in talking to, that may actually want your message. I'm just a bystander on the network and I don't really need your message but this guy is interested in it." In our application, that would be our server. We have to ask our server, who's out there that wants to hear what I have to say. The server is going to say, "Knocki 123, this Phillips Hue is over here at this address, this unique resource identifier, he's going to be very interested when you have two taps or three taps on the desk so just go ahead and talk directly to him. You don't need to talk to me." There's a lot more of that goes into that about making sure that the network can heal itself if somebody goes offline. But as I said I'm not really an expert in that subject. CHARLES: Right, but it really is compelling. Would you then, maybe have some device that was just kind of your coordinator in your home or multiple devices that would act as these bit torrent trackers? JOHN: Yeah, I think -- CHARLES: Or would the devices themselves actually be able to do that, like the Knocki could actually participate in the conversation about what other devices there were in the home. JOHN: Exactly, yeah. I think in a true peer-to-peer network, any peer can talk to another peer and eventually learn where the other node that they want to talk to is. You don't have to talk to any one particular person but you can ask anybody and they can tell you how to talk to the person you're looking for. The really big advantage to decentralization in my opinion is security. A lot of times if everything is controlled through one central point, that's one central point of failure. If someone DDOS's your cloud service, then now your entire network of devices is offline, just because one location got attacked. If it's a decentralized network, there's no one central point of failure and it's very, very difficult for someone to attack your network. CHARLES: Right, that's true but the tradeoff then is complexity that your decentralize network has to agree, somehow come to some consensus. It's very easy to generate with consensus when you have one process or one point that's driving everything. JOHN: Exactly. Another big tradeoff is ownership of the data and enterprise today are really big revenue your point for a company is being able to have ownership of data and extract meaningful insights. But if your device doesn't talk to your central server every time I want to do something, how does your server know everything that your device is doing and you lose a lot of that data. There's a tradeoff there in how you're going to get the data you need to run your business but also let your device run autonomously on decentralized network. ELRICK: Do you think that this is going to be helpful or harmful to IoT? What's your views on decentralization? JOHN: I think it could be very powerful. Right now, I'm not aware of any products that are really using a decentralized architecture for IoT and the main reason for that is companies and developers are a little slow to adopt it because they want to have that ownership of every data packet that goes to the network. They own it. They can see it. But I think in the future, people will start to realize that they can still get the data that they need to run this business. They can still have visibility and control over the network the way they need to run their business without controlling every single packet. When that happens, I think it's going to be a revolution for the internet as a whole but it's really going to revolutionize IoT and devices will get lower power. They'll get faster and they'll get more secure. CHARLES: When you say being able to get the data that they need, is it just being able to asynchronously spool off the data later? I guess I'm trying to understand how they get the data if it's never talking to some central servers? Or is it just you will get the data at the time you want it or there will be some delay? I assume you can also have your server being part of... I don't know. I'm just curious how you see that playing out. JOHN: I think, every developer is going to have to tackle that on a case-by-case scenario but take for example a big brand smart thermostat company. They have a device that's going to control your AC heating and air and the house and it also collects a lot of the data from when you're home and when you're using it to be smart and adjust the temperature at certain times of day even when you're not home. Again, I don't work for any company that does that and I don't know how they're doing their devices under the hood but traditionally, they tap to a centralized server and they send a lot of this information whenever it's happening, always to the server. Every time the user adjust the temperature, it sends an update to the server and says, "The user just updated." In a decentralized network, these devices can just talk to themselves and say maybe periodically or every day and it'll just send one update and say, "The user adjusted it." You can still talk to a central server but it doesn't have to rely on the central server. CHARLES: Right. It's just what we call, an out of band process. JOHN: Exactly, not mission critical. CHARLES: Okay, I got it. Talking about the decentralization and interacting with other devices, how do you manage the ecosystem right now with Knocki? It's a general purpose interface to rise. It serves really the role of a keyboard or a mouse or some way of controlling other devices and other systems. I assume that in order to do that, you have to understand the capabilities of those systems or maybe you don't. How do you integrate these two devices? Let's go with the thermostat and the Knocki or maybe one that you're more familiar with that you've done. Do you all have to write the integration? Can a third party write the integration? Or is there some way to automatically discover and map the existing inputs of the device. I feel like we've got all these new devices are coming out day to day then and now, there's more and more permutations in which to confine these devices into a coherent system and I'm just curious to hear about that integration story from your perspective. JOHN: Certainly. If we want to configure our Knocki to tap three times and turn on our Philips Hue light bulbs -- I keep using Philips Hue just because that's what I've been actively working on lately. We currently rewrite the integrations in our own backend so the user pulls up the mobile app and says, "Knocki on my desk, every time I tap three times, listen to this Philips Hue," and then we have an integration where in the mobile app, they can essentially set a lot of the parameters that a Philips Hue light would use based on API that Philips Hue would provide us. That's the way most integrations are going to happen with third party products. They expose an API and we can write a little module and the user can configure that API. CHARLES: I see and as far as making affordances for third party people, if they want to change the behavior or add like intelligence, obviously they can configure it from the app but if I want to say add behaviors or something like that. JOHN: When you say add behaviors, you mean add new -- CHARLES: I mean like, rather than turning the lights on and off, say I want to strobe the lights or flash the lights, maybe I'm someone who's running a theater or something and during intermission, I want to knock three times to flash the overhead lights. I don't know if that's something that your integration with Hue could do but if I want to be able to add that. JOHN: Okay, I see your question. We try to enable as much of the products functionality as possible through our own integration on our mobile app but say, you're a hacker and you've come up with your own smart light that turns on any sort of party mode and flashes different colors whenever you want and your Philips Hue or any other smart light just can't quite do what you wanted to do. In the future, our goal is to have an open API that people can access and they can hopefully control their own homemade IoT devices. CHARLES: Now, what about for existing ones. You can definitely flash the lights with the Philip Hue but you're going have to have some custom software to do it, right? Do you see what I mean? You have to send a series of messages to it in sequence. JOHN: In that scenario, we currently don't support that and don't have a plan to support that. In our research, that's a really small use case of people that would be interested in that. Also, it's difficult now if we wanted to do some sort repeated command, you knock three times and then every 30 seconds, it's going to send a command in your light bulbs. We have to be careful about having processes that run away and you have a bunch of CPU power forever in the cloud. We may include features like that in the future. I think the most likely path for that sort of stuff is we'll have an open API that people can direct Knocki's inputs to their own server and then their own server can flash their Philips Hue lights as much as they want. ELRICK: Is there any standardization between the communication and what these API supposed to look, like the communication between devices? anyone can have an API, expecting one thing and someone that's writing software to communicate with that, wouldn't have to go look it up. Do you know of any standardization? JOHN: Yes. I know there have been a couple of companies out there trying to put a standard on the market and I think a standard would be a great idea. ELRICK: Yeah, I think so too. JOHN: It would be wonderful if we could just write generic control structures or information flow structures and anybody can hook their stuff up to it. As far as I know, I haven't seen any that really fit the bill. CHARLES: It feel like there's something that programming systems like software developers have been chasing for a long time is to have some distributed set of peers that they can look each other up. You can discover the capabilities of a thing without ever having to even know about in the first place. But I haven't really known that worked really well and hit that sweet spot. I'm thinking of DCOM and Java. There's like Java distributed beans or something like that. You have this idea of these objects in the cloud, which seems kind of analogous to what we're talking about now, except we're talking about actual devices, rather the software devices but who knows. Maybe it'll pan out where we'll have some standard for discovery and integration. JOHN: It's interesting that there hasn't been one already. You look at IoT and it's really ripe for standardization because a lot of the communication between devices takes the same format. You're generally just passing a small message saying, on or off or, "I read this temperature at 75 degrees. Who knows, maybe someone will solve it. CHARLES: Yeah, maybe so. Maybe the folks at Kasita. They're active integrators. They were on the podcast two episodes ago and one of their challenges was getting all these 30 things to talk together well. Maybe we can follow up with them and if they could have a standard, what they would like it to look like? JOHN: If they get on that, I would love to hear what they were working on. CHARLES: I think, maybe they mostly, have a wish list. It is like, "I wish it did this. I wish it did this. I wish it did this." ELRICK: Maybe we need to have like a 10-way podcast. It's like IoT companies and we can hash it out like the TC39 of IoT on the Frontside Podcast. CHARLES: Right, and then everybody punches each other. All right, well thank you so much, John for coming and talking with us. It's always fascinating. You can find Knocki at @Knocki on Twitter and Knocki.com. It's a great product and like I said, always a fascinating conversation so thank you so much for coming on the show. JOHN: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It was a great conversation. CHARLES: With that, we'll say goodbye. Thank you, Elrick. ELRICK: Thank you. CHARLES: We are, as always, the Frontside at @TheFrontside on Twitter, Frontside.io on the web or just drop us a line over email, Contact@Frontside.io. Thanks everybody.
JavaScript, ECMAScript, TC39 e proposals. Tá difícil entender as versões e nomes da linguagem que quer dominar todas as outras. Nesse episódio falamos um pouco da história, da evolução e de como novos recursos entram no JavaScript, com alguém que está por trás dela. Participantes: Paulo Silveira, um host que curte especificações Sergio Lopes, o cohost frontender mais famoso do pedaço Leo Balter, engenheiro na bocoup, o brasileiro que tá tocando o terror na especificação! Links: Draft da Especificação mais atual do JavaScript. Ou EcmaScript. Ou ES. ou ES 2017 :) Ronin, o filme! Propostas do TC39 para o JavaScript Tabela de implementação por browser dos recursos do JavaScript (kangax) Proposta de decorators Podcast #38 do Hipsters sobre JavaScript Conteúdo dos criadores do podcast: Cursos online de JavaScript na Alura Novo livro de JavaScript do cangaceiro Flavio Almeida! Produção e conteúdo: Alura Cursos online de Tecnologia Caelum Ensino e Inovação Edição e sonorização: Radiofobia Podcast e Multimídia
Robert Jackson: @rwjblue | rwjblue.com Show Notes: 01:00 - Build Tooling in JavaScript 02:19 - Ember and Babel 07:14 - Deciding on Features 11:46 - Class 13:29 - Workflow 14:39 - Payload Size 15:24 - Config Targets 17:18 - Source Maps 25:05 - Ember Decorators, Objects and ES6 Classes 36:07 - What's next and when can we get it?! Resources: Babel.js esperanto Ember CLI Targets
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