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Today we are chatting with Ramona Nagabczyńska. Ramona is a Canadian and Polish dance artist from Toronto, based in Warsaw. She trained at the Warsaw State Ballet School, at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt and at The Place in London.She then performed with (only to name a few!) Polish Dance Theatre, Saju Hari, Fleur Darkin, Tom Dale, Emma Martin, Junk Ensemble, David Wampach, and Clod Ensemble. In 2008 Ramona co-founded the Universal Law of Impermanence (U/LOI) collective, and in 2013 she co-founded Centrum w Ruchu (Centre in Motion), a cooperative of Warsaw based dance artists. Her work has been touring internationally and was selected twice by Aerowaves. She was supported by the apap Network, project co-financed by the European Union in the frame of the „Creative Europe” program.Together we talked about BALLET LEGS / the UNAVOIDABLE MATERIALITY OF DANCE / DANCING DESIRES / OBJECTIFICATION OF PERFORMERS / DOING SOMETHING YOU HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT. I hope you'll enjoy this chat as much as I did!
From RachelCorrieFoundation.org, a reading of Rachel Corrie's emails to friends and family during her time volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement in Rafah. Rachel Corrie was an American college student and activist who spent winter quarter in Gaza sleeping next to water wells and protecting homes from IOF destruction. Her emails are witness to the policy of expulsion and dehumanization of the Israeli military. Rachel Corrie was killed in March 2003 when an Israeli Caterpillar D9R bulldozer ran over her while protecting the Nasrallah family's home from demolition. To date, no justice has been served to Corrie's family, neither Caterpillar nor Israel have been found liable for Corrie's death. This episode ends with Tom Dale's eyewitness account of the day of Corrie's death, and his comments regarding the court verdict against the Corrie family. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uftp/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uftp/support
Augusto Blope is renewed and the evening's big date is on! Surely all our heroes need to do now is sit back and relax in the joy of a job well done. Nothing will come back to bite them, there's no loose ends left dangling, and it's time to relax. Right? Cast: Stew Clarke can be found on Twitter at @StewClarke Tom Dale can be found on Twitter at @BrandiBun5 The excellent Critical Ditto can be found on Twitter at @CriticalDitto , on their website at https://criticalditto.wordpress.com or wherever you get your podcasts! Lou can be found on Twitter @PlotOtter Follow us on social media! Twitter: @forcemajeurepod Mastodon: @forcemajeurepod@dice.camp Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ForceMajeurePod Instagram: forcemajeurepod Online: www.forcemajeurepod.com Email: forcemajeurepod@gmail.com We have a Discord! Come and join us: https://discord.gg/DHbResPp6n We also have merch! https://teespring.com/stores/forcemajeurepodhttps://www.teepublic.com/user/forcemajeurepod If you like what we do and have some spare money, we have both a Patreon and a Ko-Fi account. We are extremely grateful for your support. https://www.patreon.com/forcemajeurepod ko-fi.com/forcemajeurepod Additional Music: "Floating Cities" "Bushwick Tarantella Loop" both by Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) The following music was used for this media project: Music: Techno 1 by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9661-techno-1 License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frank.schroeter.52 The following music was used for this media project: Music: You and Me Forever by MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7937-you-and-me-forever License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Except from "Dungeon Majeure Intro" by Sly Fox Audio (soundcloud.com/slyfoxaudio) For full credit and links please see the Credits page of our website.
With one obstacle down, an even greater threat emerges - the turbulent history between Koh Tso and Augusto Blope! Can even Chubb Salvage this relationship? Cast: Stew Clarke can be found on Twitter at @StewClarke Tom Dale can be found on Twitter at @BrandiBun5 The excellent Critical Ditto can be found on Twitter at @CriticalDitto , on their website at https://criticalditto.wordpress.com or wherever you get your podcasts! Lou can be found on Twitter @PlotOtter Follow us on social media! Twitter: @forcemajeurepod Mastodon: @forcemajeurepod@dice.camp Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ForceMajeurePod Instagram: forcemajeurepod Online: www.forcemajeurepod.com Email: forcemajeurepod@gmail.com We have a Discord! Come and join us: https://discord.gg/DHbResPp6n We also have merch! https://teespring.com/stores/forcemajeurepodhttps://www.teepublic.com/user/forcemajeurepod If you like what we do and have some spare money, we have both a Patreon and a Ko-Fi account. We are extremely grateful for your support. https://www.patreon.com/forcemajeurepod ko-fi.com/forcemajeurepod Additional Music: "Floating Cities" by Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) "Night to Remember (slower version)" "Talk To Me" "Fallen Petals" all from Fesliyan Studios Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Except from "Dungeon Majeure Intro" by Sly Fox Audio (soundcloud.com/slyfoxaudio) For full credit and links please see the Credits page of our website.
In 2022, the future of Ember is taking shape thanks to developers like Godfrey Chan. Alongside Yehuda Katz and other engineers, Godfrey's working on a new edition of Polaris. The project has three main goals: to align Ember with the modern npm packaging system, continue to invest and innovate in reactivity, and encourage universal design principles. Like many developers, Godfrey came to Ember from Rails. Months after chatting with Yehuda and Tom Dale at EmberConf, Godfrey was hired at Tilde and thrown into the Ember deep end. Today, Godfrey's focused on big picture developments, tackling lofty goals like developing an Ember model to navigate JavaScript classes. In this episode, Godfrey talks with Chuck and Robbie about what's to come for Polaris, solving major developer headaches, Godfrey's philosophy on frameworks, top use cases for solutions like Starbeam, and why these innovations are necessary in 2022. Key Takeaways [00:29] - A quick intro to Godfrey. [01:49] - A whiskey review. [09:27] - A sneak peek at Polaris. [16:15] - Why Polaris is about easy transitions. [20:11] - How Polaris plans to evolve. [24:54] - How Godfrey got into Ember. [27:30] - What Starbeam is. [32:50] - Use cases for Starbeam. [36:03] - Why Starbeam is necessary in 2022. [39:49] - A hobby and people-watching themed Whatnot. Quotes [14:54] - “Tools like TypeScript don't automatically just understand what's up within ember app. At least one of the things for Polaris is to figure out how we can transition to a world where we don't have those little tiny differences anymore so that when you open a project in VS Code, TypeScript just knows what's up.” ~ @chancancode [37:46] - “I think conceptually, a reactivity layer that is decoupled from the framework makes a lot of sense to me because there's just a lot of libraries and abstractions that you want to write that eventually, you want people to be able to use them in UI.” ~ @chancancode [39:31] - “I think having something like Starbeam where you can express those reactivity concepts or those annotations without making your library only usable in React or Vue or whatever is a good thing to have in 2022.” ~ @chancancode Links Godfrey Chan Ember Ember Core Team Rails Core Team Ruby on Rails Tilde Lyre's American Malt Multnomah Whiskey Library EmberConf Godfrey's EmberConf 2022 Keynote Slides Yehuda's EmberConf 2022 Keynote Slides Ember Octane Ember Inspector TypeScript JavaScript webpack Visual Studio Code Skypack ember-auto-import Embroider LinkedIn Yehuda Katz Tom Dale Starbeam React Polaris sketch JSNation Hooks Whiskey Web and Whatnot: RedwoodJS, Developer Experience, and Developing for Scale with Tom Preston-Werner GitHub RedwoodJS Hacker News Redux Google Maps YouTube First We Feast Hot Ones 90 Day Fiance Cities: Skyline Uncharted Twitch Discord ember-resources Connect with our hosts Robbie Wagner Chuck Carpenter Ship Shape Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Whiskey Web and Whatnot Top-Tier, Full-Stack Software Consultants This show is brought to you by Ship Shape. Ship Shape's software consultants solve complex software and app development problems with top-tier coding expertise, superior service, and speed. In a sea of choices, our senior-level development crew rises above the rest by delivering the best solutions for fintech, cybersecurity, and other fast-growing industries. Check us out at shipshape.io.
Set in the Apollo Bingo Hall, the episode follows a day in the life of the customers and employees, including the idealistic Patrick O'Neil—an ambitious teenage employee who does not like working at the hall—his friends Yvonne and Sparky, the arrogant bingo caller Tom Dale, the owner Ron Hibbert (who is afraid of Tom) and the various old women who inhabit the club.Original airdate - 19th January 2000Don't forget to check us out on Social media:Lost Art of Podcasting:Facebook: www.facebook.com/LostArtofPodcastingTwitter: www.twitter.com/lostartpodcastInstagram: www.instagram.com/lostartofpodcastingLost Art of Wrestling:Facebook: www.facebook.com/lostartofwrestlingTwitter: www.twitter.com/laowpodcastCheck out our friends:RAD Live:Facebook: www.facebook.com/ukradpodcastTwitter: www.twitter.com/ukradpodcastGunpowder, Treason, No Plot :-Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GTNPP/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TreasonNoSpreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/gunpowder-treason-no-plotYou can also follow our personal Twitter accounts:Coxy - @coxythelegendTDM - @RhogarGTNPTFG - @UKRADpodcastThe RAD: Live Podcast & Lost Art of Podcasting are proud to be part of the #BritPodScene
This is the introduction episode of the RC Plane Lab podcast. Weekly releases will begin on April 7, 2020! This podcast is for anyone who likes RC Airplanes! Join hosts Ron Hull and Tom Dale and get to know a little bit about us. Visit us at https://rcplanelab.com or you can text us, or leave us a message at 818-351-9846. Thanks for listening!
The panel dives into the pros and cons of writing PWAs versus writing React Native applications. We work out the definition (sort of) of a PWA and having a web application that works well on mobile and the availability and complexity tradeoffs between the two solutions. Panelists Jamon Holmgren Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Sponsors G2i Infinite Red CacheFly ____________________________________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ____________________________________________________________ Links Google - Progressive Web Apps Progressive Web Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul Apple's Refusal to Support PWA's Alexander Pope: ServiceWorkers Outbreak Why Was Service Worker Merged into Create React App? EmberConf 2016: Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale Picks Josh Justice: Sleeping Queens Sushi Go! Jamon Holmgren: Learn to code in 2020, get hired, and have fun along the way Charles Max Wood: Hiss King of Tokyo
The panel dives into the pros and cons of writing PWAs versus writing React Native applications. We work out the definition (sort of) of a PWA and having a web application that works well on mobile and the availability and complexity tradeoffs between the two solutions. Panelists Jamon Holmgren Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Sponsors G2i Infinite Red CacheFly ____________________________________________________________ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ____________________________________________________________ Links Google - Progressive Web Apps Progressive Web Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul Apple's Refusal to Support PWA's Alexander Pope: ServiceWorkers Outbreak Why Was Service Worker Merged into Create React App? EmberConf 2016: Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale Picks Josh Justice: Sleeping Queens Sushi Go! Jamon Holmgren: Learn to code in 2020, get hired, and have fun along the way Charles Max Wood: Hiss King of Tokyo
Dance creation is ever changing and evolving with the influence of new technologies on sound, lighting, staging, visualisations and performance. Critically acclaimed choreographer and dancer Tom Dale is an innovator in bringing these elements together to create new ways of experience and performing dance. Taking this tech approach to a new level, Tom Dale's new work Step Sonic sees the dancers' movements and breath create the live soundscape. The dancers movement affects and makes the sound, which is picked up by a series of microphones. In this podcast, Tom Dale reveals the inspiration behind Step Sonic and explains how the piece was made with the dancers and their experience of performing this tech and sound led piece. Step Sonic kicks off a 10 date UK tour from 27 October, check out the dates & location. Step Sonic also features two new commissions for Tom Dale Company: Resonance of Air by Eleesha Drennan and a new work by Jamal Burkmar; the premiere of Tom Dale's solo Surge completes the programme. https://djwpodcasts.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/1wwwod/Tom+Dale.mp3 In the podcast we talk about the below video of the early research work: Tom Dale Dance Company - Step Sonic. Photo by Alicia Clarke
Dance creation is ever changing an...
Valerie Ebuwa is a freelance dance artist, writer and model based in London. She started her training at Lewisham College before obtaining a BA HONS degree from London Contemporary Dance School. Amongst others she’s recently worked with; Vincent Dance Theatre, Clod Ensemble, Holly Blakey, Eddie Peake, Tom Dale and Rhiannon Faith. As well as her blog, Valerie writes for I am Hip Hop magazine; a printed and online publication championing Hip Hop culture. She is a panel member, host and mentor of Woman SRSLY; a female-led performance platform, which has recently been featured in i-D magazine, Ladybeard Magazine and It's Nice That. Rachel Elderkin is a freelance dancer and dance writer based in London. Her dance writing can be also be read in the Stage, londondance.com, Exeunt and British Theatre Guide. She is a member of the UK's Critics' Circle, and has previously written for publications including the Skinny (Scotland) and LeftLion (Nottingham) where she was Art Editor. Credits: Host: Rachel Elderkin Guest: Valerie Ebuwa Editing and production: George Bushaway Produced for Fjord Review
Tom Dale the Canyon County Co-missioner talked about the expansion needs of the jail then a there were discussions on hemp, medicaid expansion and more
In this episode, Adam talks to Sam Selikoff about single page application architecture, and why you should think of client-side applications like desktop applications. Topics include: Why you should think of SPAs as desktop apps instead of web apps Strategies for pushing complexity out of your backend and on to the client Building optimistic UIs Best practices for storing and retrieving data Why you should design your SPAs with an "offline-first" mindset Sponsors: Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free Rollbar, sign up at https://rollbar.com/fullstackradio and install Rollbar in your app to receive a $100 gift card for Open Collective Links: EmberMap, Sam's Ember.js training site Cruddy by Design, Adam's talk on modeling with resources Progressive Enhacement is Dead, Long Live Progressive Enhancement, a talk from Tom Dale that talks about building offline-first web applications Ember Data JSON:API Ember-Orbit
Golf Shop interview with Linville Golf Club's 2018 PGA Carolinas Professional of the Year, Tom Dale. Originally aired: 12/08/2018.
Panel: Dave Kimura Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Josh Justice In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Josh Justice who is a developer, writer, and speaker. Josh streams JavaScript and web development on Friday’s at 2:00 PM (ET) here! The panelists and the guest talk about Josh’s background and frontend testing in Ruby. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:04 – Chuck: Hi! Dave, Nate, and myself are on the panel and our special guest is Josh Justice! I am developing a show about developer freedom and it’s called The DevRev. It will be streamed through YouTube, and I will record Friday afternoons. Check out Facebook, too! 2:11 – Josh: Thanks! I am happy to be here! 2:18 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please! 2:24 – Josh: I have been a developer for about 14 years. I have used PHP and then got into Ruby and then frontend development. 2:46 – Chuck: You work for Big Nerd Ranch in Atlanta? 2:56 – Josh: Yep for the last 3-4 years! 3:15 – Chuck: Can you introduce the topic? 3:25 – The guest talks about Big Nerd Ranch and frontend development. Learn TDD is mentioned, too! Check it out here! 5:06 – Panel: How much bouncing do you do between React and Vue? 5:11 – Guest. 5:47 – Chuck: We need to get you on our podcast shows for React and Vue! It’s an approach that I am familiar with in Ruby – and Selenium what a pain! 6:16 – Guest: I’ve had a good experience with Cypress, actually! 7:47 – Guest: Panelist, can you share your experiences? 7:57 – Panel: Not bad experiences with testing, but now I am trying to minimize my use with JavaScript. 8:30 – Guest: I think there is a big push towards considering more server site rendering. 9:35 – Panel: What’s your recommendation to setup Cypress? 9:40 – Guest: Their docs are really great! They had some conference talks on how to set it up! 10:15 – Guest: Check out my talks about this topic. (Connect Tech 2018). 10:29 – Panel: I think Cypress is a pretty cool solution but one thing that left me confused is that you have to have an environment that is already stood-up and running. Is that accurate or has that changed? 11:00 – Guest: Can you clarify what you mean by a “running environment”? 11:04 – Panelist clarifies. 11:44 – Guest: Luckily for me I have something to say b/c I tried a week ago! 12:01 – Guest mentions Vue CLI 3. 14:38 – Panel: How can you test your code coverage? I want to know how much of my code coverage am I hitting? The applications are up and running, it’s not going through the files (per se), and is there anything that would indicate how good your coverage is with the Cypress test? 15:10 – Guest: Let me as a follow-up question: How do you approach it on the frontend? 15:24 – Panelist answers the guest’s question. 16:06 – The guest mentions Vue CLI 2 & 3. 18:31 – Chuck: Are you using the tool Istanbul? 18:36 – Guest: Yep Istanbul is the one! 18:54 – Chuck: I’ve heard some similar rumors, but can’t say. 19:02 – Panelist talks. 20:13 – Chuck: I have been working on a project and what doesn’t get test-coverage gets a candidate to get pulled-out. 20:40 – Guest: Talking about test-driven development... Guest: Have you read the original book? 21:02 – Guest: The book: “Effective Testing with RSpec 3” is updated information – check it out! The guest mentions his live stream on Friday’s. Check out the links found below! 23:57 – Panel: How is the stability with tests like Cypress with end-to-end tests? If you are testing with a login then the user has to be already created. Or what about a Twitter app – the user has to be created and not followed? How do you handle that? 24:22 – Guest: I think we are spoiled in the Rails world b/c of those... 24:53 – The guest answers the panelist’s question! 26:59 – Fresh Books! 28:07 – Guest: Does that help? 28:10 – Panel. 28:21 – Guest: I have been thinking about this, though, recently. Thinking about the contracts through the business. I have dabbled with native development and I see the cost that runs a native app. 30:21 – Panel: It’s refreshing to hear the new market’s demands. I truly haven’t seen an application that requires that. I have built some extensive applications and also very simple ones, too; the need for productivity. 31:17 – Guest mentions a talk at a conference. See here for that information! 31:43 – Guest: I have a friend who was a new developer and he really knows his stuff. He said that he didn’t know if he could be a full stack developer in the next 5-10 years. Wait a minute?! Guest: The freedom to create something that stands alone. Guest: Tom Dale is mentioned by the Guest. 33:35 – Panel: To choose Rails as a new developer (today) it’s not as easy as it was back in the day. Today you have Active Job, Action Cable and so many other components. It’s more complicated today then it was in the past. It could be overwhelming to a new developer. 35:00 – Chuck: I think a lot of that is the community’s fault and not Rails’ fault. 35:57 – Panel. 36:04 – Panel: The counter-argument could say that’s where server-less come in. 36:27 – Chuck: To some degree you can get away with it. You don’t have to worry about the infrastructure or anything else. 36:44 – Panel: Have you tried messing around with server-less functions with AWS? I have and...it’s not easy. There is not a good flow or good work flow in a server-less environment. 38:01 – Chuck: You can go to this website. It makes the setup easier b/c you are adding your Azure or AWS features. 38:30 – Panel: This topic, though, does tie back to the testing topic we were talking about earlier! 39:14 – Panel: Yeah that is why I haven’t gotten into server-less things. The Rails holistic approach is so appealing. 40:14 – Panel continues: I want to take smaller steps when it comes to technology! I want to move into things that we are laying down the tracks to make it easier travelable. That way we can consider the things we’ve learned in the past and help those in the future. 41:07 – Chuck: What are lacking then? What is the friction that is left? Seems like Cypress helped removed that but maybe not? 42:02 – Panelist mentions Cypress, Jest, Mocha, and others! 43:10 – Panel (continues): I am all about experimenting but I want to know all the reasons. What has changed and what hasn’t’ changed? 43:29 – Panel: There is an article written that talks about this topic. 43:59 – Guest mentions the video “Is TDD Dead?” (See links below.) 44:29 – Guest: I like brining thoughts together and taking his or her input and come up with my own thoughts. 46:32 – Guest (continues): The testing trophy is heavier on the top (picture of a trophy). Guest: I think the thing that draws me to unit testing is that... 47:37 – Guest: I am obsessed with testing. The guest gives a summary here! 48:15 – Chuck: We talked with Quincy Larson last week and it’s a really good take on what we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish with our tests. Check it out – it’s coming out soon! 49:05 – Panel: When you are younger into your career – the way you think about structuring your code – when you are comfortable you really don’t need that guidance. 50:00 – Guest: I would encourage folks who were new to coding to do the following... 51:36 – Guest: Think about WHY you are doing (what you are doing) and being able to articulate well what you are doing and why. 52:03 – Panel: There is no question – every time I test I am surprised how much it shapes my thinking about the code and how many bugs that I catch even in code that I thought was operating well. When you go too far though there is a fallacy there. 52:54 – Panel: Yes, testing is very important. I am a test-after-the-fact programmer. That is my self-key term. Don’t write 500-line methods b/c you won’t be able to test that. Don’t make it too abstract so have a common pattern that you will use. Have a lot of private methods that aren’t exposed to the API. 54:03 – Guest: Yes thinking about how to structure your code can be challenging at first but it gets easier. 55:58 – Chuck: I have had talks with Corey Haines about topics like this! 56:47 – Guest: Yes it can be helpful in consultancy now. 59:23 – Guest: Think about this: choosing what level to test at. 1:00:14 – Panel: It’s hard b/c it changes all the time per function or something else. There are tradeoffs with everything we do. 1:00:41 – Chuck: You are the consultant it depends doesn’t it? 1:00:51 – Picks! 1:00:55 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React VUE CLI 3 Jest.io Mocha.js GitHub: Istanbul The RSpec Book RR 068 Episode Ember CLI GitHub: Factory_Bot GitHub: VCR Big Nerd Ranch Big Nerd Ranch: Josh Justice / Team Manager The Bike Shed Keynote: Tom Dale @ EmberFest 2018 JSJ 291 Episode Serverless Article: Test-Induced Design Damage Video: Is TDD Dead? Music: Sub Conscious – Electronic / 2004 Music: Interloper / 2015 Disney Heroes: Battle Mode Google Play: Disney Heroes / Battle Mode Book Authoring Playlist Tom Dale’s Twitter Corey Haines’ Twitter Coding It Wrong Josh’s Twitter Josh’s GitHub Josh’s LinkedIn Josh’s Vimeo Video Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Phutureprimitive - Sub Conscious Carbon Based Lifeforms - Interloper Dave Dust collections system in Wood Shop Doctor Who - Theme Music Charles Authoring music Disney Hero Battles Josh Effecting Testing with RSpec 3 Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Test XUnit Test Patterns Spectacle App Alfred App
Panel: Dave Kimura Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Josh Justice In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Josh Justice who is a developer, writer, and speaker. Josh streams JavaScript and web development on Friday’s at 2:00 PM (ET) here! The panelists and the guest talk about Josh’s background and frontend testing in Ruby. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:04 – Chuck: Hi! Dave, Nate, and myself are on the panel and our special guest is Josh Justice! I am developing a show about developer freedom and it’s called The DevRev. It will be streamed through YouTube, and I will record Friday afternoons. Check out Facebook, too! 2:11 – Josh: Thanks! I am happy to be here! 2:18 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please! 2:24 – Josh: I have been a developer for about 14 years. I have used PHP and then got into Ruby and then frontend development. 2:46 – Chuck: You work for Big Nerd Ranch in Atlanta? 2:56 – Josh: Yep for the last 3-4 years! 3:15 – Chuck: Can you introduce the topic? 3:25 – The guest talks about Big Nerd Ranch and frontend development. Learn TDD is mentioned, too! Check it out here! 5:06 – Panel: How much bouncing do you do between React and Vue? 5:11 – Guest. 5:47 – Chuck: We need to get you on our podcast shows for React and Vue! It’s an approach that I am familiar with in Ruby – and Selenium what a pain! 6:16 – Guest: I’ve had a good experience with Cypress, actually! 7:47 – Guest: Panelist, can you share your experiences? 7:57 – Panel: Not bad experiences with testing, but now I am trying to minimize my use with JavaScript. 8:30 – Guest: I think there is a big push towards considering more server site rendering. 9:35 – Panel: What’s your recommendation to setup Cypress? 9:40 – Guest: Their docs are really great! They had some conference talks on how to set it up! 10:15 – Guest: Check out my talks about this topic. (Connect Tech 2018). 10:29 – Panel: I think Cypress is a pretty cool solution but one thing that left me confused is that you have to have an environment that is already stood-up and running. Is that accurate or has that changed? 11:00 – Guest: Can you clarify what you mean by a “running environment”? 11:04 – Panelist clarifies. 11:44 – Guest: Luckily for me I have something to say b/c I tried a week ago! 12:01 – Guest mentions Vue CLI 3. 14:38 – Panel: How can you test your code coverage? I want to know how much of my code coverage am I hitting? The applications are up and running, it’s not going through the files (per se), and is there anything that would indicate how good your coverage is with the Cypress test? 15:10 – Guest: Let me as a follow-up question: How do you approach it on the frontend? 15:24 – Panelist answers the guest’s question. 16:06 – The guest mentions Vue CLI 2 & 3. 18:31 – Chuck: Are you using the tool Istanbul? 18:36 – Guest: Yep Istanbul is the one! 18:54 – Chuck: I’ve heard some similar rumors, but can’t say. 19:02 – Panelist talks. 20:13 – Chuck: I have been working on a project and what doesn’t get test-coverage gets a candidate to get pulled-out. 20:40 – Guest: Talking about test-driven development... Guest: Have you read the original book? 21:02 – Guest: The book: “Effective Testing with RSpec 3” is updated information – check it out! The guest mentions his live stream on Friday’s. Check out the links found below! 23:57 – Panel: How is the stability with tests like Cypress with end-to-end tests? If you are testing with a login then the user has to be already created. Or what about a Twitter app – the user has to be created and not followed? How do you handle that? 24:22 – Guest: I think we are spoiled in the Rails world b/c of those... 24:53 – The guest answers the panelist’s question! 26:59 – Fresh Books! 28:07 – Guest: Does that help? 28:10 – Panel. 28:21 – Guest: I have been thinking about this, though, recently. Thinking about the contracts through the business. I have dabbled with native development and I see the cost that runs a native app. 30:21 – Panel: It’s refreshing to hear the new market’s demands. I truly haven’t seen an application that requires that. I have built some extensive applications and also very simple ones, too; the need for productivity. 31:17 – Guest mentions a talk at a conference. See here for that information! 31:43 – Guest: I have a friend who was a new developer and he really knows his stuff. He said that he didn’t know if he could be a full stack developer in the next 5-10 years. Wait a minute?! Guest: The freedom to create something that stands alone. Guest: Tom Dale is mentioned by the Guest. 33:35 – Panel: To choose Rails as a new developer (today) it’s not as easy as it was back in the day. Today you have Active Job, Action Cable and so many other components. It’s more complicated today then it was in the past. It could be overwhelming to a new developer. 35:00 – Chuck: I think a lot of that is the community’s fault and not Rails’ fault. 35:57 – Panel. 36:04 – Panel: The counter-argument could say that’s where server-less come in. 36:27 – Chuck: To some degree you can get away with it. You don’t have to worry about the infrastructure or anything else. 36:44 – Panel: Have you tried messing around with server-less functions with AWS? I have and...it’s not easy. There is not a good flow or good work flow in a server-less environment. 38:01 – Chuck: You can go to this website. It makes the setup easier b/c you are adding your Azure or AWS features. 38:30 – Panel: This topic, though, does tie back to the testing topic we were talking about earlier! 39:14 – Panel: Yeah that is why I haven’t gotten into server-less things. The Rails holistic approach is so appealing. 40:14 – Panel continues: I want to take smaller steps when it comes to technology! I want to move into things that we are laying down the tracks to make it easier travelable. That way we can consider the things we’ve learned in the past and help those in the future. 41:07 – Chuck: What are lacking then? What is the friction that is left? Seems like Cypress helped removed that but maybe not? 42:02 – Panelist mentions Cypress, Jest, Mocha, and others! 43:10 – Panel (continues): I am all about experimenting but I want to know all the reasons. What has changed and what hasn’t’ changed? 43:29 – Panel: There is an article written that talks about this topic. 43:59 – Guest mentions the video “Is TDD Dead?” (See links below.) 44:29 – Guest: I like brining thoughts together and taking his or her input and come up with my own thoughts. 46:32 – Guest (continues): The testing trophy is heavier on the top (picture of a trophy). Guest: I think the thing that draws me to unit testing is that... 47:37 – Guest: I am obsessed with testing. The guest gives a summary here! 48:15 – Chuck: We talked with Quincy Larson last week and it’s a really good take on what we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish with our tests. Check it out – it’s coming out soon! 49:05 – Panel: When you are younger into your career – the way you think about structuring your code – when you are comfortable you really don’t need that guidance. 50:00 – Guest: I would encourage folks who were new to coding to do the following... 51:36 – Guest: Think about WHY you are doing (what you are doing) and being able to articulate well what you are doing and why. 52:03 – Panel: There is no question – every time I test I am surprised how much it shapes my thinking about the code and how many bugs that I catch even in code that I thought was operating well. When you go too far though there is a fallacy there. 52:54 – Panel: Yes, testing is very important. I am a test-after-the-fact programmer. That is my self-key term. Don’t write 500-line methods b/c you won’t be able to test that. Don’t make it too abstract so have a common pattern that you will use. Have a lot of private methods that aren’t exposed to the API. 54:03 – Guest: Yes thinking about how to structure your code can be challenging at first but it gets easier. 55:58 – Chuck: I have had talks with Corey Haines about topics like this! 56:47 – Guest: Yes it can be helpful in consultancy now. 59:23 – Guest: Think about this: choosing what level to test at. 1:00:14 – Panel: It’s hard b/c it changes all the time per function or something else. There are tradeoffs with everything we do. 1:00:41 – Chuck: You are the consultant it depends doesn’t it? 1:00:51 – Picks! 1:00:55 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React VUE CLI 3 Jest.io Mocha.js GitHub: Istanbul The RSpec Book RR 068 Episode Ember CLI GitHub: Factory_Bot GitHub: VCR Big Nerd Ranch Big Nerd Ranch: Josh Justice / Team Manager The Bike Shed Keynote: Tom Dale @ EmberFest 2018 JSJ 291 Episode Serverless Article: Test-Induced Design Damage Video: Is TDD Dead? Music: Sub Conscious – Electronic / 2004 Music: Interloper / 2015 Disney Heroes: Battle Mode Google Play: Disney Heroes / Battle Mode Book Authoring Playlist Tom Dale’s Twitter Corey Haines’ Twitter Coding It Wrong Josh’s Twitter Josh’s GitHub Josh’s LinkedIn Josh’s Vimeo Video Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Phutureprimitive - Sub Conscious Carbon Based Lifeforms - Interloper Dave Dust collections system in Wood Shop Doctor Who - Theme Music Charles Authoring music Disney Hero Battles Josh Effecting Testing with RSpec 3 Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Test XUnit Test Patterns Spectacle App Alfred App
Panel: Dave Kimura Charles Max Wood Nate Hopkins Special Guest: Josh Justice In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Josh Justice who is a developer, writer, and speaker. Josh streams JavaScript and web development on Friday’s at 2:00 PM (ET) here! The panelists and the guest talk about Josh’s background and frontend testing in Ruby. Check it out! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:04 – Chuck: Hi! Dave, Nate, and myself are on the panel and our special guest is Josh Justice! I am developing a show about developer freedom and it’s called The DevRev. It will be streamed through YouTube, and I will record Friday afternoons. Check out Facebook, too! 2:11 – Josh: Thanks! I am happy to be here! 2:18 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please! 2:24 – Josh: I have been a developer for about 14 years. I have used PHP and then got into Ruby and then frontend development. 2:46 – Chuck: You work for Big Nerd Ranch in Atlanta? 2:56 – Josh: Yep for the last 3-4 years! 3:15 – Chuck: Can you introduce the topic? 3:25 – The guest talks about Big Nerd Ranch and frontend development. Learn TDD is mentioned, too! Check it out here! 5:06 – Panel: How much bouncing do you do between React and Vue? 5:11 – Guest. 5:47 – Chuck: We need to get you on our podcast shows for React and Vue! It’s an approach that I am familiar with in Ruby – and Selenium what a pain! 6:16 – Guest: I’ve had a good experience with Cypress, actually! 7:47 – Guest: Panelist, can you share your experiences? 7:57 – Panel: Not bad experiences with testing, but now I am trying to minimize my use with JavaScript. 8:30 – Guest: I think there is a big push towards considering more server site rendering. 9:35 – Panel: What’s your recommendation to setup Cypress? 9:40 – Guest: Their docs are really great! They had some conference talks on how to set it up! 10:15 – Guest: Check out my talks about this topic. (Connect Tech 2018). 10:29 – Panel: I think Cypress is a pretty cool solution but one thing that left me confused is that you have to have an environment that is already stood-up and running. Is that accurate or has that changed? 11:00 – Guest: Can you clarify what you mean by a “running environment”? 11:04 – Panelist clarifies. 11:44 – Guest: Luckily for me I have something to say b/c I tried a week ago! 12:01 – Guest mentions Vue CLI 3. 14:38 – Panel: How can you test your code coverage? I want to know how much of my code coverage am I hitting? The applications are up and running, it’s not going through the files (per se), and is there anything that would indicate how good your coverage is with the Cypress test? 15:10 – Guest: Let me as a follow-up question: How do you approach it on the frontend? 15:24 – Panelist answers the guest’s question. 16:06 – The guest mentions Vue CLI 2 & 3. 18:31 – Chuck: Are you using the tool Istanbul? 18:36 – Guest: Yep Istanbul is the one! 18:54 – Chuck: I’ve heard some similar rumors, but can’t say. 19:02 – Panelist talks. 20:13 – Chuck: I have been working on a project and what doesn’t get test-coverage gets a candidate to get pulled-out. 20:40 – Guest: Talking about test-driven development... Guest: Have you read the original book? 21:02 – Guest: The book: “Effective Testing with RSpec 3” is updated information – check it out! The guest mentions his live stream on Friday’s. Check out the links found below! 23:57 – Panel: How is the stability with tests like Cypress with end-to-end tests? If you are testing with a login then the user has to be already created. Or what about a Twitter app – the user has to be created and not followed? How do you handle that? 24:22 – Guest: I think we are spoiled in the Rails world b/c of those... 24:53 – The guest answers the panelist’s question! 26:59 – Fresh Books! 28:07 – Guest: Does that help? 28:10 – Panel. 28:21 – Guest: I have been thinking about this, though, recently. Thinking about the contracts through the business. I have dabbled with native development and I see the cost that runs a native app. 30:21 – Panel: It’s refreshing to hear the new market’s demands. I truly haven’t seen an application that requires that. I have built some extensive applications and also very simple ones, too; the need for productivity. 31:17 – Guest mentions a talk at a conference. See here for that information! 31:43 – Guest: I have a friend who was a new developer and he really knows his stuff. He said that he didn’t know if he could be a full stack developer in the next 5-10 years. Wait a minute?! Guest: The freedom to create something that stands alone. Guest: Tom Dale is mentioned by the Guest. 33:35 – Panel: To choose Rails as a new developer (today) it’s not as easy as it was back in the day. Today you have Active Job, Action Cable and so many other components. It’s more complicated today then it was in the past. It could be overwhelming to a new developer. 35:00 – Chuck: I think a lot of that is the community’s fault and not Rails’ fault. 35:57 – Panel. 36:04 – Panel: The counter-argument could say that’s where server-less come in. 36:27 – Chuck: To some degree you can get away with it. You don’t have to worry about the infrastructure or anything else. 36:44 – Panel: Have you tried messing around with server-less functions with AWS? I have and...it’s not easy. There is not a good flow or good work flow in a server-less environment. 38:01 – Chuck: You can go to this website. It makes the setup easier b/c you are adding your Azure or AWS features. 38:30 – Panel: This topic, though, does tie back to the testing topic we were talking about earlier! 39:14 – Panel: Yeah that is why I haven’t gotten into server-less things. The Rails holistic approach is so appealing. 40:14 – Panel continues: I want to take smaller steps when it comes to technology! I want to move into things that we are laying down the tracks to make it easier travelable. That way we can consider the things we’ve learned in the past and help those in the future. 41:07 – Chuck: What are lacking then? What is the friction that is left? Seems like Cypress helped removed that but maybe not? 42:02 – Panelist mentions Cypress, Jest, Mocha, and others! 43:10 – Panel (continues): I am all about experimenting but I want to know all the reasons. What has changed and what hasn’t’ changed? 43:29 – Panel: There is an article written that talks about this topic. 43:59 – Guest mentions the video “Is TDD Dead?” (See links below.) 44:29 – Guest: I like brining thoughts together and taking his or her input and come up with my own thoughts. 46:32 – Guest (continues): The testing trophy is heavier on the top (picture of a trophy). Guest: I think the thing that draws me to unit testing is that... 47:37 – Guest: I am obsessed with testing. The guest gives a summary here! 48:15 – Chuck: We talked with Quincy Larson last week and it’s a really good take on what we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish with our tests. Check it out – it’s coming out soon! 49:05 – Panel: When you are younger into your career – the way you think about structuring your code – when you are comfortable you really don’t need that guidance. 50:00 – Guest: I would encourage folks who were new to coding to do the following... 51:36 – Guest: Think about WHY you are doing (what you are doing) and being able to articulate well what you are doing and why. 52:03 – Panel: There is no question – every time I test I am surprised how much it shapes my thinking about the code and how many bugs that I catch even in code that I thought was operating well. When you go too far though there is a fallacy there. 52:54 – Panel: Yes, testing is very important. I am a test-after-the-fact programmer. That is my self-key term. Don’t write 500-line methods b/c you won’t be able to test that. Don’t make it too abstract so have a common pattern that you will use. Have a lot of private methods that aren’t exposed to the API. 54:03 – Guest: Yes thinking about how to structure your code can be challenging at first but it gets easier. 55:58 – Chuck: I have had talks with Corey Haines about topics like this! 56:47 – Guest: Yes it can be helpful in consultancy now. 59:23 – Guest: Think about this: choosing what level to test at. 1:00:14 – Panel: It’s hard b/c it changes all the time per function or something else. There are tradeoffs with everything we do. 1:00:41 – Chuck: You are the consultant it depends doesn’t it? 1:00:51 – Picks! 1:00:55 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Ruby on Rails Angular Cypress Vue React VUE CLI 3 Jest.io Mocha.js GitHub: Istanbul The RSpec Book RR 068 Episode Ember CLI GitHub: Factory_Bot GitHub: VCR Big Nerd Ranch Big Nerd Ranch: Josh Justice / Team Manager The Bike Shed Keynote: Tom Dale @ EmberFest 2018 JSJ 291 Episode Serverless Article: Test-Induced Design Damage Video: Is TDD Dead? Music: Sub Conscious – Electronic / 2004 Music: Interloper / 2015 Disney Heroes: Battle Mode Google Play: Disney Heroes / Battle Mode Book Authoring Playlist Tom Dale’s Twitter Corey Haines’ Twitter Coding It Wrong Josh’s Twitter Josh’s GitHub Josh’s LinkedIn Josh’s Vimeo Video Sponsors: Sentry CacheFly Fresh Books Picks: Nate Phutureprimitive - Sub Conscious Carbon Based Lifeforms - Interloper Dave Dust collections system in Wood Shop Doctor Who - Theme Music Charles Authoring music Disney Hero Battles Josh Effecting Testing with RSpec 3 Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Test XUnit Test Patterns Spectacle App Alfred App
Guest: Philip Poots: GitHub | ClubCollect Previous Episode: 056: Ember vs. Elm: The Showdown with Philip Poots In this episode, Philip Poots joins the show again to talk about the beauty of simplicity, the simplicity and similarities between Elm and Ruby programming languages, whether Elixir is a distant cousin of the two, the complexity of Ember and JavaScript ecosystems (Ember helps, but is fighting a losing battle), static vs. dynamic, the ease of Rails (productivity), and the promise of Ember (productivity, convention). The panel also talks about the definition of "quality", making code long-term maintainable, and determining what is good vs. what is bad for your codebase. Resources: Michel Martens mote Learn the Elm Programming Language and Build Error-Free Apps with Richard Feldman Worse is Better: Richard P. Gabriel Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software Screencasts Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values The Calm Company It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: CHARLES:: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 113. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at the Frontside and with me today are Taras Mankovski and David Keathley. Hello? DAVID:: Hey, guys. TARAS: Hello, hello. CHARLES:: And we're going to be talking with a serial guest on our serial podcast, Mr Philip Poots, who is the VP of engineering at ClubCollect. Welcome, Philip. PHILIP: Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. CHARLES:: Yeah. I'm actually excited to have you on. We've had you on a couple of times before. We've been trying to get you on the podcast, I think for about a year, to talk about I think what has kind of a unique story in programming these days. The prevailing narrative is that folks start off with some language that's dynamically typed and object oriented and then at some point, they discover functional programming and then at some point, they discover static programming and they march off into a promised land of Nirvana and no bugs ever, ever happening again. It seems like it's pretty much a straight line from that point to the next point and passing through those way stations. When I talk to you, I guess... Gosh, I think you were the first person that really introduced me to Elm back at Wicked Good Ember in 2016 and it seemed like you were kind of following that arc but actually, that was a bit deceptive because then the next time I talked to you, you were saying, "No, man. I'm really into Ruby and kind of diving in and trying to get into Ruby again," and I was kind of like, "Record scratch." You're kind of jumping around the points. You're not following the preordained story arc. What is going on here? I just kind of wanted to have a conversation about that and find out what the deal was and then, what's kind have guided your journey. PHILIP: There was one event and that was ElmConf Europe, which was a fantastic conference. Really, one of the best conferences I've been to, just because I guess with the nature of early language, small conference environment. There's just a lot of things happening. There's a lot of people. Evan was there, Richard Feldman was there, the leading lights of the Elm community were there and it was fantastic. But I guess, one thing that people have always said to me is the whole way track is the best track of the conference and it's not something I really appreciated before and during the breaks, I ended up talking to a guy called Michel Martens. He is the finder of a Redis sourcing company and I guess, this was just a revelation to me. He was interested in Elm. He was friends with the guys that organized the conference and we got talking and he was like, "I do this in Ruby. I do this in Ruby. I did this in Ruby," and I was like, "What?" and he was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He's a really, really humble guy but as soon as I got home, I checked him out. His GitHub is 'soveran' and it turns out he's written... I don't know, how many gems in Ruby, all with really well-chosen names, very short, very clear, very detailed. The best thing about his libraries is you can print them out on paper. What I mean by that is they were tiny. They were so small and I guess, I just never seen that before. I go into Ruby on Rails -- that was my first exposure to programming, that was my first exposure to everything -- unlike with Rails, often when you hit problems, you'd start to dive a bit deeper and ultimately, you dive so deep that you sunk essentially and you just accepted, "Okay, I'm not going to bend the framework that way this time. Let's figure out how everyone else goes with the framework and do that." Then with Ember when I moved into frontend, that was a similar thing. There were so many layers of complexity that I never felt like had a real handle on it. I kind of just thought this was the way things were. I thought it's always going to be complex. That's just the nature of the problem. That's just the problem they're trying to solve. It's a complex problem and therefore, that complexity is necessary. But it was Elm that taught me, I think that choosing the right primitives and thinking very carefully about the problem can actually give you something that's quite simple but incredibly powerful. Not only something quite simple but something so simple that it can fit inside your head, like this concept of a program fitting inside your head and Rails, I don't know how many heads I need to fit Rails in or Ember for that matter and believe me, I tried it but with Elm, there was that simplicity. When I came across this Ruby, a language I was very familiar with but this Ruby that I had never seen before, a clear example was a templating library and he calls it 'mote' and it's including comments. It's under a hundred lines of code and it does everything you would need to. Sure, there were one or two edge cases that it doesn't cover but it's like, "Let's use the trade off." It almost feels like [inaudible] because he was always a big believer in "You ain't going to need it. Let's go for that 80% win with 20% effort," and this was like that taken to the extreme. CHARLES:: I'm just curious, just to kind of put a fine point on it, it sounds like there might be more in common, like a deeper camaraderie between this style of Ruby and the style encouraged by Elm, even though that on the surface, one is a dynamically typed object oriented language and the other is a statically typed functional language and yet, there's a deeper philosophical alignment that seems like it's invisible to 99% of the discussion that happens around these languages. PHILIP: Yeah, I think so. I think the categories we and this is something Richard Feldman talks. He's a member of the Elm community. He does a lot of talks and has a course also in Frontend Masters, which I highly recommend. But he often talks about the frame of the conversation is wrong because you have good statically typed languages and you have bad statically typed languages. You have good dynamic languages and you have bad dynamic languages. For all interpretations of good and bad, right? I don't want to start any wars here. I think one of the things that Elm and Ruby have in common is the creator. Matz designed Ruby because he wanted programming to be a joy, you know? And Evan created Elm because he wanted programming to be a delight. I think if you experience both of those, like developing in both of those languages, you gain a certain appreciation for what that means. It is almost undefinable, indistinguishable, although you can see the effects of it everywhere. In Ruby, everything is an object, including nil. In Elm, it's almost he's taken everything away. Evan's taken everything away that could potentially cause you to stumble. There's a lot to learn with Elm in terms of getting your head around functional mindset and also, working with types but as far as that goes, people often call it like the Haskell Light, which I think those are a disservice to Elm because it's got different goals. CHARLES:: Yeah, you can tell that. You know, my explorations with Elm, the personality of Elm is 100% different than the personality of Haskell, if that is even a programming term that you can apply. For example, the compiler has an identity. It always talks to you in the first person, "I saw that you did this, perhaps you meant this. You should look here or I couldn't understand what you were trying to tell me." Literally that's how the Elm compiler talks to you. It actually talks to you like a person and so, it's very... Sorry, go ahead. PHILIP: No, no, I think the corollary to that is the principle of the surprise in Ruby. You know, is there going to be a method that does this? You type it out and you're like, "Oh, yes it is," which is why things like inject and reduce are both methods in enumerable. You didn't choose one over the other. It was just like, "Let's make it easy for the person who's programming to use what they know best." I think as well, maybe people don't think about this as deeply but the level of thought that Evan has put into designing Elm is crazy, like he's thought this through. I'm not sure if I said this the last time but I went to a workshop in the early days in London, which is my kind of first real exposure to Elm and Evan was giving the workshop. Someone asked him, "Why didn't you do this?" and he was like, "Well, that might be okay for now but I'm not sure that would make so much sense in 10 years," and I was kind of like, "What?" Because JavaScript and that ecosystem is something which is changing like practically hourly and this is a guy that's thinking 10 years into the future. TARAS: You might have answered it already but I'm curious of what you think is the difference, maybe it just comes down to that long term thinking but we see this in JavaScript world a lot, which is this kind of almost indifference to APIs. It almost doesn't really matter what the API is for whatever reason, there seems to be a big correlation between the API that's exposed with the popularity of the tool. I think there are some patterns, like something that's really simple, like jQuery and React have become popular because of the simplicity of their APIs. What the flip side to that? What other ways can APIs be created that we see in JavaScript world. Because we're talking about this beautiful APIs and I can relate to some of the work that Charles has been doing and I've been doing microstates but I wonder like what would be just a brief alternative to that API, so it's kind of a beautiful API. PHILIP: I don't know if anyone is familiar with the series of essays 'Worse is Better' like East Coast versus West Coast, from Richard Gabriel. The problem is, I guess and maybe this is just my understanding over my paraphrase of it, I'm not too familiar with it but I think that good APIs take time and people don't have time. If someone launches a V1 at first and it kind of does the job, people will use that over nothing and then whenever they're happy with that, they'll continue to use it and develop it and ultimately, if she's market share and then that's just the thing everyone uses and the other guy's kind of left behind like, "This is so much better." I guess this is a question, I think it was after Wicked Good Ember, I happened to be on the same trend as Tom Dale on the way back to New York and we started talking about this. I think that's his big question. I think it's also a question that still has to be answered, which is, "Will Elm ever be mainstream? Will it be the most popular thing?" aside from the question of whether it has to be or not. For me, a good APIs good design comes from understanding the problem fully -- CHARLES:: And you can understand the problem fully without time. PHILIP: Exactly and often, what happens -- at least this is what happens in my experience with the production software that I've written -- is that you don't actually understand the problem until you've developed a solution for it. Then when you've developed a solution for it, often the pressures or the commercial pressures or an open source is [inaudible] the pressures of backwards compatibility, mean that you can never refactor your way to what you think the best solution is and often, you start from scratch and the reality is people are too far away with the stuff you wrote in the past about the thing you're writing now. Those are always kind of at odds. I think there are a lot of people that are annoyed with Elm because the updates are too slow, it relies on Evan and we want to have a pool request accepted. All of the things that they don't necessarily recognize like the absence of which make Elm an Elm, if you know what I mean. The very fact that Evan does set such a high standard and does want everything to go through his personal filters because otherwise, you wouldn't gain the benefits that Elm gives you. The attention is very real in terms of I want to shift my software now and it becomes easier then. I think to go to a language like JavaScript, which has all of the escape hatches that you need, to be able to chop and change, to edit, to do what you need to do to get the job done and let's be quite honest, I think, also with Elm, that's the challenge for someone who's not an expert level like me. Once you hit a roadblock, you'll say, "Where do I go from here?" I know if I was using JavaScript, I could just like hack it and then clients are happy and everything's fine and you know there's a bit of stuff in your code that you would rather wasn't but at the end of the day, you go home and the job's done. DAVID:: Have you had to teach Elm to other people? You and I did some work like I've seen you pair with someone and guide them through the work that they needs to get done. If you had a chance to do something like that with Elm and see how that actually happens, like how do developer's mind develops as they're working through in using the tool? PHILIP: Unfortunately not. I would actually love to go through that experience. I hope none of my developers are listening to this podcast but secretly, I want to push them in the direction of Elm on the frontend. But no, but I can at least make from my own perspective. I find it very challenging at first because for me, being a Ruby developer and also, I would never say that I understood JavaScript as much as I would have liked. Coming from dynamic language, no functional experience to functional language with types, it's almost like learning a couple of different things at the same time and that was challenging. I think if I were to take someone through it, I would maybe start with a functional aspects and then move on to the type aspects or vice versa, like try and clearly breakdown and it's difficult because those two are so intertwined at some level. Gary Bernhardt of Destroy All Software Screencast, I watch quite a bit of his stuff and I had sent him an email to ask him some questions about one of the episodes that he did and he told me that he done the programming languages course, I think it's on Coursera from Daniel Grossman, so [inaudible] ML which is kind of the father of all MLs like Haskell and also Elm. I find that really helpful because he broke it down on a very basic level and his goal wasn't to teach you ML. It was to teach you functional programming. It would be a very interesting exercise, I think. I think the benefit that Elm gave you is you get to experience that delight very quickly with, "Oh, it's broken. Here's a nice message. I fix the message. It compiles. Wow, it works," and then there's a very big jump whenever you start talking about the effects. Whenever you want to actually do something like HTTP calls or dealing with the time or I guess, the impure stuff you would call in the Haskell-land and that was also kind of a bit weird. CHARLES:: Also, there's been some churn around that, right? PHILIP: That's right. When I started learning, they had signals, then they kind of pushed that all behind the scenes and made it a lot more straightforward. Then I just mastered it and I was like, "Yes, I know it," and then I was like, "All right. I don't need to know it anymore." This is the interesting thing for me because at work, most of our work now is in Elixir and Phoenix. I'm kind of picking a little bit up as I work with them. I think Elm's architecture behind the scenes is kind of based, I believe on Erlang's process model, so the idea of a mailbox and sending messages and dealing with immutable state. CHARLES:: Which is kind of ironically is very object oriented in a way, right? It's functional but also the concept of mailboxes and sending messages and essentially, if you substitute object for process, you have these thousands and thousands of processes that are sending messages back and forth to each other. PHILIP: Yeah, that's right. It's like on a grand scale, on a distributed scale. Although I wouldn't say that I'm that far with Erlang, Elixir to appreciate the reality of that yet but that's what they say absolutely. CHARLES:: Now, Phoenix and Elixir is a dynamically typed functional language. does it share the simplicity? One of the criticisms you had of Rails was that you couldn't fit it in your head. It was very difficult. Is there anything different about Elixir that kind of makes it a spirit cousin of Elm and the simple Ruby? PHILIP: I think so, yes. Absolutely. I don't think it gets to the same level but I think it's in the right direction and specifically on the framework front, it was designed specifically... I mean, in a sense it's like the anti-type to Rails because it was born out of people's frustrations with Rails. José Valim was pretty much one of Rails top core committers. Basically, every Rails application I wrote at one period, at 80% of the code written by José Valim, if you included all the gems, the device and the resourceful and all the rest of it. Elixir in many ways was born out of the kind of limitations of Ruby with Rails and Phoenix was also born out of frustrations with the complexity of Rails. While it's not as simple as say, Michel Martens' Syro which is like his web framework, which is a successor to Cuba if people have heard of that, it is a step in the right direction. I don't understand it but I certainly feel like I could. They have plug which is kind of analogous but not identical to Rack but then the whole thing is built out of plugs. I remember Yehuda Katz give a presentation like 'The Next Five Years' and essentially about Rails 3.0. This is going way back and Phoenix is in some ways the manifestation of his desire to have like the Russian doll pattern, where you could nest applications inside applications and you could have them side by side and put them inside each other and things like that. Phoenix has this concept called umbrella applications which tells that, like Ecto is a really, really nice obstruction for working with the database. CHARLES:: I see. It feels like, as opposed to being functional or static versus dynamic, the question is how do you generate your complexity? How do you cope with complexity? Because I think you touched on it at the beginning of the conversation where you thought that my problems are complex so the systems that I work with to solve those problems must necessarily also be complex. I think one of the things that I've certainly realized, kind of in the later stages of my career is that first part is true. The problems that we encounter are extremely complex but you're much better served if you actually achieve that complexity by composing radically simple systems and recombining them. To the commonality of your system is going to determine how easy it's going to work with and how well it can cope with complexity. What really drives a good system is the quality of its primitives. PHILIP: Absolutely. After ElmConf, I actually invited Michel to come to my place in the Netherlands. He live in Paris but I think he grew up Buenos Aires in Argentina. To my amazement, he said, "Yes, okay," and we spent a couple of days together and there he talked to me about Christopher Alexander and the patterns book, where patterns and design patterns actually grew out of. One of his biggest things was the code is the easiest part, like you've got to spend 80% of your time thinking deeply about the problem, like literally go outside, take long looks. I'm not sure if this is what Rich Hickey means with Hammock Driven Development. I've never actually got around to watching the talk. CHARLES:: I think it's exactly what he means. PHILIP: And he said like once you get at, the code just comes. I think Michel's work, you should really check it out. I'll send you a link to put in the show notes but everything is built out of really small libraries that do one thing and do it really well. For example, he has a library like a Redis client but the Redis client also has something called Nest, which is a way to generate the keys for nested hashes. Because that's a well-designed, the Redis client is literally just a layer on top. If you understand the primitive then, you can use the library on top really well. You can embed Syro applications within Syro applications. I guess, there you also need the luxury of time and I think this is where maybe my role as VP of engineering, which is kind of my first role of that kind, comes in here which is when you're working on the commercial pressure, try to turn around to a business guy and say, "Yes, we'll solve this problem but can we take three weeks to think about it?" It's never going to happen -- CHARLES:: No. PHILIP: Absolutely, it will never going to happen. Although the small things that I tried to do day to day now is get away from the computer, write on paper, write out the problem as you understand it, attack it from different angles, think about different viewpoints, etcetera. CHARLES:: I think if you are able to quantify the cost of not thinking about it for three weeks, then the business person that you're going to talk to is their ears are going to perk up, right? But that's so hard to do. You know, I try and make like when we're saying like, "What technologies are you going to choose? What are the long term ramifications in terms of dollars or euros or whatever currency you happen to be in for making this decision?" I wish we had more support in thinking about that but it is kind of like a one-off every time. Anyway, I'm getting a little bit off track. PHILIP: No, not at all. This is a subject I love to talk about because we kind of had a few a bit of turbulence because we thought, maybe we should get product people in, maybe we should get them a product team going and what I find was -- and this is maybe unique to the size of the company -- that actually made things a lot more difficult because you got too many heads in many ways. Sometimes, it's better to give the developer all of the context so that he can think about it and come up with the best solution because ultimately, he's the only one who can understand. I wouldn't say understands the dollars and cents but he understands the cost implications of doing it in efficient ways, which often happens when you're working in larger teams. TARAS: One thing I find really interesting about this conversation is the definition of good is really complicated here. I've observed Charles work on microstates and I work with him, like I wrote a lot of the code and we got through like five or six iterations and at every point, he got better but it is so difficult to define that. Then when you start to that conversations outside of that code context and you start to introduce business into the mix, the definition of good becomes extremely complicated. What do you think about that? How do we define it in a way? Are there cultures or engineering cultures or societal cultures that have a better definition for good that is relevant to doing quality work of this? CHARLES:: That's a deep question. PHILIP: Wow. Yeah, a really, really deep question. I think often for business, like purely commercially-driven, money-oriented good is the cheapest thing that gets the job done and often that's very short term, I think. As you alluded to Charles, that people don't think about the cost of not doing the right things, so to speak in our eyes and also, there's a huge philosophical discussion whether our definition of good as programmers and people who care about our craft is even analogous to or equal to a good in a commercial context. CHARLES:: Yes, because ultimately and this is if you have read Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the things that Pirsig talks about is what is the definition of quality. How do we define something that's good or something that's bad? One of the definitions that gets put forward is how well something is fit to purpose. Unless you understand the purpose, then you can't determine quality because the purpose defines a very rich texture, a very rich surface and so, quality is going to be the object that maps very evenly and cleanly over that surface. When it comes to what people want in a program, they're going to want very different thing. A developer might need stimulation for this is something that's very new, this is something that's going to keep my interest or it's going to be keeping my CPU max and I'm going to be learning a whole lot. A solution that actually solves for that purpose is going to be a high quality solution. Also, this is going to be fast. We're going to be able to get to market very quickly. It might be one of the purposes and so, a solution that is fast and the purpose fits so it's going to be good. Also, I think developers are just self-indulgent and looking for the next best thing in something that's going to keep their interest, although we're all guilty of that. But at the same time, we're going to be the ones maintaining software, both in our current projects and collectively when we move to a new job and we're going to be responsible for someone else's code, then we're going to be paying the cost of those decisions. We both want to minimize the pain for ourselves and minimize the pain for others who are going to be coming and working in our code to make things long term maintainable. That's one axis of purpose and therefore, an axis of quality. I think in order to measure good and bad, you really have to have a good definition of what is the purpose of that surface is so rich but the more you can map it and find out where the contours lie, the more you're going to be able to determine what's good and what's bad. TARAS: It makes me think of like what is a good hammer. A sledgehammer is a really good hammer but it's not the right hammer for every job. CHARLES:: Right. TARAS: I think what you're saying is understanding what is it that you're actually doing and then matching your solution to what you're actually trying to accomplish. PHILIP: Yeah, absolutely and in my experience, we have a Ruby team building a Rails application. That's our monolith and then, we have a couple of Elixir teams with services that have been spun out of that. This isn't proven. This is just kind of gut feel right now and it is that Elixir is sometimes slower to develop the same feature or ship it but in the long term it's more maintainable. I haven't actually gotten dived into to React and all of the amazing frameworks that it has in terms of getting things up and running quickly but in terms of the full scale application, I still think 10, 11 years on, Rails has no equal in terms of proving a business case in the shortest time possible. CHARLES:: Yeah. I feel very similarly too but the question is does your development team approach the problem as proving a business case or do they approach the problem as I want to solve the set of features? PHILIP: Yes. Where I'm working at the moment, I started out just as a software developer. I guess, we would qualify for 37 signals or sorry... base camps definition of a calm company -- CHARLES:: Of a what company? PHILIP: A calm company. Sorry. They just released a new book and called 'The Calm Company' and 'It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.' I was given in my first couple of months, a problem. It was business oriented, it had to be solved but it had to be solved well from a technical perspective because we didn't want to have to return to it every time. It was standardizing the way that we exported data from the database to Excel. You know, I was amazed because it was literally, the first time that I'd been given the space to actually dive in on a technical level to do that kind of stuff. But I think even per feature, that varies and that sometimes challenging when handing the work on because you've got to say, "This fit. Literally, we're just trying to prove, whether if we have this feature, the people will use it?" versus, "This is a feature that's going to be used every day and therefore, needs to be at good, technical quality." Those are the tradeoffs that I guess, keep you in a job. Because if it was easy, then you would need anyone to figure it out but it's always a challenge. What I like is that our tools are actually getting better and I think, with Elm for example, it's kind of major selling point is maintainability and yet, with Elm, there haven't been that many companies with Elm over a period of years that exists, that can live to tell the tale. Whereas, we certainly know with Rails applications have done well like Basecamp and GitHub. For sure, they can be super maintainable but the fact that it took GitHub to just moved Elm to Rails 5.0, I belief, the fact that it took them years and years and they were running off at fork of Rails 2.3, I think it shows the scale of the problem in that way. You know, Phoenix also went through a few issues, kind of moving architectures from the classic Rails to a more demand driven design model. I think we're getting there slowly, zig-zagging towards a place where we better understand how to write software to solve business problems. I guess, I was really interested in microstates when you shared it at Wicked Good Ember because that to me was attacking the problem from the right perspective. It's like given the fact that the ecosystem is always changing. How can we extract the business logic such that these changes don't affect the logic of our application? CHARLES:: Man, we got a lot to show you. It has changed quite a bit in the last two years. Hopefully, for the better. TARAS: It's been reduced and it's almost a quarter of its size while maintaining the same feature set and it's faster, it's lazier, it's better in every respect. It's just the ideas have actually been fairly consistent. It's just the implementation that's evolved. CHARLES:: Yeah, it's been quite a journey. It parallels kind of the story that we're talking about here in the sense that it really has been a search for primitives and a search for simplification. One of the things that we've been talking about, having these Ruby gems that do one thing and do it very, very, very well or the way that Elixir being architected has some very, very good primitives or Elm, the same kind of thing being spiritually aligned, even though on the surface, it might share more in common with Haskell. There's actually a deep alignment with a thing like Ruby and that's a very surprising result. I think one of the things that appeals to me about the type of functional programming that is ironically, I guess not present in Elm, where you have the concept of these type classes but I actually think, I love them for their simplicity. I've kind of become disenchanted with things like Lodash, even though they're nominally functional. The fact that you don't have things like monoid and functors and stuff is kind of first class participants in the ecosystems, means you have to have a bunch of throwaway functions. Those API surface area is very large, whereas if you do account for those things, these kind of ways of combining data and that's how you achieve your complexity, is not by a bunch of one-off methods that are like in Lodash, they're all provided for you so you don't have or have to write them yourself. That is one level of convenience but having access to five primitives, I think that's the power of the kind of the deeper functional programming types. PHILIP: And Charles, do you think that that gives you the ability to think at a higher level, about the problems that you're solving? Would you make that link? CHARLES:: Absolutely. PHILIP: So, if we're not doing that, then we're actually doing ourselves a disservice? CHARLES:: I would say so. PHILIP: Because we're actually creating complexity, where it shouldn't exist? CHARLES:: Yeah, I think if you have a more powerful primitive, you can think of things like async functions and generator functions, there's a common thread between async functions, generator functions, promises arrays and they're all functors. For me, that's a very profound realization and there might be a deeper spiritual link between say, an async function and an array in the same way that there's a deep spiritual link between Ruby and Elm, that if you don't see that, then you're doing yourself a disservice and you're able to think at a higher level. Also, you have a smaller tool set where each tool is more powerful. PHILIP: You did a grit, I think it was a repository with a ReadMe, where you boiled down what people would term what I would term, the scary functional language down to a very simple JavaScript. Did you ever finish that? Did you get to the monads? CHARLES:: I did get to the monads, yeah. PHILIP: Okay. I need to check that out again. I find that really, really helpful because I think one of Evan's big things with Elm is he doesn't use those terms ever and he avoids them like the plague because I think he believes they come tinged with the negative experiences of people trying Haskell and essentially getting laughed at, right? CHARLES:: Yes. I think there's something to that. TARAS: But we're doing that in microstates as well, right? In microstates documentation, even though microstates are written completely with these functional primitives, on the outside, there's almost no mention of it. It's just that when you actually go to use it, if you have an idea, one of the thing that's really powerful with microstates is that this idea that you can return another microstate from a transition and what that will do is what you kind of like what a flat map would do, which is replace that particular node with the thing that you returned it with. For a lot of people, they might not know that that's like a flat map would do but a microstate will do exactly what they wanted to do when it didn't realize that's actually should just work like that. I think, a lot of the work that we've done recently is to package all things and it make it powerful and to access the concepts that it is very familiar, something you don't need to learn. You just use it and it just works for you. CHARLES:: Right but it is something that I feel like there's unharvested value for every programmer out there in these type classes: monads and monoids and functors and co-functors or covariant functors, contravariant functors, blah-blah-blah, that entire canon. I wish there was some way to reconcile the negative connotations and baggage that that has because we feel kind of the same way and I think that Evan's absolutely right. You do want to hide that or make it so that the technology is accessible without having to know those things. But in the same way, these concepts are so powerful, both in terms of just having to think less and having to write less code but also, as a tool to say, "I've got this process. Is there any way that could it be a functor? If I can find a way that this thing is a functor, I can just save myself so much time and take so many shortcuts with it." PHILIP: And in order to be able to communicate that, or at least communicate about that, you need to have terms to call these things, right? Because you can't always just refer to the code or the pattern. It's always good to have a name. I'm with you. I see value in both, like making it approachable, so the people who don't know the terms are not frightened away. But I also see value in using the terms that have always existed to refer to those things, so that things are clear and we can communicate about them. CHARLES:: Right. definitely, there's a tradeoff there. I don't know where exactly the line is but it would be nice to be able to have our cake and eat that one too. We didn't get really to talk about the type versus dynamic in the greater context of this whole conversation. We can explore that topic a little bit. PHILIP: Well, I can finish with, I think the future is typed Erlang. Maybe, that's Elm running on BEAM. CHARLES:: Whoa. What a take? Right there, folks. I love it. I love it but what makes you say that? Typed Erlang doesn't exist right now, right? PHILIP: Exactly. CHARLES:: And Elm definitely doesn't run on BEAM. PHILIP: I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. When I was at this workshop with Evan, he mentioned that and I'm not sure whether he mentioned it just as a throwaway comment or whether this is part of his 20-year plan but I think the very fact that Elm is designed around like Erlang, the signal stuff was designed around the way Erlang does communication and processes, it means I know at least he appreciates that model. From my point of view, with my experience with Elixir and Erlang in production usage, it's not huge scale but it's scale enough to need to start doing performance work on Rails and just to see how effortless things are with Elixir and with Erlang. I think Elm in the backend would be amazing but it would have to be a slightly different language, I think because the problems are different. We began this by saying that my story was a little different to the norm because I went back to the dynamic, at the dark side but for example in Elixir, I do miss types hugely. They kind of have a little bit of a hack with Erlang because they return a lot of tuples with OK and then the object. You know, it's almost like wrapping it up in a [inaudible]. There are little things and there's Dialyzer to kind of type check and I think there are a few projects which do add types to Erlang, etcetera. But I think something that works would need to be designed from the ground up to be typed and also run in the BEAM, rather than be like a squashed version of something else to fit somewhere else, if that makes sense. CHARLES:: It makes total sense. PHILIP: I think so. I recently read a book, just to finish which was 'FSharpForFunAndProfit' is his website, Scott Wlaschin, I think. It's written up with F# but it's about designing your program in a type functional language. Using the book, you could probably then just design your programs on paper and only commit to code at the end because you're thinking right down to the level of the types and the process and the pipelines, which to me sounds amazing because I could work outside. CHARLES:: Right. All right-y. I will go ahead and wrap it up. I would just like to say thank you so much, Philip for coming on and talking about your story, as unorthodox as it might be. PHILIP: Thank you. CHARLES:: Thank you, Taras. Thank you, David. TARAS: Thank you for having us. CHARLES:: That's it for Episode 113. We are the Frontside. This is The Frontside Podcast. We build applications that you can stake your future on. If that's something that you're interested in, please get in touch with us. If you have any ideas for a future podcast, things that you'd like to hear us discuss or any feedback on the things that you did here, please just let us know. Once again, thank you Mandy for putting together this wonderful podcast and now we will see you all next time.
Panel: Aimee Knight Charles Max Wood (DevChat TV) Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston) Joe Eames Special Guests: Justin Meyer In this episode, the panel talks with Justin Meyer who is a co-author of DoneJS, CanJS, jQueryPP, StealJS, and DocumentJS. Justin currently works for Bitovi and is their Director of R&D. He is also a fan of basketball and Michael Jackson. The panel and Justin talk about CanJS in-detail – check it out! Show Topics: 0:58 – We had you on Episode 202. 1:14 – Chuck: Can you tell everyone who you are? 1:20 – Justin tells us his background. 1:50 – Chuck. 1:58 – Justin. 2:06 – Chuck: Can you give us an introduction to what CanJS 4.0? 2:11 – Justin: It is a JavaScript framework and is similar to Vue. It adds a very model layer, and uses Real Time very well. 2:44 – Panelist. 2:49 – Justin. 2:55 – Panelist: What is the current... 3:09 – Justin: Compatibility is very important to us. A lot of the same tools are still available. It has over 80 different repositories. Justin continues to talk about the differences/similarities between the different versions. 4:55 – Panelist: Angular, React, and Vue are dominating, so I have 2 questions. 1.) Where is the core strength of JS and its user base? 2.) What is like to be the CanJS when everyone is talking about the other programs? 5:31 – Justin: We have dealt with this for the past 10 years. Emotionally it’s not great, I wished it was more popular, but our priority is keeping our user-based happy. We’ve had big companies use it. Justin answers the second question. 8:44 – Panelist: You mentioned two things. 9:22 – Aimee: I think everything has trade-offs. I would use something because it was the right tool for the job. I wouldn’t want to make something that was “cool.” I would want to make it super accessible in a network. 10:10 – Justin: That is a great marketing angle. We are trying to remove the worst parts of the program. 10:26 – Now I am intrigued. 10:32 – Justin: You have this mutable state and you aren’t sure. At least for CanJS I don’t see that occurring too often. 10:54 – Aimee. 10:58 – Justin: Deep inheritance is definitely a problem and it can create... 11:13 – Aimee. 11:19 – Justin: We have changed strategies a lot, and I think it’s helped CanJS grow; like 60% since January. We are doing a lot of user studies now. I run Meetups, etc. That being said inheritance schemes aren’t something that people will encounter. This is something that they won’t encounter months down the road. 13:00 – Aimee. 13:05 – Panelist: I would like to dig deeper into state-management. Everyone is doing Flux, talk about that with CanJS. 13:20 – Justin: Yeah. It depends on what kind of user you are talking to. When I talk to new users off the street (people who just graduated, etc.)... If you look at React’s statistics – more than 50% doesn’t use any state management. 16:15 – Panelist: I think it’s interesting that there are people that aren’t “oh my gosh...” 16:43 – Justin: The last coolest thing I’ve done is... 18:02 – Justin continues. 18:16 – Panelist: I kind of have this belief that we as a community turn to frameworks and tools too much. From your perspective when does it make sense to turn to a tool like this or better off working with native... 18:56 – It depends on how complex your app is and our ability to work through those problems. I think that’s a generic answer, but hopefully that helps. I don’t think you really can’t live without. 19:49 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. One thing that I found is that there are many things layered into state-management. Because you mentioned performance, which is something I care about, too. At what point does the extra tooling become too heavy for the user’s experience? Where do you draw the line? 21:11 – Justin: It depends. I don’t know what the parallel is – it’s like a richer developer problem. You have too many users where you can make those fine tuned adjustments. Do whatever is going to deliver the product first and then worry about performance later? I think our things are geared towards performance by default. 22:41 – Panelist: Playing devil’s advocate, though. But isn’t there some danger in kind of suggesting that you focus on performance WHEN it’s a business issue? Maybe there is there a lack of empathy among developers. I worry that advice is hurting us. 23:53 – Justin: No matter what you can build your homepage with Angular weird monstrosity, but then when you get to the point when people are using your product – you can just use native HTML, and native methods and build that one widget and as easy and fast as possible. 24:50 – Panelist: Dealing with complexity. Now we need to do things like bundlers, and such to deal with this issue. I feel like a crotchety old man yelling because it takes forever. 25:38 – Justin: I think it depends on where you are sitting. I think that comes down to the design. If your design has a lot of complex states, then... 26:37 – Panelist: Because you care about performance... 26:54 – Advertisement 27:53 – Justin: I don’t think that the run time of CanJS is going to be a critical performance path for anybody. Is there a responsibility? This is the oldest question. It’s like saying: where do you draw the line that you need to choose success/be elected to fight the battles if you really want to win. You need someone using your product or it doesn’t really matter. Start-ups use our product because they need to get something up and in. I am going to flip this back onto you guys. 30:48 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. 31:00 – Aimee: I have a question. You got into consultancy when do you recommend using CanJS or something else? 31:15 – Justin: I always suggest people using CanJS. 31:53 – Aimee: What do these people do when their contract is over? I have used an older version of Can, and... 32:20 – Justin: Are you on Gitter? Aimee: No, I am not. 32:25 – Justin: We do offer promote job posting to help them find somebody. We try our best to help people in any way we can. 33:05 – Aimee: That’s helpful. Another question. 33:28 – Justin: DoneJS is that. It uses the full kitchen sink. That’s what DoneJS is. 33:50 – Panelist: Let’s talk about CanJS in the mark-up. Do you think it’s better now or worse than 2012? Less space or more space? 34:13 – Justin: It’s probably worse. I think the methodology that we are using: focusing on our users. We get their feedback frequently. We are listening to our users, and I think we are being smarter. 35:16 – Panelist: Is the space getting more welcoming or less? 35:31 – It depends on what framework you are. It’s very hard to compete if you are the exact same thing as... The market is so dense and there are so many ideas, so it’s getting harder and harder. What helps people break-through? Is it the technology or the framework? 36:36 – Panelist: I appreciate the richness of the field, as it exists right now. There aren’t a few things SMELT and ELM 37:10 – Justin: Elm for sure. I don’t have a lot of experience with SMELT. 37:23 – Panelist continues the talk. 37:54 – Chuck. 38:00 – Justin: I think it spreads by word-of-mouth. I used to think it was “technology” or... all that really matters is “can you deliver” and the person have a good experience. Usability is the most important to me. We will see how this turns out. I will be either right or wrong. 39:18 – Panelist: Can we talk about the long-term future of Can JS? 39:28 – Justin: We are connecting to our user-base and making them happy. If I had it my way (which I don’t anymore) I think JSX is the best template language. We have been building integrations between JSX and... I am putting out proposals where most people don’t like them. Justin continues this conversation. 44:24 – Picks! 44:28 - Advertisement Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue Polyfill.io Dinero.js Vanilla JS Toolkit CanJS’ Website CanJS’ GitHub CanJS’ Twitter JSX JSX- NPM Justin Meyer’s GitHub Justin Meyer’s Twitter Past Episode with Justin Meyer Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Taking a walk for creativity https://ohshitgit.com Chris PolyFill.io Dinero.js https://vanillajstoolkit.com/ Joe Pitch Meeting Solo Charles Phoenix Framework The Queens Poisoner A View From The Top Justin The Killing of H2Push Browser Contributor Days JSJ Episode 326 with Tom Dale
Panel: Aimee Knight Charles Max Wood (DevChat TV) Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston) Joe Eames Special Guests: Justin Meyer In this episode, the panel talks with Justin Meyer who is a co-author of DoneJS, CanJS, jQueryPP, StealJS, and DocumentJS. Justin currently works for Bitovi and is their Director of R&D. He is also a fan of basketball and Michael Jackson. The panel and Justin talk about CanJS in-detail – check it out! Show Topics: 0:58 – We had you on Episode 202. 1:14 – Chuck: Can you tell everyone who you are? 1:20 – Justin tells us his background. 1:50 – Chuck. 1:58 – Justin. 2:06 – Chuck: Can you give us an introduction to what CanJS 4.0? 2:11 – Justin: It is a JavaScript framework and is similar to Vue. It adds a very model layer, and uses Real Time very well. 2:44 – Panelist. 2:49 – Justin. 2:55 – Panelist: What is the current... 3:09 – Justin: Compatibility is very important to us. A lot of the same tools are still available. It has over 80 different repositories. Justin continues to talk about the differences/similarities between the different versions. 4:55 – Panelist: Angular, React, and Vue are dominating, so I have 2 questions. 1.) Where is the core strength of JS and its user base? 2.) What is like to be the CanJS when everyone is talking about the other programs? 5:31 – Justin: We have dealt with this for the past 10 years. Emotionally it’s not great, I wished it was more popular, but our priority is keeping our user-based happy. We’ve had big companies use it. Justin answers the second question. 8:44 – Panelist: You mentioned two things. 9:22 – Aimee: I think everything has trade-offs. I would use something because it was the right tool for the job. I wouldn’t want to make something that was “cool.” I would want to make it super accessible in a network. 10:10 – Justin: That is a great marketing angle. We are trying to remove the worst parts of the program. 10:26 – Now I am intrigued. 10:32 – Justin: You have this mutable state and you aren’t sure. At least for CanJS I don’t see that occurring too often. 10:54 – Aimee. 10:58 – Justin: Deep inheritance is definitely a problem and it can create... 11:13 – Aimee. 11:19 – Justin: We have changed strategies a lot, and I think it’s helped CanJS grow; like 60% since January. We are doing a lot of user studies now. I run Meetups, etc. That being said inheritance schemes aren’t something that people will encounter. This is something that they won’t encounter months down the road. 13:00 – Aimee. 13:05 – Panelist: I would like to dig deeper into state-management. Everyone is doing Flux, talk about that with CanJS. 13:20 – Justin: Yeah. It depends on what kind of user you are talking to. When I talk to new users off the street (people who just graduated, etc.)... If you look at React’s statistics – more than 50% doesn’t use any state management. 16:15 – Panelist: I think it’s interesting that there are people that aren’t “oh my gosh...” 16:43 – Justin: The last coolest thing I’ve done is... 18:02 – Justin continues. 18:16 – Panelist: I kind of have this belief that we as a community turn to frameworks and tools too much. From your perspective when does it make sense to turn to a tool like this or better off working with native... 18:56 – It depends on how complex your app is and our ability to work through those problems. I think that’s a generic answer, but hopefully that helps. I don’t think you really can’t live without. 19:49 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. One thing that I found is that there are many things layered into state-management. Because you mentioned performance, which is something I care about, too. At what point does the extra tooling become too heavy for the user’s experience? Where do you draw the line? 21:11 – Justin: It depends. I don’t know what the parallel is – it’s like a richer developer problem. You have too many users where you can make those fine tuned adjustments. Do whatever is going to deliver the product first and then worry about performance later? I think our things are geared towards performance by default. 22:41 – Panelist: Playing devil’s advocate, though. But isn’t there some danger in kind of suggesting that you focus on performance WHEN it’s a business issue? Maybe there is there a lack of empathy among developers. I worry that advice is hurting us. 23:53 – Justin: No matter what you can build your homepage with Angular weird monstrosity, but then when you get to the point when people are using your product – you can just use native HTML, and native methods and build that one widget and as easy and fast as possible. 24:50 – Panelist: Dealing with complexity. Now we need to do things like bundlers, and such to deal with this issue. I feel like a crotchety old man yelling because it takes forever. 25:38 – Justin: I think it depends on where you are sitting. I think that comes down to the design. If your design has a lot of complex states, then... 26:37 – Panelist: Because you care about performance... 26:54 – Advertisement 27:53 – Justin: I don’t think that the run time of CanJS is going to be a critical performance path for anybody. Is there a responsibility? This is the oldest question. It’s like saying: where do you draw the line that you need to choose success/be elected to fight the battles if you really want to win. You need someone using your product or it doesn’t really matter. Start-ups use our product because they need to get something up and in. I am going to flip this back onto you guys. 30:48 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. 31:00 – Aimee: I have a question. You got into consultancy when do you recommend using CanJS or something else? 31:15 – Justin: I always suggest people using CanJS. 31:53 – Aimee: What do these people do when their contract is over? I have used an older version of Can, and... 32:20 – Justin: Are you on Gitter? Aimee: No, I am not. 32:25 – Justin: We do offer promote job posting to help them find somebody. We try our best to help people in any way we can. 33:05 – Aimee: That’s helpful. Another question. 33:28 – Justin: DoneJS is that. It uses the full kitchen sink. That’s what DoneJS is. 33:50 – Panelist: Let’s talk about CanJS in the mark-up. Do you think it’s better now or worse than 2012? Less space or more space? 34:13 – Justin: It’s probably worse. I think the methodology that we are using: focusing on our users. We get their feedback frequently. We are listening to our users, and I think we are being smarter. 35:16 – Panelist: Is the space getting more welcoming or less? 35:31 – It depends on what framework you are. It’s very hard to compete if you are the exact same thing as... The market is so dense and there are so many ideas, so it’s getting harder and harder. What helps people break-through? Is it the technology or the framework? 36:36 – Panelist: I appreciate the richness of the field, as it exists right now. There aren’t a few things SMELT and ELM 37:10 – Justin: Elm for sure. I don’t have a lot of experience with SMELT. 37:23 – Panelist continues the talk. 37:54 – Chuck. 38:00 – Justin: I think it spreads by word-of-mouth. I used to think it was “technology” or... all that really matters is “can you deliver” and the person have a good experience. Usability is the most important to me. We will see how this turns out. I will be either right or wrong. 39:18 – Panelist: Can we talk about the long-term future of Can JS? 39:28 – Justin: We are connecting to our user-base and making them happy. If I had it my way (which I don’t anymore) I think JSX is the best template language. We have been building integrations between JSX and... I am putting out proposals where most people don’t like them. Justin continues this conversation. 44:24 – Picks! 44:28 - Advertisement Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue Polyfill.io Dinero.js Vanilla JS Toolkit CanJS’ Website CanJS’ GitHub CanJS’ Twitter JSX JSX- NPM Justin Meyer’s GitHub Justin Meyer’s Twitter Past Episode with Justin Meyer Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Taking a walk for creativity https://ohshitgit.com Chris PolyFill.io Dinero.js https://vanillajstoolkit.com/ Joe Pitch Meeting Solo Charles Phoenix Framework The Queens Poisoner A View From The Top Justin The Killing of H2Push Browser Contributor Days JSJ Episode 326 with Tom Dale
Panel: Aimee Knight Charles Max Wood (DevChat TV) Christopher Ferdinandi (Boston) Joe Eames Special Guests: Justin Meyer In this episode, the panel talks with Justin Meyer who is a co-author of DoneJS, CanJS, jQueryPP, StealJS, and DocumentJS. Justin currently works for Bitovi and is their Director of R&D. He is also a fan of basketball and Michael Jackson. The panel and Justin talk about CanJS in-detail – check it out! Show Topics: 0:58 – We had you on Episode 202. 1:14 – Chuck: Can you tell everyone who you are? 1:20 – Justin tells us his background. 1:50 – Chuck. 1:58 – Justin. 2:06 – Chuck: Can you give us an introduction to what CanJS 4.0? 2:11 – Justin: It is a JavaScript framework and is similar to Vue. It adds a very model layer, and uses Real Time very well. 2:44 – Panelist. 2:49 – Justin. 2:55 – Panelist: What is the current... 3:09 – Justin: Compatibility is very important to us. A lot of the same tools are still available. It has over 80 different repositories. Justin continues to talk about the differences/similarities between the different versions. 4:55 – Panelist: Angular, React, and Vue are dominating, so I have 2 questions. 1.) Where is the core strength of JS and its user base? 2.) What is like to be the CanJS when everyone is talking about the other programs? 5:31 – Justin: We have dealt with this for the past 10 years. Emotionally it’s not great, I wished it was more popular, but our priority is keeping our user-based happy. We’ve had big companies use it. Justin answers the second question. 8:44 – Panelist: You mentioned two things. 9:22 – Aimee: I think everything has trade-offs. I would use something because it was the right tool for the job. I wouldn’t want to make something that was “cool.” I would want to make it super accessible in a network. 10:10 – Justin: That is a great marketing angle. We are trying to remove the worst parts of the program. 10:26 – Now I am intrigued. 10:32 – Justin: You have this mutable state and you aren’t sure. At least for CanJS I don’t see that occurring too often. 10:54 – Aimee. 10:58 – Justin: Deep inheritance is definitely a problem and it can create... 11:13 – Aimee. 11:19 – Justin: We have changed strategies a lot, and I think it’s helped CanJS grow; like 60% since January. We are doing a lot of user studies now. I run Meetups, etc. That being said inheritance schemes aren’t something that people will encounter. This is something that they won’t encounter months down the road. 13:00 – Aimee. 13:05 – Panelist: I would like to dig deeper into state-management. Everyone is doing Flux, talk about that with CanJS. 13:20 – Justin: Yeah. It depends on what kind of user you are talking to. When I talk to new users off the street (people who just graduated, etc.)... If you look at React’s statistics – more than 50% doesn’t use any state management. 16:15 – Panelist: I think it’s interesting that there are people that aren’t “oh my gosh...” 16:43 – Justin: The last coolest thing I’ve done is... 18:02 – Justin continues. 18:16 – Panelist: I kind of have this belief that we as a community turn to frameworks and tools too much. From your perspective when does it make sense to turn to a tool like this or better off working with native... 18:56 – It depends on how complex your app is and our ability to work through those problems. I think that’s a generic answer, but hopefully that helps. I don’t think you really can’t live without. 19:49 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. One thing that I found is that there are many things layered into state-management. Because you mentioned performance, which is something I care about, too. At what point does the extra tooling become too heavy for the user’s experience? Where do you draw the line? 21:11 – Justin: It depends. I don’t know what the parallel is – it’s like a richer developer problem. You have too many users where you can make those fine tuned adjustments. Do whatever is going to deliver the product first and then worry about performance later? I think our things are geared towards performance by default. 22:41 – Panelist: Playing devil’s advocate, though. But isn’t there some danger in kind of suggesting that you focus on performance WHEN it’s a business issue? Maybe there is there a lack of empathy among developers. I worry that advice is hurting us. 23:53 – Justin: No matter what you can build your homepage with Angular weird monstrosity, but then when you get to the point when people are using your product – you can just use native HTML, and native methods and build that one widget and as easy and fast as possible. 24:50 – Panelist: Dealing with complexity. Now we need to do things like bundlers, and such to deal with this issue. I feel like a crotchety old man yelling because it takes forever. 25:38 – Justin: I think it depends on where you are sitting. I think that comes down to the design. If your design has a lot of complex states, then... 26:37 – Panelist: Because you care about performance... 26:54 – Advertisement 27:53 – Justin: I don’t think that the run time of CanJS is going to be a critical performance path for anybody. Is there a responsibility? This is the oldest question. It’s like saying: where do you draw the line that you need to choose success/be elected to fight the battles if you really want to win. You need someone using your product or it doesn’t really matter. Start-ups use our product because they need to get something up and in. I am going to flip this back onto you guys. 30:48 – Panelist: I think that’s fair. 31:00 – Aimee: I have a question. You got into consultancy when do you recommend using CanJS or something else? 31:15 – Justin: I always suggest people using CanJS. 31:53 – Aimee: What do these people do when their contract is over? I have used an older version of Can, and... 32:20 – Justin: Are you on Gitter? Aimee: No, I am not. 32:25 – Justin: We do offer promote job posting to help them find somebody. We try our best to help people in any way we can. 33:05 – Aimee: That’s helpful. Another question. 33:28 – Justin: DoneJS is that. It uses the full kitchen sink. That’s what DoneJS is. 33:50 – Panelist: Let’s talk about CanJS in the mark-up. Do you think it’s better now or worse than 2012? Less space or more space? 34:13 – Justin: It’s probably worse. I think the methodology that we are using: focusing on our users. We get their feedback frequently. We are listening to our users, and I think we are being smarter. 35:16 – Panelist: Is the space getting more welcoming or less? 35:31 – It depends on what framework you are. It’s very hard to compete if you are the exact same thing as... The market is so dense and there are so many ideas, so it’s getting harder and harder. What helps people break-through? Is it the technology or the framework? 36:36 – Panelist: I appreciate the richness of the field, as it exists right now. There aren’t a few things SMELT and ELM 37:10 – Justin: Elm for sure. I don’t have a lot of experience with SMELT. 37:23 – Panelist continues the talk. 37:54 – Chuck. 38:00 – Justin: I think it spreads by word-of-mouth. I used to think it was “technology” or... all that really matters is “can you deliver” and the person have a good experience. Usability is the most important to me. We will see how this turns out. I will be either right or wrong. 39:18 – Panelist: Can we talk about the long-term future of Can JS? 39:28 – Justin: We are connecting to our user-base and making them happy. If I had it my way (which I don’t anymore) I think JSX is the best template language. We have been building integrations between JSX and... I am putting out proposals where most people don’t like them. Justin continues this conversation. 44:24 – Picks! 44:28 - Advertisement Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue Polyfill.io Dinero.js Vanilla JS Toolkit CanJS’ Website CanJS’ GitHub CanJS’ Twitter JSX JSX- NPM Justin Meyer’s GitHub Justin Meyer’s Twitter Past Episode with Justin Meyer Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Taking a walk for creativity https://ohshitgit.com Chris PolyFill.io Dinero.js https://vanillajstoolkit.com/ Joe Pitch Meeting Solo Charles Phoenix Framework The Queens Poisoner A View From The Top Justin The Killing of H2Push Browser Contributor Days JSJ Episode 326 with Tom Dale
Panel: Joe Eames Aimee Knight AJ ONeal Special Guests: Tom Dale In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Tom Dale about Ember 3.0 and the future of Ember. Tom is the co-creator of Ember and is a principle staff engineer at LinkedIn where he works on a team called Presentation Infrastructure. They talk about being in the customer service role, having a collaborative culture, and all the information on Ember 3.0. They also touch on the tendency towards disposable software, the Ember model, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How Joe met Tom Programmers as rule breakers The pressure to conform Tom intro Staff engineer at LinkedIn Customer service role Having a way to role improvements out to a lot of different people JavaScript and Ember at LinkedIn Having a collaborative culture All about Ember 3.0 Banner feature – there is nothing new Cracked how you develop software in the open source world that has longevity Major competition in Backbone previously The Ember community has never been more vibrant Tendency towards disposable software The idea of steady iteration towards improvement The Ember model Being different from different frameworks Ember adoption rates Python 3 Valuable from a business perspective to use Ember Ember community being friendly to newbies How much Ember VS how much JavaScript will a new developer have to learn? And much, much more! Links: Ember LinkedIn JavaScript Backbone Python @tomdale tomdale.net Tom’s GitHub Sponsors Kendo UI Sentry Digital Ocean Picks: Joe Framework Summit Jayne React sent Evan You a cake Aimee Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham AJ James Veitch Tom JavaScript Tech Talk Drake’s Ties Melissa Watson Ellis at Hall Madden
Panel: Joe Eames Aimee Knight AJ ONeal Special Guests: Tom Dale In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Tom Dale about Ember 3.0 and the future of Ember. Tom is the co-creator of Ember and is a principle staff engineer at LinkedIn where he works on a team called Presentation Infrastructure. They talk about being in the customer service role, having a collaborative culture, and all the information on Ember 3.0. They also touch on the tendency towards disposable software, the Ember model, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How Joe met Tom Programmers as rule breakers The pressure to conform Tom intro Staff engineer at LinkedIn Customer service role Having a way to role improvements out to a lot of different people JavaScript and Ember at LinkedIn Having a collaborative culture All about Ember 3.0 Banner feature – there is nothing new Cracked how you develop software in the open source world that has longevity Major competition in Backbone previously The Ember community has never been more vibrant Tendency towards disposable software The idea of steady iteration towards improvement The Ember model Being different from different frameworks Ember adoption rates Python 3 Valuable from a business perspective to use Ember Ember community being friendly to newbies How much Ember VS how much JavaScript will a new developer have to learn? And much, much more! Links: Ember LinkedIn JavaScript Backbone Python @tomdale tomdale.net Tom’s GitHub Sponsors Kendo UI Sentry Digital Ocean Picks: Joe Framework Summit Jayne React sent Evan You a cake Aimee Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham AJ James Veitch Tom JavaScript Tech Talk Drake’s Ties Melissa Watson Ellis at Hall Madden
Panel: Joe Eames Aimee Knight AJ ONeal Special Guests: Tom Dale In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panel talks to Tom Dale about Ember 3.0 and the future of Ember. Tom is the co-creator of Ember and is a principle staff engineer at LinkedIn where he works on a team called Presentation Infrastructure. They talk about being in the customer service role, having a collaborative culture, and all the information on Ember 3.0. They also touch on the tendency towards disposable software, the Ember model, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How Joe met Tom Programmers as rule breakers The pressure to conform Tom intro Staff engineer at LinkedIn Customer service role Having a way to role improvements out to a lot of different people JavaScript and Ember at LinkedIn Having a collaborative culture All about Ember 3.0 Banner feature – there is nothing new Cracked how you develop software in the open source world that has longevity Major competition in Backbone previously The Ember community has never been more vibrant Tendency towards disposable software The idea of steady iteration towards improvement The Ember model Being different from different frameworks Ember adoption rates Python 3 Valuable from a business perspective to use Ember Ember community being friendly to newbies How much Ember VS how much JavaScript will a new developer have to learn? And much, much more! Links: Ember LinkedIn JavaScript Backbone Python @tomdale tomdale.net Tom’s GitHub Sponsors Kendo UI Sentry Digital Ocean Picks: Joe Framework Summit Jayne React sent Evan You a cake Aimee Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham AJ James Veitch Tom JavaScript Tech Talk Drake’s Ties Melissa Watson Ellis at Hall Madden
In this episode, Michael Jackson of React Training and Rob DeLuca and Taras Mankovski of The Frontside talk about what is a component, and what a component is specifically in the context of React. They also discuss when it stops being a component and becomes something larger, how it has changed the way we develop UI, and thoughts on container and presentational components being synonyms for controller and view. References The Tweet that started it all Wil Wilsman: Does my application work in real life? Do you have opinions on this show? Want to hear about a specific topic in the future? Reach out to us at contact@frontside.io or on Twitter at @thefrontside. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT: ROBERT: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 103 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm Robert DeLuca, a developer here at the Frontside and I'll be today's episode host. We're going to be discussing what is a React component or what is a component with Michael Jackson. I'm pretty excited about this topic, a sort of off from a tweet that I sent out after a long workday, when it is something being called "component" because it was built with React components but it was more like a mini application? Then Michael replied to my tweet, as they're happening and he said, "What is your definition of a component?" which is exactly what we're going to be discussing today. I thought that was a really great question. With me, as a co-host is Taras Mankovski. TARAS: Hello, hello. I'm also a developer at Frontside. ROBERT: Before we get into the discussion, I would like to make a little announcement. We've been working on building a suite of testing tools to make acceptance testing JavaScript apps like React or Vue or Ember or anything else kind of JavaScript, fast and easy to maintain over the past few months. We call it BigTest. If you follow me on Twitter, I'm kind of loud about it. I love this project that we were working and one of my coworkers just published a blog post, giving an introduction to acceptance testing on React applications with BigTest. If that sounds interesting to you, you should check it out. We'll leave a link in the show notes. Now, let's jump right into it. Hi, Michael. How are you doing? MICHAEL: Hi Robert, I'm doing well. Thank you for inviting me to be on the podcast. ROBERT: Oh, no. Thank you for joining. I feel like this going to be really fun conversation. We went back and forth on Twitter a little bit and I was like, "You know what? This serves really well like a free flowing conversation." MICHAEL: Yeah, it's something I really like to talk about, specifically, when we're talking about components or when we're talking about React components. I think there's a lot stuff there to discuss and I think that React, specifically has really, at least defined that word for me. When you were talking about your mini application, I was like, "Oh, yeah. That's cool," and to me, that's kind of what these components have the potential to be, what these React components have the potential to be. It's kind of like almost these miniature applications that you stitched together to make a bigger one. ROBERT: Yeah, that's really cool. I was frustrated at the end of that day, just because that had so much logic crammed into it and you can kind of see that come through in the tweet but I'm not going to lie. After I sent that tweet, I was a little disappointed with myself because it came off a little bit like flangy but I guess we could just kind of jump right into defining what is a component. MICHAEL: When I saw your tweet, I was like, "Oh, you know like --" and of course, I don't know the component that you're looking at. It could have been terrible. Totally, it could have been terrible. I'm totally willing to believe that it was not a good component. But writing React is hard, especially writing good React is actually hard. At first, I thought it was easy but I think it's easy to solve your immediate problems but to write React to that is generic enough to solve lots of different problems, I think it's actually very, very hard and it's something that I've spent the last couple years learning. Anyway, that's kind of a tangent. But regardless of the component that you were looking at, the way that I've tend to think about these components is we used to have a model for thinking about how to build frontend applications -- ROBERT: Like MVC? MICHAEL: MVC, that's the one. That's the one that talking about. You have, here's your model, here's your view, here's your controller. You know, there are separate logical entities and lots of times, those even live in separate files on the file system and we keep them sort of separate and spaced out. As far as I can tell, that's a sort of paradigm. I learned it in school. By the time universities catch up with industry is at least, like twenty years, so it's probably something that was invented back in the 60s or 70s. ROBERT: I think it was like the 80s because Charles talks about it a lot and sort of Taras, actually because we're building something that's like a composable model, just like the Vue of React is a composable view, its components. I think it's interesting because I was listening to the Changelog Podcast and it sounds like you worked with Ember for a while. MICHAEL: I did, yeah. ROBERT: I forget, which podcast that was but we can find it and we'll link it to the show notes but I thought that was really interesting that you also came... Oh, maybe not came from Ember. You had experience with for, at least a couple years and that's where I came from. That's kind of where that tweet came from and was like, "Man, I don't like what happened to the word component," because when I think of component, it's like something that is encapsulated in a small piece of UI. But I'm okay with letting go of that. MICHAEL: Well, yes. Ember came out of something called SproutCore, which actually originated at Apple. Tom Dale used to be a developer at Apple. I'm sure you all know all of this but just for some sort of back story for others who might not. Apple was a place where MVC was really, really big. The whole Cocoa frameworks. They're all very much like, here's your controller, here's your view, core data has all of your models, that kind of thing. It's a software development philosophy that goes back a long time and has deep roots and I'm not here to suggest that because it's old it's bad, because lots of old things are actually very, very nice and good, especially in programming. We're starting to see a resurgence of functional programming ideas, for example, which have been around forever, since at least, the 60s or even earlier than that. It's not necessarily that I think that because it's old, that it's bad. I don't. ROBERT: Right, right. MICHAEL: But the thing that I do see in these React components is they kind of go very much against the grain. If you had, for example your model, your view and your controller as these vertical silos, just imagine turning that whole thing on its side and then cutting a slices of that, so that each of your React components has elements of MVC in it. They're all sort of mixed together. I run a training company called React Training and whenever I'm doing one of my training workshops, the way that I talk about it is a component is able to encapsulate three things: markup, which is the view essentially; state, which is essentially your data or your model; and behavior, which is essentially the controller, so what happens when the user is interacting with the view and clicking on the buttons? What do we do in response to the user input? You've got all three of those MVC elements in the React component. In fact, I've been meaning to kind of coin the term for a while. Instead of MVC, I call it MSB -- markup, state and behavior. ROBERT: You heard it here first. MICHAEL: That's right, here on The Frontside Podcast, we're coining new terms. ROBERT: That's pretty great. I guess coining off of that, is it fair to say that MVC kind of still lives on, except it's now in React? Or it's kind of more sliced up into smaller, more digestible pieces? We can always come back to this composability element, right? Would you say like really React would made it possible to compose many little MVC apps? MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. The thing that people really, really love about MVC, I think you still have it in React. MVC, the thing that people always come back to is the separation of concerns. Let's just say, "I don't want everything sort of mingled together. I want it to be very clear. What is my model? What is my controller? And what is my view?" The cool thing about a React component is if you look at it, you still have very clear separation within the single component. You have a very clear separation of all three of those concerns: your state lives in an object called 'this.state,' then your view is whatever you return from your render method. That's in a completely separate spot, since still in the same component and then your behavior or your controller usually has its own method, so you can inline those in your render method or you can pull them out if this is how you'd like to do it. You can pull them out into instance methods. You can still have kind of that separation of the concerns within a single component. I think to your point, the React component model is all about composition, so this is kind of a term that we've actually adopted in other areas in technology. It's sort of just coming to frontend. The idea is you've probably heard of a service-oriented architecture for design in backend systems. These servers over here are application servers, these are database servers, here's our caching tier, here's our Ingress or LoadBalancer and maybe, you stitch them all together on the backend into one coherent system. You know, here's our storage and our image-resizing services. You stitch them all together on the backend into one coherent system but it benefits you to not build them all as one part of sort of monolith. We've got a lot of benefits from the decoupling. For one, if one piece of the system fails, the whole thing doesn't go down, so you can like swap it out or upgrade it and replace it with something else. I feel like that is kind of a similar idea to what is going on the frontend with these React components. ROBERT: Oh, microservice components. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. Each component is kind of like you said. It could be like a miniature application and it could be totally self-sufficient and I could drop it onto a page and it could just do its own thing or what I could do is I could take that app, that component and I could drop it into a larger app that can speak to it and can communicate state to it via the props that it sees and then can get state back out of it via these callbacks. I kind of view it as like all of these miniature systems that they can either be completely encapsulated and self-governing on their own or you can take them and compose them with a larger app. ROBERT: That's really interesting. I guess what is a component specifically in the context of a React. I guess, we kind of just answered that, that you can bundle all these things together, right? Does that make sense? MICHAEL: Yeah. The beautiful thing about this composition model is you can have all three of those things in the same component: markup, state and behavior. You can have all three of them right there, encapsulated in one component or once you discover more advanced patterns with React, you can actually make it so that a component only has two of the three or one of the three. ROBERT: And then it kind of like passes callbacks or props or state around? MICHAEL: Exactly. It can essentially delegate the responsibilities for handling the other pieces that it misses to other components around it. There's a pattern that I kind of coined last year called render props. ROBERT: Oh, yes. I remember hearing this on Changelog Podcast. I was actually one of the people that at first thought it literally was a prop name render. MICHAEL: Well, I mean it's not a bad way to think about it. It could be a prop name render. ROBERT: But then I found out it actually is a prop that you send JSX too and render whatever is there. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly, a prop that you used to render stuff. It's the way that I describe it. When you think about it, any component, for example that accepts a render prop is really just delegating it's rendering to some other function. It can contain the two pieces: the state and the behavior, but then it can sort of delegate this third piece, which is the markup and say, "You know what? I don't really care about, specifically what I have to render." I don't have an opinion about that. You just give me a function and I'll give you my state and possibly, some behavior callbacks and then you can tell me what to render. I'm like a component that I have two of those three pieces. I don't have the markup, you just give me a function, that I will call when I need the markup. ROBERT: That's really powerful. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. I can have all three in one place or I can also with this component model, just delegate one piece or even two pieces, using these kinds of patterns to other components, so it's really nice. ROBERT: I'm always have to come back to this because this is where I kind of cut my teeth in the frontend world. I feel like render props are very similar to the yield pattern in Ember, where you can yield out a component and place it anywhere inside that template block. I think it's really similar. Because we have a large base of Ember developers that listen and they needed a draw like a parallel, I would say that's almost a parallel. I might be off on that. Taras, would you agree with that? TARAS: Yeah, it's very similar. There is one little 'gotcha' with render props in React, which I think Ember deals with a little bit more gracefully. I do use React all the time now. I use it much more often than I use Ember but -- ROBERT: Same. TARAS: Yeah and I'm kind of curious, Michael if you would think about this. Because there are certain things that, for example, JSX does, like one of the attributes of using render prop is that you want to pass stable functions, like something that is actually defined in init hook, so you're not necessarily recreating a new identity for this function every time that you pass into the render prop. Is that right? I think for someone who is might not be familiar with this, it's a little bit counterintuitive because it just kind of like, you just pass something and then you later realize, "Actually, I can't really do that because now your components were rendering over and over again." I'm curious like where can we kind of innovate in that? Because in Ember world, for example, it's really safe to use render props. If you're delegating to the context to do the rendering, you can very easily pass a block of template into the component and then the component will know how to render that in a performant way. My experience with render props in React was that the pattern in Ember is it's a very common behavior to delegate to the context of how the children of a component are rendered. This is the primary purpose of the yield in Ember and this is used by a lot of the components to provide APIs, so essentially, you're yielding, you're sending into the children function behavior that you want the developer to use while consuming your component. The parallel with React is that you would have, essentially a function, like you have a children render prop, which is a function that receives so that when a component is rendering the children render prop, it's passing some data into that function and it's invoking the children function and it's passing to it some data and then that data is being used inside of the children render function. Now, this mechanism works really well in Ember because Ember is using its own templating engine, so it manages every placeholder in the entire template as being passed into the component. It knows exactly what has changed in the function. Looking at that, the value just passing through component as a whole thing. It's actually managing each individual spot where the dynamic elements needs to be rendered. What that does is it allows it to manage the entire children function so you don't need to worry about stabilizing the render props. You don't need to assign them. Because there's also other challenges that kind of arise when you have to move the actual function that you pass into children. You have to move into the body of the actual component. Your ability to compose the state that is within the render function is kind of limit because you now have kind of broken up into different places. I'm a little bit curious what are your thoughts about this? And if there's any innovation that's going to require or improvements that will require in the way that React handles render props. ROBERT: I definitely remember seeing some tweets from you, Michael about this, like very recently. MICHAEL: Yeah, just yesterday in fact, I was talking about this on my Twitter. First of all, thanks for the question, Taras. I appreciate it. I think you kind of nailed it with the difference between Ember and for example, just JSX -- Handlebars, really and JSX is that Handlebars is not JavaScript. Handlebars is a language of its own, really. As the implementers of that language, the Ember team or the Handlebars team has complete control over how things work. For example, when functions are allocated. If they have a yield block, for example, that yield block does not have access to things like JavaScript Scope. It really is just a block within the templating language and so, they can decide when they're implementing that language. They can say, "We're only going to ever allocate one function for this yield block." JSX on the other hand, it really is just sort of some syntax sugar over JavaScript, which is nice lots of times because you can use things like JavaScript functions scope. You can do things like refactor it, like you would any other piece of JavaScript and pull that function out into its own variable or something like that. In a lot of ways, it's more flexible but with that flexibility comes this extra concern of what happens with the prop passing and it's a real concern but I don't think it's as big of a problem as most people have heard or might think it is. The real problem, the root of the problem is that if you have a pure component in React, the pure component is optimization tool in React, if you find that your component really is a pure component of just a pure function of its props and state, and that it will never render anything different, if it receives the exact same props and state, you can declare that that component is a pure component. Instead of just a regular component, it's now a pure component and so, it will actually opt out of the render cycle if it receives the exact same props and state on subsequent render. By exact same, what I mean is like identity triple -- ROBERT: Yeah. MICHAEL: -- Same. That's an optimization tool that you can use in React to say for example, maybe I've got a component and for some reason, it's always receiving the exact same props and it's rendering a lot. I can say, "You know what, React? Don't even waste your time re-rendering this component and doing the reconciliation around it and everything like that. If it receives the exact same props, don't even waste your time. This is a pure component. It received the same props. It's going to render the exact same stuff as it rendered last time, so it will completely opt out of the render cycle," so React won't even call the render method, won't even bother doing the reconciliation for that component or its descendants. It's actually a really, really nice way to get a little performance boost in that situation. ROBERT: Interesting. Does that mean, rather than passing some JSX that returns out an anonymous function, you would rather have like a pure component over that? MICHAEL: All it really means is that when you identify a place in your app where this is happening, instead of extending React component, you can extend React.PureComponent and now you component opts out of the render cycle. ROBERT: Gotcha. Because I see a lot in React applications, it will just return some JSX out of anonymous function, kind of think, Taras was getting at, when each re-render happens, it's recreating a new function and all of it were done inside of it, from the JSX because it's just a new function that's being bound each time. I think my takeaway from that and correct me if I'm wrong, is don't pass JSX and an anonymous function or I guess, from your tweets yesterday, that's kind of a premature optimization. Maybe, not pass as anonymous function but pass as pure component. MICHAEL: I hadn't yet gotten to directly addressing Taras's concern but the idea is -- ROBERT: -- Jumping the gun. MICHAEL: Yeah, it's fine. If you do have a pure component, that is when you're going to have a problem with this render prop pattern because you can't pass a render prop to a pure component. They just don't go together. Well, sorry. I should actually qualify that. You can pass around a prop to pure component but you need to make sure that it is always the exact same function, otherwise why are you making this thing a pure component, so there's a little bit of a problem there. I actually wrote the documentation on React's website on render props and there's a little caveat section where I discuss how you could get around this, you could convert it into an instance method or something else but then the concern at this point and this is why I said it's not such a huge problem because we're getting very, very specific now. Let's assume that we've got a pure component that is the child that we want to render and it accepts a render prop and that render prop depends on state and/or some sort of scope that it needs in the render method. Now, we've got a problem because we need to generate a new function in the render method and the fact that we're generating a new function and passing it to a pure component means that we are essentially negating all the benefits of extending pure component in the first place. First of all, in order to experience the problem, you have to get very, very specific and it's not easy to actually get into a point where the problem manifests itself. But then for the second part, fixing the problem is actually not tricky, so the way that you would fix this issue, there's a couple of ways to fix it. The most common way, I think to fix it would be to just say that pure component, let's just move that down one level and we'll put it inside the render method of the component that takes the render prop. The component that takes the render prop is no longer pure but the pure component has dropped down one level and we can still get all of the benefits of a pure component and again, its whole descendant tree lives underneath it. ROBERT: That make sense. MICHAEL: So, we can still get all the benefits of having a pure component, while still being able to use the pattern. But again, just getting back to what we were saying at the beginning. The render props is just one example of an advanced pattern that actually lets you delegate one of these three pieces to somewhere else. It's just one pattern. It's not like there are others as well. ROBERT: Yeah, so getting back to what is a component, is there ever a line that's drawn, like when does it stop becoming a component and it becomes something larger. MICHAEL: It's actually interesting because for a long time, we didn't have a component model on the web and I think -- ROBERT: It's very true. MICHAEL: -- still, like we mix to all three things together in our jQuery code. It was just like there was some state mixed in with some markup, mixed in with some behavior. It was all kind of mixed into one place. ROBERT: Nice plate of spaghetti. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. As soon React came along and actually gave us a real component model that really worked where we could actually identify these pieces, then all of a sudden, everything is a component and you really can make if you want, like if you really wanted to, you could make your entire application out of components. It could just even behavior stuff like, "I want to fetch some data," that could be a component or, "I want to listen to the window scroll or the window size," that could be another component. "I want to render an image or a bit of text or do some measuring or I want to do some parsing of some data or something like that," all of this stuff could be represented as components if you wanted it to. Of course, you can still extract those functions out into their own bag of utility methods and lots of times when I write a React Apple, I have a little bag of utils and I'll go and reach in there and grab those as I need them. But for the most part, most of my React apps are just components all the way down, so there's not much that I can't do with a component. The cool thing about that is what do you get when you have components, where you get reusability and sharability. I can make a component and I can just share it with you, Robert. I could say, "You want a component for listening to the windows size? Here you go. Here's the components. Got to render --" ROBERT: Drop it in. MICHAEL: "-- It will give you the size when you need it," so that ability to share code is, I think super important. ROBERT: Yeah, I think so too and it really helps you build applications rapidly because you can just start dropping these little components that are contained in composable throughout your entire app. I guess, I'm still clinging onto like there is maybe a line that is drawn and I think from the React community, there were a couple of terms coined called the container component and the presentational component, in which I immensely mapped those to basically being synonyms for controller and view. It's like the container components is kind of like a controller, like it delegates the view... Or decorates the view, not delegates. And the presentational component is just like we're talking earlier -- pure component. It's just taking props and rendering that. Is that fair to say? MICHAEL: Yeah. As far as I can tell, that's a pattern that was first talked about by the redux community, specifically I think Dan is the first to discuss that that pattern and it's a pattern that I think can work well. I haven't ever found it to be especially useful in my code but I can see how other people could like it for their code. I really just think it has to do with how your brain works. If you prefer structuring things like that, if you prefer like the vast majority of your components to just be these little view layers and then your main container components to hold all of the logic, I want fault you for that. I'd say, that's fine you can build your app like that. But I do think that when you're thinking about components like that, you are thinking about the much less like these miniature applications. Basically, in my opinion it's kind of a false separation. It's a separation that doesn't really need to exist because essentially, the thing that I really love about these components is you have encapsulation. You encapsulate everything. As soon as you adopt this pattern of containers and essentially, just these presentational leaf nodes, they're not as useful on their own. They just encapsulate some of the rendering logic. ROBERT: That's very true and they're not reusable. I mean, it's very, very hard to make those reusable. MICHAEL: Well, yeah. Most of the time, they're designed to be used with a very specific container. It is like, "Why couldn't we just put that in a container." Like I said, I really don't fault anybody for using them. It's just not how my brain works. I tend to think more about components as if they were these miniature applications and they're going to be useful on their own for the most part. One place where I have started to do that, the fourth thing that your components can encapsulate is style information, which is really just kind of the markup but it's the fourth thing and I think that I've really started to employ that kind of pattern when styling comes in. But it's not for this separation of containers and leaf nodes. It's just because I would like to encapsulate some of the styles down at a lower level or be able to reuse some of the styles down at a lower level, so that's when I'll typically start breaking up one of my components into multiple kind of tightly-coupled components but it's just for the sake of the styling, not really in any of the control flow or the logic. ROBERT: Right. When I first got into doing React, I was first like a little befuddled and then, I fell in love. I was like head over heels. When I hear about separation of concerns, it's always talked about like we need to separate HTML, JavaScript and CSS. They're all different things. They just need to be separate. I understand that. I kind of come from there but for me, my personal opinion is coming from the context of single-page apps, there is no feature that you can ship without the three. I don't think there is a complete feature that exists. Sure, there's edge cases that's like a blanket statement but I think those lines of separation is way more blurred these days and I think that's what React just unlocked. That's kind of where all of this is sort of rolling downhill and it's not a train. It's really powerful to be able to encapsulate all of those things together and then just think of your UI as these components. That's why we call them components. They componentized. Like when I have a butt-in and I drop it on the page, I don't want to have to go and make sure that I have the right class that's wired up in some other file. I can just drop the button in there and it's going to do its thing. I can pass the props, it'll change it, that's fine. It lives within itself. MICHAEL: Yeah, I would say you're absolutely right. You can't ship anything meaningful without having, at least some styling in there, unless you're shipping very, very basic behavioral style components. It's kind of one piece, I think like the React components are able to encapsulate their own styles but there's no, I guess officially recommended way to do it, which is where I think React get some of the critique, like some people come in and say like, "There are a million different ways to do styling in React and therefore, React is supposed to something like --" I guess, yeah, some of the other frontend frameworks have like, "This is how you do styling in our framework." ROBERT: Right, like the lack of convention. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. It's a blessing and a curse, though. If there's a lack of convention, it's harder for newcomers to know exactly what to do. ROBERT: Yeah, or like what's best for their use case. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly but then on the other side, it's kind of a blessing because people are free to experiment and they don't have to feel like if they're experimenting, they're going sort of against the grain of what the community has already accepted to be the answer. I think that freedom to get out there and experiment is really valuable as well. ROBERT: You can see but I'm nodding. TARAS: I'm just curious what your thoughts were. This Suspense API is something that's... React kind of lead the way with components and now, the changes that are coming in with Suspense API coming in and it'd be great, if you can, are you able to explain a little bit about what it does for people that are not familiar and I'm curious what your thoughts about it. MICHAEL: Yeah, for sure. The Suspense API, I think is actually, with regards to what we've been talking about, with the encapsulation of markup, state and behavior and possibly styles, I think the Suspense API is kind of the React teams attempt to sort of encapsulate or generalize, at least one more thing, which is asynchronous behavior. The truth is, the most common async behavior that we know of, that most people are familiar with is a fetch, a data fetch -- you go and fetch some data. But there are others, there are things like loading of images and animations and navigation and things like that, where you have some time that passes in between when you initiate an operation and when you're actually able to render as a result of completing that operation. How do we manage or how do we generalize that and how do we think about it? The Suspense API is basically a way to declaratively say, "I need this async operation to be done." Let's just use the example of a fetch. I need this fetch. I need to have fetched this data in order to render this view and don't even attempt to render this view, unless the data has been fetched. Before the async API or Suspense, as they're calling it, you would basically have to manage this asynchronous behavior yourself. You would basically have to say, "Go and do the fetch," and while we're doing the fetch, maybe I'll set a loading flag in my state and say, "Loading is true," and then when the fetch gets back, I'll say, "Loading is false," and then I'll render. Maybe, while loading is true, I'll show like a spinner or some loading dots or something. What the Suspense API allows us to do or what they're hoping to do, again it's all very like... I don't know if I made this clear. It's still very, very, very, very early days for this API and I don't actually know when it'll be ready. But anyway, the idea is to be able to say -- ROBERT: Would you say the Suspense is killing the community? MICHAEL: The suspense around suspense. ROBERT: A terrible pun. MICHAEL: Anyway, the API is basically just a more declarative way to indicate where this asynchronous stuff is happening and give React sort of clues, if you will, to say, "There's some asynchronous stuff happening here, just so you know." That has many applications in the real world. Let's say for example, you were navigating in a master detail view and you're tapping down the master view and loading these detail views, if you tap a master view and you haven't yet loaded the information for the detail view, instead of sliding to the detail and showing the data still loading there in the detail view, you might want to show some sort of loading indicator while you're still in the master view. Then, if it's taking a while to load, they can actually select something else from the master view and in that case, you would cancel the old fetch and start another fetch. It's just supposed to make things like that, kind of feel a little bit more fluid and a little bit more intuitive to the programmer, so you don't have to think so hard about managing a lot of that complexity in your own head. ROBERT: Yeah. By the way, I love the mobile first language that you used. You tapped here, you tapped here, that slides in. MICHAEL: Yeah, for sure. It's all we're building these days. ROBERT: Yeah, it's very true. TARAS: It's interesting because the Suspense API, you wouldn't really imagine it to be within the scope of a view in a traditional sense, to [inaudible] but considering the scope of a component in React, it makes sense but I think people might not imagine as being something that would become part of core, potentially in React. I'm curious like what do you think other areas of React and I'm glad that the scope of components in React is so broad because it kind of opens up this question to be pretty much anything in React ecosystem. But is there an area of React building or the aspects of applications that you would like to see an improvement in or some kind of a change or something that hasn't seen the right amount of innovation in the same way that we've seen in other areas? MICHAEL: Basically, is there a place where I would like to see the React ecosystem improve? TARAS: Yes. MICHAEL: I know this goes kind of contrary to what I just said but I would like to see a little bit more cohesiveness. I feel like in some ways, the freedom is good but I also feel like in some ways, for the last couple of years, we've been just sort of like rehashing the exact same old problems again and again because React really made everything else so easy, like a lot of the stuff that was hard about building web apps, just got really easy when React came along. I'm not saying that because I have React training company. Of course, my livelihood right now depends on React but honestly, if it wasn't for React, I think I probably would have quit and done something else because it was actually getting really, really difficult for me. I was trying to build an app in Ember before I started with React and I just couldn't do it, you know? I just couldn't get the level of polish that I wanted in my app and get all the bugs out and get it working exactly how I want it to. It frustrated me, actually that I've spent a lot of time. I spent about 18 months, about $100,000 of my own money, just down the drain trying to build this app, trying to get it out the door and I wasn't able to finish it off. At the end of the day, I really started to question like, "Was it me? Do I just suck? Am I not a great developer? Is that the problem?" You really have to start asking ourselves hard questions like that when you put everything you have into something and it doesn't work out and then React came along and I was like, "I was just using the wrong tools." The tools were the problem. It wasn't me. There is a different way to think about this about building stuff. I thought the way that I was doing it was the only way that existed to build things but it turns out, it's not. I used to not understand what were people talking about when they were talking about functional programming or what do they talk about when they're talking about composition, solving problems with composition, instead of inheritance. I didn't even understand what that meant. But all I knew is really smart people would say stuff like that and I was like, "What are you talking about?" Now I feel like, because of React, I've gotten it. Again, to get back to your question, Taras, React made a lot of the stuff that we used to worry about, that we used to think about. It made it easy and so, we could build amazing things now a lot more easily. But now, for the last couple of years, I feel like we've just been sort of rehashing a lot of the same stuff. I would really like to see us, as a community sort of tackle the next level problems. I think the React Suspense stuff is definitely getting there. That's a problem that I really don't see anybody else sort of address, which is how do I make it easy to deal with the fact that applications by their nature -- these networked applications -- are asynchronous. How do I deal with that in a declarative way? That's why I'm encouraged by that work because I do think that it's kind of one of the more forward thinking things right now that's going on in the React community but I would like to see us in general, sort of like get past talking about styling and get past talking about service and rendering and move on. ROBERT: Right and I'm going to assume you have this really unique experience since you do a lot of trainings. I follow you on Twitter and it's just always talking about where you're flying to and who you're training, so the things have to come up there where you see these things in pattern over pattern over pattern. MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. I see like a lot of and this again, gets back to Taras's question. I train a lot of people who are very new to React and I see people who are new to React, they really don't have a ton to go on besides just like blog posts and Medium pieces and podcast like this one and who am I? A lot of people in their React community don't even know or care who I am. It's like, "There's a guy out here who are saying stuff about React. Maybe I should listen to him. Maybe I should listen to somebody else," and it's confusing. It's confusing, I feel like, for people who are just getting into React. It's confusing. Like I said, experimentation is good but I guess, I wish the experience of coming to React was a little bit more like the experience of coming to Vue because -- ROBERT: Oh, like it was a beaten path. MICHAEL: Exactly. I don't actually think there's not a whole lot about the Vue technology that is compelling to me and let's not dig on it. It's just -- ROBERT: A personal preference? MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly, just preference but I do think the thing that is very compelling about the Vue experience is just the cohesiveness of it all. You go to Vue and there's like a way to do server-side rendering with data fetching and styling and -- ROBERT: They have a CLI and -- MICHAEL: And a CLI and a component and all these stuff. Yeah, and a router built right in. Anyway, I think that's a way that the React community could improve. I don't know if that'll ever happen because the React community at heart is artists and hackers and those people are traditionally very reluctant to be corralled and like I said, it's a blessing but I think from the perspective of people who are new to the community, it does tend to cause some confusion. TARAS: I want to add to what Michael is saying. What's interesting and I'm sure Michael sees this in his training but the kind of people that use React is very diverse. There's this kind of original group or there's kind of mentality that prompted the early adopters of React and now, we're seeing these companies that are traditionally enterprise-y with MSE backgrounds and coming into React. It's really interesting to see all this kind of worlds collide and then see what's happening as a result. It's definitely interesting on what's going on now. ROBERT: This is an excellent stopping point. I really agree. I come from Ember background so I would like to see a little bit more convention but I think it's okay. It would be nice to see that. Thank you, Michael for coming on. Is there anything that you would like to give a quick plug for and where people can reach you? MICHAEL: If you want to support the work we're doing, you can sign up for one of our upcoming workshops. We've got one right now on ReactTraining.com. We've got a workshop coming up, actually in my hometown of Carlsbad. You can come out here in July and hang out with us and do some React training. We got a really awesome host here who's right here in town. We're doing some React training workshops on July 25th through 27th, I think and then, other ways that you can support what we're doing is publish in all my open source code at GitHub.com/ReactTraining or you can follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/ReactTraining or at my personal account at @MJackson -- Michael Jackson. ROBERT: Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. MICHAEL: Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. ROBERT: This is a great talk. Cool. Thank you everybody for listening. We are The Frontside and we build UI that you can stick your feature on. If you would like to give us feedback, you can always reach out to us on Twitter at @TheFrontside or you could email us at Contact@Frontside.io. We're always looking for any new topics or things you would like to talk about or things that are interesting to you. As always, thank you Mandy for producing our podcast. It's @therubyrep on Twitter and on June 28th, we're going to have Chris Martin on to discuss blockchain development.
Robert and Tom join Sam and Ryan to chat about how LinkedIn uses Ember, when teams should use Engines, build optimizations that are coming to Ember CLI and more. Topics: 0:00 – Engineering challenges of scale at LinkedIn 6:00 – Engines at LinkedIn 8:40 – When should teams use Engines? 15:25 – What are some of the downsides of Engines? 17:38 – Build-time versus AOT library transpilation 21:47 – How just-in-time compilation relates to code-splitting and importing node modules 29:50 – Ember’s philosophy on bringing new JS features to years-old apps 32:55 – How can the community be most helpful when contributing to Ember? 41:32 – Analytics and performance tracking at LinkedIn 46:07 – What are your thoughts on Vue.js? (Question from jamiewhite) 52:18 – How can we help improve the developer experience of using Handlebars templates (autocomplete, error correction, template linting, etc.)? 1:02:40 – Moving questions from Slack to the Discussion forum
Tom Dale chats with Sam and Ryan about static analysis and compilers, upstreaming learnings from Glimmer, and what sort of size and speed improvements Ember.js will see in 2018.
Toran Billups: @toranb | GitHub | Blog Toran Billips joined us for an insightful conversation regarding glimmer-redux: Predictable state management for Glimmer apps. Resources: Glimmer Redux Demystified Talk from Tom Dale on glimmer internals (contrast with Preact made in this talk) ember-redux Glimmer progress report that mentions the migration to Glimmer 0.8 (Big Changes) Blog post following EmberConf 2017 that announced GlimmerJS (for the Ember dev) The Frontside Podcast 086: Routing in Ember with Alex Matchneer An ember-rideshare Blog Post A Rollup plugin for glimmer-redux RollupJS Transcript ELRICK: Hello and welcome to another Frontside Podcast, Episode 89. My name is Elrick Ryan, a developer here at the Frontside. I'm joined by Wil Wilsman, another developer here at the Frontside. Wil, how are you doing? WIL: I'm good. How are you? ELRICK: I'm great, man. I'm excited for this podcast that we have coming up here. Today we are fortunate to have with us a podcast elite member now, Mr Toran Billups. Toran, how are you doing? TORAN: Oh, man. I joined the elite platinum club or something? ELRICK: Yes, you are in the platinum club right now. I think this is probably what? Your third or fourth episode by now? TORAN: Oh, yeah. I think the fourth. ELRICK: Oh, yeah. You're in the elite club right now. You are a Midwest programmer and I hear there is a difference between a Silicon Valley programmer and a Midwest programmer. Could you tell us about what the difference is? Because it's the first time I've heard anything about this. TORAN: Admittedly, I stole this from a very popular developer, Justin Searls who spoke at length one time on a podcast, not too different in this one about his experiences in consulting for companies, who are more in the startup phase or a company that you'll find in Silicon Valley that is mostly just trying to test an idea and get to market, versus his experience for finance or insurance companies based out of the Midwest. I like that idea because my experiences have taught me. I'm a little bit happier when I'm working for companies that are interested in quality or attributes of quality and view the software longevity as mission-critical versus a software that is really just a byproduct of an interesting idea and if we validate that idea in a market, we can always rewrite the software later. Midwest, I guess the short version is we care about the work we're doing and we understand that rewrites are difficult, if ever possible. ELRICK: Interesting, so the Midwest seems to be concerned with long term goals. TORAN: Yeah, I think sustainable -- ELRICK: Sustainable software, at least. TORAN: Yep. ELRICK: Today, you are joining us to not only talk about the Midwest and the beautiful Midwest programmers. You're here to talk about Glimmer Redux. TORAN: Glimmer Redux is a little library I wrote, I think last month. I should start off by asking you guys if you're familiar with a Glimmer JS or if you've heard of that. ELRICK: I've heard of Glimmer JS. I haven't had an opportunity to play around or mess around with it yet. I don't know if that's good or bad because I'm just really busy but I really want to get into it. Wil, what about yourself? WIL: I've read through the docs but I haven't played with it at all. It looks really nice. TORAN: I think the joke that was off the air last time I was on, Wil you might remember this. You're on that podcast with Charles. I said something like, "I'm not young enough to actually be working with Glimmer," and I felt that way for a long time because one thing you should know is it's a pre-1.0 and if you guys have ever worked in a pre-1.0 ecosystem, myself the biggest experience I have to draw from is really pre-1.0 Ember and there were some big changes before 1.0. You can imagine back to that throwaway comment about being very young, there was actually a big change in Glimmer itself recently where they decided to... I don't know if the right word is Pascal Case but they've literally gone away from that 'dasharized' components. It used to have 'foo-bar' and in your template, you would actually see lower case of 'foo-bar' and now that would just be all uppercase. Well, not all uppercase but 'FooBar' and no dash, which is a big change recently. WIL: So a class case, kind of like React or JSX. TORAN: Yeah, exactly. They have a great blog post. Actually, we can reference that in the show notes, about some of these big changes in that release. It was Glimmer 0.8 so it's still, it's making its way to the 1.0 but I got interested in this really for two reasons in the last couple of months. The first was, if you actually go build something with Glimmer -- and this is my experience -- is for the novice programmer just taking a look at it, it's really just a way to use web components to build an application. There's no routing. There's no opinions, really. There's no services like you have in Ember or contexts like you have in React. The first challenge you run up against is when you get beyond a single component or two components and suddenly, you need to share some state across this application. How do you do that? If you guys have some experience, I know the Frontside, with React, if you're not using MobX or Redux or something like that, a lot of times you'll see this pattern where you're actually passing a piece of state through the entire tree or the shared state through a big part of the component tree. Of course, that becomes painful as the application gets to a certain size. One of the things I thought about is if I was to build a real application, the one in mind that was certainly not built yet because I'm not using Glimmer at work but I always think about the ember-rideshare. I know you guys had Alex Matchneer, recently talking about routing and Alex mentions in that episode this challenge for the Ember router today, to be reactive to server-sent events. In the case, imagine you have an Uber or a Lyft app and after the ride is over, the server wants to send an event, maybe and then the app needs to react to that event -- sending you maybe to a new route or sending you back to the map to pick a new ride. The gist of the ride share app is, and Alex, of course I would reference anyone to that podcast, he does a lot better job describing the routing challenges and those are a little bit out of scope for this discussion, but imagine you're going to build an app that ambitious and you're going to build a Lyft in Glimmer. What I found was missing is really what we take for granted in Ember, which is the Ember Service and that is like a singleton or an object that allows you to have a piece of state and then share that state around by injecting that service in only the components that need to reach up and grab that shared state. Redux, which I know your audience is pretty familiar with but a quick recap, Redux is just kind of a global JavaScript object that has state and there's often a library that lets you connect to that state so you can use it in your various components. Glimmer Redux is no different than that, actually. It just allows you, instead of having to create maybe one global JavaScript object and kind of pass it down the hierarchy, you can instead just connect the components that need to be aware of Redux. The ones that don't, of course they just don't connect. ELRICK: I know that you had a hand or build ember-redux and now you build Glimmer Redux. Were there any challenges between building those two different add-ons into two different ecosystems? TORAN: I should take one minor step back because that question is a great segue. I didn't want to touch on the second motivation for Glimmer Redux, which is actually really closely related here and that is, of course I did write ember-redux so with every open source project, there's a little selfish motivation here. I imagine last year when Glimmer was announced at EmberConf that there would be a story from Glimmer to Ember. The idea being you're a small startup, you just want to get your web application going, you don't necessarily like all the big conventions or you just don't think you need all of Ember when you get started but six months down the road, you're suddenly looking at tree shaking and lazy loading with engines and you're thinking, "I wish we had that." Realistically speaking, like today what would a transition for a Glimmer shop to Ember be. Honestly, I think it's tough without a library like Glimmer Redux. Of course, I wrote this with pretty much a mere of the connect API. If people were to check out the ReadMe of Glimmer Redux and ember-redux and you looked at a connected or redux-aware component in both of those cases, the best case scenario is the only difference would be in the import. Instead of import connect from a Glimmer Redux, you would be import connect from ember-redux. Everything else underneath, all the ecosystem of Redux that you can use and both are completely compatible. In fact, if you were to move, imagine you Ember new and you're thinking, "I got to move my Glimmer ride-share to ember-rideshare. Since Redux does a good job in encapsulating all of the state transformations in vanilla JavaScript, you don't have to really worry about the differences between a number object and not having Ember object. After you did Ember new, essentially you would copy over your components. For the most part, they're still template-driven. A lot of handlebars and a lot of TypeScript to JavaScript is the biggest mismatch you would have between Glimmer and coming over to Ember, of course but there is Ember CLI TypeScript or Ember TypeScript, I think. Long story short, you essentially copy the directories of your reducers or middleware from your Glimmer app over to Ember and there should be no changes necessary at all. ELRICK: I know that is the dream that you touched on, I think they phrase it as 'NPM installing your way up to Ember.' In your perspective, do you think that is going to be a thing? Is it going to get there? What are your feelings on that? TORAN: I would definitely be in trouble if I didn't say upfront that I'm not on the Ember core team. Sometimes, people get that confused for some reason but I don't speak for the core team and I'm not really privy to anything. But I do think that the core team has this in mind that there will be a set of NPM installable modules that eventually land you the full set of tools and abstractions that we see in Ember today. A big one that I'd hit on earlier is services. What will services or the Glimmer 0.5 version of services look like when it lands and what about routing and those sort of things? This was really my personal take on how could I make that migration right now without asking permission from the core team. In a Glimmer Redux, I think honestly it offers a good 80% of that. You still have the routing issue, which is a little challenging and you have the TypeScript issue, which you just have to be aware of some of the limitations of using TypeScript in Ember. ELRICK: That's an excellent point that you made because when people outside of the core team take it upon themselves to then try to implement different things around the ecosystem, that can then be motivation or an example for people outside of the core team to see like, "This is a possible solution to a goal we're trying to reach." Kudos to you. TORAN: Back to your original question about 15 minutes ago, what was different about the ecosystems writing ember-redux the add-on and Glimmer Redux, which is... I don't really even want to call it an add-on. I kind of label it as a Glimmer library but to your point just a second ago, when I got interested and saying, "I wrote Glimmer Redux, now I want to share it so other Glimmer authors don't need to copy/paste this file," and the first resistance I hit up on is there really is no Glimmer library or Glimmer add-on. You could write an Ember add-on because if you guys get into Glimmer, you'll find this as well. There are certain hooks that are used in the Glimmer build process where Ember add-ons like Ember CLI SASS can be used from Glimmer. But the challenge I had using an Ember add-on, of course is that this wasn't an Ember component or anything Ember related. It needed to really be test driven from a Glimmer apps. Really, if you went to NPM installers, what you're pulling in is effectively my Glimmer app that also exports publicly this connect function, which is not necessarily you're leading, maybe anything to core team that could happen. A big reason for that as well and one of the challenges building this, is that Glimmer right now, after to try to emulate my 'quasi-success' in doing this, is really bring your own build system, to actually share a Glimmer components or internals like this connect API that Glimmer components can use. What I mean by that is on the website, one of the challenges I faced was -- this isn't a knock against the core team, this is just my honest experiences -- when I read the Glimmer JS docs and it says right in the installing guide, "Glimmer uses Ember CLI, this battle-tested command line interface from the Ember project." Now, pause right there because again, not to beat up on the Ember core team or anything but assuming in that one sentence that they're using Ember app, what I noticed when I opened the Ember CLI build file is the project was actually a Glimmer app. Now, I did a little bit of digging here and I think this is validated, at least back when I worked on Glimmer Redux last month, that Glimmer app is not like inheriting or pulling in a bunch of shared code from Ember app. It's actually a completely separate build tool. As part of this process, I actually for the first time had to go through and learn Rollup and understand how the Broccoli process is kicked off, how both Rollup and Babel are used to build this and then how to apply some convention. If you guys are familiar with Ember, you have this add-on directory and an app directory. The guidance from the Ember team is around how to structure add-ons. Of course, you write all of your kind of private-ish or add-on code in the add-on directory and then whatever you think will be public, you export from the app directory and that sort of merges it into the tree when the application is built. People are allowed to use your code but then also, they can override that code. One of the challenges here is if I wanted that exact same API and I want people to make this migration from Glimmer to Ember using Redux, I had to actually invent that convention so I wrote a Rollup plugin and it's all listed in the docs here. One of the strange things people who are checking out Glimmer Redux hit me with first is, "I see a Yarn installed Glimmer Redux but then second step is installing this Rollup plugin. What's the deal?" I think it is because most people assume the Ember CLI you're using is identical and somehow, I should have written an Ember CLI add-on for this. I think that was the biggest learning curve and people should just be aware of that. If you're interested in sharing code right now, there is really not a baked story and that's okay. It allows people to innovate. Of course, the innovator's dilemma being that, I don't really know without [inaudible] some migrating RFC or getting involved with the core team, how to make that thing. I ultimately just hope the core team improves this and I'm sure they will but for right now, I don't really want to wait around for it. ELRICK: Got you. What is Rollup, for people that are not familiar with what Rollup is? I'm sure everyone is probably familiar with Babel by now because it's used everywhere but what is Rollup? TORAN: Embarrassingly, I don't know the technical... But I would say the role that you can see, if you actually step through the node process as your Glimmer app is being built, is it helps really condense the overall build size. What I see is it's essentially traversing like Browserify in some ways. This is, again just my primitive look but it traverses all the imports you have and it tries to pull in the bare minimum to keep the bundle size as small as possible. ELRICK: Toran, you have had a lot of experience with Redux and Redux is now being used in several different software platforms, I guess or software areas like Vue and they probably even have in Angular now. They have it in Ember and React. Redux is kind of spreading its wings and it seeds across every ecosystem. Do you feel that Redux has reached a state where people are just satisfied with the current state of Redux or do you think that people are going to be then, looking to build another abstraction on top of Redux? Do you have any thoughts on that? TORAN: The fact that Redux is so simple has allowed it to become so ubiquitous. I heard someone say this term the other today, which is like, 'ubiquity over consistency,' and that I think describes the both the growth of Redux and why it is kind of de facto for data management across all ecosystems. I think there's two camps that I hear about and I'm curious if you guys see this in your consulting work but there is certainly, the developer see this ubiquity but no consistency and see chaos in their experiences. I can totally relate to this. There are development shops I've seen where one team goes this direction because there's no strict guidance goes another and then when those teams meet up for a project in 12 months, they look at each other and the apps are, of course nothing alike, which is a big problem that Ember tries to solve. My biggest question here really is kind of curving us slightly back to the Glimmer story. If I can reframe your question, Ember is traditionally very big on convention and I think a lot of the community that is still in Ember today in large part is because of this convention, these guide rails about the community has set up but Glimmer being this NPM install your way to Ember, I think along the way, there's going to be either a new set of users that are coming just for the winds of the Glimmer VM and they happen to find themselves, not necessarily in love with some restrictions or opinions that would come with a migration directly to Ember and I'm curious if the Glimmer community that will show up for that is mostly Ember backed, meaning that they want to slowly build with RFC as a process that the entire community uses and there's one solution like we end up with often an Ember. If a community evolves more experimentally like you saw in React, where there was, of course Redux but then there was MobX and then there was various little wares for Redux that different teams would try out and eventually, there was no one proven way but there was always at the heart of it, Redux with some extensions or other add-ons around it that got teams to where they are today. I'm curious to see where this Redux, especially with the Glimmer influence, will end up. WIL: You touched on a little, I think one of the, maybe not a problem necessarily but one of the biggest barriers in Redux and React and maybe Glimmer -- I'm not sure -- is that it's almost too loose without any opinions at all so it kind of gives developers the freedom to mess things up big time. What's your opinion on that with Glimmer, like Glimmer is headed toward this NPM install? Is it too loose? TORAN: I guess that's the question, I wish we both had the answer to. It's funny. It's a double-edged sword. If it's loose, it seems like somebody is going to go create a mess but at the same time, if it's loose on the surface, it often seems like it has less surface area and as a result, a lower learning curve. React is a good example where most people, I think have gone to React or at least in my experience, I like React because it was so simple and there wasn't a huge amount of things to learn. There wasn't this full ecosystem, at least out of the gate but of course, what you find the moment you want to join a team or go build something ambitious is that you've got to make a bunch of decisions and that is certainly the calling card of Ember. What makes Ember special is they've settled on a handful of those decisions. I think ideally, I'd like to see the community in Glimmer check out Redux, get an idea of what problem it actually solves for them and if it is useful, then find a set of middleware or extensions from the wider ecosystem that actually solve the problems they face. Back to this Glimmer rideshare example, I think one thing that stands in the way as I play around with that is just a very basic routing story. Even if that is as simple as I have a component that I'll just call it route, what hooks in this Glimmer component are correct to fetch data. In the Ember ecosystem, we have a very special route object, essentially who has a set of hooks that are known for handling the asynchronous stuff in our Ember apps but there isn't anything like that yet, in Glimmer which is the next stumbling block for me to actually go build something big. I'm kind of messing around with the idea of this reactive router built out of Glimmer components but until that's actually kind of surface, mostly just spit balling here. ELRICK: With flexibility comes a lot of power but then there's also the case where our flexibility could lead to chaos. But being that something as flexible, it allows you to adapt it to whatever your particular needs are -- you know, the 'special snowflake' as everyone ends up being. Because Ember has been around for a while now and has proven itself and its battle-tested in a lot of areas, now as NPM install in our way from Glimmer up to Ember, do you think that they'll be able to then, extract some of those hardened pieces of Ember out of Ember and then give us a solution inside of the Glimmer ecosystem based off of the Ember ecosystem? Then not have so many varying different opinions or different packages or add-ons or libraries that you may need to pull from that you may just have like a set of Glimmer-approved libraries or add-ons to use to then, get your way up to this full Ember app. Do you think that that's a road they're taking? Or a possible road? TORAN: Yeah, I think for sure. A lot of the talk right now if you're in the Glimmer channel on Slack in the Ember community, I think the next big step here is having the ability to take a Glimmer component as it exists today and use that, extrapolate from there and the plan is to prove out things in a more experimental ecosystem as pre-1.0 Glimmer ecosystem. As they become more solid, we essentially just adopt them and then use them as a first class. In Ember actually, this isn't true but I envision a world where in the months ahead, we're essentially using Glimmer components in Ember so I'm already challenging myself with how would a library or add-on author help people make this progression from Glimmer to Ember if they don't do something like I've done here with Glimmer Redux because eventually, there will be this shared component world, at least in the middle ground, where Ember has both Ember components and Glimmer components. I think it's a road yet to be traveled and that's what I'm excited to be on the podcast and get people talking about building libraries for Glimmer, just because there is not a cow path or a paved road for you right now. I think if you learn just a little bit of Rollup or you dive in and take a look at the DI system built in a Glimmer right now, there is a lot you can actually do with it. I know there are certainly big named add-on authors already checking it out in preparation for such a migration. WIL: Besides the whole Rollup process, was there any other friction points in integrating Redux with Glimmer? TORAN: One that I want to call out but it is, I believe still Rollup related. It's mostly a PSA, to warn people. If you are building one of these little libraries like I talked about with Glimmer and you're going to do a Yarn link, which means that you're going to just work locally and not really publish to NPM until you're done, be aware that if you're Yarn linking and then going over to another project to test this Glimmer library, then you'll actually get temporarily two copies of Glimmer. In fact, that is how this Rollup plugin I wrote -- sort of 'bring your own build' for Glimmer -- became essential as I was like, "I'm getting two copies of the Glimmer component," so what was happening is example, I was playing with this connect API, it was always calling into the wrong Glimmer code so the code that I was expecting in my add-on was never firing. We come to find out when you're not doing Yarn link or you're not working locally, this isn't a problem. Actually, Tom Dale reached out and helped me a little bit later because my first version of the Rollup plugin had this little hack in there that said essentially, "I'm going to mask away this duplicate Glimmer problem," and it turns out it's not a problem. If you are working locally, be aware that you will have this problem as my guess. ELRICK: What gets you most excited using Glimmer? Are there any specific features or things within Glimmer to get you most excited? I guess the second question would be, what do you think Glimmer is going to unlock for the future of app development in Ember? TORAN: I think the first thing I get excited about was visible in this talk that Tom Dale gave a couple weeks ago. I'll try and dig that up for the show notes where he show the advantages of Glimmer over the competition today. The big thing that just blew me away was some of the advantages over, even Preact, which I was kind of surprised that a lot of times there's this rivalry for performance especially between React and Angular and Ember but no one ever really talks about Preact, which is known in a lot of ways as the thinner, lighter-weight React, if I'm not completely wrong. I'm sure somebody is going to be table flip on that definition. But my view was that if you were really performance-hungry, you could check out Preact, which was for performance reasons there was a smaller bundle size so you're just actually shipping less JavaScript, which means they're parsing less JavaScript and Tom went directly after this library in his talk and just showed a very interesting point at the end. I don't want to spoil it for people but let's just say, it appears to show Glimmer as just an order of magnitude better as a primitive for building web components. I think that is the big draw and how will that make Ember better. I think, mostly in the same way that I just described, where we'll essentially get a component for free in Ember that is just a better performing primitive for the web. ELRICK: I'm not too familiar with the guts of Glimmer but from what I understand, Glimmer compiles down and it has some opcodes that then compile down to binary. Is that correct? TORAN: Yeah, I think there is a binary format that they're shipping or they will soon be shipping. If you're really interested in the technical details of that, I'll definitely be sure you check out this talk from Tom because now the real magic behind this is they essentially boil it down to the ability to compile these templates down to 'byte code,' as they call it and Tom has a really funny part in his talk where he says, "You know, it's not a marketing term, this byte code word," and it becomes true because later in the talk, you hear that, essentially the Glimmer VM or the big value add of Glimmers VM is that you're just feeding it with byte code until the next 16 millisecond buffer comes up to paint, in which case you just pause and that allows, I think as he describes, less jank or allows less freezing up that main thread because you're releasing control back to the UI every 16 milliseconds, essentially. ELRICK: Yesterday, there was a meet up with a lot of the Ember core team. Ed Faulkner had made a point that since Glimmer compiled down to byte code that then is not too far of a stretch to then use that with something like Web Assembly, that with then give Glimmer an extreme performance boost. He sets up Glimmer to be used in what can be potentially the future of the web, which is Web Assembly, which I thought was really interesting and it kind of blew my mind to think, "Oh, yeah. That is true since it compiled down to byte code and Web Assembly compiles down to that." We can get that performance boost in that Glimmer is forward thinking in a sense. TORAN: Yeah, man. I totally agree. One of the things I honestly value about the Ember core team is they're very both tactical and visionary at the same time, where in the short term, they're doing things to accomplish real pain points we have but without anyone really realizing it, they're also setting up the stage to solve huge problems that we're all going to face in six, 12, 18 months. I definitely appreciate and love the work these guys are doing. They should hear about it. Obviously, this is all open source and most of this time is gifted, just given away so I really appreciate the core team. WIL: Speaking of performance, we know that the Ember has a run loop and basically, most of these libraries have some sort of loop that determines when they should batch things together or render things to the screen. Does the Glimmer have this concept? What do they take advantage of to make it as performant as you say? TORAN: Yeah, that's actually a really good question and I'm probably minimally equipped to answer it but the short version of it is there is no equivalent run loop for batching work that I've seen inside of Glimmer. Instead, you're more directly interacting with request animation frame, which we miss directly from Mozilla here but requests animation frame tells the browser you [inaudible] browser call specific function to update an animation before the next repaint. Where does this come in for Glimmer? Essentially when you call set or you decide to change a property that Glimmer is listening to and if anyone was not familiar with Glimmer, you designate this by using the tracked attribute. The tracked attribute, when you change a value, it fires this 'set property did change' and behind the scenes, 'set property did change,' if you are familiar with Ember, in my mind is close to 'notify property change,' which is what happens when you do Ember.set. If you've ever actually change something in Ember behind the scenes, there is a notify property change event fired and then we queue that work and it's a similar-ish process except that there is no run loop. What we do is we just call schedule rerender, I think in Glimmer and that just fires off request animation frame to try and rerender within that 16 millisecond window before the next repaint. WIL: From my understanding, the request animation frame is Glimmer's run loop essentially. TORAN: I think I saw actually a discussion between someone at Ember core kind of saying in the public channel that, if you're using Embers run loop, the equivalent-ish today would be request animation frame but the point came up that there's really no way to have a different set of cues because Ember itself has many different cues in the run loop and request animation frame, as far as I know really is just one function with a single callback, where you try and fit in as much work before that repaint as you can. I don't think there's prioritization that you would get in the Ember run loop. But at the same time, I'm not sure if that's actually a requirement. I don't think request animation frame was as mature as it is today back when backburner, which is behind the scenes of what Ember run loop is using, was built years ago. ELRICK: Since Glimmer is using requests animation frame and not the Ember run loop, is it going to continue to use requests animation frame in the future or they're going to develop like a run loop equivalency for Glimmer? TORAN: That's definitely out of my depth. I know from looking inside the code, the rerender work essentially calls like a 'begin,' to say begin doing your work, which I believe is like the reconciliation type work if you have a React background, I believe. I don't know what decides to end that. If the request animation frame is truly saying, "We're at the 16 millisecond budget and we're going to quit feeding the Glimmer VM byte code instructions now because we need to go back and paint." I would guess that that is the high level narrative but I actually don't know the implementation details. ELRICK: Since Glimmer is pre-1.0, it's a place for you to experiment, try out new things, really exciting area to play around in. What kind applications do you see people building today using Glimmer and what's the good application that's a good fit for Glimmer right now for you to experiment with? TORAN: The big application that I've seen that exists is being built with Glimmer in its current form is the Glimmer Playground. The Glimmer Playground is an area to go mess around with Glimmer, if you've never used it or you just want to go [inaudible] with the basics. As far as what is an ideal application, honestly I think we're at a point where we need to push the bounds of what a purely component based library can do. I think if you could come up with some kind of basic routing story and have a mechanism to share state and bubble events, whether that's Redux or some kind of home grown service layer at some point. That would allow you, in my opinion to build just about anything. The only caveat that you're going to be missing is a ton of opinions and you're going to be paving new grounds so just be aware that happy path for any pre-1.0 is be aware that they could change anything, anytime. But that shouldn't really restrict you from making a hobby project out of it. Back to your original question, I would say building any app that you're okay to go back and rework, not necessarily reinventing Facebook or something like that with it at this moment but at the same time, it would be great if someone did in a hobby way because we need to see some of the constraints and challenges. I got playing around with it myself and noticing if I'm going to build anything with Glimmer, I've got to have a way to share state and bubble events up to the single atom at the top that allows me to share all state. I think without some experimentation, we just won't know what apps are possible. ELRICK: You've been talking a lot about Glimmer today and using Glimmer. Since Glimmer is pre-1.0, are there any limitations that people should be aware of when they're going to be going into building a new Glimmer app? TORAN: For Glimmer Redux specifically, one of the challenges that people would see and they should know about if they're going to use this little Glimmer library, is that it doesn't yet allow you to write reducers in TypeScript, which would be a little counterintuitive because if you get into Glimmer, you'll notice the big differences -- everything is in TypeScript and not JavaScript. Luckily though, I think this is really just a build tool decision. Truthfully, the spike version of this that I have where you can use TypeScript, it doesn't require any change to the Glimmer Redux library at all. In fact it's completely unchanged. The difference here is that the Rollup plugin I use needs to see a change. It's kind of weird in that way, back to my point earlier where you kind of bring your own build chain and one of the things I don't like right now, which is the reason I haven't published this TypeScript version of it is that I'm actually doing a TypeScript compile of all the reducers or middleware in the Rollup plugin. With the mass confusion right now between Broccoli, Rollup and Babel, I just don't feel really great about it. Mostly because I have not truly been in the guts of the Glimmer app build tool or the application pipeline yet and I want to be a bit more educated there before ship something, back to being a Midwest developer here. I just don't feel good about shipping something and say, "Oops, we got it wrong." I take a lot of time and I also take a lot of pride in what I am shipping so I want to have a really good story about TypeScript. It does make for a little bit of a weird experience: bouncing between Glimmer components written TypeScript and flipping back to reducer file written in JavaScript. just be aware of it and at the same time, I didn't want to completely halt shipping it because again, I think we need to actually build apps with this and a concession here being that, of course you have to write reducers in JavaScript was still enough for me personally to get some value out of building Glimmer apps and honestly, it got me building them sooner. WIL: Is there a way to use Glimmer Redux without the Rollup? Can we import something into our Glimmer app to use it or this Rollup is required? TORAN: Yeah, that's a great point. You can omit the Rollup plugin entirely. What that results in is you'll have to do some hand wiring yourself. One of the upsides or one of the benefits of this Rollup plugin that I wrote is this conventionally provides a store and redux-thunk, kind of like a happy path for people who are just not familiar with wiring up their own Redux store. If you forego this plugin, you just have to do that yourself. You may actually have to do some kind of Rollup hacking in your Glimmer app, which is the thing I want to avoid. The one in particular that I know you'd have to do is there is a Node ENV that is looking for a production setting in Redux so the first thing you have to do is use a Rollup replace plugin to replace Node ENV with Ember ENV. If you can't do that, you actually get an error in just trying to stand up your Glimmer app with Redux. ELRICK: Toran, are you giving any talks or have any books or anything that you want to get out there and talk about? TORAN: I'm not actually on speaking circuit right now. I am certainly, probably like you guys are, thrown a talk or two together for the EmberConf proposals that are now out. I think they're open until November 21st. If anyone is thinking about submitting a talk to EmberConf, this should be in next March. Now is the time to get those in and I certainly have one out there but I've got one, off the top of my head that I would certainly like to find some time and submit that's related to Glimmer. ELRICK: Cool. We had a wonderful podcast today. We touched on Glimmer Redux and Glimmer and I want to thank Toran for coming on. Thank you, Toran. TORAN: Thanks for having me, guys. The fifth time I have to be on, I don't know if that will be in 2017, though. ELRICK: Yeah, we're going to bring you back for a fifth time and I would also like to thank Wil for coming on the podcast as well. Wil, thank you. WIL: Thanks for having us, Elrick. ELRICK: Anytime. Toran, if people want to reach you, is there a particular place on Twitter or anything that people can reach out to you or email or anything? TORAN: Yeah, at GitHub, I got my email out there but also on Twitter, of course. You can reply me there. If you have a question specifically about Glimmer Redux, of course you can got to GitHub and throw an issue up there or hit me in the Redux channel on the Ember Community Slack. ELRICK: Thank you all once again for listening. This is the Frontside signing off and if you want to reach out, you can always hit us up at the Frontside.io and we always want to hear about your new project that you're working on. Thank you for listening and that's peace from the Frontside. WIL: Everybody have a good Thanksgiving!
Chase and Jonathan discuss Ember 2.15 release, a new Ember Font Awesome, the new Tom Dale blog post and more!
Mike North: @michaellnorth | mike.works Show Notes: 00:51 - Transitioning from CTO to Independent Trainer 03:37 - Customizing Content and Developing Curriculum 06:37 - Bringing a Developer Into the JavaScript Ecosystem 12:47 - Training Developers with Non-Traditional Backgrounds 16:56 - Keeping Up with “Fifth Gear” 19:27 - Developing Frontend Masters Courses 22:40 - “Progressive Web Apps” 34:37 - Web Security Resources: LinkedIn's REACH Program IndexedDB Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 79. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer at the Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me today is Elrick, also at the Frontside. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Today, we are going to be talking with Mike North, who is doing all kinds of interesting stuff as per the usual so we'll jump right in. Hey, Mike. MIKE: How is it going? I'm glad to be here. CHARLES: Last time that I saw you, I think it was about a year ago at the Wicked Good Ember Conf and we were standing on the beach, drinking scotch and talking about Fastboot but you were doing something completely and totally different then than you are now so I was wondering, we were talking the conversation before we started rolling, that your role nowadays is independent consultant and personal dev trainer. I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that move from the CTO role that you're playing at your old company to kind of moving into that independent trainer, like why and how. MIKE: Yeah, I do remember talking about Fastboot at Wicked Good Ember. It feels like things have moved quite a bit since then. I have always loved teaching developers. When I've been a team lead, it's the favorite part of my job just because I get profound satisfaction out of helping people get over these hurdles that most of the time took me a much longer time with blog posts and podcasts and incomplete examples and libraries that were out of date and Stack Overflow with half answers. I've decided to dedicate myself to trying to make it easier for people in an increasingly complex web development world to wrap their head around everything. While I was a tech lead or a CTO, I always had to split my focus between helping developers grow and something else. Oftentimes, that something else was where the deadlines were and the time pressure was. It felt a little bit like I was driving a car that only had first and fifth gear where you're like on the bleeding edge of open source and what was the latest commit to master and [inaudible]. Then like, "Oh, let's be extremely patient with this person. They've never seen promises before because they came from another programming language. Let's help them digest this at their own pace." It's this slow and patient process of building up from the fundamentals and then the bleeding edge is like, "Let's use Babel Stage 0." It was very hard for those two aspects to exist at the same time in myself so I decided I'm just going for the training side. That's really all I do these days. CHARLES: It was so, but now would you qualify that as the first gear or the fifth gear? MIKE: That's the first gear. It gets you off the ground. It takes you from stop and gets you moving and then you have to develop your own expertise beyond that. But I like to think I'm developing a really, really excellent first gear. Today for example, I'm converting a bunch of Python developers at LinkedIn who are basically the ops team. I'm teaching them Ember and JavaScript at the same time through a series of about 20 exercises over three days. That process is many weeks long without assistance so this is like, "Let's get rolling much more efficiently and quickly," than via DIY approach. CHARLES: Now, do you find you have to custom-tailor for the environment or the developers moving from like someone coming from, say C# would have a different experience than someone coming from Python? MIKE: Absolutely. When I have my material, I have sections that I can drop. If you are a C# developer, I do not have to explain conceptually what 'async' and 'await' mean. You've been working with that for a while. I probably throw up a little example in C# and then the equivalent in JavaScript to sort of create a bridge from your existing expertise into the JavaScript world. Another one -- this is very true -- is teaching Ruby developers how to use Elixir. You don't have to say, "This is a router. We have controllers. There are actions and controllers." There are so many parallels that really it's more useful to help, rather than teach things from scratch to create connections back to the expertise they already have so they're not starting from zero and they can say like, "In the Ruby world, I would think of doing XYZ." Now, I have a map in between that and this new thing. CHARLES: Obviously, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of languages and environments that you could transition to, probably more than matches your own personal experience, in doing that frontline development. What kind of research do you have to do to develop a curriculum for, say someone coming from Clojure or someone coming from Scala or something like that? Maybe that never happens. MIKE: I have a pretty, pretty broad background. My entry into programming was a subset of C and then I graduated to C++ and Java and Ruby and I used to do ASP stuff. I've written iOS apps. I feel like I have enough of a foothold into various areas like I know one JVM language. That is usually enough. If you're running a lot of Clojure, I can at least speak Java to you because odds are, you're working with that and you're seeing that and you know it. Oftentimes, I have what I need. There are situations where I can borrow something in a very cursory level. Not to rip on Scala but I have not found it valuable to make connections to that particular language for clarity and [inaudible] but I have used Haskell before and I'm not a Haskell developer but it is a pure functional language. When trying to help people understand how is this different, then the JavaScript got them running where the Ruby ends up running. It's useful to use something like that. It's a very small language, very simple and you can wrap your head around the basics. ELRICK: What are some of the particular challenges that you face when bringing in a developer outside of the JavaScript ecosystem into JavaScript since JavaScript is kind of the Wild West that you can do everything in JavaScript? What are some of the challenges you face in bringing in a new developer from Python or C or whatever that may be? MIKE: You put it very well. It is definitely the Wild West. You can do anything if you have enough [inaudible] yourself and enough power to get serious stuff done. Really, it's like the explosion in number of choices and tools, the explosion of complexity. I learned JavaScript when it was something that you sprinkle on top of your Rails app for a little interactivity, a little animation on a screen or something like that. I was lucky to learn it at that point in time when that was the norm because I've been able to gradually accumulate for more than ten years now. The tooling like using Grunt, using Golf, using Brunch and then stepping up to other more sophisticated build tools. I learned those one by one in the context of real projects. Now, it's like the mountain is so high, people don't know where to start so that's a big challenge for developers. To throw them into a meaningful project like if you asked a mean JavaScript developer, not angry but the average JavaScript developer, they're like maybe -- CHARLES: I should dare to say that the average JavaScript developer is mean. MIKE: A little bit and probably maybe [inaudible] with me as well, depending on [inaudible]. But they're going to spin up some project with webpack and Babel and all of these tools. If that's your first exposure to the language and to working with the language, you're operating in an environment that you don't understand. Research shows that is the less effective option there to slowly building things up over time. I spend a lot of time going back to the basics and making sure we're not working with promises until we've explicitly focused on them, chained a couple together, managed errors and then now, we can work with Fetch. We're not going to jump into that and throw ourselves into this deep end of the pool. We want to incrementally build up skills. It takes a little bit longer but when you have that understanding as you're learning, you get a lot more out of it because anything that you can't get a grip on to as you learn it, it sort of just evaporates into thin air and don't retain that, even if you kind of fill in those holes later. CHARLES: Yeah, it could be so hard too. Actually, this has been an experience that I've been having, I would say almost for the past two years, as the tools advance, not only you are starting from a place of not understanding but the tools themselves do not teach you. I've had two moments where I got really mad. One actually was on an Ember project and one was a project using webpack but it was the same fundamental problem where in one I was actually working with someone who was very new to JavaScript and an error happens and the stack trace was some just big bundled garbage that gave no insight at all. MIKE: In vendor.js. CHARLES: Yes, in vendor.js or in bundle JS. It was like, "How is anyone supposed to learn?" The most fundamental thing about working with Ruby or working with Node or working with anything is you get a stack trace. MIKE: Debugging is really hard. I think it just takes a little time reaching out to people who are experiencing the Stockholm Syndrome like most of the time, JavaScript developer. We all are working with Ember CLI and webpack. I'm not ripping on these tools but we're used to that complexity in our lives. When we see that stack trace, we're like, "Oh, well. I probably need a source map. I'll make sure that that's there. It's natural that I'm debugging a file that the browser is not really seeing like it mapped back to my source code debugging." This is natural to us. But if you put that in front of a developer who hasn't been living under those circumstances, the number of times they raised their hand is like, "What the hell is this?" It is just amazing and it really helps. I've reset my expectations to what a normal programming experience should be and JavaScript does not provide that today. That is really challenging to keep someone in the midst of all that. CHARLES: I feel like it's hard and do you think we'll ever achieve that? Or is it just going to be a constant hamster wheel of progress versus the tooling to educate what progress has been made or to communicate what progress has been made? MIKE: I think the tooling is fine but it's just that we have a gap in terms of learning experience. We just need really -- I'm not voluntary here because I've got a ridiculous backlog -- a couple long tail horses working with vanilla JavaScript, rendering some stuff on the screen, maybe a course of React but no JSX yet, just create component. A couple of things to fill in a gap between where maybe code school leaves off and where you are expected to be by the time you start interviewing for a spot as frontend developer on a team but there's a huge chasm right now. There's the intro guides and then there's professional life and trying to bridge the gap between those is ridiculously a challenge right now due to the huge ramp up of complexity from like, "Let's do some stuff in the console," to, "Running transpile JSX code with async [inaudible]. We've got regenerator in there to polyfill generator functions." There's so much in your average JavaScript at these days. CHARLES: Your work that you're doing at LinkedIn, part of it is trying to bring and train developers who come from more nontraditional backgrounds, including a lot of things like boot camps. What is your experience of their experience coming in? Are boot camps doing the right thing? Are they teaching the right things? Are they trying to kind of parachute them on top of that mountain? Or do you find that they're just at the base camp, so to speak? Because it sounds like your approach is like you've got to really start from fundamentals so that you can understand the layers of complexity if you're going to, someday stand on them. MIKE: I think a lot of the boot camps are doing an excellent job. These days, the employees we have at LinkedIn who come from boot camps, I would bet on them against your average MIT grad every time, just because their education is so practical. It's amazing that in the world of computer science, the stuff that you're taught in school is a little bit farther removed than one would expect, compared to the stuff that we do every day in our jobs -- building real apps. I do not need to know in my day-to-day work at LinkedIn how an operating system works or how to build a device driver. This is a little bit too fundamental. It's the wrong abstraction for practical everyday work for most people. Where in these boot camps, they focus completely on the practical. In fact, I've been fortunate enough to get involved with the REACH program here at LinkedIn, where we hire explicitly people from nontraditional backgrounds like boot camps. They're not all from boot camps but many of them are. We just hired 30 of them in March. The pilot program, I think we've hired two or three in our New York office and it just went really well. It started like, "Let's double down and double down again and double that again." This time, we're doing 30 and I expect there will be a new round next year where we poll even more. The idea is we take these REACH candidates and pair them with a mentor engineer for six months. At the end of that six months, we had to make a decision as to like this person at the level we expect of an entry level software engineering hire. From what I've seen, we're doing really well at preparing these folks and they're unbelievably valuable to the teams that they've been placed in. ELRICK: That's amazing. That's very interesting. Is there a standardized curriculum thing that each mentor will follow to get this person after they entered his REACH program and then ramp them up or is it like each person just goes and looks at what the person knows and then ramps them up accordingly. MIKE: I'd say, it's a mix of both. We have a set of technical trainings for them or we'll have a testing expert from within the company and teach a little testing seminar to them. There's that standardized curriculum there. But the nature of being taught by boot camp or teaching yourself is that you're going to have holes in your knowledge and it's not often predictable where those holes will be. That's why we make sure we do this mentorship very explicitly and over a long period of time so that if it turns out that you never learned about how to work with tree-data structures. That was not part of the go-no/go decision that brought you on but we should probably, at least get you there. At least to the point where if you're traversing a down tree and you're like parent and child, what is this, what do you mean by leaf-level node. This is stuff that is actually meaningful for web developer in some cases. CHARLES: In the context of the work that you're doing with the REACH program but also touching on something that we talked about at the beginning about the first gear and the fifth gear, part of generating a curriculum is still being in contact with what's up in the fifth gear right because ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're working with people who are in first gear or looking to get a smooth transition in the first gear but at the same time, you want to set them up and you want to be in contact for what's in fifth gear now is going to be first gear in five years. How do you feed that in? MIKE: I'm fortunate to have a great team that I work with here. This group that I roll up to in LinkedIn, they're experts and you probably know of like Chris Epstein and Tom Dale and Steph Petter. A 15-minute coffee break with one of these people is enough to keep [inaudible]. Sometimes, it's a little bit like drinking from a fire hose because it's like I spend an hour with a student trying to help them understand like, "This is why a Promise is useful. Here is the callback equivalent," and then now, "Let's dive in to Glimmer. Why this track annotation is the right way to go for automatic updating." It sends me for little bit of a loop sometimes but it is definitely keeping me up to date. The other factor, of course is when you've been doing this for a while. History sort of repeats itself so a lot of the patterns that we're seeing today, I've seen somewhere else. I was working with code splitting when I was writing Dojo JavaScript code years and years ago. I was defining my module layers in a very explicit way. I had to do that. I didn't have done a webpack that would figure out, put these splits are. But I have that experience to look back to and for that reason, it is not often that an entirely new concept comes along. Oftentimes, they're like amazing refinements on things that how to smell like stuff that we've used before in the software engineering world. CHARLES: Yeah or here's something that has never been used, is very prevalent in these other context which we're going to apply here. MIKE: Exactly. CHARLES: And like, "Oh, my goodness. It's a perfect solution." In addition to the work that you're doing with LinkedIn and developing those training curricula and stuff, you're also doing some work for Frontend Masters in an area that's very exciting, I think to me. I'm sure it's exciting to you because you decided to throw a whole lot of time into developing a course for it. That's in the development of progressive web apps, which for me has been like this thing that I'm so curious about but I'm like a kitten playing with a little yarn ball. I want to dive in but I'm just going to tap it with my paws right now. MIKE: Yeah, it's a really interesting area and I think that even if you're not using progressive web technologies today, it's one of these things that sort of reinvigorates your energy for JavaScript's future and what may be possible soon. Steve and I have put together this amazing progressive web app course, which has I think like 18 short examples of iteratively building up a grocery shopping app. If you've used InstaCard or something like that, we start out with app already built and it's like a single-page app as doing everything that you would expect. After a few of the exercises, it works offline. After a few more, you can add stuff to the card and background sync, push it to the API when you come back online. We get deep, deep, deep into service workers. That's one of the areas that my work at LinkedIn and my teaching with Frontend Masters overlaps really well because I've been heavily involved in creating our service worker for LinkedIn.com. I may be able to take some of what we've learned here and disseminate it a little bit so that, hopefully fewer people have to learn the hard way. It's best to keep things simple at first and add on functionality. I'm about to cross like the [inaudible]. This is my favorite just because the example turned out to fit so well and in particular, on Frontend Masters, I think Steve and I have had contrasting teaching styles but they complement each other so well because I'm like the 'melt people's brains' instructor. I love to throw people exercises that are like 120% of what they can do and it's going to hurt, just like when you're lifting weights at the gym, like you're going to beg for mercy but we're going to make you strong. Then Steve, just listening to him, even with I am in the classroom and he is teaching me Electron. He's so energizing and he's really funny too but not in an overtly cracking jokes kind of way. He's just so fun when he teaches. I think it is a really good combination just because things lined up just by luck and through hard work and just the right way out of a couple of important areas. CHARLES: Now, just for people who might not be familiar with the term progressive web apps, what does it encompass? Do people actually call them PWAs? MIKE: No. I'm going to start, though. I like that. That carries very well over a video chat or something. Nobody knows how to spell that: P-U-A? P-W-U-A? It is a rejection of the old idea that in order to take advantage of some web technology, it has to be supported in all of the browsers that we need to support. The idea here is to hold as a core tenet of our design practices, the idea of progressive enhancement, meaning we serve up a basic experience and where we can take on these superhero features, like the ability to work offline, the ability to receive push notifications, we go ahead and do so. If your browser doesn't support this, that's unfortunate. No big deal. You still get a good experience. But if you're using a very recent version of Chrome or Safari or you have a new Android device, these browsers can take advantage of sophisticated metadata or sped up a background process that can serve up data to your app and your app doesn't even know that there's something between it and the API. That is the idea of progressive web apps -- apps that become superheroes where possible and they still work and provide a great basic experience for antiquated browsers like IE8 and Safari. CHARLES: The idea theoretically, you could work without any JavaScript or whatsoever. What's the ground floor there? MIKE: That is ideal. I think server-side rendering, which is what you're talking about there, even if JavaScript is not working, just HTML and CSS will provide a basic experience. That's great but that's not a modern browser technology thing. If you have JavaScript turned off in today's Chrome, like Chrome 60, versus IE9, both of them working with them without JavaScript. What we're really talking about here is app-like characteristics, where we are pushing web technology to the point where you will swear that this came from an App Store. It's on your home screen. It's running in the full screen. You're getting push notifications. It works offline and you can store a large amount of structured data locally on the device. All of the stuff sounds like the list of reasons to reach for native mobile technology because the mobile web is not good enough. But in fact, it has a feature set of this family of progressive web technologies. It's really like a web app that is so good and so modern that it feels and looks just like a native mobile app. CHARLES: That sounds so hard to do right. MIKE: Well, it is now, just because what we have to work with can be thought of it like a basket of ingredients, rather than a solution that we drop in. But over time, as more people start working with these ingredients, I think we're going to see a lot of consensus around the best patterns to use and boilerplate code will fall away as we can identify that the set is in fact commonly needed and not a beautiful and unique snowflake. CHARLES: Because it seems like the thing that I always struggle with is not wanting to put the critical eggs in the basket of a superhero feature or have you being able to provide an alternative if the superhero feature doesn't exist. Some features, if you just don't have it, that's fine. You can turn it on if the capabilities available but certain features are very critical to the functioning of your application. I'm casting about for an example and I'm not finding one immediately but -- MIKE: Offline is a great one. That fits pretty neatly. If you're using an older browser or if you're using Safari, which by the way, I should stop ripping on Safari. For the listeners out there, we saw a commit lend in webkit, where service for APIs are beginning to be stubbed out. No longer do we have to look at length. Service worker, enthusiasm and Safari has got it in the five-year plan. There was motion last week. We haven't seen motion in ages so thank you Safari Team. Thank you. Keep up the good work. CHARLES: Is there a discipline of Safari-ologists who monitor the movement of Safari to bring this news? MIKE: Of course, we monitor it because right now, Chrome and Firefox, they are pretty much hopeful in terms of supporting this modern stuff. Opera supports this modern stuff. Samsung's fork of Chromes support this modern stuff. Especially when we think about the mobile web, you got to worry about Android and you got to worry about iOS Safari and right now, like we've talked about these progressive web apps, you don't get that superhero experience on an iPhone or an iPad. Once we crossed that threshold, this is going to have a breakaway level of adoption because there are no more excuses. Essentially, for a mobile web experience, you can send push notifications to the user. That is huge. That is probably at the top of the list for why some people use native apps, instead of mobile web. The more we can do that, the more we can make it so that a great LinkedIn experience can be delivered to your phone without having to install a binary. I just have to update Facebook the other day and it was over 100 megabytes. Why do we need to do that? You should be able to make it work with less. I'm sure that there's some great stuff in there. Apparently, Snapchat filters are popular but I don't need this. Can we code split that away or something because I don't want to have to download that? I can't even download it on the cell network because it's over 100 megabytes. It's really exciting to see the web start to compete with this heavy mobile experience because now I think is ready. CHARLES: Now, when you talk about push notifications, you're talking about being able to send things to my lock screen. MIKE: To your lock screen while the browser is not on the foreground, while the app is not open. Essentially, you're installing a lightweight process that runs in the background. It receives events that originate from your server and the user can tap on them and then your little lightweight worker process in the background decides what to do when that tap happens, like open up the app, take them to this URL or something like that. That is a game changer. That's huge. Or background sync like the user added some items to their cart and then they lock their phone and now, their plane has landed. That's why they were offline and they get back on the internet and without them having to touch their phone, now we can push that data to the server and everything's in sync, rather than like, "Please revisit your app. We need to run some JavaScript code to flush IndexedDB or API." It still feels like a hack at that point. This is a fluid experience. ELRICK: Wow. This is exciting for me as I don't have any more space on my cellphone, thanks to all the apps that I have to install to do various things on the web. MIKE: You're not alone. CHARLES: Yeah, it's crazy and just the amount of code sharing that you can have, I guess that doesn't happen much these days on the web where you've got these popular libraries out on CDNs so that the chances are that you've got jQuery 1.2.1 on your cache, you've got 16 versions of jQuery so most of your web applications don't have to do that. I guess we kind of do the equivalent of statically linking everything. MIKE: There is a benefit near that where we have imperative code managing our cache, instead of just relying on the HTTP cache or app cache, if you have a vendor.js file that is not changing over six months, there is no reason you should be re-downloading that every time you deploy your app or letting the browser evict that, just because memory pressure is high from Google image search results or something like that. We really don't have much control over it. But with a service worker, we can say, "Hold on to this," or maybe like prefetch the next version of the app so that we're going to show you the old version now but the next time you refresh, here's the new version available instantly. It's downloaded in the background and it's like click to update your version, like it's already here waiting for you. That's huge. That's amazing. CHARLES: That is amazing. Although the complexity skeptic in me is thinking, "Oh, my goodness. Now, we've got all this state that we're storing on the server. We have to have data migrations." We need some sort of migration mechanism for our clients-side state and perhaps some transaction and rollback in case you're not able to successfully migrate your data. It sounds like a lot of fun but I'm just imagining we really are getting started here. Has there been any work on that aspect? MIKE: If you've ever worked with IndexedDB, it does have a concept of migrations. Basically, the data you store on a device has a version and when you read in what's called a file but it's a database, when you read that in, the first thing you do is you basically bring it up to date incrementally. You'll bring it in, you're looking for version nine like your code wants version nine. What you see is version two because your user hasn't been at your site for six months and you're going to take it from two to three to four to five to six. Each of those, essentially constitutes a migration. We just have to apply the same principles of forward-compatible changes. The escape hatch here is remember it's progressive enhancement so if we had to destroy everything, fall back to a basic experience and start from scratch, like discard all of our data, it's really being held there as an optimization. Some people use this immutable caching strategy or basically, like rolling out a new service worker version constitutes for the most part. Any data that wasn't created by a user you're going to discard that and you're going to fetch it new. You don't have to worry about like, "Crap. This six month-old thing is still plaguing half our users and we can't get rid of it," like you can have [inaudible]. But you should really check out this course. It is simpler than you think and what we demonstrate is not a trivial like hello service worker. It is taking in a classic single page app, making it completely offline, having it exist on the home screen and I think the service worker ends up being no more than 100 lines of code. It's not too bad. ELRICK: I'm definitely going to check that out because my progressive web app journey is still on just service workers. MIKE: That's very [inaudible], though. ELRICK: Yeah. I'm definitely checking it out. Sounds like a really fantastic course. MIKE: I've been focusing a lot on this area and another one is security. The reason I picked these two is because developers are not really going to learn about these on the critical path to [inaudible] plus they learn about them the wrong way. As the JavaScript world is becoming radically more complex with each passing year, I've tried to target some of my efforts towards areas where they are not getting as much attention as I'd like to see, just because we have to focus somewhere. Obviously, getting the app out and figuring out how to make the build tools work for us. Without that, we can't do anything at all. One of the courses that's coming in September for Frontend Masters is a one-day web security workshop or we'll do with like cross-site scripting, how to work with certificates because if you start playing with HTTP/2 -- the next generation of HTTP -- you will need to generate some certificates for development at least today you need to. I've seen some amazingly smart developers get this dangerously wrong to the point where they compromise their own machine and anything that's on that machine, just by trying to set up dev environment. Typically, I'm an optimist but when it comes to this PWA stuff and security, I am paranoid. I feel like, we as a community need to get together and have the discipline to brush up in these areas so that as we introduce all of this new stuff, we don't end up opening a bunch of holes. Nowhere near the same rigor as put into frontend compared to backend and now, the line is blurred. Right now, we're server-side rendering so our code is running on the backend somewhere so injecting something can really mess things up in a bigger way. ELRICK: Yeah, I think that's a fundamental characteristic of someone does going to be involved in security paranoia. You have to be paranoid about everything. MIKE: Yep. I don't trust anything. CHARLES: It's important to make those things easy because I'm definitely fall more into the hippie camp like, "Everything is going to be fine. Let's trust everybody," which is I know is totally unrealistic. But then you get into these secure technologies and you learned enough of it just to get the task that you're going to do and then you forget. SSL is a great example. Over the course of my career, I've learned how SSL certs have worked probably, at least 10 times. ELRICK: Right, [inaudible] you had to set it up in production. CHARLES: Yes, exactly and then I promptly forget about it, never worry about it again and then the next time I'm like, "How did that work? What's this trust chain? What?" ELRICK: Exactly. I read a study from Carnegie Mellon a couple of years ago that showed developers observe security best practices dramatically less than the general public and the general public is not good. Do you know what I'm talking about when I say a certificate warning and a browser, there's big scary red screen saying like something is wrong here? Before the Chrome team put some effort into improving that, 70% of people would click through those and proceed anyway. After their improvements, over a third of people still clicked through and that number when you just look at Canary versions of browsers, that number is actually considerably higher close to 50% of our developers. We're trained by every broken certificate system that exists on the internet like the legitimate ones or maybe some things just expired. They're training people to just click straight through these things and as a result, it is terrifyingly easy to mess with people. We have to remember as developers, our machines, those have the private deploy keys and those have the SSH keys to commit code to GitHub, we have to treat that like it's a private data. It's really, really important that we make it easy and that we make sure that that easy path is also very safe. CHARLES: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much Mike for coming by and talking with us. We touched on a lot of subjects but I feel like I certainly learned a lot. MIKE: Yeah, thanks. It's been so much fun talking with you this morning. CHARLES: Anybody who wants to go and check out those courses, they're on Frontend Masters. Now correct me if I'm wrong, you've obviously got the one on progressive web apps or PWAs. If it doesn't work offline, it's faux-PWA. MIKE: Yes, I like that. That's going to become a t-shirt sometime soon. CHARLES: The fundamentals of progressive web app development, which is now released if I understand correctly. MIKE: Members have access to everything, you can watch the raw video now. The edited course will be available later this year. CHARLES: Okay, and that's with Steve Kenny. I am very much looking forward to looking at that and learning more about it. Then you've also got ones coming up in September on TypeScript web security in Visual Studio Code. MIKE: Yep and members can watch that as a live-streamed event. Frontend Masters even ask people to watch the comment stream so you'll have a proxy question asker or hand raiser in the room. It's really a great experience to be part of a live thing. CHARLES: Oh, man. That sounds awesome. Then if you are obviously doing your independent consulting and if people want to get in contact, how would they do that? MIKE: You can find me on Twitter, @MichaelLNorth or you can visit my website, Mike.Works and I have all of the courses I teach and outlines and I can just open up a little chat bubble on the lower right, ask me any questions that you have. I am really passionate about teaching people. If you like that's useful for your team, please reach out and I'd love to talk. CHARLES: Fantastic. Thanks, Mike and thanks everybody for listening to us. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always do that. We're on Twitter at @TheFrontside and email, Contact@Frontside.io. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Elrick and I will see you all later. MIKE: Thank you so much. ELRICK: Bye.
Chase and Jonathan talk about an Interview with Tom Dale about Glimmer, the now freely available EmberScreencasts, and a great blog post by Brian Sipple about testing conventions.
Alex Matchneer: @machty | FutureProof Retail Show Notes: 01:07 - The Introduction of ember-concurrency 02:15 - What is ember-concurrency? What are the problems it solves? 05:37 - Why not use observables or other alternatives? 09:49 - Could observables be used in conjunction with ember-concurrency? 12:16 - Simple Made Easy 14:23 - Coming Soon to ember-concurrency 16:04 - Communicating Changes in State; Glimmer Reference Primitives 23:09 - Using References 29:31 - Submitting RFCs; Adding Pipelines 32:10 - Pipeline Use Cases Resources: ember-concurrency The Frontside Podcast Episode 007: The Ember Router with Alex Matchneer The Frontside Podcast Episode 019: Origin Stories with Tom Dale and Alex Matchneer Introduction to ember-concurrency by Alex Matchneer from Global Ember Meetup RxJS Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy Glimmer.js redux-saga Lauren Tan's RFC: Cancellable task pipelines Railway Oriented Programming Apache Kafka Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 67. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and podcast host-in-training. With me today also is Elrick Ryan, a developer here at The Frontside. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on, Charles. CHARLES: Now, we have with us today someone who we love to have on the show. Everybody probably already know him. I know the first time I actually heard about him was when we had him on the podcast the first time, I was like, "Who the hell is this guy?" But since then, he's become one of my favorite developers, just with all of the things that he's done, from Router.js to more recently ember-concurrency. We have Alex Matchneer on the program. ALEX: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. CHARLES: Hey, Alex and you know what? I pronounced your name right this time. First time out of the gate. Boom! ALEX: Nice. Which one did you go with? Matchnear? Matchner? [Laughter] ALEX: I really actually don't even know which ones correct anymore. CHARLES: Was it about a year ago that you first introduced ember-concurrency? ALEX: Yeah, I had a really embarrassing introduction of it at an Ember Meetup in January before it was really done and I just kind of botched it and didn't really introduce why it was even solving problems. Then a month later, I had some time to refine it, driven by the feel of that embarrassment. I guess around February of last year, it's been pretty much in its present state. CHARLES: I remember when it came out. I must've seen the non-botched version because I remember hitting the ground running with it and being able to refactor all of this code. I definitely know that I got the honed version because you provided in that initial blog post a whole host of examples like what are the symptoms, what are the cases where it solves and then before presenting the solution. I think that was great because I didn't even realize that I had a lot of pain. I didn't realize that at all. I didn't realize I had a problem but then you were very, very elegantly packaged the problem with the solution which is always great because otherwise, it's just complaining. Maybe we should talk a little bit about -- I don't think we've officially talked about -- ember-concurrency. Even though it's been out for quite a while, the way that you model these concurrent processes using the stack is just pretty incredible. Do you want to just very briefly touch on what the problem is and what have lead you to this solution? ALEX: Sure. It's a little bit difficult to sort of succinctly say what ember-concurrency is because it kind of hits them like five different separate but kind of related but not really pain points. At its core, it's just like a task primitive and it's definitely not the first library to ever introduce that the JavaScript, I think particularly when the generator function syntax was introduced into the spec, I think a few years back. Dave Herman who's also known as, I think a Little Calculist. I think he works on the TC39. I always get those groups a little confused in my head but he introduced a task.js library that let you use the generator function syntax and then lets you yield Promises to sort of pause where you were in that task and then continue when it resolved. It had some support for cancellation. It played well with Promises and I brought that to Ember in a way that fit really nicely with Ember more than it probably does or will with other frameworks like React or Vue. By bringing it to Ember, basically if you're implementing any feature that involves async, if it's a button that needs to show that it's been clicked while you're waiting for some response to come back from the server, instead of using Promises, instead of using actions, here's an ember-concurrency task. It makes it easier to express that operation you're trying to do and it makes it really easy to drive your UI with state that comes from the state of that operation -- Is the test still running? Is your form still submitting? -- Rather than having to manage a bunch of mutable flags and properties on a component or state yourself and likely get it wrong. CHARLES: Right. Essentially asynchronous processes is like a state machine and before, we were kind of managing that state machine by hand but I think what's so brilliant about this task-oriented programming, I guess is maybe a way to put it because I really think that some of these ideas are universal and not specific to ember-concurrency. But it almost like it uses the stack, just your normal programming stack to track where you are inside of a process, rather than what it felt like what we were doing before, which was managing this state machine by hand, if that makes any sense. ALEX: It does make sense a lot of sense. A lot of people ask me, if you're going to go into sort of async territory, why aren't you using something like RxJS? Rx is observables and kind of popularized by the Netflix crowd who did a bunch of presentations on them. It's super popular these days. But one of the things I really like about RxJS or at least one of the realizations I had is that I think you're still building a state machine. You're just expressing it using different primitives. In Rx, you're still building a state machine but in Rx, they make you think about it in terms of streams and events firing over time. In ember-concurrency, also you're still building a state machine but you're using the generator function syntax and the call stack like you mentioned as another way of expressing that state machine but with a lot less code. CHARLES: Right. I was actually talking to someone about ember-concurrency just a few days ago and they were saying the same thing, "Why not use observables," and at least from my perspective, maybe I didn't quite understand the question because I feel like observables are kind of only one of the concerns that ember-concurrency addresses. I'm curious when people talk about alternatives to ember-concurrency and put observables forward, maybe I don't understand it because I usually think you might be able to use observables to register the currently executing task state and every time it changes, emit a new state and is then observed by your observable subscribers. But modeling the actual process using observables does seem weird to me because with observables, they seem like very purely functional and not heavily stateful. I don't really have that much experience with it. What's meant by using observables as an alternative? Maybe we can get more into those like how you would construct a stream or something like that? ALEX: I think the canonical Rx example of something that's elegantly expressed in Rx that would be really hard to do in just normal JavaScript, if you weren't able to use observables, is that typeahead search where as you type characters into a text field, it's already beginning to hit the server and see what you might be searching for so it can drive the state of some drop down menu. That's probably the most popular example out there because one of the things it demonstrates is that if you want to debounce, you want to allow for the user to stop typing for like 200 milliseconds before it actually hits the servers so you don't overwhelm your server, then just add a debounce operator. You've basically transformed a stream of keyboard events into that text field into something that only kicks off after it hasn't gotten an event for 200 milliseconds. If you already had a working prototype in vanilla JS and you had to debounce it, you've got to move a bunch of stuff around, you've got extract something into a function, you've got to deal with cancellation. But all those things are kind of pretty elegantly built into Rx and if you can train yourself to think in terms of streams of events, that inspires you to think about where else you could apply that in your app. I think a lot of people have felt that it's like winning, most powerful abstraction that you could think about. That's why things like cycle.js are a thing or redux-observable or just anybody working with observables in the Netflix territory. I personally find [inaudible]. If you're going to express certain processes, Rx is the way to go but it has drawbacks which is it is really hard to learn. It took me a very long time and I'm pretty good at it but if you're going to adopt Rx in your code base, then a new developer comes on, it's going to be a pretty long time. In my experience, sharing some of the Rx code I've written with fellow very talented developer, it takes a really long time to explain how to invert your thinking and think of things in terms of events. If you can get to that point, more power to you but what I found with ember-concurrency stuff is you don't have to completely invert your thinking and think of everything in terms of events and streams of events. You can use this task primitive which feels really pretty close to the code you're already writing but gives you a lot of the safety guarantees and just makes it really easy to use this derived state to drive templates. Rx is a powerful paradigm and sometimes you need that sort of event-driven push based model but I think when people wonder why aren't you just using observables, they haven't really grasped how easy and familiar it is to use task and get it right on the first try and with a lot less code. CHARLES: Right. You're able to leverage the fact that I understand what a JavaScript function looks like and the sequencing is implicit by just the order in which you were numerate the steps, right? ALEX: Right. Because I think that Rich Hickey of Clojure popularized the divide between simple versus easy and Simple Made Easy is one of his popular talks that everyone should probably -- CHARLES: It's a great talk. Yeah. ELRICK: Do you see an area where observables could be used in conjunction with ember-concurrency? ALEX: It's kind of. It's been hard for me to find that use case. Probably, there's a handful of use cases where maybe it's a little awkward to think about to have something that would be elegantly handled in Rx would be model using tasks but it really hasn't struck me enough in some of the apps that I'm building, to really try and flesh that out. CHARLES: I would be curious to see a side by side comparisons. I build a lot of auto completes using ember-concurrency. I built a lot of asynchronous processes using ember-concurrency. What would that look like using nothing but Rx and just be able to have it on the left-hand side of the paper, then Rx on the right hand side of the paper are easy. ALEX: I'd be very surprised if you could find an Rx example that is less code than the task equivalent because as much as I think the autocomplete example is the best canonical example of Rx, once you actually start making something that's production-ready, you want to start driving the button state while it's running or to show a loading indicator. When you start deriving other observables off of the source observable which is the user typing into the text field, you start having to worry about, "I'm dealing with a cold observable. If I create another stream based on it, it might double subscribe and I might kick off two things. I actually want to use a published.ref version of the stuff." To actually get away from a toy example into something that's actually production-ready, requires a lot of code. From my own conversations with the people working on Rx, there's a lot of people that are working on it and they're pragmatic about it and don't think that you have to be just purist functional all the way. But when they actually ship production code, they usually resort to using like the do operator. With Rx observables, which is basically an escape hatch to let you do mutations and side effects in what is supposed to be this monadic functional thing. If the paradigm is breaking that quickly to do production code, I'd wonder if maybe there is something better out there. I just kind of keep that in mind but I'd definitely think there should be a bake-off or comparison of how you do things in both the task paradigm and observable paradigm but I think you'd find that in most cases, just do a lot more with a task, with a lot less code. CHARLES: I want to go back to the point you were about to make about Simple Made Easy. ALEX: On the divide, ember-concurrency is very easy. I still choose easy. In the case of reservable, I'm constantly choosing easy over simple and then it always helps me out because I've made that decision. I think most people inspired by Rich Hickey from the Clojure community, would look at ember-concurrency and be like, "At a task that combines derive state and does five different things seems kind of gross. Why don't you just use observables," and the result of that if you follow it through is that you end up writing a bunch of observable code that is a mess in streams and going in different directions and you've written something that's really hard to understand, even if it's seasons Rx developers looking at the code. It's just very easy to write things that are tangled. CHARLES: It's always good to have simplicity but also a system that simple without ease, I think is far less useful because like I said, it's always going to be a tradeoff between simple and easy but the problem is if your system is too simple, then it means that you're shouldering your day-to-day programming task or shouldering the complexity and you have this emergent complexity that you just can't shake because your primitives are just too simple. You could be programming in assembly language or something like that. That's really simple. You need to be able to construct simple primitives on top of simple primitives so for your immediate need, you have something that is both simple and easy, if that's ever possible. Certainly, ember-concurrency is easy and I think it just means there's maybe work to do in trying to tease apart the different concerns because like you said, there are five. But in real complex systems, there are five bajillions, maybe teasing apart those individual concerns that is composed out of simple primitives. I'm sure you've thought about that a little bit of how do I separate this and make these tasks compose a little bit better and things like that. ALEX: This is a nice segue because it might tie into some of the work that's going to be going into ember-concurrency in the next few months. A big theme of EmberConf is actually, a lot of people are joking that it should just be called GlimmerConf because a lot of it was talking about how Glimmer is going to be this composable subset of Ember, like Glimmer is going to be the rendering layer and then there might be a Glimmer router and a bunch of these Glimmer components that once you npm install them, you get Ember. Glimmers is a chance to think about Ember as a bunch of components working together under a really nice rendering layer. There's definitely some interest in bringing ember-concurrency in thinking what is so-called Glimmer-concurrency going to look like. Part of thinking about that is going to mean teasing apart some of these details as you were just saying. I don't have a lot of specifics to give right now, just that there is a lot of interest in making sure at the very early on, there is some sort of Glimmer-concurrency equivalent. Generally speaking, as part of that process is the question of how do we bring these magical ember-concurrency parameters to just Node or just vanilla JavaScript in general. Perhaps you could use these kinds of tasks on a server and in other environments. I think there's some questions of the way the ember-concurrency bundles together derived state with the actual tasks runner, are you actually going to use that derived state in the server setting? I think some of these pieces are going to have to come apart a little bit. I don't have very concrete ideas for how that's all going to look in the end. Just that I have faith that it will happen pretty easily and the result of it is going to be something that fits pretty nicely into Glimmer as well. CHARLES: Yeah, I hope so. It certainly seems like one of the core issues right because Glimmer-concurrency really should be universal. It should be some -- I don't want to prescribe your work for you -- ALEX: I don't mind. CHARLES: That wouldn't be cool. I mean, Glimmer is very stripped down. You have a very little bit on top of a raw JavaScript environment so if you're going to go there, it'll makes sense. What is this concurrent process builder look like using nothing but JavaScript? It seems like one of the hardest problems is to disentangle it from Ember object because the way that it currently computes that derive state is very intertwined with Ember object. You know the details of this more than I do but it seems like that's one of the biggest challenges is how do you communicate those changes in state without using that? That what I was thinking, it would be a good case for using observable for ember-concurrency, although not for probably the reason that people are thinking, which is for task composition and stuff but I'm very curious. ALEX: Likely the first stab at that direction would probably be using something similar, if not exactly these Glimmer reference primitives. Maybe it is worth talking about that. References are one of the core primitives that's used by Glimmer and it represents a value that might change over time and it's a value that can be lazily gotten, whereas observables, you have something that's firing events every time something changes and it makes the whole pipeline process it right then and there. With references, when something changes, you just tell the world like something's dirty. Then at a later time, maybe when in a request animation frame or some point where it actually makes sense to get the latest values, then it goes through and finds out everything that changes, does a single rerender. What it means is that you don't have the observe recode that's firing every time some value has changed. It's one of the guiding abstractions in Glimmer that makes it possible for it to be so fast and performant. It is very likely that a vanilla version of what ember-concurrency does uses references because those are already separate from the Ember object model and actually are used today in conjunction with Ember object model with the Glimmer that works with Ember today. I think that's probably, to me a first step. Clearly the reference attraction has worked wonders for Glimmer. I prefer to probably use that than observables and the push-based. CHARLES: Observables or something else. That is really, really interesting because there's nothing like vanilla JavaScript programming these days, like the equivalent of a Haskell thunk where you're just passing these things around but you're not actually using them until you actually want to pull a value. At that point, you kick off the whole chain of computation required to get that one value that you need. But it immediately brings to mind and I don't know if this is of concern to you but I was very, very enamored of Ember objects back in the day, in 2012. I was like, "Wow, this is amazing. This solves every problem that I've had." It has been a great companion and I've built some really great stuff on top of it. But now it's definitely turned into baggage. I think it's baggage for libraries that I've written and we're talking about it in the context of it being baggage here and being making it more available to the JavaScript community so I worry a little bit about Glimmer references. Would they possibly turn into something like that and could you counteract that by maybe trying to evangelize them to the wider JavaScript community like, "Here's a new reactive primitive," so that we don't end up in an eddy of the JavaScript community, do you think there's value in trying to say, "There should be some standard in the same way of observable, which is an emerging standard is for eager reactivity, have some lazy reactivity standard," or maybe it's too early for that. That might be a way of future-proofing or getting insurance for the future so you can say, "We can confidently build systems on top of this primitive." ALEX: If the worry is something based on Glimmer reference as it's going to turn into the same baggage or [inaudible] or whatever, that maybe Ember object has turned into some apps, some applications, some libraries. I'm not sure. I guess I don't really see that happening and I know that it's already gotten some validation from some of the people that have worked on Rx. In fact, a very useful primitives for certain kinds of workloads. As much as evangelism certainly helps. It's already off to a much better start than this all-powerful, god object that you can only interact with if you're using .get and .set functions. It's very lightweight. What I'm trying to say here is that there's UI workloads and then there's server-driven workloads and using Rx for both cases means that Rx suffers as a library because in the UI workload, you want something like references where you want to let a bunch of things change and then update stuff in one pass just a tick later or later in the micro task queue. But in Rx, they make you think about things in event-driven way, which might make sense for servers and stream processing but it's ugly when you want to actually build UIs with it. I think if we pay due respect to the fact these workloads are pretty different, I think the reference is way better of an abstraction for things that are UI-centric. They're simple and their performant and I think it's often much better foot than Ember object which is kind of bloated and huge and very hard to optimize. CHARLES: Right. I like that because you have to be precise with the server side things but ironically, with the references, you only care about the state at the point at which you observe it -- when the user observes it, not when the code observes it. The user observes stuff with every animation frame and there can be any number of intermediate states that you can just throw away and you don't care about. You don't need to compute them. I think what you're saying is Rx forces you to compute them. ALEX: Right and you wouldn't use a Glimmer reference for something if you're trying to batch. But in the end, keep all of the events that were fired on all the change events. You wouldn't use references because you're losing all that information until you do that poll and you get the latest value. But 99% of the time, when you're building UIs, that's what you want to use. CHARLES: Are Glimmer reference is their own standalone library or do they currently bundled with Glimmer? ALEX: I'm not sure. If they are not now, I believe the intention is for them to be at their separate repo. I was talking to Kris Selden at EmberConf and I got the impression that the intent, it might not be there now and if I want to start extracting ember-concurrency stuff into vanilla JS, I'd probably want to use a reference-ish thing, if not the official one from Glimmer. CHARLES: I know we talked about this so then, how will you able to use these lazy references to compute tasks state? How that might work or play out? ALEX: The fundamental problem right now is that everything in ember-concurrency is so glued to the Ember object model. What that means is that all ember-concurrency has to do is broadcast so the changes has happened to the state of a certain task so that you can, maybe put a loading spinner up on your template. All it has to do is use object.set and then the built in computed property observer change detection that is in Ember object model. It's going to sort of propagate these changes but that's a bunch of heavy Ember stuff that is going to exist and a lighter weight Glimmer or vanilla JS context. Instead of using .sets and expecting that the thing you're setting it on is a big, heavy Ember object model, you could just use references. Then whoever wants to get a reference to whether a task is running or not, it is running reference. Then just using the standard Glimmer abstractions. At the Glimmer-concurrency task runner, it would just basically kick those references and anyone who has one of those references can flush and get the latest value at some later point in time and then update the UI based on that. Already, as a maintainer at ember-concurrency, I see all the pieces work with that and I could probably just start working on that today. But there's just a handful of other things that I want to align with the vision of Glimmer and Glimmer-concurrency before I start working on that. ELRICK: What would be the referency equivalent in just plain JavaScript outside of Glimmer that you would use to build this on top of --? CHARLES: Like what would the API look like? If you're like, "I don't have a Glimmer. I don't have anything. I'm just --?" ELRICK: Yeah, you just have plain JavaScript. What would be the primitive that you will build this on top of? ALEX: Whether we use a standalone Glimmer references library or this separate reference thing, then I would use the term based on something Kris Selden said. In the end, the APIs is going to be pretty similar between those two but if one thing is requires, as far as I understand it, you've got to set up where in an event loop, your response is something that's changed and then you schedule at a later request animation frame, to actually do the rendering based on that. In order to use something like references, it implies that you've got to flush at a later tick or flush at a later call back. If you've got that in whatever app you're working on, it should be pretty easy to figure out where references fit in. CHARLES: I see, so you would basically say like new task, give it your task class or whatever -- I'm just making stuff up -- then you would just schedule, do a request animation frame and then just pull the task state or something like that? Or a new task reference or something like that? ALEX: You might have some function that's schedule render pass, if not yet scheduled. Then if it hasn't been scheduled, then use requests animation frame. If you call that function again, it's going to no op until that requests animation frame happened. CHARLES: Could you explain that again? ALEX: Sure. If you're actually thinking of a really low level vanilla JavaScript to your app, in the browser or something and you were just using references, then you probably have something where the thing that kicks off the reference or dirties the reference in some way, also run some function called 'schedule rerender', if one hasn't already been scheduled or something less verbose. That would just make sure that some request animation frame has been scheduled. When it flushes, then it will get all the changes but if more references are dirty at that mean time, it won't schedule additional request animation frames. I don't know, that's kind of blue-skying but that's when -- CHARLES: Right. Here's the other things, you see like being able to integrated with a third-party state management solution like Redux or something. Basically, I've got my ember-concurrency tasks and their state is then reflected inside a Redux store. How might that work, if at all? Or was that a crazy idea? ALEX: I don't know. I played around with Redux toy examples and Redux community and Ember is only stronger by the day. I'm not entirely sure how all those pieces fit together because in Redux, they really want you to propagate all of your state changes using the reducer in that single global atom. A lot of people asked me about redux-sagas, which is another generator function-driven way of firing these state mutating actions over some async operation and this is hugely popular but I don't think they have any concept of the derived state that I've been trying to do with ember-concurrency of just being able to ask a task if it's running. You can't just do that. You've got to reflect that into the global atom -- the global store --somehow and to be honest, I don't really know if that's fundamentally at odds with the Redux model, to take something like Ember or Glimmer-concurrency and make it work that way. But ideally, you wouldn't have to forward all that state into the global atom. You just be able to reference that task object. CHARLES: If the task object itself is immutable, it would have seemed like fairly trivial, like you could generate programmatically the reducer required to do that. If you had the state encapsulated, you could come and say, "Now, there's a new state here." It seems like you would be able to adapt that but you would need to be able to react to any time if that state changed to fire and action in the Redux store or fire the Redux action. ALEX: Actually, this will be an easier question to answer because in the Ember community Slack, there's a Redux channel and I know everyone there is already starting to talk about how are references, how is Glimmer is going to, how can we kind of tie these things to Redux and I think when they have some solutions lined up, a lot of the stuff that will be in so-called glimmer-concurrency will just fit in nicely. If they've got nice models for tying references to the state atom, if you will, then it's going to work with the new way. CHARLES: Okay, cool. One of the things that I wanted to talk about was a proposal that Lauren Tan, who put on to the ember-concurrency issues list, although it's an RFC. Are you accepting RFCs now for ember-concurrency? ALEX: I'm not pompous enough to have a separate RFCs repo. Issue approaches perfectly humble for me. CHARLES: But is this the first RFC or have there been a bunch of ember-concurrency RFCs? ALEX: There's been a few. It's definitely great that Ember have standardize on this boilerplate RFC model that everyone can fit their proposal into because it means that all the add-ons that people really like and really want to invest in, they get these high-quality RFCs versus like, "Hey man. It kind of nice if you can just like, have a pipeline." [Laughter] ALEX: Just because Ember invested in that process, the whole add-on community benefits from it and it's great. There's been a few RFCs that are like that. I'm not sure how many of them have made it but I've seen a few that are in that format but this one's definitely one of the nicer ones and a lot of effort was put into it and it looks really nice. ELRICK: I'm not familiar with the RFC. What was the brief overview of what was proposed? ALEX: Lauren was basically proposing that we add concept of pipelines, which is if you have a series of tasks that are stepping the pipeline of operations, then we should standardize that and then define all the steps in the pipeline so rather than having each step in the pipeline, call the next step in the pipeline. They just return some their portion of that work and then the pipeline infrastructure will automatically run the next step in that pipeline. CHARLES: It seems like also then you can derive state about the entire pipeline, rather than just the individual task. You have to manage that a little bit by hand. But the other thing, I guess I would add is it seems like if you're going to go with pipelines, rather than being a simple list, you might want to think about it as being a tree because can you have pipelines that are composed of sub-pipelines, so to speak? ALEX: Yeah. I believe the answer is yes. I'm not sure if it's spelled out in this RFC but really a pipeline just fits the task interface so if there's a task-ish thing or taskable object that you declare as a step of a pipeline or sub-pipeline, it should just work. I'm not sure if there's more work that needs to be done in spelling that out but that seems baked into it. There's a lot of due consideration for making sure these things compose really well and it's already in a really good state. CHARLES: Yeah. What are some of the use cases where you might want to use a pipeline? I'm sure, everyone who's been writing concurrent tasks has probably been maintaining their own pipeline so what is it that you're doing and how is this going to save your time and money? ALEX: Let's use the example that I've actually used in EmberConf, which is something based on my own app, which is in my app, you have to geolocate and find nearby stores that you could walk into and that process is four async steps in a row. One is getting your geolocation coordinates and then the next step is passing those the store, getting values and the third step is maybe some additional validation or just setting a timer so that your animations or any of these little async things that you have to do. But it's really a sequential operation where each time, fetch your geolocation or get it out of a cache and then step to the next thing, then the next thing. It looks okay as I have it in my production app code but it still feels a little gross that you can just look at this thing and be like, "What is the sequence of steps here?" You have to actually get the implementation of each task to see what happens next and where will it go after that. Basically, with ember-concurrency in general, there's a lot of opportunities for finding more conventions for building apps. I don't even know if we really talk about this so far but derived state is part of it. But generally speaking before ember-concurrency, there wasn't as much opportunity, I guess for some of these conventions for building these pretty standard UI flows without feeling that you're just building your own thing every single time, with chains of Promises and your own improvise cancellation scheme and all these things. I see pipelines as a next step. Well, we're pre-building lots of pipelines in our apps. We have these processes that go through these multiple steps and right now, the best we can do is set a bunch of Boolean variables and the derived state that comes with ember-concurrency helps but with pipelines, there's even more and it also structures your thinking so that if something like pipelines catches on, hopefully as an Ember developer, you'll see them in a few different places and already have that tool in how to visualize a problem, visualize a component, visualize the async flow. CHARLES: If I spent my entire morning reading the talk that Lauren referenced in RFC, which was the Railway Oriented Programming, which I think, maybe not quite but basically a visual explanation of a Maybe monad or the Either monad or whatever it's called. One of the greatest explanations of why monads are helpful and through explanation using like the Maybe, where you can have a computation that could have more than one result, either success or failure and how do I take these functions and compose them with functions that might always succeed or might not have a return value or whatever and show the tracks that move through a computation and be able to normalize every function to have the same number of tracks. I realized, I'm getting into the description of it without actually having the visuals in front of it so I'm just going to stop myself and say everybody go read it. It'll take you 35 minutes but it will eliminate so much like the chatter that you've been hearing in the background for a couple years. ALEX: I used to tell people that they should learn Rx because regardless of me liking the task primitive a little bit better, it's great. It just scrambles your brain and reorganize your thought processes and it's such an interesting library to learn. CHARLES: All right. I like it. I'm going to go learn Rx. ALEX: I've been getting, on the server side, the sort of Kafka-based architecture, Apache Kafka. Particularly, they've released some libraries in maybe the last year or so. It's a very Rx-familiar feeling library for composing new data and new aggregates and joins between different topics and streams of events. It just seems like they're at the forefront of solving these really hard problems in a very conventional way. You get into some of that stuff and you'll find that you're doing a lot of server side processing with step that just feels a lot like Rx and I find it very interesting. I haven't actually build anything with it yet but it is likely in my future and anybody that's into the event-driven model should definitely know what people are working on in this Kafka-streams world. CHARLES: That is cool. It's so interesting to see how all the problems that you encounter on working on the server side, you will encounter on the client and vice versa. You can build up a huge corpus of knowledge on one side of the API divide and you'd be surprised that if you were to go work on the other side for a time, you'll be able to leverage 99% of that knowledge. That's fantastic. I would love to get into Kafka but unfortunately, I think we're going to have to save that for another time. That's another one of those words like... I don't know. Is Kafka descended from Storm or something like that? Is it a similar concept? I remember everybody was big on Storm. ALEX: I think Storm process the events and decides what to do with them. Kafka is really just a giant storage that plugs into something, I think like Storm or [inaudible] or any of these things that actually process the events. CHARLES: Yeah, it's all Kubernetes to me. ALEX: Yeah. CHARLES: All righty. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you so much, Alex for coming to talk to us. It's always enlightening. I love your approach to programming. I love how deeply you think about problems and how humble you are in approaching them because they are big. ALEX: Well, thank you. It's great to be on here. It's fun. CHARLES: All right, everybody. Take care. Bye Elrick, bye Alex.
While Henning is out fighting the sinister doings of Evil-Henning, Kahlil and Raquel talk about tech stuff! The Basilisk Lizard is the animal of the week. Trello has been sold to Atlassian. Rockbot is off to Austria next week. Medium fired 50 people. Yahoo is now a zombie. Tom Dale joined LinkedIn. Why did RethinkDB fail? Prettier makes all JavaScript code pretty. Raquel test drove a Tesla.
Ember is a growing JavaScript framework that large companies like LinkedIn are using for their web application. In this episode, we are joined by Stacy London from Atlassian to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of leveraging Ember as a JavaScript framework. Items mentioned in the episode: Ember, React, Angular, Ember a11y, Ember Fastboot, Ember Resolver, Frontend Masters, Ember Community Slack, Ember Conf, Ember Docs, Yehuda Katz, Django, Computed Properties, Obervables, Firebase, Handlebars, Mustache, Backbone, ASP.Net, Virtual DOM, Rust, Swift, Tom Dale, Kyle Simpson, Stefan Penner, Nathan Hammond, Chad Hietala, Brendan McLoughlin, Lauren Tan (Sugar Pirate), Erik Bryn, Jafar Husain, Mike North Guests: Stacy London - @stacylondoner Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Derrick Showers - @derrickshowers Brian Holt - @holtbt Picks: Ryan Burgess - Crimetown Ryan Burgess - Hip-Hop Evolution Ryan Burgess - The OA Derrick Showers - Ember Twiddle Derrick Showers - Dockyard Derrick Showers - Ember Community Slack Brian Holt - Webpack Brian Holt - Preact Brian Holt - Mike North Stacy London - CSS Grid Stacy London - Girl Develop It
Chase and Jonathan discuss Ember's most recent LTS release, and the subsequent beta which includes Glimmer 2! As well as a new testing addon by Tom Dale.
02:22 - Michael North Introduction Twitter GitHub Levanto Financial 04:10 - Ember vs React or Angular JavaScript Jabber Episode #203: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg 07:13 - Convention Over Configuration 09:39 - Changes in Ember SproutCore iCloud Ember CLI Performance glimmer 16:04 - Ember FastBoot Building a performant real-time web app with Ember Fastboot and Phoenix 18:53 - EmberConf Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale 22:47 - Mobile/Native Experience & Optimization Service Worker Hybrid Apps 29:52 - Electron 30:46 - Open Source Empowerment; The Ember Learning Team 33:54 - Michael North's Frontend Masters Ember 2 Series 37:11 - The Ember Community Picks React Rally (Jamison) Embedded (Jamison) Remy Sharp: A debugging thought process (Jamison) NashDev Podcast (Aimee) JS developers who don’t know what closure is are fine. (Aimee) Sublime Text (Chuck) DesktopServer (Chuck) MemberPress (Chuck) Frontend Masters (Mike) Wicked Good Ember Conf (Mike) Debugging Node.js with Visual Studio Code (Mike)
02:22 - Michael North Introduction Twitter GitHub Levanto Financial 04:10 - Ember vs React or Angular JavaScript Jabber Episode #203: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg 07:13 - Convention Over Configuration 09:39 - Changes in Ember SproutCore iCloud Ember CLI Performance glimmer 16:04 - Ember FastBoot Building a performant real-time web app with Ember Fastboot and Phoenix 18:53 - EmberConf Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale 22:47 - Mobile/Native Experience & Optimization Service Worker Hybrid Apps 29:52 - Electron 30:46 - Open Source Empowerment; The Ember Learning Team 33:54 - Michael North's Frontend Masters Ember 2 Series 37:11 - The Ember Community Picks React Rally (Jamison) Embedded (Jamison) Remy Sharp: A debugging thought process (Jamison) NashDev Podcast (Aimee) JS developers who don’t know what closure is are fine. (Aimee) Sublime Text (Chuck) DesktopServer (Chuck) MemberPress (Chuck) Frontend Masters (Mike) Wicked Good Ember Conf (Mike) Debugging Node.js with Visual Studio Code (Mike)
02:22 - Michael North Introduction Twitter GitHub Levanto Financial 04:10 - Ember vs React or Angular JavaScript Jabber Episode #203: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg 07:13 - Convention Over Configuration 09:39 - Changes in Ember SproutCore iCloud Ember CLI Performance glimmer 16:04 - Ember FastBoot Building a performant real-time web app with Ember Fastboot and Phoenix 18:53 - EmberConf Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale 22:47 - Mobile/Native Experience & Optimization Service Worker Hybrid Apps 29:52 - Electron 30:46 - Open Source Empowerment; The Ember Learning Team 33:54 - Michael North's Frontend Masters Ember 2 Series 37:11 - The Ember Community Picks React Rally (Jamison) Embedded (Jamison) Remy Sharp: A debugging thought process (Jamison) NashDev Podcast (Aimee) JS developers who don’t know what closure is are fine. (Aimee) Sublime Text (Chuck) DesktopServer (Chuck) MemberPress (Chuck) Frontend Masters (Mike) Wicked Good Ember Conf (Mike) Debugging Node.js with Visual Studio Code (Mike)
02:52 - What’s up Merrick Christensen? Twitter GitHub Blog 03:43 - Favorite Episodes Episode #124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich Episode #037: Specialized vs Monolithic with James Halliday and Tom Dale Episode #071: JavaScript Strategies at Microsoft with Scott Hanselman Episode #044: Book Club: Effective JavaScript with David Herman Episode #161: Rust with David Herman Episode #008: V8 and Dart with Lars Bak and Kasper Lund Episode #175: Elm with Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman Ruby Rogues Episode #212: Elm with Richard Feldman and Evan Czaplicki Adventures in Angular Episode #80: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg 08:58 - How have ideas about JavaScript changed since being a panelist on the show? jQuery adding 2 numbers from input fields 15:01 - Off the Air Experiences 20:23 - Work/Job Changes Kuali 23:54 - JS Jabber = Newbie-Friendly 24:58 - Work/Job Changes (Cont’d) Daplie All Remote Conferences 35:25 - Organizing Conferences and Name Recognition Dave Smith: How React literally waters my lawn from React Rally 40:55 - Spinoff Shows Adventures in Angular Web Security Warriors React Native Radio JavaScript Air Angular Air 45:08 - Podcast Administration and Organization; Episode Release Timeline Mandy Upwork Picks JavaScript Jabber (Joe) The Harry Potter Audiobooks (Joe) Calamity by Brandon Sanderson (Joe) AngularConnect (Joe) Dennis Overbye: Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory (AJ) The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life by Terryl Givens (AJ) Julia Evans: Have high expectations for your computers (Jamison) January 28th GitHub Incident Report (Aimee) Denzel Brade: Front End Dev — Running before you can walk (Aimee) Captivating Revised and Updated: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul by John Eldredge and Stasi Eldredge (Aimee) drone (Merrick) Haskell Book (Merrick) Amazon Prime (Chuck) nexxt Maine Wall Shelf/Floating Ledge (Chuck) Read the presidential candidate’s books (Chuck)
02:52 - What’s up Merrick Christensen? Twitter GitHub Blog 03:43 - Favorite Episodes Episode #124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich Episode #037: Specialized vs Monolithic with James Halliday and Tom Dale Episode #071: JavaScript Strategies at Microsoft with Scott Hanselman Episode #044: Book Club: Effective JavaScript with David Herman Episode #161: Rust with David Herman Episode #008: V8 and Dart with Lars Bak and Kasper Lund Episode #175: Elm with Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman Ruby Rogues Episode #212: Elm with Richard Feldman and Evan Czaplicki Adventures in Angular Episode #80: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg 08:58 - How have ideas about JavaScript changed since being a panelist on the show? jQuery adding 2 numbers from input fields 15:01 - Off the Air Experiences 20:23 - Work/Job Changes Kuali 23:54 - JS Jabber = Newbie-Friendly 24:58 - Work/Job Changes (Cont’d) Daplie All Remote Conferences 35:25 - Organizing Conferences and Name Recognition Dave Smith: How React literally waters my lawn from React Rally 40:55 - Spinoff Shows Adventures in Angular Web Security Warriors React Native Radio JavaScript Air Angular Air 45:08 - Podcast Administration and Organization; Episode Release Timeline Mandy Upwork Picks JavaScript Jabber (Joe) The Harry Potter Audiobooks (Joe) Calamity by Brandon Sanderson (Joe) AngularConnect (Joe) Dennis Overbye: Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory (AJ) The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life by Terryl Givens (AJ) Julia Evans: Have high expectations for your computers (Jamison) January 28th GitHub Incident Report (Aimee) Denzel Brade: Front End Dev — Running before you can walk (Aimee) Captivating Revised and Updated: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul by John Eldredge and Stasi Eldredge (Aimee) drone (Merrick) Haskell Book (Merrick) Amazon Prime (Chuck) nexxt Maine Wall Shelf/Floating Ledge (Chuck) Read the presidential candidate’s books (Chuck)
02:52 - What’s up Merrick Christensen? Twitter GitHub Blog 03:43 - Favorite Episodes Episode #124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich Episode #037: Specialized vs Monolithic with James Halliday and Tom Dale Episode #071: JavaScript Strategies at Microsoft with Scott Hanselman Episode #044: Book Club: Effective JavaScript with David Herman Episode #161: Rust with David Herman Episode #008: V8 and Dart with Lars Bak and Kasper Lund Episode #175: Elm with Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman Ruby Rogues Episode #212: Elm with Richard Feldman and Evan Czaplicki Adventures in Angular Episode #80: Aurelia with Rob Eisenberg 08:58 - How have ideas about JavaScript changed since being a panelist on the show? jQuery adding 2 numbers from input fields 15:01 - Off the Air Experiences 20:23 - Work/Job Changes Kuali 23:54 - JS Jabber = Newbie-Friendly 24:58 - Work/Job Changes (Cont’d) Daplie All Remote Conferences 35:25 - Organizing Conferences and Name Recognition Dave Smith: How React literally waters my lawn from React Rally 40:55 - Spinoff Shows Adventures in Angular Web Security Warriors React Native Radio JavaScript Air Angular Air 45:08 - Podcast Administration and Organization; Episode Release Timeline Mandy Upwork Picks JavaScript Jabber (Joe) The Harry Potter Audiobooks (Joe) Calamity by Brandon Sanderson (Joe) AngularConnect (Joe) Dennis Overbye: Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory (AJ) The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life by Terryl Givens (AJ) Julia Evans: Have high expectations for your computers (Jamison) January 28th GitHub Incident Report (Aimee) Denzel Brade: Front End Dev — Running before you can walk (Aimee) Captivating Revised and Updated: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul by John Eldredge and Stasi Eldredge (Aimee) drone (Merrick) Haskell Book (Merrick) Amazon Prime (Chuck) nexxt Maine Wall Shelf/Floating Ledge (Chuck) Read the presidential candidate’s books (Chuck)
Raquel reports back from JSConf Colombia where she gave a talk in Spanish for the first time. Jafar Husain was on Descriptive. A good place to spend the proceeds of the Nested Loops T-shirt profits. Rock and Roll with Ember - the ebook and reading books in general. Ask Kahlil Anything on his AMA repo! Offline support with one line of code. We really really like Overcast! Tom Dale makes a peace offering. Raquel wants to know what your favorite docs are.
Chase and Jonathan talk about using TIL posts as a backend for the Ember Weekend blog and quickly cover a recent talk by Tom Dale about progessive enhancement
02:43 - Dave Rupert Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Paravel 03:42 - Chris Coyier Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog CSS-Tricks CodePen 06:24 - The ShopTalk Show and Podcasting @shoptalkshow “What do I learn next?” => “Just Build Websites!” Question & Answers Aspect 23:19 - Tech Is A Niche Paul Ford: What is Code? 29:51 - Balancing Technical Content for All Levels of Listeners Community Opinion 38:42 - Learning New CSS Tricks (Writing Blog Posts) Code Golf 41:54 - The Accessibility Project Adventures in Angular Episode #027: Accessibility with Marcy Sutton Anne Gibson: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues 56:02 - Favorite & Cool Episodes ShowTalk Show Episode #091: with Jamison Dance and Merrick Christensen ShopTalk Show Episode #101: with John Resig ShopTalk Show Episode #157: with Alex Russell ShopTalk Show Episode #147: with Tom Dale ShopTalk Show Episode #123: Special Archive Episode from 2004 ShopTalk Show Episode #166: with Lisa Irish ShopTalk Show Episode #161: with Eric Meyer Picks FIFA Women's World Cup (Joe) Winnipeg (Joe) The Martian by Andy Weir (Joe) Zapier (Aimee) SparkPost (Aimee) dev.modern.ie/tools/vms (AJ) remote.modern.ie (AJ) Microsoft Edge (AJ) StarFox Zero for Wii U (AJ) Hot Plate (AJ) untrusted (AJ) Skiplagged (Dave) Judge John Hodgman (Dave) Wayward Pines (Chris) Sturgill Simpson (Chris) The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (Dave) The Adventure Zone (Dave) React Rally (Jamison) Matsuoka Shuzo: NEVER GIVE UP (Jamison) DESTROY WITH SCIENCE - Quantum Loop (Jamison) Serial Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck)
02:43 - Dave Rupert Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Paravel 03:42 - Chris Coyier Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog CSS-Tricks CodePen 06:24 - The ShopTalk Show and Podcasting @shoptalkshow “What do I learn next?” => “Just Build Websites!” Question & Answers Aspect 23:19 - Tech Is A Niche Paul Ford: What is Code? 29:51 - Balancing Technical Content for All Levels of Listeners Community Opinion 38:42 - Learning New CSS Tricks (Writing Blog Posts) Code Golf 41:54 - The Accessibility Project Adventures in Angular Episode #027: Accessibility with Marcy Sutton Anne Gibson: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues 56:02 - Favorite & Cool Episodes ShowTalk Show Episode #091: with Jamison Dance and Merrick Christensen ShopTalk Show Episode #101: with John Resig ShopTalk Show Episode #157: with Alex Russell ShopTalk Show Episode #147: with Tom Dale ShopTalk Show Episode #123: Special Archive Episode from 2004 ShopTalk Show Episode #166: with Lisa Irish ShopTalk Show Episode #161: with Eric Meyer Picks FIFA Women's World Cup (Joe) Winnipeg (Joe) The Martian by Andy Weir (Joe) Zapier (Aimee) SparkPost (Aimee) dev.modern.ie/tools/vms (AJ) remote.modern.ie (AJ) Microsoft Edge (AJ) StarFox Zero for Wii U (AJ) Hot Plate (AJ) untrusted (AJ) Skiplagged (Dave) Judge John Hodgman (Dave) Wayward Pines (Chris) Sturgill Simpson (Chris) The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (Dave) The Adventure Zone (Dave) React Rally (Jamison) Matsuoka Shuzo: NEVER GIVE UP (Jamison) DESTROY WITH SCIENCE - Quantum Loop (Jamison) Serial Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck)
02:43 - Dave Rupert Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Paravel 03:42 - Chris Coyier Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog CSS-Tricks CodePen 06:24 - The ShopTalk Show and Podcasting @shoptalkshow “What do I learn next?” => “Just Build Websites!” Question & Answers Aspect 23:19 - Tech Is A Niche Paul Ford: What is Code? 29:51 - Balancing Technical Content for All Levels of Listeners Community Opinion 38:42 - Learning New CSS Tricks (Writing Blog Posts) Code Golf 41:54 - The Accessibility Project Adventures in Angular Episode #027: Accessibility with Marcy Sutton Anne Gibson: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues 56:02 - Favorite & Cool Episodes ShowTalk Show Episode #091: with Jamison Dance and Merrick Christensen ShopTalk Show Episode #101: with John Resig ShopTalk Show Episode #157: with Alex Russell ShopTalk Show Episode #147: with Tom Dale ShopTalk Show Episode #123: Special Archive Episode from 2004 ShopTalk Show Episode #166: with Lisa Irish ShopTalk Show Episode #161: with Eric Meyer Picks FIFA Women's World Cup (Joe) Winnipeg (Joe) The Martian by Andy Weir (Joe) Zapier (Aimee) SparkPost (Aimee) dev.modern.ie/tools/vms (AJ) remote.modern.ie (AJ) Microsoft Edge (AJ) StarFox Zero for Wii U (AJ) Hot Plate (AJ) untrusted (AJ) Skiplagged (Dave) Judge John Hodgman (Dave) Wayward Pines (Chris) Sturgill Simpson (Chris) The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (Dave) The Adventure Zone (Dave) React Rally (Jamison) Matsuoka Shuzo: NEVER GIVE UP (Jamison) DESTROY WITH SCIENCE - Quantum Loop (Jamison) Serial Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck)
Tom Dale tells us about building modern web applications that are becoming increasingly like native apps. We discuss JavaScript frameworks like Ember and the future of the web.
Show Notes: http://betweenscreens.fm/episodes/120
Chase and Jonathan talk about Ember Simple Auth + Mirage, QUnit helpers, an RFC by Tom Dale, Breadcrumbs and blog posts, component actions, and the growing Ember community.
Show notes: http://betweenscreens.fm/episodes/108
Show notes: http://betweenscreens.fm/episodes/98
Show notes: http://betweenscreens.fm/episodes/88
Show notes: http://betweenscreens.fm/episodes/80
Show notes: http://betweenscreens.fm/episodes/72
Check out RailsClips on Kickstarter!! 01:41 - Craig McKeachie Introduction Twitter Blog The JavaScript Framework Guide by Craig McKeachie 02:07 - Routing UI-Router: Why many developers don’t use AngularJS’s built-in router 03:48 - Essential Characteristics of a Router 04:53 - Emphasis on the URL 10:03 - UI Router > Custom Directives, Includes, or ngSwitch Ember interview with Tom Dale, a Robust Framework Nested Views / Child Routes 12:06 - Nested Routes How to make Angularjs nested routes? 15:09 - Boxes: “Boxes in boxes in boxes” ng-view 19:44 - Navigation and Code Maintenance 25:28 - Routers in Other Frameworks and the Angular 1.4 Router The new Router for AngularJS by Rob Eisenberg at ng-europe 2014 Rob Eisenberg: Angular 2.0 Router Scenarios 27:28 - Page Lifecycle Support 37:44 - State Object URL Routing ng-conf News The Adventures in Angular Crew will be doing a LIVE panel at ng-conf on Friday, March 6th, 2015 during lunchtime at noon! Picks ng-conf (John) Angular U (John) ng-vegas (John) The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, Book 1) by Brandon Sanderson (Joe) Craig McKeache's Blog Post - UI-Router: Why many developers don’t use AngularJS’s built-in router (Ward) Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 1 of 4 (Ward) RailsCasts Kickstarter (Chuck) Developers’ Box Club (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck) A Pirate's Adventure ~ Treasures of the Seven Seas (Craig) The Ginormous Unstoppable Angular Resource List of Angular Resources (Craig)
Check out RailsClips on Kickstarter!! 01:41 - Craig McKeachie Introduction Twitter Blog The JavaScript Framework Guide by Craig McKeachie 02:07 - Routing UI-Router: Why many developers don’t use AngularJS’s built-in router 03:48 - Essential Characteristics of a Router 04:53 - Emphasis on the URL 10:03 - UI Router > Custom Directives, Includes, or ngSwitch Ember interview with Tom Dale, a Robust Framework Nested Views / Child Routes 12:06 - Nested Routes How to make Angularjs nested routes? 15:09 - Boxes: “Boxes in boxes in boxes” ng-view 19:44 - Navigation and Code Maintenance 25:28 - Routers in Other Frameworks and the Angular 1.4 Router The new Router for AngularJS by Rob Eisenberg at ng-europe 2014 Rob Eisenberg: Angular 2.0 Router Scenarios 27:28 - Page Lifecycle Support 37:44 - State Object URL Routing ng-conf News The Adventures in Angular Crew will be doing a LIVE panel at ng-conf on Friday, March 6th, 2015 during lunchtime at noon! Picks ng-conf (John) Angular U (John) ng-vegas (John) The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, Book 1) by Brandon Sanderson (Joe) Craig McKeache's Blog Post - UI-Router: Why many developers don’t use AngularJS’s built-in router (Ward) Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 1 of 4 (Ward) RailsCasts Kickstarter (Chuck) Developers’ Box Club (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck) A Pirate's Adventure ~ Treasures of the Seven Seas (Craig) The Ginormous Unstoppable Angular Resource List of Angular Resources (Craig)
Check out RailsClips on Kickstarter!! 01:41 - Craig McKeachie Introduction Twitter Blog The JavaScript Framework Guide by Craig McKeachie 02:07 - Routing UI-Router: Why many developers don’t use AngularJS’s built-in router 03:48 - Essential Characteristics of a Router 04:53 - Emphasis on the URL 10:03 - UI Router > Custom Directives, Includes, or ngSwitch Ember interview with Tom Dale, a Robust Framework Nested Views / Child Routes 12:06 - Nested Routes How to make Angularjs nested routes? 15:09 - Boxes: “Boxes in boxes in boxes” ng-view 19:44 - Navigation and Code Maintenance 25:28 - Routers in Other Frameworks and the Angular 1.4 Router The new Router for AngularJS by Rob Eisenberg at ng-europe 2014 Rob Eisenberg: Angular 2.0 Router Scenarios 27:28 - Page Lifecycle Support 37:44 - State Object URL Routing ng-conf News The Adventures in Angular Crew will be doing a LIVE panel at ng-conf on Friday, March 6th, 2015 during lunchtime at noon! Picks ng-conf (John) Angular U (John) ng-vegas (John) The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, Book 1) by Brandon Sanderson (Joe) Craig McKeache's Blog Post - UI-Router: Why many developers don’t use AngularJS’s built-in router (Ward) Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 1 of 4 (Ward) RailsCasts Kickstarter (Chuck) Developers’ Box Club (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck) A Pirate's Adventure ~ Treasures of the Seven Seas (Craig) The Ginormous Unstoppable Angular Resource List of Angular Resources (Craig)
This week, Charles, Brandon and Stanley were joined by Tom Dale and Alex Matchneer. They took a trip in the way-back machine to discuss how they got started in programming and web development. Show Links: Tom Dale Follow Tom on Twitter Alex Matchneer Follow Alex on Twitter Icon Factory Copland Icons Emblem.js Image Ready Go Live iMall.com on the Internet Archive
Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale join us to talk about the road to Ember 2.0 and "Fast Boot". They share insight about why they stick to a 6 week release cycle, and why they think JS frameworks might be the future of all web apps (especially content sites). We also chat about what "indie open source" means, and exactly how much design goes into the Ember project and community. Yehuda Katz (Twitter) Tom Dale (Twitter) Tom Dale's Klout score is 66 Tilde.io Erik Bryn Yehuda at Hack Summit: "Indie OSS" HTMLBars FastBoot: Ember's Server-Side Rendering solution Tom on Shop Talk Show on Server-Side Rendering Rendr JS Yehuda's RailsConf keynote: "10 Years!" Skylight.io: Make your Rails apps faster with actionable insights Transcript: FILE NAME: The Frontside 16 - Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale Talk About Javascript DURATION: 55:59 minutes CHARLES: Everybody, welcome to Frontside the Podcast, Episode 16. We've got Brandon and Stanley here with me on the podcast and some very special guests who need no introduction, so I'll let them introduce themselves. TOM: Maybe we just start with Yehuda because he's the most famous. Are we starting by number of Twitter followers? STANLEY: Actually, Cloud score. TOM: Yeah, it's Cloud score based. YEHUDA: I think Tom has a higher Cloud score than me. BRANDON: All right, Tom. Go for it. TOM: Hey, what's up? I'm Tom. I had the idea for Ember JS in the shower. [Laughter] YEHUDA: Hey. I'm Yehuda. I work on standard stuff and Ember a lot these days, and now Rust also. TOM: Yehuda just joined the Rust core team. I don't know if you guys saw that. BRANDON: I did see that. Rust is a programming language. YEHUDA: Programming language. STANLEY: Are we going to get to talk about that later? BRANDON: Sure. TOM: We can talk about whatever you want. I'm not going to have any insights on that. YEHUDA: We'll have some insights. TOM: Yeah. I don't know if you guys ever saw the Pokemon Movie, but basically Yehuda is reenacting that with core teams. You've got to catch them all. [Laughter] BRANDON: That's great. STANLEY: That's not just the movie, Tom. That's literally everything around Pokemon. TOM: Oh, okay. STANLEY: That is the tagline. TOM: I will definitely defer. You seem like an expert here, Stanley. STANLEY: You know; I know the most important facts of all time. BRANDON: Stanley is on the Pokemon core team actually. STANLEY: I actually just made a new Pokemon that's like a guitar, a chair, and a microwave put together. BRANDON: What's it called? STANLEY: Rock-On. TOM: That is the worst Pokemon name I have ever heard. [Laughter] TOM: Oh, my gosh. BRANDON: All right, well, off to an auspicious start here. So the two of you and Leah formed the original core team for Ember. Is that fair to say or were there other people involved at that time when you kind of were switching SproutCore 2.0 to Ember? YEHUDA: I don't think I would call the original group that switched SproutCore over to Ember necessarily the core team. I would say that there was a bunch of people that were working on what was called SproutCore 2 at the time at Strobe, and it doesn't -- what we were doing there doesn't really meet my requirements for a good core team or a good Indie Open Source project. But one of the things that we did after switching over to being Ember and announcing the separate project was to make the core team more like what I would want. TOM: Well, I would say that there was never one moment where we were like, hey, let's create a core team. I think one thing that I learned from Yehuda about managing an open source project is that it is extremely important to start delegating way before you feel ready or comfortable. So there was a point early on where we were just totally overwhelmed as people started using it and people came along and were interested. And so we just gave them commit bit without really thinking about the bureaucracy of it or the structure of it. And then it definitely got to a point where it was like, "Why is there no core team yet?" because there's a ton of people with commit. So we should probably think about this a little bit more. YEHUDA: Of the people who are on the core team now, Erik, Chris, and Steph were all involved extremely early. I think Erik Bryn was the second contributor. Well, the first contributor after people working at Strobe, and Chris and Steph got involved really early because they were building an app on Ember that was very, very mobile focused. Well, it's a mobile app, and so they needed heavy performance, and we were not necessarily focusing on that, so they got involved pretty early also. BRANDON: And you gave a really awesome talk about this recently at Hack Summit. We'll throw the link to that in the show notes. I thought it was terrific, and I thought there was a lot of amazing ideas that were clearly born of painful experience. And I want to talk about that in a moment and kind of basically running and maintaining an open source project that keeps the open source ethos, I think, was kind of the thrust of the talk and keeping the Web and Open Source Indie. But before we jump into that, I wanted to get kind of a -- without going into, like, a full state of the union, there's a really lot going on in the world of Ember right now. It can be actually kind of hard for individual developers to just keep up with the news of it. There are just so many cool things happening at once. And there are a few things in particular that I wanted to get an update about. You guys are doing some really interesting stuff right now, but some things that are shipping soon: HTMLBars is actually happening. YEHUDA: It's in the beta. BRANDON: Yeah, it's in the beta, so people -- we tested it in our app already, and with one exception with, I guess, Ember list view isn't quite ready for it yet, but. YEHUDA: I think that's ready now too. BRANDON: Oh, really? TOM: Yeah, that just got updated. BRANDON: So, yeah, it was phenomenal. I mean it just works. Like, it was pretty amazing. So the benefit to users for that has been kind of already gradually been implemented where the metamorph tags in the DOM were gone. TOM: Right. BRANDON: What else can people expect to see once HTMLBars is in place? YEHUDA: So let me just reiterate a thing that you just said that maybe people weren't clear about before I let Tom a little bit about HTMLBars, which is, one of our major goals now and probably forever is to continue to update things incrementally and without breaking apps. And that's something that takes a lot of effort, so I want to reiterate it because it's probably the driving force of everything that we do, so like you said, there's a lot of news. We've been talking about a lot of stuff. We can talk for hours on it, probably. But the key thing is that a lot of times you hear there's a lot of news in a project, and it feels overwhelming. It feels like, oh, my God, if there's that much news, it probably means I'm going to have to spend the next five years catching up with all the things that are happening. And with Ember, our major goal is to make sure that all that, all those new features don't affect your app. I mean there will be a 2.0, and at 2.0 there may be some breaking changes, but even with the 2.0, all the breaking changes will land before 2.0. They'll land on the 1x brands together with deprecation warnings so you'll learn about them as you upgrade. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And so I think this is the driving force of everything we're doing now. TOM: Yeah, I think, with 2.0, it's not like oh, my gosh, there's all this new stuff I have to learn. Instead, what it's going to be is us removing stuff that you probably never even learned about anyway. YEHUDA: Or that we told you in 1.10 or 1.11 to switch away from and you had plenty of releases to remove. TOM: Yeah, you'll have ample warning, and you'll definitely -- it's not going to blindside anyone. But I think this is exactly the point is we're on a six-week release cycle, and it is impossible to do big bang stuff in six weeks. Right? Think about any big software project anyone listening to this has worked on. It's hard to build a huge thing in six weeks, which maybe seems like a limitation, but actually I think we both see that as a huge strength, which is that it really forces you, as an engineer, to think about, okay, I want to move mountains. But I need to do it six weeks at a time, so how do I basically touch back down to reality as often as possible? With HTMLBars, if you think about it, it's a pretty dramatic thing, right? We're basically entirely replacing the rendering engine of this pretty large JavaScript framework, which in some sense is like trying to change the engine on a 747 mid flight. And the only way that we can get away with doing that is to do it very incrementally. And the only way we can do it without breaking people's apps, I should say, is to do it incrementally. Step one was metal-views, which removed metamorphs. But, fundamentally, all view rendering was still string concatenation. And then the next step after that was to get actual HTMLBars in with creating DOM instead of creating strings. YEHUDA: There was actually another step in between, which was to change all the -- so the internal, whenever you use a curlies and handlebars, those curlies, in the old version of the templating engine, would go and they would have ad hoc code to observe something, observe paths, and there was all this complicated code at each point where a curlies was used anywhere in the templating engine, and the new system -- and this is again behind the scenes, so it's easy for even Tom to have forgotten about it. We refactored everything internally so that it used a stream-based system so that all the parts of the templating engine don't have to know exactly how that's all structured internally. And that makes it a lot easier to do performance optimizations, but also makes it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and bugs that cropped up from time-to-time. So that was another step in the direction that was necessary to get all the way to the end. TOM: So now that's in, and I think the next step is to actually -- the next step will be now that we've got HTMLBars integrated in a backwards compatible way, the next step is introducing nice, new syntax. So just one example of this is this gives us the ability to remove the bind-attr helper. Most people that I've noticed when I'm teaching them Ember intuitively think that they should be able to do attrf equals curly, curly URL, and that doesn't work together. You have to do bind-attr. But because HTMLBars is a much smarter parser, we're able to have that context, and we can actually just dramatically simplify the whole model. BRANDON: Okay. And you also answered another question I had, which was, there are a lot of people basically talking about how they should be building apps for 2.0 friendliness, but it sounds like if they stay with the point releases, there'll be very little work involved in moving to 2.0. So you don't have to kind of like today sit and architect your app in a certain way as long as you're staying up to date with the point releases. Would you say that's relatively accurate? TOM: Yeah, I think so. 2.0 is not going to have any new features, and one feature that Teddy Zeenny is working on for the Ember Inspector, you know the Chrome and Firefox plugin for the developer tools, is adding a deprecations pane. So what we expect to happen is that people should just keep upgrading their apps on the 1x point releases and then, every upgrade, you may see one or more deprecation warnings pop up, either in the console or in this pane in the developer tools. And you just fix those at your leisure. Then when 2.0 comes out, all that will happen is that the payload size of Ember will shrink. YEHUDA: Yeah. I think another way to put all that is, when we looked at React, so we looked at React a lot as part of the run-up to 2.0 for the past, like, six months. And when we looked at React, initially we saw a programming model that actually wasn't that different from how we thought people should build Ember apps, so things like you should have data flowing down from a single point and, in Ember, that single point is the model hook in your route, and then we always thought about data flowing down. And you should have events bubbling up, and you should use actions mostly for communication. I remember Erik Bryn very, very early on said, "I think people are overusing data bindings. People should use events more." And that's when we started adding the evented system to a bunch of the parts of the framework. TOM: Actions. Actions weren't there originally … two-way bindings. YEHUDA: Well, we added actions, but we also added, like, Ember.evented. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And I think we kind of knew all this, right? And so idiomatically the way that Ember 2.0 works is actually not that different from how we thought Ember 1.x should work, but I think one of the things that ended up happening is that because data bindings are so -- two-way data bindings can be very nice and clever, a lot of times people would reach for two-way data mining because it was the first thing that was sitting there. And then they would end up building somewhat complicated systems that rely on communication through two-way data mining. TOM: The syntactic sugar pushed you in that direction. YEHUDA: And so a lot of what Ember 2.0 is is about making syntactic sugar more honest about what is the right default, and that does mean that there may be applications that were heavily relying on communication, especially communication channels through two-way data bindings. And that will work much less nicely in Ember 2.0, and it might feel painful to upgrade if you're trying to be both idiomatic and upgrade to 2.0 at the same time. But I think, for most people who are using actions and were using data down through the model hook, I think a lot of it will feel very familiar, will feel very much like how you've been doing things all along. CHARLES: Cool. I actually had a question about HTMLBars landing, and that's when we upgrade our apps, everything should just work seamless. Like Brandon said, we actually did a spike of that, and it mostly seems to be the case. You said that there are no new features, but are there more, like, newer development stories around? Like, given that the templating engine or the view layer understands the DOM, what power or APIs will users have to interact with it, like to do animations or bring things in and out and stuff like that? YEHUDA: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Is there any of that stuff planned? YEHUDA: I don't think we meant to suggest that there are no new features in number 2.0. Just that they will land in the 1x series, I think, is the point. CHARLES: Ah, right, right. I see. TOM: I think probably the biggest feature is just speed. And I think, also, what HTMLBars' architecture unlocks is the ability to better integrate with other libraries by adopting kind of a diffing approach similar to what React does with the virtual DOM. Basically, in my mind, HTMLBars is all about a bunch of infrastructure work that allows us to make the programming model feel more natural for people who are…. YEHUDA: One way to think about it is that it's the first templating engine that was ever built specifically for Ember. Handlebars templating engine before was built as a general-purpose templating engine, and we pushed it as far as it could go to be real useful for Ember. But things like bind-attr and the metamorph tags kind of crept in as necessary because the templating engine wasn't really built for this purpose, the exact purpose that Ember was designed for. And the HTMLBars engine, part of it is that it's DOM based, and part of it is that it supports diffing, and part of it is that it's faster. But I think, ultimately, it allowed us to look at a lot of areas that are annoying about using templates in Ember and make them nicer. And, yeah, so I think that it's -- TOM: I'd say it also unlocks things like we're working on server side rendering right now, and a lot of that is due to the power of HTMLBars because we can run it in so many different environments, and we can model all of these things as streams internally. It gives us a lot of flexibility about what we can do with your applications. You know, we can do things like server side render your applications even though, of course, you never designed your app for that case in mind. But because of how expressive the templating and, in fact, the entire application architecture is, and because we all agree as a community that this is how we architect our apps, it unlocks a lot more stuff. And I think there'll be more things like server side rendering in the future that we all benefit from by sharing this very declarative application structure and very declarative templating language. YEHUDA: Yeah, I mean honestly, under the hood, the fact a lot of the innovations of the templating engine are not things that any user will ever see directly because they're just implementation. And if we wanted to go around pimping things like streams or the way that the diffing algorithm works internally and the way we clone fragments and all this stuff, we could probably spend a lot of time pimping it, and maybe that would even make a lot of people, some people happy. But I think you'll see, over the next year or so, these things will all lead towards better features or to more features that will be nice, and that's how I think we'd like to roll -- TOM: I think Web components integration is a big one. YEHUDA: Ah, yeah, that's a good point. TOM: I think HTMLBars makes it very easy. And so, in terms of actual improvements coming on top of HTMLBars, the component syntax, instead of being curly, curly to indicate that you want a component, you'll be able to use just regular angle brackets, so that'll be nice. And another thing that we're really keen to get rid of is: You know how today when you're building an Ember component if you want to customize the element associated with that component, you have to say, like, tag name, class name, bindings. You guys know what I'm talking about? BRANDON: Mm-hmm. TOM: So that's kind of annoying because all of those special properties on the component class that you used to customize the element are all duplicating features that already exist in the templating language. So it's just kind of this weird bifurcation of the programming model where, if you want to customize the element for this top level, do it in JavaScript. Everything else, do it in the template. So HTMLBars will allow us to allow you to customize your component element purely in the template, and you won't have to -- basically there are far more cases now where you'll be able to get away with a component that's just a template file, and you'll reduce the number of JavaScript classes in your app. YEHUDA: Yeah, I think, from a high level, the biggest -- the high level of the internal technical improvements are largely that it allows for contextual work. So the old templating engine wouldn't necessarily know that you're inside of an attrf when you have curlies, so we would have to spit out a bunch of extra stuff and maybe make you use extra helpers. It wouldn't necessarily know that you're in image FRC or a video tag or a component. It wouldn't be able to tell if you were using a polymer component that implements the bind protocol, right? But the new templating engine basically lets us see exactly what's happening at every curly, and that just has a large number of positive effects. BRANDON: So you said something else that I felt like was a good segue into the next part of the discussion that this basically allows you to do server side rendering, which you guys are really, like, in the thick of it right now. But for me, a lot of the talk I've seen a about server side rendering comes across as a little inside baseball. There's this sort of discussion between people who are really into React because they're suddenly doing a lot of stuff with server side rendering, and they're seeing some benefits out of it. And you see this stuff kind of pop up in the JavaScript community, but I'm curious to know if you guys can explain a little bit about the benefit of server side rendering that this is a major new feature coming to Ember now. YEHUDA: I'll let Tom maybe give the full pitch, but I think one thing that I feel somewhat strongly about is that, for most people, if you don't have a system that actually gives you something that works pretty well out of the box, in other words it doesn't ask you to do a lot of the work yourself, the idea of isomorphic server side rendering where you run your same app on the client and the server, I don't think that that ends up being worth it. And if you look at a lot of apps that use Ember today, a lot of them have spent relatively little time building non-isomorphic solutions for specifically SEO that have been very, very cheap in terms of time and very, very effective. But I think there's the: I want to not have to write that, even that little bit, and I think that that you get a lot of benefits out of if you just have your framework do it. In other words, if it's not just like your framework does 20% and you do 80%. If it's your framework does 95% and you do maybe a little bit, or you have some constraints, I think that is worth something. And I think the rehydration of fast boot is worth something, although that has even more issues and even a larger percentage that most people have to do on their own. Basically, I think the TLDR for me is that I've always saw server side rendering as indeed somewhat inside baseball because, for most people historically, and I think this is even true largely about React, the solution that you're offered is the framework will do a little bit for you, and you have to go figure out a lot of the details about how to make this work for real. And I think most people just don't have the time to figure all those details out. TOM: So it's been kind of interesting to watch this play out over the last year or two because I think there's been a big split between the JavaScript application community and old school people that create content for the Web who are really keen on this idea of progressive enhancement. And so there's kind been this split. And, for me, for a long time, I personally didn't really care about this case because, in my mind, JavaScript apps were really good for what I'll call workspace apps, which is most of them are behind a login. You log in. You have these very rich interactions. You're editing something. You know, I worked on the iCloud apps. It's a feature, not a bug, that Google can't index your calendar and your email, right? So to me that was the use case for JavaScript apps. But that was until I saw content sites. Like, I remember the first time thinking, "Wow, maybe JavaScript apps are actually the future of all Web applications," was when I saw Bustle, actually. When I saw Bustle, it was just a content site. It was just news articles. And if you would've asked me, I would have said you should probably use Rails or some other server rendered framework for this. But then I saw it, and it felt just like a website. I couldn't actually tell the difference other than how damn fast it was. And I kind of had to step back and question all of my opinions about how people should be building these kinds of applications. And especially for content sites, I think that the server rendering is really important, right, because historically your user has had to download all of this JavaScript and all that JavaScript had to be downloaded and evaluated and run before they saw anything. So having the ability to bootstrap that process on the server and have the first bits that the user starts downloading not be the JavaScript payload, but be HTML and CSS, so that the first thing that they see is useful, I think that's really going to change how people build applications because you get the benefits of server rendering while still retaining the kind of interactions that you can build with something like Ember that you just can't do with Rails. YEHUDA: But again, I think people trying to do this on their own and taking maybe a half solution and then trying to figure out how to make this work reliably ends up producing things that are pretty buggy and feel pretty bad on first boot, or they end up requiring tremendous amounts of engineering resources. And it's possible that, like, huge companies can make this work. But I mostly think about startups, and startups simply do not have the engineering resources to take on the server side rendering task on their own, so this is why I think we care about it for Ember because, as Tom said before, Ember is already pushing you down a pretty conventional path, and we think -- our hope is that by having people do that conventional path and us taking charge of server side rendering will have something that works mostly out of the box for a lot of users. Again, assuming they follow some additional constraints about what you're allowed to do on the server. TOM: And I think we should be clear here because there's, as always happens, there's ambiguity in the terminology. So first is the term isomorphic app, which I don't really love that term, but I guess we better get used to it, Yehuda. YEHUDA: Yeah. TOM: But there's really a spectrum. On the one side of the spectrum you have something like Airbnb has a library for Backbone called Rendr (with no e - well, one e, but not the second e). And that kind of lets you wire up some of the server side rendering. But again, it's very, very manual. And the whole purpose of this is just to make sure that the first thing that you deliver to the browser is HTML and not JavaScript so that the user, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled or they're on a slow connection or whatever, they get something useful. But then on the other side, you have things like Meteor or Asana where the whole idea is -- and to me, I'll be honest with you. It strikes me as extremely silly, but the idea is that you're writing both your server and your client in the same code base, and then you're deploying them both. You describe it, and it sounds like this magic bullet, but it also just seems really silly to me. YEHUDA: Well, I think the fact that even the first releases of Meteor had if Meteor.isClient and if Meteor.isServer, and even the first demos had large blocks of content…. TOM: Yeah. Conditionals. Yeah. YEHUDA: Basically means that people hadn't really figured it out exactly right yet. TOM: Yeah, the point is that even if you have a client side app, your server still has a lot of responsibilities, especially around data access to the database, authorization, authentication, and so on. And putting that in the code base with your UI and your drag and drop code just does not make any sense to me. So I want to be clear to everyone listening that that is not what we're going for. The idea is not that you're writing your json API server in Ember. The point is that you're writing the same old app. In fact, we hope that you don't have to make any changes to your app. And you can deploy it, and it will do a render using the same code. It's basically like your app running in a browser on the server, and then we'll have some way of -- YEHUDA: Except not actually a browser. TOM: -- it's actually a transferring state. YEHUDA: Except, importantly, it's much, much cheaper than being an actual browser. We're not using phantom JS or a zombie or anything. TOM: Right. Conceptually a browser, but we don't want to pay the cost. Phantom JS is a source of great pain for many people, ourselves included, so we want a pure JavaScript environment. But conceptually it's a browser. YEHUDA: I think the reason I hopped in there is I just want to be clear that the goal of conceptually a browser is actually not to be a browser, but to make Ember itself internally abstract enough so that the most expensive parts of being a browser can be replicated in a cheaper way on the server. Obviously the most important part of that is the DOM. And that's the part that React worked out for server side rendering is use the virtual DOM on the server and not a real DOM, right? And that means you don't need real phantom JS and the full scope of DOM. But there's also other stuff like how your routing works and how the model hook runs and how it makes requests, how it makes "XHRs" to get the data in the first place. Right? There are a lot of details if you think about what it takes to boot up an app in the first place. For us, the goal is to go through that whole process of booting up an app all the way through, but not including the did insert element hooks in your DOM and make sure that all that stuff doesn't require -- it has really constrained and clear abstractions, right? So rendering has a render abstraction and routing has a location abstraction, and the DOM has the HTML bars, little dom, lower case dom abstraction, right? So instead of saying we're running it inside of something that pretends to be a browser, we're saying Ember doesn't actually care whether it's in a browser or not, but it has very, very clear abstractions for what it means to be a browser. BRANDON: Okay, so is there--? It sounds like it could be a little like -- is this a little ways off? It sounds like there are a lot of benefits. Like, if you see the hand rolled stuff that Discourse has done, clearly this is something that Bustle cares enough about to sponsor, this is probably a little ways off for Ember developers. Is there anything that you want people doing Ember to know right now about server side rendering in terms of how it's going to affect them or some of the technical stuff that you're learning through this or anything like that? TOM: I think we've been thinking about this particular problem for a very long time. And in fact, we've intentionally designed the architecture of Ember specifically to handle this case, even from the beginning, even like three years ago. We knew that this is something that we wanted or at least we didn't want to paint ourselves into a corner around. So I think there are two aspects of this, and one of them, I think, is pretty well bounded and pretty straightforward. The other one is definitely going to require a little bit more research. The first step is simply getting rendering happening on the server. So because we designed Ember for this case, we were actually able to get Ember as a framework booting up in node in about a day's worth of work. So a couple things have crept in. There were areas where we had been a little bit sloppy and introduced dependencies on things like document.body, jQuery, things like that. So it was about a day to kind of encapsulate those, make sure that they weren't hard requirements for booting the framework, and that was about a day's worth of work. And then, by the end of the week -- we've only been working on this for about a week now -- at the end of the week, we actually had an app booting in node and handling route requests. So in terms of progress, it's been really great. But I guess all that we're saying is that, in a week, we were able to capitalize on the last three years of work we've been doing. That's not as impressive as it sounds. YEHUDA: It was nice that there were relatively few regressions, right? TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: That the list of things where people were accidentally doing things that assumed the browser was actually relatively small. TOM: Yeah. And the way that we did that is basically introducing an abstraction that provides your environment to you, so a node that's different than in a browser. So that's the first part is to get the app booting, and the second part is to get it rendering. I think what's really cool is that, even though HTMLBars, of course, is a DOM based rendering engine, or despite that, we still use an abstraction around DOM access. What we're going to be able to do when we start, again, in earnest tomorrow, on Monday, is basically replace that DOM helper that we used to create DOM in the browser with something that we'll be able to build up strings so that you can build up your HTML on the server and serve that to the client. That's step one: rendering. I think we'll be able to make quite quick progress on that. I would guess probably about -- I don't know if I should give timelines here. I think we're ballparking around a month before we can at least beta it, the server rendering. BRANDON: That's a little faster timeline than I had assumed. TOM: That's purely rendering. I want to make clear that that is purely for things like SEO, for Web crawlers, for curl, things like that. Then the next phase after that, and this is where it gets into the tricky bit, is being able to -- YEHUDA: Rehydration. TOM: -- is rehydration, what people call it. What we call fast boot. And with fast boot the idea is that whatever state that we use to build up your application on the server, we also transfer that state, not just the HTML, not just the output, but the state that we use to build that output is somehow seamlessly transferred from the server to the client. And the client basically just takes the HTML that we've given it and reconnects all these bindings and goes from there, so it's totally seamless to the user. YEHUDA: And I think there's some complexity there. For example, there may be some part of your page that you can't actually render on the server because it says, like, "Hello, authenticated user," with the user's name. So thinking about ways to make sure that you can mark those as needing to be rendered on the client without causing jank. There's a bunch of stuff like that where, at first glance, it seems not too bad, but I guess the high level if there's a determinism issue, right? So the goal is to make sure that roughly what you did on the server is the same thing that you do on the client because if it's too far off, then you end up having to throw -- no matter how smart our algorithm is, we're going to end up having to throw away everything and replace it again. The idea is how to structure your app, how to structure the way that you set up your app in Ember CLI so that you tend to be putting out output that's deterministic on both sides. And, like Tom said, I think state is maybe overbroad. It's mostly modeled batter, right? Making sure that the model batter that you got on the server is equivalent and transferred together with the HTML payload so that the model hooks that you have in your client will not have to go make another XHR. They'll just have the data that the server already collected, and then hopefully rerender an equivalent DOM on the clients with relatively low…. TOM: There are just a lot of tricky cases, like imagine you have a bound helper that shows relative dates, like 30 seconds ago. So you have a clock on the server, and then you have a clock on the client. How do you reconcile those two? YEHUDA: Yeah, so the good news there -- the good news with all that, without getting too much into the weeds, is that the HTMLBars' engine is already broken up between rendering the parts of your DOM that are static, that are like the hello, the text hello inside of an H1, and updating the static parts with dynamic content. And today that's purely a performance optimization, and so that we could use the same document fragment over and over again after cloning, but that will also allow us to use server rendered content where, instead of expecting to have an empty text node that is to be filling in with dynamic content, we'll have a filled in text node. And we see, in that case, Tom, that the time that is in there already is not the correct time. It's not the equivalent time, and so we'll update it. So that's sort of like the React diffing strategy. I'm less worried about, like, there's a single text node with the wrong content because I know we can deal with that. And I'm a lot -- although if it's too much changes, it will look very bad. It will look very janky. I'm more worried about, like, this entire conditional change. So you're looking at something and then, like, your sidebar swaps out for a different sidebar, which I think would be a pretty unacceptable UI. CHARLES: Obviously there are a lot of different server side environments that people use. What requirements of the server is there going to be if I'm using a Rails app or something in Python or Java or whatnot? How am I going to interface to this? TOM: Well, you definitely need a JavaScript runtime, right, because your Ember app is written in JavaScript. Unless you're planning on pouring it into Ruby or whatever, we're definitely going to require JavaScript runtime. And I think we're starting with just supporting node. But what I would like to see, and maybe you guys can write this, is a Rails gem that you can install that will install dependencies in everything and basically get set up in a production environment. YEHUDA: I think one thing people often forget is you can definitely -- you could you have a node app running. People try to embed JavaScript. They try to use, like, The Ruby Racer, and embedding JavaScript is quite a disaster. BRANDON: [Laughter] I'm sorry. I don't know if you know. Charles wrote The Ruby Racer, and it is a disaster. STANLEY: It's cool. It's a disaster. YEHUDA: So let me be clear. It's a great idea. I use it a lot, but it just fundamentally doesn't now work. Right? It fundamentally cannot -- you cannot embed two VGCs in the same process. BRANDON: Right. YEHUDA: Okay. BRANDON: This is the greatest moment in the history of our podcast. I just want to say that. CHARLES: No, I know. There's no way to collect…. YEHUDA: Yes, exactly. CHARLES: -- for example. YEHUDA: I was about to use cycles as an example. CHARLES: The APIs just don't exist. YEHUDA: Yeah, so basically cycles, so this is why. The reason why I feel strongly about this is that we use Rust for Skylight, which is our product. And we need to embed something, and I would never in a million years embed something with a garbage collector. And I think The Ruby Racer was a pretty good -- I think, for constrained cases, it works fine if you know what you're doing, but people basically tried to use it as, "Oh, I'm just going to write part of my program in JavaScript. And, by the way, both languages have closures, so good luck," basically. The Ruby Racer is cool, but I would not -- I don't think that that's the correct strategy for having long-running JavaScript programs like Ember, like complicated stuff like Ember. I think a better thing for people to do would be to figure out a simple IPC protocol so that they could run their Ember app and then have a simple way of talking over a socket or something with the node app, so booting up your Rails app will also boot up the node app. And, if necessary, and you're serving through your Rails app, you could communicate. TOM: I think, to be clear, the Ember app, even when running on the server, still talks to the database server using json, right? So it's the exact same data marshalling flow. It's just presumably it'll be a lot faster because probably your API server and your application server are in the same data…. YEHUDA: Well, at a minimum, it'll be a lot more consistent, right? TOM: Yes. YEHUDA: I think when people -- when Twitter complained about somebody from some country connecting and getting a really slow connection, the issue there was that they were downloading the app shell and then who knows how long it took to download the json payload, right? But if the json payload is coming from the same data center, then it's, by definition, going to be downed within some range, reasonable range. BRANDON: Okay. Awesome. I'd like to shift gears and spend a couple minutes talking about something that most of the questions that I had originally for this were actually answered in your talk. But I'd like to go over it just a little bit. You alluded earlier to the way that you're running Ember as an ideal, sort of your ideals, discovering your ideals about open source projects and the Indie Web. And I think it's a really important topic, and I want to ask a little bit about that because I don't think a lot of people understand this. I think, especially I see in the JavaScript community, a lot more people establishing open source projects that are corporate run and that being considered a benefit rather than a drawback. And I've seen you push back on that a little bit, and I wanted to ask you, Yehuda, about what your definition of the Indie Web is and why you specifically run the Ember project the way that you guy run it. YEHUDA: Sure. I think there are basically two parts of what it means to be Indie, and the second one sort of derives out of the first one, but I think it's -- you wouldn't necessarily arrive at it yourself, so I'll make it explicit. The first one is that you have a diversified core team. What I mean by that is essentially diverse in all the ways you could possibly think of, and things that I learned from other projects are, like, functionally diverse. So make sure that if there's a person on your team -- if there's a person around somewhere running your events or doing documentation or doing evangelism or running user groups, make sure that if there's a person who is very skilled at doing that that they are the top person on your team in charge of that. The counter, the alternative that I've seen a lot in the open source community is that the person running events essentially reports to the core team, right? There's a person who is maybe a professional event runner, and they are not in charge of events. They're in charge of coming up with ideas for events that they run by the core team, and the core team decides yes or no. The problem is the core team has no skills in doing that, so this person ends up spending huge amounts of time being frustrated trying to explain to the core team something or other, right? That would be the equivalent of somebody on the core team writing some area of code, having to come to the rest to the core team and talking about really tiny, nitty-gritty implementation details. Of course, unlike code where I think people have an intuitive sense that you're deep in the weeds of some performance thing, and I don't really understand that. In a lot of areas that are not code, code people have a very high sense of their own understanding, right? The core teams, I've seen a lot of core teams that people come and they say, well, I happen to know a lot about how people want to read docs in this country and so I'm going to help with the translation effort. All of a sudden the core team is an expert on, like, Indian documentation. And they have all these opinions that are totally unwarranted. Step one is have a functionally diverse group of people, and have people that are not necessarily hardcore coders, but are talented and professionals in their area. Have them do that work at the top level. And I spent a little time on this just now because I feel strongly that this is an area that people miss, and it's just an area that code people are too high on their own supply. They're too impressed with their own skills. They cause a lot of pain for the people who are good at areas that are not hard-core code, so that's one. Two is be diverse in terms of the set of people that own decision-making in your project, so this is what you were talking about with the company run open source, and this is something companies can do. I've seen, for example, I worked with the Rust Project, and the Rust Project originally started at Mozilla. But they've been spending tremendous amounts of effort to try to increase the set of people who are on the core team of Rust that are not working at Mozilla. And this is something that maybe takes a lot of effort once you have an established project at a company. There's all the internal company politics you have to deal with. But the reality is that if you have a project that's at one company, you're kind of at the whims and the mercies of that one company's how they do resourcing, whether they think it's important, what their actual goals are. Maybe the thing that they built the project for doesn't necessarily match what the community is doing, right? So become diverse in the companies that own it. I think projects like Rails, Postgres, Ember, increasingly Rust are good examples of this. And, of course, I mean the regular meaning of the word diverse here, just because if you become more diverse in all areas, you actually find yourself being more function diverse just because of who ends up being in what areas. You end up finding yourself having a lot better insight. You end up sitting in a room, and when there are people of diverse backgrounds, the kinds of questions that people ask. And I can only say this. This is the thing that I've noticed personally. It's not a thing that I can empirically measure. I've just noticed that the kinds of questions that people ask, when you're diverse in all kinds of ways, ends up being -- they end up being stronger, better, and they end up pushing back on the kinds of decisions that you can make as a monoculture with group think, right? The harder it is to have group think, the harder it is for everyone to sit around and say, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to rewrite everything," right? That kind of thing is hard to do when you have a lot of people with a lot of different backgrounds with a lot of different interests. So that's, I think, the higher order bit of what in the open source means is be very diversified in a lot of different ways. But there's a specific thing that I think comes out of it that is very important, which is to do the work that you're doing incrementally. Again, the reason I think that this is a derive is that if you have a lot of people with a lot of different interests with a lot of different projects, I think it becomes very difficult for you to do full on rewrites because everybody has interests, and maybe a few people are excited about doing a rewrite, but everyone else says, "Oh, my God. What about my app?" Then you have the docs guy saying, "Oh, my God. Now we have to maintain two sets of docs?" And you have the evangelism guy hearing all the pushback from the community about the rewrite. So it becomes very difficult for you to have this situation where you're not doing things incrementally. But I think, in my talk, I spend some time on what it means to do things incrementally and what the benefits are and how to adopt the six-week release cycle and all that. I talked about that in more detail because, even though I think it's a natural consequence of being diversified, it's also something that you have to think about if you want to do it well. BRANDON: Yeah. It seems to me that that would require, like it's kind of a chicken and egg deal, but to me it seems like there was a lot of discipline in switching to a six-week release cycle, and that's important. It seems, for us at least as consumers of Ember as an open source framework, that's benefited us greatly. We find the framework much, much easier to keep up with on the six-week release cycles than pretty much most other open source projects we've worked with. YEHUDA: Which is kind of like a paradox, right, because you expect that six-week release cycle means you can never keep up with it because it's always changing. But in fact, six-week release cycle means you don't have time to ever change that much. BRANDON: Well, and even for apps that go dormant for a while, we find that, okay; we'll bring it up to one. Bring it up to the next one. The upgrade path becomes extremely obvious. YEHUDA: Yep, exactly, and there's deprecation warnings, and there's ... I think people should watch my talk on this specific area because it took me 15 minutes or something to lay out the whole thing. But I think the basic idea of just doing things incremental, and incrementally has this bad sense. It's like, oh, maybe you're hunting for the local maximum or something. All I mean by incrementally is the same way that the human body replaces its cells, right? You don't do it all at once. Maybe over an extended period of time, the thing that you're looking at is completely different. But because you did it a little at a time, you were able to move the whole community together in the direction instead of people, many, many people getting left behind, which is what used to happen a lot with Rails. I think Rails has gotten better at this over time. But it used to happen, like Rails 3 came out and a lot of people were stuck on Rails 2.3. BRANDON: I think when people hear incrementally, they can think about possibly incrementally be led in circles, right? You could incrementally be every day wake up and decide to change one degree or the other. What matters is if you have a compass that's pointing somewhere. For the Ember project, that incremental stuff doesn't work unless it's pointed somewhere very clear. And you and Tom are basically the keepers of that vision. And I wanted to ask about that, what the vision of the framework is that keeps guiding everybody. Is it sort of implicit to the project? As you use it, you recognize it. Or is it something that you've explicitly outlined somewhere? YEHUDA: I'll take this for a second and then Tom can jump in. I think, fundamentally, the main vision is just we ultimately wanted to have a full stack solution that solved the majority, the vast majority of the problems that a regular person would have writing a Web app, but we knew from the beginning that if we tried to take on that whole project, I mean even Meteor, who took on that whole project, is still struggling to have to complete the vision. And they tried to sort of boil the ocean. And so, we knew from the beginning that we were going to get it wrong if we tried to do a CLI tool and a framework and a data library and all this stuff all at once. And so I think we started off with the V in MVC, basically, right at the beginning and added routing and other stuff over time. But the mission always has been to build the thing that's a full stack of what you need to build front-end tools. Tom, you can take it from there. TOM: Yeah. I think, in the JavaScript world, I think, because JavaScript for so long was treated as a toy language that people didn't do serious stuff in, it attracted a certain type of developer who is -- which is a totally legitimate opinion, but they tended to be kind of hackers who would do these one-off experiments. And because of that, the notion of convention over configuration and having shared solutions is still a somewhat surprisingly controversial opinion in the JavaScript community. And so I think the role, as you said, for Yehuda and I, is to basically be willing to stand up and take the tomatoes that get thrown at us and say, "You know what? No, there is benefit in having a shared solution, especially when it's not just one-off hackers in their basement, but when it's a team of engineers working at a company, and you have a product that you need to ship, and it needs to have good interaction. It needs to be done yesterday. Those people need tools too. People like that deserve tools." And I think that's our goal is to have a framework that will last for at least the next ten years that is willing to incorporate good ideas as they come out and as they're embedded, move the community together, as Yehuda was saying, but without chasing the hype dragon where every six months: "Throw away everything you know because the next big thing is coming out. Rewrite your apps." I see Ember as a way of kind of tempering that instinct for engineers to chase the new and shiny constantly in a way that basically we have a community that agrees together what the next big thing is, and then we start moving towards that. I think, right now, major things that we're thinking about are one server rendering, as we talked about. Getting the CLI tools in place, that's a thing that we've wanted for a long time. But as Yehuda said, we didn't want to try boiling the ocean. And then the new HTMLBars view layer, which unlocks a lot of the cool things that React is able to do around, like, DOM diffing and so on. YEHUDA: Yeah. I usually tell people -- recently, I've come to a line, which is, if you want to tell me that there's not a place for shared solutions in some area or some abstraction, I think the burden is on you, actually. I think people in the JavaScript community, and there's a small group in the Rails community that feels the same way, they assume that the burden is on the person who is trying to abstract, right? If there's a common problem that a lot of people have, they think it's your job to prove that abstraction is a good idea. I think it is your job to prove that a particular abstraction is a good idea. But I think my de facto, my default position is that if a lot of people are solving the same problem that there's a shared solution worth hunting for. And I would say the JavaScript community is really -- big chunks of the JavaScript community are pretty anti this approach. But I think it's really the only way that you could build -- like Tom said, the only way you could build projects with large teams is to have some sense of what the shared answer is and to not have it be some genius on the fourth floor somewhere that does everything. And if you want to make any changes, you have to go to them. I've seen a lot of companies that work like this, and it works fine. Anther facet of this is that pretty much every company deciding to adopt, like, Ember, Angular, React, or Backbone, whatever, they do like this "taste test," right? A taste test is like a two-week project where they see which one is faster. By definition, the taste test doesn't successfully analyze what happens over a longer period or when you have a bigger set of developers, right? It's by definition optimized for short projects with a small number of developers, and so -- TOM: And usually it's the guy on the fourth floor conducting the taste test. YEHUDA: He's either conducting it or he is actively attacking it, right? He is saying we should not -- for example, Firefox OS refused to adopt any framework for an extended period despite the complaints of many people on the Firefox OS team because of the fact that they had a religion against frameworks. They didn't like frameworks as a concept. I've heard this from large numbers of people working on the periphery of Firefox OS and many complaints, right? And so I think we, Ember, one of the things we had to learn was that we can't get away with just saying that. We can't get away with saying, oh, you'll learn. If you just use Ember for a year, you'll figure it out. We had to really improve the getting started experience. But I think, on the flipside of that, there's no way that we could ever -- even if we get to be as nice as to optimal getting started framework, getting started tool, we're always going to have benefits that are not part of that that are very difficult to see when you're doing a quick analysis. Actually, recently we've seen a lot more big companies come out and talk about the benefits of Ember for long-lived projects, and I think that helps a lot just having people testify that they used Ember for a year within a team that wasn't three people, and they found it to be productive in these specific ways. I think that's helped a lot of people feel comfortable. BRANDON: That's been my experience, certainly, as well, just seeing that increase. I think everybody should -- honestly, I believe everybody listening to this should drop what they're doing and go watch the Hack Summit talk. I thought it was phenomenal, and I think it made me think a little differently because it's a little confusing out there, like what some of the tradeoffs are in these open source projects that are run in that kind of echo chamber. And the fact that you guys work so hard to pierce the echo chamber is really cool. I know that there may be some technical questions. We don't get a chance to have you guys on the podcast very often, obviously, so I wonder if anybody has any more questions. STANLEY: Before we get back to technical questions, I just want to cut in and say I really like Yehuda's talk from Rails Conf as well. It was really eye opening for me as somebody new to the Rails community, even though Rails has been around for a while, and kind of understanding the value of shared solutions and kind of the philosophy behind that. YEHUDA: Yeah, that was definitely the first time I tried to formulate a general theory for what shared solutions look like and why they're good, and essentially why Rails hit the nail on the head with the right amount of shared solutions and where the experimentation is happening and all that stuff. STANLEY: Cool. Back to you, Charles. CHARLES: I just had a quick question I wanted, before we wrap up. I had another question about the server side rendering, kind of a general one. I know I've definitely been burned by server side rendering in the past, you know, because it's been something that people talk about on and off, it seems like, for the last five, six years. I remember when mustache first came out. The first time that I tried it, it's like, oh, I've got this templating thing that I can run inside on my Rail server, and I can run it. There's a JavaScript implementation too. One of the things that I found was I was able to get up running very quickly, but then I felt like I was eaten alive by the edge cases. It was actually -- I think it was a blog post that you wrote, Tom, where you were talking about kind of the justification for resolving, always resolving RSVP promises asynchronously. Because, to not do so, have a different context, different stack sitting on top of the resolution was like releasing Zalgo into your application. I actually, when I read that thing about promises, it actually made me harken back to my experience with server side rendering. I was like, oh, with server side rendering I was releasing Zalgo onto my client. I had a very different context. TOM: Yeah, the thing you're describing is sharing templates across two different apps, right? CHARLES: Right. TOM: The data model diverges, and then the things that you need diverge. That specifically is something that we are going to avoid. The idea isn't, oh, you can reuse your model on the server, and you reuse your templates on the server. The point is it's your app, the same exact app, same code base that you would run in the user's browser just happens to be running on the server. YEHUDA: And I think there's also -- I think there's another important point, which is that if you look at how people do SSR, I think historically people have said, "Well, I'm going to use a view layer that's very good at SSR." And then you would have this pile of hacks that was involved in booting up your app. Honestly, Ember, in the beginning, had piles of hacks used to booting up your app. I definitely remember that period. Now the view layer maybe is very good at running on the client server and, like you said, originally was just like the template. But now maybe the whole view layer is good at it. But now the process of actually booting things is a source of non-determinism. You're saying Zalgo. I'm saying non-determinism. Zalgo is a better word. CHARLES: [Laughter] YEHUDA: And Ember has definitely held off on tackling server side rendering seriously until we felt confident that we had the full stack handled. In other words that, as a framework, we had the whole lifecycle handled. Then actually, if you look at technically what we've been doing recently, a lot of it is like separating out. We have an application right now, an application only -- there's only ever one instance of it. Now we're saying, well, there could be multiple sessions. And so we're really looking at the whole lifecycle of the application and, because we own the whole lifecycle of the application, we can actually feel confident that the path that we're going through is correct, so that's one part of it. The other part of it is essentially what React figured out at a high level. I think what we're doing is equivalent, which is you don't necessarily assume that you got exactly the same thing on the client server because probably in practice there's always going to be some thing or other, like the clock case that Tom talked about, or the hello Yehuda case that I talked about before, the authentication case. What you do is you rerender the template, and you don't say if it's not exactly the same, throw it away and start over. You say parts that are the same you can keep, and parts that are different you replace. Therefore, it's not so much a whack-a-mole problem. It's more like how much replacement can I tolerate and have it not feel janky, right? So you go use it, and if you see that there's an area that's popping in and replacing, that's an area that you have to go and figure out so, first of all, it will work. Right? It will work. It will not be broken. It might feel a little bad, and that's an area for you to go and improve the Zalgoishness of your solution. In practice, in Ember, it will almost always be something weird like you're relying on a non-deterministic DOM API or something like this, or you're relying on some XHR that even though we serialized it, you're getting a push notification, and it's different, and it happens quickly, so it's janked. Right? I think the basic point of try to control everything and also only replace things that are needed will get you to a much better starting place out of the gate with Ember than you will have if you try to do the old solutions. It may turn out to be a lot of work. And if it turns out to be a lot of work regardless, then I think it will still, even with Ember, be a thing that is used by people who really need it and not so much by people who don't. But I'm hopeful that the fact that we own the whole lifecycle of your application will let it be useful for a bigger set of people than people who are desperately in need of it as a solution. BRANDON: Awesome, so I think we're going to wrap up. Is there anything you guys want to give a shout-out to or anyone? YEHUDA: Please sign up for Skylight to make your Rails apps faster. TOM: Yeah, please. Make my Christmas a merry one. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all. TOM: And sign up for Skylight. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all, but Tom and I, much of our day job is working on Skylight. And if you watched my talk at Hack Summit, one of the things that I advocate and I really feel it in my gut because of Skylight is I advocate spending, even if you're full time in open source, spending some time, even a day a week or two days a week, would help a lot working on something that you have to maintain over the long haul because, like I said before, maintenance over the long haul is very difficult for you to market. It's something that you have to feel in your heart. If you're working on an open source project, work on -- use it for a real thing that you spend significant time on that you have to maintain over the long haul so you could feel, in a year, whether you're practice is holding up to being maintainable. And, yes, now that I've talked about Skylight for a second, please sign up. This is how we fund our ability to do any open source. Working on Skylight has definitely been the most enjoyable thing I've done in my career so far in the sense that I've had a lot of control over it, but it's also the most harrowing in the sense that we are responsible for getting all the revenue, so please sign up. BRANDON: All right, well, thanks very much, you all, for coming on. Everybody, go sign up for Skylight. It's very cool, very beautiful, and very actionable insight for Rails apps. Tom, Yehuda, thank you so much for joining us on this. It's been super enlightening. Again, everybody, please go watch Yehuda's talk on keeping the Web Indie. And if you've got a little extra time, the Rails Conf talk on layers of abstraction is also, I found, something that changed my views on a lot of stuff as well. Thanks again, both of you all, for coming on. YEHUDA: Thanks a lot. TOM: Thank you, guys. BRANDON: All right, talk to you later. CHARLES: Thank you, guys.
Adam and Jerod talk with Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz about the road to Ember 2.0 and the complete front-end stack it is today.
Adam and Jerod talk with Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz about the road to Ember 2.0 and the complete front-end stack it is today.
In this episode Ben Orenstein is joined by Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale from Tilde. They discuss bootstrapping a business and the model behind Tilde, their breakdown of product development and consulting, and how they all met. They also talk about designing APIs and frameworks that people actually want to use, how teaching helps them be better framework developers, how they can beat the competition, how supporting multiple languages and frameworks can ruin your app's experience, the big surprises as they've launched, Ember.js' push to 1.0 and beyond, the difference between Ember.js and Backbone.js and why JavaScript matters, and much more. Tilde Skylight Ember.js Ember Data The conceptual ladder W3C TC39 Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, @tomdale, and @wycats on twitter.
Panel Tom Dale (twitter github blog Tilde Inc.) James Halliday (twitter github substack.net) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Tim Caswell (twitter github howtonode.org) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:52 - James Halliday Introduction browserify 02:37 - Tom Dale Introduction iCloud Ember.js Big Data & Hadoop 04:47 - Specialized vs Monolithic github.com/tildeio Idiology Micro Libraries 14:13 - Learning Frameworks 18:04 - Making things modular 25:23 - Picking the right tool for the job 27:44 - voxel.js & emberjs emberjs / packages BPM - Browser Package Manager NPM - Node Packaged Modules testling-ci Backbone.js 38:19 - Module Systems CommonJS 41:14 - Cloud9 Use Case 43:54 - Bugs jQuery Source Code Picks jQuery 2.0 (Merrick) ECMAScript 6 Module Definition (Merrick) AMD (Merrick) Yiruma (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Miracle Berry Tablets (AJ) The Ubuntu You Deserve (AJ) Bravemule (Jamison) RealtimeConf Europe (Tim) visionmedia / cpm (Tim) Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie Miller (Chuck) Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing? [Infographic] (Chuck) testling-ci (James) voxel.js (James) CAMPJS (James) Discourse (Tom) Williams-Sonoma 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set (Tom) The Best Simple Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen (Tom) Next Week Why Javascript is Hard Transcript JAMISON: You can curse but we will just edit it out and replace it with fart noises. TOM: I’ll be providing plenty of my own. [Laughter] JAMISON: Okay, good. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have AJ O’Neal. AJ: Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you not even live! CHUCK: [Laughs] Alright, Jamison Dance. JAMISON: Hi guys, it’s tough to follow that. CHUCK: Merrick Christensen. MERRICK: Hey. CHUCK: Joe Eames. JOE: Howdy! CHUCK: Tim Caswell. TIM: Hello. CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. And this week, we have two guests. The first one is Tom Dale. TOM: Hey, thanks for having me. CHUCK: The other is James Halliday. JAMES: Yep. Hello. CHUCK: Welcome to the show, guys. We were having a conversation a while back, I don’t remember if it was during another episode or after another episode. But we were having a discussion over code complexity and having like small simple libraries or small simple sets of functionality versus large monolithic sets of functionality, and how to approach those and when they’re appropriate. So, we brought you guys on to help us explore this because you're experts, right? TOM: I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of the situation, but we can certainly fumble our way through something. [Laughter] CHUCK: Alright. So, why don’t you guys, real quick, just kind of introduce yourselves? Give us a little background on what your experience is so that we know which questions to ask you guys. James, why don’t you start? I know you’ve been on the show before. JAMES: Hello. I suppose I wrote Browserify which is relevant here. It’s a common JS style, bundler packager thing that just uses NPM. And I have a bunch of other libraries. And I really like doing data development as just a bunch of little modules put together. They are all published completely independently on NPM. I think I’m up to like 230-ish some odd modules on NPM now. So, I’ve been doing that and I really like that style.
Panel Tom Dale (twitter github blog Tilde Inc.) James Halliday (twitter github substack.net) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Tim Caswell (twitter github howtonode.org) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:52 - James Halliday Introduction browserify 02:37 - Tom Dale Introduction iCloud Ember.js Big Data & Hadoop 04:47 - Specialized vs Monolithic github.com/tildeio Idiology Micro Libraries 14:13 - Learning Frameworks 18:04 - Making things modular 25:23 - Picking the right tool for the job 27:44 - voxel.js & emberjs emberjs / packages BPM - Browser Package Manager NPM - Node Packaged Modules testling-ci Backbone.js 38:19 - Module Systems CommonJS 41:14 - Cloud9 Use Case 43:54 - Bugs jQuery Source Code Picks jQuery 2.0 (Merrick) ECMAScript 6 Module Definition (Merrick) AMD (Merrick) Yiruma (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Miracle Berry Tablets (AJ) The Ubuntu You Deserve (AJ) Bravemule (Jamison) RealtimeConf Europe (Tim) visionmedia / cpm (Tim) Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie Miller (Chuck) Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing? [Infographic] (Chuck) testling-ci (James) voxel.js (James) CAMPJS (James) Discourse (Tom) Williams-Sonoma 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set (Tom) The Best Simple Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen (Tom) Next Week Why Javascript is Hard Transcript JAMISON: You can curse but we will just edit it out and replace it with fart noises. TOM: I’ll be providing plenty of my own. [Laughter] JAMISON: Okay, good. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have AJ O’Neal. AJ: Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you not even live! CHUCK: [Laughs] Alright, Jamison Dance. JAMISON: Hi guys, it’s tough to follow that. CHUCK: Merrick Christensen. MERRICK: Hey. CHUCK: Joe Eames. JOE: Howdy! CHUCK: Tim Caswell. TIM: Hello. CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. And this week, we have two guests. The first one is Tom Dale. TOM: Hey, thanks for having me. CHUCK: The other is James Halliday. JAMES: Yep. Hello. CHUCK: Welcome to the show, guys. We were having a conversation a while back, I don’t remember if it was during another episode or after another episode. But we were having a discussion over code complexity and having like small simple libraries or small simple sets of functionality versus large monolithic sets of functionality, and how to approach those and when they’re appropriate. So, we brought you guys on to help us explore this because you're experts, right? TOM: I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of the situation, but we can certainly fumble our way through something. [Laughter] CHUCK: Alright. So, why don’t you guys, real quick, just kind of introduce yourselves? Give us a little background on what your experience is so that we know which questions to ask you guys. James, why don’t you start? I know you’ve been on the show before. JAMES: Hello. I suppose I wrote Browserify which is relevant here. It’s a common JS style, bundler packager thing that just uses NPM. And I have a bunch of other libraries. And I really like doing data development as just a bunch of little modules put together. They are all published completely independently on NPM. I think I’m up to like 230-ish some odd modules on NPM now. So, I’ve been doing that and I really like that style.
Panel Tom Dale (twitter github blog Tilde Inc.) James Halliday (twitter github substack.net) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Tim Caswell (twitter github howtonode.org) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:52 - James Halliday Introduction browserify 02:37 - Tom Dale Introduction iCloud Ember.js Big Data & Hadoop 04:47 - Specialized vs Monolithic github.com/tildeio Idiology Micro Libraries 14:13 - Learning Frameworks 18:04 - Making things modular 25:23 - Picking the right tool for the job 27:44 - voxel.js & emberjs emberjs / packages BPM - Browser Package Manager NPM - Node Packaged Modules testling-ci Backbone.js 38:19 - Module Systems CommonJS 41:14 - Cloud9 Use Case 43:54 - Bugs jQuery Source Code Picks jQuery 2.0 (Merrick) ECMAScript 6 Module Definition (Merrick) AMD (Merrick) Yiruma (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Miracle Berry Tablets (AJ) The Ubuntu You Deserve (AJ) Bravemule (Jamison) RealtimeConf Europe (Tim) visionmedia / cpm (Tim) Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie Miller (Chuck) Is Audio The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing? [Infographic] (Chuck) testling-ci (James) voxel.js (James) CAMPJS (James) Discourse (Tom) Williams-Sonoma 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set (Tom) The Best Simple Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen (Tom) Next Week Why Javascript is Hard Transcript JAMISON: You can curse but we will just edit it out and replace it with fart noises. TOM: I’ll be providing plenty of my own. [Laughter] JAMISON: Okay, good. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at Bluebox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have AJ O’Neal. AJ: Yo! Yo! Yo! Coming at you not even live! CHUCK: [Laughs] Alright, Jamison Dance. JAMISON: Hi guys, it’s tough to follow that. CHUCK: Merrick Christensen. MERRICK: Hey. CHUCK: Joe Eames. JOE: Howdy! CHUCK: Tim Caswell. TIM: Hello. CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. And this week, we have two guests. The first one is Tom Dale. TOM: Hey, thanks for having me. CHUCK: The other is James Halliday. JAMES: Yep. Hello. CHUCK: Welcome to the show, guys. We were having a conversation a while back, I don’t remember if it was during another episode or after another episode. But we were having a discussion over code complexity and having like small simple libraries or small simple sets of functionality versus large monolithic sets of functionality, and how to approach those and when they’re appropriate. So, we brought you guys on to help us explore this because you're experts, right? TOM: I don’t think that’s a fair analysis of the situation, but we can certainly fumble our way through something. [Laughter] CHUCK: Alright. So, why don’t you guys, real quick, just kind of introduce yourselves? Give us a little background on what your experience is so that we know which questions to ask you guys. James, why don’t you start? I know you’ve been on the show before. JAMES: Hello. I suppose I wrote Browserify which is relevant here. It’s a common JS style, bundler packager thing that just uses NPM. And I have a bunch of other libraries. And I really like doing data development as just a bunch of little modules put together. They are all published completely independently on NPM. I think I’m up to like 230-ish some odd modules on NPM now. So, I’ve been doing that and I really like that style.
Panel Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 03:19 - The Future of JavaScript and ES6 es-discuss -- Discussion of ECMAScript @esdiscuss six ES6 in node.js @brendaneich (Brendan Eich) @rwaldron (Rick Waldron) 10:18 - Getting News about JavaScript @derickbailey (Derick Bailey) @tjholowaychuk (TJ Holowaychuk aka Vision Media) @substack (James Halliday) @maxodgen (Max Ogden) Peter Cooper’s JavaScript Weekly Peter Cooper’s HTML5 Weekly @badass_js (Badass JavaScript) @seb_ly (Seb Lee-Delisle) 12:43 - Blogs Ben Alman James Burke LosTechies Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew The Changelog reddit 17:02 - Filtering Readability Pocket (formerly Read It Later) Instapaper three.js UTOSC 2012 Machine Learning in JavaScript Jamison Dance VIDEO0023 23:21 - The Community Airbnb Meetups Addy Osmani: Articles for Developers Utah JS Utah Software Craftsmanship Group Ruby Rogues Parley 27:33 - Podcasts and Videos The Changelog YUI Theater (Yahoo Theater) Google Tech Talks Coursera InfoQ Talks to Help You Become A Better Front-End Developer in 2013: Addy Osmani How To Stay Up To Date on Web Technology: Chris Coyier RubyTapas The JavaScript Show Wide Teams Emacs Rocks! The Breakpoint with Paul Irish and Addy Osmani NodeUp 35:53 - More Blogs HTML5 Rocks A Minute With Brendan Eich John Resig 36:16 - Conferences CascadiaJS JSConf NodeConf Picks Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (Joe) Might & Magic Clash of Heroes (Joe) Diet Coke (Merrick) Noah Gundersen (Merrick) Anis Mojgani (Merrick) How to create a bookmarklet (and load jQuery anywhere)! (AJ) So I installed Ubuntu Linux... Now what? (AJ) Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver of the 10th Doctor (Chuck) Powermat Power Dual 1200 Rechargeable Backup Battery (Chuck) Next Week Monolithic vs Modular Design w/ Tom Dale and James Halliday Transcript AJ: I ate a lot of pickle chips this morning. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at BlueBox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 46 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have Joe Eames. JOE: Howdy! CHUCK: We have Merrick Christensen. MERRICK: Hey guys! CHUCK: AJ O'Neal. AJ: I was informed that I'm not actually live. CHUCK: [laughs] Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. And real quick I just want to mention...I know that most of the people who listen to this show are JavaScript developers, but if you're interested in learning Ruby on Rails, then I'm going to be teaching a course. It starts in March and you basically get unlimited access to me during the course, access of forms. It's going to be online live training and then coding and Q&A. So if you're interested in that, go to railsrampup.com and sign up. AJ: Now what is "unlimited" mean when you talk about access to you? MERRICK: [scoffs] Come on, man! CHUCK: [laughs] If I'm awake, I'm probably available to answer to all your questions. MERRICK: Do panelists get discounts? CHUCK: If you're interested, I can probably work something out. JOE: Interesting. CHUCK: In fact, I'm offering a discount for anyone who listens to the podcast. If you go and sign up and you enter the coupon code podcast, it'll give you $200 off. MERRICK: Oh nice! Nice! AJ: Panelists only get $50 off, though. CHUCK: That's right. It's like my dad when he graduated from demo school, his cousin came up to him and said "So, do we get a family discount?" and he says "Yeah, I'll charge you 50% more". MERRICK: [laughs] No, kidding!
Panel Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 03:19 - The Future of JavaScript and ES6 es-discuss -- Discussion of ECMAScript @esdiscuss six ES6 in node.js @brendaneich (Brendan Eich) @rwaldron (Rick Waldron) 10:18 - Getting News about JavaScript @derickbailey (Derick Bailey) @tjholowaychuk (TJ Holowaychuk aka Vision Media) @substack (James Halliday) @maxodgen (Max Ogden) Peter Cooper’s JavaScript Weekly Peter Cooper’s HTML5 Weekly @badass_js (Badass JavaScript) @seb_ly (Seb Lee-Delisle) 12:43 - Blogs Ben Alman James Burke LosTechies Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew The Changelog reddit 17:02 - Filtering Readability Pocket (formerly Read It Later) Instapaper three.js UTOSC 2012 Machine Learning in JavaScript Jamison Dance VIDEO0023 23:21 - The Community Airbnb Meetups Addy Osmani: Articles for Developers Utah JS Utah Software Craftsmanship Group Ruby Rogues Parley 27:33 - Podcasts and Videos The Changelog YUI Theater (Yahoo Theater) Google Tech Talks Coursera InfoQ Talks to Help You Become A Better Front-End Developer in 2013: Addy Osmani How To Stay Up To Date on Web Technology: Chris Coyier RubyTapas The JavaScript Show Wide Teams Emacs Rocks! The Breakpoint with Paul Irish and Addy Osmani NodeUp 35:53 - More Blogs HTML5 Rocks A Minute With Brendan Eich John Resig 36:16 - Conferences CascadiaJS JSConf NodeConf Picks Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (Joe) Might & Magic Clash of Heroes (Joe) Diet Coke (Merrick) Noah Gundersen (Merrick) Anis Mojgani (Merrick) How to create a bookmarklet (and load jQuery anywhere)! (AJ) So I installed Ubuntu Linux... Now what? (AJ) Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver of the 10th Doctor (Chuck) Powermat Power Dual 1200 Rechargeable Backup Battery (Chuck) Next Week Monolithic vs Modular Design w/ Tom Dale and James Halliday Transcript AJ: I ate a lot of pickle chips this morning. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at BlueBox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 46 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have Joe Eames. JOE: Howdy! CHUCK: We have Merrick Christensen. MERRICK: Hey guys! CHUCK: AJ O'Neal. AJ: I was informed that I'm not actually live. CHUCK: [laughs] Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. And real quick I just want to mention...I know that most of the people who listen to this show are JavaScript developers, but if you're interested in learning Ruby on Rails, then I'm going to be teaching a course. It starts in March and you basically get unlimited access to me during the course, access of forms. It's going to be online live training and then coding and Q&A. So if you're interested in that, go to railsrampup.com and sign up. AJ: Now what is "unlimited" mean when you talk about access to you? MERRICK: [scoffs] Come on, man! CHUCK: [laughs] If I'm awake, I'm probably available to answer to all your questions. MERRICK: Do panelists get discounts? CHUCK: If you're interested, I can probably work something out. JOE: Interesting. CHUCK: In fact, I'm offering a discount for anyone who listens to the podcast. If you go and sign up and you enter the coupon code podcast, it'll give you $200 off. MERRICK: Oh nice! Nice! AJ: Panelists only get $50 off, though. CHUCK: That's right. It's like my dad when he graduated from demo school, his cousin came up to him and said "So, do we get a family discount?" and he says "Yeah, I'll charge you 50% more". MERRICK: [laughs] No, kidding!
Panel Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 03:19 - The Future of JavaScript and ES6 es-discuss -- Discussion of ECMAScript @esdiscuss six ES6 in node.js @brendaneich (Brendan Eich) @rwaldron (Rick Waldron) 10:18 - Getting News about JavaScript @derickbailey (Derick Bailey) @tjholowaychuk (TJ Holowaychuk aka Vision Media) @substack (James Halliday) @maxodgen (Max Ogden) Peter Cooper’s JavaScript Weekly Peter Cooper’s HTML5 Weekly @badass_js (Badass JavaScript) @seb_ly (Seb Lee-Delisle) 12:43 - Blogs Ben Alman James Burke LosTechies Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew The Changelog reddit 17:02 - Filtering Readability Pocket (formerly Read It Later) Instapaper three.js UTOSC 2012 Machine Learning in JavaScript Jamison Dance VIDEO0023 23:21 - The Community Airbnb Meetups Addy Osmani: Articles for Developers Utah JS Utah Software Craftsmanship Group Ruby Rogues Parley 27:33 - Podcasts and Videos The Changelog YUI Theater (Yahoo Theater) Google Tech Talks Coursera InfoQ Talks to Help You Become A Better Front-End Developer in 2013: Addy Osmani How To Stay Up To Date on Web Technology: Chris Coyier RubyTapas The JavaScript Show Wide Teams Emacs Rocks! The Breakpoint with Paul Irish and Addy Osmani NodeUp 35:53 - More Blogs HTML5 Rocks A Minute With Brendan Eich John Resig 36:16 - Conferences CascadiaJS JSConf NodeConf Picks Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (Joe) Might & Magic Clash of Heroes (Joe) Diet Coke (Merrick) Noah Gundersen (Merrick) Anis Mojgani (Merrick) How to create a bookmarklet (and load jQuery anywhere)! (AJ) So I installed Ubuntu Linux... Now what? (AJ) Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver of the 10th Doctor (Chuck) Powermat Power Dual 1200 Rechargeable Backup Battery (Chuck) Next Week Monolithic vs Modular Design w/ Tom Dale and James Halliday Transcript AJ: I ate a lot of pickle chips this morning. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at BlueBox.net.] [This episode is sponsored by Component One, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to Wijmo.com and check them out.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 46 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel, we have Joe Eames. JOE: Howdy! CHUCK: We have Merrick Christensen. MERRICK: Hey guys! CHUCK: AJ O'Neal. AJ: I was informed that I'm not actually live. CHUCK: [laughs] Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. And real quick I just want to mention...I know that most of the people who listen to this show are JavaScript developers, but if you're interested in learning Ruby on Rails, then I'm going to be teaching a course. It starts in March and you basically get unlimited access to me during the course, access of forms. It's going to be online live training and then coding and Q&A. So if you're interested in that, go to railsrampup.com and sign up. AJ: Now what is "unlimited" mean when you talk about access to you? MERRICK: [scoffs] Come on, man! CHUCK: [laughs] If I'm awake, I'm probably available to answer to all your questions. MERRICK: Do panelists get discounts? CHUCK: If you're interested, I can probably work something out. JOE: Interesting. CHUCK: In fact, I'm offering a discount for anyone who listens to the podcast. If you go and sign up and you enter the coupon code podcast, it'll give you $200 off. MERRICK: Oh nice! Nice! AJ: Panelists only get $50 off, though. CHUCK: That's right. It's like my dad when he graduated from demo school, his cousin came up to him and said "So, do we get a family discount?" and he says "Yeah, I'll charge you 50% more". MERRICK: [laughs] No, kidding!
James Brooks speaks to Editor Cristina Odero about this weeks edition of The Breaker and Tom Dale chats about Bournemouth University Media School's trip to newsrooms in London.
Panel Trek Glowacki (twitter github Trek by trek) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Intro to CoffeeScript) Discussion 02:18 - Ember.js (twitter, github, site) 03:17 - Based on/Inspired by SproutCore? 05:39 - The Rails of JavaScript? “Magical” 06:29 - todomvc Backbone.js 11:21 - Pulling pieces of Ember.js 12:07 - Struggles with using Ember.js Learning API can and does change frequently The applications that Ember.js targets are new New patterns 18:45 - Developer style 22:59 - Rendering 24:42 - Philosophy of Ember.js 27:00 - Ember.js router State machines 32:31 - Spending time learning Ember.js 35:06 - Frameworks and Wordpress 41:57 - Event loop 42:49 - API Object system Binding syntax Handlebars.js 46:38 - Rendering and nesting views Picks Promo Only (AJ) TinyToCS: Tiny Transactions on Computer Science (Jamison) HandBrake (Chuck) BitTorrent (Chuck) Transmission (Chuck) Presto 04213 Electronic Digital Timer (Chuck) Crafty.js (Trek) About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Robert Reimann (Trek) Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate by David Erik Nelson (Trek) Transcript JAMISON: And I’m looking sexy. [This episode is sponsored by ComponentOne, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to wijmo.com and check them out.] [This episode is sponsored by Gaslight Software. They are putting on a Mastering Backbone training in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center, December 3rd through 5th of this year. This three day intensive course will forever change the way you develop the front-end of your web applications. For too long, many web developers have approached front-end as drudgery. No more! We’ll help you build the skills to write front-end code you can love every bit as much as your server-side code.] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 33 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel we have AJ O’Neal. AJ: Yo, yo, yo. Comin’ at you live from DJ sphere of Orem, Utah. CHUCK: We also have Jamison Dance. JAMISON: Oh, gosh you get to ----. I'm sorry AJ; your intro was so good. [laughs] CHUCK: [laughs] I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv and this week, we have a special guest and that is Trek Glowacki? TREK: Oh, very close. Good job. CHUCK: [laughs] Do you wanna straighten it up for us? TREK: You can just call me Trek. Everyone does. CHUCK: Ok. How many generations removed are you from Poland or whatever? TREK: So I'm a first generation American. My parents are foreign. But my dad is Belgian, not Polish nationally, but of a Polish decent. CHUCK: Oh, OK. That's interesting. TREK: Yeah. My driver’s license is weird and everything is misspelled. My voter registration is spelled wrong. It’s kind of a nightmare. It’s why I just go by Trek. I try to snag @trek as a user handle everywhere. So I'm @trek on Twitter-- just makes my life easier. CHUCK: Yeah. That makes sense. I have to say that, if your voter registration is messed up, I hope you are voting for that “other guy”. And I'm not going to be specific about my --- because I don’t wanna start a firestorm on a programing podcast for that, so we’ll just leave it there. Anyway, we are going to be talking about Ember.js today. Now, I know that Yehuda and Tom Dale work on it. Do you work on it too or are you just kind of an expert user? TREK: A little bit of both. I hang out on the secret volcano base that we have, with Yehuda and Tom and my contributions are-- JAMISON: That's why your audio quality is so good. TREK: Yeah, we are at the volcano base, it’s really is beaming to a satellite in space. CHUCK: Yeah volcano net is awesome. TREK: So,
Panel Trek Glowacki (twitter github Trek by trek) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Intro to CoffeeScript) Discussion 02:18 - Ember.js (twitter, github, site) 03:17 - Based on/Inspired by SproutCore? 05:39 - The Rails of JavaScript? “Magical” 06:29 - todomvc Backbone.js 11:21 - Pulling pieces of Ember.js 12:07 - Struggles with using Ember.js Learning API can and does change frequently The applications that Ember.js targets are new New patterns 18:45 - Developer style 22:59 - Rendering 24:42 - Philosophy of Ember.js 27:00 - Ember.js router State machines 32:31 - Spending time learning Ember.js 35:06 - Frameworks and Wordpress 41:57 - Event loop 42:49 - API Object system Binding syntax Handlebars.js 46:38 - Rendering and nesting views Picks Promo Only (AJ) TinyToCS: Tiny Transactions on Computer Science (Jamison) HandBrake (Chuck) BitTorrent (Chuck) Transmission (Chuck) Presto 04213 Electronic Digital Timer (Chuck) Crafty.js (Trek) About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Robert Reimann (Trek) Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate by David Erik Nelson (Trek) Transcript JAMISON: And I’m looking sexy. [This episode is sponsored by ComponentOne, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to wijmo.com and check them out.] [This episode is sponsored by Gaslight Software. They are putting on a Mastering Backbone training in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center, December 3rd through 5th of this year. This three day intensive course will forever change the way you develop the front-end of your web applications. For too long, many web developers have approached front-end as drudgery. No more! We’ll help you build the skills to write front-end code you can love every bit as much as your server-side code.] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 33 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel we have AJ O’Neal. AJ: Yo, yo, yo. Comin’ at you live from DJ sphere of Orem, Utah. CHUCK: We also have Jamison Dance. JAMISON: Oh, gosh you get to ----. I'm sorry AJ; your intro was so good. [laughs] CHUCK: [laughs] I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv and this week, we have a special guest and that is Trek Glowacki? TREK: Oh, very close. Good job. CHUCK: [laughs] Do you wanna straighten it up for us? TREK: You can just call me Trek. Everyone does. CHUCK: Ok. How many generations removed are you from Poland or whatever? TREK: So I'm a first generation American. My parents are foreign. But my dad is Belgian, not Polish nationally, but of a Polish decent. CHUCK: Oh, OK. That's interesting. TREK: Yeah. My driver’s license is weird and everything is misspelled. My voter registration is spelled wrong. It’s kind of a nightmare. It’s why I just go by Trek. I try to snag @trek as a user handle everywhere. So I'm @trek on Twitter-- just makes my life easier. CHUCK: Yeah. That makes sense. I have to say that, if your voter registration is messed up, I hope you are voting for that “other guy”. And I'm not going to be specific about my --- because I don’t wanna start a firestorm on a programing podcast for that, so we’ll just leave it there. Anyway, we are going to be talking about Ember.js today. Now, I know that Yehuda and Tom Dale work on it. Do you work on it too or are you just kind of an expert user? TREK: A little bit of both. I hang out on the secret volcano base that we have, with Yehuda and Tom and my contributions are-- JAMISON: That's why your audio quality is so good. TREK: Yeah, we are at the volcano base, it’s really is beaming to a satellite in space. CHUCK: Yeah volcano net is awesome. TREK: So,
Panel Trek Glowacki (twitter github Trek by trek) AJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Intro to CoffeeScript) Discussion 02:18 - Ember.js (twitter, github, site) 03:17 - Based on/Inspired by SproutCore? 05:39 - The Rails of JavaScript? “Magical” 06:29 - todomvc Backbone.js 11:21 - Pulling pieces of Ember.js 12:07 - Struggles with using Ember.js Learning API can and does change frequently The applications that Ember.js targets are new New patterns 18:45 - Developer style 22:59 - Rendering 24:42 - Philosophy of Ember.js 27:00 - Ember.js router State machines 32:31 - Spending time learning Ember.js 35:06 - Frameworks and Wordpress 41:57 - Event loop 42:49 - API Object system Binding syntax Handlebars.js 46:38 - Rendering and nesting views Picks Promo Only (AJ) TinyToCS: Tiny Transactions on Computer Science (Jamison) HandBrake (Chuck) BitTorrent (Chuck) Transmission (Chuck) Presto 04213 Electronic Digital Timer (Chuck) Crafty.js (Trek) About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Robert Reimann (Trek) Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate by David Erik Nelson (Trek) Transcript JAMISON: And I’m looking sexy. [This episode is sponsored by ComponentOne, makers of Wijmo. If you need stunning UI elements or awesome graphs and charts, then go to wijmo.com and check them out.] [This episode is sponsored by Gaslight Software. They are putting on a Mastering Backbone training in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center, December 3rd through 5th of this year. This three day intensive course will forever change the way you develop the front-end of your web applications. For too long, many web developers have approached front-end as drudgery. No more! We’ll help you build the skills to write front-end code you can love every bit as much as your server-side code.] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 33 of the JavaScript Jabber show. This week on our panel we have AJ O’Neal. AJ: Yo, yo, yo. Comin’ at you live from DJ sphere of Orem, Utah. CHUCK: We also have Jamison Dance. JAMISON: Oh, gosh you get to ----. I'm sorry AJ; your intro was so good. [laughs] CHUCK: [laughs] I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv and this week, we have a special guest and that is Trek Glowacki? TREK: Oh, very close. Good job. CHUCK: [laughs] Do you wanna straighten it up for us? TREK: You can just call me Trek. Everyone does. CHUCK: Ok. How many generations removed are you from Poland or whatever? TREK: So I'm a first generation American. My parents are foreign. But my dad is Belgian, not Polish nationally, but of a Polish decent. CHUCK: Oh, OK. That's interesting. TREK: Yeah. My driver’s license is weird and everything is misspelled. My voter registration is spelled wrong. It’s kind of a nightmare. It’s why I just go by Trek. I try to snag @trek as a user handle everywhere. So I'm @trek on Twitter-- just makes my life easier. CHUCK: Yeah. That makes sense. I have to say that, if your voter registration is messed up, I hope you are voting for that “other guy”. And I'm not going to be specific about my --- because I don’t wanna start a firestorm on a programing podcast for that, so we’ll just leave it there. Anyway, we are going to be talking about Ember.js today. Now, I know that Yehuda and Tom Dale work on it. Do you work on it too or are you just kind of an expert user? TREK: A little bit of both. I hang out on the secret volcano base that we have, with Yehuda and Tom and my contributions are-- JAMISON: That's why your audio quality is so good. TREK: Yeah, we are at the volcano base, it’s really is beaming to a satellite in space. CHUCK: Yeah volcano net is awesome. TREK: So,