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5 episodes with yehuda katz
4 episodes with yehuda katz
5 episodes with yehuda katz
2 episodes with yehuda katz
6 episodes with yehuda katz
2 episodes with yehuda katz
4 episodes with yehuda katz
2 episodes with yehuda katz
2 episodes with yehuda katz
Fredrik talks to Balint Erdi about the web framework Ember. Where did Ember come from, what stands out about it today, how do new features get into the framework, and how is development being made more sustainable? Plus: Balint’s experiences organizing Emberfest, and quite a bit of appreciation for the Ruby and Ember communities in general. The episode is sponsored by Cursed code - a half-day conference with a halloween mood taking place on October 31st, in central Gothenburg. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Balint JSP - Java server pages ZODB - Python object database Ruby Ruby on rails Convention over configuration ORM Active record Ember Angular Yehuda Katz Emberfest Balint’s (first!) book - Rock & roll with Ember.js Ember data Support us on Ko-fi! Classes in Javascript Internet explorer 6 Handlebars Glimmer Controllers in Ember Ember addons Ember RFC:s Codemods React native Tree shaking Webpack Embroider Vite Cursed code - sponsor of the episode Poppels cursedcode.se - to read more and buy tickets The Embroider initiative The Ember initiative Ember CLI Ember core teams Emberconf devjournal.balinterdi.com Ember community links Ember guides Ember checkup - Balint’s productized consulting service Titles These two decades I’m a web guy Just one thing It’a always useful Rails carried me over Ember was in flux Javascript didn’t have classes Emberisms Nowadays I like explicitness more Everything needs to be imported A change they would like to see in the framework (The) Emberfesting Fellow emberino We don’t do drama
Have you seen a Jacked Hasidic Jew? I really haven't. Why is it so uncommon to see religious Jews in shape let alone incredible shape? This week I sat down with Yehuda Katz, a 20-year-old Hasidic Jew who began working out at 14 and now has an amazing physique. Yehuda and I discussed the stigma of wearing non-Hasidic clothing, using social media for his personal training business and how it once made things challenging with his parents, but they are now very strong supporters. We discussed not only the stigma of being an ultra Orthodox bodybuilder but also the immense benefit of being strong and confident especially in a time when so many people hate Jews. SUBSCRIBE, LIKE, AND SHARE!! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rafael-pinsky/message
Today we welcome two speakers from our upcoming Philly Emerging Tech conference: Yehuda Katz and Russ Danner! Yehuda Katz is the founder of creator of the Starbeam.js and EmberJS framework, among many others. He is also a Philly ETE veteran, having spoken at many of our conferences in the past. Russ Danner is the VP ... Read More The post TechChat Tuesdays #61: Yehuda Katz & Russ Danner appeared first on Chariot Solutions.
Üretim Bandı'nın Slack grubu olduğunu biliyor muydunuz? 2600'den fazla ürün yöneticisi, girişimci, yazılımcı, tasarımcının bir arada bulunduğu aktif ürün topluluğuna siz de katılın:>>> uretimbandi.com/slackİki haftada bir yayınladığımız, ürün geliştirmeyle alakalı bültenimizi de aşağıdaki linkten takip edebilirsiniz:>>> uretimbandi.com/bulten----KONUKEyüp AtişLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyupatis/LİNKLERInstrumentl: https://www.instrumentl.com/Yehuda Katz: https://yehudakatz.com/KONUŞULANLAR(00:00) Başlangıç(08:33) Instrumentl ne yapıyor?(10:13) Kullanılan teknolojiler(16:05) Ember.js(27:05) Takım yapısı(31:04) Kurumsal ve yeni yapılanma farkı(37:41) Feature Flag Yapısı(44:20) Test test ah şu test(49:01) Saat farkıyla toplantıların işleyişi(59:43) Yan haklar(01:03:06) Hata çözüm ve bakım süreçleri(01:05:21) İşe alım ve onboarding
It's Steph and Chris' last show. Steph found a game, and if you've been following the journey, all of the Test::Unit test files are now live in RSpec. JWTs really grind Chris' gears. They wrap up with things they've learned, takeaways they've had, and their proudest podcasting moments. They also thank all the folks who've helped make The Bike Shed happen. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Microservices (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ) Transcript: CHRIS: One more round of golden roads, our golden. So here we go. STEPH: Oh, one more round of golden roads. Okay, maybe that's going to get to me today. [laughs] CHRIS: [singing] Golden roads take me home to the place. STEPH: [singing] I belong. CHRIS: Yeah, there you go. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way, at least one more time. So with that [chuckles] as an intro, Steph, what would you say is new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. Well, today is the big day. It is the day that you and I are recording our final Bike Shed episode, which we have all the feels about, and we will definitely dive into. But to ignore some of that for now, I have another small fun update I can provide about a new game that I found. So one of the things that's new in my world is I started playing a new board game with Tim; it's called Ticket to Ride. Have you heard of that? CHRIS: I have. I don't know if I've played it. I feel like it's a particularly popular one now. But I don't know if I've ever had the pleasure. STEPH: It's a very cute game, so we have the smaller version of it. For anyone that's not familiar, it's essentially a map. And then there's a bunch of spots where you can build trains and connect them, and then you get tickets. So your goal is that you're going to connect one location to another location. And then you get points and yada yada, but it's so much fun and especially the two-player version. It's like this perfect 20, maybe 30-minute game. I'll be honest; I'm not really a board game person. I always enjoy it. Once I get into it, then I'm like, this is great. I don't know why I was resistant to this. But every time someone's like, "Do you want to play a board game?" I'm like, "Not really." [laughs] I first have to get into it. But I have really enjoyed Ticket to Ride. That's been a really fun game to play. And it's been a nice way to, like, even during the day, we'll break for lunch and squeeze in a game. CHRIS: Well, I love good two-player games. They're hard to find. But when you find a good one, and it's got that easy pickup and play...I believe I'm going to now purchase this. And thank you for the tip. STEPH: Yeah, this is definitely one of those where it's easy to pick up, and then you can get the expanded board. So there's a two-player version, but then yeah, you can get one that's a map of the U.S. or a map of Europe. And I think it accommodates up to five players as the maximum, so not a huge group but definitely more than two. On a slightly more technical note, I have something that I'm very excited to share. It is a journey that you have been on with me, that everybody listening has been on this journey with me. And I'm very excited. I see you nodding your head, so I'm guessing that you're going to know where I'm headed with this. But I'm very excited to announce that all of the Test::Unit test files now live in RSpec. So that is a big win. I'm very, very excited for that to be a previous state of life and not an ongoing state of life. Because I have certainly developed too much niche knowledge around migrating these tests, and that became apparent to me when I was pairing with another developer that works with the client because they had offered...they had some time. They're like, "Hey, do you want help migrating a test file?" And I was like, "Sure." I was like, "But this is wonky enough, like, we should pair and work on this together because I just know some ins and outs. And I don't want you to have to learn a lot of the hard lessons that I've learned." And the test that we happened to pick up was very gnarly. It had a lot of mystery guests. And we spent, I think it was a good two hours. And we only migrated one of the tests, so not even a full file but one of the tests. And at the end of it, I was like, I know way too much about some of the oddities and quirkiness of this. And we got through it, but we decided that wasn't a good use of their time for them to go at this alone. So that's why I'm extra excited and relieved because I didn't want this task to carry on to someone else. So, hooray, we did it. CHRIS: Hooray. Just in time. You're Indiana Jones grabbing your hat right as you roll out and off to [laughs] be away from the project for a bit. So you stuck the landing. Well done, Steph. STEPH: Thank you. Thank you. So that's some great news. And then also, everything else in life is pretty much focused around getting ready for maternity leave. That's about to happen soon, and I am so ready. I have thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the things that I'm doing, [laughs] but goodness, being pregnant is hard. And I am very much ready for that leave. So also, a lot of the things that I'm doing right now are very focused on making sure everything's transitioned and communicated and that I just feel really good about that day of departure. That covers all the newness in my world other than the big thing that we're just not talking about yet. How about you? What's new in your world? CHRIS: Well, continuing to skirt the bigger topic that we will certainly get to in the episode, what is new in my world? I'm actually quite excited workwise right now. We have a much larger body of work that finally we got the clarity. All the pieces fell into place, and now we're sort of everybody rowing in the same direction. There's interesting, I think, really impactful code that we're writing for Sagewell right now. So that's really fantastic. We've got the whole team back together on the engineering side. And so we're, I think, in the strongest and most interesting point that I have experienced thus far. So that's all really fantastic. On a slight technical deep dive, you know what really grinds my gears? It's JWTs. JSON Web Tokens and I have never gotten along. It's never been a match made in heaven. And we have a webhook that comes from Plaid. Plaid is a vendor for connecting bank accounts and whatnot. And they have webhooks like many people do. So they can inform us when things change, lovely feature of how we build web apps these days. But often, there's a signature that says, "This is definitively from us, and you can trust us." And usually, it's some calculated signature, HMAC, or something like that. For some reason, Plaid's uses JWTs, and more than that, they use JWKs. So there's JWT which is the signature. That JWT itself is signed with a JWK. You have to fetch the JWK from their server based on the key ID in the header of the JWT. But how do you know if you can trust the JWT before you've gotten the JWK? All of this broke in a recent upgrade. We went from Heroku-20 to Heroku-22 to the new platform with Heroku, which bumped us to OpenSSL 3.0, and it turns out JWT doesn't work with it. And so that's sad. It's a no. It's going to be a no. It turns out the way that OpenSSL 3.0 works is incompatible with some of the code paths in JWT. And so I was like, wait, we just can't do this? And it's low-level cryptographic primitive stuff that I'm not comfortable messing around with. I'm not going to hop in there and roll up my sleeves. And even just getting to the point that I understood what was broken about this took like an hour and a half just to sort of like, wait, which is okay...so the JWT signs and encodes. And this will be a theme that we come back to later, but I think web development should be simpler. I think we should strive for simplicity. And this is a perfect example where I'm guessing Plaid uses JWTs and that approach to communicating security things often, but I've not seen it used much for signing webhooks. And, oof, it led to a complicated day. And it's unfixable now as far as I can tell. There is a commit on the JWT Ruby repo as of five days ago, but it doesn't build in our system. And it's not released. And it's just a mess. So yeah, engineering is complicated. I'm both wildly excited about what we're doing at Sagewell, and then today was this local minimum of like, oh, JWTs again. Again, we find ourselves battling. And you won today, but hopefully not for too long. STEPH: Oof, how did this manifest that you first noticed? So is it because a webhook suddenly stopped working, and that was like the error that rose up, and that's what helped you dive into it? CHRIS: Yeah, we have a little bit of code in the controller for where Plaid events come in. We calculate and verify the signature of the webhook to make sure that it's valid, and we reject it otherwise. And we alert ourselves via Sentry, and then we also have a Datadog scan that can show what's the status code of the response. Because these are incoming HTTP payloads or requests, and so we can see there were 200 up until this magical day when suddenly everything changed. And that was when we switched Heroku stacks. And then we can see it also in Sentry. So we're able to look at it, and we're like, why are none of the Plaid webhooks able to verify the signature anymore? That seems weird. And so then Datadog confirmed that it consistently was broken from this point in time. And then we were able to track that back. It was also pretty easy to guess because the error was "pkeys are immutable in OpenSSL 3.0," and that was the data. And I was like, oh, cool, that sounds fun. Let me go figure out what that means. STEPH: [laughs] Well, it's a nice use of Datadog. I remember in the past you were talking about adding it. And I was excited because I've never been at that point where a team has just introduced it; either a team doesn't have it, and they wish they had more insights, or they have it and don't use it. And nobody ever checks the board. So that's a nice anecdote for Datadog helping you out. Yeah, I'm not envious of your situation, friend. CHRIS: I do love the cup half full take [laughs] that you have on the overall situation, but that's nice how Datadog worked out for you. And you know what? It was. Thank you, Steph, for once again being that voice of positivity. STEPH: I appreciate that you enjoy it because there are times that when someone points it out to me that I do that, I have to be like, "I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be toxic positivity over here. [chuckles] That's just how my brain works." CHRIS: Oh, you are definitively not toxic positivity. That's a different thing. Because you ended with but also, I feel bad for you, and I'm glad that I'm not in your shoes. So you are the right level of positivity. I don't think I could have talked to you for three and a half years as co-host on a podcast if I didn't appreciate the level of positivity or the general approach that you bring to thinking about stuff. STEPH: Okay. Well, to borrow a phrase from Matt Sumner, who has been a guest on the show, cool, cool, cool, cool. I'm glad my positivity has been well calibrated. And I was about to say I'm interested to hear how this turns out for the team. [laughs] But we're in an awkward spot where I mean, you and I, we can still totally chat. But listeners won't get to hear the rest of that particular saga. I mean, you can share. I mean, you do you. I'm setting all sorts of boundaries for you right now. Okay. And now I'm just rambling, and I'm getting weird with it. Because the truth is that, you know, we won't be back. And this is our final episode together. So I think let's just go ahead and rip off the Band-Aid. Let's dive into it. Let's talk about it. Given that it's our last episode that we are recording, we thought of a couple of things that we'd like to talk about. You brought up a great idea that I'm excited to dive into. Do you want to lead us in? CHRIS: Sure. Well, if we go back all the way to Episode 172, that is the first episode that you came on as a guest. I actually continue to really love the title of that episode, which is What I Believe About Software. And it both captured that conversation really well, but also, more generally, it's actually become the tagline of the show when we do our little introduction. What do we believe about building great software? Et cetera. And I think that's been the throughline of the conversations that we've had is what remains true. What are the themes? Not necessarily the specific technologies, although we certainly talk about that. But what do we believe about building great software? And so today, I thought it would be fun for us to talk about what do we still believe about building great software? It's roughly three and a half years or so that we've been doing this. What's still true? STEPH: Oh, well, I have the first unequivocal one, the thing that I still believe about building great software, and that's you should hire thoughtbot. That's definitely the way to go. We'll help you get it done, not that I'm biased in any way. CHRIS: No. I'd say collectively between us; there's zero bias with regard to thoughtbot or any other web development shop out there. But thoughtbot is the best. STEPH: All right, perfect. So we've got the first one, the clutch one of hire thoughtbot. And then I also really like this topic. And I still think back to that first episode that I recorded with you and how much fun that was and how that really got me to start thinking about this. Because it was something that, at the time, I didn't really reflect on a lot in terms of what does it take to build great software? I was often just doing the day-to-day actions but then not really going high-level think about it. So I'm excited this is one of the topics that we're revisiting. So for the next one, this one is, I don't know, maybe it's a little cutesy, but I was trying to think of an alliteration that I enjoyed. And so this one is be an assumption assassin. So what assumptions are you making? And then how can you validate or disprove them? And that is something that I find myself doing constantly. And it always yields better work, better questions, better software, better code, better code reviews. And that's my first one is be an assumption assassin and identify what assumptions you have. And I had a really good example come up today while I was having a conversation with Joël about something that I was looking to merge. But I was a little hesitant about it because there are some oddities that I won't dig in too deeply. But essentially, there's a test that I migrated that highlights an existing concern in the code. And I was like, should I go ahead and merge this test that documents it, or should I wait to fix that concern and address it? And he brought up a good point. And he's like, "Well, we're assuming it's a bug and an issue, but it may not actually be depending on how the software is being used." And so then he was encouraging me to reevaluate that assumption that I had where I'm like, oh, this is definitely a problem to, like, I don't know, is it a problem? Let's ask somebody. CHRIS: First off, I love that as a theme, as one of the things that you still believe about software. Second, I believe you correctly said that you were looking for an alliteration, but my brain heard acronym. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And so then I was like, B-A-A-A. Is it BAAA? What are you going for there? Oh, you just wanted a bunch of As. Okay, I got it now. Secondly or thirdly, I think I'm on my third now. Apparently, within Sagewell team culture, one of the things that I'm most known for is... there are two phrases: one is just to name it, and the other is to be clear. And these are the two things that I do apparently constantly so much that it's become a meme within the team. It's just like, okay, everybody's been talking. But I just want to make sure we're on the same page here. So just to be clear, or just to name it, here's what I'm seeing. But I agree; I think taking those things...what are the implicit bits? What are the assumptions? And making them more explicit. Our job as developers is just to yell at computers all the time and make them try and do human stuff. And there's so much room for lossy conversions at every point in that conversation chain. And so yeah, being very clear, getting rid of assumptions, love it. It's all great stuff. Actually, in a very related note, the first on my list is that code is for humans to read. This is one of the things that I believe most deeply and most impacts the way that I write software. Any given piece of functionality that we want to author in our code feels like 10, 20, 50, frankly, almost infinite different versions of the code that would produce nearly identical functionality. So at the end of the day, the actual symbols and strings of text that we bring together to write the code is all about other humans, other people on your team, you five months from now, you a week from now, frankly, or me. I'm going to say me, me a week from now. I want to do future me and everyone else on the team a solid and spend that extra 10% of okay, I have something that works now, but let me try and push it around and try and massage it into a shape that is a little more representative of how we're actually thinking about the code, how we talk about it as an organization. Is that the word that we use to describe that domain concept? Maybe we could change that just a little bit. Can I push more of this into the private API? What actually needs to be known here? And I think that's where I'm happiest is in those moments because that's where all of the parts of the job come together, the bit where I trick a computer into doing what I want and simultaneously making it so that that code is revisitable, clear, expressive, all of those things. So yeah, code is for humans. And that's true across every language, and framework, and domain that I have worked in. And I've only believed it more and more so over time. So yeah, that's mine. STEPH: Yeah, I love that one. That's one of the things that comes to mind when people talk about disliking code reviews. And I can imagine there are a number of reasons that people may have had a poor experience with a code review process. But at the end of the day, if you're not getting that feedback or validation from fellow humans, then how do you know that you've been successful, that you've written something that other people can follow up on? Which goes back to the assumptions in terms of like, you're assuming that you have written something that your future self or that other people are going to be able to read and maintain down the road. So yeah, I love that one. One of the other things that I still hold really true to building great software is prioritize early and often. So always be checking in to understand with your users, with your tech concerns, with data that you may have, new insights, and then just confirm that yes, you and the team are constantly working on the thing that has been prioritized and that is the most important. And also, be ready to let go. That can be really hard. I have definitely had those moments in my career where I've spent two weeks working really hard on something. And then we've realized that the thing that we were pursuing isn't that valuable, or it's something that users don't need or actually want. And so it was better to let go of it than to pursue it and ship it anyways. So that's one of my other mantras that I have adopted now is prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. CHRIS: Unsurprisingly, I agree wholeheartedly with all of that. We're still searching for that thing, that core thing that we disagree on other than Pop-Tarts and IPAs. But I don't know that today is the episode that we're actually going to find that. But yeah, prioritizing is such a critical activity. And it is this interesting collaboration point. It gets different groups together. It's this trade-off. It's this balance. And it's a way to focus on and make explicit the choices that we're making. And we're always making choices. We're always making trade-offs. And so being more explicit, being more connected and collaborative around those I believe in so, so, so much. So love that that was something on your list. Let's see, next up on my list is reduce complexity, just sort of as an adage, just always be reducing complexity. It is amazing to me in my time, particularly as a consultant, but even now, this is something that I hold very true is just it's so easy to grow a system in anticipation of future complexity or imagine that the performance concerns that we're going to run into will be so large that we must switch from Postgres and a nice, simple atomic database into a sharded, clustered Kafka queue adventure. And there are absolutely cases that make sense for that sort of thing. But at a minimum, I beg of you, anyone starting a new system, don't start with microservices. Don't start with an event queue-based system. These are wildly complex versions of what often can be done with so much simpler of an application. And this scales through to everything. What's the complexity of an API? Do we need caching in that API layer? Or can we just be a little bit inefficient for a little while and avoid the complexity and the overhead of caching? Turns out caching is a tricky thing to get right, just as an aside. And so the idea of like, oh, let's just sprinkle in a little bit of caching. It'll be easy, and then we'll get better performance, like, yeah, but did you get it right? Or did you introduce a subtle bug into your program that's going to be really hard to debug later? Because do you cache in development? Well, maybe, I'm not sure, could be. So over time, this is something that I've sort of always felt, but I've only ratcheted it up. It's only something that I've come to believe in more and to hold more firmly to. I think earlier in my career, it was something that I felt, but I would more easily be swayed by aspirational ideas of the staggering amounts of traffic that we would be getting soon or the nine different ways that the data model will expand. And so, we should code the current version in anticipation of that. And I have become somewhat the old man on his lawn yelling at the clouds like, "Nah, we don't need it yet. We can grow to that." And there's a certain category of things that are useful to try and get out in front of and don't introduce additional complexity, but they're a tiny, tiny list. And so, for most things, my stance is what's the simplest thing that we can get away with right now, that still provides a meaningful experience to our users, that doesn't compromise on security or robustness or correctness but just solves the problem we have right now? And over and over and over again, that has served me incredibly well. So yeah, keep that complexity at bay. STEPH: That is one that I've definitely struggled with. And frankly, it works in my favor, that idea of keeping things simple. Because I'm terrible when it comes to predicting the future or trying to build things in a way that I just don't have enough information to really drive the architecture or the application that I'm building. So anytime I'm trying to then stretch and reach for the future in those ways unless I really have a concrete understanding of I am building for these particular scenarios, it's really hard to do. So I very much like keeping it simple and not optimizing before you need to. And it reminds me of I think it's Mark Twain, who has a quote, "Worrying is like paying a debt that you don't owe." And that's something that comes to mind for me when also writing code and building features and software is that I tend to be someone who will worry about stuff. And I'm like, oh, is this going to be easy to extend? Is it going to be what it needs to be six months from now if we need to add more features to this and build on top of it? And I have to remind myself it's like, well, let's just wait. Let's wait till we get there and we know more. One of my other ideas that couples nicely with the one that you just shared in regards to keeping things simple and then waiting for those needs to arise is that mistakes are going to happen. They are a part of the process. As we are learning and growing and we're stretching our skills and trying things out, things are going to go wrong. We're going to introduce bugs. And to take those opportunities, that's when we start to use that feedback to then improve things like observability, like capturing logs, and how we handle error reporting or having a plan for emergencies. So maybe that's the part of worrying that can pay off is thinking through, all right, if something does break, or if something gets shipped that shouldn't, then what is our plan in how we handle that? How do we roll back? Or how do we get things back to a stable build? CHRIS: It's funny. I was actually visiting with a friend this past weekend, and we were chatting more generally about life things but the idea of worrying and anticipation and trying to prepare for every bad outcome. And there's the adage of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But increasingly, both in life, depending on the context, and in code, I've found that I've shifted to the opposite of it's impossible to stop everything. There are going to be bugs that are going to get out there. There are going to be places where we code things incorrectly. And I would rather...I still want to try as hard as I can to get things right, to be clear. I'm not giving up on trying. But I'm all the more focused on how do we know and how do we recover when those things happen? So it's interesting that you just described exactly that, which, again, is a very human life conversation, and yet it applies to the code. STEPH: I love that rephrasing of it. Instead of the mistakes are going to happen, it's, like, how do we know, and how do we recover? I think that's perfect. I've also found that by answering the how do we know and how do we recover, that really helps you build trust with clients as well. Because again, things are going to happen, things are going to break. And the more prepared you are for that and then the better plan that you have, and then they can watch how you execute that plan, and it's going to establish a lot of deep trust with other engineers and also the team that you're working with, that you have been thoughtful and that you have ideas on how are we going to address this? Instead of waiting for that moment to happen. That's going to happen too. You're going to make decisions in the heat of the moment. But I have found that to be a really useful way to establish yourself with a team in terms of I care about this team and these processes and this application. So how do we handle the bad times, not just the good times? I do want to circle back because you alluded to the fact that you and I, we've tried to find things that we disagree on. And so far, Pop-Tarts and beer have been the two things that we disagree on. But I do have a question for you that maybe I will disagree with you on. But I need to know some more about it first. You have alluded to there's the Brussels snack, (Oh, I'm going to get this wrong.) Brussels sprout snack hour or working lunch, something combination of those words. [laughs] And it's the working lunch that has stuck out to me, and I've wanted to ask you about it. So here I am. I'm asking you about it. What's a working lunch? What's the Brussels snack happy hour, snackariffic working lunch look like? CHRIS: This is fantastic. I love that you waited until the last episode that this was rolling around in the back of your head. And you're like, are you making the team work through lunch? And now, on this final episode, we get to address the controversy that has been brewing in the back of your head. Spoiler alert, no, this is just ridiculous nomenclature. These are two meetings that we have that are more like, let's get the dev team together and talk about stuff that's in our platform sort of developer experience. Or stuff in observability often is talked about in this context because it doesn't quite impact users, but it's how we think about the work. And so there are two different meetings that alternate every other week. So every Friday afternoon, we do this, but it's one of two meetings depending on the day. So there's a crispy Brussels snack hour that was the first one that was named, which was named purely for nonsense reasons because we don't have anything else that's named nonsensically in our organization. And so I was like, oh when we name this meeting, we should make it nonsense because we don't have any other...We don't have, you know, an SOA microservices fleet with Barbie doll and Galactus and all of the other wonderful names. Those are references to the greatest video ever about microservices; if you've not seen it, that will be in the show notes. It's required reading. But anyway, we don't have that. And so we thought, let's be funny with the name of this. So the crispy Brussels snack hour is one, and the crispy Brussels we wanted something that was...the first one is a planning meeting. The second is like, let's actually sort of ensemble program. Let's get the four of us together, and we'll work on some of the stuff that we're talking about here but as a group. And so I wanted the idea of we're working, and so I was like, oh, this will be the crispy Brussels work lunch. But it's purely a name. It's the same time slot. It's 3:00 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. [laughs] So it is not at all us working through lunch. I don't think we should work through lunch. I'm concerned that you thought that for a while, and you were just like, I'm a little worried, but I'm not going to bring it up. But I'm glad we got to cover this before we wrapped up this whole Bike Shed co-hosting adventure together. STEPH: I feel relieved and also a little robbed of an opportunity for us to have something that we disagree on because I thought this might be a thing. [laughs] CHRIS: We can continue searching for that thing. But maybe it's okay that we agreed on most stuff for the run [laughs] of this fun, little show that we did together. STEPH: Yeah, that's gone on quite a time. We've got like three years together that we have managed to really only find two, I mean, very important of course, two things. But yeah, it's been pretty limited to those two areas. And each time that you'd mentioned the work lunch, I was like, huh, I need to ask about that because I have feelings about it. But then, you always would dive into very interesting stories of things that came out of it, and I quickly forgot about it. So this feels good. This feels like very good important closure. I'm glad that this finally surfaced. But circling back, since I took us on a detour for a little bit, what are some other things that you still hold deeply about building great software? CHRIS: I've really got one last thing on the list. It's interesting, there's not a ton technically in this list, which I think represents broadly how I feel about software, and I think how you feel about software. It's like, it's actually mostly about how the people interact at the end of the day. And you can program in any language or framework, and you can get the job done. We certainly have our preferences and things that we enjoy. But the last one really rounds us out, which is think about the users. I always want to be anchoring the conversations that we're having, the approach that we're taking to building the software in what do the users think? Who are our users? What do we know about them? What do they care about? How are they using this technology? How is it impacting their lives? We've talked a number of times about potentially actually watching the sales demo as an engineering team, trying to understand what's the messaging that we're putting out into the world for this piece of software that we're building? Or write along with customer support and understand what are the pain points that people are hitting? And really, like, real humans, what are they experiencing? Potentially with a name attached. And that just changes the way that you think about the software. There's also even the lower-level version of it. As we're building classes or modules, what are the public facets of that, and what are the private API? What's the stuff that we're hiding away? And what's the shape that we are exposing to the outside world for varying definitions of outside? And how can we just bring in a little bit of empathy to try and think about, again, in the case of like the API for a class, it's probably you on the other side of it, but it's future you in a slightly different mindset with a little bit less information and context on the current problem that you're working on. And so, how can we make things easier for ourselves in the code, for our users at the end of the day? How can we deliver real value that is not mired in the minutiae of technical complexity and whatnot but really is trying to help people live better lives? That's a little too fancy as I say it out loud. But it is kind of the core of what I believe, so I'm not going to take it back. STEPH: I love how you've expanded users where more traditionally, it's people that are then using the software. But then you've expanded it to include developers because that is something that is often on my mind and something that I just agree with wholeheartedly in terms of when you're writing software; as you mentioned before, software is for people. And so we want to include others. And it does improve people's lives. People show up to work every day, and if you've been thoughtful if your past you has been thoughtful, it's either going to give you your future self a better day, or it's going to give other people a better day. So I think that's a very fair statement, improving lives by being thoughtful in regards to focusing on the users, people consuming software, and working in the codebase. CHRIS: I know we've talked about this before, but I was having a conversation with one of the developers on the team at Sagewell just last week, and they were mentioning how they really loved working on admin features. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Let's talk more about that. And it was really it's that same thing that I think you and I have discussed of like there's that immediacy. There's that connection. These are actually colleagues, but you can build software to make their day better. You can understand in detail what the pain points are. What's the workflow that as you watch it, you're like, oh, I could put a button up in the corner of the screen that would automate almost all of this and your day would be that much faster? Oh, let me do that. That's exciting. And so I love that as another variation of it, like, yeah, there's for other developers. There's also for the admin team or other users in the organization of the software. There are so many different versions of users, but I think I think we build a better thing if we think about them more. STEPH: I have definitely worked with teams where I can tell that certain people are demoralized, and it comes down to they feel frustrated and often disconnected from the people that they are building for. And so then you really feel isolated. I'm pushing code around, but I don't really see the benefit or the purpose of it. And I think that's very hard for developers who typically want to build something that's going to be useful and not feel like it's just going to be thrown away. So connecting your team to those users, I certainly understand. Getting to build something for your colleagues and then they get to say how much they like it is an incredible, rewarding experience. You also touched on something that I really appreciate, where you highlighted that a lot of the technical decisions that we make are important, but they're not at the center of the things that we believe when it comes to building great software. And that's something that I will often reflect on. Like, as we were thinking through these particular ideas that we still hold true today, how mine are more people and process-focused and rarely deep in the technical weeds. And there are times that I think, well, shouldn't there be something that's more technical, something that's very concrete? Yes, you should build your code this way or build your application or use a specific technology. But after all the projects and teams that I've been a part of, that's just usually not the most important part. And so I appreciate that you highlighted that because sometimes I have to remind myself that, yes, those things can be challenging, but it's often with people and process. 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CHRIS: Actually shifting gears a little bit, so we've just talked about what we still believe about building great software. I'm intrigued. We've been chatting for a number of years here on this microphone, these microphones. We have separate ones because we're in different states. But I'm interested; what have we changed our minds about? What have you changed your mind about, Steph? I got a couple of ideas, but I'm intrigued to hear yours. STEPH: Nothing. I've never been wrong. I've stuck to everything that I've ever thought. CHRIS: That must be boring. STEPH: [laughs] Yeah, that's totally not true there. There are definitely things that I've changed my mind about. One of the things that I've changed my mind about is that people who know the most will ask the fewest questions. That's something that I used to consider the trademark of someone who is a more experienced senior developer in terms of you really know what you're doing. And so you typically don't ask for help or need help very often. And so, I'm going way back in terms of things that I have changed my mind about. But I have definitely changed my mind where people who know the most are actually the ones that do a really great job of constantly asking questions and asking for feedback. And I think that is still a misconception that people still carry forward. The idea that if you're asking a lot of questions or asking for help that you are not as skilled in your work, and I view it as quite the opposite, that you are very good at what you do and that you know precisely the value of your time. And then also reaching out to others for help, and then also just getting validation on things that you may have concerns around. So that's one I've changed my mind on is that I think the more experienced you are, the more questions you tend to ask. CHRIS: Oh, I love that one. It's a behavior that I know...I think we've talked about this before. But as consultants, we try and model it just the like; it's totally fine to ask questions. And because we often come in with less context, it makes sense for us to be asking questions, but I will definitely intentionally lean into it in those contexts to be like, everybody keeps throwing around this acronym. I don't actually know what that is. Let me raise my hand. And my favorite moment is when people disagree on what the acronym or what the particular word or what the particular project is. Like, I ask the question, and people are like, "Oh, it's this," and someone across the room is like, "Wait, that's what it means? I thought it was this totally other thing." I'm like, cool, glad that we sorted that out. Glad that we got that one up in the air. But I actually remember many, many, many years ago, at this point, there was a video series of...PeepCode was the company, and there was the Play by Play series. And so there were particular prominent developers, particularly in the Ruby community. And they would come and sort of be interviewed and pair program. And it was amazing getting to watch these big names that you had heard of, like Yehuda Katz is the one that stands out in my mind. He was one of the authors of merb, which was a framework that was merged with Rails, I want to say around the 3.0 time. And just an absolute, very big name in this world and someone that I looked up to and respected. And watching this video, they had to Google for particular API signatures and Rails methods. They were like, "Oh, how does that work? Is it link to and then you pass the name?" I forget what it was specifically. But it was just this very human normalizing moment of this person who has demonstrably done incredible work in our community and produced very complex software still needs to Google for the order of arguments to a particular method within Rails. I was like, oh, okay, that's good to know. And with complete humility in the moment, I was just like, yeah, this is normal. Like, it's impossible to hold all of that in your head. And seeing that early on shook me off the idea that that's the thing to do is just memorize everything. It's like no, no, get good at asking the questions. Get good at debugging. Get good, yeah, asking questions. It's a core skill rather than a thing that you grow out of. But I definitely shared early on I was like, not allowed to ask questions, that'll be scary. STEPH: I love that example. Because counterintuitively, to me, it demonstrates confidence when someone can say, "Oh, I don't remember how this works," or "Let me go look it up." And so I just very much appreciate when I see someone demonstrating that level of confidence of let's keep going. Let's keep making progress. I'm going to ask for help because that is totally fine, and we are in a safe space. Or I'm going to create a safe space for us to do that. One of my favorite versions of this where you shared like if you ask about an acronym and then people disagree, one of my favorite versions is to ask about a particular area of the codebase and be like, what would you say this code is doing here? What do you think users do here? Like, what is the purpose? What's the point of this? [chuckles] And then having people be able to say, "Oh, yeah, this definitively does this thing." Or people are like, "You know, I'm not sure. I don't even know if that code is getting run." That's one of my favorite outcomes of asking questions. How about you? What's something you've changed your mind about? CHRIS: I made a list of a couple of things like remote is on there. I didn't know if I'd like remote. I wanted to try it for a while. Tried it, turns out I like it a lot. It's complex. You got to manage it, whatever. But that I think everybody's talked about that a bunch. I think probably the most interesting one is deadlines. Initially, in my career, I didn't really feel anything about them. And then I experienced the badness of deadlines. Deadlines are bad. Deadlines are things that come down from on high and then you fail to hit them, and then you're sad. And maybe along the way, you're very stressed and work long hours to try and get there. But they're perhaps arbitrary. And what do they even mean? And also, we have this fixed scope, and they're just bad. And then there was a period of my time where, like, deadlines are bad. The only thing that we do is we show up, and we make the software as quickly as we can. But in reality, there are times that we need that constraint. And in fact, I have found a ton of value in deadlines when used intentionally. So we can draw a line in the sand, and we can say, at this point in time, we will have a version of the software. We have a marketing campaign that we need to align with this. So we got to have something at that point. And critically, if you're going to have a deadline, you've now fixed a point in time. You need to flex other things. And critically, I think the thing to flex is the scope. So we need to have team management. We have user accounts right now, but now we need to organize them into teams. That is like a category of functionality. It's not a singular feature. And so yeah, we can ship teams in the next quarter. What exactly that means is up in the air. And as long as we're able to have conversations essentially on a day-to-day at least weekly cadence as to what will make it in by that deadline and what won't, and we're able to have sometimes the hardest conversations but the very necessary conversations of the trade-offs that we have to make as we're building that software, then I find deadlines are absolutely fantastic tools for focusing and for actually reducing scope but in a really useful way. And getting something out there in the hands of users so that you start to get real feedback so that you start to learn, is this useful? What are the ways that people are using this? What should we lean into and do more of? What maybe should we roll back, actually? So yeah, deadlines. First, I didn't know them, then I feared them. Now I love them but only under the right circumstances. It's a double-edged sword, definitely. STEPH: I, too, have felt the terribleness of deadlines and railed against them pretty hard because I had gone through a negative experience with them but have also shifted my feelings about them where they can be incredibly useful. So I really liked that's one of the things that you've changed your mind about. It also reminds me of one of the other things...I'm going to circle back for a moment to one of the things that I believe about creating great software is to not wait for perfection, and deadlines are a really good tool that helps you not wait for perfection. Because I have also seen teams really struggle or sometimes fail because they waited until there was something perfect to present, and then you realize that you've built the wrong thing. So I do want to transition and talk a bit about the show because it's our last episode, and we should talk about it, and the fun adventures that we've had and some of the things that we've learned or things that we're feeling in the moment. So given that it's been a wonderful three years for me, it's been four years for you since you've been a host on the show. How are you feeling? CHRIS: I'm feeling a bunch of different things sort of all at once. I am definitely going to miss this immensely. Particularly, I loved when I started, and I got to interview a bunch of thoughtboters and other people from the community. But frankly, three-plus years of getting to chat with you has been just such a delight. There's been an ease to it. We kind of just show up and talk about what we're doing. And yet there are these themes that have run through it. And it has definitely helped me hone and shape my thinking and my ability to communicate about what I'm thinking. I've learned that you have a literal superpower to remember the last thing that you were talking about. Listeners, you may not know this, but we are not quite the put-together folks that we may sound like in these recordings. We have a wonderful editor, Mandy Moore, who makes us sound so much better than we are. But we'll often pause and stop and then discuss what we want to talk about next. And Steph always knows the exact phrase that she or I left off on. And it has been so valuable to the team. But really, it's been just such a pleasure getting to have these conversations. It's also been something that has just gently been in the back of my mind at all times. And so, I'm observing the work in any given week as I'm doing it. It's almost like meditation in a certain way, whereas I'm working on something, like, oh, this is actually really cool. I want to take a note about this and talk about it on The Bike Shed with Steph. And having this outlet, having this platform to be able to have those conversations and knowing that there are people out there is fantastic, although it's very weird because really, every one of these recordings is just you and I on a video call. And so there is an audience, I'm pretty sure. I think people listen to the show; I don't know, occasionally they write in, so it seems like they do. But at the end of the day, this really just feels like a conversation with a friend, and that has been so valuable to have. And yeah, I'm definitely going to miss that. It's been a wonderful run, you know, four years is a long time. It's about as long as I've done most things in my career. And so I'm very happy with what we have done here. And there's a trite saying that isn't...yeah, whatever; I'll just say it, which is, "Don't be sad that it's over. Be glad that it happened." And I guess I'm still going to be sad that it's over. But I am so glad that I got the opportunity to do this, that you joined in this adventure and that we got to chat each week. It's been really delightful. STEPH: I really liked how you refer to this as being a meditative state. And that is something that I have certainly picked up from you and thoroughly enjoyed that I have this space that I get to show up and bring these ideas and topics and then get to talk them out with you. And that has been such a nice way to either end the week or start a week. I mean, it doesn't matter. Anytime that we record, it's this very nice moment of the week where we get to come together and talk through some of the difficulties and share our stories. And that's been one of my favorite moments is because you and I get to show up and share everything that's going on. But then when someone writes into the show or if they send a tweet or something and they share their story or their version of something that happened, or if they said that we made them laugh, that was one of my favorite accomplishments is the idea that something that we have done was silly enough or fun enough that it has brought them joy and made them laugh. So I, too, I'm very, very much going to miss this. It has been a wonderful adventure. And I thank you for encouraging me to come on this adventure because I was quite nervous in the beginning. And this has definitely been an aspect of my life that started out as something that was very challenging and stretching my limits, and now it has become this very fun aspect and something that I get to show up and do and then get to share with everyone. And I do feel very proud of it, very much in part to Thom Obarski, who was our initial producer and helped us have that safe space to chat about things. And now Mandy, who keeps the show running smoothly and helps us sound our best week to week. So it's been a wonderful adventure. This is going to be hard to let go. And I think it's going to hit me most. Like, this was one of those things as we're talking about it, it's, like, I'll see you next week. This will be fine. But I think it's going to hit me when there's something that I want to talk about where I'm like, oh, this would be great to talk about, and I'll add it to The Bike Shed Trello board. And I'll be like, oh yeah, that's not a thing anymore, at least not quite in the same way that it was. CHRIS: So what I'm taking away from this is that you're immediately going to delete my phone number the minute we hang up this call and stop recording. [laughs] STEPH: Oh yeah. I preemptively deleted. So that's already done. Friendship is over at this point. CHRIS: That's smart. Yeah, because you might forget otherwise in the heat of the moment as we're wrapping this whole thing up. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: But actually, on that note, in a slightly more serious vein, again, there's this weird aspect where the audience is out there. But we're very sort of disconnected, particularly at the moment in time where we're recording. But it has been so wonderful getting various notes from listeners, listener questions, but also just commentary and the occasional thanks and focusing; oh, you pointed me in the direction, or you helped me think through a complicated piece of work or process a problem that we were having. And so that has been just so, so rewarding. And one of the facets of this that has been so interesting to me is being able to connect to people and basically put out there what we believe about software, and for the folks that resonate with it and be able to have that connection instantly. And meeting people, and they're like, "Oh, I've listened to The Bike Shed. I like all these things." I'm like, oh, cool, we get to skip way further into the conversation because I've already said a bunch, and you say you like that thing. So, cool, we're halfway through our introductory chat. And I know that we agree about a bunch of things, and that's really wonderful. And frankly, I'm going to miss that immensely. So for anyone out there who's found something valuable in this, who's enjoyed listening week to week, or perhaps even back to Upcase for things, I would love to hear from you. I'd love to connect to folks. Send me an email, Twitter. I'm on all the places. I'm Chris Toomey in various spots or ctoomey.com on the internet. Chris Toomey on GitHub. I'm findable, I think. Chris Toomey developer will probably get you there. But I would really love to hear from folks, to connect to folks, you know, someday down the road; I think I'll be hiring again. And that'll be fun. I would love to work with some of the folks that have listened to this show or meet you at a conference, or if I happen to be traveling to a city or you're traveling to Boston. Really for me, so much of what this show is about is connecting with people around how we think about building great software. And so, I would love to continue that forward into the future. So yeah, say hi, if you're interested. STEPH: I agree. That's been one of the most fun aspects of being co-host of the show. And I'll be honest, you are welcome to contact me, but I am going to be off-grid for probably six months. [laughs] So just know that there will be a bit of a delay before you hear back from me. But I would definitely love to hear from you. I also want to say a very heartfelt thanks to a couple of people, just folks that have made this journey incredible and have made it so much fun. One, in particular, is everyone at thoughtbot for their continuous stream of knowledge. I mean, frankly, my software opinions wouldn't be half as interesting if it wasn't for everyone at thoughtbot constantly sharing their knowledge and being a source of inspiration. So I deeply appreciate everyone that has contributed to topics and ideas and just constantly churning out blog posts because those are phenomenal. And I also want to give a shout-out to my husband, Tim, because he has listened to The Bike Shed for many years and even helped out with a number of show notes when that was something that you and I used to do before Mandy made our life so much easier and took that over for us. And has intervened a number of times when Utah mid-recording would decide it's time to play. So I want to give a very special thank you to him because he has been a very big supporter of the show and frankly helped me manage through a lot of the recordings for when I had an 80-pound dog that was demanding my attention. CHRIS: I think continuing on the note of thanks; similarly, I'm so grateful to thoughtbot as an organization for everything that is represented in my career. It's a decade-plus that I have been following and then listening to the podcasts and then joining the organization, and then getting so many wonderful opportunities to learn about this thing called web development. And then, even after I left the organization, I was able to stay on here on The Bike Shed and hang out and still chat with you, Steph, which has been really wonderful. So thank you, thoughtbot, so much. Thank you to Joël Quenneville, who will be the continuing host of the show. This show is not going anywhere. And, Steph, you and I aren't really going anywhere, but we won't be around anymore. But we are leaving it in the very, very capable hands of Joël, and I'm super excited to hear the direction that he takes it and Joel's incredibly thoughtful and nuanced approach to thinking about programming and communicating. So I think that will be really wonderful. And lastly, I definitely want to thank Derek Prior and Sage Griffin, the two original hosts of this show, who really produced something wonderful, and for many years, I think it was about four years that they hosted together. I was an avid listener despite actually working at the company the whole time and really loved the thing that they produced and was so grateful that they entrusted me with continuing it forward. And hopefully myself and then with the help of you along the way, we've...I think we've done an okay job, but now it is time to pass the torch or the green lantern. That's the adage I've been going with. Gotta pass the lantern, pass the mantle on to the next one. So, Joël, it's going to be in your hands now. STEPH: Yeah, I'm so looking forward to future episodes with Joël Quenneville. They are going to be fabulous. So I've been thinking in terms of this being our finale episode and then a fun ending for it, so there's a thing called the 21-gun salute, which is the military honor that's performed by firing cannons or artillery. Not to be confused with the three-volley salute, which I definitely confused earlier that is reserved and used at funerals, which this is not. So using the 21-gun salute, I was like, hmm, it is The Bike Shed, and we have this cute ring ring that goes. So I think for our finale, we should have a 21-bell salute as we exit the shed and right off into the sunset. CHRIS: I love it. I couldn't imagine a more perfect send-off. So with that, what do you think? Should we wrap up? STEPH: Yes, but I have one more silly thing to add. I've thought of a new software idiom that I'm excited about. And so, this may be my final send-off into glory that I'd like to share with you. And I think that we should make like a shard and split. CHRIS: [laughs] I so appreciate that in this moment, this final moment that we have together, you choose to go with a punny joke. It is so on brand for the show. It is absolutely perfect. And I think with that note, shall we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! 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Yehuda Katz, a brilliant young master of Kabbalah, shares his story, gives us a peek into his beautiful mind and a glimpse though the cosmic star-speckled spheres into the mind of God. 00:00 Introducing Yehuda Katz 04:40 Yehuda's story, in his own words 11:10 Living an Authentic, Colorful Judaism | Beyond the Black n White 18:02 Ascending through Silence, beyond Words and Images | Via the Bahir 21:11 Seeing Visions vs Beyond Vision | To a Place of Listening 22:53 Imagination in Judaism | פנטזיהדות 27:43 Quieting the Mind in Kabbalah and Eastern Mysticism 30:25 How did we Implement these Ideas into our Lives? 35:58 Understanding Kabbalah contextually | Who's on First? 41:46 Kabbalah vs Hasidut? | The Eternal vs the Timely 47:08 Who are your top Kabbalists and Why? 54:28 Paradigm Shift | Who/What is God to you? 59:56 The Question We Need to Ask Ourselves 1:06:42 Understanding Kabbalah Accurately and Developmentally 1:20:21 Yehuda's Plan going forward 1:25:25 Final Words To ask Yehuda your own questions, get access to his online classes or hire him as a teacher, please email: LKatz07@Yahoo.com Join Seekers on: facebook: https://facebook.com/seekersofunityinstagram: https://instagram.com/seekersofunitytwitter: https://www.twitter.com/SeekersofUpodcast: https://anchor.fm/seekersofunitywebsite: https://www.seekersofunity.com Please, Like, Subscribe and Share. Love you. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Таймкоды: 04:40 - Opening Keynote by Yehuda Katz, Jen Weber, and Godfrey Chan (https://youtu.be/vUojP8DDPs0) 29:20 - The Power of Debugging by Samanta de Barros (https://youtu.be/d29kpZWvhQY) 36:40 - FastFlood: The Story of a Massive Memory Leak in... by Sergio Arbeo (https://youtu.be/NradLNmO9ec) 47:00 - Why JS is Coming to Ember Templates by Matthew Beale (https://youtu.be/p32zUgp4-_4) 50:50 - Closing Keynote by Nicole Sullivan (https://youtu.be/ffiDfGkZyhk) 57:00 - Why Contributing Seems Scary by Anne-Greeth van Herwijnen (https://youtu.be/5mg5ID_pIRc) 01:01:15 - Lessons Learned from Changing Careers by Kara Luton (https://youtu.be/PYZzMEfu2mo) 01:19:15 - Decorators in Depth by Marco Otte-Witte (https://youtu.be/E_grLMx7q6Q) 01:23:40 - EmberQuest: Building an Octane Role Playing Game by Dan Monroe (https://youtu.be/Ld1xnQWkqPU) 01:29:20 - Autotracking: Reactivity and State in Modern Ember by Chris Garrett (https://youtu.be/HDBSU2HCLbU) 01:40:50 - Investing in Ember by Jessica Jordan (https://youtu.be/NWcXObK2lQI) 01:55:30 - Octane: A Paradigm shift in EmberJS by Suchita Doshi (https://youtu.be/ukzyBxQ9Zsc) Мы в соцсетях: 1. Telegram: https://t.me/proConf 2. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvasfOIImo7D9lQkb1Wc1tw 3. SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/proconf 4. Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/by/podcast/podcast-proconf/id1455023466 5. Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProconfShow
Yehuda Katz joins Sam to talk about the strategies Ember's developed to keep the majority of the community on recent versions of the framework for more than 8 years. He talks about lessons learned from the 1.13 upgrade, how the core team thinks about API experimentation vs. community fragmentation, and the approach Octane is taking to enable frontend developers that know HTML and CSS to ship interactive sites with Ember. Topics include:- 5:15 – What experiences led Ember to prioritize bringing the entire community along for upgrades and changes to the programming model- 21:22 – Why open source libraries shouldn't couple breaking changes to conceptual changes- 31:30 – How to think about the tradeoff between fragmentation and experimentation- 40:00 – How Ember is exposing more low-level primitives while still emphasizing its higher-level APIs- 45:01 – What mattered to Yehuda when he became a programmer, and how he's bringing that to the Ember community- 1:02:20 – Why Octane embraces HTML- 1:12:04 – What type of developer Octane targets- 1:24:22 – What the modern version of Rails' blog in 15 minutes could look like Links:- [Together: The Merb Story](https://yehudakatz.com/2020/02/19/together-the-merb-story/), Yehuda Katz- ["We're the Together Framework"](https://yehudakatz.com/2020/03/09/the-together-framework/), Yehuda Katz- [Coronavirus will also cause a loneliness epidemic](https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21173938/coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-elderly-epidemic-isolation-quarantine)
Yehuda HaKohen is joined by Yehuda Katz of the California Bay Area's Doreinu chapter. The two discuss resisting the Trump plan, Jewish organizing in the Bay Area and the Vision movement's run in the current elections to the World Zionist Congress (slate 5 at zionistelection.org).
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
Topics include:- 1:46 – Exploring the React paradigm- 11:45 – How have your opinions on UI dev changed since starting Ember?- 16:00 – How React's render functions and Ember's templates both solve the same problem: how to restrict the rendering code that users write- 34:03 – JavaScript's multiparadigm approach: OOP + functional- 40:13 - Hooks and the importance of lifecycle entanglement- 46:15 – Do Hooks succeed in bringing the ideas of declarative rendering to our JavaScript code?- 53:58 – The ES module spec, ES imports, and ES modules vs. CJS modules- 1:04:55 – Are TypeScript users at risk of the same kinds of syntax collisions that CoffeeScript users once were?- 1:10:10 – TypeScript now doesn't ship unstable features. (e.g. Optional chaining is stage 3)- 1:15:35 – Yehuda's take on stage 0 through stage 4 ECMAScript proposals- 1:23:39 – What's missing from UI development? And the difference between paradigms and abstractions.- 1:31:00 – Ember's original sin was push-based reactivity. Pull-based is how programs work.- 1:40:30 – Ember needs a new lifecycle entanglement primitive, that borrows concepts from both Hooks and Ember Concurrency tasks- 1:57:07 – How do you feel about UI development in 2019? Links:- [No Silver Bullet](http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf), by Fred Books- [React Hook Pitfalls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIRcX2X7EUk), by Kent C. Dodds
In this episode of React Native Radio, Josh Justice interviews Calvin Yu. Calvin is a consultant mostly working with Ruby on Rails but also works with React Native and mobile development. He has quite the history of working with startups, all varying in size. Calvin shares what it was like working with startup companies. Calvin explains what you have to change mentally to work in a startup. First, you have to realize that you don’t have all the answers and that it takes a commitment. He also explains that because you don’t have all the answers you will make a mistake, which means you need to be able to learn from it and move on. Josh and Calvin share their thought on using risky or bleeding edge technologies in a startup. Calvin explains that when developers are looking to join a start-up they want to work in something new, exciting and a little risky. They consider the risks and the benefits, how new technologies could give a startup a leg up on the competition. Josh brings up a blog post titled “Choose Boring Technology”, he summarizes explaining that startups should pick boring, old reliable technology for the parts of the app that don’t matter. The panel moves on to discuss React Native more specifically, Calvin explains why he chose React Native over another cross-platform mobile solution. React Native provides a great experience in the mobile platform, it allows him to give the users what they want. Josh and Calvin discuss what users want from their apps or a user's hierarchy of needs. First, the app needs to be useful, if an app isn’t useful who cares if it performs well. After making sure the app is useful, you can then go back and worry about performance and other secondary needs, Calvin shares the story of how he got into React Native. He was working on some React apps to render kiosk displays when he was approached to build an internal iOS app. The app did some internal functionality for a team of home repair contractors. At the time NativeiOS seemed like overkill for what they wanted. Not to mention they would want the same thing in Android. React Native seemed the obvious choice, so he just dove right in; learning trial by fire. Josh and Calvin consider how React Native has evolved over the years. Calvin shares some of the enduring pros and cons of the framework and explains when to reach for React Native and when to reach for something else. He makes most of his comparisons to Flutter. Flutter is great for game design and custom UI, but React Native is the ideal solution for cross-platform native applications. React Native is well-tuned for reusability. Calvin believes that the React Native ecosystem will grow because it is such an approachable language. Ruby on Rails is considered due to Josh and Calvin’s background in it. Josh considers Ruby on Rails and how it comes with everything you need right out the box but React Native is quite the opposite. This makes Josh wonder what is so appealing about React Native to Calvin. Calvin explains that he hopes that someday React Native will be ready out of the box and gives ideas of how it might get there. Calvin considers the future of software development. He believes that building applications will be pushed up in the stack. That building applications will a thing that anyone can do, just like anyone can use a spreadsheet. He thinks software development will get more approachable and easy tooling that will make building applications much simpler. He considers how comfortable his kids are with technology and touch screens and this will affect future software developers. Panelists Josh Justice Guest Calvin Yu Sponsors Adventures in DevOps React Round Up G2i CacheFly Links Choose Boring Technology blog post Hierarchy of User Needs GraphQL Airtable Coda The Core Team of the Internet (with Yehuda Katz) https://twitter.com/cyu https://github.com/cyu/ https://www.rylabs.io/ https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Josh Justice: VuePress https://atom.io/ Visual Studio Code Calvin Yu: Visual Studio Code Live Share Apache Airflow
In this episode of React Native Radio, Josh Justice interviews Calvin Yu. Calvin is a consultant mostly working with Ruby on Rails but also works with React Native and mobile development. He has quite the history of working with startups, all varying in size. Calvin shares what it was like working with startup companies. Calvin explains what you have to change mentally to work in a startup. First, you have to realize that you don’t have all the answers and that it takes a commitment. He also explains that because you don’t have all the answers you will make a mistake, which means you need to be able to learn from it and move on. Josh and Calvin share their thought on using risky or bleeding edge technologies in a startup. Calvin explains that when developers are looking to join a start-up they want to work in something new, exciting and a little risky. They consider the risks and the benefits, how new technologies could give a startup a leg up on the competition. Josh brings up a blog post titled “Choose Boring Technology”, he summarizes explaining that startups should pick boring, old reliable technology for the parts of the app that don’t matter. The panel moves on to discuss React Native more specifically, Calvin explains why he chose React Native over another cross-platform mobile solution. React Native provides a great experience in the mobile platform, it allows him to give the users what they want. Josh and Calvin discuss what users want from their apps or a user's hierarchy of needs. First, the app needs to be useful, if an app isn’t useful who cares if it performs well. After making sure the app is useful, you can then go back and worry about performance and other secondary needs, Calvin shares the story of how he got into React Native. He was working on some React apps to render kiosk displays when he was approached to build an internal iOS app. The app did some internal functionality for a team of home repair contractors. At the time NativeiOS seemed like overkill for what they wanted. Not to mention they would want the same thing in Android. React Native seemed the obvious choice, so he just dove right in; learning trial by fire. Josh and Calvin consider how React Native has evolved over the years. Calvin shares some of the enduring pros and cons of the framework and explains when to reach for React Native and when to reach for something else. He makes most of his comparisons to Flutter. Flutter is great for game design and custom UI, but React Native is the ideal solution for cross-platform native applications. React Native is well-tuned for reusability. Calvin believes that the React Native ecosystem will grow because it is such an approachable language. Ruby on Rails is considered due to Josh and Calvin’s background in it. Josh considers Ruby on Rails and how it comes with everything you need right out the box but React Native is quite the opposite. This makes Josh wonder what is so appealing about React Native to Calvin. Calvin explains that he hopes that someday React Native will be ready out of the box and gives ideas of how it might get there. Calvin considers the future of software development. He believes that building applications will be pushed up in the stack. That building applications will a thing that anyone can do, just like anyone can use a spreadsheet. He thinks software development will get more approachable and easy tooling that will make building applications much simpler. He considers how comfortable his kids are with technology and touch screens and this will affect future software developers. Panelists Josh Justice Guest Calvin Yu Sponsors Adventures in DevOps React Round Up G2i CacheFly Links Choose Boring Technology blog post Hierarchy of User Needs GraphQL Airtable Coda The Core Team of the Internet (with Yehuda Katz) https://twitter.com/cyu https://github.com/cyu/ https://www.rylabs.io/ https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Josh Justice: VuePress https://atom.io/ Visual Studio Code Calvin Yu: Visual Studio Code Live Share Apache Airflow
Jonathan Turner, Andrés Robalino, and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about Nushell, or just Nu for short. It’s a modern shell for the GitHub era. It’s written in Rust, and it has the backing of some of the greatest minds in open source. We talk through what it is, how it works and cool things you can do with it, why Rust, ideas for the future, and ways for the community to get involved and contribute.
Jonathan Turner, Andrés Robalino, and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about Nushell, or just Nu for short. It’s a modern shell for the GitHub era. It’s written in Rust, and it has the backing of some of the greatest minds in open source. We talk through what it is, how it works and cool things you can do with it, why Rust, ideas for the future, and ways for the community to get involved and contribute.
He is the Co-author of several books including jQuery in Action and Rails 3 in Action (2011). He also has a passion for teaching others programming in a way that is respectful and makes people feel good about themselves.We talk on Ember (inc Octane). We also compare Ember to React and Svelte.Other things mentioned in the show:https://dhh.dk/posts/6-why-theres-no-rails-incWe also go a lot into the WHY of doing open source.Also, the fish and chips place I mentioned in Scotland (I called Yehuda while on holiday on the Fife coast.)
After brushing over his "false starts" at being a developer, Yehuda slowly took us into a deep, deep dive. We talked about framework design, design philosophy, the importance of communities and being part of a core team.Yehuda is one of the creators of Ember.js, and a retired member of the Rust, Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams. His 9-to-5 home is at the startup he founded, Tilde Inc.. There he works on Skylight, the smart profiler for Rails, and does Ember.js consulting. He's best known for his open source work and his work traveling the world doing open source evangelism and web standards work.Here are the links of the show:https://twitter.com/wycatshttps://www.tilde.iohttps://emberjs.comhttps://rubyonrails.orghttps://jquery.comhttp://script.aculo.ushttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merbhttp://sinatrarb.comhttps://emberjs.com/editions/octaneCreditsMusic Aye by Yung Kartz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.Your hostSoftware Developer‘s Journey is hosted and produced by Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, a crazy frenchman living in Germany who dedicated his life to helping others learn & grow. More about him at timbourguignon.fr.Want to be next?Do you know anyone who should be on the podcast? Do you want to be next? Drop me a line: info@devjourney.info or via Twitter @timothep.Gift the podcast a ratingPlease do me and your fellow listeners a favor by spreading the good word about this podcast. And please leave a rating (excellent of course) on the major podcasting platforms, this is the best way to increase the visibility of the podcast:Apple PodcastsStitcherGoogle PlayThanks!Support the show (http://bit.ly/2yBfySB)
Yehuda Katz joins Chris and Brandon to regale us with tales from his programmer history. He addresses Chris's experiences moving between Ember and React for building webapps, and explains the tradeoffs between the two tools. Chris and Yehuda talk about what they think the next 5 years of software development looks like. Notes: EmberConf 2019 keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYwdBcmz6VI&list=PLE7tQUdRKcyYWLWrHgmWsvzsQBSWCLHYL Exercism https://exercism.io/ jQuery documentation https://api.jquery.com/ Ember Octane https://emberjs.com/editions/octane/ The "combinatorial explosion of React apps" https://speakerdeck.com/tehviking/seven-months-in-react-the-perilous-art-of-swimming-upstream?slide=128
Sponsors Netlify Sentry use the code "devchat" for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel: Charles Max Wood AJ O’Neal Aimee Knight Aaron Frost Chris Ferdinandi Joe Eames Tim Caswell Notes: This episode of JavaScript Jabber has the panelists reminiscing on the past. First, they discuss the projects they’re working on. Tim has joined MagicLeap doing JavaScript and C++. Aaron Frost is one of the founders of HeroDevs. AJ works at Big Squid, a company that takes spreadsheets and turns them into business actions, and is expecting a daughter. Aimee has been exploring developer advocacy, but wants to focus primarily on engineering. She is currently working at MPM. Joe has taken over the CEO position for thinkster.io, a company for learning web development online. Chris switched from being a general web developer specializing in JavaScript and has started blogging daily rather than once a week, and has seen an increase in sales of his vanilla JavaScript educational products. Charles discusses his long term goal for Devchat.tv. He wants to help people feel free in programming, and help people find opportunities though the Devchat.tv through empowering content. Next, the panelists discuss their favorite episodes. Some of the most highly recommended episodes are JSJ 124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich (1:44:07) JSJ 161: Rust with David Herman (1:05:05) JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint with Nicholas Zakas” (1:08:01) JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler (43:36) JSJ 218: Ember.js with Yehuda Katz (42:47) Last, the panelists discuss what they do to unwind. Activities include working out, reading, playing Zelda and Mario Kart, studying other sciences like physics, painting miniatures, and Dungeons and Dragons. Picks: Charles Max Wood Villainous Board Game Joe Eames Azul Stained Glass Board Game AJ O’Neal https://www.digikey.com/ Magnetic Hourglass: Amazon | Hobby Lobby $6 Aimee Knight https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/well/mind/work-schedule-hours-sleep-productivity-chronotype-night-owls.html Aaron Frost Matrix PowerWatch https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon Chris Ferdinandi https://learnvanillajs.com/ Tim Caswell https://www.magicleap.com/ https://textonascreen.rocks/ https://history.lds.org/saints
Sponsors Netlify Sentry use the code "devchat" for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel: Charles Max Wood AJ O’Neal Aimee Knight Aaron Frost Chris Ferdinandi Joe Eames Tim Caswell Notes: This episode of JavaScript Jabber has the panelists reminiscing on the past. First, they discuss the projects they’re working on. Tim has joined MagicLeap doing JavaScript and C++. Aaron Frost is one of the founders of HeroDevs. AJ works at Big Squid, a company that takes spreadsheets and turns them into business actions, and is expecting a daughter. Aimee has been exploring developer advocacy, but wants to focus primarily on engineering. She is currently working at MPM. Joe has taken over the CEO position for thinkster.io, a company for learning web development online. Chris switched from being a general web developer specializing in JavaScript and has started blogging daily rather than once a week, and has seen an increase in sales of his vanilla JavaScript educational products. Charles discusses his long term goal for Devchat.tv. He wants to help people feel free in programming, and help people find opportunities though the Devchat.tv through empowering content. Next, the panelists discuss their favorite episodes. Some of the most highly recommended episodes are JSJ 124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich (1:44:07) JSJ 161: Rust with David Herman (1:05:05) JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint with Nicholas Zakas” (1:08:01) JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler (43:36) JSJ 218: Ember.js with Yehuda Katz (42:47) Last, the panelists discuss what they do to unwind. Activities include working out, reading, playing Zelda and Mario Kart, studying other sciences like physics, painting miniatures, and Dungeons and Dragons. Picks: Charles Max Wood Villainous Board Game Joe Eames Azul Stained Glass Board Game AJ O’Neal https://www.digikey.com/ Magnetic Hourglass: Amazon | Hobby Lobby $6 Aimee Knight https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/well/mind/work-schedule-hours-sleep-productivity-chronotype-night-owls.html Aaron Frost Matrix PowerWatch https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon Chris Ferdinandi https://learnvanillajs.com/ Tim Caswell https://www.magicleap.com/ https://textonascreen.rocks/ https://history.lds.org/saints
Sponsors Netlify Sentry use the code "devchat" for $100 credit Clubhouse Panel: Charles Max Wood AJ O’Neal Aimee Knight Aaron Frost Chris Ferdinandi Joe Eames Tim Caswell Notes: This episode of JavaScript Jabber has the panelists reminiscing on the past. First, they discuss the projects they’re working on. Tim has joined MagicLeap doing JavaScript and C++. Aaron Frost is one of the founders of HeroDevs. AJ works at Big Squid, a company that takes spreadsheets and turns them into business actions, and is expecting a daughter. Aimee has been exploring developer advocacy, but wants to focus primarily on engineering. She is currently working at MPM. Joe has taken over the CEO position for thinkster.io, a company for learning web development online. Chris switched from being a general web developer specializing in JavaScript and has started blogging daily rather than once a week, and has seen an increase in sales of his vanilla JavaScript educational products. Charles discusses his long term goal for Devchat.tv. He wants to help people feel free in programming, and help people find opportunities though the Devchat.tv through empowering content. Next, the panelists discuss their favorite episodes. Some of the most highly recommended episodes are JSJ 124: The Origin of Javascript with Brendan Eich (1:44:07) JSJ 161: Rust with David Herman (1:05:05) JSJ 336: “The Origin of ESLint with Nicholas Zakas” (1:08:01) JSJ 338: It’s Supposed To Hurt, Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone to Master Your Craft with Christopher Buecheler (43:36) JSJ 218: Ember.js with Yehuda Katz (42:47) Last, the panelists discuss what they do to unwind. Activities include working out, reading, playing Zelda and Mario Kart, studying other sciences like physics, painting miniatures, and Dungeons and Dragons. Picks: Charles Max Wood Villainous Board Game Joe Eames Azul Stained Glass Board Game AJ O’Neal https://www.digikey.com/ Magnetic Hourglass: Amazon | Hobby Lobby $6 Aimee Knight https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/well/mind/work-schedule-hours-sleep-productivity-chronotype-night-owls.html Aaron Frost Matrix PowerWatch https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon Chris Ferdinandi https://learnvanillajs.com/ Tim Caswell https://www.magicleap.com/ https://textonascreen.rocks/ https://history.lds.org/saints
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.
Today Joel catches up with Iheanyi Ekechukwu. Iheanyi is a Product Engineer currently working at DigitalOcean. He previously worked at IBM on Watson. They also talk about Iheanyi's education, stack, and side projectsIheanyi started out majoring in Computer Engineering, but switched to Computer Science after he figured out hardware just wasn't for him. He now lives and works in Brooklyn and spends most of his time coding (though he always brings his design skills to the table).Iheanyi's design comes from a dual degree program at Notre Dame, the college where he graduated. He noticed a lot of subpar interfaces coming from pure programmers, and he was frustrated with that, so he took his school's opportunity to learn design and apply it to his work. Even if he isn't a designer, he uses his skills daily to communicate with designers and make whatever he works on that much better.Iheanyi started using Ember back during college. He was frustrated by his school's class search interface, and he set out to improve it. Ember and Rails were like a match made in heaven for him, Ember having been authored by ex-Rails core team member, Yehuda Katz.Joel discusses with Iheanyi what he's currently using in his work. They get into GO, and how Iheanyi has enjoyed working with a statically typed language when doing back-end work. Not having to worry about full test coverage when refactoring has been great!Lastly, they talk about the various side projects Iheanyi has going. Such as Interface Lovers, a blog where top designers are interviewed and share their work music playlists. Also, Seeker, a job-board app that allows you to connect your strip account to it and have companies submit jobs.Transcript"Iheanyi Ekechukwu on education, programming, and managing side projects" TranscriptResourcesseekerInterface LoversCreative BlackChef WatsonIheanyi EkechukwuWebsitePodcastTwitterGithubegghead.ioJoel Hooks:TwitterWebsite
Dan Gebhardt: @dgeb | Cerebris Show Notes: 01:33 - The JSON API Spec and Pain Points it Solves 08:40 - Tradeoffs Between GraphQL and JSON API 19:33 - Orbit.js 26:30 - Orbit and Redux 32:22 - Using Orbit 37:24 - What's coming in Orbit? Resources: orbitjs.com (Guide Site) ember-orbit Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 87. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at the Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. Joining me today in hosting the podcast is Elrick Ryan. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's up, Charles? CHARLES: How are you doing today? ELRICK: I'm doing great. CHARLES: Are you pretty excited? ELRICK: I'm very excited for this podcast because this is a topic that I've heard a lot about but don't know much about and it just seems so awesome that I'm just very stoked to hear all the details today. CHARLES: Yeah, me too, especially because of who's going to be giving us those details, he's one of the kindest, smartest, most humble and wonderful people that I've had the pleasure of meeting, Mr Dan Gebhardt. Hello, Dan. DAN: Hey, Charles. Hey, Elrick. Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed listening to this podcast. It's nice to be part of one. CHARLES: It's good to have you finally on the show. We talked over chat and we talked over email and we meet every once in a while and conferences and it's great to get to share more widely some of the great conversations that always arise in all of those contexts. For those who don't know you, you are a founder at Cerebris and that is your company, which is involved very heavily in a lot of open source projects that people are probably familiar with. One of them that we're going to be talking about today is JSON API. I bet most people didn't know that you are one of the biggest driving factors behind both the specification and several of the implementations out there. DAN: Yeah, that's been a pretty core focus of my open source work for the last few years. Actually JSON API Spec, which is perhaps a somewhat confusing name for those who aren't familiar with it. It was started by Yehuda Katz in almost three and a half years ago, I think now and it hit 1.0 a couple years ago and has stabilized since then and we've seen a lot of interesting implementations on top of it. There are some exciting stuff that's actually coming soon to this Spec that I'd like to share with you guys today. CHARLES: To give us a little bit of context, why? What pain am I experiencing that JSON API is going to solve or it's going to address or give me tools to deal with? DAN: One of its prime motivators is the elimination of bikeshedding. There's a lot of trivial decisions that are made with every implementation of an API and JSON API makes a lot of those decisions for you about how to structure your document, how to include relationships and lengths and metadata in a resource, how to represents relationships from hasOne/hasMany. Even polymorphic relationships have a type of that data. JSON API has opinions about all these things at the document structure level and it also has opinions about our protocol usage, how to use HTTP together with this media type to make requests and for servers to return responses, how to create a resource, how to add resources to relationships and things like that. CHARLES: Also, it's not just this is a serialization format. It's very much like also delving into the individual interactions and how they should be structured, more about the conversation between client and server. DAN: Yeah, in that way, it is somewhat unusual as a media type that covers both. CHARLES: Can you dig into that a little bit because I'm very curious? Something made my ears prick up was when you said, it tells you how to, for example add relationships to a resource. What would that look like? DAN: A lot of the influences behind JSON API are hypermedia-related. It's influenced by RESTful principles and includes a lot of hypermedia aspects. One aspect is how a resource represents relationships in terms of the data in document, the type and the ID that specify a linkage to that another resource in the same document but it can also include links to discover those relationships. There's a self-link for a relationship and a related link for relationship and the self-link will return the data for that relationship in the type/ID pairs. The related link will return the related resources. The Spec doesn't have strong requirements or any requirements about URL usage but instead, it describes where to find resources through these hypermedia links. If you want to say, add records to a relationship, you'd follow the self-link for that relationship when that was returned with a resource. Then you would send a post to that endpoint and you would include the relationship data in the terms of type and ID pairs. It gets down to that specifications so that removes the ambiguity of how to interact with these resources and mutate them and retrieve them. CHARLES: I see, so is there an idea then that you are going to explicitly model the relationships as individual resources? Or is that the recommendation or the requirement? DAN: The link for a relationship would point to an endpoint, which would then model the relationships that are represented that endpoint, so to say just to speak a little more concretely because certainly, it makes some simple concept sound a lot more esoteric than they really need to be. Let's just talk about an example. Let's say, we're talking about articles and comments and maybe an author. Let's say, you've fetched a collection of articles from an article's endpoint and within the article resource, you would have a relationships number, which would include comments and then comments could have links, which one of the links would be a self-link and a related link. The related link could be followed to then retrieve all the comments for that particular article. You could also, if you wanted to add a comment for that article, post to the self-link for that relationships. You post to that whatever endpoint that is specified. Maybe it's 'articles/1/comments.' It could be anything that you want. Now, the Spec does have some recommendations to make everything fit nicely in terms of the URL design patterns and such but those are not, by any means required but having those recommendations just eliminates more bikeshedding opportunities. We find it that people who are gravitate towards the Spec really appreciate having a lot of these trivial decisions made for them so even if we don't want to come down and be hard line about requiring those particular answers, we can at least provide some guidance for how things can work together nicely. There's a whole recommendation section on the site for things like URL design patterns. CHARLES: Right, so things that aren't prescribed but these are best practices that are recognized. DAN: Yeah, exactly. CHARLES: A question then that comes to mind, it sounds like JSON API solves a lot of these bikesheds or just kind of comes in and takes one side or the other for modeling both the resources and the relationships between those resources so there's the... I don't want to call it a schema but the boundaries around which resource are very clear and where they live and how they connect together. I was hoping we could maybe contrast that with some another approach, which is also become very popular and that's the GraphQL approach where you're essential assembling views at runtime for the client. It's very easy to marshal the data that you need to present to your view because you've got only one endpoint, as opposed to having to coordinate between them. I can understand the appeal of that and I was wondering if you have any insight into what the tradeoffs are between the systems and what are some of the capabilities that one can do that the other can't. CHARLES: Yeah, sure. I'm glad that you brought that up because I feel like GraphQL has become a real juggernaut, at least because of its marketing. It's very effective in being marketed for its use to developers and it's capabilities versus REST, as if a RESTful system can't possibly achieve the same outcome or the same efficiency. I'm glad to compare and contrast the two. To be honest, one of our short term goals is to better tell the story on the JSON API site, which was always a kind of a more technical spec-y site and a marketing site. That hasn't really helped its uptake as much as it could as some of the GraphQL sites are very sleek and polished. Anyway, let's get down to it. GraphQL allows you to basically define the data that you want for a particular view and that can bring together multiple related resources. It defines a way to specify exactly which fields you want in that graph of resources. We'll just stick with the articles, comments and authors example. You can specify that you want a collection of articles and perhaps the comments-related to that and the authors and you could have it all assembled in a single response. JSON API also allows you to do just that. It allows you to make requests for multiple related resources to constrain the fields that are returned for each resource and to include all of these related resources in a single document. The main difference in the representation is that JSON API requires that resources only be represented once in a single document. GraphQL may have repetition of resources throughout the document that's returned. For an instance, your articles that may nest authors and those authors like Charles Lowell, may have written three of those articles and that representation of that author is going to be repeated in that JSON API compound document, which is a term for document, which has a primary dataset combined with related resources. That single author would only be returned once as related resource and the linkage between the primary data and the related resources would be established to type/ID pairs. Instead of having the author represented three times, the same type/ID pairs would just be providing that linkage to the same author and that author resource would only be represented once. This happens to be ideal for client-side applications that number one, basically want to minimize the size of a payload that sent. Number two, don't want to after-handle repetition of data by doing extra processing of pushing the same record multiple times into a memory store that is keeping that data. I think that GraphQL is well-suited to applications that request data and display that data pretty much as returned. There is no intermediate holding onto that data in, say a memory store for later access. Basically, it lines up well with a component library link React, which wants to display that data that's returned from the server. If it wants to display that collection again, it will simply request that collection again and pretty much throw away the data once it has been rendered. CHARLES: I can see that. Dan, you and I might be some of the only folks who remember. I don't know if you ever did any Microsoft Access Program. DAN: Yes, I did, believe it or not. CHARLES: Doesn't it feel a little bit like the Access pattern all over again, where you have your components requesting data from basically, constructing a query and requesting it -- DAN: Yeah. CHARLES: And then throwing it up on the screen. DAN: You're going deep there but I do remember that. Definitely, there is that same paradigm. CHARLES: It's really powerful. DAN: It is and it's pretty accessible too because it's a direct representation of what you've requested and there's no intermediate processing. I guess the question is, whether that intermediate processing provides some value. Actually, holding onto that data provided some value because as far as I'm concerned, GraphQL is great for that rendering of DOM data, where the data has no meaning except outside of the rendering. But if you want to actually have models that have some intelligence about that data, then you want to use a store to keep those models in and you want to be able to reuse those models for other purposes. CHARLES: What might be an example? What's a concrete use case that we can ground this discussion? DAN: I would say that the big one is offline. You simply can't have just DOM data that's useful in any way in an offline application or an optimistic application, where you are doing some things client-side and only say undoing them if a request fails. But if your data is DOM and only structured for a particular view, then all you can do with that is redisplay that view. But if you understand the schema of your data and that data is available in a store, then regardless of whether you have a network connection, you can actually display that data in different ways. If that same article shows up in a collection in a list, you could also display that article on its own in a different format with more fields. If you want to, say allow editing of that data, you could allow for an editor when your app is offline. Allow changes to be made to that data and then redisplay it because you understand the fields that are in that data. CHARLES: Right and then at some point later, then spool those changes back to the server. DAN: That's right. CHARLES: It almost sounds like, ironically if a system like JSON API where you have very concrete boundaries around each of the underlying resources in your data model, it allows you to essentially do rich-querying on the client and not just the server. DAN: Yes, that's absolutely true. CHARLES: Because I feel like what you just described to me it's like, now we have some sort of store over which we can map all kinds of different queries to our own liking and there's no dependency on the server. DAN: Yeah and if you just want more web app to be pretty much a view representation of what's on the server and without additional intelligence, then GraphQL really lines up well with your needs because any extra processing you're doing is just not valuable to you. But I think a lot of the really interesting things being done in client-side applications are where your client application is pretty loaded with a lot of intelligence and you're out there autonomous and able to make sense of data. In that case, then thinking about the data only as it pertains to views is not nearly as powerful. CHARLES: Right, so you could do something like that with GraphQL but then you would have to, essentially structure your queries such that they drew the boundaries around the individual resources anyway, rather than composing them on the server. You'd have to query them discreetly into a store and then run your local operations. Then I guess at that point, it's like what are you doing? DAN: Yeah, you're still doing the extra processing of handling the repetition of any nodes that repeat and such. That's just extra processing you have to do but I agree that you certainly could structure your GraphQL queries to return data that is then loaded, say to a store that really has awareness of the data types but I don't think that is -- CHARLES: But then you're defeating the purpose, right? DAN: Yeah, it's not its selling point and it's not its strong suit. CHARLES: You've done a lot of work on the JSON API Spec. JSON API allows you to fetch discrete resources and their relationships but still, keeping one representation of each resource in the payload so it's optimized for wanting to do client-side processing and have intelligence based on these entities, which are in a store. You actually maintain a fairly mature, at this point, framework called Orbit, which helps you do some of these things. Now, what Orbit does today and I understand that you've got a lot of new features that are really exciting, that are coming down the pike. Before we get into those, what is Orbit and what do you use it for and how does it use JSON API? DAN: Orbit is a data access and synchronization library, which sounds sufficiently vague because it has a lot of low-level primitives for structuring client-side. Also, actually isomorphic can be run on the server and nodes so it's not even only used for client-side purposes but that was its original purpose. The abstraction that it includes are allowed for synchronization of data changes across multiple sources of data. Source of data might be represented by, say a JSON API server, an in-memory store, an IndexedDB database in your browser, a local storage, all of these sources of data can support an Orbit interface, which provides their access to their data and also broadcasts changes to that data. In order to coordinate the changes across multiple sources, say to back up all of your data that's in memory to IndexedDB source, you can observe the changes on one source and then sync those changes up with another. For instance, you want to structure an offline application which you have been in-memory store, which uses client-generated IDs, which then syncs up with a backend JSON API source and every change that gets made to the memory store needs to be backed up, you could configure multiple coordination strategies between the sources to make sure that the data flows so that every change that is made to the store is immediately backed up to IndexedDB. If it can't be backed up, then it fails. You can add some error handling and then when you're online, you can then also sync those changes up with a backend so you're basically pushing those changes that are local to a remote store and you're not slowing down your offline app, which you're communicating with optimistically and then only handling, say synchronization failures when there is a problem. In order to handle those problems, Orbit sources are very deterministic about their tracking of changes and they provide get-like rollback capabilities so you can look at the history of changes to a particular source and reset the history to any point there and basically handle conflicts and merges in a very get-like way. Often I use cases, the primary driver of Orbit's whole architecture, I realized that it needed to be able to give you the tools to handle any conflicts that happen when changes get sync up. Also, give you the different tools to model all the different places of data is kept in order to support the offline mode. That's a kind of a broad overview of Orbit. There's a new guide site, OrbitJS.com for those who want to dig a little deeper into it. The data is structured in the JSON API format internally to the store and the standard operations are very much influenced by the standard JSON API protocols that are allowed in the base Spec over creating records and removing records and all that crud for both records and relationships. That's where JSON API comes into Orbit. CHARLES: Right, I see. The primary use case for Orbit is offline. Is that fair to say? DAN: Yeah, that was the primary driver, although it's just not the primary -- CHARLES: It seems like you could use this in a lot of places where I might use Redux or something like that, like on the server to model... I don't know, a chat app. DAN: Yeah, definitely. CHARLES: I have a bunch of different information streams coming together and how am I going to merge them and make sense of them. DAN: Yeah, in fact, that it's primitive level. Orbit has essentially an async redux-like model for queuing up changes and applying those changes. The change sets are all immutable. There's actually a lot of immutability use here throughout the library. In order to ensure that the changes that are applied are tracked deterministically, we just can't have those changes mutating on us. There is definitely some overlap with Redux concepts in terms of the general tasks or action concepts in Redux but instead of Redux's synchronous approach, everything in Orbit is async. CHARLES: What does that mean? Redux is synchronous in the sense that there's a natural order to all actions. For those of us familiar with Redux, are you saying it would be like a store where actions can be dispatched at any time or is it more like, I've got multiple stores happening and I need to resolve them somehow so each one is synchronous? How can I make sense of that? DAN: In Redux, the actual application of an action is performed synchronously. CHARLES: Right. You can have asynchronous processes but there is a natural order to the actions that those asynchronous processes yield and then those are applied synchronously to the Redux Store. DAN: Yeah. To compare and contrast Orbit and Redux, I guess you'd first have to say there's a primary difference of -- CHARLES: I think there are a lot of people are familiar with Redux. I think it's not so much to compare and contrast it but just to use it is as an analogy of like, "Here's how it's the same here. Here's how it's different," because that's compare and contrast. DAN: There you go. CHARLES: But not in terms of evaluating them but it's like, "Maybe I should be using this instead." DAN: Right, they are sort of on different levels, although there are some primitives in Orbit to it and it's shipped across multiple libraries. There are some primitives, I think that could be useful outside of the main Orbit data application. Anyway, the way that Redux state changes are applied, the function is synchronous is all I was getting at and on Orbit, every state change that applied to a source is asynchronous so the result is never applied immediately. You'll always get a promise back and you'll never have that application happen immediately. That's one clear distinction. Another is that a redux has a big singleton global state for the entire application. Orbit very much has a model of state per source so there can be any number of sources in a particular application and the source might be an in-memory source or might represent a browser storage in XTP or might represented a socket that streaming data in. All of these have state at different, temporarily distinct state that even if they all converge to a common state, the Orbit models separately so that there's a set state per source. I'm just contrasting the global apps state that exists in Redux with the per source state in Orbit. CHARLES: It sounds like there's nothing that would be fundamentally incompatible of using Orbit really in conjunction with Redux, where Redux is kind of a materialized view of all of your different data sources presented as what you're going to render off of, right? DAN: Yeah. You could use it in a similar way to Redux Saga, where Orbit fills the role of Saga, where it's doing the asynchronous actions that results flow back into the Redux state. CHARLES: I'm just imagining having one big global atom, which is your Redux store and now I'm saying, prescribing this is an optimal architecture but I'm saying, one way it could work is it picks and chooses and assembles off of the different sources as new data becomes available. As the states change for those sources, it can be integrated into a snapshot state, which is suitable for rendering or provides one view for rendering. DAN: Yeah. You're basically talking about the in-memory source, perhaps merged with other applications state, which is not so resource-specific and that is possible to model. CHARLES: What I think I might be hear you saying is you could also just use another source which is the merge itself. DAN: Yeah. I'm not sure how much we want to continue this thought exercise because the architecture becomes almost not something I'd recommend. But I would actually like to explore how Orbit and Redux could be used together optimally. I played around a bit with Redux but I have not written a full-fledged application with it, other than a [inaudible] location. I definitely defer to you for Redux best practices and such and how people are using it in real world applications but I'd be really interested to talk that over again soon. CHARLES: Well, I just certainly don't count myself a Redux expert, although we have developed some applications with it. We'll put that on the back burner or something to explore it later. I will say this, I find Redux to be both wonderful and terrible, kind of in the same way the Java is both wonderful and terrible. We'll leave it at that. DAN: Okay. ELRICK: That was going to be my question. This is why I was very excited to hear about today was Orbit because I've heard so much about it. In terms of the implementation of Orbit into an application, what would that look like from a high-level? Has anyone used Orbit in the production app? Have you built any apps using Orbit? DAN: Yeah, definitely. There are people using Orbit with React, with Vue, with Angular and with Ember and there's an integration library called ember-orbit which makes Orbit usage really easy in Ember. In a lot of ways, working with ember-orbit feels a lot like working with Ember Data but it allows a lot more flexibility. I suppose one of its strengths and weaknesses is there's a lot of configuration that's possible because there's a lot of possibilities. The internals are exposed of how data get synchronized so you can define your strategies and sync up different sources. In terms of how it's actually used in an application, you'd start by modeling your data in terms of the resources that are in the application. You'd have a schema that defines your articles, your comments and your authors, just to keep that example going. Then that schema would be shared among all the sources in your application. You would have one source, say that might be the in-memory source and another source that is the representing a browser storage so you could, say swap out either local storage source or an IndexedDB source and use either one to provide that backup roll. You would declare those sources, you connect them to each other with strategies so that, say when memory storage changes, you would then sync that change to the browser storage source. Then you'd have back up and you'd be able to then, refresh your page and view the same data you were looking at before. Now then, if you probably want to wire up a remote source so that you're communicating with the servers so you bring in JSON API source and you would then set up a new strategy for working with that. You have to decide like, "When my memory storage changes, do I want this change to happen optimistically or pessimistically?" By that I mean, "Do I only want it to appear successful if it's been confirmed by the server." Depending upon whether you want to be optimistic or pessimistic, you setup your strategies a little differently. If you handle this change pessimistically, you wanted to block success on the successful completion of pushing of that change to your remote server. You have the set of tragedies that define the behavior of your application and then doing your crud operation is probably pretty much directly with your memory source. Then if you wanted to, say do an edit in a form, you might fork the store, now the store keeps its data in an immutable data structures. That forking that store is very cheap so you don't have a bunch of data that's copied. You're just keeping a pointer to that and getting a new pointer to that same immutable data structures. Every time they get changed, there been new references. There's an immutability under the hood but you're pretty well insulated from the annoyances of working with that immutable data structures. At that form, you make your changes, you then merge your changes back, you'd get a condensed change set of operations that then can flow through your strategies. It flow through to your backup source. It could flow through to the back to the server. I think it would feel pretty familiar for users of Ember Data because there are a lot of the API influences came from that library. But obviously, people are using just plain Orbit with other libraries, with other frameworks and finding it useful there but it definitely involves a little more configuration up front to do all that wiring that might be more implicit in library like Ember Data. CHARLES: I understand that before we go, there is some pretty exciting new things coming in Orbit. Do you feel like you're ready to mention a couple of those things or they've been kind of mixed in with the conversation? DAN: Let's see. I have the guides up, which I mentioned, which is pretty new in the last couple of months. In the last year, we did a rewrite and Orbit is now completely in TypeScript and there are no external dependencies. For a while there, I was using RxJS and observables internally and immutable JS so there's now an internal immutable library. It's lighter-weight with fewer dependencies now. I'm excited about that and finally feel like I can recommend people digging in with the guides that are up. I'm hoping to get up the API docs soon. I will say I'm excited. I just got back from a retreat in Greece. Séb Grosjean who owns the company, BookingSync does this amazing thing with the Ember community, where for the group that's working on Ember Data, he invites them every year to come to his family's place in Greece. He grew up working with his family on his rental properties, which was the inspiration for his company, BookingSync and said, "This is a fantastic opportunity that for us to get together and collaborate in a really nice place," and I had a really productive time this last week. This is the very first time I had gone. It was just fantastic and I worked with the Ember Data team. Igor Terzic and I spiked out some interesting collaboration between Orbit and Ember Data so I'm really looking for it to see where those go and hopefully, we'll see a little bit more Orbit, either directly or just through influence appearing in Ember Data. I'm looking forward in working more closely with the Ember Data team. We'll see what comes of that. CHARLES: Yeah, I, for one am very excited to see it. I'm resolved now. I'm just looking at these guides. These look fantastic and I'm resolved to give Orbit, at least a try here, either in some of our applications or maybe trying to spin up some new ones and have it the basis for some of ideas I've been playing with. DAN: That would be awesome and there's a [inaudible] channel, which I hang out into if you have any questions, if anyone out there does. CHARLES: Before we go, if anyone is interested in JSON API, is interested in Orbit, is interested in Cerebris, we mentioned a lot of things that in one way or another, map back to you. How do we get in touch to find out more about these different entities/projects? DAN: I'm at @DGeb on Twitter. My company site is Cerebris.com. Also check out, OrbitJS.com for the new guides. Reach out to me. I'm on the Ember Core Team so I'm also hanging out in the Ember community Slack, depending upon what you want to talk with me about. I'm in all these different places so I love to hear from you all. CHARLES: All right. Fantastic. We'll make sure that we put those in the show notes and I guess that's about it. Do you have anything else you want to leave folks with, any talks, papers or big news coming around soon? DAN: Something that we didn't really get a chance to talk about today, which I'm really excited about is JSON API operations, which is an extension to the base Spec, which I'll be proposing very soon. There's a future to the JSON API once it hit 1.0 a couple of years ago. It didn't just stop. We're looking at different ways to extend the base Spec and use it for different and interesting purposes. JSON API operations, I think one of the most interesting ones. The idea is basically to allow for multiple requests that are specified in the base Spec to be requested in a batch and perform transactionally on the server so the Spec will define how would each request gets wrapped. Each operation very much confirms with the base Spec concept of a request. For implementations, there's a lot of opportunity to reuse existing code for how to handle each particular operation but to provide a whole new set of capabilities by allowing you to batch them together and process and transactional it because it just unlocks a ton of different things you can do, all based on the same base concepts from JSON API. I'm really excited to have something to announce soon about that. CHARLES: That sounds like it might solve a lot of problems that are always associated with those things. It always comes up. What's our batch API look like? I don't think I've been on a project that didn't have a months-long discussion about that. I ended up like kicking it down the road and I'm just flumping something in place. DAN: Yeah, all those messy edge cases where people figure out how do we create multiple related records altogether in a single request and people do it ad hoc and do it with embedding and such and want to standardize that in the same way, that we've standardized the base operations. CHARLES: Well, that is really exciting, Dan. I wish you the best of luck and we'll be looking for it. DAN: Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on, guys. CHARLES: It was our pleasure. Thanks. With that, we will say goodbye to everybody. Goodbye, Elrick. Goodbye, Dan. Goodbye everybody listening along at home. As always, you can get in touch with us. We're at @TheFrontside on Twitter or you can see our website at Frontside.io or just drop us a line at Contact@Frontside.io. Always love to hear from you with new podcast topics, anything that you might be interested in so look forward to hearing from you all and see you next week.
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
Steve Klabnik @steveklabnik | Blog | GitHub Show Notes: 02:56 - Getting Into Rust 05:51 - Working on Rust for Mozilla 07:01 - Writing Documentation and Preventing Burnout 13:24 - The Rust Programming Language 18:45 - Rewriting Firefox in Rust 21:20 - High-level Functions 25:23 - Typesystem and Concurrency 36:35 - Rust and Web Developers; Digging Into Rust on a Deeper Level 43:46 - The Rust Ecosystem and Using Rust on a Day-to-Day Basis 48:38 - The Rust Book Resources: Rust For Rubyists Cargo Servo Application Binary Interface (ABI) MetaLanguage (ML) Tokio Systems Programming intermezzOS Steve Klabnik: Exploring Ruby Through Rust What's new with “The Rust Programming Language”? rustbook Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast episode 51. I'm here, my name is Charles Lowell. I'll be hosting today. With me is Chris Freeman, also of The Frontside and with us is Steve Klabnik. Now, most of you probably heard of Steve before. My first encounter with Steve was actually at the LoneStarRuby Conference back in... Gosh, I don't know. It was many, many years ago and he was giving a talk on Shoes, which I also had never heard of before. It was a wonderful story of a code archaeology project where he was kind of investigating, rehabilitating, and in carrying forward a project that the 'why the lucky stiff' had done. That was a wonderful introduction but it was certainly not the last time that I encountered him in his writings and in talks and stuff, mostly within the Ruby community. But it popped up again and again, talking about Rust APIs and always making a point to take a good knowledge that he'd learned and spread it around. Personally, I've lost track of Steve or hadn't really heard much of what he was doing for a while. But then Chris came into the office and he was always talking about this language called Rust. While I've heard Rust, Chris was just all about it and wanted to have Steve come on the show because it turns out that Steve, you've been really, really, really into Rust these last few years and sounds like concentrating most of your work there. STEVE: That is totally true and accurate. Also to go back a bit, that means that you are in attendance for my very first conference talk ever. CHARLES: Really? STEVE: That was literally the first one. CHARLES: Wow, it was a great start. That was a great story. It was educational and also touching. STEVE: Thank you. It's actually interesting because what happened was is that someone else who works on Shoes have encouraged me to submit to RubyConf and I was like, "Who would want to hear me talk at a conference?" I submitted the talk and RubyConf accepted it and I was really excited. Then a bunch of other conferences noticed and two other conferences had asked me to give a talk before RubyConf happens and LoneStar was one of them and it was the first one chronologically. That moment was also very special to me as well. CHARLES: Fantastic. What year was that? STEVE: I want to say it was like 2012 or 2011. It's really hard for me to pay attention to time and date. My history is so complicated that I often forget. I've literally told people that I'm 10 years old or younger than I am because I would like mess up to date on the things. It just happens. CHARLES: Yeah, but it was a while ago and it's been quite a journey, in between now and then. STEVE: Yeah, definitely and you're also definitely right. It is now literally my day job to work on Rust so it is definitely the focus of most of my efforts. Partly, why I made that happen was because it was the focus of all my hobby efforts before I made my job. It's definitely been a couple of years that I've been a full-time on all the Rust stuff. CHARLES: How was it that you actually got into Rust? How did you hear about it before everybody else and how did it capture your attention? STEVE: I've always liked programming languages and learning different programming languages. Ruby was sort of where I became known professionally. But it wasn't the first language that I knew and I knew it was never going to be the last. As much as I always loved Ruby and I'm like literally have a tattoo on my body so I will be with Ruby forever. I always try to learn new stuff and I find it exciting. I'm from middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania in the suburbs of Pittsburgh on a cattle farm and I was visiting my parents for Christmas one year. There's not really a whole lot to do out of the very small town so I was just reading the internet, as usual and it turns out that that was the day that Rust 0.5 had been released. I saw this release announcement go by and I was like, "I vaguely heard of this programming language once or twice maybe. I don't have anything to do. Let's give it a try." I downloaded and installed it. I looked at their tutorial and the tutorial has a problem that a lot of tutorials had, which is I read it, I said, "This all makes sense," I tried this down to write a program, and I had no idea how to actually write a program in it at all. I'm just completely confused. I couldn't actually apply the sort of syntax stuff that I learned. At the same time, I was going to be working on this hypermedia book -- that was my plans for that trip -- as always, you just rewrite your tooling over and over again. You [inaudible] like, "Just don't write the thing. Write the tools that make the thing," so I wanted to try out a new way to take mark down and generate PDFs in HTML, involving pandoc. I sort of had that all set up and I said, "Well, let me give this a try run. What I'm going to do is I'm going to write down what I learned in Rust as I learned it," and sort of from a Ruby programmers perspective, I'll use that and working with my new tooling to see if it works to actually work on the real book and it will also help me understand Rust better because one of the reasons why I do all this sort of teaching and advocacy is because I think it helps me learn. Just as much as I like helping other people learn stuff, I find that the repetition and being forced to explain something to someone else really make sure that I understand what I'm talking about. That's what the thing called Rust for Rubyist became boring. I'm a sucker for alliteration and that sort of became the first to tutorial for Rust from outside of the Rust projects proper. From there, I went on to submit some pull requests because everything's open source so I wrote some documentation and funny enough, my first ever pull request to Rust was actually rejected based on procedural grounds. At the time, they didn't actually accept pull request to master, they accept this other weird branch and GitHub don't have the ability to re-target the branch of the pull request. I also, always like this story because the thing that I now on the core team of, like my first attempt at getting involved was wrong and was turned down. But I'd fixed that pull request issue and got that in but it is kind of kept working on an open source capacity for a while and then decided to ask Mozilla if I can make it my job. Luckily they said yes. CHARLES: Wow, so what? Your job at Mozilla, like you just kind of showed up and said, "I would like to have a pretty cool, awesome job, working on this brand new language," and they were like, "Sure, come on in?" STEVE: To some degree, yes. That's one way of putting it. There is always the devil in these details. The first thing is that that wouldn't have worked if I had wanted a different kind of job. But when someone comes to you and says, "I would like to write documentation for you all day," you go, "Oh, my gosh. This literally never happens." If I had wanted to like work on the compiler, I'm pretty sure they would have said no. But because they knew documentation was important and they wanted documentation and because I had already been basically doing that job in an open source way, it's like I've had a year-long interview already. Then finally, they actually didn't have headcount at the time so I actually moved on as a contractor initially and had to do some freelance work and then eventually, once we were able to hire a new person kind of got it in. They're like a cool kid story. It's like, "Oh, yeah. I totally asked Mozilla for my perfect dream job and they just gave it to me," but like that's not really the way that it works. CHARLES: Got you. That actually leads me into a question that I have wanted to ask you. You write a very good documentation as your day job and documentation is extremely hard. For me, it is extremely hard to get and stay motivated to document something that I've worked on. I think that is probably a common enough experience for programmers. We don't recognize because we use documentation that it's extremely valuable and yet, it still this thing that is just a constant uphill battle. I'm curious, how do you manage to stay motivated to write documentation for an entire programming language over the span of years? STEVE: As I'm often want to do, this has like three or four different components. I guess, there's a couple of different things involved. The first one is that I actually got accepted to go to English grad school, although I ended up not pursuing that. Like writing, it's something I have just always enjoyed. I got a Bachelor in Computer Science but then I was going to go to grad school for English and due to university shenanigans, it didn't really work out. They told me I was going to get a free ride and then accepted me and then they were like, "Oh, wait sorry. You have to pay for this." And I was like, "Wait, sorry. No, I'm not doing this anymore. That's ridiculous." That's kind of always a predilection for writing and I think that the reason why that is because I grew up basically like on Slashdot and eventually then on Dig and Reddit and all these other things. I've kind of been writing a couple paragraphs a day, basically every day in my life since I was a little kid. I think that's something that's sort of like underappreciated. Documentation is hard but it's like a skill, like any other thing. Programmers will say, "I really want to learn TDD so I'm going to make myself do some TDD, I'm going to practice it, I'm going to focus on it and that's going to be a skill that I'm going to improve," and then they see documentation, and they kind of think it's this thing that you either have the skill or you don't. But writing is just another thing like anything else that you can practice at and get better. I think maybe it's because it's a little bit farther away from the wheel house of what you do day to day, that people aren't as interested in it but it is something you're truly interested in, I think the best way to get better is just to do it and do it a lot. I say this is I'm kind of in the middle of a little bit of writer's block at the moment to be honest. Then finally, I think the other reason that I'm motivated about docs is that I actually believe that documentation is an exercise in empathy. Like good documentation, the ideal as a programmer, the ideal thing that happens in documentation is I have a question about how to use something, I go to the documentation, and it says the exact sentence that answers my exact question. As those varying degrees of vaguely gives you the right idea, versus literally tells you exactly what to do. I think that the way that you can accomplish that excellent documentation is by understanding what your users need and then preemptively figuring it and/or writing that down. I think that that requires being able to put yourself in their shoes to some degree. I'm not going to say that that's a thing that I am perfect at but I think that a valuable skill when trying to improve docs's like figure out what they actually need and then give it to them. It's doesn't always have to be in that order, like sometimes people will fail to find the thing they need, tell you what you need, and then you give it to them. That's a strategy I've used a lot and that's one reason why I hang out in the Rust IRC all the time, helping people is for a very long time, I would like sit in IRC, someone would ask a question, I would answer the question, I'd go look in the docs and see if they could have figured out themselves. If they couldn't, that would be might next doc PR. It's just like even if it's just a couple sentences like add the question from IRC into the documentation and then just do that over and over and over again and then eventually, people start learning from the docs instead of actually ask questions because they already found what they needed. CHARLES: Right. I have a question about that because once you develop those skill, I think you also still run the risk of like burning out. I know that one of the reasons I tend to always fall back to like, "I'm going to spend my time doing coding instead of documentation," Or, "I'm going to spend my time --" Even with TDD is a great example is like with TDD you get to experience those short term wins. I think that kind of prevents you from burning out, where sometimes when I'm writing documentation, it feels like I'm screaming at the void. I might be screaming really loud and really, really well but I feel like a lot of times, I'm not experiencing those wins and I'm wondering if you have any tips for like experiencing those wins. Or getting that feedback to kind of keep you motivated and keep you doing the job. Also, trying to push the level of your own documentation skill and communications skill. STEVE: Yeah, experiencing the wins is definitely a part of it. But one of the other things that is sort of part of it is that like I do the opposite. I do a lot of coding but that's my side projects. When I get fed up with writing documentation, I maintain the [inaudible] implementation that Cargo uses to resolve Rust packages, for example. If I'm feeling a little stuck on docs, I'll go write some software and then come back to the docs so that kind of help with burnout. Another thing is that I think I'm just like perpetually in a state of just barely above burnout anyway so that also sort of factors in I guess. You know, it's like Bruce Banner. The secret is that I'm always angry so -- CHARLES: So you work on open source, is that what you're saying? STEVE: Yeah, exactly. We're working on open source all the time. I've been lucky enough to make open source as my job for, basically almost my entire professional career. Although not totally. You know, at some point, you just kind of get used to it. But in terms of experience and the wins, this is also one of the reasons why I like to teach beginners specifically is that beginners allow you to remember what it's like to be a beginner, which is also part of building the empathy. By interacting with beginners a lot, you also get a lot of those wins because beginners usually ask easy questions so it's easy to figure out the answer that stuff. Then you've got that positive feedback loop kind of going. To me it's maybe not IRC literally for every project but answering questions on Stack Overflow, or whatever message board forum you have, or Twitter, like actually interacting with other people. For me at least, that's how I get that kind of sense of not screaming into the void that you have to like go into the void and find the other people there, I guess, that I'm just like come to you necessarily. CHARLES: Speaking of empathy for beginners, it just occurred to me that we didn't actually talk about what Rust is. We probably should do that. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the Rust, language, as well as, you've mentioned Cargo and [inaudible] ecosystem for us as well? Let's talk about that. STEVE: Yeah, totally. Basically, Rust is a new-ish. I should stop saying new because it's almost not really at this point. A kind of new-ish programming language, heavily sponsored by Mozilla in development. Its idea is to become a new low-level programming language. But I always hesitate when I say this because one of my old pitches for Rust used to be like, "Rust could be used anywhere. You can use C." Then people go, "I would never write, C is so cool. Rust is not for me." I'm like not do that. But the reason that people don't use C is a lot of the problems that we are also trying to fix. I guess the primary differentiator for Rust in terms of like programming languages theory is that it is safe and safety as they got specific meaning. But basically C is a very dangerous sharp tool and you can cut yourself and people who use those tools often do cut themselves, whereas Rust is like it's got a safety guard on it. It's a compiled language so its compiler actively prevents you from making some of the worst mistakes that you can make in a low-level programming language like C. It turns out that when you start building up these sort of safe abstractions on top of these really fundamentally low-level details, you actually end up with a relatively high-level programming language. I talked to a lot of people, for example from JavaScript or Ruby world or Python world who come to Rust that are modulus, some libraries, and other things. This is actually high-level enough that I feel like I could do this instead of review JavaScript all day and I would be just as comfortable. The other day, I did a little bit pair programming and we actually recreated a JavaScript library in Rust that had virtually the same interface because like you can actually build relatively high-level things so pass an enclosure to a function that does some stuff is totally normal and Rust world. That's also very familiar to people that come from the Ruby, JavaScript, Python background. Also then, as part of that is we also culturally like Rust the projects, not Rust the programming language, really, really cares about helping people understand what systems programming and like lower-level programming means. A lot of people will not program and in C or C++ because they have no idea how to get help or to learn because many people in the low-level space have this RTFM attitude or like, "If you don't know what you're doing, then get out of here," whereas in Rust world, if you ask an extremely basic question, we're like, "Welcome. We would love to have you. I would be very happy to like walk you through," like explaining how that works on these kind of low-level details. Part of the culture of Rust is to bring this sort of low-level programming to people that have rejected it before for various reasons. The reason that Mozilla cares and the reason Mozilla sponsored the project is that Firefox is written in C++, so like four million lines of C++ last I checked. Last time we did a security audit of a really pants-on-fire, terrible security bugs in Firefox, I go to this website and now they run arbitrary code on my machine kinds of terrifying bugs. Basically happened because C++ is dangerous and sharp. If you screw up, there's the kind of bad things that can happen. About 50% of those security issues in Firefox would be eliminated at compile time by the Rust compiler. That's a really huge win in general so the idea is that we are slowly rewriting Firefox and Rust over time. That's one angle of why Mozilla cares about Rust. The second part is Servo, which is a rendering engine that's built in Rust from the ground up. If you think about Firefox proper, it's got Gecko as the rendering engine inside that actually determines where things go on the page and stuff. We're also writing a new one of those from scratch called Servo in Rust. That was also to prove that the language was doing the kind of things that we need it to do. But also Servo is an impressive piece of technology in its own right so it might become its own thing and/or bits and pieces of it are already making their way into Firefox. It's kind of also a way to improve our core products. That's why Mozilla cares. CHRIS: I was curious with Servo and Servo is the layout engine. Do you know if there are any plans to write a JavaScript runtime in Rust? STEVE: That question is complicated. Sort of what it boils down to is that a Git is inherently kind of unsafe by Rust definition of unsafety. It's actually controversial like when I talk to people that work on JavaScript engines, they're pretty much 50/50 split between, "Oh, yeah. Totally Let's absolutely rewrite the whole thing in Rust because we rewrite it every two or three years anyway from scratch so why not use Rust next time," to, "Since it's massively unsafe anyway, I don't see what benefit I would actually get so why not just stick with what we know." It's like very extreme ends. It's definitely feasible but I don't know if it's going to happen and/or when exactly. CHARLES: There were two questions that I had kind of to unpack some of the things that you said in there that were just really interesting to me. You said Mozilla plans to incrementally rewrite Firefox in Rust, where it's currently four million lines of C++. Now, how does that actually work where you're talking about swapping out large parts of the runtime with something that's written in a completely separate language? How does that communication happen between those language boundaries? STEVE: There's this concept called an ABI, not API. It may sound very similar -- Application Binary Interface. What this really boils down to is assembly language does not have function calls. That's not a concept, that's in assembly. People have come up with, "If I write a function and I map it to assembly code, what's the convention about how I do things like passing an argument and return values? How those all that stuff actually work?" Because assembly is so low-level, there are multiple different ways that you can make that happen. There's a number of different specifications how to make that work so C, the programming language, has a very straightforward ABI so any programming language that knows how to call C functions, uses these convention at the assembly level to do the function call. What you can do with Rust is you can say, "Please make this Rust function follow the C calling convention," in that way, any sort of thing that knows how to call C functions can call Rust functions directly. By doing that, you can sort of say like take a chunk of code, write it in Rust, expose a C interface, and then anything that knows how to talk to C, which is virtually everything, can talk to Rust equally as well. For example, one of the earliest production uses of Rust was actually inside of a Ruby gem because Ruby can be extended to C and Ruby knows how to have C extensions. It doesn't actually need to know that it's literally written in C. It just needs to know how to generate the assembly to call the correct functions. That's actually like a thing. Basically, the process is like write a component in Rust, expose this language independent wrapper, and then call into it like you would in C code. CHARLES: So it's really, just they're sharing memory and sharing is like right there in the process and there's no overhead for the intercommunication, it sounds like? STEVE: Yeah, exactly. You could also do all the regular things with JSON-RPC over a socket or whatever if you wanted to. The most efficient way is to literally include it as your binary just like anything else. CHARLES: Which kind of leads me into my next question, which is Rubyist and Pythonista people coming from JavaScript, one of the reasons we don't like to write in C is because, as you mentioned, they're so sharp so we have safety so that you don't have to worry about memory allocation for the most part, the garbage collector kind of has your back there. You access things by reference so you never have to worry about accessing memory. That's not there but kind of the conventional wisdom is that that all comes with a pretty big cost. It's like really, really expensive. I know when I was getting into Ruby and I was explaining a lot of the pushback I got from people doing C and even Java, it was like, "It's going to be super slow because all those high-level features that you love so much, you're paying a lot. A lot for them." My understanding is that's not really true with Rust. Is that fair to say? STEVE: Well, Rust does not have a garbage collector so, yes, it does not pay that cost because it doesn't exist. Now, that also raises a bunch of other interesting questions and basically what it boils down to is a compiler and especially one that has a typesystem, basically asks you to declare certain properties of your code like this function takes one argument only and it's always a string. That's sort of what type safety means. It kind of like a fundamental level. One of the ways that Rust uses type safety is to say, "This pointer to this memory always points to valid memory," and you have to be able to demonstrate that to me at compile time. From those couple of sentences, that sounds extremely complicated but it turns out that most programming code is written in a way that actually works this way. For example, like I'd talk to Yehuda Katz a number of times because we're friends, he also works on the Rust project and he's also well-known in JavaScript and to you all, I would assume. It turns out that the style of Rust code I write is actually extremely similar to the style of JavaScript code that I write is just sometimes there are some tweaks. It is true that those features often do take up a lot of memory and/or rely on any sort of expensive, from a low-level perspective, way of doing things. But it turns out that's actually more of a function of the way that the programming language is made in semantics. You could design a programming language that feels very similar but as very different underlying characteristics. For example, Closures in Rust, the compiler is smart enough to know that if you don't actually capture an environment. Say you're going to add one to every number in a list. You want to do like .map, pass in a closure that takes one argument X and adds one to every single X and then collect that up into like the map join kind of thing, to collect into a new array. That closure that you had passed a map, while it's a closure, it's taking that one argument X and doing X + 1, so it's not really capturing an environment at all. There's actually no reason to allocate a bunch of extra memory because it turns out, it's the same thing as a regular function. The compiler is able to optimize that call away completely to the same thing as if it was a normal function and not a closure, and therefore, you're paying no overhead. Even though, like syntactically, it looks kind of like a closure. Then you're kind of think of that applied to almost everything in Rust. For example, Rust has methods but almost all of them are actually statically dispatched at compile time, as supposed to dynamically dispatched, where you need to look through some sort of object hierarchy because we don't really have inheritance. There's no way to say like this might result to a colon, this class or this class is super class, or this class is super class so I have to do this runtime look up to call functions that just doesn't actually really exist. Part of it is through the fact that these coding patterns don't strictly require this stuff. It's just the way those languages are built and part of it is because as we were building a language, we were extremely sensitive to not include features that would require this really heavy overhead. In a language, that's like a low-level of focus on details, it's extremely hard to talk about the details without code. There's a lot of details, it turns out. CHRIS: One thing that I'm very curious about and one of the things that drew me to Rust actually is the fact that its typesystem is, I guess an ML typesystem. It is like much more [inaudible] to something that you would see in a functional programming language like Haskell, than you would like a regular C++ or Java. CHARLES: Now, a Chris-acronym alert. What is an ML-style typesystem? CHRIS: I'm sure Steve can answer this better than I can but it's a typesystem that uses the Hindley-Milner algorithm for type inference. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, in terms of correctness. Is that correct? STEVE: Yeah, I would say more accurately, ML is a programming language. It's the name of the language so by saying like an ML-like typesystem, he means like a Java-type typesystem. It's like a similar statement but about a different language. I always forget what ML stands for specifically but like OCaml has got ML at the end so like OCaml is one of the languages that sort of the family of ML. There's like two branches of functional programming, which of course everything is wrong when you try to organize things this way. Like you could also argue Lisp as a third but there's kind of like the Haskell-style and the ML-style are these two big pillars of functional language stuff and Rust tends to be in the ML sort of family. There's lots of common features between families of programming languages and all that kind of stuff. I think the ultimate point that Chris is trying to make is when I say that Rust is a typesystem, I do not mean it's like Java. There is a wide variety of typesystems and they do all sorts of different things and actually Java has been getting increasingly better over the years as well. But it is much more canned to a functional language in the typesystem, which I think is what you were getting at and serves the actual question, right? CHRIS: Yeah. Actually, I just looked it up and ML stands for MetaLanguage. It is actually is going to serve my question really well. ML was originally designed for theorem improving in math, which is part of why it works really well in functional programming languages. But it also makes sense if you use Rust, how the compiler work from the kinds of things that it catches, like a relatively low effort on your part because it is originally designed to completely prove out a theorem so the compiler is doing that to your program. That leads to my question which is I recently heard someone else on the Rust core team talk about one of the things that Rust really seeks to improve upon is concurrency and parallelism, which is historically very hard. To do that, you could use things like mutexes or reference counting, which Rust has. But they also lean extremely heavily on the typesystem itself to sort of guarantee that your concurrent code is actually going to run safely. On one hand, I'm interested in hearing you expound on that but I'm also really curious how the C, C++, Java programmers take to that sort of thing in Rust because as I understand it, that is a pretty novel approach to that kind of problem. I wonder if there's like pushback from the existing low-level systems community on that stuff. STEVE: I'll do the second part first because it's a little simpler. One thing that I will say is we sort of didn't appreciate over time because we were creating Rust for ourselves, roughly the C++ programmers are working on Firefox, which we had to say for ourselves because I was not literally one of those people but you get the idea, is like assuming that C++ people would be the primary audience. But it turns out that a lot of people that programming C or C++ are pretty happy with it and they like doing things that way. They're a lot smaller of a population than the number of programmers who do not program of those languages, which is true for any language, basically. The sum of all other people is bigger than your specific thing. What that means, I think that in retrospect this seems obvious but at the time, it was like hard to figure out or I definitely did not understand this at that time, that most people would come to Rust from not C or C++ than they would from C and C++, just even by virtue of numbers alone. A lot of the people who are not doing it are not doing it for reasons. They've already rejected it for some sort of purpose and the people who are still doing it often are like happy with what's going on. There's definitely a little skeptical at times of the kinds of things that we can accomplish. Also, our success has been pushing C++ specifically to grow a lot of safety things so we hear a lot of people say like, "In five years, C++ is going to have this tooling that's going to make it also pretty safe, even if it's not as safe as Rust. I'll just wait for that instead." Surprise, low-level programmers are extremely conservative bunch in many instances. The first part, which is the bigger and more interesting one, the typesystem is absolutely how concurrency works in Rust. This is extremely powerful for a number of different reasons. The first one, and I think the fundamental reason why it's done this way is that typesystems don't have any runtime overhead. When you're in a performance-heavy language, that's really the key. Originally, a long ago in Rust, we actually had a garbage collector even, like a very long time ago in Rust. The primary goal was always safety and we thought the only way to accomplish that was with lots of runtime checking, heavy runtime, and all these things. Over time, as the typesystem grew, we realized we could use more and more of a typesystem to eliminate more and more of the runtime because types are checked to compile time so they have no overhead cost, which is awesome. Like Rust references, doing this validation that they're always valid is completely a compile time construct that at runtime, they're literally the same thing as C pointers. That's one reason why the typesystem is really heavily useful for concurrency because you want things to be safe. We also don't want to slow them down. The whole point of concurrency in many instances is to get a speed up. If you introduce too many safety checks to make sure that your concurrency stuff works, you lose all the gains that you were trying to get from being concurrent in the first place. Having that like as low-cost as possible is extremely important. The second one is that concurrent problems are extremely difficult to debug because you need to recreate the exact set of circumstances under which the bug happens. If you have a bug because you have two threads that have a particular access pattern on a particular variable and that's where the bug is introduced, good luck coercing your operating system scheduler into scheduling those two threads at exactly the same way as when the bug happens. To some degree of the way that you fix a lot of concurrency bugs is by introducing an extreme amount of logging and then just kind of let it run and praying that you hit into the situation that causes the bug. That really brutal and doesn't really work. By using the typesystem and verifying it upfront, you just know it will work at runtime because you've already proved the concurrency property before your code even runs. It's also just like a better debugging experience, I think in general. The way that we accomplish this task is extremely novel. I guess I should also say extremely novel to working programmers, like almost all Rust is built off of existing research that has been known in academia for a relatively long time. That's actually one of the places where it gets the name from, it's like taking ten-year old ideas that have a little bit of rust on them, that have found usefulness and bringing them to [inaudible] research. Anyway, the way we accomplish this basically is the typesystem in the standard library, the way that you spin up a new thread, it has a particular type signature and the type signature says, "Only allow the types to be sent to this new thread. There are safe to pass between threads," and/or like, "Only allow references between this thread and that thread of types that are safe to use across thread." What that means is that when you try to spin up a thread and you passes a thing that doesn't work, you get a typesystem error. It turns out this is not concurrent safe collection so it does not have the prerequisite types so therefore, you cannot pass on this thread and you're done. That's sort of like at a core level of how these things work. Then for example, mutex is a type that does have that property so by sticking with non-concurrency thing into a mutex, now you can share it safely. That means we've guaranteed that the compile time that you'd safely done this transfer between threads and that kind of thing. It's not just about mutexes but that's sort of the general approach. The last thing I want to say briefly because I just said a whole bunch of things. I'm sure, I've raised a ton of questions here is that the other powerful thing about using the typesystem for concurrency guarantees is that other people can extend it. If you write a library in Rust, your library will be exactly as concurrency safe as the standard library and as the language itself. It's not like we provide the set of concurrent collections and then we vetted our own implementations and then you're kind of your own or building your own stuff. You can use those exact same types to help guarantee properties on your stuff. Also build alternate threading situations, as well that use the same things and the ecosystem all works together so everything is just concurrency safe by default because it's like a property of typesystems that are being built into the runtime or something. CHRIS: I know that recently, there's been a lot of, I guess excitement about this library called Tokio. It's not like there's future that kind of like promises in JavaScript, then there have been abstractions just kind of consistently being built up but it seems like Tokio is the next step and it's building towards a whole stack of higher-level concurrency things. Is what you just said enables that kind of thing to happen? STEVE: Yes. Tokio is using those exact same typesystem features in order to guarantee that when you have a chain of promises, to use the JavaScript terminology instead of future things, that you make sure that they're safe. This is not literally implemented yet but Tokio, for those who are not paid hyper attention to the Rust space because this is a cutting-edge, the library is gearing up for an initial release in the next week or two. Soon after you hear this or maybe right before you hear this, it's just going to be released. It's extremely cutting edge. But in some ways it follows sort of the node model of concurrency. There's event loops, you chained together, we call them futures, you call them promises together, you put that pile a future chain and do an event loop and watch the concurrency kind of go. One example of how Rust can do cool things is you could -- this is not implemented yet but it will be in the future -- run, let's say, five event loops on five different threads. Then you just tell the framework, "Please run this future chain onto one event loop. I don't care which one," and then it will automatically load balance across the five threads and five event loops because you've guaranteed the compile time that everything is safe to pass between threads so we know that that's just trivial to do and therefore it's like not a big deal. We can add those heavy duty features without worrying about introducing very subtle bugs, which is really cool. CHRIS: That kind of leads me to my next question, which is at The Frontside, we are pretty into web development, in case you didn't know. I am someone who follow Rust a lot and I find it very interesting. But for the most part, I don't have a need to do systems programming on a regular basis. I also wouldn't even really know where to start, if I wanted to do systems programming. As I learned Rust, I tend to always gravitate towards wanting to do things that I would probably do in Ruby or Python, like write the back-end for some web app or something. That goes okay but Rust is very much still in the process of building those abstractions to the point that it's relatively digestible. So I have a couple of questions. One is do you see Rust being a thing that would be used by web developers a lot more broadly and two, how would you recommend that people like me who aren't really familiar with systems programming start to really dig into Rust on a deeper level? STEVE: I would like to think that web programmers will use Rust more often and to be honest, originally, I was extremely skeptical of this. But it's been changing rapidly as time has gone on. Part of that is because as we've gained more experience, actually in programming in Rust, the fact is Rust used to be a lot less ergonomic than it is and now it's fairly ergonomic and will only get more so in the future. That's something that web people or at least, I come from Ruby so Rubyist care a lot about ergonomics, maybe more than anything else frankly. I'm not sure it's the first tool that you'll reach for but I do believe that sometimes, it makes a lot of sense. As one example that I will use, there's not a whole lot about this but basically, npm has started using Rust on the server side for powering the registry. They have three services in production now but they were basically like JavaScript as a language we all know what is the best language for doing this. We have a service that needs a little more oomph so maybe let's rewrite that in Rust instead and use it for those kind of things. I think that there's a lot of situations for web developers where they don't realize they have the power to make things faster without just adding on more servers. I think that's kind of like a compelling sort of [inaudible]. Any sort of background job like any sort of job queue thing is like often better written in a faster language but you would not reach for that faster language first because traditionally, those faster languages have been terrible to use. I think we continue to win on the ergonomics and continue to win the libraries that web developers will reach for Rust like more often than not. In terms of the learning rest on a deeper level, I think that one of the initial things and sounds like maybe you personally are a little past that but maybe not the people who listen this podcast is that I do think that sort of building the things that you would normally build in Ruby or JavaScript or Python is the good first step. For example, right now Advent of Code has been like a really fantastic way of having these little programming projects. If you haven't seen AdventOfCode.com, it's like every day in December up until Christmas, there's a new programming project that you can build the thing in. I've been doing those in Rust and that's a lot of fun and it's a good way to practice and gain some basic literacy. But after that moving at a low-level stuff, my personal thing and I know something you've expressed interest in the past is my side project is building an operating system in Rust. More so, than just that the pitch is, "You've written JavaScript before. Let's write an operating system together. Here is this companion book and I'll show you how," and that's called intermezzOS. It's like I'm basically trying to rebuild an operating systems curriculum but in Rust instead from nothing, like we start off with assembly code and move up into Rust code. CHARLES: Now, you can't even use anything like all the things that we've been describing like threads, kernel level callbacks. You get none of that, right? You have to implement it all from scratch. You can't use POSIX or whatever. You know, 90% of your code ends up going through. STEVE: It turns out that and it's sort of like for reasons that hopefully I'll be able to fix in the future, you need about like 200 lines of assembly code before you get into Rust and then you basically don't need to use assembly again, really. It's not that big of a barrier in terms of [inaudible] things and its copy-paste stuff that I explained extremely heavily so it's like totally an accomplished real thing. Then you're in a real programming language and you can do more normal things on top of it. But one thing about that because it is my side project, the kernel is actually farther along than the tutorial is and I actually need to find some time to write more of the freaking tutorial but this is kind of my personal long-term project over the next, let's say, decade and to have a completely free and open source tutorial for you to learn about operating system developments. That's one of the things I've been doing. Another one that I think that is really extremely useful is once you gain some amount of literacy on this, you can actually start to learn more about how your regular programming language works. I've been giving this conference talk recently. It's called 'Exploring Ruby Through Rust', and I'm like, "Once you know this low-level stuff and you gain this literacy, you can look at the source code of your language as interpreter and learn stuff about it and you can contribute to it maybe even." Maybe that's not the most practical thing or whatever but now that I've spent a bunch of time with Rust, I understand Ruby on a far, deeper level than I ever did before because now I'm not afraid to go poke around in the internals and learn how it really works under the hood and I understand what those internals do far better. Maybe five years ago, I could have told you like, "Ruby is garbage collector. It's extremely basic. But I don't really know what that means." And now I can be like, "Ruby has this mark and sweep generational garbage collector. But it's not compacting or concurrent yet but maybe in a year or two. Now, that's not just a bunch of buzzwords because I have this low-level literacy." CHRIS: Yeah, that's definitely something. I forgot about but every time I go learn something in Rust and initially this happens a lot. Every time I do that and I go back to JavaScript or something else, I find that Rust inadvertently taught me something about the language that I actually work on every day. Especially, when it comes to things like references, values, and the difference between them and debugging weird prototype behavior in JavaScript became so much easier after I had spent some time working with Rust and had had to like actually deal with passing around references or dealing with life times or having the compiler yell at me for a lot of things that I thought were totally normal. Then I'm going back to JavaScript, it's like, "Wait a second --" Suddenly a lot of these pieces are starting to fit together and before what was just as weird mystery, now I can totally see what is happening and start to think about how to fix it. Even though I don't even have the same tools that I do with Rust, it still is extremely useful from that perspective. STEVE: That's awesome. I'm glad to hear it. That's how I definitely felt with Ruby for sure. CHARLES: You know, in terms of actually using it for day to day stuff, is there other plans, is the ecosystem already supporting things, say, a web framework? Like a low-level web framework like Sinatra or Express or even higher one like Rails. STEVE: I guess, like you've already qualified it as web stuff. But I would say, in a broader sense, whether or not Rust is ready today for you, it depends entirely on the ecosystem. I feel like 80% is productive in Rust as I did ever in Ruby. But that's only if there's a library that I don't have to rewrite myself because it doesn't exist yet. That number is actually growing rapidly so I just look because it's like the end of the year and our package ecosystem is actually doubles. This is a request from earlier. I didn't expect Cargo so Rust basically has bundler or yarn/npm built into the language itself. We distribute it with Rust and we have all that great package ecosystem shenanigans. Another great example of Rust over a language like C is the tooling. Basically, what happened was Yehuda and I kind of showed up in Rust world and we're like, "Why are you still using make files. We know a better way." And they're like, "Okay." Then he builds the equivalent of bundler for Rust. Then everyone's like, "Oh, yeah. This is way better. We're not using make files anymore." The tooling situation is very familiar to a dynamic programming language person because we literally had the same people write the tools. That also means you can share packages freely and briefly so operating system development thing is totally intense to be able to use your package manager to download packages to help you build an operating system. For example, X86 has custom assembly instructions that you need to use when interacting with the hardware and someone has already built a package on [inaudible] that wraps the inline assembly up in a nice to use Rust functions. I can just include that package and use it when building my operating system, which is totally mind-blowing. The npm is sort of feel into OS development is just real intense and cool. Back to the ecosystem thing, though. For web application specifically, it's good and also bad. There's actually multiple different web frameworks already at different levels of comparison. For example, you have Nickle which is kind of like Sinatra and you have Pencil, which is kind of like Flask and Python, which is also kind of like Sinatra. Then you have Iron, which is kind of like expressed in JavaScript. There's also like I know of at least two. One of is has been worked on but it's not been actually released. But the code is at least open source yet. I know a second that is being developed fully in private that has not had any public release yet. Then when the Tokio stuff comes out, People are going to be building new frameworks on top of the new async shenanigans and/or porting the async stuff into the existing frameworks. We kind of have a lot of options but there's also a lot of churn and activity and stuff going on in that space so that either terrifies you or makes you enthusiastic. They're basically is like that. We definitely don't have a Rails yet. I don't think that's because a Rails will never exist but because it's a much bigger project to build a Rails than to build a Sinatra. CHARLES: Yeah, and you just need those foundational pieces there in place before you really want to attempt that. STEVE: And I think Tokio is the real foundational piece and it's just taken us a long time to put it all together. The initial tests in Tokio, we could do a 'Hello, World' benchmark like the tech and power benchmark. Some of you are already familiar with those things, or not, they're like 'Hello, World' benchmark. We actually got faster than they are fat than all of them. It just edged out the fastest Java, which is currently the reigning benchmark on it. That's like extremely compelling. Even if after all this stuff is built on top of it but it's taken us a while to build those foundations and we're just getting that point like Tokio is going to have a release, hopefully before Christmas. I've been assured by the end of the year and then people are going to build stuff on top of it and it's just going to explode from there. Here's another little interesting pitch. I'll give you for this, is that one of the things I like about Rust on early ecosystem is it means that if you want to be that person who built the library that does X that everyone uses, there's lots of opportunity in Rust world right now. Where there's a lot of foundational libraries that you could be the person who wrote that thing when everyone knows and loves and uses. Like JavaScript is still kind of there. In Ruby, every library basically exists already so there's no more room to build a foundational thing. But if you're someone who likes working on open source and that story is compelling to you like getting involved in a younger ecosystem, it means that you can have a much larger impact. I maintained the [inaudible] library that things used. The only reason that's true is because I was around before we had one and then Yehuda wrote the initial version and now, I'm maintaining it. There's tons of space out there so if writing a web framework is the thing that's interesting to you, Rust is a great place to explore and actually doing that at the moment. CHARLES: Steve, one of the things that I know you do is you actually write the Rust Book. I heard that you're also in the process of rewriting it along with Carol Goulding, I believe. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. STEVE: As part of this Steve getting the job right in the docs on Rust thing, I kind of working on lots of stuff so up to Rust 1.0, we knew we needed to have some long form explain all the things that Rust so that became what's called the Rust programming language which I named so because the C programming language and the C++ programming language, the names of the foundational books for those languages so I wanted to continue kind of in that tradition. But there is some problems with that which is I'll say that I'm a little harder on my own work than I think other people are so I hear people tell me all the time that they love the Rust Book and that it's like one of the best programming books that have ever written. But I think it's not that great. The reason why is also because I just know that the way in which I wrote it. You have to remember that Rust 1.0 happened in May of 2015. We were working on language for six or eight years before 1.0 happened so there was lots of changes, language is changing on a daily basis. Now, it's super stable like super, super, super stable. But what that also means is in some like deeper philosophical sense, nobody had had experience programming in what really was Rust yet because we were still like finishing building it's so like how do you write a book on a language that like the precursor language is what you're using and you're trying to see like what is it going to actually end up being like at 1.0. Because it's not like we can just say, "It's done. Now, go write a book, Steve and then we'll release it at that time." The circumstances in which I wrote the original book were I had a very intense deadline of this has to be done by the 15th of May. While the language was coming together, it takes a couple months to put together a book so I had to make sure that the stuff I was starting I would need to go back and re-fix. That also means that I was like much more vague in some places where pieces were still falling into place and you're like, "This is definitely going to be the same. But this might change so I'm going to leave that part off," and then I just have to plow through because the deadline. All those things coming together means that I kind of put together this book that while good and I'm proud of the work that I did, I can do much better. At this point in time, we now have a full year and a half after Rust 1.0 has come out. I know the struggles that people have when learning Rust. I know the ways in which they succeed or fail and I've talked to a lot of people so I'm sort of rewriting the book now, bringing that knowledge and understanding in as well as the fact that the language just been around for a minute so it's much easier. As part of that, I brought on Carol. She goes by Carol Nichols or Goulding. She both has her maiden name and her married name. She's been one of my best friends for a very long time so I'm extremely happy that she's my co-author on this book. The two of us together and working on doing the rewrite, I think that it is possibly the best thing I've ever done or worked on as far as books go, like I'm extremely happy with it and you can read it online right now, if you want to and see if I'm right or wrong about that. But I think it's a far better book than the original book was. It's actually going to publish at No Starch as well. We're donating all the proceeds to charities since we're being paid to actually write the book in the first place, like [inaudible]. It's going to be a much, much easier and better way to learn the language, I think as well. CHARLES: If we want to check that out, where can we find the new version? STEVE: I'll give you a link to put in show notes or whatever as well. But it's Rust-Lang.GitHub.io/book. There's also just like a book repo in the Rust Lang organization on GitHub. All things in Rust is being developed fully in the open so you can read the drafts and see what's been done where. We're getting towards the end, slowly but surely so I'm hoping that's going to be done relatively soon. CHRIS: Well, I'm looking forward to it. CHARLES: Fantastic. Sounds like the documentation is there. It's excellent. The community is there. It's excellent and from what I'm hearing like the kind of the tower of the ecosystem is really being built up. It's not as high as a bunch of other places but it's definitely high enough to jump in and get your feet wet. If you're you know coming from almost any walk of programming. STEVE: It's a lot of work but we seem to be doing good. CHARLES: All right. Well, thanks for stopping in and talking about this with us, Steve. STEVE: Thanks so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun. CHARLES: Yeah, and now Chris, we do need to kind of figure out what is going to be our Rust project here at The Frontside. CHRIS: I'm up for that challenge. CHARLES: Yeah, that'll be some Christmas homework. All right-y. Take care everybody and thanks, as always, for listening. We'll see you next week.
In this episode, Yehuda Katz, co-founder of Tilde, OSS enthusiast, and world traveler, talks about what's in store for Ember. Yehuda Katz: @wycats | blog | GitHub Transcript: ALEX: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Frontside Podcast, Episode 46. My name is Alex Ford, subbing in for our usual hosts, Brandon and Charles, today. We have an awesome episode. We have a really special treat for you. Co-creator of Ember, Yehuda Katz is joining us today. Hello, Yehuda. YEHUDA: Heyo! ALEX: We also have a first time Frontside podcaster, Chris Freeman. Chris, do you want to introduce yourself? CHRIS: Hey, everybody. ALEX: We've also got a podcast Frontside favorite, Robert DeLuca. ROBERT: Favorite? I don't know if you say that. Hey, everyone. How are you doing? ALEX: I'm really excited about our guest today. Yehuda was just in Austin a couple of days ago. He gave a great meet up talk and a deep dive into Ember and it looks like you're going on-tour with that talk, Yehuda. Is that what I saw from your website schedule? YEHUDA: Yeah, I'm not sure exactly. I change it up every time, largely because things happen. So if I say this thing is 'active' or 'in progress', and then it actually shifts, I have to change it up. I've been talking a little bit about what's up on what we were working on. ALEX: Do you want to give us a brief outline as to what's going on in that talk for those podcast listeners who might not be able to attend? What's going on with Ember? What's new? What is it that you're trying to get across here? YEHUDA: Sure. Actually, the talk I gave in Austin was, you're right, it was basically a deep dive. It was really focusing on a few targeted things that we're working on. I would say that at a high level, we're basically working on a couple of things. One of them is generally more integration with the ecosystem, things like ES6 modules, classes, components that look more like HTML and more graphic components and things like that, also improving EmberCLI so it's more integrated with other tools that people are using. A lot of that stuff has to do with the fact that Ember started a long time ago now, like five years ago or so. And so, I think we've actually done a pretty good job of keeping up with things. For example, we adopted ES6 modules and promises a while ago now, and I think generally speaking, we tend to keep up with the ecosystem. But because we've been around for so long, there are certain things like classes, where it took a while for that feature to catch up with the functionality that we were using in Ember. Decorators landed a little while ago as a stage 2 feature in TC39, and that lets us really take a bigger chunk of the functionality that we have in our class model. I make it work for everybody with class syntax and that's something we're pretty excited about. So that's one area just generally taking things where Ember had its own stuff and try to integrate a better ecosystem. Another big area is this mobile readiness and also, a lot of that has to do with the fact that things like service worker have just recently landed. For example, AppCache was a nice feature in some ways. Some people at Google will kill me for using the word 'nice' in AppCache in the same sentence. [Laughter] YEHUDA: But AppCache was trying to accomplish something for a long time. I think it did some version of what it was trying to do. But really, using AppCache is a default behavior for all users having - there's too many caveats to make it work well where service worker, because it's more of level one and more directly controllable is a better fit for something that we could ship with all Ember users. We basically want to use Ember and EmberCLI, you build an application, you get a good mobile experience out of the box. Some of that has to do with trimming down parts of Ember that we don't need to be using in simple applications. Some of it has to do with service workers, some of it has to do with things like Glimmer 2, just making the performance better. But generally, that's the other [inaudible] so it's basically mobile readiness on the one hand and just integrating better with the one ecosystem are both big picture things we're work on. ALEX: Something that you brought up in your talk where private Ember methods and how a lot of people use private methods and you have to keep them around, what you we're just talking about that was unifying around the conventions of programming in Ember. Whatever JavaScript people bring in to Ember, you want to try to incorporate that as the language moves forward which is, I think, a really interesting problem. Also, something you could talk about a little bit further is what you look for in the way people use Ember going forward and how you have to kind of bend the framework to allow it to be backwards compatible. I'm curious what that decision making is like. YEHUDA: What you're talking about and what I talked about yesterday is what we call 'intimate APIs' and that basically means APIs that we never intended to be public. But for some reason or the other, people got their hands on them and started using them. I gave a somewhat elaborate example of funky case yesterday. But basically, the way we approach generally dealing with compatibility is pretty similar to how the web itself does it. First off, there's a thing that we mark as a public API. We just don't break it unless we make a major version which is very rare. We have basically one of those the entire Ember, and I don't think there's anyone coming in the near future. One option is if we don't like something, we just break it. That's very uncommon. Another option, and this is way more common, is that we try to build -- it's for public APIs -- we try to build a new API and we try to nudge people away from the old one. One approach for nudging that is probably the most common is deprecation. So, deprecations themselves don't violate semantic versioning because we're allowed to say, "Please don't use this anymore." The one area that's annoying about deprecations is that if backup code that powers the old feature has to still stick around. And so something that we've been working on around that aspect, around deprecations is something we called svelte build, which is basically the idea that we'll mark every deprecation with the version, that it will start to be deprecated in and people can ask for, "Please don't include any code that was deprecated out of 2.4, or 2.5, or 2.6, or whatever." Then, we'll automatically slip it away. You could think of it sort of like as a reverse feature flag. CHRIS: Wow, that's actually super interesting. I didn't know that. YEHUDA: We haven't finished it up yet but the RFC that talked about it and actually some old guy who actually wrote the RFC along with 1.13 when I noticed that 2.0 was going to end up being a pretty painful release for a lot of users. We did a lot of things around 2.0 to make things less painful, like we made sure that 1.13 contained all of the deprecations that you could possibly need, as well as all the new features. So if you went to 1.13, you could look at all the deprecation warnings, switch to the new functionality. As long as you have no deprecations left, 2.0 was just the exact same code without any of the deprecated features. But as we're working on that, I realized that there is no real reason to give people such a heartbreak, if we could instead just slip away the code. So that's one approach and I think, more or less deprecations, and then eventually, svelte builds are the normal path. With regard to intimate APIs, those are cases where people came to rely on very specific timing or very specific API, very specific details in some internal API and for those things, if we know that a lot of people use them -- usually they get used to like a couple of add-ons. Maybe Ember Wormhole, which is really popular, we'll use it. Then it's really hard for us to remove those things. Those APIs are harder to maintain compatibility for because the exact details of what they even did was never really well-defined in the first place because they were never documented. So usually what we'll do is we'll look at the usage of the API. We'll come up with a new API that is satisfying the exact same use case, and then we'll deprecate the old API. The policy these days is that you have to go through an LTS release so we'll make sure it's deprecated. Let's say, you want to deprecate something now, make sure it's deprecated in 2.8. And you'll know that if you were actually doing the whole song and dance that deprecate what is intrinsically a private API, so it would be within our rights to say like, "Sorry guys. You used the private API. We're not going to help you." But we really think it's important that for Ember, if something feels like a breaking change, that we're not doing it willy-nilly. If somebody upgrades to 2.9 and all of the sudden, Wormhole stops working, they're not going to understand that the reason that happened was because Wormhole did a bad thing. We basically need to do a clear pass. So we'll do a deprecation in LTS release, then we'll wait a couple of releases before removing it. Then usually what happens is, in the meantime, we'll go ahead and we'll submit pull request for the big add-ons that we're responsible for, and we'll also try to talk and write down why it happened. Historically, we've done that a few times and it's worked okay. There was an example of this, which is the lookup factory API in Ember which is really a boring API but it's used by a bunch of high profile add-ons. So the reasons why we needed to deprecate it were silly. They were just a bunch of bad behavior in the old thing that was making everything super slow. We can make things faster by giving people exactly the same functionality without exactly but identical guarantees. So there were some 'guarantees' which don't even make sense for private API. But there were some things that in theory, the API did that we didn't want to support because of performance reasons. And so, we gave people a new API that is, for all intents and purposes, identical. All users will be able to use it in identical way. But it doesn't have exactly the same weirdness and that weirdness was pretty expensive. ALEX: So you've trained Ember developers to be on the 6-week release cycle? They're looking at the blog posts. They're looking to upgrade but you've been involved in a lot of open source projects where I'm sure that wasn't really the case. Say, jQuery has a huge API and obviously, some things have to be deprecated on that and you were on the jQuery core team, I should mention. YEHUDA: Rails has the same story whereas API releases every year, more or less. ALEX: So, I'm just curious. The fact that you have Ember developers, I would like to think bingeing on your word and hinging on those updates, how would you go about, say, the Rails API? Or the jQuery API? Maybe, now you're involved with Rust, and maybe the plan is to have Rust on a 6-week release cycle. I'm curious, if you don't have your developer's attention, as you do the Ember developers, how do you deprecate an API like that? YEHUDA: That's a good question. How do you deal with deprecations if you're releasing quickly? I think there's a couple of important points to make here. First of all, Rust is on the 6-week release cycle. Sometimes, as the same kind of story with intimate APIs, it's much less common with a strong-type system like Rust. I guess, important things to point out, first of all, deprecations don't intrinsically break things. When we talk about intimate APIs and deprecations happening pretty quickly, those are APIs that are large, if someone is not paying super attention to Ember, they're probably not using those APIs, like they would not have known to use them in the first place. They might be using an add-on that use those APIs and the intimate API deprecation process causes the add-ons to update relatively quickly. In terms of regular deprecations, those deprecations stick around forever so you could come back a year later. For the most part, you could make an app that was 2.2 and upgrade it to 2.9 as long as you upgrade the add-ons that you are using at the same time and everything will work. We also realized that some people can't upgrade every six weeks and that LTS release process which is basically a six-month process, more or less. It basically gives us a communications channel to people who want to pay less attention. The way that that works is that, every four release cycles, so that six times four is 24 weeks -- about half a year. Every 24 weeks, there's another release. We assume people are on that release channel. Some people operate at 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8. Some people go directly from 2.4 to 2.8. For those users, we [inaudible] ecosystem, please make sure you support the last LTS release, which means that if your user's on 2.4, and 2.8 comes around, you know that you could have stuck to 2.4 and generally got add-on support and when 2.8 comes around, you should probably upgrade. Also, with intimate APIs, we make sure we always deprecation them one LTS release before we move into an LTS release. Now, what that means is that if we want to remove something by the 2.8 LTS, we have to have already deprecated it in 2.4. If we want to remove something by 2.12, we have to remove it at 2.8. So six months is still not quite the one-year Rails release cycle but it's starting to get to a reasonable state. Also, I would point out that the LTS releases, the support policy for them is that they're four cycles long. We do bug fix support for six cycles and security releases for 10. What that means is that we're actually supporting LTS releases. We were supporting two at a time for security patches -- two and half basically -- and we're supporting one and half at a time for critical bug fixes. The one and a half basically means that when 2.8 comes out, you have two release cycles which is basically three months to upgrade. If you're on 2.4, and 2.8 comes out, it's not like, "Oh, my God. Panic! I got to upgrade right now." You can take a few months to upgrade. Basically, 2.4 came out, you got all the deprecations you need to care about. You had six months to deal with deprecations and then another three months after that. Even in terms of intimate APIs, where in principle, like Rails and jQuery don't even care about those things for the most part -- ah, jQuery cares about it even more. But most projects will get private APIs and say, "Sorry you used the private API. Why did you do that?" Ember is a rare project in that we actually deprecate things that we know where we actually use them. We have a process for dealing with them. Even that process, like I said, it's not a six-week process. We don't deprecate something and remove it. We deprecate something and then give it a pretty long horizon before removing it. ROBERT: I'm curious. You brought up that you are the common element between jQuery, Rails, and Rust. I know that there are, at least, between Rust and Ember and from Rails to Ember, there have been a lot of commonalities and lessons learned in how the projects themselves are managed. But I'm also curious with Rails, Ember is clearly pretty heavily influenced by Rails, which you were doing before. You've been working on Rust quite a bit and I'm curious, does your usage of Rust, even though it's a very low-level language, does that influence Ember at all? Does that change how you think about the framework or JavaScript in general? YEHUDA: The number one thing that I got out of all those projects that I think used to be a thing is something like a conventional reconfiguration idea which is really not - I think the mentioned of reconfiguration is probably not even the best description of what it is. I think the idea that communities that are all working together on the same thing to build that thing bigger and better and better and better and build ecosystems around that thing, those communities are able to build much higher than communities that ask every single developer to put together a bunch of pieces themselves for profit. That's the basic idea. If you look at Rust, which is conceptually very low-level, you'll find that there are things like Cargo, which is a tool that not only builds your thing and not always package manager but it has a convention -- not only a convention -- it has a built-in support for documentation. So you're on Cargo docs, you get all your documentation for all your dependencies. You run Cargo bench. That's a built-in thing that runs your benchmark. You run Cargo test that runs your test. To mark your documentation as being Rust code, it will automatically run your tests for you when you run Cargo test. We will build your examples for you and make sure your samples keep compiling. There's all this stuff in Cargo that you would not necessarily consider, like it's basic [inaudible] helping you get your workflow the same. Then there's things like Rust format which you've been working on and there's been a huge debate in the community about exactly how much configuration we want to allow in Rust format. But the irony of it is something that most people agree with is that we should try to come up with some kind of default style for Rust that everyone agrees to, that most people can pick up and use the Rust products where it's often used. Then there's things like Futures and [inaudible], where the goal of those libraries is really to make there be a single central way that everybody does [inaudible] in Rust. These are all things that if you look at like C or C++, which are languages that are sort of in the same low-level in this space, in the same kind of area, you'll find that those languages have billions of ways in doing all of those things and there's so many different styles and so many different workflow tools, so many different things that you can make in then a million things that [inaudible]. Even the Rust is conceptually low-level, it doesn't really affecting every single environment as some sort of things that everyone doesn't need to do themselves. I think, an important thing that people don't always get about convention configuration is that it's not just that everybody doesn't have to do all of those things and it saves you some time, it's that when everyone is doing the same thing, it's a lot easier to build another level on top of that. For example, a fast food is a great example of this in Ember. The fact that everyone initializes their application using an Ember initializer, the fact that services were these global things that are sort of global- there's no better word than 'services' but global services, the different components could share the fact that those are all going in the same place. The fact that the way we manipulate DOM is always in a constraint single area. Almost things mean that when it comes out and to build something like fast food, it's pretty easy to take almost any Ember application and make it run in the fast food environment because we know what we're looking at, and that's something that isn't necessarily true about other tools. For me, Chris, the number one thing that, I think, all of those sharing, including jQuery, actually, like jQuery said, "There's so many different ways that people do DOM manipulation, why don't we unify it into one thing that I everyone can use?" You know, the 'jQuery plugin', which is something that has falling out of favor over time. The reason it was so popular was largely because people knew, "Okay, I'm dealing with jQuery object. If I just put a plug into the jQuery object, it makes sense." People understand how to use it. I think that's something that a lot of projects that I used to share and it's also something that is not close to ubiquitous. It's very uncommon, actually. So that's one thing -- the conventional configuration story. I think, another major aspect of all this, and this is something that jQuery and Rails do not share, but Rust and Ember have the RFC process, which more or less, is just a wave as a community of saying, "The way that we agree to add new features to the project is not something coming down the [inaudible] with a tablet every year." At a conferencing, we have agreed to add these features but sometimes people are core team, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes, they're actual contributors, coming with an idea, write their view down in a format that we all know how to do with. Then there's a community discussion about it. Sometimes it takes a very long time. Sometimes it's not. But then we eventually come to a conclusion about what it is that we're doing. Eventually, the core team agrees to merge the RFC. I think one of the nicest things about RFC process is that it produces an artifact that you can come back to a year, two years, three years later. If you say, "Oh, I wonder why they've made that decision. I wonder why that's the thing that they did," and the reason why this is great is that the RFCs are not gospel. They're not something that we should hold onto forever. But at the same time, we don't want to reel it again, things that we already discussed that in-depth over and over and over again. If a person comes back and they say, "Oh, why do they do that? The modification of RFC, why are these instructions directors are like that?" If they go back and look at the RFC and the thread associated with it, and the thing that they want to bring up is something that was already discussed, it's really no reason to bring it up again. But maybe someone have thought of a different idea or a different reason to dislike or to disagree with the decision that was already made. That was already discussed. That's a much better rationale for bringing up for re-litigate. In other words, re-litigating is actually good but if you re-litigating five times a day, on every decision, that's not why you move. So RFCs, by their very nature, the fact that the core team is doing things in public like anybody else and everybody else is also participating in that same process, the fact that artifact tells you, more or less, exactly what was discussed, makes it really easy to decide when is a good time to revisit some of the questions. ALEX: Do you find that poll request has the same process as an RFC and it's an artifact you can go back to, it's a place to have communication that is visible to everybody, unlike say, this micro message service such as Slack where context is just lost for the public. I'm curious if you want to see that modeled in poll requests or if an RFC is where something like that belongs. YEHUDA: I think, poll requests are great. I remember that when I was somewhat like the first user on GitHub who's not a founder of GitHub. I remember one of the things that excited me about GitHub early, although, the very beginning, didn't have poll request yet. but one thing that excite me about poll request is that before poll request, every single time I would use an issue tracker so they were like a billion issue trackers like [inaudible] whatever, and at that time I called it 'patch management'. I want something that helps me manage patches because the actual discussions are not the higher of it. The higher of it is something that submitted a request for me to merge in this patch. How do I merge it? How do I discuss with them? Those things were always really hard so I might ask people to upload patch files or whatever. It's hard to remember how bad things were but the number one thing that was just so obvious but also so terrible about the ecosystem before GitHub was patches were like old mailbox approach. Like you'll make a patch, and hopefully, get it to the right place at the right time. So I think, poll request and comments of poll request and many of the improvements that have been made for poll request are great. The reason, I think, RFC are really important in addition to poll request is that, by the time someone actually took the time to write some code and submit it, it's very easy to look at it and say, "Well, I don't necessary agree on all the things here but I don't want to give a person a hard time that will do the work," whereas somebody submit some idea early on and they say, "I have this idea --" It's actually a lot easier to sort of get into details at that point and say, "Don't do this. If we should do this or it doesn't fit that well with this other RFC or this other poll request that's already open --" But once somebody actually does start and actively working on the feature, I think, poll request are great, like most open source project these days. Ember doesn't ever committed anything to master. Everything goes to poll request, and even core team stuff. I also find that when I submitted a poll request or anybody in the core team, there are almost always people who are not in the core team that saves or fix in the poll request, for various reasons. Of course, poll request also are the usual mechanism by which people run things like CI and linting tools and things like that, called quality tools. I think, the poll request workflow is really good. In terms of other messaging services, I think, there just sometimes the need to have conversations that are faster than poll request and I don't really have any problem with check conversations. But I definitely agree that it has a deep conversation. This is something that happened in the [inaudible] a lot where we having this conversation with the core team and somebody will say like, "We should really move this out into a public discussion, or move it into RFC. If you don't agree with this thing that somebody said public, can you say [inaudible]." So I totally agree that if there's a thing that people want to say in private about something but it's just in private for convenience, it's not private or transient for any good reason, actually getting out there onto the issue or the poll request and say your opinion and letting the conversation back and forth happen there is, for the exact same reason as you said, very useful. In fact, Aaron Turon from Rust brings this point out repeatedly. We just had a conversation this past week about the fact that we have sort of a normal Rust project that, let say in the core team room and it's a technical topic, and it doesn't have anything sensitive about it, people always say like, "Hey, can you move that into Rust Internals," which is a public room. Or like moving this course, we have internals at Rust-Lang.org and I keep thinking Ember could use it. Basically, this sort of a hierarchy of private to public or transient to sort of a free-form discussion forum like this course to something like a GitHub issue, something like an RFC to something like poll request. There's like a hierarchy of how much of those artifacts are easy to search and find. But I think, you're totally right that there's no reason why, things like the core team needs to exist because at some point, the buck has to stop somewhere. Somebody has to make decisions. Somebody has to actually responsible for laying out the cross-cutting vision for the entire project. But those things are actually pretty lightweight. The core team when it's doing its job, it's just sort of making an omnibus of everything that the community is thinking at a particular point and making it more concrete. While, I think that's important that there are spaces which are core team spaces, or spaces that are transient, I think, a lot of questions that people have in the Ember slots are important that people who can just jump in and ask them. I think, getting things out into both public and more of permanent artifacts spaces is good. ALEX: Rob, you are a co-runner of Ember ATX and I was hoping you could speak on the fact that we've gotten some core team members down to Texas to come talk. It's nice that they're able to share their message with what's going on in the core team. But also, they're doing work. They're seeing how real people use Ember and then taking that back to the core team. I was wondering if have just want to comment on that and your work on bringing some really excellent people who make decisions down to Austin. ROBERT: As a meet up runner, like a co-runner, I guess. It's me, Jeff, and Lydia that run Austin Ember ATX. We really like to try and bring people that are deep into Embers core into Austin to talk about the framework that these people work in daily. It's always awesome because whenever you get them there in the flesh, you can ask questions. I guess, we can go back to where Slack is, like you have the higher bandwidth communication but it's even higher bandwidth when you're in person. Getting those people to talk to people that are actually working on the framework daily is I think, hugely important and that's why we work really hard to try and bring out people that work on the core. YEHUDA: For what it's worth, I think that Rails and Ember shares a common core value, like other projects have, more or less. Ember core team people almost exclusively actually work on Ember apps as part of their jobs so I work on skylight. Having some responsibility in the real world for apps that you are working. It's a big difference in just [inaudible]. I definitely noticed a few. Sometimes, I'll be working on a project for a while, like when I was working on Rails for 18 months and never actually used Rails. I mean, I used it but not for anything significant during that time. I, sometimes, get into a rut where I'm working on Ember a lot and I haven't had a chance to work on an app at all. Then, you go back to work on that for a day and it's like, "Oh, my God. There are so many obvious things that I can make better here." Like the kind of things that you would think about when you're working on your framework stuff is not necessarily- as quick it gets, the quickest things that you can fix. The Ember welcome page is a good example of this. I think, when someone is training, it's very easy for them to notice that it would be great if there was some kind of welcome screen for people. But it's not something that a framework author would necessarily think of on your own. Similarly, getting down to places that are not my usual haunts and hearing people bringing stuff that I just hadn't heard before. Like things, "Oh, that's a good idea. But I haven't heard that." A lot of that just come from the fact that the core team has a lot of different kinds of users in it so the people doing training, there are people doing apps or people doing consulting, there are people doing rescue projects in that kind of combos is pretty good. There's a long tale of all kinds of stuff, like people using web sockets for network people using React. People are trying to do Redux in Ember, who knows? That long tale is impossible to represent all that long tale. In a core team, we try to get as much as possible. It's impossible to represent all of them so going out there and talking to people doing weird stuff and weird doesn't meant pejoratively, just unusual stuff. Like Ember, really wants to be pretty flexible under the hood. Even though, it's a pretty conventional tool, we want it to be flexible under the hood so I kind of no way of flexibility is but sometimes, I'll talk to somebody and I'll be like, "Oh, in retrospect, that particular thing, I thought that was flexible as missing as little knob that we can add." So I really enjoy it. CHRIS: Since you've been pretty heads down on Glimmer 2 and you are actually traveling out and talking to people, I'm curious, are you noticing any common themes from the feedback that you're getting recently in terms of what users are saying? Do you have an indication of what the next move might be? Or what people are asking for? YEHUDA: For Glimmer specifically? CHRIS: For Ember in general, or Glimmer specifically. But I imagine, you're probably getting general Ember feedback. YEHUDA: Yeah. I talk about this a little before like the two big areas of interest are mobile readiness and better integration with the ecosystem. Integration is the wrong word. There's nothing wrong with Ember to that extent but people want classes. I think, those are the biggest picture things. I actually noticed a couple, somewhat interesting things when working with Ember. We ship the Glimmer Beta six weeks ago and we're doing another beta just because there's a couple of bugs that we got that were trickling and we want to make sure we get it right. I've actually noticed the people have on the one hand, the story of Glimmer is that we're pretty similar to React in the sense that you should think of what we're doing as a top down, you render the whole time and that there are some nice [inaudible] that use Ember.set or the set API, then we are able to do what people should do with component update automatically for you. For [inaudible], then we know, "Oh, this whole area, doesn't need anything to be updated." If you think about it that way, if you think about it as how can we render [inaudible] around set, I think, you'll notice that Glimmer updates are always faster than React's updates. But people have come to really rely on the sort of quasi-guarantee that if you didn't update something, it doesn't change the DOM associated with it, or even execute code associate with it. I find it sort of interesting. This is like meta problem, which is React actually got some things right about how to make this story performance. Part of that has to do with not assuming that you need as much bookkeeping as Ember always assume that you need. In exchange, you get much faster initial render and you have to do more work around updates. We actually have a pretty good story here. Ember.set is pretty nice because it lets us use API that our users are used to, say, generate [inaudible] upon updates for you and that's nice. But people get very upset when things run that they didn't expect, which of course, is not how React people think about it. The way React people thinking about it is, of course, [inaudible]. That's the whole API. It runs until you told not to. In Ember, things run at people who don't expect to get very angry. I think, you have to be one that I'm thinking about and that's a lower [inaudible]. But in terms of low-level, like thinking about how to shift the mental model of an Ember user so that we can get away with less and less bookkeeping upfront. I still do too much bookkeeping as part of initial render but in order to keep reducing the amount of bookkeeping, we need people to get into mindset of things are fast initially and the tradeoff is that your updates are slower, unless you do whatever. There are mighty things like React does this wasted time debugging tool or they basically tell you, "Hey, you didn't tell us not to render this but it never render," so you should try and do that. To be honest, I think, having to write something once your component updates, that exactly, "Do I [inaudible] is not okay. I'm not willing to do that." But there are a lot of things that approximate that were more similar to Ember existing APIs that we can find. I guess, my medium-term goal here is to make it so that we have the sweet spot so that the initial render is always very efficient. I think, we're getting closer. There's still some back problems that we can deal with so. Initial render is very efficient, fast components are fast, and more or less, you get good updates performance until you reach a certain amount of scale and then the escape valves are much nicer [inaudible] before an update. They're basically little [inaudible] where you say, "You know this thing can't change." It would be hard for me to explain. It would feel like it's [inaudible] we talk about. We've had a bunch of discussion about different escape valves, and the thing I'm most interested in is finding once that feels semantic. Should there a component update doesn't feel like you're describing anything other than React's API. I'm more interested in things that feel like you're talking about your app or your data. ALEX: Yeah. ROBERT: Keeping with the Glimmer 2 topic. Glimmer 2 is written in TypeScript, right? YEHUDA: Yep. ROBERT: Do you see that creeping its way more into the Ember community? I guess, I kind of want to get your general thoughts on TypeScript and what your experience was writing in Glimmer 2. YEHUDA: I actually really like that. But the story with TypeScript was that I was writing the Glimmer 2 originally in regular JavaScript and I came back from a long trip. I want to show Godfrey what I've done and I was having trouble explaining some of the interfaces. I happen to know that TypeScript is a lot of it is just interface so I'll just use their syntax and I think, I open the playground and I type in some TypeScript interfaces. Then I was like, "Oh, it's annoying that if I reload, I'll lose it so let me copy the interface into the ReadMe, basically and to the app." Then over time, like not very much time, I was like, "Oh, it's very annoying that now that I have this, I really wish I could just use it inside of the code." So we started doing that. It took us maybe a week of actually being to be able to use TypeScript for real. But honestly, the code base is pretty big at that point, and the actual was not so bad. A lot of the reason why it was at the time, TypeScripts like VS Code, TypeScript was still younger and it wasn't a slam dunk. For example, in today's TypeScript, you can just have JavaScript files in your directory and just tell it to [inaudible] that works. At that time, you couldn't so you have to really change all the files and there are some things like TypeScript requires you to specify in classes. It requires you to specify all your fields and I think that's fine, that's good for TypeScript. But you're not going to have already done that in JavaScript so you can't just like rename all your JS files with TS and have a nice day. So it took as a little over a week, I think, and we also have to write the Broccoli TypeScript thing during that same period of time. That was another thing we have to do. ROBERT: Yeah, that's a [inaudible]. YEHUDA: Then, with TypeScript change the compiler API a few times so we have a bunch of [inaudible] to do. But other than that initial like [inaudible] to get it working, I would say that it was every single point in time, there was always a [inaudible] win, in terms of what we had to do to make TypeScript happy and what wounds that we got out of it. You get things like, obviously, people know about code completion. I personally like code completion. I think, it's helpful. But I think, jumps to definition is actually more important feature than code completion. Just like what is this method? I want to look at it. You can jump directly to it. Also, for me, the code completion of parameters is way important the code completion of method names so when someone teaches you about code completion, they will usually show you, "Oh, look [inaudible]." It gives you the list of all method names, and you're like, "Well, that's fine. But I probably know all of those method names." But you don't necessarily know all the parameters. Especially, once you start using types, the parameter or information is actually quite rich, like it's telling you this is a component definition, this is a string or this is whatever. All that stuff, I think, I basically come to realize from using TypeScript that Microsoft has done a really good job with [inaudible] code of distilling down to just what part of ID experience is really good and just bring you that to an editor, that feels a lot like Atom or Sublime, or other than that. So if you get like a pretty good ID experience, without all of [inaudible]. ALEX: I've seen some talk on GitHub about people who want to write their Ember add-ons on TypeScript and I did not know Glimmer 2 was written in TypeScript until just now. I'm glad that was brought up. But we as Ember developers have been trained to use convention over configuration. The convention is Ember is not written in TypeScript. We're starting to see convention now where logic has crept into the template, or it's not as much as convention as people are doing it right now. I'm curious what your thoughts on that and more is treating Handlebars as a programming language and something that we're seeing now in real production Ember code, so what is the path going forward there because it is happening? YEHUDA: Yeah, I agree. I just want to say, I didn't actually answer the previous question in full. I think my expectation is we have no interest in ever making TypeScript as rudimentary part of Ember. I think Ember should always work and work nicely with regular JavaScript. I don't want to do anything that would lean to heavily on people having TypeScript around. Certainly, I don't want to do with Angular did, which they use the types as semantic markers for dependency injection and something like that. But I do anticipate things like Ember-metal for sure, Ember runtime being written in TypeScript because anything that's pretty low-level and a lot of algorithms benefits a lot from clearly delineating interfaces. I think, another thing people don't realize is that there are all these [inaudible] interfaces floating around your code in JavaScript. But like you are in a class, it's pretty easy to document what the class does. But if you have an interface, it's not really any good mechanism for describing it and it can become very [inaudible] and it's Like, "Please give me an object as these methods on it and build these methods." It's funny because you don't realize until you start using TypeScript that it's a very recursive problem. It's like, it has these three methods on it have these six parameters and these parameters have these interfaces and those have these. So you can actually start describing a very complicated thing and it's like those complicated things didn't exist before, they were just very implicit. The explicitness of the interfaces is not you can write [inaudible]. You can write the three interfaces and have the methods with all types of networks [inaudible]. I think, I expect Ember-metal, Ember runtime, other low-level parts Ember, certainly the component library now it's like directly linking in with Glimmer and Glimmer were written in TypeScript so that stuff would really benefit with TypeScript. In terms of Ember itself, using TypeScript, I think we have sort of a medium term goal of letting Ember apps use TypeScript if they want. I would say that making that story really nice, pretty much leans on ES6 modules and ES6 classes so we have some of the ES6 modules but there's still a lot of Ember [inaudible] whenever module story. In terms of classes, were still using the old-style class system and that class system is actually just really hard to get the types working in TypeScript. It's hard, period. But like React has a similar problem and there's lot of advance features that only really exists in [inaudible] express ES5 class [inaudible] and TypeScript doesn't have all the features. My expectation is that sort of along the same path as getting ES6 classes. We will also get a lot of TypeScript support in Ember and I think a lot of people are interested. A lot of people have work on Glimmer now and they're like, "I would love to use it in my app so we'll probably have that happen." Coding your templates, was the other question. I sort of have a mixed feeling about this because on the one hand, I actually do want Glimmer to be the programming language in production way. So either templating engines are just using the programming language embedded like the ERP. Or they are like Mustache or like the general templating engine -- forget what that thing is called -- but there's a bunch of template engines that use like the curly syntax and those things aren't very rigorous in terms of how they think about scope. Like lexical scope, it turns out to be a pretty important thing about how programming language work. If you have a shitty scope story, people don't have a good sense of what's going on so like the Angular 1 templating story was you basically find your scope on wherever and you attach to a part of your template and that basically means that if you're looking at just temple, you have no idea what the actual variables mean, anyway, because any part of it could be choking up the scope to be whatever. I start with Handlebars but have refined a lot overtime and I'm pretty happy with it now. The Glimmer templating engine is basically defines a programming language. It has scoping story. If you want a variable, name it. Use the as-pipes syntax and you get some variables there. Your function, your output, your components, and your helpers are functions and sometimes it's written in JavaScript, just like in Ruby cellular functions that are written in C. But ultimately, just like a C extension, it can't magically change the scope of Ruby program, helper or component in Glimmer. It can't magically change the scope of your template. With all that needs, if you look at a Glimmer template, it's actually really clear what are the names mean. That sound boring but ultimately, that's one of the things that needs to you look up at a lot templating engine and not only really know what's going on. I don't understand what's going on, without thinking of what every single one of those custom helpers is doing. I think Jinja is the name of the templating engine in Django. If you look at some of the templating engine like that or even like Handlebars before Ember 2.0, you really have to go that like 'for x and y' is a magic syntax that needs a particular thing. Because a lot of these templating engines are very flexible in the sense that they let users have or whatever, any particular piece of syntax could actually be creating random names that mean whatever. I've just found, having worked through that in the Ember community, I'm very happy that we took the time to get that stuff solid. One of the nice side effects of that is that it makes some of the usual optimizations that people do on code work very nicely. Once we know all the names mean and know all the scopes mean, things like in lining specialization from invocation. This component is invoked here. It has these parameters, but those parameters are all strings and I can see the receiving end. The receiving end just fix those strings into attributes or something. At compilation time, like to combine all into one thing. This is an optimization that we haven't done yet because we been working on compatibility. But there's a lot of normal 'programming languages standard optimizations' that we can do because we design Glimmer to be a programming language. The fact that we've done that is actually mean the root cause of people doing more programming language stuff in their templates, in older versions of Ember before, we had done such a good job of rationalizing everything. You would start doing that stuff and you would start hitting clips where the behavior didn't work the way expected for some reason, then you just use a sub-expression as something and then depending on exactly which things you put into the slots, maybe it didn't update on the inside of the template. We always consider those things as bugs so we would fix the bugs that we encountered. There's an explosion of different kinds of things in a programming language and if you don't model variables as variables basically, then it's hard to know callbacks are callbacks, variables as variables. There's a lot of doubt so they would start using the APIs as part of them [inaudible] hit someone and they would pull back. But today, the implementation of Glimmer, especially with Glimmer 2 is extremely [inaudible] standard, and what that means is that you want to do very [inaudible], parenthesized expressions with as type something and then you want to go and take that and send to the component and you have that and you put that value and put it to a service and you do all that and it works. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea for your template to be in a large program. That's generally that. I think that's main question that you asked me and it is generally, for things to get really complicated. But I think there is a reason for it and I think it's something we're doing to make it better. I think, the reason for it is that, if you think about the Glimmer core language, the main escape of what you have to get complicated expressions out of Glimmer and back into a reasonable place is helpers. Let's say you have a big bunch of [inaudible], and/or whatever people are doing inside of their Glimmer templates and it's like a multi-line thing and you want to pull that out to a more reasonable place. The natural way to do that is to make a helper. But it's also pretty common that you have a complicated piece of expression that isn't reusable. It's not being reusable for multiple places and helpers in Ember right now are global so you may have this big block. Another [inaudible] of computer's property, but computer property's don't have a nice- like I have a few internal parameters and I just do something that they always require you do something against it, the components off of this, and that is usually what's you are doing. You're usually have what is effectively a function with a bunch of parameters in it and those parameters combine some way like with 'and', 'or', maybe there's some comparisons like 'greater' or 'less than' or whatever. One of the things that comes out of module modification RFC and makes everyone pretty excited is the ability to have helpers in your templates that are local so it's a helper that is just sitting right next to your template. I think, those kind of things -- helpers that are right next to your template -- will give people who like you do not want to see so much code in your template, a much nicer story to explain to people why we're doing it, and what we should do instead. A template has a three-line, fifteen is privacy expression and you want to convince the person not to do it. The re-factor is literally just to make a local helper, put the code in there and use the local helper. I think that's the better story to explain to people than, "Hey, I don't like that. It feels bad. What should I do?" CHRIS: This brings up an interesting point that we actually encountered recently at The Frontside, we use helpers a lot and are frequently trying to get them to do all sorts of weird things. But recently, it occurred to us that one kind of blocker was that you can't compose helpers. We had an existing helper and we kind of needed to make a helper on top of it and it suddenly dawned on all of us that, "Oh, we can't go up a level." We can't build a helper and its abstraction over another one because you kind of have to hit the dump. You have to have a component or a template or something to invoke that. Is that's true? YEHUDA: I would expect that you could call the function with the arguments that looked ugly but I would suspect and I would say that you can call it and just pass the parameters and hash these [inaudible] and -- ALEX: Like a helper that invoke or something? Because to write a new helper, you would have to go back to JavaScript. YEHUDA: That array an object. I expect that to work. Do you just need a helper calling another helper? ALEX: Well, a helper composing, like composing several helpers into a bigger helper and then just calling in the template, much like how you might write some functions and that write a function that closes over them or something. YEHUDA: Are we talking about a helper that takes the helper? ALEX: I guess it could be. I guess, higher order helpers could be a thing in this case. YEHUDA: Helpers that call helpers are helpers that close over helpers really should just- helpers are more or less functions. It would just be able to use them directly. I think, what you're saying is an interesting Ember phenomenon. I actually don't know which of two categories this discussion is in. Basically, either. Either there is some good reason why this turns out to be difficult and there's like a missing API that usually fix it. Like in general, my mental model here is you're talking about a function so if you can just [inaudible] the function, it really should work and in that, it is hard. There's something weird. Basically, what I'm saying is either there are some 'gotcha' that how it was structured right now, that's like an accident. That means they're not exactly as much like functions as we think or the mental model that you have using them doesn't make you think of them like functions. So you think that there are hard to compose but actually there are functions. Basically, those two things are equally likely Ember. I think that's unfortunate. ALEX: I think that with them, you can certainly combine them in a template and you could even pass one into the other. What we ran into an issue was, similar to functions, if you are writing like an npm library, you may write five functions and only export one of them. That one function will compose the other four and call them. In some cases, you may not realize, do you want to export that composed abstracted function until much later and it's okay, because you just import the function from somewhere else, then you say like, "All right. I'm just going to consume this function from another and now I have this combination put together." Well, with a helper, if you already have a helper that does something and then you realized, "Oh, actually, I need to build an abstraction on top of this helper in a new helper," we so far have not found a good way to combine them like that. YEHUDA: So probably, it will not succeed and having this conversation through to the completion year. I'll just say for listeners, what I find surprising about this, although, I can believe that there is something that makes it true is that helpers in Ember are really just functions and increasingly they really are like helpers in Glimmer are functions. They have a weird arguments signature. They take positional parenthesis in array and named arguments as dictionary and that's a convenience basically because otherwise, you have to scrape of the last parameter and try to figure stuff out. So that's a signature issue. But generally speaking, helpers are supposed to be functions and if there's something that you could do with regular functions you can't do them with helpers, that sounds to me like something is wrong. Like I said, I can definitely believe I should talk to Chris about this and he should write a blog post about it. I can definitely believe that there is something that makes it true but it's hard for me to imagine what it is. CHRIS: Well, I'm glad to talk to you about it offline. YEHUDA: Yes. We will figured it out. ALEX: Yehuda, thank you for this deep dive into open source process into Ember. I could drill deeper into your brain and just extract as much knowledge as I can. I hope to be able to do that someday soon. We're going to wrap up for today. Thank you very much for Yehuda Katz and your time. YEHUDA: Yeah. Thank you. I apologize for people who didn't understand half the things I said. ALEX: Yeah, it's a podcast for everybody. But we have a lot of Ember developer's listening and I'm sure that they loved it and hated it all up so thank you very much.
In this episode, Leah Silber, CEO of Tilde, Inc. and Ember.js core team member talks about what she's learned building communities, organizing events, and running a business. We talk about how people can move from "observer" to "participant" and grow their own healthy communities and companies. Links: Leah Silber: EmberConf 2016: The Morning-After Post-Mortem Event Driven: How to Run Memorable Tech Conferences Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to the Frontside Podcast, Episode 43. I am Charles Lowell. I'm here with Brandon Hays, and a very, very special guest. Brandon, do you want to introduce her? BRANDON: Yeah, we're here with Leah Silber. She runs Tilde? 'Tild'? I always say this incorrectly. LEAH: You can't be saying it incorrectly. When we named the company, we knew we were choosing one of those names where people are going to say it and you just have to accept it. That's fate and that's how it goes. We usually say 'til-de' here. BRANDON: Okay, I'll say Tilde, and you can say 'Frontsi-de'. CHARLES: The way you say Tilde says more about you, than it does about us. BRANDON: Yeah, it's a verbal Rorschach test. We were really, really glad to have your time. We know that people actually work with you as a consultant for these kinds of things to help with communities, conferences, build their businesses. So, you have a lot of gathered expertise around these things. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, what you do and kind of how you got involved in tech and running businesses? LEAH: Sure, not unlike an elevator pitch but I have been working in open source startups and companies, I want to say it's probably been like 10 years now or crazy something like that. But my first open source project that I was seriously involved in was jQuery, and that was a long time ago and it was pretty magical in retrospect because jQuery was, at the time, it was like coming out of nowhere. Nobody thought it was going to really make a dent in technology. John Resig was this clearly brilliant but still this nobody, sort of working on this project in his spare time, and Yehuda Katz jumped in and a bunch of other people earlier at the beginning. It was a time in the ecosystem where they were a little bit laughed at the room. In retrospect, there was a time when the ecosystem was a little more rude, like some of the competitive behaviors that happened back then. Thankfully, it just wouldn't fly right now. But it's been super cool to be involved with something and be able to witness something at the ground floor where this little idea and project that nobody takes seriously because there are these seemingly massive projects and landscape, and then just sort of watch it take over the world. It was a process obviously that took a little while. But again, in retrospect, it didn't take all that long, so that was really an amazing experience to watch. It was also my first really intense open source community learning experience. Everything from witnessing what kind of personalities got involved and how they did it, to watching John who sort of -- I want to say he's a consummate politician, but he's not a political person. I guess what I mean, he's just really good at people. CHARLES: He's like a diplomat? LEAH: He is. But like the sort of diplomat where you're in a battle and then suddenly a treaty happens and you just don't even know what happened but everybody's happy and you vaguely remember that you all hated each other a few minutes ago. He's really talented. Obviously, also having the technical chops to build something impressive helps with that. But watching how different personalities in open source interacted with each other, and even just for myself, like learning how to be a good open source citizen and learning how to contribute to a project and finding a way as a non-coder at the time to be useful in an open source project was really amazing. That was something I was involved with for a number of years. Then, slowly as time went on, I got involved in other projects and other events. And along the way, I was like, "This is really fun. Why am I working not in technology but doing this at night." Well pretty early on, I moved out from New York to California which is, I guess, the rite of passage or at least was. Got a job at my first startup, spent a couple years there, sort of again learning everything in fast forward because that's how startups work. I've done that a couple of different times over the years, thankfully not that many. I've managed to have what I consider impressive stability in a startup land where people can end up needing to change jobs, projects and positions very rapidly. Nowadays, I mostly focus on Ember work. There was a big chunk of time in the middle where I was focused on Ruby on Rails work. I do events, conferences, meet up groups, community management. A lot of the less glamorous stuff involved in once a project does become more successful, like figuring out a governance strategy, and figuring out how you protect your brand and what happens when lawyers and PR people and all these other different industry people start coming at you with all these questions that you hadn't thought about. How much infrastructure is too much infrastructure? What happens when the project starts having money? All these sorts of things. I feel like I've lived through a bunch of projects and their growing pains, and have a really solid understanding of the different routes. I'm still learning every day, and that's kind of why I love it. I started with my co-founders, I started my own company about five years ago which I'm always pleased and astonished to still be existing. Obviously, I watched companies spin up and die down overnight in the fast-paced technology sector. So, I'm a fan of stability and continuing to exist, is basically the top of my list. But that was about five years ago now, and it's been really great. I would never previously have identified myself as an entrepreneur. I had this, I want to say now, misconception that I was a support person, that I was the perfect second-in-command that I needed somebody at the top of the food chain who had these brilliant ideas and then I would be the person who would come in and say, "Great idea. Let me make it happen for you," and like operations and execution. At some point, I realized that that's not real. There's no reason that the person who has ideas has to be more in-charge than the person who makes ideas happened, like these two skill sets, if they're not in the same person are equally necessary. I think that was probably a little bit of standard sort of impostor syndrome kind of stuff. And also, there's a lot of pressure involved in thinking about yourself as in-charge of something important with high stakes. But I don't know. At some point, I think I watched enough people do the job and I served as that second-in-command or upper management kind of role for a lot of people. I realized that primarily, the difference between the people who were running the show as figureheads and the people who were actually running the show day to day, the difference primarily was just boldness. Like one of them had the audacity to say, "I can be in charge. I'm going to start a company. I'm going to do this." And that's not actually that big of delta so 'fake it until you make it'. BRANDON: I kind of want to lock in on that concept a little bit. I don't want to let that just float by on the river. That is something that has been such a profound lesson in my life over the last six months or a year that I think, a lot of us that wind up running companies kind of fall into that by accident or happenstance or something. You always have this weird left over hope from times where you work for other people, that somebody will step in and be in charge. It's a deal where everybody stands on the line and like, "Okay, whoever wants to step forward, step forward, and everybody steps back but you." And that feeling of being the last person standing when everybody else has backed, just by nature of not stepping back, you realized, "Oh, you know what --” Like there is such a thing as an operationally oriented CEO. So it really is the idea that you just said, it really is a matter of boldness and being willing to be the person, where the buck stops, is really the only difference between a person that feels like a really great second-in-command versus the person that feels like they could be running things. LEAH: There's just this magical myth of the big important idea person. Anything that's going to be successful or most things are going to be successful I guess, they're rarely just one person sitting on a mountain. One person starts with a shred of an idea, and then everybody around them sort of helps turn it into something real. So it could really be anybody who has that first instinct that it doesn't mean that that person has to be in-charge. CHARLES: I'm wondering, if there's any parallels there between, "Have you borrowed any of that boldness through community?" Or has there been any bouncing back and forth about lesson in terms of somebody has to take the lead on something. LEAH: Actually, it's harder a little bit in community stuff because taking a lead typically means or we think it typically means making a decision. I think that's where in open source, a lot of people go wrong, and a lot of open source projects end up with a top down management strategy where somebody is in-charge and that person tells them what's going to happen and then everybody, for example, freaks out about backwards compatibility. Then they're like, "Oh, yeah. I got a plan for this." But part of that is like you see a power vacuum and you think like, "Okay, I can step up and take this." But in open source, that's not really the ideal way or at least not in the philosophy of most of the projects that I've been in which is you only need to ask people what they think along the way, differently than in a professional environment. Like in Ember, we have the RFP process where we source a feedback before we make massive changes. That just makes everything, like you can even really say, "This is the exact thing I want to do," and you can lay out a really great plan and take that leadership role. But in a framework where it's not an edict, in a framework where it's like, "Okay, now everybody else, what do you think about it? How can you improve my idea?" And there's a whole bunch of things that happen. The first and most obvious is your idea gets better because people point out things that you didn't think of or don't necessarily personally have the experience or have noticed. But also, people just feel consulted in a way that is more critical. I like to think people want to feel consulted in work environments also. But I guess when you're the boss, you can get away with just saying, "This is the policy. I made the policy." In open source, people won't really let that fly. You can't just say, "This is a feature set. I've made this. That's the rule." Certainly not if you want them to use your project and contribute to your project and help you be successful. There are some similar things to think about when running a company versus running an open source project. But essentially, the project has to be a significantly more collaborative environment that makes people feel invested in the project and want to stick around and want to become other contributors so that the project can grow, succeed, and have a lot of people involved rather than just one-idea person. BRANDON: I was listening to a podcast recently that I can't remember which one it was but the people were talking about a different tech community and their definition of community really surprised me and it made me realize that people have different definitions for what a community is. LEAH: Wildly. BRANDON: Yeah, and so I'm curious about what your definition, in terms of an open source community, what it is and what it's job is for that open source project? LEAH: I don't have a dictionary definition and in a lot of cases, it's kind of a feel. Like I like to talk about sometimes how the different communities I've been involved with had a different feel. In an indirect fashion, a lot of what your community is comes from the people who are theoretically in charge, be that your core team, or your benevolent dictator, or whoever sort of the thought leader. That person or people really influence the kind of community that you create with their behavior. For example, the kind of community where the person in charge just tells you what the project is going to do next and does it, has a very different feel where the person in charge says, "Here are my thoughts. What do you guys think about it? How do you want us to do this? Do you have suggestions? Did I miss anything?" I think if there's enough premeditation and consideration that goes into the decisions that that person makes, that he or she can really shape a positive community, a collaborative community, and a supportive community. In Ember, we have managed to collect a group of amazing people who want to help each other, want to support each other, and who are enthusiastic about what's happening, and on most good days who don't freak out when they get a little worried that something isn't happening the way they want it to because they can trust that they're going to have a period of input and their needs are going to at least be considered. You don't always get the exact thing that you want. But it's a lot better if you know that your concerns were heard, evaluated, and maybe there's some other plan or way to sort of not completely screw you, basically. Ember's been really good at taking care of people and their needs even as the user base is more needy in different changing ways. I guess a community is a living breathing thing. For sure, it changes. I'm oftentimes sort of paying attention to the undercurrent of what happened, what's going to be the outcome of this? Having chats with people, especially people in theoretical leadership roles, about different ways to handle different situations that will keep as many people as possible, happy and supported. BRANDON: As you were describing that, to me, it feels like you've highlighted something interesting about communities, which is, you can use a theme and not be a part of its community. Somebody could use Ember and not choose to be a part of the Ember community. But participating in a community is kind of the desire to influence that thing in some way. Like, when you say they want to have their needs represented and they want to be a part of the RFC process, there is some part of it where I guess a lot of it has to do with just any kind of connection with other people who do the same thing or probably do the textbook one. But I also feel for a lot of people, there's a desire to be able to have their needs represented and met and feel like they are somehow a part of the direction of this thing, as well. LEAH: Yeah. It totally varies based on your personality. Some people just want to feel like they are a part of it. Even if they feel like their interests are well represented, you see people all the time looking for small ways to contribute because it's fun. It's exciting. There's progress happening, there's success, it's something that isn't like a lot of other opportunities that you have especially if you've been in some other industry, or some other kind of job. You don't always have this thing where you can sort of be part of an organism and a community and watch something evolve and maybe even have input in it, or just have 40 friends around the world who want to chat with you about it at any given time. It's fun. BRANDON: A question that I have in terms of following up on that is your role on the Ember side of things, I'm assuming and I want you to clarify if I'm not hitting it properly. My understanding of your role in the Ember ecosystem, in addition to handling a lot of the unglamorous logistical components is to help kind of grow and foster that style of community and Ember's become pretty well-known for having a unique focus on quality of community. I'm wondering if that's intentional or if there are things that you do or if it's sort of been luck. I don't know how much intentionality has gone into that or how much the community design has gone into that. LEAH: For sure, it's mixed. There's a lot of things where select events are really good example of setting the tone. And there's like an evolution of events that I like to follow in some of my newer growing communities that I'm focusing on where you start out with a little more of a campy feel, it's a little scrappy. And slowly, you iterate to get into a much more professional feel. But all along the way at those stages, having that event, the logistically top quality really sort of changes the tone of everything. If you show up to an event and it sort of haphazard and no one knows what's happening, you might all love each other and you probably will have a good time. But it's a different experience than one where it's sort of run like a well-oiled machine where you get a sense of people take this seriously. This is real. This is impressive. We're building big, amazing things together. We can accomplish together. So some of it is just on all the little things. Event is just one sort of example. But all the little things that go into the well-rounded ecosystem, I try and focus on quality so that obviously, there's a whole bunch of people focusing on the quality of the code. But I also want to focus on the quality of the events and the website and helping meet ups run quality events around the world and helping people show off that they use Ember and are proud. Any sort of these peripheral things -- the better you execute them, the more of an overall, "Wow! This is real. This is serious. I can stake my professional future on this." The more of that kind of a feeling that you're going to get. Community growth is organic in a lot of ways, obviously. But there are certainly things that you can do along the way to help foster the community growth. There's like personality things like making sure everyone's actually welcoming, and that people want to come and get to know you and work with you and get involved in your technology. There's things like the tactical processes of our RFC. Making sure there are ways for people technically to get involved. There's things like a focus on documentation, which again just makes it easy. So, it's really an overall quality thing every step along the way, and a lot of community overlook the parts of building community that aren't code. You can do that but you end up on a different trajectory than a project where you pay attention to all the peripheral things. CHARLES: So, I'm actually curious because I've witnessed the things that you've done like on a grand scale which definitely have had that air of quality that you're talking about. But I'm curious about these kind of nascent communities that you're talking about and kind of just, one, just curious about what they are because I'm curious. Then the second is, for people who might be speaking of doing something similarly, like starting something small that they want to grow into something huge, but actually that concrete, small scope. What are the things you can do with limited resources, if you have limited resources and you've got a small scope, what can you do to imbue it with that sense of quality that will carry you to higher places? LEAH: I guess the first thing to think about, and I hope this does not sound bad, but is whether or not your project actually needs a community. By that I mean I certainly think open source projects should all be actual open source projects. So you should accept pull requests, you should let people file issues, you should have collaborators, etcetera. But there have been a lot of projects along the way that I've been involved with helping with where we looked at it and said this doesn't need to be a community. This doesn't need to have a conference every year, or it'll have some sort of community right just amongst people who contribute but it doesn't need to be like Ember, like Rails. We're a whole giant ecosystem that spins up. For example, over the years, there have been projects like Handlebars, Bandler, and Thor. These are projects that tremendous numbers of people use. You don't run into anyone who says like, "I'm a member of the Thor community." And that's perfectly fine, right? There's sort of a version of a project where you have an MVP, you have a good website, you have good docs, you have a bunch of contributors, and that's all you really need. Then there's the version where you want it to be a much bigger, more involved setup. So one community that, I would say, in a nascent stage right now is the Rust community, which I've been peripherally involved with. I'm not on the team. I'm not doing significant community masterminding but I have been working with some people in the project to do agree with me on the value of this quality. And so, I've helped them. We just ran Rust Conf this last weekend which was their first conference. It was 250 people in Portland. It was really, really fantastic. I've worked with them on, for example, making quality swag over the years and trying to figure out what level of control over their brand. It's not too much but still protects the brand enough, things like that. They've also modeled some of their governance kind of stuff after the Ember community which makes sense. Yehuda is involved in both projects and he's a big proponent of a lot of that stuff. But it's been really cool to watch. Like first Rust was saying, "Oh, this how Ember does it. Let's crib some of that stuff." Now, in a lot of cases, Ember is saying, "Oh, wow! Look how Rust is doing that. Let's take that back." It's been a very good symbiotic back and forth relationship. But it really just does take the people who are leading intellectually to decide that they care about quality, to decide that they care about a collaborative community environment, to decide that they care about diversity, to decide that they care about all of these little things along the way. The earlier people recognize that these are things you need to care about, the better job that you can do. You can always sort of ride the ship most of the time. But if you start out on the right path to begin with, you're going to be able to accomplish so much more because you don't have that much course correcting to do. There is obviously, also always course correcting in Ember, in Rust, in Rails, everywhere, where somebody not speaking about code but somebody takes a misstep and the whole community sort of has to figure out like, "Okay, this is not the way we want. This is the kind of interaction to go. How are we going to fix this?" Or, "This is not the way we want. There's kind of major technical decisions to be made. How are we going to fix this?" It's an evolution. It's a collaboration. I'm absolutely a fan of the core team entity and of that core team being a medium sized group. Not tiny but a medium sized group of people who bring really, really different things to the table in terms of who they are, their backgrounds and their skills. For example, this serves me well but I am a fan of core teams that have non-coders on the core team. There's a lot of stuff that can get done for a project that doesn't involve writing a line of code. Now, obviously you want to have somebody around who understands open source and the strategy. It is in fact challenging to find people who don't have to be coders but also appreciate all this other stuff and want to be involved in it. But when you can find people like that, that's the really magical key to this more well-rounded community. I like to say, engineers are basically superheroes. They can sort of think of something and then create it and that is the power that most other kinds of people don't have. I mean, maybe contractors and welders, but if you are working at a desk job somewhere, there's not really much that you can conceive of where you have an idea, you write it down, you spend a couple months then it exists, it works, it actively changes your life. One of the downsides of that amazing superpower is that engineers can oftentimes get into a position where they think anything is possible and they don't recognize that just because they can figure out how to do something doesn't necessarily mean that they are the best people to do that thing. That comes into play a lot with these other qualitative things in an ecosystem. So, you can go to a lot of technical conferences and wonder, sort of, why is the quality not quite there? In a lot of cases, the answer is because the person in charge is not particularly skilled in this area. They are coder. They can write brilliant code but do they know how to think about where the lunch line is going to queue up and make sure that it's going to go through the phase, and that there's enough bathrooms and stuff like that. These are very vastly different skill sets. One of the past successes there is to sort of realize, "Yes, I can probably pull this off." But if I can find somebody for whom this is a natural area of expertise and I can focus on my area of expertise. Like, wow. We'll be able to accomplish so much more and everything will be better all around. BRANDON: I think you've hit on something there again that I've seen since moving into technology from -- I come from a non-technology background and there is a sense outside of this industry that people kind of have different areas of expertise. When you are an engineer, your job -- I actually think a lot of it stems from the fact that your job is to become an expert in the field of other people's jobs. So, your job is to automate something so you have to know enough about marketing to do marketing software. Then you have to know about enough about this other thing to do this other thing. So you think that you can learn anything and it's true that you can learn anything but there's a skill tree associated with each of those things. You don't realize, you're a junior level conference organizer, and maybe it might be worth talking to a senior level conference organizer. We've definitely fallen victim to that many times where we thought, "Oh, you know what? I'm pretty good at the technology side. I can give a conference talk. I must be probably pretty good at education." And it turns out that education is a multi-thousand year old skill tree that is pretty well-defined. LEAH: One of the hard parts in thinking about this for me is, I really like the MVP concept that I have taken from technology, which is you don't have to get it right. Get something out there. Figure out what the bare minimum version of whatever it is you're trying to accomplish is. Ship it, iterate. I like that and I talk about a lot of things in my life in that frame which is kind of weird when I talk to my parents about iterating on things and what not. For example, in a decision about child rearing. "Oh, my God. The first one is this way." It's a very useful way of thinking about things and I am a fan in many things of actually applying it to areas all over your life. But for something like how to run a small conference, you oftentimes don't need an MVP. You don't need to go through the stage of that level of quality because you can just work with somebody who's already learned all those lessons and already done those things. It's not like a greenfield code project where somebody has to actually start from the baseline every time it's a new project and build up all the infrastructure. You can just skip right to the front of the line. Find someone who's good at this and start out initially at a much higher level of quality. BRANDON: I want to kind of dig into that a little bit and ask about you wrote a really great blog post earlier this year about your experiences running Ember Conf. It's so obvious the amount of effort and kind of thought, not just effort, but like directed effort and thought that goes into building a really great experience for people. I'm wondering if you have like certain areas that you look for and noticing whether somebody has really put a lot of thought into designing a good conference experience for somebody. If somebody were hoping to do something like that, what are some of the areas that tell you that you're dealing with like a really good, thoughtfully designed conference? Or where does that effort go basically when you run through the process? You only have so much time and effort you can put into this thing to create that experience, not the minimum viable conference, but the conference when you look at the division of your time and doing conference stuff. I think people wind up being surprised how much goes toward one thing or another. LEAH: I'm not entirely sure how to answer that question because you don't usually get insights into what people are doing along the way. I go to fewer conferences these days because I find myself irritated. I don't even like the way it sounds but it's kind of true, where I go to a conference and I'm really trying to focus on the content and I'm really trying to focus on the goodwill of the people who are organizing it. Oftentimes, it's just so many moments where I'm like, "That should be better quality." Like it is very easy to get that right. You just need to have thought about that. You just need to plan for that. I don't think there's many opportunities to sort of figure out those things ahead of time from somebody else to make an assessment of how a show is going to go. I can say that there are sometimes things that I see on just the websites where I'm like, "Oh, that is not a good sign." There are tools around for most of the things that you would want to do like selling your tickets and collecting information, and the online pre- event functionality. It's rarely a good sign when you see someone build their own. It's sort of another engineer foible kind of thing. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. It takes substantial energy to reinvent the wheel. If you go with something that already exists, you can focus for example, on all this other quality stuff. But there's also sort of the way in which people build the content of their conference, like that's super telling. Maybe not even so much about logistics but it is pretty telling about the community or at least the people running a show as a representation of the community. For example, I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom these days that you want to have blind call for papers. It's not reasonable to me when I see someone not do it that way. I understand that small events maybe just go invitation in the first year or two. I think that's actually a pretty justifiable thing. We don't have the critical mass yet to get enough submissions in for a program, or we're not really sure how to execute on that, and our community has these specific people who we know are really talented and will do a good job. I think you end up with usually a subpar roster that way because you don't have the variety of experience that you'd be able to attract in a call for papers. But what's super weird to me is, yes, we're going to do a call for papers but we're not going to go the classic extras steps that open source and technology as a whole has learned that will really help this task go better and help eliminate latent biases and things like that. That's kind of weird. I still see it sometimes. I find myself confused by it. I suspect more than anything that people just haven't thought of it or don't know how to execute on the strategy that a lot of other conferences has figured out a successful. I don't know, part of the reason I don't like to go to conferences so much is I remember when I was making all these mistakes, and I don't want to be that person who's really critical of someone who's trying to do something good but it's hard. Once you have that experience and once you sort of know better, it's hard to watch somebody else stumble over the same things you stumbled over. You feel like, "You should know that. I know that." CHARLES: So, is there a community of conference organizers? It seems like they need to be some sort of meta conference or some sort of meta community of community organizers. BRANDON: There is Conf Conf. CHARLES: Are you serious? LEAH: I might not be impressive enough to go to something called Conf Conf. I don't know. A lot of those things actually when you get to, "Oh, it's industry, upper-tier collaborator events." They're often times invitation kind of things and I'm not very cool. I don't know. I see things like that sometimes. There's this conference about speakers. It's like speakers conf – CHARLES: Oh, speakers conf, yeah, and it's like in Aruba. LEAH: It seems cool but I'm always like, "How do you get invited to that?" CHARLES: Yeah, that's the part -- BRANDON: How do you get into that club? LEAH: I know people who should be there and don't know it exists, or people who should be there but just - I don't know, no one has invited them, and it's invitational. It's hard to say. But I guess what I was going to say is over the years, I have at times belonged to different online forums that were trying to scratch that itch. The most successful one was probably for a good five, six years. There was a very active community of conference organizers in the Ruby space. But I think most of those people have either stopped doing conferences or gotten to a place where they just don't need that much help anymore, and there hasn't been like an influx of new people doing it. So there isn't really any strong community like that that I belong to today. That's a challenge in anything you face, where once you don't need the help anymore, people don't stick around to help the other people and it's hard to sort of organize that way. BRANDON: That sounds like a big opportunity to me. But it sounds like an opening or a hole for providing something like that. Do you do any consulting for people on this? Do people hire you to help design a conference experience? Because I know that the ones you've put together -- you're pretty well-known for being one of the best in the business for this. LEAH: Thank you, I think. No pressure at all. I do consulting, though obviously, that's mostly for companies and not communities because communities don't typically have money for that sort of thing. In communities, you need to create your own experts, and in an ideal world, there are people who recognize that when they're at the beginning of the learning curve, they should reach out to people who are further along and benefit from their experience and do things like read blog post and books and what not. The blog post that you mentioned earlier, it was absurdly long. I was surprised that anybody read it and then a lot of people read it. I was surprised because of the length but I was also surprised in the way that it's difficult to come up with a conference talk where you're sort of like, "I know all this stuff," but I don't know what amongst this knowledge base is interesting to other people, and I don't know what other people don't know and I know the stuff so obviously, it's not impressive. But I sort of forced myself to write it anyway because it was just such a big endeavor and there were thoughts even for myself that I wanted to preserve for later. Then I was pleasantly surprised by how many people read it and had comments and had useful things to say, or even just like, "I appreciate how much thought went into XYZ. I wouldn't have thought that. It was value that came out of that blog post that I didn't think of at the beginning. The value of other people getting a chance to recognize what kind of thought and planning needs to go into having something like that execute flawlessly, or dealing with things when they don't execute flawlessly. BRANDON: One thing that that was an obvious expenditure of effort, because you started so early in the process, many months before the conference was the Women Helping Women Initiative. I saw that really early on. I actually don't think that was precedented in conference organizing. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I don't remember how far in advance it was, I just remember thinking it was absurdly far in advance and very well thought out and very well designed. LEAH: Well, it was early. For example, I actually have to email the Women Helping Women group today with a long list of thoughts and activities for next year. I feel like I'm super behind because it's September 15th and the conference is at the end of March. Last year, I think we were already talking basically like 2, 3 weeks after the previous year's conference had ended. So basically, I looked at the conference in 2015 and it was great. I was really happy with most areas of it but I was not happy with the representation of women. There's so many groups that in fact, the conference would benefit from that representation of, but women was obviously a target that I thought I could potentially bring something to the table on being a woman in technology and in Ember. I spent some time thinking about all the various women in tech efforts. I have been involved over the years in a lot of things that felt good and said good things but at the end of the day didn't seem to accomplish very much. Right from the beginning, I wanted it to be a tactical effort. I wanted it to be like a short term pipeline of, "We put this in one end and we get this out the other end, and we have accomplished XYZ." Because it's important to have lots of organizations that make people who are under-represented in any community feel good and feel welcome. But it's also just as important and a little bit less prominent, in most cases, to have those same people then become leaders in that community. That' sreally sort of a signal to everybody else that they're welcome and that they can accomplish things. I looked at our community and I thought there are already, actually, really awesome women here. Not as many as I'd like. But I know a lot of women who are impressive and who are like, "Why aren't they on stage?" So, I sort of approached the effort last year from the perspective of there's a lot of organizations out there working on the women in technology pipeline problem, and it's a very real problem. Hopefully, they're going to do a solid job. There's a lot of insights and I'm watching and it's cool. But I want to focus on the problem of -- let's not call it a problem -- but I want to focus on the situation of the people who are already here and helping them take those leadership roles and step up and really join the community at every level. Not just at the entry level. We've come in through the fix the pipeline problem setup. CHARLES: And then hope everything kind of magically works itself out from there. LEAH: Yeah, which shockingly, it doesn't. I don't know... We spent many, many months basically supporting people at every step along the way from, "I want to go to this conference," to, "I'm a speaker at this conference." And we did things like brainstorming about what kind of proposals people could submit. We helped each other once we had a critical mass of a bunch of talented women. We helped each other with our proposals. We helped each other with our ideas. I organized podcasts where the program committee did question and answer sessions with the women. We did some hangouts where women who had more experience than the rest of us came and talked about their first time speaking or their experience getting to know a community or their experience learning to code and we encourage each other in a lot of ways. It's just a really positively pushy support group. We encourage each other. It's funny because it was hard along the way sometimes because you don't want to be too pushy. I was always worried and sort of dancing on that line of, "I want to repeat to you, you can clearly do this. You have said things. You have accomplished things, look at your education, look at your career. You are obviously, obviously good enough and impressive enough to be on the stage and I want to keep reminding you of that so you do it. But I also don't want you to feel like you are being bullied into it." Not everybody wants to be a leader. Not everybody wants to be in a role of getting up on stage and giving a talk. I had a couple of the participants come talk to me or email me after the program saying, "That was really helpful. That was the nudge that I needed." So that made me feel good about the various interactions along the way and it's always just going to be something that you have to do in a very sensitive manner. But there are women that I knew that were here that were talented and then so many women that just came out of the woodwork where I was sort of like, "I know your name or I didn't know you at all," and like, "Why don't I know your name? You're incredible. You're better than half the people I see on stage at a conference." And so we worked on this for months and months and months. I got a bunch of women in the community who were in sort of transitional leadership roles which is I thought, "Hey, you're a community leader," but they weren't sure they were a community leader yet. I got a lot of people like that involved to help nudge along all the other people who could potentially be our next batch of community leaders. I don't know... It was really amazing and you have to pad the numbers every step along the way and at the end of the day, you actually want a conference with impressive representation of anyone. So you have to get significantly more than you need into the pipeline thinking about it, and then significantly more than you need actually submitting and then hopefully at the end of the tunnel when everything shakes out, you'll get a reasonable number of people right. Because obviously things get filtered out and at every step of the way. There's a lot of other people that you're competing with. Overall, the quality of the proposals from the women was astonishing. It was a blind call for papers process in terms of the program committee. But as the administrator, who doesn't get a vote in these things, I was managing the app that handle the voting during the process of picking our speaker and all that kind of stuff. I was just astonished by watching quietly in the background how all these ratings came in and nobody knew they were doing this but the proposals from the women were on average, like dramatically better than everybody else. I'm not like saying, "Oh, yay! We're better." I'm sure a lot of that had to do with the amount of thought that went into it because even a seasoned conference submitter who spoke in a lot of conferences might get to a point where they're sort of cranking out a proposal in a week or even a month, and a lot of these women spent six months thinking about it. But all that hard work showed in the proposals, all that hard work showed in the roster, and I really want that hard work to show around the community. Part of what I'm trying to focus on this year is how do we take that from being the EmberConf Women Helping Women program to being the general Ember Women Helping Women program. Because after EmberConf, I felt like I could really help other conferences change their way that their rosters grew. Specifically before that EmberConf, you did have a lot of well-meaning organizer saying, "I want more women represented at my conference but I can't find them." Now, I think there's certainly ways to do it and there's a lot of clever ways to meet people and encourage people. But when push comes to shove, and it's in that moment, you would just run into a lot of organizer saying, "Well, I don't know what to do. It's an open process. Anyone can submit." And now, they could look at our conference and see there's a dozen women who are clearly talented and capable. I'm going to go to all 12 of those people and ask them to submit to my conference. Maybe some of them will and maybe that will help. It's a small step but I started seeing the women who spoke at EmberConf who a lot of them hadn't spoken anywhere beforehand, pop up at conferences all over the place. So, I sort of felt like the effect was magnified and we were able to really... I don't want to say like we, all of us women together, were able to help each other not just at Ember Conf but in a larger way. We're focusing a lot on that this year or I should say, we're going to start on how can we expand the program to be a resource that helps women take leadership roles and speaking opportunities across the JavaScript ecosystem so that Ember is really truly well represented by the people who actually make up the community. BRANDON: I think it's super clear that the thought process that you put into this was well designed enough and the work that went into it was consistent enough that you both got a huge uptick in the number of women represented at the conference. But also actually overall, the quality of conference talks went up year every year as a result of all of that additional preparation. And the encouraging people from backgrounds that had something to say that maybe felt like they didn't have something to say, instead of seeing the same faces over and over again, they went all the way across the board and it ended up showing and being a better quality conference experience for attendees for that. LEAH: It turns out the diversity is actually awesome. It's not just the thing that you should talk about and put on a list because it's politically correct. But in fact, things will be better if there are more people represented from different backgrounds with different experiences, different skills, different everything. You felt it everywhere you went and felt like you were hearing new things, interesting things, and perspectives that maybe weren't always as well represented. My biggest sad point about things is I'm trying to tackle the community of women but there are so many other communities that could also be better represented in Ember and in technology at large. And I would really love for more people to step up and sort of focus. It's hard to get involved in an effort like this because it's hard to get any traction and also because honestly, there's a lot of concern about, "Am I going to do it right? Am I going to make the problem worse?" All those sorts of self-doubt issues that are legit and based on having seen other people out in the world make a good faith effort trying to fix a problem but like say something wrong and get in huge trouble. It's just challenging and it requires a lot of thought. Even me, as I talk about this right now, I'm stressed out and I'm like, "Am I using the right words? Am I going to say the wrong thing?" But it's still worth doing. And if you're persistent and you work hard, you can really, really change things and have a positive impact. BRANDON: Well, I think it sets forward a lot of good patterns for other people trying to do this thing and I think when you talk about this being scary, the point is that it's not going to be scary. It's very scary so it makes it super brave that you're attempting that stuff. I think the impact is certainly on me. I found that pretty inspiring. Certainly at the Frontside, we found it inspiring. I hope it inspires other people in other communities to follow the same patterns. LEAH: Yeah, I hope so. I mean if there are women or anybody else that feels like they have something to contribute to really improving the landscape of who our leadership is and making sure each they are represented, I guess I would encourage those people to step up. It's the same thing as being a CEO or being the second-in-command. You just need to have the boldness to decide that you're going to try and make a difference. In the Women Helping Women program specifically, I've been talking to a lot of the women that I met last year about how can you take more of a leadership role in the program? For example, I was talking a week ago to somebody who's a student in the Women Helping Women program and I was like, "I can't represent your concerns as well as you can." I was in college at some point but that was a very long time ago, and there are just perspectives that you're going to have that I'm not going to have. Even within the women's group, there's like different perspectives and I've been working with people and encouraging them to try and work with me on taking leadership roles within the program itself. So many well-meaning programs like this, by the way, like spin up, have some success and then go away because the person-in-charge got busy and that's the end of that. It's similar to a community in that if it's going to be a long term successful effort, or at least as long term as it's necessary, I'm really going to need other people in the community to step up and find ways to be involved so that I'm not actually important to the success of this anymore. Instead, it's a whole group of people and there's no one single point of failure. BRANDON: When that happens, I can't wait to read that particular blog post. When you're able to kind of demonstrate the process for other people to be able to follow and, "Hey, look at this thing. It kind of runs itself now." That sounds really awesome and you're definitely -- LEAH: Fingers crossed. BRANDON: Yeah, you're kind of off road because you're helping to find some of the things that may influence other communities, as well. So, I think that's super cool. LEAH: I hope so. BRANDON: All right. We need to get let you get back to CEO-ing. You have a company to run and you have a whole life and everything. LEAH: I'm going to put on my business jacket as soon as I hang up on you and get back to work. BRANDON: You're in Portland. It would be a like a business hoodie probably, right? LEAH: Sort of. I have this really nice blazer. It literally changes my mind some days. I'm like, "Oh, I'm not getting enough done." I'm going to put out my business blazer. Then, they shift into over drive. BRANDON: All right. We'll get your business blazer and get to business-ing. That actually sounds like a cool little business life hack. LEAH: Yeah. BRANDON: Well, thank you so much for your time on this stuff. We got about halfway through the questions I want to talk to you about so I hope we get a shot at doing this again. I really love learning from you on this stuff. I've learned a ton from your writing. I've learned a ton from watching you work and I really appreciate all you do for the Ember community, the JavaScript community, all the stuff you've done for the Ruby community. You've had a really big impact, and so it's really great to talk to somebody that kind of sets a pattern of how these things are possible. I hope that good fortune continues to follow you as you're bold in doing these things. So, thank you for all the stuff that you do. LEAH: Thank you. I hope so, as well. It's been fun. CHARLES: Thank you. All right, goodbye everybody. BRANDON: So, bye everybody. If you have any questions or anybody else that you'd like us to talk to, let us know. If you have any additional questions for Leah, hit us up on Twitter at the Frontside. CHARLES: We usually ask for people's contact information. Where can youl be found on Twitter? LEAH: I do have a Twitter account. I'm not super active because I'm busy wearing my business blazer. But my handle is @Wifelette and I try to be as responsive as I can certainly to people who reach out to me, even if I'm not broadcasting all that much. BRANDON: Awesome. Okay, well thank you again Leah, and thanks Charles. I hope everybody listening has an awesome week.
In episode 13 of the Front End Happy Hour podcast, we’re joined by Jafar Husain from Netflix to talk with us about the future of JavaScript. Jafar is part of the TC-39 committee that helps determine the future specs of ECMAScript. Jafar shares a lot of interesting insights into how the committee works and how a feature makes it's way into the spec. Jafar also talks to us about Observables and cancellable promises. Items mentioned in the episode: TC-39, ECMAScript, Iterators and Generators, Proxies, Observables, Promises, Evan Czaplicki, Yehuda Katz, Rust Language, TypeScript, Elm Language, PureScript, Flow, Jay Phelps, LazyDOM, Tracy Lee Guests: Jafar Husain - @jhusain Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Jem Young - @JemYoung Derrick Showers - @derrickshowers Brian Holt - @holtbt Picks: Jafar Husain - Idris Language Ryan Burgess - Status, process, and documents for ECMA262 Ryan Burgess - Octomore Scotch 07.1 Jem Young - Morbotron Jem Young - Full Stack Toronto Derrick Showers - Glimmer 2 Deep Dive Derrick Showers - Rogue varieties Brian Holt - I Really Like Angular 2 - Trailer for The Jeff Cross Show on Modern Web feat Jafar Husain Brian Holt - Modern Web Podcast
Check out Newbie Remote Conf! 02:38 - Yehuda Katz Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Tilde Peter Solnic: My time with Rails is up Peter Solnic: Abstractions and the role of a framework (Follow-up) Ember.js The Skylight Blog: Inside Skylight 05:37 - Batching Updates 10:04 - Naming Fastboot Services glimmer 14:19 - Communication Skylight 16:21 - Decorators 19:46 - “Junior Developer” and Knowledge Bias CodeNewbie Ep. 90: Creating EmberJS - Part I with Yehuda Katz CodeNewbie Ep. 91: Creating EmberJS - Part II with Yehuda Katz 28:25 - Termanology in Tech 29:23 - Diversity Women Helping Women Picks Event Driven: How to Run Memorable Tech Conferences by Leah Silber (Yehuda) TypeScript (Yehuda) emberjs/rfcs (Yehuda) rust-lang/rfcs (Yehuda) Pretty Pull Requests (Aimee) Full-Stack Redux Tutorial by Tero Parviainen (Aimee) The mountains (AJ) The quadruple click in iTerm2 (Dave) 2016 UtahJS Conference (Dave) Start With Why by Simon Sinek (Chuck)
Check out Newbie Remote Conf! 02:38 - Yehuda Katz Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Tilde Peter Solnic: My time with Rails is up Peter Solnic: Abstractions and the role of a framework (Follow-up) Ember.js The Skylight Blog: Inside Skylight 05:37 - Batching Updates 10:04 - Naming Fastboot Services glimmer 14:19 - Communication Skylight 16:21 - Decorators 19:46 - “Junior Developer” and Knowledge Bias CodeNewbie Ep. 90: Creating EmberJS - Part I with Yehuda Katz CodeNewbie Ep. 91: Creating EmberJS - Part II with Yehuda Katz 28:25 - Termanology in Tech 29:23 - Diversity Women Helping Women Picks Event Driven: How to Run Memorable Tech Conferences by Leah Silber (Yehuda) TypeScript (Yehuda) emberjs/rfcs (Yehuda) rust-lang/rfcs (Yehuda) Pretty Pull Requests (Aimee) Full-Stack Redux Tutorial by Tero Parviainen (Aimee) The mountains (AJ) The quadruple click in iTerm2 (Dave) 2016 UtahJS Conference (Dave) Start With Why by Simon Sinek (Chuck)
Check out Newbie Remote Conf! 02:38 - Yehuda Katz Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Tilde Peter Solnic: My time with Rails is up Peter Solnic: Abstractions and the role of a framework (Follow-up) Ember.js The Skylight Blog: Inside Skylight 05:37 - Batching Updates 10:04 - Naming Fastboot Services glimmer 14:19 - Communication Skylight 16:21 - Decorators 19:46 - “Junior Developer” and Knowledge Bias CodeNewbie Ep. 90: Creating EmberJS - Part I with Yehuda Katz CodeNewbie Ep. 91: Creating EmberJS - Part II with Yehuda Katz 28:25 - Termanology in Tech 29:23 - Diversity Women Helping Women Picks Event Driven: How to Run Memorable Tech Conferences by Leah Silber (Yehuda) TypeScript (Yehuda) emberjs/rfcs (Yehuda) rust-lang/rfcs (Yehuda) Pretty Pull Requests (Aimee) Full-Stack Redux Tutorial by Tero Parviainen (Aimee) The mountains (AJ) The quadruple click in iTerm2 (Dave) 2016 UtahJS Conference (Dave) Start With Why by Simon Sinek (Chuck)
In part two of our interview with Yehuda Katz, we talk about how he created EmberJS, and what it means to build a web framework. We also talk about what it means to be a beginner, and how growing up poor has influenced his perspectives as a coder today. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Liz Bailie YAGNI EmberJS John Resig's Interview on CodeNewbie jQuery FrontPage Visual Basic Q Basic GW Basic Glimmer Oauth Skylight Codeland Conf Codeland 2019
Yehuda Katz has done many, many code things. He co-created Ember.js, co-founded a tech startup Tilde, is a frequent contributor to open source projects including Handlebars, Bundler, and Thor, and is a member of the Rust Core Team. But it took years of playing with tech before he finally felt like coding was something he could do. In the first half of our two-part interview, he talks about what he looks for when he hires, how it took him years to feel like he could code, and why he doesn’t like the term “junior developer”. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Skylight Oauth Glimmer GW Basic Q Basic Visual Basic FrontPage jQuery John Resig's Interview on CodeNewbie EmberJS YAGNI Liz Bailie Linode (sponsor) Codeland Conf Codeland 2019
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)
What is TC39? Yehuda Katz is interviewed by Jay Phelps and discusses details behind what TC39 does as an organization, ES2015, and more. Find more podcasts, videos, and online conferences at http://modern-web.org or follow us on Twitter @modernweb_.
Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about JSON.API — where the spec came from, who’s involved, compliance, API design, the future, and more. We also finally got Yehuda on the show alone, so we were able to talk with him about his origins, how he got started as a programmer, and his thoughts on struggle vs aptitude.
Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about JSON.API — where the spec came from, who’s involved, compliance, API design, the future, and more. We also finally got Yehuda on the show alone, so we were able to talk with him about his origins, how he got started as a programmer, and his thoughts on struggle vs aptitude.
We talk with Yehuda Katz about how much risk is right for you and your app, the sharp tools of high level abstractions, and how our statistical intuition leads us astray on web performance. Remove The Stress, Pick a Deadline Writing Software by DHH Skylight The Log Normal Reality - On how our statistical intuition leads us astray. Yehuda on Twitter
02:27 - Alex Eagle Introduction Twitter GitHub Google 02:54 - Jonathan Turner Introduction Twitter GitHub Microsoft [Talk] Jonathan Turner: TypeScript and Angular 2 @ ng-conf 2015 [Talk] Jonathan Turner: TypeScript and Angular 2 @ Angular U 2015 03:30 - What is TypeScript? 04:40 - Google + Microsoft =
02:27 - Alex Eagle Introduction Twitter GitHub Google 02:54 - Jonathan Turner Introduction Twitter GitHub Microsoft [Talk] Jonathan Turner: TypeScript and Angular 2 @ ng-conf 2015 [Talk] Jonathan Turner: TypeScript and Angular 2 @ Angular U 2015 03:30 - What is TypeScript? 04:40 - Google + Microsoft =
02:27 - Alex Eagle Introduction Twitter GitHub Google 02:54 - Jonathan Turner Introduction Twitter GitHub Microsoft [Talk] Jonathan Turner: TypeScript and Angular 2 @ ng-conf 2015 [Talk] Jonathan Turner: TypeScript and Angular 2 @ Angular U 2015 03:30 - What is TypeScript? 04:40 - Google + Microsoft =
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.
02:26 - Shai Reznik Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog YouTube Shai Reznik: ng-wat @ ng-conf 2015 03:02 - Angular 2 and Shai’s Background Adventures in Angular Episode #40: ng-wat with Shai Reznik HiRez.io Preparing for Angular 2.0 (Part 1) 05:56 - Radical Changes and the Future Pascal Precht: The difference between Annotations and Decorators Yehuda Katz 12:56 - Comparing and Lining Up Code [YouTube] Patrick Stapleton and Aysegul Yonet: Creating d3 components with Angular2 and TypeScript @ ng-vegas 2015 13:46 - Preparing for NG2 Emotionally ng-europe [YouTube] Shai Reznik: Angular 2 - A Very Very Short Introduction 18:44 - What should people start doing to prepare? John Papa's Angular Style Guide Stop Using $scope Templates => Sections and Components Native Query Selector .service Start Using ES6 Babel typescript-compiler webpack gulp.js Grunt Picks The Princess Bride (Katya) Visual Studio Code (Joe) Console (Shai)
02:26 - Shai Reznik Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog YouTube Shai Reznik: ng-wat @ ng-conf 2015 03:02 - Angular 2 and Shai’s Background Adventures in Angular Episode #40: ng-wat with Shai Reznik HiRez.io Preparing for Angular 2.0 (Part 1) 05:56 - Radical Changes and the Future Pascal Precht: The difference between Annotations and Decorators Yehuda Katz 12:56 - Comparing and Lining Up Code [YouTube] Patrick Stapleton and Aysegul Yonet: Creating d3 components with Angular2 and TypeScript @ ng-vegas 2015 13:46 - Preparing for NG2 Emotionally ng-europe [YouTube] Shai Reznik: Angular 2 - A Very Very Short Introduction 18:44 - What should people start doing to prepare? John Papa's Angular Style Guide Stop Using $scope Templates => Sections and Components Native Query Selector .service Start Using ES6 Babel typescript-compiler webpack gulp.js Grunt Picks The Princess Bride (Katya) Visual Studio Code (Joe) Console (Shai)
02:26 - Shai Reznik Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog YouTube Shai Reznik: ng-wat @ ng-conf 2015 03:02 - Angular 2 and Shai’s Background Adventures in Angular Episode #40: ng-wat with Shai Reznik HiRez.io Preparing for Angular 2.0 (Part 1) 05:56 - Radical Changes and the Future Pascal Precht: The difference between Annotations and Decorators Yehuda Katz 12:56 - Comparing and Lining Up Code [YouTube] Patrick Stapleton and Aysegul Yonet: Creating d3 components with Angular2 and TypeScript @ ng-vegas 2015 13:46 - Preparing for NG2 Emotionally ng-europe [YouTube] Shai Reznik: Angular 2 - A Very Very Short Introduction 18:44 - What should people start doing to prepare? John Papa's Angular Style Guide Stop Using $scope Templates => Sections and Components Native Query Selector .service Start Using ES6 Babel typescript-compiler webpack gulp.js Grunt Picks The Princess Bride (Katya) Visual Studio Code (Joe) Console (Shai)
Chase and Jonathan talk about the growing ember-weekend community, there adventures in fastboot, and a new RFC by Yehuda Katz.
02:47 - Martin Grider Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog ActionChess Go Tetris For The Win Catchup Abstract Puzzle @abstractpuzzle 09:29 - Interaction Design and Mechanics Make it Playable, Then Add “Juice” 12:25 - Designing for Mobile vs Board Games Touch Interaction 14:30 - Converting Board Games to Mobile Getting the Company on Board Michael Mindes @MichaelMindes For The Win Kickstarter Carcassonne Ascension 17:09 - Copyright Infringement (Cloning) Settlers of Catan Threes 2048 Triple Town 20:54 - Protecting Your Ideas and Partnering with Publishers 23:19 - Getting Help as an Indie Game Dev Marketers, App Store SEOs, etc. 27:02 - App Shopper 28:24 - Technical Aspects of Game Development Cocos2d UIkit SpriteKit Unity Unreal Engine 34:31 - Physics 36:12 - The International Game Developer's Association (IGDA) 39:47 - Catchup Picks Hunter Loftis: We Will All Be Game Programmers (Pete) Indie Game: The Movie (Pete) Eurogames (Pete) The Changelog #151: Rust with Steve Klabnik and Yehuda Katz (Pete) A Swift Guide to Rust (Andrew) Arduino Esplora (Andrew) Analogue Nt (Andrew) L3D (Martin) Game Developers Conference (Martin) GameLoading (Martin) Top Hat (Martin) CumulusPRO Commercial Grade Anti-Fatigue Comfort Mat Area Mat (Jaim) iPhreaks T-Shirts are available via Teespring! Visit teespring.com/iphreaks to reserve yours by Wednesday, May 6th! T-shirt styles include: unisex up to 3x, ladies', hoodies, and long sleeve tees. Teespring also offers international shipping so that all of our listeners have a chance to buy!
02:47 - Martin Grider Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog ActionChess Go Tetris For The Win Catchup Abstract Puzzle @abstractpuzzle 09:29 - Interaction Design and Mechanics Make it Playable, Then Add “Juice” 12:25 - Designing for Mobile vs Board Games Touch Interaction 14:30 - Converting Board Games to Mobile Getting the Company on Board Michael Mindes @MichaelMindes For The Win Kickstarter Carcassonne Ascension 17:09 - Copyright Infringement (Cloning) Settlers of Catan Threes 2048 Triple Town 20:54 - Protecting Your Ideas and Partnering with Publishers 23:19 - Getting Help as an Indie Game Dev Marketers, App Store SEOs, etc. 27:02 - App Shopper 28:24 - Technical Aspects of Game Development Cocos2d UIkit SpriteKit Unity Unreal Engine 34:31 - Physics 36:12 - The International Game Developer's Association (IGDA) 39:47 - Catchup Picks Hunter Loftis: We Will All Be Game Programmers (Pete) Indie Game: The Movie (Pete) Eurogames (Pete) The Changelog #151: Rust with Steve Klabnik and Yehuda Katz (Pete) A Swift Guide to Rust (Andrew) Arduino Esplora (Andrew) Analogue Nt (Andrew) L3D (Martin) Game Developers Conference (Martin) GameLoading (Martin) Top Hat (Martin) CumulusPRO Commercial Grade Anti-Fatigue Comfort Mat Area Mat (Jaim) iPhreaks T-Shirts are available via Teespring! Visit teespring.com/iphreaks to reserve yours by Wednesday, May 6th! T-shirt styles include: unisex up to 3x, ladies', hoodies, and long sleeve tees. Teespring also offers international shipping so that all of our listeners have a chance to buy!
Steve Klabnik and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about the Rust Programming Language, a systems programming language from Mozilla Research. We covered memory safety without garbage collection, security, the Rust 1.0 Beta, getting started with Rust, and we even hypothesize about the future of the Rust.
Steve Klabnik and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about the Rust Programming Language, a systems programming language from Mozilla Research. We covered memory safety without garbage collection, security, the Rust 1.0 Beta, getting started with Rust, and we even hypothesize about the future of the Rust.
01:08 - Dropping the “JS” 02:15 - Announcements from ng-conf Blog Post 03:20 - Angular Internationalization (i18n) 05:27 - Annotations Yehuda Katz and Rob Eisenberg Reflection and Injection 09:24 - Runtime, Type Inference, and Dealing with Types at Runtime in TypeScript Metaprogramming Dependency Injection 11:05 - The Stability of the Current State of Angular Directives AngularDart 12:51 - forEach syntax change (from ! to *) 13:30 - Binding/Syntax [YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 “Motivation” Angular Design Docs 17:34 - Two-way Data Binding 20:30 - Observables 22:04 - Two-way Data Binding (Cont’d) 25:22 - Directives (Angular 1 vs 2) How Do You Integrate HTML Templating with the ECMAScript 6 Module System? Template Annotation Use Cases 27:39 - Why Declare Imports in JavaScript? 32:37 - Using Globals with WebComponents Tooling Property Binding 35:23 - Winning Hearts: Moving From Angular 1 => 2 Getting Started with Angular 2? Current Status: No Docs; Missing Pieces WE WANT FEEDBACK! But first: View the Angular Design Docs Watch: [YouTube] Brad Green and Igor Minar: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 1 [YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 ng-vegas News Sponsors! Get in touch: joeeames@gmail.com Now LIVE! ng-vegas Speaker List AngularU News Coming to California in June! Picks angular2_calendar (Joe) ng-vegas (Joe) ng-conf 2015 YouTube Channel (Ward) [YouTube] Shai Reznik: ng-wat (Chuck) The New Angular.io Site (Lukas) Coding Like a Girl (Brad) Didgeridoo at ng-conf (Igor) Angular 2 (Miško) [YouTube] Dave Smith: Angular + React = Speed + Dave’s Addendum (Igor)
01:08 - Dropping the “JS” 02:15 - Announcements from ng-conf Blog Post 03:20 - Angular Internationalization (i18n) 05:27 - Annotations Yehuda Katz and Rob Eisenberg Reflection and Injection 09:24 - Runtime, Type Inference, and Dealing with Types at Runtime in TypeScript Metaprogramming Dependency Injection 11:05 - The Stability of the Current State of Angular Directives AngularDart 12:51 - forEach syntax change (from ! to *) 13:30 - Binding/Syntax [YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 “Motivation” Angular Design Docs 17:34 - Two-way Data Binding 20:30 - Observables 22:04 - Two-way Data Binding (Cont’d) 25:22 - Directives (Angular 1 vs 2) How Do You Integrate HTML Templating with the ECMAScript 6 Module System? Template Annotation Use Cases 27:39 - Why Declare Imports in JavaScript? 32:37 - Using Globals with WebComponents Tooling Property Binding 35:23 - Winning Hearts: Moving From Angular 1 => 2 Getting Started with Angular 2? Current Status: No Docs; Missing Pieces WE WANT FEEDBACK! But first: View the Angular Design Docs Watch: [YouTube] Brad Green and Igor Minar: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 1 [YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 ng-vegas News Sponsors! Get in touch: joeeames@gmail.com Now LIVE! ng-vegas Speaker List AngularU News Coming to California in June! Picks angular2_calendar (Joe) ng-vegas (Joe) ng-conf 2015 YouTube Channel (Ward) [YouTube] Shai Reznik: ng-wat (Chuck) The New Angular.io Site (Lukas) Coding Like a Girl (Brad) Didgeridoo at ng-conf (Igor) Angular 2 (Miško) [YouTube] Dave Smith: Angular + React = Speed + Dave’s Addendum (Igor)
01:08 - Dropping the “JS” 02:15 - Announcements from ng-conf Blog Post 03:20 - Angular Internationalization (i18n) 05:27 - Annotations Yehuda Katz and Rob Eisenberg Reflection and Injection 09:24 - Runtime, Type Inference, and Dealing with Types at Runtime in TypeScript Metaprogramming Dependency Injection 11:05 - The Stability of the Current State of Angular Directives AngularDart 12:51 - forEach syntax change (from ! to *) 13:30 - Binding/Syntax [YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 “Motivation” Angular Design Docs 17:34 - Two-way Data Binding 20:30 - Observables 22:04 - Two-way Data Binding (Cont’d) 25:22 - Directives (Angular 1 vs 2) How Do You Integrate HTML Templating with the ECMAScript 6 Module System? Template Annotation Use Cases 27:39 - Why Declare Imports in JavaScript? 32:37 - Using Globals with WebComponents Tooling Property Binding 35:23 - Winning Hearts: Moving From Angular 1 => 2 Getting Started with Angular 2? Current Status: No Docs; Missing Pieces WE WANT FEEDBACK! But first: View the Angular Design Docs Watch: [YouTube] Brad Green and Igor Minar: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 1 [YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 ng-vegas News Sponsors! Get in touch: joeeames@gmail.com Now LIVE! ng-vegas Speaker List AngularU News Coming to California in June! Picks angular2_calendar (Joe) ng-vegas (Joe) ng-conf 2015 YouTube Channel (Ward) [YouTube] Shai Reznik: ng-wat (Chuck) The New Angular.io Site (Lukas) Coding Like a Girl (Brad) Didgeridoo at ng-conf (Igor) Angular 2 (Miško) [YouTube] Dave Smith: Angular + React = Speed + Dave’s Addendum (Igor)
Check out RailsClips on Kickstarter!! 02:23 - Justin Searls Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Test Double @testdouble 03:02 - Justin Searls: The Social Coding Contract Open Source GitHub 04:58 - Transitive Dependences and Understanding Technical Debt RailsConf 2014 - Keynote: 10 Years! by Yehuda Katz The CAP Theorem 15:21 - Learning Outside Work Hours Tracking Time Micromanagement 21:21 - Understanding Transitive Dependencies (Cont’d) Gary Bernhardt 23:00 - Use Someone Else’s Framework or Write Your Own? “It Depends.” “A dirty code base is the sign of a well-monetized application.” - Matt Scantland 31:25 - When Does it Hurt to Use Tools You Don’t Completely Understand? Elasticsearch 34:14 - Leaving Code Behind 36:26 - Be a Responsible Open Source User Pull Request Sample Amount of Investment Community Management Communication cancan => cancancan GitX Graphical User Interface (GUI) rowanj GitX 47:22 - Reacting to Change Process and Ceremony Deming’s Common Cause and Special Cause Pair Programming [YouTube] Justin Searls and Aaron Patterson: The act of using vim, tenderly. 54:16 - Just Blog It! Picks Royalty Free Music by Kevin MacLeod (David) Rebif (David) Ruby Rogues Episode #188: Community Building with Pieter Hintjens (Jessica) Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2015: Call for Presentations (Jessica) James Clear: Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. (Jessica) Screw motivation, what you need is discipline. (Jessica) A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (Chuck) Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education by Glenn Beck (Chuck) Sony NEX-5T Compact Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera (Justin) Justin’s Talk at RailsConf 2015: Boring Code (Sometimes a Controller is Just a Controller) (Justin) Alpine iLX-007 7-Inch In-Dash Receiver with Apple CarPlay (Justin)
Check out RailsClips on Kickstarter!! 02:23 - Justin Searls Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Test Double @testdouble 03:02 - Justin Searls: The Social Coding Contract Open Source GitHub 04:58 - Transitive Dependences and Understanding Technical Debt RailsConf 2014 - Keynote: 10 Years! by Yehuda Katz The CAP Theorem 15:21 - Learning Outside Work Hours Tracking Time Micromanagement 21:21 - Understanding Transitive Dependencies (Cont’d) Gary Bernhardt 23:00 - Use Someone Else’s Framework or Write Your Own? “It Depends.” “A dirty code base is the sign of a well-monetized application.” - Matt Scantland 31:25 - When Does it Hurt to Use Tools You Don’t Completely Understand? Elasticsearch 34:14 - Leaving Code Behind 36:26 - Be a Responsible Open Source User Pull Request Sample Amount of Investment Community Management Communication cancan => cancancan GitX Graphical User Interface (GUI) rowanj GitX 47:22 - Reacting to Change Process and Ceremony Deming’s Common Cause and Special Cause Pair Programming [YouTube] Justin Searls and Aaron Patterson: The act of using vim, tenderly. 54:16 - Just Blog It! Picks Royalty Free Music by Kevin MacLeod (David) Rebif (David) Ruby Rogues Episode #188: Community Building with Pieter Hintjens (Jessica) Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2015: Call for Presentations (Jessica) James Clear: Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. (Jessica) Screw motivation, what you need is discipline. (Jessica) A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (Chuck) Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education by Glenn Beck (Chuck) Sony NEX-5T Compact Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera (Justin) Justin’s Talk at RailsConf 2015: Boring Code (Sometimes a Controller is Just a Controller) (Justin) Alpine iLX-007 7-Inch In-Dash Receiver with Apple CarPlay (Justin) Special Guest: Justin Searls.
Our guests Michael Bleigh, Divshot CEO, and Kevin Chau, Director of Business Development at Divshot, talk about the importance of Static Applications, Hosting Static Apps, & Hackathons. Static Showdown is a worldwide 48 hour hackathon featuringstatic web apps. Divshot, a company born of a hackathon, is a leader in Static App Hosting. They are Community Builders and lovers of the web. This year, Divshot brings us it's 2nd incarnation of the Static Showdown competition that will be held online Jan 24th through Jan 25th. Registered teams will be provided with a private github repo & Divshot Static App hosting for the hackathon. Some prizes include Chrome Books, Moto 360's, $300 Apple Gift cards, $500 Amazon gift cards, cold hard cash and more. This Serverless coding event is sponsored by some of the top companies & projects in the web development industry. Past Judges have included Yehuda Katz, Eric Bidelman, Alex McCaw, Mark Otto, Zach Holman, and many others. Sign ups end on Jan 22nd so hurry and get your team ready ASAP for a solid 48 hours of fun, creativity, & excitement. Register at http://staticshowdown.comnow! Hosts: Erik Isaksen - UX Engineer at3Pillar Global Christian Smith- Open Source Developer & Startup Enthusiast Danny Blue - Senior Front End Developer at Deloitte Digital Nick Niemeir- JavaScript Agent Engineer atNew Relic This episode is also available on our YouTube channel Links StaticShowdown 2015 - http://www.staticshowdown.com/ Divshot Static App Hosting - http://divshot.com ReadTheSource.ioSuperStatic walkthrough with Scott Corgan - http://hangouts.readthesource.io/hangouts/divshot-superstatic/ Divshot's Blog - https://divshot.com/blog/ ele.io (ellie) Web Components Playground - https://ele.io Built With Polymer - http://builtwithpolymer.org/ Web Components LA - http://www.meetup.com/Web-Components-LA/ Erik's quick intro to Divshot (15 min) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DXme0_dfK4 Creating Webpages using Bootstrap and Divshot (73 min) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLYZ7ZVwnvk Static Apps Org - http://www.staticapps.org/
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.
本期由Terry Tai和Dingding共同主持，邀请了 neo 的美女软件工程师鲁葳，和她一起聊聊软件咨询公司是如何工作的。让大家了解更多的优秀软件咨询公司的细节和内幕。 关于鲁葳： Twitter Blog 访谈笔记 neo Pivotal Labs thoughtbot PivotalTracker University of Waterloo rocketfuel Jim Weirich Pair programming TDD Continuous integration Sublime Text RubyMine Vim Emacs tmux Travis CI Jenkins CI Yehuda Katz Eric Ries Lean UX Rails Girls Remote Pair Programing Blog Customer.io Effective JavaScript Special Guest: 鲁葳.
本期由 Terry Tai 主持，Dingding Ye 协作主持，邀请到Richard Huang 和 XDite 一起回顾了这一次RedDotRubyConf之行，扯扯淡，谈谈收获。同时也谈谈他们两人在这次大会上名为 "Building Asynchronous APIs" 和 "Secure Your Rails Application: The Basics"两个演讲。 RedDotRubyConf 珍宝海鲜楼 天天海南鸡饭 Universal Studios Singapore Refactoring Rails JRuby For The Win Building Asynchronous APIs Concurrency In Ruby Ruby 2.0 on Rails in Production LessConf Secure Your Rails Application Security is Hard em-synchrony Goliath Grape Sinatra sinatra-synchrony async-rails 构建异步的API服务 Strong Parameters Yehuda Katz DHH slice pattern Double Your Freelancing Rate in 14 Days The blueprint Don't Let Your Business Run You DNSimple Reform Warden Github Rails gosu gem LogDown COOKPAD 24-hour Hackathon Competition Medium 南京第一次Ruby聚会 Special Guests: Richard Huang and xdite.
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.
The Rogues talk about web programming and updating frameworks with Yehuda Katz.
The Rogues talk about web programming and updating frameworks with Yehuda Katz.
The Rogues talk about web programming and updating frameworks with Yehuda Katz.
Adam and Wynn caught up with Yehuda Katz to talk about upcoming changes in Rails 3.1, SproutCore, and his growing list of open source projects.
Adam and Wynn caught up with Yehuda Katz to talk about upcoming changes in Rails 3.1, SproutCore, and his growing list of open source projects.
Thank you guys so much for helping me make it to RubyConf this year. It was a great experience. I was exposed to a lot of new technologies that I'm anxious to help you figure out. I'd heard about some of these, but here is a list of some of them: mustache.js gdb memprof Ruby 1.9.2 and Ruby 2.0 Rite (Ruby Lite) which was announced as an embedded systems version of Ruby Metric Fu Hotspots Citrus I also ran into some familiar voices (from interviews) and new voices (that will be interviewed) including: David Heinemeier Hansson Yehuda Katz James Edward Gray II Wayne Seguin Michael Hartl Chad Fowler Dave Thomas Finally, I'd like to thank the handful of people who came up to me and told me how much they enjoy the podcast and screencast. It's great to talk to you guys. You inspire me to do better. Download this Episode
Loading multiple Ruby Gems can result in runtime errors when an incompatible version of a gem dependency is already loaded as a dependency of another gem.Gem bundler can also pre-load and cache gems for faster loading. Having two gems that require different versions of the same dependency can sometimes cause runtime errors. Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche have created an elegant solution in the Gem Bundler. Download 108.8 MB Download (iphone & ipod) 48.8 MB
Loading multiple Ruby Gems can result in runtime errors when an incompatible version of a gem dependency is already loaded as a dependency of another gem.Gem bundler can also pre-load and cache gems for faster loading. Having two gems that require different versions of the same dependency can sometimes cause runtime errors. Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche have created an elegant solution in the Gem Bundler. Download 108.8 MB Download (iphone & ipod) 48.8 MB
Yehuda Katz returns to San Diego with a report on the latest developments with the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
This episode was originally published on May 9, 2009. Interviews with Yehuda Katz, Ed Allan, Joe Fiorini, and Blue Box Hosting. Also Mentioned Yehuda Katz Joe Fiorini Blue Box Hosting
This episode was originally published on May 9, 2009. Interviews with Yehuda Katz, Ed Allan, Joe Fiorini, and Blue Box Hosting. Also Mentioned Yehuda Katz Joe Fiorini Blue Box Hosting
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